The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has never cared much for the truth when speaking about me. The organization's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, has defamed me on national television, and the organization's website even featured a link, for a time, to a tissue of lies penned by a pathetic convicted felon.
But now CAIR has reached a new low, in a press release entitled, "'Islamo-Fascism' Week Speaker Meets With European 'Neo-Nazis.'"
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed today that the main speaker for an upcoming series of "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" lectures at university campuses nationwide recently offered a keynote address at a European gathering that included representatives of racist or "neo-Nazi" political parties.
The gathering was organized by American bloggers. It was about the Islamization of Europe. I had no hand in the selection of attendees, and was meeting most of them for the first time. No racist or neo-Nazi themes were discussed. If any of the people there are actually racists or neo-Nazis, I completely disavow them and all racist and neo-Nazi ideas. Now: will CAIR do the same thing regarding Hamas?
What's more, the real neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nations have said: "Islam is our ally, and the 1500 cults all claiming to be 'Christian' are our opposition."
Author Robert Spencer, who is scheduled to appear beginning next week at universities such as Brown, DePaul and Dartmouth, is regarded by American Muslims as one of the nation's worst Islamophobes. His virulently anti-Islam website promotes the idea that life for Muslims in the West should be made so difficult that they will leave.
Here again, there would be no "Islamophobes" if there were no Islamic jihad terrorism. The whole concept of "Islamophobia" is designed to divert attention away from Islamic terrorism and onto those who resist it. And we do not actually promote the idea that life will be made so difficult for Muslims that they will leave. In reality, I have consistently asked that American Muslim advocacy groups like CAIR help implement comprehensive programs in American mosques and Islamic schools to teach against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, and that they renounce now and for the future, in deed as well as word, any intention to impose Sharia here. Why is that too much to ask? Why does that make me an "Islamophobe"?
Spencer recently spoke at a so-called "Counterjihad Brussels 2007" conference in Belgium attended by those with links to far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang (Belgium) and Ted Ekeroth of Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden). Both parties have been accused of either having a racist platform, a neo-Nazi past or having links to neo-Nazis and other racists....
I know very little about Dewinter and virtually nothing about Ekeroth, and I am not going to be held responsible for all the ideas and associations of people with whom I shared a platform, any more than they should be held responsible for mine. It is noteworthy that the New York Times, in a profile of Dewinter, found no grounds to call him a neo-Nazi, which they surely would have if they could have. It is also perhaps worth noting that his father was in the anti-Nazi resistance. But ultimately, I said it all above: if there were any actual neo-Nazis there, I disavow them, and ask CAIR likewise to disavow the terrorists of Hamas.
Later on they quote Hugh Fitzgerald (why the quotation marks around his name?):
Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch Board Vice President "Hugh Fitzgerald" wrote on that hate site: "Only one group, only one belief-system, distinguishes itself by appearing incapable of fitting in. And that is Muslims, and Islam ... if one really knew what Islam contained ... then how could any decent person remain a Muslim?"
"Only one group, only one belief-system, distinguishes itself by appearing incapable of fitting in." Right. That's why there was a "Muslim Accommodations Task Force" (that was an MSA initiative; they're doing their best to erase all traces of it, but it's still mentioned on this Google Cached page). Why no "Hindu Accommodations Task Force"? "Buddhist Accommodations Task Force"? Because such groups don't seem to have so much trouble...fitting in.
"...if one really knew what Islam contained ... then how could any decent person remain a Muslim?" So Hugh doesn't think Islam is true. This is hate speech? Christopher Hitchens says the same kind of thing about Christianity every day. Would CAIR recommend locking him up?
He also recommended that western nations be "Islam-proofed the way a house is child-proofed," compared Muslims to Nazis and urged that they be boycotted: "[I]t should not be hard to find ways to limit the spread or practice of Islam. And if in addition to whatever local, state and federal government officials do, private parties simply conduct their own boycott of goods and services offered by Muslims, in the same way that they would have refused to buy, in 1938, a German Voigtlander camera..."
This is the kind of suggestion that arises from the spread of Islamic supremacism and increasing demands for Muslim accommodation. If CAIR would renounce Sharia and political Islam, and accept the Western model of a society based on non-establishment of a religion, and ensure that these ideas are propagated among American Muslims, there would be no problem, would there? No need to think about how to protect our societies from Sharia.
But ultimately, I am not going to answer for Hugh Fitzgerald. Contrary to rumor, I am not Hugh, and he is not me -- we both attended the Horowitz Center's last Restoration Weekend, and this conflation of us is absurd. He may choose to answer for himself, or he may not. But if I am such a terrible "Islamophobe," why can't CAIR, after all these years, come up with any quotes from me to fill their hit piece with? It is not Hugh who is speaking this week at DePaul, Dartmouth, Brown, and URI. It is I. I've written seven books and hundreds of articles. You'd think they could find something in that huge mass of material, but no...they have to drag out some old musings by Hugh, that were just searching for a solution to a problem CAIR has resolutely refused to address.
Other speakers on the "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" tour include Ann Coulter, who refers to Muslims as "rag heads," and Daniel Pipes, a supporter of the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and of the views of French racist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Why didn't CAIR mention Hugh Fitzgerald's criticism of LePen's racism and antisemitism?
"All those who value religious tolerance and diversity should be concerned about the growing links between European racists and American Islamophobes," said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper.
Right, Ibrahim. But not in the least concerned about your own group's record of associations with jihad terrorists, eh?
Publicity for the tour got off to a bad start when it was revealed that the poster promoting the campus events used a photograph that purportedly showed a Muslim woman being stoned to death, but which was in fact an image from a fictional movie.
CAIR, of course, does not mention that eight women are right now awaiting stoning to death in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
UPDATE: Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal sends me this information:
It is simply not true that "Vlaams Belang's founders were Nazi collaborators in WW II."Vlaams Belang founder Filip Dewinter was born in 1962 in a family that cannot be accused of Nazi sympathies. His father and uncle were members of the anti-German Resistance. Vlaams Belang was founded in 2004, sixty years after the end of WW II.
The Vlaams Blok, predecessor to the Vlaams Belang, was founded in 1977 by Karel Dillen (1925-2007). Mr Dillen came from a non-political background. His father, an Antwerp labourer, abandoned his wife and their two sons when when Dillen was still a baby. He was raised by his mother. Neither he, nor his brother nor his mother were involved in any political activities at all during the war, let alone that they belonged to pro-Nazi and collaborationist groups.
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"Christopher Hitchens says the same kind of thing about Christianity every day. Would CAIR recommend locking him up?"
Yes CAIR would but granted not because he said bad things about Christians.
It is funny how they call other people racist yet Dougie, Nihad, and the rest of the merry band have stated for the record their hope for Sharia law in America which is akin to some KKK guy ranting on about his dreams of America returning to segregation.