Mike Pompeo’s Allies on the Anti-Muslim Right
The new secretary of state nominee hasn’t merely consorted with anti-Muslim bigots. He has echoed their arguments.
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Try this simple experiment. Take Mike Pompeo’s statements about Muslims, and his alliances with anti-Muslim bigots. Then imagine that he had made similar statements about Jews, and forged similar ties to anti-Semites. Then imagine the reaction if he were nominated for secretary of state.
If the analogy appears farfetched, it’s only because, in the President Trump era, anti-Muslim bigotry is so pervasive that many of us have trouble recognizing it as bigotry at all.
Pompeo has a record of making dangerously misleading statements about Muslims. In 2013, he used the Boston Marathon bombing to imply that many American Muslim leaders and organizations secretly support violence against their country. From the House floor, he claimed that the “silence in the face of extremism coming from the best-funded Islamic advocacy organizations and many mosques across America is absolutely deafening. It casts doubt upon the commitment to peace among adherents of the Muslim faith.” This “silence,” Pompeo alleged, “has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts” of terrorism. In fact, however, several major Muslim organizations had weighed in within hours of the attack to condemn it.
These two allies, Gaffney and Gabriel, are to American Muslims what David Duke and Louis Farrakhan are to American Jews. Duke believes that American Jews—at least those who support Israel—are not loyal to the United States. “I’m against Jews or anybody else,” he declared in 2016, “that puts the interest of some of other place, another country, over our own country.” Farrakhan believes in a Jewish conspiracy to control the United States government. “The Jews have control over those agencies of government,” he asserted last month. “When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.”
Gabriel declared in 2007 that “a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Quran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day—this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Quran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.” After Khizr Khan brandished a copy of the Constitution at the 2016 Democratic Convention, Gabriel insisted that he was lying. “Waving the Constitution is a misrepresentation,” she said, “when one’s religion teaches that it and any other man-made law, for that matter, are to be removed and superseded by the Quran.”
Gaffney and Gabriel don’t consider Muslim disloyalty a passive, theoretical problem. Just as Farrakhan and Duke believe that many American Jews are part of an active conspiracy to undermine the United States, Gaffney and Gabriel believe the same thing about American Muslims. At the center of this conspiracy stands the Muslim Brotherhood, which supposedly controls most American Muslim organizations and mosques, and seeks to replace the Constitution with sharia law. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Egypt in 1928 with the goal of spreading Islam around the world and recreating an Islamic Caliphate, though what exactly that means differs among the Brotherhood’s many loosely affiliated branches in different countries.
When asked this week about Pompeo’s elevation to secretary of state, Gaffney replied, “I’m a big fan of Mike Pompeo’s. I think he is a splendid choice.” Imagine if David Duke had said that about a secretary of state nominee who had won an award from an anti-Semitic organization and had a history of slandering Jews. Would the Senate confirm such a nominee? Of course not. Then how, in good conscience, can it confirm Mike Pompeo?
The article appeared in the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/pompeo-muslims/555680/