The 'Roadkill' of the Islamophobia Industry

IN HIS BOOK The Islamophobia Industry, author Nathan Lean points out that two months after the attacks of 9/11, Pew research showed that 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam. That was a 14-point increase from a similar poll taken in March 2001, several months before the Twin Towers fell. This was likely because U.S. leaders, including President George W. Bush, stated publicly and repeatedly that Islam and Muslims were not to blame for terrorism—terrorists were.

By October 2010, nine years later, only 39 percent of Americans expressed a favorable view of Islam.

What accounted for this dramatic drop? Yes, Muslims committed 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during that period, attacks that tragically took the lives of 33 people, but this hardly seems overwhelming in a nation that experienced 150,000 murders in the same time span. Lean concludes that the “spasm of Islamophobia that rattled through the American public is the product of a tight-knit and interconnected confederation of right-wing fear merchants ... the Islamophobia industry.”

The controversy the “industry” generated around Cordoba House (the original name for what became known as “the Ground Zero Mosque”) was its first taste of sustained mainstream public influence, but it would not be the last. A few years later, many denizens of this world were either in or orbiting the Trump campaign and later his White House. “Fringe, Sinister View of Islam Now Steers the White House” was how a New York Times headline described it.

Trump himself appears to embrace this worldview. During the presidential campaign, he repeatedly made comments such as “I think Islam hates us” and threatened to enact this worldview into policy.

A week into his presidency, Trump signed the infamous executive order, later blocked in the courts, titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Each of the seven nations designated in the document had overwhelmingly Muslim populations, prompting critics to refer to the policy as a “Muslim ban.” The Trump administration claimed that the purpose was to prevent people who might commit murderous violence from entering the United States.

CNN contributor Fareed Zakaria called the policy “truly mysterious” in light of a study by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute that tallied the number of Americans killed on U.S. soil from 1975 to 2015 by citizens of the seven countries in question. That number being zero, Zakaria concluded that the refugees and foreign nationals affected by the policy were simply the “roadkill of Trump’s posturing.”

Among that roadkill was Munther A., an Iraqi who had served as an interpreter for the U.S. government. He and his family had settled into their seats on a flight in Istanbul bound for JFK airport when officials boarded the plane and removed them.

Additional roadkill included Dr. Amer Al Homssi, who had left his patients in Chicago for a few days to get married in the United Arab Emirates, but was prevented from flying back to the United States because he carried a Syrian passport. When he finally returned, Al Homssi went straight from O’Hare airport to his workplace, the Advocate Christ Medical Center at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. “I’m very anxious to go back to my residency, back to my patients, back to my colleagues,” he told The New Yorker. “I’m very delighted to be here to do my work.”

Dr. Al Homssi was far from the only physician whose life and work was disrupted by the travel ban. The Medicus Firm, which recruits physicians for hard-to-fill jobs, reported that across the United States there are more than 15,000 doctors from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the original travel ban.

Powerful proof, if there wasn’t already enough, that prejudice not only violates the dignity of particular communities, it erects a barrier to their contribution, thereby weakening the whole.