Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a May 24 joint meeting of Congress, "Militant Islam threatens the world. It threatens Islam." Netanyahu was specifically referring to Iran's potential use and proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the Islamic terrorist network. Yet the Prime Minister's statement applies even without considering the addition of nuclear weapons to the terrorists' arsenal. Truly, anyone denying that radical Islamists instigate most terrorist incidents denies reality.

It is against the backdrop described by Netanyahu that Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Director Nihad Awad sent a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking for "an agency-wide investigation of the use of outside trainers who offer hostile, stereotypical and grossly inaccurate information about Muslims and Islam to our nation's security personnel." Awad calls the trainers "fear-mongers." The director doesn't much clarify what is meant by "hostile" and "inaccurate," but the man does do a great deal of obfuscating.

Awad's letter adopts CAIR's standard position that when anyone makes any observation that labels any Muslim as "hostile," the observer must be considered hostile. When analysts offer evidence that Muslims have behaved badly, the analysts are advancing "inaccurate" analyses. Acknowledging that some Muslims do bad things perpetuates a "stereotypical" profile of all Muslims. Such posturing lacks intellectual integrity.

Awad condemns "a controversial security drill" in which a subject "who appeared to be Middle Eastern in descent or Indian/Pakistani" was used to test airport screening procedures. Awad proposes no alternate method for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to train personnel to look for Middle Eastern terrorists in a Middle Eastern terrorist-threatened world.

CAIR's criticize-but-offer-no-alternative style of "thinking" is shared by American progressives. In the CAIR/progressive mental model, it is verboten to cast Middle Easterners as more likely terrorists than ninety-five-year-old wheelchair-bound Iowans. Had such thinking been applied in a particular type of incident, the frequency of which peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, police would have been frisking black children on bicycles while ignoring angry white guys driving around with white sheets in the back seats. The word "dumb" is too complimentary to the proponents of such an approach.

In the letter to Napolitano, Awad expressed concern over a government contractor named Walid Shoebat training law enforcement personnel in terrorist screening techniques. Shoebat has indeed stated that "Islam is the devil" and that President Obama is a Muslim. But Awad did not acknowledge that Schoebat is also a reformed Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist who developed firsthand the view that terrorism is inherent in Middle Eastern Islam. Still, CAIR's concern over someone like Shoebat teaching excessively zealous "lessons" is understandable.

Less understandable, however, is Awad calling Robert Spencer an "Islamophobe" and accusing the noted Islam scholar of co-founding a "hate group." By engaging in such shrillness, Awad again role models CAIR's propensity for assigning the adjective "Islamaphobic" to anyone who points out negative truths about Islam. Spencer has made a practice of sticking to well-researched facts. Awad's characterization of Spencer as being in the same league as Shoebat demonstrates poor judgment at best.

On the whole, the thrust of Awad's letter is that evidence which highlights violent elements within Islam must be considered "anti-Muslim propaganda." In essence, truths that offend CAIR must be reclassified as fiction. The letter calls law enforcement training materials that cast radical Muslims as terrorists "garbage."

And CAIR's ideological zealotry runs deeper still. The organization's website cites a report, "Manufacturing the Muslim Menace," by a member of a progressive organization called Political Research Associates. The document opens by quoting a Georgetown University professor who implies that a "group of private security firms operating outside officially accredited systems" has all but made up the Islamist threat and in the process "demonize[d] mainstream Islam and Muslim Communities." The PRA report proceeds to carry forward the tone of the professor's allegation. Nihad Awad's letter to Homeland Security keeps the farce alive.


A writer, physicist, and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér invites you to sign up to receive his "Clear Thinking" blog posts by email at http://www.chuckroger.com/. Contact Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com.