Islamophobia: America in grip of hysterical episode but lacks the politicians capable of restoring sanity

What Islamophobes fail to understand now is that their behaviour plays into the hands of enemy they seek to eradicate

Armed protesters from the so-called Bureau of American-Islamic Relations (BAIR), take part in a demonstration in front of a mosque on December 12, 2015 in Texas (2015 Getty Images)

America is standing on the edge of a precipice of irrational and counter-productive Islamophobia. Following last month’s attacks in Paris, and the Isis-inspired rampage at a social-services centre in San Bernardino, California, anti-Muslim incidents have notably increased in the US. Some have been violent, others absurd – such as the decision of a Virginia district to shut down its schools amid parental uproar over a geography homework assignment for their children to copy a piece of Arabic calligraphy.

How things have changed since 2001. A few days after the 9/11 attacks – an unprecedented and seismic shock to mainland America’s sense of invulnerability, and 200 times deadlier than the shootings in San Bernardino – the then President, George W Bush, went to the Islamic Centre in Washington, DC to denounce Islamophobia: “Those who feel they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. They represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed of that kind of behaviour.” If only the Republicans currently vying to follow him into the White House could speak out in the same way.

Instead, Donald Trump, with his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, fans the flames and his rivals follow his obnoxious example. Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, trumpets his record as a no-nonsense federal prosecutor, and thunders that not even five-year-old orphan girls from Syria’s ghastly civil war should be allowed into the US as refugees.

The World Trade Centre, of course, was not destroyed during an election campaign, let alone in a political environment like today’s, in which Republicans are determined to keep the spotlight on national security, an issue where the party fares well and on which, they contend, the President, Barack Obama, and the Democrats have been dangerously weak. But there is no lack of historical precedents: the banning of Chinese immigrant labour in the 1880s; the turning away of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany on the grounds that they might be Communists, followed by the full-blown Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most shocking was Franklin D Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Mr Trump has cited FDR’s action as justification for his own proposal. He fails to understand that internment is perhaps the largest blot on the reputation of one of the country’s greatest presidents.

These were gross overreactions, born of a peculiarly American jitteriness, evident in the shutdown of the entire Los Angeles school system on Tuesday because of a half-baked threat. In LA’s defence it should be said that San Bernardino had occurred only a few days earlier. But a similar threat was received in New York, the city that bore the brunt of 9/11, which nonetheless kept its schools open.

In fact, the US screening system for refugees is extremely effective. Of 785,000 admitted since 2001, only a dozen have been linked with terrorist activity and none has carried out an attack. The biggest risk lies in Islamic militants who are citizens of European countries, and thus granted entry under the Visa Waiver programme.

America’s Muslim population is much better integrated into society than its British and French counterparts. However, it is also far smaller and more recent, and settled in a more overtly Christian country, remote from the Islamic world and in a culture with less understanding of it. What Donald Trump and America’s Islamophobes fail to understand now is that their behaviour plays precisely into the hands of the enemy they seek to eradicate.