A friend of mine who avoids Twitter (“X”) recently logged into his old account after a long while and was shocked to find that “they converted my whole feed into racist literal Nazi propaganda.” Having barely used the platform, he said there were no interactions he’d had that could justify the change. But his feed was chock-full of horrific racism. 

I’ve noticed the same thing. In my case, an algorithm might conceivably have determined that it’s what I want to see because I spend so much of my time reading and responding to right-wing arguments. (I can assure you it is not what I want to see.) But I’ve been a little shocked myself at just how much I see on Twitter consists of outright bigoted remarks about ethnic minorities, whether Muslims, Haitians, or Jews. 

The anti-Muslim propaganda is the most ubiquitous. In just the last few days, I’ve seen:

• A tweet showing the 9/11 “falling man” and musing “Kinda mad to think that Islam was welcomed into the West AFTER this happened.” (10,000 retweets, nearly 100,000 likes)
• A British user asking: “Is it racist to say we have too many Muslims in positions of power running our country?” (4,200 retweets, 37,000 likes) 
• Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative influencer, saying that “Israel is the only place in the Middle East I, a woman and a Christian, could safely travel. This isn’t complex.” (nearly 1,000 retweets, 9,000 likes) 

On and on it goes. “Islam is a horrible human invention.” “Imagine thinking Israel is the threat instead of radical Islam.” “Muslims commanded by Allah to ki*ll all of his human enemies on earth.” 

All of this is nasty bigoted propaganda. It is based in deep levels of ignorance. Israel is not the “only place in the Middle East” that Stuckey could travel. (Does she realize how many Western tourists visit the Egyptian pyramids or Dubai every year?) The idea of linking 9/11 to “Islam” is absurd. Islam has nearly 2 billion adherents. Osama bin Laden was the leader of a small isolated criminal gang and was motivated as much by U.S. foreign policy as by theology. (He explained his motivations in a letter to Americans, which most people never heard about or read.) 

My reaction to seeing anti-Muslim propaganda is always the same: first, I am disgusted, but then I always think some variation on the same thought. The people who write this can’t possibly know many Muslims. The Muslims I have interacted with in my life have uniformly been decent, ordinary people. I just had a long conversation with the wonderful Islamic scholar and activist Omar Suleiman, who is humane, compassionate, and deeply well-read. I followed and reported on Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for governor of Michigan in 2018, and he is a brilliant spokesperson for Medicare For All and a more egalitarian public health system, as well as a devout Muslim. I find it ridiculous that I should even have to mention the existence of such great American Muslims, but the bigots are so ignorant of real-life Muslims that it is important to remember that “Islam” is not some faceless abstraction but a set of real people with names, faces, families, jobs, and neighbors. 

Bigots do not like the word “Islamophobia,” but so much of the discourse about Islam is exactly this: an irrational fear. I saw one person on X saying that in Europe, “every second spent outside the house is a threat to our safety,” implying that thanks to the presence of Muslim immigrants, the entire continent must cower in terror at all times. They are genuinely afraid of Muslims. That fear is entirely irrational, and I write that mere blocks from the site here in New Orleans where an ISIS supporter killed revelers on New Years Eve. I am sensible enough to understand that to reach conclusions about Islam itself from this incident is not logically justifiable, because I am aware that it’s equally possible for a white nationalist to massacre Muslims as it is for an individual Muslim to commit a massacre. I also understand that when there have been acts of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims in this country, the cited justifications by the perpetrators have almost always related to violence by the United States against Muslim populations abroad. To look only at violence committed against the United States but not at the violence committed by and with the support of the United States leads to a totally faulty understanding of how the world works. Just as many Israelis do not notice their occupation of Palestine, and thereby conclude when they are attacked that Palestinians must be fanatical, violent antisemites, Americans who sense anti-American hostility in the Muslim world tend not to wonder where that hostility may come from and end up concluding that Islam must simply be committed to a global jihad against freedom. That’s certainly a description of the worldview of our current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who is an extreme anti-Muslim bigot. (He also thinks Guantánamo Bay should have been used as a death camp, which really should have been a bigger deal during his confirmation hearings.)   

I am consistently horrified by the level of negative sentiments that so many people in the U.S. and Europe feel comfortable expressing about Muslims. I have noted before that a quick way to be disturbed by the society you live in is to imagine how things said about Palestinians or Muslims would sound if said about Jews. The moment you do this you develop a better understanding of "the banality of evil" and how Nazism became normalized. I see people on Fox News warning about Palestinian birthrates, or coming up with Nazi-like plans to send Palestinians to live on a small island, and I think: do you hear yourselves? Imagine saying there were too many Jews in positions of power or Judaism is a “horrible human invention.” Many of us can see clearly why these positions would be horrifically bigoted, but for some reason anti-Muslim bigotry is much more tolerated, to the point where the New York Times actually employs a columnist, Bret Stephens, who once wrote that there was a “disease of the Arab mind” (namely antisemitism). Imagine someone writing about a “disease of the Jewish mind” and remaining employed by a major newspaper!

The fact that antisemitism is considered toxic is a very good thing. We’ve seen, in the form of the Holocaust, what happens when people demonizing a population as a kind of cancer on society and then decide to find a “final solution” to the disease. We know how this can go. But anti-Muslim bigotry is simply not met with the same abhorrence as anti-Jewish bigotry. Dr. Suleiman told me that Islamophobia is “the most permitted form of bigotry in the mainstream in the United States,” and he’s right. We will know we have made moral progress when we do regard all prejudices as equally pernicious and wrong.

Of course, antisemitism is making a comeback, too, and I see plenty of antisemitic tweets that turn my stomach as well. Nick Fuentes, an open admirer of Hitler, actually dined with the current president! I am concerned that all of this is part of a broader descent into hatred, bigotry, and ignorance that Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk) is doing his best to encourage, with wild tales of Haitians eating pets and immigrant “animals” destroying our society from within. We must resist these delusions. We must defend our Muslim brothers and sisters. We must fight hatred and fear with compassion and solidarity. (And perhaps a little bit of hatred and anger too now and then, but directed against injustice.) The propagandists never stop. They produce image after image designed to emotionally manipulate people, just as the racist propaganda of old did. They want to make us stupid and to make us afraid. We must preserve our ability to think rationally, because demagogues are constantly trying to convince us not to use our critical thinking skills. The dangers of anti-Muslim propaganda are immense, and it is incumbent on all of us to fight against it every day.