The conundrum of “Islamophobia”

Charlie Hebdo, 10 years on

Vigil, Strasbourg, France - January 9, 2015. Photo by AdrianHancu on iStock.

As the title suggests, this post is about a landmark terror attack 10 years ago — I write it in the shadow of another Islamist attack that ushered in the new year in the Big Easy.

But I’m going to take the long route to there via a small, if upsetting, incident that took place in Sydney in mid December when a busy underpass in Chester Hill, in Sydney’s heavily Muslim west, was graffitied on either side with the words “Fuck Islam” and “Cancel Islam.”

The crime provoked a chorus of condemnation from mostly Labor MPs; here, they uniformly proclaimed, was a despicable act of “Islamophobia.” Federal minister Jason Clare, the MP for Blaxland, said whether it’s “anti-Semitism on the streets of Sydney or Islamophobia, both are just as bad as one another”.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, his electorate also home to a substantial Muslim minority, posted on his X account: “Anti-semitism and Islamophobia have no place in Australia.

“The false conversation over whether this is happening should end now.

“The bigotry is real, it is debilitating and it must end.”

The “false conversation” about whether this is happening refers to claims from Opposition figures such as senator Dave Sharma that Islamophobia — that’s the “this”— is “fictitious”. Speaking in the aftermath of last month’s firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue, Sharma had said:

“Any time any senior minister mentioned anti-Semitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.”

So Clare and Burke et-al seized on the Chester Hill graffiti as proof Islamophobia was happening and in the interests of multicultural harmony — I’m ad-libbing here — and because they’re naturally fair, even-handed chaps, in condemning this instance of Islamophobia they also condemned anti-Semitism. Because “both are just as bad as one another,” as Clare put it.

Only, the two things aren’t as bad as one another. They’re also vastly different from one another.

Antisemitism is an ancient prejudice against Jews freshly unleashed in the West in the aftermath of October 7. Islamophobia is a linguistic sleight of hand that shields from criticism a dogmatic belief system — a global religion commanding loyalty from 1.9 billion people and constituting the official creed in 49 countries — one that in its more virulent iterations is in no small part responsible for the present wave of antisemitism. We have enough examples from Australia alone.

The combined sermons of two western Sydney imams slandered “Jews” as “monsters,” “vile and treacherous,” “Nazi gangsters,” “descendants of pigs and monkeys” and called for them to be drowned.

At a rally marking the one year anniversary of October 7, Islamic scholar Sheikh Wesam Charkawi, an organiser of The Muslim Vote campaign, told a crowd outside Lakemba mosque that the massacre was a legitimate act of “resistance.” He also described Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s use of the words “social cohesion,” as an attempt to stop Muslims from voicing their political concerns.

Outside the Victorian Parliament anti-Israel protestors have chanted the Arabic phrase, “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud, jaish Muhammad soufa ya’oud,” which translates as “Remember Khaybar, oh Jews. The army of Muhammad will return,” a reference to the massacre of Jews at Khaybar, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 628 CE.

The Islamic Council of Victoria, a peak body that by definition purports to speak in the name of Islam, falsely insinuated in a social media post in November 2023 that the arson attack on a Burgertory store owned by a Palestinian activist was a hate crime. Such false accusations incited an angry mob to rally outside a Caulfield synagogue forcing worshippers to cancel the Friday night service.

The equivalent of “Islamophobia” would be “Judeophobia,” an irrational fear of the religion of Judaism. Or, to flip this around, the rough equivalent of anti-Semitism is anti-Muslim hatred or discrimination; in other words, the targeting of people of Muslim faith or perceived as such. And while I’m prepared to take it on faith that anti-Muslim prejudice has escalated since October 7, the evidence suggests it’s nowhere near as frequent or as disinhibited as anti-Semitism.

What Clare described as anti-Semitism on the streets of Sydney was likely a reference to property damage in Woollahra in the city’s east where footpaths and homes were tagged with “Death 2 Israiel” and “Kill Israiel”. Again an equivalent attack would entail graffiti reading “Death 2 Palestine,” or “Kill Gaza”. The equivalent of “Fuck the Jews,” a chant heard at the infamous anti-Israel protest outside the Sydney Opera House two days after October 7, would be “Fuck the Muslims.”

In decreeing Islamophobia, in this instance graffiti, on a par with anti-Semitism, these ministers yet again diminish and obfuscate the nature of the threat confronting Jewish communities by shielding a major source of the threat, namely sections of Islamic Australia.

To be clear: scrawling “Fuck Islam” on a busy underpass in a suburb where 40 per cent of residents are Muslim is a nasty act, “disgusting” in the words of NSW Premier Chris Minns, and could be legitimately read as an attack on freedom of religion. Those responsible should be caught and charged.

But the term “Islamophobia” deliberately blurs the line between the racist targeting of Muslims and overt disrespect towards a doctrine that should enjoy no more protection in a liberal democracy than does Christianity. Would “Fuck Christianity” or “Fuck Jesus” graffiti provoke the same indignation from our Labor MPs? Would the NSW police similarly describe such graffiti as a “likely” hate crime? If yes, I’d be no less troubled than I am at the mischaracterisation of blasphemy as “hate” when Islam is the target.

Islam, crudely speaking, successfully asserts victimhood while waging a campaign of intimidation. And no single episode more neatly illustrates our confusion and cowardice in the face of this intimidation than the response in elite quarters to the atrocities at Charlie Hebdo.

**

Even a decade after the massacre, a decade which saw a lamentable series of jihadi terrorism from the November 2015 Paris attacks to the May 2017 bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester to the live-on-camera orgy of slaughter on October 7 to the ISIS-inspired truck ramming and shooting that killed at least 15 New Year’s revellers in New Orleans, the murderous assault on staff at the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, retains its perverse honour as the terror act that most shook me. At the risk of seeming narcissistic, this one felt personal.

After all, the targets on that awful January 7 morning in Paris were counter-cultural polemicists and their production staff: while Islam was not the only religion Charlie Hebdo delighted in vilifying, it earned special notoriety for publishing pornographic images of Mohammed — if you like, a high art and very French version of “Fuck Islam.” One of the 12 fatalities felt more personal still.

Though the French-born Algerian brothers and al-Qaeda operatives, Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, sprayed the magazine’s headquarters with gunfire they were chivalrous assassins, sparing the women. A female secretary later told the media that one of the men, Kalashnikov in hand, had urged her to cover her hair but said, “don’t be scared.”

“We don’t kill women.”

Only, they did kill one woman; Elsa Cayat, a Tunisian-born psychoanalyst who wrote a fortnightly column for the magazine. She was the author of several books, among them Desire and the Whore: The Hidden Stakes of Male Sexuality. And she was Jewish. Some in her family believe that’s why she was killed: a couple of weeks before the shooting she had received anonymous death threats referencing her Jewishness. Cayat’s story was lost in the bigger story of the 7th and subsequent days of Islamist rampage, including the murder of four Jews in a kosher supermarket.

Anti-terrorism protest in Paris. Photo by OnickzArtworks on iStock.

Most of us will recall how tens of thousands of people marched through Paris in solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims brandishing the placard-cum-hashtag, “Je Suis Charlie.” And yet some big name writers went out of their way to make it known they weren’t in fact Charlie.

The bodies were still warm when the lament first heard in 1989 after Ayatollah Khomeini’s issuing of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie was reprised in sections of the intelligentsia: “murder is of course wrong, but ..”

But racism. But “Islamophobia.”

Some months after the massacre more than 30 acclaimed writers, including Michael Ondaatje and Peter Carey, objected to PEN America, the venerable organisation established to defend literary freedom, about its honouring of Charlie Hebdo. The killings were wrong, of course, these writers said. But the magazine had also mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalised, embattled, and victimised”.

If France’s Muslims were indeed “victimised” by the contents of the niche literary publication, the Kouachi brothers had on their behalf spectacularly evened the score. In any event, the allegation was outrageous — and racist, in taking the actions of brutal jihadists as a sincere measure of the hurt the magazine occasioned to ordinary Muslims, now cast as thin-skinned primitives.

Far from mocking an oppressed minority, the magazine had taken aim at a dictatorial deity with ample means of retaliation via the casting of terror into the hearts of infidels and so on. The jihadists were not animated by racialised depictions of Mohammed; they cared that “the Prophet” was depicted at all. And so they canceled the law of the republic on orders of the caliphate.

If there had been any doubt about the courage of those who worked at Charlie Hebdo the terror attack laid it definitively to rest.

**

A decade on it is painfully clear that few among us are Charlie.

When in November British Labour MP Tahir Ali used the occasion of “Islamophobia awareness month” — of course there’s such a thing, what planet have you been living on? — to advocate for blasphemy laws, prime minister Keir Starmer responded with an elegant and rousing defence of the spirit of Voltaire: in a secular, pluralist society, he said, the freedom to ridicule, and even vilify, religion is sacrosanct. Just dreamin’. He actually said that “desecration (of religious texts) is awful” and his government was “committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division,” including Islamophobia and you guessed it — antisemitism. (As if Britain’s Jews were fulminating over blasphemous depictions of Jehova; notice how Jews are perpetually used as cover for societal fears of radical Islam?)

And if you trust Australia’s state and federal Labor governments — whose representatives similarly spew forth declarations of “we’re committed to tackling all forms of hatred..” whenever they’re caught, rabbit-like, in the headlights of sectarian tension — if you trust our tribunals and police and human rights bureaucracies not to reintroduce blasphemy through further expansive interpretations of “anti-vilification” laws, you’re a more trusting soul than I. If you trust our political class not to take the protestations of the increasingly hardline self-appointed leaders of the Islamic community as representative of the views of all Muslims in Australia you believe in miracles of biblical proportion.

If scrawling “Fuck Islam” on a Sydney wall is seen as a hate crime — as opposed to a lesser species of crime — I see no compelling reason why before long saying “Fuck Islam”, saying it even in an artful context, would also constitute a hate crime. And undermining our precious freedoms in this way would be a likely recipe for, in Starmer’s words, “hatred and division,” wherein racists of all stripes would find themselves emboldened.

In the interests of the elusive “social cohesion” that our leaders so love to invoke might I suggest, respectfully, that a little Islamophobia has its place.

Dedicated to Elsa Cayat (9 March 1960 – 7 January 2015).