This has been a big week for elected officials and political candidates to accuse various people of being “Jihadists” or “Jihadis” or, in the words of Senator Roger Marshall, plotting to let “radical Islams into our country.” Because we are so close to the election, and because, lamentably, so few conservatives now serve as Republican candidates or elected officials, the onetime desire carefully to distinguish between rejection of radical Islamism and blanket rejection of Muslims regardless of their conduct and beliefs has not been much in evidence. This raises a question that has been discussed ad nauseam, but not without reason, in other contexts: Do criticisms of this kind of speech as “Islamophobic” conflate opposition to radical Islam with a general hatred of Muslims? (Personally, I prefer “Muslim-hating” or something of the sort, in the same way that it is appropriate to talk about a “Jew-hater” instead of an “anti-semite.” Sometimes the generic term just doesn’t supply a sufficiently visceral sense of the vulgar bigotry involved.)
Using a little mutatis mutandis adaptation, applied there in a different context but hopefully adapted here with due attention to the difference, one might begin by observing that “Jihadist” can sometimes serve as a proxy for “Muslim.” (Or, for no small number of bigots, “Arab.”) For example, when someone talks uses “Jihadis” to refer generically to Muslims, or points to entire Muslim communities when making generalities about “Jihadism,” or refers to Muslim students on a campus generally as “Jihadis,” or invokes classic racist or bigoted tropes about Muslims or Arabs when speaking of “Jihadis,” the fact that they substitute “Jihadis” or “radical Muslims” for “Muslims” does not make the statements any less bigoted. A candidate who invokes “Jihadis” or some retreaded nonsense about “sharia law” but targets or foments hostility toward the entire population of Muslims can’t get around the charge of anti-Muslim bigotry because he used the word “Jihadist” or referred to “radical Islam” instead of using the word “Muslim” or “Arab.”
One might add that Muslim-hating statements phrased as anti-“Jihadism” can offer relevant evidence of the political speaker’s bigoted motivation. And so can the surrounding context. Criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood as such falls within the scope of plausible political and ideological criticism, and then some. But when that criticism is linked–by a lying, worm-ridden idiot, in fairness–to specious claims about the intellectual achievements of “500 million Arabs,” as the person inexplicably occupying the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services did in a speech yesterday, that speech should be understood as an obvious, uncomplicated case of Muslim-hating, Arab-hating bigotry. And when another person–also a liar and idiot, in fairness–talks about “Abdul” [El-Sayed] “open[ing] the floodgates and invit[ing] hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” no sensible person–whatever his views of El-Sayed himself, and his beliefs and associations–can mistake this for anything other than an appeal to Muslim-hating, a straight-up encouragement of religious and ethnic bigotry by, as it turns out, the president of these United States.
It hardly bears stating the obvious: Whatever one’s views about El-Sayed himself, or about radical Islam, Gaza, or anything else, one should view weeks of bigoted speech of this sort as being as dangerous as they are disgraceful. And –given how well the adaptation from the earlier discussion maps out,–dangerous to Jews along with everyone else. None of the rhetorical devices used to foment anti-Muslim bigotry in the last few weeks (not to speak of months or years) have been or will be off the table for Jews. Not that this appeal to self-interest should be necessary for Jews, or anyone else, to condemn obviously hateful and bigoted conduct.