Barbara Kay: How Islamists hijacked leftist oppression narratives
A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Indian-born Muslim Nomani was a friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl, the WSJ's South Asia bureau chief who was kidnapped and publicly beheaded in 2002 by rabidly Judeophobic al-Qaida operatives. Pearl's gruesome death galvanized Nomani to political activism as a Muslim 'Reformer,' a Muslim who supports an interpretation of Islam that is compatible with human rights, gender equality, religious (or atheist) pluralism and secular governance.
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Irritated by her criticism, Muslim Brothers' machinations drew Nomani into a world of grief orchestrated by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), nominally a 'civil rights' organization but in Nomani's account, 'a front for an extremist form of Islam.' But she persevered, and Woke Army is, therefore, not only an enlightening exposé of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, but the absorbing story of Nomani's personal near-martyrdom and eventual triumph.
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To silence Nomani, CAIR foot soldiers cooked up a years-long character assassination campaign through 'the deadly underbelly of cyber jihad' — specifically Loonwatch, a GoDaddy website that protected their users' anonymity. Her foes there labelled her a 'Zionist media whore' amongst other slurs, and accused her of being funded by Israel. In 2018, Nomani responded with a defamation suit that halted Loonwatch harassment and permitted her to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 'John Doe' anonymous stalkers, most of them outed in Woke Army.
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The 'perception management' campaign found low-hanging fruit in left-leaning political leaders. President Obama, who flinched at Black anti-Americanism and antisemitism, was eager to please on the equally phobic Islamist file. When CAIR issued a statement Nomani described as advocating for 'separating the brutal actions of ISIS from the faith of Islam,' Obama obliged, she writes, with his government agencies giving in to pressure to scrub terms like 'jihadist' and replace them with 'extremist.'
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Although Nomani's research treats Islamism in the U.S., her themes map neatly onto Canada. Following the Islamism-driven 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Justin Trudeau, asked to identify the bombing's 'root causes,' reflexively saw, heard, and spoke no Islamist evil, responding: 'there is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.'
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The Muslim Reform Movement, in which Nomani and Canada's own heroic Raheel Raza play prominent roles, has been stalwart in its resistance to Islamist bullying, but their members are in a David-and-Goliath relationship with what Nomani describes as Muslim Brotherhood's well-funded machine. They get worn down by what Nomani's young son articulated as a 'terrorism of the mind.'
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It would help if politicians cold-shouldered Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups and instead elevated Muslim Reformers' public status, seating them 'above the salt,' so to speak. Active pushback against institutionalized Islamism is in motion in the U.S. But in Canada, alas, 'perception management' rules at the desk where the buck on a threat to our cultural health is supposed to stop.
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