Only Muslim religious identity is openly debated as a security threat

Evidence

As hegemonic as it now seems, the moral peculiarity of these rhetorical positions is revealed immediately, and quite shockingly, if one tries to apply them to Christians or Jews as such. An application of this kind is forbidden in polite, metropolitan society; indeed, the ban defines polite metropolitan society, a space in which a person’s enemy or friend status does not follow immediately from his or her status as a Christian or a Jew. The argument that Christianity (or Judaism) is, in key respects, antithetical to democracy, or national identity, or even to modernity, is not often made today, and those who care to pursue the argument in depth will be treated as intolerant cranks, or denounced as anti-Semites. 44 The space given in public discourse—in the United States or elsewhere in the world of Anglophone mass media—to the consideration of Christianity and Judaism as security threats, to the links between these belief systems and terror, and to the difficult task of turning Jews and Christians into viable, constructive members of modern society, is miniscule. Yet talking about Muslims and Islam in this way is normal; indeed, it is hard to imagine a public forum on Islamophobia (or a scholarly forum; or even a theological one) that did not consider security issues—that is, the role of violence in the making of anti-Muslim politics—as necessary to a realistic discussion of how Islamophobia is defined, how it is put to use, and how it can be alleviated. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 712

Categorization

• SEED: This ‘reversal test’ — apply the accusation to Christians or Jews and watch the debate collapse — is itself a sharp analytical device worth an essay on how the thought experiment exposes the special status given to Islam in public discourse.
• XREF: The reversal-test method parallels the technique in The Reluctant Fundamentalist where Changez’s normalcy is interrogated — and resonates with the reader’s own ‘complaints about immodesty’ article, which uses similar cultural relativism jumps.
• DEFINE: Names the unstated ‘polite metropolitan society’ norm as the baseline that makes anti-Muslim discourse anomalous.