By Paul Austin Murphy
Loon noun
1. a worthless lazy fellow
2. a person with confused ideas; incapable of serious thought [syn: addle-head]
[As found on the Loonwatch website.]
The Loonwatch website uses the subheading: “the mooslims! they’re heeere!” The implication here is that all us “loons” and “Islamophobes” are exaggerating the problem of Islamic terrorism, sharia law, etc. Consequently, Loonwatch dedicates itself to uncovering such “Islamophobia” and exposing “Islamophobes”, “loons” and “wackos”; as well as to analyzing all the various and many unfounded criticisms of Islam and Muslims.
Yes, the problem is that each and every criticism of Islam, Muslims (as Muslims), the Koran, Muhammad, etc. is deemed — by Loonwatch — to automatically be “Islamophobic” and/or the work of a “loon”.
Now, isn’t that convenient? Isn’t that neat?
Exactly the same thing occurs in the UK. The British have Islamophobia Watch as well as the “anti-Islamophobia” journalist, Seumas Milne (of the Guardian). Neither of them attempt to make even the most basic of distinctions between the many critics of Islam and Muslims. To Islamophobia Watch and Seumas Milne, all critics of Islam and Muslims are, by Marxist/Leftist definition, “Islamophobes” and/or “fascists”. Even the critics whom Islamophobia Watch and Seumas Milne don’t explicitly call “fascists” or “Islamophobes” are still accused of “contributing to Islamophobia” or even of “contributing to the rise of fascism”. In other words, all critics of Islam and Muslims should, according to Leftist diktat, keep utterly silent. (Seumas Milne is an open and keen fan of the former Soviet Union and Bob Pitt, the founder of Islamophobia Watch, is a Trotskyist.)
Let’s put what Loonwatch is doing in this way. Instead of sharia law (i.e., blasphemy law, death for apostasy, etc.) stopping all criticism of Islam, the Koran, Muhammad, etc. (which it has for up to 1,400 years in parts of the Muslim world), we now have a seemingly hip, ironic and Leftist website which is attempting to enforce sharia law with the help of its pseudo-journalistic and sometimes pseudo-academic articles. These articles are also copiously sprinkled with mindless ad hominems and some terrible pop psychiatry (stuff about “loons” and “wackos”).
One permanent article on Loonwatch is: ‘All Terrorists are Muslims… Except the 94% that Aren’t’
When you read the small print, the percentages are only actually about the situation in the United States (which neither the writer — Danios — nor the title make clears); which has a big problem, according to Loonwatch, with “Latino” terrorism. However, most of that Latino terrorism is very low-level — hardly anyone has been killed.
Everyone is well aware that all sorts of non-Islamic groups have bombed places and buildings. (In England and the U.S. animal rights activists have done so.) But there is a big difference between all Islamic bombings and most other attacks. (The attacks Loonwatch is talking about are in the U.S.) In most cases of the latter, the bombings weren’t carried out specifically in order to kill civilians; but to intimidate and scare. In the Muslim terrorism case, virtually every bombing is designed specifically to kill civilians. In fact I’ve never heard of an Islamic terrorist attack which was only aimed at a building or designed simply to intimidate rather than kill. Most Islamist bombs are designed to kill civilians — and that is the source of the terror. Most other non-Muslim bombings — specifically in the U.S. and Europe — are designed to scare or intimidate.
Loonwatch provides a link to a FBI page which cites 318 terrorist attacks in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005. Firstly I would say that there have been more attacks in one year alone in, say, Pakistan and Iraq than during the entire 25-year period cited by the FBI. In the Muslim world as a whole, there will be more than 300 terrorist attacks every few months.
The death toll of such attacks in the U.S. was 3178 (between 1980 and 2005) — and that includes 9/11 and the Oklahoma bombing! If you take away those two attacks, you are left with around 116 deaths in 25 years. (That death toll has been surpassed in a single day in such Muslim countries as Syria and Egypt.) The other thing worth mentioning is that most of the attacks in the U.S. were either carried out by foreigners or by American citizens who favored foreign causes. Hardly any of the attacks were for domestic causes.
As for the Latinos, it’s hard to tell what Loonwatch means by “Latino” terrorist attacks because it has classed various and heterogeneous groups together with that term: most are fighting for completely different causes (e.g., Ejercito Popluar Boricua Macheteros, Puerto Rican Armed Resistance, Antonia Martinez Student Commandos, etc.). Loonwatch would have better classed some of them as “left-wing” terrorists; not as “Latinos”. In other words, Loonwatch has based its position on “Latino” terrorism solely on race or ethnicity! Now classing disparate groups together as Latinos is worlds apart from classing all Islamic terrorist groups together.
The Muslim population in the U.S. is small compared to the Latinos. There are around 43 million Latinos in the U.S. compared to between 2.8 to 6 million Muslims (as in the UK, the true numbers are in dispute). So is it any wonder the figures are what they are? But all this also depends on what Loonwatch classes as “terrorism” in the Latino and in other non-Muslim cases. When Muslims bomb, tens of civilians are often killed. Have the Latinos really done anything even remotely equivalent to the daily worldwide carnage that is Islamic terrorism? No! …not even according to the statistics which Loonwatch provides links to.
Of course Loonwatch’s central argument may be that Americans Muslims are fundamentally different from Muslims in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, etc. But are they really? Or is the real point that Muslims in the U.S. are a minority? Is that fact alone at the heart of all such differences? (For example, Muslim interfaith and moderation occurs in the U.S., but in most Muslim countries there’s virtually zero interfaith and moderation.) If Muslims were a majority in the U.S., or even a much larger minority, would Loonwatch argue that things would be just the same? I strongly doubt that. History has shown that the larger a Muslim minority becomes, the more violent it becomes towards its non-Muslim neighbors and equally towards the states which host them.
The other thing is that percentage figure: 94%. I too have seen the figure which states that 94% of all terrorists — globally, not in the U.S.! — are Muslims. So what Loonwatch has done is simply use that figure itself, applied it only to the U.S. alone and then stated: “except the 94% of terrorists that aren’t”. But even that doesn’t make sense. Even if Muslims don’t make up 94% of all terrorists, it’s a bit of a coincidence that, according to Loonwatch, they make up 100% minus that 94% of terrorists — that is, 6% of all terrorists. If that 94% figure was wrong in the first place, then why has Loonwatch used it again in such a sly way so as to come to a figure of 6% Muslim terrorists? In addition to that, Loonwatch gives a contradictory figure elsewhere in the very same article. Here it says that 99.6% of terrorists attacks — in the U.S.? — are carried out by non-Muslims. That is, less than 1% of terrorist attacks are carried out by Muslims. So what on earth happened to the 6% Muslim terrorist figure Loonwatch cited earlier?
I also love the way Loonwatch uses classic Stalinist tactics. Stalin himself accused virtually all of his political opponents of being “fascists”. Nowadays the word-weapons Stalinists, Trotskyists, and progressives use include “racist”, “Islamophobe”, “bigot, “xenophobe”, etc. And now Loonwatch adds such tasteful psychological ad hominems as “loon”, “wacko” and “mad” into the mix. (The Communists/Stalinists of yore used more scientifically respectable psychiatric terms for political dissidents and opponents such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenic“.)
So who runs and writes for Loonwatch? There’s a lot of speculation about this because no writer uses his or her real name. (Most recent posts are by someone called Emperor and Garibaldi is also a frequent contributor.) My strong guess is that Loonwatch writers use fake names for one very simple reason: they are Muslims. Distinctly non-Muslim names may be used because Loonwatch knows full well that if they used their Muslim names then, in a manner of speaking, the cat really would be let out of the bag. In other words, why else would Loonwatch writers use false names? (Because Loonwatch lies so much, it may also have something to do with avoiding litigation.) Alternatively, it may that both totalitarian ideologists, Leftists and Islamists, are working together (as they often do) on this project of monumental taqiyya or, as Leftists put it, “lying for Justice”.
Finally, Loonwatch’s central claim is that all critics of Islam and Muslims are “loons”. This is quite amazing claim when you bear in mind the simple fact that every single week 150 people — at the very least! — die (sometimes up to 200 or more) as a result of Islamic terrorism around the world. On top of that there’s the daily deaths from sharia law, honor killings, the massive persecution of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. Yet Loonwatch thinks that everyone who points such facts out is a “loon”. That strikes me as being the position of, well, a loon. If not a loon, then the position of an Islamist Muslim or, alternatively, a Trotskyist/communist/progressive. Who knows, perhaps some of Loonwatch’s writers have managed, somehow, to fuse totalitarian Leftism with totalitarian Islamism (or vice versa). Would that be such a difficult thing to do?
According to Loonwatch.com – a well known Islamophoiba watchdog site – there is no distinction. Loonwatch unconditionally attacks criticism of Islam but they refuse to criticize the many, many Islamic clerics and terrorists who are hurting people in the name of Islam. Should a person have something to say publicly questioning the funneling of monies from Islamic charities to Islamic terrorist networks, Loonwatch is there to call them a “Loon” for even raising the question. That’s quite a clever system – a form of radical Islamic McCarthyism it seems – with the first line of defense being a blogoshere of misinformed infidels who will blurt out the word “Islamophobe” at the slightest mention that within Islam there might be a problem brewing. What a clever design.
Should an article be written about forced marriages of Muslim child brides overseas or the stoning to death of a Muslim woman as punishment for being raped, or the many young boys who are brainwashed in Islamic madrasas only to become radicalized Islamic militants, or the Muslim men who were arrested in the UK for distributing fliers to Londoners saying that Homosexuals should be punished by hanging because their lifestyle is against Islam – any article written to express concern about these developments will likely lead the writer of such article to be branded a “Loon” by Looonwatch.com and have his name put out on the street.
This might cause the author of any such article to wonder if they will face the same fate as the Danish cartoonist Kurt Vestergaard who received death threats, followed up by a Somali Muslim intruder armed with an axe and knife who entered Westergaard’s house, for drawing pictures of Mohammed (actually this lead to a bout 100 deaths and the bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan, and setting fire to the Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, storming European buildings, and burning the Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, French and German flags in Gaza City and a letter bomb being sent to the Jyllands-Posten newspaper) orTheo Van Gough the filmmaker who was brutally murdered for expressing views which criticized the treatment of women in Islam, or author Salman Rushdie who faced a Fatwa placed on him by an Iranian Ayatollah for his book “The Satanic Verses” and the list goes on.
And Loonwatch will call out those who criticize Islam and put their name on the street while the deafening silence remains when it comes to any kind of meaningful condemnation of this increasingly more and more common type of Islamic brutality in the world today.
In fact, Loonwatch.com credited Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.com with more or less causing Anders Breivik to commit mass murder and writing a psychotic manifesto which included many ramblings about Islam taking over Europe. Although there are numerous articles from experts who say that Breivik clearly had plans to kill before JihadWatch even existed, the blame goes to Spencer just the same. But this is of course a double standard. Loonwatch will not tolerate anyone connecting the dots between Islamic terrorism and violent passages in the Koran and Hadiths commanding Islamic violence.
(http://www.NotWelcomeDocuemtnary.com) After making a documentary entitled “Not Welcome” which chronicles events surrounding the construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in the middle of America’s Bible Belt, I have become a frequent reader of Loonwatch.com as a source for understanding the scope of the Islamophobia problem in the United States. There is an entire industry, run for profit, of Christian Zionist propaganda designed to scare people into believing that Sharia Law is going to take over in America. It is my view that this is absurd and that Frank Gaffney’s notion of “Creeping Sharia” is a ridiculous paranoid concept designed to instill fear in order to manufacture consent for the bombing of more oil rich Islamic countries.
That said however, my research didn’t end there. I am highly sympathetic to the Muslims in Murfreesboro, TN and around the country who are being wrongly harassed and persecuted for their beliefs and I must admit that there is a part of me that would like to see this in simple black and white terms – a David and Goliath story with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist. It was heart breaking when Muslim women told me stories of how Southern white kids were beating up Muslim kids in school and calling them “terrorists”. This should not happen in America or anywhere. In Murfreesboro, TN a group of radical Evangelicals were the aggressors, but this point of view is not a one-size-fits-all that works with other world events. It’s more complex than that.
First let me make it clear that there is a difference between a Muslim and Islam. One is a human being and the other is a religious doctrine. No matter how many times I repeat this, there will always be a fair share of people who refuse to comprehend it and will go on the attack mode saying that I am insulting Muslims. Such was the case when I wrote an article entitled “Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam” (http://www.dailykos.com/… ).
The next day when I received the usual Loonwatch email containing the next round of articles on who they had singled out to be a “Loon” I saw a photograph of my own face blown up with the words “Loon At Large” over it. The article itself ended with a demand that I be silenced and a link to Daily Kos asking people to write in and demand that I be censored. (http://www.loonwatch.com/…)
My assertion in the article was and is that Loonwatch is protecting Jihadists and terrorists through lies of omission. Criticism ranged from emails I received saying that “it was about time someone stood up to Loonwatch”, to people who simply disagreed and felt Loonwatch to be a legitimate Islamophobia watchdog site and that my point was a bit of a stretch, to those who immediately took to the blogosphere, parroting all of the talking points of the Loonwatch smear piece, saying that I was “right wing” and a follower of Robert Spencer and a bigot and so on.
So how can it be that I could make a documentary defending the rights of an Islamic community to build a 53,000 square foot mega mosque and then only months later publish an article with so many criticisms of Islam while accusing a major Islamic blog of being a “terrorist spin control network”? Am I as they say, just somebody with a split personality, or a “Loon” or some kind of an attention-seeking bigot? What happened?
What happened is that my investigation into the theology of Islam continued. And I started to notice more and more of a correlation between some of the violent passages in the Koran and the Hadiths and many of the acts of brutality being carried out by radical Muslims in the world – mostly overseas.
Then when I posted some of these news articles, from Al Jazeera and other international news sources on my Facebook wall, lively discussions and sometimes even debates took place concerning the fact that although the Koran very clearly commands violence in a few passages, most Muslims do not take those passages literally. And thank God, or Allah or Zeus or whoever one imagines to be ruling over the world that most Muslims do not follow all of the commandments in the Koran to the letter or take those dark passages literally.
During those debates I was threatened twice. The first time was from a Muslim computer programmer out of Saudi Arabia who told me he was going to destroy me after I said that I thought Mohammed was too violent, had killed too many people to be considered a holy man(Mohammed personally beheaded hundreds of people and is considered the ideal man in Islam). I did not take this threat too seriously but soon after my website was hit with a denial of service attack. The second threat came from a Muslim man in New York who told me “I will cut off your dick and stuff it down your throat”. This time I not only contacted Facebook but also contacted the FBI.
While all of this was happening I continued to receive newsletter emails from Loonwatch.com every few days. Their content was mostly obsessed with Robert Spencer and his blog called JihadWatch.com so I put myself on that mailing list as well. It was more than just strange to be receiving these two newsletters every week, each with their own bias. Spencer was meticulously pointing out nearly every act of Islamic inspired violence around the world while Loonwatch responded, tit for tat, by calling him a “Loon” over and over. I’m not sure what Spencer’s preoccupation with Jihad is really all about. He seems a little too cozy with the radical Evangelicals to me. That said, when I click on the links in his articles – for instance this one: “I was doing my duty as a Muslim,’ says father who handed out leaflets saying gay people should be hanged” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/… sure enough, Spencer wasn’t making this stuff up. In fact the Daily Mail in the UK did report on several Muslim men handing out fliers demanding that homosexuals be executed by way of hanging for disobeying Islam – in England.
Spencer’s take on this is naturally seen through the lens of his own sense of reality – a reality strongly motivated by his own reasons – which are not entirely clear to me. Loonwatch would have us believe that Spencer hates all Muslims, but that is not the impression I come away with. That Loonwatch hates Robert Spencer will become immediately self evident to anyone who browses their site. And how does Loonwatch report on the many, many Islamic inspired hate crimes in the world today? By waiting for someone to say anything critical about them and then brading that person a “Loon”.
The Holy Land Foundation was the largest Islamic charity in the United States. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, it was originally known as Occupied Land Fund. In 2007, federal prosecutors brought charges against the organization for funding Hamas and other “Islamic terrorist organizations”. Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) was founded in 1987 (The charter exhibits the influence of anti-Jew conspiracy theories throughout, as evidenced by the explicit mention of the “The Protocols of the Elder of Zion,”) as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (an organization often credited as being the mother ship for Al Queda, those followers of “the religion of peace” who brought us 9/11). In the 1920s, an Egyptian school teacher, Hassan al-Banna, gathered discontent Muslims to found the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to a former prosecutor with the US Justice Department, John Loftus, “Al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and wrote to him frequently.” Loftus adds that Al-Banna was so persistent in his “admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence. With the goal of the Third Reich to develop the Muslim Brotherhood as an army inside Egypt.”
For what it’s worth, here is what WikiPedia says about the connection between Hamas and the Council on American Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.):
“Critics of CAIR, including six members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, have alleged ties between the CAIR founders and Hamas. The founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, had earlier been officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), described by a former FBI analyst and US Treasury Department intelligence official as “intimately tied to the most senior Hamas leadership.” Both Ahmad and Awad participated in a meeting held in Philadelphia on October 3, 1993, that involved senior leaders of Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation (which was designated in 1995 by Executive Order, and later convicted in court, as an organization that had raised millions of dollars for Hamas) , and the IAP. Based on electronic surveillance of the meeting, the FBI reported that “the participants went to great length and spent much effort hiding their association with the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas].” Participants at the meeting discussed forming a “political organization and public relations” body, “whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous.”
CAIR raised suspicions by raising its annual budget of around $3 million (as of 2007) in part through large donations from people and foundations identified with Arab governments.
How does this relate to Loonwatch? Loonwatch works with CAIR by broadcasting CAIR’s point of view. They are very consistent on this. Loonwatch is never in disagreement with CAIR. CAIR thanks Loonwatch in their “Hate Report”.
Connecting all of these dots is deeply, deeply concerning. Here is the math: Out of the Muslim Brotherhood come a number of terrorist organizations including Al Queda and Hamas. Out of Hamas comes C.A.I.R. and Loonwatch becomes a mirror for anything that C.A.I.R. wants to convey to Americans about how harmless Islam is. Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sure does not look right.
It has been my personal experience that the vast majority of Muslims in the world are in fact peaceful. It’s the many who are not that have me concerned and the propaganda machine designed to shoot down any criticism of this fact that causes me to find it necessary to speak my mind about Loonwatch.
I was happy to see oppressive dictators in Tunisia, Egpyt and Libya fall but find it very disconcerting to see the old form of oppression replaced by a new form of oppression, that being Islamic Law (or “Sharia”). As of the time of this publication it appears that the Muslim Brotherhood is prepared to take over leadership in Egypt as they are likely to be voted in Democratically by a majority of Egyptian Muslims.
Let us not forget that the radical Islamic nuclear-armed military in Pakistan arrested those who helped the US to find and kill Bin Laden. Am I an “Islamophobe” for being concerned about these developments?
So in America we have Fox “News”, the most widely watched television cable news network, who gives us half truths about the wars our so-called “leaders” wage. The won’t tell you about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children killed or maimed using bombs that your tax dollars paid for. And within the American Liberal and Islamic world, for some, there is LoonWatch.com – which again will only tell you half truths and use lies of omission when it comes to the religiously inspired Islamic violence which is occurring mostly overseas. Two sides of the same coin in a way, even though the mandate of each organization is quite different – each provides a highly distorted and profoundly biased view regarding the clash of the civilizations. My feeling is that in the broader scheme of things these civilizations do not want to be at war with each other. On both sides of the conflict it is the so-called “leaders” – the “leaders” of America, the “leaders” of Islam (not all of them) who are creating more and more of a mess of this world, using religion and fear and nationalism to achieve their wicked ends.
We must not tolerate this any longer. If you value human rights, I would strongly urge you to reconsider just how serious the rise of Fundamentalism in general is and how there is hiding among the well-meaning liberal crowd a wolf in sheep’s clothing – that being Loonwatch.
In closing, Osama Bin Laden made it clear that he wanted to see the return of an Islamic Caliphate (or Global Islamic Kingdom) and it looks like his dream might just come true in that region of the world at least. Radical Islam is on the rise – nuclear bombs and all. And if you have anything critical to say about radical Islam, anything critical at all, prepare to be branded a “Loon” and have your name and photograph put out on the street when you become the next “Loon at Large”. Welcome to the new Islamic McCarthyism in America.