The Rise of the New, Liberal Islamophobia

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Sam Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher

The recent television kerfuffle involving “Real Time” host Bill Maher and guest Sam Harris over whether Muslims are bad people because their religion is, in the words of Harris, “the mother lode of bad ideas,” is symbolic of the new American Islamophobia.
Muslim-bashing has become a popular sport several times over the last decade and a half, most notably in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; after the election of Barack Obama; over the proposal for the so-called Ground Zero mosque; and now with the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But this time, it’s not just members of the extreme right, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann and presidential wannabe Herman Cain, equating Islam with terrorism.
Maher, one of the bastions of liberal ideology, is the source of the latest strain of anti-Muslim racism, along with his cohort Harris, a neuroscientist and author whose bigotry was superbly exposed by Chris Hedges in his 2008 book, “I Don’t Believe in Atheists.”

Historian and academic Reza Aslan’s brilliant response to Maher on CNN laid bare Maher’s poor logic in equating the actions of extremists with nearly a quarter of the world’s population who identify as Muslim. But Maher’s sentiments aren’t just dissonant with reality; they lend a liberal veneer to Islamophobia, which in turn casts as increasingly legitimate the ongoing government targeting and public venom aimed at American Muslims. I have never liked Maher. His comedy has generally catered to a white middle-class male audience that has attempted to reconcile ideals of equality and freedom with moral superiority and American exceptionalism. In that sense he perfectly reflects the hawkish desires of the Democratic Party, which sees war as a just cause in the face of fundamentalism—never mind that U.S. policies have often laid the groundwork for said fundamentalism to flourish in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria.
In another incisive rebuttal to Maher, Dean Obeidallah, a stand-up comic, Daily Beast columnist and co-director of the documentary “The Muslims Are Coming,” called for the revocation of Maher’s progressive credentials: “My fellow liberals should no longer give Maher a pass. His continuous drumbeat of reckless comments about Muslims is contributing to a climate where American Muslims are increasingly seen as ‘the other’—or worse, as the enemy.”
If the post-9/11 years of Patriot Act barbarism are to be laid at the feet of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their ilk, today’s anti-Muslim bigotry is a bipartisan affair. It is present in thinly veiled references from the Obama administration to the “enemies” in our midst, via phrases such as “homegrown terrorism.” In fact, under Obama, the nation for the first time specified as part of its national security strategy a focus on those people who might become “radicalized” in the U.S.
While there have been no studies tallying the numbers of U.S. casualties at the hands of incidents perpetrated by Muslims, two high-profile incidents are often cited to justify anti-Muslim policies: the 2009 Fort Hood shooting by U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing being the most high-profile cases, which together resulted in 16 deaths and about 200 injuries. A recent study by the FBI of active shooters in the U.S. found that over a 13-year period, more than 11 shootings per year on average took place, mostly at the hands of non-Muslim Americans.
The FBI study does not include all gun-related violence, which would yield numbers several orders of magnitude higher. In fact, an analysis by Mother Jones of mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 found that in the incidents, in which 530 people were killed, more than 60 percent of the shooters were white males. But we don’t see government efforts aimed at curbing white male violence, or a public backlash against white male gun owners. Rather we are expected to fear “homegrown terrorists” exclusively of the Muslim variety.
Soon after President Obama announced his strategy for the war against IS, Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled a plan to curb recruitment for IS here in the U.S. In the words of the Justice Department, the project will be a “new series of pilot programs in cities across the country to bring together community representatives, public safety officials and religious leaders to counter violent extremism.” Although details of the plan are still being worked out, the preliminary language harks back to the dark days of the Bush administration’s attacks on American civil liberties.

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Reza Aslan Responds to CNN and Bill Maher on Islam