University of Michigan Prof Juan Cole: ‘Islam Wasn’t the Threat — Islamophobia Was’

On June 1, 2009, a Muslim named Abdulhakim Muhammad shot a soldier to death at a Little Rock military recruiting office, explicitly in the name of Allah.
On November 5, 2009 in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered thirteen unarmed soldiers while screaming “Allahu akbar.”
On April 15, 2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev exploded two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring many more in the name of Islam.
On September 25, 2014, Alton Nolen, a convert to Islam, beheaded a coworker at Vaughan Foods in Moore, Oklahoma, and had publicly supported jihad violence.
On July 16, 2015 in Chattanooga, a Muslim named Mohammad Abdulazeez went on a shooting spree at a naval base, murdering five soldiers.
On November 4, 2015 at the University of California, Merced, Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people “in the name of Allah.”
On December 2, 2015 in San Bernardino, a Muslim couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a Christmas party, murdering fourteen people.
On January 7, 2016, a convert to Islam named Edward Archer shot Philadelphia police officer Jesse Hartnett because “police bend laws that are contrary to the teachings of the Qur’an.”
On February 11, 2016, a Muslim named Mohammad Barry entered the Nazareth Restaurant & Deli in Columbus,Ohio and began stabbing patrons because the owner of the restaurant was an Israeli.
On June 12, 2016 in Orlando, Florida, a Muslim named Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and injures 58 at a gay bar. He insisted that he was doing this out of loyalty to the Islamic State.
On November 28, 2016 at Ohio State University, a Muslim student, Abdul Artan, intentionally rammed a car into pedestrians and then began stabbing people with a butcher knife, injuring 11 people.
On October 31, 2017, a Muslim named Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov rented a Home Depot pickup truck and intentionally drove it down a bicycle path, killing eight people and injuring twelve.
On December 6, 2019 at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, a second lieutenant of the Saudi Royal Air Force, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, murdered three U.S. sailors.
On May 21, 2020 at the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, a Muslim named Adam Alsahi crashed through a gate, got out and opened fire, shooting a Navy police officer.
On August 29, 2021 in Plano, Texas, a Muslim named Imran Ali Rasheed murdered a Lyft driver, stole her car, and drove to Plano police headquarters, where he shot two people. He left a note explaining his Islamic motivations.

Longtime Jihad Watch readers know that this is only a partial list of jihad terror acts in the U.S. since 9/11. Then there are all the foiled plots.

Meanwhile, how many people were killed or injured in the U.S. in “Islamophobic” attacks? None. None at all.

“Islam wasn’t the threat — Islamophobia was,” says the bought-and-paid-for pseudo-academic Juan Cole.

“Islam Wasn’t the Threat — Islamophobia Was,” by Juan Cole, Foreign Policy In Focus, February 3, 2022:

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American.

Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, Muslim Americans have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.

No matter that this group resides comfortably in the American mainstream, it remains under intensive, often unconstitutional, surveillance. In contrast, during the past two decades, the Department of Justice for the most part gave a pass to violent white supremacists. No matter that they generated more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than any other group. The benign insouciance of the white American elite toward such dangerous fanatics also allowed them to organize freely for the January 6th assault on the Capitol and the potential violent overthrow of the government.

Donell Harvin was the chief of homeland security and intelligence for the government of the District of Columbia in the period leading up to January 6th. He assured NBC News’s Ken Dilanian that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seemed completely oblivious about the plans of white supremacist hate groups to violently halt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, despite plentiful evidence on social media that they were preparing to bring weaponry to the Capitol.

Consider now the treatment that the very same agencies offered distinctly inoffensive Muslim Americans.

Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz has argued that many white Americans see Muslims not merely as a religious group but as a racial one and have placed them on the nethermost rung of this country’s ethnic hierarchy. Muslim Americans are regularly, for instance, profiled at airports and subjected to long interrogations. Over many years, the New York City Police Department gathered intelligence on more than 250 mosques and student groups.

The FBI even put field officers in mosques not only to spy on, but also to entrap worshipers who, alarmed by their wild talk, sometimes reported them to... the FBI.

Aziz notes that Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 to register all Muslim Americans in a database, institute widespread surveillance of mosques, and possibly exclude Muslims from the country. Even non-governmental far-right groups like discredited ex-journalist Steve Emerson’s “Investigative Project on Terrorism” have spied on Muslim Americans.

And as with everything else in the contemporary United States, a partisan divide has emerged regarding them, with 72 percent of Republicans holding the self-evidently false belief that Muslims are more likely to commit violence than adherents of other faiths, while only 32 percent of Democrats say this.

Apparently, though, our concern over the potential commission of violence in this country should actually focus on Republicans. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34 percent of Americans now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, a statistic that rises to an alarming 40 percent among Republicans....

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