Last week, I was honored to be appointed by President Donald Trump to serve on the Advisory Board of Religious Leaders for the newly established U.S. Religious Liberty Commission.

The commission is tasked with an issue I’ve thought a lot about in my capacity as a Jewish leader: I believe that all Americans have the freedom to worship as they choose, and think it’s crucial we protect religious freedom for all — including Muslim Americans who love this country and support its values.

I am proud to call many of them my friends, and I viscerally deplore any bigotry directed against them. But pretending that “Islamophobia” is a widespread national crisis is a dangerous lie that protects the wrong people and only fuels hatred.

“Islamophobia” may sound like a civil rights concern. But in practice, that term is wielded as a dangerous and repressive weapon. While peaceful Muslim citizens deserve protection from discrimination, Islamist pressure groups and progressive elites cry “Islamophobia” to blur moral lines, suppress condemnation of terrorism, and discount the reality of antisemitism in America and the West.

There is simply no parallel to the plague of antisemitism in human history. But while Jews are orders of magnitude more likely to find themselves targeted than members of any other minority group in America, the same advocates for “tolerance” who demeaned “all lives matter” as a racist slogan typically feel compelled, after every performative condemnation of antisemitic harassment and violence, to append “Islamophobia, and all forms of hate.”

In reality, bias against Muslims as Muslims is no more common than bias against other minority faiths. There is no major effort or large-scale advertising campaign to combat discrimination against Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists — even though each of those communities faces prejudice. It is not widespread or socially acceptable to display animus against people of a particular faith or ethnicity — except Jews.

What, then, is “Islamophobia?” It is most frequently not an aversion to Islam or peaceful Muslims, but a perfectly rational fear of radical Islamism, its desire for dominance, and its support for terrorism. To call that fear a “phobia” inverts the hater and the victim.

Consider Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) claim that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was started to combat anti-Muslim bias after September 11.

The facts are starkly different. Not only was CAIR founded seven years prior, but a French think tank identified over 48,000 Islamist terror attacks in less than half a century, causing over 210,000 deaths.

That’s not a minor footnote in history: it is the defining threat of the modern age. And while most Muslims are not extremists, a troubling percentage of them support radical ideas and justify attacks upon American and Western civilians. Studies consistently show that Muslims in the West are several times more likely than the general public to hold antisemitic views.

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Furthermore, the most prominent Muslim advocacy organizations in America, including CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and American Muslims for Palestine, are not merely apologists for terror. CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America owe their existence to members of the Muslim Brotherhood; both organizations were unindicted co-conspirators who aided the Holy Land Foundation in providing funding for Hamas terrorism.

CAIR’s Executive Director declared that he was “happy” to see the massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023, which he called “self-defense.” And American Muslims for Palestine, a group closely tied to the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine and its discriminatory and often-violent activities on college campuses, is currently under investigation by a Senate committee for its own ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Despite this, we are told that criticizing radical Islamic terrorism or calling out antisemitism within the Muslim community is itself a form of “Islamophobia.” This is exemplified by CAIR itself, which in 2024 depicted antisemitic violence against Jews on campus as a “movement opposing the Gaza genocide,” and claimed that university administrators who halted the harassment and vandalism were “a primary perpetrator of anti-Muslim racism.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center labels as “Islamophobic” such organizations as Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Jihad Watch. It once also included Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, an Evangelical Christian Zionist cause, among those groups.

None of these organizations opposes Islam; only the radical Islamic theology, which is one of the leading drivers of hateful violence today. Condemning them is not tolerance, but gaslighting.

After a wave of antisemitic protests, harassment, and vandalism on its campus, Harvard formed a Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias. The university started from the premise that these students and faculty were victims, not perpetrators, although it couldn’t identify a unifying explanation for why they were targeted.

In actuality, the one characteristic that all of the purported victims shared in common was quite obvious: antisemitism.

This is why the term “Islamophobia” is so dangerous. It isn’t employed to protect innocent Muslims, but guilty ideologies. It shifts the blame, silences critics, and gives cover to those who cheer as Jews and other “infidels” are slaughtered.

Radical Islamists and their allies cannot be granted leave to rewrite reality. There is no moral equivalence between a Jewish student targeted for wearing a yarmulke and a keffiyeh-clad Muslim activist condemned for cheering Hamas. Stereotyping is always wrong, but there is no epidemic of Americans attacking Muslims as Muslims. There is, instead, a well-funded, well-organized campaign to shield Jew-hatred by claiming that those combating radical Islamic antisemitism are motivated by “Islamophobia.”

This moment demands moral clarity. Not all hate is the same, and not all ideas deserve protection. It’s time to stop pretending that bigotry against Muslims is the crisis, when that false charge is being used to defend and enable radical Islamism, antisemitism, and those who endanger Western civilization.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken is Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values and a member of the Advisory Board of Religious Leaders to the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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It’s Time To Dispel The ‘Islamophobia’ Myth Once And For All