Excerpt:
Wajahat Ali thinks we’re a bunch of hate mongers. Islamophobes. Part of a handful of groups “primarily responsible for orchestrating the majority of anti-Islam messages polluting our national discourse,” he wrote in a 2011 report for the Center for American Progress called “Fear, Inc., the Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.”
But Ali also is part of a dialogue with liberal Zionists as part of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI). The program includes travel to Israel to meet with Israelis and Palestinians to learn about their perspectives.
For this, he is deemed insufficiently hateful about Israel. He is pilloried on social media for “faithwashing,” and as “selfish parasite” willing to “throw the Palestine cause for freedom under the bus” and placed among “Muslim sell-outs who tickle Islamophobes pink but whom no other Muslims listen to.” And now, he’s been disinvited from speaking at this summer’s annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention – touted as the largest gathering of Muslims in the country.