Moorthy Muthuswamy is an Indian-American anti-Muslim extremist who has promoted Islamophobic rhetoric and policies of the BJP and the RSS, two far-right political organizations in India.
In 2009, Muthuswamy published a book titled Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War. Muthuswamy portrays Islam has a force of conquests in his arguments. He argues that Islam is “less of a religion and more an ideology of conquest.” In the first chapter of the book, Muthuswamy insists there is “mounting evidence of a political ideology masquerading as a religion [Islam] to create conditions ranging from terrorism to unbeliever genocide for the purpose of conquest.” In the second chapter of his book, he writes, “At a fundamental level, Islam appears to be dominated by the politics of its founder, with its external focus on conquest – and not coexistence. The conclusion that Islamic doctrines are the root cause of terror conducted against unbelievers is no longer escapable and is backed by statistics – not subjective opinions!”
Steven Emerson, a prominent far-right Islamophobic journalist who led a spying effort against multiple Muslim advocacy groups across the United States, authored the foreword of Muthuswamy’s book. Geert Wilders and Robert Spencer praised Muthuseamy’s book on the author’s website. These two individuals are classified as Islamophobic by The Bridge Initiative and the Southern Poverty Law Center respectively.
Muthuswamy is a popular contributor of FrontPage Magazine, a prominent far-right online publication. He wrote an article titled “Is Wilders Wrong about Islam?” in April 2010. Muthuswamy writes a defense of Geert Wilders, the current leader of the right-wing populist Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and author of numerous Islamophobic texts. Furthermore, Muthuswamy wrote in the article that the Holy Qu’ran inspires terror and that violence is inherent to Islamic teachings.
Muthuswamy has made bizarre claims about Islam and Muslims, primarily on his Twitter account. He has written that “India faces an existential threat from political dynamics driven by Islam” and that “Indian Muslims are highly radicalized and this issue must be tackled.” In one tweet, he claims that “about 74% of the adult Muslim community is radicalized.” He has supported the BJP’s Islamophobic policies against Indian Muslims in multiple tweets. He has falsely claimed that wearing a “hijab itself is an imposition of the clerics” in a response to a US Ambassador’s statement about religious freedom. In a response to a CNN article, he has written that the “Indian Muslim community [sic.] poses an existential threat.”
Muthuswamy called on the BJP government to act on the “Islam problem” in India in an article for OpIndia, an Indian right-wing newspaper known to promote disinformation on the Internet. He falsely claimed the presence of “Taliban-style courts” and called for the imposing of martial law as a response. A peer-reviewed journal article published by the International Journal of Communication at the University of Southern California has revealed how OpIndia spreads false Islamophobic articles with an alleged involvement with the RSS and BJP. Muthuswamy has promoted numerous OpIndia articles on his Twitter page.
Moorthy Muthuswamy is a nuclear physicist and writer who has received a doctorate at Stony Brook University in New York.
