Merriam-Webster’s dictionary describes the word “phobia” as “an exaggerated, usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation.” In the wake of recent events, is fear of Muslims, labeled “Islamophobia,” really exaggerated, inexplicable, and/or illogical?

I’ve concluded that not only is fear of Muslims logical and explicable, but it is by no means exaggerated and, most probably, understated. The deliberately misleading term “Islamophobia” itself amounts to a cudgel used to silence critics of what Dutch Parliamentarian (and possible new Dutch Prime Minister) Geert Wilders has at times characterized as a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.

I could enumerate just some in the endless litany of recent (and even not-so-recent) violent attacks that radical Muslims have perpetrated in (delusional) Western societies that welcomed and unsuccessfully attempted to absorb and assimilate large numbers of Muslims. However, Raymond Ibrahim has already done so, writing extensively (and magnificently) about historical events that provide countless examples (here and here) of aggressive Muslim behaviors resulting in widespread slaughter. His writings elucidate numerous historical episodes consuming people of all ethnicities and religions, including their fellow Muslims, with particular cruelty reserved for Africans, Armenians, and, of course, Jews.

Image: Salman Rushdie (edited), a “lucky” victim of Muslim violence, for he survived the deadly attack against him. YouTube screen grab.

Why has

• Geert Wilders been (in his own words) “deprived of a personal life” requiring constant police protection for more than a decade?
• Salman Rushdie had to spend the last 35 years in fear? (And note that his fear was justified.)
• Hoover Institute fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a Christian, who was both abused and mutilated by “Imams” as a child, been living “with round-the-clock security due to her willingness to speak out and her abandonment of the Muslim faith?

If Islam is peaceful, why do these prominent critics need constant protection?

If we look around the world, Muslims are fighting in many places:

• Muslim insurgencies are found in the Philippines and Thailand.
• Numerous Indo (India)-Pakistani Wars have pitted Muslim Pakistan against majority Hindu India, while India’s Muslims regularly launch religious attacks.
• Muslim Chechens fight Russian Orthodox Christians and send death squads into Europe.
• Muslim Azeris fight those Armenians who remain from the genocide the Muslim Turks perpetrated against them in 1916.
• Historical animosity between Turks and Greeks is well documented and continues to this day in Cyprus, split between the Turkish North and Greek South.
• Orthodox Christian Serb and Muslim hostility dates back 600 years to the Ottoman Wars.
• And we have the ongoing Arab/Israeli wars as the most glaring current-day example, during which a fictitious Muslim ethnic group, the “Palestinians” (really, Arabs), perfect modern-day terrorism.
• Muslim Arab Janjaweed regularly slaughter black Africans in Sudan.

Even the incomparable “Islamophobes” in China, who view any religion as a threat, place particular focus on Islam, which could be why the government maintains a system of “re-education camps” for Uyghurs, containing (for the time being) any potential for Muslim violence.

There also are examples of persistent internecine warfare between Muslims themselves:

Hamas displaced the PLO in Gaza in 2007, fighting door to door. Ironically, few were concerned about civilian casualties then, as Muslims slaughtered each other with impunity.

The Syrian Civil War, pitting Alawite against Sunni, resulted in upward of a half million slaughtered, displacing more than 6 million people and creating the largest refugee crisis since WWII, perhaps forever changing the character of the European continent and society. It also led to the rise of ISIS, whose members cruelly tortured and killed thousands of “impure” Muslims and other ethnicities, most famously Yazidis, until eliminated by US forces under President Trump’s leadership.

The mostly Shia Houthis displaced the hapless Sunni leadership in Yemen following a decade of proxy civil war during which tens of thousands died.

If we go back to the 1980s, more than a million were killed in the Iran-Iraq War, after which, two years later, in a duplicitous show of gratitude for financial support, Saddam invaded his Muslim-Arab financiers in Kuwait to avoid repayment of Iraq’s accumulated war debt.

Muslim societies themselves lean heavily toward despotism, demanding ideological purity and groupthink through a culture that requires submission. Indeed, a Muslim is “one who submits.” All who live in Muslim society live in constant fear of violence from the government and their fellow citizens.

Note that refugees from Syria insisted on going to Europe, particularly Germany, not to another Muslim country where they might have been familiar with the customs. Why is that? No reasonable person believes that Algerians, Gazans, Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, or Yemenis live carefree, unencumbered existences. African Haratine people in Mauritania remain enslaved by (of course) Muslim Arabs.

Facts show that Islam’s religio-political ideology and its adherents are anything but peaceful. Islam’s holy texts themselves incite violence, manifested against both non-believers and believers.

Islam’s teachings drive some Muslims to commit and condone evil. Muslims mutilate the genitalia of their subjugated women, whom they treat as children or second-class citizens. Family honor is tied to the sexual behavior of women, and honor killings often blame women, the victims, for being in situations they are unable to avoid or control.

Whenever women live under Muslim control, they exist in fear due to the primitive, dysfunctional “customs” enforced by a violent, patriarchal society that punishes differing opinions and free thought. Men, separated from women without the possibility for intimacy, turn to molesting young boys, a vile, hypocritical contradiction of their “faith”, which purports to prohibit homosexuality.

Considering its 1,500-year history of brutal, ruthless violence in pursuit of domination, it is logical for anybody to be afraid of Muslims and Islam. Fear of Islam is not, therefore, an exaggerated, inexplicable, or illogical fear. It is a reasonable, measured, and logical response to the repeated, ongoing violence that Muslims worldwide have committed for centuries. Winston Churchill, unencumbered by political correctness, said about Islam, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

Churchill, Rushdie, and Wilders all “told it like it is.” Islamophobia is a canard. This is all TRUE. If Muslims do not like hearing this then they must change their behaviors.

Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper, the father of modern handgun safety, advised: “Observe your cat. He moves well, using his senses fully. He is not preoccupied with irrelevancies. He’s not thinking about his job or his image or his income tax. He is putting first things first, principally his physical security. Do likewise.” This teaches us two things: (1) Be aware of your surroundings and take precautions to stay safe and, perhaps more importantly, (2) Don’t worry about your image.

Americans, however, refuse to act like cats. They live in fear because many have abandoned truth. This is why useful idiots can repeat nonsense such as “Islam is a religion of peace” while the USA has been fighting Muslims for 30 years.

Christ taught the world that “the truth will set you free.” We must re-embrace Judeo-Christian values and stop worrying about our “image” or having woke mobs rebuke us for speaking the truth they consider “politically incorrect.” This self-censorship erodes truth.

Cowards lie due to weakness. Psalm 34 tells us to “keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.” Liars understand what awaits them at the gates of heaven.

Be courageous. Courage is needed in Joe Biden’s America, where nobody is punished for lying but only for telling the truth, which perpetuates deceit. We must flip the script and reacclimate society to truth, which will be difficult, especially for the “snowflakes.”

We must stop deceiving ourselves. We’ve been propagandized by academia and the media to self-censor, to believe that the truth (about everyone except Jews, apparently) is somehow offensive. It’s not. It’s reality. If something is true, say it loudly and repeatedly. While there are individual Muslims who are peaceful, Islam is not a “religion of peace,” and fear of Muslims is rational because of Islam’s violent history, medieval culture, and totalitarian tendencies. It is a ferocious political ideology masquerading as a religion. Don’t allow these tyrants, their useful idiots, nor their apologists to silence you any longer.

Jonathan Gault is a pseudonym.