Boston, London, Paris: The Goal of the “Islamophobia” Hysteria Realized

Boston, London, Paris: The Goal of the “Islamophobia”
Hysteria Realized
By Robert Spencer

In the last few weeks, Islamic jihadists have murdered three
people and wounded 260 at the Boston Marathon, brutally murdered a British
soldier on a London street, and critically wounded a French soldier in a
copycat attack on a street in Paris. And so we have three fresh examples of
what the ongoing drumbeat over “Islamophobia” is all about: enabling Islamic
jihad murder.

The response to these jihad attacks has been drearily
predictable: government officials including Barack Obama and British Prime
Minister David Cameron have assured us that these jihad attacks have nothing to
do with Islam, and the mainstream media has embarked upon its usual search for
“backlash” attacks against innocent Muslims, avid as always to portray Muslims
as victims in the wake of an Islamic jihad attack against Infidels.

By contrast, there have been few, if any, calls for Muslims to confront the
Islamic texts and teachings that exhort to violence and supremacism. Few are
calling for any monitoring of the mosques and imams who mentored the jihadists.
No one wants to see these jihad terror-producing mosques shut down. Even Melanie
Phillips, in a
column calling for some measure of realism in the official response to the
jihad threat, felt it necessary to utter the usual pro-forma niceties: after criticizing
“an interpretation of Islam which takes the words of the Koran literally as a
command to kill unbelievers in a jihad, or holy war, in order to impose strict
Islamic tenets on the rest of the world,” Phillips assured us that “of course,
millions of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere totally reject this interpretation
of their religion. Most British Muslims want to live peacefully and enjoy the
benefits of Western culture. They undoubtedly utterly deplore the notion that
the kind of carnage that occurred in Woolwich should take place in Britain.”

Phillips, of course, has
made serious lapses of judgment in the past. And
so perhaps it is not surprising that she feels it necessary to affirm the
existence of these “millions of Muslims in Britain and elsewhere” who
“totally reject this interpretation of their religion,” despite the fact that
there is absolutely no tangible evidence that they really exist at all, or if
they do, that they are really interested in doing anything to oppose this
interpretation of their religion. If there really are “millions of Muslims in
Britain and elsewhere totally reject this interpretation of their religion,”
they are doing absolutely nothing of any consequence to oppose this
interpretation. Beyond platitudinous and vague condemnations, Muslim groups in
Britain and elsewhere are doing nothing to stop the spread of the ideology of
violent jihad and supremacism. There are no programs in mosques or Islamic
schools in Britain or the U.S. that teach against this understanding of Islam
that these “millions of Muslims” ostensibly reject.

But Phillips has to affirm the
existence of these utterly indifferent and/or impotent millions because if she
doesn’t, she will be labeled “Islamophobic.” Likewise Cameron and all the other
members of the government and media elites who rushed to exonerate Islam of any
responsibility for these jihad attacks, even though their perpetrators pointed
explicitly to Islam to explain and justify their actions: they have succumbed
to Islamophobophobia, the fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe,” and are
willing to dissemble in order to avoid being thus tarred.

And so we see the real point of the hysteria over
“Islamophobia.” When the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Hamas-linked
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and American writers such as Reza Aslan,
Nathan Lean, Haroon Moghul and Dean Obeidallah (among a host of others) claim
that innocent Muslims suffer from widespread discrimination, harassment, and
vigilante attacks (a claim that FBI statistics annually belie as they show that
anti-Semitic attacks are significantly more common than attacks on Muslims),
and that those who are speaking out against the jihad and Islamic supremacism
are “bigots” and “hatemongers,” they are laying the groundwork for what we saw
in Boston, London and Paris. Their goal is to demonize and discredit utterly
anyone and everyone who speaks out against the jihad, and to intimidate the
less courageous (such as Cameron and Phillips) into backtracking and
apologizing when they should be pressing the Muslim community to address the
jihad problem realistically and back up its condemnations of jihad terror with
honest work against the jihad doctrine.

The perfect world for the likes of Aslan, Lean, Moghul,
Obeidallah and the other Islamophobia-mongers would be one in which no one
speaks up against jihad violence and Islamic supremacism – for they have never,
ever seen a counter-jihadist for whom they had any positive words. They want to
render the U.S. and the West in general mute and hence defenseless before the
advancing jihad.

The jihad attacks in Boston, London and Paris are the fruit
of their work, and the blood is on their hands.

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, Not Peace But A Sword:
The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam, is now available.