Is Islam Bashing a Lucrative Industry?
The US-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life predicts that over the next two decades, Muslims will make up 26.4% of the world’s population of 8.3 billion people. This means that the worldwide Muslim population will have grown by 25% at the end of 2030.
However, while the population of Muslims in the West is growing, a fear of Islam as an ideology is increasing. This has sometimes resulted in aggressive and discriminatory measures against Muslims, which compels some scholars and thinkers to warn against the rise of “Islamophobia.” The belittling and mocking of Islamic beliefs, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad — often in popular culture and the media — indicate that Muslims face a serious challenge: How to continue living in Western societies peacefully, while being on the receiving end of hate crimes, the denigration of their faith and the restriction of social freedoms.
Nathan Lean is an American scholar and writer, who has investigated Islamophobia extensively. Lean believes that Islamophobia is a lucrative “industry” that wins skyrocketing salaries for those who promote and contribute to it.
Nathan Lean: An unfortunate consequence of the War on Terror was that it operated on the premise of a “foreign enemy, domestic threat.” While the Bush and Obama administrations went to great rhetorical lengths to avoid conflating the actions of extremists with the peaceful majority, the policies they put in place reinforced the notion that the religion of Islam, and by extension all Muslims, deserved special scrutiny.
Thus, we see a plethora of examples of religious discrimination in the name of national security: The NYPD collaborated with the CIA to spy on Muslim communities in New York, in some cases designating entire mosques as “terrorist organizations”; the FBI paid informants to infiltrate mosques and entrap Muslim worshippers — in one California case, the informant was instructed to sleep with Muslim women; the State Department, in concert with federal immigration offices, delayed or denied visa, passport and citizenship applications based on nothing more than the applicant’s name or country of origin; Congress held a series of McCarthy-esque hearings on “radicalization” of American Muslim communities that produced no evidence such a thing was occurring; and more recently, the White House announced its “Countering Violent Extremism” program, which unlike its broad name, has a narrow focus on the Muslim American community.
Lean: Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten had the “right” to publish their cartoons. But having that right does not mean that what they did was right. In Western societies, free speech is fast becoming a weapon. We don’t fight for it as much as we fight with it.
Free speech is about as sacred to most people as are their religious values: When it works for them, they embrace it. When it doesn’t, they reject it. Interview on Muslim Bashing
