as a unified entity on such matters, ignoring opposition within Western countries toward LGBT+ acceptance or rights. Whitaker concludes Massad is blinded by his focus on these alleged forces which causes him to ascribe such pernicious influence as the cause of LGBT+ issues being raised in the Arab and Muslim world, rather than as the outgrowth of a wider social movement as a whole, following naturally from greater global communication. Massad is faulted as ignoring evidence of Arab and Muslim people adopting LGBT+ identities themselves, along with dismissing or downplaying repression they suffer from their governments. Islam in Liberalism (2015) Islam in Liberalism is Joseph Massad's fourth book, published by University of Chicago Press in 2015. An article published by the Los Angeles Review of Books states that the thesis of the book is that "American and European missionaries of liberalism are trying to proselytize Muslims – and the entire world writ large – to the only sane system of values that exists on the planet: those of Western liberalism". The book deals with the "instrumentalization of Islam in the West" and responds to critiques of his earlier book Desiring Arabs. Political views On antisemitism Following arguments made by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism, Massad asserts that 19th Century European antisemitic characterizations of Jews have transformed in the present era to target Arabs, while maintaining the same racialist characterizations, and thus, racism towards Arabs and Muslims today is a form of "Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and ... Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism." Massad bases this belief on an understanding of antisemitism as a specific historical phenomenon originating in Europe, rather than simply as hatred of Jews; he writes: "the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smack of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism". On Israel and Zionism Massad believes that Israel is a racist Jewish state. He believes that Zionism is not only racist but antisemitic, and antisemitic not only towards Arab Palestinians, but also towards Jews. Massad writes that after Europeans invented the racialist conception of the "Semite," the Zionist movement "adopted wholesale anti-Semitic ideologies", and describes Zionism as an "anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora", which has ultimately led to "the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into