Jihad Watch: Why is the State Department participating in conferences like this? Why is the State Department participating in conferences with people like Nihad Awad and Mahdi Bray? And why is the State Department spending any time at all discussing "Islamophobia" in the U.S., when, if it exists at all, its cause is clear?
Just in case you're coming in late, Americans are an extraordinarily tolerant people. There are large numbers of immigrants in the U.S. right now, legal and illegal, and apart from some isolated incidents they are not being victimized. The age of "Dogs and Irish Not Allowed" is long gone. Muslims in America are not suffering from any large-scale discrimination or hatred, and much of CAIR's vaunted hate crimes report is trumped-up. "Islamophobia" is a political tool invented by people like the speakers at this conference, for the purposes of providing protected victim status for American Muslims. The primary cause of "Islamophobia," insofar as it exists at all, is precisely the disingenuousness of those same American Muslim leaders when confronted with acts of violence committed by their coreligionists, in the name of the religion. Americans aren't stupid. They can see through the shiftily-worded and inadequate condemnation of terrorism issued by the Fiqh Council of North America.