Ya’ll may have seen this one from Serge Trifkovic in Frontpage Magazine, but it’s worth mentioning again.
Nearly two years ago the Jihadist lobby in the United States made a concerted affort to have my book The Sword of the Prophet banned from National Review Online. Jihadi activists gathered around CAIR claimed the book defamed Islam and its “prophet.” When it did not get immediate satisfaction from National Review, CAIR instructed its partisans to pressure the Boeing Corporation to withdraw its advertisements from the magazine. Faced with the loss of revenue National Review briefly took down The Sword, but then quickly reposted it, under pressure from mainly conservative quarters.
It is now, perhaps inevitably, the turn of a phony conservative to join CAIR’s ranks. In his latest book, The Enemy At Home, Dinesh D’Souza writes that,
“In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet.”
Two of the titles D’Souza finds so offensive that condemning them tops his list of “critical steps” are by my friend Robert Spencer, and “The Sword” is mine. D’Souza wants us, and presumably other similarly minded authors (Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq,…et al), to shut up.
[…]
It is noteworthy that D’Souza is condemning our writings as “Islamophobic” without further elaboration. Like the term “Islamophobia” itself–a classic product of the Hate Crime Industry–his technique is characteristic of the totalitarian Left. I remember reading, as a teenager in Tito’s Yugoslavia, similarly worded condemnations of dissident writers and their “tracts” in the communist-controlled press. Once they were defined as “anti- socialist,” “reactionary,” or “nationalist,” no further elaboration was needed and no debate allowed.
Furthermore, D’Souza uses “Islamophobia” with the implicit assumption that the term’s meaning is well familiar to his readers. For the uninitiated it is nevertheless necessary to spell out its formal, legally tested definition, however. It is provided by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a lavishly-funded organ of the European Union. Based in Vienna, this body diligently tracks the instances of “Islamophobia” all over the Old Continent and summarizes them in its reports. The Monitoring Center’s definition of Islamophobia includes eight salient features:
1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change. 2. Islam is seen as separate and “other.” 3. Islam is seen as inferior to the West, barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist. 4. Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations. 5. Islam is seen as a political ideology. 6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand. 7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society. 8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.
This definition is obviously intended to preclude any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. The implication that Islamophobia thus defined demands legal sanction is a regular feature of the Race Relations Industry output. It also routinely refers to “institutional Islamophobia” as an inherent social and cultural sickness of most Western societies that needs to be rooted out by education, re- education, and legislation. In reality, of course, all eight proscribed statements are to some extent true.
If you missed it, the whole article is definitely worth reading. Attaboy, Serge.