Cerritos College Philosophy Club Presentation

March 24, 2015

Ted Stolze, Islamophobia: What It Is and Why Its Wrong
I.

Sartres analysis of anti-Semitism in Rflexions sur la question juive [Reflections on the Jewish
Problem], published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew (1948)
If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. (Sartre 1995, p. 13)
No external factor can produce anti-Semitism in the anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is a free and
total choice of oneself, a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only toward Jews but
toward human beings in general, toward history and society; it is at one and the same time a
passion and a conception of the world. (Sartre 1995, p. 17; translation modified)
The anti-Semite is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own
consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of
society, and of the worldof everything except the Jews. He is a coward who does not want to
admit his cowardice to himself; a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder
without being able to hold it back, yet who dares to kill only in effigy or protected by the
anonymity of the mob; a malcontent who dares not revolt from fear of the consequences of his
rebellion. In espousing antiSemitism, he does not simply adopt an opinion, he chooses himself
as a person.
He chooses the permanence and impenetrability of stone, the total
irresponsibility of the warrior who obeys his leadersand he has no leader. He chooses to
acquire nothing, to deserve nothing; be assumes that everything is given him as his birthright
and he is not noble. He chooses finally a Good that is fixed once and for all, beyond question,
out of reach; he dares not examine it for fear of being led to challenge it and having to seek it in
another form. The Jew only serves him as a pretext; elsewhere his counterpart will make use of
the Negro or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the antiSemite
to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has
been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy
it. AntiSemitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The antiSemite is a man who
wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderboltanything except a
man. (Sartre 1995, pp. 53-54)

II.

A working definition of Islamophobia

[A] hostile attitude toward Islam and Muslims based on the image of Islam as an enemy, as a
threat to our wellbeing and even to our survivalIslamophobia can be shared by many
people irrespective of ideology or religious beliefsbeing racist does not necessarily mean
being Islamophobic, just as being Islamophobic does not necessarily imply being a racist.
(Lpez 2011, p. 20)

III.

Five persistent myths about Muslims that underlie Islamophobia (from Kumar 2012, pp. 41-60)

IV.

Islam is a monolithic religion

Islam is a uniquely sexist religion
The Muslim Mind is incapable of reason and rationality
Islam is a uniquely violent religion
Muslims are incapable of democracy and self-rule

A Select Bibliography
Arthur, Paige 2010, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre,
New York, NY: Verso.
Bronner, Stephen Eric 2014, The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox, New York, NY: Grove
Press.
Flynn, Thomas R. 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.

Gottschalk, Peter and Gabriel Greenberg 2008, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy,
Lanham, MD.
Jonathan Judaken 2006, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the
Politics of the French Intellectual, Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Kumar, Deepa 2012, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Lpez, Fernando Bravo 2011, Toward a Definition of Islamophobia: Approximations of the
Early Twentieth Century
https://www.academia.edu/2098927/Towards_a_definition_of_Islamophobia_approximatio
ns_of_the_early_twentieth_century.) (Published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34:4, pp.
556-73.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1984 [1956], Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, New
York, NY: Washington Square Press.
________ 1995 [1948], Anti-Semite and Jew, New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Spellberg, Denise A. 2013, Jeffersons Quran: Islam and the Founders, New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf. (A short interview with
Spellberg about her book is available online: http://youtu.be/V5xb_8Kyd1s.)