If the nearly uniform narrative offered in a spate of recent books about “Islamophobia” is to be believed, Western Muslims, who enjoy freedoms denied to their brethren in most places in the world, are being tyrannized by hateful white Westerners afflicted with an irrational “phobia” of Islam and its adherents, which drives them to blithely reenact the crimes their ancestors perpetrated in previous centuries against indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere.
In these books, Muslims living in the West are the hapless victims of oppression, and their non-Muslim neighbors are the eternal oppressors. Accordingly, these oppressors can only offload their burden of civilizational guilt (and the punishment it invites) by confessing their sins (and those of their ancestors), engage in acts of contrition, and convert, either to Islam itself or to a political agenda that acquiesces in Islamist assaults on the rights historically accorded to citizens in Western democracies. Under this arrangement, the only rights that need to be protected are those of Muslims; non-Muslims have no rights, only rules and liabilities.
