“White supremacy is coming after all of us,” Muslim Brotherhood (MB) apologist Wajahat Ali said of Jews, Muslims, and other minorities at Washington, DC’s Newseum on December 3. Addressing the previously discussed launch of the Inter Jewish Muslim Alliance (IJMA), he whipped up fear of “Islamophobes” contributing to a bigoted, dangerous climate for minorities in America while denying any charges of personal antisemitism.
Ali conjured an ominous picture with hate crime statistics, including the record number of hate crime murders (24) in 2018. He thereby repeated the discredited Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claim that “in 2018, mostly all extremist-related murders in the U.S. were committed by rightwing extremists.” Yet the reality of hate crimes is more complex.
Total reported hate crimes dropped slightly from 2017 to 2018, including a noticeable drop in hate crimes against Muslims, in contrast to an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes under President Barack Obama. Overall, hate crimes have had a long-term declining trend in past decades, particularly with respect to anti-black hate crimes, while hate crime perpetrators are actually somewhat disproportionately black. Past statistics, moreover, have often indicated that Jews, the target of over half of all religiously-motivated hate crimes, are, like gays, more likely to suffer hate crimes than Muslims.
Ali peddled further distortions to argue that fearmongering about Islam promoted such hate crimes. He decried a “deliberate media story about Islam and Muslims that goes back to the Crusades,” as if these medieval campaigns were unprovoked aggressions against Muslims, and not Christendom’s self-defense against jihad. He condemned President Donald Trump for spreading conspiracy theories about Muslims celebrating on 9/11, even though various reports emerged in the media and elsewhere of such incidents in the New York metropolitan area.
Ali whitewashed Islamic doctrines such as sharia, a legal system whose liberty infringements repeatedly recur in modern, publicly available documents such as the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. Supposedly the conservative think tank Center for Security Policy (CSP) had “mystified sharia in a way that is not applicable or understandable by any Muslim that ever lived.” He joked that in his travels, most Muslims “think that taqqiya is a new taco released by Taco Bell,” but Muslim leaders like Yasser Arafat have long practiced this established doctrine of deception.
Ali complained of undue focus on Muslim terrorism yet unintentionally conceded its disturbing magnitude. He cited unspecified statistics that Muslim individuals in the last decade had committed only 12.5 percent of terror attacks in the United States but had received over half the media coverage. Yet he had previously stated that America had about four million Muslims, similar to some estimates of 4.4 million American Muslims, or 1.4 of the American population, a gross disproportion to his description of their terrorism involvement. Meanwhile he claimed that surveyed American Muslims believed that they “should help law enforcement,” something that might surprise the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The slanderous Ali discussed the malign individuals behind this “Islamophobia” environment examined by him in the propagandistic 2011 Center for American Progress’ (CAP) Fear, Inc. report. He slyly mentioned “Richard Spencer,” a surely intended malapropism (taqiyya?) that confused Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer with notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer. For a few years following Fear, Inc., the “Republican Party had vomited out most of these people” as “fringe,” he stated, while mentioning Steve Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.
Many of these “supreme evil villains” are Jews, as some Jewish observers have previously noted and earlier conference discussions indicated, thereby raising questions of who is prejudiced against whom, Jews or Muslims. Accordingly, many Muslims have a perception that “wherever American Muslims in this country rise, there is always a Jewish footprint there to stomp them out,” Ali stated during audience questioning. To allay any antisemitism concerns, he added that one of his Fear, Inc. coauthors was Eli Clifton, a Jew who “is very sensitive to antisemitism.”
Clifton has had a funny way of showing these sensitivities, for his fringe leftist views at CAP concerning Israel achieved notoriety (e.g. his contention that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons to threaten Israel). Observers noted that antisemitism watchdogs like the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center had assessed him and other CAP researchers as “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” These researchers reflected perfectly a major CAP donor, the Jewish leftist billionaire George Soros, described by some Jews as “perhaps the archetype of Israel-hating.”
Accordingly, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has condemned Soros as someone who “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments.” He funds numerous organizations around the world “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself.” Other Jewish analysts have caustically quipped that he “is as much a practicing Jew as the Iranian ayatollahs; and when it comes to foreign policy, finding daylight between him and them would require a microscope.”
Soros has continued his relationship with Clifton by funding the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI), where he is a policy analyst along with a rogues’ gallery of Israel-haters. QI President Andrew Bacevich has mused about “Israel-firster” policies and a new “honest conversation” about Israel while QI Executive Vice President Trita Parsi is a well-known apologist-lobbyist for Iran’s Islamic Republic. Both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the error-ridded, anti-Semitic screed The Israel Lobby, are QI colleagues with Sarah Leah Whitson, who has exhibited a longstanding “Jewish problem” during her years at Human Rights Watch.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, QI analyst Lawrence Wilkerson, has proven to be a “third-rate conspiracy theorist and a borderline bigot” who engages in “Jew-baiting.” He has theorized that 2013 Syrian regime chemical weapons attacks were actually an Israeli false flag operation and he has falsely claimed that Israel persecutes Christians. Joining him at QI are Professor Gary Sick, an Islamic Republic of Iran apologist who has received funding at Columbia University from Iranian front groups, and longstanding Israel-hater Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst. He is obsessed with the pro-Israel Jewish-American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and willingly accepts both the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran and academic boycotts against Israel.
Such is the company Clifton, his friend Ali, and, by extension, IJMA are promoting, even as he praises Jewish-Muslim alliances. While trying to prod leftist Jews into continued embrace of multicultural ideologies with distorted arguments about hate crimes and white supremacy, he is actually promoting hatred of Israel’s Jewish state and its Jewish diaspora supporters. This helps explain IJMA’s insidious incoherence, as the last article in this series will analyze.