The ‘Islamophobia’ Canard Returns

W e really are living through one of the stupider eras in American history.

Representative Lauren Boebert is a clown show. Representative Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semitic hard-leftist and Islamist apologist. Nevertheless, the people of their districts, in Colorado and Minnesota, respectively, have seen fit to elect them to the House of Representatives.

Boebert jokingly refers to Omar — who is a self-professed member of “the squad” of AOC progressives — as a member of the “jihad squad.” In some of her stand-up routines, moreover, Boebert has repeatedly told an apocryphal story about how she saw Omar mistaken for a terrorist on an elevator by House security (“she doesn’t have a backpack; we should be fine”). Boebert also refers frequently to the likelihood that Omar married her brother for immigration-fraud purposes (a claim for which there is evidence, but to which the media and federal law-enforcement have turned a blind eye, accepting Omar’s non-explanation that the claim is “absurd and offensive”).

For her part, Omar has countered that Boebert is an “insurrectionist who sleeps with a pervert” — references to reports that (a) Boebert, a MAGA darling, had contacts of some kind with protesters before January 6 (in Democratic dogma, any Trump supporter who bought “stop the steal” and protested the election becomes a “rioter” and thus an “insurrectionist”), and (b) Boebert’s husband pled guilty to public indecency and lewd exposure in 2004 after allegedly exposing himself to two women at a bowling alley (before he married Boebert, who was then 17 and apparently in attendance). Omar adds, on Twitter, that Boebert is a “deprived person who shamefully defecates & defiles the House of Representatives,” whatever that means.

Naturally, the idiotic dispute between these two geniuses spilled over into the full House, which, as currently constituted, doesn’t need much of an excuse to indulge idiocy. So late Tuesday, the lower chamber passed Omar’s legislation to combat “Islamophobia,” on a straight-party-line vote, 219–212, with no Republicans in favor. The bill will not be entertained in the Senate, where it has no chance of passage.

It is difficult to take seriously anything Democrats have to say on bias, radicalism, and terrorism. They have spent the past year portraying their political opponents as “domestic terrorists” and supporting the virulently discriminatory Black Lives Matter movement, while closing their eyes to months of lethal left-wing rioting and surges in violent crime that most harm black neighborhoods in the big cities their governance is destroying.

But it is perhaps worth reiterating that “Islamophobia” is not an authentic condition. It is demagoguery conjured up by the Muslim Brotherhood to discourage examination of sharia supremacism — a construction of Islam, supported by centuries of scholarship, that seeks to implement and spread sharia (Islam’s legal and societal system) by any means available.

There are many constructions of Islam. Sharia supremacism — often referred to as “radical Islam,” especially in its forcible manifestations — is mainstream in parts of the world, including in some Muslim-majority areas of the Middle East. It is rejected by most Muslims in the West, though it has more influence than it should because our political class gives the time of day to Islamist organizations, many of which have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The purpose of the “Islamophobia” artifice is to intimidate analysts and commentators into ignoring the straight line from bellicose verses in Muslim scripture to sharia-supremacist ideology to influential jihadists who recruit young Muslims to do violence in the name of that ideology to the terrorist attacks those recruits commit. That straight line is patent and has been proved in many criminal prosecutions. But if examining it can be made taboo, then sharia supremacists have a leg up when exploiting modes of persuasion other than force — e.g., the media, academia, lawsuits — to promote their ideology and influence government officials.

After all these years, it should be clear by now that Americans are not generally biased against Muslims as a class — there will always be pockets of bias against virtually every group, but Muslims are successfully integrated in American society, Americans have made enormous sacrifices for Muslim societies overseas, and we have striven to avoid tarring all Muslims with the horrific acts of violence committed against our society by avowed, unapologetic jihadists (the overwhelming majority of whose victims, it should be noted, are also Muslims). What Americans are biased against, with eminent good reason, is sharia supremacism, a systematically discriminatory and misogynist ideology that is antithetical to our constitutional republic.

When the House of Representatives champions the fight against “Islamophobia,” it is using the Muslim Brotherhood’s playbook.