One of the most glaring hypocrisies surrounding the so-called “war on terror” has been the way that mass killings committed by non-Muslims have been treated as functions of mental illness while those committed by Muslims have been treated as functions of ideology. This hypocrisy is made explicit by a pundit [...]]]>
One of the most glaring hypocrisies surrounding the so-called “war on terror” has been the way that mass killings committed by non-Muslims have been treated as functions of mental illness while those committed by Muslims have been treated as functions of ideology. This hypocrisy is made explicit by a pundit like Marc Thiessen — here as elsewhere emitting right-wing hackery in its purest form — in the wake of last week’s Aurora shooting; Thiessen is keen to insist that James Holmes’s massacre in Aurora is categorically different from Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood because “[t]he Aurora shooting was a senseless act of violence; Fort Hood was a terrorist attack.” (Never mind that Hasan’s undeniably horrific attack was directed at a military target and thus fit classic definitions of terrorism far less than Holmes’s.) Of course, the dichotomy between insanity and ideology is itself a misleading one: on the one hand, mass-murdering lunatics frequently come up with grand political theories to justify their actions; on the other, even committed ideologues are unlikely to undertake bloody suicide missions if they don’t have a screw or two loose.
The basic difference between how Muslim and non-Muslim mass killers are viewed is nowhere more obvious than in the reaction to Anders Behring Breivik’s killing of 77 Norwegians a year ago. Breivik was about as committed an ideologue as one could hope for, as is made clear by his 1500-page manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Throughout the sprawling manifesto, Breivik is explicit that he sees himself as representing the militant wing of the broader “anti-jihadist” movement — represented in the U.S. by the writers he most frequently cites, such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.
Of course, no one suggests that such writers (to which we could add others like Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, and Andy McCarthy) would approve of Breivik’s murderous rampage. Yet their sheer refusal to recognize any commonalities between his goals and theirs was quite brazen and frequently led them into outright self-contradiction. Thus we see Mark Steyn, who in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings mocked authorities for stubbornly refusing to take Hasan’s professions of his beliefs at face value…stubbornly refusing to take Breivik’s professions of his beliefs at face value:
It is unclear how seriously this “manifesto” should be taken….As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder.
But of course, Breivik was perfectly explicit that he was targeting the Norwegian elite in the belief that only by doing so could he shock European nationalists into responding to the supposed Islamicization of Europe. Citing Steyn by name on page 338 of the manifesto, Breivik makes clear that he largely agrees with Steyn concerning the existential nature of the Muslim threat to the West, disagreeing with him only in thinking that this Islamicization can be reversed through bold action by European nationalists. Compare Steyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 (the piece is no longer online but can be found here):
That’s what the war [against Islamism]‘s about : our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”–as can be seen throughout much of “the Western world” right now. The progressive agenda–lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism–is collectively the real suicide bomb.
And here’s Breivik, invoking the same tropes in much less elegant prose on page 12 of his manifesto:
As we all know, the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism)…. Needless to say; the growing numbers of nationalists in W. Europe are systematically being ridiculed, silenced and persecuted by the current cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political establishments. This has been a continuous ongoing process which started in 1945. This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic colonization is increasing annually. This book presents the only solutions to our current problems. You cannot defeat Islamisation or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.
Breivik’s ramblings about the threat of “multiculturalism/cultural Marxism” are relevant given the recent and rather laughable attempt by Daniel Pipes, another frequently cited source in 2083, to exculpate himself and his allies from their implication in Breivik’s worldview. Pipes — responding to a ThinkProgress graphic detailing Breivik’s reliance on various “anti-jihadist” writers — attempts to show that Breivik could equally be viewed as a leftist given his frequent references to left-wing thinkers like the Frankfurt School and liberal politicians like Barack Obama. Pipes further argues that Breivik, far from agreeing with the likes of him, Spencer, and Geller, “intentionally sought to damage and delegitimize” them by his massacre.
The flaws in Pipes’s apologia are so obvious that it feels almost superfluous to point them out, but here goes. The ThinkProgress graphic listing Breivik’s reliance on the anti-jihadist writers served some purpose in that Breivik was largely agreeing with them (on the alleged Islamic threat to the West, if not necessarily the proposed remedies.) His frequent citations of figures like Marx or Marcuse — or, for that matter, Obama or Blair — are completely irrelevant in this regard since Breivik was listing them as perpetrators or enablers of the Islamic/cultural-Marxist/multiculturalist/environmentalist attack on the West. (The basic incoherence of listing all these currents as if they were the same thing is by no means exclusive to Breivik.)
Similarly, Breivik’s criticisms of anti-jihadist writers that Pipes cites are notable primarily for how limited they are. To take the one example Pipes gives, Breivik writes:
The reason why authors on the Eurabia related issues/Islamisation of Europe — Fjordman, [Robert] Spencer, [Bat] Ye’or, [Andrew] Bostom etc. aren’t actively discussing deportation is because the method is considered too extreme (and thus would damage their reputational shields). . . . If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to.
So, to be clear, Breivik agrees with Pipes’s allies about the threat Muslims pose to the West, and merely disagrees with them about the desirability of mass deportation, revolution, and “armed resistance” to deal with it. This is hardly of a piece with his paranoid rantings against leftism and “cultural Marxism.”
It’s been a bit of a scandal how quickly Breivik has been forgotten, and how easily his ideological inspirations have been able to shrug off his massacre. Like the Aurora shooting, Breivik is a reminder of how pervasive the double standards surrounding “terrorism” remain.
]]>Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely [...]]]>
Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.”
The anti-Muslim activists, who all play a prominent role in the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” play pivotal roles as misinformation experts and online activists, stirring up Islamophobic fears across the country.
The SPLC’s list of “new activists heading up the radical right” include:
As recently as in 2002, a prominent British newspaper listed him with Iraq invasion cheerleaders Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as one of the men “directing” then-President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 security doctrine.
Sometime between then and now, Gaffney seems to have snapped.
Geller has mingled comfortably with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists, defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and denied the existence of Serbian concentration camps. She has taken a strong pro-Israel stance to the point of being sharply critical of Jewish liberals.
Muslims aren’t the only group with whom he has a bone to pick. Yerushalmi, an Orthodox Jew, also rails against liberal Jews and the “progressive elites” he says they influence. He’s described blacks as “the most murderous of peoples” and reportedly once called for undocumented immigrants to be placed in “special criminal camps,” detained for three years, and then deported.
The prominent role given to Islamophobes in the SPLC’s list underscores the anti-Muslim sentiments which have emerged on right-wing media outlets, Washington think tanks like the Center for Security Policy and the “anti-Shariah” legislation which has swept across more than two-dozen states.
]]>Today, National Review Online‘s David French leapt to the defense of Spencer and Horowitz. His aim is to show that far from being Islamophobic, they and their allies are simply applying the same standards to Islam that we would apply to any other religion. To do so, he resorts to a familiar kind of thought experiment, asking how we would respond if Christians posed the same sort of threat to the U.S. that Muslims ostensibly pose.
But French’s “thought experiment” is perhaps more revealing that he intended. Its astonishingly hyperbolic portrayal of the extent of the “Christian” (i.e. Muslim) threat only reinforces the conclusion that he and his allies hold a hysterical and alarmist view of Islam.
French’s imaginary account of the “Christian” menace is too long to reproduce in full here — read the full post for that — but the gist is: “Christians” (i.e. Muslims) have launched 10,000 terrorist attacks against the United States in the span of a decade. They control five states “in whole or in part,” having wrested sovereignty away from the U.S. government, and are fighting a violent insurgency to take control of California. Anti-blasphemy laws are enforced “at rifle point,” members of other religions are crushed under tanks, and the last synagogue closes as Jews have been expelled from the United States.
Clearly, French expects readers of this fantasy to nod in knowing recognition. How clever, they are meant to think to themselves — he’s precisely described the Muslim threat to America! And to be sure, much of what he describes is modeled on recent events in various Middle Eastern countries.
But for the thought experiment to make sense — and for his defense of Horowitz, Spencer et al to hold water — one must believe that these events are a plausible account of the threat posed to America by radical Islam. And here the paranoia on display becomes so over-the-top as to be laughable.
After all, have Muslims launched 10,000 terrorist attacks in America? Have they launched 1,000? Have they launched 100? Do radical Muslims control five American states, “in whole or in part”? Do they control a single state? Do they control a single county? Has a Muslim anti-blasphemy law been passed by even a single jurisdiction in the United States? Has even a single Christian or Jewish religious congregation been forced out by Muslims? (This last notion is especially ironic, since French’s allies have been dedicated to preventing Muslims from opening mosques throughout the country.)
There is nothing wrong, of course, with faulting the governments of many Muslim-majority countries for their illiberal practices. But to suggest, as French seems to, that Muslims are on the verge of imposing an Islamic Republic in America is frankly insane. (Once again the Bircher parallel holds: it was perfectly justifiable to denounce the brutality of the Soviet regime, but it was lunatic to suggest that a Soviet takeover of America was imminent.)
French may have intended to clear Horowitz and Spencer from the charge of Islamophobia. Instead, he has given yet another demonstration of the depths of anti-Muslim paranoia prevailing on large segments of the right.
]]>Responding to CAP’s Islamophobia report, anti-Muslim activists David Horowitz called it “fascistic” and Robert Spencer deemed it the “agenda of the Islamic jihad.” Determined to one-up her Islamophobia network colleagues, Pamela Geller took to her blog on Friday evening to unleash a fiery tirade [...]]]>
Responding to CAP’s Islamophobia report, anti-Muslim activists David Horowitz called it “fascistic” and Robert Spencer deemed it the “agenda of the Islamic jihad.” Determined to one-up her Islamophobia network colleagues, Pamela Geller took to her blog on Friday evening to unleash a fiery tirade against the new report “Fear, Inc.”
Geller piles baseless, if at times colorful, allegations on the report’s authors. Including:
- Over at the wildly funded machine of hate and lies, the “Center of American Progess,” the Soros cranks have spent hundreds of thousands producing a pile of dung masquerading as research. [...]
It reads more like a Mein Kampf treatise. The funding section of the report is outrageous. I have not seen one dime from any those donors, though they name me as a recipient. Lies. [...]
[MediaMatters and the Center for American Progress] mean to destroy this country, and they will crush anyone who gets in their way. [...]
This “report on Islamophobia” is Goebbels attacking the Jew. I wear it as a badge of honor. These quislings are the enemy. They fear my work, and that is good. They fear my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. [...]
Watch them choke on their own vomit.
Geller’s only factual issue with the report is that “I have not received one cent from any of these funders they attempt to tie me to.” But the report never claims that Geller receives any money from the seven funders who contributed $42.6 million to the Islamophobia network. Indeed, Geller is probably one of the few individuals who requires little money from outside donors. Last year, The New York Times reported:
- Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when [she and Michael H. Oshry] divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.
Geller, much like her colleagues Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, uses the report as an opportunity to solicit readers for contributions while never meaningfully challenging the factual accuracy of the 130-page report on Geller and her anti-Muslim allies. While unsurprising and certainly not out of the norm for Geller, her response to the report underlines the bigotry, hatred and intolerance exhibited by many member of the Islamophobia network.
UPDATE: Last night, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Faiz Shakir discussed the Islamophobia network with Keith Olbermann:
]]>A new, must-read report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of Islamophobia in America,” exposes the Islam-bashing network in America which has considerable reach in the U.S. news media and has an audience among some well-known politicians such as Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.
The report includes detailed information about the more than $42 million that has flowed from seven key foundations to the network over 10 years, as well as the key “misinformation experts” who generate the false facts and materials which are then regurgitated by the media and certain politicians and grass-root groups.
Islamophobic misinformation is not only harmful for Muslims inside the U.S. and abroad who continue to be persecuted and isolated for crimes committed in the name of Islam even as the vast majority of Muslims denounce them. If accepted unchallenged, these claims can also lead to misguided and harmful U.S. domestic and foreign policy decisions which can further exacerbate national security threats.
Click here to read the report in full. Jim’s IPS article on the report can be found here.
]]>With those preliminaries aside, a few thoughts:
1) It’s become clear that Breivik’s political views were drawn in large part from the writings of “anti-jihad” writers in Europe and the U.S. I’ve written about many of these writers in the past — folks like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy — and it’s fair to say that I don’t have much sympathy for their views; I think they’re ignorant, bigoted, and frequently hysterical. But ignorance, bigotry, and hysteria are very different from the mass murder of innocent civilians. So while it’s perfectly legitimate to fault the Gellers and McCarthys of the world for fostering an atmosphere of apocalyptic alarmism about Islam, let’s be clear that none of them has ever legitimated or called for anything resembling Breivik’s actions.
2) But if the “anti-jihadists” are within their rights to object to being tarred with Breivik’s actions, one would nonetheless hope that the atrocity in Norway would prompt some degree of introspection on their part — some reflection on how it was that this person (however crazy or evil) took their work as justification for mass slaughter. Unfortunately, such introspection has been in short supply. Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy have typically glib responses, in which they breezily deny that there might be any connection between Breivik’s politics and their own.
Their arguments are unconvincing and in places downright silly. Can Steyn actually believe, for instance, that just because Breivik’s victims were white Christians the entire Islamophobia angle on the killings is therefore simply a distraction? As even a cursory skimming of Breivik’s writings will show, Breivik’s main criticism of the European ruling elite is that they are too decadent, relativist, and multiculturalist to stop the threat from Muslim immigrants. (They’re “supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe,” he writes at the beginning of his manifesto.) Perhaps this might ring a bell for Steyn, since he’s written a book arguing precisely the same thesis. (It’s also striking how many of the keywords — “lack of cultural self-confidence,” “national suicide” — are the same.) Insofar as we can perceive a motive for Breivik’s attack, it appears to be that the mass slaughter of the future Norwegian political elite would be a shock that would force Europe to awake to the Muslim threat.
3) As always, the double standards involved in the treatment of Muslim and non-Muslim terrorists are highly revealing. Molly Ziegler Hemingway, for instance, attacks the media for labeling Breivik a “Christian extremist.” He may be both a Christian and an extremist, Hemingway suggests, but there’s little evidence that his Christianity was a central cause of his rampage — he’s more of an extremist-who-happens-to-be-Christian. This is a fair point, but it’s striking that such logic virtually never gets applied to Muslim militants — “radical Islam” is trotted out as an all-purpose explanation regardless of the militant’s specific beliefs and grievances. (Witness the Fort Hood shooting, where the right was eager to downplay all of Nidal Hasan’s concrete political grievances and to focus on his religion as the sole and sufficient cause of his rampage.)
Similarly, it’s been revealing to see so many of the “anti-jihadists” draw a strict differentiation between violent and non-violent forms of politics, and suggest that even if Breivik shares many of their political goals, his use of violence utterly differentiates him from them. Again, this may be a fair point — but it’s precisely the distinction that they frequently deny when it comes to Muslims. Andy McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad, for instance, argues at great length that the threat from Muslim violence is largely a red herring, that the more insidious threat is from religious Muslims pursuing their goals peacefully through the political process, and that these peaceful Muslims (or “peaceful” Muslims, to adopt his gratuitous use of scare quotes) should essentially be viewed as no different from the terrorists. Of course, applying the same logic to the anti-jihadists would suggest that there’s little distinction between a McCarthy on the one hand and a Breivik on the other. If McCarthy and his compatriots don’t like this conclusion (which I myself don’t share) then perhaps they should reevaluate the premises that led them to their Islamophobic alarmism.
]]>The CPAC agenda has [...]]]>
The CPAC agenda has not yet been formally released but a file posted by Citizens United to Scribd, a document sharing service, lists the “CPAC Theater Schedule – Sponsored by Citizens United Productions.” Three of the sixteen films scheduled for screenings are right up Frank Gaffney’s—and CPAC-approved Clifford May’s—alley.
They are:
“Iranium”- Ali and I just posted our review of the film on Tehran Bureau. The film is the latest production from the Clarion Fund. Clarion–which appears to be an offshoot of the evangelist, ultra-orthodox, Jerusalem-based Aish-HaTorah– gained notoriety for mailing 28 million copies of “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election. “Iranium” contains similar themes to the Fund’s previous films, suggesting that a clash of civilizations is imminent and that anti-Semitism and irrational hatred toward Israel are key to understanding the anger and frustration voiced by Muslim countries in opposition to the United States.
“America At Risk: The War With No Name” – A Citizens United Production starring Newt and Callista Gingrich. Talking Points Memo’s Rachel Slajda observed that “America at Risk” bears striking similarities to Clarion Fund films. “This is the end of times. This is the final struggle,” intones a narrator in the film’s trailer.
“The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave Of The 911 Attack”— The documentary, executive produced by notorious anti-Jihad blogger Pamela Geller along with associate producer Robert Spencer, will document the anti-Park 51 Islamic community center campaign from last summer. The screening will be followed by “a question and action and strategy session on stopping the mosque.”
With films like these being promoted during the three day conference, it seems safe to say that Islamophobia and anti-Muslim propaganda will continue to find a safe haven at CPAC.
]]>When the Post hired former Bush speechwriter and torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen as an opinion columnist, I encountered widespread disgust and some outrage among the people I talked to about the hire. Reaction to the Rubin hire, by contrast, has largely consisted of amusement and incredulous smirks. “What was Fred Hiatt thinking?” has been the question most frequently asked asked about the Post‘s hawkish editorial page chief. While the Post op-ed page still features some smart right-of-center commentary from Charles Krauthammer and George Will, Hiatt has also brought on board a number of party-line hacks like Thiessen, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and now Rubin. The fact that Rubin is intended as a counterpart to Sargent is also revealing about the way that “balance” is understood in the mainstream media. Sargent certainly leans liberal, but he is also a very good reporter who breaks stories and is willing to criticize the Democrats; Rubin, by contrast, has no real experience as a reporter (as opposed to commentator) and has never met a Republican or Likud talking point she didn’t like.
The dominant feature of Rubin’s politics, of course, is her ultra-hawkish Greater Israel Zionism. She is adamantly opposed to any Israeli territorial concessions, which explains her great affection for John Hagee’s Christian Zionists, who believe that Israeli control of the entire Holy Land is necessary in order to precipitate the Rapture. While she is quick to accuse Israel’s critics of anti-Semitism, Rubin is not so fond of actually existing American Jews, whom she views as unpatriotic and insufficiently supportive of Israel.
These aspects of Rubin’s thought came to a head in her Commentary piece “Why the Jews Hate Palin,” which was almost universally denounced across the political spectrum for sloppy argumentation and trafficking in anti-Semitic stereotypes. (To briefly summarize Rubin’s arguments, The Jews hate Palin because they are a bunch of effete, overeducated, rootless cosmopolitans, averse to manual labor and military service, who therefore despise Real Americans like Palin.) “In a strikingly unified response from liberals as well as conservatives,” the Atlantic noted in a rundown of the various demolitions of Rubin’s piece, “most commentators are trashing the piece as illogical, poorly-argued, and anti-Semitic.”
Along with Israel, Rubin’s abiding passion is her hatred of Obama, whose “sympathies for the Muslim World,” she argues, “take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens.” Ever since Obama came to prominence, she has spent several posts a day prophesying impending doom for his political fortunes. I actually came to enjoy reading her analysis during the 2008 presidential campaign — every time the McCain-Palin campaign hit another pothole, Rubin would invariably come forward with a strained explanation for why this was only an insignificant setback, and the collapse of the Obama campaign was surely right around the corner. (Like Bill Kristol, I’ve often thought that Rubin would have made an excellent Soviet agitprop officer.) Of course, in recent months Obama’s popularity has indeed sagged — a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. But even if Obama recovers and successfully serves another six years in office, we can expect Rubin to use her perch at the Post to offer daily predictions of Obama’s impending collapse until the moment he leaves office in 2017.
While it is sad to see the continuing self-destruction of one of America’s great newspapers, I am curious to see how low they can go. David Broder is getting up in years and surely due to retire soon; could Pamela Geller be next in line for his job?
]]>The EDL’s participation in the rally is only the latest step marking the convergence of American pro-Israel hawks with segments of the European far right — a process that we have been tracing over the last couple years. (The radically Islamophobic Dutch MP Geert Wilders will also be a featured speaker at the rally.) It remains to be seen whether the more mainstream Republicans who have been involved in the campaign against Park51 will distance themselves from the neofascist elements who are attempting to cash in on the uproar.
]]>In addition to Wilders, the rally [led by Pamela Geller] will feature a videotaped address by John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations during the second Bush administration, and speeches by Republican political candidates and [...]]]>
In addition to Wilders, the rally [led by Pamela Geller] will feature a videotaped address by John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations during the second Bush administration, and speeches by Republican political candidates and by a conservative radio host. Former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich was previously listed as a speaker, but he is not attending. A spokesman for Gingrich said that he had never intended to attend, and that the listing was based on a misunderstanding.
While it’s impossible to know the actual story, it sure sounds like Gingrich decided that associating himself with the likes of Geller and Geerts Wilders was not a sound political strategy for a 2012 presidential hopeful. Similarly, it’s notable that even John Bolton — who is about as far right as any high-profile U.S. political figure, and who wrote the forward to Geller and Robert Spencer’s latest book — is declining to appear in person. Perhaps Gingrich and Bolton calculated that there is a not-insignificant chance that Geller’s Muslim hatefest will end in some kind of “incident” — see the near-miss at last week’s Ground Zero rally for an idea of what this would look like — in which case participation at the rally would become politically toxic for whoever was involved.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, one of the most important stories about the whole controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is the extent to which prominent Republican political figures, most notably Gingrich, have mainstreamed a virulently Islamophobic discourse that was once limited to the right-wing fringes. Does Gingrich’s pulling out of the Geller rally mean that he has reconsidered the wisdom of trying to carve out a niche for himself as America’s most prominent Islamophobe? It would be premature to say so for sure, but keep an eye on Gingrich and other prominent Republican opinion-makers in the months to come.
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