Kevin Barrett is “an American scholar and political commentator,” according to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s house organ, PressTV. He is also, as this article shows, a paranoid conspiracy nut who sees Jews behind everything.
This is no surprise. Barrett is a convert to Islam, and so his hatred, contempt, and fear of Jews has a clear source: the Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41); they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony (9:29).
And as the Left sinks ever farther into antisemitism, the point of view of Kevin Barrett and his ilk plays better and better in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Rushdie attack might be Israeli plot to spread Islamophobia: Scholar,” Press TV, August 18, 2022:
An American writer and political analyst says the last week’s attack in the US on Salman Rushdie might be an Israeli plot to spread Islamophobia around the world….
Press TV website conducted an online interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American author, journalist, and radio host, on the issue on Thursday.
“The obscene blasphemy in Rushdie’s book is actually much worse than just calling the Prophet (PBUH) insulting names. It is way over the top, and raises the question, why did he write such a book?” Barrett said.
“Several decades ago I read three of Rushdie’s novels as part of my graduate studies in World Literature. My impression was that he wrote The Satanic Verses as a deliberate provocation designed to get exactly the kind of attention it got… Why? Because he is an extreme egotist with boundless ambition but without the talent to match it; he wanted more fame than his writing alone would ever earn him,” said Dr. Barrett, who has a PhD in Islamic and Arabic Studies.
“Rushdie’s first book Midnight’s Children attempts to turn the author himself into a mythical hero whose birth and biography represent the birth and biography of modern India. That is quite a grandiose self-image. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize and sold well. What could he ever do to surpass that? I think he realized, consciously or unconsciously, that Midnight’s Children was overrated, his talent was limited, and that he would never again achieve that kind of success…unless he did something so outlandishly provocative that his name would become a household word for extra-literary reasons,” he added.
“So in my view, Rushdie deliberately courted the notoriety that ensued from the publication of The Satanic Verses. He invented himself as a character—the obscenely blaspheming author held up as a symbol of Western-style freedom, hunted and forced to live on the run, vastly more famous than thousands of much better writers, a kind of real-life cartoon character in the West’s comic book narrative of free speech (us) versus its enemies (them),” he said….
