Profs Blame ISIS on ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Grievances’

rezaPresident Obama’s infamous proclamation that ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is “not Islamic” was received sympathetically within the ranks of Middle East studies. While many scholars of Islam and the Middle East have condemned ISIS’s heinous actions, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge their theological underpinnings lingers. Those who do concede ISIS’s Islamic supremacism are branded “Islamphobes.” Others attribute ISIS’s rampage of mass murder, beheadings, rape, slavery, and strict Sharia law in pursuit of a caliphate to Western-inspired “grievances” or “root causes.”

John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, is at the forefront of such obfuscation. Disregarding ISIS’s adherence to Quranic literalism, Esposito declared:

I do not think that this is a very Islamic vision at all. . . . Theirs is a kind of religion that is extraordinarily full of violence and abuse that is not in accordance with the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet or even with Islamic Law.

Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, lived up to his title by invoking victimhood. Bazian claimed that:

When Islamophobes point to the Koran and Islam as the problem, they are epistemically reinforcing ISIS’s claims and also pushing every Muslim into the same categorization. . . . For me, religion is a rationalization rather than the root cause.

Responding to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s public acknowledgement that British Muslims are joining ISIS, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole ranted, “It’s just a way of beating up on the Muslims in the UK. . . . Cameron is grandstanding about this and it’s Islamophobia, it’s just racism.” Perhaps Cole is unaware that Cameron, speaking at a reception for British Muslims, kowtowed to political-correctness by declaring that ISIS has “nothing to do with the great religion of Islam, a religion of peace.”

Meanwhile, Sahar F. Aziz, Texas A&M University law professor, condemned those who are “blindly blaming religion . . . rather than root causes,” lamenting that, “Thousands of miles away from the Middle East, it is tempting for Americans to view the atrocities committed by the Islamic State (ISIS) as further evidence that something is wrong with Islam.” Instead, she asserted, “The politics of authoritarianism, rather than religion, explain the rise of ISIS.” Given that ISIS arose in a power vacuum, there is little basis for blaming authoritarianism.

Going to ridiculous lengths, Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, faults humanity itself:

I am mindful of the fact that much of the Islamophobic discourse of today holds Muslims in the West accountable for atrocities of ISIS. In that context, it makes a fundamental mistake. . . . All of us, Muslims and Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no faith and people of occasional faith, we are all responsible.

That is, since everyone is responsible for ISIS, no one is responsible.

After conceding that “Muslims have a responsibility to speak out against ISIS,” Safi then entreated,

[A]ll of us to speak out with the same vehemence . . . about the victims of the American drones, about the victims of the allies of the United States? Can we mourn Palestinians? Can we mourn Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin? Can we mourn the 2.5 million Americans caught in a penal industrial complex?

A better question for Safi would be whether there is any unrelated societal ill that cannot be associated with condemning ISIS?

University of California, Riverside creative writing professor Reza Aslan denied that ISIS has any appeal whatsoever to devout Muslims, marveling over “how little religion plays a role in this group, how little the idea of reading the Koran or praying or those kinds of things play a significant role on the ground among these militants.” Granting that “religion is the sort of underlying, unifying aspect of it,” Aslan then contradicted himself: “But the idea that ISIS is drawing excessively religious people to it is factually incorrect.” Elsewhere, he alluded to the “grievances . . . that a lot of Muslims around the world have” and warned that ISIS’s appeal would remain, “unless those grievances can be addressed.”

Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, suggested that Muslim scholars respond to ISIS by proclaiming:

What you are doing, killing innocent people, implementing so-called “Sharia” or the so-called “Islamic State”, this is against everything that is coming from Islam. . . . It is not a caliphate. It is just people playing with politics referring to religious sources.

While it is indeed necessary for Muslim moderates—a group that does not include Ramadan—to condemn ISIS, it is self-defeating to deny the Islamic basis for its behavior.

Other academics engage in moral relativism, equating ISIS’s unbridled aggression with the defense of Western democracies. Absurdly, Musa al-Gharbi, a University of Arizona instructor, described the U.S. as the bigger evil: “It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS.” Al-Gharbi also dubbed Mexican drug cartels more destructive than ISIS and maintained that, “What is fueling the disproportionate reaction to ISIL is Islamophobia.”

Mark LeVine, a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, simultaneously absolved Islam and demonized Zionism by likening ISIS fighters to religious “fanatics” of all types:

[The Islamic State] is as real a form of expression of Islam as the violent and chauvinist Israeli settler movement is to Judaism or as extreme Hindu nationalism, Rahkine Buddhism and militant Christianity are to their religions in India, Myanmar and the United States.

Georgetown University history professor Abdullah Al-Arian drew a cruder comparison on Twitter:

Israel and ISIS sitting in a tree, K-I-L-L-I-N-G, First come the bombs, then come the savages, then come the U.N. to survey the damages.

Likewise, Steven Salaita, a former Virginia Tech University English professor whose offer of a position at the University of Illinois was withdrawn, tweeted nonsensically, “#Israel and #ISIS are but two prongs of the same violent ethnonationalism.”

Stretching credulity even further, Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, alleged that ISIS “would be positively affected if the United States stopped its biased support of Israel.”

Seemingly bucking these trends is an open letter to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi signed by over 120 Muslim leaders and scholars, including the aforementioned Hatem Bazian, Hamza Yusuf of Zaytuna College, and Brandeis University’s Joseph E.B. Lumbard. However, the letter calls its sincerity into question in its calculated ambiguity, endorsement of Sharia law, and the Islamist bent of many of its signatories.

Plainly, these Middle East studies academics are reluctant to admit the existence of Islamic supremacism. The rise of ISIS has challenged their ideology even more than the growth of al-Qaeda. Instead of addressing the monster to which Islam has given birth, as French Muslim philosopher Abdennour Bidar recently put it, they blame the non-Muslim world. Quite simply, the “experts” have buried their heads in the sand.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

  • Joe The Gentile

    Hear no Jihad
    See no Jihad
    Speak no Jihad
    And let your children die from Jihad

  • Frau Katze

    Just unreal. Scarcely believable.

  • hitz

    When will Mark LeVine stop pretending to be an academic and go back to doing his Hanna Montana impersonation??

    • garyfouse

      He screamed at me yesterday at UCI for saying he was an anti-Israel activist-right in front of his own students.

  • Joe The Gentile

    The “Grievances” or “root causes” Models of Jihad = Jihadists are juvenile delinquents who just need our support and understanding.

    This is the Bigotry of Condescension, the overarching bigotry which drives Progressives to yell ‘bigot!’ at everyone else!

  • Hard Little Machine

    This is the same line of reasoning as the Nazis or Pol Pot.

    • Edward E

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Countries✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Cities✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Neighborhoods✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Workplaces✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Schools✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Sports✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no White Anything✓

      Anti-Whites say there should be no Whites✓

      Anti-racist is a >codeword< for anti-White.

      STOP White geNOcide!

      • punk

        eh shut up.

  • logdon

    The subject of this piece is entirely about the narrative.

    The narrative being that Islam is as pure as the driven snow and heaven forfend we should think otherwise.

    We are asked to suspend our observational faculties and as for this, I’d
    say that the new truth is the untruth and the untruth is actually the
    narrative welded hook line and sinker to the received opinion
    universally accepted by politicians academia and mainstream media alike.

    Here are the facts. It’s all documented and sourced. It is not the narrative. It is actually what is happening on a global scale.

    http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

    We (I am British but America suffers from the same malaise) are in fact living right now in an elected dictatorship whereby common purpose educated journalists steeped in political correctness join at the hip with this on-message, message from all political parties who are either

    A/ touting for the Muslim vote

    B/ cowed by threat of rioting or terrorism

    C/ buried up to the gills in stifling political correctness

    D/ or more likely, all three.

    So there we have it and it’s not only in Britain. Arab oil money and dawa
    has captured the narrative worldwide and until that censorous grasp is
    removed all we’ll get is fake news from fake people about a religion which is all too real in it’s caliphate aims.

    When the truth is too much to bear for our sensitive souls at the helms of media, academia and politics alike we are in deep trouble.

    Guiding ships of state education and culture, these days, seemingly cannot be achieved without the big lie.

    And if still in doubt of what I’m talking of, watch this as Clegg (uber left political leader of our Lib-Dem Party) wriggles this way and that to avoid any hint of honesty.

    It was almost a Damascean Moment as I watched and I was not alone.

    In the post debate poll Clegg was universally trounced and the straight talking
    Farage won the day in a tremendous victory for honesty, common sense
    (remember that?) and the shifting judgement of the British people who,
    at last have awoken to the calumny of abject disinformation being
    foisted upon them.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd9rsmD4HiM

    And here in this great piece by Cinnamon Stilwell, we have a Muslim drenched academia doing it’s best to deny the obvious.

    We, whether Brits or Americans are in the same boat.

    Feckless leadership, a corrupted education system and the big media enabled lie running like a seam of ghastliness throughout society.

    It cannot be sustained. Either that or it’s goodby to our way of life and values for evermore.

  • Jon Sobieski

    These ‘experts’ aren’t burying their head in the sand. They are running interference by obfuscating the truth about Islam. Denial and finger pointing at the infidels’ supposed transgressions against Muslims is their game plan.

  • http://historyscoper.com/ T.L. Winslow

    Muslims enjoying protected sacred cow status in U.S. academia are not real academics, but the advance force for a future Muslim invasion-takover. Their goal is paralysis of analysis while keeping the gates open. they’re like that new TV show Better Call Saul, a sleazy lawyer whose doors are open to criminals so he can try to stick it to the Man and keep them on the streets and in business. Take time to study my free Historyscoper’s Modern Muslimscope, which lays out Muslim infiltration of the U.S. and makes you aware of every person and org. Google to find the url, and find the time so that by next year you’re more savvy.

  • Douglas Mayfield

    “Going to ridiculous lengths, Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, faults humanity itself:

    I am mindful of the fact that much of the Islamophobic discourse of today holds Muslims in the West accountable for atrocities of ISIS. In that context, it makes a fundamental mistake. . . . All of us, Muslims and Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no faith and people of occasional faith, we are all responsible.”

    Many of the statements quoted in the article are malevolent and absurd but I nominate this as the worst since it is a pure call for absolute tyranny world wide masked as political analysis.

    Consider. stripped of rhetoric, what it actually means. No murderer, no rapist, no child abuser, no savage tyrannical death worshiping follower of Islam is responsible for their actions. We are.

    The implication is that the only solution to the evil belief system that is Islam is to surrender.

    Duke University should be ashamed to have this creature, Omid Safi, on its payroll. Then again, Duke may well be one of those institutions which took the thinly disguised bribes from Middle Eastern money to set up its Department of Middle Eastern Studies in the first place.

    Islam is evil because it demands of its followers that they murder or enslave anyone who disagrees with them. That some followers of Islam do not take this commandment seriously does not alter the fact that in every country around the world in the grip of Islam, rape, murder, atrocities, are committed daily on behalf of that evil belief system.

    We in the West who value freedom and individual rights are at war with Islam. The actions of ISIS and other Islamic groups make this clear on a daily basis.

    The sooner we acknowledge this fact, the more likely it is that we will survive.

  • Metatrona

    If you cannot succeed in life, become a Professor. Then you can pretend you are accomplished.

  • garyfouse

    In the UC system we have them infested like bugs.

  • Cristinascar

    I blame the ISlamophobia on the Polish Ottoman wars all 30 of them and the milions the Arabs brought there for conquest killed throughout the 17th Century in order to take over Europe.

  • epaminondas

    When the folks who believe ISIS is unislamic, and hurt the ideal of the prophet and allah, and fill the streets in the hundreds of thousands and millions as if a Quran made it into the toilet or was handled and burned by an american, or some cartoon has been created, CALL ME.

    I’ll answer and accept that a lot of muslims believe that proposition and not a tiny minority of those who are afraid we have had a peak under their skirt and observed no underwear.

    • Well Done

      Inmates at Gitmo were defacing copies of the Koran, scribbling messages and slogans intended to be read by other inmates, of course. When Gitmo employees destroyed copies of the Koran so defaced, the usual idiots blamed America for “disrespecting” the Koran. The little detail that the Koran is not to be used for passing messages escapes the noisemakers, of course.

  • Matthew Johnston

    I have not been able to get a passport since 2007 to Israel for a water conference, but I can still arrange for weapons small arms to be sent by the Arabs.

  • bill reitzes

    Deny deny deny, condemn condemn condemn.
    What has changed?
    ISIS still fights under it’s flag, which has the Shahada, clearly written on it.
    ISIS fighters still pray allah uahkbar, whilst committing their acts of worship to their allah god.
    Even the most blind, have to see that ISIS is ALL about Islam.