How Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism were born together

Middle East Eye

27-02-2025

Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism were born together, inseparable from the start a millennium ago.
Long before these ideologies acquired their contemporary names as masks for conquest, Palestinians had already become a target. In the 11th century, just as they are today, they were marked for elimination because they are the native inhabitants of Palestine, and the majority are Muslim.
Palestine has had the misfortune of being the site of both the first European settler-colony and the last, a calamity from which the Palestinian people continue to suffer and against which they continue to resist.
Palestinians were certainly not the first Arab Muslims or Christians to be targeted by European armies.
The first were the Arab Muslims of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy. The latter were conquered by the Normans to extend the frontiers of Latin Christendom and wrest these territories from Arab Muslim rule.
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But unlike the conquest of Muslim Arab Sicily and southern Italy, the Muslims and Eastern Christians of Palestine were the first to be targeted by Latin Christendom in a "Holy War", subsequently known as the First Crusade.
The Crusade also inspired the zealotry of the so-called Reconquista in Iberia, which came to be seen as a "second march to Jerusalem". But unlike Muslim Arab Italy and Spain, Palestine did not border Latin Christendom, even if it was the territory where the events of the faith to which European heathens had converted originated.
The sin of the people of Palestine, in the eyes of the Crusaders, was precisely that they were not Latin Christians. Similarly, since the Zionist project for the conquest of Palestine began, the sin of the Palestinian people, in the eyes of the latest Crusaders, is that they are not Jews.
In both cases, Palestine was identified as a land that the Lord had bequeathed - first to Latin Christians and, since the turn of the 20th century, to Ashkenazi Jews, both of whom originated from what became Europe.
'War on Muslims'
While anti-Islam structured the Latin Crusader wars from the 11th century onwards, by the 19th century, it would be European white Christian supremacy and Orientalism that took on this role.
Islam remained a structuring factor but was now enmeshed with several questions that Europe articulated, emerging in the 18th century - what the British called the "Jewish Question" and the "Eastern Question".
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Still, the war on Muslims between the end of the 18th century and the end of the First World War did not subside. Estimates suggest that as many as five million Ottoman Muslims were killed between 1820 and 1914, with six million more made refugees.
The Palestinian people were spared some of these murderous campaigns and, by the 20th century, were conceived by the Christian West primarily as Arabs - an identity most adjacent to Muslim.
This Arab designation remained salient until 9/11, when Europe's most recent Islamophobia, which had seen its early manifestations following the triumph of the Iranian Revolution, came to be articulated as President George W Bush put it in 2001: a new "Crusade" that "is going to take a while".
It was then that Israel and the West re-identified the Palestinians as objectionable Muslims who must be defeated.
As Bush intimated, the Crusade has indeed been taking a while and remains with us. President Donald Trump's recent plans for the Palestinians of Gaza are resonant with the history of the Crusades, if not directly inspired by them.
In November 1095, Pope Urban II declared the necessity of recapturing the land where Christianity was born. Addressing the European converts to the Palestinian religion of Christianity, the Pope averred:
"Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says 'floweth with milk and honey', was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel. Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights…This royal city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially, she asks succour."
At the time, the majority of Jerusalem's native inhabitants were Arabic-speaking Christians, or what the Crusaders called "Suryani". One of the declared motives of the Crusade was to rescue them and the Eastern churches from the Muslims, even though no Eastern Christians had ever complained or appealed to the Latins for help.
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Indeed, the Eastern Christians, especially those of Palestine, would be, along with Muslims, as historians have put it, the "most unwilling" and "unhappy victims" of the Crusades.
The crime of Palestine's Arab Muslims - these "enemies" of God, this "wicked race" of "heathens" - was their "unlawful possession" of the "holy" places which Latin Christendom coveted.
Frameworks of conquest
It was during the First Crusade that the fanatical Latin Christians first named Palestine the "Holy Land", replacing its biblical Old Testament nickname as the "Promised Land".
They also refused to use Jerusalem's real name, al-Quds, which had replaced its Aramaic name in the ninth century.
The people of Palestine served as a convenient foil for the papacy, as the internecine wars among Latin Christians were considered sinful by the Church and hindered their service to God.
Unifying the Latins and expanding Christendom territorially were deemed as crucial as redirecting Latin animosity towards Muslims.
Through the Bible and the sword, the Crusades established the first European settler-colony in Jerusalem following the genocidal extermination of its population
Since Latin Christians viewed Muslims as inconvertible, and the Church prohibited making peace with them, considering them heathens, they were to be slain, with any survivors expelled from the "Holy Land".
As for the Arab Christians, the Crusaders attempted to Latinise them by force but ultimately failed. Consequently, the surviving members of the large Muslim and Christian Arab populations, along with the small Arab Jewish community of Jerusalem, were expelled to make way for the Frankish settlers.
When the fanatical Crusades slaughtered between 20,000 and 40,000 of these "Saracens", as the Arab Muslims were also called, in Jerusalem and inside al-Aqsa Mosque in a horrific massacre on 15 and 16 July 1099, they were incensed that their victims fought back in self-defence.
Through the Bible and the sword, the Crusades established the first European settler-colony in Jerusalem following the genocidal extermination of its population. They called their settler-colony "the Latinate Kingdom".
After expelling the entire population, they brought in 120,000 Latin Christian colonists, who made up 15 to 25 percent of the population of the Frankish settler colony, which extended across Palestine and beyond.
In their settler-colony, the Crusaders instituted an "apartheid" legal system, as Israeli historian of the Crusades Joshua Prawer describes it.
Intertwined ideologies
Unlike Zionism, which has always been an ideology that combined religion and colonial nationalism, Palestinian resistance has largely remained intrinsically anti-colonial and nationalist rather than religious.
Still, following the tradition of the Crusaders, Zionists have used similar descriptions for Palestinians since the 1880s - portraying them as "dirty" barbaric Arabs, antisemites, and even Nazis.
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After Hamas was established in 1987, the Israeli government began referring to them as antisemitic jihadist Muslims who needed to be crushed.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, early western media speculation frequently suggested that Hamas could be responsible, despite the fact that it had never carried out any act of resistance outside historic Palestine. The intertwining of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism has only deepened since.
In June 2009, US President Barack Obama addressed not only a local Egyptian audience but also the entire "Muslim World" from Cairo University. He emphasised the importance of religious tolerance among Muslims towards Egyptian and Lebanese Christians and promised to end the institutionalised discrimination against American Muslims that followed 9/11.
Yet he justified the ongoing, murderous American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan - he could have added Yemen but did not - as necessary. His administration was not only killing non-American Muslims in these countries but also targeting non-white American Muslim citizens for assassination.
In the same vein, Obama sought to provide a theological justification for an American-sponsored policy: the imposition of a "peace" between Palestinians and Israelis that preserves Jewish settler-colonialism and occupation at the expense of Palestinian rights.
To achieve this, he declared that the "Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the [Quranic] story of Isra [sic], when Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon him) joined in prayer."
In doing so, Obama was clearly asserting - in a distinctly Zionist fashion - that Jewish colonisers of Palestine are exempt from the obligation to be tolerant. He argued that they are resisted not because they are colonists but solely because they are Jewish - hence his call for Muslim tolerance and ecumenical peace rather than for an end to Jewish settler-colonialism.
Of course, since the Iranian Revolution, Islamophobia has come to encompass all Muslims worldwide.
Yet, much like the Islamophobia of the Crusades, which targeted all Muslims - Turks and Arabs alike - while reserving a particular hatred for Palestinians, today's Islamophobia follows a similar pattern.
Palestinians, cast as the worst among Muslims, occupy a central place within it.
Current Crusade
Since 7 October 2023, when Palestinian resistance forces attacked Israel, Islamophobia has surged across the US and Western Europe, targeting all Muslims and those mistaken for them.
If Islamophobia once drove anti-Palestinianism as a pretext for conquest during the Crusades, today, it is anti-Palestinianism that fuels Islamophobia in Europe and the US.
If Islamophobia once drove anti-Palestinianism as a pretext for conquest during the Crusades, today, it is anti-Palestinianism that fuels Islamophobia in Europe and the US
It is hardly surprising, then, that when Palestinians rise up and resist their white Christian and Jewish colonisers today, they threaten the entire ideological structure of the western world - one built upon the inaugural moment of the Crusades.
This is why every weapon at the "Christian" world's disposal, including Islamophobia, has been and must be deployed against the Palestinians in an effort to defeat them.
Yet, a millennium later, the Palestinians continue to resist, and the new Crusaders persist in their attempts to crush them.
It is no accident that Trump's current Crusade for Gaza and his call for the expulsion of its surviving Palestinian population following Israel's genocidal extermination campaign echo the First Crusade and the Crusader-led genocide and expulsion of the survivors in al-Quds.
That both projects are rooted in white settler-colonialism in the land of the Palestinians is clear enough.
Just as the defeat of the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries and the dismantling of their settler colony in Palestine brought an end to their rule, in view of the persistent and steadfast resistance of the Palestinian people, the prospects for the success of this latest Crusade are slim at best.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.