On the fine line between anti-jihadist activism and Islamophobia
I reckon it’s worth my time to make a few things clear.
CONTENT NOTE for a discussion of Islamophobia in the context of a vociferous repudiation thereof.
There was an evil and horrific Islamophobic terrorist attack in a town neighbouring mine (it’s called London, but it’s not the real London) a few days ago. Inna lilahi wa inna lilayhi raji’ún. Baruch dayan emet. My friend Yosi Mesbah’s setting-to-music of the Bahá’í prayer for the departed is here, and I’m singing it to myself a lot these days in memoriam of these dearly departed, and worrying for the lone survivor, now an orphan, whose life will surely now be so much more difficult and painful.
As someone who makes a regular habit of commenting at length on issues related to Islamic extremism and supremacism and generally doesn’t take kindly to the accusation that his work in this regard is Islamophobic, I thought it would behoove me, and also be apropos, to examine carefully what responsibilities people like me, and the kind of people I support and signal-boost, might have in relation to hate crimes and terrorist attacks which target Muslims. Most of what I have to say is here, but I wanted to take a moment to add to it, because I think the occasion merits it.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame reasonable and decent critics of Islamic extremism for attacks like this, but I also don’t think it would be fair on the part of the movement I represent to foreswear any responsibility to staunchly and forthrightly oppose the kind of blanket anti-Muslim hatred represented by this sort of thing. It’s quite important to me, as a vocal and unapologetic commentator on these issues, to stand up and be counted as someone who never intends for my work to result in an atmosphere in which innocent Muslim civilians come to harm, or to be used in ways which conduce to the suffering of innocent Muslim civilians. And to be clear, by “innocent” I mean any civilian, even though there may be certain Muslim civilians whose conservative or even supremacist or extremist convictions make them my ideological enemies. A hypothetical Islamophobic terrorist attack that murdered a group of Muslim civilians who approvingly and enthusiastically supported extremist messaging at a Muslim Brotherhood-influenced mosque would still be a terrorist attack, and I would still see it as my responsibility to condemn it, even though under ordinary circumstances I would identify such people as my political enemies. I don’t respect the fact that some of the people whose work I have studied to gain a broader and more detailed understanding of the nature of Islamic extremism and supremacism, notably the Greek Orthodox Christian and staunch political conservative Robert Spencer (who runs Jihad Watch, which chronicles Islamic supremacist activity around the world), generally don’t accept that they have any responsibility to speak compassionately about the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry, or to acknowledge these dangers at all.
Spencer is on the record as claiming that “Islamophobia” is “a propaganda neologism designed to intimidate reasonable people into thinking that it is wrong to oppose jihad terror and the oppression of women, LGBTQ+ people, and others by sharí’ah.” He cites the testimony of the Black American imam Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who was present at the 1994 meeting of the International Institute of Islamic Thought at which the term was coined and who later fulminated against its use in this way, and, as in so many other cases, Spencer has the raw facts right (and deserves credit for that), but uses them to tell a story that makes many innocent Muslims feel demonized
With regard to Islamophobic terrorism, Spencer’s oft-repeated formulation is as follows:
“Attacks on innocent Muslims are never justified, but honest exploration of the ways in which Islamic supremacists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and make recruits among Muslims who are otherwise peaceful is always necessary.”
Strictly speaking, all of this is true, but I resent the fact that Mr. Spencer, whom I must admit is a scholar I respect and someone whose takes on many issues I consider cogent (even though he supports Donald Trump, whom I contend that no decent person should), doesn’t go further in conceding that his work is being misinterpreted and misused by people who really do hate Muslims, and doesn’t make more of an effort to put daylight between himself and people like this murderer in London, Ontario.
I understand why Spencer doesn’t do this – it’s because he’s so ensconced in an archconservative ideological position which hates, reviles, and distrusts the Left that he doesn’t want to give his enemies any ammunition or be made to go on the defensive at all. I think this position is firmly wrong. I know that Mr. Spencer is engaged in the same human rights struggle I am (I trust not only his public statements to this effect but also the answers he’s given me privately when we’ve communicated by email), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to treat that fact as self-evident in light of the present atmosphere, which really does see innocent Muslims getting victimized on a semiregular basis. I think prominent writers and commentators on these issues need to make more of an effort to make sure the general public knows that we hate and denounce any and all attacks on any and all innocent Muslim civilians, including not just terror attacks but also hate crimes such as taunting Muslims with bacon or ripping off Muslim women’s hijabs or whatever.
I’ll still go to bat for the counterjihad (or the anti-jihad if you prefer) as a fundamentally humane and necessary movement in defence of human rights – I’m openly affiliated with it, or at least a committed fellow traveller, because I believe it’s morally necessary and just. But I have no patience at all for those within the ranks of the movement who really do hate Muslims or who excuse-monger for hatred of Muslims. I want it understood that every good-hearted Muslim on earth is my sibling and friend, and I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with those Muslims, as well as Christians, Hindus, nontheists, and literally everyone else, to make the world a better place for everyone.
Since I am making known where I stand on these issues, I might as well lay all my cards on the table. I am a Bahá’í by religion, a Jew by ethnicity, and a left-wing Zionist – that is, a friend of the state of Israel and a supporter of its continued existence. I am also an ardent and devoted friend to various other put-upon peoples who are menaced by Muslim extremists around the world – Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Kurds, Sikhs, Yarsanis, Yezidis, Mandaeans, Shabaks, Assyrians, Armenians, the Kalasha, the Imazighen, and others. What is more, I am someone who believes very fiercely and forthrightly in the human rights norms adumbrated by and enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and fundamentally distrusts all leaders, commentators, and regimes who do not respect, advocate for, or abide by these principles, whether or not they claim Divine inspiration for their alternative social arrangements. As such, I am someone who frequently criticizes the interpretations of Muslim scripture, theology, history, tradition, and jurisprudence which are used by Muslim extremists to brutalize, persecute, and otherwise harm the people of my ethnic patrimony, the people who share my religion, the people who live in the nation-state which constitutes my rebuilt indigenous homeland, and many of the faith communities and ethnic people-groups to which my friends belong.
And I can’t apologize for doing any of that – it’s an urgent human rights concern. I have a moral responsibility to do it. I am of the opinion that everyone has the moral responsibility to do it, insofar as they have the physical and intellectual capacity to. President Biden, Prime Minister Trudeau, Prime Minister Johnson, President Macron, Chancellor Merkel, Pope Francis, Kanye West, Paul McCartney, literally everybody. I have no patience to dialogue with, let alone kowtow to, anyone who wants to stop me from speaking out about this. It’s simply too urgent for me to be prepared to pussyfoot around with.
But I can certainly swear up, down, and sideways that I never want my activism on these issues to be mistaken for a nuance-free blanket endorsement of anti-Muslim prejudice, or for an effort to demonize, stigmatize, or criminalize any of the various elements of Islam which are in harmony with the norms and standards of universal human rights. I need it to be fully and universally understood that my work in this area is a form of human rights activism, and that I have no patience for or interest in Islamophobic prejudice as such at all, not even in the slightest. I will never cover for, make excuses for, carry water for, or falter in condemning anyone who ever hurts or targets innocent Muslim civilians for any reason. I can’t say this too loudly or too forcefully. I need to insist upon it.
Certain of my Muslim friends may occasionally disagree with me in conscience about specific stances I have taken or specific controversial voices I have confessed to paying attention to – I do after all sometimes read, and even approvingly quote, the likes of not just the infamous and widely (if largely unjustly) hated Mr. Spencer and his friends Hugh Fitzgerald and Andrew Harrod and Pamela Geller, but also Douglas Murray, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Andrew Bolt, Pat Condell, Brendan O’Neill, Melanie Phillips, Alan Dershowitz, Barbara Kay, Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, and the vociferous ex-Muslim writers Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and Ali A. Rizvi, plus occasionally Azam Kamguian, Irfan Khawaja, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, Amir Taheri, Ehsan Jami, Imran Firasat, Amil Imani, and others. These people tend not to be approved of (sometimes they are outright hated) by the mainstream Muslim community in the aggregate, because there is a widespread understanding, which I take to be erroneous and objectionable, that many of them hate Islam and Muslims and wish ordinary Muslims ill. I don’t always agree with everything these people say, but I’m prepared to defend my decision to engage, often critically but sometimes approvingly, with the written and spoken statements each of them have made, and I believe it can be demonstrated that all of them oppose extremist and supremacist iterations of Islam on the same grounds that I do, for the same reasons.
It is also true that many of the Muslim voices I pay the closest attention to and work hardest to signal-boost are unpopular among mainstream Muslims – they’re seen as sellouts, sometimes even as “native informants.” But, again, I can’t apologize for reading, standing with, and, when possible, outright working with the likes of Zuhdi Jasser, Raheel Raza, Salim Mansur, Tahir Aslam Gora, Tawfik Hamid, Ahmed Subhy Mansour, Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Naser Khader, Tarek Fatah, Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the late and much-lamented likes of Tashbih Sayyed and Courtney Lonergan, and their fellow Muslim dissidents. I have occasional disagreements with some of these people, the same way I do with a variety of my other allies across the full spectrum of the political matters upon which I take public positions. But I believe all of these people to be fundamentally good and to be making salutary contributions to the public discourse, and I consider most of the attacks on them defamatory and baseless, and I think most of their critics are assholes. When the chips are down, I’m proud and honoured to stand with these people in defence of a shared vision of human rights against that which is advanced and taken for granted by the Muslim Brotherhood and many other conservative and/or supremacist Muslim individuals and organizations, to say nothing of Daesh, Al-Qaeda, and the familiar catalogue of jihad terrorists.
So I do sometimes have to take controversial positions and ally with people who are seldom respected by mainstream Muslims. But always and everywhere, in every case, I want it known that my goal is to defeat bigots, extremists, and fascists of all kinds, and to foster the creation of an atmosphere in which Muslims can thrive, and can live together happily as equals with non-Muslims of every kind on an indefinite basis, forever. I want Muslims to feel safe, happy, and welcome everywhere in the world, and to be enabled to flourish and prosper everywhere in the world, and to step with me into the sunlight of a renewed and brightened future in which they partner with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Bahá’ís like myself, non-theists of every kind, and all others to enrich and better the world of humanity.
My Muslim friends and I are at work building that future all the time. We are building it right now, moment by moment, as day follows day. In the wake of an atrocious attack like this, I want to redouble my commitment to bringing that future to life.
Not least, may I venture only somewhat off-topic to add, by doing my part to condemn and oppose white supremacy, which is not identical to Islamophobia but which is often linked thereto and which I have a specific responsibility to acknowledge, being someone who benefits from the system of privilege and oppression, built upon white supremacist principles, which governs many aspects of the societies in which we find ourselves. As of June 2021, I’m in the midst of examining the degree to which I agree with and can sign on for the intersectional feminist and Leftist narrative of the way race works in contemporary Western society, and I certainly do pay attention to a large number of iconoclasts of colour who don’t agree with that increasingly mainstream narrative, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Chloe S. Valdary, Dumisani Washington, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Robert Woodson, the Christian preacher Voddie Baucham, and others. I am not convinced that these people are full of shit, which is what it seems to me that most Leftists would have to believe in order to sign on to the worldview being advanced by most of the proponents of critical race theory and related ideas to do with relations between people of varying pigment colours in our societies today. But it is true that, for the most part and with very rare exceptions, I see questions connected to race the same way that people who identify as “white abolitionists” in the context of critical race theory do. I’m bringing the matter up because I’m interested in connecting and harmonizing my anti-jihad activism with a thorough going anti-racism. I think this is not only necessary and sensible but logical and natural, and despite the fact that I spend a lot of my intellectual resources engaging with Black and Muslim iconoclasts, I think the point stands that the view of race being articulated by someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates is basically the one I think applies to the society in which I live. I certainly believe that, my ethnic Ashkenazi Jewishness notwithstanding, I myself have access to many aspects of white privilege, and that I have the responsibility to reckon with it and to use it for good. This is really a subject for another piece, but to be frank (and to attempt concision for once), I really do think that these ideas are fundamentally in harmony with, rather than opposed to, one another, and that the people who think intersectional feminism and opposition to the jihad ideology are fundamentally at odds are deeply mistaken. I feel the same way about the relationship between hawkish foreign policy beliefs and socialist domestic policy priorities, and I have in mind to write an essay or two harmonizing all four of these strands of thought at some point in the near future.
For now, that’s where things stand – it’s very important to me to stand firm as someone who engages in thoughtful and intelligent and thoroughgoing critique of the elements of Muslim scripture, tradition, jurisprudence, theology, and history that used to justify violence and cruelty, but who wants to avoid allowing his (my) work to be licensed to justify violence and cruelty against innocent Muslims. In the wake of this latest Islamophobic terrorist atrocity, I feel morally obliged and spiritually compelled to enunciate that clearly, and to work to establish that I mean what I say when I talk about universal human rights, and to do whatever is within my capacity to live up to the principles I claim to have been inspired by. The global jihad ideology is my enemy, but so is nuance-free, blanket Islamophobia. Here I stand, and I can do no other.