Islamophobic attacks continue
Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Nominee for Mayor of New York City, has faced constant attacks targeting him for his faith since his campaign for Mayor started to see success.1
On the 2nd of July 2025, one day after Canada Day, a Muslim woman was swarmed in the city of Osahwa, her hijab pulled off of her as she was stomped in the head.2
Three Palestinian men were shot in Burlington Vermont for the sin of speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs, one of them will never walk again. 3
Six year old Wadea al-Fayoume was stabbed to death by his landlord in Plainfield Township, who yelled "You Muslims must die." 4
Western media chooses not to highlight this rising hate by declining to give these events visibility in their headlines and what they choose to repeat. This is unforgivable for many reasons, one of which is that we are unable to move on from merely acknowledging this Islamophobic/Anti-Arab racism and onto the next necessary step of understanding the root causes.
One of which is support for the State of Israel as the philosophy that underpins it, Zionism, is inherently Islamophobic/Anti-Arab. And to support Israel is to support the hate that is at the core of it. Because how else can the injustice visited about the Palestinian people be justified other than bigotry?
Zionism is Islamophobic
Now to be sure there are many different kinds of Zionism, some more militant, and some not. That all these variations are lumped together in our discourse is a rhetorical muddle that feels deliberate. Nevertheless it needs to be teased apart and so I'm going to call the version that has been put into actual horrific practice over decades Israeli state Zionism. This reflects not only how integral the ideology is to the Israeli state but led to the creation of it in the first place. And at the heart of it is the bigoted conviction that there is no way that Jewish migrants coming into the Levant could ever adopt the conventions of the dirty and uncivilized Palestinian/Muslim population already there but would have to live separate from them and impose 'civilized' European ideas onto the region. Most tragically European ideas of land rights.
Nothing shows this more than the first contact between Zionist ideas and Palestinians. There is a wonderful paper written by Liora Halperin entitled " Petah Tikva, 1886: Gender, Anonymity, and the Making of Zionist Memory"5 that is about Zionist mythmaking and details the first conflict between Zionist, or at least proto Zionist, ideology and Palestinians.
The paper states:
"Ottoman custom dictated that new owners would continue to let tenant farmers graze their animals on the land even after it changed ownership... But in 1883, a new group of Jews arrived from Bialystok, and they demanded that the tenant farmers and grazers vacate."
This denial of Palestinian land rights led to, a few years later in 1886, physical violence. This occurred close to a hundred and fifty years ago. The point being, that right from the start, Zionist migrants had no regard at all for the culture of the people who were already there, and had no problem denying land rights. And that it has always been Palestinian land rights taken away before any Palestinian attempt at gaining restitution for those injustices.
The tragedy is that if the migrants had given up on imposing European ideas on local peoples, then history would have turned out very differently. As proof of this, the same paper states that Petah Tikva was actually started in 1878 by Jewish people from Jerusalem and there was no conflict for 5 years before the Europeans came!
Even more tragic is what has been documented by Illan Pape in his work "Ten Myths About Israel" where he notes:
"The diaries of the early Zionists... are full of anecdotes revealing how the settlers were well received by the Palestinians, who offered them shelter and in many cases taught them how to cultivate the land. Only when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin. And when that resistance started, it quickly took the form of every other anti-colonialist struggle."
So how can the violent displacement of such a hospitable and giving people be justified? By painting them as something else. Perhaps as something uncivilized and barbaric, perhaps as dirty Arabs, and savage Muslims.
Islamophobia and Anti-Arab racism is necessary to provide moral cover to the project of Zionism. And so Until Western media, and Western politicians give up on it, the image of the evil Muslim somehow incompatible with Western civilization, will not fade.