State Department's love affair with Islamists

With the United States battling Islamist extremists, making America's case to Muslims around the world has never been more of a priority for policymakers. Unfortunately, the State Department continues to take a counterproductive approach: serving as a veritable infomercial promoting Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) while giving the back of the hand to the very anti-jihadist Muslims that Washington should be cultivating.

The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled "Being Muslim in America." Unfortunately, the booklet perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims' civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows:

"A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks - planned and executed by non-Americans - [which] raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in return a measure of Muslim-American alienation."

This is an extremely tendentious, even intellectually dishonest, description. From reading it, one would have no idea that there have been numerous convictions and guilty pleas on terrorism-related charges since September 11 that involved Muslims living in the United States. This includes terrorist plots to attack the military base at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to create a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon and to attack US military and Jewish targets in California.

THE BOOKLET makes no mention of the fact that organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) were listed by the government as unindicted coconspirators in the successful Hamas-support prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF).

But from reading this passage in "Being Muslim in America," one would get the impression that public concern about Islamist terror has no basis in reality and is merely the result of backward Americans' "discrimination and resentment."

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