Have you ever been blamed for a murder? Speak out against jihad terror, and you probably will be. It has happened to me three times (so far):
3. Reza Aslan blames me for murder of Muslim woman in California.
Last Thursday in El Cajon, California, an Iraqi Muslim named Kassim Alhimidi was found guilty of murdering his wife, Shaima Alawadi, after she had told him that she wanted a divorce.
Before Alhimidi was arrested, this murder was widely reported as an “Islamophobic hate crime”: a note was found by Alawadi’s body that read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Leftists and Islamic supremacists made a great deal of this, claiming that the murder was the work of an “Islamophobe” who hated Shaima Alawadi for wearing a hijab. They even staged a campaign, “One Million Hijabs for Shaima Alawadi.”
Reza Aslan, the celebrated author of Zealot, bashed out a sub-literate tweet blaming Pamela Geller and me for the murder: “If a 32 year old veiled mother is a terrorist than [sic] so am I you Islamophobic fucks Gellar [sic] Spencer et. [sic] al. Come find me.” When Alhimidi was arrested and it became clear that this was not an “Islamophobic hate crime” at all, I asked Aslan for a retraction and an apology, whereupon he showed yet again what a classy and mature individual he is, tweeting: “You owe me an apology for that beard you sexy walrus.”
In any case, the whole “hate crime” aspect of Shaima Alawadi’s murder was staged to deflect attention from the real murderer. Now that it has been definitively established that the murder was an Islamic honor killing, will the Leftists and Islamic supremacists who made so much of the hate crime now stage “One Million Hijabs Against Honor Killing”? Somehow I doubt it.
Via Daily Mail / Facebook
2. I’m blamed for a murder in New Jersey, too
Islamic supremacists are avid to find “Islamophobic” hate crimes that supposedly show that what I say incites people to violence – so avid that the Alawadi case was not the first time I was blamed for a murder.
In August 2011, a young Muslim man, Kashif Pervaiz, murdered his wife, Nazish Noorani, while she was pushing her three-year-old son in a stroller on a street in Boonton, New Jersey. Pervaiz was walking with Noorani when the shooting took place, and was shot himself. According to the New York Post, “Parvaiz originally claimed three men — one black, one white and one of an uncertain race — called the couple ‘terrorists’ before opening fire.” That was enough for police to investigate the possibility that the shooting was an anti-Muslim hate crime — that is, until Pervaiz began changing his story, and began to emerge as a suspect who had staged the whole thing, including his own shooting, so as to deflect attention away from himself as a suspect.
Even as Pervaiz was starting to equivocate and spin ever-taller tales, the blame game began. I received a tweet from a certain Jawad Rasul, containing a link to one of the initial stories about the murder: “Thank you @PamelaGeller and @jihadwatchrs [my Twitter handle], If you have any humanity, you might ponder over this!” Meanwhile, a source close to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) told me that Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR was “salivating and waiting to jump all over” the Noorani murder story: “They are waiting to blame you for everything.”
Another Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), wanted Obama to take action on this: “The rise of Islamophobia fostered by individuals such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller has threatened our communities and prompted such acts of violence. ICNA calls upon the international community and the Obama administration to take action against hate groups and so-called ‘experts on Islam’ who promote this kind of bigotry.”
In reality, the idea that any of the counter-jihad activists and writers whom the mainstream media and Islamic supremacists blame for violence against Muslims are actually responsible for any such violence is absurd. This is true not just because I was nowhere near Boonton, New Jersey, in August 2011, but also because we have never called for or justified violence. It is ironic that the Islamic supremacist groups that are trying to shut down the counter-jihad movement by claiming that our views lead to violence at the same time hotly deny that there is any connection between Islamic teachings and jihad violence — even though Islamic jihadists routinely point to those teachings as their motivation.
1. Max Blumenthal blames me for murders in Norway – and karma comes around
Hard-left journalist Max Blumenthal blamed me for murder in 2011. Noting that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik had cited me (among many others) in his rambling and incoherent “manifesto,” Blumenthal wrote:
The rhetoric of the characters who inspired Breivik, from Pam Geller to Robert Spencer to Daniel Pipes, was so eliminationist in its nature that it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone put words into action.
Blumenthal’s narrative was exploded recently when Breivik revealed that he had been a Nazi all along, and that he had published his “counter-jihad manifesto” intending to destroy the counter-jihad movement – not that the mainstream media, which had lavishly covered Breivik’s supposed admiration for counter-jihad leaders, deemed that news fit to print. What’s more, the idea that Breivik had been inspired by us in the first place was belied by his recommendation that European nationalists ally with jihad terrorists: “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties,” he wrote, as “we both share one common goal.”
But karma had more in store for Max Blumenthal. Last week in Overland Park, Kansas, a Ku Klux Klansman named Frazier Glenn Miller, or Frazier Glenn Cross, murdered three people outside a Jewish community center and then shouted, “Heil Hitler!” The killer, as it turned out, was inspired to hate Jews by Blumenthal’s viciously anti-Israel writings. Wrote Miller:
Jew journalist Max Blumenthal exposes and explains this attempt by a foreign government Israel, to buy the presidential election for the neo-con, war-mongering republican establishment.
Will Blumenthal acknowledge his role in inciting Frazier Glenn Miller to murder? Or will he retract and apologize for his earlier writings linking Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes and me to Breivik’s murders? Will his leftist and Islamic supremacist allies who gleefully blamed us for Breivik’s killing spree now denounce Blumenthal for inciting violence?
None of that will happen. But their self-serving hypocrisy is clear, as it will be the next time they try to frame me and my colleagues for the murder of a Muslim. Leftists like Blumenthal and his Islamic supremacist allies never miss a chance to position Muslims as victims, so as to deflect attention away from jihad terror and try to place Islam and the Muslim community beyond reasonable scrutiny. One way they do this is to portray freedom fighters as spreading “hate” and inciting violence – incongruous claims to try to hang on those defending human rights and constitutional freedoms.
Ultimately, this relentless attempt to frame us for murder and demonize all those who tell the truth about Islam and jihad is about much more than just us: it’s a threat to the freedom of every American. For make no mistake: everyone who tells the same truths with comparable effectiveness will be likewise demonized, and probably blamed the next time a Muslim is murdered. This is the deadly game that leftists and Islamic supremacists play in their all-out effort to stigmatize resistance to jihad terror, demonize its opponents, and outlaw speech critical of Islam.
These efforts have not stopped and will not stop, despite the karmic justice meted out to Blumenthal last week. That is why those who know these truths must tell them now, all the more loudly and persistently, before it’s too late.
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