From Religion News Service
by Ruth Nasrullah | May 17, 2016
(RNS) Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and former NPR commentator, has written a new book, “Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms.” The quick read offers a summary of the phenomenon of Islamophobia, providing specific examples of common misconceptions and how they are spread.
With a foreword by best-selling author Reza Aslan and a blurb by former President Jimmy Carter, the book is receiving some buzz.
RNS talked with Iftikhar, who is now senior editor at The Islamic Monthly, about the book and some of the topics it touches on. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: “Scapegoats” explores the historical American phenomenon of groups — usually defined by religion or race — that have been the focus of public fears and resentments. What can American Muslims do to survive “their turn” at being scapegoats?
A: I think our best strategy is to create more allies. Any civil rights struggle in the United States was only able to succeed because of allies who did not fit the demographic mold of the people that were being scapegoated. When Jewish Americans stood side-by-side with Martin Luther King during his struggle for equality, that ally relationship helped the African-American civil rights struggle. When Muslims start to speak up against anti-Semitism, when Jewish people start to speak out against Islamophobia, when everybody starts to speak out against homophobia, that can really resonate with the American public. The American public expects to see Muslim public intellectuals like myself speak out against Islamophobia but they don’t expect to see white Christians or black Christians or white Jewish people doing the same. It’s really important for us to get allies from outside the community to speak out on our behalf because even though we might be the scapegoats of today it’s going to be somebody else tomorrow.
“Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms,” by Arsalan Iftikhar. Photo courtesy of Skyhorse Publishing
Q: In the book you write: “When a group of people are dehumanized by public rhetoric and turned into the proverbial other, we usually see the tragic societal consequences … ” How bad could modern-day consequences get?
A: Obviously hate crimes are the one key manifestation of demonization of any minority group. We have seen a lot of hate crimes since 9/11. Muslim kids are being bullied all over the country now. In California a young Muslim high school female student who wears the hijab — the headscarf — was labeled as “Isis Phillips” in her high school yearbook. And the high school chalked it up to being some sort of typographical error, which is absolute nonsense. This is the sort of normalization of Islamophobia that we’re seeing today. In a recent poll, nearly 70 percent of Republicans in many Southern states agree with (presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald) Trump’s sentiment that we should ban Muslims. So he is a very loud mouthpiece for a wide cross section of America today.
Q: You say that crimes are more likely to be labeled as terrorism if Muslims are involved. Can you talk about the impact of that?
A: As I write in the book, the term terrorism has been sadly co-opted in the 21st century to only apply to brown Muslim men committing acts of mass murder. In 2015, there were over 350 mass shootings in the United States and less than 1 percent of them were committed by Muslims, but it was the one committed by Muslims in San Bernardino that was labeled an act of terrorism — even though a week before a deranged white man named Robert Dear walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killed people. But that was never called Christian terrorism or domestic terrorism. A few months earlier in Charleston, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into an African-American church, sat in Bible study for an hour and then proceeded to slaughter nine innocent parishioners, including a South Carolina state senator. Now if a white male with a race war ideology committing a mass murder is not an act of terrorism, I don’t know what is.
