ny-daily-news-islamic-states-rise-has-fueled-islamophobia

Robert Spencer Nov 8, 2014 at 5:01pm "Islamophobia", claiming victim status, journalistic bias, Useful idiots 23 Comments

There is no free press in the U.S. Since the Islamic State began to make headlines, there has not a single article about how Muslims are instituting programs to convince young Muslims that the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam is wrong. There has not been a single rally of any significant size of Muslims against the Islamic State — nothing like the demonstrations against cartoons of Muhammad and the Pope’s Regensburg remarks. But there has been an avalanche of pieces like this one in the New York Daily News, claiming that Muslims are being victimized.

This is the only point of view that the mainstream media allows. “Journalists” such as Corinne Lestch (and there is a host of others, of course) do all they can to convince Americans not to believe what they see in the news, but to believe them that the problem is not jihad violence and Muslims victimizing non-Muslims, but non-Muslims victimizing Muslims, who must not be challenged to work against the understanding of Islam that gives rise to Muslim-on-Infidel violence, for that would be “Islamophobic.”

More interspersed below, and Pamela Geller has a terrific takedown of this ridiculous article here.
“Muslims across America, Europe face renewed 9/11-style scorn amid ISIS’ violent campaign,” by Corinne Lestch (on Twitter, @NYDNCorinne), New York Daily News, November 7, 2014 (thanks to all who sent this in):

When Zainab Chaudry left a grocery store Wednesday in her native Baltimore, a man loitering outside followed the 32-year-old to her car.
“‘Are you one of those people who are beheading people over there?’” she recalled him asking her. “He said, ‘You need to go back to where you came from, because you’re not welcome here.’”

Step back and think about this for a second. A lout in a grocery store says some insulting things to a Muslim, and it makes the New York Daily News. Late in August I was in a rental-car shuttle and a Muslim (to whom I had just given up my seat) said some insulting things to me. That was not news, and it never remotely occurred to me that it might be, but this is. Why? Because this anecdote, uncorroborated by anyone but its alleged victim, fits the mainstream media narrative, while the other one does not.

Note also the grotesque lack of proportion. Has Corinne Lestch ever written article about the Muslim massacres of Christians all over the world in the last few years, all done in the name of Islam and in accord with imperatives in the Qur’an and Sunnah? I doubt it. Did she write about the culture that could make a 13-year-old boy say, “I like Islamic State because they pursue Sharia and kill infidels”? Unlikely. These things and 1,000 others like them don’t fit the mainstream narrative, and so they don’t get mainstream attention. But some creep says unkind things to a Muslim in the supermarket, and it’s “Stop the Presses!”

Chaudry, who wears a traditional headscarf, is one of many Muslims and Muslim-Americans who face heightened backlash since the Islamic State tried to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
“I never really was very conscious of my Muslim identity in a negative way as I was after 9/11, but even more so after ISIS and the beheadings,” Chaudry said in an interview with the Daily News. She was referring to a slew of executions of American and British citizens by the militants.
From Europe to Canada to the United States, experts say Muslims have been the target of increased discrimination and recent waves of violence as ISIS continues its brutal campaign — in an environment seemingly more hostile than the one after 9/11.

Which “experts”? Oh, do read on.

Social media has also contributed to the invective against Muslims, more so than after 9/11, when Facebook and Twitter did not yet exist.
“The use of social media has grown exponentially in recent years,” said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Even post-9/11, it wasn’t really there. But nowadays, everybody uses social media. When you have this constant stream of anti-Muslim polemics and false information, it has a corrosive effect on our society.”

Ah, now we see our “expert” in Muslim victimhood: none other than Honest Ibe Hooper of Hamas-linked CAIR. Corinne Letsch doesn’t see fit to mention, of course, that while CAIR is quite mainstream these days, this self-styled “civil rights group” was actually named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Hooper himself), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.

The acts of bigotry also take on other forms.
Last month, an Albuquerque mosque was hit by a Molotov cocktail, which briefly ignited, according to local reports. Five shots were fired Tuesday at a mosque in Coachella, Calif., when four people were inside preparing for an early morning prayer.

Whoever committed these crimes should be found, arrested, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Lestch doesn’t mention, of course, that Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

No one was hurt in either incident.
Hooper said fewer people are condemning the incidents, which are being investigated as hate crimes.
“Even after 9/11, when a mosque would be attacked, we’d see people coming out with flowers and offers of support,” Hooper told The News. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing less of that.”

Maybe people are getting fed up with your endless whining.

Across Europe, the anti-Muslim sentiment has reached a boiling point.
There was a recent spate of violent attacks in Germany, according to a Washington Post story, when right-wing conservatives protesting Islamic fundamentalism in Cologne clashed with police while waving German flags and screaming “foreigners out!” Dozens were injured.
In Paris, a Muslim woman wearing traditional clothing was kicked out of a performance at the Opera Bastille.
And in Denmark, some politicians are calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants from entering the country.

Note how Lestch presents these incidents and actions as if they were gratuitous manifestations of bigotry and hatred — which is the Islamic supremacist line. No acknowledgment is ever made of the political and supremacist aspects of Islam, the vows of conquest and subjugation, the violence against non-Muslims, etc. No innocent people should ever be victimized. It is the height of dishonesty to portray suspicion of Islam in Europe as if it had no connection to 7/7, 3/11, the boasts about the imminent conquest of Rome, the never-ending stream of arrests of Muslims for terror plots, etc. Lestch doesn’t challenge any of the Muslims to whom she speaks on what their communities are doing to fight against jihad terror and Islamic supremacism. I’m sure it never crossed her mind to do so; that would have been “Islamophobic.”

“The stigma against Muslims is just getting worse, and I have considered moving across the border to Sweden,” 21-year-old Alisiv Ceran told the newspaper. “I feel that here, they are saying that integration means forgetting your religious values. I don’t agree with that.”
Experts said Muslims have encountered discrimination in Europe since before 9/11 — but it may be intensifying now because thousands of Europeans have fled to the Middle East to fight with the militants.

Actually, hate crimes against Jews are much more common than hate crimes against Muslims. Where is Lestch’s article on Islamic antisemitism and how because of it, Jews are increasingly menaced in Europe?

While dozens of Americans are believed to have traveled to fight alongside terrorists, at least 3,000 Europeans — many from France and Germany — are estimated to have joined ISIS forces, according to New York-based intelligence firm The Soufan Group.
“You have lots of Americans who, like Europeans, now see Islam as not a religion — it is simply a terrorist ideology,” said Jocelyne Cesari, senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University.

Cesari is being spectacularly disingenuous here. The truth is that they don’t see the religion and the terrorist ideology as mutually exclusive.

But the anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. is “not as common or intense as what’s happening in Europe,” Cesari told The News.
Chaudry, who also works for CAIR, said associating ISIS with Islam only legitimizes the terrorists’ propaganda.

Ah — Chaudry also works for Hamas-linked CAIR, but Lestch saw fit to bury that fact.

“They are barbaric,” she said. “There’s nothing Muslim about ISIS. In actuality, the vast majority of their victims are Muslims. The kinds of atrocities they’re engaged in in no way reflects the true ideals of Islam.”

The vast majority of their victims are Muslims whom they consider apostates and heretics, and thus deserving of death. But here again, Lestch doesn’t challenge Chaudry to explain how the Islamic State is violating the tenets of Islam. She heard what she wanted to hear, and that was good enough.