The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (34 page)

On February 24, 1997, at the Empire State Building, a Muslim named Ali Abu Kamal started shooting at tourists, killing one and wounding six before killing himself.
¹⁸
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani informed the public that he had “many, many enemies in his mind.”
¹⁹

On July 4, 2002, at the Los Angeles International Airport counter of El Al, the Israeli national airline, a Muslim named Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet started shooting at people. He killed two. The FBI initially said that “there’s nothing to indicate terrorism.” However, after it came to light that Hadayet may have been involved with al Qaeda and was known for his hatred for Israel, the FBI finally did classify this as a terrorist act.
²⁰

The Beltway snipers, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, who were linked to eighteen shootings and ten murders in the Washington, D.C. area in October 2002, were two converts to Islam. Before they were caught investigators ascribed the crimes to an “angry white man;” the perpetrators turned out to be two black men. After they were caught, the media persistently referred to John Muhammad as John Williams, ignoring his conversion to Islam and consequent name change. And even after Malvo’s drawings of Osama bin Laden (whom he labeled a “servant of Allah”) and ramblings about “jihad” were revealed, authorities continued to downplay the possibility that the shootings had anything to do with Islam or terrorism.
²¹

On August 6, 2003, in Houston, a Muslim named Mohammed Ali Alayed slashed the throat of his friend Ariel Sellouk, a Jew. Alayed had broken off his friendship with Sellouk when he began to become more devout in his Islam. On the night of the murder, Alayed called Sellouk and they went out to a bar together before going back to Alayed’s apartment, where Alayed killed his friend. The two were not seen arguing at the bar. Although Alayed killed Sellouk after the fashion of jihadist murders in Iraq and went to a mosque after committing the murder, authorities said they “could not find any evidence that Sellouk…was killed because of his race or religion.”
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There are many similar examples: When a Muslim named El Sayyid Nosair murdered Israeli political activist Meir Kahane in New York City on November 5, 1990, authorities ascribed the killing not to jihad but to Nosair’s depression; and when a co-pilot crashed EgyptAir flight 990 on October 31, 1999, killing 217 people, officials posited no link to terrorism, although the co-pilot exclaimed, “I rely on Allah” eleven times as he crashed the plane.
²³

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

The Raft of Mohammed
by Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz; St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1988. Besides vividly detailing the prejudice against non-Muslims that is rampant in the Islamic world, Péroncel-Hugoz devastatingly describes the intellectual dhimmitude of numerous American and European writers, politicians, and other public figures. He shows how eager PC Westerners are to believe the best about Islam—and even to exchange fact for fantasy in order to do so.

Are officials trying to not alarm Americans? Or are they trying to protect innocent Muslims from backlash? Whatever their motivations, they are keeping Americans in the dark about the true nature and extent of the jihadist terror threat.

Chapter 17

CRITICIZING ISLAM MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

T
he window of free speech in America is closing—at least regarding Islam.

The whitewashing of Islam and jihad goes farther than tendentious propaganda. Honest investigations of the causes of Islamic terrorism are increasingly termed “hate speech” by the PC establishment. CAIR has filed numerous lawsuits against those who say things about Islam that it doesn’t like—making for a chilling effect on those who speak the truth about the religion. “There’s no doubt that CAIR understands this,” notes
National Review
’s John Derbyshire. “They have Saudi oil money behind them and finance is no issue at all to them. They essentially have infinite funds. They will shut up everyone. On the topic of Islam, free speech is dead.”
¹

Meanwhile, Islamic jihadists have their own methods of silencing critics, as the murder of Theo van Gogh last year on the streets of Amsterdam illustrates.

Guess what?

• One Australian state has outlawed speaking the truth about Islam…and Great Britain and other countries are contemplating similar laws.
  
• Violent Islamic intimidation has come to the West: Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street for allegedly offending Muslims.
  
• Converts from Islam to Christianity must live in fear even in the United States.
  

The chilling of free speech in America: FOX’s
24
and CAIR

24
is a FOX TV drama about terrorism. Episodes have featured Bosnian terrorists, German terrorists, South American terrorists, and terrorists from a Halliburton-like conglomerate. And, most famously,
24
featured Muslim terrorists—or at least terrorists with a vaguely Middle Eastern aspect. But while no Bosnians, Germans, South Americans, or Halliburton execs contacted the network to complain about the way they were portrayed on the show, when FOX ventured into Islamic terror territory, the network immediately aroused CAIR’s ire.

Sabiha Khan of CAIR’s Anaheim chapter worried that
24
’s Muslim terrorists would “contribute to an atmosphere that it’s okay to harm and discriminate against Muslims. This could actually hurt real-life people.”
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CAIR scheduled a meeting with FOX executives in Los Angeles to air its concerns.

Meanwhile, IslamOnline, a popular Muslim news portal run from Qatar, had its own ideas of who was behind
24
’s introduction of Muslim terrorists: FOX Entertainment Group, it said, was “part of Jewish billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.” It asserted that
24
’s new plot direction was “hailed by Jewish groups and lobbyists as a bid to reveal Muslims’ ‘true nature,’” and noted that “Jewish writer Daniel Pipes wrote in the Israeli
Jerusalem Post
and the American
New York Post
hoping FOX would not bow to Muslim objections on the series.”
³

IslamOnline dropped “Jewish” from in front of “billionaire Rupert Murdoch” when informed that Murdoch is not, in fact, Jewish, but the implication of the article is still clear:
24
’s introduction of Muslim terrorist characters was yet another in a long line of Jewish conspiracies. It is frequently a bit of knee-jerk paranoia on the part of the defenders of Islamic jihad that anyone who opposes them must be Jewish. This paranoia about the Jews is nourished by the Qur’an’s portrayal of them as crafty, untrustworthy, and accursed. And, of course, jihadists today would have us believe that the trouble between Muslims and non-Muslims is all because of Israel.

But the shadowy “Jewish groups and lobbyists” evidently dropped FOX’s puppet strings, because even before network execs met with CAIR, the producers of
24
removed some material from the show that they were afraid might stereotype Muslims. FOX also agreed to distribute CAIR’s public service announcement about American Muslims to their affiliates, although the affiliates were not bound to run it.

Dealing with the devil

But why was FOX playing ball with CAIR in the first place? Were the execs who met with CAIR representatives aware that three of its officials have been arrested for various terrorist-related activities? Yes, said a FOX source, that is a matter of public record. Are they aware that CAIR founder Nihad Awad helped establish the organization after working at the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), where he was public relations director—and that former FBI counterterrorism official Oliver Revell has called the IAP “a front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants”?
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Did they know that Awad himself has declared, “I am in support of the Hamas movement”?
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Well, yes, said the source, they were aware of allegations that CAIR had some links, however tenuous, with Hamas, but they judged the organization’s complaints on their merits. That’s what FOX always does, he said; it considers not the source of a complaint, but the worthiness of the complaint itself.

So if the Ku Klux Klan called FOX with a complaint, that complaint would be judged on its merits, not on its source?