You Scratch My Backlash, I'll Scratch Yours

Perhaps second only to the undying myth of the arrival of the Great Pumpkin on Halloween is the myth of the arrival of a Great Backlash against America’s Muslims. Like the Backlash that never arrives, Linus van Pelt is out there year after year, waiting in the pumpkin patch, missing all the Halloween fun, just so he can witness that Great Pumpkin rising from the pumpkin patch. And year after year, alas, the Great Pumpkin never shows up.

Linus does what he does every year because he’s sincere in his beliefs. He has to be: the Great Pumpkin will only show up at a pumpkin patch that is completely sincere.

Which is one big difference between the myth of the Great Pumpkin and the myth of America’s Great Backlashes against Muslims. No one who talks about the backlashes as if they really happen has an ounce of sincerity.

Not the imams, not the community organizers, not the CAIR spokesmen, not the reporters, not the editors, not the government officials. There was a moment after 9/11 when America held its breath wondering if there was going to be a backlash against the people who practiced the religion that did this to us. But it didn’t happen after 9/11. (You will research in vain for actual victims of the Great Anti-Muslim Backlash of September 2001. But I invite you to try. The most you'll find are some quotes from mopey UM coeds who thought somebody looked at them funny for wearing a hijab, or heard about a guy who heard about a girl who got yelled at from a car. Kristallnacht it ain’t. ).

But even though the backlash was a myth, you'll still hear “the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11” cited uncritically as an historical fact, like the Battle of Gettysburg.

Nor has a backlash happened since. If 9/11 didn’t cause a backlash, nothing that’s happened since was going to do it.

We Americans, apparently, just don’t go in for backlash.

Yet, every time there’s a domestic act of violence or a plot uncovered involving self-identified Muslims who’ve been documented citing the Koran as a license to kill, we’re scolded that we’d better not get angry, or “jump to conclusions,” or think that “every Muslim is a terrorist.” We should just drop the whole subject and be quiet. Anything less will only make the “backlash” against innocent Muslims worse.

After bona fide racist Sunni and jihadist hater Imam Luqman Abdullah got himself martyred by the FBI, CAIR’s Dawud Walid and the ADC’s Imad Hamad both told WDET “the emphasis on Islam could trigger a backlash against other Muslims and contribute to Islamophobia.”

Then, after the Fort Hood murders by self-identified jihadist Malik Hasan, we’re lectured about how “Metro Detroit Muslims [are struggling] with . . . fears that a backlash will dismantle years of progress toward better understanding of Islam.”

Even Army Chief of Staff General Casey said on CNN this morning “that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan . . . could ‘cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.’” He’s going to have his Army leaders “be on the lookout for that.”

American soldiers don’t deserve to be blamed for future backlashes, let alone nonexistent ones in the present. Right now, Major Hasan is receiving the best medical care in the world, after having his wounds treated almost as soon as he fell by Army medics. That’s how the Army handles backlash. If he had been an Egyptian officer, or an Iranian, or a Syrian, and he had done that to his fellow soldiers, he would have been torn limb from limb on the spot. And more than likely, those limbs would have been paraded around by his killers to chants of “Allahu Akhbar!”

And wasn’t it officers’ fear of Army leaders looking out for “Islamophobia” that kept them from reporting Hasan’s jihadist leanings? That kind of PC nonsense is a big part of why there will be thirteen military funerals this week.

The thing that drives me craziest about all this backlash talk is that no one, I mean NO ONE, Muslim, non Muslim, Arab, Christian, anyone, believes these threats about backlashes are serious. I can assure you that no local press, no police department, nor the Islamic community activists are doing one thing any different tonight out of genuine expectancy there’s going to be a “backlash” against Dearborn’s Muslims.

If there were such a backlash, no one would be more surprised than Dawud Walid.

When Islamic spokesmen fret publicly about “backlash,” what they mean is their job convincing us that Islam is a peaceful religion just got harder thanks to the violent actions of some unmistakeably Muslim bad guy. The actions of Muslims like Major Hasan or Imam Abdullah or the Fort Dix Six throws a floodlight on the contradiction between Islam as understood in the Ummah, and the Potemkin Islam that’s being peddled for domestic consumption.

The constant carping about “backlash,” like the constant carping about “Islamophobia,” is intended to accomplish one thing: to silence critical analysis of Islam.