The year 2024 marks the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack on American soil that took the lives of 2,997 people. The attacks were committed by nineteen terrorists who shouted “Allahu Akbar” moments before committing the murders. The words “Allahu Akbar,” God is great, in Arabic, were later discovered in Mohammed Atta’s journal after the attacks. Atta, an Egyptian militant Islamist and Al-Qaeda operative, helped plot and lead the attacks. In the ensuing months, as the United States and the rest of the Western world reeled from the largest-scale attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor, terms such as “war on terror” and “radical Islam” emerged to best address and represent the violent actions of individuals united by a common religion and ideology.
Regarding terms and language to appropriately address these heinous acts of violence, a year had not passed since September 11, 2021, when policing of language surfaced in a report titled “Islamophobia in the European Union After September 2001.” Indeed, according to Google NGram Viewer, an online tool that allows users to track the frequency of words or phrases in printed materials over time, the appearance of the word “Islamophobia” in English-language texts surged in the year 2001. Because Google NGram helps users explore historical trends in language and culture, visualizing the appearance of words or phrases in literature throughout periods allows us to better comprehend the emergence of ideologies and trends. The 2002 report endeavored to capture anti-Muslim reactions in 15 EU Member States, based on a reporting system implemented on potential anti-Islamic attitudes. In its finding, the report demonstrated that Islamic communities were becoming targets of increased hostility since September 11, 2001.
While it is undeniable that attitudes toward Muslims shifted in the post-9/11 world, the use of the term “Islamophobia” has become an effective tool to shut down any criticism of Islamism; elsewhere, “Islamophobia” amounts to a dog whistle used to unite Muslim advocacy groups such as CAIR that often traffic in openly anti-Jewish and anti-American rhetoric. In fact, following the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas, many of CAIR’s leaders defended or justified the terror attack, arguing that it was a legitimate right of the Palestinians to “resist occupation.”
To wit, invoking “Islamophobia” has successfully instilled fear in people who may wish to discuss the threat of radical Islam, so much so that in a recent lesson plan, “Teach 9/11 with Compassion,” published by the San Diego County Office of Education, the source of the ideology that was responsible for the terror attacks is glaringly missing. Instead, the drafters of the module opted to use 9/11 in order to teach empathy, as well as a cautionary tale on the dangers of stereotyping: “To create a safe space in the classroom and to work through this topic in a healthy and productive way, avoid singling out Muslim students and children of first responders or members of the military to “carry” this topic. By teaching 9/11 through a culturally responsive lens, teachers have an important opportunity to clarify misconceptions about their Muslim students and promote respect for individual differences and across cultures.” Instructing teachers to use “appropriate language,” the censors of this curriculum urge teachers to “avoid terms such as ‘Islamic extremists’ and ‘radical Islam.’” The document goes on to explain that “adding ‘Islamic’ implies that there is something inherently Islamic about terrorism or extremism.” I do wonder, however, if the writers of this lesson plan would likewise urge educators not to use the word “Nazi” when talking about Germany during World War Two as it may imply that Germans are inherently Nazis. But I digress.
Indeed, if an alien descended on Earth and were given this very lesson plan, the extraterrestrial being would not be able to figure out what happened on that fateful day. But “Teaching 9/11 with Compassion” did not appear in a vacuum. The concerted effort to sanitize the horror of 9/11 began long before Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota refused to identify the perpetrators, stating that “some people did something.”
The individuals who crafted “Teaching 9/11 with Compassion” spend considerable time instructing teachers and students on the care they must take to use “appropriate” language, evincing that language is, indeed, critical to how we not only understand the world, but influence our reality. As such, where does the term “Islamophobia” come from? Who coined it and why? Answering these questions may help us understand how and why it has become a powerful tool for promoting anti-Western and anti-American ideologies. To be sure, a forensic examination of the term “Islamophobia”, its origins and uses, is critical if we are to understand the machinations of brilliant propaganda.
There are several sources that describe the genesis of the term. While most agree that “Islamophobia” was popularized in the 1990s, according to the Center for Research at the University of Oslo, the term itself was already in use, though scarcely, in France during the 19th century. But why did “Islamophobia” gain traction in the 1990s and who was responsible for disseminating it?
To answer this question, we turn to the United Kingdom and the publication of a report in 1997 that was one of the first to use “Islamophobia” in the context of an official document that advocated for policy change. “Islamophobia”: A Challenge for Us All,” published by Runnymede Trust, a British think tank devoted to generating research that challenges structural racism in England, detailed British attitudes toward an estimated 1.4 million Muslims living in England. The introduction of the term “Islamophobia” was justified by the report’s assessment that “anti-Muslim prejudice has grown so considerably and so rapidly in recent years that a new item in the vocabulary is needed.”
Co-founded by Anthony Lester, a British barrister who was at different times a member of the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Liberal Democrats, and Jim Rose, a British Jewish journalist, the origins of Runnymede Trust is found in the union of two lethal ideologies: Marxism and Islamism, which had gained traction in the 1970s with the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who had praised and supported the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Seeing communism as a waning ideology in Western Europe, Foucault turned to Islamism as an effective tool to challenge western liberalism. Foucault welcomed the challenge and published more than a dozen essays praising the Islamic revolution in Iran, calling the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini and his brand of Islam an era of a new “spiritual politics.”
The left’s adulation of ideologies that counter the West, and more specifically, its courting of Islam, can be traced to the Soviet Union, which after the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and four Arab countries, began a concerted anti-Israel and pro-Arab campaign. Turning a blind eye to the mistreatment of women and minorities within the Muslim world, the Foucaults of this world saw Islam as a formidable foe to the oppose the West, which they believed to be the greater evil.
Much has been written about the bizarre alliance between Marxists and Islamists. But in the broader context of globalization, the Marxists and Islamists emerge as bedfellows intent on spreading anti-Western, “anti-imperialist” ideologies. As Michael Kelley, a senior journalist for The Washington Post wrote in his column, “Marching with the Stalinists,” 9/11 became that moment when Americans had to face the notion that they were deeply hated. Among them were a group of people—the leftists—who wanted, no less than Islamist terrorist groups such as the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, to see the demise of the United States. Regarding wishing the demise of the United States, once upon a time, chanting “Death to America” and burning American flags happened on Iranian soil, and we, in the United States, gaped and covered our mouths. Today, the burning of American flags accompanied by chants of “Death to America” occur on the same soil where 2,997 people died on September 11, 2001.
How did this occur?
Cherchez l’Iran: On the Origins of “Islamophobia”
If the French cliched expression “cherchez la femme” suggests women’s nefarious role in doomed events, in the case of the Red-Green Alliance, and more pointedly, the appearance of the term “Islamophobia”, cherchez l’Iran describes the birth of this lethal alliance as the Iranian Revolution engendered a new era of Islamization that would become a threat no less deadly than the number killed by Communist governments, which amounts to more than 80 million.
According to Pascal Bruckner, a French writer and philosopher, “Islamophobia” was invented to silence those Muslims who question the Koran and who demand equality of the sexes.” Writing for Islamic Watch in 2011, Bruckner claimed that at the end of the 1970s, “Iranian fundamentalists re-invented the term “Islamophobia” formed in analogy to ‘xenophobia.’ The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist.” In his book, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt, Bruckner observes that the term “Islamophobia” makes it virtually impossible to criticize Islamic theological doctrines, which must remain a basic right in every liberal and free society. Deploying “Islamophobia”, Bruckner claims is thus a successful method of casting those who criticize any faction of Islam as racist and oppressors, or as Salman Rushdie observed, “Islamophobia” was created to help the blind remain blind.”
The term is worthy of totalitarian propaganda and is deliberately unspecific whether it refers to a religion or those who adhere to its tenets around the world. It also finds its genesis in those who wish to address and combat antisemitism. To be sure, whenever an initiative to combat antisemitism is born, advocates against “Islamophobia” insist that educators, policymakers, and journalists concomitantly address “Islamophobia”. Why?
The birth of the term “Islamophobia” in the West is closely linked to Jew-hatred. In fact, the origins of Runnymede Trust’s report on “Islamophobia” are to be found in the year 1992 when the think tank set up a committee to examine antisemitism in the UK. “A Very Light Sleeper,” published just three years before the official report on “Islamophobia” described an alarming spike in antisemitism in the UK. Citing an 85% increase in the reporting of antisemitism incidents between 1984 and 1992, what the report failed to point out is that the surge coincided with an increase in Muslim migration to the UK. Elsewhere, the year 1991 seems to depict a seismic shift in Muslim migration (especially from Pakistan and India) into the UK. And while there is nothing wrong with migration, what the uptick in anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior demonstrated is that migrants bring with them the cultural norms. This is not unique to Muslims. Values become portable as migrants often carry with them extant cultural norms.
The relationship between antisemitism and immigration in Western Europe has been widely discussed and reported. According to one such report, in the case of the United Kingdom, the rise in antisemitic incidents is linked to the ongoing conflict between the Arab Palestinians and Israel, as well as a documented increase in Muslim immigrants into the UK. What the publication history of Runnymede Trust’s reports on antisemitism and “Islamophobia” inadvertently demonstrate is that “Islamophobia” is often invoked to stymie any criticism of Islamic ideology that may have been a cause for an increase in bigotry.
The same sequence, it would seem, continued, as evidenced by the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France in 2015. In that case, French-born Algerian Muslim brothers murdered 12 people and injured 11 others. The attack on the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, was immediately followed by an assault on Jews at a kosher supermarket. In the days following the massacres, a concerted effort to talk about “Islamophobia” emerged. In fact, just as in the case of the Google NGram that depicted a spike in English-language use of the term “Islamophobia” immediately following the 9/11 attacks, in the case of the Google NGram, a similar spike in the term “Islamophobia” appeared in the French language following the year 2015.
The pattern of pushing for addressing “the dangers of “Islamophobia” as a substitute for addressing antisemitism continues today. In the post-October 7 world, where antisemitism has surged to unprecedented levels in both the United States and Europe, advocacy groups such as CAIR, insist that policy makers address a phantom hatred: “Islamophobia”.
The latest iteration of this phenomenon can be found in a relatively new framework that is being introduced in K-12 education called “anti-Palestinian Racism” (APR), a reaction to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. As with reporting on “Islamophobia” that hopes to capture anti-Muslim attitudes, the creation of this sub-type of racism – anti-Palestinian racism – presupposes a surge of racism directed at Palestinians. However, according to Axios, anti-Jewish hate crimes, which spiked in the fall of 2023 following the October 7 massacre in Israel, have replaced Black hate crimes as the most targeted type in America’s ten largest cities. Claiming that “most people do not report these incidents [anti-Palestinian racist incidents] because of a fear of reprisal in their workplace or their profession,” drafters of the APR report no data on anti-Palestinian hate crimes directed at Palestinians in the West. Moreover, among Generation Z, support for Palestine and the Palestinian cause is rising.
As such, what the appearance of the term “Islamophobia” reveals is not what one would expect: namely that anti-Muslim perceptions and attitudes contribute to “Islamophobia”. Rather, violence in the name of Islam precedes the proliferation of “Islamophobia”, thus reaffirming Pascal Bruckner’s original claim that the term is invoked to silence any criticism of Islam. Moreover, in a comparative search of the terms “Islamophobia” and “antisemitism” (in both English and French), Ngram shows how the two perfectly parallel each other. Put differently, attacks against Jews by Muslims are followed by an increase in the term “Islamophobia” being used to silence those who may wish to discuss the problem of antisemitism within the Muslim community.
The Jewish origins of “Islamophobia” – namely, the remarkable feat of taking a real phenomenon such as anti-Jewish hate and replacing it with concerns over anti-Muslim hate – is truly masterful. Bruckner argues that the Muslims-are-Jews trend goes back to the 1970s, and more specifically, to Edward Said’s trendy book, Orientalism. Calling himself the “last Jewish intellectual,” Said had successfully cultivated an image of self in relation to Jewish pain and marginalization at the behest of the Holocaust. Indeed, today’s Holocaust inversion found in ludicrous comparisons of the IDF to the Nazis, goes back to Said and his careful construction of Palestinians as the Jews of the Middle East. As Bruckner points out, “the Jewification of the Muslims automatically leads to the Nazification of the Israelis,” and of course, the Nazification—the demonization—of all Jews. Said’s identification of the Muslim self with the Jew influenced Muslim street activism. For example, in 1994 in Grenoble, France, young Muslims marched in protest of a ban on Islamic headscarves, wearing armbands that featured yellow Islamic crescents, a direct allusion the yellow armbands Jews were forced to wear during the Nazi occupation of France.
The irony of Muslims marching on European streets in the 21st century chanting “when will it be my turn” in relation to the Holocaust, is found in the icon of the yellow star itself, which a majority in the West instantly connect with Christian Europe and Nazi Germany. In reality, Jews living in Islamic lands were forced to wear yellow marks that would designate their dhimmi status. The progenitor of the yellow star is to be found in a caliph in Baghdad in the ninth century, where Jews were forced to wear yellow marks.
The history of the yellow star instructs us on both how easily symbols become seized and the dangers of an illiterate population. In this case, the hijacking of antisemitism extends to the very terms used to express anti-Jewish attitudes. Consider the term “genocide,” coined in 1941-43 by a Polish Jewish attorney to describe crimes against humanity unprecedented in human history. Within two generations, genocide is now used to describe Israel’s actions against enemies who wish her destruction. And it happened in two stages. First, by replacing Holocaust with genocide, the Nazi crime against Jews was universalized. Put differently, while Holocaust has a precise meaning, while genocide gained an obtuse connotation.
The universalization of the Holocaust was a necessary step in Holocaust inversion. The second stage thus took a word that had stopped being specific and applied it to “any” scenario. A prime example is found in the case of Sir Iqbak Sacranie, the founding Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, who in 2006 proposed to replace Holocaust Memorial Day with “Genocide Day.” One year later, the radical Israeli scholar, Ilan Pappe, published The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a book flippantly regarded among historians of the Middle East. The hijacking of the term “genocide” also included the misuse of Holocaust vocabulary and in particular, the word “ghetto.” Already in 2003, Gaza was referred to as a “ghetto-like setting” in James Ron’s book Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Israel and Serbia.
For better or worse, what the Holocaust created was the coveted status of the victim. In this sense, the genesis of “Islamophobia” makes sense, for while the term “Islamophobia” may have already existed in French in the 19th century, its frequency increased as hate crimes motivated by Islam grew. In sum, the success of “Islamophobia” is not simply that it is an effective tool used to shut down any criticism of Islam. Importantly, it also took its place in the popular field of antiracism, thus making Islam untouchable by placing it on the same level as antisemitism and racism.
Seizing on the opportunity of inserting “Islamophobia” within an antiracist framework can also be traced to the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. In subsequent years, the UN would reaffirm its commitment to combating “Islamophobia” as one of the “most serious forms of the defamation of religions.” Never mind that today, Christian minorities in Islamic lands are persecuted, killed, and forced to exile. Alas, the word “Christianophobia” did not catch on.
By positioning “Islamophobia” within the framework of antiracism, crimes committed in the name of Islam are not only immune from criticism, but they are also unseen. In a macabre feat of deception, while antisemitism is flourishing in the Arab Muslim world, we are told to keep our eyes on crimes committed by Jews against Muslims in Gaza. Meanwhile, in Israel, the only Jewish country in the world, “Islamophobia” is hardly ever tolerated.
This then is the perverse brilliance of the term “Islamophobia” which has little to do with actual anti-Muslim attitudes and behaviors and more with glorifying Islam as a new Bolshevik utopia that will counter the greatest evil – the West. And when deadly attacks by Muslims ensue, invoking ”Islamophobia” provides an imprimatur to commit these violent and evil deeds.
Naya Lekht received her PhD in Russian Literature from UCLA, where she wrote her dissertation on Holocaust literature in the Soviet Union. A passionate educator and curriculum developer at the collegiate and high school levels, Naya has taught courses on the history of antisemitism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Soviet history and literature. She is a regular contributor to the Jewish Journal and is a columnist at The Jerusalem Post. In addition to writing and speaking on contemporary antisemitism, Naya is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.