University of Michigan Professor Claims ‘Islamophobia’ Bigger Threat Than Islamic Terrorism

My latest in PJ Media:

Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, proved once again Thursday something that everyone who has been paying attention knows by now: you don’t go to an American university to get an education but to be indoctrinated into Leftist dogma and recruited for Antifa. Cole, who has written a hagiographical and whitewashed biography of Muhammad and is a Leftist go-to authority on Islamic issues, published an article in Foreign Policy In Focus entitled “Islam Wasn’t the Threat — Islamophobia Was.” If this sounds like nonsense, that’s only because it is, but that’s what sells on the Left these days.

Concern for Islamic terrorism, in Cole’s view, has been greatly exaggerated, in part for “racist” reasons (of course), while the rampant terror threat of “white supremacy” has been downplayed or ignored outright. Those who have suffered the most from this lack of focus, he insists, have been Muslims in America, who have borne the brunt of “Islamophobia” in America’s misguided quest to protect itself from a largely nonexistent threat of jihad terrorism.

All this is designed to inculcate the hatred and contempt for the United States that the Left is working to instill everywhere these days, and of course, Cole’s chief targets are conservatives. He begins his ridiculous piece by whining that “Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as ‘a devout Christian.’ It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American.” Aside from denigrating Tucker Carlson, Cole’s point here is that the Jan. 6 “insurrection” was a manifestation of “Christian terrorism,” equivalent to the Islamic terrorism we saw on 9/11.

To drive this point home, Cole has to ignore numerous inconvenient facts, including these: that no one has been charged with insurrection in connection with Jan. 6, the protestors were unarmed, the police opened the doors of the Capitol and invited them in, and no one was killed except one of the protestors, by a rogue cop who has faced no punishment, since he is safely anti-Trump.

Cole also has to ignore the fact that nearly 3,000 people were murdered by Islamic jihad terrorists on 9/11 and that those attacks were just one day’s worth, with 40,000 more jihad attacks coming worldwide since then. He sees 9/11 solely as the impetus for the victimization of Muslims in the United States: “Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, Muslim Americans have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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