One of the established clichés of the Islamophobia industry is the claim that Muslims can't be trusted because they all practise taqiyya, which is characterised as a licence to lie to non-Muslims.
Robert Naiman takes up a recent article in New York Times in which the paper's intelligence correspondent James Risen assessed the public statements of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on his country's nuclear programme. Risen wrote:
".... some analysts say that Ayatollah Khamenei's denial of Iranian nuclear ambitions has to be seen as part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling. For centuries an oppressed minority within Islam, Shiites learned to conceal their sectarian identity to survive, and so there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community."
Naiman notes that on his blog Informed Comment Juan Cole points out that taqiyya has been "widely misrepresented by Muslim-haters and does not apply in Khamenei's case", describing the taqiyya argument in relation to Iran as "just some weird form of Islamophobia".
On top of that, the Risen article misrepresented Khamenei as stating that it was "a mistake for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program", when in reality Khamenei referred only to nuclear facilities.
Naiman concludes: "Some have characterized the Risen piece as an example of the general tendency of Fox-like arguments to penetrate liberal discourse. If that's true, then we ought to be able to do something about it. We can't stop Fox from spewing out garbage, at least in the short run. But the New York Times has a different reputation, and therefore can be called to account. You can help do so by asking the New York Times to correct its reporting, and to report these issues fairly, accurately, and with balance in the future."
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