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How ‘Islamophobia’ panic gives the media a license to lie

Last week we learned that the wife of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji, had liked Instagram posts celebrating the mass murder of over 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and other similarly themed posts, including one calling the rape of women on that day a “hoax.”

Duwaji’s approval came before Israel retaliated against Hamas.

Not a single Israeli soldier was on Gazan soil when the wife of New York’s future mayor was celebrating the “collective liberation” of “Palestine” and liking posts calling for the Jews to be displaced from the “river to the sea.”

Mamdani contends his wife is a “private person,” and her bloodlust doesn’t reflect his own positions.

A trove of evidence strongly suggests otherwise, I’m afraid.

Even so, the mayor is the rising star in media and Democratic Party circles, and his wife was the focus of scores of glowing puff pieces during and after his campaign.

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One recent New York Times feature, headlined “The Complicated Politics of Rama Duwaji’s Style,” celebrated the New York first lady’s ascent into the “spotlight.”

If you pose for magazine photos, give interviews and offer political opinions on social media, your positions are fair game for the public to scrutinize.

You are not a “private person.”

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Nor are Duwaji’s politics “complicated,” a well-worn left-wing media euphemism for extremist views that are allegedly too nuanced for the proles to understand without layers of “context” from journalists.

When the mayor stood up for his wife, The New York Times reported, “Mamdani Defends Wife Amid Criticism of Her Support for the Palestinian Cause.”

Either this is a lie of omission, or the editors believe that the “Palestinian cause” entails hunting down terrified, unarmed young women and then murdering them.

Considering its coverage over the years, it might well be both.

The Duwaji story isn’t Watergate, but it’s a good example of establishment media doing everything in its power not to appear “Islamophobic,” including smothering the truth.

The late Christopher Hitchens once argued that the “stupid neologism” of “Islamophobia” was aimed “to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.”

And for years, merely pointing out factual, inconvenient truths about some Muslims or certain Islamic governments and leaders has been cynically cast as “Islamophobia.”Journalism’s core mission is to report and synthesize events to tell people the truth in clear language.

Does anyone believe the New York Times’ headline about the two alleged ISIS-inspired terrorists throwing homemade bombs at peaceful protesters — “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House” — accomplished that job?

The subhead, no less vague, informed readers that they “were arrested after anti-Islamic protesters led by the right-wing activist Jake Lang clashed with counter protesters near Gracie Mansion.”

Those “smoking jars of metal and fuses,” more familiarly known as improvised explosive devices or “bombs,” were constructed and allegedly thrown by two budding Islamic terrorists.

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And the Times is hardly alone in obfuscating the event: An unsuspecting CNN reader could easily have walked away with the impression that wide-eyed innocent children had merely stumbled upon the scene of the anti-Muslim protest, provoking them to assemble nail bombs and throw them.“Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather,” CNN’s since-rewritten story began.

This isn’t merely bias, it’s anti-journalism — reporting that literally leads the reader away from the truth.

It’s also unsurprising.

Recall that many outlets could barely get themselves to offer the unvarnished truth about the head Islamic State warlord, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.After the death of Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah, the Times heralded him as a “revolutionary religious leader” and “powerful orator, beloved by Shi’ite Muslims” who helped “provide social services for Lebanon.”Perhaps the pinnacle of this demented genre appeared in the Economist this week in the guise of an obituary of the late supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei.

The magazine chose to tell us that Khamenei believed that “divine right [was] on his side” and that he had “countless reasons to hate the West,” especially the United States, the tip of a “phalanx of morally corrupt countries.”

This is a stylistic choice no editor would ever make in the obituary of a fascist — or even a Republican.

Islamists are often given a special dispensation from Western moral standards by the media.

People, of course, should be judged as individuals.

But “Islamophobia” attempts to transform criticism of a political philosophy into an act of racism.

It has long been meant to chill speech.

These days, it’s been internalized so deeply by the left that it is used to destroy truth, as well.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi

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