It should be a given that a young child brandishing a severed human head is something that no reasonable person would condone. And yet such is the animosity toward Islam that when one such image was splashed on the front page of The Australian – the son of an Australian 'jihadist' posing with the decapitated head of a Syrian soldier – Muslims were expected to vocalise their horror lest they be taken to approve of it.
As Muslim academic and feminist Susan Carland tweeted at the time, 'If you honestly need me to TELL you that I don't agree with a father getting his young son to hold up a severed head…I kind of want to cry.'
The relentless persecution of minorities, public beheadings of journalists and crucifixions that are a now a daily occurrence in Syria and Iraq are all atrocities that most Muslims find no less terrifying and distressing than the wider community. It is a testament to how 'different' Muslims are considered that some Australians still think many, if not all, Muslims living here are not only unbothered by such atrocities, but actually support them as a legitimate expression of Islam.
This is the reality for Muslims in the age of the war against terror. Condemning terrorism is exhausting. No matter how loudly or often Muslims distance themselves from the actions of groups such as the so-called Islamic State (IS), it is never enough.
That the world's 1.8 billion or so Muslims are expected to rally against every bad deed committed by a stranger who happens to nominally share their faith speaks to the deep distrust with which Muslims are regarded.
It is demoralising to know that people in my own country assume, or at least suspect, that I approve of these atrocities. Whether I like it or not, my religious background and my name tie me to these 'jihadists.' Their actions reflect on me; I feel the permanent weight of expectation to publicly apologise for their actions.
And I do so, knowing full well that to some, nothing I say will make up for the fact that I was born into the Islamic faith. Or, more specifically, I was born into one of the many Islamic faiths.
That a non-practising Alawite Muslim such as myself feels pressured to repeatedly condemn rogue Sunni groups like IS demonstrates both how much the west fears 'otherness', and the extent to which western society is unwilling to confront its own prejudice.
There are more than 15 denominations and sects in Islam, all with varying interpretations of the faith, all with differences both subtle and vast. Alawites are considered heretics by many Sunnis, and indeed have been the victims of persecutions and attempted genocides dating back centuries.
Though some (and I stress some) Alawites have achieved unprecedented prominence due to the rise of the Assad family in Syria's ruling Ba'ath party, Alawites are a secretive sect and have always historically existed on the fringes of Islam.
Although much of the Sunni majority regard them as being outside the fold of Islam, Alawites are Muslims in that they regard Mohammed as the messenger of God and the Quran as the last holy book.
I mention all this only to highlight the ludicrousness of assuming that Alawites secretly approve of Islamic State actions and goals, not least because they too would be annihilated under its 'caliphate.'
That is not to say that Sunnis themselves generally approve of the Islamic State. Of course they don't – given that many victims have been Sunnis who refuse to recognise delusions of an 'Islamic State.'
That IS and other terror groups are a perversion of Sunni Islam is evidenced in the fact that so many of its adherents know little of the religion itself. As Mehdi Hasan notes in New Republic, the books of choice for 'the swivel-eyed young men who take sadistic pleasure in bombings and beheadings' are Islam For Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.
All of which serves to highlight that the readiness with which some westerners take the most violent and extreme groups as legitimate expressions of Islam betrays the racism that underpins perceptions of Muslims.
Islam may indeed be a religion and 'not a race' as the popular mantra of the Islamophobe has it, but it's a religion that has never been sanctioned by the west. While extremists of other stripes, whether they be Christian or even Buddhists, are regarded as aberrations, no such allowances exist for Muslims. A Muslim doing a bad thing must be doing so because of Islam, not despite it, even when their victims are other Muslims.
Despite evidence to the contrary, the western world has long regarded Mohammed as a barbarian and the Quran a fundamentally more violent book than the Bible. Every beheading, every massacre and every terrorist attack is consequently taken to reflect Islam as a whole.
Rather than assessing terrorism in the context of the political and social environment in which it occurs, it becomes a flag of convenience for the distrust that lies dormant, waiting for the chance to surface. When the most extreme forms of terrorism are used to legitimise the ostracism of ordinary Muslims of all stripes, then nothing will satisfy the persistent demands for condemnation.
They merely serve as a reminder that to some, Muslims will never fit in.
Ruby Hamad is a Sydney writer and associate editor of progressive feminist website The Scavenger. She blogs at rubyhamad.wordpress.com and tweets as @rubyhamad.