Now we see clearly (with the World Trade Towers being destroyed) what the result of this "teaching" and "language" of Islam is.
Below is one of those "denial" articles from the Islamics, trying to "cover" for their own "hate teachings" in Islam -- which is similar to Hitler and the Nazis.
December 4, 2000
Steven Emerson's Crusade
Why is a journalist pushing questionable stories from behind the scenes?
by John F. Sugg
On Sunday, June 28, a sensational story appeared in the British newspaper The Observer: "Pakistan was planning nuclear first strike on India." The stunning revelation that South Asia was on the brink of thermonuclear war was credited to an unnamed "senior Pakistani weapons scientist who has defected." The next day, papers on the Indian subcontinent were full of the news. Shock spread and distrust mounted. "The scenario is frightening," stated the Times of India (6/29/98).
On Wednesday, July 1, a USA Today report by Barbara Slavin named the defector, Iftikhar Chaudhry Khan. The press scrambled to contact New York lawyer Michael Wildes, who represents Khan in his attempt to get political asylum.
Emerson, in an odd role for a journalist, worked behind the scenes to interest reporters in Wildes' client. A top network news producer says his congressional sources and news contacts were tipped to the story by Emerson. Slavin says she was mainly convinced of the story's legitimacy because of one of the Observer's three writers was associated with the prestigious military analysis group Jane's, but that Emerson's involvement added credibility. Attorney Wildes himself says, "Emerson was helpful in corroborating information and making scientific clarifications."
As the story matured, skepticism mounted about Khan, especially after sources in Pakistan described him as "a former low-level accountant at a company that makes bathroom fixtures." (San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/3/98) By July 7, U.S. nuclear physicists had interviewed Khan and pronounced him a fraud (USA Today, 7/7/98).
Emerson's priorities
Emerson has escaped notice in the affair--but his efforts had helped craft a hard-to-erase public perception that Pakistan was the bad guy among Asia's nuclear novices.
The role Emerson played may at first seem perplexing. He presents himself as a journalist, yet he handed off what appeared to be a major story to rivals. A closer look at Emerson's career suggests his priority is not so much news as it is an unrelenting attack against Arabs and Muslims. From this perspective, his gambit with Khan seems easier to understand: Pakistan is a Muslim nation, while India's nuclear program has long been linked to Israel. As the Indian Express noted (6/29/98), Pakistani politicians were "convinced that they were about to be attacked by India, possibly with Israeli assistance."
Emerson's willingness to push an extremely thin story--with potentially explosive consequences--is also consistent with the lengthy list of mistakes and distortions that mar his credentials as an expert on terrorism.
Those blemishes had, for a time, seemed to drive Emerson from major news outlets. He has had to resort to new tactics to maintain his anti-Muslim crusade--an "anti-terrorism" journal that he uses as a soapbox, associates whose reputations aren't as damaged as his, and, as in the Khan episode, staying behind the curtains.
Emerson was back in the news last August--when terrorist bombs shattered U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. While most Americans watched the grisly nightly news in open-mouthed dismay, self-styled anti-terrorism experts seemed to be jostling with one another to grab a few minutes on Rivera Live, the Today show and CNN. For a brief few days, they even displaced the Monicagate pundits.
In the vanguard of the chattering heads was Emerson, whose past errors were quickly forgotten in the wake of African and Middle Eastern carnage.
"Middle Eastern Trait"
Emerson gained prominence in the early '90s. He published books, wrote articles, produced a documentary, won awards and was frequently quoted. The media, Capitol Hill and scholars paid attention. "I respect his research. He gets to people who were at the events," says Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of A Century of Spies.
As Emerson's fame mounted, so did criticism. Emerson's book, The Fall of Pan Am 103, was chastised by the Columbia Journalism Review, which noted in July 1990 that passages "bear a striking resemblance, in both substance and style" to reports in the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. Reporters from the Syracuse newspaper told this writer that they cornered Emerson at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference and forced an apology.
A New York Times review (5/19/91) of his 1991 book Terrorist chided that it was "marred by factual errors…and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias." His 1994 PBS video, Jihad in America (11/94), was faulted for bigotry and misrepresentations--veteran reporter Robert Friedman (The Nation, 5/15/95) accused Emerson of "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs."
Emerson was wrong when he initially pointed to Yugoslavians as suspects in the World Trade Center bombing (CNN, 3/2/93). He was wrong when he said on CNBC (8/23/96) that "it was a bomb that brought down TWA Flight 800."
Emerson's most notorious gaffe was his claim that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing showed "a Middle Eastern trait" because it "was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible." (CBS News, 4/19/95) Afterward, news organizations appeared less interested in Emerson's pronouncements. A CBS contract expired and wasn't renewed. Emerson had been a regular source and occasional writer for the Washington Post; his name doesn't turn up once in Post archives after Jan. 1, 1996. USA Today mentioned Emerson a dozen times before September 1996, none after.
"He's poison," says investigative author Seymour Hersh, when asked about how Emerson is perceived by fellow journalists.
Dubious document
Yet Emerson seems irrepressible. In 1997, for example, an Associated Press editor became convinced that Emerson was the "mother lode of terrorism information," according to a reporter who worked on a series that looked at American Muslim groups.
As a consultant on the series, Emerson presented AP reporters with what were "supposed to be FBI documents" describing mainstream American Muslim groups with alleged terrorist sympathies, according to the project's lead writer, Richard Cole. One of the reporters uncovered an earlier, almost identical document authored by Emerson. The purported FBI dossier "was really his," Cole says. "He had edited out all phrases, taken out anything that made it look like his."
Another AP reporter, Fred Bayles, recalls that Emerson "could never back up what he said. We couldn't believe that document was from the FBI files."
Emerson's contribution was largely stripped from the series, and he retaliated with a "multi-page rant," according to Cole. AP Executive Editor Bill Ahearn does not dispute that the incident happened, but refuses to comment or to release documents because the episode was deemed an "internal matter." A ranking AP editor in Washington says: "We would be very, very, very, very leery of using Steve Emerson."
Also during Emerson's lean years, he scored a November 1996 hit in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (11/3/96)--owned by right-wing Clinton-basher Richard Mellon Scaife, who also partially funded Jihad in America. Considering Scaife's patronage, it is not surprising that Emerson declared that Muslim terrorist sympathizers were hanging out at the White House. Emerson had a similar commentary piece printed three months earlier in the Wall Street Journal (8/5/96), one of the writer's few consistent major outlets.
Tampa's "terrorists"
His most fruitful media foray during this period was at a Tampa, Florida, newspaper. Emerson's Jihad in America video had, in part, targeted Islamic scholars at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Following Emerson's leads, a reporter for the Tampa Tribune launched a series of articles in 1995 titled "Ties to Terrorists." The series and subsequent articles relied on Emerson as a primary source.
The Tribune's managing editor, Bruce Witwer, wrote in a July 15, 1997, letter to an attorney: "Emerson is an acknowledged expert in the field, while he may be controversial. Emerson has the information. It is legitimate information." But the information that Emerson is "controversial"--much less Emerson's record of mistakes and the allegations of bias that swirl around him--has never been disclosed by the Tribune to its readers.
The Tribune's articles lacked balance and fairness, according to other newspapers that have covered the events, including the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald. The Herald (3/22/98) ran a lengthy analysis of the Tribune's reporting and concluded the Tampa newspaper had ignored "perfectly innocent" interpretations of activity, giving vent only to characterizations that suggested "extremely dark forces were on the prowl."
Among the Tribune's and Emerson's charges are that Muslims, while at the University of South Florida, were active Islamic Jihad commanders. Emerson told Congress: "One of the world's most lethal terrorist factions was based out of Tampa." If that's so, federal agents must have missed something. Although the FBI and INS have been searching for clues for more than three years, no charges have been filed.
Like Emerson, the Tribune uses tenuous chains of association to bolster its claims that individuals are linked to terrorist groups. For example, in one article, the Tribune claimed that because an Islamic Jihad leader had given a Reuters reporter, Paul Eedle, several articles, including one interview published in a Tampa magazine, and because material seized by federal agents in Tampa included a 1993 Jihad calendar, this proved an organizational linkage. The Tribune (7/28/98), ignoring the stated purpose of the South Florida scholars to collect material about and from all Middle East points of view, stated: "Eedle's experience appears to tighten the relationship between the Jihad and the Tampa group."
Eedle, when interviewed for this article, said that while it was clear people in Tampa were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, "being given the magazine didn't prove that there was any organizational link between Islamic Jihad and the publishers of the magazine in Tampa."
Although no criminal charges have been filed in the Tampa case, Emerson flatly states there is insidious wrongdoing. In February 1996, Emerson claimed that Tampa Muslim academics were directly involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (St. Petersburg Times, 2/10/96). "I am constrained at this point from revealing some of those details," Emerson said. "But they include money transfers, they include actual reservations and planning for the conspirators in the bombing, and they include visits back and forth between Tampa and New York and New Jersey, between officials here of the groups [operating in Tampa] and officials there."
Yet no federal record of such allegations could be found. A Freedom of Information request to the Justice Department seeking any information tying Tampa residents to the World Trade Center bombing produced this reply from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General: "Please be advised that no responsive records were located."
Actions have been taken against a couple of Emerson's targets. Emerson seemed to gloat (Miami Herald, 3/22/98) that one Tampa academic, Mazen Al-Najjar, has been jailed during a deportation appeal since May 1997 based on secret evidence that he is a national security threat. And he appeared gleeful that another University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, was removed from the classroom and is now unable to "propagate his message to young students" (Miami Herald, 3/22/98). Typical of Emerson's fact-checking, the university says no one has ever alleged that Al-Arian, who is again teaching, brought politics into the classroom.
"Arabaphobia"
This summer's U.S. embassy bombings produced others who believed in Emerson's legitimacy. Geraldo welcomed Emerson, as did NPR, Good Morning America and MSNBC's Internight. Emerson popped an opinion piece into the Wall Street Journal (8/8/98), that attacked Clinton for "legitimizing self-declared 'civil rights' and 'mainstream' Islamic organizations that in fact operate as propaganda and political arms of Islamic fundamentalist movements."
Although he piously prefaces diatribes by saying there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, it's a hollow defense. He claimed, in a March 1995 article in Jewish Monthly, that Islam "sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine."
Occasionally, Emerson outdoes himself with hyperbole. In an inflammatory letter to the Voice of America (12/2/94), he fumed that radical Muslims in the United States are plotting the "mass murder of all Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims." Buddhists, Wiccans and Scientologists are apparently exempt in the apocalypse Emerson prophesies. Last year he warned that "the U.S. has become occupied fundamentalist territory" (Jerusalem Post, 8/8/97).
While Emerson makes incredible claims about Muslim conspiracies that purportedly intend to commit terrorism inside U.S. borders, he ignores the fact that far more of these American atrocities, such as the anti-abortion bombings and murders, are committed by apple-pie militant Christian fundamentalists.
His denunciations are often backed up only by allusions to unnamed law enforcement sources. "Emerson makes unsubstantiated allegations of widespread conspiracies in Arab-American communities and brushes aside his lack of documented evidence by implying it only proves how clever and sinister the Arab/Muslim menace really is," investigative reporter Chip Berlet has written (Covert Action Quarterly, Summer/95). "This is a prejudiced and Arabaphobic twist on the old anti-Semitic canard of the crafty and manipulative Jew."
Emerson buffs, such as Sen. Jon Kyl (R.-Arizona) provide the journalist with a podium from which to make claims that are then recycled as part of the public record. A Kyl subcommittee welcomed Emerson as a witness in February, allowing him to present a 46-page harangue against mainstream American Muslim organizations.
Savaging critics
When criticized by journalists, Emerson retaliates with invective-laden letters, often from lawyers. He has launched salvos at the Miami Herald, The Nation, Voice of America, FAIR (which publishes Extra!), and a Council on Foreign Relations newsletter, as well as at numerous individual journalists.
Kojo Nnamdi, a talk show host on Howard University's WHUT, remembers that when he invited some Muslims on a program, "Emerson started making threats. He wanted to link academics to terrorists. He succeeded in delaying the program, I'm sorry to say."
After Emerson in 1996 attacked the Council on Foreign Relations for including Muslim points of views in its newsletter, the group's president, Leslie Gelb, dubbed Emerson the "grand inquisitor." (Forward, 5/10/96)
The Miami Herald's highly regarded senior writer, Martin Merzer--who has experience as a bureau chief in Jerusalem--demolished many of Emerson's and the Tampa Tribune's claims in a March 1998 article (3/22/98). Prior to publication, Emerson sent a letter to the Herald's top editor, Doug Clifton, with copies to Jewish leaders, in an attempt to derail the story. The letter called Merzer, who is Jewish, "nothing short of racist."
Subsequently, in a publication run by Emerson allies that has become his bully pulpit, the Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International (Spring/98), Emerson published what he claimed was a transcript of his interview by Merzer. The "transcript" presents Merzer as stammering and admitting to extraordinary ignorance. Merzer calls the transcript a fabrication. "It's crap," he says. "A few tiny kernels of truth surrounded by a mountain of lies."
Ironically, despite Emerson's many attempts to silence his critics, he spends much of his time nowadays wailing that he's the victim. Recently, an NPR producer was moved by protests over Emerson's anti-Muslim prejudice to stop using him as an expert on the network. That prompted Emerson fans, such as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby (8/31/98), to cry "blacklisting"--never bothering to note that Emerson is a blacklister with few rivals.
Money trail
As recognition of Emerson's liabilities has grown, he has handed his bullhorn to less controversial fellow travelers. Retired federal agents Oliver "Buck" Revell and Steve Pomerantz, who run a security business, showed up echoing Emersonisms in an October 31 Washington Post article warning of conspiracies and front organizations.
In an interview prior to the article's publication, the co-author of that piece, John Mintz, said he was aware that Emerson was highly controversial. The Post's solution: Don't mention Emerson but use his allies. (Mintz had been provided with material documenting links among Emerson, Pomerantz and Revell.)
The three "experts" spend a lot of time congratulating each other on their courage and expertise. Pomerantz, for example, has written that Emerson "is actually better informed in some areas than the responsible agencies of government." (That came as news to Bob Blitzer, the FBI's top counterterrorism official, who says Emerson "doesn't have access to any high-level FBI intelligence.")
Revell's credits include quashing an investigation of the Iran-Contra arms smuggling operation (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, p. 231). Revell also acknowledges another member of the fraternity is Yigal Carmon, a right-wing Israeli intelligence commander who endorsed the use of torture (Washington Post, 5/4/95), and who has stayed at Emerson's Washington apartment on trips to lobby Congress against Middle East peace initiatives (The Nation, 5/15/95). An Associated Press reporter who has dealt with Emerson and Carmon says: "I have no doubt these guys are working together."
Says Vince Cannistraro, an ABC consultant and a retired CIA counterterrorism official, of Emerson's allies, Pomerantz, Revell and Carmon: "They're Israeli-funded. How do I know that? Because they tried to recruit me." Revell denies Cannistraro's assertion, but refuses to discuss his group's finances.
Emerson's own financing is hazy. He has received funding from Scaife. Some Emerson critics suspect Israeli backing. The Jerusalem Post (9/17/94) has noted that Emerson has "close ties to Israeli intelligence."
"He's carrying the ball for Likud," says investigative journalist Robert Parry, referring to Israel's right-wing ruling party. Victor Ostrovsky, who defected from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and has written books disclosing its secrets, calls Emerson "the horn"--because he trumpets Mossad claims.
Presumed credible
Emerson is aided by those who appear to be ignorant of his record, or who fear reprisal from his backers. He testified in February before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Sen. Kyl. The testimony accused most major American Muslim organization of terrorist connections. "We presumed him to be credible [because] he is known to have contact with street agents," said Jim Savage, at the time a Kyl staffer. "He represented his findings as authentic. We haven't verified them."
After the NPR spat over the summer, Jacoby's column quickly bludgeoned the network into capitulation. Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's news chief, kowtowed and stated in a letter to the Boston Globe that Emerson "has never been banned from NPR and never will be. Emerson is one of many commentators available to NPR on events involving his area of expertise (terrorism and counter-terrorism). No doubt there will be other opportunities for him to appear again."
A warning to us all.
John F. Sugg is senior editor of the Weekly Planet, the alternative newspaper in the Tampa Bay area. He regularly writes media criticism, including articles on Steven Emerson and the Tampa Tribune's coverage of Muslims. Sugg has received three threatening letters from Emerson's lawyer seeking--unsuccessfully--to deter further reporting.
"The level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity within contemporary Islam, unfortunately, is something that we are not totally cognizant of, or that we don't want to accept. We don't want to accept it because to do so would be to acknowledge that one of the world's great religions -- which has more than 1.4 billion adherents -- somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine." -- Steven Emerson, Jewish Monthly (3/95)
_______________________________________
Source:
by courtesy Copyright 1999-2000 Extra / FAIR
Copyright 2000 Media Monitors Network. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
Vitally important & explosively relevant documentary!
We can safely hope, and perhaps even assume, that most of the domestic organizations supporting terror in this film are now, belatedly,
on the USG's / Pres. Bush's targeted terrorist front organizations &
"frozen assets" list
and a number of their memebers are being "interviewed" at least (& arrested, at best) in recent days.
Daniel Pipes,
Commentary, November 1999
The problem began in January 1989. That was when Muslims living in Bradford, England, decided to do something to show their anger about The Satanic Verses, a new novel by the famed writer Salman Rushdie that included passages making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. The Muslims, mostly Pakistani immigrants, purchased a copy of the novel, took it to a public square, attached it to as take, and set it on fire. Television news showed this auto da fé in scandalized detail, and pictures of the scene were splashed across the British media for days, making it a major topic of discussion throughout the country.
In Pakistan itself, after a month's buildup, an unruly mob of some10,000 anti-Rushdie protesters took to the streets of the capital city of Islamabad. Marching to the American Cultural Center (a fact significant in itself), they attempted with great energy, but without success, to set the heavily fortified building on fire. Six people died in the violence, and many more were injured.
These events, in turn, caught the attention of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary ruler of Iran, who took prompt and drastic action: on February 14, 1989, he called upon "all zealous Muslims quickly to execute" not just Salman Rushdie as the author of The Satanic Verses but "all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content." This edict led to emergency measures in England to protect Rushdie's person, and to weeks and months of intense debate among the world's politicians and intellectuals about the issues of freedom of speech and blasphemy.
When the dust settled, Khomeini had failed in his specific goal of eliminating Rushdie physically: today, over a decade later, the author is once again writing well-received books and accepting literary awards. But if Khomeini did not manage to harm Rushdie, he did accomplish something far more profound: he stirred the souls of many Muslims, reviving a sense of confidence in their faith and a strong impatience with any denigration of it, as well as a determination to take the offensive against anyone perceived to be a blasphemer or even a critic. Although Khomeini himself passed from the scene just weeks after issuing his decree, the spirit it engendered is very much alive.
During the decade since 1989, many efforts have been undertaken by the forces of Islamism-otherwise known as Muslim fundamentalism-to silence critics. Ranging from outright violence to more sophisticated but no less effective techniques, they have produced impressive results.
Some early acts of physical intimidation involved the Rushdie case itself. Translators of The Satanic Verses were stabbed and seriously injured in Norway and Italy and, in Japan, murdered. In Turkey, another translator escaped when a fire set in his hotel failed to kill him, but 37 others died in the blaze. Other acts of violence were designed to punish both Muslims and non-Muslims for a variety of alleged offenses.
Egypt alone offers a number of examples. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a professor of literature who wrote that certain references in the Qur'an to supernatural phenomena should be read as metaphors, found his marriage dissolved by an Egyptian court on the grounds that his writings proved him an apostate. (According to Islamic law, a Muslim woman may not be married to a non-Muslim.) Another case involved the author of a nonconformist essay on Islam: he, his publisher, and the book's printer were each sentenced to eight years in jail on the charge of blasphemy. Farag Foda, an Egyptian intellectual who expressed scorn for the Islamist program, was shot and murdered. And Naguib Mahfouz, the elderly and much-celebrated Nobel Prize laureate for literature, was seriously injured in Cairo when an assailant knifed him in the neck, presumably in revenge for an allegorical novel written decades earlier.
Nor has the campaign been limited to Muslim-majority countries. Makin Morcos, also an Egyptian, was killed in Australia for criticizing the Islamists' anti-Christian campaign in his native country; Rashad Khalifa, a biochemist from Egypt living in Tucson, Arizona, was stabbed to death in January 1990 to silence his heretical ideas. (A member of Usama bin Laden's gang has been implicated in the latter murder.) Both these incidents sent a chilling message: you can run but you cannot hide.
Nor, finally, is the campaign in Western countries limited to violence or threats of violence against Muslims; it also extends to non-Muslims. In some cases, purely private matters may be at issue: Jack Briggs, an Englishman, has been on the lam for years, hiding with his wife from her Pakistani family who have vowed to kill both of them (even though they are properly married and even though he converted to Islam to win their approval). Other cases concern publicly expressed views: Steven Emerson, a former Senate aide and investigative reporter for U.S. News & World Report, CNN, and other media, received death threats for Jihad in America, his award-winning television documentary that drew on the Islamists' own commercial videos to demonstrate their virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American views and activities.
Emerson told his story to a congressional committee in 1998, and it bears quoting at length:
Immediately following the release of Jihad in America, I became the target of radical fundamentalist groups throughout the United States (and internationally) who fiercely denied the existence of "Islamic extremism" and accused me of engaging in an "attack against Islam." For this "transgression," my life has been permanently changed.
Explaining the details of just one incident-to pick among a whole series-will help you understand the changes I have been forced to endure.
One morning, in late 1995, I was paged by a federal law-enforcement official. When I returned the call, this official immediately instructed me to head downtown to his office and specifically directed me to take a taxi rather than my car. The urgency in this person's voice was palpable. When I arrived at the office, I was ushered into a room where a group of other law-enforcement officials was waiting. Within minutes, I found out why I had been summoned: I was told a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists had been assigned to carry out an assassination of me. An actual hit team had been dispatched from another country to the United States. The squad, according to the available intelligence, was to rendezvous with its American-based colleagues located in several U.S. cities.
Compounding the jolt of being told about this threat was an additional piece of information: the assassination squad had been successfully able to elude law-enforcement surveillance.
I was told that I had limited choices: since I was not a full-time government employee, I was not entitled to 24-hour-a-day police protection. However, I could probably get permission to enter the Witness Security Program under the right circumstances. But the prospect of being spirited away and given a new identity was not acceptable to me-especially since that would afford the terrorists a moral victory in having shut me down. Frankly, however, the alternative option was not that attractive either-being on my own and taking my own chances. And yet that for me was the only effective option.
While Emerson remains doggedly on the trail of Islamists, especially those among them who support terrorism, he has for four years been forced to live at a clandestine address, always watching his movements. Like the case of Rashad Khalifa, murdered in Tucson for his views, the case of Steven Emerson suggests that, despite the Constitution's guarantees of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, when it comes to Islam, unapproved thinking can lead to personal danger or even death.
Still, were force the only weapon in the Islamists' arsenal, their accomplishments would be limited. In the West, at least, violence and physical intimidation can achieve only so much. But, contrary to stereotype, Islamists are hardly all wild-eyed hit men and suicide bombers; in Western countries, many of them are quite at home with computers, well-versed in the latest lobbying techniques, and adept at the game of victimology. Energetic, determined, and skilled, they employ the tools not of physical but rather of intellectual intimidation. Their aim in doing so is to build an inviolate wall around Islam, endowing it with something like the sacrosanct status it enjoys in traditionally Muslim countries.
Islamists of this latter stripe make full use of every recourse available to them in the laws and customs of the Western liberal democracies themselves. A few examples will illustrate. In France, Marcel Lefebvre, a renegade Catholic bishop, was fined nearly $1,000 under French law for declaring that when the Muslim presence in France becomes stronger, "it is your wives, your daughters, your children who will be kidnapped and dragged off to a certain kind of place as they exist in [Morocco]." In Canada, a Christian activist handing out leaflets protesting the Muslim persecution of Christians was accused by Muslim organizations of "inciting hatred," found guilty of breaking Canada's hate-speech laws, and sentenced to 240 hours of community service and six months of probation time in jail. At the United Nations, the decidedly non-diplomatic epithets "blasphemy" and "defamation of Islam" have become part of normal discourse, serving as convenient instruments for shutting off discussion of such unpleasant matters as slavery in Sudan or Muslim anti-Semitism.
In the United States, where the concept of freedom of speech is sturdier than elsewhere, the First Amendment still prevents the government itself from fining or jailing anyone for offensive speech. But, relying on the ethos of political correctness that has resulted in such abridgements of First Amendment freedoms as university speech codes and other restrictive practices, Islamists seek to win what sanction they can to censor others.
Thus, they have recently sponsored an innocent-sounding Senate resolution entitled "Supporting Religious Tolerance Toward Muslims." This resolution states as a fact that "Muslims have been subjected, simply because of their faith, to acts of discrimination and harassment that all too often have led to hate-inspired violence," and concludes that criticism of Islam, though legal in the strict sense, is morally reprehensible ("the Senate acknowledges that individuals and organizations that foster such intolerance create an atmosphere of hatred and fear that divides the Nation"). Should this resolution pass, and there is every reason to expect that it will, anyone with anything negative to say about Islam or Islamism can expect to be accused of fostering a hate crime.
Who, in the American context, is behind this campaign of mental intimidation and of what, in a journalistic context, would be called prior restraint? Among the many candidates, the leading one is surely the Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based institution founded in 1994. CAIR presents itself to the world as a standard-issue civil-rights organization, whose mission is to "promote interest and understanding among the general public with regard to Islam and Muslims in North America and conduct educational services."
Sometimes, indeed, this is what CAIR does. In 1997, for example, it protested when an official at a meeting of a board of education in South Carolina said, "Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims." At other times, it has come to the defense of women who have lost their jobs for insisting on wearing a headscarf, or of men for wearing beards. But these occasional good works serve mostly as a cover for CAIR's real agenda, which appears to be twofold: to help the radical organization Hamas in its terror campaign against Israel, and to promote the Islamist program in the United States.
In furtherance of the first goal, CAIR regularly sends out "action alerts" to instigate dozens or even hundreds of protests, many of them vulgar and aggressive, whenever anyone dares to suggest publicly that Hamas or other terrorist networks operate in the United States, or indeed dares to support those who say such things. When Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, protested CAIR's almost successful effort to have Steven Emerson blacklisted from National Public Radio, CAIR cranked up its letter-writing campaign ("Dear JEW," went a characteristic missive from a CAIR minion, "How dare you defame Islam. . . . There is enough Muslim-bashing going on, I am sure your resigning will not make a difference to our Jewish [sic] media") and, in a bit of raw intimidation, threatened the Globe with legal action.
CAIR's defense of Islamist violence takes other forms as well: picketing the Dallas Morning News for revealing the Hamas infrastructure in Texas, launching a campaign against the Tampa Tribune for uncovering the Islamic Jihad network in that city. The group has inveighed against the Journal of the American Medical Association for investigating the medical condition of victims of terrorism, and against a children's magazine, The Weekly Reader's Current Events, for publishing material on international terrorism. CAIR denounced the Atlantic Monthly for publishing an article on Islamist violence in Sudan, and a Senate Subcommittee for holding a hearing on "Foreign Terrorists in America: Five Years After the World Trade Center Bombing."
As for its other goal-promoting Islamism in the United States-CAIR focuses on the single tactic of trying to silence those who have anything critical to say about Islam. It attacked the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles for portraying Ayatollah Khomeini as a Hitler-like enemy of Jews, and it went after the Reader's Digest for documenting the repression of Christians in several Muslim countries. When James Jatras, a Senate aide, published in his private capacity a stinging critique of Islam ("a self-evident outgrowth not of the Old and New Covenants but of the darkness of heathen Araby"), CAIR took out a full-page newspaper ad in the Washington Times calling for his dismissal. And when Father Richard John Neuhaus, the distinguished author and editor of First Things, outspokenly condemned contemporary Islam's "resentments and suspicions, alternating with low-grade jihad in the form of the persecution of Christians, international terrorism, and dreams of driving Israel into the sea," CAIR called on the Catholic Church to "investigate" Neuhaus, and its supporters sent a cascade of abusive mail accusing him of being "obviously mentally ill" and "doing the work of Adolf Hitler."
Even lesser provocations than these elicit a barrage of CAIR-inspired letters that can leave writers and editors feeling isolated and under siege. A case in point indirectly involves the Oslo peace process. Beginning in May 1995, Yasir Arafat, having entered into negotiations with Israel, took to defending himself before Arab audiences by alluding cryptically to the treaty of Hudaybiyah, signed by the Prophet Muhammad in 628 C.E. Dusting off their history books, American commentators mostly concluded that, in invoking an agreement signed but then subsequently broken by Muhammad when circumstances changed, Arafat was signaling that he, too, did not really mean to keep his pledge. Arafat's intentions aside, however, it was the suggestion that the Prophet Muhammad had gone back on his word that aroused CAIR's fury. So impassioned was the reaction when Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, referred in a column to "the doctrine of the prophet Muhammad of making treaties with enemies while he is weak, violating them when he is strong," that the magazine ended up printing not one but two apologies.
A flavor of what CAIR and its network of letter writers were capable of producing on this occasion may be gleaned from the pages of the New Republic, where a similar statement had been made by Yehoshua Porath, an eminent professor of Middle East history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This statement ("Muhammad broke the [Hudaybiya] agreement eighteen months after its conclusion") elicited, according to the magazine's editors, "hundreds of abusive phone calls, letters, and e-mail accusing us of defamation of the Prophet and worse." Among the letters published by the editors, all in their original grammar and spelling, one read:
You guys had better watch out, ok? Because this is not going to go on further anymore, ok? You'd better watch out that f*ing Jew . . . tell him where he is coming from, ok? Because you know mother-f*er bastard, mother-his mom is a bastard. ok? He can't talk about Muslim sh*t and you get your act together . . . all of you. We don't want to hear anymore about this problem, ok? You got that right?
Another was more threatening:
The Jews from back in history were the ugly deceivers and BLOOD SUCKERS. . . . It is important that an apology is issued to calm down the MUSLIM all over the world. WE DO NO WANT TO SEE ANOTHER 19 AMERICANS GO A WSAY IN THA LAND OF THE PROPHET ,,, DO WE ??????? !!!!!! I am saying this because the Muslims will never tolerate the actions of the Jews against their religion. And articles like these contribute in the future loss of life of Americans all over the Islamic world. . . . We are fed up of filthy Jews robbing our lands, and defaming all HOLY concepts we have. Please, save the lives of few Americans by issuing your apology.
Which brings me to my own case. In mid-1999, I published articles in the Los Angeles Times and the National Post (Toronto) emphasizing the distinction between, on the one hand, traditional Muslims who go quietly about their business and ask only to be allowed to practice their faith, and, on the other, radical Islamists with their agenda of transforming society in the image of their beliefs. In reply, CAIR launched fifteen separate attacks on me in the space of two months. Many of these, reaching all the way back to 1983, cited random quotations from articles and books in order to indict me out of my own mouth, or resurrected unflattering appraisals of my work by others. One bulletin attempted to demolish an article I had written about the treaty of Hudaybiya-even though, contrary to other American commentators, I had found that "Muhammad was technically within his rights to abrogate the treaty." The broadside was titled "Daniel Pipes Smears Prophet Muhammad": fighting words for many Muslims.
Reverberating through the Internet, CAIR's attacks were also widely reprinted in Muslim publications, spurring dozens of letters, overwhelmingly negative, to the two newspapers that had carried my articles. One such letter urged me to enroll in sensitivity training (at CAIR, naturally), while others branded me with harsh names ("bigot and racist"), compared me to the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, or characterized my writings as an "atrocity" filled with "pure poison" and "outright lies." More alarmingly, the letters accused me either of perpetrating a hate crime against Muslims or of promoting and abetting such crimes. And they did not stop short of vague threats: "Is Pipes ready to answer the Creator for his hatred or is he a secular humanist . . . ? He will soon find out."
I do not want to leave the impression that CAIR represents the only opinion to be found in the Muslim community, either here or abroad. Shaykh Abdad Hadi Palazzi, for instance, secretary general of the Italian Muslim Association and director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Muslim Community in Rome, has actually denounced CAIR for falsely claiming to represent the entire Muslim community while in reality being bent on launching "hate campaigns against journalists, Congressmen, Senators, and Muslims who interfere with [its] true terrorist agenda." What is more, Shaykh Palazzi has commended both me and Steven Emerson for daring to challenge the Islamists; though he does "not agree with [our] attitude toward Islam in particular and with [our] secular worldview in general," nevertheless we are to be lauded for distinguishing "authentic Islam from the counterfeit image presented by the Islamists"-of whom, the Shaykh pointedly concludes, Muslims themselves "are the main victims."
But Shaykh Palazzi is one among only a few voices of reason and sanity.
Within the universe of Muslims who speak and write about Islam and its position in the modern world, the Islamists by far have the upper hand. That is not only a great tragedy for Muslims, but a danger to the rest of us. For if the Islamists have their way, any possibility of speaking the truth not only about them but about Islam itself will be foreclosed.
Indeed, to a certain extent, as in the near-successful blacklisting of Steven Emerson at National Public Radio, it already has been.
Bernard Lewis, the renowned scholar of Islam and the Middle East, has noted with asperity that whereas, in this Christian country, an English-language biographer of Jesus enjoys total latitude to say what he will and as he will, his counterpart working on a biography of Muhammad must look fearfully over his shoulder every step of the way. About my own writing, one correspondent protested to the National Post: "It's is interesting to me as a Muslim American to hear you, a non-Muslim, speaks about Islam as an expert without you first consulting with an American Muslim organization like CAIR for an example, to get their opinion about what you are about to print. "In other words, one is perfectly free to voice an opinion about Islam, provided that one has vetted its contents beforehand with the Islamists-roughly the situation that now prevails in Iran.
What the Islamists are demanding, in short, is that the United States take a giant step toward applying within its borders the strictures of Islamic law (the shari'a) itself. A basic premise of that body of law is that no one, and especially no non-Muslim, may openly discuss certain subjects-some of the very subjects, as it happens, that CAIR wishes to render taboo. However absurd this may seem to a casual observer-Muslims, after all, make up, at most, 2 percent of the U.S. population-it is a fact that, when the guard of the democratic majority is let down, determined minorities in pursuit of anti-democratic aims can sometimes get their way.
Daniel Pipes is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.