Anti-Muslim attacks on civil society echo Klan and Know Nothing animus.

Evidence

Ayaan Hirsi Ali pays homage to Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory in her assertion that Islam is incompatible with Western democratic values. Her loathing of Islam, coupled with her claims of authenticity as a Former Muslim, makes her instrumental in political attacks on Muslim American organizations. Mirroring the animus of the Ku Klux Klan and the Know Nothing Party toward Jews and Catholics in the early twentieth century, the Islamophobia industry set its sights on destroying Muslim American civil society and quashing Muslims’ political influence. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 793

Categorization

• XREF: The Klan/Know Nothing parallel extends the historical pattern of nativist moral panics against immigrant religious groups, resonating with discussions of Catholic and Jewish exclusion. — connects to: Tennessee officials equated a mosque with the KKK while institutionalizing the actual Klan. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 415