The Jihad against muslims: when does criticism of Islam devolve into bigotry?

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Column

FEW SUPPORTERS OF the War on Terror voiced grief at the death of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who instigated the brutal "ethnic cleansing" campaigns in Croatia and Bosnia. Some, such as the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal, used the occasion to declare that U.S. intervention in Kosovo was unquestionably right and to attempt an analogy with the war in Iraq. But there were exceptions. In some "anti-jihadist" circles, the Butcher of the Balkans was mourned as a misunderstood hero in the war against the Muslims.

On March 12, the group blog Infidel Bloggers Alliance ran an item titled "Memorable moment in the Milosevic trial." It described, without further comment, an episode in which Milosevic tried to portray himself as fighting the same forces of terrorism now threatening the West. Co-bloggers chimed in with such comments as "Wouldn't it be strange if Milosevic ends up being remembered by history as a hero and a kind of prophet?" and "Ever since 9/11, one question after another about whether we were on the wrong side in the Bosnian conflict has come up. The only thing you can trust a Muslim to be is a Muslim" (Including, it seems, the famously secularized and nonradical Bosnian Muslims, some 100,000 of whom died in Milosevic's assaults of the 1990s.) Similar attitudes, somewhat less stridently expressed, could be found on Fihad Watch, FrontPage, and other popular right-wing sites.

Wolds like Islamophobia and phrases like anti-Muslim bigotry are bandied about too liberally, often applied to those who merely criticize fanatical Islamic radicalism or point out the deep-seated problems in much of Muslim culture today. But the real thing does exist, and it frequently takes the cover of anti-jihadism.

Fihad Watch--a fixture on the blogrolls of MichelleMalkin.com and Little Green Footballs, two of the most popular right-wing blogs--traffics fairly openly in such stuff. After the sister of Mohammed Taheri-Azar, the Iranian-born young man who had plowed his car into a crowd of students in North Carolina this March, expressed shock at her brother's act, contributor Hugh Fitzgerald commented, "Why should Infidels take a chance, if the likelihood of their being able to distinguish the 'moderate' from the 'immoderate' Muslim is even slimmer than that of the closest relatives of those Muslims found to have engaged in ... acts of terrorism?"

Fitzgerald's phrasing may be fuzzy, but his sentiment is clear: All Muslims are a threat. Indeed...