Header image by BP Miller on Unsplash
When prejudice targets Black, Jewish, or Latino communities, Americans voice outrage. But when it targets Muslims? Too often, there is silence, dismissal, or even applause. Anti-Muslim sentiment isn’t an outlier in the United States — it is woven into the nation’s social DNA and political machinery.
Islam is a faith followed by over two billion people worldwide, and America is home to millions of Muslims. Yet hostility toward them in the U.S. is tolerated in ways that would be unthinkable toward other religious communities. Why is such discrimination accepted? Is it simply fear, or part of a larger political and geopolitical apparatus designed to keep the U.S. at odds with the Muslim world?
I have witnessed this reality firsthand since the fall of 2001 — at the start of a federal law enforcement career that intersected with a personal relationship that shook my worldview. On the morning of the 9/11 attacks, I was driving to the Pentagon to conduct background investigation interviews when the world was swiftly upended. Within days, history — and my understanding of the Middle East — would be forever altered.
At the time, I knew little about Islam. But weeks later, I would meet — and eventually marry — a Palestinian-American whose perspective transformed my understanding of faith, humanity, and the world’s uneven balance of power.
Structural marginalization against Muslims is deeply entrenched in military, intelligence, and law enforcement sectors. While serving as a Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I attended a terrorism seminar led by former CIA officials who propagated widespread misconceptions about Islam: that Muslims sought the annihilation of all Jews and Christians, that martyrs were literally promised “72 virgins,” and that Muslim women were universally oppressed — forced to wear hijab, denied higher education, and coerced into arranged marriages. Yet through my wife, colleagues, and countless Muslim families I’ve known over decades, I have seen that the reality is quite the opposite. Muslim households are like any others, with women often serving as the anchors holding the family together.
Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve observed an indiscriminate pattern: prejudice against Muslims has grown from isolated acts into an institutionalized mechanism — embedded across communities, workplaces, government agencies, and the media. Policies framed as patriotism or security measures commonly single out Muslim Americans, while political rhetoric and news coverage reinforce caricatures that bear little resemblance to reality. This is not mere ignorance or fear — it is systemic, sustained because it serves political, geopolitical, and territorial interests.
That distorted perception permeates institutions and communities alike. Mosques, like other minority places of worship, are routinely subjected to harassment and vandalism. Yet unlike attacks on other religious communities, these incidents rarely prompt meaningful accountability, and public response is strikingly muted.
According to the ACLU, “anti-Muslim sentiment has spiked” in recent years. Rawand Abdelghani, a board member at the Nueces Mosque in Austin, Texas, noted, “Since October 2023, we’ve definitely seen a rise in Islamophobia.” This bias, more than any other, has become America’s accepted bigotry.
Further illustrating this resentment, coordinated efforts to block the construction of new mosques have emerged across the United States. It prompts an uncomfortable question: would the same tactics be used to obstruct the building of new synagogues or churches?
The political arena reflects the same double standard. On October 2, 2025, Senator Ted Cruz labeled New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “jihadist” on national television — drawing little collective criticism. The incident is a stark reminder of anti-Muslim resentment normalized at the highest levels of power.
I have witnessed the same dynamic personally: in 2003, when I criticized America’s one-sided Israel-Palestine policy — around the time activist Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza by an Israeli armored bulldozer — a DHS colleague dismissively told me I “shouldn’t have married a terrorist.” Whether broadcast on cable news or whispered in the break room, the message is clear: Muslim Americans are all too often presumed suspect, and anyone who contests the narrative becomes fair game. It is a culture of sanctioned discrimination masquerading as national security.
Beyond America’s borders, U.S. perceptions and policy are shaped by foreign actors, including the Israeli government, whose strategies and rhetoric foster anti-Muslim division. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long blurred the line between “militant Islam” and Islam itself, portraying the faith as a global threat. By repeatedly invoking “Judeo-Christian” values, he casts Jews and Christians as natural allies while framing Muslims as outsiders, reinforcing an us-versus-them narrative.
This message has been amplified by his son, Yair Netanyahu, whose past incendiary social media posts about Muslims — such as “Terror has a religion and it is Islam” and “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims” — have further linked hostility toward Islam with the defense of the West.
Overcoming this cycle requires both moral clarity and structural reform: dismantling norms that perpetuate bias toward Muslims, engaging the Islamic world with fairness rather than ulterior motives, and supporting Palestinian rights with dignity. It also means holding Israel’s government accountable when its actions conflict with U.S. objectives — because American foreign policy should never be dictated by blind loyalty to any international power.
Only by confronting intolerance at home and recalibrating engagement abroad can America restore credibility, foster genuine religious pluralism, and uphold justice without exception. Until it reckons with this sanctioned discrimination, the nation will continue betraying the very ideals it professes to uphold.
Jamie Haase is a former Special Agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and a freelance writer who has been featured in HuffPost, The Free Lance–Star, Carolina Journal, and San Antonio Express-News, covering U.S. foreign policy, immigration, and Middle East affairs.
