Nabilah Islam Parkes is running for lieutenant governor of Georgia because she got angry. And her anger was righteous. Or so she would have the world believe, anyway.
The 19th, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, policy and power” (oh, brother, or oh, non-binary sibling) explained in a recent puff piece on Parkes that it all started when she saw a supposedly “Islamophobic” campaign ad that the campaign of another candidate for lieutenant governor had produced. Propagandist Mariel Padilla does her best to make the ad sound as scary, and Parkes’ rival as evil, as possible.
“Nabilah Parkes,” Padilla begins, “was inside the state Senate chamber in Georgia when she first saw the video. Her Republican colleague, state Sen. Greg Dolezal, had just released a 30-second ad, reportedly made using AI, as part of his campaign for lieutenant governor that depicted Muslims terrorizing White Georgia residents and ended with the message: ‘Keep Georgia sharia free.’ Shariah is the body of Islamic religious law.”
Note the reference to “White” Georgia residents. It’s completely gratuitous and uncalled for, as Sharia is a supremacist political ideology that subjugates both black and white non-Muslims whenever and wherever Muslims are able to impose it, but Padilla throws in the adjective to try to suggest that Greg Dolezal, and by extension all opponents of Sharia, are “racist.”
And it just gets worse from there. Padilla continues: “The caption for the campaign ad, posted on social media earlier this month, said: ‘London has fallen. Europe is under siege. In America, the invaders who would rather pillage our generosity than assimilate are roaming Minnesota, New York, and LA. As Lt. Governor, I will fight the enemy before they’re within the gates and keep Georgia safe and Sharia free.’”
Parkes, to hear Padilla tell the story, was filled with righteous rage, and did not hesitate to confront the miscreant: “a Democratic state senator at the time, said she immediately turned around, went over to Dolezal’s desk and asked him, ‘What is this?’”
The villain was duly abashed, at least according to Parkes, who recounted: “He refused to look at me and just looked down as if he was in shame. It was such a hateful, racist, Islamophobic video that he even came to my desk the next day and said, ‘Feel free to take a shot at me’ — as if he wanted me to even the score.”
Instead of taking “a shot” at Dolezal, Parkes decided to run against him for lieutenant governor. She explained: “This type of hate, this type of Islamophobia, this type of racism has no place in the state legislature, no place in Georgia politics, no place in general.” Yet Padilla goes on to try to give the impression that “this type of hate” and “Islamophobia” is everywhere, and growing: “Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at CAIR, said they received 8,683 claims of discrimination and bias — the highest number since the organization started tracking in 1997. After the Israel-Hamas conflict began in October 2023, Saylor said Muslim Americans saw a surge in Islamophobia that has remained at an all-time high…. Islamophobia is not new, but Saylor said it feels like it’s ‘on steroids’ with an energy he’s never seen before. And it feels different than the fallout from the 9/11 attacks, he added.”
Saylor doesn’t say how many of those “8,683 claims of discrimination and bias” have actually been substantiated. Nor does he even mention violent attacks against innocent Muslims, as there haven’t been any and shouldn’t be any, but meanwhile there has been a steady stream of violent jihad attacks against innocent non-Muslims, including four in the first two weeks of March alone.
On March 1, a Muslim migrant opened fire in a bar in Austin, Texas, killing three people and injuring 13 others. Then on March 7, two pro-ISIS Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” threw a homemade shrapnel bomb at a crowd of pro-freedom protesters in New York City. Five days after that came two jihad attacks in one day, when a Muslim crashed his car into a Michigan synagogue and opened fire, while another Muslim started shooting at Old Dominion University, murdering one person and injuring two others.
Yet the “Islamophobia” has supposedly gotten so bad that Parkes “said she’s especially concerned about Muslim women in her community who often wear head coverings that make them a more visible target for Islamophobic vitriol. Parkes said her grandma wears a burka and her mom and aunts wear hijabs, so she worries about what will happen if they are attacked without anyone to defend them.” Yet neither Parkes nor Padilla adduce any examples of hijab- or burqa-wearing Muslim women actually being attacked, because such attacks are vanishingly rare.
This is just one of a great many articles that all fall into the same fallacy, or attempt to pull off the same rhetorical trick: they characterize any and all criticism of Islam and opposition to Sharia as a “racist” attack on Muslims that places them in physical danger. They do this despite the fact that Islam is not a race, and that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races.
Related: And in Other News, an Islamic Terrorist Attacks in… Utah
And above all, this article totally ignores the fact that Sharia is not benign, but is political, supremacist, expansionist and violent, as one can see from Iran, Afghanistan, or anywhere else it is implemented. Pretend that this isn’t true, and then it’s easy to portray Greg Dolezal and other anti-Sharia lawmakers as “racist.”
The leftist political and media establishment plays this game any and every time any opposition to Sharia arises. But once Sharia is actually imposed, leftists will find that their solicitude and admiration for Islam will not be reciprocated.
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