(Israelnationalnews.com)
Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D.
is emerita professor of Psychology and Women’s
Studies and a frequent contributor to FOX News,
Pajamas Media, and Middle East Quarterly.
I did not think that the
pro-Muslim/pro-Islamist and anti-Western
propaganda could get any worse—and yet it just
has.
TIME
magazine has an August 30 cover
story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” Within, the article
is titled: “Islam in America: It’s part of the fabric of life,
but protests reveal a growing hostility to the
religion of Muslims.”
President
Obama’s rather strange assertions that “seven
million” Muslims live in
America (only 2.5-3 million actually do), and that
“Islam has always played a role in America,” actually
contradict the point of this piece, but no matter.
One might wonder why any
“hostility” to a productive, historically
significant Muslim presence in America exists. TIME
magazine does not tell us.
The article
portrays Muslims as innocent victims and American
non-Muslims as prejudiced racists who, historically,
once banned Catholicism, tried to limit immigration,
burned African-American churches, passed anti-Chinese
legislation, criminalized certain Native-American
rituals (polygamy,
rejection of modern medicine), spawned the Ku Klux
Klan, failed to elect a Catholic President until 1960,
allowed Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi rants
to appear over the airwaves, and interned 120,000
Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War Two.
This is all contained in TIME’s “Brief
History of Intolerance in America.”
This article could
easily appear in an Egyptian or Syrian magazine;
however it would be Israel that would be blamed for
various alleged atrocities, and Palestinians, Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, even al-Qaeda, who
would be seen as the innocent victims.
TIME
magazine does not balance out their history of
American intolerance with a history of American tolerance, which
included separating the state from religion, reforming
religions, instituting a tradition of free speech,
fighting a bloody Civil War in order to free the
slaves, giving women the vote and educational
opportunities, freeing Europe from Nazi fascist rule
and waging a Cold war against Soviet totalitarianism.
Also missing in
the TIME magazine article is the fact that
Muslim leaders, in the name of Islam, have behaved
very badly and for a very long time. Missing is an
equal history of Muslim countries which have practiced
colonialism, imperialism, forced conversions, slavery
(which is still practiced), and a far more barbaric
mistreatment of non-Muslims infidels.
Muslim leaders, in the name of Islam,
killed and forcibly converted Hindus in India for 800
years—and are still persecuting them; they have also
destroyed the Christian Church in the Middle East and
Central Asia—it is no more; in its place are only
mosques and minarets where once only churches stood.
Muslims vanquished Zorastrianism and Buddhism, and
both exiled and genocidally exterminated Jews,
Armenians, and Greeks. According to Israeli historian,
Benny Morris, the Arab 1948 war against Israel must
now also be understood as a religious holy war, a
jihad, one that is still ongoing (“The 1948 War Was an
Islamic Holy War,” Middle East Quarterly,
Summer 2010).
TIME magazine
fails to note all this—and gives little credence to
more recent historical events.
Recently, Muslims,
in the name of Islam, have hijacked planes, blown
themselves and other people up, flown planes into tall
buildings, plotted bomb attacks in New York City’s
Times Square and over Detroit, shot American soldiers
down on a military base in Texas, plotted to do so on
military bases in New York and New Jersey. In
addition, mosques everywhere, even in the West, have
been preaching death to the Jews, death to Zionists,
infidels, and Jihad Now! These mosques and their imams
or mullahs have been funded by Arab and Muslim
pro-jihad financiers.
After years of
denial, indifference, and anti-racist,
multi-culturally relativist political correctness,
Europeans and Americans are only now just waking up to
what Israel has been living with for 63 years. Too
little, too late, they are now trying to halt some of
the Islamist practices which are crimes and
are best described as Islamic gender and religious
Apartheid.
When westerners
protest Islamic Apartheid, they are demonized as
“Islamophobes” and “racists.” This means that any
resistance to aggressive Islamification is shamed and
slandered. If that doesn’t work, physical intimidation
and lawsuits (“lawfare”) follow.
Incredibly, the
Western media and political establishment has taken
the Islamist side. They
confuse “Islamism” or “radical Islam” with the
majority of silent Muslims who are too afraid to take
on the Islamists, (or who agree with them), and with
the small but precious number of Muslim and ex-Muslim
dissidents, feminists, secularists, and moderates who
do stand up to the Islamists but who are not consulted
by western leaders or quoted in the Western media.
TIME
magazine does not quote Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Seyran Ates, Zeyno Baran, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Magdi
Allam, Bassam Tibi, Khaled Abu Toameh, who are Muslims
and ex-Muslims who have written major works against
Islamism, and who have argued for human rights within
Islam, including the right to leave Islam without
risking death.
TIME
magazine’s approach has also been adopted by the
mainstream media in how they cover the controversy
over the controversial mosque near Ground Zero. Those
who oppose it are being called “bigots,” “racists,”
and madmen, at least in the mainstream media. Those
who defend it are seen as enlightened, tolerant
“victims” whose religious freedom has been impinged.
Just yesterday, Daisy
Khan, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf’s
wife, claimed that the attacks have gone far beyond
“Islamophobia” and are now in the realm of
“discrimination against Jews.”
Next thing I
expect to hear is that the “Zionists” are behind the
discrimination against the “Jewish” Muslims.
Folks: Welcome to
the Middle East in New York City. Now, we are really
all Israelis.
Phyllis Chesler is the author of thousands of
articles and of thirteen books, including "Women and
Madness" (1972), "Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman"
(2002) and "The New Anti-Semitism" (2003).
