Esposito expose'

A favorite of mine in the Islamic apologist world of leftist ideals is John Esposito of Georgetown University. Head of their Middle East studies department he is also a prime mover in the "America is bad" crowd and has without fail condemned Israel and Christians for the violence in the Middle East. If you have never heard of Esposito, or want to know more, this article is a great reference to the influence Esposito and his handlers, the royal family of Saudi Arabia have here in the US. Read it sitting down.

From Crisis Magazine November 1 by Robert Spencer

Georgetown's Catholic Apologist for Islam

(...)At Fox, Alwaleed has Murdoch; at Georgetown, he has John L. Esposito. Esposito is the director of the ACMCU, a professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown, and one of the most prominent scholars of Islam and the Middle East in the nation; the Wall Street Journal once hailed him as “America’s foremost authority and interpreter of Islam.” He is the author of numerous popular books on Islam, and, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, has been “called upon often to brief government agencies about Islam, including the State Department, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and various branches of the military.”

Esposito reportedly spent ten years in a monastery, is still identified as a Catholic, and is frequently invited to address Catholic audiences. However, emblematic of the doubtful orthodoxy, or even of the doubtful Christianity, of the perspective he brings to the Alwaleed Center was an extraordinarily curious remark he made shortly after September 11, 2001: Esposito said that he was “pleasantly surprised” that after the attacks the rate of conversions to Islam in America had not fallen off, but had actually increased.

The Second Vatican Council states “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day” (Lumen Gentium, 16). It also says that “the Church has also a high regard for the Muslims” and calls upon Muslims and Christians to make “a sincere effort” to “achieve mutual understanding” (Nostra Aetate, 3). It does not exempt Muslims from the Church’s duty to preach the Gospel to all nations (Matthew 28:19-20) and to “proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life” (Nostra Aetate, 2). The call to hold individual Muslims in “high regard” does not conceivably justify encouraging or taking pleasure in conversions to Islam, even for liberal Catholic academics.

While cheering conversions to Islam, Esposito has downplayed persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. Journalist Cinnamon Stillwell reports that when speaking in Stanford in 2008, Esposito did not welcome questions about that persecution: “When asked about the well-documented violence againstChristians in Iraq and the persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world, Esposito resorted at first to obfuscation and then bullying. After trying to chalk up the violence merely to ‘primitive’ behavior, he cut off one young woman angrily, telling her that it was ‘an absurd question.’” Esposito, according to Stillwell, claimed that “all religions produce violence,” and offered up “a litany of talking points in which he compared random and universally condemned acts of violence among Christians and Jews to the routine and often sanctioned bloodshed emanating from the Muslim world.”

During his Stanford talk Esposito displayed a deep hostility toward Christianity: “He referenced the Crusades three times in the first ten minutes, each in the false context of acts of purely Christian aggression. In a relativistic attempt to paint all religions as equally problematic, Esposito compared Islamic terrorists to ‘Christian militants,’ and referred repeatedly to ‘Christians blowing up abortion clinics’ and the ‘Christian Right.’” He didn’t mention that the handful of abortion clinic bombers were universally condemned by all Christian authorities, while the thousands of Islamic jihadists who have perpetrated attacks worldwide in the name of Islam since 9/11 generally enjoy the blessing of Muslim clerics.

Esposito generally tends to blame Christians for friction between Muslims and Christians. In his 2002 bookWhat Everybody Needs to Know about Islam (Oxford University Press), he acknowledges that “Muslim-Christian relations have deteriorated,” and lays the responsibility for that deterioration squarely at the feet of Evangelical Christian leaders in the U.S. – and Jews: “The creation of the state of Israel has contributed to the deterioration of relations and the Christian fundamentalists like Robertson, Graham and Falwell have been the source of intolerance, persecution, violence and terrorism.”

Meanwhile, Esposito has praised one of the most notable of those clerics who exhort their people to violence. He has called Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who advocates suicide bombings, a champion of a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.” An indication of Qaradawi’s firm commitment to “democracy, pluralism and human rights” came in January 2009, when during a Friday sermon broadcast on Al-Jazeera, he prayed that Allah would kill all the Jews: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” He also declared: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler.”

To be sure, Esposito’s endorsement of Qaradawi may have been based on incomplete knowledge, although Qaradawi has made his positions abundantly clear in over a hundred books and an enormously popular television show on Al-Jazeera. The same cannot be said, however, of Esposito’s association with the unsavory Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has called a “phenomenal organization.” Esposito has spoken at CAIR fundraisers in order, he explained, to “show solidarity not only with the Holy Land Fund [that is, the Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR.” The Holy Land Foundation was shut down and prosecuted for funneling money to the jihad terror group Hamas, which once boasted on its website about its murders of civilians in pizza parlors and on buses; the Justice Department named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

There is more, read it all