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War on Terror, War on Muslims?

US President Barack Obama is vowing to "degrade, and ultimately destroy" a terrorist group destabilising the Middle East he says could threaten Americans at home.

Sound familiar? George W Bush made a similar vow, yet more than a decade after launching the so-called War on Terror, both the war and the terror are still raging.

Obama says the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will be different than the two wars started by Bush. But Muslims looked at with suspicion around the world are wondering, how different will their treatment be?

What is the impact of increasing surveillance of Muslim communities, banning Islamic dress and equating a religion with a threat? Do the counter-terror measures adopted by the US, Britain and France erode the very democratic principles considered the pillars of a "free" society?

Marwan Bishara asks what happens when the War on Terror turns inward, and prolonged military action abroad turns into a culture of fear at home.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/empire/2014/10/war-terror-war-islam-20141022122932493495.html

It's a war on Islam, as it should be.

If Muslims want to live here, and conform to our liberal system of the rule of law and tolerance of others' rights - as they haven't done in great enough numbers - I'm more than happy for them to do that. It's great; multiculturalism is socially beautiful.

I will not, however, bend my knee to barbarism and those who would impose upon me their medieval ethics and laws.

I'm not seeing where this War on Muslims is coming from. Various Islamic countries (including Indonesia, one of the largest Muslim populations, IIRC) have publically denounced them. I know Muslims myself who have integrated well into western society.

It just seems that because ISIS and other terrorist groups happen to be Muslim/Islamic, everyone came to their own assumptions which just so happen to be xenophobic. It's sort of natural, it's happened before. (See: The IRA of the 20th Century and how automatically all Irish were though to be terrorists in the UK).

It should be a war on terror, regardless of it's origin or beliefs that drive it, but public opinion (or at very least the influential/vocal opinion) seems to have shifted it towards the war on muslims, and so the government has reciprocated that in their policies to appease the masses.