The Woke Army attacks anyone in its way. Johannes Eisele/AFP/ Getty Images
LoonWatch.com was born on April Fool’s Day 2009. At precisely 20:33:38, someone used the pseudonym “Zuhair Thomas” to register the new website with GoDaddy, an internet service provider based in Arizona. What “Zuhair” created was a platform for anonymous character assassins, who used the names of little-known fish species — “Emperor”, “Garibaldi”, “Danios”, “Darter” — to conceal their identities. Their targets were so-called “loons”: anyone who spoke out against Islamic extremism, or in favour of Muslim reform.
For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?
After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.
You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.
These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.
The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.
His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.
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