By Jamal Kanj
Abdul El-Sayed. (Photo: Conlan Houston. Via Wikimedia Commons)
Islamophobia does not stem from Islam being less progressive than the other Abrahamic religions, all of which have their own well-documented histories of intolerance and compatibility challenges.
Jewish hatred is real and must be condemned without qualification. But it cannot be fought by propagating hatred against the followers of another religion. Demonizing Muslims does not combat antisemitism; it simply transfers prejudice from one target to another. Sadly, that is precisely the objective of Jewish supremacists who readily invoke antisemitism to shut down debate and weaponize anti-Muslim hatred, redirecting public attention away from Israel’s policies of genocide and dispossession.
At the recent Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit in Las Vegas, Florida Congressman Randy Fine told the crowd that the problem was not radical Islamism but “mainstream” Islam. In a separate interview, Fine went further, suggesting some civilizations are simply superior to others. Texas Congressman Brandon Gill referred to a Heritage Foundation poll claiming that 40 percent of American Muslims support Sharia without acknowledging that the poll deliberately left ambiguous what respondents understood by the term, including whether they meant mandatory religious law or private observance. Sharia in the life of a Muslim is not different from the Catholic canon law or the religious laws and practices observant Jews follow in their daily lives: religious frameworks that guide personal conduct and communal life, not systems intended to govern the state.
Hate promoters are clearly gaining ground among an unsuspecting American public, and the timing is what makes this wave distinct. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s Islamophobia Index climbed from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025, and Pew Research finds 51 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence, more than double the share six months after 9/11. Within a week of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary, Islamophobic posts naming him jumped nearly 1,900 percent, branding him a jihadist and every Muslim officeholder a Trojan horse.
The message is clear: Muslim identity itself, not the candidate’s policy position, is disqualifying. A campaign bankrolled by Israel-first Jewish plutocrats financing pro-Israel lobbies like AIPAC, which spent approximately $30 million to defeat Al Sayed. After that effort failed, the same billionaires and AIPAC jumped horses, pouring money now supporting the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers. The single-issue lobbyists are prepared to back whichever Republican or Democratic candidate is most willing to serve the interests of a foreign nation, not Americans.
What unites these plutocrats is not their faith or the American party system. It is an Israel-first agenda, one that treats American Muslims as a proxy battlefield for a foreign policy argument and makes Islam, not policy, the dividing line.
Follow the money and the microphones, and the same Israel-first commitment shows up institutionally, not just individually. From the multimillion-dollar tax-exempt charity led by Jewish-American Steven Emerson, who produced a movie in 1994 instigating Muslim hate in America. To the so-called Clarion Fund, a nonprofit founded by Israeli Canadian brothers, who spent more than $17 million, likely tax-deductible funds, to distribute 28 million DVDs of an anti-Muslim film in swing states weeks before the 2008 election. Its partner, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, filled its advisory board with career Islamophobia figures like Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney, alongside a former Israeli ambassador to the US. And in 2026, there is Ben Shapiro’s fictional Islamophobic movie. These are not civic organizations with one thing in common: promoting Israeli propaganda and inciting Islamophobia.
The countries and communities Fine, Shapiro, and Laura Loomer describe as civilizational threats are, for the most part, not at war with the United States, France, or Britain. They are critics, boycotters, and protesters of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Zionist mob violence in the West Bank. The “enemy” being conjured is those who are resisting an Israeli apartheid occupation, not at war with the US. Manufacturing a shared Western-Islamic civilizational conflict is a way of recruiting Americans into Israel’s endless wars by convincing them it is their own (the war on Iran is the latest), and Israel-first American Zionists have every incentive to keep that conflation alive.
This dynamic is not new; it is the domestic cousin of an older ploy, dressed as principled liberalism rather than open hatred. For decades, Bill Maher built a brand insisting that berating Islam was simply standing up for liberal values, that Muslims uniquely threaten free speech and women’s rights in ways no other faith does. Inarguably, fundamentalism exists in every faith. Only one gets singled out as incompatible with modern life, and it is never a coincidence which religion, or which conflict it serves.
Maher turns a blind eye when, in the 21st century, it is not the “incompatible” Muslim men who recite the morning blessings, Birkot Hashachar: “shelo asani ishah,” thanking God for not making them a woman, or “she-loh asani goy,” for not making them a non-Jew, alongside the blessing for not making them a slave. As if being a woman, non-Jew, or a slave were divine curses rather than victims of human-inflicted ills.
In fact, all of what Islam is accused of as being incompatible with Western culture was adopted from the moral codes of the Old and New Testaments, with few variations. This includes attitudes toward women and slavery. Islam, however, introduced significant changes in the treatment of women, recognizing them as persons with an equal soul and granting them legal and moral rights, including inheritance and choosing who to marry. It also accepted black slaves as full members of the Muslim community, with the same religious standing as non-black Muslims.
This was 1,400 years ago, a revolutionary transformation by any measure, and it was not merely an abstract theory. Khadija, the first woman in the Prophet Muhammad’s life, later his wife, was his employer. Bilal, a formerly enslaved Black African, became Islam’s first muezzin, the person who calls Muslims to prayer five times a day. These were not symbolic gestures; they reflected a profound reordering of social norms at a time when women and enslaved people occupied vastly different positions in Maher’s and Shapiro’s ancestral cultures.
Islamophobia does not stem from Islam being less progressive than the other Abrahamic religions, all of which have their own well-documented histories of intolerance and compatibility challenges. Rather, like the hostility toward Islam voiced by Israel-first figures, it is driven by a Zionist agenda aiming to normalize bigotry against Muslims.
This bigotry lands on real people: American Muslim students told their faith makes them suspect, worshippers who now factor gunmen into their Friday prayers, and ordinary Jewish Americans whose legitimate fears are being weaponized to license bigotry, their religion conflated with the politics of a state that international courts and human rights organizations have condemned for war crimes and genocide.
– Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
