Since the onset of the United States’ attack on Iran, there has been a troubling and increasingly visible rise in Islamophobia, both within the halls of Congress and on the streets of our cities. This piece is an attempt to name what is happening with care and precision: to examine how Islamophobic rhetoric and policy are being used not only to rationalize military aggression abroad, but also to cultivate public consent for a war that lacks broad popular support.
Unlike earlier reflections I have written, this essay focuses on concrete examples and recent developments. My aim is to show how the familiar political process of manufacturing an enemy, and then systematically dehumanizing that enemy, functions as a tool for legitimizing controversial military action. What we are witnessing is not merely rhetoric run amok, but a deliberate strategy with real human consequences.
This pattern, of course, is not new. History offers countless examples of marginalized groups being vilified in order to forge unity against a perceived threat. What distinguishes this moment is the speed and visibility with which this narrative is being constructed. Social media accelerates it; official statements echo it; legislation begins to codify it. Even as this article is being written, language emerging from Congress reveals an effort to conflate the actions of a foreign government with an entire religious community—fueling fear, deepening division, and narrowing the space for moral reflection at home.
Earlier this week, in my post titled “Yet, Another War,” I reflected on how nations at war often rush to assemble moral and strategic justifications, hoping to secure public allegiance and claim ethical high ground. In recent days, that impulse has intensified. Several Republican members of Congress have escalated their rhetoric to openly Islamophobic statements, including calls for the removal or deportation of Muslims from the United States. These moments should give us pause. They are not random outbursts, but part of a broader attempt to redirect fear and consolidate support for a war that polling suggests nearly two-thirds of Americans do not support.
By sharpening the image of a constructed enemy, proponents of the war seek to make military action appear not only defensible, but necessary—inevitable, even. Fear does much of the work that reason cannot.
The long and painful cycles of violence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews stretch back centuries, leaving scars that continue to shape our present moment. Time and again, moral justifications for these conflicts have failed to deliver peace or healing. Instead, they have perpetuated mistrust, grievance, and loss. The past does not remain in the past; it waits, unresolved, ready to be reactivated when tensions rise.
Because these conflicts are framed in religious terms, the moral stakes are often intensified to an absolute pitch. Each tradition claims one God, one sacred text, one ultimate truth. When identity is rooted so completely in sacred certainty, it becomes easy—almost automatic—to see those outside one’s sect as enemies by default. This is made all the more tragic by the fact that these traditions share common foundations: overlapping prophets, shared stories, and intertwined histories. Yet difference hardens into division, and interpretation becomes a battleground rather than a bridge.
As Americans and as participants, whether willingly or not, in this war, we should be honest with ourselves: we are not standing on especially firm moral ground. The only argument that seems capable of shifting public sentiment relies on the oldest and most corrosive of impulses, longstanding suspicion of Muslims and the collective memory of atrocities committed by some, in the name of Allah, against us. When we lean on that memory without discernment, we allow fear and trauma to substitute for ethical reasoning and thoughtful policy.
If you feel yourself persuaded by the invocation of 9/11 or other horrors as justification for today’s bloodshed, I ask you to pause and widen the frame. Consider the human cost of war, not in the abstract, but in faces and futures. Look into the eyes of children whose lives are being shaped by fear, displacement, and loss. Recognize that we are planting the grievances that will fuel the next conflict, and the one after that.
I return, finally, to a hard truth I have named before: War is who we are, and we can always find an excuse to justify it. But inevitability is not the same as necessity. We are still capable of choosing differently—of refusing the easy narratives, of resisting dehumanization, of remembering that our shared humanity is larger than our fear.
Let us not fall into that trap again.