Reza Aslan is a Muslim writer who has been shown to play fast and loose with the facts before.
On ABC’s “This Week” this past Sunday, a pointless exercise in whitewashing jihad from which most of what I said was edited out, Aslan said to me, “No one is taking you seriously.”
Well, heavens to betsy, by all means we should take Reza Aslan seriously, shouldn’t we? And a serious character is always ready to back up his assertions with evidence, isn’t he?
So let’s see if Reza Aslan is really to be taken seriously at all. Here are some of the claims he made on “This Week”:
Well, [SIOA] comes from the – an organization, a neo – not – what the E.U. refers to as the neo-Nazi organization called Stop Islamization of Europe.
Please provide documentation, Mr. Aslan, for your claim that the EU, or any other government or law enforcement authority, has ever referred to SIOE as a neo-Nazi organization — which it in fact is not.
Also, you are a Board member for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has clear links to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and you have called for the U.S. to “squeeze a deal out of” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Don’t you think it’s ironic to call me, a defender of Israel and of human rights, a neo-Nazi while you are a Board member of an organization linked to a genocidally antisemitic regime, and want the U.S. to make a deal with a man who blames Israel for 9/11 and has called numerous times for its eradication? Who is really the neo-Nazi here?
Robert Spencer is quite famous for spewing nonsense, and this is – this is more nonsense that every single -media matters– every single non-partisan media organization has said, quite clearly, every word that came out of Robert Spencer’s mouth – the reason that he’s the only one who said this is that he’s the only one who actually has this information.
This bit of incoherence came in response to my pointing out that Muslims have fabricated anti-Muslim hate crimes in the past, which is amply documented by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha here. So much for my evidence for the assertion that I made.
But what about Aslan’s claim that Media Matters is “non-partisan”? Please provide evidence, Mr. Aslan, that Media Matters is not a relentlessly partisan, hard-Left propaganda organ bent on smearing and discrediting anyone considered to be on the Right (actually I believe that defense against the jihad is not a Left/Right issue, but of course anti-jihadists in general are routinely dismissed as “far Right”). This evidence could come in the form of Media Matters ever offering a debunking of anything said by, say, Keith Olbermann, or ever vouching for the accuracy of anything said by, say, Rush Limbaugh.
I’m going to go ahead and trust the FBI instead of Robert Spencer when it comes to the rise in Muslim hate crimes.
How do you square this statement, Mr. Aslan, with the FBI’s actual data, which shows that hate crimes against Muslims are actually rare?
Those studies have already been bunked [sic] by everybody.
Aslan said this in response to my reference to three separate studies — Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani’s in 1998, the Center for Religious Freedom’s in 2005, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s in 2008 — that independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule. Please provide evidence, Mr. Aslan, that any or all of these studies have actually been “bunked,” by anybody, much less “everybody.”
He will not answer this, of course. He won’t and he can’t, because he has no facts to back up his claims. On “This Week,” Reza Aslan was lying again.