The American Caliph Act

Is the world finally beginning to return to normalcy? One sign is when even our enemies have turned the page away from the pandemic and are beginning to read from their same old tired sheet music of their anti-American hymnals. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently dusted off her circa 2016 Islamist playbook. With the Biden administration outsourcing all cognitive processes about foreign policy to progressivists and Islamists in Obama 3.0, Omar and her allies are unhinged and seeking to make generational changes to our American system that will empower un-American global Islamist narratives.

This should come as no surprise. Since Day One, the Biden administration began peppering its rolls with Islamists and their sympathizers in all its corners from Reema Dodin at the White House to Khizr Khan at the US Commission of International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and now even an attempt to place the long controversial Rashad Hussain as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department.

Nothing, however, better epitomizes the penetration into this administration of Islamist influence operations than the most recent legislative proposal from Rep. Omar and Rep. Schakowsky, which seeks to establish in the Department of State the “Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” an Act described in the “Combating International Islamophobia Act”. A more appropriate name for this proposed legislation would have been “The American Caliph Act”.

First, let us get straight what Rep. Omar means when she invokes the term “Islamophobia” in this legislation. Obviously, since 9/11, the term is deployed against non-Muslims when Islamists insist they are addressing issues synonymous with “anti-Muslim bigotry.” However, the history of the term belies another origin.

The term Islamophobia was a term operationalized in the early ‘90’s by information operatives from autocratic Muslim majority nations. It was then systematically promulgated by their umbrella (neo-Caliphate) organization the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations in order to suppress the free speech and criticism against their regimes. What better way to squelch criticism and invoke the equivalent of global anti-blasphemy laws than to get the west to self-censor due to fear of being labeled anti-Muslim bigots or “Islamophobes”.

These authoritarians had long known that same trick works internally against other Muslims, so deploying it against non-Muslims with an eagerness to please was even simpler. For generations, Islamist theocrats and autocrats imprisoned droves of domestic dissidents by claiming critiques of Islamist jurists and their sharia regimes were akin to being anti-Islam or anti-God.

Condemnation of the ruler was equated to criticizing God and His law. Thus was borne the concept of Islamophobia. It was a simply diversionary information ops tool in which the ruler becomes the protector of the image of the religion of Islam and in effect becomes God (“Allah”). It is always easier to quell the masses through agitprop that says the dissidents are “enemies of God and thus enemies of His Islamic State”, rather than deal with the actual concerns of the demonstrators. So then when the dissidents are tortured, stoned, or hung, the ruling class are only enacting God’s will instead of an inhumane authoritarian injunction of government against the free.

In an identical fashion, Islamists in the West have equated criticism of Muslim leaders, their states, regimes, and legal systems (shariah) with criticisms of Islam. They invoke what have become essentially global anti-blasphemy laws through the self-censorship; of Western leaders trying to avoid the stigma of being labeled “Islamophobes.” Thus, built into this information operation is a civilizational jihad in lands where Islamist remain a minority. The goal is to put non-Muslims on the defense as bigots invoking the name of Islam as their target exploiting their respect for religious freedom. A defensive west becomes much less impactful in its human rights or liberal governance critiques.

Enter Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act, The language invoked in the legislation reads like an OIC state manual on quelling not bigotry but dissent, utilizing easily manipulated language to justify usurpation of human rights. The invocation of the word incitement will be used as a bludgeon to silence those who dare speak ill of Islamist theocrats and their theocracies. Take note of these excerpts from the bill:

“An office to monitor and combat Islamophobia” with the “primary responsibility for…monitoring and combating acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement that occur in foreign countries.”

“…in preparation of that portion of the [State Department] report required by …IRFA (International Religious Freedom Act) of 1998 relating to an assessment and description of the nature and extent of acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement.”

“Instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that attempt to justify or promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Muslim people”.

“actions, if any, taken by the government of the country to respond to such violence and attacks or to eliminate such propaganda or incitement…or to enact and enforce laws relating to the protection of the right to religious freedom of Muslim people”

The space created here for the promotion of Islamism, and its jihad, by suppressing any possibility of countervailing ideas of liberalism and freedom is breathtaking. There is little chance any filter save the Islamist one will be used as the compass for this office’s work. This bill creates a bureaucracy inside the State Department which will have no other purpose besides attacking U.S. allies, from Europe to Israel, under the guise of protecting Muslims from anti-Muslim bigotry.

The Press Release on Rep. Omar’s website lists endorsers who are a veritable who’s who of Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the United States. She uses data attributed to the discredited Islamist group CAIR (a group founded to support Hamas) in order demonstrate the gravity of the so-called Islamophobia problem. Omar follows CAIR’s lead in treating all hate crimes reports as genuine, despite serious questions about the notable tendency of “hate crimes” hoaxes.

Note also that the lead supporters of Omar’s legislation make a habit of slandering and libeling other Muslims in the Muslim Reform Movement as Islamophobes. Islamists uniformly exaggerate the frequency, extent and proportionality of anti-Muslim bigotry compared to other minorities in the United States. Even a cursory review of culled data from the FBI shows orders of magnitude greater number of hate crimes against Jews than Muslims.

It’s worth noting that Islamist groups spoke in one voice to counter my appointment by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to USCIRF in 2012 bolstered by OIC nations and their media. They utilized similarly Orwellian language about Islamophobia at the time, and then were never heard from again during my tenure on the Commission.

In the past two years the Red-Green Axis has gone full tilt on its domestic and global agitprop from the radical left (the Red side of that equation) as it accelerated its planned destruction of American history and its institutions. With the Biden administration, at its beckon call, the radical Islamists are now putting into place an Islamist institution inside our government. It would even be a challenge for an non-Islamist to not end up catering to the Islamist agenda in such an office, even though an anti-Islamist might seek to use the office to counter the biggest offenders of anti-Muslim bigotry—Muslim tyrants.

Once it used to be thought that such an office or position could never be housed in a secular free nation, like the United States.

Yet, a look across the planet in Australia shows a secular nation that somehow allowed the designation of a “Grand Mufti” (aka Caliph), with Islamist groups now vying to place their own separatist Imams at the helm. In fact recently one of the groups proudly sought to host the newest Islamist Emirate leaders of the Taliban for their Australian constituency, until the rest of Australia caught wind of it.

Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act and the office it creates is the first step down the road towards an American Caliph, an established religious office in government issuing edicts regarding what Islam is or isn’t.

Zuhdi Jasser is senior fellow for the Center for Security Policy. He is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona and the co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander and former Vice-Chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is author of the book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith. He is also a physician in private practice. Find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser

Ilhan Omar by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0