There's an argument worth taking seriously: that the real 'phobia' at work isn't fear of Islam — it's a resistance, within some currents of Islam, to criticism, especially public criticism. That resistance traces back to a broader academic trend, dating to the late 1970s, that dismissed almost any criticism of the Arab or Muslim world as simple racism — a label that shut down debate before it could even start. (Worth noting: the word 'Islamophobia' itself hadn't even been coined yet when that trend began.)

If that diagnosis is right, a few things follow. First, the instinct to punish criticism — sometimes violently — for causing public embarrassment isn't actually a religious teaching. It's a much older cultural pattern, found in societies organized around honor and shame, and it has nothing to do with any faith's core scripture. Second, that same instinct explains why critics of the religion's founder or its central claims have faced disproportionate danger going back to the very beginning. Third, and more hopeful: one of the great achievements of the modern world is learning to absorb criticism without resorting to violence — and whether a community can hear honest criticism without treating it as an attack is a fair test of whether that community is neighborly rather than supremacist. That standard applies to how women are treated too.

There's a useful inversion worth naming plainly: the same people who dismiss accusations of antisemitism as an attempt to shut down any criticism of Israel even when the “criticism” is false and demonizing, use accusations of 'Islamophobia' to shut down any criticism of Islam even when true. Thus rather than protecting Muslims from real bigotry, it makes legitimate criticism of a real threat impossible to voice. When a label can end a career regardless of whether the underlying claim is true, it stops protecting citizens and starts protecting those enemies of civil society who benefit from the silence.