“Islamophobia”: Causes and Remedies

“Islamophobia”:
Causes and Remedies
by Robert
Spencer

Imagine a
political analyst in 1940 who studied the low opinion that Americans had of
Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and concluded that the problem was not the
genocidal anti-Semitism, the international aggression, or the vile racist
ideology, but bad press. Imagine further another analyst who pointed out that
the bad press that Hitler and the Nazis got was a just result of their own
words and actions, and that if they wanted to improve their public image in
America, they should clean their own house and stop giving decent people so
much cause to oppose them.

Finally,
imagine that the second analyst, the one who ascribed the public’s low image of
Nazis to the actions of Nazis themselves, was derided as a “hatemonger” and
“bigot” who simply had an irrational hatred of Nazis and Germans in general. Would
that be absurd? Of course. Outrageous? Undoubtedly. Morally inverted?
Absolutely. Yet this little thought experiment encapsulates the prevailing
sentiment regarding Muslims and “Islamophobia” today.

We saw this
again Saturday, when it came to light that a deranged woman in New York City,
Erica Menendez, pushed a Hindu man into the path of an oncoming subway train
and murdered him because she thought he was a Muslim. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks,” she said, “because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001
when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Leftist
pseudo-journalist propagandists such as Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer, along
with Islamic supremacists such as Hussam Ayloush of the Hamas-linked Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), began scratching their heads and wondering
where the killer, in Greenwald’s words, “learned this level of hatred for
Muslims.”

They had their answer ready, of course. The thuggish Nathan Lean, editor-in-chief of Aslan Media,
answered Greenwald immediately by listing Pamela Geller and me, along with
David Yerushalmi and several other counter-jihadists, as the cause of Menendez’s
“hatred for Muslims.” Never mind that Menendez hadn’t mentioned any of us.
Never mind that she was obviously unbalanced and irrational. The new Left
fascists thought they had found another weapon they could
use to try to discredit and shut down resistance to the global jihad and
Islamic supremacism, and they rode it for all it was worth.

But the whole episode only highlighted the larger question. The words of
a clearly insane murderess can be discounted, but insofar as sane and
non-murderous Americans have a dim view of Islam and Muslims, what is the cause
of that? Is it the “Islamophobic” writings of people like Pamela Geller and me?
Or could it be that anti-Muslim bigotry, that is, any that may really exist, is
a reaction to people like Amine Mohamed El-Khalifi, the would-be
jihad/martyrdom suicide bomber at the U.S. Capitol; Naser Abdo, the would-be
second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass
murderer in Lubbock, Texas; Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in
Baltimore; Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; Faisal
Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; Abdulhakim Mujahid
Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; Naveed Haq,
the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; Mohammed
Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow
up a Manhattan synagogue; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas
airplane jihad bomber; or the many others like them who have plotted and/or
committed mass murder in the name of Islam and are motivated by its texts and
teachings, all in the U.S. in the last few years?

Any bigotry and victimization of innocent people is to be unequivocally
condemned and opposed. The question here, however, is whether “hatred of
Muslims” is really caused by bad press, and by the “hatemongers” responsible
for that bad press, or whether that hatred is a reaction to the violent actions
that all too many Muslims have undertaken recently in the name of Islam. The
further question is what can be done to end it. Is the remedy to stop all
honest reporting about jihad violence and Islamic supremacism, and the Muslim
texts that jihadis use to justify both? Or is it for genuinely peaceful Muslims
to take decisive action against that jihad and Islamic supremacism?

If Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. like Hamas-linked CAIR’s Ayloush and
others really want to end “anti-Muslim bigotry,” rather than use it as a tool
to destroy the freedom of speech and bring Sharia blasphemy laws to the West,
they need to stand against Muslims like the ones I have just listed, rather
than against those non-Muslims who are trying to resist them, when “anti-Muslim
bigotry” breaks out. That they do not do so shows up the hypocrisy of their
entire enterprise. For this is not a difficult point to grasp. That it so
persistently eludes Leftist and Islamic supremacist spokesmen who otherwise
seem to display a reasonable level of intelligence indicates that a very
different agenda is playing out – one that bodes ill for all free people.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad
Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam
(and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His
latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?.

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Jack Kemp

11 years ago

Robert, speaking of blaming the victim, I was just listening to the abridged audiobook of “The Warrior King,” an American combat officer’s story of his career and time in Iraq. At one point, an Iraqi bus is traveling in front of a small American military vehicle convoy when the bus, near the road’s shoulder, is blown apart by a roadside bomb intended to kill the Americans. Nearby Iraqi civilians, like politically correct grievance mongers in the U.S., then say to the American soldiers who have now stopped, “Why did you (Americans) blow up the bus?” The leftists in the U.S. are almost as extreme in their rewrites of both history and Cause and Effect – and full of the same general level of hatred for American values.

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RCCA

11 years ago

I believe that most Americans are not as familiar or comfortable with Arabic/Muslim names as Mr. Spencer, and tend to remember the incidents of “terrorism” and near misses more than the people who commit the acts. It’s possible and more likely that people have a generalized negative attitude towards Muslims simply from listening to the news reports every day about these attacks and the constant violence in the Muslim world, on top of our memory of 9-11. No offense, but I don’t think it’s the blogs or subway ads despite Mr. Spencer’s brilliance and success as a New York Times best selling author and Pamela’s stellar media appearances and ads.
Lean and his cohorts now want to turn whatever public awareness people have to AFDI, Spencer and Geller, to persuade people to think that Spencer is leading a hate group against “all Muslims.” That’s their main strategy to invalidate the counter jihad. I don’t know that they really believe that’s true, since Spencer’s so called Islamophobic hate group never does anything violent or hateful towards anyone.
But it seems to me that CAIR’s tactic preys on the weakness of AFDI of not having any association with any Muslim groups and while maintaining that Islamic reformers are insignificant and moderate Muslims are suspect (as if all Germans were Nazis, for instance). Those may be valid points for those who know the full scope of Islam, but the label of hater sticks if you avoid any contact with Muslims on principle. I’m sure you’d have plenty of support in the Muslim world but those people tend to get assassinated or jailed.

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dad

11 years ago

Obviously whacked out on PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. That drug fail reporting is not allowed to be reported like all those islam kills.

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duh_swami

11 years ago

Religion ’causes’ religious supremacist bigotry…If the other guys religion is superior to yours, why are you not over there with him?
And if his creed says he should kill you because of kufr, do you tolerate that? Will you speak out against it you bigot? Sometimes bigotry is called for…Every religious person has it because it is unescapable, so it is more a matter of how you handle it…Islamics do not handle their bigotry well at all, because they will kill over it…Bigotry over that is justified…

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