A Muslim Brotherhood Smear Job on The Third Jihad

CAIR enlists the New York Times in its newest propaganda attack.

by
Phyllis Chesler

To date, the New York Times has published at least ten articles (op-eds disguised as news, real op-eds, letters) about the film The Third Jihad, which first appeared in 2009. The NYT-dominated campaign led to coverage in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and other mainstream media venues.

Ordinarily, this would be very good news for the filmmakers. More than three years later and so much publicity — and yet, the price for so many negative film reviews involves being demonized and erroneously portrayed. In the NYT, the backers of the film are referred to as “deep pocketed” pro-Israelis, wealthy and/or religious philanthropists, who “have opposed a full return of the West Bank to Palestinians.”

What makes the film newsworthy is that it was recently shown to a small number of NYC police officers who work in counter-terrorism. What makes the film newsworthy is that it was recently shown to a small number of NYC police officers who work in counter-terrorism.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been condemned for appearing briefly in the film, and for allowing police officers to view it; Mayor Bloomberg has condemned its showing as well. Kelly has been made to apologize; he said it was a “mistake” to have shown the film. A demonstration, replete with placards and bullhorns, quickly took place on the steps of City Hall and was dutifully covered by the local TV media.

Condemned but by whom? Perchance by a genuine film reviewer? No. Condemned by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood outpost in America which has spawned the aggressive Muslim Students Association and which was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, one in which a Florida-based professor, Sami Al-Arian, was found guilty of funneling funds to a known terrorist organization, Hamas (“An Enthusiastic Islamic Resistance Movement”), aka the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. CAIR denies any guilt in this matter. However, CAIR has written an op-ed piece demanding that Al-Arian be freed.

In 2008, the FBI cut ties with CAIR and listed Hamas as a terrorist group with whom it will not negotiate.

Of course, the Shariah-compliant CAIR would not want anyone to think that the film The Third Jihad is credible, nor would they want the film to be seen, especially by NYC police officers.

In a personal interview with the film’s producer, Raphael Shore, he said that he regretted that the film has been removed from the counter-terrorism unit in NYC. Shore also said:

Claims that The Third Jihad is an anti-Islam film are ignorant and misinformed. These claims are meant simply to defame the filmmakers and prevent the public from judging the film for themselves. There is a very good reason the NYPD selected to show The Third Jihad to nearly 1,500 police officers, and other law enforcement agencies have done the same. The film deals with the very real process of radicalization and indoctrination of anti-American ideology taking place in some sectors of the Muslim community today.

First, we are only talking about a mere 1,400-1500 NYC police officers who specialize in anti-terrorism who were exposed to the film. Why shouldn’t those entrusted with our safety see this film? Why is the NYT conducting a veritable witch-hunt against it and against the religious Muslim who narrates the film, none other than Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a former American Navy officer, a physician, and the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy? Dr. Jasser is a past president of the Arizona Medical Association and has been active in interfaith work. Why silence or “slime” Dr. Jasser’s free speech, which is protected by the First Amendment?

Here’s why.

Dr. Jasser is a religious Muslim who is an anti-Islamist; a religious Muslim who wishes to protect his religion from the Wahabis, Salafis, and Islamist jihadists who are trying to hijack it right back to the 7thcentury. The Muslim Brotherhood is part of this effort and they, in their writings, speeches, and demonstrations, call for a global caliphate and for a “jihad for Allah.”

There are other Muslims like Dr. Jasser — alas, few Western organizations, including our politicians and our armed forces, rely upon them. You may read their words in a very important book edited by Dr. Zeyno Baran titled The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular. It is a book that I absolutely could not get the mainstream media to review. Dr. Jasser has an article in it, as do nine others whose names and work most people know nothing about and who live in the United States, France, Holland, Britain, Italy, Lebanon, and Turkey. These anti-Islamist Muslims are both religious and secular. They were born and grew up in Italy (converted to Islam), Jordan (Yunis Qandil), Morocco (Mostafa Hilali, Fouad Laroui), Tunisia (Samia Labidi), Turkey (Zeyno Baran, Cosh Omar), and the United States (M. Zuhdi Jasser, born here to Syrian immigrants).

Is the film The Third Jihad really biased against Muslims? Allow me to suggest that it is not. Here is how the film begins. We see the following words in large print and they remain onscreen for awhile:

This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.

The footage is of real Islamist Muslim terrorist attacks: the 2004 Islamist massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan; the 2004 Islamist terrorist attacks in Madrid; the 2005 Islamist terrorist attacks in Kenya and in London; the 2008 Islamist terrorist attack in Mumbai; and of course, the 1993 Islamist terrorist attempt to blow up the World Trade Center and the Islamist terrorist attack in NYC on 9/11.

These are real terrorist events conducted by real Muslim Islamists.

In addition, the presumably “offensive” signs which promise Muslim domination are real signs that have been held by real Muslim Islamists and others at real demonstrations. The most “offensive” moment — that in which an Islamic flag flies over the White House — is taken from an Islamist website.

So — what is “offensive”? The actual Muslim Islamist hate of infidels? The actual Muslim Islamist blowing up of both Muslim and infidel civilians? Or is the offense strictly in exposing this as a reality? And to police officers?

The chilling effect of CAIR’s activism against this film and the media support for it cannot be underestimated. In a recent op-ed piece, Dr. Jasser clarifies the matter. He writes:

The point is not that the small Islamist minority could ever take over the United States, but rather that they pose as moderates as they seek to weaken our advocacy of liberty while Islamists take over Muslim-majority nations abroad and drown out other, genuinely moderate Muslim voices here at home. The imbroglio over the film shows how effective they are at portraying criticism of Islamism as a criticism of all Islam and Muslims.

I understand: Many Muslims in the West may feel somehow implicated, unfairly judged, because of the many Islamist terrorist attacks by Muslims that have taken place. Many Muslims may feel angry, defensive, even insulted by the mere possibility that infidels may be viewing them as fanatic terrorists. But many Muslims are overly sensitive and thin-skinned, vigilant, quick to assert prejudice against them. Why? Perhaps because they have been taught to view themselves as superior and when they are not treated in an overly deferential way they may indeed — psychologically — feel they have been discriminated against.

But let’s be honest. How many Muslim organizations and Muslim religious leaders, both in the West and in the Islamic world, have clearly and strongly condemned Islamism, infidel-hatred, Jew-hatred, Islamic gender and religious apartheid, Islamic censorship, and Islamist terrorist jihad? Not many, are there? Perhaps many private Muslims have done so, privately. However, like Germans under Hitler who may not have shared his views but who did not oppose him — the fact that the majority of Muslims may be peaceful and are not connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or to any other terrorist organization does not exactly constitute a resistance movement. Their understandably human and yet still cowardly or opportunistic silence condemns both their co-religionists and all infidels to savage reigns of Islamist terrorism, censorship, torture, barbarism, and genocide in Islam’s name.

I have no doubt that Westerners, especially those who believe in multicultural relativism, do not understand that multiculturalism is a racist doctrine. But it is for it ultimately denies Muslim citizens in the West access to the same universal rights that others enjoy. It especially condemns Muslim women, dissidents, and apostates to tribal injustice at the hands of their families and communities — and in the West.

I know: There is a “politically correct” worldview that believes Muslims are discriminated against in the West by “Islamophobes.”

However, contrary to this myth, according to FBI statistics for 2010, the breakdown for hate crimes in America in terms of religion is as follows: 67% are anti-Jewish crimes, 12.7% are anti-Islamic, and 4.2% are anti-Catholic. The statistics regarding racial hate crimes in the same FBI 2010 study illustrate the strong and continued existence of racism in America: 70% of racial hate crimes are anti-black, 17.7% are anti-white, and 5.1% are anti-Asian Pacific Islander.

I suspect that liberals who truly care about civil rights and who feel “guilty” about the long history of anti-black bias in America may now view Muslims as if they are African-Americans; therefore, they may support extreme tolerance of Islamism as a way to compensate or apologize for America’s tragic history of racism.

In a way, European leftists and liberals are psychologically similar. Europe genocidally murdered six million Jews, who are, after all, Semites. At some level, European “guilt” (as well as European continuing racism) has therefore led to Europe’s “multicultural” tolerance towards another group of Semites — Arabs — who, unlike the murdered Jews, are less assimilated, more hostile, and more violent. In addition, Europeans continue hating Jews and appeasing angry Muslims by scapegoating Israel, the Jewish state, for their own European Nazi-era crimes. They accuse Israel, falsely, of being a “Nazi, apartheid” state. This pleases their highly “Palestinianized” Muslim population and their European leftist supporters.

And, by the way, the West abolished slavery. Islamic countries never did. Islam has its very own history of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, forced conversion, and genocide — a history that is unknown to most Westerners and denied by most Islamists.

In addition, many American civil libertarians are more concerned with the rights of the innocent individual Muslim who may be falsely accused than they are concerned with the rights of the innocent civilians, both Muslim and infidel, to remain safe from Islamist terrorism and from Islamic gender and religious apartheid.

Thus, such civil libertarians have been more concerned with the alleged “humiliation of Palestinians at the Israeli checkpoints” than they have been concerned with the increasingly long lines which civilians must stand in at every airport and the humiliating pat-downs and X-rays due to the epidemic of Islamist Muslim airplane hijackings, bombings, and other acts of terrorism.

I say: Let’s balance our principled American concern with the rights of individuals who are presumed innocent until proven guilty against the rights of civilians of all faiths and race to survive. And let’s reinvigorate our instinct for survival and our pride. I, among others who are mainly Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents as well as conservatives, call for a defense of Western civilization both culturally and in terms of the survival of our living, breathing, citizens.

According to film producer Raphael Shore,

Those that have blasted the film are attempting to stifle an important debate about the internal state of the Muslim community in America, and whether politicized Islam and indoctrination pose tangible security threats.

We invite the general public to watch and judge the documentary for themselves. The Third Jihad is now being made available for free viewing online at http://www.thethirdjihad.com.

Shore is not surprised that CAIR in particular is upset with the content of this film:

The Third Jihad documents their ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and to terror financing. Rather than addressing the content, CAIR simply brands anything or anyone who levels criticism as “Islamophobic.” Now CAIR is using our film to go after an even bigger fish, the NYPD. Fortunately, New Yorkers have the sensibility to realize just how ridiculous it is for a group with terror ties to be dictating how the NYPD conducts its counter-terrorism training and operations. And now, thanks to CAIR, even more Americans are getting the opportunity to view our critically acclaimed film.

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the author of 14 books and an emerita professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies. She once lived in Kabul, Afghanistan. She may be reached through her website www.phyllis-chesler.com.