Max Fisher: While Muslim American circles are acutely aware of the growing hostility and even danger facing them and their families, this has received less attention in American media and politics than one might expect. The absence of concern may be easier to see if you consider, briefly, how we might view these killings if the identities of the killers and their victims were reversed. If Islam had been the religion of the shooter rather than the religion of the victim, if police suspected a motivation of Islamic extremism rather than a possible motivation of anti-Muslim extremism, the murder would have been enormous national news. But because the shooter was perhaps instead motivated by extremist Islamophobia (again, at this point an unconfirmed but widespread perception), and because it was the victim rather than the killer who was Muslim, it hardly caused a blip. […] Those in America who truly hate Islam enough to use violence are a tiny fringe. Still, the problem of Islamophobia in America is larger than them, and it would be wrong to focus only on those most extreme voices. So too would it be wrong to focus only on those in more powerful positions, the Bill Mahers and Bobby Jindals who use their platforms to push an Islamophobia that is less extreme but still encourages those who take it a step further. In many ways, the onus of responsibility lies with the larger mainstream that neither promotes nor resists Islamophobia, that immediately classifies the murder of three Muslim-American students as a “parking dispute” and doesn’t bother to even acknowledge the dead-of-night murder of Al-Jumaili. The absence of concern for or even knowledge about the rising wave of anti-Muslim hatred, deliberately or not, enables it to proceed. More here.