How these things work

The whole kerfuffle between Dallas Muslim leader Mohamed Elibiary and Your Working Boy occasioned a visit to my files here, to go over a printout of e-mail traffic on a Dallas Muslim listserv dedicated to criticizing The Dallas Morning News. Elibiary wrote on this listserv in December 2004 to comment on the Ayatollah Khomeini celebration at which he spoke here in Dallas, and which I was fiercely criticizing on the DMN blog. To his credit, he told the others that he didn't realize at the time how offensive one of the speakers, Mohammed Asi, really was, and added that Asi's radical views are opposed to those of his own organization, and others in Dallas. That's all Elibiary said about the subject -- at least as far as I can tell, because they kicked me off when they found I had subscribed.

The apparent moderator of the list then was a local convert to Islam who no longer lives here. His comments on the list were illuminating. He proposed to his readers that they launch “a concerted effort to destroy any credibility [Dreher] has to the extent that he become ineffective in his current position.”

He further wrote: “Dreher incites people to hatred and violence against Muslims. We know that in the current social envirnment[sic], any statement made against the community in general places us in danger of violent attacks."

Notice how he phrased that. "Any statement made against the community in general places us in danger of violent attacks." Got that? According to this point of view, to say or write anything critical of Muslims is to incite others to hate Muslims and do violence against them. The attempt here is to shame everyone else into refusing to criticize anyone or anything about the Muslim community. The attempt is to intimidate the media into silence by refusing to allow for the prospect of legitimate criticism.

This man went on:

Dreher needs to be ruined. When people here [sic] the name ‘Rod Dreher’ the image of David Duke should appear in their mind’s eye. So, a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke … because right now he is a champion in DFW. He is the voice of the haters, and that voice is potent and dangerous. Yes, he is no Imam, but he is still a danger. Just the idea of a Dreher is dangerous for the community. My idea is more low-key than anything. It should be designed to stay under the radar for a long time. It is not designed to raise any red flags in TDMN. It is not designed to work overnight, but may take time and require patience.

Another member of the group suggested that “We should compile a dossier and alert major churches, temples and local non-Muslim organizations and ask them to contact major DMN advertisers. It is best if pressure came from the wide community as a hole [sic].”

I was fortunate enough to find out about this plan by signing on to the listserv and downloading the thread before they discovered my presence. Happily, I sent it all to company lawyers, because the way the instigator characterized the putative campaign would have been potentially a cause for a defamation lawsuit against them, as they would have intentionally set out to destroy my reputation. In the end, I think my discovering this and publicizing it killed the malicious thing.

I bring it up here as a lesson. Notice how these folks strategized not to meet my own arguments with presumably better arguments of their own, and to have this debate in the public square. They discussed operating a whispering campaign, and co-opting unsuspecting churches, temples and business owners in a stealth effort to paint me as a David Duke bigot to well-meaning non-Muslims.

I can't say how representative this small group is, or was, of Muslim leadership, but I will say that every time someone like Elibiary trots out the "stirring up hatred and inciting violence" charge as a response to criticism, I think about this shabby little backroom discussion I stumbled onto. I think about how members of that listserv were discussing ruining my reputation and harm my newspaper with a groundless whispering campaign designed not to rebut a critic, but to destroy him professionally and to intimidate a newspaper into silence.