Faisal Al Mutar on Media Bubbles, the Two Faces of Al Jazeera, and Nuance
"What do you call a white Republican who is against same-sex marriage? If you call them a bigot, then you’re calling 90% of Muslims bigots. While you accuse others of racism, you are actually being racist here because you’re applying different standards to different people based on their race because Islam is viewed as a “brown man’s religion”. You are not being liberal by supporting illiberal ideas coming from people from different countries, religions, and cultures.
I would ask somebody who reads Salon, if you claim to be against homophobia, like I am and many people are, you should stand against it whether it comes from the Evangelicals, the black church, or the Muslim in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iran. Otherwise you are the racist. If you think it’s acceptable for “other” people do it just because they’re a different race other than a “white male” then you’re not really a liberal — you don’t subscribe to the concept of equal rights and anti-racism. You’re propagating racism and you’re part of the problem. This might sound aggressive but I cannot find a polite way to call people delusional.
It should be easy for a supporter of same-sex marriage, women’s rights, and the first amendment to just apply those principles to everybody. I’m asking them to believe that gay Muslims or gays living in Muslim dominated countries are also human — and those who kill and persecute them are bigots and part of the problem.
All I want is for them to acknowledge that if they think a Republican who does not like gays is a homophobe, then a person in the Muslim Brotherhood who does not like gays is also a homophobe...
I think many people who study liberal arts and subjects like sociology are exposed to only one type of history — which is white history and white colonialism. They’re inculcated with the idea that the Holocaust, genocide against Native Americans, and Japanese internment camps represent white people. When people are only exposed to these ideas, of one oppressor — meaning white people — what they’ll do when they hear a person criticize a foreign culture is to get immediately defensive on behalf of that culture. And they’ll do it to protect a former victim of imperialism, racism, etc.
But the people who are most hurt by this — by preventing this discussion — are the minorities within the minorities. So when people don’t talk about Islamic homophobia, the people who are hurt by this are the gays living in Muslim families in Qatar, Iran, or America...
Liberals try to stand with the underdogs. But the most important underdogs here are the minorities within the minorities...
I think another problem is that people see Muslims as a minority, but they’re not a minority globally. They’re the second biggest religion in the world. The true minorities are those living within them who do not subscribe to conservative Muslim values...
If you subscribe to the concept that Arabs as an ethnicity are a bunch of savages, and that they’re just the bad guys, you’re leaving no room for reform. You’re thinking there’s something wrong with them internally — something genetically wrong and they’re incapable of being civilized. That is racist, first of all, secondly, it’s unscientific.
I’m all for acknowledging the problem of Islamic extremism and how we should fight it. But that means you have to look for the people with good values within these communities, the individuals who subscribe to ideas of universal human rights, liberal values, and you have to stand with them...
One of the things many people don’t know about Al Jazeera is that is mostly owned by the royal family of Qatar which is financed by oil and gas. It’s a company that doesn’t rely much on advertising because they have other sources of revenue.
The version I grew up with of Al Jazeera is a channel that is literally the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood and a light version of Al Qaeda. You can see them entertaining the idea of supporting groups like Jabhat Al Nusra in Syria — which is literally Al Qaeda’s affiliate. Let’s not talk about what they think about homosexuality and Jews and their anti-semitism, because it’s bad.
I think I saw an article on there saying something like “The theory of evolution is a myth.” So, if you’re a liberal and whatever you think of Fox News, Fox News would look like a progressive or liberal channel if you compared it to Al Jazeera Arabic. Al Jazeera Arabic is a hub for xenophobia, hardcore conservatism, social conservatism, anti-women’s rights, anti-gay rights.
But then you have Al Jazeera English speaking about Black Lives Matter, pandas, climate change, because what they’re trying to do is make Islam look as good as possible. They want to make Muslims appear victimized. And they want to make the West look as bad as possible. They show the worst that exists in the West. Flint, Michigan — they were reporting on that constantly. Standing Rock as well, you get the idea.
But you never see them criticizing Islam, Islamists, or the Muslim Brotherhood. They only show you the side of Aleppo that is controlled by Islamist and Jihadist groups. They never criticize Qatar but they criticize Saudi Arabia because they’re rivals.
Anybody that has an understanding of Qatar foreign policy would see that Al Jazeera is just a PR company for them. You can hardly see them ever criticizing slavery in Qatar of Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis and other human rights abuses happening there...
They show the best things of Islam and the worst things of the West because they want the West to not interfere in the Muslim world. And that means the Muslim Brotherhood wins. They show the atrocities in Egypt by Sisi and then they show that there’s a solution — it’s the Muslim Brotherhood. The “democratically-elected” Muslim Brotherhood. This way they’re able to pander to liberals and progressives.
The more they show the terrible things in America, the less likely people are to be critical of Islam. They want to tell people in the West: “Oh, you have the same thing over there. You want to talk about racism? Oh, black people are being shot without regard in the streets.”...
They want to make the West so critical of itself, to an extent, that they’ll not want to say anything else to any other culture and more importantly: they’ll forget about challenging Islamism.
I don’t think this is a conspiracy. I’ve maybe watched 70 or more videos of AJ+ and compared them with Al Jazeera Arabic and I can really see their agenda. It fits. If I’m an Islamist what do I want to do? For Arabs, I tell them this is what Islamism is and what Shariah law truly is.
But how can I make progressives in the West support me? I know, I’ll make them so critical of their country that they don’t intervene in Muslim countries so that Islamists can take over. This way I’ll win. So it seems like a very orchestrated PR campaign...
The biggest backlash people like me face is actually from Islamists. They think my ideas are antithetical to Islam and an enemy according to their ideology.
The far-Left, or the regressive-Left as Maajid Nawaz refers to them, believe in the narrative that to criticize Islam and even Islamism is a form of imposing your own values on them. Regressives consider values like liberalism to be Western values so they think that you are imposing the white Western values on the brown Muslim — and to them that’s terrible. They think that Islam is a brown man’s religion. Even though there are many adherents to Islam who are white, black, Bosnian, Sudanese, Chinese. So any criticism of it from a white person is a form of racism. Any criticism coming from a brown person who was adhering to that religion is the equivalent of a black person supporting white slave-owners. That’s where terms like “Uncle-Tom” and “House Muslim” come from. They think you are trying to assist the white imperialist “agenda” against the brown victims.
On the far-Right there are strong elements of xenophobia. There are many people who adhere to the concept of white superiority — which is a bad idea — and they subscribe to this idea that there is a clash of civilizations. That there is a war between the East and the West. That’s wrong. There are many people from the East who are liberals and who adhere to universal liberal values. Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, Ali Rizvi from Pakistan, I’m from Iraq. So there’s many people in the East who support universal human rights — sometimes more than the people in the West!"
Liberals don't love "minorities" - they just hate "majorities".
Too bad he conflates a clash of civilisations with a clash of everyone in one civilisation with everyone in another - the presence of some liberal Muslims doesn't mean most Muslims aren't conservative