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Islamophobia Bad for All: Dalia Mogahed

CAIRO – In a special course at the University of Pittsburgh, Muslim researcher Dalia Mogahed has warned that bigotry and Islamophobia are having a bad effect on all Americans and not only Muslim by opening door to racism.

“Why is Islamophobia a threat to all? It’s a door to other types of racism,” said Dalia Mogahed, a Muslim and the director of research at the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported on Monday, March 21.

Mogahed comments came at the conclusion of a three-day intensive course on Muslims in America held at the University of Pittsburgh.

Offered by Pitt’s Global Studies Center, the course is the latest of a series of mini-courses begun in 2011 focusing on Muslims in different parts of the world.

Participants in the course included students from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University as well as primary- and secondary-school educators and others from the community.

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“People need to understand not only other parts of the world but our neighbors, too,” said Veronica Dristas, assistant director of outreach for the Global Studies Center.

Suad Yusuf, a student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said that bigotry was having a heavy toll on their safety.

“Because I am a Muslim and at times I wear a headscarf, there is more of a responsibility for me to be an advocate and present information from a logical point of view, because some of these issues are so close to home that it does trigger emotion,” she said.

Public Manipulation

The former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies noted that the increase of anti-Muslim attacks has always accompanied highly contested political seasons and not after terrorist attacks.

According to Mogahed, the statistics reflect that anti-Muslim rhetoric has been used as a “tool of public manipulation” in preparing for a war many now recognize as mistaken.

“Fear of Islam turns out to be at the heart of anti-Muslim bigotry,” she said.

She cited a national survey by Public Policy Polling in December which asked, “Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?”, using the name of a fictional city in Disney’s “Aladdin.”

Shocking many, the results of the survey showed that thirty percent of Republican primary voters said they would, as did 19 percent of Democrats, the polling firm said.

“It’s funny on one level, but on another level, it’s terrifying, to bomb, to kill people in a country that … has absolutely done nothing to us since it doesn’t exist simply because it sounds Muslim,” said Mogahed.

Mogahed warned that increasing bigotry in the society will have a bad effect on both Muslim and Jewish communities, as the most vulnerable communities to attacks.

“Fear kills freedom,” she said.