Blinded by Hate
Islamophobic-Racism Relies on a Set of Ugly Stereotypes and Can and Often Does Turn Deadly
This is a story of ingrained bias and hate, and of how our hate and fear grow from a broader well, from an array of prejudices reinforced by our politics and popular culture.
This story happened in Florida, but it could have taken place anywhere. It caught national attention briefly, because of its “ironic” twist, but then faded from national view. It is about a hate crime, but that designation underplays America’s deep cultural and racial pathologies.
Here is what happened, according to the Miami Herald:
“A 17-shot fusillade from a shooter with a semiautomatic handgun sent two Israeli tourists to the hospital after an encounter Saturday night in Miami Beach.” Two Israelis who were mistaken for Palestinians by an alleged shooter who thought he was acting as a patriot. Two victims who, according to reports, assumed Palestinian.
So, while there are no actual Palestinians or Muslims in this story, it is fairly clear that this is a story about how Americans — and my fellow Jews, in particular — see Palestinians, about how Palestinians and Muslims are pre-supposed to be dangerous threats.
Florida officials, to their credit, do see the shooting as a hate crime because he allegedly selected his targets solely because he thought they were Palestinian. But, as I said, calling this a hate crime is not enough, not if it allows us to minimize the deep cultural currents from which this shooting rises. This runs deeper than a single act of hate, as indicated by the reported response of the victims: “They tried to kill us for nationalistic reasons,” the “they” being Palestinians or Arabs when, of course, the alleged shooter was Jewish.
Allison Kaplan Sommers hints at this in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper. The number of hate crimes against both Muslims and Jews has grown exponentially “over the course of the Israel-Gaza war,” she writes, both here and globally, “fueled by the unremitting hatred and vitriol online surrounding the conflict.”
Her argument, while accurate, also minimizes the deep and longstanding animus of Western culture toward Muslims — and not just since Oct. 7, 2023, or even Sept. 11, 2001. Anti-Muslim bigotry has guided American foreign policy for decades (at least since the Iranian Revolution), and has largely infected American cultural and political discourse.
As with antisemitism and anti-black racism, Islamaphobic racism is both structural/systemic and casual. The structural aspect presents itself in American foreign policy — with whom we align and support and against whom we stand — and in the literal structures of society, the hierarchies of access, power, and representation. The casual exists beyond the structures, is embedded in them but also in a more general set of biases that influence everyday behavior.
TV and film have long relied on what academics call “orientalist” Muslim tropes. They include the cartoonish other of early Hollywood, and the more recent Muslim villain from film and television. These longstanding cliches the way the broader culture sees Islam and they way Islam is used in politics.
Consider the repeated attacks by President Donald Trump and the Right on Muslim U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Talib (D-Mich.). They nearly always focus on their religious and ethnic identities (Omar is Somali and Talib Palestinian). They are called foreign agents, Jihadis, accused of a deeply rooted antisemitism that critics of the pair see as endemic to their backgrounds. (The same people who target the pair give people like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon a pass, despite their overt hostility to Jews and their uses of Nazi symbolism.)
And consider the attempts by U.S. Rep Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) to smear (https://www.jns.org/nj-congressman-slams-rutgers-for-antisemitism-after-lecturer-attends-hamas-linked-webinar/) a Rutgers professor who spoke during a webinar on UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians and the Near East). The webinar looked at the impact that the Israeli ban on UNRWA would have, and was supportive of Palestinian rights and critical of Israel — which in Gottheimer and the pro-Israel right’s worldview, makes it suspect.
These attacks are not overtly Islamophobic, but they rely on a long list of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes that remain acceptable in American culture these stereotypes proliferate and influence our attitudes and political beliefs.
This is a form of radicalizing the Muslim, as attorney Sahar Aziz, director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers, has written.
“The idea is that no matter what you look like, you’re a Muslim and we can’t trust you,” she told Time magazine in 2021. The 9/11 attacks are a flashpoint, but “Orientalism and American imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa operated long before 9/11.”
(T)hose two phenomena were the primary drivers for whatever anti-Muslim perceptions existed in American society before then. I identify several major international events—including the creation of Israel in 1948, the Arab Israeli war in 1967 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979—as contributing to the racialization of Muslims. Each one of these events created a huge uptick in media coverage that was primarily negative about Muslims and implied that Islam motivated them to behave in what Americans believe were “barbaric” ways.
When students camped out on campuses around the country to protest the war on Gaza, students that included not just Muslims, but Jews, and others, politicians quickly labeled them antisemitic and the product of outside agitators and Islamic terrorist groups (this was reported repeatedly on rightwing media despite evidence to contradict their assertions).
And now, as Trump and the xenophobes are rounding up and beginning to deport immigrants around the country, they make sure to raise the specter of terrorism: “We don’t know who is coming in,” they say. They could be gangs or terrorists.
The Florida shooting is not an isolated, ironic incident, but a part of this larger set of tropes. It follows on the heels of other more deadly incidents (like the the Sikh service station owner who was killed days after 9/11) or the 6-year-old killed by his landlord.
These seemingly smaller incidents stem are a form of more casual Islamophic-racism, but they stem from the same poisoned well.