Charles Featherstone, who was a practicing Muslim for 16 years, says there really isn’t Islamophobia in the US. Excerpt:

Well, they are at least right that there is no “Islamophobia” in the West, and that some Western elites are deeply bigoted against working-class and some middle class people they are elected (or appointed, or however that happens anymore) to govern. This is the clerisy versus the rest of the bourgeois, a long fight in the West that clearly hasn’t gone away and won’t soon.

It brings to mind something that happened long ago, in 1991, at the San Francisco Islamic Center. It was a long ways away from where we lived, but I would make my way there occasionally — several times a week — to pray and have fellowship with other Muslims. The population who worshiped there were mostly working class immigrants — North Africans and South Asians.

It was a couple of weeks after the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait, and as Americans were preparing themselves for the possibility of war with Iraq, tensions were beginning to tighten. A lot of Muslims were nervous, Christian media was apocalyptic, anger was focused on Arabs and Muslims. The Islamic Center had gotten some threatening phone calls.

They were in the process of finishing construction on a small room to handle the dead — where bodies could be washed prior to funerals — and I was helping a little and listening to several of the mosque elders talk about the situation. One brother mentioned the threats.

“Doesn’t that scare you?” I asked.

He stopped working at looked at me intently.

“I am from India. Life has no value there, and it takes nothing for Hindus to decide to kill Muslims. The terrible things they say, and then do when they want. You have no idea. This is nothing. You people have no idea what real violence is like, and how to live with it. It is something to remember, but not fear. You have no idea what it is to truly be afraid.”

And the look in his eyes told me he was speaking from real experience. He knew exactly what he was talking about.

And with that, we went back to work.

Read the whole thing.