“You’ve scurried along the gutter floor for too long, unnoticed. Your prejudice towards Muslims deserves to be put on blast. I’ll do that!” the “Islamophobia” scam artist Nathan Lean has previously tweeted to this author. Like his previously documented anti-Semitic hatred of Israel, such screenshotted tweets from this longstanding Georgetown University associate’s erased Twitter account display the emptiness of his career against “Islamophobia.”
Ensconced in prestigious institutions, Lean has always been quick to employ sophistry in defense against any scrutiny of Islam. “The Bible is full of vicious & violent stuff, and is no different than the Quran,” he has tweeted. This shockingly shallow analysis compares singular events and laws for particular times and places described in the Bible with violent Quranic commands.
“Being a Muslim doesn’t make one prone to violence,” Lean has correspondingly tweeted in utter disregard of the influence of jihadist ideologies upon Muslims past and present.
Therefore a 2017 Barcelona, Spain, jihad suspect was for Lean merely an individual isolated from any wider Islamic ideology. “Driss Oukabir doesn’t represent Islam. He doesn’t represent Muslims. He represents only himself, and only he is to blame,” Lean tweeted.
In complete contradiction of such pontificating on Islam, Lean has then claimed that he is “not the spokesperson” for the “world’s 1.7 billion Muslims.” (They actually might have far more popular spokespersons among jihadists like the Muslim Brotherhood.)
When discussing Islamic modesty restrictions for women, Lean has focused on instances in free countries like the United States where some Muslim women might choose to wear hijab. “Insisting that the veil is oppressive denies agency to women who choose to wear it” and “feeds on Islamophobic narratives,” he has tweeted. He thereby ignored the far larger number of Muslim women worldwide coerced into veiling by various physical and psychological pressures.
Lean has accordingly falsely equated critical analysis of Islamic veiling with police state enforcement of veiling in countries like Iran as “telling women” what they should or should not wear.
Such statements reflect that Lean has made a name for himself pontificating that any criticism of Islam, an idea, is in reality a form of bigoted prejudice against individuals. As a key promoter of the totalitarian term “Islamophobia,” he rejects any skeptical placement of this propaganda within “scare quotes.”
Lean thus has strived to define “Islamophobia” as a form of racism, an evil that for leftists like him seems to always lurk behind any disagreement. He has therefore condemned any vetting of Muslim immigrants, who come in a wide variety of complexions, for dangerous jihadist ideologies. “Presuming that brown-skinned refugees need to be scrutinized for their potentially murderous tendencies is, in fact, racism,” he has tweeted.
Accordingly, Lean has rejected the “sly claim that because Islam isn’t a race, one can’t harbor racist views towards Muslims, and that strident criticism of their religious beliefs is innocuous and indeed noble.”
The self-appointed judge Lean has then condemned this author, as the “suggestion that Islam is merely a belief system is a loophole for you to malign Muslims with impunity. Religion is about identity.”
Ultimately, no criticism of Islam could survive this equation of ideas with individual identity, as in Lean’s statement that “religion is more than a mere disembodied collection of ideas. It is integral to identity.”
As Lean’s previously analyzed tweets have shown, he disparages anyone like the Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser who deviates from Lean’s judgments of Islam as an “anti-Muslim bigot.” Lean effectively danced on the grave of the late eminent historian of Islam Bernard Lewis, who “was a racist whose caricatured depictions of Arabs and Muslims paved the way for unbridled prejudice.” Lean took umbrage at a thoroughly empirical proposition, namely that Lewis “peddled the idea that ‘the West’ is superior to all others. Good riddance.”
Lean slandered the legal authority Alan Dershowitz as a “known plagiarist” and “virulent Islamophobe, who also disparages Arabs as easily as he breathes.”
Lean also unloaded his bile on Brigitte Gabriel, a “venomous snake-of-a-woman that heads the anti-Muslim hate group” ACT for America.
For someone who tirelessly invokes Muslim honor, Lean is actually highly dismissive about religion. “I actually don’t care for religion at all — any of them. I do care, however, about prejudicing people based on their religious identity,” he has tweeted.
For all of Lean’s talk about “Islamophobia,” Lean can be quite caustic about Islamic beliefs like the claimed miraculous journey of Islam’s prophet Muhammad into heaven from the Temple Mount in seventh-century Jerusalem. Irrespective of any beliefs “integral to identity,” Lean has called this an “absurd thing to believe *actually happened.* Of course it didn’t. Reasonable people often suspend critical thinking when it comes to religion.”
While at the supposedly Catholic institution of Georgetown University, Lean has had no reservations about mocking Christians and their identity. With a flawed understanding of the Christian doctrine of Jesus having been fully God and fully man, Lean has tweeted in ignorance of historical evidence substantiating Gospel accounts that:
Ah, yes. The God who sent his virgin-born, half-God-half-man son to planet Earth, knowing in advance that he’d be nailed to a tree and would magically bust out of his grave 3 days later and fly back up to Heaven. Makes perfect sense. Completely logical.
The prospect of a loving God sharing in the trials and toils of ordinary human life somehow merely provokes derision from Lean, who gives no indication of any serious consideration of Christian claims. “Ah yes, that makes *so much more” sense. A God-man. Who moonlights as a carpenter,” Lean has tweeted.
Lean’s caustic irreverence more befits an atheist like Richard Dawkins, not a self-proclaimed expert at Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). He has tweeted:
I don’t understand an invisible Daddy God who impregnated a Jewish teen, which produced a Man-God, who was nailed to a tree and busted out of his grave, and is said to come back to planet Earth one day and ultimately judge me? You’re right. I don’t understand that at all.
In Lean’s desperate attempts to argue that Christian doctrine is just as violent as Islamic doctrine, he has distorted the Christian teaching of Jesus’ self-sacrificial atoning crucifixion for human sin as a manifestation of Christian aggression.
Our religion is a peaceful one. It is tolerant. That is, if you forget that it’s *entirely premised* on an act of premeditated murder whereby God the Father sends his Son to the Earth to be tortured & killed by Romans and nailed to a tree.'—A hypothetical religion.
No matter how sophomoric Lean’s analysis, this self-anointed guru feels qualified to comment upon all manner of theological matters, as in the wake of the sex scandals involving Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Following the disgrace of this longstanding ACMCU supporter and awardee, Lean deemed the “priesthood” as an “archaic post to begin with,” an assessment that might surprise Catholics at Georgetown and other Christians.
For someone who celebrates himself on Islam and other religious issues, Lean is really just another pop theologian. His religious views are no more rigorous than those of rock star Madonna or his longtime associate and religious sensationalist Reza Aslan, whom CNN fired for his profane anti-Donald Trump tweets. Lean has decried this author as someone who has “zero education in anything related to Islam; no Arabic,” yet Lean’s few years of Arabic study is a meager Islam-related credential. His scholarly “Islamophobe” opponents like Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, or Ibn Warraq have far more impressive resumes, to say nothing of native Arabic-speaking non-Muslims like Gabriel, Nonie Darwish, or Walid Phares.
Like many in ivory towers in general and Middle East studies in particular today, Lean is an academic farce who peddles politically correct pieties as profound erudition. Students contemplating the expenditure of their precious tuition funds or laypersons, whom he would presume to lecture, should keep his fraudulent nature in mind for future reference. He is an intellectual snake-oil salesman, not a high priest proclaiming metaphysical holy writ.
Yet disturbingly, like many leftists Lean thuggishly seeks to destroy anyone who attempts to expose the vacuity of people like him, as a final article on his past tweets will examine.
