Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Fighting Islamophobia is trendy. But it also often becomes a means of enabling and expressing hatred toward others. Especially Jews. It doesn’t take much digging into campaigns against Islamophobia to find the anti-Semitism lurking underneath the bright lights and polished logos.
The Ford Foundation, which in its time had played a key role in the anti-Semitic Durban hatefest, hosted a forum titled, “Confronting Islamophobia in America Today.” Participants included Linda Sarsour, who had promoted the anti-Semitic Muslim practice of throwing rocks at Jews and appeared at a rally for a pro-Hezbollah organization, along with Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, who had defended Ahmadinejad’s call for destroying Israel and described such a proposed atrocity as a sentiment born of “legitimate anger.”
Why was the Ford Foundation privileging the persecution fantasies of Islamist bigots who believe that plotting the genocide of millions of Jews is somehow rooted in “legitimate anger”?
The loudest voices inveighing against Islamophobia often justify Islamic terrorism, explicitly or implicitly, even while they whine that being associated with Islamic terrorism is a form of Islamophobia. Indeed the campaign against Islamophobia has, among its agendas, the legitimization of Islamic terrorism.
If Islamic terrorism, and its underlying supremacist hatred of Jews, can’t be discussed, then it also can’t be condemned. And, in a perverse twist, Islamic terrorists then become the victims of Islamophobia.
The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has been fundraising aggressively for its “Islamophobia Project”. The FCIR is the work of Trevor Aaronson who had attempted to dismiss anti-Semitic Muslim terror plots against synagogues as an FBI conspiracy.
The FCIR’s Islamophobia Project is run by Trevor and Roqayah Chamseddine.
Roqayah has written for Mondoweiss, an anti-Semitic website which has published Holocaust deniers and runs articles with titles like, “Liberals like to deceive themselves about Jewish power.”
She has written at Electronic Intifada that the attackers would “smash the settler state” and destroy the “vast Zionist settler-colonial project, i.e. Israel”. She has defended Islamic terrorism against Jews, writing that the, “choice of what methods of resistance are used, be it armed or unarmed, are to be left entirely up to those occupied.”
At Mondoweiss, Roqayah Chamseddine also expressed support for Tarek Mehanna, who had been convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda, and praised the Islamic terrorists of Hezbollah.
Roqayah praised Mehanna’s “powerful statement” in which the Al Qaeda supporter describes how he watched on “September 11th as a group of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings from their outrage at the deaths of these children”.
This is what the face of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting’s Islamophobia Project looks like.
Despite this, the Islamophobia Project anticipates a grant from the Knight Foundation to fund its work. And the Islamophobia Project already promotes JVP’s so-called Network Against Islamophobia.
The Network Against Islamophobia and its “No to Islamophobia” events are actually designed to promote the JVP hate group. JVP or Jewish Voice for Peace consists of former Jews recruited to defend the Islamic war against the Jewish State. It is telling that “fighting Islamophobia” requires attacking Jews.
JVP has co-sponsored rallies featuring support for Hamas and its leader gave an interview to a Holocaust denial website. After outrage grew over this latest JVP act of hate, the hate group claimed that the interview had been obtained under “false pretenses”. Its bigots even disrupted a New York City Council memorialization of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The “No to Islamophobia” events attacked and appropriated the Jewish celebration of Chanukah to spew hatred against the Jewish State. Instead of criticizing this ugly outpouring of bigotry to fight “Islamophobia”, the mainstream media wrote up glowing reports of the hate group’s anti-Semitic antics.
“No to Islamophobia” was interlinked with various Islamist hate groups including American Muslims for Palestine, a group with Hamas links that celebrated a murderer of Jews, and CAIR, which had invited a Holocaust denier to its conferences. Islamists have a history of awkwardly using fake Jewish allies like JVP in its campaigns to spread anti-Semitism and muzzle any conversation about Islamic terrorism.
A JVP protest against the 9⁄11 Museum featured a handful of elderly leftist radicals and Muslim women in burkas and young girls in hijabs holding up signs reading, “Jews Say No to Islamophobia”.
Not only was there no Islamophobia, but there were Islamists appropriating Jewish identity to protect the Islamic supremacism that is killing Jews, along with Christians, Yazidis and countless others.
There has recently been some debate over the intersection between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. And there are explicitly anti-Semitic interpretations of this intersection by Islamists and their allies.
A familiar defense by Muslims accused of hating Jews is to argue that they are also “Semites”. Some have even urged appropriating the term to refer to Islamophobia. This isn’t a denial of the accusation; it’s a shameless semantic move to eliminate the ability by Jews to call out Muslim anti-Semitism.
The more mainstream approach is to insist that Muslims are the “New Jews” on account of being the most persecuted minority. But even the recently “goosed” hate crimes statistics put the lie to that.
The rhetoric of Islamophobia inevitably trends toward colonialist messages, appropriating and displacing the identities and cultures of the groups persecuted by Islam. Mohammed founded Islam as a religion of colonialism. The Ummah model fosters an Islamic globalization in which Saudi, Iranian and Qatari money are used to consolidate a worldwide network of former colonies into a proposed Caliphate.
ISIS is a brute force derivative of a far more sophisticated global industry of Islamic colonialism.
Jews have always been the leading edge of resistance to Islamic colonialism. Mohammed’s religious colonialism appropriated Judaism and then sought to legitimize it by eliminating the Jews.
Modern Islamists continue to use the same Mohammedan anti-Semitic rhetoric internally; descriptions of Jews as “pigs and apes” or the “killers of prophets” abound in the literature and speeches of both “moderate” and “extremist” groups along with the infamous genocidal Hadith which claims that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims exterminate the Jews.
But externally, Islamists have deployed a sophisticated vocabulary of political victimhood centered on the use of Islamophobia as a shield to silence criticism of their supremacist bigotry and violence.
The greatest victims of the Islamophobia narrative are the targets of Islamic violence.
Historically some of the greatest victims of Islamic supremacism, from Mohammed’s demand that the Jews and Christians be ethnically cleansed from the Arabian Peninsula to the last century of Islamic persecution with everything from pogroms with knives to sophisticated bombs, have been the Jews.
And yet to criticize Mohammed’s violence is “Islamophobic”. And the FBI’s effort to stop Muslim terror plots against Jewish synagogues is also somehow rooted in Islamophobia. Needless to say, Israel’s refusal to allow its population to be exterminated by Muslim colonialism is also Islamophobic.
Jews are the only surviving minority group in the region with their own independent state. The latest calls by the Islamic colonial project for its destruction come under the guise of fighting Islamophobia.
The Islamophobia hoax is not merely a denial of anti-Semitism. It enables anti-Semitism. The biggest proponents of the hoax, such as Hatem Bazian, have rich histories of persecuting and hating Jews.
Some Jewish organizations have come to believe that they ought to be fighting both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. But that is as impossible as aiding both the perpetrators of crime and their victims. Muslim Anti-Semitism is enabled, empowered and protected by the Islamophobia narrative. The only way to fight back is to expose Islamophobia as the lie that Islamist bigots use to shield their bigotry.
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