Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Lightfootland) have determined to take action against “Islamophobia,” and their initiative is gaining traction. The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday approved their bill calling for a State Department “Islamophobia monitor,” and now it will go to the full House for further consideration. The idea that Pelosi’s House would reject such a bill is virtually inconceivable.
This all started back in October, when Omar and Schakowsky introduced the Combating International Islamophobia Act, which would, according to a press release posted on Omar’s website, “require the State Department to create a Special Envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia, and include state-sponsored Islamophobic violence and impunity in the Department’s annual human rights reports.”
This would supposedly “help policymakers better understand the interconnected, global problem of anti-Muslim bigotry. It will also establish a comprehensive strategy for establishing U.S. leadership in combatting Islamophobia worldwide.”
The press release said nothing whatsoever about combating jihad terror or about how suspicion of Islam may be created by the all too common spectacle of Muslims committing acts of violence while screaming “Allahu akbar” and justifying their actions by reference to Islamic texts.
Omar and Schakowsky claimed that “this year, the United States has seen over 500 documented complaints of anti-Muslim hate and bias.” Their link went to another press release, this one from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), claiming that these documented complaints include “hate crimes, harassment, school bullying, discrimination, hate speech, and anti-mosque incidents.”
“Hate speech”: this means that trivial incidents in which someone who is rude to a Muslim gets counted in as a hate crime, inflating the numbers of those crimes and contributing to the false impression that Muslims are victims of widespread discrimination and harassment in America today. With that low a bar, it’s no surprise that the press release at Omar’s site goes on to note that “in March, the United Nations Human Rights Council cited discrimination and hatred towards Muslims has risen to ‘epidemic proportions.”
Omar claimed that “we are seeing a rise in Islamophobia in nearly every corner of the globe. In my home state of Minnesota, vandals spray-painted hate messages and a Nazi swastika on and near the Moorhead Fargo Islamic Center. These types of incidents are all too common for Muslims in the United States and beyond. As part of our commitment to international religious freedom and human rights, we must recognize Islamophobia and do all we can to eradicate it. That’s why I’m proud to partner with Rep. Jan Schakowsky to create a special envoy to put an end to this bigotry.”
Really, that Nazi swastika business is terrible. But let’s try to keep some perspective, shall we? Muslims in Nigeria are subjecting Christians to murderous jihad attacks on a near-daily basis. Muslims in Pakistan persecute Christians and other religious minorities by means of that country’s draconian blasphemy laws, which have seen lives destroyed on rumors and false charges. Compared to that, some spray-painted graffiti just isn’t that big a deal, although certainly the louts who did it should be caught and prosecuted.
Omar doesn’t say anything about Muslims being beaten or murdered, or even denied jobs and preferment, in the United States, because such incidents are vanishingly rare; to establish her victimhood bona fides she has to fall back on graffiti.