Tin foil hats, conspiracy theories and American politics

“Muslims assaulted a Denny’s waitress for serving bacon during the holy month of Ramadan?”

“How many Muslims has Obama brought into America? How much has it cost American taxpayers to bring and support Muslims being placed in America? If Obama is not a Muslim, why does he want to flood our country with them?”

{mosads}The above questions are just a sampling of the anti-Muslim email sent to our inbox at the fact-checking and myth-busting web site, Snopes. In the month since I started working here, I couldn’t help but notice a large quantity of queries asking whether outlandish claims that seem intended to smear Muslim people are true. 

The claims are invariably pushed by disreputable clickbait and fake news websites, but predictably, if it’s in print, some will believe it. If there’s enough critical thought present to raise doubts about the veracity of such claims, readers turn to us.

“Were Tennessee public school students being forced to pray in a mosque?” (No.) 

“Did President Obama ‘enforce’ an Islamic opening prayer in the US House of Representatives?”(Again, no.) 

“Is Paris ‘under siege’ by Muslims?” (No, and lay off the Steven Seagal flicks.)

Curious about the dynamics behind what seems to be a spate of Islamophobia, I asked a couple of experts to weigh in. 

My managing editor, Brooke Binkowski, said the election has helped fuel so many spurious claims coming into Snopes, but added that no matter the season, “there seems to be a constant undercurrent of xenophobic — and almost always either completely untrue or simply twisted — stories getting passed around.”

The only thing that changes is the group being attacked.

“But no matter what the reason is behind it, their stories are still easily debunked,” she said. 

“It’s not always this bad but it’s always there. Sometimes, I get cynical and think that the only thing that is going to end this kind of thing is if green-skinned aliens land on Earth, and then all humans can bond together against the ‘greeners.’ When I’m feeling a little more charitable, I think that this is good, because we’re getting all this hatred and fear out into the open where people can actually discuss things openly and honestly,” Binkowski said. 

At the very least, we at Snopes have the opportunity to knock down false claims when we see them. But Khaled Beydoun, associate professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, agreed that a lot of Islamophobia is being driven by this year’s unusual election. Donald Trump, he said, has made it a point of targeting Muslim people with his rhetoric – and legitimizing irrational fears.

“Trump has been using Islamophobic rhetoric as a strategy to mobilize voters,” he said, adding that the Republican candidate has taken the unprecedented step of proposing extreme vetting and banning Muslim people from entering the country.

But it’s gone beyond far-fetched emails and political rallies. Beydoun said there’s been a spike in anti-Muslim violence and the numbers back him up. Anti-Muslim hate crimes rose a whopping 78 percent in 2015, according to research by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Overall, hate crimes rose just over 5 percent in the same year.

Beydoun said the issue is hardly unique to the United States. He pointed to Brexit and the success of the National Front in France, a party headed by Marine Le Pen, who has, as the New York Times puts it, parlayed anti-Muslim sentiment into political influence. It’s in part a result of fears generated from demographic shifts in countries where the majority of the population has been Caucasian. But using fear tactics against a minority group to gain political power is far from new – in fact, it has chilling precedent.

“This is a strategy that has been used with great success in the US with scapegoating other people — black people under Reagan, Japanese people circa World War II, and obviously Jewish people in Nazi Germany,” he said. “It always comes back up because [playing on irrational fears of minority groups] is really successful.”

A common iteration of Islamophobic fear is the notion Muslim people are slowly taking over the country by implementing Sharia law. The fear sporadically rears its head, for example when American school children are learning about world religion and come across the portion of the lesson in which they learn about Islam.

For historical context, I turned to Aviva Chomsky, author of “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” and professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University. She said the issue has well-established roots in colonialism and reaches back centuries.

“Law has always been a big issue in establishing colonial domination—the push to establish western law over non-western peoples. And colonized peoples trying to assert their right to use their own law,” she told me. “Think of [the novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe] Things Fall Apart, think of the many struggles of Native Americans and Latin American indigenous peoples to assert the right to their own law. Europe also colonized the Muslim world and imposed European law. So the assertion of sharia law could be seen as part of an anti-colonial struggle—and the terror of sharia law could be seen as the typical colonial terror of having colonizers’ own violence and domination come back to bite them.”

Aside from current events like election cycles and violence driving a refugee crisis, broader forces are at play – namely demographic shifts in countries where the population has been dominated by Caucasians. Within the current century, for instance, white people will no longer make up a majority of the US population.

“I think we can also see this in the context of immigration and ‘assimilation’—and the Anglo- Saxon fear that non-Anglo- Saxon immigrants are going to dilute or threaten their cultural

dominance in the US—look at the history of anti-Catholicism in the US, the ‘fear’ that Catholics are loyal to a foreign power, are threatening Anglo dominance,” Chomsky added.

Whatever the source of these sentiments, it’s best to remember that we in recent history have been down this road before. A 2015 story in the Washington Post cautioned about allowing anti-Muslim or anti-migrant sentiments to reach the pitch they did in Europe before World War II.

“It’s important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees,” wrote the Post’s Ishaan Tharoor. “And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.”

Palma is an author at Snopes and a journalist from the Los Angeles area who has covered everything from city hall to crime to national politics. She started as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and wrote for a variety of publications including the LAist, the OC Weekly, LA School Report, Truthout and The Raw Story. Follow her on Twitter @BPalmaMarkus

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.