The Clarion Fund’s Film Jihad Against “Islamism”

This brilliant exposé of the Clarion Fund’s Islamophobic propaganda film was written by Azeezah, originally published at Muslim Lookout.

From the same team that gave America Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East and the award-winning Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West comes a new blockbuster “documentary”: The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America. Undeterred by the thorough debunking Obsession received following its mass distribution in American newspapers last year (financed by the eminently shady Clarion Fund), producer Raphael Shore and director Wayne Kopping are back with more of the same in their latest offering.

The Third Jihad’s vortex of fear-mongering centers on the Muslim Brotherhood’s so-called “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Plan For the Group in North America,” a document dating back to 1991 that supposedly outlines the Muslim Brotherhood’s manifesto of “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western Civilization from within.” (The memorandum is available exclusively on the website of Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism.) The Third Jihad premiered in Canada on Wednesday May 20 to a sold-out crowd at Toronto’s Eglinton Grand theatre; I attended the premiere to discover what my “radical” co-religionists envision for America. As the film’s narrator Dr. Zuhdi Jasser so ominously put it, “We all know about terrorism; this is the war you don’t know about.”

An exhaustive treatment of the film’s contents lies beyond the limits of this piece, and so what follows is an assessment of its most salient assertions and an analysis of the function those claims serve in The Third Jihad’s broader propagandic narrative.

“Where are the Muslims? Where are they in speaking out and condemning terrorism?” – Dr. Zuhdi Jasser

In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani described the American endeavor to discriminate the “good” Muslim from the “bad” Muslim. This distinction is political, rather than religious or theological: as Mamdani explained, “Even when Bush speaks of ‘good’ Muslims and ‘bad’ Muslims, what he means by ‘good’ Muslims is really pro-American Muslims and by ‘bad’ Muslims he means anti-American Muslims.” The Third Jihad shamelessly exploits this bifurcative dynamic to cast suspicion on the majority of the American Muslim community – belying its opening disclaimer that it is only about the “small percentage” of Muslims embodying “the threat of radical Islam” – while propping up its Muslim cheerleader for American neo-conservatism, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser.

Dr. Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), is The Third Jihad’s narrator and central protagonist. He is described in the film as “a devout Muslim,” as if his pious Muslim-ness qualifies him to speak authoritatively on global and local Islamic politics and history (it obviously doesn’t, given the quality of the political and historical analysis The Third Jihad offers; see sections below). Moreover, it is obvious that what characterizes Dr. Jasser as a “good” Muslim is not his devotion to his religion, but rather his uncritical devotion to the neo-conservative agenda: AIFD’s list of core principles includes an affirmation that “as United States citizens we support our American armed forces,” and expresses a commitment to “work to express the consistency of the principles of Islam with economic principles of free markets and capitalism.” The film ends with an American-as-apple-pie scene of Dr. Jasser playing soccer with his children and exhorting people to “stand up for the freedoms and liberties our forefathers fought to create.”

The Third Jihad’s promotional material bills Zuhdi Jasser as “the one person who is not afraid to tell you the truth” about “the jihadist quest to rule America.” He is also apparently the only Muslim willing to condemn terrorism: “Where are the Muslims?” Dr. Jasser wonders in the film. “Where are they in speaking out and condemning terrorism?” (To relieve his bewilderment he could refer to the lists of anti-terrorism statements issued by Muslim leaders and organizations, compiled by Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Sheila Musaji.) Mainstream American Muslim organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Muslim Students Assocation (MSA) are cast in the role of “bad” Muslim, working to undermine Western society from within while deceptively “presenting themselves as moderate.” While it is true that the Muslim Brotherhood named ISNA and the MSA as possibly friendly organizations in their putative “General Strategic Plan,” the film gives no evidence to suggest that the organizations are indeed participants in the Brotherhood’s nefarious “grand jihad” plot, or are vitiating American society in any other way.

The Third Jihad’s portrayal of the American Muslim community as a towering fifth column is a potemkin construct of half-truths. For instance: The film shows extensive footage of the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS) proclaiming their desire to institute Shariah law in America, but it doesn’t reveal that the ITS membership is “less than a handfull [sic] of Muslims” localized in Jackson Heights, New York City. The film asperses CAIR because it was founded in 1994 by three former leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine (described as a front group for Hamas), but it conveniently neglects to mention that support for Hamas wasn’t illegal when the CAIR founders were IAP members.

“In today’s context there are actually two different types of jihad. There’s the violent jihad, where the Islamists use violence and terror to try and overthrow their enemy. And then there’s what has been termed the cultural jihad, where these Islamists use in a most duplicitous way the laws and the rights they are given in our society to try and work against society and overthrow it.” – Dr. Zuhdi Jasser

The promotional material accompanying The Third Jihad notifies that “radical Islamists are taking advantage of the United States of America’s democratic processes, and using them to destroy the American way of life.” The film provides several sinister (European) instances of this “cultural jihad”: toy pigs being banned in a British office because they offended a Muslim employee; Burger King recalling a desert because its logo resembled the Arabic script for “Allah;” a Turkish lawyer attempting to sue a soccer team because its jerseys displayed a Crusader-like cross. (Interestingly, Barbara Kay trots out many of the same examples in her National Post article on “soft jihad.”)

While these cases may indicate the oversensitivity of individual Muslims to insult of Islam, they are hardly signs of a concerted strategy to “try and work against society and overthrow it,” much less the most serious current threat to liberal democracy and society. If a ban on toy pigs is a troubling assault on rights and freedoms, then where do you rank the USA PATRIOT Act, which permitted the indefinite detention of non-citizens upon secret evidence and extensive government surveillance of communications? Or the judgment of Guantanamo inmates in secretive military commissions, contravening all notions of fair trial? Is the American state also waging a “jihad” on Western civilization?

“The clash between Islam and Christendom has now been going on for 14 centuries.” – Dr. Bernard Lewis

The Third Jihad condenses 1400 years of Islam into three jihads, rendering history thus: The first jihad was the 7^th century spread of Islam out of Arabia (and “that was obviously not done by peaceful persuasion,” comments Bernard Lewis), and the second jihad was the Ottoman expansion beginning in the 15^th c. CE. According to Zuhdi Jasser, “we’re [currently] in the third and final phase of their mission to bring about the domination of their version of Islam.” The graphic accompanying this cobbled-together history shows a map progressively covered by metastasizing star-and-crescent symbols, until the whole world is dominated by Islam. This domination is portrayed as a cumulative process, leaving one with the erroneous impression that the Ottoman Empire still exists and controls significant portions of the globe. One is also left puzzling when the Islamists conquered the continents of South America, Australia, Asia, and Africa, since the film deals mainly with North America and Europe.

Edward Said remarked in Orientalism that the Orientalists (including Bernard Lewis) saw Islam as a “ ‘cultural synthesis’ . . . that could be studied apart from the economics, sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples . . . The impact of colonialism, of worldly circumstances, of historical development: all these were to the Orientalists as flies to wanton boys, killed – or disregarded – for their sport.” And so The Third Jihad draws straight, spurious lines of continuity from the Ottoman Empire to the modern day, blithely ignoring pesky historical “flies” such as the emergence of the modern system of nation-states, the colonial and post-colonial encounters between “Islam” and “the West,” the Cold War, and the processes of modernization and globalization that have been so instrumental in shaping the contours of political Islam. Juan Eduardo Campo makes an incisive analogy: “One can only imagine the objections that would be raised if a respected American Studies scholar were to interpret Chicano or African American gang activity in American cities in terms of ancient Aztec or African warrior religions, while neglecting to discuss the immediate social, cultural, and economic causes.”

Provided with no description of the different ways Islam has been interpreted and enacted throughout its history, the unfortunate viewer of The Third Jihad is left to imagine that the “version of Islam” spread through subsequent jihads is synonymous with the worst behaviors of Muslims documented in the film: extremism, oppression, and intolerance. (Incidentally, the branch of Islam that seems to constitute The Third Jihad’s greatest concern – Wahhabism – only achieved prominence in the early 20^th c. CE, a period entirely elided in the film’s telescoped history. Wahhabism was considered a form of heresy by the 18^th-century Ottoman Empire.) Moreover, the film’s insinuation that Islam as a religion was spread purely by the sword is misleading: even Daniel Pipes notes that in the prevailing classical conception of jihad, its purpose was “political, not religious. It aim[ed] not so much to spread the Islamic faith as to extend sovereign Muslim power.” Bernard Lewis’ castigation of the Muslim empires for using means other than “peaceful persuasion” to expand is historically anachronistic – is there any empire which extended its sovereign power without using force?

The film situates this piecemeal history within a cosmic clash between two “religiously-defined civilizations” which will only end when “they [the Muslims] triumph universally” (according to Bernard Lewis). The “clash of civilizations” thesis has been discredited ad nauseum (see, for instance, Francis Robinson’s “Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations?”), so I will refrain from entering into a full rebuttal of it in this piece. However, one wonders if Zuhdi Jasser realizes that if Bernard Lewis was correct – that the “Islamic” and “Western” civilizations really are fundamentally incompatible – his dream of creating “a world where my children can grow up, and there’s no conflict in their hearts between being American and being Muslim” would be unattainable.

“The real war is not a war against a bunch of terrorists. It’s a war between the values of freedom and democracy, and the values of barbarism.” – Dr. Tawfik Hamid, “former Jamaa Islameia terrorist”

The Third Jihad plays as fast and loose with contemporary politics as it does with history to extend its Manichean grand narrative to the current age. Sundry conflicts are stripped of their contexts and presented as fronts in a unified Islamist movement. In Dr. Jasser’s analysis, “When we look at the conflicts in India, Chechnya, Indonesia, Gaza, Iraq, Somalia, and countless other countries,” what’s at root is “the quest for Islam to become the dominant religion.” No allusion is made to the history of violence between Muslims and Hindus in India, or the brutal repression of Chechen separatists by the Russian government, or America’s pre-emptive war in Iraq, or the 60-year Israel/Palestine conflict. The Muslim actors in these theaters are robbed of all rational political motivation: “It’s an entire movement,” states Rudy Giuliani, “and the idea of it is hatred for our way of life.”

But as writer Melanie Phillips suggests in The Third Jihad, “surely it’s more sensible to look at what they [radical Muslims] actually say they’re doing.” For example, Al-Qaeda’s 1998 declaration of jihad “against the Jews and the Crusaders” outlined three goals of the jihad: the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, an end to sanctions against Iraq, and the establishment of Islamic control over holy sites in Jerusalem. These objectives were obviously not driven by abhorrence for American “freedom and democracy,” but rather by specific elements of American foreign policy that have crippled freedom and democracy in parts of the Muslim world. Portraying the situation as an ineluctable “clash of civilizations” – in which the enemy “hates us for what we are, not what we do” – may provide absolution for America, but it does nothing to address the root causes that give rise to violence. Obviously violent Islamism and anti-Americanism do exist, but The Third Jihad mischaracterizes both its motivations and its scale.

“Islamism is like cancer. You either defeat it or it will defeat you.” – Dr. Tawfik Hamid

Ironically, The Third Jihad mirrors the “us-against-them” logic and rhetoric of the anti-American radical Islam it so decries. And its farrago of innuendo and half-truth is extremely persuasive. Following the screening, a member of the audience stood up and drew a parallel between Islamism and Nazism, arguing that Islamists have to be destroyed as the Nazis were – a dangerous proposition, considering the blurry line the film draws between radical Islamists and the rest of us Muslims. But that is the inescapable conclusion of The Third Jihad’s perverted message. If the dog is to be put down, it must first be declared sick.

“War on Terror” Ends Reign As War on Words

As I was scrolling through Yahoo news stories, I was happy to find this little gem which discusses changes Obama’s administration has been putting into effect since his campaign.

During the past seven years, the “War Against Terror” or “War on Terror” came to represent everything the U.S. military was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the broader effort against extremists elsewhere or those seen as aiding militants aimed at destroying the West.

Ultimately and perhaps inadvertently, however, the phrase “became associated in the minds of many people outside the Unites States and particularly in places where the countries are largely Islamic and Arab, as being anti-Islam and anti-Arab,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

We come to understanding through communication. This means that language in its many forms holds the key to understanding and whether it is fueled by tolerance or intolerance. I hope President Obama continues to lead by example using language that keeps problem-solving in mind as opposed to the last few years of a linguistic reign of fear.

First Muslim Female State Representative Elected to the Michigan State Legislature

By DAVID N. GOODMAN

DETROIT — Michigan is getting its first female Muslim legislator, thanks in large part to her Jewish boss, the incumbent.

Rashida Tlaib, a lawyer, community activist and daughter of Palestinian immigrants, easily won a House seat in Tuesday’s general election after emerging from an eight-way Democratic primary with 44 percent of the vote in August.

Tlaib, 32, said she wouldn’t have run but for the repeated urging of Democratic state Rep. Steve Tobocman, who is stepping down because of term limits. Once she decided to run, she threw herself into it, knocking on 8,000 doors and hitting each household twice.

Southeastern Michigan has about 300,000 people with roots in the Arab world, but few of them live in Tlaib’s largely black and Hispanic district in southwest Detroit.

“We view her victory as a sign that Michigan Muslims are welcomed as a part of our state’s multi-faith and multiethnic society,” said Dawud Walid, Michigan director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

According to the American Muslim Alliance, only nine Muslims were serving in state legislatures nationwide before Tuesday’s elections, and only one of them is a woman. There are two Muslim members of Congress - Democrats Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana.

The Michigan Legislature’s first known Muslim member, James Karoub, served three terms in the state House in the 1960s.

Tobocman said he first met Tlaib about five years ago when she was working for the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, where she did advocacy work for immigrants.

“I was just really, really impressed,” he said. When he later became majority floor leader and got another staff slot, he recruited Tlaib for the job. He said she brings a passion for social justice and the ability to work with people across the political aisle with very different outlooks.

“She’s someone who just intuitively understood the process right off the bat,” Tobocman said.

The election was only one of many firsts for Tlaib. The eldest of 14 children of a retired Ford Motor Co. worker and his wife, she was the first in her family to earn a high school diploma. She went on to finish college and law school while helping raise 13 siblings.

“My parents … are amazing Americans,” she said. “They never thought this would ever happen.”

Casting Out: Exploring the Racialization of Muslims

The following is a brilliant article written by Fatemeh Fakhraie.  She reviews Sherene H. Razack’s latest book, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law & Politics (2008), which discusses how the racialization of Islam (and Muslims) subsequently evicts them from Western politics and law. Fatemeh is the Editor-in-Chief for Muslimah Media Watch. This article first appeared on Racialicious.

I just finished reading Sherene H. Razack’s Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law & Politics (2008). And I gotta say, it blew me onto my ass.

Razack is the author of several books, including Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, and her work in race theory definitely shows in Casting Out. She uses plenty of theory and excellent cross-racial examples to illustrate that what’s currently happening to Muslims in the West (racialization that results in “the expulsion of Muslims from the political community, a process that takes the form of stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and bombing”) has happened to other groups before.

She first argues that Muslims are racialized through “race thinking”, which “divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving, according to descent.” The racialization of Islam and Muslims is something the editors and I have been wanting to address on Racialicious for awhile, but I haven’t quite known how to begin; Razack’s book provides the perfect springboard.

Islam is represented in mainstream media as South/West Asian brown-skinned people who are bearded and turbaned or veiled and hidden: this racializes Islam.

Now, before you start typing a response that there are non-West Asian Muslims and that Muslim isn’t a race, re-read what I just wrote. There are Muslims in every country in the world, and they are all colors and sizes. But Western media representation of Islam and Muslims simplifies this world-wide group of people into one picture: that of a brown guy with a beard and a keffiyeh. His female counterpart is a brown woman with a veil. Reducing an entire group of people to these static images that have to context or history creates flat attributes (such as the incorrect assertion that West Asia = Muslim) that can be applied to anyone deemed in the “Muslim” category.

Razack argues “the eviction of Muslims from [the Western] political community is a racial process that begins with Muslims being marked as a different level of humanity and being assigned a separate and unequal place in the law.” (her emphasis) When Islam is racialized, the presentation of terrorism as Islamic thus racializes terrorism, especially when terrorism is illustrated by brown-skinned bearded South/West Asians. So, if terrorism is equated with Muslims, then we come to “widespread condemnation of bodies marked as ‘Muslim,’ and heightened support for punitive measures against them.”

Her book also examines three figures: the dangerous Muslim man, the imperiled Muslim woman, and the civilized European. She maps out the racialization and “race thinking” of and around these figures, and traces their roles in things such as the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, racial profiling, Western feminism’s call for improving the lives of Muslim women in North Africa and South/West Asia*, and fears of Sharia law taking over Western politics.

This is where Razack defragments the “culture clash” duality.

“The close connections between assertions of cultural difference and racism has meant that in white societies the smallest references to cultural differences between the European majority and the Third World peoples (Muslims in particular) triggers an instant chain of associations (the veil, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages) that ends with the declared superiority of European culture, imagined as a homogenous composite of values… Culture clash, where the West has values and modernity and the non-West has culture…”

The culture clash argument uses the flat, racialized images of Muslims and puts them in inherent opposition to the West, as if all Muslims everywhere are this one way and the only possible explanation for their being “this way” is because they are Muslims and that’s “their culture.” Razack sums this up nicely: “Cultural difference, understood as their cannibalism, their treatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out.”

(her emphases)

She then connects the culture clash to the expulsion of Muslims from Western law:

“The state’s central conceptual tool in suspending the rights of those suspected of involvement in terrorism or considered to have the potential to be terrorists has been the idea that Islam breeds a particular pre-modern subject, one who possesses a violent hatred of the West and who is not committed to the rule of law, respect for human rights and women’s rights, or democracy.”

And then she connects this expulsion to neo-colonialism and/or Western imperialism:

“The West is understood as culturally committed to the values of the Enlightenment, while the non-West remains incompletely modern at best, or hostile to modernity at worst. Within this conceptual framework, one often described as a clash of civilizations, it is the duty of modern peoples to bring pre-modern peoples in line.”

She draws great historical parallels between camp mentality in other times and what’s going on now, giving excellent analysis on how Southern plantations, Japanese internment camps, the Spanish Inquisition, etc., were earlier forms of the “race thinking” that is being enacted now in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and the suspension of civil liberties of Muslims and South/West Asians in Western countries. Not only are her parallels apt, but they’re very educational: in her comparison between Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, refugee camps, etc., I learned the Guantanamo Bay had previously been used as a “holding center” for Haitians deemed an HIV threat under President Clinton. In her analysis of Abu Ghraib, she compared what happened there to Canadian peacekeeper violence against Somalians just a decade earlier—something I didn’t know about, either.

I had a difficulty with her focus on “Arabs and Muslims,” which I think is a bit reductive, given the heightened media attention on Iran and Pakistan, two non-Arab but predominately Muslim countries. Though I agree that Islam and Muslims have been racialized into being “brown” and perhaps even “Arab,” I still think it would be more beneficial to the argument if Razack had clarified that she was focusing on the treatment of North African and South/West Asian Muslims. Though she posits that all Muslims are racialized, I get caught up in her use of “Muslims” because most of her examples deal with North African and South/West Asian Muslims.

Also, the inclusion of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla in her argument about the racialization of Islam and terrorism would be an interesting one; they have been convicted as terrorists, but neither are North African or South/West Asian. Both are American citizens. Lindh is white and Muslim; he was treated just as badly as North African and South/West Asian detainees because he is Muslim. Padilla is Latino and Muslim. He was detained and his habeaus corpus was suspended just like North African and South/West Asian Muslim detainees. They are presented has having their American citizenship and ethnicities taken over by “brown” Islam, which Razack notes is often compared to disease with panicked media allegations that Islam is “spreading.”

This book, though only 180 actual pages, is a wealth of colonial and race theory. It’s dense, and written a bit academically, but worth any struggle. This book taught me more about colonialism, race thinking, and Orientalism than three university courses on Muslims (specifically, Muslim women, but still), and it’s the first book that’s really galvanized my viewpoints in a long time.

*I am deliberately using the cumbersome but geographically accurate term North Africa and South/West Asia instead of “Middle East,” which is a colonial term because it locates this geographic terrain in respect to the West.