The sharia hysteria of the past couple of months is just the latest in a seemingly never-ending wave of bigoted frenzies targeting American Muslims, from the attacks on the Somali American community to the smears against Muslim students speaking up for Palestinian human rights on college campuses. It seems once the Islamophobia industry exhausts one invented narrative, it shifts to another.
Such hate also has real-world consequences.
Zahra Billoo is executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Ismail Allison is national communications manager of CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C.