FrontPage Magazine Compares Liberal Think Tank to Nazis
FrontPage Magazine’s Daniel Greenfield reacted with total hysteria today to a report on anti-Muslim activists, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in the United States,” that was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) last week. Greenfield alleges that the report, which named FrontPage Magazine and its head David Horowitz as key players in fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S., is part of an anti-Semitic conspiracy.
“If Americans view Islam badly, it can only be because a handful of Jewish experts financed by other rich Jews brainwashed them into it,” Greenfield writes, falsely implying that the CAP report makes the argument that the Jewish community writ large is maligning Muslims in the U.S. Rather, CAP’s report profiles a small handful of activists, some Jewish and some not, who have worked to demonize the Muslim community.
Greenfield actually compares CAP’s work directly to major anti-Semites deserving of condemnation, writing, “When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad blamed Jewish influence for the poor image of Muslims in the West, he was widely condemned for it.” And he doesn’t stop with one example. He further analogizes CAPs report to various major instances of anti-Semitism over the centuries. “England’s first socialist party blamed the Boer War on the Jews. Henry Ford claimed the Jews were behind WWI. Charles Lindbergh delivered speeches accusing the Jewish lobby of stirring up war against Germany,” writes Greenfield.
He even analogizes the report to the anti-Semitic violence of the Nazis, particularly on Kristallnacht: “In the dark days of the Twentieth Century, while Jewish storeowners were sweeping up broken glass, and Jewish children were being assaulted on the streets of Europe – the appeasers were blaming the Jewish lobby for growing tensions in Europe. Now as Jewish storeowners sweep up broken glass after leftist pro-Muslim attacks on their stores and Jewish children are attacked again on the streets of Europe – growing tensions with the Muslim world are once again blamed on the Jewish Lobby.”
Greenfield’s conclusion: “The Center for American Progress is guilty of repeating a sinister history” and “blaming Jews for Islamophobia.” Greenfield says CAP’s researchers have done “the work of the jihadists and have thus also become part of the problem.”
In his Web posting, Greenfield takes a cheap shot at the report’s co-author, Faiz Shakir, of whom he says that if he “really wanted to understand why his religion is viewed negatively by so many Americans,” Shakir should “stand at Ground Zero, the graveyard of thousands murdered by holy warriors invoking the Koran … walk through Times Square, where a fellow Pakistani plotted to detonate a car bomb, or … visit the small towns where every few weeks a body is lowered into the ground courtesy of a Muslim terrorist.”
This isn’t the first hysterical response to CAP’s report from FrontPage Magazine. Earlier, Horowitz had called CAP “fascistic” and accused it of trying to “silence critics of Islamic terror.” FrontPage is also planning to release its own report, “Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future.”
