Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, proved once again Thursday something that everyone who has been paying attention knows by now: you don’t go to an American university to get an education but to be indoctrinated into Leftist dogma and recruited for Antifa. Cole, who has written a hagiographical and whitewashed biography of Muhammad and is a Leftist go-to authority on Islamic issues, published an article in Foreign Policy In Focus entitled “Islam Wasn’t the Threat — Islamophobia Was.” If this sounds like nonsense, that’s only because it is, but that’s what sells on the Left these days.
Concern for Islamic terrorism, in Cole’s view, has been greatly exaggerated, in part for “racist” reasons (of course), while the rampant terror threat of “white supremacy” has been downplayed or ignored outright. Those who have suffered the most from this lack of focus, he insists, have been Muslims in America, who have borne the brunt of “Islamophobia” in America’s misguided quest to protect itself from a largely nonexistent threat of jihad terrorism.
All this is designed to inculcate the hatred and contempt for the United States that the Left is working to instill everywhere these days, and of course, Cole’s chief targets are conservatives. He begins his ridiculous piece by whining that “Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as ‘a devout Christian.’ It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American.” Aside from denigrating Tucker Carlson, Cole’s point here is that the Jan. 6 “insurrection” was a manifestation of “Christian terrorism,” equivalent to the Islamic terrorism we saw on 9/11.
To drive this point home, Cole has to ignore numerous inconvenient facts, including these: that no one has been charged with insurrection in connection with Jan. 6, the protestors were unarmed, the police opened the doors of the Capitol and invited them in, and no one was killed except one of the protestors, by a rogue cop who has faced no punishment, since he is safely anti-Trump.
Cole also has to ignore the fact that nearly 3,000 people were murdered by Islamic jihad terrorists on 9/11 and that those attacks were just one day’s worth, with 40,000 more jihad attacks coming worldwide since then. He sees 9/11 solely as the impetus for the victimization of Muslims in the United States: “Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, Muslim Americans have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.”
That would be a shame if it were true, but it isn’t. In reality, FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Muslims are rare, far more rare than hate crimes against Jews. No hate crime is justified, but the idea that Muslims in the U.S. have been unique victims of discrimination and harassment since 9/11 is simply without foundation.
And then there’s the larger picture.
On June 1, 2009, a Muslim named Abdulhakim Muhammad shot a soldier to death at a Little Rock military recruiting office, explicitly in the name of Allah. On November 5, 2009, in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered thirteen unarmed soldiers while screaming “Allahu akbar.” On April 15, 2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev exploded two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring many more in the name of Islam. On Sept. 25, 2014, Alton Nolen, a convert to Islam, beheaded a coworker at Vaughan Foods in Moore, Oklahoma and had publicly supported jihad violence.
Related: Berkeley Professor of ‘Islamophobia’ Claims ‘the Muslim Is Presumed Guilty’ on U.S. Campuses
On July 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn., a Muslim named Mohammad Abdulazeez went on a shooting spree at a military installation, murdering five soldiers. On Nov. 4, 2015, at the University of California, Merced, Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people “in the name of Allah.” On Dec. 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, Calif., a Muslim couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a Christmas party, murdering fourteen people. On Jan. 7, 2016, a convert to Islam named Edward Archer shot Philadelphia police officer Jesse Hartnett because “police bend laws that are contrary to the teachings of the Qur’an.” On Feb. 11, 2016, a Muslim named Mohammad Barry entered the Nazareth Restaurant & Deli in Columbus, Ohio, and began stabbing patrons because the owner of the restaurant was an Israeli.
On June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Fla., a Muslim named Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and injured 58 at a gay bar. He insisted that he was doing this out of loyalty to the Islamic State. On November 28, 2016, at Ohio State University, a Muslim student, Abdul Artan, intentionally rammed a car into pedestrians and then began stabbing people with a butcher knife, injuring 11 people. On Oct. 31, 2017, a Muslim named Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov rented a Home Depot pickup truck and intentionally drove it down a bicycle path, killing eight people and injuring twelve.
On December 6, 2019, at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, a second lieutenant of the Saudi Royal Air Force, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, murdered three U.S. sailors. On May 21, 2020, at the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, a Muslim named Adam Alsahi crashed through a gate, got out, and opened fire, shooting a Navy police officer. On Aug. 29, 2021, in Plano, Texas, a Muslim named Imran Ali Rasheed murdered a Lyft driver, stole her car, and drove to Plano police headquarters, where he shot two people. He left a note explaining his Islamic motivations.
Longtime readers of my news site Jihad Watch know that this is only a partial list of jihad terror acts in the U.S. since 9/11. Then there are also all the foiled plots.
Meanwhile, how many people were killed or injured in the U.S. in “Islamophobic” attacks? None. None at all. That in itself should have made Cole too embarrassed to publish his piece, but of course, his objective isn’t accuracy, but propaganda and indoctrination.
“Islam wasn’t the threat — Islamophobia was,” says the pseudo-academic Juan Cole. Alas for his students at the University of Michigan! His article is a neat summation of the sorry state of American academia today.
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