Berkeley and CAIR team up on "Islamophobia"

The University of California-Berkeley has a Center for Race and Gender, and withinthat center they have recently started an "Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project." CAIR is a major sponsor of this initiative, and CAIR co-sponsored a conference in April on the topic.

Yesterday, they announced the First Annual Islamophobia Report.

It takes only a few seconds of reading it to see that there is nothing academic about this report. It is little more than an excuse to push a myth of Muslim victimhood in America.

One proof of this is a section of the report called "The Worst":

Some individuals, institutions and groups were at the center of pushing Islamophobia in America during the period covered by this report. This list is neither comprehensive nor offered in any specific order. However, those listed below do deserve particular note for their intentional efforts to spread fear and prejudice.

Everyone that they hate, from Pamela Geller to Robert Spencer to Steven Emerson and Newt Gingrich.

I was particularly interested in their section on how "Islamophobic" Daniel Pipes is. I once had a lengthy message board exchange with a (very nice) Muslim woman who claimed that Pipes hates Muslims and Islam, and she gave me a bunch of quotes proving it from CAIR (or maybe from WRMEA.). Luckily, Pipes keeps every one of his writings available on his website, easily searchable, and I spent the time to track down the context of each quote.

Every single quote was taken out of context, deliberately, to make Pipes appear to be a hater.

Here is part of what this report, under the aegis of UCB, says about Pipes:

The grandfather of Islamophobia in America. Pipes’ eminence is fading but his contributions to anti-Muslim intolerance in America cannot be overlooked.

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank.

In 1990, he said:

“Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

“This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer,” Pipes said of Islam in 1996.

And so forth.

Pipes, however, has already responded to most of these CAIR lies here. He shows how the quotes are either mis-attributed or way out of context. And anyone can search his site and figure out that he is entirely right.

Which means that a publication with a university imprimatur is pushing what are, quite literally, lies written by CAIR. It doesn't even pretend to fact-check the lies.

This may be the worst example of pseudo-scholarship in the US today. The University of California-Berkeley is no longer even engaging in the pretense of scholarship - it is now a fully activist organization masquerading as a university.