Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week continues to make apologists nervous, resulting in a slew of case studies in all the usual devices they use in hope of diverting discussions away from the elements of Islamic texts and teachings that fuel the jihad ideology: Fear of “backlash,” denial of the connection between Islamic jihad doctrine and Islamic jihad violence, and, of course, good old slander.
“Commentary: On propaganda and Islamophobia in the US,” by Abukar Arman, “a freelance writer who lives in Ohio,” (whose writings have come under scrutiny at Jihad Watch before), for the Middle East Times:
The daunting reality facing people of conscience is the seemingly impossible task of controlling propaganda in a free society, and how the protected freedom of the perpetrators increases the vulnerability of their potential victims.
Interesting choice of words there: “controlling” propaganda. Not recognizing it, answering it, or critically engaging it, but controlling it. But the “control” of information and discussion is itself an exercise in indoctrination, propaganda, and the mark of a patronizing government that feels it knows better than the citizens whose consent gives it power.
In the past few years, while many positive things have happened to Muslims in
America, dark clouds continue to gather over them as a result of relentless propaganda by certain special interest groups. All one has to do is to randomly listen to AM talk show radio to hear the overtly-expressed hatred that hundreds of thousands – or perhaps millions – in America internalize each day and night. And this, needless to say, makes the backlash of any terrorist attack in the US soil a nightmare scenario for all Muslims.
More on “backlash” here.
‘But, these are mere words,’ the proponents of the status quo argue. ‘It’s not like they’re throwing Molotov cocktail bombs at Muslims’ homes’ they insist, in an attempt to minimize the power of words.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made an observation about another common charge that is aimed at silencing criticism of Islam, namely, that noting the Islamic underpinnings of the jihad ideology creates more jihadists. Part of her response also applies here: “If we continue that reasoning, we”ll never scrutinize anything. Can we ever write? Can we ever criticize anything?”
Indeed, there is a difference between incitement to violence, and criticizing an ideology. That is, unless we’re now going to treat all criticism and disagreement as a prelude to violence. I (Marisol) would disagree with that. (Uh oh. Duck!)
[…]
In this age of Reality TV where the real, the unreal, and the surreal are deeply entangled, few have the ability to decipher disinformation or propaganda for what it truly is. Few would ask themselves: is stereotyping a major religion in its entirety ethical or even prudent? Is there any historical or even a current trend supporting the so-called “Islamo-fascism” propagated by certain vociferous political and religious provocateurs?
Yes. If you like, we can just call it jihad, too. We’re flexible.
And assuming their charges were correct, the question that begs an answer is:
why are the millions of Muslims in the US not wreaking “fascistic” havoc? More importantly,
why are these provocateurs and their Grand Wizards such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Televangelist Pat Robertson, Daniel Pipes, and Steve Emerson, and the cottage industry of fear, online outfits such as FrontPage Magazine, Jihad Watch, and Little Green Footballs keep spewing hate speech that indiscriminately offends Muslims and only provides more fuel to the radical elements?
Hate speech is described as words uttered, recorded, written, pictured, or communicated in any other means (softly or loudly) that are “intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or a group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion.”
But Arman does not bother to attempt to provide any quotation of something he finds “hateful” from any of the men he mentions.
However, as a result of the heinous aggression of 9/11 and the subsequent fear
industry, a number of people have become desensitized to the dangers of Islamophobia and
its mirrored image, anti-Americanism.
[…]
And in the political spectrum, early this summer, while being critical of how, in their first two debates, the democratic presidential candidates avoided connecting terrorism with Islam, one of the frontrunner republican candidate’s, Rudy Giuliani, recently had this to say: “During their two debates, they never mentioned the word Islamic terrorist, Islamic extremist, Islamic fascist, terrorist, whatever combination of those words you want to use – [the] words never came up … Maybe it’s politically incorrect to say that. I don’t know. I can’t imagine who you insult if you say Islamic terrorist. You don’t insult anyone who is Islamic who isn’t a terrorist.”
Now imagine if media routinely described the widely-reported sexual abuses
committed by individual members of the Catholic clergy as ‘Catholic-pedophiliac culture’ and blamed everything on Roman Catholicism or the church doctrine. Or, imagine the Zionist brutal oppression of the Palestinian people being routinely referred to as Zio-Nazism or being blamed on Judaism and the teachings of the Torah.
Cheap shot. But here’s the problem: Where does Catholic teaching endorse molesting children? Nowhere. It’s a scandal which Catholics from the Pope to the rank-and-file parishioner have denounced forthrightly and want to eliminate with all the urgency in the world. Where does the Islamic faith demand the conversion, subjugation, or waging of war against unbelievers? Qur’an 9:29, for one.
Recently, however, realists such as Gen. John Abizaid, who have realized that
the venomous rhetoric employed by anti-Muslim propagandists is in no way in the US’ best interest, have also started to speak out.
“Adding the word ‘Islamic’ extremism, or qualifying it to Sunni Islamic extremism … all make it very, very difficult because the battle of words is meaningful, especially in the Middle East to people,” said the former commander of the US Central Command, adding that it was crucial to: “figure out how we don’t turn this into Samuel Huntington’s Battle of Civilizations, and we work toward an area where we respect mainstream Islam. There’s nothing Islamic about [Osama] Bin Laden’s philosophy, there’s nothing Islamic about suicide bombing. I believe that these are huge difficulties that we need to overcome, this notion of Christianity versus Islam. It’s not that, it doesn’t need to be that.”
In its true essence, propaganda is different than other forms of communication,
as it consciously employs half-truths, falsehoods, and misleading information to manipulate feelings and attitudes. Propaganda mainly targets the emotions, precisely because they stir the targeted subject into a frenzy of impulsive actions.
Time to play the “Hitler” card. Never mind the continuing popularity of Mein Kampf in places like Turkey, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries.
Adolf Hitler clearly understood this. In his infamous Mein Kampf, he wrote: for propaganda to be more effective, it: “must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.”
[…]
That said, Arman moves on to single out one of the aforementioned “Grand Wizards” as a “Jewish American conservative writer.”
Ironically and, perhaps, while counting on the herd mentality of the frightened masses, this same propaganda machine is promoting Jewish American conservative writer and
activist David Horowitz’s spread-the-hate campaign, the so-called “Islamo-fascism Awareness
Week,” coming to a university campus near you.
And now, outright slander. It is a well-substantiated fact that the flyers Arman mentions next were produced as a smear tactic by students opposed to the event.
Horowitz and his affiliates’ hateful mission was first unveiled in George Washington University, when students promoting the event plastered provocative fliers all over the university, the most despicable among them being a poster bearing the image of a Muslim man with Islamic attire that read “Hate Muslims? So Do We!”
A retraction would be nice.