Activity

I am enjoying reading the back and forth on this topic, but I don’t know.  Let’s look at a similar word, “homophobia”.  That’s obviously a real thing, and it’s not ethnic.  It’s not even religiously based.  It’s hatred aimed at people for following a certain lifestyle choice, whatever their race, sex, or religious/philosophical creed.  In my experience a lot of the people who I would describe as “homophobic” don’t hate gay people all that much, they just hate the IDEA of gay people existing.  They hate gay pride celebrations, they hate seeing gay characters on television.  What they really want is for the world to go back to the way it “used to be”, when gays stayed in the closet where they didn’t have to know they existed.

Is “Islamophobia” something similar?  Not so much a reaction to terrorism as a reaction to the world once again not being the way it “used to be”, when religious freedom in America just meant that everyone was free to attend the Christian church of his or her choice.