Rising Islamophobia

The rise of Islamophobia in Western nations, particularly the United States, has become quite troublesome over the past five years (Ott, 2018). Assaults, hate crimes, and discrimination have always been a difficult reality for many Muslims in Western nations. Still, it has sharply risen in the past half a decade, especially in the United States. Unfortunately, the increase in Islamophobia parallels the rise of nationalist political parties with authoritarian sympathies (Bieber, 2018). Trends have been similar in most industrialized Western nations, intertwined with rising wealth inequality, political disenfranchisement, and the erosion of trust in social institutions, all of which have made the opportunity for authoritarian governments who explicitly target Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples.