Eric Holder's statements about Islam demonstrate ethnocentric stereotyping

Jihad Watch

Those who speak about "Islamists" and "Islamism," and who insist that Islam is a peaceful religion that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists -- like Holder -- are imposing Western categories upon Muslims, not taking Muslims and Islam as they actually are. That's ethnocentric stereotyping. "Eric Holder’s stereotyping of Muslims irresponsible, say critics," by Neil Munro for The Daily Caller, November 10:

Attorney General Eric Holder is stereotyping Muslims in America, and his willful ignorance about the religious roots of Islamic terrorism endangers Americans and marginalizes Muslim reformers, say experts on Islamist terror groups. That assessment was prompted by Holder’s announcement during a Tuesday congressional hearing that American Muslims “have the same desires that we all have.”

His declaration came during an answer about the training manuals used by some FBI trainers, which have drawn furious criticism from Islamist lobby groups. Those manuals, Holder said, contain training lessons that “can really undermine, really undermine, the really substantial outreach efforts that we have made and really have a negative impact on our ability to communicate effectively, as we have in the past, with this community.”

“I almost hesitate to say ‘this community,’ because the reality is that we’re talking about Americans, Americans citizens, who have the same desires that we all have, who want their kids to be safe, who want the opportunities that this great country has to offer them,” Holder added.

Holder’s blanket statement about Muslims’ desires “is ethnocentric in the sense that he is imposing his own values upon people who may have, and often demonstrably do have, vastly different perspectives,” Robert Spencer, the author of several books on Islam, told The Daily Caller.

During the hearing on Tuesday, Holder criticized arguments that Islam’s tenets spur violence, and that adherence to Islamic rituals and dress are a marker of “possible extremism.” [...]

Those claims are “flat wrong,” Holder said.

Islamist advocates in the United States, and their allies in the U.S. progressive movement, have fiercely attacked Spencer because he cites Islamic texts that repeatedly urge attacks on people who are not Muslims. Spencer has offered to debate Holder or his advisers in public. [...]

In the ten years since the 9/11 terror attacks, 40 Islamic plots to attack people and targets in the United States have been foiled, according to a count by the Heritage Foundation.

In contrast, only two German-Americans citizens participated in a planned sabotage plot during World War II, along with six Germans who had worked in the United States, even though roughly 20 percent of the country had German ancestry. There were almost no examples of cooperation by Japanese-Americans with Imperial Japan’s forces....