After the bombings in Brussels and Lahore, brief, perfunctory comments of sympathy were made, and then non-Muslims were ordered to be nice to Muslims. Muslims are now what Stephen Krason has called a “favored group.” How did this happen?
In 2004, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made the grave diagnosis that the West is afflicted with Islamophobia. Annan soberly explained that “the weight of history and the fallout of recent developments have left many Muslims around the world feeling aggravated and misunderstood, concerned about the erosion of their rights and even fearing for their physical safety.” His remarks, astonishingly, suggested that Muslims were the real victims of 9/11. Anan went on to describe the growing concern among non-Muslims that Islam carries within it a strain of anti-Western ideology as a “caricature.” Christine Fair, Associate Professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, almost explicitly blamed Belgium for the two attacks in Brussels on NPR, saying that Belgium should expect such attacks given its lax gun laws and an anti-Islamic bias which prevents assimilation. This, of course, is the result of Belgian Islamophobia.
Related:
Nominally Catholic Georgetown University boasts a $20 million eponymous Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), part of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. On its website, John L. Esposito, University Professor and Founding Director of the ACMCU, defends the term Islamophobia, opining that Jews have the term “anti-Semitism” to rally support for their causes, while the other Semitic religion had no such term within which it could find protection. Esposito asserts, “we have had no comparable effective way to counter the hostility, prejudice and discrimination directed towards Islam and the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world.” (Note Esposito’s claim that Islamophobia is so prolific it touches every Muslim in the world.) According to Esposito, “in 1997, the Runnymede Trust, a UK-based independent think tank on ethnicity and cultural diversity, coined the term ‘Islamophobia,’ to describe what they saw as a two-stranded form of racism—rooted in both the ‘different’ physical appearance of Muslims and also in an intolerance of their religious and cultural beliefs.” Predictably, Esposito turns to specious data, claiming “in 2005, the Muslim civil rights advocacy organization reported a 49 percent increase in the reported cases of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment from 2003, which marked the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever reported to CAIR in its eleven year history.”
CAIR is the Center for American-Islamic Relations, an organization that has long been of interest to the FBI because of links to terrorist networks among its leadership. This doesn’t bother Esposito or the ACMCU. Nor does he cite any secular, independent source to support his astounding claim about the increase in alleged hate crimes against Muslims; far easier to assume things than to prove them.
The ACMCU rejects any approach to the Islamist crisis that “implies that Islam, not just its misuse by extremists, is the root cause of the problem.” Rather, Esposito, CAIR, and the UN, along with President Obama, continually suggest terrorism is the result of Western policies in the Middle East. Islamophobia is invoked anytime someone dissents from this orthodoxy.
To make their claims credible, Islamophobia apologists insist a qualitative difference exists between Muslims and terrorists, the latter being a fringe group of radicals who do not represent “true Islam.” They tell us repeatedly, “Islam is a religion of peace.” Yet, each attack, rightly, brings such claims under closer scrutiny. And, what about attacks by Muslims who are not terrorists, such as the 15 migrants arrested in Italy last April for throwing 12 Christians overboard during their Mediterranean crossing simply because their fellow migrants were saying Christian prayers?
Claims that Islam has nothing whatever to do with Islamism ignores the prevailing exegesis of the Qu’ran and Hadith in the Islamic world. As Robert R. Reilly masterfully explains in his book The Closing of the Islamic Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Islamist Crisis, with the ascendancy of Ash‘arism in the Middle Ages, the template of today’s Sunni and Wahhabi Islam, God is understood as pure will. Secondary causes are denied and no act is good or evil. There is only what Reilly calls “moral agnosticism,” what Allah allows or prohibits. Reilly indicates that every school of Islamic thought has rejected causality and accepted the God of voluntarism, including Shi῾ites. This has serious implications for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. A God of will rather than logos leads to tyranny, the will to power. Neither the ACMCU nor CAIR addresses these profound questions, even though they constitute the root of the Islamist crisis. They would rather shift the responsibility onto non-Muslims under the banner of Islamophobia.
Rather than engage the non-Muslim world in the free market of ideas, the ACMCU and CAIR hide behind smoke and mirrors, claiming prerogatives only available in Europe and the U.S. Islamophobia is a strategy implemented systematically to silence citizens in politically correct societies ruled by unelected elites where being intolerant is the most egregious of crimes (unless committed against Christians). CAIR now bears the First Amendment like a shield, deflecting attention from Islamist violence to civil liberties. Moreover, by making this an issue of civil rights rather than theological reform, CAIR and Georgetown’s ACMCU stifle the theological and philosophical reflection regarding Islam that needs to begin in earnest. This is a disservice to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Phobia as a Political Weapon
In a civilization rife with fear, it’s no wonder the word phobia has gained currency. Anyone who disagrees with any tenet of populist sentiments is immediately diagnosed with a phobia of some kind. There cannot possibly be sound reasons to object to so-called “marriage equality”; that’s homophobia. No rational person can be anxious about unregulated immigration; that’s xenophobia. Equally, there can be no reasonable questions asked about the connection between Islam and violence; this is now Islamophobia.
Are those who use the word Islamophobia using it correctly? The Greek word phobosmeans the emotion of fear. The English word phobia means an irrational psychosis. This is why phobias are relegated to the domain of psychology, not schools of foreign service or the UN. There is nothing irrational about phobos. Aquinas, in Question 125, ‘Of Fear,’ noted “fear is natural to man.” He supports his claim by referring to The Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle observed that “a man would be insane or insensible to pain, if nothing, not even earthquakes nor deluges, inspired him with fear.”
Is the growing anxiety regarding Islam irrational? If so, then the American Psychological Association should be hosting symposia on Islamophobia, not the UN or Georgetown. Many reasonable figures have expressed quite rational concerns regarding Islam, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, John Wesley, Hilaire Belloc, and Winston Churchill, just to name a few. Aquinas saw a danger in Islam’s inability to attract adherents through the persuasiveness of its own arguments because this leaves only force.
Some have suggested Islamophobia is the result of media coverage. This seems unlikely given that the media now seem to make a point not to say anything about Islam when reporting terrorist attacks, even when it is clear jihadists are responsible. The media now prefer amorphous terms like “radicalized individuals.” Yet, this immediately provokes the question of who or what radicalized them. Those who would have us believe these people are motivated by economic atrophy caused by bygone policies of Western imperialism woefully underestimate the power of religious fervor. And, they ignore the claims of the jihadists themselves who know their own religion better than any non-Muslim does. The Brussels bombers were not crying out phrases from the Sykes-Picot Agreement as they murdered scores of helpless civilians.
It seems manifest that CAIR and leftist PC ideologues are largely succeeding in divorcing Islam from terrorism. Yet, the question persists: why, among the world’s religions, are orchestrated acts of indiscriminate violence committed only in the name of Islam? No other religious tradition in the world must grapple with such a phenomenon. One sympathizes with the average Muslim who does not himself understand what is being done in his name.
Two decades of Islamist violence tells us that anyone who rejects the anti-rationalism of modern Islam is now a potential target. This is not Islamophobia. It is a sad fact proved by the indiscriminate nature of every terrorist attack, both in terms of locale and number of innocents killed. It is also clear from the words of Islamists themselves.
It is not a symptom of phobia to expect an organization like CAIR, which posits itself as a guide toward “the middle way,” to offer some means of synthesizing virulent claims by prominent Muslims with a “religion of peace.” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s spokesman, standing in front of a clutch of microphones claiming “terrorism has no religion” is simply not enough anymore. Whether he likes it or not, terrorism has claimed a religion.
What is CAIR?
What are we to make of CAIR, the group that now stands at the vanguard of Islamic-American relations? CAIR claims it respects the Constitution and accepts the religious pluralism guaranteed by its First Amendment. This is hard to believe when Mr. Hooper himself famously (or infamously) said, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future… But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.” This is cold comfort.
Many on both sides of the aisle in Congress are keenly aware of CAIR’s suspect behavior. Senator Chuck Schumer said, “we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism.” Senator Dick Durbin commented that CAIR is “unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Likewise, Senator Barbara Boxer noted, “To praise [CAIR] because they haven’t been indicted is like somebody saying, ‘I’m not a crook.’ We made a bad mistake not researching the organization.” Additionally, Rep. Bill Shuster observed, “CAIR has failed to prove that it is not in league with radical Islam. Time and again the organization has shown itself to be nothing more than an apologist for groups bent on the destruction of Israel and Islamic domination over the West.”
Interestingly, the Middle East Forum reports that there are many notable Muslim Americans who also have serious concerns about CAIR.
The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, publisher of the New Jersey-based Voice of Peace, called CAIR the champion of “extremists whose views do not represent Islam.” Jamal Hasan of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance explains that CAIR’s goal is to spread “Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook.” Kamal Nawash, head of Free Muslims Against Terrorism, finds that CAIR and similar groups condemn terrorism on the surface while endorsing an ideology that helps foster extremism, adding that “almost all of their members are theocratic Muslims who reject secularism and want to establish Islamic states.” Tashbih Sayyed of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance calls CAIR “the most accomplished fifth column” in the United States. And Stephen Schwartz of the Center on Islamic Pluralism writes that “CAIR should be considered a foreign-based subversive organization, comparable in the Islamist field to the Soviet-controlled Communist Party, USA.”
Are all of these Muslim organizations also afflicted with Islamophobia? Despite all of these concerns, CAIR has enjoyed privileged access to the last three administrations.
If the actions of Islamists all over the world are not “true Islam,” then what is? No one at CAIR or Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding seems interested in considering this question honestly. Accusing non-Muslims of being afflicted with a phobia is absurd and evasive. CAIR and the ACMCU should be working to help the Islamic world toward untangling the thick knot of theological confusion that is undermining the very goals they claim to be pursuing. In the meantime, they should also put plenty of daylight between themselves and known agents of Islamism, while showing some sensitivity to the rational concerns about Islam among non-Muslims in America and Europe.
Editor’s note: Pictured above is CAIR executive director Nihad Awad at a press conference.
Australia: Muslim whose daughter was killed waging jihad demands her life insurance
“Mr Karroum told how his daughter introduced him to Islam but fell into the wrong crowd worshipping at an Auburn mosque.” Somehow I doubt that Mohamed Karroum was introduced to Islam by his daughter. She was only 22 when she was killed two years ago, and since he says she introduced him to Islam after she finished high school, that means that if this introduction took place at all, it most likely happened just a few years ago. But Mohamed Karroum looks as if he has been developing his beard and zebiba for a longer time than that.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/04/australia-muslim-whose-daughter-was-killed-waging-jihad-demands-her-life-insurance
“UK Equalities Chief Who Popularised The Term ‘Islamophobia’ Admits: ‘I Thought Muslims Would Blend into Britain… I Should Have Known Better,’” by Raheem Kassam, Breitbart, April 10, 2016:
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration in a damning new report on integration, segregation, and how the followers of Islam are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Phillips, a former elected member of the Labour Party who served as the Chairman of the EHRC from 2003-2012 will present “What British Muslims Really Think” on Channel 4 on Wednesday. An ICM poll released to the Times ahead of the broadcast reveals:
One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house;
39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband;
31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife;
52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal;
23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/04/uk-equalities-chief-admits-muslims-wont-assimilate
There are no consequences for clever Trevor.
There are no enraged Brits out to lynch him, there are no authorities persecuting him for the damage he caused and there are no public figures who condemn him. He won’t go to jail like Tommy Robinson; he will not suffer financially, and there are few people who ask why such a person, a third-world settler in the UK, a man who has nothing at stake and nothing to lose, could ever be the former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
Here in Australia, we have created similar positions. Our Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Tim Soutphommasane, is a man with a large chip on his shoulders. Like Trevor, Tim is a man who has nothing at stake and must not fear consequences for his nefarious, overpaid activities. White guilt equals collective insanity.
The UKtard who fomented the vile “islamophobia” term just (shockingly) admitted he was WRONG the whole time. In public!
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/10/geller-uk-equalities-chief-admits-wrong-muslims-wont-assimilate/
Geller: UK “Equalities” Chief Admits He Was Wrong, Muslims Won’t Assimilate
“In one of the most extraordinary admissions of defeat in modern times, Trevor Phillips, the former chief of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has admitted that the path that Britain has been on for years is a catastrophic failure. Muslims won’t assimilate and become loyal Britons.”
From the land that brought us Sherlock Holmes et al LOLOL!
Oh well, better late than never, I guess.
assimilation. Ahahahahahah.
REPOST……..
THESE ARE THE FACES OF THE CHILDREN……..
Its funny, whenever you hear a Muslim talk about Islam the thing that strikes one the hardest, for those with insight into Islam and the truth of the same, is the contrast between reality and the stunning lies that fall out of their mouths.
In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary Muslims call their political ideology, Islam, a religion, a religion of “peace” no less.
In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary Muslims tell us of their love for the weakest amongst their own, and from the death and madness that reflects from that murderously obscene departure from the truth can be found another grotesque reflection, as through their clenched teeth, they hiss of their “love” for non-Muslims.
Those Muslim lies, that poisonous black-hearted Muslim reality is, more often than not, reflected on those who bear the greatest burden of the poison of Islam, reflected on the faces of Muslim children.
These faces, some as yet unstained with the harsh reality of Islam, reflect trust, love, mirth, wonder, expectation and the simplicity and joy of childhood. Unfortunately they will not remain this way for long, for in their future awaits a predator of the human soul, awaits the grotesque, awaits the mind numbing, awaits the hateful and the disfiguring, in their future awaits the love of Muhammad.
These are the faces of children, unsuspecting and oblivious, children who will meet the purest manifestation of poison, of sickness and of evil, these are the children who will meet Islam.
These are the faces of little girls who will spend their childhoods learning that they are worth less than domestic livestock.
These are the faces of little girls who will learn that for a bodily function as normal as a heartbeat, their menstruation, they are the most vile, loathsome filth on the planet, reviled by even God himself.
These are the faces of little girls who will lead lives of grinding poverty and servitude, lives completely devoid of one shred of joy, lives in which laughter is little more than a distant echo, a taunting echo reminding them of innocence lost.
These are the faces of little girls that, for the heinous crime of seeking the joys and wondrous enlightenment of education, will melt and burn as they are splashed with acid.
These are the faces of little girls who, stunned, bewildered, will pack their meager belongings and be sent off to join their new owners their parents sold them to.
These are the faces of little girls who, at tender prepubescent ages will, in accordance with the dictates of the mass murdering pedophile Muhammad, be married off to men in their 50’s and 60’s, where on their “wedding night”, miles from their villages, their screams of agony will shatter the night air as they are violently sodomized and raped by grunting, drooling Muslim husbands.
These are the faces, the bright shining faces of little girls who, as Muslim wives, leading lives of quiet desperation, will, for the crime of lacking in domestic skill or failing to bend over and hike their skirts fast enough for the Muslim master of the house, be dragged outside, held down and have their ears and noses sliced off with a knife.
These are the faces of little girls, little girls who had the misfortune of being born female in the world of Muslims, and they will pay for that mistake by running, from cradle to grave, a gauntlet of violence, depravity, misery, brutality, indifference, servitude, grovelling deference, illiteracy, malnutrition and premature death, in other words, they will live their lives according to the sadistic will of Muhammad.
These are the faces of little girls, little girls who will grow into women, and as
women will, wrapped in suffocating cloth and scurrying like frightened mice from crevice to darkened alleyway, live lives as little more than life-support systems for vaginas and wombs, wombs become little more than arms factories.
These are the faces of little girls, little girls who, having no place left to turn, having nothing left to give, having no spot on their bodies unbruised by the love of Islam, little girls who will douse themselves with gasoline and self-immolate and, if they are lucky, will die, and if not, as reflected in hospitals across the Muslim world, will spend their last earthly moments in tortuous agony, begging, praying every moment for the merciful release that is their death.
These are the faces of little boys, little boys who will be taught that their sisters and mothers are little more than human garbage.
These are the faces of little boys who, burying their faces in pillows and covering their ears, will still hear the crunch as the fists of Muslim fathers meets the flesh of their mothers faces, as Muhammad’s law is dispensed.
These are the faces of little boys who will bear witness to their fathers and brothers as they mutilate the bodies and faces of their sisters and mothers.
These are the faces of little boys, incarcerated in madrassas, who, through forced mind numbing repetitive recitation, will spend their days and nights being poisoned by the sickness of the madman Muhammad as reflected in the netherworld lunacy of the Koran.
These are the faces of little boys that will reflect confusion as they are told to dress in women’s clothing and dance an erotic Bacha Bazi dance for the pleasure of leering Muslim pedophiles, for the pleasure of Muhammad and his men.
These are the faces of little boys, faces that will contort in agony and beg deliverance as they are treated to a post-dance evening of rape, forced oral sex and sodomy as they are passed from Muslim man to Muslim man.
These are the faces of little boys, faces of little boys that will render pink with their mother’s arterial spray as her head is removed for the convenient contrivance of crime of adultery or blasphemy.
These are the faces of little boys who, with rumbling tummies, will be told the blackest of lies, will be told fabrications by the quintessential pimps of madness and hate; conniving mullahs and imams, truly, the blackest of liars to ever walk the face of the earth.
These are the faces of little boys who will be told that a better life awaits them after death, a life of riches, a life of plenty and ease, a life filled with fawning virgins and sumptuous feasts, all at their leisure and simply for their pleasure, if only, if only, if only they will perform this one small favour for Allah.
These are the faces of little boys that will be beaded with sweat as, their nervous fingers fumbling, they close the locks and hasps of the explosive vest placed on them with expertise by their own fathers and mothers, all under the approving gaze of the leering reptiles; mullahs and imams.
These are the faces of little boys, little boys beguiled with the hypnotic and soothing reassurances, little boys who will wander through the marketplace, the moment of their death, a cell phone, a cell phone held in the grasping hands of mullahs and imams.
These are the faces of little boys, faces that will, in a deafening roar, in a blinding flash of light, in the sweetest agony of a life taking shower of glass and razor sharp shrapnel, as that number is dialed on the cell phone, simply evaporate, borne away on a river of blood and despair, borne away on a cowardly, murderous lie.
These are the children of Islam, children who never had a chance.
I had a thought, if I could grab every one of these kids, sweep them up in my arms and dash them off to safety, ahhhhh what the hell, it was just a thought.
Ladies and Gentlemen, there is no joy in the world tonight for the love of Islam stalks the streets and alleyways.
Food for thought, catalyst for action.
Don Laird
Alberta, Canada
https://youtu.be/_CBOUpqTNWk