Anti-Islamism doesn’t equal Islamophobia

Anti-Islamism isn’t Islamophobia.  And let’s not equate either with antisemitism!

Just as we were thinking mischievous word-manipulation couldn’t get any worse, the ABC served us up a whopper last week.

The news item, which I heard on  Australia’s national news station ABC News Radio and subsequently read on its news site, was entitled Islamophobia is on the rise across Australia. It’s opening paragraph: A news report has found Australia has seen a rise in Islamophobia particularly since the October 7 terror attack on Israel. (At least the ABC was good enough to label it a “terror attack”!)

Was it really Islamophobia? The following paragraph reveals all. It states that a man witnessed someone setting fire to a truck belonging to a neighbour who had been flying a Palestinian flag from the truck. (The good neighbour succeeded in dousing the flames.)

Now attempted arson is unacceptable, period.  But this arsonist was provoked not by a devout Muslim kneeling in prayer, but rather by the sight of a Palestinian flag which, post-October 7^th 2023, flown in Australia, is making a heavy ideological statement – From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.  In other words: a declaration propagating hate-fuelled genocide against Israel. This is the rallying cry of an extreme political movement claiming to derive legitimacy from Islam the religion but utterly distinct from it.  A movement accurately termed Islamism.

Again, Heaven forfend that anyone should misconstrue my words as condoning the deliberate setting fire to the truck of this man.  I certainly do not. But isn’t it an act of anti-Islamism, rather than Islamophobia?

The piece goes on to report “an increase in Islamophobic incidents including at pro-Palestinian rallies” (emboldened text mine). Hallo? Pro-Palestinian rallies are habitually hotbeds of antisemitic hate! If a potential victim of such hate was provoked at such a rally, is it a surprise?

Most of the other incidents this ABC report highlights would likewise appear not to be examples of Islamophobia but rather instances of anti-Islamism.

There is a massive difference, Islamophobia is directed against Muslims in general, i.e. those professing the Muslim faith. While some incidents of this nature, i.e. directed against mosques or Muslim schools, have been reported – and they ought to be roundly condemned by all – the majority of such incidents, judging by the ABC report, were directed against those who propagate political Islamic triumphalism which includes chief among its goals the wiping out of Israel. This is anti-Islamism not Islamophobia.

Anyone gratuitously displaying a Palestinian flag in Australia displays his abhorrence of what he would call “occupied Palestine”, i.e. Israel.

Again I am not remotely condoning violence against anyone simply for displaying a Palestinian flag.  But call a spade a spade! Don’t call anti-Islamism “Islamophobia”.

And indeed I would go so far as to say that post-7/10/23, to be ideologically anti-Islamist is to be on the right side of history!

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By contrast, a refreshingly honest piece in The Australian authored fascinatingly by a journalist with the name Mohammad Alfares places Islamophobia strictly in context.  He quotes Federal Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson as saying there is “no parallel” between “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” with attacks against Jews “far more prolific ….We have not seen any places of worship important to Muslim Australians firebombed as we have seen a synagogue …we have not seen any cars set alight in Muslim neighbourhoods targeting Muslim Australians …it’s far more prolific against the Jewish community which is a far smaller community ..and that’s why it has the attention it deserves”.

Alfares to his credit does not try to twist or juggle facts or statistics in his report  Nor for that matter does the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ). Its definition of an antisemitic attack excludes speech and social media posts without specific threats of violence. 2,062 incidents accompanied by violence or threats of violence against Jews were recorded in 2024. By contrast the Islamophobia Register of Australia (IRA) claimed just 932 incidents in 2024 and these include online abuse without threats of violence.  Moreover Australian Jewry is about one-eighth the size of Australia’s Muslim population.

Senator Paterson is one hundred per cent right.  There is no comparison between the extent of anti-Semitism and that of Islamophobia.

But now we have also to bring into the equation that many instances of so-called Islamophobia actually constitute anti-Islamism as I argued earlier. And not all of it is unprovoked. Unprovoked Jews don’t start up with Palestinian Arabs.

So while it appears a large proportion of antisemitic incidents are perpetrated by Islamists or Palestinian Arabs, very few Islamophobic occurrences are perpetrated by Jews. Again, no parallel!

And of course one must not forget that, for all that Palestinian Arabs may protest that their fight is against Israel not Jews, their hostile pronouncements in Arabic always use the word Jahud. Their horrible, expletive-ridden battle-cry at the Sydney Opera House on October 9^th 2023 was aimed at Jews, not just Israelis. At the heart of it all is the terrible toxic scourge called Islamism and to be against that is to wear a badge of honour. It is a badge that the international community have yet to merit.  

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Thank G-D that we can declare truthfully and honestly that an ideological movement akin to Islamism has never sprung up among Jews. Don’t let anyone compare Kahane-ism, repugnant though it may be to many Jews, with Islamism. Kahane-ism never sought to gratuitously murder innocents  Moreover, nothing akin in scope and intensity to Hamas’s unspeakably brutal massacre, mass rape, abduction and torture which began on 7/10/23 and continues as I write, has never been perpetrated by our nation, even in antiquity during the wars for conquest of our G-D-given Land.

In all our history, there was just one comparable but isolated, aberrant, shameful local incident recorded in Judges 19 when a group of Benjamite thugs raped and abused an innocent woman to death. The Scriptural postscript on this incident (19:30) is telling: There hasn’t happened, nor has there been seen, anything like this from the day the Children of Israel  came up from  the land of Egypt ad ha-yom ha-zeh, until this day (today!); learn from it, take counsel and speak out!

Is the prophet Samuel, author of the Book of Judges, being anti-Semitic by roundly excoriating this incident?  Of course not!  By the same token, anyone condemning acts of Islamic violence, rape or incitement is not an Islamophobe. He is merely an anti-Islamist.

Blessedly, there continues to be no Jewish equivalent of militant Islamism Or, for that matter, medieval, fanatical Christian stake-burning Inquisitionists.  We are , Barukh haShem, still a nation with values like no other.