The Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council has just released a “Combatting Islamophobia” policy handbook. The group is calling for the introduction of “anti-Islamophobia education” into school curricula, at least $40 million in federal funding for anti-Islamophobia programs, an additional Islamophobia funding stream worth around $20 million, and initiatives designed to counter what it describes as online misinformation. All paid for by the Canadian taxpayer.
This handbook is one with so many of its kind. Consider, for example, “the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate,” issued by the Biden administration in late 2024.
Its purpose is to outline how to—
Increase awareness of hatred against Muslims and Arabs and broaden recognition of these communities’ heritages. Muslims and Arab Americans have helped build our country since its founding, but they have also routinely experienced hate, discrimination, and bias due to baseless stereotypes, fearmongering, and prejudice.
Let us for now ignore the demonstrably false claim that Muslims “have helped build our country since its founding” (in reality, Muslims were the first to terrorize our country since its founding) and focus on the assertion that they “have also routinely experienced hate, discrimination, and bias due to baseless stereotypes, fearmongering, and prejudice.”
Focus especially on the italicized phrases: Muslims, according to this formulation, are “routinely experiencing” hate — meaning always and for a long time — but this hate has no foundation other than “baseless stereotypes, fearmongering, and prejudice.”
There are only two ways to understand this: either Americans are extremely dumb or evil, buying into and acting on any meaningless stereotype thrown their way to express their hate; or else,what Muslims “routinely experience” is not based on “baseless stereotypes” but rather something else — perhaps reality.
The Biden-Harris administration and the Canadian government, to say nothing of the so-called “mainstream” media, all argue, even if implicitly, for the first interpretation: They suggest that temporal developments, such as the September 11 attacks prompted Americans to “baselessly stereotype” Muslims as violent terrorists.
On the other hand, history argues for the second interpretation: that Muslims “routinely experience” aversion from non-Muslims, not because of “baseless stereotypes” but because non-Muslims understood, often from firsthand experience, what Islam is all about.
The fact is that from the very start, Western peoples, including many of their luminaries, portrayed Islam as a hostile and violent force — often in terms that would make today’s “Islamophobe” blush. There’s a reason for that.
In 628 AD, Muhammad summoned the Christian Roman emperor, Heraclius, to submit to Islam. When the emperor refused, a virulent jihad was unleashed against the Western world. Less than 100 years later, Islam had violently conquered more than two-thirds of Christendom, and was raiding deep into France.
While these far-reaching conquests are often allotted a sanitized sentence, if that, in today’s textbooks, the chroniclers of the time made clear that these were cataclysmic events that had a traumatic impact on Europe.
But it wasn’t just what they personally experienced at the hands of Muslims that developed this ancient “phobia” to Islam. As far back as the seventh century, Islam’s scriptures became available to nearby Christians, such as John of Damascus (b. 675), one of history’s earliest “Islamophobes.” Based solely on these primary sources of Islam, Christians concluded that Muhammad was a (likely demon-possessed) false prophet who had very obviously concocted a creed to justify the worst depravities of man — for domination, plunder, cruelty and carnality.
This view prevailed for well over a millennium throughout Europe; and it was augmented by the fact that Muslims were still — well over a millennium after Muhammad — invading Christian territories, plundering them, and abducting their women and children. As mentioned, the United States’ first conflict with Islam — indeed, its first war as a nation — came not after Sept. 11, 2001, but in 1801, as a response to jihadist raids on American ships for booty and slaves.
A miniscule sampling of what Europeans actually thought of Islam throughout the centuries follows.
Theophanes, important Eastern Roman chronicler (d.818):
He [Muhammad] taught those who gave ear to him that the one slaying the enemy — or being slain by the enemy — entered into paradise [see Koran 9:111]. And he said paradise was carnal and sensual — orgies of eating, drinking, and women. Also, there was a river of wine … and the women were of another sort [hooris], and the duration of sex greatly prolonged and its pleasure long-enduring [e.g., Koran 56: 7-40, 78:31, 55:70-77]. And all sorts of other nonsense.
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