The Biden administration’s Islamophobia strategy perversely claimed that Muslims were the real victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, suffering “hate and discrimination” in its aftermath, which paralleled their alleged “experiences” after 9/11 in the United States.
Journalist Daniel Greenfield described the resultant moral inversion writing, “Every Muslim terrorist attack soon concentrates attention on the ‘backlash,’ not the act itself, victims are sidelined and Islamist groups like CAIR [Council on American Islamic Relations] redefine themselves as the victims.”
This cynical dynamic has been playing out in Rhode Island following the Oct. 7 attacks and two manufactured “Islamophobic shooting” incidents in November 2023.
On Nov. 17, 2023, Mustafa Ramos was shot while selling Islamic paraphernalia adjacent to the Islamic Center of Rhode Island mosque in the state capital of Providence. Relying heavily upon a propagandized “assessment” by Hamas-linked CAIR, local TV channel WPRI suggested the shooting was an “Islamophobic hate crime,” while a police official in Providence, Maj. David Lapatin said, “To say the mosque was targeted would be premature.”
Regardless, a “hate crime” narrative was how the local media framed the story, including The Providence Journal and The Boston Globe, with CNN and The Guardian and The Daily Mail, both in the United Kingdom, echoing the notion of a presumed “Islamophobic shooting.”
A Rhode Island House resolution on Islamophobia was passed in February 2024 that referenced the Ramos shooting, as well as the November 2023 shooting of Brown University student Hisham Awartani and two friends in Burlington, Vt. Language in the resolution declared the “belief” that Ramos was a target based solely on his faith, implying the same conclusion for Awartani.
Now, more than 18 months after those shootings and following extensive criminal investigations, neither the Ramos nor Awartani shooting has been classified as a hate crime.
Actual investigation reveals Ramos was most likely shot by another Muslim, Nasir Dupont, a recidivist criminal with a long history of serious drug and firearms convictions, currently incarcerated for offenses unrelated to the Ramos shooting. Ramos himself served five years in prison (of a 20-year sentence) for illicitly distributing and manufacturing dangerous and addictive drugs. No evidence has emerged that the Ramos shooting was an “Islamophobic hate crime.”
The suspected gunman in the Awartani shooting, Jason Eaton, was a pro-Hamas, leftist organic farmer with a history of mental-health issues, but no history of ethnic or religious prejudice. There is zero evidence that the Awartani shooting was an “Islamophobic hate crime.” It is not being prosecuted as one, even after Eaton’s bizarre courtroom outburst on May 23, claiming that he was working for the CIA and Mossad.
Conversely, my own investigation has revealed that the Islamic Center of Rhode Island, which bellowed the false claim of Islamophobia in November 2023, consistently preaches jihadism and hatred toward non-Muslims, especially Jews.
Examples of this hateful sermonizing at the center include:
- On Dec. 22, 2023, three days before Christmas, it was preached that the Muslim Jesus (“Isa”) will destroy Christianity, and in the same sermon, the imam invoked Quran (17:4-10 and 2:61/3:112) while accusing Jews of “genocide in Gaza,” and reminding Muslims that Jews are “corrupters” to be “punished” (17:4-10) and “prophet killers” (2:61/3:112).
- On Jan. 12, 2024, the imam, after explaining that chapter 1, per Muhammad, is “the greatest verse in the Quran,” noted that Quran 1:7, which pious Muslims repeat 17 times daily, means it is the Jews who have “incurred Allah’s anger,” and observed they are “cursed” (Quran 5:78), while again accusing “prophet killing” Jews—not the Israel Defense Forces or Israel—of committing “genocide in Gaza,” because of their inveterately evil nature.
- On Jan. 3 of this year, just two days after the New Orleans vehicular carnage on New Year’s Day, which the imam ignored altogether, he preached treating non-Muslims harshly (Quran 48:29) and concluded with an Arabic supplication to “fight the disbelievers and polytheists,” consistent with the jihad war proclamations of the ninth Quranic sura (9:5 and 9:29).
The center’s recent sermon on May 30 invoked Islam’s supersessionism, its notion of being the true primordial monotheism of Jewish patriarch Abraham, reciting in Arabic, then translating, accurately, Quran verses 3:67 and 3:68, as follows: “Ibrahim is not a Christian or a Jew. He is someone who worships only one God [Allah]. He is a Muslim. … And the people who have the greatest claim to Ibrahim are those who follow his and this Messenger [Muhammad], and those who believe [Muslims] and Allah is the protector of the believers.”
The imam then segued from that traditional Quranic supremacism into a derision of Christianity, and an ugly, contemporary blood libel against Jews and Judaism, saying, “One group, the Christians, can’t articulate what they really believe, what their tawhid (monotheism) means. And the other group (the Jews) has reduced their religion to an ethnic identity that they use to justify a slaughter of innocent people.”
A painstaking investigation by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) of “hundreds” of Friday sermons from mosques across the United States after Oct. 7 places the ICRI’s sermons within their alarming context. As MEMRI said, “ … almost all the sermons amplify(ied) a single narrative which justifies Hamas’s attack as a legitimate act that is based on the command of Allah and the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.” The report found that the sermons didn’t “condemn or hold Hamas responsible” for the killing and abducting civilians, including children and the elderly, or for using Gazans as human shields and causing the death of thousands of Palestinians.
Instead, the MEMRI report said: “Their sermons, focused on highlighting the similarities between Hamas’s attack and the wars fought by the prophet and his companions, demonizing Israel, narrating historical antisemitic stories attributed to the prophet Muhammad and citing verses from the Quran that characterized Jews as corrupt, treacherous, untrustworthy and the killers of prophets.”
MEMRI director Yigal Carmon had warned in 2019 about America’s “mosque problem,” a warning that has gone unheeded, as feckless U.S. Jewish “leadership” remains paralyzed by fear of being sprayed with scurrilous charges of Islamophobia. As Carmon said in an interview with the Hebrew Israel 10 news at the time, “A lot of the incitement actually deteriorated into threats of violence based on Islamic texts ... Jewish communities, who are the direct victim or the direct target of this incitement, are afraid to do anything … . They are afraid of being considered Islamophobic.”
