This week, President Biden’s Administration drew a clear equivalence between antisemitism and islamophobia. His press secretary used both terms in the same sentence in contending—properly so—that neither is acceptable. Most people can agree that neither is a good thing. However, the two definitions are quite different. Let’s start with what Webster’s dictionary says about both terms.
Antisemitism means “feeling or showing hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a cultural, racial, or ethnic group.” Pretty clear. From the term’s origin in the mid-19th Century, “antisemitism” bore special racial connotations and was meant specifically to be prejudice against Jews, a racial and ethnic group. Said plainly, it means hatred of Jews.
Islamophobia is defined as an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against Islam or people who practice Islam.”
Note the difference. Antisemitism is open hostility based on “cultural, racial, or ethnic” factors. But islamophobia is termed an “irrational fear” against a religion or its practice. The term does not involve race; it’s not about culture, and it’s certainly not focused on the ethnicity of people, especially because people of all backgrounds practice Islam without respect to race, culture, or ethnicity.
The difference is clear. One is based on objective hatred of a race of people, the Jews. The other an “irrational fear” of people who practice a particular faith. Absent a good reason, it would be unjustified to be fearful of a person based on how they worship. But is there a case for “rational fear” when people cite their faith as a justification for killing people they do not like, for whatever reason?
In the case of radical Islamists there is a very rational case for fear based on the brutal acts we witnessed with ISIS over the past decade. Their televised beheadings of hostages revealed the very dark side of how they carried out their faith. To be sure, not all Muslims identified with the murderous ways of ISIS or Hamas.
So, what are we to think of the “irrational fear” provision in Webster’s definition of “islamophobia?” Consider this. If it were not true that radical Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York TWICE (1993 and 2001) out of hatred for America, we might count the fear of such people as irrational. If it were not true that radical Islamic terrorists attacked the USS Cole on 12 October 2000, we might count that possibility as irrational also. And if it were not true that at Friday prayers in Tehran, the people chant “death to America,” we might be able to brush it off as so much Iranian Islamic hyperbole. But it isn’t irrational to worry about Islamic terrorists, particular those inspired by the theocratic dictatorship in Iran. During the Biden Administration there have been over 120 attacks by Iran-inspired Islamic terror groups against American targets in the Middle East. They were real attacks. And yes, there’s a very rational basis for worrying about radical Islamic terrorists that is not “islamophobia.” Indeed, it is a justified concern about something to be feared.
On the other hand, it is irrational to hate an entire race of people, Jews, and to espouse the view that they should be annihilated as the radical Islamic terrorists, Hamas, demonstrated on 7 October 2023.
To be sure, both antisemitism and islamophobia are wrong. Indeed, they are sinful. But they do not belong in the same sentence as the Biden Administration quite eagerly placed them this week. It would have been far better to simply declare that “it is wrong to hate others based on their race, culture, and religion.” But it is far worse to act on that hate as did Hamas on 7 October. Biden’s circumambient halfwits should know better.
Unfortunately, in their haste to please a domestic audience, particularly to Arab communities in places like Detroit, Michigan, the Biden team sought to balance their support of Israel with a sop to Arab Americans. It was trite. It was wrong, and it was a moral equivalence that conflates racial hatred and irrational fear, two entirely different matters.
We shouldn’t be surprised, however, that certain of the Biden Administration could make such a gross misinterpretation. After all, campus radicals all across American have taken up the Hamas messaging and are expressing disgusting antisemitism, indeed threatening Jewish Americans daily. The only difference between these youthful dolts and the Biden Administration is the campus children are not running the country.
If ever there were a time to speak up against racial hatred of the Jews, it is now. And in doing so we should also emphatically condemn universities when they condone and, in some cases, encourage antisemitism by hate filled students whose understanding of events in Gaza is superficial and wrong. And the Biden Administration’s faux equivalence isn’t helpful.
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