This Foreign Policy piece is a lurid fantasy about how a sinister and well-heeled cabal of racist, bigoted “Islamophobes” have smeared a thoughtful, mild-mannered academic, Professor Jonathan Brown, and opened him up to death threats, as part of a larger endeavor to do nothing less than deprive Muslims of the freedom of speech. In reality, just about the opposite is true, and this Foreign Policy article is a sterling example of the victimhood propaganda that the establishment media uses in order to cover for its own and deflect attention away from unpleasant realities of Islam. My comments are interspersed below.
“The Making of Islamophobia Inc.: A well-funded network is trying to strip the right to speak away from American Muslims and fanning the politics of fear,” by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Foreign Policy, March 16, 2017:
A decade ago, few outside the academy would have noticed Jonathan Brown’s lecture on slavery. A Washington native who looks a good bit younger than his 39 years, Brown is now a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, where he directs the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He’s also a convert to Islam. Much of his work is aimed at making Islamic thought more accessible to general audiences.
But Brown’s attempts to explain the faith have made him a hate figure for the American right. A flood of articles accuse him of being an apologist for slavery and rape.
His family has received death and rape threats.
It all started with good intentions. Brown is one of the majority of Muslims around the world who believes the Islamic State practices a warped interpretation of Islamic thought that blesses slavery, rape, and other crimes. But Brown also knows that not all Muslims are so quick to dismiss the jihadi group’s theology. Certainly the hundreds of foreign fighters who have trickled into Syria and Iraq to join its ranks find its ideas seductive. For some others, the veneer of religious authenticity used to justify Islamic State atrocities has led to a crisis of faith. And the cacophony of violence plaguing much of the Muslim world tends to drown out the voices of those most qualified to referee the religious confusion.
But Brown felt that he was called to try, hence his public lecture at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia, on Feb. 7. In the first of what he intended as a three-part series, Brown addressed slavery in Islam, hoping to combat the idea that Islam could ever condone the subjugation and exploitation of human beings.
That was when he encountered a cacophony of a different sort — America’s far-right, anti-Muslim ecosystem that has adopted the same twisted interpretations of Islam that the Islamic State promotes. After the lecture, Brown endured a cascade of online attacks from conservative and alternative-right heavyweights such as Ann Coulter, Robert Spencer, and Milo Yiannopoulos, who claimed that he had actually condoned the acts he had set about to condemn. His university department was flooded with demands that he be fired.
Brown is the victim of an increasingly empowered industry of Islamophobia that constricts the space for balanced and open dialogue, sidelining the very Muslims who are doing the most to promote peaceful, orthodox interpretations of Islam. The United States has powerful protections for speech and religious liberty that have allowed faith traditions to hammer out their theological debates in a free and protected environment.
But a targeted network now seeks to deny Muslims that freedom and to treat Islam as a dangerous political ideology rather than a religion — and, like the McCarthyites of the 1950s, to silence and discredit any Muslims who disagree....
Anyway, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian then follows with a long discussion of the evolution of Christian thinking in the U.S. about slavery, concluding it with this claim:
Islam in the United States today is increasingly — and systematically — denied that free and respected space for discussion....
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian then summarizes Brown’s lecture, leaving out the quotes above and other indications that he condones slavery and rape. Then:
What Brown was attempting to do was build a bridge for American Muslims between their sacred scripture and their human rights sensibilities, as many Christian thinkers before him have done. For his efforts, he attracted the attention of an Islamophobic ecosystem designed to marginalize any Muslim who speaks out. Brown’s straightforward academic lecture was quickly transformed into fodder for a flood of unscrupulous articles painting him as someone who “justifies slavery and the rape of female slaves,” leaving him with a horrific online footprint that is likely to trail him for decades.
In the years after 9/11, a small but powerful network of funders and ideological activists has waged a major misinformation campaign, seeking to cast Islam as a diabolical threat that must be eradicated.
Their concerted efforts have resulted in an influential infrastructure of websites, activists, lawmakers, and grassroots organizations that hold sway in municipal councils and state legislatures — and now have the ear of the president of the United States.Between 2001 and 2009, seven charitable foundations donated $42.6 million to think tanks that promoted anti-Muslim rhetoric, as a 2011 report by the Center for American Progress revealed.
These organizations include Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy; Stop Islamization of America, founded by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; the website Jihad Watch, directed by Spencer; and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which hosts Jihad Watch. These organizations came up with several talking points about Islam that they promoted among lawmakers, grassroots networks, and the Christian right. Chiefly among these ideas was the belief that sharia, or Islamic law, is a totalitarian political ideology that presents the greatest domestic threat facing the United States today; that the Muslim Brotherhood, a loosely organized international Islamist movement, has infiltrated the U.S. government; and that Islam commands believers to lie about their motives. In other words, no Muslim can be trusted; you must infiltrate their private spaces to learn what they think.
This campaign has been wildly successful. Gaffney is now a senior advisor to the Donald Trump White House. Gaffney’s influence extends throughout the administration. Kellyanne Conway, who ran Trump’s campaign and now serves as counselor to the president, managed polling for the Center for Security Policy. Stephen Bannon, former head of the alt-right website Breitbart and now White House chief strategist, frequently invited Gaffney to appear on Breitbart’s radio show.
Spencer’s website Jihad Watch, which received more than $500,000 in donations between 2001 and 2009 from those same seven foundations,
has brought him global influence as well. He has published two New York Times bestsellers. The ideas he has promulgated on his site have resonated in the U.S. Tea Party movement and abroad: Anders Breivik, the self-styled Christian conservative who murdered 77 people in the worst mass killing Norway has seen since World War II, referred to Spencer and his website Jihad Watch 162 times in his manifesto, in which he justified his actions as necessary to combat the “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”
Jihad Watch even has a correspondent whose primary beat appears to be attending academic lectures around the Beltway, particularly at Georgetown, and publishing articles “exposing” the creeping ideology of radical Islam.
Websites like Jihad Watch have proliferated, including sites such as Religion of Peace and Answering Islam, and sites that often repost their content, including World Net Daily, the Daily Caller, Heat Street, and, of course, Breitbart.
The effect has been to create a self-reinforcing online ecosystem that churns out frenzied headlines and constructs alternate online biographies, often displayed in first page results from any search engine, in which normal American Muslims are painted as Muslim Brotherhood-linked, jihad-loving, rape-defending threats to the American way of life. Brown’s lecture lasted like chum in shark-infested waters.
It started with a blog post titled “Georgetown Professor Jonathan Brown Defends Slavery as Moral and Rape as Normal in Virginia Lecture” on a website called Student Voices. The author is a former cabdriver from St. Louis and a Muslim convert named Umar Lee, with a long history of flip-flopping between Christianity and extremist Islam who had attended the lecture. “Not knowing what to expect from Brown I was shocked when he basically went into a 90 minute defense of slavery which included an explicit endorsement of non-consensual sex,” Lee wrote. It’s unclear how that was Lee’s takeaway from a lecture explicitly intended to do the opposite.
Lee’s blog was quickly picked up by the website Jihad Watch, with its founder Robert Spencer getting into a round of Twitter sparring with Brown. On Feb. 10, Ann Coulter retweeted a related article from Heat Street to her 1.4 million followers, which read, “A Georgetown Islamic Studies professor defends slavery and says rape is okay because consent is a ‘Western’ concept.”
On Feb. 11, in an attempt to stem the bleeding, Brown tweeted, “Islam as a faith and I as a person condemn slavery, rape and concubinage.”
But it was too late. Soon dozens of articles were published proclaiming that Brown had defended slavery and rape as acceptable. Pamela Geller wrote about him; Milo Yiannopoulos featured Brown on his website and Facebook account. Brown received dozens of voice messages on his office phone telling him to pack his bags and leave the country, implying that people were coming to look for him and threatening to rape his wife.
By Feb. 15, the relatively mainstream conservative National Review had piled on, suggesting that Brown’s supposed defense of slavery may be related to his endowed chair, which is funded by a Saudi. By Feb. 20, it was on Fox News. On Feb. 22, Gaffney wrote a public letter to Georgetown University President John DeGioia calling for Brown’s termination. Brown told Foreign Policy that the university had remained very supportive; other academics have come out to back him....
Ideologues are seeking to marginalize Muslims by making their speech and their activism relating to their religion come at a very high price. They believe that Muslims are malevolent, duplicitous, and dangerous, and these Islamophobes will bend the truth to fit their claims. In the process, they are denying Islam the same functional rights that Christianity enjoys and silencing the very people best poised to reconcile Islam with modern American life. Which may be the very point.