“Google’s first page results for searches of terms such as ‘jihad’, ‘shariah’ and ‘taqiyya’ now return mostly reputable explanations of the Islamic concepts. Taqiyya, which describes the circumstances under which a Muslim can conceal their belief in the face of persecution, is the sole term to feature a questionable website on the first page of results.”

“Reputable” according to whom? “Questionable” according to whom? Google is bowing to pressure from Muslim such as Omar Suleiman without considering whether those who are demanding that the search results be skewed in a particular direction might have an ulterior motive. Could it be that those who are pressuring Google want to conceal certain truths about Islam that they would prefer that non-Muslims not know?

This is a real possibility, but of course Google executives would have to study Islam themselves in order to determine whether or not these Muslims who are pressuring them are misleading them, and that’s not going to happen. Still, they could have done a bit more due diligence, and made some efforts to determine whether those being tarred as “hate groups” really deserved the label, whether the Southern Poverty Law Center was really a reliable and objective arbiter of which groups were and weren’t “hate groups,” and whether the information that Google was suppressing was really inaccurate. Instead, Google seems to have swallowed uncritically everything Omar Suleiman and the others said.

Suleiman, however, still isn’t satisfied: “One leading activist in favor of Google modifying its results told Anadolu Agency he noticed the updated search results and thanked the company for its efforts but said ‘much still needs to be done.’” He claimed that Google has a responsibility to “combat ‘hate-filled Islamophobia’ similar to how they work to suppress extremist propaganda from groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda.”

This should have made Google executives stop and think. The Islamic State (Daesh) and al-Qaeda slaughter people gleefully and call openly for more mass murders. There is no firm evidence that anyone has ever been killed by a “hate-filled Islamophobe,” and the claim that Hamas-linked CAIR and the SPLC make in this article, that this supposed “Islamophobic” rhetoric has led to a rise in hate crimes against Muslims, is supported by not a scintilla of evidence. Suleiman is equating critical words with murderous deeds, and Google should have realized at that point that he had an agenda and wasn’t being honest.

“Suleiman said Google should differentiate between ‘criticism of Islam and hate-filled Islamophobia’, emphasizing the religion should not be infringed upon.”

That’s not clear. He apparently is saying that there is acceptable criticism of Islam that is not “hate-filled Islamophobia,” but if that is so, then the religion can be “infringed upon,” at least by this legitimate criticism, no? Or if the claim that Islam must not be “infringed upon” means that it cannot be criticized, why is that so of Islam but not any other religion?

Suleiman says: “I don’t think Google has a responsibility to portray Muslims positively. I think Google has a responsibility to weed out fear-mongering and hate groups but I don’t want Google to silence critique of Islam, or critique of Muslims.”

The problem with this is that neither Suleiman, nor Hamas-linked CAIR, nor anyone else who has ever said that there was a distinction between legitimate criticism of Islam and “hate-filled Islamophobia” has ever identified anyone he thinks is a legitimate critic of Islam who is not “Islamophobic.” Over 16 books now, as well as thousands of articles and over 45,000 blog posts, I have attempted to present a reasonable, documented, fair and accurate criticism of Islam and explanation of the jihad doctrine. Nevertheless, I’ve been tarred as a purveyor of “hate-filled Islamophobia” by groups and individuals that have never given my work a fair hearing, but have read it only to search of gotcha!-quotes they could wrench away from their obvious benign meaning in order to claim I was saying something hateful. And this isn’t just me — this happens to anyone and everyone who dares to utter a critical word about Islam or jihad, wherever they are on the political spectrum.

This experience, reinforced countless times over a decade and a half, makes me extremely skeptical when Omar Suleiman says that he doesn’t want Google to silence critique of Islam. If he could produce some critique of Islam that he approved of, my skepticism might lessen. But he won’t, and can’t. It seems much more likely that he pressured Google to skew its results so as to deep-six criticism of Islam, but knowing that he couldn’t tell them that he was trying to bring Google into line with Sharia blasphemy laws forbidding criticism of Islam, he told them instead that he wasn’t against criticism of Islam as such, but only against “hate-filled Islamophobia.”

Mr. Suleiman, if you and your colleagues hadn’t spent years tarring rational criticism of Islam that was accurate and presented in good faith as “hate-filled Islamophobia,” I might have believed you. But as one of your primary victims, I don’t.

I discuss the Islamic supremacist initiative to compel the West to accept Sharia blasphemy laws under the guise of stamping out “hate speech,” an initiative that is now galloping forward and achieving immense success, in my new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies).

“US Muslim groups welcome changes to Google results,” by Michael Hernandez, Anadolu Agency, July 26, 2017: