Islamophobia is the new global currency of power

There is no more honest way to describe the world we live in than this: Islamophobia has become the new global currency of power. It is traded in the speeches of politicians, exchanged in the deals of diplomats, printed in the pages of media, and laundered through the language of security and counterterrorism. It buys impunity for genocide, secures legitimacy for authoritarian leaders, and bankrolls new markets of surveillance and control. The Gaza genocide has torn away whatever illusions were left: the blood of Muslims is not just cheap; it is expendable capital in the economy of global powers.

Look at Gaza. For nearly two years now, the world has witnessed the systematic destruction of a besieged people — homes pulverised, families buried under rubble, hospitals bombed, and children starved into silence. When the Israeli prime minister calls Palestinians “human animals” and Western leaders repeat the mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” what is being transacted is not security but the politics of dehumanisation. Islamophobia is the medium that allows entire populations to be killed with international applause. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s actions plausibly amount to genocide, yet instead of sanctions or embargoes, Israel has received more weapons, more diplomatic cover, more money. The “currency” metaphor becomes literal here: billions of dollars in Western aid flow to sustain an occupation and war whose very justification rests on the idea that Muslim life is less worthy of grief, less deserving of protection.

The Gaza genocide is not an isolated catastrophe; it is the center of a global pattern. From the internment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang’s camps to the expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, from the headscarves torn off French Muslim girls in the name of secularism to the US “Muslim ban” dressed in the language of national security, the same logic is at work. Islamophobia is the shared language of power between democracies and dictatorships, between so-called secular republics and openly ethno-nationalist states. It allows brutality to pass as order, apartheid to pass as security, and genocide to pass as policy.

Nowhere is this more visible outside Palestine than in India, where 200 million Muslims are being pushed to the edge of extermination by the RSS-BJP regime. Under Narendra Modi, Islamophobia has been weaponised not as fringe hate but as state ideology. Laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens have created a framework where Muslims can be rendered stateless in their own homeland. Pogroms in Delhi, lynchings over beef, bulldozers demolishing Muslim homes, and open calls for genocide from Hindutva leaders are not accidents but steps in a carefully scripted project. This project is nourished by propaganda techniques borrowed directly from Zionism: Palestinians are framed as “terrorists” the way Indian Muslims are framed as “jihadis” or “Bangladeshi infiltrators”; Gaza’s resistance is criminalised the same way Indian Muslims’ protests are portrayed as sedition. Both Zionism and Hindutva work by criminalising Muslim existence itself — and both find eager allies in Western capitals that profit from these performances of “civilisational defence.”

This convergence is not coincidental. Hindutva leaders openly admire Israel’s methods. The Indian state has imported surveillance technologies, counterinsurgency strategies, and propaganda frameworks from Israel, applying them first in Kashmir and now against Muslims across the country. The message is simple: what Israel does to Palestinians, India can do to Muslims within its borders. In this way, Islamophobia is not only a domestic political tool but an international bridge: it cements alliances, smooths over contradictions, and guarantees the flow of weapons, contracts, and legitimacy.

READ: Gaza Government: Israel ignores ceasefire calls and kills 94 Palestinians in 48 hours

Some critics argue that “Islamophobia” is too blunt a term, that it conflates criticism of a religion with persecution of people. But this is an evasion. What we are seeing is not a critique of doctrine but a political technology of exclusion. As Mahmood Mamdani has explained, the division of “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” is not about belief but about governance — it is the state’s way of deciding which Muslim may live as a citizen and which must be marked as a problem. In Gaza, every Muslim is branded “bad,” and therefore killable. In India, the “good Muslim” is one who remains silent while his neighbour is lynched, while his mosque is demolished, while his daughters are vilified. To demand “proof” that this is Islamophobia is itself to participate in the economy of denial that sustains it.

What makes Islamophobia uniquely powerful is that it serves both domestic and international ends. Domestically, it rallies majorities, distracts from economic inequality, and licenses repression. Internationally, it produces a shared grammar of alliance: Israel can bomb Gaza with US bombs because both states speak the language of counterterrorism; India can bulldoze Muslim homes while being welcomed as a democratic partner because its propaganda resonates with the West’s own history of securitizing Muslims. This is why Islamophobia is not just prejudice, it is the most tradable political commodity of our time.

But if Islamophobia is the currency of power, resistance must be the counter-economy. It must be transnational, because Islamophobia is transnational. It must link Gaza to Kashmir, Xinjiang to Rohingya camps, Paris suburbs to Delhi slums. It must refuse the hierarchies of grief that make some deaths worthy of mourning and others mere statistics. It must insist, in the words of Edward Said, that human suffering is indivisible, and that the suffering of Muslims is not a lesser tragedy.

The truth is clear now: Islamophobia is not a side effect of global politics, it is its bloodstream. Every time a bomb falls on Gaza and is justified in the language of security, every time a Muslim in India is lynched with police protection, every time a girl in France is barred from her school for wearing a scarf, a transaction is made. Power is bought, legitimacy is sold, fear is banked. If the world does not learn to bankrupt this economy of hate, we will be left with a civilization that finances itself by feeding on Muslim lives. That is not just Islamophobia. That is the blueprint of global barbarism.

At bottom, calling Islamophobia a currency is an attempt to make visible the transactions that too often pass without notice: how a phrase in a speech can buy impunity for a police crackdown, how a policy framed as “security” can be cashed in to dispossess a people, how a national myth of purity purchases votes in exchange for the safety of minorities. In Gaza, the invocation of “terror” becomes the license for flattening entire neighbourhoods; in India, the cry of “national security” and “civilisational purity” becomes the justification for bulldozing Muslim homes and stripping citizens of their rights. These are not isolated acts of prejudice but routine exchanges in a marketplace where fear of Muslims is the most tradable commodity.

If that currency is to be devalued, the counter-economy must be stronger, more imaginative, and less tolerant of the moral accounting that treats human beings as collateral in the pursuit of power. It must mean solidarity that refuses the false divisions between “good” and “bad” Muslims, resistance that sees Gaza and Yemen, Rafah and Delhi, Xinjiang and Rohingya camps as different battlefields of the same global war on Muslim existence.

The alternative is a world in which fear is not an exception but the routine medium of political exchange, and that is a cost no decent polity, no moral civilization, can afford.

OPINION: How Modi’s India became Israel’s loudest cheerleader in Gaza’s war

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.