Wajahat Ali is a former official of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Students Association, so it is no surprise that he would want to defame and smear those who are fighting against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. But in this piece he sinks to a new low, using a criminal act by an obviously insane woman — just look at her photo above — to do his smearing.
“Death by brown skin,” by Wajahat Ali in Salon, December 31:
Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Indian immigrant, recently opened a small copying and printing business in New York City”s Upper West Side with his
hard-earned savings. Described by friends as “very educated” and “so quiet, so gentle, so nice,” Sen’s American dream ended in tragedy last Thursday when Erika Mendez [sic] fatally pushed him in front of an oncoming subway train.
Ali was in such a hurry to get to the meat of his defamation that he couldn’t even be bothered to get the murderer’s name right: it’s Menendez, not Mendez. But what does a Muslim Brotherhood-linked Leftist “journalist” care for accuracy?
Mendez [sic] admitted the hate crime, explaining she “pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I”ve been beating them up.”
Never mind that Sen was raised Hindu and the 9-11 terrorist attacks were coordinated by 19 foreign hijackers primarily from Saudi Arabia.
An unbalanced, paranoid mind marinated in our oversaturated Islamophobic environment is numb to such cultural specifics and susceptible to conflate anyone appearing “Muslimy” as the “enemy.”
Although Islamophobes did not cause the NYC murder, they contaminate civil society with their toxic ideological fuel and remain a beacon for bigots, hate-mongers, and the mentally unhinged, all of whom emerge from the same diseased infrastructure.
Notice the little weasel’s out sentence so that I don’t sue him for libel: “Although Islamophobes did not cause the NYC murder…” But that is just to set up the Orwellian twist that is the focus of his article and the anti-“Islamophobia” industry in general: the claim that people are suspicious of Muslims because of the actions of “bigots, hate-mongers, and the mentally unhinged,” rather than because of the actions of Islamic jihadists done in the name of Islam, and which peaceful Muslims are doing nothing of significance to resist or counteract.
Even the deranged killer said she hated Muslims because of 9/11, which probably means that she hated Muslims since 9/11. Muslims committed the atrocities of 9/11 and justified them by reference to Islamic texts and teachings, so seeing someone do evil to someone she thought was a Muslim because of 9/11 should make Muslims who claim to oppose 9/11 redouble their efforts to stamp out the understanding of Islam that leads Muslims to murder and otherwise victimize non-Muslims. Instead, the fact that Wajahat Ali and others point fingers to a non-existent “Islamophobia industry” shows that they have no interest in stamping out that view of Islam, but only in stamping out resistance to it.
This is not to approve of Erica Menendez’s crime. It is only to say that if anyone dislikes Muslims, it is because of the actions of Islamic jihadists, and they are the ones peaceful Muslims should be fighting against. The cause of any “Islamophobia” that may really exist is the daily atrocities committed by Muslims in the name of Islam around the world. Just today we see a bombing on a bus, a nail bomb at a church, and more. “Islamophobes” don’t set those bombs. And Wajahat Ali, although he may never admit it, knows that.
Citizens of this dangerous, fringe minority include Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 individuals last summer to punish Europe’s alleged leniency towards Muslims and multiculturalism. Upon reviewing Breivik’s 1,500 page anti-Muslim manifesto, which frequently cites notable American Islamophobes, counter-terrorism expert Marc Sagemen concluded this Islamophobic rhetoric is “not cost free.”
Same old thing. Wajahat Ali, Nathan Lean and others must thank Allah daily for Anders Breivik. Without him, their hit pieces on counter-jihadists would be so much thinner. But it’s rather monstrous that they keep using this murderer to advance the spurious claim that resistance to jihad leads to murder, while denying and obfuscating the very real and obvious connection between Islam’s doctrines of hatred and violence and murders around the world.
Anyway, Ali wants you to believe that Breivik’s “manifesto” cites only “notable American Islamophobes,” but actually he cited many, many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson — who are just three of the many who are never blamed for his murders. Also swept under the rug is the fact that whether he is sane or not, Breivik’s manifesto is actually quite ideologically incoherent — so far was he from being a doctrinaire counter-jihadist that he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups. I am no more responsible for Breivik than the Beatles are for Charles Manson.
The cost of such hate is mostly borne by members of the AMEMSA (Arab Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian) communities, however the tainted profit is collected by bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the “hate group” Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), part of the lucrative “Islamophobia network” subsidized by inciting fear-mongering and misinformation against Muslims.
Ali here repeats the Big Lie that there is a well-funded “Islamphobia network.” The claim rests on a Center for American Progress report that conflates money received by “Islamophobic” organizations over a period of ten years to give the impression of a huge sum funding some coordinated machine — when in fact the aggregate amount was less than the budget of the Center for American Progress for one single year, and was spread among seven quite disparate organizations.
The reality is that this claim of Ali is just more projection: in reality the well-funded and coordinated machine, all working from the same talking points, is that of Islamic supremacists working to intimidate Americans away from resisting jihad aggression. The SPLC, with its spurious “hate-group” designation for numerous conservative groups that go against politically correct dogmas, is one of the most well-heeled cogs of this machine. Those of us who are fighting against this and trying to defend freedom are a tiny group of individuals who are always struggling for adequate funding for our efforts.
And the Islamic supremacists need that machine, because they are engaged in a massive endeavor to obscure the truth. That is always a tough thing to do, as reality keeps breaking through. Every time a Muslim kills in the name of Islam, which is pretty much every day somewhere in the world, their claim that people are suspicious of Islam because of “Islamophobia” is shown up. They need to buy more fawning media coverage to paper over the unwelcome truths.
SIOA claims that
it is a “human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.” However, the Anti Defamation League reviewed SIOA”s activities and concluded SIOA “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy “˜American” values.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” What does that make the ADL? Just another in a long line of dupes.
In the fall, SIOA purchased inflammatory anti-Muslim ads that continue to appear in New York City and Washington D.C. metro stations and buses. One ad reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat jihad,” suggesting all Muslims are savages. Another ad features a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning next to two Quran quotes.
The quoted ad only suggests that “all Muslims are savages” if all Muslims support the bloody jihad against Israeli civilians like the Fogel family, murdered in their beds by Islamic jihadists whose deed was then celebrated in Gaza. I expect Wajahat Ali does support that jihad, but for him and other Islamic supremacist writers in the U.S. to suggest that all Muslims do is more than a little…”Islamophobic.” Doesn’t the Vast Majority of Peaceful Muslims reject jihad violence, as we are constantly told?
In light of SIOA”s recent propaganda in NYC subway stations, it is not far-fetched to wonder if Mendez’s [sic] hate toward Sen was in some way influenced by these ads.
Yes, it is. The ads aren’t actually up now, and Menendez never mentioned them. She mentioned 9/11 only. But Ali wants you to forget that.
After news broke of Sen’s murder, Robert Spencer tweeted what sounded like a justification for senseless, anti-Muslim hate crimes: “If Muslims would stop doing evil in name of Islam and jihad, no one would respond with evil to them.”
It takes a particularly brazen disregard for truth to characterize something I called “evil” as a justification for that action, but again, when have Islamic supremacists ever had any regard for truth or accuracy? What I obviously meant here was what I have said many times before: any negative view of Islam that actually exists is the result of jihadists’ actions and the lies and obfuscations, rather than an honest grappling with the problems posed by Islam’s violent teachings, of people like Wajahat Ali — not because of “Islamophobes.”
This is typical rhetoric from Spencer, a hack whose writings are so toxic they reverberate globally and damage both national security and our relationship with Muslim communities abroad.
Ah yes, the sweep of my Zionist black arts is truly global! Look on, ye cowardly Islamic supremacists, and fear! Anyway, I’d like to see Wajahat Ali present some evidence that my writings “damage both national security and our relationship with Muslim communities abroad,” but he won’t, because he can’t, because there isn’t any.
Before her death, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazhir [sic] Bhutto name-checked Spencer in her biography as an individual who “uses the Internet to spread misinformation and hatred of Islam”¦he presents a skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps sow the seeds of civilizational conflict.”
Ali doesn’t bother to tell you that Bhutto in that passage attributed to me a quote that was actually by Ibn Warraq, so careful was she (like Ali himself) for the facts. Much more importantly, Ali doesn’t tell you that Bhutto covertly armed and funded the Taliban — casting serious doubts upon her reputation as a saintly moderate and making it understandable why she would oppose counter-jihadists.
Spencer’s blog “Jihad Watch” was cited more than 162 times in mass murderer Breivik’s manifesto. Spencer has published the writings of Serge Trifovic, one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Spencer believes the neo-Nazi group English Defense
League “deserves the support of all free people.”
Re Breivik, see above. Re Trifkovic, actually he was never a “leader of the Bosnian Serbs.” Re the EDL, it is so far from being a neo-Nazi organization that it is forthrightly and strongly pro-Israel — pro-Israel neo-Nazis are a recent invention of the Leftist and Islamic supremacist propaganda machine against freedom fighters. Frequently targeted for infiltration by Leftists bent on discrediting it by being photographed making the Nazi salute and the like, the EDL in reality expels anyone from its ranks who advocates any kind of racial supremacism or fascism.
Spencer’s colleague in hate, Pam Geller, who never met an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory she didn’t immediately publish as fact, believes “devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?”
Geller was referring to devout Muslims like Major Nidal Hasan, who passed out Qur’ans and then murdered thirteen Americans at Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu akbar,” and Pfc. Naser Abdo, who was intent on imitating him. Does Wajahat Ali want devout Muslims like those two men in the military? If not, how does he propose they be screened out?
She also thinks President Obama is a Muslim,
The link goes to a Geller article discussing Obama’s Muslim background and how Obama’s presidency has “helped foster America’s submission to Islam.” She never says Obama is a Muslim. But again: what care Islamic supremacist propagandists for truth?
illegitimate son of Malcolm X who once went to Pakistan for drugs and jihad,
Refuted here.
and that the Arabic language is a spearhead for anti-Americanism.
That claim actually comes from a quote from Mark Steyn, but what cares Wajahat Ali for truth? Anyway, Arabic instruction and Islamic indoctrination do all too often go together: see here for a firsthand account.
She believes stealth jihadists have infiltrated Disneyland because employees wear headscarves to work.
Ali’s link doesn’t go to a page that mentions Disney, but what do pseudo-journalists care for accuracy? Here is the correct link. Geller’s point is not that they wear hijabs to work, but that they want to force Disney to alter its fifty-year-old dress code to accommodate Islamic law. Wherever Islamic law and American custom and practice conflict, they expect the latter to give way — that is the stealth jihad, that is Islamic supremacism. But since Wajahat Ali is part of this program, of course he would want to obfuscate it.
Like Spencer, Pamela Geller once strongly endorsed the English Defense League writing, “I share the EDL”s goals“¦ We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”
Re the EDL, see above.
In a perfect world, these rantings would be amusing fodder for an amateur comic. However, when over 60% of Americans say they do not know a Muslim and Islam has its lowest favorability rating ever, extremists like Geller and Spencer disproportionately inform and influence the nation’s conversation and perceptions about Islam and Muslims.
I am flattered at your enormous overestimation of our evil Zionist powers, Wajahat, but most people in America have never heard of Pamela Geller or me. They have heard, however, of the Muslims who keep blowing things up in the name of Islam. They’re your problem, not us. As long as they keep acting, Islam will keep on having a low favorability rating.
According to a new quantitive analysis published by the American Sociological Review, sociologist Christopher Bail mentions Stop Islamization of America as one of the “angry and fearful fringe organizations” that “not only exerted powerful influence on media discourse about Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, but ultimately became some of the most influential mainstream groups in the field. By 2008, these fringe organizations not only permeated the mainstream but also forged vast social networks that consolidated their capacity to create cultural change.”
Pure projection. The media has done its best to ignore and obfuscate the root causes within Islam of jihad violence and Islamic supremacism. The Society of Professional Journalists even has policies in place to that effect.
These Islamophobic memes do not exist in a victimless vacuum. There is a cost to such dissemination of hate.
In 2012, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a 300 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups.
Yeah, and they arrived at this figure by counting anti-jihad websites like this one and others as “anti-Muslim hate groups,” often to ludicrous effect: Pamela Geller alone, with Atlas Shrugs and the AFDI and SIOA websites and Facebook pages, is listed as five separate “hate groups.” But as long as the money keeps rolling in, the SPLC doesn’t care.
In 2010, the FBI reported unprecedented 50 percent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, with 160 reported cases. In 2011, the number dipped slightly to 157.
160 cases? 157 cases? In a nation of 300 million people? Why, “Islamophobia” is rampant! Pandemic! All genuine bigotry and victimization of innocent people is absolutely unacceptable, but in fact, Muslims are rarely its victims. FBI statistics show that there is no “Islamophobia.” Contrary to media emphases and preoccupations, many “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have been faked by Muslims, and Jews are eight times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate attacks.
SPLC mentions the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque debate as the key driver for the recent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment. The controversy and subsequent protests against the Park 51 community center, which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, was directly manufactured and orchestrated by Pamela Geller and SIOA….
What cares Wajahat Ali for truth? Actually, it most certainly is a mosque and nothing else, and it is at Ground Zero.
Then Ali retails a list of crimes and evils he ascribes to “Islamophobia,” and follows that with this:
Nearly 31 states have introduced an anti-sharia bill, which is about as necessary as a bill banning big-foot or unicorns.
Then why bother opposing it, as Islamic supremacist groups do with such energy?
Yet, 6 states have passed it (Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma.) The author of the bill is attorney David Yerushalmi, who serves as counsel to none other than Pamela Geller….
In Ali’s perfect world, Pamela Geller would have no legal counsel, or any right to free speech. Nor would any other critic of the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. As we see from what he follows with after retailing more evils:
In America, there exists space for legitimate criticism, debate, and discussion about religion, race, and ethnicity. But we must finally confront ourselves and ask how do we, as a society, benefit from hysteria, fear and scapegoating? What do these Islamophobes inspire except division and lucrative, personal paychecks?
I think it almost certain that Wajahat Ali makes more than I do, as do other Islamic supremacists like Imam Rauf and Reza Aslan with their lucrative five-figure speaking fees, but never mind. The key here is that Ali is (again) lying. He says that “there exists space for legitimate criticism, debate, and discussion about religion, race, and ethnicity,” but there is no one who has ever expressed any criticism of jihad and Islamic supremacism that he supports. He wants to destroy any and all who raise any such criticism.
Yes, we give the KKK a freedom to speak their nonsense, but we as citizens and as a nation have disempowered them, denied them a mainstream platform and silenced their megaphone.
The question now at hand is how many Sens and Sodhis will it take to expose these fringe Islamophobic voices, marginalize them, and move onward, together, as they slither in shame and eventually drown in their own irrelevance.
Ali’s problem here is that his Muslim Brotherhood-linked MSA and allied groups are much closer to the KKK in spirit and vision than anything Pamela Geller or I do in defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for all. If he and his friends succeed in silencing us and other critics of jihad and Sharia, and they continue to spread in the West, those freedoms will eventually disappear — and not a few among today’s enlightened liberals, like the editors of Salon, will look back at how they aided and abetted this descent into darkness, and wish bitterly that they had it all to do over again.
UPDATE: Ali has now corrected his spelling of the killer’s name — you’re welcome, Wajahat. “Benazir” remains misspelled. Ali tries, in other words, to cover up his carelessness, but he just can’t quite manage it.