An imam prayed, “O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them”. A new report funded by the Canadian government claims that his critics are Islamophobes. The targets of the report include the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Canadian Islamophobia Industry Research Project, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, was set up to “create profiles of key public, media and political figures as well as organizations who produce and distribute Islamophobic ideologies and propaganda”.
A government funding a project to create “profiles” of political opponents is bad enough, but this project also includes antisemitic conspiracy theories and defenses of calls to kill Jews.
The “Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North” report is out and its unhinged claims tie Jews, Christians, Hindus, and even “Muslim dissidents” together as part of a vast Islamophobic conspiracy aligned with white nationalists.
The report slurs David Horowitz as an “Islamophobia kingpin” and the “godfather of the anti-Muslim movement”, Daniel Pipes as the “grandfather of Islamophobia” and Gatestone founder Nina Rosenwald as the mother of “anti-Muslim hate”. Not only are these despicable lies, but the report unintentionally demonstrates how the entire concept of Islamophobia had been invented by Islamists to silence critics who point out their violence and hate.
Islamists began producing “Islamophobia industry” reports to shut down counterterrorism groups by cutting off their funding. We’re always their target and even when the report is coming out of Canada, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is accused of functioning as a “key institution in the U.S. Islamophobia industry”.
That means we expose Islamist violence and hate. And that’s what we’re doing here.
“Canadian Islamophobia Industry”, backed by a Canadian government funding institute, is the work of Jasmin Zine, a Pakistani sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, who has been accused of antisemitsm and who has blamed Jews for Islamophobia.
What is Zine’s definition of Islamophobia?
Her report features Ayman Elkasrawy as an example of “the Islamophobia industry in action”.
Elkasrawy was a Toronto Imam who lost his university job after videos showed him leading prayers urging, “O Allah! Purify Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews!” and “O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them”.
Zine (pictured above) contends that the hateful cleric was actually an innocent victim of the Islamophobia industry which had mistranslated his remarks.
“What “Elkasrawy said was not to ‘purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews,’ but rather to ‘cleanse Al- Aqsa Mosque from the Jews’ desecration of it,’” she argues.
The alternate translation comes from another “Islamophobia researcher” who claimed that the Arabic word used by the imam could also mean “besmirch,” “defile,” and “impurity” or “filth”.
According a report funded by the Canadian government only an Islamophobe would think that’s antisemitic.
What about “slay them”?
According to Zine’s report, “experts clarified that Elkasrawy’s alleged call to ‘slay them one by one’ was not a reference to Jews or Al-Aqsa Mosque but was taken from another part of his supplication made on behalf of suffering in the Muslim world.” As if that makes the killing better.
The call to mass murder comes right before the one about cleansing the filth of the Jews. It begins with a call to “humiliate the polytheism and polytheists.” In Islamic theology that can refer to anyone from Hindus to Christians and Jews: depending on the interpretation.
Objecting to genocidal calls to “slay” people “without sparing “one of them” is islamophobic. No wonder also Zine attacks the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.
The imam was accused of previously retweeting a message about Hamas stating that, “Events in Gaza, no matter how you [Muslim] disagree with the resistance, they are Muslims and their enemy is an infidel who doesn’t believe in Allah.” Others have documented a history that appears to include support for terrorism against non-Muslims and cheering an Al Qaeda group.
Researchers, journalists and activists who have pointed this out are ‘Islamophobes’ too.
Zine’s report, funded by the Canadian government, is filled with Jewish targets, alongside Christians, Hindus and even Muslims who are willing to speak out against Islamic terrorism.
While the report claims to focus on an imaginary “Canadian Islamophobia Industry”, it spends much of its time attacking American Jewish conservatives and their organizations including Horowitz and Robert Shillman: who is accused of funding “a number of pro-Israel groups” as well as providing crucial support for the work of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Zine takes special care to note that the anti-terrorist figures whom it’s attacking are Jewish. For example, Ezra Levant is described as “Canada’s Jewish Steve Bannon wannabe”.
The report hatefully defames Gatestone Institute‘s founder Nina Rosenwald, claiming that she “has used her wealth to forge alliances between the American pro-Israel lobby and the anti-Muslim network”.
Gatestone has over a dozen Muslim authors. Zine’s report suggests that four of these Muslims are “Islamophobes”. Her definition of Islamophobe appears to be anyone who doesn’t support murder.
Is the Canadian government aware that it’s funding the fight against “Muslim Islamophobia”?
Other Jewish targets of the antisemitic report on Islamophobia include Aish, a Jewish religious group that runs dozens of synagogues around the world and focuses on religious outreach.
What did Aish do to fall afoul of the Canadian Islamophobia Industry report?
Zine attacks Aish for taking part in a “United Against Terrorism” event by Jews, Christians and Hindus. According to her, this united condemnation of terrorism by “diverse groups” shows the “nascent development of Islamophobia networks in Canada.”
Diversity is not our strength anymore, it’s evidence of Islamophobia.
It’s impossible to escape the impression that while Jasmin Zine really hates Jews, she considers everyone except Islamists to be ‘Islamophobes’. And she traffics these smears into academic sources by describing people of all races and religions as allied with “white nationalists”.
Her report even claims that “white nationalists” and Jews are coming together due to their “their shared Islamophobic views”.
Zine’s pretext for attacking the David Horowitz Freedom Center is that, in her own lying words, “Canadian anti-Islam activists and ideologues have written for DHFC’s Front Page Mag, including Raheel Raza and Christine Douglass-Williams.”
Raza is a Muslim and the author of “Their Jihad, Not My Jihad: a Muslim Canadian woman speaks out”. Zine follows the familiar pattern of describing Muslim opponents of Islamist groups as “anti-Islam”. That’s a smear that tells us far more about her agenda than it does about Raza.
During her report’s extended attack on Christine Douglass-Williams, a courageous opponent of Islamic brutality and theological tyranny, Zine fails to note her own ugly confrontation at a 2019 conference during which she accused Williams, who is Black, and assorted Jewish people at the event of harboring “thinly veiled white supremacist views”.
Jasmin Zine’s views are not especially subtle or hidden even in her own report. A subsection claims that “most Islamist movements are non-violent and focus on community and societal development through political and social engagement” and tries to whitewash the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb by putting forward views that he “did not condone violence but believed that Islamists were justified in using force to protect their religion”.
Qutb, a favorite of Jihadists, was a deranged bigot who claimed that “jazz is the American music, created by Negroes to satisfy their primitive instincts”, “the Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality” and urged Muslims to “plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”
This is the sort of hateful evil that the Canadian government has decided to whitewash.
Is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council comfortable with defending racists as well as antisemites? That is a question that Canadian activists and officials ought to ask it.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has regularly been the target of “Islamophobia industry” reports produced by Islamists trying to silence their critics. And I have reviewed many of them over the years. But Canadian Islamophobia Industry is unique in its utter shamelessness, its barely disguised antisemitism and determination to whitewash even the worst forms of hatred.
That a Canadian federal government research agency funded a defense of the Muslim Brotherhood and of violent calls to kill Jews speaks volumes about what’s going on in Ottawa.
