Non-Muslim disasters still get read through Islamophobic suspicion

Evidence

Before friends and families began to pick up the pieces of shattered glass and debris in Beirut on Tuesday, rumors about the possible culprits circulated. These rumors, particularly for those wed to the War on Terror, were refracted through an Islamophobic prism. Was it Hezbollah or a transnational Islamist terror group tied to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as some suggested? Or were the explosions the work of Israel or a diabolical conspiracy staged by Iran to push the embattled nation of my father toward war with Israel, as others speculated? Islam was, then and always, a central character in the theater of terror, even when it was not Islam or Muslims at fault, or an act of terrorism at all. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 47

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the complaint-about-immodesty-style argument that moral suspicion gets projected onto convenient Others regardless of facts — here the Beirut blast shows the reflex precedes evidence.