Barbara Kay: How Islamists hijacked leftist oppression narratives

Yahoo

2 days ago

In March 2008, revelations surfaced of past anti-American and antisemitic rhetoric by Barack Obama's longtime pastor and friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright, including Wright's accusation that the U.S.'s own terrorism helped motivate al-Qaida's 9/11 attack. Knowing his political credibility depended on it, Obama abruptly severed ties with Wright. Post-inauguration, Wright blamed 'them Jews' for Obama's continuing frostiness.
Seventeen years on, Zohran Mamdani, newly-elected Democratic contender for New York's upcoming mayoralty race, appears to have (correctly) calculated that public allyship with an imam who lionizes Hamas, reviles Jews and Christians, and encourages anti-American pedagogy would not be a political liability in America's most Jewish city.
Apart from smartphones spreading an oil slick of disinformation across Gen Z, strongly supportive of Mamdani, what explains such a momentous change in our political culture between the two campaigns?
Principally, the symbiotic merger of three already active ideological streams that swelled into an impassable river: multiculturalism (all cultures equally deserving of respect), Islamism (Islamization of the West is inevitable) and intersectionality (all oppressed identity groups must stand together against a common enemy of white imperialism).
Islam is a religion, not a race. Nevertheless, the merger allowed the Muslim Brotherhood — Islamism's C-suite in the West — to exploit the ideological overlap to align Islamist claims for oppression with Black Lives Matter, bestowing 'racialized' status on Muslims.
The crossover permitted Islamists to promulgate false notions that are widely accepted as true: that 'brown' Palestinians are the world's most oppressed people, that 'white' Israel represents a uniquely evil form of colonialist oppression meriting violent elimination ('Globalize the Intifada') and that Islamophobia — a trope popularized in 1994 by a Runnymede Trust report, but almost invariably associated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — is, allegedly, a far greater problem than the actual global scourge of Islamism-driven terrorism.
Since then, combatting an alleged 'Islamophobia industry' has been a principal focus of all Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated advocacy groups, as well as some academics and political actors. Their campaign of 'perception management' to ensure a reflexive, society-wide association between Muslims and victimhood has succeeded.
I plucked the strikingly apt trope 'perception management' from journalist and Muslim Reformer Asra Nomani's enlightening 2023 book, Woke Army: The Red-Green alliance that is destroying America's freedom. In it, Nomani argues that the partnership between the hard left (red) and Islamism (green) exploits America's freedoms to wage disinformation and propaganda campaigns against critics of political Islam. Politicians and mainstream media learned over the years that it was easier, following news of jihadist violence, to acquiesce to the shibboleth that the 'religion of peace' had been 'hijacked' than to endure accusations of Islamophobia by insisting on more objective terms like 'radical' or 'political' Islam.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Indian-born Muslim Nomani was a friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl, the WSJ's South Asia bureau chief who was kidnapped and publicly beheaded in 2002 by rabidly Judeophobic al-Qaida operatives. Pearl's gruesome death galvanized Nomani to political activism as a Muslim 'Reformer,' a Muslim who supports an interpretation of Islam that is compatible with human rights, gender equality, religious (or atheist) pluralism and secular governance.
Irritated by her criticism, Muslim Brothers' machinations drew Nomani into a world of grief orchestrated by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), nominally a 'civil rights' organization but in Nomani's account, 'a front for an extremist form of Islam.' But she persevered, and Woke Army is, therefore, not only an enlightening exposé of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, but the absorbing story of Nomani's personal near-martyrdom and eventual triumph.
To silence Nomani, CAIR foot soldiers cooked up a years-long character assassination campaign through 'the deadly underbelly of cyber jihad' — specifically Loonwatch, a GoDaddy website that protected their users' anonymity. Her foes there labelled her a 'Zionist media whore' amongst other slurs, and accused her of being funded by Israel. In 2018, Nomani responded with a defamation suit that halted Loonwatch harassment and permitted her to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 'John Doe' anonymous stalkers, most of them outed in Woke Army.
The 'perception management' campaign found low-hanging fruit in left-leaning political leaders. President Obama, who flinched at Black anti-Americanism and antisemitism, was eager to please on the equally phobic Islamist file. When CAIR issued a statement Nomani described as advocating for 'separating the brutal actions of ISIS from the faith of Islam,' Obama obliged, she writes, with his government agencies giving in to pressure to scrub terms like 'jihadist' and replace them with 'extremist.'
Although Nomani's research treats Islamism in the U.S., her themes map neatly onto Canada. Following the Islamism-driven 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Justin Trudeau, asked to identify the bombing's 'root causes,' reflexively saw, heard, and spoke no Islamist evil, responding: 'there is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.'
The Muslim Reform Movement, in which Nomani and Canada's own heroic Raheel Raza play prominent roles, has been stalwart in its resistance to Islamist bullying, but their members are in a David-and-Goliath relationship with what Nomani describes as Muslim Brotherhood's well-funded machine. They get worn down by what Nomani's young son articulated as a 'terrorism of the mind.'
It would help if politicians cold-shouldered Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups and instead elevated Muslim Reformers' public status, seating them 'above the salt,' so to speak. Active pushback against institutionalized Islamism is in motion in the U.S. But in Canada, alas, 'perception management' rules at the desk where the buck on a threat to our cultural health is supposed to stop.
[e-mail]
X: @BarbaraRKay
National Post
Adam Zivo: With Iran defeated, Israelis look for peace in Gaza
Colby Cosh: Mark Carney's unstable environment