What have moderate Muslims done with the unmistakable evidence that jihad terrorists are working within mainstream Islamic traditions and using the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example to exhort Muslims to wage war against unbelievers? Have they clearly and definitively rejected the teachings of the jihadists as being incompatible with any twenty-first-century version of Islam? Have they confronted and refuted the jihadist exegesis of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition? Have they presented an alternative vision of Islam that will be convincing enough to compete with the jihadists’ “pure Islam” in the global battle for Muslim minds?
Guess what?
· The UN has condemned “Islamophobia” while turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by jihadists.
· The charge of “Islamophobia” is used to intimidate and silence critics of violent jihad in Islam.
· Some groups are even trying to brand those who tell the truth about Islam and jihad as purveyors of “hate speech.”
By and large, the answer to all these questions is no. Instead, “moderate” Muslims have invented “Islamophobia.”
At the UN: A new word for a new tool of political manipulation
No one had heard of “Islamophobia” just a few short years ago. But a year is a long time for a well-oiled propaganda machine. Now this concept, vague and ultimately empty, is taken seriously at the highest levels. In December 2004, Kofi Annan presided over a UN seminar on “Islamophobia,” explaining with his best PC straight face: “When the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development. Such is the case with ‘Islamophobia.’ The word seems to have emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, 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.”
The UN’s focus, not unexpectedly, stayed mostly on the aggrieved, misunderstood Muslims, with no questions raised about the Islamic roots of jihad terrorism. Nor was there any discussion of the compatibility of Islam with universally accepted ideas of human rights, as embodied in the UN’s own 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Islamic responses
We have already seen that Iran’s Sheikh Tabandeh published an Islamic critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Islamic world has seen fit to formulate two major responses to this document: the 1981 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which we owe to the courageous Charles Malik of Lebanon, states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief.”1
You will find no analogous guarantee of the freedom to change one’s religion in either of the Islamic declarations; indeed, as we have seen, traditional Islamic law mandates the death penalty for those who leave Islam. What’s more, the Cairo declaration states: “Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah.”2
By focusing on “Islamophobia” instead of the unpleasant realities of Islam, the UN dishonors past and present victims of jihad terror, and colludes with terrorists. Although this stance is born of political correctness and a putative concern to prevent vilification of innocent Muslims, it actually prevents honest attempts by Muslims and non-Muslims to address the actual sources of jihad terror and find some way to turn Muslims away from the path of violence.
What is Islamophobia, anyway?
Journalist and Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz defines “Islamophobia” this way:
Notwithstanding the arguments of some Westerners, Islamophobia exists; it is not a myth. Islamophobia consists of:
attacking the entire religion of Islam as a problem for the world
condemning all of Islam and its history as extremist
denying the active existence, in the contemporary world, of a moderate Muslim majority
insisting that Muslims accede to the demands of non-Muslims (based on ignorance and arrogance) for various theological changes in their religion
treating all conflicts involving Muslims (including, for example, that in Bosnia-Hercegovina a decade ago), as the fault of Muslims themselves
inciting war against Islam as a whole3
While there may be by this definition some Islamophobes in the world, Schwartz actually obscures more than he reveals. Does labeling as “Islamophobic” the practice of “attacking the entire religion of Islam as a problem for the world” mean that it is also Islamophobic to focus attention on the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet as motivations for terrorist activity? If so, then jihad terrorists worldwide are themselves “Islamophobic,” for, as we have seen, they routinely point to jihad passages from the Qur’an and Hadith to justify their actions. Nor is a frank discussion of the doctrine of Islamic jihad equivalent to saying that the “entire religion of Islam” is a “problem for the world.” No one is saying that tayammum (ablution with sand instead of water) or dhikr (a dervish religious devotion) or other elements of Islam pose a problem for the world.
Defining the condemnation of “all of Islam and its history as extremist” as “Islamophobic” is similarly problematic—and not just because of the sloppy imprecision of the word “extremist.” Jihad and dhimmitude are part of Islam. Yet no commandment of any religion has ever been uniformly observed by its adherents, nor any law universally enforced. Jews and Christians in Islamic lands were able at various times and places to live with a great deal of freedom; however, this does not contradict the fact that the laws of the dhimma always remained on the books, able to be enforced by any Muslim ruler.
Likewise, while it may seem “Islamophobic” to deny “the active existence, in the contemporary world, of a moderate Muslim majority,” it is also beside the point. Whether a moderate Muslim majority exists depends on how you define “moderate Muslim.” Is it one who will never engage in terrorist acts? That would make moderates an overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide. Or is a moderate one who sincerely disapproves of those terrorist acts? That would reduce the number of moderates. Or is a moderate Muslim one who actively speaks out and works against the jihadists? That would lower the number yet again. Or finally, is a moderate Muslim one who actively engages the jihadists in a theological battle, trying to convince Muslims that jihad terrorism is wrong on Islamic grounds? That would leave us with a tiny handful.
Moreover, it would be silly for anyone to treat “all conflicts involving Muslims…as the fault of Muslims themselves,” or to incite “war against Islam as a whole.” To go to war with Islam as a whole—grizzled shepherds in Kazakhstan and giggly secretaries in Jakarta as well as bin Laden and Zarqawi—would be absurd and unnecessary. But what does Schwartz really mean by saying that those who would advocate “war against Islam as a whole” are “Islamophobic?” Would that include those who recognize that Islamic jihad has been declared against Americans and who advocate resistance?
All this indicates that “Islamophobia” is virtually useless as an analytical tool. To adopt it is to accept the most virulent form of theological equivalence, and to affirm, against all the evidence, that every religious tradition is equally capable of inspiring violence. In many cases, this is part of an attempt to smear Western civilization by comparing the sins of Christians to an ideal, fictionalized Islam. To make this comparison is to deny the sensible observation of the once eminent atheist and, late in life, theist philosopher Antony Flew: “Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.”4 Once again, this is not base theological one-upmanship, but a realistic analysis of Islamic jihad. It also strengthens the idea that Western civilization is worth defending.
Muhammad vs. Jesus
“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.”
Jesus (Luke 6:35)
“Let not the believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers. If any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah; except by way of precaution, that ye may guard yourselves from them.”
Qur’an 3:28
“Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad
The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5
This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails:
There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7
Reform or denial?
Often going hand in hand with charges of Islamophobia is a strange disingenuousness on the part of Muslim reformers. In April 2005, the Toronto Star ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she “blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity” in the Islamic world. This was one in a long series of articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines in the Western world, which describe “true” Islam as a religion of tolerance, freedom, and pluralism. Yet the idea that “true Islam” is more akin to Quaker pacifism than to the religion of Osama bin Laden is untrue and dangerously misleading. It keeps Americans in the dark about the real motives and goals of the jihadists.
Mulia, according to journalist Haroon Siddiqui, “wears the hijab but says it’s not mandated by Islam, a position augmented by a sizeable majority of Muslim women in Indonesia, indeed around the world, who don’t don it and feel no less Muslim.” Yet neither Siddiqui nor Mulia mention the Islamic tradition in which the Prophet Muhammad commands, “When a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except…face and hands.”8 Nor do they mention, while noting that she “wants polygamy banned,” that Mulia will face an extremely difficult battle, since the Qur’an tells men to “marry women of your choice, two or three or four” (4:3).
Musdah Mulia, exults Siddiqui, “is no Westernized secular feminist. She is an Islamic scholar, with a Ph.D. from the Institute of Islamic Studies” in Jakarta. “She teaches there part-time but her day job is director of research at the ministry of religious affairs, from where she needles the government. When her bosses issued a white paper last year updating religious laws, she wrote a 170-page critique that annoyed them and the conservatives.”
Mulia was not always such a gadfly. She is the “granddaughter of a cleric, went to an Islamic boarding school and grew up in a strict environment.” She offers one stinging memory of her childhood: “I could not laugh hard. My parents did not allow me to befriend non-Muslims. If I did, they ordered me to shower afterwards.” But then she traveled to “other Muslim nations” and realized that “Islam had many faces. It opened my eyes. Some of what my grandfather and the ulema (clerics) had taught me was right but the rest was myth.”
News flash: Islam as Muslims live it is false Islam!
So what led to her transformation? It turns out that her parents, her grandfather, the clerics, everyone had Islam all wrong, and she, Mulia, had gotten hold of the real Islam: “The more she studied Islam, the more she found it modern and radical.”
So the hijab, the burka, the chador, the polygamy, the divorce that the man achieves by uttering a phrase three times, the unequal inheritance laws, the inability of women in many Muslim countries to leave the house without a male relative as escort, the ban in some Muslim countries on women even driving—all this is now, according to Mulia, un-Islamic. After all, Islam, she says, “had liberated women 1,400 years ago, well ahead of the West.”
The claim that Muhammad actually improved the lot of women is curious. It is based on the allegation that women in pagan Arab society were treated terribly. But did those conditions really improve with the coming of Islam? As we have seen, even Aisha, Muhammad’s beloved child bride, said, “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women.”9
So many fighters for women’s rights or wider reform in Islam are like Mulia. They cannot admit to themselves or others that Islam itself, through its religious texts, is responsible for the problems they seek to reform. They speak blandly of how the jihadists, or terrorists, or Wahhabis, or the villain du jour, have hijacked Islam, without offering any coherent program for converting these violent “misunderstanders” of Islam throughout the world into peaceful, tolerant pluralists.
Mulia does not explain how the “cultural traditions and interpretations” to which she objects arose in Islamic countries. How did Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Iran model their laws and fashion their mores other than through Islam? Beyond the basics of faith, Mulia says, most laws affecting women are man-made; “none of it came as a fax from heaven.” But those who legislate in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Pakistan believe that they are following a “fax from heaven,” namely the Qur’an. After all, what is a series of dictations by Allah to Muhammad other than a “fax from heaven”?
Like so many other self-proclaimed Islamic reformers, Mulia seems to be on the side of the angels, but she is actually helping to promote confusion about Islam. Ibn Warraq put it well: “There are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate.” Too many Muslim reformers think they must defend Islam at all costs, whatever mental contortions they have to perform in order to do so—even if it means glossing over and refusing to face the elements of Islam that jihad terrorists use to justify their actions. It is only “bad Muslims,” we’re told—Wahhabis, other extremists, you name it—who are responsible. Yet these very same “bad Muslims” seem to be those who most fervently accept, in every area of life, the actual teachings of Islam, while the more relaxed, unobservant, and above all non-literal minded believer treats women better and is committed to pluralism and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims.
That is something that even Musdah Mulia and others like her cannot hide from forever.
Misrepresenting Islam
Besides the denial that unpleasant elements of Islam are “true Islam,” some Muslim advocacy groups and their allies routinely brand true statements about Islam as “hate speech.” In December 2004, CAIR issued a predictably venomous reaction to some observations made by former CIA official Bruce Tefft. CAIR objected to statements by Tefft such as “Islamic terrorism is based on Islam as revealed through the Qur’an,” “To pretend that Islam has nothing to do with September 11 is to willfully ignore the obvious and to forever misinterpret events,” and “There is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, which is a totalitarian construct.” CAIR called on the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which sponsored Tefft’s address, “to condemn these Islamophobic remarks in the strongest possible terms. Characterizing Islam and its revealed text as promoting terrorism can only lead to increased anti-Muslim prejudice and intolerance.”
“As an organization that says it is committed to ‘fostering tolerance and understanding,’” CAIR fulminated, “the Simon Wiesenthal Center must immediately repudiate all Islamophobic rhetoric and hold its Canadian office accountable for failing to challenge the speaker’s hate-filled views.”10
Of course, in light of the fact that many Muslims advocate jihad and base their arguments on the Qur’an and Sunnah, Tefft didn’t invent this connection. But instead of working to refute it through these sources, CAIR took aim at Tefft.
CAIR says that it was established in order to “promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in America,” and declares “we believe misrepresentations of Islam are most often the result of ignorance on the part of non-Muslims and reluctance on the part of Muslims to articulate their case.”11 That sounds great if you’re a weepy PC type—but the cure CAIR offers may be worse than the disease.
Dhimmitude from media and officials
Whether from a fear of alarming the populace or a PC unwillingness to cause offense to Muslims, or both, authorities have on occasion been absurdly reticent about drawing conclusions from evidence that points to jihad terrorist activity in the United States.
In April 2005, firefighters conducting a routine inspection in a Brooklyn supermarket found two hundred automobile airbags and a room lined with posters of Osama bin Laden and beheadings in Iraq. An element in the airbags can be used to make pipe bombs. The owner of the building, according to the New York Post, “served jail time in the late 1970s and early 1980s for arson, reckless endangerment, weapons possession and conspiracy, according to the records.” But officials were definite: The hidden stockpile had nothing to do with terrorism.
It doesn’t? What does it have to do with, then? Macramé?
Similarly, when explosions killed fifteen people and injured over a hundred at an oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, on March 23, 2005, the FBI quickly ruled out terrorism as a possible cause.12 When a group calling itself Qaeda al-Jihad and another Islamic group both claimed responsibility, the FBI was still dismissive.13 But then it came to light that investigators did not visit the blast site until eight days after the explosions and after they ruled out terrorism as a possibility. A more independent-minded investigator asked, “How do you rule out one possibility when you don’t have any idea what the cause is?”14 Still later came the revelation that initial reports of a single blast were inaccurate; there were as many as five different explosions at the refinery.15
It may still be possible that these blasts were accidental, and that five distinct things went wrong at the refinery to cause five separate explosions at around the same time. And maybe there was no terrorist involvement. But how did the FBI know that before even investigating?
These are just two examples of a consistent pattern, as terrorism expert Daniel Pipes has documented:
On March 1, 1994, on the Brooklyn Bridge, a Muslim named Rashid Baz started shooting at a van filled with Hasidic boys, murdering one of them.16 FBI: It was “road rage.”17
On February 24, 1997, at the Empire State Building, a Muslim named Ali Abu Kamal started shooting at tourists, killing one and wounding six before killing himself.18 New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani informed the public that he had “many, many enemies in his mind.”19
On July 4, 2002, at the Los Angeles International Airport counter of El Al, the Israeli national airline, a Muslim named Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet started shooting at people. He killed two. The FBI initially said that “there’s nothing to indicate terrorism.” However, after it came to light that Hadayet may have been involved with al Qaeda and was known for his hatred for Israel, the FBI finally did classify this as a terrorist act.20
The Beltway snipers, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, who were linked to eighteen shootings and ten murders in the Washington, D.C. area in October 2002, were two converts to Islam. Before they were caught investigators ascribed the crimes to an “angry white man;” the perpetrators turned out to be two black men. After they were caught, the media persistently referred to John Muhammad as John Williams, ignoring his conversion to Islam and consequent name change. And even after Malvo’s drawings of Osama bin Laden (whom he labeled a “servant of Allah”) and ramblings about “jihad” were revealed, authorities continued to downplay the possibility that the shootings had anything to do with Islam or terrorism.21
On August 6, 2003, in Houston, a Muslim named Mohammed Ali Alayed slashed the throat of his friend Ariel Sellouk, a Jew. Alayed had broken off his friendship with Sellouk when he began to become more devout in his Islam. On the night of the murder, Alayed called Sellouk and they went out to a bar together before going back to Alayed’s apartment, where Alayed killed his friend. The two were not seen arguing at the bar. Although Alayed killed Sellouk after the fashion of jihadist murders in Iraq and went to a mosque after committing the murder, authorities said they “could not find any evidence that Sellouk…was killed because of his race or religion.”22
There are many similar examples: When a Muslim named El Sayyid Nosair murdered Israeli political activist Meir Kahane in New York City on November 5, 1990, authorities ascribed the killing not to jihad but to Nosair’s depression; and when a co-pilot crashed EgyptAir flight 990 on October 31, 1999, killing 217 people, officials posited no link to terrorism, although the co-pilot exclaimed, “I rely on Allah” eleven times as he crashed the plane.23
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Raft of Mohammed by Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz; St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1988. Besides vividly detailing the prejudice against non-Muslims that is rampant in the Islamic world, Péroncel-Hugoz devastatingly describes the intellectual dhimmitude of numerous American and European writers, politicians, and other public figures. He shows how eager PC Westerners are to believe the best about Islam—and even to exchange fact for fantasy in order to do so.
Are officials trying to not alarm Americans? Or are they trying to protect innocent Muslims from backlash? Whatever their motivations, they are keeping Americans in the dark about the true nature and extent of the jihadist terror threat.