On Islamophobia First, let’s define phobia.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971):
Phobia: Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character….So Phobist nonce-wd. one who has a horror of or aversion to anything.
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1956) states:
Phobia: An irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or class of objects.
The Oxford definition does not claim that a phobia is necessarily irrational, but however stresses its cause as being a person. The Webster’s definition does not even mention a person, just objects or classes of objects, which, of course, can include persons. Other dictionary definitions more or less track the Oxford and Webster’s definitions.
And here is the origin of the term Islamophobia, from Discover the Networks.
The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them….
Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11. Since that time, Islamist lobby organizations (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR) and Muslim civil-rights activists have regularly accused the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. The accusers charge that as a result of this “Islamophobia,” Muslims are disproportionately targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes and acts of discrimination.