The clown prince of “Islamophobia” propagandists, Haroon Moghul, published this ominous diagnosis in Time Magazine last week:
You can blame Islamophobia for that.
Yet to be sure, Moghul is as vicious as other “Islamophobia” propagandists, despite his comic persona: he cheerfully traffics in defamation and dishonesty and routinely takes advantage of his audience’s ignorance about Islam to invert reality, portraying Muslims as victims of a cruel “Islamophobia” machine, instead of non-Muslims threatened by the global jihad.
And now we learn from the sage and stalwart Dwayne that “Islamophobia” is to blame for the disintegration of America’s infrastructure. What? Have dastardly “Islamophobes” infiltrated the air-traffic control system and the government of Flint, Michigan? Have these “Islamophobic” villains persuaded those who take care of our nation’s sewage pipes, bridges and highways that if they kept them in good repair, Muslims might use them?
No. Dwayne has a splendid comic touch, but he is not quite that good. What he means is that if we hadn’t spent all that money in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would have the money to shore up our infrastructure. And that is actually true. Osama bin Laden has stated that he carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to weaken America economically, and he succeeded in splendid fashion. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan incursions were disasters in every way. They were intended to create stable secular republics that would be beacons of freedom in the Islamic world; only someone who believed that Islam is religion of peace that is completely compatible with democracy could ever have thought that outcome would be achieved.
The problem, however, was how we responded to 9/11, not the fact that we responded at all. But Moghul is suggesting that the best response to the global jihad threat would be to ignore it: al-Qaeda, he says, was “a fringe terrorist movement with the support of the backwater Taliban” that Bush transformed into “an existential threat to Western civilization.” Never mind that the Taliban actually ruled Afghanistan at the time, and that al-Qaeda had a global network and had declared war against the United States. “Jeb Bush was one of the rare Republican candidates who wasn’t an anti-Muslim bigot, but he still described ISIS as an ‘existential threat.’ Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, maybe, and in any case, Jeb’s out. But I hardly think Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can destroy the world’s most powerful nation.” Certainly not by means of a conventional war. But his plan is to overwhelm law enforcement and intelligence agencies with so many jihad attacks and plots that they collapse, and bring the whole system down with them.
And in September 2014, the Islamic State issued a lengthy call to Muslims to murder non-Muslim civilians in the U.S. It says: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him. Do not lack. Do not be contemptible. Let your slogan be, ‘May I not be saved if the cross worshipper and taghūt (ruler ruling by manmade laws) patron survives.’ If you are unable to do so, then burn his home, car, or business. Or destroy his crops. If you are unable to do so, then spit in his face.”
Yes, how “Islamophobic” of Jeb to see this group as an existential threat!
What’s more, as wrongheaded as Bush was about both Iraq and Afghanistan, he was responding to a jihad attack that took 3,000 lives. Haroon Moghul is characterizing that response as “Islamophobia.” Apparently he would have preferred we had surrendered outright.
Moghul also whined: “Has any other demographic had to suffer the indignity of being declared insufficiently loyal to be President, or hear proposals to be banned from the country?” Of course, no one said that Muslims were “insufficiently loyal to be President” or should be banned from the country. Ben Carson noted that elements of Sharia contradict Constitutional freedoms, which is manifestly true, since Sharia denies the freedom of speech and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims. Carson pointed out that a Sharia-adherent Muslim would have troubled defending certain elements of the Constitution. That was true, and needs to be discussed. Instead, as leftist commentators always do, Dwayne misrepresents the position of those he hates and fears and sets up a straw man.
The very concept of “Islamophobia,” for that matter, is a straw man. Moghul decries what he calls “the deliberate and calculated inflammation of anti-Muslim sentiment on the right,” maintaining that “anti-Muslim sentiment” comes from sinister professional “Islamophobes.” He would have us believe that nobody would get a negative view of Islam from, say, Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki and Khaled Shaikh Mohammed and Muhammad Atta and Nidal Malik Hasan and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Mohammed Abdulazeez and Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik and so very many others like them. Tell us another, Dwayne!
Time Magazine was once the place where Whittaker Chambers wrote his lyrical and elegant paeans to freedom and rallying cries to stand against Communist tyranny. Now it gives itself over to the likes of Haroon Moghul to pen preposterous victimhood narratives in support of Islamic supremacist tyranny. A swift and steep descent indeed.
