Questioning The Far-Right’s Information Sources

The Muslim Public Affair Council (MPAC) of America have released a very interesting study named “Not Qualified: Exposing the Deception behind America's Top 25 Pseudo Experts on Islam,” that examines the credentials of 25 known Islamophobes who claim to be experts on Islam, Muslims and national security.

Those exposed of lacking credentials, include Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Nonie Darwish, Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz and Walid Shoebat. Some of them (like Spencer and Geller) have close ties with the English Defence League (EDL) as seen in the image below.

Supporters of the far-right have shown to cite and link to these ‘experts’, (even the Norway bomber Anders Breivik cited many of them in his manifesto).

But as this study notes, Pamela Geller (as seen above), has no formal university academic credentials, much less one that would qualify her as an “expert” on Islam and Muslims at-large and her highest degree is a high school diploma.

We should hence, begin to question these so-called ‘experts’ who actually have little or no expertise in the field they specialise in.

Read the study here (PDF)

Further reading:

1. MPAC Releases 'Not Qualified: Exposing America's Top 25 Pseudo-Experts on Islam'