The Egyptian Government has released the names of nineteen American citizens that it intends to prosecute for their role in fomenting anti-government protests – a charge they deny. Protests from the American Government have so far been futile, met with sneers of contempt.

The echoes are unmistakable. On November 4, 1979, Iranian thugs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. Jimmy Carter’s government wrung its hands in futility for the next fourteen months, until finally the Islamic Republic released the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office as President of the United States.

The bitter irony in all that was that Carter had betrayed the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, and thereby paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that has ruled Iran ever since. Rather than feel gratitude toward Carter, however, Khomeini viewed his abandonment of the Shah as a sign of weakness, and pressed forward with his jihad against the Great Satan.

Iran has maintained a hostile posture toward the United States ever since then, including gleeful predictions of our nation’s imminent demise. Just days ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, declared to an enthusiastic Tehran crowd that “in light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated….Allah’s promises will be delivered and Islam will be victorious.”

As the Iranian regime inches ever closer toward constructing nuclear weapons, as even Hillary Clinton has acknowledged it is trying to do, these words become more than just empty braggadocio and saber-rattling. The U.S. and Israel have one man to thank for the advent of a genocide-minded regime that considers them both the most implacable of enemies, is not deterred by the prospect of millions of its own people dead, and is racing toward completion of a nuclear weapon.

That man, of course, is Jimmy Carter. And from the looks of recent events, he is back in the White House.

In June 2009, when Barack Obama made his notorious appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo, he specifically stipulated that leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood be allowed to attend – despite the fact that at that time the Brotherhood was still an outlawed group. Last March, as the “Arab Spring” uprisings toppled the sclerotic and brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak, Obama hailed “the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt.” As the regime fell, Obama exulted: “We’ve borne witness to the beginning of new chapter in the history of a great country and a longtime partner of the United States.”

At the same time, Obama signaled his willingness to open talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, and gave every indication that he would not oppose the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt.

Now, as Egypt rushes headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and adopts a posture of increasing hostility toward the United States, Obama is scrambling to hold at bay the forces he is largely responsible for unleashing.

Editor’s note: Sign the Freedom Center’s petition, Purple Hearts for Fort Hood Heroes.

The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the twelve U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 1, 2009.

The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.

Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”

In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.

Apparently the Taliban are softening, even allowing girls to get an education. Clearly this heralds an opening to the West, a heady indication that their most repressive days are past them, and that soon they will take their place among the free people of the earth. Soon they will be following the teachings of Naomi Wolf and Thomas Paine.

Yaroslav Trofimov, in a piece that ran Sunday in the Wall Street Journal, noted that Maulvi Qalamuddin, who headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice back when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, has completely changed his tune regarding the education of girls. Where once he oversaw the shutting-down, sometimes violently, of girls’ schools, now he says: “Education for women is just as necessary as education for men. In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning.”

Anyone who believes this, or believes that Maulvi Qalamuddin believes it, should contact me, as I have a lovely bridge to sell you. “War is deceit,” said Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, according to a famous hadith, and the Taliban are listening. But the Taliban are to be forgiven for thinking that this sort of thing would play well in Washington, for it very likely will. After all, Joe Biden is still the Vice President – the amiable dunce who recently said: “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.”

In other words, the Taliban might win, so we have to surrender and act as if we’re just fine with that. And the alternative? Hamid Karzai, who got so annoyed with his American patrons last year that he threatened to join the Taliban himself. The Karzai government, that has been so helpful in “cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us” that an increasing number of American and allied soldiers have recently fallen victim to surprise attacks from Afghan army forces that are supposed to be on our side.

A controversy has broken out this week that epitomizes how bold the Islamic supremacist forces in the U.S. have become, and how weak and supine those who are charged with protecting the public have become.

The New York Times has run a news story and an indignant unsigned editorial about the showing of The Third Jihad, a relatively tepid anti-jihad film, to New York Police Department personnel. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) immediately got into the act, compelling New York’s ever ready to accommodate Mayor Michael Bloomberg to apologize and denounce the film, which he almost certainly has not seen. But that wasn’t enough for Hamas-linked CAIR: they’re calling now for the resignation of New York’s Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

And that stands to reason, based on the principle that when one’s enemy is down, one should kick him some more. Hamas-linked CAIR sees its chance to end all effective counter-terror measures in New York, and is going for it.

This whole controversy is epitomized by the photo illustration and lead paragraph of the first New York Times story on this issue: “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims,” which was by Michael Powell and appeared in the January 23 issue. The photo shows the black flag of jihad flying above the White House, with the caption, “An Islamic flag atop the White House in ‘The Third Jihad.’”

Then the lead paragraph says: “Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.”

Both the Times’ use of the image and its reference to it at the beginning of the story suggest that the producers of The Third Jihad doctored the photo themselves in order to push their cockamamie idea that some Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate America.” But in reality, Muslims originated this image, as we have reported here several times. Here is a photo of Muslims holding up this photo at a rally in New York in February 2006:

And another:

Yet this whole controversy is predicated on the assumption that The Third Jihad is whipping up hysteria about a non-existent threat. In reality, it covers much the same ground that I cover in my book Stealth Jihad, in which I show that the agenda of infiltration and subversion on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied groups is very real.

In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. are told that they “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Abdel Hameed Shehadeh wanted to join the U.S. Army so that he could turn and kill American soldiers. Instead, he has exposed a jihad network of impressive proportions that, if his assertions are true, should end the rush toward politically correct self-deception in the way law enforcement officials approach the problem of jihad terrorism in the United States.

The criminal complaint against him says that he “and several other individuals” were being charged “in connection with a plot to travel overseas and wage violent jihad against the United States and other coalition military forces.” Shehadeh had planned to wage this jihad from within the U.S. military: in 2008, he went to a recruiting station in Times Square and attempted to join the Army, so that he could, according to law enforcement officials, get training that he could use “to fight beside fellow Muslims against their enemies, including United States military forces.”

But things didn’t work out that way. Shehadeh got caught, and quickly began cooperating with authorities. He gave FBI agents a lengthy interview that fills a 22-page report that his lawyers are now trying to deep-six: although Shehadeh gave the interview in an attempt to get a better deal for himself, he quickly started worrying about “how much I incriminated myself,” and so now wants the report suppressed.

Those he named no doubt also want his report suppressed. According to the New York Daily News, Shehadeh was “a fount of information.” Among the jihad plotters he mentions in the report are “Brooklyn teachers of the Islamic orthodoxy Salafism” and Muslims who “delivered pro-jihadist speeches at mosques or ranted in online chat rooms.”

Salafism is a form of hardline Islam that calls for the imposition of Islamic law in its fullness, including stonings, beheadings, amputations, and warfare against unbelievers. Salafis just made a strong showing in Egypt’s elections. But in the U.S., the Islamic establishment insists that all Muslims happily accept constitutional freedoms and pluralism, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a venomous “Islamophobe.” If Shehadeh’s claims are true, however, Salafism is being preached in Brooklyn, and pro-jihad sermons are being preached in mosques in the New York area – and the Islamic establishment claims about the Muslim community in the U.S. are false.

Shehadeh’s claims are really not all that surprising, even though they go against the view of the government, the mainstream media and Islamic spokesmen in America. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.”

Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.

No comedy show, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings — all in the U.S. in the last couple of years.

The fact that there are other Muslims not fighting jihad is just great, but it doesn’t mean that the jihad isn’t happening. This comedy show simply doesn’t address the problem of jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.

As David Horowitz and I show in our pamphlet Islamophobia: Thoughtcrime of the Totalitarian Future, the term “Islamophobia” is a politically manipulative coinage designed to intimidate critics of Islamic supremacism and jihad into silence.

Claire Berlinski explains how Islamic supremacists from the Muslim Brotherhood devised it for precisely that purpose:

Now here’s a point you might deeply consider: The neologism “Islamophobia” did not simply emerge ex nihilo. It was invented, deliberately, by a Muslim Brotherhood front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, which is based in Northern Virginia. If that name dimly rings a bell, it should: I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s particularly important because it was co-founded by Anwar Ibrahim–the hero of Moderate Islam who is now trotting around the globe comparing his plight to that of Aung San Suu Kyi.Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the IIIT who has renounced the group in disgust, was an eyewitness to the creation of the word. “This loathsome term,” he writes,

is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.

And in fact, FBI statistics show that there is no “Islamophobia.” In fact, 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.

The Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” One easy way to do that would be to guilt-trip non-Muslims into being ashamed of resisting jihad activity and Islamic supremacism, for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia.” I doubt these comics are aware of this program, but they’re useful tools for it.

“Muslim American comics’ tour and documentary,” by Tara Bahrampour in the Washington Post, December 27 (thanks to James):

Beware, America. The Muslims are coming, and they look and act suspiciously like you.

Sheesh. No one says they aren’t. This is just a straw man designed to demonize opponents of jihad.

Negin Farsad, an Iranian American stand-up comic from California, wears eye-catching mini dresses, curses liberally and has awkward sex talks with her mother (though hers sound more like alien encounters. Actual quote: “You had intergender flesh relations without the security of external safety product?”).

Then she has more to worry about from observant Muslims than she does from “Islamophobes.”

Such conversations, painfully private in traditional Muslim societies, are public fodder for Farsad and three other Gen X and Gen Y Muslim comics with whom she traveled to the deep South this past summer. The tour, which later extended to Western states and included other Muslim comics, will form the backbone of “The Muslims Are Coming!,” a documentary film about Islamophobia in America that Farsad is working on with Palestinian Italian American comedian Dean Obeidallah.

This is going to be the usual victimhood-mongering and deflecting of attention from the real causes of suspicion of Muslims in the U.S. Obeidallah contacted me and asked me to be interviewed for the piece, and assured me he would give me a fair hearing. But then he went on Twitter and called Pamela Geller a “Muslim-hater” — echoing the deceptive Islamic supremacist claim that fighting for free speech and equality of rights for all people is “hate.” His true agenda thus revealed, I bowed out of the interview.

The documentary, which includes interviews with comics such as Jon Stewart and Louis Black and commentators including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, explores freedom of religion and what it means to be a minority in America.

Note the implication: that minorities have it so tough in America. No mention will be made, no doubt, of the far more precarious position of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim societies.

Catherine Herridge of Fox News reported last week that “despite Saudi Arabia’s promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom, recent editions continue to raise alarms in the West over jihadist language.” The story of the Saudis’ supposed duplicity has been circulating widely, but what is more surprising than the contents of the Saudi textbooks is that anyone would be surprised by them. The Saudi textbooks teach Islam. What else did anyone expect?

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, correctly pointed out that “this is where terrorism starts, in the education system.” He stated, quite rightly, that “if you teach 6 million children in these important years of their lives, if you install that in their brain, no wonder we have so many Saudi suicide bombers.”

But there is nothing in the least unusual about what the Saudis are teaching given the fact that the official religion of the Kingdom is Islam. For example, Al-Ahmed explained that tenth-grade textbooks “show students how to cut [the] hand and the feet of a thief.”

Why not? The Qur’an says: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise” (5:38). Is the problem that tenth graders are too young to learn this sort of thing? But why should anyone be too young to learn the ins and outs of the eternal and perfect law designed by the supreme being for all human societies in all times and places?

Al-Ahmed also noted that a ninth-grade text called on Muslims to kill Jews in order to bring about the hour of judgment: “The hour [of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. … There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.”

Here again, why is anyone surprised? The hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable, Sahih Bukhari, quotes Muhammad saying this: “Allah’s Apostle said, The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him’” (4.52.177).

Should Saudi ninth graders not be learning about what they must do in order to bring about the blessed day and hour in which all things will be consummated and the golden age will dawn? Yes, it’s genocidal, anti-Semitic and monstrous, but then again, so is the original statement attributed to Muhammad. To condemn the Saudi textbooks is to condemn Muhammad and Islam. Yet the mainstream media stories that wrung their hands over the Saudi textbooks never pointed out that the noxious elements of those textbooks came straight from the Qur’an and the Islamic prophet.

Ace New York Times pundit Nicholas Kristof recently had dinner in the Cairo home of some Muslim Brotherhood members, and he had a wonderful time. And from this experience, there is something he wants you and the world to know: Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, and the Brotherhood in general, is nothing to be concerned about.

Kristof’s touchingly naïve and ignorant column raises the question once again of how such an uninformed and easily misled analyst could enjoy so much respect among the nation’s intellectual elites – and the answer, as with all such mediocrities, is that they retail politically correct opinions, and so rise to the top regardless of the poor quality of their work. In this case, Kristof is pushing the theme that the Muslim Brotherhood is “moderate” – an idea in fashion today in the mainstream media, however ridiculous it may be.

Kristof marvels that his hostess, a 24-year-old woman named Sondos Asem, “speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.” Kristof warns that “the Brotherhood is far more complex than the caricature that scares many Americans” – but does he really think that because the Brotherhood employs a young woman who speaks perfect English and works in social media that somehow they don’t intend to impose the oppressive aspects of Sharia upon Egypt?

Sondos Asem specifically denies that the Brotherhood will do so regarding Sharia’s oppression of women: “It’s a big misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood marginalizes women. Fifty percent of the Brotherhood are women.” She dismisses the suggestion that the Brotherhood might bring Sharia laws regarding women to Egypt, making it resemble Saudi Arabia, Iran or Afghanistan. Egypt, she says, is “religiously very moderate,” and hence much more likely to follow Turkey’s model.

Unfortunately for Asem, and Kristof, Turkey is not presently a Sharia state, although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing all he can to change that. Its religious moderation is not the product of a different model of Sharia from that implemented in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but from no Sharia at all. If Egypt adopts Sharia, as the Muslim Brotherhood wishes it to do, the only Sharia model available to it are those of Saudi Arabia and Iran, which implement classic provisions of Islamic law’s treatment of women that have been in place for centuries and are not disputed in any significant way by any sect or school of Islamic law.

Islamic supremacists have firebombed and caused extensive damage to the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in Paris, after it ran an issue featuring Islam’s prophet Muhammad as the guest editor.

Some Muslims didn’t get the joke. Recently the magazine’s website was hacked; the hackers left this message: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be Allah’s curse upon you!” The firebombing followed shortly thereafter.

The destruction of the Charlie Hebdo offices is the ugly obverse of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s ongoing campaign to compel Western states to criminalize criticism of Islam, including discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. The objective of this campaign, of course, is to render Western countries mute and hence defenseless against the advancing jihad.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the OIC’s secretary general, has explained that Islam is under attack and must be defended. That Islam would not be “under attack” were not so many Muslims committing acts of violence and hatred in its name does not faze him for one second. The OIC is dedicated to getting the United Nations to approve a “legal instrument” that would criminalize “Islamophobia,” which “cannot be dealt with,” Ihsanoglu declared, except through “a robust political engagement” – that is, restrictions on the freedom of speech. Abdoulaye Wade, the President of Senegal and chairman of the OIC, made this point explicit several years ago: “I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.”

Ihsanoglu has expressed his pleasure with the success of this campaign: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna’, we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

The pressure to accommodate Muslim demands to place Islam off-limits to critical discussion has been met with widespread success. While this self-censorship is presented as an act of “tolerance,” in reality it is a deliberate erosion of core Western concepts of free expression, which is an indispensable foundation of the American Revolution and of republican government in general. And we are surrendering it, gradually and voluntarily, to those who seek to impose on us a value system that elevates the sanctity of Islam over freedom.

Last August, the International Islamic News Agency reported that Secretary of State Clinton had agreed to “coordinate” with Ihsanoglu on ways in which “defamation of religions” could be prevented – an operation that cannot possibly be performed without placing freedom of speech restrictions into law, and giving some government agency the power to determine what is “hate speech” and what isn’t.

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well: “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths and those who are, or who are mistakenly perceived to be, of Arab or South Asian descent. Some have wrongly sought to blame the horror of 9/11 on Arab-American, Muslim American, Sikh-American and South Asian American communities. It has led to attacks against places of worship and other hate crimes, to job discrimination, and to the tragic harassment of children in our schools.”

After sketching out this horror tale, Cole declared: “We must never allow our sorrow and anger at the senseless attack of 9/11 to blind us to the great gift of our diversity.” And this, he said, must involve a rejection of the stereotyping of Muslims: “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim.  As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.” It was George Bush, he said, who after 9/11 “made clear to the nation that these terrorist acts were committed by individuals who distort the peaceful religion of Islam,” and now all government analysis of jihad terror would reflect that perspective.

Of course, the controversial training materials did not really claim that all Muslims are terrorists or that all terrorists are Muslims, and it is noteworthy that Cole had to resort to dismissive caricatures to make his point. For in taking this course, the Obama Administration is bowing to pressure from the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic advocacy groups. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed that appeared on the same day as the conference in Washington, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) roundly criticized existing training materials about jihad terror and demanded that the FBI and the Justice Department “issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community; establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials; invite experts who have no animosity toward any religion to conduct training about any religious community to law enforcement.”

Al-Marayati complained that training materials reflected “bigoted and inflammatory views on Muslims, including claims that ‘devout’ Muslims are more prone toward violence, that Islam aims to ‘transform a country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways,’ that Islamic charitable giving is a ‘funding mechanism for combat’ and that the prophet Muhammad was a ‘violent cult leader.’”

In this al-Marayati was simply repeating talking points from an “expose” of FBI training materials by hard-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman in Wired, who has been conducting a campaign for some time to get the bureau to purge its terrorism training seminars of any hint of the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. Yet like virtually all Leftist and Islamic supremacist critics of anti-jihad and anti-terror material, Ackerman and al-Marayati take for granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how or why. Apparently they believe that their falsity is so self-evident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately, however, there is considerable evidence that they are true, and that in banning such materials, the Obama Administration has essentially banned the truth.

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the leftist American hikers who unwittingly ventured across the Iran/Iraq border and were convicted of espionage and imprisoned for two years in Iran, have been freed – and at a press conference Sunday, revealed that they were none the wiser for their ordeal.

They indulged in some moral equivalence: “Two years in prison is too long, and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran.” They assured the right-thinking world that their hearts (obviously not their minds) were in the right place: said Bauer, “The irony is Sarah [another hiker who was freed earlier], Josh and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.”

They thanked some of the world’s leading enemies of freedom and Useful Idiots for fighting for their freedom, including Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, limousine leftist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Code Pink’s manipulative propagandist Cindy Sheehan, hard-Left America-hating pseudo-scholar Noam Chomsky, and the addle-brained actor/activist Sean Penn.

Bauer appeared to be on the verge of an independent thought when he said: “We were convicted of espionage, because we are American. It’s that simple. No evidence was ever presented against us. That is because there is no evidence and because we are completely innocent.” But any hope that he might realize that the Iranian hostility toward the United States is similarly irrational and unjustified proved unfounded. For above all, Bauer said: “The only explanation for our prolonged detention is the 32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran.”

The “only explanation”? Really? Well, actually in other remarks Bauer made it clear that he thought that America was more culpable than Iran: “In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us in other parts of the world and the conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S. We do not believe such human rights violations on the part of our government justify what has been done to us. Not for a moment. However, we do believe these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments, including the government of Iran to act in kind.”

It is clear from this that Shane Bauer, like Barack Obama, Ron Paul and so many others on all points along the political spectrum, believes that the actions of the United States provoke Muslims to behave badly, and that if the U.S. would only behave decently, then the Muslims would calm down, and a new era of peace would dawn. While this view is common among followers of Paul on the Right, it is much more prevalent on the Left, and indeed forms the underlying assumption of all of Obama’s foreign policy.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has announced that women will have the right to vote in the next Saudi elections. Pardon me if I am underwhelmed. Women will be able to vote in Saudi Arabia, but presumably they will have to walk to the polls, since they still aren’t allowed to drive. And once they get there, with blistered feet from the long walk and suffering from heatstroke from having to walk while fully veiled under the desert sun, they will face a choice of candidates that is about as broad and diverse as a choice between Charles Rangel or Cynthia McKinney.

Offering Saudi women the right to vote in a country that doesn’t offer its citizens even the semblance of any real choice in the voting is a hollow victory at best. How excited would you have been if you had heard that some previously disenfranchised group had finally been awarded the right to vote in Stalin’s Russia?

Nevertheless, some of the perennially starry-eyed may think that King Abdullah, in announcing this great breakthrough on Sunday, was paving the way for further advances in Saudi women’s rights. The reaction from Washington was predictably fatuous: National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said that the move recognized the “significant contributions” women have made in Saudi Arabia, and will give them a share in making “the decisions that affect their lives and communities.”

Who knows? Maybe King Abdullah’s generous decree is a harbinger of more good things to come for Saudi women, who have made so many “significant contributions” to Saudi society, by having many Saudi babies, and cooking many Saudi meals, and cleaning many Saudi floors. Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe in another year, the Saudis will let women leave the house without being chaperoned by a male guardian.

Maybe in two years the testimony of Saudi women will no longer be valued as only half that of a man. Maybe in three years women will be able to inherit a share equal to that of men if the person writing the will so desires. Maybe in four years women will be able to have some recourse when they are beaten. Maybe in five they’ll be able to protest when they’re used as commodities in business deals, given in arranged marriages the way others trade horses or cows. Maybe in six they’ll be able to speak out against the dehumanization of polygamy, and in seven years, who knows? Maybe pre-pubescent girls will be able to reject being married off to men decades older than they are.

But these further advances are, in fact, unlikely. For unlike the restriction on voting, these other limitations on the lives of women in the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places are rooted directly in Islamic law, and thus are not likely to be revised or discarded by a regime that is not only explicitly and self-consciously based upon Islamic law, but is beset by hardliners who believe that it is nonetheless still not Islamic enough. Al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists deride the Saudi royals as hypocrites already; imagine their fury if those royals started letting Saudi women be loosed, even just the tiniest bit, from their gilded shackles.

The FBI came under fire again Wednesday from hard-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman in Wired, who has been conducting a campaign for some time to get the bureau to purge its terrorism training seminars of any hint of the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Ackerman reported with breathless self-righteous indignation that “the FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’ At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’ under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.’”

Like virtually all Leftist and Islamic supremacist critiques of anti-jihad and anti-terror material, Ackerman’s piece takes for granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how or why. Apparently Ackerman believes that their falsity is so self-evident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately for him, however, no one else has provided any proof of this, either. And there is considerable evidence that what this FBI training material asserts is true.

Are mainstream American Muslims “likely to be terrorist sympathizers”? Certainly all the mainstream Muslim organizations condemn al-Qaeda and 9/11; however, some of the foremost of those organizations, such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Students Association, and the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and others, have links of various kinds to the jihad terrorist group Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated to imposing Islamic law around the world. A mainstream Muslim spokesman in the U.S., the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, refused to condemn Hamas until it became too politically damaging for him not to do so; another, CAIR’s Nihad Awad, openly declared his support for Hamas in 1994. Another mainstream Muslim spokesman in this country, Reza Aslan, has praised another jihad terrorist group, Hizballah, and called on the U.S. to negotiate with Hamas. Other mainstream Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. such as Obama’s ambassador to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Rashad Hussain, and media gadfly Hussein Ibish, have praised and defended the confessed leader of another jihad terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Sami al-Arian.

Do these men and organizations represent a tiny minority of extremists that actually does not express the opinions of the broad mainstream of Muslims in this country? Maybe, but if so, they simply do not have any counterparts of comparable size or influence who have not expressed sympathy for some form of Islamic terror.

Was Muhammad a “cult leader”? Certainly one definition of a cult is that members are not free to opt out if they choose to do so – and it was Muhammad who enunciated Islam’s notorious death penalty for apostasy by saying, ““Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Bukhari 9.84.57). Also, there are several celebrated incidents in which Muhammad lashed out violently against his opponents, ordering the murder of several people for the crime of making fun of him — including the poet Abu ‘Afak, who was over one hundred years old, and the poetess ‘Asma bint Marwan. Abu ‘Afak was killed in his sleep, in response to Muhammad’s question, “Who will avenge me on this scoundrel?” Similarly, Muhammad on another occasion cried out, “Will no one rid me of this daughter of Marwan?” One of his followers, ‘Umayr ibn ‘Adi, went to her house that night, where he found her sleeping next to her children. The youngest, a nursing babe, was in her arms. But that didn’t stop ‘Umayr from murdering her and the baby as well. Muhammad commended him: “You have done a great service to Allah and His Messenger, ‘Umayr!” (Ibn Ishaq, 674-676).

Is the “Islamic practice of giving charity” no more than a “‘funding mechanism for combat’”? If not, one wonders why so many Islamic charities in the United States and around the world have been shut down for funding terrorism, including what was once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), as well as the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), and many others.

Is it true that “the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent,’” and is it also true that “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah”? While certainly not all devout Muslims are terrorists, virtually all Islamic terrorists are devout Muslims. In recent years, not only Osama bin Laden but also devout Muslims such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would-be Times Square bomber Feisal Shahzad, Arkansas jihad murderer Abdulhakim Muhammad, and other jihad terror plotters such as Khalid Aldawsari, Baitullah Mehsud, and Roshonara Choudhry, among many others, reference Islamic teachings to justify violence against unbelievers. Just this week, Detroit underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab declared in court that Muslims should only be judged by the Qur’an.

“Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” from the Center for American Progress is just the latest in an ever-lengthening string of markedly similar “exposés” of so-called “Islamphobes.” Each purports to show that the anti-Sharia movement in America is a sinister cabal of well-funded, dishonest hacks stirring up hate against innocent Muslims in order to profit from it. Each has been highly distorted and markedly unfair, twisting the facts and cooking the data in order not to enlighten but to manipulate, not to educate but to propagandize.

Just in recent months there have been two other reports, both almost identical in substance to “Fear, Inc.”: the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Jihad Against Islam” and the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations’ “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States.” Each of these is lavishly produced, printed on glossy paper and full of colorful illustrations. With the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in the midst of a full-scale, years-long campaign at the United Nations to compel the West to criminalize any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to recruit and motivate terrorists, it would be useful to know who is funding these slickly produced reports; but, true to form, the mainstream media instead glosses over the radical and genuinely sinister ties of the organizations that produced them, and repeats their agitprop as if it were fact.

But it isn’t. In what follows I must, for reasons of time, limit myself largely to responding to the report’s attacks on me; however, the “Fear, Inc.” attacks on my colleagues and others doing similar work are no more substantive or less manipulative and propagandistic.

The misinformation starts on the first page, when the “Fear, Inc.” authors call me “one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report.” The term “anti-Muslim” is immediate evidence of the manipulative, propagandistic nature of this report: my work, and the work of the other scholars and activists demonized in “Fear, Inc.,” has never been against Muslims in the aggregate or any people as such, but rather against an ideology that denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people. In fact, years ago at Jihad Watch I had an exchange with an English convert to Islam. I said: “I would like nothing better than a flowering, a renaissance, in the Muslim world, including full equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies: freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, equal employment opportunities, etc.” Is all that “anti-Muslim”? My correspondent thought so. He responded: “So, you would like to see us ditch much of our religion and, thereby, become non-Muslims.”

In other words, he saw a call for equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies, including freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, and equal employment opportunities, as a challenge to his religion. To the extent that they are, these facts have to be confronted by both Muslims and non-Muslims. But it is not “anti-Muslim” to wish freedom of conscience and equality of rights on the Islamic world — quite the contrary.

The report also contains a – by now obligatory – lengthy excursus on Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik: “While these bloggers and pundits were not responsible for Breivik’s deadly attacks, their writings on Islam and multiculturalism appear to have helped create a world view, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended.” While granting that we are not responsible for Breivik’s acts, the report also takes pains to point out that “Robert Spencer and his blog were cited 162 times in the nearly 1,500-page manifesto of Anders Breivik, the confessed Norway terrorist who claimed responsibility for killing 76 people, mostly youths.” Not surprisingly, it doesn’t mention that I have never sanctioned or justified violence, or that Breivik was plotting violence in the 1990s, before I had published anything about Islam, or that he complained that I was not recommending violence, or that he recommended making common cause with jihadists, which I would never do – indicating that his “manifesto” is actually ideologically incoherent, and not a legitimate counter-jihad document at all. These facts are not mentioned in “Fear, Inc.,” because they would interfere with its propagandistic agenda.

As for the claim that Breivik committed his murders because of the worldview we had created that “sees Islam at war with the West,” “Fear, Inc.” is also silent about the many Muslims who have declared that they are indeed at war with the West, in the name of Islam. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said: “Have no doubt… Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.” CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad said in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” (He now denies saying this, but the original reporter sticks by her story.) The prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj said in 2002: “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” The most influential Islamic cleric in the world today, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has said: “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice.”

True to form for these “Islamophobia” reports, “Fear, Inc.” ignores such statements and many others like them, attempting to create the impression that the only ones responsible for the idea that Islam is “at war with the West” are the “Islamophobes.”

Maryam Namazie, One Law For All

The One Law For All Campaign has published a new monograph, “Enemies not Allies: The Far-Right” (pdf here), which is essentially a hit piece on me, Pamela Geller, our organization Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), which is actually a program of our American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), our sister group Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE), and several groups that we have never had anything to do with, such as the British National Party, which we have consistently denounced.

Not coincidentally, One Law For All is headed up by Maryam Namazie, a Marxist anti-Semite who claims to be anti-jihad but actually has attacked Israel and spread Palestinian jihad propaganda on numerous occasions. An anti-jihadist who doesn’t support the country on the front lines of the global jihad? Pull my other leg.

In the new report, Namazie includes one quote from me that has long circulated, and misrepresents its meaning — and in light of the intense demonization that is going on lately, I thought it worthwhile to clarify it. This is the quote:

‘There is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.’ – Robert Spencer, Stop Islamization of America

The report adds:

The group’s American branch, currently run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, was set up by SIOE’s leadership. In 2010 Spencer defended his and Geller’s ‘colleague’ Joseph John Jay, who had recommended the ‘wholesale slaughter’ of Muslim civilians, including children. Spencer has also written that there is ‘no distinction’ between American Muslims and Jihadists, and explained that Muslims must prove their innocence or else be considered guilty. Pamela Geller’s web log has featured conspiratorial articles regarding the President of America’s religion, his family, his sexual history, and the circumstances of his birth. Geller and Spencer have also defended Serbian war criminals.

John Jay does not actually have any role in or position with SIOA, but be that as it may, the report is lying about him. In reality, he has written, in his inimitable fashion, “i do not advocate carte blanche killing one’s liberal relative, nor all muslims. to assert differently is a lie.”

Likewise false is the claim that “Spencer has also written that there is ‘no distinction’ between American Muslims and Jihadists, and explained that Muslims must prove their innocence or else be considered guilty.”

This is based on the quote from me above. Yet not only is that not what the quote means, but I have said just the opposite. See, to take one of many examples, here, where I say, in connection with mosques getting extra police protection, “This is a nation of laws, not vigilantes, and the principle of innocent until proven guilty still holds and must hold.” And here, where I said that “everyone is innocent until proven guilty” and “many Muslims are not on board with this supremacist program.”

Time Magazine has published a classic example of the Islamic supremacist attempt to position Muslims as victims and deflect attention away from the global jihad. This effort has, of course, gained a new impetus from the Norway murders, which the Left and their Islamic supremacist allies are using as a pretext to discredit all resistance to jihad activity of any kind. The mainstream media as a whole has taken the stance that the anti-jihadists named in the murderer’s manifesto are responsible for the murders, despite the fact that none of us have ever advocated violence or any kind of illegality.

Media bias? Media support for the jihad? What else is new? Is anyone doing anything else these days? Still, I think it important to answer as many as I can of these and show the truth:

“When Slogans Beget Slaughter,” by Ishaan Tharoor, was published by Time Magazine on August 6:

Last year on Sept. 11, I stood at Ground Zero as hundreds of people shouted obscenities against Muslims and Islam.

There were actually many thousands of people there, as photos attest. But however many people were there, were “hundreds of people” really shouting “obscenities against Muslims and Islam”? Absolutely not. In a crowd of that size it is impossible to ensure that everyone is civil and polite, but our speakers set the tone, and none of them indulged in or encouraged any “obscenities” whatsoever. The videos are readily available on YouTube. Tharoor here is defaming not just me, but all the decent people who turned out to protest the desecration that is the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero. And his whole argument here depends on this defamatory charge. But I’d like to see him substantiate it.

They were gathered to protest the proposed construction of a Muslim-run interfaith community center nearby, which had earned the inaccurate moniker Ground Zero mosque.

A “Muslim-run interfaith community.” We were actually the ones who suggested that if the Ground Zero Mosque organizers were serious about reaching out to non-Muslims, they could include a synagogue, a church, and a Hindu temple inside their center. This suggestion, like everything we said, was arrogantly brushed aside with more smear charges of “hate” — as Tharoor is charging in this piece.

The rally was conducted by a motley crew of Islamophobes, among them several European visitors. Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called for a ban on immigration to the Netherlands from Muslim countries, denounced the arrival of a “new Mecca” on the shores of what was once New Amsterdam….

Actually he didn’t say that at all. Watch his speech here. He was actually lauding New York’s tradition of tolerance, and said that if New York were open only to people of one persuasion, it would not be New York, but would be like Mecca.

I mention this because the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the man behind the massacre in Norway, echoed those calls. Multiculturalism, Marxism, the supposed insensibility of Islam to Western values and the appeasement tendencies of a naive liberal elite: such were the grievances raised separately by both Breivik and the riled-up crowd in lower Manhattan. The writings of Robert Spencer — an organizer of that rally and an anti-Muslim polemicist routinely accused of hate speech — were cited 64 times in Breivik’s manifesto, according to the New York Times. [...]

Here the plan becomes obvious. Tharoor is by no means the only one trying to use Breivik’s murders to discredit any and all opposition to “multiculturalism, Marxism, the supposed insensibility of Islam to Western values and the appeasement tendencies of a naive [or complicit] liberal elite.” Sit back and take it as your freedoms are stripped from you, for opposition leads to mass murder. Of course, this is no more true than it would be true to say that Martin Luther King should have stopped opposing institutionalized racism because of the Watts riots.

We held a rally for justice for Fatimah Abdallah last June. Now at last the truth is coming out. This is justice in America in 2011: a police department cowers in fear of violence from Muslims if it tells the truth about an Islamic honor killing. Ask yourself if all the “Islamophobia” mongers care even the slightest bit about justice for Fatimah Abdallah.

Here is an extraordinary announcement from David Caton of the Florida Family Association:

Tampa Police CSI tech admits “fear of Muslim reprisal” in Palestinian woman’s death. Florida Family Association asks Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate.Florida Family Association (FFA) now has direct evidence that officials with the Tampa Police Department are intimidated by the possible involvement of religious creed in the death of the Palestinian woman named Fatima Abdallah.

The Tampa Police Department claims that Fatima Abdallah killed herself by repeatedly beating her head against a coffee table. FFA and numerous other organizations call that assertion preposterous. Florida Family Association contends that Fatima Abdallah died as the result of an honor killing and not an accident. Florida Family Association’s full report on the mishandling of the death of Fatimah Abdallah is posted here at Floridafamily.org

Tampa Police Crime Scene Technician Shelby Garman called Florida Family Association’s private investigator on July 26, 2011 to request that her name be removed from the Tampa Police Department GO report posted at Floridafamily.org because of “fear of Muslim reprisal.” Click here to read our private investigator’s report.

Florida Family Association wanted more documentation to support our private investigator’s report so we sent an email to Shelby Garman. When Florida Family Association asked Shelby Garman by email to confirm her request she did. Click here to read her reply and email property validation information that documents she sent the email from the Tampa Police Department.

This Crime Scene Technician’s statement and request verifies what Florida Family Association has alleged all along that the Tampa Police Department and/or the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Office were intimidated by the possible involvement of religious creed in the death of Fatimah Abdallah. It appears that some officials feared Muslim reprisal, feared media attention if the case became public and therefore decided to promptly call this violent death an accident without any further investigation beyond the incident date.

If law enforcement agencies are unwilling to properly investigate and bring charges in violent crimes that may have been perpetuated by religious creeds it will undermine our public safety and severely change our value system.

Florida Family Association sent this letter asking Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the mishandling of this death investigation by the Tampa Police Department and Hillsborough County Medical Examiner.

How many times do you think Scott Shane is going to smear me in The New York Times (my comment on the first time is here) without bothering to even try to create the appearance of journalism by contacting me for comment?

Answer: As many times as he wants, because he is accountable to no one except his hard-Left masters, and they don’t care how viciously biased he is, as long as he serves their agenda.

“To Fight Radical Islam, U.S. Wants Muslim Allies,” by Scott Shane in The New York Times, August 3 (thanks to all who sent this in):

WASHINGTON — Rolling out a new strategy for combating radicalization, White House officials on Wednesday warned that casting broad suspicion on Muslim Americans is counterproductive and could backfire by alienating a religious minority and fueling extremism.

This is ridiculous on its face. We are not to cast “broad suspicion on Muslim Americans,” or else they will become alienated and this will fuel “extremism” — in other words, this inappropriate casting of suspicion will provoke some Muslims to turn to jihad. Yet by what criteria are we to distinguish between Muslims in the U.S. of whom we should be suspicious, and those of whom suspicion is unjustified, because that suspicion will provoke “extremism”? Wouldn’t a Muslim who would turn to violent jihad because he is unjustly suspected of an affinity for violent jihad be a justified object of suspicion?

And since no criteria are offered for non-Muslims to use to determine which Muslims are justifiably suspect and which aren’t, the implication is clear: no Muslims are justifiably suspect. There is no “extremism” among Muslims in the U.S., except that which is provoked by non-Muslim “suspicion.” Naser Abdo? Abdulhakim Muhammad? Naveed Haq? Nidal Hasan? Daniel Boyd? Faisal Shahzad? James Cromitie, David Williams and Onta Williams? Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh? Pshaw. It is only non-Muslim suspicion that provokes “extremism” among Muslims, not anything that is happening in mosques or anywhere among Muslims in the U.S.

The administration also promised to identify accurate educational materials about Islam for law enforcement officers, providing an alternative to biased and ill-informed literature in use in recent years, including by the F.B.I. Denis R. McDonough, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Al Qaeda and those it inspired remained the biggest terrorist threat inside the United States. But he said the bombing and shootings in Norway last month, carried out by a right-wing, anti-Muslim extremist, were a reminder that the government could not focus exclusively on any single brand of radicalism.

Yeah, one nutcase who supposedly found incitement to violence in my (and others’) defense of human rights and freedom versus 17,000+ jihad attacks since 9/11, carried out explicitly and proudly in the name of Islam and with reference to Islamic texts and teachings, and the government should change its focus. And don’t worry: it will.

Meanwhile, the “biased and ill-informed literature” in question includes my books, but neither Scott Shane or Denis R. McDonough nor anyone else can show any inaccuracy in any of them. It is noteworthy that in this torrent of abuse and scapegoating over the last couple of weeks, blaming me for the Norway shooting, no one has come up with any gotcha quote from me — no incitement to violence, no broad-brush demonization of all Muslims (although it is routinely alleged that I do this), and not even anything false. The windy “refutations” of my work that are available online are generally windy tu quoques that point the finger at the West and Christianity without ever genuinely showing that what I say is false. And the numerous jihad attacks that happen worldwide on a daily basis show that, lo and behold, for some reason many Muslims have misunderstood Islam in the same way I have. No one ever explains how they have so drastically misunderstood their peaceful religion in such large numbers, or why the misunderstanders themselves consistently claim for themselves the mantle of Islamic authenticity, and in that generally go unchallenged by their peaceful brethren in the West.

But the demonization continues apace, and the Big Lie that I am a racist and hatemonger is repeated endlessly, despite the fact that I have consistently, over ten books, hundreds of articles, and 25,000+ blog posts, rejected racism and firmly advocated for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people. It may be that this campaign will succeed, and all counterjihadists will be finally discredited. Then all will be well, eh? “Islamophobia” eradicated! And then the world will wake up the next day and find that the jihad continues and Islamic supremacism still advances, and there will be no one to speak up for and defend freedom.

Don’t believe me? No problem. You’ll find out soon enough. But remember one thing also: in Hamas-linked CAIR’s recent report on “Islamophobia,” it made the unexpected admission that not all criticism of Islam constituted “Islamophobia.” But did it offer any examples of critics of Islam, or of jihad, or of Islamic supremacism, who were not “Islamophobes”? Why, no. It didn’t. And that’s because it couldn’t. Its assurance that not all criticism of Islam was “Islamophobia” was just window dressing for the leftist suckers who make up its audience, when in fact Hamas-linked CAIR and its allies defame as racist and bigoted anyone and everyone who dares to stand up against the jihad in any way. And sure, they can demonize us, marginalize us, and cut us off. And then make no mistake: if you resist them, your turn will be next.

Mr. McDonough said that Al Qaeda had a “bankrupt ideology,” but that accusing the entire Muslim community of complicity in terrorism could “feed the sense of disenchantment and disenfranchisement that may spur violent extremist radicalization.”

No one I know has ever accused the “entire Muslim community of complicity in terrorism.” I have never done that, and challenge Scott Shane or anyone else to show that I have. But here again, does McDonough’s mouth connect to his brain at all? He is saying that falsely accusing peaceful Muslims of “complicity in terrorism” could make them turn toward…terrorism? So then how peaceful were they in the first place?

Finally, a word on the Times hit piece, in which I am a significant presence, and yet neither Scott Shane nor anyone else at the Times bothered to contact me for any comment whatsoever.

“Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.,” by Scott Shane in the New York Times, July 24 (thanks to all who sent this in). The first clue as to the bias of Scott Shane comes in the title’s reference to “Anti-Muslim Thought,” as if I am fighting against human beings, rather than against a radically intolerant and repressive ideology. Seven years ago here at Jihad Watch I had an exchange with an English convert to Islam. I said:

“I would like nothing better than a flowering, a renaissance, in the Muslim world, including full equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies: freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, equal employment opportunities, etc.”

Is all that “anti-Muslim”?

My correspondent thought so. He responded: “So, you would like to see us ditch much of our religion and, thereby, become non-Muslims.”

In other words, he saw a call for equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies, including freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, and equal employment opportunities, as a challenge to his religion. To the extent that they are, these facts have to be confronted by both Muslims and non-Muslims. But it is not “anti-Muslim” to wish freedom of conscience and equality of rights on the Islamic world — quite the contrary.

[...] His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

Jihad Watch commenter Kinana of Khaybar analyzed these 64 citations here, and concluded:

“Breivik himself has apparently ‘quoted’ Robert Spencer by pasting in large unprocessed chunks of material from 3 different sources–the documentary, the crusades piece, and the article on Muslim persecution of Christians. Needless to say, Breivik never in his approximately 1500-page ‘compendium’ quotes Spencer as supporting his (Breivik’s) ‘revolutionary’ views, values, methods, proposals, and objectives.”

The Times piece continues:

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim [sic] bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

17,000+ Islamic jihad terror attacks since 9/11. Two non-Muslim terrorists: Tim McVeigh and, sixteen years later, Anders Breivik. And Scott Shane suggests that the “focus of counterterrorism efforts” should be shifted from Islamic jihadists to “the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists.”

Charles Manson thought he heard instructions to kill in the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” and committed mass murder. There were no instructions to kill in the song. In the video below, Bono says, “This song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”

The Breivik murders are being used to discredit all resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. But we’re stealing it back.

Yesterday morning I received this email:

Dear Robert Spencer I am a staff writer at the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. You have probably heard about the tragic terrorist attack in Norway this Friday. Just before the attack took place, the perpetrator published a manifest he has called “A European Declaration of Independence”. In the manifest he uses text from your work and also lists you as one of the leading intellectuals he has been inspired by.Have you ever been in contact with Anders Behring Breivik?

What do you think about being listed as an inspiration for his work?

Best regards
Gunnar Thorenfeldt

I responded:

I have never been in contact with Anders Behring Breivik.If I was indeed an inspiration for his work, I feel the way the Beatles must have felt when they learned that Charles Manson had committed murder after being inspired by messages he thought he heard in their song lyrics. There were no such messages. Nor is there, for any sane person, any inspiration for harming anyone in my work, which has been consistently dedicated to defending human rights for all people.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, renowned poet Reza Aslan graced us with another masterpiece. He wrote this to me on Twitter:

According to logic used by Robert Spencer and @jihadwatchRS to blame muslims for all terror he is personally responsibility for #Oslo

Yes, it’s incoherent, but give the man a break: he’s a poet. Here, try it this way:

According to
logic
used by Robert Spencer
and @jihadwatchRS
to blame muslims for
all terror
he is personally
responsibility
for #Oslo

Genius!

In any case, seriously, I know what he means. But he is wrong, of course. The difference is this: Islamic texts and teachings, and frequently imams, directly exhort their followers to commit acts of violence. I do not. Nor does anyone else in the counterjihad. There is nothing Breivik could conceivably have read at JihadWatch.org or in any of my work anywhere as a justification for killing anyone. There is plenty in the Qur’an and Sunnah that jihadists can and do use as justification for murder.