Anti-Muslim racism is a global system used to normalise mass killing

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Anti-Muslim racism is a global system used to normalise mass killing Submitted by Amina Shareef on Thu, 11/12/2026 - 17:28 The ongoing genocide in Palestine is among the most…

Hospitals, schools and residential buildings have been bombed. Water and sanitation infrastructure have been destroyed, amid warnings of mass malnutrition and starvation.

No, these are not headlines from Gaza - although they could be. They are from Iran and Lebanon, two countries that have been systematically targeted by the Israeli military over the past three years.

Yet the destruction of civilian life in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran is not an isolated phenomenon. Across different political contexts, Muslim and Muslim-adjacent populations have long been subjected to violence, abandonment and containment.

Well before 2023, hundreds of civilians were killed by US drone warfare in Yemen; refugees attempting to reach Europe were abandoned to death in the Mediterranean by the EU; and millions of displaced Syrians were warehoused in camps enclosed with barbed wire.

What connects these, and countless other cases, is the discourse of terrorism. It does not simply identify populations as security threats; it justifies managing those threats through lethal means. Death is administered immediately or slowly, by creating conditions that expose people to premature death.

These interconnected practices of death-dealing across multiple geographical sites reveal the global operations of anti-Muslim racism.

November is Islamophobia Awareness Month. During this period, we will hear different understandings of Islamophobia: as a problem of individual prejudice, as discrimination and exclusion, or as a form of racism.

This article argues that Islamophobia is a global system of racism, built in part through the governance and control of Palestinian bodies, that makes mass Muslim death politically intelligible and permissible.

Islamophobia is much more than personal bias, fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims. It is a system of racism that constructs Muslim populations - and those identified as Muslim - as security threats, and legitimises their exposure to premature and various forms of death.

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