Why Obama is stoking "Islamophobia"

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal meets the charge that Americans are Islamophobic head-on.

The prevailing media narrative has it that America is suffering from an acute case of "Islamophobia," an irrational fear of Muslims. This seems to us quite wrong. American mistrust of Muslims is no more irrational than black mistrust of whites or Jewish mistrust of Germans. That is not to say that it is completely justifiable, only that it is completely understandable, for Americans have been, and continue to be, the targets of Islamic supremacist violence.

You can only accuse Americans of an irrational fear of Islam if you ignore 9/11, the other terrorist attacks by Jihadists around the world before and after 9/11, and the efforts by our own home-grown Muslims to attack us. So no, there is no irrational Islamophobia here. The concern about violent Islam is totally understandable.

Because mistrust of Muslims is not completely justifiable, Obama and his backers in the media feel no obligation to understand it. "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society," Obama said Friday, echoing Robert Reich's Marxism Lite analysis, which we noted last month.

This is a complete non sequitur. No one, not even the unhinged anti-Muslim types on the right, is blaming Muslims for America's current economic difficulties. American mistrust of Muslims is a reaction to Islamic supremacist terrorism, especially 9/11. That mistrust has surfaced recently because another group of Muslims is seeking to exploit that atrocity by building a fancy mosque adjacent to its site.

The reason President Bush did a better job at managing Americans' mistrust of Muslims is not, as Obama seems to suggest, that the Bush economy was so much better than the Obama one. It is, rather, that Americans, on this matter, trusted Bush.

There was no doubt in any one's mind whose side Bush was on.

The drumbeat from the MSM is that the violent Jihadists are a small minority not at all representative of Islam as a whole.  We would like to think so, but we are not totally persuaded.  Andrew McCarthy asks where all the pro-American moderate Muslims are.  

Such an Islam, over nine long years, would have risen up and made itself heard. It would have identified by name and condemned with moral outrage the imposters purporting to act in its name. It would have honored America’s sacrifice of blood and treasure in the liberation of oppressed Muslim peoples. It would have said “thank you” to our troops. It would have joined America, without ambiguity or hesitation, in crushing terror networks and dismantling the regimes that abet them. It would not have needed trillion-dollar American investments to forge democracies; it would naturally have adopted democracy on its own.

What excruciating truths have we yet failed to grasp on this ninth anniversary of 9/11? The first is that such an Islam does not exist.

All we have heard form the leading "moderate" groups like CAIR are pro-forma denunciations of terrorist act.  But, and here the operative word in all their announcements is "BUT" there is always an ambivalence, or the reference to things America did to bring on the latest atrocity.  Why do the pronouncements from these groups always sound as if they are "the other" instead of "us?"  Would it not be better if they wholeheartedly joined us without the inevitable "but?"