Garbanzo Toons

More Islamic Turnspeak

The Detroit News ran this editorial comment by Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In this piece, Hamad relies on the current favorite propaganda technique of jihadists: turnspeak, defined as:

where you attack someone and then turn it around 180 degrees and claim they attacked you. Because the truth is the exact opposite of the information being disseminated it is psychologically difficult to counter and leads to confusion.

Turnspeak leads to psychological confusion and a feeling of being "burned-out" or "overwhelmed" with too much information, effectively creating a blanket of "white noise" which makes clarity difficult to achieve.

[ . . . ]

The Arab claim that Jews are "Nazis" is not without motive. They are trying to obscure their own close connection with the Nazis. During World War II leading Muslims including Haj Amin al-Husseini worked for the Nazis in Germany and called for a intifada against Britain. Haji Amin al-Husseini was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, as well as Yasser Arafat's close relative and mentor

In his piece, Hamad claims,

As Americans, we take pride in our Constitution and our right to freely debate the policies of our government on both the domestic and international level. This right is what separates us from many other undemocratic countries in the world. However, a disturbing trend has emerged over the years and an ideology has manifested, which somehow mandates that, when it comes to Israel, it is not only unacceptable to criticize, but it is reprehensible.

The disturbing fact is that people who are justifiably critical of Israel immediately become targets of harassment.

Although the Arab-Israeli conflict has been a subject of debate for almost 60 years, this conflict, in the past month, has taken a drastic and dramatic turn and called into question our precious freedom of expression here in the United States.

It is most disappointing to witness the labeling of efforts to oppose the war against Lebanon as unpatriotic, anti-Semitic and divisive among fellow Arab and Jewish Americans in Metro Detroit. It is a true shame that differing opinions and voices continue to face attempts at censorship and are judged based on their alignment with Israel and with the administration's policies.

To anyone who has been paying attention and is honest, this claim is the purest bunk. In fact, the opposite is true. It is Muslims who are harrassing critics of Islam. But by using his best Turnspeak, Mr. Hamad hopes we will forget a lot of very recent history. Some of it is so recent it can still be referred to as current events. Hamad still thinks he can obscure the facts. But let's examine the facts of some recent episodes of Islamic harrassment.

Remember Michael Graham? He was fired last year from radio station WMAL due to pressure from CAIR after he called Islam a "terrorist organization".

National Review and Boeing were both targets of Islamic harrassment when CAIR demanded that National Review stop selling books that CAIR found offensive. Boeing succumbed to the harrassment and dropped ads from The National Review.

Thomas Klocek, part time adjunct professor in DePaul’s School of New Learning, was fired from DePaul University for daring to argue with Muslim students on the Palestinian issue.

He is guilty of a thought-crime, challenging the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel mindset which has come to dominate the DePaul campus

Klocek’s challenge to this new campus orthodoxy occurred in a cafeteria during a student activities fair last September. For 15-20 minutes, Klocek, who is Catholic, not Jewish, confronted a group of 8 students manning two tables for the groups Students for Justice in Palestine, and United Muslims Moving Ahead. Klocek says he argued that the materials the groups were disseminating were one-sided. On this, he is indisputably correct. Neither group pretends to provide balanced information on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. That of course, is perfectly understandable and acceptable. These are advocacy groups.

Klocek says the discussion was heated at times, and he admits to raising his voice. He says he told the students that Palestinians were Arabs who lived in the West Bank and Gaza – that they had no unique national historical identity. He challenged one student’s assertion that Israel was behaving like the Nazis. He stated that while most Muslims were not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists these days were Muslim. This statement had originally been made by the manager of an Arab news channel, and had recently been quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. It has the incidental merit of being true.

Clearly, the students were not used to such a challenge. DePaul in fact has gone out of its way in recent years to make the campus dialogue “safe” for Muslim and Arab students. The University administration warned the campus community after the September 11th attacks that offensive speech hostile to Muslims would not be tolerated.

[ . . . ]

For his behavior in this brief debate with the students, Klocek, a popular long-time DePaul professor, has lost his job, his health benefits, and has been smeared and humiliated by the University administration.

It has gotten so bad that Klocek has even been told not to pray at the campus chapel, which he formerly did regularly during his DePaul teaching stint. Such is the retribution of a Catholic University for a professor who has taken the risk of challenging the established mindset at DePaul on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.

When Nolan Finley, editor at the Detroit News wrote a column local Muslims found offensive, someone tried to get the Michigan House to pass a resolution condemning him for expressing his opinion. From the Arab American News:

CAAO president Abed Hammoud said, "We support Resolution 214 and thank the representatives for their action on this very important issue," Hammoud also praised the AAJA for their position on the Finley issue. He encouraged other organizations to follow suit.

Dawud Walid, Director of CAIR Michigan said, “Mr. Finley broke the golden rule: treat others as he would like to be treated. He would not want his racial group called blood-thirsty people. His comments show a lack of prudence and human sensitivity. CAIR-MI affirms Resolution 214.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC-MI) issued a statement which "calls on all community members and concerned citizens to contact their State Representatives and encourage them to support House Resolution 214."

The AAJA is a non-profit membership organization with approximately 2,000 members with 19 chapters across the U.S. and Asia. The Association is based in San Francisco.

Finley's column is sadly no longer available on the Detroit News website, but is reprinted at least partially here. It seems that freedom of speech does not apply to critics of Islam, only to critics from Islam. And by that same twist, it's not harrassment if Muslims have you fired from your job, or use the government to shut you up. It's only harrassment if Jews write negative things about what you say. Notice also, that there is never an attempt by the Muslim voices to answer the charges made against them. There is only outrage, namecalling, and threats.

These incidents of harrassment by Muslims in the United States are the ones I could think of quickly. There have been international incidents too. Does anyone recall a small outpouring of outrage due to some Danish cartoons? How about the murder of Theo Van Gogh over a movie he made? And now his partner in the making of the movie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been forced to live under 24 hour protection. And then there's Salman Rushdie. To be fair, these are not really incidents of harrassment. They go miles beyond mere harrassment. The murder and mayhem created by Muslims is inexcusable. So why do so many in the West keep pandering to these murderers? Why do they accept the Muslim propaganda, when by merely reading the daily news anyone can see that Imad Hamad and his associates are liars?

Useful idiots in the West either accept Turnspeak or truly don't get it. Either way, the rest of us have to fight back.

Labels: Imad Hamad, islam, turnspeak

posted by Harry @ 5:30 PM