Amid all the exquisitely painful and debilitating maladies that can afflict the human body and burden the human spirit, surely one of the most pernicious is “Islamophobia,” which can come upon one unaware, and render him completely unsuitable for the company of decent folk. And yet, oddly enough, while diagnoses of this phenomenon are as common as leaves falling from the trees in autumn, cures are hard to come by. Some people even seem to regard “Islamophobia” as a lifetime affliction for which there is no cure at all; the sufferer simply has to be quarantined and cut off from all contact with other human beings, and that is that.
But now there is hope, and that hope comes from the unlikeliest of sources: the recent buddy-buddy meet-up between President Donald Trump and New York City’s Marxist Twelver Shi’ite Muslim Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani.
As improbable as it may seem, a Muslim writer named Sarchi Aziz wrote Wednesday in the Muslim publication S2J News about the stunning and unexpected event: The Trump-Mamdani meeting was “widely expected to be tense,” but instead, “turned into one of the most unexpectedly calm and constructive political encounters of the year. Their exchange was measured, direct and largely cooperative.”
In that, Aziz saw a sign of hope, and explained that “what made the meeting remarkable was largely the shift in tone, posture and interaction between two men who, until now, had publicly criticised each other with sharp rhetoric.”
Aziz complained that Trump had likened Mamdani to London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, which was a bad sign because Trump only disliked Khan because of “who Khan was. A Muslim man.” Khan’s disastrous socialist policies, in Aziz’s view, had nothing to do with it.
Aziz claimed that Trump had criticized “revived parts of that same vocabulary” in criticizing Mamdani, as if the problem lay with the president’s “Islamophobia” and not with Mamdani’s Marxism and determination to implement multiply-failed socialist policies that will destroy New York City just as they have destroyed London.
Then, however, came Trump’s unexpectedly cordial meeting with Mamdani, and Sarchi Aziz professed to see in it a sign of hope. “The meeting,” Aziz wrote, “doesn’t guarantee a new political era. But it does offer a glimpse of what politics could look like when confrontation is set aside long enough for leaders to engage on shared challenges…. If anything, the meeting proved that humanisation remains the most effective antidote to Islamophobia.”
This is not actually Sarchi Aziz’s original idea. “Humanization” as the cure for “Islamophobia” has been a recurring theme of “Islamophobia” propagandists for years. It’s based on the false claim that “Islamophobia,” broadly understood as dislike of Islam or Muslims, stems from ignorance and prejudice. A person who suffers from “Islamophobia” simply doesn’t know what Islam teaches, or harbors some irrational dislike for “brown people.”
Yeah, it’s always about race, but the reality is that race actually has nothing whatsoever to do with suspicion of Islam. Muslims are found among people of all races, as are Islamic jihadis, but that quite obvious fact never enters into discussions of “Islamophobia.”
Anyway, the antidote to “Islamophobia” is supposed to be simply to get to know a Muslim, and then one’s alleged prejudice will supposedly disappear. The “Islamophobe” will finally see that they’re just ordinary folks like everyone else, and realize that there is no reason to fear Islam or be concerned about it in any way. Likewise, there will be no reason to be concerned about the sharply rising Muslim population in Europe and the U.S.
People have said this to me many times. One of the most noteworthy incidents of it took place several years ago; I was speaking at some university and got into a conversation before the event with three friendly young Muslim students, one of whom asked me if I knew any Muslims personally, and if that relationship made me want to revise any of my writings.
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This Muslim student was working from the same false premise: that simply getting to know a Muslim would eradicate what he regarded as “Islamophobia.” He looked more than a little surprised and annoyed when I told him no, that I wouldn’t change a thing, because nothing I had written was based on ignoring or denying the fact that Muslims could be good people. I was discussing the ideology taught in the Qur’an and Sunnah, not the people. Articles such as Sarchi Aziz’s piece about the Trump-Mamdani meeting appear to be designed to obscure that distinction, so that no one ever gets around actually to examining the ideology of Islam.
Doing that, after all, could lead to “Islamophobia,” so it’s much easier simply to try to intimidate people into thinking that the problem is really just one of a racial prejudice that any decent person should be ashamed of harboring in this enlightened age. That enterprise will continue, as even now it remains largely unchallenged. This fanciful piece on the Trump-Mamdani meeting is just one of many.
