Late comedian Norm MacDonald, once joked (video; encapsulated on his X and Facebook accounts):
“What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?”
Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield recounted MacDonald’s macabre joke in his recent eponymous analysis, “Islamophobia is the cover-up for the crime,” noting, somberly, “But that’s not just a joke: it’s the end stage of Islamophobia.”
Greenfield elucidated the designed, nefarious exploitation of the largely invented phenomenon of “Islamophobia.” He observed, for example, how the recent Biden administration’s Islamophobia Strategy claimed that Muslims were the real victims of the Oct 7th jihad carnage in Israel. That “Strategy” argued Muslims were suffering “hate and discrimination in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel,” which paralleled their alleged, “experiences following the 9/11 attacks.” Greenfield described the perverse moral inversion that results from this factitious “reasoning”:
“Every Muslim terrorist attack soon concentrates attention on the ‘backlash,’ not the act itself, victims are sidelined and Islamist groups like (Hamas linked-) CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) redefine themselves as the victims…Once the moral inversion is underway, continuing to talk about the original Islamic crime becomes ‘Islamophobia’ and those who keep speaking out face shunning, censorship, deplatforming and even criminal charges”…
This cynical, corrosive dynamic has been playing out in Rhode Island in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, particularly following a manufactured November, 2023, “Islamophobic shooting” incident.
On 11/17/23, Eli Sherman and Alexandra Leslie, part of WPRI’s “investigative team,” referred to a shooting outside the Islamic Center of Rhode Island (ICRI) mosque, in Providence. Relying heavily upon an instant, propagandized “assessment” by Hamas-linked CAIR (“a specially designated terrorist organization, and an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case”), Sherman and Leslie made the heavy-handed suggestion that the shooting was an “Islamophobic hate crime.” Indeed, that was what the mosque claimed about the crime and its victim, Mustafa Ramos, who was shot in the buttocks while selling Islamic paraphernalia adjacent to the mosque.
Within a week of the shooting, based upon actual criminal investigation, Providence police Maj. David Lapatin was reticent (understandably, as it turns out!) to declare the incident a hate crime, stating “To say the mosque was targeted would be premature.” Nevertheless, the “hate crime” narrative was how WPRI (here; here) and the rest of the local Rhode Island media uncritically framed the story—including The Providence Journal (here; here), The Boston Globe Rhode Island section, and The Patch. CNN, and even the UK Guardian and UK Daily Mail, echoed this same narrative in their obsessive coverage of a presumed “Islamophobic shooting.”
But more than a year later it is still not designated a hate crime, and in fact, having spoken to the investigating officer last week, the shooting never will be designated as one. It emerges that the victim, and the shooter, knew each other, and both the mosque and CAIR likely were aware of this as well, possibly from the outset. While the case remains open, a completely different line of criminal investigation is being pursued, unrelated to any “hate crime”. None of the local Rhode Island reporters who rushed to validate a false, CAIR-promoted “Islamophobic hate crime shooting” story, have exhibited any curiosity about why this shooting, more than 14-months later, has not been classified as a hate crime.(Again, it wasn’t and never will be classified as a “hate crime”)
Worse still, last February, 2024, a Rhode Island House resolution on “Islamophobia” was passed riveting on this manufactured, factitious “Islamophobic shooting,” introduced by Representatives Ajello, Ackerman, Tanzi, Sanchez, Felix, Potter, Cruz, Boylan, Blazejewski, and Shekarchi. The resolution included this language:
“WHEREAS, Closer to home, Mustafa Ramos, ‘a jovial man with a giant smile,’ [note: directly quoted from this Providence Journal story] was setting up a table before prayers outside the Islamic Center in Providence, when he was shot by a man who had waited nearly half an hour to attack. It is believed that Mr. Ramos was a target based solely on his faith… RESOLVED, That the Secretary of State be and hereby is authorized and directed to transmit duly certified copies of this resolution to the Islamic Center of Rhode Island and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Mustafa Ramos c/o the Islamic Center in Providence, and Hisham Awartani c/o Brown University.”
My own investigation has revealed that this same mosque which bellowed, falsely, “Islamophobia,” in November, 2023, preaches jihadism and hatred toward non-Muslims, especially Jews. I’ve put together two meticulously documented analyses, including video evidence, detailing exactly how the mosque promulgates such hate, here, and here.
I analyzed a very inflammatory Friday sermon or “khutbah” (see Qur’an 62:9), delivered 1/3/25 at the Islamic Center of Rhode Island (ICRI). During the body of the khutbah, in English, the presiding imam invoked Qur’anic references reminding Muslims of their religious supremacism—extolling the global Muslim community (or “umma’) as mankind’s “best” community (Q 3:110), a single, united entity (Q 21:92), standing in opposition to any nationalism (even Egyptian Muslim, Saudi Muslim, and Pakistani Muslim nationalism!). The imam simultaneously advocated contempt for all non-Muslims, quoting, Qur’an 48:29, which calls upon Muslims, as “those with Muhammad,” to be “severe against disbelievers and merciful among themselves.” In his brief concluding Arabic only supplication, the imam exhorted Muslims to “fight the disbelievers and polytheists”—consistent with the multiple jihad war declarations of the Qur’an’s 9th sura or chapter (see Q 9:5; Q 9:29; Q 9:36; Q 9:41; Q 9:111)—a mere 2-days after the vehicular jihad carnage in New Orleans, on New Years Day, 2025.
A year earlier, the same ICRI imam, during his Friday, January 12, 2024 “khutbah” (at the ICRI) launched into a virulently Antisemitic diatribe. First, he provided a summary description of a canonical tradition of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, about how Muhammad explained to one of his early followers that the brief opening sura (chapter) of the Qur’an (sura “Al-Fatiha,” “The Opening,” chapter 1/sura 1, [verses 1–2–3–4–5–6–7]) was the “greatest sura in the Qur’an.”
Having established the importance of this sura, the imam focused on its last verse (Qur’an 1:7), in which Allah warns Muslims to follow, “The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who are astray.” Beginning with a canonical tradition of Muhammad (Jami` at-Tirmidhi 2954; “The Prophet said, ‘The Jews are those who incur Allah’s wrath, and the Christians are [those who are] astray.’”), through some 90 percent of authoritative Qur’anic commentaries, classical and modern, alike, Muslims are taught those who incurred Allah’s anger are the Jews (and those who went astray, are the Christians). The imam repeated this authoritative interpretation of Qur’an 1:7, i.e., the Jews having incurred Allah’s anger, and conjoined this theme, as authoritative Qur’anic commentators have done for 13-centuries, to the notion of the Jews as disobedient to Allah, therefore cursed (directly quoting Qur’an 5:78), and even killers of prophets (Qur’an 2:61, 3:21, 3:112). These negative, timeless Qur’anic characteristics of Jews—not the Israeli Defense Forces, or The State of Israel—especially their evil capacity to murder prophets, were invoked as the rationale for their falsely alleged wanton killing of Muslims in Gaza, which the imam libelously designated as a “genocide” of Muslims by Jews, concluding:
They were even killing the Prophets (also in Qur’an 2:61/3:112), so why is it a surprise to us if they are killing Muslims today? We witnessed that this is their pattern. We are sad that our brothers are going through this kind of suffering in Palestine, and in Gaza an act of genocide, a persecution unprecedented, acts of killing and murder…
Putting the lie, definitively, to the vicious “Gaza genocide” libel, the US Census International Database shows Gaza’s population grew by 2.07% in 2023, and 2.02% in 2024!
What has happened, till now, in Rhode Island vis-à-vis the ICRI’s manufactured “Islamophobic shooting incident,” while its mosque openly preaches jihadism and Jew-hatred, is a textbook example of the weaponization of scurrilous allegations of Islamophobia exploited by U.S. Muslim mosques, and so-called Muslim “civil rights” organizations like Hamas-linked CAIR. Daniel Greenfield made plain why we must expose and defy this subversive Muslim tactic:
Defying false accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ is not just about standing up to censorship; it’s about fighting to expose what is being done to us and to make sure it ends once and for all.
