Islamists’ Media Jihad: The Deadly Embrace
The American liberal media continues to pander to the American Islamists’ narrative
The American liberal media continues to pander to the American Islamists’ narrative. Too frequently positions are naturally assumed: that America discriminates and investigates all Muslim Americans, favoring the Islamists’ portrayal of a ‘Muslim America under siege’; that criticism of Muslims is tantamount to defamation of religion, and that challenging the actions of extremist Muslims and their interpretations of their ‘Islam’ is bigoted, rather than objective and serious analysis, even when proffered by observant Muslims like me.
This seduction of our media – which has been subdued largely by intimidation and the fear of accusations of Islamophobia -is the Islamists’ greatest coup, one as a Muslim, I must challenge and one which I am relieved to see The Blaze has decided to address.
Expressing concern, executive editor Chris Fields of The Blaze recent wrote “American journalists bend over backward to treat Muslims in a positive way, even to ludicrous extremes. As a result, terrorists are often called “militants”—even when they are on U.S. government terror watch lists. And any open criticism of radical Islam has typically been treated as “Islamophobia.”
He later draws a contrast with the much more critical portrayal of Christians in the media. His argument is long overdue, though most members of the press are too uncomfortable to consider engaging in this debate.
A new and important documentary reveals what liberal media willingly obscures: the sophistication of Islamist operatives exploiting America’s civil rights privileges. The Investigative Project on Terrorism’s “The Grand Deception” is based on primary source materials gathered at assemblies of some Muslim American Islamist groups, exposing the Muslim Brotherhood in particular.
Problematically for me, an observant Muslim, Islamist groups self-identify as ‘Muslim’ and primarily ‘religious’, while their actions speak to not Islam but religionized Islamofacism, an explicitly totalitarian political Islamism.
“The Grand Deception” exposes radical Islamist in their own words, shattering to any Muslim in America- and is exactly why our communities invite unwanted scrutiny. In their own voices, American Islamists demand violent jihad against the United States.
The Qu’ran calls such individuals the Munafiquun – the hypocrites and emphasizes the need for Muslims to recognize and repudiate them. The documentary captures such hypocrisy, unveiling not only preachers recognized as ‘spiritual leaders’ but also mainstream groups branded as American ‘Muslim advocacy’ groups while remaining unindicted coconspirators in Federal Investigations.
Declassified Muslim Brotherhood memoranda examined in the movie claim Muslims’ “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religion” supposedly while also enjoying all the civil rights protections and privileges America affords a ‘religious minority’ on American soil.
Muslim Student Associations members are documented in their own voices expressing loyalty to Osama Bin Laden. “I don’t know this guy,” Amir Mertaban, recorded in 2007 when President of MSA West, “I don’t know what he did. I don’t know what he said. I don’t know what happened. But we defend Muslim brothers, and we defend our Muslim sisters to the end. Is that clear?”
The film examines Nidal Malik Hassan, a Muslim US Army Medical Corp psychiatrist-turned-mass killer who shot 13 and wounded 29 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood Texas, the worst shooting ever at an American military base. Authorities cowered by an official lexicon ‘sanitized’ by President Obama’s administration refused to call Hassan’s actions ‘radical Islamist terrorism’ instead calling it ‘workplace violence’. This is precisely the reticence Fields refers to by way of a ‘media jihad”.
Radicalism within US armed forces was examined in the 2012 King Investigative Hearings on the Radicalization of Muslim Americans, showing neither Hassan’s ideology hardly an exception.
In June 2012, testifying in the fifth of these hearings I became privy to the sum findings, which paint a comprehensive view of America’s Islamists. This data is not the result of indiscriminate, slipshod and unlawful profiling but of devoted, painstaking police work and hard-won intelligence. While calls for transparency of law enforcement surveillance rise, calls to pursue the rich findings of these hearings are yet to be heard.
Congress is reluctant to confront reality. One Homeland Security Committee member objected to my testimony supporting investigation of some Muslim Americans and advising against the dangers of sanitizing the lexicon. I was firmly warned that my words were inviting another ‘Internment’ akin to the Japanese internment during World War Two.
Such hysteria, at the highest levels of our society, vilifies both Muslims willing to enter this debate and any agency gathering meaningful data within the bounds of the law.
Muslims in America are diverse, rendering political Islamists difficult to identify and the need for vigilance ever greater. Muslims in America come from over 68 different countries of origin. We belong to over 70 distinct sects. A 2011 Pew survey shows Muslim Americans’ religiosity to be heterogeneous – more than half do not attend weekly services. Even so, the overwhelming majority of Americas Muslims state quality of life for Muslims in the U.S. is better than in most Muslim countries upending the Islamist narrative of an entire community under siege from civil rights violations but again these arguments go unheard.
The battle for America’s Muslim narrative is here even if the liberal media has failed to identify this. Like it or not, some Muslim Americans are American political Islamists no matter how reluctant we are to accept this assertion. If only the media paid the same scrutiny to such data as to that gathered by the IPT in The Grand Deception, or accrued during the King Investigative Hearings as is to the actions or language of our enforcement agencies, we would greatly advance the public debate. It’s time to emerge from our torpor. Refusing to debate these issues, however uncomfortable or intimidating, is a grand deception indeed, one which we accomplish at our own hand and our own peril.
