When was the first time you ever heard of the word “Islamophobia,” as best you can remember? Other than very young readers, who have heard it their whole lives, the likely answer for most would be about 20 years ago -- say, following the 9/11 terrorism attack and its aftermath. There is a reason why that answer would be very common, but maybe not the reason you expect.

As many also will recall, America was rather agitated against the 9/11 terrorists at the time, and could not help noticing that they were all Muslims, as are nearly all terrorist groups worldwide (per the U.S. State Department’s listing of international terrorist organizations). So, the propaganda arm of international Islam realized it had a public relations problem. “People are on to us; they are beginning to realize our movement’s true, violent nature,” they might have thought. But what to do about it? Their response strategy is obvious to anyone who knows anything about marketing and PR: They decided on a propaganda campaign to equate any criticism of Islam with bigotry, thereby intimidating potential critics into submitting to that constraint and effectively silencing any opposition. QED. Widespread Muslim PR was around earlier, of course, but it intensified, of necessity, after 9/11.

Evidence of this? Your own memory: Have you ever seen any criticism of Islam that was not immediately denounced as bigotry, i.e., Islamophobia? In fact, how rare is it to see or hear criticism of Islam, period -- especially relative to the provocations? Evidence of the campaign’s effectiveness: Why is it that there is one and only one particular religion we are not allowed to criticize? In contrast, surely you have noticed abundant public criticism of Christianity and Judaism. In some Muslim countries, practice of either religion is a capital crime!
But does Islam, the so-called “religion of peace,” deserve any criticism? And is it really so protected against criticism? An example, based on publicly available information that no one seems to have noticed, answers both:

Shortly after 9/11, the Pew research organization began polling of the populations in most of the Muslim-dominated nations. This massive survey work continued through 2014. A striking finding, when results are read correctly, is that a very large fraction of the polled Muslims -- nearly half -- actually reported that they favor terrorist mass murder against the West. Really. The finding’s plausibility has been cross-validated recently, in a way, by the 75-80% of Palestinians who declare support for the October 7 Israeli massacre.

“Read correctly”? What possible issue of correct interpretation of the Pew survey results could there be? The relevant questionnaire item was simple enough, asking whether violence such as “suicide bombing... against civilian targets can be justified,” with listed response options “often,” “sometimes,” “rarely,” and “never.” Unfortunately, in an amateurish error, Pew and others have construed the “rarely” answer as non-support of terrorism. But what could “rarely” mean to a survey respondent? Only one 9/11-type atrocity every 20 years? Once every five years? No more than every six months -- or once a week at the most? The frame-of-reference problem is apparent.

Pointing out this ambiguity and tabulating past Pew results correctly is a major part of a paper I have presented at a national academic conference and published in an international refereed journal. The paper has also been accepted at two international conferences. Recently, however, after having been accepted at the annual conference of a leading behavioral science association, the paper was “cancelled” from the conference program. Why? Because one self-identified Muslim participant declared the paper Islamophobic (and that it had reduced him to tears). Upon that, the sponsoring organization caved.

The grounds offered by the conference officials were flimsy and bogus. They claimed a lack of scientific rigor in the paper, but there is no way such a judgment could have been made based on the only relevant materials available, i.e., a short abstract and a few PowerPoint slides. Moreover, I am not the one who collected the data. I merely reported on what was collected by the venerable Pew polling operation. Islamophobic? The journal that published the paper is an Islamic journal from an Islamic university in Pakistan! Readers can assess the likelihood of such an institution supporting Islamophobia.

So what does Islamophobia mean? The natural, inherent meaning is fear of Muslims. Obviously, however, the prevailing usage has transmuted into a practical meaning of hostility toward Muslims, as any online dictionary can confirm. Clearly, my paper and I do not demonstrate the latter nouveau meaning. We are only hostile toward the large proportion of world Muslims who support terrorism and mass murder. Shouldn’t we all be? You have a problem with that? Yet we also cannot deny that the grounding for such violent Muslim sentiment can be found in the Quran’s aggressive advice and the murderous example of Mohammed himself. So, I also suggest that genuine, devout Muslims, presumably including the conference critic, take a hard look at their religion -- and the barbaric behavior practiced in its name.

By the same token, fear of Muslims can indeed be reasonable, given the violent record of the religion’s most intense adherents along with the sect’s core purpose of imposing submission on the entire world, by force if necessary. Islam, you see, by its own testimony, is not only a religion but a cultural, social, and military movement -- with all non-Muslims targeted, so to speak. Sorry to break the news this way.

Allahu Akhbar, and heaven help the rest of us. “Be afraid, be very afraid.” And remember my name, just in case this short opus makes me the next victim of a fatwa, jihad, or Charlie Hebdo-type mayhem. Can we imagine what Islam’s record of violence would be if it were not such a “religion of peace”?

John F. Gaski, Ph.D. is anAdjunct Scholar at the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. The author’s research specialization is social and political power and conflict.

Image: Aia Fernandez via Flickr