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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Bruce Bawer: Mustafa Akyol, the New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man

Feb 24, 2019 2:00 pm By Robert Spencer

Here is a superb takedown by Bruce Bawer of the Islamic “moderate” Mustafa Akyol, whose disingenuousness we have exposed here at Jihad Watch many times.

“The New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man,” by Bruce Bawer, PJ Media, February 21, 2019:

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Last November, the Times published a piece by Akyol entitled “True Islam Does Not  Kill Blasphemers.” Anyone who has even a patchy awareness of Islam knows just how dishonest a claim this is; as Robert Spencer dryly observed at the time, “if Akyol denied the death penalty for blasphemy in any Sharia state, he could end up being executed for blasphemy himself.”

In keeping with his practice of blatantly lying about his faith and its adherents, Akyol’s latest Times piece was headlined “The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam.” It began as follows:

Since 9/11, a recurrent theme in the far-right circles of America has been “creeping Shariah.” It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death.

Implicit here is that such concerns are outrageous and that only an extremist – a member of the “far right” – would profess them. Never mind that as the number of Muslims in Western Europe has proliferated, so have burkas. Never mind that it’s a core tenet of Islam that adulterers – like blasphemers – must be put to death. Akyol continues:

In this scenario, American Muslims, who make up only 1 percent of the population, will pursue this grand scheme because they are here not for freedom and opportunity, but to form a fifth column in it, as Steve Bannon seriously claimed in 2016.

Akyol implies that one percent is a ridiculously paltry number and that this figure will remain at one percent. It wasn’t long ago that Muslims made up only one percent of Western Europe, too. Presumably, Akyol prefers not to acknowledge that, given the difference between infidel and Muslim birth rates and the much younger age at which Muslim females begin to reproduce (to say nothing of continued Muslim immigration), a tiny percentage can very quickly become a sizable one.

As for the idea of Muslims as a “fifth column” – an enemy within – Akyol goes on to describe this as “sordid fantasy” and “paranoia” and a “calumny about Islam.” So it’s “fantasy” to think that American Muslims might go the way of their European counterparts? So it’s “calumny” to tell the truth about Islamic belief and practice – about sharia law and the doctrines of jihadist conquest – and about the dark and dramatic ways in which Islam is transforming Europe?

But Akyol is just winding up for his big point. And here it is: conservative Muslim leaders in America today, he maintains, aren’t “cheering for any creeping Shariah”; instead, they “seem worried about a creeping liberalism within American Islam.” He cites a Muslim imam who frets that young American Muslims are challenging traditional Islamic norms and a Muslim academic who complains that American Muslim women are embracing “individual choice” and wearing “‘sexy’ versions of the hijab.”

Akyol would have you think all this is new and that it’s a sign of broad-based Muslim integration. Nonsense. This sort of thing has been going on in Europe for years. Muslim girls start dressing in ways their fathers or imams don’t like, or insist on staying in school or starting careers instead of submitting to an arranged marriage. Consequently they’re accused of being “Westernized.” Sometimes they end up the victims of honor killings; sometimes they eventually knuckle under; sometimes they break free. This doesn’t mean Western Islam as such is modernizing or liberalizing; it means some individuals, after being exposed to Western values and possibilities, are trying to liberate themselves from this primitive, evil cult.

Akyol notes that surprisingly high numbers of American Muslims tell pollsters they support same-sex marriage. I looked this one up. The poll in question was done by Pew Research Center. The question was: do you oppose or strongly oppose gay marriage? The responses were broken down by age. You might expect opposition to be highest among older people. On the contrary, only 7% of American Muslims over 65 say that they oppose same-sex marriage. The figure grows steadily as you move to younger and younger cohorts. 13% of Muslims aged 50 to 64, 35% of Muslims aged 30 to 49, and 45% of Muslims aged 18 to 20 say that they oppose same-sex marriage. In other words, younger Muslims – the Muslims who represent the future of American Islam – are less liberal-minded. No wonder Akyol deep-sixed this detail: it totally contradicts his thesis.

But do all those Muslims really accept same-sex marriage? Or are they practicing taqiyya– misrepresenting their views, as their faith encourages them to do, when it seems useful to do so? Who knows? I’m willing to believe that many American Muslims who aren’t really believers – but who keep this fact to themselves for fear of being killed for apostasy – are sincerely O.K. with same-sex marriage. But pious Muslims can’t possibly be, because their faith makes it quite clear that gay people should be executed.

As evidence of the blossoming liberalism of American Islam, Akyol adduces “the pro-L.G.B.T.Q. stance” of our two wonderful new Muslim congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. I don’t buy for a second that either of these vixens is gay-friendly. They’re part of the same unholy alliance between “progressives” and Muslims that dominates the left throughout Europe and that’s currently in the process of taking over the Democratic Party in the U.S. They and the other Muslims involved in this charade (Keith Ellison, etc.) aren’t liberals in any sense of the word – they’re neither classical liberals nor socialists. They’re hardline devotees of a brutal religion who, in the cause of advancing that religion, have entered into an entente, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that will endure only as long as it takes to win them and their allies greater power.

Akyol even tries to spin Omar’s outspoken anti-Semitism in such a way as to help make his point, accepting her ridiculous claim – after party leaders forced her to apologize – that she’d been unaware of“the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.” Pathetic. Imams around the world preach those tropes, and madrassas around the world spread them daily. Those tropes are at the center of their curricula. She’s a product of them. Omar hasn’t been educated out of her anti-Semitism; she’s only been educated out of expressing it so explicitly. Is that a positive development? No.

Akyol isn’t done with same-sex marriage. He introduces us to Jonathan Brown, “a convert to Islam and scholar of Islamic studies at Georgetown University,” who he says has worked out an Islamic way of accepting same-sex marriage – namely, “by making an analogy to traditional Muslim empires’ noninterference in what he called ‘incestuous Zoroastrian marriages.’” Ah, Jonathan Brown. In a tweet promoting his Times piece, Akyol thanked Brown. I wasn’t aware that Brown had come up with this Koranic loophole. What I am aware of is that not very long ago, Brown, director of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (named for and funded by the Saudi royal who was arrested in November 2017 for money laundering, bribery, extortion, and other crimes), was defending the Islamic death penalty for gays.

That’s not all. In a 2017 lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery,” Brown defended Islamic slavery, describing it as far more humane than slavery in the antebellum U.S. South, and even defended the rape of slaves by their masters, calling consent “a modern Western concept.” (During the subsequent Q & A, Brown insisted that it’s “not immoral for one human to own another human.”) In addition to his association with Prince Alwaleed, Brown is the son-in-law of Sami Al-Arian, a Florida professor who was deported in 2015 for aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad….

Read the rest here.

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Filed Under: Featured, journalistic bias, Moderate Muslims, Taqiyya, War is deceit Tagged With: Mustafa Akyol


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Comments

  1. Buraq says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 2:04 pm

    It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death. (Akyol)

    This is called a Freudian slip! Clown!

    • J D.S says

      Feb 25, 2019 at 10:22 am

      Muslim population in America set st One percent??? Well maybe that could be right but with our doors still open more will come in and it won’t happen tomorrow but they multiply like rats and rabbits…like a.”puppy mill” and the birth rate for other Americans is about one and one half children per family .(.”ONE HALF”) so eventually what will happen?

  2. eduardo odraude says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 4:14 pm

    The chief characteristic of immigration policy should be that, without mentioning any particular religion, it institutes a moratorium on immigration from any nation that does not protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Obviously that would affect Islamic nations, but it would also put pressure on Europe to provide stronger protections for free speech, and it would pressure states like China to liberalize. Since the proposed immigration policy would not mention any particular religion, it would not provoke huge First Amendment controversies, and thus might be politically possible to put in place. Such a policy, without mentioning Islam, would block Islamization in the West, and block that which accompanies Islamization, namely the erosion and eventual destruction of basic human rights. The immigration policy described could make exceptions for dissidents, oppressed minorities (if they respect freedom of religion and speech), and perhaps for scientists.

  3. eduardo odraude says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 4:36 pm

    Bruce Bawer is one of the counterjihad heroes.

    • gravenimage says

      Feb 24, 2019 at 9:31 pm

      Yes, he is! Kudos to him.

  4. DBM echo says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 4:54 pm

    That Jonathan Brown of Georgetown. He’s basically a winner of the Trifecta Plus. Not only is he a Muslim, occupant of the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, Muslim Center at Georgetown (meaning a part of the ultra liberal “academy”), associate prof of Islamic Civilization, he’s also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Wow!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_A._C._Brown#Background_and_education

    http://drjonathanbrown.com/

  5. Warrenraymond99@gmail.com says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 7:30 pm

    Hugh Fitzgerald wrote this years ago. Is this no longer true today?
    .
    “The chief weapon in the quiver of all Islamist expansionist movements, is the absolute necessity to keep victims largely unaware of the actual theology plotting their demise. To complete this deception, a large body of ‘moderates’ continue to spew such ridiculous claims as “Islam means Peace” thereby keeping non-Muslims from actually reading the Qur’an, the Sira, the Hadith, or actually looking into the past 1400 years of history. Islamists also deny or dismiss the concept of ‘abrogation’, which is the universal intra-Islamic method of replacing slightly more tolerable aspects of the religion in favor of more violent demands for Muslims to slay and subdue infidels”

    • gravenimage says

      Feb 24, 2019 at 9:33 pm

      +1

  6. elee says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 7:42 pm

    (1) He’s got a challenging job, has our Mr. Akyol……fronting in America for Turkish majority culture/government. Imagine trying to make FETOphobia sound plausible to a non-Turk, for example. IMHO and all, I take responsibility for this sentiment;
    (2) If you grew up Muslim and want to make a relatively comfortable living rather easily in the west…….declare yourself a “moderate Muslim.” The infidels will beat a path to your door, it’s easy to tell them what they want to hear, and after the first three times you’ll be a credentialled expert. This didn’t originate here, it’s a paraphrase of some advice I saw on the Internet somewhere, from a credentialled expert.

  7. brane pilot says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 9:12 pm

    I think the problem that the NYT, WAPO, SPLC, etc. have with this website is the razor wit and droll sarcastic humor with with Islamist horror is confronted.
    When you see stuff so horrible or stupid you could not make it up, you gotta laugh.
    People who call this a ‘hate site’ would have their face explode before they could laugh about anything that hasn’t been PC filtered until the life was squeezed out of it.
    jihadwatch is not a hate site. It is a dark theater of the absurd.

  8. shea says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 9:24 pm

    PRINCE ALALEED aint that the guy that OWNS TWITTER?

  9. gravenimage says

    Feb 24, 2019 at 9:36 pm

    Bruce Bawer: Mustafa Akyol, the New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man
    ………………..

    Thanks to Bruce Bawer for his exposé here.

  10. Michael Copeland says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 4:52 am

    “As for the idea of Muslims as a “fifth column” – an enemy within – Akyol goes on to describe this as “sordid fantasy” and “paranoia” and a “calumny about Islam.”

    Anjem Choudary describes Islam in UK as a “fifth column”. He must be a paranoid sordid fantasist.

  11. SamB says

    Feb 25, 2019 at 7:55 am

    Can this spin doctor go and do his research . Either he is an extreme apologist or taqiyya is invoked to mislead the New York Times. This URL is but one example telling us what we already know about Muslim killings and Pakistan extreme blood thirstiness. I suspect this man and others like him together with Newspapers like the NYT are hiding behind an agenda to make Islam seem fair. On the contrary, our mission is to open the eyes of those who are mislead by this evil religion.

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