“John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.” John Feffer is either unaware or wants his readers to be unaware of the fact that Sharia is political, such that Muslims would have sought political power in the U.S. whether or not there had been any “Islamophobia.” Like all treatments of “Islamophobia” we have seen in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Feffer completely ignores the violent exhortations in the Qur’an and Sunnah, which are the reason why anyone is suspicious of Islam or worried about Muslim political power at all. Take that away, and hey, presto, you have more victimhood propaganda about supposed anti-Muslim bigotry. The leftist idiots to whom you’re writing will lap it up, and that’s all that matters.
“American Muslim Organize in the Face of Rising Islamophobia,” by John Feffer, CounterPunch, September 8, 2026:
Anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise in the United States, and yet Muslim political candidates are enjoying a banner year.
Zohran Mamdani was elected the first Muslim mayor of New York City in 2025. This year, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in Michigan and stands a good chance of becoming the country’s first Muslim senator. The number of Muslims in the House of Representatives could rise to as many as seven after the upcoming November elections. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a record 255 Muslim elected officials now serve in 26 states, including four members of Congress, 11 mayors, and 46 members of state legislatures.
At the same time, however, America experienced a major increase in Islamophobia last year—8,683 cases of discrimination, the highest since CAIR began tracking such developments in 1996. The surge has been particularly visible in states such as Florida, Minnesota, and Texas. One Republican candidate for state office in Texas, Bo French, wrote on social media this summer that “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone” from the state….
These aren’t the first such mobilizations. The earlier wave of Islamophobia in the early 2000s prompted Muslim Americans to seek political power. At that time, conservative activists were deploying widespread misinformation and invective in their high-visibility campaigns to stop the construction of mosques and ban “sharia law” at the state level. But these campaigns also pushed Muslim Americans to fight back. In 2006, five years after the September 11 attacks, voters sent the first Muslim American, Keith Ellison, to Congress….
jerry glenn says
Instead, let’s end Islamopandering.