Dalia Mogahed is a former Obama administration advisor who directs research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding "focused on empowering the American Muslim Community." She's pretty much what Linda Sarsour has become in recent months - an articulate female defender of Islam using liberal phraseology.
In an op-ed today, Mogahed pretty much says that anyone who asks Muslims to condemn terrorism is an Islamophobe:
There isn’t a mode of communication through which Muslims have not tried to communicate to the world their disgust with terrorism in their name.It is very interesting that Mogahed makes this argument.
But is this a reasonable expectation?
Asking Muslims if they condemn terrorism carried out by a Muslim may seem legitimate to many Americans: “People carry out acts of targeted violence in the name of Islam and as a follower of said religion, how are we to know you don’t agree? We will suspect you until and unless you sufficiently convince us otherwise.”
The question is an accusation of monstrosity — cheering for the literal murder of children — for no other reason than the faith I practice and the way I look.
Imagine if white folks were collectively suspected of condoning the actions of Dylann Roof, who walked into that black church in Charleston and shot and killed African Americans in supposed defense of the white race. Or Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people, mostly children, in Norway in defense of white Christian Europe against brown and black Muslims.
When Robert Lewis Dear Jr. shot and killed three people in a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, I didn’t ask my neighbor, a vocal pro-life evangelical Christian, if she condemned it. I assumed she did — because anyone with the most basic human decency would abhor the murder of innocent people.
Yet this basic assumption of innocence is often denied Americans who are Muslim.
...[S]uspecting someone of something as despicable as condoning the murder of children because of their ethnicity or faith is the definition of bigotry.
In 2008, Mogahed co-wrote a book with John Esposito called "Who Speaks for Islam?" where she argued, like here, that only a small percentage of Muslims support terror. Using a very strange methodology, they found that only 7% of Muslims worldwide according to Gallup polls were considered "extremist" and the rest were "moderate."
However, when one dug into the numbers - numbers that they did not publish in the book! - it was seen that they defined "extremist" as people who found 9/11 completely justified and hated the US.
If you included the numbers who found the 9/11 attacks to be "mostly" justified (6.5%) or "somewhat" justified (23.1%) then at the time fully 36.6% of Muslims could find some justification for the terror attack in the US on September 11.
Do 36% of whites support Dylann Roof or Anders Breivik? The question is absurd. But Mogahed herself knows that (as of 2007 or so) 36.6% of Muslims supported the most heinous terror attack to some extent.
Mogahed doesn't want you to know this. That's why she wrote an entire book claiming Muslims were moderate based on polling data without including the polling data.
In 2007 a Pew poll found that about one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam.
Mogahed knows this statistic as well. She doesn't want you to know.
So, yes, most American Muslims are law abiding citizens and most do not support most terror attacks. But these numbers do not exactly make non-Muslim Americans feel safe.
And I would love to see a poll that asks Muslims worldwide, as well as in the US, whether they consider Palestinian suicide bombers to be "martyrs." I am willing to bet that the number is very close to 50% if not more in the US, and nearly unanimous in the Middle East and Europe. Meaning that suspecting Muslims of condoning the murder of Israeli Jewish kids is not at all bigoted - it is very possibly entirely accurate.
After all, every Arabic language newspaper, even the most moderate, refers to such people as "martyrs." Meaning that they have raised themselves spiritually by getting killed while murdering Jews.
That isn't exactly moderate. Mogahed might even share that opinion.
Mogahed is trying to say that anyone who is frightened of possible Muslim terror attacks is a racist. But she won't tell you that it is a far more rational position than she claims.