Kafir-phobia: Americans as Violent Anti-Muslim Bigots
August 31st, 2006
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5810
The story that developed in July was just too good to pass up: a
Jordanian-born restaurant owner in Xenia, Ohio had been the apparent
victim of repeated attempts to burn down his store. The day after the
third attack, when a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through the
front window of his business, yet another explosion rocked the store –
the second attack in 24 hours – sending the owner and his son to the
hospital with burns over 80-90 percent of their bodies. An employee in
an adjoining store was also taken to the hospital for injuries.
Just hours before the blast, the store owner had been interviewed by a
local TV station vowing that he would never give in to pressure to
close the store (video of the interview can be seen here).
Into this situation jumped the Cincinnati-area chapter of the Council
on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – the self-proclaimed Muslim
“civil rights” organization suggesting that anti-Muslim hatred was at
work. An item posted on July 14th on the national CAIR website
screamed the headline, “Blast at Arab-American Restaurant ‘Suspicious’
..”
Karen Dabdoub, the local CAIR spokeswoman, was quoted in the local
media saying,
“Anytime an attack like this happens, the perception in the Arab and
Muslim community is that it is ethnically or religiously motivated.
Especially in the absence of perpetrators being caught by law
enforcement, that’s the fear. Until that (motivation) is discovered,
people speculate, rightly or wrongly.”
The problem with CAIR’s narrative of anti-Muslim hatred in small-town
America was that it wasn’t true. Arson investigators have determined
that the final blast that severely injured the store owner, Musa
Shteiwi, and his son, Essa, was set by the pair themselves. In a
performance worthy of a Darwin Award, the Shteiwis were standing in a
pool of gasoline that they intended to use as an accelerant in setting
their store ablaze later that night when Musa Shteiwi took a break and
lit up a cigarette, igniting the gasoline prematurely and causing the
blast that inflicted their injuries.
But there’s more: prosecutors claim that Shteiwi had hired a former
employee, Joshua Hunter, to commit the previous attacks against his
store that CAIR had insisted were hate crimes committed by non-Muslim
members of the Xenia community. Hunter has been jailed and charged
with arson, and similar charges against Musa and Essa Shteiwi are
pending until after they have recovered from their injuries.
This incident is a textbook example of CAIR’s incitement of kafir
(lit. infidel, non-Muslim)-phobia. On July 14th, when CAIR began
making public statements and posting notices on their website about
the incident, it had already been widely reported in the Cincinnati
Enquirer and local TV news stations that the Shteiwis were either
accidentally or intentionally responsible for the explosion. It is
clear now that it was both.
That notwithstanding, CAIR officials were quick to use the incident to
indulge in their kafir-phobia by portraying the local non-Muslim
community as simmering with anti-Muslim hatred, just waiting for the
slightest provocation to lash out in acts of violence. But the facts
they relied on weren’t true and the date of the item regarding this
incident posted on CAIR’s website was almost a week after it was known
and reported numerous times in the local press that the pair were
implicated, directly or indirectly, for the blast.
Since the arrest of Shteiwi’s associate, CAIR has refused further
comment and has offered no apology for its shameless kafir-phobic
behavior to the community they falsely impugned.
This recent incident is hardly the first time that CAIR has used faked
hate crimes to flame the fires of kafir-phobia. As Daniel Pipes and
Sharon Chadha discussed in an article last year, “CAIR’s Hate Crime
Nonsense,” a report issued in May 2005 by CAIR, “Unequal Protection:
The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005” – a
report allegedly identifying a rapid rise of anti-Muslim violence in
America – cited several hate crime hoaxes where incidents had been
staged or invented whole-cloth by Muslims themselves to make it appear
that they were religiously or ethnically motivated. Perhaps CAIR might
have rationalized the inclusion of these debunked hate crimes in their
report as “fake, but accurate” representations of supposed anti-Muslim
bias in America.
One of the hate crime hoaxes identified by Pipes and Chadha in the
2005 CAIR report involved a July 2004 act of arson at an Everett,
Washington grocery that CAIR claimed as an anti-Muslim hate crime. But
it had been announced more than eight months prior to CAIR’s May 2005
report that the grocery owner, Mirza Akram, was the accused culprit in
the arson at his establishment – as an August 2004 article in the
Seattle Times makes clear. The article even noted a CAIR spokeswoman’s
request that the FBI investigate the incident as a hate crime.
In a separate blog post, Daniel Pipes cites additional instances of
CAIR rushing to get in front of reporters and TV news crews when the
incidents they decry as hate crimes later turn out to be false reports
or self-inflicted by the Muslim “victims” themselves.
To date, so far as I can tell, not only has CAIR not apologized for
falsely accusing non-Muslims of hatred and bias in the respective
communities where these hate crime hoaxes occurred, but the press
releases on CAIR’s website go uncorrected even after the truth is
revealed. For instance, a press release related to a staged hate
crime in McAllen, Texas still appears today without any correction or
update whatsoever, even though multiple media outlets, including even
the New York Times, had debunked the incident as a hate crime hoax
perpetrated by the “victim” almost two years ago.
Admittedly, CAIR’s ubiquitous appearance in stories related to staged
hate crimes denouncing supposed Islamophobia makes for great press
releases and news stories, but does little too actually improve
American-Islamic relations (CAIR’s self-stated goal). Such feeds the
very prejudices that distances Muslims from their non-Muslim
neighbors.
Instead of building cultural bridges to achieve their social and
political agenda, CAIR regularly burns those bridges by inciting
kafir-phobia and carelessly making charges against non-Muslims. As
Robert Spencer of JihadWatch pointed out in commenting on this latest
incident,
“Hate crimes are a big business: they enable the targeted group to
claim victim status, which entitles that group to full-hearted Leftist
support, and a free pass for all its own enormities.”
Meanwhile, CAIR’s website makes no reference at all to one of the most
arresting incidents Islamic relations with America: the videotaped
forced conversion at gunpoint of Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni
and his New Zealander cameraman Olaf Wiig. Does CAIR condemn such
actions in Islam’s name, and call on all Muslims to recognize the
illegitimacy of compulsion in conversions to Islam? Or does it now
regard these two men as irrevocably Muslims? Surely, that is an
important issue in “American-Islamic Relations” isn’t it?
Kafir-phobia seems to be CAIR’s go-to propaganda weapon of choice
whenever they want to make their constituency appear legitimately
aggrieved or victimized by falsely portraying the non-Muslims in these
communities as seething with pent-up anti-Muslim hatred – regardless
of whether it is true or not – as the inclusion of previously debunked
hate crimes in the May 2005 CAIR report demonstrates.
The consequences of CAIR’s kafirphobia and the manufacturing hate
crimes are far-reaching. American media and officials rush to dismiss
incidents such as-StartFragment—> Omeed Aziz Popal’s intentional SUV
attacks on pedestrians in San Francisco and Naveed Haq’s shootings at
a Seattle Jewish center as isolated incidents of madmen, not
terrorism, even when the former was quoted as announcing “I am a
terrorist” and the latter announced that he was an angry Muslim. The
media and officials are behaving as good dhimmis, absorbing and
regurgitating the kafir-phobia.
Hypocrisy is part and parcel of kafir-phobia, as CAIR is quick to
identify supposed anti-Muslim bias amongst the American public at
large on a fairly regular basis, while reluctant to look at its own
ready negative presumptions about Americans at large.
If CAIR is truly interested in improving American-Islamic relations,
perhaps it might spend more time dealing with the kafir-phobia among
Muslims instead of investing its time and energy into diagnosing the
supposed Islamophobia of its critics.
--
"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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