Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway attends a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades
In November 2023, the Rutgers Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights published a paper that is embarrassingly bad scholarship.
Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine–Israel Discourse is a collection of anti-Israel talking points. It starts off by admitting that it is using a troubled definition of Islamophobia for the purposes of the paper:
Islamophobia, as the term is being used here, refers to what Professor Sahar Aziz calls “an exaggerated fear of, and hostility to Islam and Muslims by the state and the public as a result of imputed inferior biological and cultural traits based on religious identity that produce systemic bias, discrimination, and marginalization, and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life.”
Although anti-Arab racism is separate from Islamophobia, the two forms of bias often overlap. A sizable minority of Arabs (including Palestinians) are not Muslim, but often experience Islamophobia because Americans incorrectly assume all Arabs are Muslim. The considerable overlap between these two prejudices in the West, and especially in the United States, should be noted while acknowledging the two are not identical. For the sake of brevity and clarity, this report uses Islamophobia broadly to describe both anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.
Who is Professor Sahar Aziz, who claims that critics of Islam consider Muslims to be biologically inferior? Why, she is one of the authors of the paper. The paper is built around a definition that was literally made up by one of the authors. And that is then extended to claim that the fictional “anti-Palestinian racism” is by definition “Islamophobic.” Does this mean that any criticism of any Palestinian, including their overwhelming support for terrorism (according to polls), is presumed to be racist?
In fact, both Aziz and co-author Mitchell Plitnick quote themselves extensively in this paper, which cherry picks quotes and makes assertions that are absurd. One example is the claim that a newspaper headline “Omar, ‘squad,’ launch another anti-Israel strike” is Islamophobic. The paper claims without any convincing proof that debate about American support for Israel is restricted. It also implies that historic US support for Israel is based partially on Islamophobia.
Aziz is the Executive Director of the same Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights that published the piece. The Rutgers name implies that it is an academic paper that has serious research behind it, but the paper itself does not say whether the authors have any conflict of interest (e.g., anti-Israel activism) and does not consider any other viewpoints. There is an obvious conflict of interest in publishing a paper under the Rutgers name when it was written by the same person that is needed to approve its publication.
One of the key claims in the paper is that US Muslims are unfairly tarnished with the presumption that they are antisemitic.
There are surprisingly few surveys about this topic of American Muslim attitudes towards Jews. One 2022 article, using a methodology I disagree with, finds that American Muslims don’t have a significantly different attitude towards Jews than non-Muslims.
But a more recent Heritage Foundation survey found that American Muslims are far more likely to believe the antisemitic trope that Jews have too much control over the US government.
One other question that has been asked of US Muslims was whether they felt that the October 7 massacres were justified.
Right after 10/7, one poll found that 57.5% of US Muslims felt that Hamas was at least partially justified in the attack.
Whether American Muslims are presumed to be antisemitic is not clear, but when a majority in some polls believe antisemitic tropes and can justify an attack on mostly Jews in their homes and during a concert, way out of proportion to most Americans, then it is not Islamophobic to point that out.
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