The Hamas-linked Bridge Initiative, a program of the Saudis’ bought-and-paid-for Georgetown University, this week hosted Nazia Kazi, an assistant professor at Stockton University in New Jersey, to tell Georgetown’s hapless students that no resistance to the global jihad whatsoever is allowed, no matter how tepid, half-hearted, or fantasy-based. It’s all “Islamophobia.”
According to Georgetown’s student newspaper, The Hoya, Kazi warned that “young U.S. citizens risk forgetting how post-9/11 U.S. policies have harmed Muslim communities at home and abroad.” And clearly, from the look of Kazi’s presentation, they’re at even greater risk of forgetting, if they ever knew, how much people around the world have been harmed by jihad violence.
Kazi, according to The Hoya, said that “the U.S. government’s war on terror is a manifestation of Islamophobia,” and explained: “If we are to understand Islamophobia at all, we must push ourselves to think beyond the actions of bigoted individuals, and we must push ourselves to understand the roots of their hate. We must push ourselves to see the Islamophobia that is perpetrated by the state and all too often paid for by our tax dollars. And most importantly, we must push ourselves to see our own tragic and often invisible complicity.”
Why would the state perpetuate “Islamophobia”? Kazi, the author of a book called Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics, asserted that the war on terror was all really about American imperialism. The idea that Islamic jihad is an imperialist project didn’t seem to catch her attention. “There are ideological underpinnings at the heart of U.S. empire building,” said Kazi.
Sure there are. And there are ideological underpinnings to the concept of “Islamophobia” as well. The problem with most uses of the term “Islamophobia” is that they tend to condemn under the same rubric of bias and bigotry any analysis of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Yet the jihad threat is real, and growing worldwide, as the evidence of over 36,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11 shows. Nonetheless, as Kazi’s presentation shows, “Islamophobia” has become, for all intents and purposes, a larger threat than jihad terror. The Bridge Initiative would rather be beheaded by someone screaming “Allahu akbar” than host a presentation similar to Kazi’s about the nature and magnitude of global jihad violence, and the motivating ideology behind it. This myopia endangers us all in numerous ways.
In December 2015 in San Bernardino, when the Islamic jihadist couple Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party, a friend of one of their neighbors recalled that the neighbor had told him about suspicious activity at the couple’s home. “Sounds like she didn’t do anything about it,” the friend remembered. “She didn’t want to do any kind of racial profiling. She’s like, ‘I didn’t call it in … maybe it was just me thinking something that’s not there.’”
“She didn’t want to do any kind of racial profiling.” For years she had been force-fed the notion that to be suspicious of Muslims was “bigotry” and “racial profiling” – “Islamophobia” – and so she didn’t alert police to the strange activity at the home of Farook and Malik.
Fourteen people were killed so that politically correct niceties could be preserved, and no one incurred any charges of “racism.”
This wasn’t a singular incident. The fear of “Islamophobia” charges has overridden, or threatened to override, concern about jihad terrorism for years. Thanks to Nazia Kazi, the Bridge Initiative, and Georgetown University, as well as hordes of like-minded academics at universities and colleges all over the country, there are innumerable young people today who were born after 9/11 and who believe that – in the immortal words of Ilhan Omar – “some people did something” on that day that led to the widespread victimization of innocent Muslims in the U.S. They assume that the danger of “Islamophobia” and American imperialism is all that there is to be learned from the terrible events of that day.
The crowd that came to hear Nazia Kazi at Georgetown University likely left the hall feeling righteous and informed. They were neither. They had just been subjected to another episode in one of the most successful propaganda efforts in world history. When the jihad threat is unmistakable and can no longer be denied by anyone, will they remember how Kazi, Bridge and Georgetown worked so hard to stigmatize all resistance to it?
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
