Stop Using the Term ‘Antisemitic’ to Hide Your Islamophobia – Muslim Girl
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At the time of my writing this, over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7 by the ongoing ethnic “cleansing” and cultural annihilation by factions of the Israeli forces. By the time you read this, I fear it will be countless more, thanks to the Islamophobia hidden in the guise of calling us all “antisemitic.”
We have seen the images of young lives lost, grief across generations, and the bloodied rubble where families once lived. We have also seen the silencing of Palestinian and Muslim voices across the world. Institutions, whether higher education or more openly corporate, stand with Israel. Social media shadowbans and HR firings scream “That’s antisemitic!” to people of all faiths who mention Palestinians’ right to live on their ancestral lands without constant violence and religious apartheid.
Regardless of your chosen new sources and lived or learned experiences about the 70+ year war on stolen lands, consider the absence of voices addressing the blatant Islamophobia in the ways that global cultures equate Islam with violence.
It’s assumed.
And it’s insidious.
What would the world look like if Muslim identity was verbally valued or protected just as much as Jewish identity? What if we stopped seeing Palestine and Israel as the automatic yet mythical “good vs. evil” and instead saw the conflict as what it is: a genocide borne of another genocide, fuelled by guilt, taboos, and billions of dollars of geopolitical capital, both physical and ideological?
The status quo is to go along with hating and fearing Muslims (or at best, showing us disdain) so that any framing of Muslims as victims and survivors challenges biases that many don’t even know they have.
I’m writing this to ask why the proverbial we, majority never-studied-Gaza-let-alone-lived-there Americans, only have one default reaction to discourse on Palestine and Israel? Where are the shadowbans and firings from Fortune 500 companies against those who call all Muslims terrorists? Those who say that Palestinian children deserve to be bombed simply because they exist? Those individuals and organizations alike who make broad statements on “peace” while fostering the same Islamophobia that seems to take for granted that no Muslims of any ethnicity are deserving of safety, agency, and dignity?
The generations of Islamophobia that are so intrinsic to dominant U.S. culture are so deeply woven into the fabric of any rhetoric around the Middle East that speaking against any single aspect of Israeli’s occupation or literal war crimes means you are somehow aligned with the obvious ‘bad guys’ in this story. The status quo is to go along with hating and fearing Muslims (or at best, showing us disdain) so that any framing of Muslims as victims and survivors challenges biases that many don’t even know they have. The hissed “you can’t say that!” responses that I know this post will garner come from a place of consciously and subconsciously never having seen Muslims (yes, even men; let’s not just play the women and children card here) as likable or worthy enough to be victims or survivors.
As a country, we’ve made Muslims the de facto villains of a story that most are not taking the time to read. We’ve normalized the hate of one group and the heroism of another. Surely, we can move past these binaries and see the humanity of all involved. 1
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