Are Muslims Victims?

There are today frequent claims that Muslims are victims. But is this true and if so to what degree and who are their victimizers? Muslims generally suffer informal discrimination as immigrants and descendants of immigants in Western European countries in both housing and employment. But aside from that, Muslims are certainly not victims of non-Muslims. The notion of Muslims as “victims” was created by Postcolonialism and taken over by Islamist movements worldwide. The September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States were perpetrated on behalf of alleged “Muslim victims” worldwide in appropriating various armed conflicts and simplistically claiming that these were evidence of Muslim “victimization”. The myth of Muslims as victims is explicitly supersessionist in nature in systematically painting Jews as oppressors and denying that Jews are an oppressed group. 

What is the origin of this myth? The Soviets wanted to create an impression that “the East”, including the Soviet Union were victims of the “the West” and hence did Postcolonialism come about as a product of Soviet propaganda. The KGB propaganda discourses of Operation SIG systematically claimed that peoples in Africa and Asia were victims of a Jewish-led American plot to control the world. This was in fact a deliberate inversion of Soviet imperialist ambitions for Communist world rule. Islamist claims that the American superpower is a global Jewish conspiracy are thus an echo of Soviet propaganda from which this idea derives. American Muslims are not an oppressed group as Muslims, in fact Muslim integration in American society is an extraordinary success and Muslims are part and parcel of American society. This stands in contrast to the tragically failed integration of Muslims in Western Europe. The claim that Muslims are victims by non-Muslims obfuscates the reality that the real victimizers of Muslims are Islamists and Jihadists. It is often claimed that Muslims are victims of American and Israeli counterterrorism as if fighting terrorism is an act of victimization. This is also the basis for the false claim that Palestinians are an oppressed group. This is propaganda meant to undercut the fight against Jihadist terrorism worldwide and to claim that Jihadists are victims rather than terrorists.