There was a great deal of mainstream media frenzy over the last few days about “heavily armed protesters” supposedly set to menace and harass innocent people at mosques nationwide. The media treated these protests as if it were absolutely gratuitous and offensive to hold protests at mosques, without making any mention, of course, of the fact that in four separate studies, each independent of one another, conducted by different groups since 1998 (including a Muslim group), each found that 80% of mosques in the US were teaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia. The other 20% have not repudiated or separated themselves institutionally from the majority.
In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.” Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each 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. And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in U.S. don’t teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.
The coverage also, predictably enough, ignored the fact that the some of the protesters were armed only because of violence committed by Islamic jihadists against non-Muslims. No one was going to get shot at or killed unless jihadis showed up, and so in the event, no one was hurt.
The hysteria of Islamic supremacists was likewise predictable, and ironic in light of recent news stories such as these, about which, of course, they said not a word:
Islamic State threatens to murder 180 Christians unless it gets $12 million ransom
Video of devastated Christian family: Longtime Muslim friends and neighbors killed their children
Bangladesh: Muslims attack Christian pastor with knife, attempt to slit his throat
Islamic State murders 12 Christians for refusing to renounce Christ
Nigeria: “Boko Haram marked me for death because I converted to Christianity”
Bethlehem monastery torched by Islamic jihadists
Tanzania: Muslims torch three churches
Pakistan: Christian arrested after Muslim mob sets his house on fire
Yemen: Islamic jihadists torch Roman Catholic church in Aden
Texas: Armed Muslim enters church, says Allah told him to “slay infidels”
And that’s just going back three weeks. But none of these stories received the mainstream media attention that these protests did. And as Pamela Geller shows in this article, the media was already framing its narrative before the protests even happened.
“The Media Frenzy on a News Story That Hasn’t Even Happened,” by Pamela Geller, Breitbart, October 9, 2015:
The media is in a constant state of frenzied panic to advance and promote the lie of Islamophobia and the Muslim-victimhood myth. Despite a complete lack of any real evidence, the media frames opposition of jihad terror, FGM, creed apartheid, gender apartheid as “islamophobia,” or this pearl, “anti-Muslim extremists,” as if one should support those things.
They take their marching orders from terror-tied groups like CAIR and ISNA.
And the media mania to advance this complete fiction is at a fever pitch this week. There have been a number of news stories, crafted from whole cloth, about armed islamophobes descending upon poor, victimized Muslims this weekend. Protests against jihad terror are a rational response to the unspeakable carnage in the cause of Islam. But rest assured that the media will be at these protests, looking to capture a plant or infiltrator to splash across their front pages. The same pages that never print the word jihad.
The media is aligned with the jihad force, and no amount of death and destruction, rape and ruin is going to change one column inch of their narrative. Do they ever ask why not one mosque has instituted programs against jihad recruitment? Or why there is a mosque behind every jihad attack?
Here is a typical email exchange (unedited) between a US News and World Report reporter and me. Needless to say, they didn’t run it:
Steven Nelson of U.S. News & World Report wrote this to me:
Pam [sic],
I’m working on an article about this weekend’s anti-Islam mosque rallies. Do you support these, or have any involvement in them? And do you believe it’s possible they could they backfire and actually help radicalize some Muslims?
Steven Nelson
My response:
Steven,
I have no involvement in them. I support any lawful and peaceful effort to raise awareness of the nature and the magnitude of the jihad threat, and to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the equality of rights of all people before the law, and individual rights. Your question about their backfiring and “radicalizing” Muslims is absurd. If a Muslim rejects and opposes jihad terror, he isn’t going to turn to jihad terror because of some anti-jihad protesters. In fact, Muslims who sincerely oppose jihad terror should join the protests. The media in a lather about something that has not even happened, presupposing that there will be violence against innocent Muslims, as it always does after every jihad attack and plot. Yet such violence never actually happens. The media is more concerned with those who oppose jihad terror than they are with jihad terror itself, and its death toll and the destruction it wreaks on countries, communities and entire cultures.
Steven Nelson came back with this:
Thanks for the response. Do you believe it’s a mistake for organizers to choose “every mosque” (regardless of the variety of Islam they preach) as a protest location, as it seems to conflate their anti-jihad message with targeting of all observant Muslims?
Or is that just a golden opportunity for Muslims to join in?
To which I responded:
It’s neither. It’s a recognition of the fact that four separate studies, each independent of one another, conducted by different groups since 1998 (including a Muslim group), each found that 80% of mosques in the US were teaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia. The other 20% have not repudiated or separated themselves institutionally from the majority.
Perhaps they are protesting mosques because right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in US mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the US have gone to wage jihad for the Islamic State. I expect that the organizers are trying to raise awareness about the need for Muslims in the US not just to denounce ISIS, but to teach young Muslims why this understanding of Islam is wrong and must be rejected. While Muslims in the US condemn the Islamic State, where are they teaching against the ideology that gave rise to it?
If the moderates really reject extremism, let them show it by instituting genuine programs to teach against this view of Islam.
I did not hear back, so I wrote to Steve:
Steven, Please send a link to your piece. I would love to share it with my readers.
And he basically said, uh, never mind.
Pam,
Right now it looks like we’re going to wait and see what happens this weekend. I’ll be sure to let you know if I end up using your commentary.
Steven
But the Washington Post was beating the jihad drum and ran with this vicious propaganda quoting Heidi Beirich of the far-left hate group the Southern Poverty Law Center, which smears and defames anyone who opposes its hateful, authoritarian agenda. Beirich, the article says, “describes the protesters as a loose affiliation of anti-Muslim extremists who do not seem to be organized by larger, better-known anti-Muslim groups, such as Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative. She said: “This mix of racist groups, anti-Muslim groups and anti-government groups is basically a recipe for disaster.”
No. What is a recipe for disaster is how the mainstream media abets U.S. Muslim groups’ efforts to portray Muslims as victims and deflect attention away from the genuine threat of jihad terror.