WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, has reported another “anti-Muslim” contretemps. The story is here:
Muslim rights and advocacy groups in Massachusetts have accused a suburban Boston city councilor of anti-Islamic social media posts.
Revere city councilor George Rotondo Jr. insisted late Tuesday his online posts “are not what they are being called” and said the allegations were “totally politically motivated.”
Rotondo is not folding. He has understood that his islamocriticism is being slandered as “Islamophobia” in order to shut down his, and all other, evidence-based criticism of Islam. His posts “are not what they are being called” – that is, “Islamophobic” and “racist” – and are not “hate speech” directed at individual Muslims, but rather, they offer studied criticisms of the tenets and teachings of the faith. Evidence from the Qur’an, hadith, and the history of Muslim conquest over the past 1,400 years that all help us to understand Muslim behavior today, are an important part of Jihad Watch.
But Jetpac, a political action committee that supports Muslim candidates for public office, and the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for an investigation of the posts. The two groups want to know if Rotondo is using city resources to promote what they say is an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant agenda.
Rotondo should come out swinging against the use of the word “Islamophobic.” He should tell local media that his concern about Islam is not an “irrational hatred” as that epithet implies, but rather, a rational anxiety based on the observable behavior of Muslims today, and on what he has learned about the contents of the Qur’an and hadith, which contents he would be happy to discuss with any interlocutors, Muslim or non-Muslim.
Jetpac and the Islamic council [CAIR] say Rotondo has posted links several times to “propaganda” by discredited anti-Muslim groups such as Jihad Watch and a YouTube video that describes Portland, Maine, as “overrun” by migrants from Africa.
Who “discredited” Jihad Watch? Why, CAIR itself did, an organization led by such people as the head of its L.A. Chapter, Hussam Ayloush, who has called for the overthrow of the American government and denounced “Zionazis.” Its Executive Director is Nihad Awad, who as long ago as 1994 was publicly supporting Hamas, which the American government has recognized as a terrorist organization. Instead of helping the government in its efforts to contain Muslim terrorism in this country, CAIR has conducted campaigns of urging Muslims not to talk to the FBI. Yet it is this organization, and the SPLC, which we are expected to uncritically put our faith in when they declare, without the slightest evidence, that Jihad Watch is a “hate site” and others then mindlessly repeat, without doing their own research, that Jihad Watch has indeed been “discredited.”
Apparently Rotondo provided a link in his postings not just to Jihad Watch, but to one YouTube video, in which a single “unacceptable” remark is made. To wit: that Portland, Maine is being “overrun” by migrants from Africa. Here is what the Wall Street Journal reports about that city:
But Maine’s largest city, population about 67,000, is now struggling with an influx of asylum seekers, to the point where a local official is alerting shelters in other parts of the country to discourage people from heading here.
The word is out there that our community is open to that population and has some assistance programs,” said David MacLean, administrator of Portland’s Social Services Division. “Our local resources are not able to keep up.”
Asylum seekers, who are primarily from African countries, now make up 90% of the people living in Portland’s city-run family shelter and overflow shelter, where new arrivals sleep on mats. A city fund that assists with necessities is dwindling fast, and pro-bono lawyers are overwhelmed with cases, Mr. MacLean said.
Portland’s strain comes as the number of asylum requests, in which people ask to be allowed to stay in the U.S. for humanitarian reasons, has ballooned.
Portland’s challenge is expected to drive new debate around immigrant assistance in the state, where Democrats recently gained control of the legislature and the governor’s seat.
Legislation recently filed by Democratic state Rep. Michael Brennan would beef up state assistance to asylum seekers. He said it would give them flexibility to settle in other Maine communities that need workers in the fast-aging state.
But Jacob Posik, communications director for the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a think tank focused on limited government, cautions public officials not to overpromise.
“We certainly need the help,” Mr. Posik said, referring to the state’s labor-force needs. “But if we’re attracting people to come here, we should certainly do it in a responsible way that isn’t strangling resources.”
Jennifer Bailey, the asylum program director at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Maine, which works with arrivals, said the migrants in Maine have typically come to the U.S. on visas.
“We have more cases than we’ve ever had,” she said. “The number of people coming is out of sync with resources.”
“Our local resources are not able to keep up” says David MacLean, the administrator of Portland’s Social Services Division. Even an advocate for migrants in Maine – Jennifer Bailey — worries that “the number of people coming is out of sync with resources.” Given such remarks, it is certainly reasonable to conclude that Portland, the center of this migration, is being “overrun” with migrants from Africa, who make up 90% of the people living in Portland’s shelters. This is not incitement to hate, but the description of a problem that is visible to Portland’s people.
And again, as for the dismissal of Jihad Watch as “discredited,” here we are entitled to ask a few questions. In what way has Jihad Watch been “discredited”? By the likes of CAIR and SPLC? Has JW peddled false stories about Muslims? Written something false about Muhammad, such as a crazy story about his consummating his marriage to a little girl, Aisha, when she was only nine and he was 54? Oh dear, that story turns out to be true. Has JW attributed to Muhammad statements surely concocted to make him look bad as, e.g., “War is deceit,” or “I have been made victorious through terror”? What? He did say both of them? Obviously this has to be looked into. Have Robert Spencer and his contributors made up a single Qur’anic command to wage violent Jihad? Not one. Every Qur’anic verse, every story in the hadith that are mentioned, are quoted scrupulously from the sources. We know that all of these things are, in fact, true, and that CAIR has yet to provide a single example of Jihad Watch’s supposed “hate crimes.” Robert Spencer has never descended to “hate speech” against Muslims. He bases his islamocriticism on the words of the Qur’an, on the most authoritative Hadith, and on the words and behavior of Muslims themselves, both today, and over the past 1,400 years. He criticizes the faith, but nowhere promotes hatred of individual Muslims. Nor do any of the other islamocritics who regularly contribute to the site engage in “hate speech.”
The word “discredited” refers to the attacks on Jihad Watch by such groups as CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which have called JW a “hate site.” We have already seen, above, the kind of people – Hussam Ayloush, Nihad Awad – who direct CAIR. We know that they help publicize supposed “hate crimes” against Muslims, including those that turn out to have been fabricated. We know that they urge their members not to cooperate with the government on security matters (“Don’t talk to the FBI”). We know that their task has been to employ taqiyya, religiously-sanctioned dissimulation, in order to defend Islam from all criticism. Surely this behavior has contributed by now to discrediting not Jihad Watch, but CAIR itself.
CAIR has been equaled, and possibly even surpassed, in mendacity by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which we will examine tomorrow.