Saturday, August 25, 2012

How the Term “Islamophobia” Got Shoved Down Your Throat

Moderate Muslim Watch: How the Term “Islamophobia” Got Shoved Down Your Throat – Ricochet.com.
 
The neologism “Islamophobia” did not simply emerge ex nihilo. It was invented, deliberately, by a Muslim Brotherhood front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, which is based in Northern Virginia. If that name dimly rings a bell, it should: I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s particularly important because it was co-founded by Anwar Ibrahim–the hero of Moderate Islam who is now trotting around the globe comparing his plight to that of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the IIIT who has renounced the group in disgust, was an eyewitness to the creation of the word. “This loathsome term,” he writes, is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.
In another article concerning the many moderate Muslims whose voices have been drowned out by Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Muhammad describes the strategy behind the word’s invention:


In an effort to silence critics of political Islam, advocates needed to come up with terminology that would enable them to portray themselves as victims. Muhammad said he was present when his then-allies, meeting at the offices of the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Northern Virginia years ago, coined the term “Islamophobia.”

Muhammad said the Islamists decided to emulate the homosexual activists who used the term “homophobia” to silence critics. He said the group meeting at IIIT saw “Islamophobia” as a way to “beat up their critics.”

Really imagine that scene: a bunch of Islamists admiring how astutely the queers–people who in their ideal world would be served with the lash or hanged–had portrayed their critics as mentally disturbed. Brilliant. Let’s take a leaf from them and then kill them. The association of anti-Islamism–the noblest form of liberal anti-totalitarianism–with gay-bashing rednecks in the grip of a psychosexual panic was not just one of those linguistic accidents of history, in other words. These guys were sitting there in Virginia and really thinking about the best way to exploit the weaknesses of the Western psyche. They came up with this word–and admit it, it’s clever; I challenge you to find a better one if you want to yank the West’s chain–and they marketed it with petrodollars, and now it truly does drive public discourse and policy the world over.

The fact that the IIIT was co-founded by Anwar Ibrahim, who is now on trial for sodomy–something of a homophobic charge, that--would be almost hilarious in its just-deserts irony if Anwar hadn’t succeeded in portraying himself as the moderate darling of Muslim moderation whose plight should now trouble the liberal conscience of the West, no matter his own role in exploiting it.
So Anwar Ibrahim– our moderate man in moderate Malaysia–is the moderate man behind this Orwellian effort to render the West incapable of objecting even verbally to political Islam. The gift of “Islamophobia” is just the beginning of the story.

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