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It is a horrible fairytale that Islamophobia, as in hostility and bias against Muslims, does not kill. And I'm sure in French there is also a specific word for mentioning one's employer in such a tweet? https://twitter.com/quatremer/status/1386649333739802624
Not only are there the violent attacks by the far right on Muslims and their institutions in which Islamophobic rhetoric plays an important role as driver and legitimizer, there is also the War on Terror partly based upon Islamophobic themes centering on the 'bad Muslim'
There are the violent attacks by individuals on, in particular Muslim women wearing the veil, on Sikhs and others racialized as Muslims in Europe and the US. But we may also think of the colonial contexts such as Algeria.
There are ethnic cleansings against Bosnians (Srebrenica), against Rohingya and Uyghurs in which Islamophobia played or plays a role as mobilizer and legitimizer of lethal violence and rape.
Besides the violent aspects Islamophobia forms the background of several European laws specifically aimed against Muslims (headscarf bans, niqab bans, bans on minarets and call for prayer) and other forms of discrimination.
It is Islamophobia which often constitutes the legitimizer of violence and discriminatory practices against Muslims when such practices are exposed: but see the Muslims do this or Islam is this or form part of the great replacement myths.
"Islamophobia does not kill" not only serves to denounce critics of (violent) racist practices and policies but is used to minimize, ridicule and legitimize the victims. And is a lie, as I show in my small book on five myths about the term (In Dutch) https://kifkif.be/vijf-mythen-over-islamofobie-ebook
Such denouncements of Islamophobia are related to how particular categories of ethnicity and religion have developed through colonial conquest, anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial racist violence, as Silverstein shows in the case of France https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220701805877
Peter Hopkins wrote on gendered violence against those who look Muslim https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820616655018
Stating Islamophobia does not kill is yet another way of accusing those who write and talk about it of incitement to hatred and polarization, something @Nadia_Fadil wrote about earlier https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/radical-free-speech/
Policing those who as journalists, academics, activists or otherwise write about violent and other forms of Islamophobia, basically becomes another way of normalizing Islamophobia (or what happens when resisting Islamophobia becomes a weird thing to do) http://religionresearch.org/closer/2019/03/30/normalization-of-islamophobia-what-do-we-mean-by-that/
Fortunately, many journalist, academics and activists such as @MehreenKhn continue to write and speak about Islamophobia even when facing all kinds of attacks from different sides, in particular women of colour. In solidarity!
