Groups including the Hamas-derived Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) quickly cried bigotry in response to the August 31 broadcast comments of Joy Reid, host of MSNBC’s primetime Reidout news talk show. Yet her discussion concerning “how we talk about the way Muslims act” is actually banal compared to numerous similar analogies between Islam and various radicalisms in past decades across the political spectrum.
During recent nationwide riots provoked by radical leftists such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, President Donald Trump had incited his supporters to violence, Reid had claimed. Thus she wondered that “when you see what Donald Trump is doing, is that any different from what we describe as radicalizing” Muslims? She elaborated:
When leaders, let’s say in the Muslim world, talk a lot of violent talk and encourage their supporters to be willing to commit violence including on their own bodies in order to win against whoever they decide is the enemy, we in the U.S. media describe that as they are “radicalizing” these people, particularly when they’re radicalizing young people.
CAIR’s San Francisco chapter leader Zahra Billoo, no stranger to bigotry and radicalism, denounced Reid’s “blatant Islamophobia.” CAIR’s national leadership correspondingly tweeted on September 2 about having met with MSNBC officials to discuss her “inaccurate, offensive remarks” and thanked them for their “pledge to avoid Islamophobia in all forms.” CAIR demanded that “Reid must clearly apologize,” for “Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in mainstream society.”
CAIR later expressed disappointment in a tweet when Reid offered not an apology for, but nuanced clarification of, her remarks during her September 2 broadcast. She conceded that her perhaps generalizing remarks (i.e. “the way Muslims act”) were “not exactly the most artful way of asking that question.” Muslim-American Newsweek editor-at-large Naveed Jamali, who was her genial show guest during both the initial controversial broadcast and this subsequent segment, concurred that she had tried to articulate valid concerns, not bigotry. He understood Reid as having addressed “this double standard that exists when we talk about brown and Muslim people in this country” in comparison to radicals such as white supremacists.
Meanwhile media sources recalled Reid’s supposedly “inflammatory posts” about Muslims on her past website. “Give them [Muslims] resources and I fear that they will come after us everywhere,” she had quoted from one online commentator. In another 2006 post, she had written that “current iterations of Islam are largely incompatible with Western notions of free speech and expression, and thus, I’d say, with the [George W.] Bushian dream of Western style democracy for all.”
No such reporting ever suggested that Reid’s comments might have some plausibility. All media outlets simply echoed the anti-Semitic Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar, who had condemned Reid’s “casual Islamophobia,” yet Reid’s analysis merely reflects casual, common sense. At least some Muslim theocratic movements and regimes such as Iran’s Islamic Republic, for example, will exploit any “resources” for nefarious ends.
While this Reid posting was somewhat broad-brushed, her worries about what others have termed an Islamic “jihad on freed speech” is an undisputed truism. This among many Islamic doctrines frustrated President Bush’s Iraqi democratization strategy. For decades the 57-member state (including “Palestine”) Organization of Islamic Cooperation has led efforts to implement de facto global Islamic blasphemy bans, as Pakistani government officials recently reiterated.
Their remarks came as thousands in Pakistan demonstrated against the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo republishing older Muhammad cartoons after the jihadists who had committed a 2015 massacre in the magazine’s Paris offices went on trial. Similarly, Muslims have rioted in Malmo, Sweden, after a Quran burning. This summer also the Danish Ministry of Justice found that 76 percent of surveyed Danish Muslim immigrants or their native-born children want to prohibit criticism of Islam.
The outrage at Reid’s comments must have surprised her, for left-leaning commentators like her have made numerous unfavorable comparisons between conservatives and Muslims in the past decades. Muslim-American Daily Beast columnist Dean Obeidallah, for instance, has angered conservatives in 2014 and 2018 by claiming that conservatives advocate “Christian Sharia Law.” Supposedly their beliefs about human sexuality with respect to issues such as abortion or the definition of marriage are merely “based on the Bible.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show producer Steve Benen similarly noted in 2009 that “[f]rom time to time in recent years, liberals have identified the ‘Taliban wing’ of the Republican Party.” “The phrase is generally considered offensive by most Republicans,” he rightfully added, given the fanatical brutality of these Afghan sharia supremacists. Correspondingly, Senator Tim Johnson (D-South Dakota) apologized during a 2004 election campaign for having referred to the “Taliban wing of the Republican Party.”
By contrast, late National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chairman Julian Bond remained unrepentant. On repeated occasions in 2001, 2008, 2010, and 2013 he condemned conservatives as the “Taliban wing of American politics.” Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page even claimed in 2015 that “it’s not hard to see where Bond came up with that notion” given presidential candidate Trump’s comments on immigration.
Other Leftists have been like-minded, such as Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum, who in 2011 referenced the Republicans’ “Tax Jihadism” and “Anti-Tax Jihad.” Rick Ungar, Forbes magazine’s “Token Lefty” columnist, also discussed the “GOP Tax Jihad” in 2012. Meanwhile conservative sexual politics again caused the feminist activist Kimberley A. Johnson to condemn in 2015 “Sharia Law Republicans.” In 2017, a similar internet meme appeared asking “Republicans and Sharia Law, Can you tell the difference?”
Conservatives in turn have made their own Islam political analogies. Columnist Cal Thomas raised leftist eyebrows in 2006 when he described the “capture of the Democratic Party by its Taliban wing.” He was responding to “Taliban Democrats” under Ned Lamont who had defeated the moderate, pro-Iraq war Senator Joe Lieberman in a Connecticut Democratic primary, thereby forcing him to win reelection as an independent. They had issued a “political ‘fatwah’” against an “infidel worthy of electoral death” in a “political jihad,” such that the “few remaining rational Democrats should put on their burkas now and submit to the will of the party mullahs.”
BLM-inspired statue iconoclasm on both sides of the Atlantic in 2020 prompted comparisons with the Taliban, infamous for destroying in 2001 the Bamiyan Buddhas, the world’s largest Buddha figures. In England, protesters tore down in Bristol the statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and defaced with graffiti a Winston Churchill statue in London’s Parliament Square. In response, the conservative politician Nigel Farage tweeted on June 7 about a “new form of the Taliban.” Three days later Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted about “American Taliban” after protesters toppled a St. Paul, Minnesota, Christopher Columbus statue.
LGBT claims of being a new civil rights movement opposed only by irrational bigots have also led to comparisons with historic Islamic dhimmi subjugation of non-Muslims. Such was the analysis of Princeton University legal scholar Robert George during a 2014 Washington, DC, lecture before this author and others. Any religious “faithful must be reduced to a dhimmi-like status in respect of opportunities (in employment, contracting, and other areas)” if believers express opposition to LGBT ideologies.
Peter West, a writer for the Australian Quadrant magazine, noted one example of such “rainbow dhimmis” in 2019. The Australian rugby player Israel Folou suffered a professional contract termination after posting on Instagram a Bible-based condemnation of homosexuality. West noted that the Rugby Australia league had thus banned the “brightest star in the Australian game.”
National Review writer Jack Butler offered this year a more comical reference to Islam. This fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune science fiction novel series wants to see the new film adaption of the original book appear in 2020. This wish he has termed “Dune 2020: My Butlerian Jihad.”
Such public commentary clearly reveals the failure of the politically correct to convince people such as Reid of the dogma that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Rather, even leftist individuals like her have noted the undeniable association of Islamic terms with phenomena including fanaticism, radicalism, and oppression. Words such as “jihad” have undergone a development akin to Japan’s World War II kamikaze pilots, who made their name synonymous for suicidal behavior. Reid and others owe no apology to CAIR or anyone else for recognizing Islam’s realities.