Conservative political commentator Douglas Murray has described Islamophobia in 2013 as a "nonsense term" and stated "a "phobia" is something of which one is irrationally afraid. Yet it is supremely rational to be scared of elements of Islam and of its fundamentalist strains in particular. Nevertheless, the term has been very successfully deployed, not least because it has the aura of a smear. "Islamophobes" are not only subject to an irrational and unnecessary fear; they are assumed to be motivated (because most Muslims in the West are from an ethnic minority) by "racism". Who would not recoil from such charges?"