Religion gets invoked to explain violence committed by a tiny Muslim minority

Evidence

The realization that anti-Muslim attitudes are embedded in larger social and political processes than the fear of Islam begs the question of why has American society resorted to religion as an explanation for acts of terror committed by a very small portion of the world’s vast Muslim population, thereby stigmatizing American Muslims to the point that large number of Americans are willing to tolerate discriminatory profiling of Muslims and to deny American Muslims their constitutional rights to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and to build places of worship. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 261

Categorization

• QUESTION: The entire chapter’s driving question: why does American society choose religion as the explanatory frame? This is the pivot to ‘us’ — the fearer’s choice.
• XREF: connects to: Fewer than one in a million Western Muslims per year turned to political violence; Only Muslim violence is read as caused by the perpetrators’ religion — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 366