🔒 What the Right Doesn't Understand About Islamophobia

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For the longest time I thought that the Western right, generally speaking, was only pretending not to understand why the rest of us have such a problem with their constant Middle East forever-wars. Obviously it’s a mistake to label “the right” as some monolithic entity. But for a lot of them it comes down to bewilderment about the concept of “Islamophobia:” Whether such a “phobia” may be justified, actually, and whether it should be in the left’s best interest to also be “Islamophobic.”

 Most will say that we’ve simply invented a new bigotry buzzword to oversimplify the myriad different military adventures such as Israel’s US-backed massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, and America’s obsession with perpetually scouring the Persian Gulf to dispense with imaginary WMDs. We have to apparently just keep bombing this quarter of the world, forever, to prevent anyone who lives there from ever seeing through a single day without traumatic existential dread, as penance for their “anti-Western ideology.”

 And yet, they don’t really seem to know what that ideology is.

There’s a school of thought on the right that insists that keeping the Islamic world in a state of perpetual terror in which nobody from Tehran to Baghdad to Kabul to Gaza City is ever comfortable stepping outside for the entirety of their life is essential to global security. In the same breath they will say it’s a mystery why they hate us.

The usual answer is it all boils down to “they hate our freedom,” as though the freedoms enjoyed by people on the other side of the world from them occupy much space in their day to day minds at all, and as though their comparative lack of freedom is a personal choice rather than a consequence of the fact that, every time they step outside, there’s a nonzero risk that an American Palantir ™ drone will fly out of a nearby manhole and launch a Plutonium-tipped AI frag rocket with pinpoint accuracy into their left eye socket.

 Yes, Islamic terrorism is a problem. Yes, when you hear about some large scale violent attack in a public place that isn’t a school, you can guess the motivations of the suspect with a depressing rate of accuracy. I feel a ritualistic should-not-be-necessary need, in the wake of the media scouring of people like Hasan Piker, to say that I condemn September 11 and October 7 and other calendar-date-specific atrocities committed against innocent people. But there are a lot of innocent people on both sides of this.

And this drives people nuts, not just on the far or even moderate right, but also relatively “liberal but anti-woke” circles who thoroughly misunderstand what they’re being accused of when they’re charged with Islamophobia. They say Islam is a religion and an ideology, not an innate identity, and you cannot be bigoted against a religion or ideology. They will make all sorts of inaccurate claims—some intentionally inaccurate and some just genuinely ignorant—about why people oppose specifically anti-Islamic wars and anti-Islamic domestic immigration policies. Surely, in light of these atrocities, it should be normal to want to remove Muslims from the West, chase them back to their home countries, and then bomb their home countries into a sandy crater, right?

 But what exactly is the ideology of Islamism and why do they oppose it? That’s the thing—they don’t know, and that’s why it’s possible to distill so much of this phenomenon down into a simple bigotry and a phobia. And boy do I have one comprehensively stupid example of this to help make my point. Today, we’re going to be discussing Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire’s unintentionally (actually partly intentionally?) hilarious new film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels. Yaaay!

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