America’s leading Islamophobes

October 8, 2008
Robert Spencer

... the far Left organization known as Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting has issued a list of twelve "America’s Leading Islamophobes" (whom they term, with numbing predictability, "Islamophobia's Dirty Dozen") ...

Anyway, the main rap is that I am "selectively ignoring inconvenient Islamic texts and commentaries." Of course no examples are produced, and none can be. I've asked at this site many, many times in the past for anyone to send me evidence of a mainstream Islamic jurisprudential tradition that did not ever or at very least does not now teach ... jihad as warfare (be it hot war or warfare by other means) against non-believers in order to institute Sharia worldwide... I invite especially Crane, Louay Safi, Khaleel Mohammed, D'Souza or Schwartz to send me the names of those texts and commentaries that I am supposedly ignoring. Specific citations would be good, too. But they would be well advised to take a good long look at my Jihad Watch Blogging the Qur'an series first -- for after doing so, it will be very hard for any honest observer to claim that I am ignoring any Qur'anic text, or any of the commentaries that Muslims consider authoritative.

Quotes from Smearcasters' Dirty Dozen ...

David Horowitz

"The point here is that there are 150 Muslim students’ associations, which are coddled by university administrations and treated as though they were ethnic or religious groups, when they are political groups that are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of the terrorist jihad against the West."

Robert Spencer

"Of course, the devil can quote scripture for his own purpose, but Osama’s use of these and other passages in his messages is consistent ... with traditional understanding of the Quran. When modern-day Jews and Christians read their Bibles, they simply don’t interpret the passages cited as exhorting them to violent actions against unbelievers. This is due to the influence of centuries of interpretative traditions that have moved them away from literalism regarding these passages. But in Islam, there is no comparable interpretative tradition."

"Unfortunately, however, jihad as warfare against non-believers in order to institute “Sharia” worldwide is not propaganda or ignorance, or a heretical doctrine held by a tiny minority of extremists. Instead, it is a constant element of mainstream Islamic theology."

Daniel Pipes

"Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene.... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."...

Pipes sits on the advisory board of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition ... created ... to ... end the “‘soft jihad’…infiltrating our schools.” ... that would “impose a radical Islamic agenda in its classrooms” ...

Pipes has long argued that “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage”

Michael Savage

... "We know you want to take over America. We know you wanna push your religion down everyone’s throat"

"I’m not gonna put my wife in a hijab. And I’m not gonna put my daughter in a burqa. And I’m not getting on my all-fours and braying to Mecca.... I don’t wanna hear anymore about Islam..."

... people "are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world... I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? ... Because you’re going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later."

Rev. Pat Robertson

He describes ... Osama bin Laden as a true disciple of the Quran “because he’s following through literally word-for-word what it says.”

Robertson tells viewers ... that Islam is “not a religion” but a “worldwide political movement... meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law” ... he claims Islam is a “bloody, brutal type of religion” ... whose followers only “deal with history and the truth with violence” and “don’t understand what reasoned dialogue is” ...

Sean Hannity

Remarking on reports that U.S. congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, was planning to be sworn in with a Quran, Fox News personality Sean Hannity ... drew a parallel between Islam and Nazism, asking a guest on his show, “Would you have allowed him to choose, you know, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which is the Nazi bible?” ...

On the Sean Hannity Show ... U.S. Representative Peter King ... told Hannity’s listeners that 85 percent of mosques in America are “ruled by the extremists,” constituting “an enemy living amongst us.” King added that while most American Muslims were more moderate, “they don’t come forward, they don’t tell the police.” ...

Dirty Dozen member Mark Steyn explained on Hannity & Colmes ... that Islam was really “a political project that has opened up branch offices on just about every Main Street throughout the Western world,” and which featured religious leaders interested in “overthrowing 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace and the White House.” Hannity’s response: “Well, then you have to say that that’s a threat within a culture, Mark. I mean, you know, here you have a culture within a culture that’s talking about destroying outside culture.”

Also on Hannity & Colmes ... Pat Robertson called Islam fraudulent and a scam, Mohammad “an absolute wild-eyed fanatic,” and said that Al Qaeda was merely “carrying out Islam.”

Bill O’Reilly

The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble--the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads.... This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard.... If they don’t rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

Also on his list were Iraq (“Their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain”) and Libya (“Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.... Let them eat sand”)...

O’Reilly has bemoaned ... the fact that areas of London are “just packed with just dense Muslim neighborhoods, which breed this kind of contempt for Western society. Why do they let them in?” He defended airport security profiling of Muslims ... saying: “We’re not at war with Granny Frickin. We’re at war with Muslim fanatics. So all young Muslims should be subjected to more scrutiny than Granny”--a move that he said would not be “racial profiling” but rather “criminal profiling.”

O’Reilly compared a University of South Carolina assignment asking incoming freshmen to read a book called Approaching the Quran: The Early Revelations to teaching Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1941 ... On his syndicated radio program ... O’Reilly blamed killings in Iraq on the religion of its people: “They’re all Muslims, and they’re doing what they do. They’re killing each other. And they’re killing Americans.”

Mark Steyn

In his 2006 New York Times best seller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Steyn warns of the “demographic decline” posed by Europe’s emerging Muslim population and suggests there are lessons for Europeans in the Balkan example of ethnic cleansing. As he explains, “You can’t buck demography--except through civil war”:

"The Serbs figured that out--as other Continentals will in the years ahead: If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent."

Steven Emerson

A proponent of a theory that “the U.S. has become occupied fundamentalist territory” ... he has written ... that “the level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity within contemporary Islam... sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.”...

Emerson can ... be heard ... warning ... of the FBI’s failure to “battle... groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other jihadists that don’t break the law.”

Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin calls Islam “the religion of perpetual outrage” ...

In her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in WWII and the War on Terror, Malkin argued that the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans was explained and justified by what she presented as evidence of subversion; she drew a present-day parallel to alleged subversion amongst Muslim and Arab populations in the U.S. today.

On her website ... Malkin explained why she no longer uses the term “Islamofascism”:

"I stopped using the terms “Islamic fascist” and “Islamofascism” a while ago... because they obscure rather than clarify. The views held by the Muslim jihadis who want to destroy us are not marginal views held only by a minority of “Islamic fascists.”"

Glenn Beck

... has warned ... of “World War III and the impending apocalypse,” declaring that “whether you like it or not, this is a religious war. Radical Muslims want to wipe everybody else off the face of the earth.”

Beck reserves some hate-talk even for “good” Muslims ... :

"All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin’ hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, “Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.” ..."

Beck has asked Muslim guests to distinguish themselves from Islamic terrorists. “I mean, you’re reasonable,” he said to Sharida McKenzie, organizer of a Muslim Peace March ... “How do we know the difference between you and those that are trying to kill us?”

When Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, appeared on his show ... Beck said: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’“ Beck added: “I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”

Debbie Schlussel

Schlussel presents America as being in “the war of our lives with Islam,” and depicts the American Muslim community as a dangerous fifth column ... :

"They are here on our shores, pretending to be loyal Americans, and they are plotting to take over our country. With the help of plenty of complicit Muslim-Americans, working for the government and government contractors. "

A resident of the Detroit area, which has large Muslim and Arab populations, she wrote immediately after the September 11 attacks ... : “Don’t blame federal agents for Tuesday’s lapse in national security. Blame my neighbors--the Arab-American and Muslim leaders who’ve actively blocked the fight against terrorism for years.”

Schlussel ... has raised national security concerns about Muslims being employed in certain fields, and having access to public resources that would allow them to teach their own children Arabic:

"As long as we continue to hire Muslims to be translators and analysts, as long as we continue to give money to Arabic and Muslim schools to teach their kids Arabic instead of non-Muslim, non-Arab Americans, as long as the FBI (and ICE) continues to turn down Sephardic Jews and Maronite Lebanese Christians who speak Arabic and who’ve applied for jobs in favor of extremist Muslims... the result we will get is... spies, spies and more spies. "

She has also questioned ... “Barack Hussein Obama’s” patriotism based on his father being born Muslim."