The Council on American Islamic Relations, unindicted co-conspirators in the Hamas funding trial of the Holy Land Foundation, have released a “media guide” (for “professionals” only) on the correct way to whitewash Islam. Robert Spencer takes a look: CAIR Instructs the Media.

In its continuing effort to impede freedom of the press in the United States, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued a new media guide — available only to “media professionals” — that purports to “educate the media and disabuse journalists of misinformation” about Islam. The notorious Islamic advocacy group, which has seen several of its officials convicted on various terrorism-related charges, and which was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case, asserts that “common misperceptions in the media include the notion that Islam is not compatible with democracy or modern culture, that the Quran teaches violence, that Muslims around the world hate the US, that Islam does not respect women’s rights, and that all Muslims are Arab.”

The media guide itself purports to correct other “misperceptions” also, including the idea that Islam doesn’t value religious freedom (which will come as a surprise to Abdul Rahman, the Afghani who was arrested in 2005 for converting from Islam to Christianity) and that Islam was spread by the sword.

Where could such misperceptions have come from? Could the media have gotten the idea that Islam is not compatible with democracy from the Ansar al-Sunnah Army in Iraq, which stated that democracy “is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God — Muslims’ doctrine,” because it means “the rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit”? Or maybe from Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, who said in 2006 that the devil uses concepts “such as liberty and democracy to achieve his plans”? Or was it from Usman Badar, president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who in April 2006 declared: “Democracy sounds nice enough, (but) not to a Muslim”?

Read the whole thing…