“The next question to ask is: why is it a crime to raise doubts about the Holocaust? Why anyone who writes about such doubts should be imprisoned while insulting the Prophet (PBUH) is allowed?” asked Iranian Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, in a tweet.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech has opened up widespread condemnation throughout the Muslim world. One aspect of the conversation that has gained steed is the question of Western civilization’s hypocrisy in defending its own institutions and narratives with strict chastisement for insurrectionists. At the same time, Western politicians and some media shove all disrespect and defamation of institutions that Muslims hold dear under the guise of ‘freedom of speech.’
Islamophobia nothing new in Europe
“Everyone believes in protecting certain institutions, including America. Don’t be fooled by resources to free speech or “why are Muslims so offended by free speech.” In Islam, it is the personality of the Prophet. In America and Europe, it’s copyright and trademarks. Use your free speech to violate copyright law, and you will be prosecuted. In America, Capitalism has been given a sacred aura and state protection. For Muslims, it singularly was & is the exalted Prophet,” wrote ‘Saalehbaseer,’ a popular Islamic scholar on Instagram.
A reason may be that Islamophobia, especially insulting the Prophet (PBUH), is nothing new. The same scholar shared a piece of history in a previous post, citing a 16th-century fatwa from a mufti in Spain addressing complaints about Spanish Muslims being asked to send curses to the Holy Prophet (PBUH).
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So the existential disdain toward Islam and the Prophet (PBUH) has always existed deep down in the West, but now it is surging. In an interview on Al-Jazeera, Noam Chomsky, talking about how ‘intellectuals’ in the West like Ben Harris, who claims to be on the ‘liberal’ front, are pushing the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim agenda. “Islamophobia is more dangerous than anti-Semitism,” he said in the interview.
The war on terror has truly come home. https://t.co/EeLz4RSlt7
— The Nation (@thenation) July 17, 2020
In a bizarre self-feeding loop of xenophobia, the West explains Chomsky, uses violence to enact its narrative into the Middle-east and Muslim countries, enabling terrorism, and then using that terrorism as fear-mongering, Western politicians push forth more Islamophobic narratives.
Why is Islamophobia in Europe and the West surging?
It is conceded in historical texts that Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power as a result of the conditions created by the Great Depression of 1929, and this creates the expectation that every severe economic crisis will bring a strong right-wing surge, according to a research paper ‘The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Europe.’ A similar concern came to the fore after ‘the Global Economic Crisis’ of 2008 when the extreme right-wing parties in some countries gained electoral successes across Europe.
Extreme right-wing parties across Europe seem to have doubled their old achievements by raising their votes from 5.1% to 13.2%, given the national elections and European Parliament elections since the 1960s. The share of the seats they obtained in the councils increased threefold from 3.8% to 12.8% in the same period. Even extreme right-wing parties without elected representatives had the power to influence public discourse and policy agenda by applying serious blackmail pressures to mainstream parties. It can be seen as one of the most important indicators of this situation that the UKIP2, which failed to achieve significant success in the UK elections, played a key role in the Brexit process (Inglehart & Norris, 2016: 2).
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This may explain the position that French President Emmanuel Macron took last week, France has seen a sharp rise in extreme-right parties the past few years. In his election, President Macron’s rival was Marie Le Pen, daughter of a famous anti-semite Jean-Marie Le Pen. She kicked her father out of the party in bids to reform the party; ironically, now the party is infamously Islamophobic.
The similarities and differences in Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism
All xenophobic and racist tendencies are based on vague, non-specific narratives. Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are based on the stereotyping of a particular group as per the popular narrative.
The Holocaust saw the Nazi party blame Jewish people within the nation as a ‘weak link’ that lost them the First World War, the economic recession in 1929, and the need for their ‘exclusion.’ Similarly, as the world suffered the 2008 economic crisis and now the economic crisis caused the coronavirus, the West returns to its historic populist tendencies, blaming immigrant communities pushing a Muslim genocide.
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The second part of the Holocaust was pushing self-serving policies under the guise of action against the ‘others.’ Some of the Holocaust victims were political opponents of the Nazi party, many victims of the West’s war on terror, were leaders that were non-adherents of ‘Western values.’ Hatemongers riding the wave of populism slide in self-profiting policies. Proxy wars with Iran under the guise of ‘war on terror’ are examples of this phenomenon. A silent Muslim genocide is taking place.
The Muslim genocide
According to a 2020 study conducted under the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs auspices, the several wars initiated by the United States in its war against terror have caused the displacement, conservatively calculated, of 37 million people. According to the same institution, around 801,000 people have died in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Iraq. It continues to say, howeve,r that, “several times as many have been killed indirectly as a result of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
This does not count Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Myanmar, or Muslims killed or persecuted as direct victims of Islamophobic attacks in western countries. The numbers of victims of the Muslim genocide are accumulating, albeit not the result of one guilty authority, unlike the Nazi Party in Germany.
GVS News Desk