Sen.
Murphy's Misguided "Anti-Muslim" Smear
by Steven Emerson
IPT News
May 1, 2018
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first of your friends to like this.
 Some non-Muslim
white folks seem to feel comfortable and well qualified to smear advocates
for reform in Islam as "anti-Muslim."
The Southern Poverty Law Center smeared former radical Maajid Nawaz as an
"anti-Muslim extremist" in a 2016 report. After several shifting
justifications, the group had to eat the report last month, taking it off its website.
Now, a United States senator has called a devout Muslim and reform
advocate "anti-Muslim" in remarks on the Senate floor. Chris
Murphy, D-Conn., was explaining his decision to oppose CIA Director Mike
Pompeo's nomination to serve as secretary of state last week. One reason,
Murphy said, is Pompeo's "deeply intertwined" relationships with
anti-Muslim groups including the American
Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD).
The charge is as baseless as the SPLC's.
The AIFD has demanded an apology from Murphy for calling the group
"anti-Muslim."
According to its website, "AIFD envisions a future wherein Muslims
never feel a conflict between their personal faith and their commitment to
individual liberty and freedom. Rather, we work to empower Muslims to be
primary advocates for liberty and freedom."
Can't you feel the hate?
If you want to know what AIFD founder and President Zuhdi Jasser thinks
about Muslims and Islam, it makes sense to read the Muslim Reform
Movement's declaration of principles. Jasser helped create the group and craft this statement.
For the sensitive of heart, brace yourselves for some flaming-hot Muslim
hatred:
1. We are for secular governance, democracy [and], liberty. We
are against political movements in the name of religion. We separate mosque
and state. We are loyal to the nations in which we live. We reject the idea
of the Islamic state. There is no need for an Islamic caliphate. We oppose
institutionalized sharia. Sharia is manmade.
Better than half the words in this excerpt are applications of the First
Amendment. The rest does nothing to restrict anyone's right to worship, to
practice Islam, in any way. If ever realized, nothing in the entire declaration inhibits a Muslim's rights in
any way. There is zero hostility or enmity.
That doesn't mean Jasser isn't critical of political groups which claim
to act in the name of Muslims. But if doing that is tantamount to telling
"Americans that all Muslims are out to get them and that we are better
off if we just shelter ourselves from people of the Muslim faith," then
critics of the Catholic Church must also be guilty of anti-Catholic
bigotry.
Murphy's statement was similarly off base with the other groups he
named, including the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) and the
Middle East Forum (MEF).
Contrary to Murphy's assertion that it is anti-Muslim, the MEF points out that it "has given hundreds of
thousands of dollars to moderate Muslim and anti-Islamist causes, working
with moderate and reformist Muslim groups and activists all across the
country."
Murphy included IPT among the groups he described in
his Senate comments as having benign names, but dark missions, that
Pompeo was "deeply intertwined" with.
We wish reality was different, but the IPT has never had a relationship
with Pompeo of any kind.
We asked Murphy's office on Monday to provide the basis for saying
Pompeo was deeply intertwined with the IPT. We also asked for specific
examples to support Murphy's claim that IPT and the other groups he named
"try to tell Americans that all Muslims are out to get them and that
we are better off if we just shelter ourselves from people of the Muslim
faith."
We have received no response.
While CIA director, Pompeo helped then-IPT Senior Fellow Pete Hoekstra,
now the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, secure the freedom of former CIA operative Sabrina
DeSousa, who faced four years in an Italian prison after being convicted in
connection with a 2003 rendition of a suspected al-Qaida cleric in which
DeSousa denies involvement.
Two years ago, Hoekstra – a former U.S. House colleague of Pompeo's –
wrote an op-ed
praising Pompeo for remarks calling out an imam who was recorded
praising Hamas. If those two episodes constitute "deeply
intertwined," then Murphy is a linguistic revolutionary.
If expressing concern about radicalization among some Muslims, or
opposition to political Islam, makes one anti-Muslim, then Sen. Murphy needs
to add a prominent elected official to his list: Chris Murphy.
In a 2016 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
Murphy described the challenges he saw in radical Islam. He described the
way radical Wahhabi education and charismatic clerics can lure young
Muslims into a life of jihad.
"A cleric from a nearby conservative mosque offers you a different
path," Murphy said. "He tells you that your poverty is not your
fault, but simply a punishment handed down to you because of your
unintentional deviation from the true path of Islam."
You send your son off with the imam for an education. Soon, "He's a
teenager, announcing to you that the only way to show true faith to Islam
is to fight for it against the kafir, the infidels who are trying to
pollute the Muslim faith, and against the Westerners who are trying to
destroy it. He tells you that he's going off to Afghanistan, or Syria, or
Iraq with some fellow students, and that you shouldn't worry about him
because God is on his side."
Murphy criticized the emphasis Republicans placed on uttering the term,
"radical Islamic terrorism," but acknowledged that Democratic
Party leaders "do backflips to avoid using these kind of terms, but
that ends up forestalling any conversation about the fight within Islam for
the soul of the religion."
What's needed, he said, is "a real conversation about how American
can help win the moderate voices within Islam, help them win out over those
who would sow the seeds of extremism."
That's exactly what Jasser is trying to do through AIFD and the Muslim
Reform Movement. Jasser even wrote a book called A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim
Patriot's Fight To Save His Faith.
"Wow, talk about schizophrenic," Jasser said after the IPT
forwarded him a transcript of Murphy's CFR speech. "Sounds like he
just reads what's put in front of him. The same person who called AIFD out
could not have had these thoughts or statements."
In the end, Murphy's objections weren't enough to derail Pompeo's
nomination, which was confirmed 57-42, with Democrats Heidi Heitkamp, Joe
Manchin, Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill, Bill Nelson, Doug Jones and
Independent Angus King supporting him.
Murphy obviously can support or oppose whomever he chooses. In this
case, however, in criticizing someone he sees as unjustly smearing people,
Murphy unjustly smeared people who, in many cases, may not differ from him
as much as he'd portray it.
Related Topics: Steven
Emerson, Chris
Murphy, Mike
Pompeo, Islamophobia
smear, Southern
Poverty Law Center, Maajid
Nawaz, Zuhdi
Jasser, American
Islamic Forum for Democracy, Middle
East Forum, Pete
Hoekstra, Muslim
Reform Movement, radicalization,
Council
on Foreign Relations
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