“I highly recommend everyone tonight goes to the BDS website,” stated Rice University sociologist Craig Considine during an April 19, 2019 lecture at Houston, Texas’ River Oaks Islamic Center (ROIC). Although this self-proclaimed “Islamic apologist” fancies himself an interfaith guru, his support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel reveals his darker side of constant demonization of the Jewish state.
Considine is a jihad-appeasing, former sports management student, whose confused interfaith views on Islam Muslims themselves have condemned. He has recently conducted a virtual tour for his debunked, new book, The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View, in which he has absurdly characterized Muhammad as an antiracist social justice warrior. Considine additionally has sophistically spun Muhammad’s subjugation of the Arabian Peninsula’s non-Muslims into a fairy tale of creating a “civic nation” such as the United States. While relying upon fraudulent historical documents rejected by serious scholars, Considine has imagined a “fantasy Islam” as a cosmopolitan faith in Europe and elsewhere.
From an Irish-Catholic background, Considine addressed at ROIC “Why the Irish Support Palestine?” and thereby called for American politicians to “get on board with the BDS movement.” As he stated during the lecture and tweeted on May 8, 2019, the
answer to this question is rooted in the similarities between Irish & Palestinian history: settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, dehumanization, & racial/religious institutionalized bigotry.
Considine in his lecture described how Arab armies during Israel’s 1948 independence war fought against an “immoral conquest.” For him, Israel did not manifest Jewish national liberation, but merely colonialism following the United Kingdom’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and Britain’s post-World War I League of Nations Palestine Mandate. This was an “entire immoral beast.”
As in 2019, Considine on Twitter usually commemorates May 15, the anniversary of the day after Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence, as “Nakba Day, ‘the day of the catastrophe.’” He hereby propagates the Palestinian myth that the Nakba “marks the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.” Actually, most of these Arabs fled a combat zone, often precisely under the orders of Arab authorities, who intended to crush quickly with few Arab civilian casualties the nascent Israeli state.
In 2020, Considine marked the “72nd anniversary of the ongoing Palestinian ‘Nakba.’” He felt “inspired by Palestinian resilience in the face of ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid, occupation, & annexation.” “World leaders should recognize” such “crimes against humanity,” he concluded, hyperbole that corresponds to his statement at ROIC that “Palestinians are on the brink of Nakba II.”
Considine, who at ROIC condemned Israel’s 2018 Jewish Nation State law as the “Jewish Supremacy Law,” has regularly invoked the slander of Israeli “apartheid conditions” oppressing Arabs. On January 21, he tweeted approval of a recent report by the fringe Israeli organization B’Tselem that denounced Israel as an “apartheid regime.” “What do you call a country that makes racist laws, confiscates land, expels natives, demolishes homes, & establishes colonial settlements,” he asked.
Considine has regurgitated standard anti-Israel talking points that Jews have no right to live in their ancestral homeland of Judea and Samaria, part of the Palestine Mandate that the new state of Israel legally should have inherited in 1948. Instead, Jordanian invaders seized this area and turned it into the West Bank, before Jordanian aggression against Israel again in the 1967 Six Day War resulted in Israel expelling Jordan. In his ROIC lecture and tweets he has called Israeli Judea and Samaria settlement “illegal under international law” and demanded “End the occupation. Now.”
President Donald Trump’s initiative to recognize Israeli annexation of various Judean and Samarian territories therefore enraged Considine as mere land theft in an April 28, 2020, tweet:
“Annexation” is the polite word to describe “stealing land.” Stealing land from people is the equivalent of confiscating their history, culture, & identities. Stealing land amounts to “colonization.”
America’s supposed “massive media bias” concerning Israel is why, Considine announced at ROIC, the Palestinian cause’s advocates (including Considine himself) “really can’t talk about it” in America. “Sometimes you have to dig a little bit to find even the term Palestine in the news” and its “population is often silenced, it’s often forgotten, and it’s often neglected.” Considine’s May 5, 2019, tweets also suggested that media bias created negative American opinions of Hamas jihadists, who have ruled the Gaza strip as an anti-Israeli terrorist base since shortly after Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal.
Yet Considine still found a way to blame Israel, tweeting that:
Most people in the U.S. only hear about Palestinians after Hamas launches rockets into Israel. Americans hardly (if ever) hear about Israel’s colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian land or the bulldozing of Palestinian houses/villages. It’s dehumanization through silencing.
The same day Considine condemned various media reports on the Gaza strip as
anti-Palestinian propaganda spoon-fed to the masses. Pointing the blame on “Gaza militants” & erasing everything that is inconvenient is dehumanizing. No reference to Israel apartheid, the killing of Palestinian protesters, ethnic cleansing, or illegal settlements. Shameful.
However, Considine and his anti-Israel influencers have funny ideas about what is “shameful,” as the forthcoming conclusion to this analysis will show.
mortimer says
Considine appears to be a secret Muslim, and now he is a not-so-secret anti-Semite as well. The two go together. Well, Considine must be hanging out with anti-Semites at the mosque.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCQEmeGfFmY
very old white guy says
After thousands of years the irrational hatred of Jews continues.
mortimer says
If … as I believe … Craig Considine is a secret, clandestine Muslim, it is entirely reasonable to suspect that everything he says is permeated with hot, steaming, farm-fresh TAQIYYA.
If it SMELLS like taqiyya, it probably IS taqiyya.
DavidR says
It may be the case that Sheik Craig is in it for the money. French author Maurice Bucaille wrote a book, “The Bible, the Quran and Science” that exploited Muslim intellectual insecurity and ushered in Islam’s age of scientific illiteracy that continues to this day. Despite his own “proofs” that the Quran is scientifically sound he, like Craig, never became a Muslim.
mortimer says
Agree. It is quite possible … and even likely … that Considine is a ‘hired gun’ for wealthy Arabs …
If Considine were ever in an actual ‘duel’ with a counterjihad debater, Considine would be unable to defend any of his ideas. The debate would be decided against him in a matter of minutes.
Is Considine the BEST that Islam can do to defend itself? Then, no wonder one fifth to one quarter of young Muslims are declaring that they have left Islam.
Islam simply cannot be INTELLIGENTLY defended. Considine proves that.
mortimer says
addendum: In spite of writing a ‘scientific’ defense of Islam, Dr. Bucaille never joined Islam. That should tell us Bucaille’s true feelings on the matter.
gravenimage says
Craig Considine and the Jews (Part One)
…………….
The “Palestinian” issue–and Islam in general–gives cover to garden-variety antisemites–very ugly stuff.
OLD GUY says
Considine is a propagandist for the Muslim/islamic regimes with the destruction of Israel and the domination of islam world wide. The sad part is that our Universities and media give this jerk a microphone to broadcast his hate and bile. God bless freedom of speech, it’s to bad the Universities and media don’t provide the opposition to this crap the same opportunity to be heard.