Liberals weaponized atheism to rationalize anti-Muslim war backing

Evidence

This new word, “Islamophobia,” and the truth it spoke to power rattled proponents of the War on Terror, old and new. Christopher Hitchens, a prominent contrarian turned War on Iraq apologist revered by this new anti-Muslim vanguard, spurred on Islamophobia denialism with his 2007 book God Is Not Great. The book and its title, a direct swipe at Islam’s signature proclamation of Allahu Akbar, weaponized atheism as a new liberal sword against the prolific anti-Muslim hate that percolated post-9/11. Hitchens, once an intellectual giant among progressive and liberal thinkers, embraced the hawkish posture of the Bush administration and its war on Iraq, and pivoted markedly to the right on account of his swelling Islamophobia. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the civil-liberties/anti-Muslim corpus already read alongside Iftikhar. — connects to: New atheist critiques of religion functioned as liberal cover for imperial war policy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 722
• SEED: Essay angle: the 2007+ liberal-atheist pivot to hawkish Islamophobia as an intellectual-history case.