The Muslim Brotherhood’s Congressman

by Robert Spencer
http://www.humanevents.com
09/21/2010


Rep. Keith Ellison (D.-Minn.), the first Muslim in the House of Representatives, has weighed in on the Ground Zero mosque controversy, and in the process defamed the 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque.

After the November elections, Ellison predicted, the controversy will “die down” but not “go away,” because “the people who are struck by fear and who are creating a climate of fear with the thought of this Islamic center are not going away.”

He compared this “climate of fear” to “people scapegoating Catholics” in the early 1960s, and added: “We have a long history of racial discrimination and scapegoating,” naming Jews, welfare queens, black men and Latinos as victims of this scapegoating.

This is the same dishonest narrative we have seen recently from Nicholas Kristof and many others: that Muslims in America today are facing a resurgence of the nativism that earlier targeted Catholics and others.

In the first place, there is no such scapegoating: Hate crimes against Muslims are actually quite rare. But also, the comparison is entirely fallacious because none of the groups Ellison (pictured at right) names as previous “scapegoats” were carrying out terror attacks against Americans and others worldwide.

They weren’t justifying violence and hatred by reference to Catholic or Jewish teaching. The people who were worried about the pope running the country could point to no action by the pope to try to achieve such power. The Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast, is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” so that Islam “is victorious over other religions.”

The idea that non-Muslims are suspicious of Muslims out of bigotry, rather than out of a legitimate concern for both jihad terror and the utterly supine and often disingenuous response to it from peaceful and ostensibly moderate Muslims is nonsense of such an outstanding character that I wonder if Ellison himself even believes it, rather than simply seeing it as a useful line he can use to bamboozle the besotted leftists who elected him to Congress.

It is rich for Ellison to complain about scapegoating when so many mass murderers and would-be mass murderers point to Islamic teaching as the motivation and justification for their actions.

Think of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihadist; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas underwear jihadist; Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square jihadist; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden on 9/11; the London jihad bombers of July 7, 2005; and so many, many others. How long will non-Muslims continue to swallow the increasingly less convincing line that none of this violence has anything to do with Islam?

Of course, many will continue to do so, and they will continue to do so because of the attempts by Ellison and so many other Muslim spokesmen to claim victim status for Muslims and divert attention away from jihadist crimes. Ellison does mention a few of these jihad attacks, but says nothing about the belief-system that motivated them, or what can and should be done within the Muslim community in the U.S. to help ensure that there will be no such attacks in the future—that is, if preventing such attacks is on the Muslim community in America’s to-do list at all.

Ellison also praised President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler for contributing to the “marginalization of people who make their living on this stuff, like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer.”

He would certainly like to see us marginalized, since I have been the one calling attention to his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca was paid for with $13,350 from the Muslim American Society, which is the Brotherhood’s chief operating arm in the U.S. The Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Imagine if a conservative congressman had taken a trip that had been paid for by a Christian group that was, according to one of its own documents, dedicated to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” so that Christian law would replace the U.S. Constitution. I expect we would hear more of an outcry than we ever heard about Ellison’s Brotherhood-funded hajj.

But I’m going to keep talking about it. No wonder he wishes we were marginalized.


- Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad (both from Regnery—a Human Events sister company) and most recently coauthor of Pamela Geller’s The Post-American Presidency (Simon & Schuster).