Islamic extremist groups like CAIR renew push for radical Somali Congressmuslim Ilhan Omar’s First Amendment-killing “Islamophobia” Bill

The Combating International Islamophobia Act, which thankfully appears stalled in the U.S. Senate, is receiving a new boost from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) and other terrorist-linked Muslim organizations. It was among the issues pushed last month when a coalition of Islamic organizations gathered in Washington D.C. to meet with elected officials and Congressional staffers.

Investigative Project  (h/t Nita) The bill, introduced in October by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., would create a new special envoy to monitor and combat Islamophobia globally. It passed the House last December 219-212, with near-unanimous support from Democrats.

It has not moved in the Senate, however. It is an ambiguous initiative that could create more problems than the ones it aspires to address. If this bill becomes law, critics fear it will contribute to weakening U.S. support of Israel, and disable criticism of Islamist activities both abroad and in the United States.

In December, the White House issued a statement supporting the bill as a way to protect religious freedom. “The Administration strongly believes that people of all faiths and backgrounds should be treated with equal dignity and respect around the world,” it said.

But the bill as written does not ensure equal dignity and respect of religions.

“This bill doesn’t make it clear whether the term Islamophobia includes for example, criticizing radical Islamic terrorist groups or calling out the persecution of Christians,” Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, said before December’s House vote. “Is it Islamophobic to oppose unacceptably intolerant blasphemy laws or criticize those who call for the destruction of Israel? What about criticizing the Taliban’s brutal repression of women or condemning those who deny the Holocaust as Iran’s Supreme Leader has repeatedly done?”

Iranian journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner Masih Alinejad opposed the bill in a January Washington Post op-ed, saying that it “might be creating precedents that could undermine our freedom to speak out.” The bill is too vague, with no clear definition of what constitutes Islamophobia, wrote Alinejad, who was targeted for kidnapping by Iran’s Islamist authoritarian regime last year. “Is criticism of the Taliban a form of Islamophobia? What about criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Can one criticize Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations?”

Other Iranian dissidents worry about the bill’s effect on free expression.

Interestingly enough, the idea of an office to monitor Islamophobia worldwide has been promoted in the last year by both Turkey and Iran. Turkey is an unlikely candidate to stand out against discrimination given President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s problematic record of human rights’ abuses and its support of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s ultimate ambition is a global Islamic state.

The SETA foundation, a semi-official Turkish think tank with Muslim Brotherhood links, drafted the European Union’s 2018 report on Islamophobia, an example of the infiltration of Islamist ideas in official circles. Turkey launched coordinated diplomatic efforts to promote its propaganda on Islamophobia in mid-2021. Last September, Erdogan declared that Turkey will launch a political initiative to combat Islamophobia in the West, saying that it “has turned into a trend that disrupts Muslims’ daily lives and threatens social peace.” In February, Turkey hosted a conference with Pakistan and Malaysia, aiming to promote the image of an intolerant, Islamophobic Western world. In June, Turkish authorities aimed to silence critique against Turkish organizations in the Netherlands by equating critique of the Islamist Turkish circles with “Islamophobia.”

Interestingly enough, some supporters of the U.S. bill also share ties with Turkey. The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) is regarded by Ahmet Yayla, a 20-year veteran of the counterterrorism and operations department in the Turkish National Police, as “working closely with Erdogan.”

Ilhan Omar’s excellent relations with the AKP regime of Turkey are well-known and documented by think tanks and other analysts (here, here and here). She met Erdogan in a “closed-door meeting” in New York back in 2017 when Omar was still relatively unknown. Since then, Omar has received generous support from Turkish-state run media. TRT World has run numerous stories in support of Omar. Both the state-run Anadolu news agency and the Erdogan-friendly Yeni Safak ran an article in 2019 describing Omar as the victim of a “media lynching campaign.” It urged readers to donate to Omar’s campaign as “an adequate way of denying powerful organizations the power to censor alternative voices.” At least one Turkish-American advocacy group has donated to Omar’s political activity. Iran’s officials have also been vocal in promoting the image of an “Islamophobic West.”

In essence, the Islamophobia Act institutionalizes the undefined, non-legal concept of Islamophobia, while at the same time actually promoting the same distorted narratives put forward by the authoritarian regimes of Iran and Turkey. Secular think tanks have raised concerns about the vagueness of the very term. In a detailed 2019 report, the British group Civitas tapped secular, religious and academic voices to critique a recent attempt to draft a definition of Islamophobia. They shared the concern that codifying the term could pose “a danger to civil liberties in the United Kingdom, particularly freedom of expression, and journalistic and academic freedom.”

Other scholars have asked in analyses for the possible substitution of the term with other more fitting examples, as “Islamo-prejudice.”

If passed as is, this bill is likely to create a lot of problems. Would publishing images of Islam’s prophet Muhammad be considered a matter for the U.S. State Department’s intervention? Will Israel’s and other Western states’ potential actions against Islamist terror groups be labeled “Islamophobic?” These are not just hypothetical mental exercises. In fact, such incidents have already happened.

When a CAIR official accuses Jewish organizations of driving “a well-funded conspiracy” to push “Islamophobia,” her bosses say her critics are not just mistaken, but are “smearing Muslim leaders who support Palestinian human rights.” When allied European nations impose bans on the hijab at work or in other public settings, would the State Department envoy be expected to act?

Fighting bigotry is necessary and noble. But the Islamophobia Act could be used to curtail free speech in the United States and worldwide, undermining the fight against resurgent Islamist terrorist activities and weakening established U.S. ties and cooperation with Israel. As Jonathan Tobin of Jewish News Syndicate has already eloquently pointed out in an op-ed, “the State Department doesn’t need a new office whose real purpose will be to defend anti-Semites rather than countering religious persecution.”

Dr. ZUHDI JASSER, a dedicated Islam reformer, says radical Somali Congressmuslim Ilhan Omar’s “Anti-Islamophobia Act,” which is a law to ‘monitor criticism of Islam’ is an ‘unmitigated crime.’ “This legislation is a nightmare for Muslims and non-Muslims alike – for all Americans,”  Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy said. The bill, he argued in an article for the Center for Security Policy, creates a space in U.S. bureaucracy which exists exclusively to attack our allies with charges of anti-Muslim bigotry when they criticize Islamic extremist regimes.

Jasser founded AlFD in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States as an effortto provide an American Muslim voice advocating for liberty and freedom, and the separation of mosque and state. Dr. Jasser is a first generation American Muslim whose parents fled the oppressive Baath regime of Syria in the mid-1960’s for American freedom. He is leading the fight to shake the hold that the Muslim Brotherhood and their network of American Islamist
organizations and mosques have on organized Islam in America.

Highlights from Jasser’s article, titled “The American Caliph Act,” which appeared in the Center for Security Policy include:

Omar and her allies are unhinged and seeking to make generational changes to our American system that will empower un-American global Islamic extremist narratives.

This should come as no surprise. Since Day One, the Biden administration began peppering its rolls with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers in all its corners from Reema Dodin at the White House to Khizr Khan at the US Commission of International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and now even an attempt to place the long controversial Rashad Hussain as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department.

Nothing, however, better epitomizes the penetration into this administration of Islamic extremist influence operations than the most recent legislative proposal from Rep. Omar and Rep. Schakowsky, which seeks to establish in the Department of State the “Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” an Act described in the “Combating International Islamophobia Act”. A more appropriate name for this proposed legislation would have been “The American Caliph Act”.

First, let us get straight what Rep. Omar means when she invokes the term “Islamophobia” in this legislation.

he term Islamophobia was a term operationalized in the early ‘90’s by information operatives from autocratic Muslim majority nations. It was then systematically promulgated by their umbrella (neo-Caliphate) organization the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations in order to suppress the free speech and criticism against their regimes. What better way to squelch criticism and invoke the equivalent of global anti-blasphemy laws than to get the west to self-censor due to fear of being labeled anti-Muslim bigots or “Islamophobes”.

These authoritarians had long known that same trick works internally against other Muslims, so deploying it against non-Muslims with an eagerness to please was even simpler. For generations, Islamic theocrats and autocrats imprisoned droves of domestic dissidents by claiming critiques of Islamic extremist jurists and their sharia regimes were akin to being anti-Islam or anti-God.

In an identical fashion, Islamic extremists in the West have equated criticism of Muslim leaders, their states, regimes, and legal systems (shariah) with criticisms of Islam. They invoke what have become essentially global anti-blasphemy laws through the self-censorship; of Western leaders trying to avoid the stigma of being labeled “Islamophobes.” Thus, built into this information operation is a civilizational jihad in lands where Islamic extremists remain a minority. The goal is to put non-Muslims on the defense as bigots invoking the name of Islam as their target exploiting their respect for religious freedom. A defensive West becomes much less impactful in its human rights or liberal governance critiques.

Enter Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act, The language invoked in the legislation reads like an OIC state manual on quelling not bigotry but dissent, utilizing easily manipulated language to justify usurpation of human rights. The invocation of the word incitement will be used as a bludgeon to silence those who dare speak ill of radical Islamic theocrats and their theocracies.

Take note of these excerpts from the bill:

The space created here for the promotion of Islamic extremism, and its jihad, by suppressing any possibility of countervailing ideas of liberalism and freedom is breathtaking. There is little chance any filter save the Islamic extremist one will be used as the compass for this office’s work. This bill creates a bureaucracy inside the State Department which will have no other purpose besides attacking U.S. allies, from Europe to Israel, under the guise of protecting Muslims from anti-Muslim bigotry.

The Press Release on Rep. Omar’s website lists endorsers who are a veritable who’s who of Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the United States. She uses data attributed to the discredited terror-linked group CAIR (a group founded to support Hamas) in order demonstrate the gravity of the so-called Islamophobia problem. Omar follows CAIR’s lead in treating all hate crimes reports as genuine, despite serious questions about the notable tendency of “hate crimes” hoaxes.

Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act and the office it creates is the first step down the road towards an American Caliph, an established religious office in government issuing edicts regarding what Islam is or isn’t.

Most of the alleged ‘hate crimes’ are not backed with photo or video evidence or eyewitness accounts. More often than not, vandalism against mosques turns out to have been committed by Muslims themselves, looking for attention and pity from the media. What’s more, anti-Muslim hate crime hoaxes are vastly under-reported by the sharia-compliant left wing media.

DEMAND THAT THE TWO SENATORS FROM YOUR STATE REJECT the Hamas linked CAIR-inspired, radical Congressmuslim Ilhan Omar’s sponsored ‘Combating International Islamophobia Act,’ which would make justified criticism of Islam and even Islamic terrorism a chargeable ‘hate crime’ in this country.