by Robert Spencer
Reza Aslan is an increasingly comic figure as he races around the country slandering freedom-fighters and trying to pretend that people have a negative view of Islam because of “Islamophobes” rather than Islamic jihad terrorism. It’s rather surprising that this diminutive Islamic supremacist snake-oil merchant still finds willing audiences of dupes, but such is the abysmal state of the public discourse today. “Aslan discusses causes, dangers of anti-Islam sentiment,” by Caitlin O’Donnell in The Pendulum, Elon University’s student newspaper, November 10:
A year following Sept. 11, a Washington Post poll found that 40 percent of Americans had a negative view of Islam – nine years later, that number has jumped by nine percent to almost half of the population of the United States.
Any rational and honest person will know that that is because Islamic jihadists just recently sent bombs via UPS to synagogues in Chicago and stormed a church in Baghdad, murdering 58 people. Then there was the Fort Hood jihad shooting, the Arkansas recruiting center jihad shooting, the Christmas underwear bomb jihad attempt, the Times Square jihad car bomb attempt, the Fort Dix jihad plot, the North Carolina jihad plot, the Seattle jihad shooting, the JFK Airport jihad plot, and on and on. But Reza Aslan is not an honest man, and so he doesn’t mention any of that, but rather blames “Islamophobes”:
Based on this and other statistics, author and scholar Reza Aslan discussed the apparent “Islamaphobia” prevalent throughout the United States Wednesday night, citing the dangers to security and national identity that results, as well as what can be done to end the trend.
“Dangers to security and national identity” — note the sleight of hand. Aslan is trying to get his hapless audience to think that it is those who are fighting against Sharia and Islamization, and in defense of the freedom of speech and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims that are denied by Sharia, who are the security threat — not the people sending letter bombs, shooting up military recruiting centers and military bases, plotting to blow up airplanes, etc.
“A lot of these anti-Muslim zealots have always been around, but for many years have been in the shadows,” he said. “What’s strange is that this kind of rhetoric, a year ago would have had no place in rational discussion, but has now become so commonplace that even mainstream politicians have adopted it.”
Translation: “I am fooling fewer people than ever, and I am getting desperate.”
Aslan noted Pam Gellar [sic] and Robert Spencer, who are some of the major proponents of an anti-Muslim movement with their organization “Stop Islamization of America”, as well as members of the mainstream media, such as Bill O’Reilly, who has associated all Muslims with terrorism.
SIOA is not anti-Muslim, of course, it is pro-human rights and against Sharia. For Aslan, that’s the same thing. He would abandon to their fate the Muslim women who suffer under the institutionalized oppression of Sharia, and who long to be free. We, in contrast, stand up for the rights of such people. So which one of is the bigot and hater? The answer is clear to anyone who can cut through the fog of Aslan’s disinformation and see the truth.
But how did the nation get to this point? According to Aslan, it’s nothing new.”Everything being said about Islam in this country, that they’re foreign, un-American, that they don’t belong here was said about Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Mormons,” he said.
At this point I would have expected Aslan to produce some shells and ask me to guess which one the pea was under. Once again, the difference between Islam on the one hand and Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Mormons is that Islam is frequently, repeatedly invoked by Muslims as the motivation and justification for violence and supremacism. Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Mormons were not plotting to bring down airliners, shooting up military bases, or demanding special rights that other citizens did not enjoy.
Aslan might respond, if he weren’t so hopelessly intellectually bereft and afraid of honest discussion, that all Muslims are not terrorists or even Islamic supremacists (although he himself is obviously the latter), and that is manifestly, obviously true. He would claim that working to stop “Islamization” — i.e., the imposition of elements of Sharia in the U.S. — somehow demonizes all Muslims. That is, of course, false. Any Muslim who truly values U.S. Constitutional principles and freedoms, and doesn’t want Sharia here, should stand with us instead of making ridiculous comparisons with Nativism. The Nativists were genuinely prejudiced. To equate that with a determination to defend the U.S. against a radically intolerant and supremacist ideology manifests an immense moral myopia, or a craven dishonesty. Or both.
While Aslan said Americans are using Muslims as scapegoats for political and economic anxieties, the foundation of this sentiment goes deeper, based on another poll that found the more one disagrees with President Barack Obama’s domestic policies, the more likely they are to believe he’s a Muslim.”Islam in this country has become ‘otherized’, become a kind of receptacle into which Americans are dumping all of their fears and anxieties, not just about the uncertain economic situation, but about the changing political landscape, changing racial makeup,” he said. “Whatever is foreign, exotic, unfamiliar, fearful is being tagged as Islam.”…
You mean like moo satay or feijoada, you dope?
“Do we want to live in an America in which we define ourselves as against another group of Americans?” he said. “Or do we want a nation that says ‘as you accept us, we’ll accept you.’ That’s the country I hope we continue to work for.”
Of course, if that were true, Aslan would not be a Board member of the National Iranian American Council, a group that is widely regarded as an apologetic vehicle for the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has also called on the U.S. Government to negotiate not only with Ahmadinejad but with Hamas — that is, with some of the most barbaric and genocidally-inclined adherents of Sharia. “As you accept us, we’ll accept you” indeed.
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