From BuzzFeed News
April 6, 2018
Arsalan Iftikhar, senior fellow for the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University, which analyzes anti-Muslim sentiment around the world, told BuzzFeed News that the resilience of the anti-dog tale shows how hard anti-Muslim stories are to debunk.
“Since Islamophobia has become pervasive in many parts of the Western world today, it has become quite clear that people are willing to blindly share these anti-Muslim conspiracy theories without even seeking out whether they are true or not,” Iftikhar said.
The Bridge Initiative’s Iftikhar said stories like these have “a hugely negative impact on Muslim communities throughout the West because these false conspiracy theories either make Muslims direct targets for hate crime backlash or Muslims are forced by their neighbors to debunk these hoaxes without being given the benefit of the doubt like other minority groups.”
