On Monday, Bob Beckel, a liberal member of Fox’s, The Five, declared on air that he is a proud Islamophobe.

The hosts of the show began to criticize the Muslim community for their refusal to condemn the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo’s office and the kosher grocery store in Paris.

“If you say, ‘It’s not Islamic terror,’ then when we kill terrorists, or I talk about terrorism, or we talk about terrorists, it’s not about Islam,” co-host Greg Gutfeld said. “You can’t accuse me of Islamophobia anymore if it’s not about Islam.”

“I just wrote a piece for USA Today that’ll be in next week. It said, ‘I’m an Islamophobe,’” Beckel chimed in later. “That’s right, you can call me that all you want.” (Read more about the self-proclaimed Islamophobe HERE)

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Is Islamophobia a Myth?

By Brendan O’Neill. . . Across Europe, among the right-thinking sections of society, among the political classes, the response to the massacre of the cartoonists and satirists has been the same: to panic about how Them, the native masses, especially the more right-wing sections of the French population, might respond to it. The blood on the floor of the Charlie Hebdo offices was still wet when brow-furrowed observers started saying: “Oh no, the Muslims! Will they be attacked?” It’s the same after every terrorist attack: from 9/11 to 7/7 in London to last year’s Sydney siege to Paris today: Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims. The uprising never comes, but that doesn’t halt their fantasy fears. What’s it all about?

. . .Islamophobia is a myth. Sure, some folks in Europe and elsewhere no doubt dislike Muslims, just as other losers hate the Irish or blacks or women. But the idea that there is a climate of Islamophobia, a culture of hot-headed, violent-minded hatred for Muslims that could be awoken and unleashed by the next terror attack, is an invention. Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence. The thing that keeps the Islamophobia panic alive is not actual violence against Muslims but the right-on politicos’ ill-founded yet deeply held view of ordinary Europeans, especially those of a working-class variety, as racist and stupid. This is the terrible irony of the Islamophobia panic: The fearers of anti-Muslim violence claim to be challenging prejudice but actually they reveal their own prejudices, their distrust of and disdain for those who come from the other side of the tracks, read different newspapers, hold different beliefs, live different lives. They accuse stupid white communities of viewing Muslims as an indistinguishable mob who threaten the fabric of European society, which is exactly what they think of stupid white communities. (Read more from “Islamophobe: A Myth” HERE)

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