In the past few days "fear" has been offered as the grand explanatory motivator for One Nation's supporters, for those calling for bans on Muslim immigration, and even the internment of Muslims. Fear, we are told, is what shapes anxieties and suspicions about Muslims.
But as somebody who has spent the past 3\xC2&#189; years researching Islamophobia from the point of view of people who have shared with me their concerns, ambivalence and hatred for Muslims, I am not only unconvinced by the fear thesis, but find it deeply problematic. At the very least, defining Islamophobia in terms of fear is simplistic and deeply hurtful to victims of racism. 
In the past days Muslim friends and family have expressed feelings of vulnerability and despair because of Sonia Kruger's call to ban Muslim immigration. Protected by her whiteness, by her high-profile position, by the media and political elite who rush to defend her right to free speech, Muslims have been reminded of the conditional nature of their citizenship.
Muslim friends and family have shared their despair about calls on social media for people to go "Muzzrat hunting", to kill Muslims by putting their bodies in a wood chipper ("a few thousand an hour with a little hard work"), shoot up mosques and Muslim families, and to see "towelheads" all stabbed on the street.
Calls for a ban on Muslim immigration casually made on morning TV share something in common with this kind of brutal and terrifyingly violent racist vitriol.
Both assume an emotional orientation towards Muslims that constructs Muslims as an enemy, as threat. The construction relies on flattening and freezing Muslims into an undifferentiated singular category, which then becomes a site defined between people who scare us, and people who are scared.
During my research I spoke to people who expressed genuine concerns about terrorism. What we need to be speaking about is what happens when "fearing Muslims" becomes a systematic, methodic process that's reinforced and repeatedly excused, and even justified as "natural". What we need to expose is how white bodies are trained to fear, interrogate, judge, discipline, even seek to banish brown bodies.
Of course people are worried about a terrorist attack occurring in Australia. But the discussion proceeds on the basis that Muslims are exempt from any such fears, as though they can only ever perpetrate terrorism, not be its victims. This speaks to the basic racial logic that has always, and continues to underwrite the privileging of Anglo-Australia's fears. Whether it was the fear of indigenous Australians resisting their genocide, dispossession and theft, or the fear of "the yellow peril", or fears of racial "contamination" by non-Whites, or fears of "boat people", or "Asians", or "multiculturalists" - at the centre is always a scared and paranoid Anglo-Australia which, despite all the dominance and privilege afforded to it, continues to play the role of the underdog, the victim.
Meanwhile, it is racialised minorities and, speaking to the current debate, Muslims, who are the subject of intense surveillance, curtailing of basic liberties and democratic freedoms, harassment and hate crimes, and discrimination.
These are the dangerous consequences of holding one group to ransom because of the "fears" of the majority. The minority becomes a dehumanised category around which the majority organises its anxieties and emotions. The fear of veiled Muslim women who must walk in the streets the day after Pauline Hanson has ranted about Islam on national TV, or media personalities have called for banning Muslim immigration, are completely irrelevant. The fears of Muslim parents who send their children to school knowing they will be subjected to further abuse and bullying is ignored. Dialogue, forgiveness and discussion may make for a warm and fuzzy intervention into an increasingly hostile climate of racism. But it assumes that victims of racism aren't already taking the moral high ground, responding on a daily basis to systemic and everyday racism with dignity and resilience.
It's about time we stop asking victims to rehabilitate themselves and their responses to racism, and focus our attention instead on rehabilitating the perpetrators of racism.
Randa Abdel-Fattah's latest novel,