Islamophobia

Muslims should be banned from entering the United States and we should have a database to track every American Muslim” (Healy). This recent statement by the Presidential candidate, Donald Trump asserts that Islamophobia in the United States is not a myth. Islamophobia is a serious issue which distresses many Muslims in the United States today. Thus, creating tension between Muslims and many fellow Americans leading to hate crimes, stereotypes, and inhumanity. This phenomenon is one which was created by Radical Islam and given life by the media. Before one can talk about the causes of Islamophobia one must understand its meaning. “Phobia” is defined in Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of

One that was fundamental for the rise of Islamophobia was an event that occurred in 1979 when Iranian revolutionists seized the American embassy in Tehran and held American citizen hostages for months. This event established the terrorist stereotype. However, the terrorist image was not targeting Muslim groups specifically, but rather Middle Eastern communities such as Arabs and Sikh (Love 405). By the mid of the 1990s, the stereotype about Middle Eastern terrorist was widely spread in the United States, specifically after the 1995 terrorist attack on Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, as the media rushed to assume that the terror is caused by an Arab before any evidence was available. A similar case occurred in 1998 with the accidental explosion that caused the destruction of TWA flight 800 (Kumar 255; Love 410). But the real upsurge of Islamophobia occurred in the 21st

Is Islam a violent religion? Well, the Islamic holy book, the Quran, states “…if anyone killed a person, it would be as if he killed the whole of mankind; and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole of mankind…” (Qureshi). The Islamic Messenger Muhammad also states, “You do not do evil to those who do evil to you but you treat them with kindness and forgiveness” (Prophet Muhammad). These are statements by Islam’s 2 most reliable sources and they clearly show that Islam does not preach for violence, but peace. Now the other stereotype is that Muslim’s themselves are violent people. One fact that we cannot ignore is that there are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world today, if Muslims were violent a big part of the world’s population would be dead today. Also according to FBI, 94% of terrorist attacks carried out in the United States from 1980 to 2005 have been by non-Muslims. This means that an American terrorist suspect is over nine times more likely to be non-Muslim than a Muslim (Alnatour). Another point is that there have also been 140,000 terror attacks committed worldwide since 1970. Even if Muslims carried out all of these attacks, which they have not, those terrorists would represent less than 0.00009 percent of all Muslims. To put things into perspective, this means that you are more likely to be