Berkeley Center for Race and Gender works with CAIR to demonize critics of Islam

From the Berkeley Center for Race & Gender:

The UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender is excited to announce the release of our third collaborative research report with The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) entitled, Confronting Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States.

The report has already been written up in The Guardian and probably elsewhere. It says that over $200 million was "accessible" over a five year period by groups dedicated to promoting hate for Muslims.

It lists a series of groups that it identifies as Islamophobic, both an "inner core" of hardcore Islamophobes and an "outer core" of supporting organizations to Islamophobia.

But it doesn't really describe how it categorized these groups to begin with.

For example, it describes MEMRI as one of its "Inner Core" of Muslim haters. Here's why:

On its website, MEMRI claims to “bridge the language gap between the West and the Middle East” by translating Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and other languages into English. Their translations have been widely criticized for inaccuracy and inflammatory misrepresentation.

How about another "Inner Core" group, the Middle East Forum?

According to its website, the Middle East Forum “works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East and protect Western values from Middle Eastern threats.” The group’s founder and director is Daniel Pipes, known as the grandfather of Islamophobia in the United States.

But Pipes says, over and over again, that moderate Islam is the solution to extremism. I have never seen anything inaccurate at MEF.

CAIR is offended at criticisms of terrorists and their enablers. And Berkeley's CRG accepts, without question, CAIR's criticisms.

But are those criticisms valid? Not at all. In these cases, the report accepts Muslim outrage at the truth as prima facie evidence of "Islamophobia."

The "Outer Core" includes outlets like Fox News and National Review, based on occasional comments or editorials that they deem "Islamophobic."

In other words, this 89 page report has no methodology to back up for its main accusations. If one is going to label an organization as "Islamophobic" one would need some actual evidence - what percentage of its articles attack Islam and Muslims in general, as opposed to radicals and extremists? Does it ever praise moderate Islam and Muslims?

The report claims that it is not against legitimate criticism of Islam:

Caveat: Questioning Islam or Muslims is Not Islamophobia It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority, of those who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes. Equally, it is not Islamophobic to denounce crimes committed by individual Muslims or those citing Islam as a motivation for their actions.

But it gives no proof that (at least some of) the groups it calls out is doing anything other than legitimate criticism.

One of the main accusations that CAIR and others have against Zionists is that they use the charge of antisemitism too freely, and they use it as a club to shut down any criticism of Israel. But this is exactly what CAIR and Berkeley's CRG are doing, by defining at least some legitimate critics of radical Islam as haters - and therefore convincing people not to accept any valid criticism of today's Islamic world.

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