Fear, Inc.: The Business of Saving Jihad From 'Islamophobia'

Fear, Inc.: The Business of Saving Jihad From 'Islamophobia'
by Robert Spencer
08/30/2011

This past week, “Mohammed K.,” a Muslim teenager in Maryland, was arrested for plotting jihad murder along with Colleen LaRose, aka “Jihad Jane,” who tried to recruit jihadists to kill Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who dared poke fun at Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Mohammed K. also wrote in an Islamic jihadist chat room about carrying out a Columbine-style shooting in his high school in the name of Islam, because “the kids who study in my school proudly state that their parents work in NSA [National Security Agency] and FBI.”

Also last week, two Muslims beat unconscious an ex-Muslim author, Paris Dipersico, for writing a book, Wake Up Call, in which he wrote: “Islam is a religion of ‘peace’ and Muslims will kill you to prove it.” Dipersico said that his attackers “called me a Jew in Arabic and said the Jews are paying you to write this against Islam.” Other Muslims threatened to kill him.

Meanwhile, here again in the last few days, Islamic jihadists murdered 18 people in a jihad/martyrdom suicide car bombing at the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Other Islamic jihadists murdered 18 more people in a jihad/martyrdom suicide attack in Algeria. In Somalia, Islamic jihadists beheaded 11 people, in accord with the Koran’s exhortation to behead unbelievers (47:4). In Pakistan, a Muslim gang put a gun to the head of Mehek Masih, a 14-year-old Christian girl, at her home. As they kidnapped her, one of them told her parents that he was going to force Mehek to “convert to Islam and become my mistress.”

And as all this was happening, the far-Left Center for American Progress issued “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” the latest in an ever-lengthening string of markedly similar “exposés” claiming that the problem America and the world face is not Islamic jihad, but “Islamophobia.” These reports all claim to show that the anti-jihad movement in America is a sinister cabal of well-funded, dishonest hacks stirring up hate against innocent Muslims in order to profit from it. Like them, it is 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.

And all that Islamic jihad activity just in the past week? “Fear, Inc.” gives no indication that any of it ever happened.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is 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. These “Islamophobia” reports serve the OIC’s agenda of ruling discussion of jihad activity off-limits and thereby rendering the West mute and defenseless in the face of the advancing jihad.

The report claims that the “Islamophobes” it profiles (who include, besides me, terror researcher Steven Emerson​, human rights activist Pamela Geller and others) are responsible for the view that “Islam as at war with the West.” The idea that we made that up would come as a surprise to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said that “Allah willing, Islam will conquer … all the mountaintops of the world,” as well as to the prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, who said in 2002 that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate,” and to the most influential Islamic cleric in the world today, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has said: “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice”—and to many other Muslims who have made similarly bellicose and triumphalistic statements about conquering the West.

Any honest presentation about “Islamophobia” would address the violent acts committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, such as those committed just this past week. It would call upon the Muslim community to lessen suspicion against Muslims by cooperating fully and honestly with law enforcement anti-terror activities, something that the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) explicitly discouraged in a recent poster.

“Fear, Inc.” does none of those things. Instead, it ignores jihad activity altogether, portraying Muslims as victims and demonizing all who stand in the way of the misogynistic and unjust agenda of the Islamic jihad, whether advanced by violent or nonviolent means. It thus reveals itself to be just another tool of those same jihadists.
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