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Islamophobia may be history’s Holy Grail of imperial ideologies – one that conditioned the world to accept the most depraved treatment of fellow human beings as not just normal, but necessary.
The images are seared into our collective consciousness: Syrian refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. Drone strikes obliterating villages in Pakistan and Yemen. Gaza’s children being burned alive. Palestinian doctors being raped to death by Israeli soldiers. The torture photos from Abu Ghraib showing Muslim prisoners stripped naked, stacked in pyramids, leashed like dogs. These are not random tragedies – they are the logical endpoints of a systematic death-dealing project called Islamophobia.
The silence around Islamophobia in anti-imperialist spaces roars like thunder to those who care to listen. How is it that those who pride themselves on unmasking power can remain so blind to one of imperialism’s central organizing principles? This is no mere oversight—it is a revelation of how completely the imperial worldview has colonized even the minds of its supposed critics.
This dehumanization serves a dual purpose: it not only justifies violence but renders imperial plunder invisible. The same logic that makes Muslim death acceptable makes Muslim wealth collectible—their resources become not rightful property but unclaimed treasures awaiting “proper” Western management. From Iraq’s oil fields to Libya’s gold reserves, from Syria’s wheat to Afghanistan’s mineral wealth—the wholesale looting of Muslim resources proceeds without protest or moral outrage. While Islamophobia does not justify the theft; it simply makes Western audiences numb to it. The same psychological machinery that normalizes Muslim death also normalizes their dispossession, allowing the imperial project to kill with one hand and loot with the other, all while the public’s eyes watch with cultivated apathy.
Attempting anti-imperialism without confronting Islamophobia isn’t just incomplete—it’s an exercise in futility, like trying to understand gravity while ignoring mass, or claiming to fight class inequality while refusing to analyze racism and white supremacy.
Yet watch how even in independent media, where anti-imperial analysis thrives, Islamophobia is treated as peripheral—a footnote, an afterthought, a “cultural issue” somehow separate from the “real” mechanics of power. This blindness is not accidental—it is evidence of how deeply the logic of Muslim disposability has embedded itself in our Western consciousness, infecting even those spaces that imagine themselves sites of resistance.
When I speak of Islamophobia, I speak of racism—not because Muslims are a “race,” but because racism itself was never about real-existing racial categories. Racism did not emerge to explain races; races were invented to justify racism. European colonialism didn’t discover racial differences—it manufactured them, creating hierarchies of human worth to rationalize its own need for domination. Today, Islamophobia performs this same lethal function — constructing “the Muslim” as an inferior category of human inherently marked for elimination, transforming religious practices, ethnic features, and cultural markers into manufactured evidence of irredeemable “otherness” that ultimately serves to justify systematic violence.
This is not similarity by analogy—it is the exact same machine of dehumanization, retooled for an era where older forms of explicit racism have become harder to defend, but the imperial need to mark certain populations for elimination remains unchanged.
Death-Dealing by Islamophobia: The Normalization of Dead Muslims
This brings me to my recent encounter with Dr. Armina Shareef’s meticulous analysis of how anti-Muslim racism operates through multiple interconnected layers, systematically enabling and normalizing Muslim deaths. Her framework illuminates why Western tears flow freely for Ukraine while for many Gaza’s genocide barely registers – and why even supposed allies in the fight against imperialism often fail to recognize the Muslim bodies at the heart of the imperial project, or worse, perversely blame Muslims themselves for their suffering under imperialism’s boot.
Source: Photos of US Torture of Iraqi Prisoners At The Abu Ghraib Prison In Iraq
Islamophobia’s foundation lies in dehumanization through securitization – a systematic process that constructs Muslims as an existential security threat to Western civilization. The “terrorist” emerges as the embodiment of this threat – a racialized category positioned deliberately outside the “rules-based order” and stripped of human complexity. This construction relies on depicting the terrorist as driven by an inherent, almost biological predisposition to irrational violence. The telling fact that the label “terrorist” is rarely applied to political violence perpetrated by white actors reveals Islamophobia’s true nature as a fundamentally racist framework. The false but widely circulated Western claim that ‘not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim‘ exemplifies this racist framework.
Because the notion of existential threat is ascribed to the terrorist’s “Muslimness” itself, this framework inevitably expands beyond individual actors to encompass entire Muslim populations, marking them all as threatening and therefore ultimately disposable. This logic creates the conditions where Muslim deaths become not just acceptable but necessary for what is framed as the preservation of Western security and values. As President George W. Bush proclaimed, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America” – a stark articulation of how this framework renders entire populations and territories as legitimate sites of violence.
The calculated efficiency of this Islamophobic conditioning of the public lies in its dual function: it first places an entire population outside the rule of law, then transforms their systematic elimination into a rational response to an ‘irrational’ threat. It is not surprising, therefore, that the slaughter of an astounding number of Muslims – at least 4 million since 1990 by U.S. military actions alone – has passed with such muted protest from Western publics.
This death-dealing by Islamophobia operates through multiple, interlocking channels of discrimination and deprivation. But most importantly, at its core is its moral laundering – the transformation of mass violence into acts of virtue. And nowhere is this perverse alchemy more evident than in the manipulation of liberal discourse.
“Women’s liberation was cynically weaponized to legitimize two decades of occupation and drone warfare – even as Western forces themselves perpetrated systematic sexual violence against local women and children with impunity.”
Gender, Human Rights, and Pro-Imperialist Feminism
A system that promotes Muslim death requires ideological scaffolding — a justification for the dehumanization and devaluation of Muslims life. Consider how gender functions as a pivotal mechanism: The “imperiled Muslim woman” narrative, for example, performs dual work – it constructs Islam as fundamentally anti-feminist and therefore anti-civilizational, while simultaneously providing moral scaffolding for military intervention. The Muslim woman emerges in Western discourse solely as victim – of forced marriages, honor killings, and patriarchal oppression – allowing Islam itself to be positioned as barbaric and hostile to “civilizational values.”
This gendered dehumanization proved particularly potent in Afghanistan, where women’s liberation was cynically weaponized to legitimize two decades of murderous occupation and drone warfare – even as Western forces themselves perpetrated systematic sexual violence against local women and children with impunity.
The Muslim woman’s body thus becomes a site where claims of Western moral superiority intersect with justifications for Muslim death – her “salvation” requiring the very violence that kills her and her people. This reveals how seemingly benevolent concerns about gender rights can be twisted into ideological cover for what is, at its core, an imperial death-dealing project targeting Muslim populations.
From the stereotypical ‘mono-brow’ to the vilified beard and prayer mat – White liberal feminism actively perpetuates colonial Islamophobic tropes, reducing complex Muslim identities and practices to orientalist caricatures in service of imperial agendas. The same movements that claim to champion women’s liberation often participate in the racist othering of Muslim bodies and religious expressions. What makes this death-dealing system so potent is how thoroughly it permeates supposedly opposed political ideologies. Far from being confined to explicit far-right bigotry, it finds eager collaborators across the spectrum. Self-styled “liberal” governments, while claiming to champion equality and human rights, implement policies like Macron’s “separatism” law that systematically criminalize Islamic religious practice. Perhaps most tellingly, in France, armed police have forced Muslim women to remove their clothing on public beaches – a striking instance where the supposed defense of ‘liberal Western values’ manifests as state-sanctioned violation of women’s bodily autonomy.
This juxtaposition captures a revealing irony: while 1920s officers measured women’s swimsuits for showing too much skin, modern French police order Muslim women to undress – both representing state violence against women’s bodily autonomy, now repackaged as ‘liberating’ Muslims from their own conservative religious choices.
The system’s genius lies in transforming ostensibly liberal humanitarian responses into mechanisms of Muslim oppression and death – refugee camps, presented as shelters for the vulnerable, function as militarized containment facilities to warehouse “unwanted” Muslim asylum seekers far from European borders. While Ukrainian refugees receive housing and integration support, Syrian Muslims languish for decades in what amount to open-air prisons. In these facilities, disease runs rampant and staff perpetrate systematic sexual abuse against unaccompanied victims – often young and helpless – with virtual impunity.
This reveals how anti-Muslim racism operates not through crude rejection of liberal values, but through their selective application – weaponizing the language of rights, security and humanitarian concern to justify the abandonment of Muslim populations to death.
One of the most perverse aspects of Islamophobia is how it performs a grotesque inversion – taking the very crimes of Western imperialism and projecting them onto its Muslim victims. This projection serves a dual purpose: it absolves the West of its historical crimes while simultaneously justifying continued violence against Muslims.
Consider how European politicians — direct descendants of the architects of modern antisemitism — now brazenly accuse Muslims of “importing antisemitism” to Europe. This breathtaking reversal of historical reality serves to both whitewash Europe’s genocidal past and paint Muslims as civilizational threats. The same societies that systematically persecuted Jews for centuries now position themselves as defenders of Jewish life against the ‘antisemitism’ of the Muslim “barbarians.”
This cynical projection of Europe’s own historical crimes onto Muslims extends beyond antisemitism. Western nations that criminalized homosexuality well into the 20th century, exported their homophobic laws through colonialism, and left a legacy of anti-LGBTQ+ violence across their former colonies, now present themselves as enlightened protectors of sexual minorities threatened by “backward” Muslim values.
India provides a stark example of this colonial distortion. Pre-colonial Indian society recognized and accepted diverse gender expressions and same-sex relationships, as evidenced in ancient texts, temple art, and cultural practices. The Hijra community, representing various non-binary gender identities, held respected social and spiritual roles. This acceptance was systematically destroyed by British colonial rule, which imposed Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 1861, criminalizing “unnatural” sexual acts. This Christian Victorian morality was forced upon a civilization that had for millennia embraced sexual and gender diversity.
Yet through a perverse sleight of hand, this colonial imposition of homophobia has been rewritten in Western consciousness as inherent to Indian and Muslim — or better yet ‘non-Western’ — “backwardness.” The same Western powers that violently suppressed indigenous forms of sexual and gender diversity now position themselves as the global champions of LGBTQ+ rights, while portraying “Oriental” societies as naturally intolerant.
This convenient amnesia about the West’s own recent history of violent homophobia – and its active role in destroying non-Western systems of sexual and gender diversity – allows it to construct Muslims and other colonized peoples as uniquely intolerant.
This pattern of projection and inversion is not accidental – it’s a fundamental mechanism of imperial power. By attributing its own worst crimes to its victims, the West accomplishes two goals simultaneously: it cleanses itself of historical guilt while constructing Muslims as deserving targets of violence. The Muslim becomes a repository for everything the West wishes to disavow about itself: religious fundamentalism, sexual repression, violent intolerance, and civilizational backwardness.
This racialized projection then enables and justifies the continued killing of Muslims – after all, if they embody everything “we” have overcome, their destruction becomes necessary for “progress.” The death-dealing project thus disguises itself as a civilizing mission, transforming genocide into liberation, occupation into women’s empowerment, and mass murder into the defense of tolerance.
Understanding this inversion is crucial for dismantling Islamophobia and, in extension, imperialism. We must relentlessly expose how the West projects its own violence onto Muslims, using accusations of bigotry to mask and justify the most extensive system of bigotry operating in the world today. The true bigotry lies not in Muslim communities, but in the imperial system that needs Muslims to embody evil so it can continue its killing spree while claiming moral superiority.
“While social media erupts over animal rights violations and environmental concerns, the routine vaporization of Muslim families barely registers a blip.”
Normalized Methods of Muslim Slaughter: Drone Warfare
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the casual dispensability of Muslim life than the bipartisan embrace of drone warfare. From Bush to Obama to Trump, the program expanded while maintaining broad acceptance across the political spectrum. Even self-proclaimed anti-war voices like Tulsi Gabbard have defended drone strikes as “an important tool.”
The metrics used to identify targets reveal the profound dehumanization at work. Any “military-aged male” in a strike zone is automatically classified as a combatant – a grotesque logic that transforms entire demographics into legitimate kills. When one of Obama’s drone strikes in 2009 obliterated a Yemeni Bedouin village ‘mistaken’ for a terrorist camp, killing 20 civilians including children, it barely registered in Western media or public consciousness.
The same pattern repeats with each new atrocity – Muslim deaths are recorded as sterile “collateral damage” statistics, if they’re recorded at all. The complete absence of Western moral outrage at these routine massacres reveals how thoroughly Muslim life has been devalued – their deaths provoking no more ethical consideration than the squashing of insects. This mechanical integration of Muslim death into normal statecraft represents the ultimate success of dehumanizing logic – making the regular obliteration of Muslim communities appear not just acceptable, but necessary and good.
Ask yourself: How many drone strike victims can you name? How many cases of “collateral damage” can you recall? When was the last time you saw sustained media coverage or public outrage over a drone massacre? While social media erupts over animal rights violations and environmental concerns – worthy causes deserving attention – the routine vaporization of Muslim families barely registers a blip.
Western societies will organize protests over the treatment of dogs or cats, yet meet the systematic drone bombings of innocent Muslim communities with deafening silence. The grotesque perversion of moral priorities is perhaps best exemplified in countries like the Netherlands, where animal rights parties hold seats in parliament while the mere suggestion of parties advocating for Muslim or Arab rights is treated as a civilizational threat. That a society can institutionalize political representation for animals while systematically excluding and demonizing Muslim political organization reveals the depths of dehumanization at work.
Remote-Controlled Genocide
The shift from capture-and-detain to “kill rather than capture” under Obama’s drone doctrine marked a sinister evolution of the Muslim-killing project. No longer content with the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay, where Muslim detainees exist in a state of perpetual suspension of rights, the program embraced outright execution. The 15-meter “kill radius” of each strike makes a mockery of international requirements to distinguish between civilians and combatants.
This automated death-from-above approach reduced Muslim lives to digital coordinates on a screen, targets to be eliminated with clinical detachment. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s data reveals the staggering scale: between 2004 and 2020, U.S. forces conducted over 14,000 strikes across Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, claiming between 8,858 and 16,901 lives. Of these, between 910 and 2,200 were confirmed civilians, including 283 to 454 children. The numbers become even more grotesque when considering the injured – up to 3,922 additional victims who survived but with devastating consequences. Afghanistan alone endured 13,072 strikes, demonstrating how entire nations have been transformed into free-fire zones.
These aren’t just statistics – each number represents families shattered, communities traumatized, and lives erased by operators viewing their targets through the sanitized interface of a screen thousands of miles away. The wide ranges in civilian casualty figures reveal another disturbing truth: the difficulty of distinguishing between “combatant” and “civilian” when death is delivered by algorithm and distance under the control of a brain conditioned into Islamophobic propaganda – a mind trained to view Muslim life through the lens of suspicion, threat, and ultimately, disposability.
Dead Muslim children are casually dismissed as “collateral damage” in the Islamophobic death-dealing project of imperialism.
The sanitized language of “surgical strikes”, “collateral damage”, and “precision targeting” masks a brutal reality: Muslim populations have been transformed into literal targets in a deadly video game, their deaths mandated by algorithms and “signature behaviors.” When Western operators can eliminate human beings with the push of a button from thousands of miles away, while enjoying their lunch break, we’ve reached the ultimate expression of Muslim life as worthless.
That this program continues with minimal scrutiny or protest reveals how thoroughly the dehumanization has been internalized. In a world where Muslim deaths barely merit a headline, drone warfare isn’t an aberration – it’s the logical outcome of a system that has already determined that some lives matter less than others. Unsurprisingly, we have now entered an era of AI warfare where algorithms, shaped by Western minds conditioned in Islamophobic cultures, accelerate and automate the killing of Muslims even more efficiently, as evidenced in Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
“The entertainment industry becomes complicit in the broader architecture of imperial violence, its stereotypes serving as the cultural software that enables the hardware of military devastation”sm
From Hollywood’s relentless portrayal of Arabs as barbaric villains to European politicians’ calculated fear-mongering, the demonization of Muslims operates through a sophisticated ecosystem of cultural and political institutions. This is no accident or organic development – it represents a carefully cultivated project decades in the making.
Hollywood’s “Reel Bad Arabs” phenomenon, extensively documented by scholars, shows how entertainment media systematically dehumanizes Muslims and Arabs. The tropes are painfully familiar: the terrorist whose religious devotion is inseparable from violence, the backwards tribesman who lusts for white women, the perpetually oppressed veiled Muslim woman awaiting Western salvation.
These Hollywood caricatures don’t merely reflect societal prejudices – besides, as Freud would argue, being the projections of the repressed desires, fears, and colonial fantasies of those who create these caricatures – they actively manufacture consent, programming Western audiences to accept Muslim deaths as natural and necessary. When drone operators raise their joysticks, when politicians sanction the imprisonment of innocents, when citizens remain silent – all have been primed by decades of media propaganda to see Muslim life as expendable. The entertainment industry thus becomes complicit in the broader architecture of imperial violence, its stereotypes serving as the cultural software that enables the hardware of military devastation.
This cultural conditioning finds its most explicit political expression in Europe’s manufactured Islamophobic crises. Nigel Farage’s notorious Brexit campaign poster showing a massive queue of mostly Muslim refugees under the headline “BREAKING POINT” was deliberate fear-mongering, playing on fears of a Muslim “invasion.” Boris Johnson’s comparison of niqab-wearing women to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers” wasn’t just casual racism – it was a calculated political move that led to a 375% increase in anti-Muslim incidents in the following week. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has built his entire political career on anti-Muslim hatred, calling for banning the Quran, closing mosques, and declaring “Islam is not a religion, it’s a totalitarian ideology.”
The infamous “Breaking Point” Brexit campaign poster – featuring a long queue of refugees against a blood-red warning text – epitomizes how anti-immigrant sentiment was weaponized to promote EU withdrawal. The image cynically juxtaposes a crowd of people seeking asylum with ominous messaging about the EU having “failed us all,” explicitly stoking xenophobic anxieties about border control.
The self-fulfilling prophecy: Hollywood’s decades-long portrayal of Arabs as violent extremists (left) bears striking resemblance to ISIS propaganda imagery (right). This is no coincidence – these parallel images represent two sides of the same imperial coin, where popular culture’s dehumanizing stereotypes help manufacture consent for military interventions while Western-backed militant groups embody and reinforce those very caricatures.
“The millennial and Gen X readers among us will recall how American heroes like Rambo would routinely slaughter hordes of Arabs and Muslims, conditioning audiences to view the mass murder of Muslims as not just normal, but necessary to ‘save the world.’”
Another genius of this system lies in its self-reinforcing nature, operating through multiple layers of societal conditioning. Hollywood’s dehumanization campaign begins in childhood, training Western audiences from their earliest years to associate Muslims and Arabs with villainy, irrationality, and danger. Through countless films and TV shows, this psychological conditioning effectively kills empathy before it can develop – when we see Muslim deaths on the news, we’ve been programmed since childhood to feel less, to accept these deaths as natural outcomes for “those people.” The millennial and Gen X readers among us will recall how American heroes like Rambo would routinely slaughter hordes of Arabs and Muslims, conditioning audiences to view the mass murder of Muslims as not just normal, but necessary to ‘save the world.’
This cultural conditioning creates fertile ground for political demonization. Politicians who themselves grew up on these stereotypes now weaponize them, knowing their audiences have been primed to receive anti-Muslim messaging. When they speak of Muslims as security threats or civilizational enemies, it resonates because it fits perfectly with the preconceptions planted by decades of media stereotyping. The public accepts increasingly extreme rhetoric because it aligns with their Hollywood-shaped worldview.
Academia then provides the intellectual scaffolding for this hatred through “terrorism discourses.” These scholarly frameworks create artificial distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence, where legitimate violence is the exclusive domain of Western states operating within their “rules-based order” (i.e., imperialism), while resistance by the colonized – in this case Muslims – is labeled as illegitimate “terrorism” driven by supposedly innate biological tendencies toward irrational violence (i.e., anti-imperial resistance). This academic veneer makes anti-Muslim racism appear scientific, reasonable, and necessary for civilization’s survival.
The end result is a perfect storm where Western imperialism can kill millions of Muslims without meaningful opposition. The public, conditioned to feel no empathy, encouraged by politicians to feel threatened, and reassured by academics that these deaths are necessary, raises no objection. All while the funding trails for this entire infrastructure lead back to those who benefit most from Muslim deaths — the military-industrial complex, colonial projects like Israel, the corporate sector, billionaires, and imperial powers seeking control of Muslim-majority regions.
This system doesn’t just normalize Muslim deaths – it makes them seem inevitable and necessary for Western “civilization” to survive. Each layer reinforces the others, creating a seemingly impenetrable wall of institutionalized Islamophobia that turns Muslim lives into acceptable collateral damage in the West’s various “civilizing” missions.
“When Palestinians and their supporters feel compelled to highlight victims who look more “European” to generate sympathy, it reveals the terrible success of the Islamophobic death-dealing project.”Does
Perhaps the most devastating evidence of this system’s effectiveness lies in how thoroughly its logic of racial hierarchy has been internalized – even by its victims. During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a disturbing pattern emerged in Palestinian social media advocacy: the disproportionate sharing of images showing lighter-skinned, more “Western-looking” victims. As I’ve written about previously, this is not coincidental – it reflects a tragic internalization of the West’s racial hierarchy, where even those facing systematic killing understand that some victims are seen as more “worthy” than others.
When Palestinians and their supporters feel compelled to highlight victims who look more “European” to generate sympathy, it reveals the terrible success of the Islamophobic death-dealing project. They’ve learned through bitter experience that darker-skinned victims, no matter how innocent or young, simply don’t generate the same empathy. This internalized racism – where even the victims of anti-Muslim violence conform to Western standards of whose life matters – represents the ultimate triumph of the dehumanization campaign.
This psychological colonization, where the oppressed adopt their oppressors’ value system, shows how deeply the death-dealing project has penetrated global consciousness. When Muslims themselves begin to subconsciously rank the worth of Muslim lives based on proximity to European appearances, we see the full scope of how thoroughly this system has corrupted our basic human capacity for universal empathy.
Islamophobia: Imperialism’s Most essential death-dealing project
Indeed, the ultimate proof of the Islamophobic death-dealing project is playing out in Gaza. The ease with which Western societies accept the mass killing of Palestinian civilians – mostly women and children – reveals how thoroughly Muslim life has been devalued.
Yet we cannot end on despair. The stakes may be life itself, but Muslims and anti-imperialists are not passive onlookers. From legal advocacy to workplace reform to education, grassroots movements are fighting back. This isn’t about hurt feelings or “identity politics” – it is about survival. When we understand Islamophobia as an essential death-dealing project of imperialism, we see why confronting it isn’t optional. The choice is stark: either we dismantle this system, or it will continue claiming lives with ruthless efficiency.
The time for polite discourse is over. We must name this system for what it is – a project of mass death operating under the cover of civilization. The question is not whether we’ll act, but whether we’ll do so before more bodies wash up on Europe’s shores or disappear in the rubble of the next “precision strike.”
Our response must match the severity of what we face. As long as Muslim deaths remain normalized and necessary for Western “flourishing,” we are all implicated in this moral catastrophe. The death-dealing project can only continue because we let it.
