To provide some background information for anyone who doesn't have the necessary context:
1) You can't be racist towards white people because we sit at the top of the hierarchy that racism creates. Essentially, being racist is about wielding the power of a social hierarchy that says that white people are better than everyone else. That's why it's a systemic form of oppression, because the very structure of our societies features racism baked in as a fundamental feature. It's a one way relationship, if you're on top then you're treated as better than people on the bottom.
Ergo, you can't actually be racist towards a white person because we only benefit from racism, we aren't harmed by it. There's no power for non-white people to tap into that can harm us when it comes to racism.
You can be prejudiced towards white people, and sure, there are times when that prejudice can be a hateful and negative thing, but that's not the same thing as racism. By a long shot.
2) The image itself is inaccurate, as the quote is actually from Andrew Cummins, and it was misattributed to Christopher Hitchens by Bill Maher. That said, Hitchens himself was still quite Islamophobic and I imagine he would have agreed with that idea wholeheartedly, right alongside Cummins and Maher.
And yes, it's total bullshit to claim that Islamophobia isn't real. Islamophobes like Cummins, Maher, and Hitchens (along with many other prominent leaders in the "rational" skeptic atheist community) think of Islam as a religion of terror and portray it as being full of radicalized Muslim terrorists. They highlight cases of individual bad actors or terror groups with Muslim members as evidence that all Muslims everywhere are driven to murder and oppress people, even though there are well over 1 billion Muslims on the planet and the vast majority of them live in peace.
Islamophobes like those in the rational skeptic community are reacting out of fear.
Yes, there are unethical people that are Muslims (just like how there are unethical people in every other social group in humanity), but islamophobes are reacting to an extremely tiny minority of all Muslims and using it to stereotype the entirety of Islamic faith as being violent and oppressive.
You can test this by trying to find an example of rational skeptic making the same claims about modern Christianity. Everything they claim to be true of Islam is true of Christianity, and yet they don’t make those same claims about how violent and oppressive Christianity is. Even though the US faces a much larger danger from oppressive Christian groups that exert political power in the US.
And that's before you even get to talking about the fundamentalist Christian groups that engage in violence to promote their own bigotry, like the KKK, which make a much better analog to Islamic terrorists. If the KKK doesn’t represent all of Christanity then Islamic terrorists don't represent all of Islam.
This means that the views of islamophobes is not internally consistent. The fact that their views are not internally consistent tells you that these are not rational, reasoned beliefs, or they would have eliminated that inconsistency. Ergo, you can see that these beliefs are emotional and are fundamentally a form of bigotry.
There's room to discuss the beneficial and harmful effects of religion, but such discussions should be respectful of the fact that the vast majority of people who follow a religion are not violent, do not set out to oppress people, and are not fundamentally wrong just because they have a religious belief.
Humanity has a need for spiritual expression and that need isn't a foolish or immature one, even if religious groups have caused harm in the past. And acting like a few individual assholes can speak for over a billion people, making them all into villains?
That’s just bigotry dressed up in fancy clothes.
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