Robert Spencer likes to say, “Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?”

Here you go Bob,

Robbery or Hate Crime? Sacramento Cabbie Severely Beaten

(Fox40)

Ben Deci

Sacramento cab driver Harbhajan Singh is recovering from severe injuries he received at the hands of two men he drove into West Sacramento early this morning.

56-year-old Singh believes the men intended to kill him, but he was able to get away.

In a press release, West Sacramento Police say “two of the subjects began assaulting the victim and demanded money.” But Singh says that his money wasn’t what provoked the attack. He says it was his turban.

“After he gets the money,” Singh said of one of his attackers, “he’s still fighting. He says ‘I’ll kill you.’ I say, ‘I’m not Muslim. Please.’”

Singh has several stitches on his head and other parts of his body, bone chips in his nose, and bruising along his rib cage.

He says he picked-up the near fatal fare at Harlow’s in Midtown Sacramento Sunday morning. He says there were two men and two women. They first told him they were headed toward Broadway in Sacramento, but later had him drive into a dark West Sacramento neighborhood.

That’s when, according to  Singh, the two men exploded into violence. One shouted expletives and called him Osama Bin Laden.

Singh wears a turban because he is Sikh.

“It’s part of the religion,” said Resham Singh, a coworker of Harbhajan’s. “So we don’t know how to show the community we are different people. We are nice people. We are not joined with bad people.”

During the violent beating, one of the female passengers put her body between Singh and his attackers.

“She was very nice. She said ‘why you fight him? You’ll go to jail.’ But he did not listen,” Harbhajan Singh said.

Still, Singh was able to use the distraction to get away.

“God help me, I put the car into drive from park… and raced away,” Singh said.

He wound-up in a West Sacramento apartment complex where, still bleeding and with one eye swollen shut, he banged on doors until he found someone to call 9-1-1.

Singh was taken to the hospital. His attackers, and the woman who defended him, disappeared.

Rabbi Shlomo Lewis

It finally found its way into my synagogue’s newsletter. Making its rounds on the internet is a sermon entitled “Ehr kumt” (Yiddish for “he’s coming”) given during last year’s Jewish High Holidays by Rabbi Shlomo J. Lewis of Atlanta’s Etz Chaim (Conservative) synagogue. The piece, also called by its admirers the “Sermon of the Century,” has been reproduced on all the usual Islamophobia hate sites, the Republican Jewish Committee’s web site, and its notoriety has increased due to commendations for Lewis by the Georgia legislature and the US House of Representatives. I won’t reproduce the almost 4000-word piece because it’s simply too long, but if you haven’t read it you will find it here.

Quite simply, it’s nothing but a piece of hate speech by a religious leader. Not only that, it’s a piece of dreck delivered at a pulpit by a rabbi on the first day of Rosh Hashanah — a day for introspection and self-examination, not high political theater.

I read and found the sermon very offensive, as I do any time a preacher, rabbi or imam takes to the pulpit to bludgeon his congregation with bigotry. It reminded me of an exchange with a Muslim neighbor who emailed me that “I want to tell you that the situation in the U.S. now is similar to that in Germany in 1935, where bigotry, hatred, lies, and wide-spread discrimination against a hunted minority were very common.” His deepest fears, true or only partially true, made me wonder what sort of ranting about Jews was common in German churches in 1935.

I thought about this while I re-read Rabbi Lewis’ sermon and it struck me as ironic that a Jew — a rabbi no less — would willingly play the part of religious Hetzer.

In the Germany of 1935, while there were certainly members of the clergy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, or Karl Barth, who spoke out clearly and with almost as much passion as Jewish prophets themselves against the Nazi regime, for the most part the Pfarrer (pastors) of mainly the Evangelische (Lutheran) church (but also the Catholic church) practically tripped over themselves in embracing the new German culture war on Jews. Even the church itself was enlisted in the persecution. Susannah Heschel has documented this sad chapter of German religious history.

Rabbi Lewis reminds me of a pastor in some Pomeranian backwater who chose to deliver — not a homily on redemption and hope — but the most virulent, anti-Semitic diatribe he could think of on an Easter morning in 1935, using some of Lewis’ own themes and words to paint a portrait of Jewish evil. The pastor might have invoked passages from Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet, “Von den Jüden und ihren Lügen” (About the Jews and their Lies), as Lewis seems to take his from the world of Islamophobia.

On this holiest of days Lewis led with a martial theme:

“We are at war. We are at war with an enemy as savage, as voracious, as heartless as the Nazi.”

Ridiculing what he regards as present-day “moral relativism” and political correctness, Lewis’ prescription is to return to the imagined moral absolutes of an idealized World War II:

“Evil — ultimate, irreconcilable, evil threatened us and Roosevelt and Churchill had moral clarity and an exquisite understanding of what was at stake. It was not just the Sudetenland, not just Tubruk, not just Vienna, not just Casablanca. It was the entire planet.”

The evil that faces us, then, according to Lewis, is Amalek — the personification of evil and existential threat. Lewis then continues the story for which his sermon is named. It is the story of none other than the neo-fascist Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky showing up at a synagogue in Kovno, Lithuania, and warning the city’s Jews of impending doom. Lewis embellishes the story to paint Jabotinsky as a prophet:

“When Jabotinsky came, he delivered the drash [sermon] on Shabbos morning and I can still hear his words burning in my ears. He climbed up to the shtender, [lectern] stared at us from the bima [pulpit], glared at us with eyes full of fire and cried out. ‘EHR KUMT. YIDN FARLAWST AYER SHTETL — He’s coming. Jews abandon your city.’ We thought we were safe in Lithuania from the Nazis, from Hitler. We had lived there, thrived for a thousand years but Jabotinsky was right — his warningprophetic. We got out but most did not. [...] We are not in Lithuania. It is not the 1930s. There is no Luftwaffe overhead. No U-boats off the coast of long Island. No Panzer divisions on our borders. But make no mistake; we are under attack – our values, our tolerance, our freedom, our virtue, our land.”

These last words are exactly the same ones our German pastor would have used in 1935: Unsere Freiheit, unsere Ehre, unsere Heimat. Lewis doesn’t even have any idea of how distastefully he has expropriated the same language used against Jews by Nazi collaborators.

At this point, the congregation is transfixed. Lewis is working the pulpit, reciting Prophet Jabotinsky’s words. But this time the villains are not Nazis or the mutable forms of Amalek — but Muslims. High Holidays be damned, Lewis is not in a forgiving mood. Muslims — all Muslims — are guilty by association. If they aren’t perpetrators, they’re mute enablers of evil:

“Today the enemy is radical Islam but it must be said sadly and reluctantly that there are unwitting, co-conspirators who strengthen the hands of the evil doers. Let me state that the overwhelming number of Muslims are good Muslims, fine human beings who want nothing more than a Jeep Cherokee in their driveway, a flat screen TV on their wall and a good education for their children, but these good Muslims have an obligation to destiny, to decency that thus far for the most part they have avoided. The Kulturkampf is not only external but internal as well. The good Muslims must sponsor rallies in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the UN Plaza, on the Champs Elysee, in Mecca condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent. Thus far, they have not. The good Muslims must place ads in the NY Times. They must buy time on network TV, on cable stations, in the Jerusalem Post, in Le Monde, in Al Watan, on Al Jazeera condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent — thus far, they have not. Their silence allows the vicious to tarnish Islam and define it.”

Of course, the same could be said about his own congregation’s — most any Jewish congregation’s — silence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but Lewis’ point is clear: there really are no good Muslims because even the “good” ones have thumbed their noses at their obligation to destiny and decency. And worse: they haven’t chosen sides properly in the Kulturkampf. For the remainder of his talk, Lewis doesn’t bother making a distinction between terrorists, Islamic radicals, Islamists, political Islamists, or just plain Muslims. His audience knows what he means.

But what Lewis is peddling is stronger than just Kulturkampf. It’s War of the Worlds or maybe an old-fashioned Evangelical Apocalypse:

“Let us understand that the radical Islamist assaults all over the globe are but skirmishes, fire fights, and vicious decoys. Christ and the anti-Christ. Gog U’Magog. The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness; the bloody collision between civilization and depravity is on the border between Lebanon and Israel. It is on the Gaza Coast and in the Judean Hills of the West Bank. It is on the sandy beaches of Tel Aviv and on the cobblestoned mall of Ben Yehuda Street. It is in the underground schools of Sderot and on the bullet-proofed inner-city buses. It is in every school yard, hospital, nursery, classroom, park, theater — in every place of innocence and purity.”

As in many shuls, Lewis is playing to a crowd that sees Israel as a beleaguered Western force of good fighting forces of darkness and evil (translation: Muslims). The rest of Lewis’ rant is reserved for whining about Europeans, NGOs, the United Nations, the “liberal” media, and Christian Liberation Theology. For Lewis it’s not just about terrorism. It’s about the Muslim hordes knocking on the gates of Vienna while the liberal appeasers make tea for them.

Next, Lewis paints Islam as a disease to be eradicated:

“Let’s try an analogy. If someone contracted a life-threatening infection and we not only scolded them for using antibiotics but insisted that the bacteria had a right to infect their body and that perhaps, if we gave the invading infection an arm and a few toes, the bacteria would be satisfied and stop spreading. [...] Anyone buy that medical advice? Well, folks, that’s our approach to the radical Islamist bacteria. It is amoral, has no conscience and will spread unless it is eradicated. — There is no negotiating. Appeasement is death.”

I found this disturbing and repugnant because, once again, my neighbor had a point. In 1935 German propaganda posters portrayed Jews as a bacteria.Yad Vashem has also documented a series of “educational” materials published at the time in Germany which included descriptions of Jews as:

“… foreigners threatening to displace the Germans from Germany. As hyenas strike disabled animals, Jews are portrayed as preying upon disadvantaged Germans/Christians. Other animals included in these comparisons are the chameleon (the great deceiver), the locust (the scourge of God) [...] and the tapeworm (the parasite of humanity). Finally, Jews are compared to deadly bacteria, which threatens the existence of the human race. Just as deadly bacteria must be exterminated, so must the Jew.“

Now concentration camps and crematoria hopefully weren’t in the back of the good rabbi’s mind when he talked of “eradicating” the Islamist bacteria. But what in God’s name was he thinking? I suspect, for Lewis and his right wing political message, God didn’t even enter the equation. This was not adrash. It was a political rant, an abuse of his position.

Lewis then moves on to a meditation on the story of an Afghan woman who was a victim of an “honor” disfigurement by a relative– something which unfortunately occurs in numerous developing, not just Muslim, countries. For Lewis, though, it’s all about Islam:

“If nothing else stirs us. If nothing else convinces us, let Bibi Aisha’s mutilated face be the face of Islamic radicalism. Let her face shake up even the most complacent and naive among us.”

Lewis then finishes with a rhetorical flourish, once again using the neo-fascist Jabotinsky’s words:

“A rabbi was once asked by his students….’Rebbi. Why are your sermons so stern?’ Replied the rabbi, ‘If a house is on fire and we chose not to wake up our children, for fear of disturbing their sleep, would that be love? Kinderlach, di hoyz brent.’ Children our house is on fire and I must arouse you from your slumber. [...] My friends — the world is on fire and we must awake from our slumber. ‘HER KUMT.’”

This was the end of a pathetic performance that should never have taken place at a synagogue, much less the pulpit, and never on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. This was the kind of outrageous performance one expects from Glen Beck or David Duke.

On the same day, my rabbi, in contrast — also at a Conservative synagogue — talked about new beginnings. He cited stories, without embarrassing individuals, of people who had made enormous, positive changes in their lives over the course of the year. It was as inspiring and sweet as Lewis’ was repellant and hateful.

What now for Rabbi Lewis, flush with his 15 minutes of fame? He’s back at it again. His latest message to his congregation is again a long political piece you’ll just have to read to understand why the framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted separation of church and state. I sincerely hope Rabbi Lewis’ congregants don’t need him for spiritual matters pertaining to Judaism or for pastoral counseling. Because this is a guy truly obsessed with seeing evil in Muslims and too busy writing his political screeds.

The largest cache of the homemade explosives PETN and HMTD ever found in the United States was discovered on Thanksgiving Day by San Diego police. PETN happens to be the type of explosive favored by Al-Qaeda militants. Now, I know what many people out there are thinking. All terrorists are Muslim and, therefore, this bomb-maker must be a Muslim too. Only Muslim terrorists use PETN. Correct?

Not correct. This very big batch of PETN belongs to one George Djura Jakubec, a Serbian national and 54 year-old computer software consultant who happens to hoard all sorts of dangerous chemicals including sulfuric acid. George is considered a bank robber but he is now under investigation for links to terrorist organizations. The stockpile of explosives was so dangerous that authorities had the entire block near Escondido, California evacuated. These types of explosives are very sensitive and could be detonated with a slight shock, making law enforcement’s task all the more difficult and dangerous.

But what if he were Muslim?

If he were Muslim, then expect to hear more pretentious “I told ya so” rhetoric from talking-heads about how Americans shouldn’t be so politically correct because all terrorists are Muslim and foreign so therefore we shouldn’t feel bad about racial or religious profiling. Never mind the concrete data showing that most terrorists in America and Europe are not Muslim.

What these hot-air blowing pundits don’t understand (or don’t care to understand) is that racial profiling doesn’t work, it’s counterproductive, and it is an affront to American pluralism. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has called it “misleading and, arguably, dangerous.” It is dangerous because terrorists have no race or religion. Terrorists come in all shapes and sizes. So if we profile only Muslims or immigrants, then terrorists who are not Muslims or immigrants will have a better chance at getting through security. The better option is to profile for suspicious behavior. But facts, logic, and the recommendations of high-ranking security officials and scholars won’t stop these loons from continuing their holy waragainst Islam. Why let a little rationality bring down the party when the business of Islamophobic alarmism is booming and anti-Muslim politicians are winning?

For this Thanksgiving holiday, I am thankful for many things, but in particular, I am thankful the people who live in the anti-Muslim blogosphere’s perpetual Muslim-bashing imagination fantasy land aren’t actually in charge of our collective security.

Note: This article is part of our “What if they were Muslim?” series. In this series, we examine the double standards used by anti-Muslim activists when discussing religious extremism in Islam as compared to other religions. We reject using extremists of any religion to justify prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility towards all members of that religion. Period.

Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange has strongly stated that the so called “anti-Sharia” measure is an affront to the Constitution. A sad day for fear-mongerers like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and others who wished to foster hate of Muslims. Special shame on the politicians who attempted to ride the wave of Islam-bashing to populist success.

Judge rules in favor of Muslim man on State Question 755; Injunction filed

BY NOLAN CLAY

A federal judge today issued a preliminary injunction that keeps a restriction against Islamic Sharia law out of the Oklahoma Constitution for now.

In a 15-page order, U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange ruled in favor of an Oklahoma City Muslim who complained the new constitutional amendment would violate his religious freedom.

Oklahomans on Nov. 2 approved the amendment — in State Question 755 — with more than 70 percent of the vote. The amendment forbids state courts from using or considering international law or Islamic Sharia law in making decisions.

Muneer Awad, 27, quickly challenged the amendment, saying it demonizes his faith. Awad is executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma.

The judge on Nov. 8 agreed to a temporary restraining order barring the state Election Board from certifying the SQ 755 results. Her order today means the Election Board is barred indefinitely from certifying the results.

In today’s order, the judge wrote that Awad “has made a strong showing that State Question 755′s amendment’s primary effect inhibits religion and that the amendment fosters an excessive government entanglement with religion.”

The judge also wrote: “This order addresses issues that go to the very foundation of our country, our (U.S.) Constitution, and particularly, the Bill of Rights. Throughout the course of our country’s history, the will of the ‘majority’ has on occasion conflicted with the constitutional rights of individuals, an occurrence which our founders foresaw and provided for through the Bill of Rights.”

Read more: http://newsok.com/judge-rules-in-favor-of-muslim-man-on-state-question-755-injunction-filed/article/3519080#ixzz16hxM0T35

According to the logic of Robert Spencer this guy is probably a Stealth Jihadist working on a plot that steals mathematical teaching techniques from Dhimmis and then uses it to brainwash children into becoming radical Mooslim mathematical Jihadists.

Person of the Week: Salman Khan: Bill Gates’ Hero

Intolerance and the Law in Oklahoma

(Editorial)

For a few days this month, it was illegal in Oklahoma for a state judge to base a court decision on Islamic religious law or consider any form of international law. It was a manufactured problem; the issue has never come up in the state’s courts. But more than 70 percent of voters in Oklahoma still approved a state constitutional amendment to that effect, apparently persuaded by anti-Islamic activists, and a few cynical politicians, that Oklahoma was about to be brought under Islam’s heel.

After Muslim groups challenged the constitutionality of the “Save Our State Amendment,” a federal district judge issued a temporary restraining order. Last Monday, the judge, Vicki Miles-LaGrange, held a hearing to determine whether to issue a preliminary injunction against the measure, and said she would make a decision by the end of November. A federal injunction is warranted to save Oklahoma from its pernicious folly and to prevent other states from following the same path.

Islam-bashing for political gain was a chilling feature of this year’s campaign. The proposed Islamic center and mosque in downtown Manhattan was publicly announced last year, but no one paid much attention until activists began loudly denouncing it in the middle of the midterm election campaign. Right-wing groups then made commercials attacking several Democratic candidates for respecting the First Amendment and saying they had no problems with the project.

Islamic law, known as Shariah, is no threat to our legal system and is not in force anywhere in the United States except within a religious community, in the same manner as Jewish Halakhic law or Catholic canon law.

Nonetheless, supporters of the amendment raised absurd fears that it could entangle the American courts at any minute. Rex Duncan, a Republican state representative and the author of the ballot measure, told The Los Angeles Times that Oklahoma does not yet have that problem. “But why wait until it’s in the courts?” he asked. He has also said that Muslims want to take away American liberties and freedom.

It is fear-mongering, of course, and all too successful. As James McKinley Jr. recentlyreported in The Times, the issue helped drive the high Republican turnout at the polls in Oklahoma.

That, combined with the national Republican wave, helped give the party veto-proof control of the Legislature and a Republican governor for the first time. Now Republicans in several other states are talking about similar measures. Muslim leaders in Oklahoma say they are getting more hate mail.

It’s bad enough that in its hatred the state amendment singles out a religion’s law for condemnation, in violation of the nation’s Constitution. Or that it forbids a longstanding practice of mentioning the laws of other nations in a legal ruling. It is not even clear what the implications might be if the courts allowed this measure.

Would private contracts or wills drawn up under religious law, a common practice, be unenforceable, or only those drawn up by Muslims? Could a judge refer to the Bible in a ruling, but not the Koran? How about the Book of Mormon or the teachings of Confucius?

The voters of Oklahoma were badly misled by demagogues into passing a profoundly un-American measure. Now it is up to the federal courts to prevent the hatred from spreading further.

An interesting report on Sufi leader Fethullah Gulen and the wild conspiracies thrown out against him and his Hizmet (Service) movement. Conspiracies of “militants” being trained at a Pennsylvania retreat that houses Gulen are debunked, though unfortunately space and weight is given to anti-Muslim bigots and Islamophobes Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson, whose commentary is near worthless on these matters.

Daniel Pipes argues from conspiracy, essentially asserting that Gulen is a “stealth Jihadist” while Emerson who is well known as being in the anti-Muslim game for cash money can at most offer the meek “we don’t know” if Gulen is a radical. Sorry to burst your bubble Emerson, but we do know –Gulen is NOT a “radical.” Only in your cerebral world in which every Muslim is guilty until proven innocent can we entertain the question of whether Gulen, a Sufi leader of an inspirational organization that fosters interfaith dialogue, ecumenicism, opens exceptional schools for the poor be considered “radical.”

Imam who lives in rural Pennsylvania arouses praise, concerns

By Andrew Conte

SAYLORSBURG — Just a short drive on a two-lane road from the Dunkin’ Donuts here, the Golden Generation Retreat Center hardly seems like the home of one of the world’s leading Islamic thinkers.

A metal gate at the driveway stands open, and no fences or walls protect the 25-acre property from suburban homes and rolling hillsides nearby. Officials recently invited their neighbors to celebrate the opening of a three-story meeting center and share a Thanksgiving feast.

“They’re friendly people,” said Rod Schreck, 74, who lives within walking distance.

“Put it this way,” his wife, Maxine, 69, said, “they’re better to us than we are to them.”

Still, mystery surrounds the center’s most famous guest, Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam who has lived here for 11 years after arriving in the United States for medical treatments. Gulen practices Sufism, a mystical form of Islam that requires strict religious observation, austerity and abstinence, according to one of his more than 60 books.

“We are for one thing: peace and prosperity in the world for everyone,” said Bekir Aksoy, president of the retreat center. “There is no ‘them’ for us. All humanity is one.”

After coming here, Gulen was tried — and then acquitted — in Turkey on charges related to inciting an overthrow of the government. He might face criminal charges again if he returned home, a supporter in Istanbul said. And that could trigger chaos.

So Gulen remains in this rural community about 30 miles northeast of Allentown and less than a two-hour drive from Manhattan. He lives alone in one room of the large main house and owns only the toiletries and small possessions in his bedroom, Aksoy said.

Debilitated by health issues — he has heart, diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure problems — Gulen, 69, was not well enough to meet with a reporter during a recent visit, Aksoy said.

The ongoing mystery around Gulen breeds suspicion, particularly since the 9/11 terror attacks added to Americans’ unease with Islam. Some research groups raise questions about Gulen’s real intentions. Yet, some contend he is no different from any other religious leader.

Concerns in the United States about Gulen and the spread of Islam are rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, said Terry Rey, chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University, which co-hosted a conference on Gulen with his supporters this month.

“Any religious movement that begins to draw people is a threat to someone,” Rey said. “As a scholar of religion, I can contextualize it, and I cannot see it as anything fundamentally different from what has always gone on.”

AN ENIGMA

Internet rumors say the retreat center was used as a militia training ground and schools started by Gulen’s admirers are brainwashing children.

An article published last year by the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based policy group, suggested Gulen’s supporters control $25 billion and could be plotting a religious takeover of Turkey’s government, a secular republic.

Daniel Pipes, the nonprofit’s director, called Gulen dangerous. Pipes said he could be “perhaps the most sophisticated Islamist leader in the world” for eschewing violence and extremism but still seeking to apply Islamic religious law.

“He’s a bit of a mystery,” said Steven Emerson, an expert on Islamic extremists. “The question is, is he a radical or not?”

Michael Werz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, described Gulen as a moderate who spoke out against terrorism and supported interfaith dialogue.

“He’s a pretty middle-of-the-road guy,” said Werz, who plans to speak Tuesday at an event hosted by the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh.

The government allowed Gulen to remain in the country as an alien worker with “extraordinary ability” since he won a court ruling in 2008 that overturned an initial denial by immigration officials.

Rumors that the retreat center is being used to create an army are unfounded, said Howard Beers Jr., chairman of the board of supervisors in Ross Township in Monroe County, home of Golden Generation. His construction company built the retreat center’s facility.

“That’s so far-fetched,” he said. “People love to make up crap, and they know if they make that up, someone will believe them.”

A state police supervisor in nearby Lehighton said the retreat center has not created problems or generated emergency calls. Gulen cooperates during FBI visits, said J.J. Klaver, spokesman in the agency’s Philadelphia field office.

“We have no reason to believe anything other than what he says is going on there, is going on,” Klaver said.

Nothing obvious about the retreat center suggests that it could be a training ground for militants, either.

Newly constructed guest houses surround the meeting center. The houses hold up to 80 visitors, who come from around the world and stay for days at a time, said Steve Sablak, vice president of the retreat center.

The buildings appear clean and modern, with a granite countertop and plastic furniture in one kitchen. Visitors’ clothes spilled out of small suitcases in a room lined with Turkish futons, and children’s toys, including a Bob the Builder doll and a plastic ball, sat on the floor.

‘FANTASTICALLY DISORGANIZED’

The understated campus belies the wide reach of Gulen’s teachings.

Readers of Foreign Policy magazine voted Gulen the world’s leading public intellectual in 2008. A report by Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst last year called him a polarizing figure in Turkey.

The number of people inspired by Gulen is estimated at more than 5 million.

Gulen’s supporters belong to a “fantastically disorganized organization,” said the Rev. Walter Wagner, a Lutheran minister and adjunct professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. They do not report to a central authority or maintain membership lists.

These people often refer to themselves as “volunteers” rather than followers. The movement — another term they shun — is typically known in the United States as hizmet, for the Turkish word for service. Turks refer to the group as cemaat, the word for a religious community.

Gulen’s influence emanates from the schools founded by those inspired by his words, said Yvonne Haddad, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Washington. The schools, located in 120 countries, typically emphasize math and science over religion, with the goal of educating young people in poor areas.

“Conspiracy theories are everywhere,” Haddad said. “I have looked at the material and interviewed people. As far as I know, it’s no different than any other” school connected to a religious group.

Huseyin Gulerce, a columnist in Istanbul with the pro-Gulen Turkish newspaper Zaman, said the movement stresses three points: education, dialogue and communication.

“The first thing when I think about Fethullah Gulen and his movement is their schools,” said Emin Kahveci, 25, a graphic designer in Istanbul.

Gulen’s admirers started a school in Monroeville, called the Snowdrop Science Academy, in 2005. But the school closed four years later because it did not have enough students, a former administrator said.

Americans, like all people, could learn from Gulen’s sermons, said Mahmut Demir, president of the Turkish Cultural Center Pittsburgh in Dormont. The center typically draws 100 to 200 people for dinners and events related to Turkey and interfaith communication.

“(Gulen) is open to all different ideas,” said Demir, a doctoral candidate in physics at the University of Pittsburgh. “He respects people’s choices. … Everybody can learn something from this man who teaches nothing but peace and tolerance.”

Free-lance writer Ali Abaday in Turkey contributed to this report.

Recently a case regarding a 19 year old Somali-American accused of attempting to blow up a Christmas event in Oregon has garnered national attention. The arrest fits a familiar pattern in which individuals are encouraged, supported and financed by the FBI to detonate bombs. Did the FBI stay within their limits when pursuing the Somali-American, or did they cross over the boundary into entrapment?

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece that questions this arrest and highlights for the umpteenth time the motive behind these “attacks,” a motive that is obfuscated quite often by politicians, the media and anti-Muslim activists.

These individuals aren’t, (as the Robert Spencer’s of the world proclaim) randomly convinced to blow up things because of some religious prescription/motivation, they are motivated by “occupations” and aggression against Muslims and Muslim countries! (Note to the FBI: Spencer is not going to tell you that when he is training your gumshoe detectives)

Time and time again the statements of these misguided individuals speak towards the reality that “It’s the occupation stupid!” but the Cassandra cries of Glenn Greenwald and those like him are willfully ignored and marginalized and so the fear-mongering, exploitation and violence against innocents continues unabated.

The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot

(Salon.com)

by Glenn Greenwald

The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon.  Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as the FBI describes it.  Loyalists of both parties are doing the same, with Democratic Party commentators proclaiming that this proves how great and effective Democrats are at stopping The Evil Terrorists, while right-wing polemicists point to this arrest as yet more proof that those menacing Muslims sure are violent and dangerous.

What’s missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism.  All of the information about this episode — all of it — comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud.  As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims — as here — are uncorroborated and unexamined.  That’s why we have what we call “trials” before assuming guilt or even before believing that we know what happened:  because the government doesn’t always tell the complete truth, because they often skew reality, because things often look much different once the accused is permitted to present his own facts and subject the government’s claims to scrutiny.  The FBI affidavit — as well as whatever its agents are whispering into the ears of reporters — contains only those facts the FBI chose to include, but omits the ones it chose to exclude.  And even the “facts” that are included are merely assertions at this point and thus may not be facts at all.

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise.  Court-approved surveillance and use of undercover agents to infiltrate terrorist plots are legitimate tactics when used in accordance with the law.

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI – as they’ve done many times in the past — found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a “Terrorist plot” which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI’s own concoction.  Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts — and an uncritical media amplifies — its “success” to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government’s vast surveillance powers — current and future new ones — are necessary.

There are numerous claims here that merit further scrutiny and questioning. First, the FBI was monitoring the email communications of this American citizen on U.S. soil for months (at least) with what appears to be the flimsiest basis: namely, that he was in email communication with someone in Northwest Pakistan, “an area known to harbor terrorists” (para. 5 of the FBI Affidavit).  Is that enough to obtain court approval to eavesdrop on someone’s calls and emails?  I’m glad the FBI is only eavesdropping with court approval, if that’s true, but certainly more should be required for judicial authorization than that.  Communicating with someone in Northwest Pakistan is hardly reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Second, in order not to be found to have entrapped someone into committing a crime, law enforcement agents want to be able to prove that, in the 1992 words of the Supreme Court, the accused was “was independently predisposed to commit the crime for which he was arrested.”  To prove that, undercover agents are often careful to stress that the accused has multiple choices, and they then induce him into choosing with his own volition to commit the crime.  In this case, that was achieved by the undercover FBI agent’s allegedly advising Mohamud that there were at least five ways he could serve the cause of Islam (including by praying, studying engineering, raising funds to send overseas, or becoming “operational”), and Mohamud replied he wanted to “be operational” by using exploding a bomb (para. 35-37).

But strangely, while all other conversations with Mohamud which the FBI summarizes were (according to the affidavit) recorded by numerous recording devices, this conversation — the crucial one for negating Mohamud’s entrapment defense — was not.  That’s because, according to the FBI, the undercover agent ”was equipped with audio equipment to record the meeting.  However, due to technical problems, the meeting was not recorded“ (para. 37).

Thus, we have only the FBI’s word, and only its version, for what was said during this crucial — potentially dispositive — conversation.  Also strangely: the original New York Times article on this story described this conversation at some length and reported the fact that “that meeting was not recorded due to a technical difficulty,” but the final version omitted that, instead simply repeating the FBI’s story as though it were fact:  ”undercover agents in Mr. Mohamud’s case offered him several nonfatal ways to serve his cause, including mere prayer. But he told the agents he wanted to be ‘operational,’ and perhaps execute a car bombing.”

Third, there are ample facts that call into question whether Mohamud’s actions were driven by the FBI’s manipulation and pressure rather than his own predisposition to commit a crime.  In June, he attempted to fly to Alaska in order to work on a fishing job he obtained through a friend, but he was on the Government’s no-fly list.  That caused the FBI to question him at the airport and then bar him from flying to Alaska, and thus prevented him from earning income with this job (para. 25).  Having prevented him from working, the money the FBI then pumped him with — including almost $3,000 in cash for him to rent his own apartment (para. 61) — surely helped make him receptive to their suggestions and influence.  And every other step taken to perpetrate this plot — from planning its placement to assembling the materials to constructing the bomb — was all done at the FBI’s behest and with its indispensable support and direction.

It’s impossible to conceive of Mohamud having achieved anything on his own.  Before being ensnared by the FBI, the only tangible action he had taken was to write three articles on “fitness and jihad” for the online magazine Jihad Recollections.  At least based on what is known, he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and — before meeting the FBI — had never taken a single step toward harming anyone.  Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?

Finally, there is, as usual, no discussion whatsoever in media accounts of motive.  There are several statements attributed to Mohamud by the Affidavit that should be repellent to any decent person, including complete apathy — even delight — at the prospect that this bomb would kill innocent people, including children.  What would drive a 19-year-old American citizen — living in the U.S. since the age of 3 — to that level of sociopathic indifference?   He explained it himself in several passages quoted by the FBI, and — if it weren’t for the virtual media blackout of this issue — this line of reasoning would be extremely familiar to Americans by now (para. 45):

Undercover FBI Agent:  You know there’s gonna be a lot of children there?

Mohamud:  Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m looking for.

Undercover FBI Agent:  For kids?

Mohamud:  No, just for, in general a huge mass that will, like for them you know to be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays.  And then for later to be saying, this was them for you to refrain from killing our children, women . . . . so when they hear all these families were killed in such a city, they’ll say you know what your actions, you know they will stop, you know.  And it’s not fair that they should do that to people and not feeling it.

And here’s what he allegedly said in a video he made shortly before he thought he would be detonating the bomb (para. 80):

We hear the same exact thing over and over and over from accused Terrorists — that they are attempting to carry out plots in retaliation for past and ongoing American violence against Muslim civilians and to deter such future acts.  Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture:  that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world — invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries — torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death  — and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims — an amazingly small percentage — harbor anger and vengeance toward them and want to return the violence.   And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse:  that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism — rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism.

UPDATE:  A very similar thing happened last month when the FBI announced that it had arrested someone who was planning to bomb the DC Metro system when, in reality, “the only plotting he did was in response to instructions from federal agents he thought were accomplices.”  That concocted FBI plot then led to the Metro Police announcing a new policy of random searches of passengers’ bags.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, the mosque sometimes attended by Mohamud wasvictimized today by arson.  So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one.

Why American Indians Are Watching The Fate Of The Oklahoma Sharia Ban

(TPMuckracker)

by Rachel Slajda

So far, the outrage over the so-called Sharia ban Oklahoma voters approved this month has focused on the freedom of religion of the state’s Muslim residents, culminating in a lawsuit by a CAIR official that has successfully stalled the law from going into effect.

But there’s another minority the ban could affect: American Indians.

The proposed constitutional amendment, approved by voters in a 70-30 margin, would prohibit state courts from considering not only Sharia law, but international law — defined as the law of other “countries, states and tribes.”

Oklahoma has a relatively large population of American Indians, who make up about eight percent of the state population, compared to one percent of the country as a whole. Part of the reason so many Indians live in the state is forced relocation programs like the Trail of Tears, which moved tribes from land in the Deep South to what the federal government had designated Indian territory in Oklahoma.

It’s possible the amendment could affect how disputes between Indians and non-Indians are settled in state courts, as well as the many historic treaties between tribes and the U.S.

Last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that personal injury lawsuits, filed by non-Indian casino patrons, could be tried in state court. It’s still messy, though: Several tribes have entered arbitration with the state over the rulings, and some of their motions are still pending.

And then there are the treaties between the state’s tribes and the federal government. The ban specifically defines international treaties as a “source of international law.” So how would the Indian treaties be treated?

No one really knows, yet. Tribes and tribal lawyers are waiting to see what happens, mostly voicing private concerns but no official positions.

“It wouldn’t seem like it would be legal,” Chris White, director of governmental affairs for the Osage Nation, told Indian Country Today. “I’m not an attorney, but that’s the reason why the people I’ve talked to about it are concerned. They’re concerned about the treaties.”

Barbara Warner, the executive director of the Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission, told the Norman Transcript she’s heard concerns that the law could be “detrimental” to the tribes.

An Oklahoma University law professor, Taiawagi Helton, who specializes in tribal law, told the Transcriptthe language is too “ambiguous” and allows ways for the “opportunistic” to avoid tribal law that would hurt their case. But he added that he believes the law will be struck down.

“The likely effect is it won’t have much effect at all,” he said.

The amendment is barred from going into effect until Nov. 29, when a federal judge will rule on CAIR’s legal challenge.

Bloomberg’s defense of the Park51 proposal will never be forgotten but neither should be his mixed record in regards to the Muslim community.

Beyond the Mosque: Bloomberg and New York’s Muslims

(Gotham Magazine)

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg strongly defended the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero last August even as polls showed most New Yorkers opposed the project, he garnered some favorable media coverage and praise for his stance.

A New York Times editorial called Bloomberg “the leader with the courage to make the case” for the center. Tom Robbins, a Village Voice columnist and frequent critic of the mayor, wrote, “Mike Bloomberg did a brave and good deed for this city” when he spoke out in favor of the project, known as Park 51. Errol Louis called Bloomberg’s speech on Governors Island defending the proposed center “the finest speech of his career.” And the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, praised Bloomberg for “defending the rights of Muslims and other Americans to build houses of worship.”

The mosque, while significant, is just one issue. Beyond that, many Muslim groups, faith leaders and activists who have applauded Bloomberg’s forceful defense of Park 51 say his administration has had a mixed and at times disappointing track record on policies affecting the Muslim community. Among other issues, they cite his failure to speak out on proposals for other mosques around the city, his refusal to provide a school holiday for Muslim holy days and the attitude of the police department toward Muslims in the city.

“We appreciate that Bloomberg came out and took a stand in a very difficult political moment, particularly a backlash against Muslim communities,” said Monami Maulik, the executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, a grassroots activist group serving the South Asian community. “On the other hand, we also saw it as window dressing in many ways because the bottom line is that it’s the policies and practices that the administration puts in place that affects the members of our community day to day.”

A Range of Concerns

An estimated 800,000 Muslims live in the city, and their numbers are growing. Not surprisingly, they have an array of concerns — extending far beyond a mosque in lower Manhattan. Interviews with a wide array of Muslim community leaders indicate that the Bloomberg administration and the city’s Muslim community have a complicated and nuanced relationship.

“It is a work in progress,” said Adem Carroll, the former executive director of the Muslim Consultative Network and the former coordinator for the Islamic Circle of North America’s 9/11 relief program. “He has hired some Muslims as commissioners who work very hard at being liaisons. He himself does not visit our community members very much, at least that’s the perception.”

Robina Niaz, the founder and executive director of Turning Point for Women and Families, a non-profit organization that seeks to address domestic violence within the Muslim community, said she has seen a “marked change in the last several months” toward the positive in how Bloomberg is perceived in the Muslim community.

Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, an African-American leader at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, describes the relationship between the Bloomberg administration and the Muslim community as “strained.” But he said, “There has been a demonstration of some political sensitivity on the part of that administration toward some issues of importance to the Muslim community.” For example, ‘Abdur-Rashid said, after a September 2009 fire badly damaged a mosque in the Bronx that served a large West African Muslim community, “the Bloomberg administration was a great help and assistance to them, helping them to find a temporary place to worship.”

However, a consensus exists that the Bloomberg administration needs to reach out more to the Muslim community, especially in a difficult political climate for Muslims.

“Just because he supported Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Park 51, that doesn’t mean every other issue should be taken off the burner,” said Niaz.

In an interview, Fatima Shama, a Palestinian-American Muslim who is the commissioner for immigrant affairs under the Bloomberg administration, forcefully defended the administration’s efforts.

Bloomberg “has engaged with the Muslim community more than any other mayor in this city,” said Shama, noting that she was the first Muslim hired to be commissioner of immigrant affairs. Shama also pointed out that Bloomberg holds an annual Iftar dinner, to mark the fast breaking during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Voice of Reason

With anti-Muslim prejudice seemingly on the rise across the country, many Muslims in New York would like the mayor to go beyond his speech on the mosque and community center near Ground Zero. In particular, they wish he would speak out on the battles over proposed mosques elsewhere in the city. In the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island, the board of a Catholic Church blocked plans for a proposed mosque when, in the face of harsh condemnation, they refused to sell a vacant convent to a Muslim organization. In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, a proposed mosque and community center has also sparked controversy.

“Bloomberg this time around chose to stand on the right side of history on the Park 51 controversy by making that eloquent speech, but I don’t think that he should stop there. I think he’s positioned uniquely as a mayor, as a national leader, to lead the charge against Islamophobia if he really wants to redeem himself in the eyes of Muslim New Yorkers considering that he’s failed them a few times,” said Debbie Almontaser, the founder and former principal of theKhalil Gibran International Academy, the city’s first dual-language Arabic public school.

In 2007, many Muslims and other New Yorkers believe, Almotaser fell victim of that prejudice when a right-wing campaign targeted the school and Almontaser. Following an article in the New York Post that claimed she “downplayed the significance” of T-shirts bearing the word “intifada,” she was“forced to resign following a directive from Bloomberg, according to Almontaser. Earlier this year, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that the Department of Education discriminated against Almontaser and “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school intended to dispel.”

Almontaser’s resignation remains on the mind of many community leaders.

Perceptions of the mayor’s actions don’t stop at New York’s borders. While Bloomberg does not have a role in formulating foreign policy, many Muslim activists disapprovingly cited his staunch support for Israel, and specifically his January 2009 visit to Israel while the country waged an assault on the Gaza Strip in Palestine.

“His relationship with Israel, supporting Israel with no limits, hurts us,” said Zein Rimawi, a member of the New York City-based Arab Muslim American Federation. “Don’t forget: We are Arabs, we are Muslims, and the people in Gaza are Arabs and Muslims and we support them.”

Under Suspicion

In addition, Muslim leaders have concern about New York Police Department counter-terrorism practices in the Bloomberg era. Civil rights organizations like CAIR-NY and DRUM have of police harassment of Muslims in New York.

Arguably the biggest irritant came when the police department released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”

Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”

While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.

“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community's] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”

The police did not respond to requests for comment. But Shama defended the department, saying it has many Muslims in the police force and also has aMuslim Officers Society whose mission includes promoting “a mutual understanding between the NYPD and the Muslim community.”

“I don’t think there are any broad brushes or generalizations in the report,” said Shama, when asked about Muslim community leaders’ criticism of the document. “But we do have a policy that if you see something, say something. … It’s a new day in a new country,” she said, referring to the post-9/11 world.

No Days Off

Bloomberg’s opposition to closing public schools on two Muslim holidays — Eid Ul-Fitr and Eid Ul-Adha — disappointed many in the Muslim community — particularly after the City Council approved the change in the school calendar. In July 2009, the New York City Council passed a nonbinding resolution calling for the inclusion of Eid Ul-Fitr and Eid Ul-Adha, two Muslim holidays, into the school calendar. Underscoring the issue, parent-teacher conferences this year are being held today, which is also Eid Ul-Adha.

The administration opposed the measure, saying that the school system can’t celebrate every holiday. “One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” Bloomberg has said.

Shama said the Bloomberg administration “absolutely listened to all the requests and concerns of the school holidays coalition” before taking its position. Despite that, ‘Abdur-Rashid said, the administration stand “left a very bad taste in the mouths of many Muslims.”

Faiza Ali, the director of community affairs for CAIR-NY, said her organization is still pursuing the issue. “We’re looking to the leadership of the mayor and chancellor…[to] re-tool the school calendar to fit the needs of the community,” she said.

Alex Kane blogs on Israel/Palestine and Islamophobia in the United States athttp://alexbkane.wordpress.com/, and you can follow him on Twitter here. His work has also appeared in Mondoweiss, Salon, The Electronic Intifada, Common Dreams, Palestine Chronicle and Alternet. He is a former intern at the Gotham Gazette.

Yes, anti-Muslim bias is real

By Adam Serwer
Conservative writer Jonathan Tobin argues that the small number of Muslim hate crimes indicates that those wringing their hands about American Islamophobia are making a big deal out of nothing:

Even more to the point, the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes dwarfed again the number of anti-Islamic attacks, as they have every year since such statistics were first kept: 931 anti-Semitic incidents, compared with 107 anti-Islamic incidents, a ratio of better than 8 to 1. The same was true in 2008, when the figures were 1,013 anti-Jewish incidents to 105 anti-Muslim incidents. Indeed, even in 2001, the worst year for anti-Muslim hate crimes, there were still more than twice as many anti-Jewish incidents as those with anti-Islamic motivations. Throughout this period, the vast majority of hate crimes motivated by religion have been directed against Jews, not Muslims.

As I’ve written before, hate crimes are an imperfect metric for measuring anti-Muslim bias. Hate crimes statistics tell us that anti-Muslim bias crimes are thankfully rare and that anti-Semites are more likely to commit bias crimes. But that doesn’t mean anti-Muslim bias isn’t widely shared. Americans are pretty open about their negative feelings about Muslims — almost half the country admits to some level of anti-Muslim prejudice.

This sentiment hasn’t manifested as hate crimes, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t manifested. A Tennessee judge recently had to greenlight the construction of a mosque after weeks of hearings that focused on whether or not Islam is actually a religion, a seemingly absurd question that gets plenty of debate among conservatives. The Tennessee incident isn’t exactly unique. There has been a recent rise in the number of incidents involving people using local zoning laws to prevent mosques from being built, which is illegal under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. There have been eight RLUIPA cases involving Muslims filed in the past six months, almost half as many as in the nearly 10 years prior, with a sharp uptick following the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. These aren’t hate crimes, but they’re disconcerting evidence of anti-Muslim bias.

I’d submit that if liberal magazines and politicians openly questioned whether Judaism was a religion, and that if liberal activists were targeting the seats of Jewish lawmakers based on their being Jewish, Tobin would see that as serious evidence of anti-Semitism. I’d also submit that if there were public protests at synagogues and JCCs all over the country held by people warning of a nationwide conspiracy to subvert the U.S. government, and that if members of Congress were being presented with shoddy national security analysis to that effect, both Tobin and I would be very, very worried about where the country was heading. It’s true that Islamic extremist terrorism is a real threat, if not an existential one. The number of actual terrorists is very small, and these responses only make sense if you want to hold Muslims collectively responsible for terrorism rather than the terrorists themselves.

Tobin writes that “the hallmark of American discourse since 9/11 has been a conscious effort to disassociate Islam from the war being waged against the West by Islamist terrorists.” Rhetorically, that’s more or less true about this administration and the last. But as far as many conservatives today are concerned, that’s old and busted. “Clash of Civilizations” is the new hotness.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The American Prospect, where he writes his own blog.

Fans of Ugly Betty, the American dramedy TV series on ABC, were in for quite a shock this week. Actor Michael Brea is being accused of murdering his own mother with a samurai sword while reciting Biblical passages. “Repent! Repent! Sinner! Sinner! You never accepted Jesus!” his neighbor reported hearing at the time the crime took place. Brea is now in police custody and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, and for good reason. It takes a very evil or very sick mind to do what occurred to Yannick Brea.

An impartial analysis of the situation has led the authorities to believe this is likely a case of mental illness. It seems to be, although we don’t know the details yet. It certainly can’t be used as an example of the inherent violence of Christian teachings. Love thy neighbor, said the Christ. Most people can understand that the actions of a deranged few do not represent the sentiments of the whole religion or the teachings of the founder.

But what if he were Muslim?

Well, if a mentally ill Muslim had murdered people while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), it would be immediately held up as just another example of the essential barbarism of Islam. The very fact that a Muslim commits a crime while shouting God is great is more than enough to indict all Muslims in all times and places for eternity. No context needed. No facts or explanation necessary. But is that fair?

In fact, an example like this did occur and is firmly implanted in the national consciousness. We all remember when Nidal Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers while allegedly shouting Allahu Akbar. The anti-Muslim blogosphere sprung into action at the drop of hat, even before basic facts about his mental state could be discerned, castigating all Muslims everywhere, even those who unmistakably condemned Nidal’s actions and even though Nidal acted in clear violation of mainstream Islamic doctrine. No need for context, background, or an informed frame of reference for interpreting these events. Why bother with burdensome facts when anti-Muslim ideology can explain everything for you? Why worry about anti-Muslim prejudice when you can exploit this tragedy to make obscene amounts of money or win elections while riding the bandwagon of Islamophobic populism? Prejudice pays more than prudence.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing very many people taken seriously if they cite Mrs. Brea’s murder as an example of the intrinsic brutality of Christianity, even though her son allegedly cited scripture and invoked the name of Jesus as he killed his mother. But for some reason a similar objective, nuanced discussion of Islam and its more than 1 billion followers is off the table for many of America’s finest anti-Muslim pundits.

But hey, it’s not personal. It’s just their world view.

Happy Thanksgiving to all! May it be a day of restfulness and enjoyment with your loved ones and don’t forget about those in need, share the Turkey.

Charles Johnson over at LGF launches into Pamela.

Your Whacked Out Pamela Geller Rant of the Day

A classically incoherent run-on title from the Shrieking Harpy introduces her latest outrageous outrage:

JIHADIST DEVELOPERS OF GROUND ZERO MOSQUE HIT UP 9/11 FUND TO REBUILD LOWER MANHATTAN FOR $5 MILLION JIZYA TO ERECT ISLAMIC SUPREMACIST MEGA-MOSQUE

Imagine the gall of these Islamic supremacists. The very idea that the infidels should finance the second wave of 911 attacks on the American people again exhibits the contempt Rauf and his gang have for the filthy kuffar.

Here’s what her latest asinine Crusade is about: the developers of Park51 have applied for funding from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks to help distribute federal funds to businesses, for the improvement of lower Manhattan. The fund was set up specifically for projects like the Cordoba House, which proposes to take an abandoned eyesore of a building and turn it into a world class community center open to all. I don’t know if they’ll receive the funding, but it certainly qualifies under the intent of the LMDC.

But Geller and her Bigot Brigade are raging out of control again, because in their universe it’s obvious that none of that money was ever intended to get into the hands of Muslims. In other words, you’re looking at pure naked bigotry, unashamed, ignorant, and proud of it.

A footnote: Geller is always claiming that she doesn’t hate Muslims, she’s not a bigot, etc., all while spewing the most disgusting slurs, insults and hate speech. For example, this post: BLIND GIRL SAVES FOR THREE YEARS TO BUY A GUIDE HORSE BECAUSE HER STRICT MUSLIM PARENTS CONSIDER DOGS UNCLEAN.

You can tell how much sympathy Geller has for this blind Muslim woman by her comment:

Why not a goat? Isn’t that cheaper? (/sarc)

Hurr hurr.

UPDATE at 11/23/10 6:55:20 pm:

Some facts about the plans for Cordoba House:

The majority of the center will be open to the general public and its proponents have said the center will promote interfaith dialogue. It will contain a Muslim prayer space that has controversially[7][8] been referred to as the “Ground Zero mosque”. It would replace an existing 1850s Italianate-style building that was being used as a Burlington Coat Factory before it was damaged in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The proposed multi-faith aspects of the design include a 500-seat auditorium, theater, a performing arts center, a fitness center, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a childcare area, a bookstore, a culinary school, an art studio, a food court, and a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. The prayer space for the Muslim community will accommodate 1,000–2,000 people.

Islamophobes like to distance themselves from the actions of those they influence, but this story is a chilling reminder of the fall out of bigotry.

Woman Arrested for Threatening School Violence: FBI

The FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Group in Miami arrested a Florida woman Tuesday in connection with the November 10 violent email threat that lead to a massive lockdown of all Broward County schools for much of a day.

The US Attorney’s Criminal Complaint suggests the woman, Elissa Martinez, was inspired by Tea Party radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman of Fort Lauderdale and conservative GOP leader Sarah Palin.

In the complaint, the FBI says it traced the e-mail, sent to Kaufman vowing to use violence against schools and government buildings in Broward County to “make headlines” and “teach all the government hacks working there what the 2nd amendment is all about,” from Martinez’ computer at her home in New Port Richey, Florida. The FBI also traced a subsequent phone call to Kaufman’s radio station from Martinez’ cell phone.

Kaufman has told political rallies previously that “if ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and that individual citizens should become armed militias. The video clip of her rant has been broadcast widely. Kaufman claims her words were misrepresented, and that she was only trying to inspire people to vote.

But, the FBI says the e-mail, only portions of which have been released until now, began “dear ms. kaufman, i was so thrilled to see you speak in person for congressman elect west. i was especially exited to hear you encourage us to exercise our second amendment gun rights. i felt your plan to organize people with guns in the hills of Kentucky and else where was a great idea. i know that you know one election is not enough to take our country back from the illegal aliens, jews, muslims, and illuminati who are running the show. i am so glad you support people who think like me. I’m planning something big around a government building here in Broward County, maybe a post office, maybe even a school, i’m going to walk in and teach all the government hacks working there what the 2nd amendment is all about. Can I count on your help?”

The day before the incident, Kaufman was hired by newly-elected Congressman Allen West as Chief of Staff. Kaufman and West parted ways immediately after the incident.

The threatening e-mail also quoted Sarah Palin’s often used line, “what does Sarah say, don’t retreat, reload! Let’s make headlines girl!”

After the e-mail was received by Kaufman, her radio station got a call from a woman claiming her husband was going to shoot up a school in Plantation, Florida. The woman asked the station to air a plea to stop him. Police were called and school officials eventually locked down the entire school district, affecting tens of thousands of school kids and their anxious parents.

The Criminal Complaint says the FBI and other law enforcement went to Martinez’ home in New Port Richey and questioned her outside her home. She refused to let authorities into her home or to see her computer. She told them she knew nothing about the threats. She conceded she owned a cell phone with the number in question, but that she had left it in a restroom during the time in question while she was at a New Port Richey café called Starz.

Martinez was not taken into custody at that point and, somehow, managed to leave her home without police noticing. The FBI reviewed security camera video at the Starz Café and did not see Martinez during the crucial time frame.

Martinez, 48, was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles. She may also own a home in Santa Monica, CA.

The e-mail also said near the end “we’ll end this year of 2010 in a blaze of glory for sure. thanks for your support mrs kaufman.”

Spain was largely free of the high-profile child sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in many European countries and the United States… until now. Even more men of the cloth are found to be involved in sexual child abuse. A Spanish Catholic priest was arrested with 21,000 images of child porn on computersin his church.

To be fair, it should be obvious that hoarding pornography of any sorts, especially children, is against the formal teachings of the Catholic Church. “If the accusation is true, this is something that hurts us deeply, that we sincerely regret and that we reject unreservedly,” the diocese said. Just because some criminals belong to a faith does not mean that faith endorses criminal behavior. Reasonably open-minded people can understand that.

But what if he were Muslim?

Expect no fairness from the anti-Muslim conflict-o-sphere. Child porn is a tenet of Islam, we’d be told. We’d see another repeat of the whole child bride fiasco, echoing again and again the tired “Muhammad is a pedophile” smear.

But was Muhammad’s marriage to the young but post-pubescent Aisha unusual for 7^th century Arabia? Nope. As Colin Turner of the University of Durham Middle East Studies department points out:

A marriage between an older man and a young girl was customary among the Bedouins, as it still is in many societies across the world today. It was not unheard of in Muhammad’s time for boys and girls to be promised to each other in marriage almost as soon as they were born, particularly if the union was of direct political significance to the families concerned. However, such marriages were almost certainly not consummated until both parties had entered adulthood, which Arabs in the 7^th century tended to reach at an earlier age than Westerners today. It is highly unlikely that Muhammad would not have taken Aisha into his bed until she was at least in her early  teens, which was wholly in keeping with the customs of the day, and in context not in the least improper.

[Turner, C. (2006). The messenger. Islam: the basics(pp. 34-35). London: Routledge.]

But wasn’t Muhammad some sexual pervert that couldn’t control his libido? False. As Aisha herself testified:

Narrated Aisha: “The Prophet used to kiss and embrace his wives while he was fasting, and he had more power to control his desires than any of you.”

[Sahih Bukhari, Volume 3 Book 31 Number 149]

But wasn’t Muhammad a violent misogynist who beat women and children all day? Wrong again. As Aisha again testifies:

Narrated Aisha: “The Messenger of Allah never struck a servant or a woman.”

[Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 41 Number 4786]

عَنْ عَائِشَةَ، عَلَيْهَا السَّلاَمُ قَالَتْ مَا ضَرَبَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم خَادِمًا وَلاَ امْرَأَةً قَطُّ

Now, do these same anti-Muslim bloggers know (or care) that Christian sources record that Joseph married the Virgin Mary when he was 90 and she was 12? Probably not.

A year after his wife’s death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age. Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates…

[Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Joseph]

Will these same anti-Muslim keyboard warriors accuse Joseph of being a pedophile and Christianity of being a religion of pedophilia? Not likely. So what is at play here? As George Readings observed, “This attempt to aggressively apply a modern British definition of pedophilia to seventh century Arabia strikes me as a sign of severe anthropological illiteracy…”

Anthropological illiteracy indeed! But who has time for troublesome scientific principles and scholarly analysis if you rely on “closed information systems based on pretend information” and your anti-Muslim canards fit so neatly into your supremacist ideological view of the world?

Note: This article is part of our “What if they were Muslim?” series. In this series, we examine the double standards used by anti-Muslim activists when discussing religious extremism in Islam as compared to other religions. We reject using extremists of any religion to justify prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility towards all members of that religion. Period.

Whoopi could use some Loonwatch help in eviscerating Bill O’Reilly but over all she was able to handle his attacks and stand her ground, even though he wouldn’t let her talk.

Notice O’Reilly’s profound ignorance of the Islamic world. He claims “madrassa” which literally means school is a “place where violent Jihad” is taught. Bill, read a book, even the majority of madrassas which are of a religious bent don’t teach Jihad, they provide a free opportunity to poor students to learn the Quran, and some, though too often not enough secular sciences.

Also O’Reilly says that 90% of terrorists in the world today are Muslims. Where does he get these stats? As we have shown, in the West at least, Muslim terrorism barely makes up one percent of all terrorist attacks.

(Huffington Post)

O’Reilly, Whoopi Goldberg Clash About Muslims On ‘O’Reilly Factor,’ And Whoopi Swears Again

Whoopi Goldberg’s appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show was aired in full on Tuesday’s “O’Reilly Factor.” It was their first meeting since October, when O’Reilly caused Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the set of “The View” in anger. Unsurprisingly, that incident, and O’Reilly’s statement that “Muslims killed us on 9/11,” was the focus of his and Goldberg’s rematch.

Though the encounter remained fairly civil — except for one moment when Goldberg swore– the two expressed a fundamental disagreement over both the impact of O’Reilly’s words and the situation in the Muslim world. O’Reilly told Goldberg he thought it was ludicrous to assume that he literally meant all Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

“I don’t worry so much about what you think,” Goldberg said, adding that she did worry about the effect such statements might have on viewers. “You’re a really great showman, you’re a great guy to talk to, but sometimes I think you give yourself less credit, which is shocking, I know, than you think,” she told O’Reilly.

O’Reilly then asked Goldberg if she thought there was a “Muslim problem” in the world, as he did. She said that she thought there was a “terrorist problem.” The two clashed about the issue for a few minutes, with O’Reilly saying that 90 percent of the terrorism in the world was being caused by Muslims, and Goldberg insisting that he was painting things with too broad a brush.

The spikiest moment, however, came when O’Reilly referred to Goldberg as “Ms. Goldberg.”

“What is this bullshit about Ms. Goldberg?” Goldberg snapped — ironically, using the very word that she used during their encounter in October. “Stop that, Bill, just call me Whoopi.”

We all need rain.

Holy Land Jews, Muslims and Christians Pray for Rain

BY JUDITH SUDILOVSKY (Ecumenical News Wire)

Unseasonably dry weather in the Holy Land region, with no predictions of rain in the near future, has led a group of about 60 local Jewish and Muslim religious leaders, plus one Christian, to join in praying for rain.

Rabbi Yehuda Stolov of the Interfaith Encounter Association, which helped organize the gathering, said that the prayers on Nov. 11 were not only a plea to God for much-needed rain but also showed the commonality that the residents of the region shared.

The Christian involved was a Roman Catholic priest from Bethlehem.

“They are joint needs. They [the people] need the same things, and they ask for them from the same God,” Stolov told ENInews.

The prayers were said at a natural spring in a valley between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which lie close to one another, and near the village of Wallajah, whose land is under threat during the expansion of an Israeli-built separation barrier, which juts into Palestinian-held land.

The joint prayer occurred after a group of rabbis had visited the West Bank village of Beit Fajjar, where they met Bethlehem governor Abd Al Fattah Hamayel several weeks ago, after Israeli settler were accused of vandalizing a village mosque.

“It [the joint prayer session] was a very emotional experience,” said Rabbi Elchanan Nir, coordinator of the Abraham’s Tent group, which brings together rabbis and Muslim sheiks for monthly meetings.

Nir said it was the first time such a joint prayer for rain had been held in the Holy Land with rabbis and sheiks, and added, “It was a very strong prayer. We saw them pray, and they saw us pray. I hope it will bring rain, and that it will bring unity.”

Stolov commented that the presence of media representatives prevented a true meeting between the worshippers, which was one goal of the event, but they were able to witness each others’ prayer, “which is something to be valued.”

A speech by Bethlehem governor Al Fattah began the proceedings. Then, a Jewish prayer for rain was recited, after which the sheiks recited their regular afternoon Islamic prayers, plus a prayer for rain.

“The purpose of this joint prayer gathering was to break the boundaries between Jews and Muslims,” Ibrahim Embawi, the Muslim coordinator for Abraham’s Tent, told ENInews. “We both inhabit the same land, and need the same water. We all pray to the same God. If it does not rain, we both will be in trouble.”

The real threat to Oklahoma?

The federal judge presiding over the sharia ban case in Oklahoma has decided to extend the TRO on a new Constitutional amendment banning Sharia in Oklahoma

Judge Extends Ban on Anti-Shariah Measure

By ANNIE YOUDERIAN

(CN) – A federal judge in Oklahoma said she needed another week to decide if the state’s new constitutional amendment barring courts from recognizing Shariah, or Islamic law, discriminates against Muslims.
U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange extended her Nov. 9 temporary restraining order blocking the results of the Nov. 2 referendum, in which 70 percent of voters passed the anti-Shariah amendment.
The amendment directs courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and bars them “from considering or using Shariah law.
Muneer Awad, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), had asked the judge for an order barring state officials from certifying the elections results.
He called the amendment “ridiculous” and a “gross transgression of the Establishment Clause,” as it could void his will and other legal contracts between Muslims, though courts are allowed to consider the traditions of other religions. He noted that no other state constitution “attaches special burdens on a religious tradition.”
“Indeed, the only interest consistent with both the language and operation of the Shariah Ban is an interest in harming an unpopular minority,” he argued in hismotion for a preliminary injunction.
“The goal was to stigmatize Islam by establishing in the public’s mind that Islam is something foreign and to be feared,” he said.
In issuing the temporary restraining order, Judge Miles-LaGrange said Awad “has made a preliminary showing” that the amendment “is not facially neutral, discriminates against a specific religious belief, and prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.”
On Monday, she extended her order to Nov. 29.

One of our readers, Jalal, emailed us to inform us of what he believes is a hate crime. He was a friend of the victim, and this is what he had to say to us,

i want you to know of a hate crime that took place in the UK just a few days back, we had a mutual friend so I’m sending this to you,

Boy injured in Deanshanger group attack dies

(BBC)

A 16-year-old boy critically injured in an attack in a Northamptonshire village has died in hospital.

Adil Basharat, of Milton Keynes, was assaulted in Stratford Road, Deanshanger, at 1100 GMT on Friday.

He died in Milton Keynes General Hospital on Sunday morning. Police said they had received no indication that the attack was racially motivated.

A 21-year-old man and three men aged 19 have been charged with Adil’s murder and are due in court on Monday.

The men are from Deanshanger, nearby Cosgrove and Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, and will appear at Northampton Magistrates’ Court.

Police appealed for anyone with information to contact them.

A tribute page on Facebook to Adil has been visited by thousands of people, some of whom have been leaving photographs and messages about the teenager.

this has not been mentioned in the mainstream much but this WAS a hate crime, he was attacked for being a pakistani muslim. i am telling you this as a certified fact,

It would not surprise us if indeed this was a hate crime considering the pervasive atmosphere of Islamophobia and the rise of such anti-Muslim hate groups as the EDL in Britain and Europe in general.

Dennis Prager is at war with leftists, secularists, labor unions, civil rights organizations, Big Government, academics, atheists, Europeans, internationalists, “moral relativists” — and Muslims. Nothing personal, it’s just his worldview — that and the fact that not one Muslim in the entire world is a moderate:

There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude?

Long before it was fashionable to burn Qu’rans, Prager, a Republican convert, began trash-talking them:

In 2006 he wrote that “America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on,” in taking great offense that the first Muslim elected to Congress had decided to take his oath of office on a Qu’ran and not on a Christian bible. The ADL noted the bigotry of Prager’s remarks and conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson pointed out the irony that “here we have a Jew pushing a Muslim to use the Christian Bible.”

In Moment Magazine, which features articles of contemporary Jewish interest, Prager awkwardly (and self-contradictorily) defended his views, even after it was pointed out that many politicians had sworn their oath of office on books other than the bible or on none at all:

America has no state religion, nor should it ever be allowed to have one. But it has always been a Judeo-Christian country. Jews—and America itself—will suffer if we cease to be one. Just ask the Jews of secular Europe how their secular societies treat them and Israel. For that matter, just think about how our secular universities have become anti-Israel hate centers.

On the one hand Prager says America should be secular. But on the other hand he says it should privilege Jews and Christians. This is vintage Prager — a new believer in Kulturkampf between Islam and the West.

Despite his own advanced case, Prager denies that Islamophobia actually exists. As the co-author of a book on anti-Semitism himself, Prager should know better, but he wrote:

The fact remains that the term “Islamophobia” has one purpose — to suppress any criticism, legitimate or not, of Islam. And given the cowardice of the Western media, and the collusion of the left in banning any such criticism (while piling it on Christianity and Christians), it is working.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, however, Prager rejects identical arguments and in fact argues that Zionism is part of Judaism — so any criticism of Israel or Jewry amounts to the same thing:

Among the many lies that permeate the modern world, none is greater — or easier to refute — than the claim that Zionism is not an integral part of Judaism or the claim that anti-Zionism is unrelated to anti-Semitism.

Thus, anyone who challenges Zionism — for example, Palestinians who are in conflict with Israel or the legions of academics, NGOs, international organizations, or human rights groups, even many Jews — is by definition an anti-Semite.

The Middle East conflict? Bah! That’s just anti-Semitism he writes in a piece, “The Middle East conflict is hard to solve but easy to explain:”

Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as “Israeli occupation,” “Jewish settlements,” a “cycle of violence,” “the Zionist lobby” and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel’s enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians — in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders — as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated.

Thus Prager completely dismisses any geopolitical causes or “trivial issues” like land theft or ethnic cleansing. No, there is just one reason for all this hostility and it can only be Islam. And it’s clear that Prager is not just talking about a few fanatical winguts when he lumps all of the world’s Muslims into this denunciation, in an article entitled “The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats were:”

A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones. But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

But in fact, for Prager, who participated in one of David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events, “Islam is identical to “Islamofascism:

So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims — specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others — the term “Islamo-Fascism” is entirely appropriate.

Dennis Prager’s attitudes toward Muslims are echoed in his views on immigrants in America. A Tea Party supporter, Prager supports Arizona Law SB1070 and believes in American Exceptionalism or Judeo-Christian Dominionism. In this clip at a Tea Party event in Colorado, sitting next to Sarah Palin, Prager describes his revulsion for internationalism and European morality, praising something rather like an American version of Zionism. His is a world view common to the Tea Party, Likudniks, and neoconservatives.

As for Islamophobia — it’s just one of Prager’s many hobbies — but integral to this worldview.

A good article by SAM STOCKARD.

STOCKARD: Mosque lawsuit boils down to dislike of Islam

Foes of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro’s building plan used Rutherford County’s lax planning rules as a cover to hide their dislike for Muslims and their religion.

In what may have been the longest temporary restraining order hearing in county history, the attorney for mosque opponents tried to shoot holes in planning and public notification rules.

Make no mistake, they have plenty of gaps, because the county’s guidelines don’t require neighbors to be notified about site plans and they don’t require the Rutherford County Regional Planning Commission agendas to be published in their entirety in advance of a meeting.

But for mosque foes to act as if they didn’t know about the Islamic Center’s plan to build a mosque on Veals Road off Bradyville Pike is disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst.

The Islamic Center posted a large sign on the property letting people know about the future site in late 2009, months before the Planning Commission was to consider the proposal.

The Daily News Journal also published stories about the sign being vandalized with the words “Not welcome” spray-painted on it. It was later broken in two.

On the day the Planning Commission was to consider the measure, The DNJ also published a small story notifying the public about the matter.

Not until several days later did mosque opponent Kevin Fisher start raising questions about the issue. In a later interview, Fisher more or less said the mosque foes would have to use technicalities to defeat the Islamic Center site plan. He also acknowledged he has personal problems with Islam.

One of Rutherford County’s planning flaws is that places of worship are allowed by right, the same as residential zoning, thus no public hearing was held.

The second is that apparently little thought was given to the impact of a facility that could eventually encompass nearly 53,000 square feet, though the Islamic Center acknowledges that could take about two decades to complete.

One of Judge Robert Corlew’s biggest concerns was that the County Commission had its legal ads and public notices published in the Murfreesboro Post. Commissioners switched to the Post from The DNJ to save money. Because state law requires only that meetings be advertised in a weekly newspaper of general distribution, the county’s ads are legal.

But even if the county had continued advertising with The DNJ, the notice still wouldn’t have let people know the planning commission was going to consider the Islamic Center plan that day. The agenda isn’t published, only a note saying when and where the meeting will be held.

That’s why The DNJ felt it necessary to let people know what was coming up, even if it wasn’t a front-page story that, up to that point, had received no public attention.

Even when The DNJ published reports about Islamic Center sign vandalism, nobody started fussing about the proposed site.

Only after the matter was approved did people start rallying against the mosque plan, going before the County Commission, holding marches on the Public Square and, ultimately, trying to stop the county from issuing more building permits with a legal challenge.

Chancellor Corlew allowed the hearings to stretch over the course of three months with more than eight hours of testimony and arguments in which the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joe Brandon, tried to label the county mayor and half the county Planning Commission as being soft on terrorism.

Fortunately for the First Amendment, Corlew ruled against the plaintiffs, saying he could find no harm done to them and that the county did not act capriciously in approving the Islamic Center site.

Interestingly enough, he ruled that Islam is, in fact, a religion. That is the key to all of this because the first argument a mosque foe takes is that Islam is not a religion.

Well, it may not be their religion, and it may not be a haven for women’s rights, but it is a religion, the second largest in the world. In fact, many people believe America is in the midst of a religious war, following the 9/11 bombing by Islamic radicals.

It’s a religion that Christians more or less tried to wipe out in trying to reclaim Jerusalem from Mohammedans during 200 years of Crusades in the Medieval period.

So if you don’t like Islam or Muslims, that’s your business. Call yourself a modern Crusader. But trying to take away their rights to worship in Rutherford County is about like trying to cut federal taxes at a Murfreesboro City Council meeting.

Corlew doesn’t have the authority to ban a religion, and attacking county planning rules won’t bring an end to Islam.

DNJ Senior Writer Sam Stockard can be reached 615-278-5165 or stockard@dnj.com.

The Brass Crescent Award 2010 wrapped up this past Friday, LoonWatch was nominated for several awards including Best non-Muslim Blogger, Best Blog and Best Blogger. Loonwatch won the Brass Crescent Award for Best non-Muslim Blogger, and our very own Danios received honorable mention for Best Blogger.

The category of Best non-Muslim Blogger was accompanied by the question, “Which blog writen by a non-Muslim is most respectful of Islam and seeks genuine dialogue with Muslims?” The category included such luminaries as Glenn Greenwald and Richard Silverstein, genuine writers who have made a tremendous contribution to the fight against Islamophobia while at the same time striving for true understanding in matters that effect us all. We would love to share this award with them since this award is in some respects a recognition of them, individuals whose articles we have featured and utilized.

One point that must be made in relation to this award is that Loonwatch is a cooperative and not a solo venture which the title of the award, “Best Non-Muslim Blogger” may confuse, in our case “Best Non-Muslim Blog” may have been more appropriate. We have writers from a diverse background including Muslims, Christians, Jews and even agnostics and it is this team that continues the tremendous work of “deconstructing the lies” and inanities that is the anti-Muslim blogosphere and machine.

We would also be remiss if we did not once again include our heartfelt thanks and recognition to all the Loonwatchers on our site and beyond who make Loonwatch the finest and most professional anti-Muslim exposing site out there.

(CNN) — A federal judge will hear arguments Monday on a temporary restraining order against an Oklahoma referendum that would ban the use of Islamic religious law in state courts.

Oklahoma voters approved the amendment during the November elections by a 7-3 ratio. But the Council on American-Islamic Relations challenged the measure as a violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange issued a temporary restraining order November 8 that will keep state election officials from certifying that vote.

“What this amendment is going to do is officially disfavor and condemn the Muslim community as being a threat to Oklahoma,” Muneer Awad, executive director of CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter and the lead plaintiff in the suit, said earlier this month. In addition, he said, the amendment would invalidate private documents, such as wills, that are written in compliance with Muslim law.

The amendment would require Oklahoma courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using” either international law or Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, which the amendment defined as being based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates both the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. Awad has said the amendment passed “under a campaign of fearmongering” about Islam.

The entire U.S. Muslim population is about 2.4 million — less than 1 percent of the country, according to a 2009 survey by the nonprofit Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

But supporters said a New Jersey case, in which a judge refused to grant a restraining order against a Muslim man whose wife accused him of raping her repeatedly, made it necessary for Oklahoma to take action to keep Islamic law from being imposed there.

The New Jersey decision, in which the family court judge found the husband was abiding by his Muslim beliefs regarding spousal duties, was overruled by an appellate court.

But in automated phone messages in support of the amendment, former CIA Director and Oklahoma native James Woolsey warned that there was a “major campaign in Europe to impose Sharia law” and that Islamic law “is beginning to be cited in a few U.S courts.”

Robert Spencer

Hate-blogger and career bigot Robert Spencer issued an open challenge to debate numerous times on his vitriolic site.  LoonWatch accepted his challenge.  It has now been officially 155 days since Spencer has avoided the debate.  By Spencer’s own logic (whereby anyone who dodges a debate is a chicken), this makes him a big fat chicken.  This is why I recently published an article entitled JihadWatch Afraid to Debate LoonWatch.

Instead of taking up his own challenge to debate, Robert Spencer now tries to take the chicken’s way out and has started throwing out wild Glenn Beck style accusations against LoonWatch.  Of course, this is no different than his normal M.O., which involves saying absolutely outlandish things and then simply repeating them over and over.  And so, Spencer now calls LoonWatch an “Islamic hate site.”  Next thing you know, Glenn Greenwald will be an “Islamic supremacist” and “stealth jihadist” to JihadWatch!

To give “proof” that LoonWatch is an “Islamic hate site”, the best Spencer can do is reproduce a comment posted by a random reader of our site by the name of Mosizzle.  Amazingly, Mosizzle (whoever he is) is not even a part of the LoonWatch team, nor has ever worked for us, nor has anything to do with us!  He’s just one of the thousands of people who read our website and decided to post a comment under one of our articles.

Is Robert Spencer to be held accountable for what every commentator on his site posts underneath his articles?  OK, let us apply this standard to him.  Even in the blog post itself (the one in which he decries Mosizzle’s alleged “threat”), we see the crazy minions on his site saying completely absurd things, like this (posted by the always classy SaleemSmith):

Muhammad was an insane goat and camel f**ker.

Will Robert Spencer condemn SaleemSmith for saying this?  And is it now fair to say that “JihadWatch calls Muhammad an Insane Goat and Camel F**ker”?

The sheer number of hate-filled comments on JihadWatch is in fact astounding.  One does not need to dig far to find them.  Simply clicking on the comments to any post will do.  For example, just yesterday, we have one dedicated JihadWatch reader (by the user name of dumbledoresarmy) advocating ethnic cleansing of Germany:

evict from Germany, back to various parts of dar al Islam, all known Muslims (including native German converts to Islam; converts have shown a distressing tendency to involve themselves in Jihad plots).

How to reduce the danger of raids carried out from outside?

Don’t let any more Muslims into Germany. Not students, not tourists, not businesspeople, not diplomats, no nothing.

No Muslims allowed on German soil, would make life much more difficult for planners of jihad raids.

Another JihadWatch reader takes offense at this comment, arguing that it should be extended to all countries, not just Germany:

Could we not amend that fine premise to ‘No molsems allowed on non-moslem soil.’?

The next commentator (by the name of TJ) weighs in with a possible solution, arguing that Mecca should be nuked:

I believe a decent leader should prevent an attack by issuing threats that islams capital would be nuked (mecca) is theres a single attack in the country.

Another JihadWatch reader cheers on, likening Muslims to animals:

Do NOT surrender to these animals.

One has to scroll halfway down to find anyone who criticizes the “nuke Mecca” option offered by TJ.  In this case, it is a user by the name of Roland, who takes issue with nuking Mecca…Except only because it would mean destroying the oil that America so desperately needs:

TJ please do not spread such vile mischief. Believe it or not, America cannot use nukes against any land that is filled with oil, it will be slow suicide.

Ronald could care less that millions of civilians would be killed.  He cares about the oil over civilians, like all good neocons do.

The next commentator after Roland (by the name of El Cid) voices his support for ethnic cleansing, arguing for a policy involving “throwing them all out.”  The next commentator after him decides to go back to the “nuke Mecca” option, and prays for an earthquake to destroy Mecca.  (Why nuke when you can pray for an earthquake to do the same thing?)

Then R.K. MacUalraig decides to give his two thumbs up to the idea of ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Germany, saying:

Yes! Staright talk, straight solutions.

The poster after him also extends his support to the “throwing the Muslims out of Germany” solution (remember how the “throwing the Jews out of Germany” thing worked out?).  Then, he says:

Fortunately, slowly but surely, we are getting to that stage.

“That stage” refers to the Final Solution, i.e. ridding Germany of Muslims.

Then finally, we have someone who opposes this Final Solution to Rid Germany of Muslims idea.  Ahh, the voice of reason on JihadWatch.  Of course, the same poster offers his own solution which involves “dropping a load of old shoes over the grand mosque and kaaba stone of mecca”.  He argues that this is a “perfect solution” because it would “be pure insult and humiliation.”  He also notes that he has many other such ideas which are even more insulting than this, and then encourages the other readers to come up with “their own creative suggestions.”  So, this is the voice of reason on JihadWatch, the only user who actually opposed the Final Solution idea in the entire thread.

The next poster isn’t having any of it, and says:

I think it is time for a mass roundup and deportation, There is plenty of room in the sands of Arabia for all of them.

The commentator after that decides to give his own “creative solution”, arguing:

Pig parts, pig blood and perhaps waste towels from the bath houses of the lower east side (Village) NYC could be dropped on the holy land.

Then we have the last commentator on the page, the same one who came up with the idea to ethnically cleanse Germany of Muslims, chastise Ronald for being against the “nuke Mecca” idea.  In Ronald’s defense, however, it should be noted that he never claimed we shouldn’t nuke Mecca because it would kill filthy Muslim civilians, but because of the oil.  So c’mon crazy JihadWatch readers, cut him some slack!

Dumbledoresarmy addresses the crazed JihadWatch crew with the words “ladies and gentlemen” and then explains why nuking Mecca is a good idea.

And that’s the last post in the article.  Thirty-five comments by JihadWatch readers, and not a single one who opposed the idea of ethnic cleansing of Germany (or the entire non-Muslim world) and the nuking of Mecca on ethical grounds (with the notable exception of Ronald who thought that it would mean losing the oil reserves and another user who thought there are more creative ways to deliver “pure insult and humiliation” upon Muslims).  Not a single commentator on the thread opposed either of these two ideas on moral grounds.

Not a single peep from the ever vigilant Robert Spencer or any of the other moderators on the website either.

If Robert Spencer is claiming that LoonWatch must be held responsible for the solitary comment by Mosizzle, then by this logic, Spencer and JihadWatch are to be held accountable for the above comments advocating ethnic cleansing and genocide of Muslims.  Notice that JihadWatch has a disclaimer at the bottom saying:

The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.

If Spencer can use this defense of his site, then why does not the same apply to LoonWatch?  Therefore, even if–hypothetically speaking–an “Islamic supremacist” were to post a threat against Spencer on our site, it would not be (by Spencer’s own logic) attributable in any way to LoonWatch.  After all, JihadWatch commentators had threats against not just one person but against an entire religious group!

Having argued that point from a hypothetical standpoint, the reality is that no threat towards Robert Spencer was ever posted on LoonWatch.  Mosizzle’s comment was simply:

Like all cancers, this one needs to be cut out before it spreads.

Anyone who has ever spent more than three minutes of their lives on the internet well knows that people are “proverbially speaking” when they say such things.  For example, when the Huffington Post says “Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News…” or Fox News says that “O’Reilly Destroys Eminem and Media Matters”, nobody actually seriously thinks that Fox News has actually literally been destroyed or that Eminem or Media Matters are actually dead.  Or when someone says “Stewart Rips Maddow”, nobody actually thinks that Maddow has been literally ripped into little pieces.  Or when someone online says “Maddow eviscerated [someone]“, nobody actually thinks that the person has been literally eviscerated.

Mosizzle’s comment, in the context of epic blog language, is the most normal thing in the world.  In fact, the “[blank] is a cancer that must be cut out” phrase has been used only just a million times on the internet, never once being interpreted as an actual death threat.  For example, this neocon clown asks “Is Progressivism a ‘cancer’ that must be cut out of the American system?”  I am a progressive in the American system; should I claim that I have been threatened?  Glenn Beck also uses the “[blank] is a cancer that must be cut out” phrase.  Maybe Glenn Beck is not a good example (because he is nuts), but the point is that most people would not think that Beck is actually advocating physical violence by such a phrase.  Interestingly, the “Islam is a cancer in America that must be cut out” is very familiar and Spencer never seems to object to it.

In any case, Mosizzle himself clarified his statement, by saying that he was “just implying that we must refute Spencer’s lies now before he become more influential…”  So, it is exactly as I initially thought it was: it was not a threat of physical violence at all.  Instead, it was a call to refute his lies before his influence spreads.  The phrase was used in the same way “destroys”, “eviscerated”, etc. is used in blog talk.

Robert Spencer, on the other hand, physically threatened me (Danios), calling for me to be lashed 100 and 101 times on two different occasions respectively, saying about me (“the slick liar”):

The slick liar who penned that piece ought to get 100 lashes

And:

The slick liar who penned that piece ought to get 101 lashes

Calling for someone to get lashed 100 or 101 times cannot really be understood as “proverbially speaking” nor is it a common saying. (Admittedly, I think it was nothing more than him just losing his temper…) So basically on the one hand we have on LoonWatch a comment using a phrase most commonly used in the proverbial sense by a random reader of our site who is not even a part of the LoonWatch team…(Nowhere in the quote by Mosizzle is violent action called for.)  And on the other hand we have a threat that explicitly says I should be lashed, a threat issued not by some random reader of JW, but by the main man himself!

Furthermore, this entire idea of “the commentators on my site don’t reflect on me at all” is a bunch of baloney.  The fact that JihadWatch attracts so many crazy bigots speaks volumes about what JihadWatch is all about.  It’s food that fuels the bigots, and that’s why so many of them are there.  We at LoonWatch have some crazies who roam our site (which website on earth doesn’t!?) but unlike JihadWatch, they are just a tiny percentage.  Not only that, but someone will challenge a person if he says something crazy like that.  As for Mosizzle’s comment, I am sure that most loyal readers thought like me that his comment was proverbial in nature.  And Robert Spencer knows that.  The fact that he’s forced to use the words of random visitors to our site–and superimposing it upon us–tells us very clearly that he knows he has got nothing on us, so he must rely on indirect means. How desperate is Spencer to get at us, and how truly far he has to go to find something against us!

Remember I told you that Robert Spencer is a liar?  He feels no compunction in misleadingly titling his article: “Islamic hate site says Spencer is like a ‘cancer’ that must be ‘cut out.’”  Yet, our website never said that. It’s not just poor form to write like this; it’s outright lying and libel.  This from the man who keeps crying about people supposedly doing that to him.  He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

The way Robert Spencer tries to superimpose a “threat” on the words posted by Mosizzle show how truly desperate Spencer is to get a death threat.  In the deranged world of Islamophobia, the more death threats and fatwas you have against your head, the more cred you have and the more books you can sell.  No wonder the cover of Spencer’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) is emblazoned with a death threat against Spencer made by some crazy internet Islamic extremist, and no wonder it boasts “[Robert Spencer] lives in a Secure, Undisclosed Location.”  And yet in an interview available to the whole wide world to see, Spencer reveals his “undisclosed location” as “New England.”  If his life is really in such great peril from the Bad Guys (which no jail but Gitmo can stop apparently), why is he revealing his location?   And then why is he simultaneously printing books claiming that his location is “Undisclosed”?  All of this shows his sheer fraudulence.  It’s all histrionic theatrics and sensationalism designed to sell books.  The whole “I-have-death-threats-against-me-for-this-book” thing is as trite as the “Warning: Images too graphic for some”…These are just gimmicks designed to entice the viewer.  Oh, you’re getting death threats?  Then I must read your book to find out what you say!

Again, if Spencer wants to attribute one singular comment (that too which is simply proverbial in nature) to LoonWatch, then all those ethnic cleansing and nuclear genocide quotes are attributed to JihadWatch.  Having said that, it is not right to strike some sort of equivalency here.  LoonWatch has never advocated physical violence against Robert Spencer or the people who run his site.  On the other hand, Robert Spencer has himself advocated the same things that dumbledoresarmy and TJ did.  Dumbledoresarmy called for a ban on all Muslim immigration, which Spencer himself advocates:

Officials should proclaim a moratorium on all visa applications from Muslim countries, since there is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims. Because this is not a racial issue, these restrictions should not apply to Christians and other non-Muslim citizens of those countries, although all should be subjected to reasonable scrutiny.

Reduce all this to its essence and you have exactly as dumbledoresarmy said: “No Muslims allowed on German soil.”

As for dumbledoresarmy’s support for ethnic cleansing, Robert Spencer was caught joining a white nationalist genocidal facebook group that advocated the same exact thing that dumbledoresarmy did on JihadWatch: ethnically cleansing a country (Turkey in this case) of all Muslims.

As for nuclear annihilation of Muslim lands, Robert Spencer posted a video advocating the nuclear annihilation of Pakistan.

So there can be no equivalence between the singular comment found on LoonWatch and the countless comments on JihadWatch.  Had anyone actually threatened Spencer, we would have called him out as a loon.  Will Robert Spencer strongly condemn as loons those people who post on his site calling for ethnic cleansing and nuclear genocide against Muslims?  We’re not asking just to reject what they are saying, but to clearly say that any who say such things are nutjobs.

The truth is, however, that such people characterize the vast majority of JihadWatch’s loyal readers.

Anyways, it is amazing how Robert Spencer chooses to focus on one teeny-tiny comment from someone who is not even a LoonWatch writer, instead of tackling the hefty arguments I have thrown his way.  Quite telling.  Also interesting is the fact that Robert Spencer and his minions mine our site looking for stuff to use against us even reading our comments section (whereas I would blow an aneurysm were I to read the comments section of JihadWatch for longer than a few minutes!), and yet Spencer still can’t get himself to say the name of our website.  How truly juvenile.  In that regard, I dedicate this song to him.

In the above article, I eviscerated Robert Spencer–proverbially speaking I assure you.

By JEFF HORSEMAN
The Press-Enterprise

Mano Bakh has personal reasons for opposing a mosque planned in Temecula.

The 73-year-old from Murrieta said he barely escaped with his life when revolutionaries toppled Iran’s monarchy in 1979 and established an Islamic republic.

His self-published book, “Escaping Islam,” describes being arrested and interrogated. Now he fears his new home is treading down Iran’s path.

Bakh is one of the most vocal critics of the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley’s plan to build a roughly 25,000-square-foot mosque in northeast Temecula. The Temecula Planning Commission will discuss the mosque Dec. 1.

Bakh, who said he went into hiding for his safety, insists he does not hate Muslims. The former Muslim said an expansionist Islamic ideology supports terrorism and seeks to repress liberty through religious-based Shariah law.

Center supporters, including a coalition of religious leaders, say Bakh and those like him are misguided at best and bigoted at worst. They say the majority of American Muslims are law-abiding.

“I can understand (Bakh’s) personal pain. My family suffered the same persecution,” said Salam Al-Marayati, an Iraqi and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “But that’s not a reason to prevent people from worshiping freely in the United States …”

‘revolutionary network’

A married father of two and grandfather of four, Bakh said he grew up in Iran and studied overseas while rising through his country’s navy. He described the Iran of his youth as a moderate country.

“Prior to 1979, there were miniskirts on our women, the latest styles from Paris in our shops, frivolity among our people, and Western music in the air,” reads an online book excerpt.

Iran was ruled by Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had close ties to the West. While credited with modernizing Iran, the shah also cracked down on political dissent.

Protesters eventually demanded the shah’s ouster, and he fled Iran in 1979. Islamic revolutionaries took over and established a theocracy.

In the years before the revolution, Bakh said he noticed more mosques being built. He wasn’t concerned at first because the mosques kept kids off the street.

“Later, we learned the mosques were nodes in the revolutionary network,” he said.

During the revolution, Bakh said he was arrested, searched, blindfolded, interrogated and accused of helping the U.S. Navy build a spyhouse in Iran.

He said he was allowed to return home, where he had less than an hour to pack before he and his family fled for Great Britain and ultimately settled in the U.S.

‘Deep Penetration’

Bakh sees Islam not as a religion, but a political movement seeking to take over the world.

He said there are signs of “deep penetration in all segments of society to implement the Islamic radicalization.”

As examples, he points to the incident last year at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 Army soldiers were killed — the suspect is a Muslim — and Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric once based in San Diego described as a spiritual adviser and attack planner for terrorists.

Bakh speaks about Islam to churches and Republican assemblies across Southern California and is a member of Concerned American Citizens, which opposes the mosque.

The City Council will decide the mosque’s fate if the commission’s decision is appealed.

‘who is he …?’

Bakh wants Islamic center Imam Mahmoud Harmoush to disclose the mosque’s funding sources, denounce the militant Palestinian group Hamas and sign a “pledge of friendship” in which the imam would vow to denounce Shariah law and uphold the Constitution.

Harmoush said he shouldn’t have to answer to him.

“Who is he to ask me any of those questions?” Harmoush said, adding the center has been raising funds for the mosque for a decade and shouldn’t have to open its books. Harmoush has said there is only enough money to build a 4,000-square-foot first phase.

As for Hamas, Harmoush, who has publicly condemned violence and terror, said Middle East politics have nothing to do with his center.

Bakh was at the July 30 protest outside the Islamic center’s current building. He said he did not approve of protesters who brought dogs, a move decried as harassment by the center supporters.

‘i lost one country’

Besides Harmoush, Bakh said he’s concerned with the center’s backers, including Al-Marayati, whom Bakh said won’t denounce Islamic terrorists.

Al-Marayati said his group works with law enforcement to fight terrorism. Bakh “just parrots what he hears” on the Internet, Al-Marayati said, adding, “When you’re a critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, then immediately opponents want to portray you as supporting terrorism.”

Al-Marayati tried to dispel what he calls false notions about Islam at a forum hosted by the Interfaith Council of Murrieta and Temecula Valley. He said the true ideals of Islamic law closely mirror the Constitution and that for Muslims, the Pledge of Allegiance is as sacred as a pledge to God.

Bakh said he’s resigned to never returning to his homeland.

“I lost one country,” he said. “I don’t want to lose a second one.”

Reach Jeff Horseman at 951-375-3727 or jhorseman@PE.com

Will the loons accept the verdict or resort to violence?

Judge refuses to stop construction of Tenn. mosque

A judge refused Wednesday to stop construction of a proposed mosque in Tennessee that was opposed by some local residents who tried to argue that there was a conspiracy by Muslims to impose extremist law on the United States.

Opponents filed a lawsuit claiming that Rutherford County planning officials violated Tennessee’s open meetings law when they approved the site plan for an Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of Nashville.

Rutherford County Chancellor Robert Corlew ruled after closing arguments that he could not find that the “county acted illegally, arbitrarily or capriciously” in approving the plan.

But much of the questioning from plaintiffs’ attorney Joe Brandon Jr. during seven days of testimony since late September was about whether Islam qualified as a religion. He pushed his theory that American Muslims want to replace the Constitution with extremist Islamic law.

Corlew said there was some concern about the public notice requirements and suggested county or state officials look at those requirements. But he said the court did not find that members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro adhered to extremist religious ideas.

Mosque leaders want to expand their facilities to accommodate a growing congregation and currently the proposed site is being prepared but no construction has started. Federal investigators are looking into a dump truck that was set on fire at the construction site earlier this year and twice the sign announcing the future site of the new Islamic center was vandalized.

Brandon had his hands on his face and at times was bent over the desk during the judge’s ruling. Afterward he briskly walked out of the courtroom without addressing the media.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, who opposes the mosque but was not among the plaintiffs, said the plaintiffs are disappointed with the judge’s decision. However, she said the judge did recognize some of their concerns regarding notification of public meetings.

“We felt like the judge did hear us on those issues,” she said.

During the testimony, witnesses pointed out that Islamic Center of Murfreesboro board member Mosaad Rowash previously had pro-Hamas postings on his MySpace page, something the mosque’s leaders have not denied. The U.S. government considers Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic political party with an armed wing that has attacked Israel, a terrorist organization.

But Corlew said the actions of individuals associated with the mosque was poor judgment.

Brandon said before the ruling that the dispute would continue, however the judge rules. “If the court rules against us, we’re not going to stop,” he said.

Cardoza-Moore said the legal team would meet with the plaintiffs to decide the next course of action.

Jim Cope, the attorney for the county, said they will be prepared for any further challenges.

“We will continue to defend the county’s rights and interests in seeing the actions that we took were upheld appropriately,” he said.

Layla Hantouli, a 22-year-old Muslim woman who has been following the testimony, was glad the judge ruled against the mosque opponents.

“The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro is not promoting anything violent or anything unlawful,” she said.

Fischer says inflicting “massive casualites” is Christian. He cites massacres in the Old Testament as his proof. Does this mean Christianity is a violent religion that supports massacres? Imagine if a Muslim had said what Fisher said.

Fischer: God Honors Those Who Inflict “Massive Casualties” Because “Christianity is Not a Religion of Pacifism”

(Right-wing Watch)

Bryan Fischer responds to the latest outrage he has provoked with his recent blog post decrying “the  feminization of the Medal of Honor.”

As he typically does in these situations, Fischer reacts by accusing everyone else of intentionally misrepresenting his point and then proceeds to “clarify” it by reiterating his position in such a way that it makes the extent of his extremism all the more obvious, as if the problem was that somehow people just misunderstood him the first time.

And so we end up with posts like this in which he explains that all he was saying was that we as a nation need to start honoring soldiers who kill lots of people because such actions are greatly pleasing to God:

The Scriptures certainly know nothing of such squeamishness. Remember what drove King Saul into a jealous rage was when the women of Israel commemorated David’s exploits in song:

“Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7).

And this was not the last of David’s exploits in just wars. He went down to the town of Keilah where he “fought with the Philistines and brought away their livestock and struck them with a great blow” (1 Samuel 23:5).

Then he went after the Amalekites, and we are told that “David struck them down from twilight until the evening of the next day, and not a man of them escaped, except four hundred young men who mounted camels and fled” (1 Samuel 30:17).

Again, “David did as the LORD commanded him, and struck down the Philistines from Geba to Gezer” (2 Samuel 5:25).

Further we read in 2 Samuel 8, “David defeated the Philistines and subdued them…he defeated Moab…David also defeated Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah…David struck down 22,000 men of the Syrians…and the LORD gave victory to David everywhere he went…and David made a name for himself when he returned from striking down 18,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt…and the LORD gave victory to David wherever he went” (vv. 1,2,3,5,6,13,14).

And this, remember, was “the man after (God’s) heart” (1 Samuel 13:14).

Christianity is not a religion of pacifism. Remember that John the Baptist did not tell the soldiers who came to him to lay down their arms, even when they asked him directly, “what shall we do?” (Luke 3:14).

War is certainly a terrible thing, and should only be waged for the highest and most just of causes. But if the cause is just, then there is great honor in achieving military success, success which should be celebrated and rewarded.

The bottom line here is that the God of the Bible clearly honors those who show valor and gallantry in waging aggressive war in a just cause against the enemies of freedom, even while inflicting massive casualties in the process. What I’m saying is that it’s time we started imitating God’s example again.

I guess you could say that Fischer is more of a Psalm 137 Christian than a Matthew 5 Christian.

Spencer-hypocrisy continues, this time the police-blotter, faux scholar had his paper-thin sensitivity hurt when a story came out highlighting the Park51 Syndrome that exists in the United States. For example it has gotten to the level that even the Google “e” on Veterans Day was thought of as a “crescent moon.”

The story that Spencer took issue with was about a Christian Church that is under construction and is going to have a dome, “concerned residents” thought a mosque was being built. The story pointed out quite accurately that Spencer and his fellow goon blogger Pamela Geller were the main voices branding Park51 a “victory mosque at Ground Zero.” So How can Spencer now complain about something that is an incontrovertible fact!

Message to Spencer: Your hysteric anti-Muslim rantings and disinformation campaign have an effect on your minions, this is one such effext. At the very least take some responsibility.

Church in Arizona protested because it looks like a mosque

(RAW Story)

By David Edwards

Islamophobia may have reached a point in this country where people condemn Christians that they suspect are Muslims without ever checking the facts.

In Phoenix, Arizona, a new Christian church has residents fearing that it is an Islamic mosque.

The Light of the World multidenominational church is being built just off of Interstate 10 and features a dome-like structure.

“Since the distinctive dome shape went up, church leaders said they have received phone calls from concerned neighbors who’ve mistaken the building for an Islamic mosque,” KPHO reported.

“I heard many people, they came over and they say, ‘Is this a Muslim temple?’ No, it’s not,” church member Juan Calixto told KPNX.

“It is unfortunate that people are so intolerant to differences that they aren’t willing to see that the place of worship is not a mosque,” said Tayyibah Amatullah of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Arizona chapter.

Church officials have hung a sign to let people know they aren’t Muslim. “If you think we are different you are wrong,” the sign reads. “We are building a Christian house of prayer.”

“We’re trying to let people know that we’re Christian and our churches are modern,” Uzieo Martinez, a church official told KPHO.

Officials are trying to avoid the type of backlash received by the Park51 Islamic center that is planned near Ground Zero.

The cultural center was largely ignored when The New York Times first reported about it in December 2009.

The project received wider notice in May 2010 when a community board considered the construction plans. Conservative bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer dubbed the proposed center the “Ground Zero Mosque” which started a national controversy.

“But with so many high-profile figures selling unfounded, anti-Muslim fear to the public, is it any wonder that all many Americans can see in Islam is a phantom menace?” asked Tanya Somanader at the liberal blog Think Progress.

This video is from KPNX-TV, broadcast Nov. 15, 2010.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is on a rampage.  It’s been one conspiracy theory after another, often with an anti-Semitic twist. In June, Beck promoted The Red Network, a book by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Elizabeth Dilling. In September, Beck promoted another book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, written by Eustance Mullin, described in his obituary as a “nationally known white supremacist and anti-Semite.” And lately, Beck has devoted several days of coverage to his crusade against Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Soros is no stranger to criticism, but is it right for a so-called “news anchor” to invoke the holocaust for cheap political points?

Several Jewish groups have spoken out against Mr. Beck’s pattern of anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering, such as the Jewish Funds for Justice and the Anti-Defamation League. Media outlets joined the criticism as well, like Howard Kurtz on CNN, Reason magazine , and Commentary magazine.

Apparently, Beck’s shenanigans have gone too far this time, prompting conservatives like David Frum to complain about the right-wing’s “closed information systems based upon pretend information.” Frum writes in the New York Times:

Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

More like alternative delusions. We’ve seen how quick CNN was to fire Rick Sanchez for his off-the-cuff remarks about Jews and Jon Stewart. Such is the nature of professional news organizations who don’t want to be seen as pandering to anti-Semitism. But has Beck gone too far for Fox News?

Sadly, no. Fox stands by the nutty professor Beck. Apparently their cost-benefit analysis has concluded that Beck’s rabble-rousing anti-Semitic flirtations bring in more profit and ratings than harm to the company’s reputation. So much for “fair and balanced.”

So now I have to ask: what if Beck was Muslim? What if, for example, Fareed Zakaria of CNN had spewed anti-Semitic nonsense on national television?

Following Islamophobic doctrine, as articulated by Pam Geller and company, we’d see the anti-Muslim blogosphere fired up by the same less-than-lazy comparisons between Muslims and Nazis. Then we’d see more of the same outpour of vitriolic hate speech from the Stop the Islamization of America crowd. Fox News would continue to aid and abet the anti-Muslim counter-culture by smearing () ordinary mainstream Muslim leaders. (Yawn). And as usual, missing from the story would be good examples of Muslims saving Jews during World War 2 out of religious conviction to love thy neighbor, or mainstream American Muslims standing alongside Jews under attack by extremists, or the myriad of interfaith initiatives that bring together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others to promote world peace. If mentioned at all, these positive stories would be explained away as silly Muslims who don’t know that their faith equals Nazism or just more ultimate intellectual cop-outs.

What we are witnessing here is the phenomenon of selective outrage, a tribalistic notion of us-versus-the-Moozlims, my country right-or-wrong, a rejection of immutable ethical principles applied evenly to all human beings regardless of race, color, gender, or religion. Rather, we see that when one of “them” is an anti-Semite, it gets projected onto all Islam and Muslims forever, but when one of “us” is an anti-Semite, well… nothing.

Closed information systems based on pretend information, you say? Precisely.

Pamela Geller is called out by Keith Olbermann for fanning the flames of Muslim hatred, to an extent where it has now reached people protesting “Mooslim looking” Churches.

Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?

(hat tip: Asad Dandia)

Mob in Athens abuses Muslims as they celebrate Eid

By Yannis Behrakis
ATHENS | Tue Nov 16, 2010 8:08am EST

(Reuters) – Dozens of far-right activists and local residents threw eggs and taunted hundreds of Muslim immigrants as they gathered to pray in a central square for Eid al-Adha surrounded by a protective cordon of riot police.

Greece, which has become the main immigrant gateway to the European Union, has a growing Muslim community and tensions between locals and incomers have run high in some Athens areas such as Attiki square, the scene of Tuesday’s incident.

Athens’ Muslim community is without an official mosque and prayers are usually held at cultural centers or community halls or private apartments around the city. The Muslim community in Greece is estimated at about 1 million, in a country where most people are Greek Orthodox Christians.

While the Muslims prayed, some locals shouted obscenities from their balconies and waved Greek flags. Leaflets that depicted pigs — an animal Muslims consider unclean — were scattered across the square.

“There is a (unofficial) mosque near here but we’re afraid to go there,” said a 30-year old migrant from Bangladesh, who gave his name as Shamasul. “Sometimes Greeks in the neighborhood threaten to kill us.”

Margarita Vassilatou, 56, who has lived in the square for more than 35 years said she wanted to leave as a result of the immigrants:

“This is not a life … We are afraid of them. Many of them are criminals, they carry knifes and deal drugs.”

In another, more central square in front of Athens university, about 2,000 Muslim men and women prayed peacefully in front of the neo-classical university and ancient Greek statues.

In the past, moves to build a mosque in the capital have been met with opposition from local residents and some priests of the Greek orthodox church.

However, the current archbishop supports the construction of a mosque and the socialist government has set aside a site close to the city center, although building has not yet begun.

The only mosques in Greece are in the northeastern region of Xanthi near the Turkish border, home to a large Muslim minority.

(Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Matthew Jones)

Pat Robertson

Robertson’s Organizations Persist in Calls for Probe of Congressional Muslim Staffers

by Sarah Posner (ReligionDispatches)

Under the headline, “Calls Rise to Probe Capitol Hill Muslim Prayer Sessions” yesterday, Pat Robertson’s news channel, CBN News, was able to offer only one organization that has called for a probe of the Congressional Muslim Staff Association: Robertson’s own American Center for Law and Justice.

As I’ve reported here and here, after Fox News ran a report claiming that speakers with terrorist ties spoke at Congressional prayer meetings, the ACLJ called for a Justice Department investigation of the CMSA. Suhail Khan, a Muslim Republican who has worked as a staffer for a Republican Congressman and as a political appointee in the Bush administration, and who currently serves on the board of the American Conservative Union,called the Fox report nothing but “anti-Muslim bigotry” and noted that Robertson is “notorious for anti-Islamic comments.”

On its Newswatch program, CBN attempted to create the impression that calls for law enforcement to intervene are somehow on the rise. Yet the only source for the story was Jordan Sekulow, the ACLJ’s Director of International Operations.

“The media didn’t want to report this,” Sekulow asserted, claiming they feared being called Islamophobes or bigots if they reported that the CMSA was hosting terrorist speakers. “When we started talking about this,” said Sekulow, “immediately the left and the kind of pro-Islamic world immediately cries bigot and says, why do you want to investigate? The reason you want to investigate is of course because we’re Muslims.” Sekulow went on to claim that individuals with terror ties were invited to prayer meetings, which, as Khan told me earlier this week, are not official CMSA functions, but are run under the auspices of the House Chaplain. (See theHouse Chaplain’s website for evidence of the prayer meetings being open to the public, like other religious meetings held under the Chaplain’s auspices.) What’s more, neither Fox nor ALCJ have produced evidence any of these individuals were invited by the CMSA; as Khan noted, the prayer meetings are open to the public.

Yet Sekulow went on, “Why we’re calling for an investigation — who was picking these people to speak is what we want to know.” He went on to claim — something already disputed by Khan — that the Council on American Islamic Relations chooses the speakers. “This group,” said Sekulow, referring to the CMSA, “meets under the United States Capitol dome, they actually meet at the United States Capitol, at taxpayer expense. If CAIR is running prayer meetings there, and bringing in known terrorists, the American people deserve to know about it.”

As the interview went on, it became clear that Sekulow’s goal is to end the Muslim prayers at the Capitol by portraying Muslim organizations as necessarily having ties to terrorists, a common smoke and mirrors routine used by the right. “We see now,” he said, “that when we scratch the surface of most Islamic organizations we find something that we don’t hope to find. we find that if you bring in speakers, they’re connected to terrorism.” He identified this as “a problem within Islam. As Christians, we can’t change what’s happening internally in Islam, but we cannot be afraid of exposing the truth of what is happening here in our US Capitol. Our hope is that the truth comes out, that people see the associations here, and that this group isn’t able to meet anymore.”

As I noted on Friday, the vice-president of the CMSA (which, as Khan pointed out, doesn’t organize the prayer meetings but there is overlap between its members and people attending the prayer meetings, obviously) is a staffer for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Sekulow is a prominent Republican activist — he was the National Youth Director for the Bush-Cheney in 2004, and was a consultant to Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign, to which his father, Jay, the ACLJ’s Chief Counsel, also served as an advisor. Yet Sekulow is claiming that group for which a staffer for the ranking Senate Republican serves as an officer has ties to terrorists. McConnell’s office still has not responded to a request for comment.

Terry Jones who came to our attention because of the whole Quran burning issue visited Park 51.

Florida Pastor Who Proposed Koran Burning Travels to Park51 Islamic Center

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER MANHATTAN — The Florida pastor who threatened to burn Korans in protest of the Park51 Islamic center visited the center’s proposed site near Ground Zero for the first time Tuesday.

Pastor Terry Jones first spoke to reporters at the World Trade Center site about 11 a.m. Tuesday and then walked two blocks up to the future mosque and community center on Park Place.

“We feel the mosque should not be built there,” Jones told DNAinfo after the press conference. “I consider it in bad taste so close to Ground Zero. I also question the motivations behind it. Is it a victory mosque?”

Jones, 59, originally planned to visit lower Manhattan around this year’s 9/11 anniversary, but Police Commissioner Ray Kelly asked him not to for security reasons.

Jones said he decided to try a second time to come downtown because he wanted to pay his respects to the first responders killed on 9/11.

Jones also wanted to promote his new organization, Stand Up America, which he said would combat radical Islam worldwide.

“We will speak out about human rights issues,” Jones said, “especially in Muslim-dominated countries, where Christians are treated unfairly.”

During his trip, Jones admitted that many members of his congregation had left his church because of his crusade against Islam, the Daily News reported.

“People come to church and want to hear, ‘God loves you, you’re a good person,’” he said, according to the paper. “That’s true. God does love you. But there’s more we need to tell people, and they don’t want to hear it.”

Jones’s visit to Park51 Tuesday coincided with the celebration of Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday. Park51 held Eid services at the site of their future center Tuesday morning, followed by a public feast.

Jones said the timing was “purely an accident.” He wanted to get the visit in before Thanksgiving, he said.

After Jones’s suggestion of an “International Koran Burning Day” created a national firestorm over the summer, he has since promised not to burn any Korans.

But that doesn’t mean he’s done criticizing the Muslim holy book.

“We are thinking about doing something similar,” Jones told DNAinfo Tuesday. “Maybe ‘Internationalal Judge the Koran Day’…to put that book on trial. But as far as actual burning, that’s not in our plans.”

Ann Coulter advocates profiling Mooslim looking people

Hmmmm…are terrorists all foreign looking?

Whereas the United States government consistently refuses to take the measures needed to curtail terrorism (i.e. halting U.S.-led occupations and interventions abroad), Homeland Security (and the TSA in specific) has taken extreme measures in the name of Security.  Although these curtailments on civil liberties do virtually nothing to stop terrorism, they are very successful in ratcheting up the fear level in an already spooked citizenry. This may well be an unintended yet helpful consequence, but it may certainly also be a deliberate attempt to create an aura of imminent danger.

It truly speaks to our state of mind that we forever live in a world characterized by the government as “threat level: orange” or “threat level: red.”  Before the threat of Terrorism our collective conscious was paralyzed over the thought of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union.  It seems there is always one great existential threat that must exist in order for the U.S. government to keep its citizenry in a state of eternal trepidation.  Fear-stricken Americans are then forced to turn to the government for Security, ceding their freedoms in the process.

One American patriot, John Tyner, decided he had just about enough.  Tyner refused to be go through the XXX-ray scanner.  He also refused to be sexually molested by those acting in the name of Security.  Tyner’s refusal may well turn out to be historic.  It is certainly reminiscent of Rosa Parks and her refusal to go to the back of the bus. Glenn Greenwald writes:

Last week, John Tyner, a resident of Southern California, was subjected to a long series of harassing and vindictive actions by Homeland-Security/TSA functionaries after he refused to submit to the new body scanning and groping searches at the San Diego International Airport.  He was randomly selected for the new procedures, and after he refused on privacy grounds, he repeatedly offered instead to go through the metal detectors which were being used on the vast majority of passengers.  When told that he would not be permitted to fly unless he submitted to the new procedures, he agreed to leave the airport, but was then prevented from doing so and threatened with large fines and other punishments if he tried.  The same day, he chronicled this abuse in a long blog post — with detailed narratives and videotapes — which quickly went viral and was widely-circulated.   If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading it.  As Digby wrote about it:

Just read this story of Orwellian airport hell and then think about how many of our basic notions of freedom we’ve given up in the name of “Homeland Security” in the past few years. Then think about the fact that we are spending billions of dollars in this so-called era of austerity on bullshit like this, with layer upon layer of supervisors and officers and supervisory officers basically performing security theater for no good reason.

These routine insults, humiliations and suspensions of human dignity are training us to submit to the police state. I noticed this morning that in all the blathering about tax cuts and deficits, not one person brought up Homeland Security. That bloated budget is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and if you build it they will use it. And the results of that are obvious.

Making this story so much worse:  as John Cole notes today, the TSA called a news conference to announce that it was formally investigating Tyner to determine whether to impose $11,000 in fines on him.  As Cole observes:  ”Don’t submit to the police state, and we’ll come after you. This isn’t a punishment for Tyner, it is a message to everyone else.”

This is the sort of outrage that really merits a national uprising in defense of this citizen.  I hope to have some details on that in a bit (I turned in a major chunk of my book today and am thus slightly liberated until tomorrow).  I wrote on Twitter two days ago in response to this story:  “What has most degraded the American citizenry is convincing them that no value competes with or should be weighed against *Security*.”  And, of course, these measures rarely provide real security:  only security theater.

Many Americans, to their shame, are typically apathetic to such concerns because privacy and civil liberties infringements are — at least it’s perceived — being directed only at foreigners and Muslims, not “real Americans.”

I have bolded the last two paragraphs because they are especially poignant.  The last sentence speaks to the general theme of our website: Islamophobia (which, in all honesty, is simply one of the flavors of Other-ophobia) has far reaching consequences.  Not only does it enable and encourage morally defunct and horribly unjust wars, but Islamophobia’s power stretches to affect the lives of everyday Americans.  It is true, however, that many Americans won’t care until it affects the “real Americans”, by which of course we mean God-fearing Judeo-Christian white people.

Anyways, here is the whole post by John Tyner (well worth the read):

TSA encounter at SAN

…This morning, I tried to fly out of San Diego International Airport but was refused by the TSA. I had been somewhat prepared for this eventuality. I have been reading about the millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray machines and the possible harm to health as well as the vivid pictures they create of people’s naked bodies. Not wanting to go through them, I had done my  research on the TSA’s website prior to traveling to see if SAN had them. From all indications, they did not. When I arrived at the security line, I found that the TSA’s website was out of date. SAN does in fact utilize backscatter x-ray machines.

I made my way through the line toward the first line of “defense”: the TSA ID checker. This agent looked over my boarding pass, looked over my ID, looked at me and then back at my ID. After that, he waved me through. SAN is still operating metal detectors, so I walked over to one of the lines for them. After removing my shoes and making my way toward the metal detector, the person in front of me in line was pulled out to go through the backscatter machine. After asking what it was and being told, he opted out. This left the machine free, and before I could go through the metal detector, I was pulled out of line to go through the backscatter machine. When asked, I half-chuckled and said, “I don’t think so.” At this point, I was informed that I would be subject to a pat down, and I waited for another agent.

A male agent (it was a female who had directed me to the backscatter machine in the first place), came and waited for me to get my bags and then directed me over to the far corner of the area for screening. After setting my things on a table, he turned to me and began to explain that he was going to do a “standard” pat down. (I thought to myself, “great, not one of those gropings like I’ve been reading about”.) After he described, the pat down, I realized that he intended to touch my groin. After he finished his description but before he started the pat down, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “if you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” He, a bit taken aback, informed me that he would have to involve his supervisor because of my comment.

We both stood there for no more than probably two minutes before a female TSA agent (apparently, the supervisor) arrived. She described to me that because I had opted out of the backscatter screening, I would now be patted down, and that involved running hands up the inside of my legs until they felt my groin. I stated that I would not allow myself to be subject to a molestation as a condition of getting on my flight. The supervisor informed me that it was a standard administrative security check and that they were authorized to do it. I repeated that I felt what they were doing was a sexual assault, and that if they were anyone but the government, the act would be illegal. I believe that I was then informed that if I did not submit to the inspection, I would not be getting on my flight. I again stated that I thought the search was illegal. I told her that I would be willing to submit to a walk through the metal detector as over 80% of the rest of the people were doing, but I would not be groped. The supervisor, then offered to go get her supervisor.

I took a seat in a tiny metal chair next to the table with my belongings and waited. While waiting, I asked the original agent (who was supposed to do the pat down) if he had many people opt out to which he replied, none (or almost none, I don’t remember exactly). He said that I gave up a lot of rights when I bought my ticket. I replied that the government took them away after September 11th. There was silence until the next supervisor arrived. A few minutes later, the female agent/supervisor arrived with a man in a suit (not a uniform). He gave me a business card identifying him as David Silva, Transportation Security Manager, San Diego International Airport. At this point, more TSA agents as well as what I assume was a local police officer arrived on the scene and surrounded the area where I was being detained. The female supervisor explained the situation to Mr. Silva. After some quick back and forth (that I didn’t understand/hear), I could overhear Mr. Silva say something to the effect of, “then escort him from the airport.” I again offered to submit to the metal detector, and my father-in-law, who was near by also tried to plead for some reasonableness on the TSA’s part.

The female supervisor took my ID at this point and began taking some kind of report with which I cooperated. Once she had finished, I asked if I could put my shoes back on. I was allowed to put my shoes back on and gather my belongs. I asked, “are we done here” (it was clear at this point that I was going to be escorted out), and the local police officer said, “follow me”. I followed him around the side of the screening area and back out to the ticketing area. I said apologized to him for the hassle, to which he replied that it was not a problem.

I made my way over to the American Airlines counter, explained the situation, and asked if my ticket could be refunded. The woman behind the counter furiously typed away for about 30 seconds before letting me know that she would need a supervisor. She went to the other end of the counter. When she returned, she informed me that the ticket was non-refundable, but that she was still trying to find a supervisor. After a few more minutes, she was able to refund my ticket. I told her that I had previously had a bad experience with American Airlines and had sworn never to fly with them again (I rationalized this trip since my father-in-law had paid for the ticket), but that after her helpfulness, I would once again be willing to use their carrier again.

At this point, I thought it was all over. I began to make my way to the stairs to exit the airport, when I was approached by another man in slacks and a sport coat. He was accompanied by the officer that had escorted me to the ticketing area and Mr. Silva. He informed me that I could not leave the airport. He said that once I start the screening in the secure area, I could not leave until it was completed. Having left the area, he stated, I would be subject to a civil suit and a $10,000 fine. I asked him if he was also going to fine the 6 TSA agents and the local police officer who escorted me from the secure area. After all, I did exactly what I was told. He said that they didn’t know the rules, and that he would deal with them later. They would not be subject to civil penalties. I then pointed to Mr. Silva and asked if he would be subject to any penalties. He is the agents’ supervisor, and he directed them to escort me out. The man informed me that Mr. Silva was new and he would not be subject to penalties, either. He again asserted the necessity that I return to the screening area. When I asked why, he explained that I may have an incendiary device and whether or not that was true needed to be determined. I told him that I would submit to a walk through the metal detector, but that was it; I would not be groped. He told me that their procedures are on their website, and therefore, I was fully informed before I entered the airport; I had implicitly agreed to whatever screening they deemed appropriate. I told him that San Diego was not listed on the TSA’s website as an airport using Advanced Imaging Technology, and I believed that I would only be subject to the metal detector. He replied that he was not a webmaster, and I asked then why he was referring me to the TSA’s website if he didn’t know anything about it. I again refused to re-enter the screening area.

The man asked me to stay put while he walked off to confer with the officer and Mr. Silva. They went about 20 feet away and began talking amongst themselves while I waited. I couldn’t over hear anything, but I got the impression that the police officer was recounting his version of the events that had transpired in the screening area (my initial refusal to be patted down). After a few minutes, I asked loudly across the distance if I was free to leave. The man dismissively held up a finger and said, “hold on”. I waited. After another minute or so, he returned and asked for my name. I asked why he needed it, and reminded him that the female supervisor/agent had already taken a report. He said that he was trying to be friendly and help me out. I asked to what end. He reminded me that I could be sued civilly and face a $10,000 fine and that my cooperation could help mitigate the penalties I was facing. I replied that he already had my information in the report that was taken and I asked if I was free to leave. I reminded him that he was now illegally detaining me and that I would not be subject to screening as a condition of leaving the airport. He told me that he was only trying to help (I should note that his demeanor never suggested that he was trying to help. I was clearly being interrogated.), and that no one was forcing me to stay. I asked if tried to leave if he would have the officer arrest me. He again said that no one was forcing me to stay. I looked him in the eye, and said, “then I’m leaving”. He replied, “then we’ll bring a civil suit against you”, to which I said, “you bring that suit” and walked out of the airport.

You can see the video of Tyner’s encounter on his blog.

We at LoonWatch salute this man’s bravery and his courageous support of civil liberties.  Unless more Americans stand up to such curtailments of citizen rights, then it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that one day TSA will give us pre-flight colonoscopies, and we’ll be forced to walk onto planes naked.

UPDATE:

A reader by the name of Mindy posted the following comment:

How come on Puerto Rico they had a base, they did not attack us, and we left it a couple of years ago(please correct me if I am wrong)

In fact, Prof. Brent Smith writes in his book Terrorism in America (p.22):

Puerto Rican Terrorism Puerto Rican nationalists were the most active terrorists in the United States and its territories during the 1980s.  From 1980-1982 Puerto Rican terrorists accounted for fifty-three of the 122 terrorism incidents (43 percent) that took place in that period.  As many as ten different Puerto Rican groups claimed responsibility for bombings and assassinations during the early 1980s.

In 1990 alone, Puerto  Rican terrorists carried out five bombings in the United States.  Can one imagine the reaction of the media and “average Americans” if Muslims carried out five coordinated terrorist attacks in one year?

Puerto Rican terrorism has subsequently declined.  Why?  Prof. Smith writes (p.23):

…Recent efforts in the U.S. Congress to allow Puerto Ricans to vote on the future political status of the island may have had an adverse effect on violent nationalists’ recruitment efforts.

How much clearer would you like it to be?  Was it Jihad, Islam, and the Quran which compelled Puerto Ricans to terrorism?  Or was it U.S. interventionist policies?

Mindy says further:

If people want sympathy from the average American, don’t blow things up, average people like me won’t like you.

This is exactly what average Muslims in the Islamic world think about us.  The United States drops more bombs on Muslim heads in the Islamic world in one single day (and continue to do so on a regular basis) than all the Islamic extremists combined have ever detonated throughout history.  The U.S. kills more Muslims in the Islamic world than Islamic extremists have ever killed Americans, on the order of magnitude of greater than 100.  And these killings, unlike the non-state actors like Al-Qaeda, are orchestrated by the democratically elected U.S. government herself, with the blessing of its citizenry.  So yes: if the United States wants sympathy from the average Muslim in the Islamic world, don’t blow things up, because average people won’t like you then.  Americans should not vote for such warmongers if they wish not to be seen as warmongers by the populations living in areas being warred upon by the U.S.

Please see:

Prof. Stephen Walt: Why They Hate Us?

And of course Glenn Greenwald’s excellent commentary:

They Hate Us For Our Occupations

Mindy says:

Weren’t terrorists trying to kill us before Afghanistan and Iraq?

U.S. interventionism in the region far preceded the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  It may be worthwhile to read this document from the CATO Institute, which calls the U.S. “the heir to British imperialism in the region” and concludes that “U.S. conduct in the Middle East since the end of World War II” is “trag[ic]“.  The right-liberterian group argues that “it should not be surprising that the West is viewed with suspicion and hostility by the populations…of the Middle East.”

There is indeed a direct correlation between U.S. interventionism and terrorism against the U.S.  The more people we bomb, the more they want to be bomb us.  The more people we kill, the more they want to kill us.  Having said that, it’s probably a good idea to eschew the usage of unhelpful terms like “us” and “they”, as neither “us” or “they” are two monoliths.

And just for the record:

The FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) is a clandestine organization committed to the political independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN claimed responsibility for more than 120 bombings of military and government buildings, financial institutions, and corporate headquarters in Chicago, New York, and Washington DC, which killed six people and injured dozens more. The purpose of these bombings was to protest U.S. military presence in Puerto Rico, draw attention to Puerto Rico’s political relationship with the United States, and object to increased influence of U.S.-based corporate and financial institutions on the island.

source

Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, a Puerto Rican nationalist, was classified as a terrorist by the United States, and was in fact one of the FBI’s most wanted.  He had great support in Peuerto Rico.

Los Macheteros is a Puerto Rican group categorized by the FBI as a terrorist group.  It operated (and continues to operate) cells in the United States, with an active membership in 2006 of approximately 1,100 to 5,700 members and an unknown number of supporters and sympathizers.  The group campaigns for Puerto Rican independence from what they see as “U.S. colonial rule.”

Members of the Puerto Rico Nationalist Party infiltrated the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives and shot 5 Congressman. We must ask, as we always do: what if they were Muslims?

Loonwatch sends its greetings and well wishes for all who are celebrating Eid Al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice.

Millions of Muslims around the world celebrated one of the biggest Muslim religious festivals, Eid al-Adha, on Tuesday morning.

Prayers were offered up and, in keeping with tradition, goats, sheep and cattle were slaughtered in commemoration of prophet Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son to show obedience to Allah.

– Los Angeles Times

Photo: Pigeons take to the air as Afghan men offer Eid al-Adha prayers in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday morning. Credit: S. Sabawoon / European Pressphoto Agency

Safed

Safed, a town that before the creation of Israel used to be a mixed majority Arab and minority Jewish neighborhood has become the scene of Orthodox Jews attacking Palestinian students claiming that they are undermining the Jewish character of Safed. Imagine if they were Muslims who were attacking Jews or Christians because they were “undermining the Muslim character” of a city?

Allegations of racism and questions about a town’s character

By Joel Greenberg

(Washington Post)

In the winding stone alleys of this Galilee hill town, a centuries-old center of Jewish mysticism, a campaign is underway.

It is being waged by the town rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, who along with other area rabbis issued a religious ruling several months ago forbidding residents to rent apartments to Israeli Arab students from the local community college.

The rabbi has warned that the Jewish character of Safed, long revered as sacred, is at risk and that intermarriages could follow if the students mingle with the locals.

Last month, Eliahu called a public meeting to sound the alarm. On the agenda was “the quiet war,” a reference to the feared Arab influx, and “fighting assimilation in the holy city of Safed.”

Several days later, a building that houses Arab students was attacked by a group of young Jews, and an elderly Holocaust survivor renting a room to students received threats.

To civil rights advocates and other critics, the unsettling developments in this normally quiet community of 32,000 are a window into ugly currents of racism in Israeli society. The events here, the critics say, reflect a general atmosphere of growing intolerance under a government and parliament dominated by parties of the nationalist right.

Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said that public attitudes have been legitimized by proposals in parliament that send a message of exclusion to Israeli Arabs. One bill authorizes rural Jewish communities to review applications for residence on the basis of social and cultural compatibility, language that critics say is code for keeping out Arabs.

But people in Safed dismiss the accusations of racism, saying that the issue is a culture clash between rowdy Arab students and the city’s strictly religious Jews who feel that their way of life is being threatened.

In a city park next to a college building on a recent afternoon, “Death to Arabs” was scrawled on a gatepost. The park is a hangout for the Arab students, who were scattered on benches during a break between classes.

Nasrat Ghadban, a student from the village of Arrabeh, said that he had been trying to find an apartment to rent in Safed but that his phone inquiries were repeatedly turned down.

Similar accounts were heard from other Arab students, who make up about half of the student population at the school, the Tzfat Academic College. Because of a shortage of dormitory space, many Arab students commute from their villages. Some who have found apartments in Safed said they have recently felt uneasy walking the streets and preferred to stay in at night, fearing run-ins with religious Jewish youths.

Last month, a group of young Jewish men attacked apartments of Arab students near the old city of Safed. An indictment against two of the assailants said that before the attack, the group had talked about an increasing presence of Arabs in town and their alleged harassment of local Jewish women.

The mob gathered outside a building housing Arab students, shouted “Death to Arabs!” and “Stinking Muslims!” and hurled stones and bottles, smashing a window, according to the indictment. The Arab students threw stones back, and a shot was fired by one of the Jewish youth. He and the other indicted youth were charged with racist incitement, rioting and vandalism.

Eliahu Zvieli, an 89-year-old resident of the old city who rents a room to three Arab students, said he had received numerous phone calls and visits, including from Rabbi Eliahu, urging him to remove his tenants. One caller threatened to burn down Zvieli’s house, he said. A sign was posted on the gate calling the Arabs’ presence “a shameful disgrace.”

Zvieli, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who endured forced-labor and prisoner-of-war camps, said he was not fazed. “I’ve been through a few things, and I’m handling it,” he said. “You can’t surrender to terror.”

Across the street at his food stand, Yosef Pe’er, bearded with a large knitted skullcap, said that providing housing for Arab students in the heart of the old city, where many strictly Orthodox and newly observant Jews live, is a provocation.

“This place has a particular character, and it’s preferable that it remain Jewish,” he said. Arab students drive by in cars blaring loud music on Friday night, during the Jewish Sabbath, and generally “don’t respect where they are,” Pe’er said.

Safed’s mayor, Ilan Shohat, said the students were “behaving like they were back in their villages.” He said the municipality had received complaints from religious residents after Sabbath weekends of disruptive behavior by students, ranging from playing loud music to smoking a hookah opposite a synagogue and badgering young women.

“Safed is not a racist city at all,” Shohat said. “There’s a cultural problem, which because of the Jewish-Arab divide in Israeli society, is interpreted by the residents as a provocation.”

Arab students denied the allegations of inappropriate behavior, saying that most stay home on weekends and that those in town were often at work at hotels, replacing Jewish employees who were off Saturdays. Some students noted that they had warm relations with their Jewish landlords, who they said treated them like family.

On the streets of Safed, memorial plaques commemorate Jewish fighters killed in the town during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. Safed’s Arab majority fled the fighting, changing it from a mixed city to a Jewish one. The sign plastered on the home of Zvieli, the man threatened for renting to Arab students, accused him of “returning Arabs to Safed.”

Yisrael Lee, an architect and a neighbor, said that the past still hangs heavy over the town. “Memories here are strong,” he said.

Greenberg is a special correspondent.

———————————————–

In the meantime here is an excellent video exploring what it feels like being in the shoes of a Palestinian.

Note: This article is part of our “What if they were Muslim?” series. In this series, we examine the double standards used by anti-Muslim activists when discussing religious extremism in Islam as compared to other religions. We reject using extremists of any religion to justify prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility towards all members of that religion. Period.

Excellent rebuttal from Media Matters.

Fox News attacks prominent Muslim leaders as a “‘Who’s Who’ of controversial figures”

(Media Matters)

FoxNews.com: “Some Muslims Attending Capitol Hill Prayer Group Have Terror Ties.” A November 10 FoxNews.com article reported on a Capitol Hill prayer group, held by the Congressional Muslim Staff Association (CMSA). According to the article, “An Al Qaeda leader, the head of a designated terror organization, and a confessed jihadist-in-training are among a ‘Who’s Who‘ of controversial figures who have participated in weekly prayer sessions on Capitol Hill since the 2001 terror attacks, an investigation by FoxNews.com reveals.” The article listed nine prominent Muslim leaders as examples of participants that “have terror ties.”

FoxNews.com’s main source is anti-Muslim Pajamas Media contributor. The article repeatedly quotes Patrick Poole, who is identified as “an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the U.S. military who has written about CMSA for the conservative blog Pajamas Media.” Poole often writes of alleged “jihadist” threats, and, among other things, has accused the Muslim Student Association of having a “terror problem.”

Doocy: “As you look at some of” the speakers “you realize, hey wait a minute. Didn’t anybody do a background check?” On the November 12 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade called the report “disturbing” and said, of the prayer group, “it’s not the meeting that’s of concern; I think it’s some of the people attending.” Co-host Steve Doocy replied that the group “invited special muslim preachers in…and you look at some of them and you realize, hey wait a minute. Didn’t anybody do a background check? Some of these guys have ties to terror.”

Kilmeade calls the meeting a “Who’s Who of bad Islamic extremists.” Later on Fox & Friends, Kilmeade introduced the story by saying “I was concerned by this, but not that surprised. It turns out on Capitol Hill, there’s a weekly prayer meeting – it’s official since 2006, it’s like the ‘Who’s Who’ of bad Islamic extremists.” Kilmeade later suggested, as a solution, putting “an F.B.I. agent in there?”

Many of the leaders cited in the article have no apparent terror ties and are outspoken opponents of terrorism

SALAM AL-MARAYATI

Al-Marayati: “Al Qaeda represents the cult of death.” In a May 22 Los Angeles Times article, Marayati said Al Qaeda “represents the cult of death” and noted that “we’ve made progress in the counter-narrative.” From the Los Angeles Times:

When something like the Times Square incident happens, many people think: Muslims are at it again. How do you alter that reaction?

I think we have gotten through [to most people]. We’ve made progress in the counter-narrative. Al Qaeda represents the cult of death, that tells [young people] to go die on behalf of leaders who sit in their self-righteous thrones and exploit the grievances of Muslims. The Muslim-American tradition promotes the theology of life, to engage constructively [to] address the grievances.

Some say the condemnation of that cult of death has been a little perfunctory.

I understand that perception. On our website, you’ll see all the condemnations. The mosque in America has become an asset to society, to interfaith groups, to law enforcement, in terms of preventing Al Qaeda from having [a] foothold in America. We see the battlefield now on the Internet.

Al-Marayati appeared on Fox News at least twice to discuss Park51. Al-Marayati appeared at least two times in 2010 to discuss the debate surrounding the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero. On a recent episode of Fox News’ America’s News HQ, Al-Marayati appeared to express support the building of the center, and to express his hope that the conflict over the construction would end. On the August 12 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, Al-Marayati appeared and noted that Imam Rauf has “promoted America as a country that is not at war with Islam, but accepting as Muslims as part of the pluralism” and said “that is what we need in terms of being effective in fighting the war on terrorism, the war against extremists.”

Al-Marayati condemned the Ft. Hood shootings in the Wall Street Journal. Following the Ft. Hood shooting, Al-Marayati wrote an op-ed on December 8, 2009 in the Wall Street Journal in which he condemned the actions of Maj. Nadal Hasan and urged him to “take responsibility for committing two major sins in Islam–the murder of his fellow citizens and the violation of two oaths he took”– the Hippocratic oath and his oath as a member of the military “to defend our country.” Al-Marayati further wrote:

[B]eing moderate is about upholding religious values while working with other members of society for the greater good. Extremists believe they are compromising their Islamic values when living in the West. This is not true. And Muslim-haters oblige them with the converse, when they argue that the West should not tolerate Muslims. This is not just.

Maj. Hasan’s hodgepodge of verses from the Quran and quotes from extremists left out the most important Quranic verse in his section on enjoining peace and forgiveness: “God invites you into the abode of peace” (10:25). Nor did he include the admonition by the Prophet Muhammad never to harm the innocent and never to target noncombatants.

Al-Marayati testified before Congress on the “Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism.” On June 14, 2007, Al-Marayati submitted written testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security on the subject, “Assessing and Addressing the Threat: Identifying the Role of the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism.” In his testimony, Al-Marayati said:

On behalf of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), I am honored to offer analysis and recommendations that we believe can be helpful and constructive in increasing the understanding and role of the mainstream Muslim American community within the broader strategy of protecting the country. While one of the most underutilized assets, understanding and partnering with the Muslim American community and its legitimate, authentic and credible leadership is the key to countering extremism and radicalization.

Al-Marayati’s group founded the National Grassroots Campaign to Fight Terrorism. In his congressional testimony, Al-Marayati further noted:

One major aspect of any effective counterterrorism strategy is community-based policing, similar to neighborhood watch groups that have been effective in dealing with various crimes throughout the United States. To this end, MPAC launched the National Grassroots Campaign to Fight Terrorism in 2004 (http://www.mpac.org/ngcft/ ). This program was based on three critical components: 1) amplifying Islam’s message against terrorism; 2) developing partnerships between law enforcement and local Muslim communities; and 3) offering guidelines to Muslim institutions to demonstrate transparency and accountability in the post 9/11 era. This program is based on the Quranic instruction:

“Whosoever killed a human being – unless it be in punishment for murder or for spreading corruption on earth – it shall be as if he had killed all humankind; whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all humankind.” [5:32]

TARIQ RAMADAN

Ramadan has condemned terrorism as being against the teachings of Islam. In a November 1, 2004, interview with Foreign Policy, Ramadan said, “Terrorism, which kills innocent people, is not Islamically acceptable.” From the interview:

FP: How do you feel when Islam is used to justify terrorism?

TR: Horrified. But responsible. When the Luxor terrorist attack took place [in Egypt] eight years ago, long before 9/11, I wrote a letter from a Swiss Muslim to his fellow citizens saying that this is not acceptable…. We have to condemn this as Muslims and as human beings. And we have to do whatever possible within Islamic communities to spread better understanding about who we are and what we can do to deal with other people. We can have a legitimate resistance to oppression, but the means should be legitimate. Terrorism, which kills innocent people, is not Islamically acceptable. Within Islam there is an accepted diversity — you can be a literalist, a Sufi mystic, or a reformist, so long as you don’t say others are less Muslim than others — and we must never say that terrorism or violence is part of this accepted diversity.

As the U.K. Independent reported, Ramadan said after the July 7, 2005, London terror attacks, “The authors of such acts are criminals and we cannot accept or listen to their probable justifications in the name of an ideology, a religion or a political cause.”

State Dept. official: “We do not think that either one of them represents a threat to the United States.” In a January 20 State Department briefing noting the decision to overturn the Bush administration’s ban on Ramadan and Adam Habib — a deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg — from entering the U.S., assistant secretary Philip Crowley stated, “[W]e do not think that either one of them represents a threat to the United States.” Crowley also stated: “[T]he next time Professor Ramadan or Professor Habib applies for a visa, he will not be found inadmissible on the basis of the facts that led to denial when he last applied.”

Bush administration cited tenuous ties between Ramadan and a charity later linked to Hamas as a justification for revoking his visa. The New York Times reported on January 20 of Ramadan “[a]t first, the government refused to give its reason [for denying Ramadan's visa]. But eventually it pointed to evidence that from 1998 to 2002 Professor Ramadan had donated about $1,300 to a Swiss-based charity that in turn provided money to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.” The article continued: “But the professor argued that he had believed the charity had no connections to terrorist activities or to Hamas, and said that he had always condemned terrorism.” The Times also noted on July 17, 2009 that “[t]he government cited evidence that from 1998 to 2002, [Ramadan] donated about $1,300 to a Swiss-based charity which the Treasury Department later categorized as a terrorist organization because it provided money to Hamas.” The Treasury Department did not designate Association de Secours Palestinien — which the Times reported was the charity in question — as a “primary fundraiser” for Hamas until August 22, 2003.

Ramadan publicly criticized U.S. policies during Bush administration. In an October 1, 2006, Washington Post op-ed, Ramadan — whom the Post reported in December 2004 “is well-regarded in intellectual circles as a scholar who seeks to bridge the Western and Muslim worlds” — wrote: “I am increasingly convinced that the Bush administration has barred me for a much simpler reason: It doesn’t care for my political views. In recent years, I have publicly criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East, the war in Iraq, the use of torture, secret CIA prisons and other government actions that undermine fundamental civil liberties.”

NYT: “Evidence suggests that Mr. Ramadan’s strong criticism of United States foreign policy is what really triggered his exclusion.” A September 17, 2009, New York Times editorial argued that the Bush administration “barr[ed] numerous people from entering the country for speaking engagements or conferences to teach at leading universities-all under the flimsily supported guise of fighting terrorism.” Of Ramadan, the Times argued that the “evidence suggests that Mr. Ramadan’s strong criticism of United States foreign policy is what really triggered his exclusion.” From the Times:

In 2004, the Bush administration revoked the visa of Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss national and Muslim scholar, who was to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame. It again denied him a visa in 2006. Two months ago, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan unanimously reversed a lower-court ruling allowing the government’s move.

The government cited evidence that from 1998 to 2002, Mr. Ramadan contributed about $1,300 to a Swiss-based charity that the Treasury Department later categorized as a terrorist organization. Mr. Ramadan said that he believed the group was involved in humanitarian projects, and that he was not aware of any connections between the charity, the Association de Secours Palestinien, and Hamas or terrorism, which, he said, he condemns. The evidence suggests that Mr. Ramadan’s strong criticism of United States foreign policy is what really triggered his exclusion.

JOHARI ABDUL-MALIK

FoxNews.com article claimed Abdul-Malik “made statements in support of convicted and suspected terrorists who attended his mosque.” The FoxNews.com article’s evidence that Malik had “terror ties” is that he “made statements in support of convicted and suspected terrorists who attended his mosque.” Speaking of the feelings of the members of his community, Malik did, in 2005, say of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was accused of plotting to assassinate President Bush:

“Our whole community is under siege. They don’t see this as a case of criminality. They see it as a civil rights case. As a frontal attack on their community…The feeling I get here on a daily basis must be what it was like to be a member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church following the case of Rosa Parks. People always ask, ‘What is the latest from the courthouse?’”

At the time, Abu Ali had just been returned from a Saudi prison, where he was held without charge for 18 months while attending the Islamic University of Medina. He was eventually transferred to U.S. custody, where he was charged with providing material support to al Qaeda. The government’s evidence of this was a confession that Abu Ali made during his time in the Saudi prison. According to theWashington Post, Abu Ali’s defense “argued that any statements Abu Ali made while in Saudi custody were obtained through torture. Two doctors who examined Abu Ali found evidence that he was tortured in Saudi Arabia, including scars on his back consistent with having been whipped.” The judge sidedwith the government, who argued that Abu Ali made his confession voluntarily and challenged his allegations of torture. Abu Ali was eventually found guilty and is serving a life sentence in prison.

Abdul-Malik was not associated with Dar al-Hijrah mosque, where two 9/11 hijackers “briefly worshiped” at the time of the 9/11 attacks. As a May 11 Washington Post article pointed out:

Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers briefly worshiped at his mosque, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, and one of its former imams, Anwar al-Aulaqi, has been linked to accused terrorists and subsequently denounced by the mosque, one of the largest in the United States.

But Abdul-Malik was not affiliated with the mosque in 2001, when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. In recent years, he has made statements following the arrest of Muslims on terrorism charges, arguing for due process, civil rights and fair sentencing.

“To try to cast me as someone who’s a terrorist and closed-minded — they picked the wrong guy,” he said.

Abdul-Malik has denounced Al-Awlaki. On his blog, Abdul Malik denounced the anti-American statements of Dar al-Hijrah’s former Imam, Anwar Al-Awlaki, saying:

I openly denounce the statement of Mr. Al-Awlaki as posted on his website and those who may follow him.  During Mr. Al-Awlaki’s employment his public speech was consistent with the values of tolerance and cooperation.

Mr. Al-Awlaki, after his return to Yemen and his imprisonment, now claims that the American Muslims who have condemned the violent acts of Major Hassan have “Committed treason against the Muslm Umaah (community) and have fallen into hypocrisy”.  With this reversal Mr Al-Awlaki has clearly set himself apart from the Muslim community in the United States.  Al-Awlaki served a brief term of employment at Dar Al-Hijrah from January 2001 until his depart of April 2002.

Abdul Malik has denounced other terrorists. Following the discovery of an alleged plot to bomb the Washington, DC Metro, Abdul Malik told the Washington Post:

“It’s a conversation that’s definitely going on in the community,” said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, spokesman for Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church. “At the same time, though, if you’re dumb enough and sick enough to think you’re working for al-Qaeda, then maybe your behind should be put in jail. If what the authorities accuse him of turns out to be true, I have very little sympathy for someone who plans something like that.”

ABDULAZIZ OTHMAN ALTWAIJRI

FoxNews.com did not offer any evidence of “terror ties” for Altwaijri. The FoxNews.com article did not cite any evidence of Altwaijri’s “terror ties,” but rather identified Altwaijri as a “foreign agent.” Altwaijri is Tunisian, and the head of the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISECO). According to ISECO’s charter, their objectives include:

a) To strengthen, promote and consolidate cooperation among the Member States and consolidate it in the fields of education, science, culture and communication, as well as to develop and upgrade these fields, within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.

b) To consolidate understanding among peoples inside and outside the Member States and contribute to the achievement of world peace and security through various means, particularly through education, science, culture and communication.

c) To publicize the correct image of Islam and Islamic culture, promote dialogue among civilizations, cultures and religions, and work towards spreading the values of justice and peace along with the principles of freedom and human rights, in accordance with the Islamic civilizational perspective.

Altwaijri has previously spoken out against terrorism. In a May 24 article for the Global Arab Network, Altwaijri summarized his comments in a 2007 counterterrorism meeting in Tunisia:

Speaking at the opening of the workshop on the UN Global Counterterrorism Strategy Implementation, this morning at ISESCO, Dr Altwaijri underlined, “Terrorism and extremism constitute a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of all countries and peoples. At the international conference which we held in Tunis in November 2007, on “Terrorism: Dimensions, Threats and Countermeasures”, we recognised that terrorism is a criminal act denounced by all religions and which cannot be associated with any particular religion or civilization. We also stressed that terrorism is never justifiable on any grounds.”

He added, “In the Tunis Conference, held in cooperation with the United Nations and the government of Tunisia , it was also underlined that terrorism should be understood in its own political, religious, historical, cultural and economic context. Our current workshop will explore other issues of relevance to what has been tackled at the Tunis Conference. Clearly, the promotion of the Global Counterterrorism Strategy in North Africa is part of the implementation of the recommendations of both the Tunis Conference, and several other international and regional conferences aimed at addressing terrorism-related issues.”

He also noted in this regard that fostering global cooperation between governments, regional and international organisations, and local community organs is crucial in the fight against all forms of terrorism.

We at ISESCO, Dr Altwaijri underlined, are dedicated to combating all forms of extremist beliefs, conducts and practices. He added, “To that purpose, we have scheduled under our action plan a number of programmes and activities dealing with the ways to fight extremism, which we believe is the source of terrorism. For terrorists are people holding extremist views on worldly and religious matters.”

He went on to explain that terrorism and extremism can only be effectively combated through promoting education on true values and sound concepts, in addition to increasing understanding of the essential message of all revealed religions: namely, to advocate clemency, love and unselfishness, as well as tolerance, understanding and coexistence.

At the Tunisian conference, Altwaijri called terrorism “a criminal phenomenon.” In the 2007 Tunisian conference (translated from Arabic), Altwaijri called terrorism “a criminal phenomenon that assaults human values and has nothing to do with religion and culture, it is not permissible in any case.” Altwaijri also said “[t]he promotion of a serious and equal dialogue between the different religions and civilizations, for common human values and principles of peace, human rights, tolerance, citizenship, democracy and education to fight terrorism, are the most important priorities in ISESCO.”

This might shed light on why the Sharia’ measure passed.

A majority of Oklahomans believe Islam is a violent religion that is far removed from Christianity, the most recent Oklahoma Poll found.

The survey, taken before voters overwhelmingly approved a state question banning Islamic Shariah law from state courts, revealed that fewer than one-quarter of Oklahomans have a favorable opinion of the Muslim religion.

Fifty-eight percent said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, and 61 percent said Muslims don’t worship the same God as Christians.

More than half agreed that Muslims should have the same rights as others to build houses of worship in local communities. However, 36 percent said local communities should have the right to prevent construction of houses of worship if they do not want them.

“I’m leery of any group that wants to kill Americans,” said poll respondent Janie Lloyd of Fort Gibson.

“Do I believe all Muslims want to kill Americans? Of course not,” said Lloyd. “But you’ve got to be vigilant on certain things. When someone says they want to kill you, you have to listen. Timothy McVeigh was an American citizen, and look what he did.”

McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

More than anything, though, Lloyd seemed frustrated.

“I want them to be American,” she said. “I want them to act like American citizens. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

Upon hearing the poll results, Luanne Butler of Tulsa said, “In a way it’s not surprising, but in a way it is disheartening to make sweeping generalizations about people called Muslim.”

Butler said there is “a lack of openness and also a pervasive element whispering (in) our ear that (Muslims) don’t have good intentions, that they want to take over, invade.”

She said the vote on State Question 755, banning the use of Shariah law in state courts, represented Oklahomans, saying, “So there. We don’t want interference from outside.”

Lloyd acknowledged that Shariah law has never entered into an Oklahoma court case and appears to have affected only one decision – a decision quickly overturned – in the entire country.

But, she said, she thinks the state question was a good idea.

“Look what’s going on in Europe,” she said. “They’re trying to dig themselves out of those people taking over.”

Muslims now make up sizable minorities in several European countries, including Germany and France. In the United Kingdom, Shariah courts can be used to settle civil disputes – technically, through arbitration – if all parties agree.

Islam is derived from the same monotheistic tradition as Judaism and Christianity. In the Quran, Islam’s holy book, Jesus Christ is described as a great messenger of God.

The majority of Oklahoma Christians, however, apparently reject the notion that the two religions have common roots. In the Oklahoma Poll sample, 83 percent of those who said they attend religious services more than once a week said Muslims worship a different God than Christians.

Three-quarters of those identifying themselves as evangelical Christians said Muslims worship a different God.

Feelings about the Muslim religion were also reflected in political affiliations and affinities. Seventy-two percent of those supporting Gov.-elect Mary Fallin said Islam promotes violence, compared with 46 percent of those who supported Jari Askins, the loser in the Nov. 2 election.

Oklahomans’ opinion of President Barack Obama also found expression in the poll questions about Islam. Fully one-third said they believe Obama is Muslim. Half said he is not.

“I don’t think he’s a Muslim,” said Marilyn Allen of Broken Arrow. She suspects Obama is “mixed up” because of his unusual childhood and “wants to please everyone,” including Muslim nations.

“I really don’t like the way he kowtows to them,” she said.

“But I’m more worried about the communist part than the Muslim part.”

Almost half the Republicans surveyed said they think Obama is a Muslim – and more than one-fifth of Democrats agreed.

Butler laughed at the notion.

“He’s not a Muslim,” she said. “He’s not anything. He’s a golfer.”

In general, would you say your opinion of the Muslim religion is:

Very favorable …………………………7%
Somewhat favorable………………16%
Neutral/no opinion…………………21%
Somewhat unfavorable …………22%
Very unfavorable……………………34%

(Numbers have been rounded)

Do you think Muslims worship the same God as Christians?

Worship same God……… 25%
Don’t worship same God…..61%
Don’t know/refused………14%

Which comes closer to your view:

The Muslim religion is more likely than others to encourage violence ……..58%
The Muslim religion does not encourage violence more than others …………29%
Don’t know/refused ……..13%

Do you think President Obama is a Muslim?

Yes…………………………………34%
No………………………………… 50%
Don’t know/refused…….. 16%

(Numbers have been rounded)

About the poll

SoonerPoll.com conducted the scientific telephone survey of 753 likely Oklahoma voters Oct. 18-23. The poll includes 384 Democrats, 345 Republicans and 24 independents selected randomly from those who have established a frequent voting pattern.

The margin of error is plus or minus 3.57 percentage points.

The poll is sponsored by the Tulsa World.

Original Print Headline: Sooners have low opinion of Islam

Hearing over Tenn. mosque turns into ‘circus’ of attacks on Islam, vague rumors of Muslim plot

TRAVIS LOLLER

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) — Islam is suddenly on trial in a booming Nashville suburb, where opponents of a new mosque have spent six days in court trying to link it to what they claim is a conspiracy to take over America by imposing restrictive religious rule.

The hearing is supposed to be about whether Rutherford County officials violated Tennessee’s open meetings law when they approved the mosque’s site plan. Instead, plaintiff’s attorney Joe Brandon Jr. has used it as a forum to question whether the world’s second-biggest faith even qualifies as a religion, and to push a theory that American Muslims want to replace the Constitution with extremist Islamic law.

“Do you want to know about a direct connection between the Islamic Center and Shariah law, a.k.a. terrorism?” Brandon asked one witness in a typical line of questioning.

Brandon has repeatedly conflated a moderate version of Shariah with its most extreme manifestations, suggesting that all Muslims must adhere to those interpretations.

At one point, he asked whether Rutherford County Commissioner Gary Farley supported hanging a whip in his house as a warning to his wife and then beating her with it, something Brandon claimed was part of “Shariah religion.”

The commissioner protested that he would never beat his wife.

County attorney Jim Cope objected to the question, saying, “This is a circus.”

The rhetoric has conjured up comparisons to another culture clash that played out in a Tennessee courtroom a hundred miles and nearly a century away from Murfreesboro, a college city of 100,000 that is among the fastest-growing communities in the country. In 1925, the world watched as evolution came under attack at the Scopes monkey trial in Dayton, Tenn.

Even the group that provided the information on Rowash, the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, doesn’t claim that the MySpace postings prove anything about the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro or its members.

Managing director Ray Locker said the Washington group provided the information about Rowash to a Tennessee resident who sent an inquiry about the mosque. He said how such information is used is beyond his group’s control.

“We don’t consider all Muslims to be terrorists,” he said. “The vast majority of American Muslims just want to worship freely, just like members of other religions.”

Chancellor Robert Corlew has consistently given the plaintiffs leeway to present testimony by nonexperts and documents that they cannot prove are legitimate, saying he reserves the right to strike things from the record later.

Corlew, who holds an elected office, has given little explanation for why he has allowed the testimony to stray so far afield.

Since it is not a jury trial, the judge can ultimately disregard anything he deems irrelevant. Several attorneys suggested he may want the plaintiffs, three residents who object to how the mosque came about, to feel they were able to have their say.

That could explain why Corlew has allowed Brandon to repeatedly question witnesses about whether Islam is a legitimate religion — even after the Department of Justice stepped in with a brief stating that it was.

When Farley, the commissioner, told Brandon the federal government defined Islam as a religion, Brandon responded, “Are you one of those people who believes everything the government says? Are you aware the government once said it was OK to own slaves?”

Other faiths have risen to the defense of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The newly formed Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which is composed of prominent Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Southern Baptists and other Protestants, has filed a brief in the case.

It’s good for the mosque’s opponents to get their day in court — testimony is to resume Friday — said the Rev. Joel Hunter, an evanglical megachurch pastor and coalition member.

But it’s “really out there” to question whether Islam is a religion, said Hunter, who leads a Longwood, Fla., congregation called Northland, A Church Distributed.

Seeking to prove that the mosque has terrorist leanings, witnesses have pointed out that board member Mosaad Rowash previously had pro-Hamas postings on his MySpace page, something the mosque’s leaders have not denied. The U.S. government considers Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic political party with an armed wing that has attacked Israel, a terrorist organization.

The political views of Rowash — who hasn’t been called to testify and hasn’t commented publicly — and other board members are “totally irrelevant,” said Deborah Lauter, the director of civil rights for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which sponsors the interfaith coalition.

If all of the members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro were public cheerleaders for Hamas, it would still be illegal to discriminate against them because the First Amendment protects freedom of worship, she said.

That wasn’t the message of witness Frank Gaffney, the president and founder of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

While acknowledging he was not an expert on Shariah law, Gaffney testified that Shariah, and by extension the new mosque, poses a threat to America.

Shariah isn’t really law, at least not law as a universally recognized, codified body of rules and rights, the way Americans have come to know it. Shariah is a set of core principles that most Muslims recognize as well as a series of rulings from religious scholars.

It’s some of those rulings, such as stoning a woman to death for committing adultery, that many non-Muslim Americans find reprehensible. But many Muslims, in America and around the world, are equally horrified by them, said Mohammad Fadel, an assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and an expert on Islamic law.

The mosque project has had problems outside court as well. A sign at the construction site was spray-painted with the words “Not Welcome” and torn in half, and federal investigators have offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in what they say was the arson of a dump truck on the grounds.

Hunter, the Florida pastor, said he studied American history in college and knows that what is happening to Muslims today has happened to other groups in the past.

“Every minority — and Islam is very much a minority in this country right now — has had to struggle for equal rights,” he said. “Islam is facing that now and we will not rest until they have equal rights with other religions.”

The political insane asylum in this country just gets larger and larger.

Allen West Defends Joyce Kaufman (Via Huffington Post)

Tea Party-backed Congressman-elect Allen West (R-Fla.) broke his silence over a controversial chief of staff pick this weekend, aggressively defending his selection of radio show host Joyce Kaufman despite the fact that the decision failed to come to fruition.

Here’s CNN’s report on their discussion with West:

“I was not hiring a talk radio host; I was hiring a very brilliant political mind, someone that has been in South Florida politics for 20 plus years. But unfortunately the liberal left showed that I guess they are threatened and intimidated by me, and so they went into the attack dog mode, which is something that they did the entire time in our campaign,” West told CNN Sunday in an interview at a downtown hotel where incoming freshmen were gathering for orientation.

Reports by the “attack dog” media turned upnumerous incidents in which Kaufman had spoken with incendiary rhetoric against illegal immigrants and Muslims. Soon after the reports, she turned down West’s chief of staff offer.

According to one such glance back at her past of public speaking, Kaufman reportedly said: “If you commit a crime while you’re here, we should hang you and send your body back to where you came from, and your family should pay for it.”

Oddly enough, West seemed to contend that the examination of Kaufman’s past of extreme speech was a sign that liberals had “issues with racism” against him.

“I think the American people are sick of, and that despicable, disgusting action and the way that they went after Joyce Kaufman shows that not only this liberal left has some issues with racism,” West told CNN. “I guarantee you, if I was a black Democratic Congressman-elect, they would not be doing these type of actions, and the fact that they’re attacking a woman like this, that shows me something about sexism and misogynist behavior.”

Kaufman reportedly addressed the incident herself over the weekend, as well. This from theBroward Palm Beach New Times.

“This is not about me,” she said of the threats. “This is the first attack on this man [Allen West].” She called the incident, “an attempt to try to make us look bad,” adding, “We didn’t fall into the trap!” She said she is remembering the individuals who have “demonized” her in the last few days, the columnists, the bloggers, and that she will call them out by name soon. She said she’s already received an offer to write a book about her ordeal.

Glenn Greenwald

Another excellent piece from Glenn Greenwald, candidate for anti-Loon of the year.

Terrorism and civil liberties speech

by Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com)

I’m traveling today and therefore likely unable to post, but last night I spoke at the University of Wisconsin on “Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama.” An article on the event from the Badger Herald is here. The speech — which focused on the meaning (or lack thereof) of the terms “civil liberties” and “terrorism” — was roughly 50 minutes long and can be seen in the video below. There was also an hour-long question-and-answer session that followed which was quite good, and although the video of the Q-and-A portion appears to be not yet available, it will be posted here once it is. Note that I will also be on MSNBC with Dylan Ratigan at roughly 4:00 p.m. today, and on Morning Joe tomorrow morning:

UPDATE:  I neglected to mention that tomorrow from 11:oo am-12:15 p.m., I’ll be at NYU Law School for this event on Terrorism and the First Amendment.  The all-day event is free, open to the public, and features some excellent speakers and panels.

As for last night’s speech at the University of Wisconsin, the 50-minute Q-and-A session that followed my speech is below, and was driven by uniformly excellent questions (and some dissents):

Muneer Awad

Muneer Awad, the Executive Director of CAIR-OK was on the Rachel Maddow show discussing the Oklahoma amendment that seeks to ban Sharia’.

2012: Exploiting Islamophobia to Win Big

by Kelley B. Vlahos, November 09, 2010 (antiwar.com)

Why did Renee Ellmers, a Republican candidate for Congress from North Carolina, produce a campaign ad skewering her opponent for not vociferously opposing the Park 51 Islamic center planned for Manhattan near Ground Zero, over 500 miles away?

Because it was good campaign strategy, that’s why. She presumed that the Newt Gingrich-hyper-generated history of the Muslims conquering the city of Cordoba 13 centuries ago, complete with illustrations and the juxtaposition of Ground Zero, would pay off, particularly among the disgruntled southern conservatives in her district, which covers the central and eastern parts of the state. And she was right – this blatant exploitation of their fears certainly didn’t hurt and might very well have helped her beat seven-term incumbent Democrat Rep. Bob Etheridge in one of the many GOP upsets of the midterm elections.

The offending Google Crescent

When we saw the Google logo this morning that comemorated Veterans day and noticed that the tip of the letter “e” from “Google” remotely resembled 1/5^th of a Crescent moon, we joked about how it would be only a matter of time before some loon individual or group complained to Google about it.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long before we got our loon with a severe case of Park51 syndrome! Danny Gonzalez, the Director of Communication for MAF (Moving America Forward) sent a press release accusing Google of offending American sensitivities and the sanctity of the troops by allowing 1/5^th of the letter “e” to look like 1/5^th of the crescent moon therefore “obviously” making it look like Islam RULES America.

In another case of “You just can’t make this up” here is press release from MAF,

Move America Forward noticed the similarity between the Islamic Crescent moon symbol and the tail of the E in the Google logo sticking out from behind the flag in the search engine’s special Veteran’s Day graphic. Visitors might see this and infer a connection and come to their own conclusions as to what Google’s intentions would be tying Islam to Veteran’s Day. This would be cause for concern and cause widespread confusion and wild theories to fly.

We have received hundreds of emails from our members who are concerned about this and wanted us to take action against Google but for now we are giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying this was probably just a mistake and the artist did not notice the similarity.

If this was a mistake by a graphic artist it should be corrected as soon as possible, so as not to further confuse people. If this was indeed done purposefully to create a link between Veteran’s Day and Islam, then Google has seriously offended many patriotic Americans and veterans of the armed services.

Whether by mistake or design, it SHOULD be corrected as soon as possible and modified so as not to so closely resemble this religious symbol.

For further details, please contact Danny Gonzalez at (714) 926-6189 or Danny@MoveAmericaForward.org (emphasis mine)

I would take Danny up on that offer to contact him. Let him know how much of a threat this really is!

Mayfield mosque plan OK’d months after rejection

MAYFIELD, Ky. — City officials in Mayfield have unanimously approved a request to use a building as a mosque.

The Mayfield Board of Zoning Adjustment approved the petition Tuesday from Khadar Ahmed after rejecting the same request over the summer. Board members said they turned down the August request over concerns about limited parking around the small commercial building near the city’s downtown.

Hundreds showed up for that meeting, but The Paducah Sun reported that no one spoke against the petition Tuesday.

Information from: The Paducah Sun, http://www.paducahsun.com

Muslims in Chicago joined their Christian brethren in condemning and opposing the slaughter of Christians in Iraq. (hat tip: Robert Spencer)

Beyond the Comfort Zone: Passion and Peril at a Pro-Christian Rally

(ahmedrehab.com/blog)

by Ahmed Rehab

Yesterday, CAIR-Chicago staff and interns participated in a rally alongside the Assyrian community of Chicago to condemn violence against Iraqi Christians. The rally was organized in response to the massacre of dozens of Assyrian Christians in Baghdad on October 31st.

It was a tricky decision for us. We knew that there could be anti-Muslim sentiment at the rally that would put is in a precarious position, but we decided that our disdain for the heinous acts of Al Qaeda far exceeded our concern for personal inconvenience.

We decided that the right thing for us to do was to act on our values and our sincere feelings of camaraderie with our fellow human beings in times of anguish. We wanted to raise our voices as Muslims in support of the Assyrian community and against terrorists who purport to act in the name of our faith.

Al Qaeda does not have reverence for any innocent life, including those of Muslims. It is a fact that they have bombed many more Mosques in Iraq than churches.
While we were weary of the possibility that some people at the rally could lash out at us, Muslims-at-large who condemn terrorism, we were not interested in seeing ourselves as victims. The only victims we were prepared to recognize were the 52 innocent souls that were claimed by the recent church bombing, and the many others – Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and otherwise – claimed by terrorism.

And so we set out with signs including “An Attack on Your Church is an Attack on my Mosque,” “American Muslims, Iraqi Christians, One Blood,” “My Brother is an Assyrian,” “We Stand with Iraqi Christians,” and “Muslims for Peace.”

We held our signs up high and marched in solidarity with the predominantly Assyrian Christian crowd.

The reaction we got was mixed.

In an interesting scene that summed up my experience, I was asked by one man if I was a Muslim. I said “Yes, I am.” He then asked, “Am I impure?”

I joked, “I don’t know did you shower this morning?”

He dismissed the joke and asked me if I thought “his blood was impure.” I told him, “why would you expect that, you’ve never met me, I am here supporting you, what about me leads you to ask me such a question?” He told me, “You said you are a Muslim.” I told him, “so what?” He said that Muslims believe this sort of thing. I told him that he had been grossly misinformed, “you’re blood like all innocent blood is holy to me.”

Another man interjected and started yelling that I was “unwanted” there, motioning with his arms for me to leave. As he continued to yell at me, my attention was drawn to something that touched me. A young woman a few yards away leaned down on a stroller she was pushing and started to sob uncontrollably.

At first, I thought it had nothing to do with us but my intuition told me otherwise. I asked here, “what’s wrong, why are you crying?”

She said unable to hold back her tears, “I am so sorry you and your friends have to deal with idiots like that, this man does not represent us, I am so embarrassed. This is so wrong.”

Here I was standing before a stark display of contrasts, extreme animosity on one end and extreme compassion on the other.

In a single powerful moment, I was reminded yet again at the absurdity of those who generalize about any one group of people. Here were two people of the same religion, color, and ethnic background standing side by side rallying for the same cause — and yet they could not be any more different.

I hugged her and tried to comfort her, “Trust me, I know, we have our share of idiots too, everyone has them, most people here have been kind.”

And it was true. Many in the crowd were genuinely happy – almost relieved – to see Muslims standing with them at this rally. Some smiled, some nodded, others simply said “thank you!” It reinforced my feeling that our participation was extremely important.

While there were other incidents – one lady held a cross up to my face and told me I was a “bad Muslim” for condemning terrorism which is “in my Quran”, two people told us that we are going to hell for not accepting Jesus as our Saviour, some guy yelled profanities and was held back by a girl half his size, another called for reciprocal violence – in every single instance, someone else would take a strong stance, telling the others to back off and apologizing.

As we made our way back to the office, we were chased by two girls. “Can I ask you a question?” one of them said. “Can I just give each of you guys a hug?”

We met back in the office for an evaluation.

I learned that my colleagues’ experience mostly mirrored mine.

Despite the bigotry of some, we all felt strong solidarity with most people. We felt as if the Assyrian community, with its good and bad, was our own.

It is of no surprise to any of us that there are some negative feelings among some Arab and Assyrian Christian communities regarding Islam and Muslims. Part of it is understandable to us, given the ugly acts by saboteurs claiming to act in the name of Islam. Part of it is due to the opportunistic work of preachers like father Zakaria Boutros who make a living out of telling Arabic-speaking Christians that Islam is an evil religion. Part of it still is due to the lack of dialogue and engagement between our faith communities, and that was the part we resolved to try to change.

Assyrians have a long and proud history that goes back to one of the earliest civilizations in the world. They live as a religious minority in their indigenous homeland. For centuries, they have coexisted peacefully with their Muslim neighbors. But at other times, especially now, the instability and violence is leaving them feeling frightened for their loved ones and overall vulnerable. Some of them blame Al Qaeda, others demonize all Muslims, and others still blame the United States and its wars.

One thing we must never allow is for the bad amongst us – terrorists, extremists, ideologues of exclusion and hate – to succeed in turning the rest of us against each other. We must condemn them, ostracize them, and disempower them. The way to do that is to strengthen our relations, and stand with one another. That is the only way to spell defeat for the agents of hate.

We must emerge from our comfort zones and stand together as one against all forms of violence, ignorance, and intolerance.

When Christians are attacked, they should NOT have to rally alone. We must rally along with them. When Jews are attacked, they should NOT have to rally alone. When Muslims are attacked, we should NOT have to rally alone.

Voting is now open for the annual Brass Crescent Awards, “that honors the best writers and thinkers of the emerging Muslim blogosphere (aka the Islamsphere).”  LoonWatch and its writers were nominated for multiple award categories, including Best Blog, Best Non-Muslim Blogger, and Best Writer.

We issue a fatwa declaring the obligation for you to vote for us in all three categories: LoonWatch for Best Blog and Best Non-Muslim Blogger, and Danios of LoonWatch for Best Writer.  Cast your vote here:

The Seventh Annual Brass Crescent Awards

Allow me to be a bit sensationalist and over-the-top with this:  our site is one of the finalists for the best Islam-related blog in the entire world. I think this really speaks to how effective our site has been.  Our opponents have tried (quite unsuccessfully) to minimize our importance, hoping that people will ignore us.  But the Muslim masses have spoken, and have given us a clear mandate and their vote of confidence.

I was nominated for Best Writer.  Aside from basking in the glory of this and using it to stroke my already overblown ego, this has some serious importance.  Robert Spencer, king pin of Islamophobia on the internets, issued an open challenge to debate any “Muslim or liberal” spokesmen.  When I accepted his debate challenge, he issued a “haughty refusal” and tried to minimize my importance.  Does a nomination as the Best (Islam-related) Writer in the WHOLE WORLD, as voted for by the Muslim masses themselves, qualify me as relevant enough?

Some random haters comment on our website, saying that they will debate me, asking why should Robert Spencer accept to debate me when I don’t accept to debate them?  They try to strike some equivalence between themselves and myself.  Yet, there is absolutely no correlation.  Nobody reads the random haters’ comment rants (half the time not even myself).  On the other hand, so many people read my writing (and that of other writers on LoonWatch) that I (and our site) have been nominated for BEST (ISLAM-RELATED) WRITER (AND BLOG) IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD.

Robert Spencer is widely known as the most prolific anti-Islam blogger, and I am in the running for Best (Islam-related) Writer.  It only makes sense then that he and I are meant for each other, and that he and I should debate each other.  Shouldn’t the Best Anti-Islam Blogger and the Best Islam-related Writer not duke it out (proverbially speaking)?  Why does Robert Spencer agree to debate so many Muslim and liberal spokesmen out there but refuse to debate the one who is in the running for Best (Islam-related) Writer, at least in the eyes of the Muslim masses?  We can only conclude that he is scared to debate me.

Anyways, I’d like to thank everyone for nominating us.  We do appreciate the support.  Go cast your vote (don’t vote twice since it tracks IP addresses and invalidates cheaters), and let the best blog win (unless of course it’s not ours).

Jews on First has an excellent report on the CUFI Conference that is a must read.

Inside CUFI’s 2010 Washington “Summit”

Christians United for Israel’s (CUFI) fifth annual Washington Summit, held this past July 20-22, 2010, highlighted once again the persistence and institutionalization of CUFI as the American Christian Zionist organization. As with its previous Summits, it was repeatedly emphasized that t

he support and love that CUFI and its members have for Israel and the Jewish people – to be sure a very particular kind of support – was based on the Biblical mandate of Christians to do just that. Of course, this is not to be dismissed as afalse reason for its support. Indeed the proliferation and popularity of the “prosperity gospel” in contemporary conservative Protestantism has ensured that the repeated refrain of Genesis 12:3 (I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you) resonates among the (Christian) leaders of CUFI and its members. This is because it funnels the belief in personal “blessings” (which are almost always considered in financial terms) and national blessings (the furtherance of a conservative social agenda and American global dominance) into the ultimate investment: Israel.

This point was emphasized within the first hour of the opening night of the conference by Diana Hagee (wife of Rev. John Hagee) who pointed out that: “we need to spend more time praying for Israel and less time praying for our personal needs. Life is going to get a whole lot better for us, and trust me, all those other things (one’s personal desires) are going to be taken care of [if we bless Israel correctly].” While not false reasons for support (irrespective of how misguided they might be), it was evident that the repeated invocation also served a didactic function for those in attendance – many of whom, as in previous years, cited the importance of Israel in the end-times as reasons for their support – to let them know how they should be responding to questions regarding their support for Israel.

Despite this, the subtle invocations of symbolic eschatological language and logic were evident, not only in the words of the speakers, but also in the jubilant responses from the audience when such symbolism was used. And really, in the context of CUFI, symbolism is all that is needed to convey the eschatological underpinnings of its goals and their mission, despite the sustained refrain to the contrary. This is because the particular end-times message has been around long enough and is more comprehensively conveyed in other mediums that allusion is sufficient to engender the desired understanding from the audience, while not alienating those who don’t understand or share the same beliefs.

The use of symbolic language, in a particularly religious context was most evident in the opening session of prayer, in which attendees were instructed on how to effectively pray for Israel, and taught the purpose of their mission. Significantly, the opening prayer session was used as a moment to consecrate the conference and the role of attendees as God’s divine agents at a particular point in history (the history of the future), and that they would be blessed accordingly for serving God in this way. In Diana Hagee’s words: “God use me, ’til I draw my last breath or better yet till the trumpet sounds!” (That is, until the rapture occurs).

Diana Hagee further elaborated CUFI’s prophetic mission when she likened her husband to a modern day prophet:

Watchmen can see into the distance, and there have been three people in history with this prophetic power. Theodore Herzl – although being an unlikely candidate for God’s will (as a secular Jew) fulfilled it (and it was made clear that this was concomitant with the help of early Christian Zionists) by pushing for the creation of modern Israel. The second person was Ze’ev Jabotinsky for calling Jews out of Europe prior to the Holocaust. The third is John Hagee. Four years ago, John Hagee called together over 400 leaders to start CUFI and at the time things were good; we had a Christian who supported Israel in the White House and there was little trouble. But he said that in its fifth year we “will know why we are here.” And now we are in our fifth year and we know why we are here.

The implication of this – which was not lost on the audience – was that now, the Obama Administration is serving the cause of evil. It is applying further pressure on the Israeli administration to negotiate peace with its Palestinian neighbors, while also attempting to reach out to the Arab and Muslim world – two things which are themselves considered to be harbingers of the end-times because of the “false peace” brought about by the antichrist, and also the establishment of a one-world government, to which international cooperation and diplomacy are frequently portrayed as precursors.

The opening night of the conference coincided with the start of Tisha B’av, the Jewish commemoration and mourning of the destruction of the first and second Temples. It is difficult to discern whether or not Tisha B’av was taken into account prior to the organization of the conference. When asking whether attendees knew what it was, Diana Hagee claimed a willful ignorance, relating that when Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg used the words “Tisha B’av”, she didn’t know what it was and thought he could have just as easily been “ordering a sandwich.” Although the comment was meant to be light-hearted it seemed to betray a distinct lack of respect for Jewish tradition from an organization that emphatically portrays itself as an embodiment of modern philo-Semitism (admiration for Jews). Nevertheless, the customary reading of the Book of Lamentations proceeded to the delight of the Christian attendees. This commemoration of Tisha B’av at the conference seemed to perform another function: It further consecrated the event, as an historical one of the coming together of Christians and Jews, but more importantly it defined the Jewish speakers at the conference as “real Jews,” conferring to them a much greater sense of legitimacy and authority because of their religious devotion. Such adulation is in keeping with our report and reflections on the 2008 Summit (which can be found here.)

The religious and motivational significance of this opening night should not be underestimated. It set the tone for the rest of the conference, which was slowly emptied of overt theological reference to focus on politics and the more practical reasons that Christians need to be supporting Israel, instilling the belief that they have been brought up by God for a mission “at such a time as this.” It conveyed to the Christian attendees that they were “walking in the mantle of Esther” – a reference to Queen Esther who saved all the Jews from annihilation, as celebrated during the Jewish holiday of Purim. Importantly for today, the parallel is rendered even more effective due to the fact that the Book of Esther is set in ancient Persia – modern Iran – the current thorn in the side of neoconservatives and also a country with a prominent role in the eschatology of Christian Zionists. Therefore the neoconservative message they received at the various tutorials during the proceeding days became imbued with a sacred meaning despite the very worldly hegemonic goals of those espousing them.

Israel 101: The Basics of the Arab Israeli Conflict
At one of the educational breakout sessions entitled: Israel 101: The Basics of the Arab Israeli Conflict, Gary Bauer opened the session, highlighting the salience of fear and emotion used to garner support and to frame issues within a wider cosmic battle by using his time to speak explicitly about 9/11. The central thrust of Bauer’s argument, was that “the attackers on 9/11, thepeople causing havoc throughout the Middle East were not created by poverty or social injustice, they grew out of radical Islam.” Palestinians were further painted with a broad brush as extremists, while strains of thought that gave the Palestinians a sense of humanity were similarly disparaged when Bauer later noted that:

It is has become an accepted fact among America’s elites that the great majority of the Palestinian people want to live in peace, side by side with the Israeli people – I’m sorry, somebody needs to prove it to me… The reality, ladies and gentlemen is this: evil men, who worship death, they brag about. Evil men who worship death, at this very moment are planning for you and for me, and for Israelis and for free men and women all over the world, sorrows unimaginable to us.

He later went on to state that he does not believe “any peace process will work in the Middle East, until this evil philosophy has been defeated. And then – and only then – Israel will be secure, America will be secure, and we, thank God, will have avoided another dark age.” This statement furthered a theme that was evident throughout the conference, which began with the divine mandate given to CUFI by its leaders on the opening night: America and Israel are engaged in a cosmic battle between good and evil, the success of which must be ensured to continue to curry God’s favor for the West. Moreover, it subtly shows the continued hostility that CUFI has towards the peace process, preferring to focus on defeating “this evil philosophy”, which appeared to be code for an unabated continuity of the “war on terrorism.”

Bauer was followed by AIPAC’s Jeff Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn opened his speech using language that spoke directly to the eschatological hopes and dreams of many Christian Zionists, describing Israel as “not just a Jewish issue, it is [also] a Christian issue, it is an American issue, it is an issue of importance to the Western world – and I think ultimately, it is an issue of great importance to all of civilization.” That is to say, Mendelsohn was engaging Christian Zionists in their belief that Israel is the key to end-times prophecy and the place where God’s millennial kingdom will be established after the tribulation; it is the epicenter where civilization will continue after the current world has been rid of evil.

The Iranian Threat
As in previous years enmity towards Iran maintained a strong foothold throughout the conference. During the second breakout session, The Iranian Threat, self-described CUFI “repeat offender” and former Reagan official, Frank Gaffney, described Iran as being “probably within months of operationalizing” its “incipient nuclear capabilities.” Gaffney then told the audience that Iran could use one of these weapons against the United States in a “catastrophic attack that could literally destroy the country” through the use of electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a favorite line that John Hagee has also towed in his numerous books on prophecy. 9/11 was again intoned to remind attendees of the threat purportedly facing the United States and to link Iran to those events, whenGaffney described jihad as “the violent form of terror that we have all come to know particularly since 9/11 but that actually, arguably, was first waged against us back in 1979 by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

While reminding the audience of this ominous threat, Gaffney quickly altered his focus to the more subtle (and potentially more fear-inducing) threat of “stealth jihad” and the notion that Iran and the rest of the “Muslim world” were unequivocally bent on establishing a global theocracy that would rule over each one of us.

The idea that Iran and other more generic threats from Islam were “stealing a march on us” through this stealth jihad was discussed in terms of the availability of “Shariah compliant finance” as an insidious threat to our way of life: “It is afflicting freedom loving people not just in the Middle East, but Europe, Canada, Latin America, and yes here in the United States as well. We must do what we can to save our country, to save Israel, from these assorted threats. We need to be informed about this one most especially.”

The “Ground Zero Mosque” was highlighted as the most ominous characterization of this threat, and elicited the most emotional response from the audience. In Gaffney’s words:

Right now, there is a fight brewing over whether we will accede to the latest assertion of Shariah’s dominance of our ultimate, inevitable submission to this program, within what I like to call ‘spitting distance’ of what is arguably for most Americans today, the most sacred ground in this country. I’m talking about Ground Zero. There, in keeping with the traditions of Shariah…. adherents to Shariah, people who have made it absolutely explicit they intend to bring it to America, are now proposing to build within 600 feet within the World Trade Center site, a 13-story building, $100 million for Shariah…. It is part of this supremacist agenda of symbolically and for all time demonstrating the triumph of this Islamic program, on our most sacred soil. I say to you ladies and gentlemen, it is not about faith; Shariah is a totalitarian, political program. It is about conquest. It is about the destruction of freedom of religion, and indeed all civil liberties … those who adhere to it are our absolutely immutable enemies! They must be defeated!

Clifford May, president of the conservative “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies”, also appealed to the attendees’ belief in their divine mission, letting them know during the opening of his talk that they were “doing God’s work.” His talk, followed a similar line to Gaffney’s, warning the audience of the goals the Iranian Mullahs’ desires to bring the Western World under the control of an Islamic Caliphate. May further entrenched Gaffney’s point that “once shariah get its nose, its camel’s nose, in the tent, the beast will follow.” May then spent most of his talk, traversing quickly between statements by Iranian officials and other leaders in the Muslim world about their purportedly unified effort to bring down the West.

Controversial and incendiary comments about a pre-emptive strike on Iran – which many ChristianZionists see as a catalyst for an attack on Israel purportedly prophesied in Ezekiel 38-39 – that have been made by John Hagee at past conferences were notably absent from this year’s Summit. However, May was able to effectively promote the idea by putting the words into the mouth of the ambassador for the United Arab Emirates, as May paraphrased him:

We cannot live with a nuclear Iran. By we [the ambassador] apparently meant the more moderate countries of the Middle East. He went on to add that if sanctions failed to stop Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons military force will be the only option left, and it must not be ruled out.

In describing the Iranian threat of nuclear capabilities, Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also created a sense of urgency. Like the speakers before him, Satloff used some vague terms that are familiar to Christian Zionists regarding the end times, suggesting that the short time needed for Iran to achieve nuclear capability meant that it was “five minutes to midnight.” Anyone familiar with John Hagee’s book From Daniel to Doomsday or other literature on prophecy will know that certain prophetic events are often demarcated based on their length of time from midnight.

To Satloff’s credit he did speak on the importance of the Green movement in Iran and the reality that the country itself is divided, rather than portraying the country as a unified force where the enitre population seeks to destroy the West and Israel through any means necessary. However, this assertion was undercut by Gaffney later during the question and answer period when Gaffney argued that: “Time is running out to support the Greens. We had best be about the business of preparing for military action,” to which the crowd responded far more enthusiastically than they did to Satloff’s suggestion of the potential to reach out and help the Green movement.

Lobbying Congress
During the “Civics 101″ session CUFI’s Executive Director, David Brog took time to steer attendees down a particular path: appeal to American civil religion, but don’t reference your explicit beliefs. He instructed attendees to “tell your congressman that you are a Christian and you are here for onereason and one reason only: Israel…. It’s a Christian issue, and more importantly, it’s an American issue.” Something that again subtly speaks to the belief among Christian Zionists that their, and America’s, failure to support Israel in the way that CUFI defines support will result in divine punishment for America.

Intent on ensuring that an effective and professional group was representing CUFI to their congressmen and women, while also understanding the true issues that motivate CUFI members, Brog was even more specific:

Please stay on the issue of Israel…. If you care about the issue of life, that’s fantastic, but come another day. If you care about the issue of marriage, that’s important. Call them another day. We are here for one issue and one issue only. [tell them] ‘I’m your constituent, I’m a Christian, I’m here for Israel.’ Please don’t stray from the talking points…. When in Rome, do as the Romans do … it is important to speak to policy makers in a language that they understand, and that is the language of policy. Our faith informs and inspires our activism. We’re all here because of our faith. But with sadly limited exceptions, most of those guys on Capitol Hill, don’t speak the language of faith. With sadly limited exceptions, most of the guys on the Hill are driven by policy considerations, not considerations of faith. So, I ask you this quite seriously. When you go up to a congressman, and you start quoting the Bible, quoting the scripture, talking about a vision you had that’s been very important in your life … they just don’t speak that language, and they’re not going to be swayed by that language. So unless you know your member well, and you know he’s a man of God, we strongly and respectfully request you speak to them in a language that they will understand, the language of policy.”

While asking members not to express the specifics of their faith openly, Brog quickly emphasized that he understands and shares the views of the attendees, speaking inclusively, he stated: “We are here because of our faith, but we’re doing something important for God if we get these men of power to stand with Israel … let’s speak their language, that’s how we will best serve God tomorrow.”

Diana Hagee also made a brief appearance during the session as a way to remind attendees of their prophetic mission as a parallel to Brog’s more practical requests: “we are chosen for such a time as this to be watchmen on the wall. We’re all building our portion of the wall; we’re all doing a good work. We have a hammer in one hand and a sword in the other….”

Night To Honor Israel
While Brog emphasized the importance of speaking in the language of policy, rather than prophecy, to the elected officials,speakers at the culminating Night to Honor Israel reversed the trend and reinvoked the symbolic, eschatological language that opened the Summit.

As in previous years, Sentator Joseph Lieberman referred to John Hagee as a “man of God” just like Moses. Similarly, Gary Bauer, after again disparaging the catastrophic threats awaiting Israel and the West proclaimed, “It is for such a time as this, that John Hagee has become a watchman on the wall for Israel who never sleeps.”

During his speech John Hagee quickly divided the world into two groups: “those who support Israel, and those who don’t. There is no middle ground.” Hagee continued to claim, “The free world is at war with radical Islam. Without victory there is no survival. Not for America, not for Israel.”

Immediatly following Hagee’s speech, his wife Diana took the stage to put pressure on attendees for financial donations. “Our future does not depend on our economy,” stated Diana, “our future depends on our obedience to the living God. And if we give, and if we honor God, we can trust him to honor us. Our cause is Israel. Our cause is just. Our cause is right. Our cause is good, and our cause is holy.”

Critical Reflections on the 2010 Washington Summit
Throughout the conference a number of observations can be made. Firstly, now in its fifth year, CUFI has evolved and seems to have tightened it grip on some of the more stark language that can be easily attacked by its critics. Violent language calling for preemtive strikes on Iran were softened, and terms like “Islamofascism” – favorites of John Hagee in other mediums and previous Summits – were notably absent. Even Frank Gaffney who is openly hostile towards Islam corrected an attendee who referred to Islam as “Islamofascism” preferring to call it jihad. However, the emphasis on these issues and the preferred action to be taken against them remained the same as in previous years. There was also a strong sense that despite CUFI’s obvious purpose being the support of Israel, the interest among many of the Summit attendees was the salvation of America. Standing with Israel was always framed as an “American Issue.” Senator Joseph Lieberman, after once again comparing John Hagee to Moses, stated “Support of Israel is as American as apple pie and baseball.” It is this issue that helps confirm the eschatological worldview of participants and leaders as well. Their absolute belief in Genesis 12:3, combined with a belief in the imminence of divine judgement propels them to support Israel, ultimately it would seem for many, to ensure America survives.

US judge bars Oklahoma measure that targets Sharia law (AFP)

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has granted a temporary block to a new law approved last week in Oklahoma that bars state courts from considering international or Islamic law, after opponents challenged it on constitutional grounds.

The amendment to the state’s constitution, approved by over 70 percent of voters in mid-term elections, was to be temporarily stayed after the judge ruled Monday in favor of challenger Muneer Awad, a Muslim resident of the state and local chapter head for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“The amendment it will make once certified is a gross transgression of the establishment clause,” Awad said in his lawsuit, asserting the measure violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s clause that bars the government from making laws “respecting the establishment of religion.”

His lawsuit stated the measure is aimed at ensuring “Oklahoma?s courts are not used to ‘undermine those founding (Judeo-Christian) principles,’” and goes even further to denigrate Awad’s standing in the community by transforming the state constitution “into an enduring condemnation of plaintiff?s faith.”

The amendment, the lawsuit added, “singles out plaintiff’s faith, but no other faith, for special restrictions.”

CAIR, which is gearing up for a full hearing into the law on November 22, said Oklahoma’s move would prevent courts in the state from “from implementing international agreements, honoring international arbitrations, honoring major international human rights treaties.”

The measure was one of hundreds of referendums held across the country in the November 2 including votes on cannabis legalization and puppy farms. It was specifically intended to harm “an unpopular minority,” Awad said in his lawsuit.

“The goal was to stigmatize Islam by establishing in the public?s mind that Islam is something foreign and to be feared,” he said.

YoungTurks Take:

Colbert interviews Reza Aslan on his newest work. Does he give a possible headnod to Loonwatch by saying “Mooslims”?

Colbert: “Is there a difference between Moslem and Muslim?”

Aslan: “There’s a difference between Moslem and Mooslim.”

Robert Spencer is lost

Robert Spencer had a “debate” at Thomas More College recently with a former professor of his, Catholic Theologian and apologist Peter Kreeft. It was quite evident that the two were friends and they were quite chummy with one another, in fact it was pointed out by Kreeft that this wasn’t a debate as much as it was a “dialogue” or “discussion.”

The Debate:

The resolution being debated was that “the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.” Of course yours truly Robert Spencer, affirmed the resolution, defending it with the usual canard of ‘any Muslim who truly practices his faith is potentially dangerous and a threat to society.’ The “debate” was interesting as it exposed even more vividly the inherent biases and prejudices held by Spencer, the deep lack of understanding and knowledge of Islamic theology, belief and history as well as his limited command of the Arabic language.

Kreeft who didn’t provide much of a challenge to Spencer and who showed brightly his Ultra-Conservative Catholic belief essentially agreed with 95% of what Spencer was saying. While it is clear that Kreeft regards Muslim devotion to, and confidence in their faith in high esteem he nevertheless believes Islam is a “primitive,” “defective,” and “false” religion that has caused “more bloodshed” than Christianity.

Instead of challenging Spencer’s consistent distortions of Islam and Islamic teaching (he deferred to Spencer as an “expert on Islam”) he pivoted the argument to say that the greater threat to Catholicism is the Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution.

Surprisingly, Spencer agrees with Professor Kreeft regarding the Enlightenment being a threat to Catholicism though he didn’t explicitly say that Islam was less of a threat. I can see how Ultra-Conservative Catholics may rail against the Enlightenment, it was the era which saw a secularist revolt in the name of Reason against the Catholic Church and which led to formulas for the Separation of Church and State, it also witnessed the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in the temporal realm.

However, it is quite hypocritical for Spencer to agree with such a premise, especially considering Spencer claims to be a defender of the West. Agreeing that the Enlightenment is bad is like saying that the Separation of Church and State is bad, or that Constitutional government is bad, all the things that Spencer claims to champion! (but which we have frequently shown is just a front for his own anti-Freedom supremacist beliefs).

A few other points were likewise revealed in this debate:

Spencer’s terrible command of Arabic and very poor articulation of Arabic. This has been revealed on other occasions such as when Danios slammed Spencer and one of his JihadWatch groupies‘ faulty understanding of the word dhimmi, which Spencer was trying to pass off as meaning “guilty people.”

Spencer said during the course of the dialogue on the topic of Islamic views of marriage that,

In Islamic marriage the woman is essentially chattel, and actually the word for marriage in Islam is an obscenity in Arabic, I am not making this up, the theological word for marriage in Islam is not a word that people say in polite company.

(Gasps from the crowd)

It’s because its a very degraded idea.

In this instance Spencer says that the theological word for marriage in Islam is actually an obscenity! A ridiculous notion that underscores the willful and deliberate ignorance of the so-called “scholar of Islam.”

The word that Spencer is likely referring to is “Nikah” which simply means “marriage.” In claiming that “Nikah” is an obscene word that cannot be uttered in polite company, “scholar” Robert Spencer is committing a laughable gaffe that underscores yet again the shallow nature of his knowledge of Arabic and Islamic terminology. He is confusing a classical Arabic word Nikah, with the colloquial word (“Neik”), a different word, just because they sound similar. This would be like Spencer suggesting that Richard is an obscene word, because a colloquial subtract “Dick” is used as a derogatory word for penis. Well, here Spencer is arguing that Richard is an obscene word. That’s your scholar.

Also, when Spencer attempted to say Arabic words such as madhab, nasikh, mansukh, etc. it sounded like an Arabic 101 student struggling with pronunciation, it was quite embarrassing.

Kreeft, in one of the rare instances where he pushed back against his buddy Spencer said,

Kreeft: Doesn’t the Qur’an say that you can only have four wives if you respect them and treat them equally?

Spencer: It doesn’t say respect all of them, I have it here, it says you can have four wives if you treat them all equally, in other words if you treat them all the same, if you’re beastly to all of them then you can have them. It doesn’t say anything about respect.

Here Spencer reveals more of his biases and readings of his own prejudice into Islamic text. He believes the Qur’an calls for men to treat their wives “beastly.” Can he provide us a quote, a single verse that says anything remotely near that claim? In fact his claims are belied by the fact that the Qur’an and Islamic teaching specifically call for love, harmony, and respect between a husband and wife.

Take this verse (30:21),

“And amongst His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you love and compassion. Indeed in that are signs for a people who contemplate.”

or this one (2:228),

“And they (women) have rights similar to those (men) over them in kindness…”

or this (2:187),

“They (women) are your garments and you are their garments.”

or take the saying of Prophet Muhammad,

“The best amongst you, are the best for their wives”

So much for all that chattel nonsense.

More disturbing was when the question shifted from one in which Islamic belief is questioned to questioning the mere presence of Muslims in the West.

In reply to a commenter/questioner from the audience who basically asked “what will we do with Muslims in the West, since they are in our midst now,” Spencer replied,

Anyone who professes the Islamic faith, if he delves into the teachings of his own religion, he can end up being someone who is very dangerous to us. Now that doesn’t mean that people should be round up into camps and such but we need to enforce our own laws about sedition and formulate some sane immigration policies and recognize that this is an ideological conflict and not a problem of racism.

Oh thank heavens! At least Spencer isn’t calling for camps! Though his buddy Michelle Malkin does. Muslims need to *just* be aware that for merely professing to follow Islam they can be convicted of sedition! That is really the import of what Spencer is saying, he is calling for Muslims to be locked up and denied entry to the USA. Very Geert Wilders-esque.

The moderator asked the horrid question earlier to Kreeft and Spencer,

Couldn’t we learn from Muslims what we need to learn from reading their books but nevertheless energetically fighting their attempts to assert themselves in American society, restricting their entrance into our countries and just generally fighting political Islam, protecting our own religious freedom and our own political freedom by aggressively imposing our own values on our own societies. In other words, not permitting them polygamy, not permitting them honor killing, or wife beating or any of the other aspect of Sharia that they are asserting. In other words couldn’t we get all this from your book, your book tells us what we need to gain from Islam, and so, ok, fine, they can go home now?

(Laughter)

The framing of the question is terrible, which Muslim or Muslim group is asserting Sharia? Who is calling for polygamy and honor killings? Then look at the condescending way in which the moderator asks “why don’t we tell them to go home now?”

So I ask you who is for freedom? Democracy? Who is viewing the “other” as foreign and not belonging?

Kreeft who is supposed to be the “counter” replied,

the long and complete and nuanced version of my answer to your question is ‘yes.’

Spencer answered the question without any caveats simply saying,

yes.

Spencer also asserted that there are “20-30,000 polygamous groups of Muslims in the USA” but he didn’t provide any independent evidence. This is in fact all conjecture to further the “stealth-Muslims-in-our-midst-who-are-trying-to-advance-creeping-Sharia’ conspiracy theory.”

To cap it all off a Thomas More student who is joining the Israeli Army said,

You’re probably familiar with the supremacy clause in the Qur’an, “In order to honor Allah you must kill all the infidels, first the Saturdays and then the Sundays.”

Spencer replied accurately (he had no choice) for once, thereby sparing himself further ridicule from us that “such a verse doesn’t exist in the Qur’an,” but unable to help himself he went on to say,

There is a hadith, it isn’t in the Qur’an that says the Muslim must kill the Jews, and the Jews hide behind trees and the trees cry out and say, O’ Muslim there is a Jew behind me come and kill him, that is an authenticated hadith, and so it is considered to be a laudable practice for a Muslim to kill a Jew because it is something that hastens the coming of the end times in which all things will be consummated, but its not specifically in the Quran like that.

Unbelievable. A colossal falsity, an absurd statement that ventures on the ridiculous and is certainly slanderous. In this instance Spencer is attempting to advance the notion that a tenant of Islam is that the End Times can be hastened and brought quicker by killing Jews.

In fact, Spencer should focus more on his Christian brethren in the Evangelical movement who believe they can hasten the second coming of Christ by planting the seeds of the second Armageddon.

Such a theological precept doesn’t exist in Orthodox Islam. In fact it runs counter to Islamic theology to say that one can hasten the End Times, and if anyone were to claim they could they would be immediately considered a heretic. However, I will deal with this claim in more depth in a future article. Suffice it to say that it is a despicable statement that underscores Spencer’s profound ignorance of Islamic theology and belief.

John Feffer wrote an excellent piece on the politics underpinning he “misunderstanding of Islam.”

The Politics Behind Misunderstanding Islam

John Feffer: The Myths Underpinning Islamophobia Share a Long History

The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut down the finest soldiers in Charlemagne’s command, including his brave nephew Roland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy, Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.

The Song of Roland, an eleventh century rendering in verse of an eighth century battle, is a staple of Western Civilization classes at colleges around the country. A “masterpiece of epic drama,” in the words of its renowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for students before they delve into readings on the Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.

The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood. The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all. In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basques furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emerged from a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. Only later, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the First Crusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of an emerging cross-against-crescent holy war.

Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal “clash of civilizations” between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammed. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has, in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with as enemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in southern France.

Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washington performed a similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled “godless communists” for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an attempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran into epic struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces of evil. In recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again by portraying Arab nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalists when we invaded Iraq and prepared to topple the regime in Syria.

Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A clearly Christian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant number of Americans. The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closet fundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become an extremist “mosque at Ground Zero” in the TV appearances, political speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing activists.

This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself — as if Ann Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity — comes at a somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic rhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001, had been on the wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current American president had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the controversial acronym GWOT, or “Global War on Terror.”

All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on an ugly chapter in our history. Yet it’s as if we remain fixed in the eleventh century in a perpetual battle of “us” against “them.” Like the undead rising from their coffins, our previous “crusades” never go away.  Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of the millennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over and the third has been rhetorically reduced to “overseas contingency operations.” The Crusades, which finally petered out in the seventeenth century, continue to shape our global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements of the anti-communism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist adversary. And the Global War on Terror, which President Obama quietly renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into the wars that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim that they are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. However, what really keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-looking Islamic fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and global influence of modern, mainstream Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grappling with modernity abound, from Turkey’s new foreign policy and Indonesia’s economic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of providing reassurance, however, these trends only incite Islamophobes to intensify their battles to “save” Western civilization.

As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness — and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan — Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life. Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.

The Crusades Continue

With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of both harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases, an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos of spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. What makes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency to lump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then to exaggerate how threatening they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible for at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.

Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslim fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasists about a “global caliphate” continue to plot attacks on perceived enemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan’s Taliban and Somalia’s al-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. But Islamophobes confuse these small parts with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.

Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Our irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened in the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of the Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherently violent, Muslims want to take over the world, and Muslims can’t be trusted.

The myth of Islam as a “religion of the sword” was a staple of Crusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim leaders and armies — and there were some — rarely rivaled the slaughters of the Crusaders, who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable bloodbath.

“The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors,” writes Christopher Tyerman in God’s War. “Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred.” Jerusalem’s Jews suffered a similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph ‘Umar put no one to the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged “no compulsion in religion.”

This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam “teaches violence,” televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimedin 2005. “The Koran teaches violence and most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in violence,” was the way Major General Jerry Curry (U.S. Army, ret.), who served in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, put it.

The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did indeed imagine an ever-growing Dar-al-Islam (House of Islam). By the time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of desires when it came to extending the Pope’s authority to every corner of the globe. Even that early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam through conversion.

Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in lower Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab: “This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” writes right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who made the “Ground Zero Mosque” into a media obsession. “Islam is a religion with a very political agenda,” warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. “The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule the world.”
These two myths — of inherent violence and global ambitions — led to the firm conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a twelfth century translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophet Mohammad this way: “Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradict yourself.” The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on any Christian who took up the possibility of coexistence with Islam. Pope Gregory, for instance, believed that the thirteenth century Crusader Frederick II was the Anti-Christ himself because he developed close relationships with Muslims.

For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. As for Muslims at home, “American Muslims must face their either/or,” writes the novelist Edward Cline, “to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet, sanctioning fifth column.” Even American Muslims in high places, like Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said, “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”

These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almost a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O’Reilly was neatly channeling this Crusader mindset when he asserted recently that “the Muslim threat to the world is not isolated. It’s huge!”  When Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered “What I’m here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God’s kingdom,” he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.

But O’Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and expansionist mind-set of today’s Western crusaders, were also invoking a more recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.

The Totalitarian Myth

In 1951, the CIA and the emerging anti-communist elite, including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for Freedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe. The language of this “crusade” was intentionally religious. It reached out to “peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization,” living under the “crushing weight of a godless dictatorship.” In its call for the liberation of the communist world, it echoed the nearly thousand-year-old crusader rhetoric of “recovering” Jerusalem and other outposts of Christianity.

In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel. However unconsciously, the old crusader myths about Islam translated remarkably easily into governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets and their allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted with their rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization, and fought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr themselves for the greater ideological good.
Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed with fighting this new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islam as a weapon. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil’s Game, the U.S. funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan was only one part of the anti-communist crusade in the Islamic world. To undermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might align themselves with the Soviet Union, the United States (and Israel) worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, that era’s mind-set — and so many of the Cold Warriors sporting it — never went with it. The prevailing mythology was simply transferred back to the Islamic world.  In anti-communist theology, for example, the worst curse word was “totalitarianism,” said to describe the essence of the all-encompassing Soviet state and system.

According to the gloss that early neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in her book Dictatorships and Double Standards, the West had every reason to support right-wing authoritarian dictatorships because they would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships, which, unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable of internal reform.

According to the new “Islamo-fascism” school — and its acolytes like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly, Pamela Geller — the fundamentalists are simply the “new totalitarians,” as hidebound, fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a more sophisticated treatment of the Islamo-fascist argument, check out Paul Berman, a rightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to demonstrate that “moderate Muslims” are fundamentalists in reformist clothing.

These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as an undifferentiated mass — in spirit, a modern Soviet Union — where Arab governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simply fail to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments have launched their own attacks on radical Islam. The sharp divides between the Iranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and the Palestinians, between Shi’ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among Kurds all disappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists generally failed to distinguish between the Communist hardliner Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are “immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world,” rather than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliers or the Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, something flawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence done in its name — a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold Warriors made about communism.

All of this, of course, represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda’s arguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during the Cold War, hardliners reinforce one another.

The persistence of Crusader myths and their transposition into a Cold War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so many misconceptions about Islam. They don’t, however, explain the recent spike in Islamophobia in the U.S. after several years of relative tolerance. To understand this, we must turn to the third unfinished war: the Global War on Terror or GWOT, launched by George W. Bush.

Fanning the Flames

President Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during his campaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously avoided mosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of Muslim identity in his past.

His opponents, of course, did just the opposite. They emphasized his middle name, Hussein, challenged his birth records, and asserted that he was too close to the Palestinian cause.  They also tried to turn liberal constituencies — particularly Jewish-American ones — against the presumptive president. Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christian
fundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the Anti-Christ of the Islamophobes.

Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policies toward the Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with his plan to remove combat troops from Iraq (with some important exceptions). He has attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and to negotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind of pressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of U.S. arms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairoin June 2009, he also reached out rhetorically to the Islamic world at a time when he was also eliminating the name “Global War on Terror” from the government’s vocabulary.

For Muslims worldwide, however, GWOT itself continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan. The CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. U.S. Special Forces now operate in 75 countries, at least 15 more than during the Bush years. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition, and assassination remains an active part of Washington’s toolbox.

The civilians killed in these overseas contingency operations are predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated are mostly Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result, the rhetoric of “crusaders and imperialists” used by al-Qaeda falls on receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, the favorability rating of the United States in the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further since Obama took office — in Egypt, from 41% in 2009 to 31% percent now; in Turkey, from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan, from 13% to 8%.

The U.S. wars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have produced much of this disaffection and, as political scientist Robert Pape has consistently argued, most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops and targets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking — just as it was for Americans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M. Junaid Levesque-Alam astutely pointed out, “When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger and hatred rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblical verses?”

And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflect a rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they mean exactly that). “Numerous polls that we have conducted,” writes pollster Stephen Kull, “as well as others by the World Values Survey and Arab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for democracy, for human rights, and for an international order based on international law and a strong United Nations.”

In other words, nine years after September 11th a second spike in Islamophobia and in home-grown terrorist attacks like that of the would-be Times Square bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures: American critics of Obama’s foreign policy believe that he has backed away from the major civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim world see Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of Bush-era policies of war and occupation.

Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise of fundamentalism over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towards violence, the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the cliché that Islam has held countries back from political and economic development. “Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslim countries have developed more democratic institutions, with fairly run elections, energized and competitive political parties, greater civil liberties, or better legal protections for journalists,” writes Philip Howard in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey has emerged as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is now the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the eighteenth largest economy in the world.

Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam’s accommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story (not Islamo-fascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?

The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling in this regard. Pamela Geller, after all, was typical in the way she went after not a radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zero proposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. As journalist Stephen Salisbury writes, “The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche.” For her latest venture, Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell’s Soup because it accepts halal certification — the Islamic version of kosher certification by a rabbi — from the Islamic Society of North America, a group which, by the way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.

Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama bin-Laden or his ilk, but of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamic theologian. Ramadan is a man firmly committed to breaking down the old distinctions between “us” and “them.” Critical of the West for colonialism, racism, and other ills, he also challenges the injustices of the Islamic world. He is far from a fundamentalist.

And what country, by the way, has exercised European Islamophobes more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Taliban Afghanistan?  No, the answer is: Turkey. “The Turks are conquering Germany in the same way the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birth-rates,” argues Germany’s Islamophobe du jour, Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. The far right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out of the European Union.

Despite his many defects, George W. Bush at least knew enough to distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamic center, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal Islamic country — all firmly in the mainstream of that religion — the Islamophobes have actually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.

The victories of the tea party movement and the increased power of Republican militants in Congress, not to mention the renaissance of the far right in Europe, suggest that we will be living with this Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the West against the Rest for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let’s hope that Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a far shorter lifespan.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

John Sugg tears Steven Emerson a new one.

John Sugg on why won’t the Tampa Trib tell you what people in Nashville know about Steve Emerson?

John F. Sugg was editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008.  In his tenure, he reported extensively on the Sami Al-Arian story.  After recent negative news broke about terrorism “expert” Steven Emerson, Sugg contacted CL about filing this post.

Steven Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert, is a guy who had a profound and caustic impact on Tampa for more than a decade. Emerson has had much less of an impact on another city, Nashville, although his corrosive brand of often-inaccurate smear jobs recently slithered into Tennessee.

Still, Nashville’s citizens know a whole lot more about Emerson than folks in Tampa, despite his relatively recent arrival on the Tennessee hate-Muslim soapbox, where he jostles for the limelight with loopy religious fanatics and just plain old-fashioned Southern bigots.

Why that imbalance of knowledge about Emerson? The answer lies in a horrible miscarriage of journalism committed over many years by The Tampa Tribune, a series of atrocities the Trib could easily correct by just providing a dash of fair and accurate reporting, something history indicates the newspaper won’t do. Nashville should be grateful that it has a newspaper, The Tennessean, which unlike the Trib will fearlessly dig out the truth.

In tandem with his vassal reporter at the Tampa Trib, Michael Fechter, Emerson waged a decade-long jihad against a professor at the University of South Florida, Sami Al-Arian, accused by Emerson and Fechter of being a terrorist mastermind. Emerson and Fechter were backed by a shadowy network of former federal agents and foreign spooks, notably a disinformation specialist for Israel’s ultra-right Likud party named Yigal Carmon and a controversial ex-FBI official named Oliver “Buck” Revell – and a lot of money whose origins have never been revealed.

However, where their information came from was clear. As the great Israeli newspaper Ha’aretzexplained before Al-Arian’s 2005 federal trial: “Israel owns much of the copyright for the case; a well-informed source termed the prosecution an ‘American-Israeli co-production.’ The Americans are running the show, but behind the scenes it was the Israelis who for years collected material (and) transmitted information…” How did they transmit information? In part, via “secret evidence” slipped to our federales, evidence and accusers Al-Arian wasn’t allowed to confront (who needs that nasty old Sixth Amendment?). But reporters were also conduits for scurrilous “intelligence” claims. Fechter himself wrote that “former and current senior Israeli intelligence officials” loaded his stories with information. Those allegations, many ludicrous on their face, were rejected by a federal jury, despite a highly prejudiced judge and rulings that, if they had been issued against Martin Luther King Jr. would have prevented him from mentioning Jim Crow in his defense.

Over the years, while a Weekly Planet and Creative Loafing editor, I had a great deal of fun exposing Emerson, and the prevarications by Fechter and the federal government. I tried to put into contextwhat the anti-Muslim crusaders were up to. I joined a rather elite cadre of journalists that had tangled with Emerson – including famed investigative reporters Seymour Hersh, Robert I. Friedman and Robert Parry, who provided me with insight into Emerson’s real agenda.

Emerson filed two bogus lawsuits against me, the Weekly Planet (AKA Creative Loafing) and an AP reporter who had told me about questions he had had over the provenance of a document Emerson gave the news service. We obtained a court order that would have forced Emerson to produce real proof of his allegations – and he knew we were digging into who he really was and who paid his bills – so he ran away from the fight he started; the good guys (me, for example) prevailed.

It’s noteworthy that a number of dispassionate analysts had observations similar to mine. New York University scholar Zachary Lockman, for example, (as quoted on “Right Web”) wrote in 2005: “[Emerson's] main focus during the 1990s was to sound the alarm about the threat Muslim terrorists posed to the United States. By the end of that decade Emerson was describing himself as a ‘terrorist expert and investigator’ and ‘Executive Director, Terrorism Newswire, Inc.’ Along the way, critics charged, Emerson had sounded many false alarms, made numerous errors of fact, bandied accusations about rather freely, and ceased to be regarded as credible by much of the mainstream media . The September 11 attacks seemed to bear out Emerson’s warnings, but his critics might respond that even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day.”

Again, it’s sadly significant that the Trib never even provided such mild doses of context about its primary source, Emerson, in its inflammatory, intentionally erroneous and misleading, and often racist diatribes against Al-Arian. The Trib still gives Emerson ink – never questioning his claims and guilt-by-association-and-innuendo tactics, and never vetting his background, associations, financing and motives.

Some insight on Emerson’s millions has now been provided by The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, citing the Tennessean’s reports, on Oct. 26 awarded Emerson his nightly “Worst Person in the World” citation. Olbermann expressed regret that the network had previously used Emerson as a chattering head on terrorism topics. (Similarly, CBS did not renew its contract with Emerson after he claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had “a Middle Eastern trait” because it was carried out “with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible.” That was a big “Oops.”)

The Tennessean reported that Emerson collects money through a non-profit, the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, and then funnels that money to his for-profit SAE (as in Steven A. Emerson) Productions. Quoting Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Nashville paper reported: “Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit. It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”

That little bit of information on Emerson, contained in one report, is far more than the Trib told you about Emerson over a decade – despite Emerson using the Trib to provoke a legal firestorm that is still ongoing.

You do recall the firestorm, right? Emerson and Fechter launched a series of series of attacks on Muslims. No amount of hyperbole and vitriol-spewing was considered excessive by the Trib or Emerson. Fechter, for example, darkly hinted that the FBI found documents about MacDill Air Force Base among Al-Arian’s papers, insinuating some dastardly design. Nope. Al-Arian had twice been invited to speak to large groups of military and intelligence officers, and the sinister documents were, well, just the hand-out materials. Fechter, following the lead of his guru, Emerson, also tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Arabs, an egregiously false story the Trib has never seen fit to correct. Emerson, meanwhile, said in February 1996 that Palestinian advocates at USF were involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Emerson promised proof “in the near term.” The proof never came, and the Justice Department said it had no records supporting the allegation.

You think the Trib might have called Emerson on that one? Hahaha.

The former head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa, Robert O’Neill, twice concluded during the 1990s there was no evidence to prosecute Al-Arian, according to my multiple sources in the Justice Department. I don’t like quoting anonymous sources so I’ll be clear: O’Neill, now the U.S. Attorney for Florida’s Middle District, himself told me he had looked at the evidence and found no reason to prosecute. In 1998, the then FBI counterterrorism chief Bob Blitzer also told me “no federal laws were broken” by the Tampa Muslims.

Yet, after 9/11, propelled by hate-Muslim diatribes from Bill O’Reilly (who had been funneled highly slanted information by Fechter) and the fear by Jeb Bush that the University of South Florida would conclude a settlement with Al-Arian that would prove embarrassing to the Bushite regimes in Washington and Tallahassee, the federal government indicted Al-Arian. The trial concluded with the government failing to win a single guilty verdict against Al-Arian or his co-defendants, an immense disaster for the Bush Justice Department.

Al-Arian later plea bargained in order to preclude another trial on counts on which the jury didn’t reach a verdict – although notably no more than two jurors felt he was guilty on even those “hung” counts.  Al-Arian’s plea bargain stipulated that he had had no involvement in terrorist activities. Rather, he had provided some minor support to people who might have become terrorists, although it’s clear from the trial that any such activities by Al-Arian occurred when they were legal. The plea agreement supposedly ended all business between Al-Arian and the federal government. However, due to legal chicanery by a rogue federal prosecutor in Virginia, Gordon Kromberg – who has been called a doppelganger of Emerson – Al-Arian remains entangled in federal courts and on house arrest.

According to my federal sources, the Al-Arian case cost our government at least $50 million, and, no, the Trib and Emerson didn’t offer to pay part of the bill (you and I had that honor). And, with so many FBI agents chasing a guy whose “guilt” was mostly in exercising his First Amendment rights, the FBI missed another fellow flitting around Florida, a real terrorist with blood on his mind, Mohammed Atta.

The final chapters in the Trib’s pogroms against Muslims had a sadly humorous angle. Fechter, who had long been a tool of Emerson’s, finally got slightly honest and went to work for his mentor. And Fechter dumped his wife and children and shacked up with one of the federal prosecutors who tried Al-Arian. I don’t recall where Fechter got his journalism training, but he must have skipped the classes on journalistic objectivity and not sleeping with your sources.

So, The Tennessean’s articles might have provided an excellent opportunity for the Trib to revisit and maybe heal a terrible wound it was complicit in inflicting in Tampa. On Friday, I asked TribManaging Editor Richard “Duke” Maas if he had such an inclination – heck, I inquired, aren’t you interested in what The Tennessean wrote about a guy who had so much impact on Tampa and your newspaper? Well, not really, Maas responded, sounding more irritated than journalistically curious. He added that Fechter had left the newspaper, which I gather meant he felt the Trib was thereby absolved of responsibility.

If you happen to have a spare backbone, you might send it to the pathetic folks at The Tampa Tribune.

John F. Sugg was editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008.

United is the only way to defeat terrorism, extremism and occupation which is creating the spring well of terrorism.

Local Muslims and Christians condemn bloody Baghdad church massacre

According to media reports 58 were killed and 75 more injured after Al-Qaeda extremists in suicide vests raided Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Church in Baghdad, Iraq during evening mass on Sunday.

The deaths and injuries occurred after Iraqi Special Forces backed by U.S. troops entered the church while Al-Qaeda extremists held clerics and worshipers hostage in the central Karada neighborhood of Baghdad. Witnesses say the insurgents began killing guards outside a stock exchange in Baghdad before going to the church.  Two young priests and a deacon were killed during the raid.

“I cry for my country that was the best country in the world. They killed these people and for what? Just because they were praying at church. Who killed them? I think who killed them, doesn’t believe in God. If they believed in God they would have never killed these people,” said Pastor Hanna Sullaka of Lutheran Church in Warren and Dearborn during an interfaith gathering at the Islamic House of Wisdom (IHW) in Dearborn Heights on Monday.

According to various sources, the Christian population in Iraq was at 800,000 before the United States invaded in 2003 .  As a result of the continuous terrorist attacks against Christians from the resulting destablization of the country, that number has decreased to 550,000. Sullaka says it’s a fact that Christians are on the verge of extinction in Iraq and several have fled to Iraq’s bordering countries to avoid religious attacks.

More than half Iraq’s Christans left the country particularly after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Those who remain are less than three percent of the population which was more than seven percent in the 1980s according to various news sources.

Some Iraqis criticized their government for not having better security at the church, and believe the incident may have been prevented if there was better security available. In response to the series of attacks on Christians, the Iraqi federal police and army have guarded the fronts of churches during mass for two years.  But no security was outside the church that Sunday.

To raise awareness of the plight of Iraq’s shrinking Christian population, the St. Toma Syrian Catholic Church of Farmington Hills is holding a demonstration outside the United States Eastern District Court of Michigan,  231 Lafayette Blvd, Detroit Michigan  48226 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Nov. 8.  According to St. Toma priest Father Toma, more than 1, 000 are expected to attend the demonstration.

Father Toma said the future of Iraqi Christians is uncertain and 55 churches have been bombed and more than nine priests killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.  ”Christians are terrified of going to church to pray,” he said.

Syriac church official Monsignor Pius Kasha told McClatchy Newspapers the attack is the deadliest in Baghdad since before the March elections.

Other religious leaders at the interfaith event Monday which was held to honor the victims of the barbaric attack, spoke out against terrorism in Iraq.  Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, the spiritual leader of the IHW, called the church raiders people without faith, dignity or spirit.

“The innocent victims of this tragedy that happened in the church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad was an attack by a terrorist. This aggression is for people who have lost their faith, their dignity, their spirit and they choose to act as anyone but human beings.  Obviously we condemn what they did. We condemn terrorism in general. We hate terrorism,” he said. Elahi says those who practice acts of terrorism in the name of Islam in reality are the worst enemies of Islam and add fuel to the fires of Islamophobia.

Sullaka says the Christian Iraqi community in the United States has been effective in helping Iraqi Christians but can become more powerful if they join forces to create effective strategies for peace. Sullaka says to do that American Christian Iraqis must first put their differences aside.  ”We can’t say he’s orthodox, he’s Syrian, he’s Chaldean. We have to be one heart. We can become strong, we can get hold of Congress and all parts of the world,” Sullaka said.

During the interfaith event Sullaka also encouraged different faiths to come together.

“We will all pray together, please, raise your right hand all together and pray and say Lord Jesus or the Prophet Moses, Muhammad, together, come on, together, and pray to make peace,” he said.

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-Michigan Executive Director,  Dawud Walid encourages Iraqi Americans to continue praying for their families in Iraq.  ”CAIR-Michigan strongly condemns the terrorist attack in the Baghdad church. No faith supports such violence against civilians and we pray for the day that Iraqis can worship in peace and no church can be attacked in that historic land,” Walid, also a speaker at the interfaith event said.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Public Affair Council (MPAC) of Washington D.C., a public service agency working for the civil rights of Muslim Americans, released a statement immediately after the massacre strongly condemning the killing of hostages on Sunday.

“The Quran calls for the protection of human life, all houses of worship and religious minorities and yesterday’s attack is an affront to the teachings of Islam and the rich religious diversity if Iraq,” the statement read.

“This violence is not acceptable,” said MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati. “Violence is continuing to drain valuable resources from Iraq, and it is forcing its people to live in fear and with constant strife and devastation. This is one of two incidences of extremists groups attacking other houses of worship. The Qur’an clearly states that the attack on human life and houses of worship is not acceptable.”

Gingrich has aligned himself with the wackos.

Sharia in NJ? More crazy talk from Gingrich and Co.

The small cadre of hysterical conservatives who’ve been stirring up local fear of Islamic law like to point to New Jersey.

That’s where they found their one — and only — example of “creeping Shariah” in our courts. In 2009, a Hudson County judge gave too much weight to the religious beliefs of a Moroccan man accused of sexually assaulting his wife. The decision was overturned on appeal, and now the convicted defendant, who lives in Bayonne, faces up to 20 years in state prison.

But no matter. Commentators like Newt Gingrich, who wants a federal law banning Shariah, still use this case to insist that Islamic law is taking over. He talks only about the trial judge, who wrongly ruled this wasn’t assault because the man was motivated not by criminal intent, but by his cultural belief that a wife must yield to her husband.

As with other clearly bad decisions, it was promptly reversed by appellate judges. Religious beliefs do not trump U.S. laws, just as they don’t in cases of Mormon men defending their right to polygamy, or Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions for children, they ruled.

Still, the case was used to fan anti-Muslim fervor across the country, with Nevada tea partier Sharron Angle wildly claiming that Shariah law had taken hold in Michigan and Texas, and Oklahoman voters approving a ballot measure banning Shariah in their state.

Oddly, no one seems worried about a similar takeover by polygamists. Just wait ‘til Gingrich tunes in to that HBO series, Big Love.

Robert Spencer is miffed. There has just been too much good press for those pesky Moozlims. Writers of late have pointed out that the mainstream Muslim community is at the forefront of combating terrorism and extremism; such as the Muslims who prevented the recent Yemen mail bomb plot or Muslims who have prevented numerous other cases of terrorism. If Spencer’s goal was to prevent terrorism, one would think these news stories are cause for celebration. But if the goal is to tar all of Islam in a fear-for-profit holy war racket, eh, not so much.

For Spencer, highlighting anything positive Muslims do in the fight against violent extremism just doesn’t jive with his lop-sided cherry-picked contextless narrative that Islam is the root cause of all evil. He says,

There is a counterproductive aspect to this kind of publicity for the Muslim community in America: that these stories would be considered newsworthy at all is due to their unusual, man-bites-dog aspect.

It bewilders those of us not indoctrinated with prejudiced anti-Muslim hostility to see how stories about ordinary Muslims thwarting terrorist attacks are “counter-productive.” These stories are positive reminders that our fight is against violent extremism, not the religion of Islam or all Muslims. But Spencer’s transparent goal is not to prevent terrorism as much as it is to profit by demonizing all of Islam and its adherents. He continues,

If the teachings of Islam and the sentiments of the Muslim community in the U.S. really were the way they are ordinarily represented by the mainstream media and assumed to be by the U.S. Government, then there ought to be a concerted, organized, ongoing effort among Muslims in the U.S. not only to foil jihad terror plots, but also to eradicate the Islamic teachings that inspire and encourage such plots.

Here Spencer fumes with conspiracy-mongering indignation as he decries how the mainstream media and the U.S. government fail to smear the entire religion of Islam and its 1.5 billion followers. Then he demands that Muslims “eradicate the Islamic teachings” that inspire terrorists while he ignores the mountains of empirical research which demonstrate that military occupations are the root cause of terrorism, not the religion of Islam, or that alienation

from the mainstream Muslim community leads to terrorism, not engagement with it. But he continues,

Also, these writers and others generally assume that the Muslims who foiled these jihad plots did so out of Islamic conviction, and that they therefore represent an alternative perspective on Islamic teaching, one that opposes and counters that of the jihadists. Unfortunately, that is not established.

This sentence explicates Spencerian Islamophobic doctrine: when a Muslim commits a criminal act, that is “true Islam,” but when a Muslim does a good deed, he is somehow acting against the teachings of Islam. Of course, this non-terrorist “alternative perspective on Islamic teaching,” which those of us in the real world call “mainstream Islam” is in fact well-established not only in countless scholarly books, organizations, and websites, but also by scientific polling of global Muslim attitudes. Unsurprisingly, Spencer has been unable to publish any of his Muslim-bashing conspiracy theories in a single academic peer-reviewed journal. No need for balance, scholarship, or polling; mere speculation and “truthiness” are good enough for Spencer.

Mr. Spencer, your stubborn self-serving denial of reality obscures our country’s ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys. As Jon Stewart recently said, “…the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.”

Mr. Spencer, you are making us less safe, not more.

Ahmed Rehab

A well-argued analytical piece by Ahmed Rehab in the Chicago Tribune that looks at the role of language, translations, and definitions as a factor in shaping (or misshaping) Western public perception and discourse on Islam – the first piece in the series is the word “Islam” itself.

Chicago Tribune: Language Matters: Islam, A Definition

By Ahmed Rehab

Language is to ideas what the body is to the soul. It is the physical manifestation of thought. It is the mortar with which we shape our understanding of the world.

But what happens when words are transmuted from one language to another and subjected to preconceived notions or limitations prevalent in the new language? Do they lose some of their original meaning?

If we are interested in gaining a better, more accurate understanding of Islam, its concepts, doctrine, and ideas, we must concede that there needs to be more robust scrutiny of the definitions that shape our discourse on Islam.

So with that in mind, I will be running a special series here at the Chicago Tribune’s The Seeker faith blog in which I will attempt to analyze definitions and translations of key Islamic terms to test them for authenticity. I am calling the series “language matters,” an intended pun on the importance of language in the understanding of faith constructs.

For this first installment, let us start at the root, the word “Islam” itself.

Islam is commonly translated into English, by both Muslims and non-Muslims, as simply “submission” (or “surrender”).

This is a simplistic translation that fails to convey the full meaning of the Arabic word.

There are namely two problems here.

First, “submission” and “surrender” in English contextualized usage imply a sense of coercion, a usurpation of one’s free will. When we say “surrender!” for example, it’s usually at gun point.

This contradicts a foundational criterion of Islam: freedom of will.

In Arabic, “Istislam,” not “Islam”, means “surrender” (noun). Like its English counterpart, “Istislam” implies coercion, and like its English counterpart it can be used to describe the act of one man vis-a-vis another. Conversely, “Islam” is used ONLY in the context of God, and ONLY in a state of free will (there is no single word in the English language that conveys this).

In other words, for a Muslim to be a Muslim, he or she must accept Islam free of force or coercion. God wishes for us to choose him because we want him, and for no other reason but that. This is a key point that is often misunderstood. Since faith is a matter of the heart, it can never be forced. It is technically impossible that Islam could ever be spread by the sword or by coercion, as some suggest, since even if at gun point (or at the sword blade), one could just as well proclaim to be a Muslim to avoid death, but reject Islam in their heart.

That is not to say that an “empire,” whether Islamic or otherwise, cannot be spread by the sword. But faith cannot. Just as no physical force can coerce you to love someone you do not love, none can coerce you to believe something you do not believe.

God understands this; in fact, he ordained that it be so. Since he is a judge of hearts first and foremost, it is logically necessary that he makes faith a matter of free choice, a matter of the heart and mind. Islam can only be spread by invitation (Da’wah) and persuasion (Hujjah), not coercion (Ikrah). The Qur’an explicitly states: “La Ikrah fel Deen” or “Let there be no compulsion in matters of faith.” (Ultimately, Muslims believe that faith is decreed by divine guidance.)

The second problem this translation poses is that there is no linguistically derived relationship between the English “submission” and the English “peace,” unlike the case in Arabic where “Islam” and “Salam” (peace) are derived from the same root word “slm” (to be in peace).

This etymological relationship is critical and cannot be lost in translation. We submit willingly to God in search of peace. As Muslims, we cannot take the “peace” out of our relationship with God, we cannot be Muslims resigned to anger, trepidation, or bitterness. Human beings are free to choose God’s peace or reject it. The Quran puts generous emphasis on these themes. When we achieve peace with God whom Muslims regard as the ultimate Peace, only then can we be at peace with ourselves. And only when we are at peace with ourselves can we then be at peace with others.

In conclusion, a qualified translation is in order for the real meaning of the Arabic word “Islam” to be fully and faithfully conveyed in the English language. Islam does not mean “submission,” Islam means “to freely submit one’s will to God’s, in pursuit of divine peace.” A simpler version that carries the same meaning is “to enter into God’s peace,” as Professor Tariq Ramadan proposes.

It is ironic that two important characteristics of being a Muslim, in fact the two most basic criteria (freedom and peace), are two of the most misrepresented and conflated when it comes to the West’s conception of Islam. But that is of little surprise when you consider that the building blocks of our discourse and understanding – the language we use – is itself flawed.

[Ahmed Rehab Chicago Tribune Original Link]

The Swedish city of Malmo has been hit by a series of shooting attacks which has left one person dead and several injured.

But police do not have many clues or even a photofit of the suspect they are supposed to be hunting. The only thing they do know is that the attacks appear to be racially motivated.

Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips travelled to Malmo to find out what impact the shootings are having on the community there.

France has chose over the past year or so to focus extensively on the face-veil and Islam related issues under the cover of integrating the “Muslim immigrant” population.

However such moves have led to an increasing stigmatization of the the Muslim minority and invariably to a wider chasm in society in which bigotry is openly professed and accepted. One such case is the attack on a tourist from the Emirates who was wearing a Niqab in a clothing store by a French retiree named Jeanne Ruby.

AlJazeera Report:

She was eventually given a suspended sentence and charged 1,000 Euros. Essentially a slap on the hand.

From Molly Norris, who we support and is one the Anti-Loons of the year:

hat tip: JustAFan.

Justice Stevens voices support for NYC mosque

WASHINGTON (AP) — Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said Thursday that Americans should be tolerant of plans to build an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center in New York.

The 90-year-old Stevens said it is wrong to lump all Muslims with the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people. “Guilt by association is unfair,” he told a Japanese-American group in Washington.

The center’s location two blocks north of where the Twin Towers once stood has upset some relatives of Sept. 11 victims and stirred nationwide debate and angry demands that it be moved. Critics say the site of mass murder by Islamic extremists is no place for an Islamic institution, while supporters of the center say religious freedom should be protected.

But Stevens, a World War II veteran, compared the criticism of the mosque to the emotion he said he initially felt when he saw Japanese tourists at Pearl Harbor.

Among the thoughts that he said flashed through his mind during a 1994 visit to the memorial to the Japanese attack that brought the U.S. into World War II was, “These people don’t really belong here.”

He said many New Yorkers might have had a similar reaction to news about the mosque in lower Manhattan.

But Stevens said he realized he was drawing conclusions about a group of people that did not necessarily fit any one of the tourists he saw at Pearl Harbor.

“We should never pass judgment on barrels and barrels of apples just because one of them may be rotten,” said Stevens, who left the court in June. He commented on an issue of public debate in a way he most likely would have avoided had he still been serving as a justice.

He said that a nation built by people who fled religious persecution “should understand why American Muslims should enjoy the freedom to build their places of worship wherever permitted by local zoning laws.”

Stevens said the National Japanese American Memorial in Washington offers a similar message in its recognition that the internment of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was wrong.

He called the monument a “a powerful reminder of the fact that ignorance — that is to say, fear of the unknown — is the source of most invidious prejudice.”

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Election season 2010 provided many interesting and quite scary insights into the relationship between American and Islam. On the good side of things Keith Ellison won re-election by a tremendous 44 point margin. On the other hand, Allen West an outspoken anti-Muslim candidate won election to Congress in Florida’s 22nd district. West believes Islam is not a religion and that we are at war with Islam.

Also on the ballot in Oklahoma was an initiative that seeks to ban “Sharia’” in the state. It is a ginned up initiative that seeks to ban something that doesn’t exist in Oklahoma, which has all of 15,000 Muslim citizens.

Spencer saw the passing of the measure as an indication that Americans are standing up against Muslims and Islam. However he doesn’t see the fact that what Oklahomans actually banned is something that doesn’t exist in their state. What is next, Unicorns?

Colbert expressed it best,

An excellent piece from Mother Jones, rounding up the Islamophobe results.

Muslimophobia: Election Roundup

First, the good news: Many anti-Muslim candidates did not get elected Tuesday. Now the bad news: Alas, several anti-Muslim candidates won—mostly in the South. Oh, and Oklahoma became the first state to ban sharia law, even though only 0.8% of the population is Muslim. Below, a (fairly) complete list of vocally anti-Islam politicos in 2010. I’ve tried to include only candidates who won primaries, but if you have additions, please post them in the comments.

Oklahoma

Question 755: Banning of Sharia and international law. This measure, aka “Save Our State,” amends the state’s constitution to forbid Oklahoma judges from “considering or using” international or sharia law when deciding cases. The bill’s sponsor, Oklahoma State Senator Rex Duncan, admits that no judge in the state has ever tried to use sharia law. As he told Fox News, “we want to make sure they never will.” He’s called the bill a “preemptive strike” against sharia.

PASSED 70% / 30%

Delaware

Christine O’Donnell for Senate: O’Donnell worked with an aide who, as we reported, pushed the idea that Obama was secretly Muslim and would always be one, despite attending Christian churches for decades. On another note, O’Donnell said it was “refreshing” to go on a Bible-themed tour of Jordan because she found the culture more modest. She’s a bit of a mixed bag (declined to endorse or condemn the mosque near Ground Zero) but with her wacky statements and fuzzy hold on separation of church and state, still probably a good thing she didn’t get elected.

FAILED 40% / 56.6%

New York

Carl Paladino for Governor: Paladino said the proposed Islamic center near ground zero “makes a mockery of those who died there” and promised to stop it if elected in this campaign ad. He called it “a monument to those who attacked our country,” simultaneously espousing that Muslims are not Americans and they’re all terrorists. Paladino went further to propose no mosque be built where the 9/11 “dust cloud” had been.

FAILED 34% / 61.5%

Minnesota

Keith Ellison for House: Rep. Ellison, a Muslim and a Democrat, has been attacked by conservatives like Glenn Beck and more recently, by tea party leaders like Judson Phillips. Back in 2006, Beck asked Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.” This year, Phillips wrote that “I’m bothered by a religion that says kill the infidel,” encouraged Minnesotans to vote for Ellison’s rival, and said that “I, personally have a real problem with Islam.” Voters disagreed with Phillips, and re-elected Ellison by a landslide.

WON 68% / 24%

North Carolina

Renee Ellmers for House: Republican Ellmers ran on an anti-mosque platform, running ads like this one that equates the Muslims of ancient Constantinople (failing to mention the equally rapacious Christians of that era) with the Muslim Park 51 organizers and calls the proposed Islamic center a “victory mosque.”

WON 49.6% / 48.5%

Ilario Pantano for House: Pantano is perhaps better known for shooting 45 rounds of ammunition into two unarmed Iraqi civilians, killing them, during his 2004 tour of duty. “I had made a decision that when I was firing I was going to send a message to these Iraqis,” Pantano said. He was charged with murder, but the charges were later dropped. Since then, Pantano’s been busy protesting the Park51 project and welcoming an endorsement from radical anti-Islamist Pam Geller. He even wrote in an op-ed that the Islamic prayer space was a “martyr marker” and “If this was truly about bridging cultures, we should be erecting a church.”

FAILED 46.2% / 53.8%

Ohio

Josh Mandel for State Treasurer: Mandel said in an ad that Boyce gave out jobs as favors, including one “he only made available at their mosque” and another “sensitive” job at the Treasury Department. The ad looks like it was trying to paint Boyce as a Muslim, even though he is Christian and had never been to the mosque in question. Boyce’s deputy, Amer Ahmad, is Muslim but both he and Mandel disputed the claims in the ad, including that the secretarial job at the Treasury was sensitive in nature. The ad stopped running after a week, but Mandel won anyway.

WON 54.9% / 40.2%

Florida

Allen West for House: Tea party candidate West is one of the most anti-Islamic this election season. West said that “Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD, and we need to have individuals that stand up and say that.” To continue the blatant fear-mongering, in speeches West equates today’s Muslims with those of medieval Europe, alleging that if Muslims in the US are not stopped, we too will have to change our name like Constantinople.

WON 54.4% / 45.7%

Indiana

Marvin Scott for House: Scott ran against Muslim Andre Carson for a House seat and used Carson’s faith as a campaign tool. Scott stated on his website that “Radical elements of Islam are funding and building mosques across America.” While professing a love for freedom of religion, he said that “I passionately defend his [Carson's] right to become a Muslim… What they do not have the right to do is to replace American law with extremist Muslim Sharia law.” To Scott, apparently, there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim or one who doesn’t advocate Sharia law.

FAILED 37.8% / 58.9%

Nevada

Sharron Angle for Senate: Angle thinks the Park51 organizers should move their mosque, and told an audience that “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States … on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan.” She also voiced concern about sharia law, which she seemed to think was being used widely in American courts in Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas (it’s not, and Frankford was incorporated into Dallas long ago).

FAILED 44.6% / 50.2%

Jen Phillips is the editorial coordinator at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here or follow her on Twitter, @the_hip_hapa. Get Jen Phillips’ RSS feed.

Religious Freedom USA has a campaign in response to Bill Maher’s bigoted comments on Muslims.

Tell Bill Maher About a Muhammad

Last Friday, HBO’s Bill Maher expressed his fear that the Western world could be taken over by Islam in 300 years. Why? Because “Muhammad” was the most popular baby name this year in the United Kingdom.  “Am I a racist to be alarmed by that?” he asked.  “Because I am, and it’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion.”

Not only does Bill Maher wrongfully assume that all Muhammads are religious Muslims, but he goes on to assume that as a Muslim, you are incapable of being a productive member of Western society. We find this to be horribly misinformed—but we don’t want to tell him that, we want you to!

Since he already made it clear that he isn’t interested in apologizing for his statements, I think we can one up him. Introduce Bill Maher to a Muhammad you know.  Tell him about your friend, or coworker, or family member who goes by the name Muhammad.  Tell him how this person, Muslim or not, is a hardworking, good-natured, and patriotic American, and how in spite of Mr. Maher’s prejudiced labeling, Muhammads are no more of a threat to Western society than Johns, Mikes, and even Bills.

Islamophobia is becoming increasingly rampant in America, and the time to stand up against it is now.  This poses an opportunity to repaint the discussion of Islam in America with the human faces of our Muslim friends and neighbors.

Check out what Bill Maher said below, and find the link to email himabove the clip.  Let’s tell him about some great Muhammads, and help him realize that Muslim Americans, named Muhammad or otherwise, are an integral part of the American community.  If he gets a thousand emails from all of us, perhaps Bill Maher will rethink his sloppy analysis of Islam in America.

Email the show:

http://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bill-maher/index.html#/about/contact.html

.
Some people will do absolutely anything to fear-monger….

NY Livery Cab Driver littered anti-Semtic notes to frame Muslims

Newsday (New York)
November 4, 2010 Thursday

A former livery cabdriver from Brooklyn told authorities he littered his routes in Nassau with handmade anti-Semitic leaflets because he wanted “the Jews to find them to think it was the Muslims,” officials said yesterday.

On Tuesday, for the second time this year, detectives arrested Dimitrios Apolonides, 37, after tracing 1-by-3-inch notes bearing the slogan “KILL JEWS” back to the livery company where he once worked, police said.

Apolonides wished to create “alarm in the Jewish community” by leaving notes on the street in several Nassau communities since at least September 2009, including Rockville Centre, Port Washington, and West Hempstead, according to Nassau police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith. Similar notes also were found in Melville in March 2009, Suffolk police said, but no arrests have been made.

Apolonides is charged in Nassau with nine counts of aggravated harassment as a hate crime. Yesterday, he pleaded not guilty and was held on bail of $5,000. If convicted, the hate crime charges will be upgraded to felonies carrying a sentence of up to 4 years, police said.

Nassau police said they believed this was happening “across the tristate area.”

In July, New York City hate crimes detectives arrested Apolonides and charged him with aggravated harassment as a hate crime in connection with similar notes found near the Jewish Guild for the Blind on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said an NYPD spokesman.

An NYPD spokesman said Apolonides was believed to have dropped dozens of notes around the borough. Apolonides was released without bail after his July arrest; the case is pending.

As in Nassau, city detectives were able to trace the notes to Apolonides when they discovered they were cut from a log sheet bearing the name of his employer, XYZ Car Service in Brooklyn, authorities said. Prosecutors at Apolonides’ arraignment in Hempstead yesterday said he faces similar charges of aggravated harassment in Westchester County.

Apolonides told Nassau officers, “I wanted the Jews to find them to think it was the Muslims,” according to a criminal complaint.

XYZ owner Mohamed Mowad said Apolonides was hired in 1994 and was a conscientious, polite employee, friendly with people from many backgrounds, including Jewish employees. Apolonides was fired at the time of his July arrest, Mowad said.

“You talk to him, he’s a sweetheart, always polite, he smiles,” he said.

Apolonides’ attorney, Michael Alber of Rockville Centre, said Apolonides is married and has one child. He questioned the timing of Apolonides’ arrest. “Some of these charges date back to 2009. … There is a substantial gap in time,” he said. “Why wasn’t he arrested in 2009?”

(Loonwatch welcomes new blogger Pterois to the Loonwatch team)

It is not easy being a progressive in America these days. Perhaps yesterday’s elections are evidence of that. Or maybe the heat NPR is facing for firing Juan Williams is another indicator. But one so-called progressive remains relatively untouched by the conservative rage sweeping the nation: Bill Maher. How does he do it? How does this pseudo-intellectual continue to espouse progressive causes for the most part, yet remain on the good side of the Neo-Con Bully Machine? By willfully bashing Muslims, that’s how!

In spite of Maher’s hostility towards everything conservative: He hates religion, hates Republicans, hates Sarah Palin, he nonetheless blatantly espouses the notion that culturally speaking “we are white, therefore right” and thus remains the little darling of The Right.

Fox News columnists make guest appearances on his show, as does Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who doctored a video of African-American Shirley Sherrod earlier this year. The video was edited to make the former government official appear racist.

The entire video was eventually released exonerating Sherrod and implicating Breitbart as a professional scheister who clearly and undisputedly lied about Sherrod being a racist in order to further his agenda. Yet Maher still welcomes Breitbart on his show.

This week, the self-proclaimed progressive was at it again. A current survey in the UK concluded the name Mohammed is currently the most popular name for newborns in the country. To this statistic Maher replied:

Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that? Because I am. And it’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?

First of all Bill, if you have to ask your panel whether you are being a racist then your probably are being a racist. But, then again, the Fox News guest on his show, Margret Hoover joined in and took it a step further by saying: “I think England has far bigger problems with Islam than they do with the names of their children.” Of course that “problem” is the Shaira law bogey man the Right so often likes to use to scare us into war…as they have for the last ten years. Maher’s response? … “then I should be alarmed, and I don’t need to apologize for it.”

Wow, way-to-go Maher, it’s nice seeing your views on Muslims are indistinguishable from yet another Fox chicken-hawk who has been using this kind of trash logic for a decade, only to profit the military-industrial complex and waste our precious resources at the expense of a truly progressive agenda—especially the weekend before the election. Maybe we should elect Republicans to protect us from those scary moooslims.

Newsflash Maher: Racism has no place in a truly progressive philosophy.

Progressives believe that socio-economic justice defines politics, not culture. But then again, Maher is a fake progressive anyway, who lacks the intellectual substance to resist the temptation of racism. It makes him feel sooo good.

“At least we are not the Taliban” he said a couple of weeks ago in his pathetic defense of ourselves. What kind of progressive compares a thoroughly industrialized and diverse country like ours to a war torn, devastated and underdeveloped country like Afghanistan? Racists do. Racists who consider themselves better than non-Europeans who are less well off due to war and disaster. Neo-Cons do. Neo-Cons who consider themselves better than non-Europeans who they want to make less well off through war and disaster. Well Maher, true Progressives have higher standards and more noble aims. So, “New Rule:” Stop calling yourself a progressive.

Allen West, a favorite of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller is the likely winner in Florida for a seat in Congress. This is quite troubling though not surprising news. West is a supporter of Geert Wilders and is a staunch hater of Islam and a bigoted racist against Arabs.

We reported last year that this election season was going to be an interesting one and that some in the GOP were going to attempt to capitalize on anti-Muslim sentiment to fear-monger against Muslims. This prediction was more true than we could ever imagine, and now it is safe to say that we have the most Islamophobic House of Representatives in recent memory.

Some tidbits from our previous article on West,

I do not support any creation of a Palestinian state, to do so would be to create a terrorist state. There is already a state for the Arabic people residing in the region called Palestine, Jordan…I do not support any division of Jerusalem. If I recall from history and the Old Testament, David, Son of Israel built Jerusalem and his son Solomon made it great. The muslim claims to Jerusalem are based upon a very contentious story concocted by muhammad, and of course the latter conquering of the city, even by Salahaddin. One flag will fly over Jerusalem, the Israeli flag, never any other, certainly not a UN flag.

Here we are given a glimpse into how West formulates his policies: it is based on his literal understanding of the Bible and Christian dispensationalist theology.

How many Muslims live in West’s district? How many Palestinians? Imagine how they must be feeling at this moment.

Here is Allen West on Arabs,

Genesis Chapter 16, verses 11-12 states, “And the Angel of the Lord said to her (Hagar): Behold you are with child, and you shall bear a son, you shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your affliction. He shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against everyman, and every man’s hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”

Ishmael of course became the beginning of the Arab people….and God’s word is immutable truth.

In closing, there are battle lines clearly drawn, I know where I stand, and that is to support the State of Israel.

At the end of the day West believes that we are at War with Islam which he believes, echoing Wilders is not a religion but a totalitarian, theocratic political system.

A nation does not go to war with a tactic…we are against something that is a totalitarian, theocratic, political ideology and it is called Islam. (CPAC, “Jihad: The Political Third Rail,” 2/19/10)

Scary stuff. Lets see how this plays out now that West is a Congressman.

In happier news Ilario Pantano lost his race in North Carolina.

In my opinion the work Ruth Pfau is doing is greater than Mother Theresa because she is attacking the root of the problem and not just helping people cope after the fact. (hat tip: Leonoroa)

Pakistan’s ‘Mother Teresa’ saving flood victims

By Mark Lobel (BBC)

A tiny, frail lady – her silver grey hair tucked under a white head scarf with a red floral trim – stands defiantly at a relief camp she set up for minority people displaced by Pakistan’s recent deadly flooding.

Eighty-one-year-old German nun Ruth Pfau is surveying the needs of hundreds whose homes were washed away.

Two months since they sought shelter in Hyderabad, on disused land by the side of a busy road, she and her team have provided them with tents, food, water, medicine and a school.

“We need blankets,” many of them shout at once. Then they complain the dry rations they received did not include sugar, milk, salt or chilli.

For a split second Dr Pfau is taken aback and winces, before noting down their concerns.

Her arrival has been a Godsend for them, the forgotten of the floods.

Immense stamina
“We only go into these camps where, for some reason or other, nobody else is willing or able, or ever thought of helping them,” Dr Pfau explained.

Dr Pfau has established leprosy clinics across Pakistan
She is one of the very few helping the flood-affected Hindu minority.

Dr Pfau’s service to Pakistan’s most neglected began more than 50 years ago.

She took on the country’s leprosy problem, rescuing children holed up in caves and cattle pens for years as their disfiguring and suffering worsened, abandoned by distraught parents terrified they were contagious.

She trained Pakistani doctors and attracted foreign donations, building leprosy clinics across the country.

“Working with Dr Pfau is very, very difficult, because she has such immense stamina, that I don’t think anyone can match,” said Mervyn Lobo, the organisation’s national co-ordinator, who has travelled with her for more than 11 years.

Born in the German city of Leipzig in 1929, Ruth Pfau grew up fearing for her life as first Allied forces bombed her town during the Second World War, then Russian forces ran amok.

She saw her younger brother die, was forced to steal wood and coal for heating food and risked her own life escaping East Germany.

“If I give any sense to these years, it is a preparation to be ready to help others,” she explained.

After completing a medical degree and joining a French Roman Catholic Order, she decided to leave for India.

But diverted to Pakistan while waiting for her visa in 1958, she was to stumble upon leprosy, a disease she had never heard of in a country she did not know existed.

“Well if it doesn’t hit you the first time, I don’t think it will ever hit you,” she recalled, after first seeing leprosy during a visit to a makeshift dispensary built on a disused graveyard in Karachi.

“Actually the first patient who really made me decide was a young Pathan.

“He must have been my age, I was at this time not yet 30, and he crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal, as if someone has to crawl there through that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog.”

Tears of happiness
Soon after, the clinic was moved from the makeshift dispensary to a two-storey nursing home in Karachi, which became Dr Pfau’s new headquarters.

Dr Pfau’s compassion for people like Bundu Sheikh have drawn comparisons with Mother Teresa
The Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre is now eight storeys high, staffed by former patients and children of patients and houses a hospital.

Sitting in the corridor, 31-year-old leprosy patient Shabana, the wife of a rickshaw driver, awaits a check-up.

“I was ill with fever and severe fits so I went to the civil hospital and they sent me here. Dr Pfau’s clinic paid for all my tests and treatments. I could never have afforded them myself,” she said.

“After seven months, I am now much better.”

On the outskirts of Hyderabad, Dr Pfau received a warm welcome from a former leprosy patient Bundu Sheikh, during one of her visits.

Covered in dust with bright, dyed-orange hair, he greeted Dr Pfau with a huge hug and raced out so fast he forgot his shoes.

He is now a cleaner with a deformed nose and no feeling in either leg, living in a makeshift shack on the roadside.

When asked how important Dr Pfau has been in his life, he cried tears of happiness.

“Without her,” he said, “I’d be in the hands of God.

“She is not just a doctor, not just an ordinary person, not just a mother, but a Messiah.”

‘Pakistani marriage’
Key to Dr Pfau’s huge success in saving people’s lives and bringing leprosy under control by the mid-1990s was winning over Pakistan’s leaders.

Dr Pfau has transformed the lives of thousands of people in Pakistan
They were hesitant to help at first but soon appointed her the country’s federal advisor on leprosy.

She said the government was an essential partner.

“We are like a Pakistani marriage. It was an arranged marriage because it was necessary. We always and only fought with each other. But we never could go in for divorce because we had too many children.”

Having won over the establishment and created such a strong and widespread network of doctors, Dr Pfau used the opportunity to tackle tuberculosis and partial blindness.

She has also assisted the country’s many forgotten displaced people and rescued victims from the 2005 earthquake and floods of 2010.

Her determination and selfless service explain why many see her in the same light as another European-born nun – Mother Teresa, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her services to the poor and dispossessed of India.

Dr Pfau said that, though she greatly appreciated and admired Mother Teresa, in reality the similarities between them were few.

She said her focus was on removing the root of the problem – not just dealing with its symptoms – the same ethos that has served her so well over the years in Pakistan when dealing with poor, displaced and marginalised people.

“The most important thing is that we give them their dignity back,” she insisted.

Sometimes you can make a pretty penny when being an anti-Muslim bigot or Islamophobe. Emerson, Spencer, Geller and a host of others have literally laughed all the way to the bank but in some scenarios such actions can bite you in the butt.(hat tip: Eric Allen Bell)

County’s costs in mosque suit mounting

by Scott Broder

Rutherford County leaders recently added $50,000 to the county attorney’s budget for lawsuits against the government, but more could be needed by the time hearings end for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.

“That was one estimate,” Rutherford County Finance Director Lisa Nolen said. “We may have to come back. I have received no bills yet.”

County Attorney Jim Cope gets paid $250 per hour and at least three associates earn $150 per hour. All four attorneys have spent multiple hours in court during six days of testimony before Chancellor Robert Corlew III. The case is scheduled to resume Nov. 12.

Cope said he and his associates have not added up their billing hours for being in court, preparing briefs, holding strategy meetings and talking to witnesses, media and other people involved in the case.

“It’s a costly case,” Cope said. “It’s involving a lot of time by the county attorneys. It’s a team effort.”

If Cope has spent 50 hours representing the county in court or preparing lawsuit motions, his bill would be $12,500 so far for September and October work. If associate Josh McCreary put in 50 hours, add another $7,500. If the other two associates have dealt with it for the same amount of time, each would get $7,500.

Even before plaintiffs Kevin Fisher, Lisa Moore and Henry Golczynski filed their suit Sept. 16, the county had already faced about $2,000 in legal bills from county attorneys spending 11.2 hours researching answers in August to four questions about the Islamic Center issue Fisher presented to the County Commission’s Public Works & Planning Committee.

“I’m expecting more,” Nolen said.

The county has a legal services agreement to pay Cope and his Murfreesboro firm at least a $6,000 per month retainer fee and more if the attorneys’ hours exceed $6,000 worth of service.

The county began this fiscal year July 1 with another $37,800 in the county attorney budget to cover additional work beyond the 12 months of retainer fees that total $72,000. The approved budget was based on Cope’s firm making $109,978 in the previous fiscal year.

The commission decided Oct. 14 to add another $50,000 to the budget to cover the additional work that included the lawsuit defense.

Other legal work includes Cope settling a dispute between the county’s Election Commission and its suspended Administrator of Elections Hooper Penuel; the county attorney office working on agreements to form a consolidated fire and rescue squad department; and a law firm associate preparing a proposed anti-litter resolution.

The county’s defense so far has dealt with plaintiffs seeking a restraining order to stop the county from issuing any more construction permits for the Islamic Center’s proposed mosque on Veals Road.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, Joe Brandon Jr. of Rutherford County and Tom Smith of Williamson County, have brought up additional challenges in the case. They contend Islam is not a legitimate religion deserving of First Amendment rights because it seeks to take over the country to enforce Shariah Law, and they accuse local Muslim leaders of promoting terrorism.

Brandon also challenged whether the county broke the state’s open meetings law by not providing sufficient public notice of the Regional Planning Commission’s May 24 meeting to approve the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro’s site plan.

The congregation also has plans to build a cemetery there, pending approval from the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals. Brandon has questioned Planning Director Doug Demosi’s role in approving a Muslim burial May 18 on the site.

Some details about paying for the plaintiffs’ lawsuit have emerged in court. Moore testified that she didn’t have to pay anything to Brandon.

“Donations is how I get paid,” Brandon said while questioning her. “You’re not obligated to pay me one cent.”

Other testimony has emerged about donations being paid to Proclaiming Justice to the Nations to educate the public about the dangers of Shariah Law and radical Islam. The group’s website offers an icon people can click on to “Donate to PJTN” and offers the statement: “Educating Christians about their biblical responsibility to stand with their Jewish brethren and to defend the State of Israel.”
PJTN President Laurie Cardoza-Moore has traveled here from her Williamson County home to attend much of the testimony at Rutherford County Chancery Court. She previously spoke at Rutherford County Commission meetings to warn officials they could be liable for failing to protect residents here.

“We are raising money to educate Christians about the growing threat of radical Islam and Shariah Law in our communities,” Cardoza-Moore said in an interview last Tuesday. “I have not contributed to the lawsuit fund.”

The website mentions her grassroots activism since the 9/11 terrorism attacks and a documentary she made, “Lest We Forget” that focuses on “Islamofacism and the war that the U.S. and Israel wage against it today.”

Murfreesboro resident Jeanetta Alford testified that she contributed $100 for what she thought promoted education about the threat of Islam as well as her getting a copy of “Lest We Forget.”

“I think Shariah Law is overtaking the United States,” Alford said from the witness stand. “It violates our U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights.”

Plaintiffs’ witness Millie Evans testified that she wrote a $500 check and gave another $100 in cash to the fund because of her concerns about Shariah Law.

“I oppose the dangers of the center in the future,” testified Evans, who’s not satisfied that county officials have properly examined the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. “I wish they’d ask more questions.”

Evans said the group has met several times, including at the home of Sally Wall, a retired real estate and development professional, and Howard Wall, a former chairman of the Rutherford County Republican Party.

The Walls have watched much of the hearing from the spectators’ seats, along with her daughter, Beth O’Brien, a former Murfreesboro City councilwoman. None of them have been called to the witness stand.

Howard Wall, in an interview outside of the County’s Judicial Building, said he had contributed a small amount to the legal fund.

In addition to Howard Wall, former Rutherford County Republican Party chairwoman Lou Ann Zelenik has attended some of the hearing, sitting with opponents of the Islamic Center.

Zelenik during her close but unsuccessful campaign to be the Republican Party nominee for the 6th Congressional District seat in the Aug. 5 primary, accused Islamic Center board member Mosaad Rawash of supporting Hamas and “violent Jihad and martyrdom of Palestinians fighting against Israel” by posting these positions on his MySpace page on the Internet.

Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert had historian Garry Wills on his program discussing the issues of the day. He was asked what is the issue that will divide us today? Willis replied, “Muslims.” (hat tip: Just a Fan)

Check it out:

From Think Progress. (hat tip: Just A Fan)

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly has been on an Islamophobic tear lately. O’Reilly initially took heat for saying that “Muslims attacked us on 9/11″ and he has since defended that claim, saying that “there is a Muslim problem in the world.” After receiving criticism for that statement, O’Reilly defended himself again, claiming that there is a “Muslim problem” because “good” Muslims don’t combat extremism — a point radio host Don Imus told O’Reilly was not “accurate.”

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) seems to have picked up on O’Reilly’s spurious reasoning, telling Imus yesterday that leaders in the Muslim community “do not cooperate”:

KING: It’s not just people who are involved with the terrorists and extremists,it is people who are in mainstream Islam, leaders of mosques, leaders of Muslim organizations who do not come forward and denounce, officially denounce, officially cooperate with the police against those extremists and terrorists. So, it goes beyond the terrorists and the extremists and also includes those in what others call mainstream Muslim leadership.

Watch it:

King didn’t provide any evidence that Muslims aren’t cooperating with authorities. While many Muslim leaders have complained of a heavy-handed FBI presence in their communities, American Muslims have been integral in combating domestic terrorism. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) said at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, according to the Muslim Public Affairs Council, “About a third of all foiled al-Qaida-related plots in the U.S. relied on support or information provided by members of the Muslim community.” Indeed, a Senagalese Muslim immigrant who works as a vendor in Times Square was the first to bring the smoking car that was part of the failed Times Square bombing plot to the police’s attention. And the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who failed in his attempt to blow up an airplane over Detroit last year — alerted U.S. authoritiesof his son’s “extreme radical views” months before he tried to carry out the attack.

Moreover, a recent academic study found that American contemporary mosques are serving as a deterrent to the spread of extremism and terrorism. The New York Times noted that the study found that “many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.” “Muslim-American communities have been active in preventing radicalization,” said study co- author David Kurzman. “This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulted in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11.”

King’s claim that Muslim organizations in the U.S. aren’t denouncing terrorism is simply false. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim organization, unequivocally condemned terrorism and has launched numerous anti-extremism campaigns.

From the Khalil Gibran controversy to Park 51 the anti-Muslim machine is not new. (hat tip: Garret)

Killing the Buddha: The anti-Muslim Machine

by Kiera Feldman

In the fall of 2007, New York’s first Arabic-language public school was slated to open in Brooklyn. For a namesake, organizers chose the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, a pacifist, an immigrant to New York, and a Christian so obsessed with Jesus he often said the Son of God visited him in his dreams. With a name like Khalil Gibran International Academy, they thought, surely no one would mistake it for a Muslimschool.

“Imbuing pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, proselytizing for Islam, and promoting Islamist sympathies will predictably make up the school’s true curriculum,” professional anti-Muslim Daniel Pipes wrote in a New York Sun op-ed, “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn.” Later, he’d admit the claim was “a bit of a stretch.” No matter: Pipes’ rallying cry was heard by conservative activists, who founded a Stop the Madrassa Coalition, unleashing a vicious tarring of Khalil Gibran’s would-be principal, Debbie Almontaser. Three years later, those same activists would set upon the “Ground Zero mosque.” “All of these groups are connected and working on one thing,” Almontaser told a colleague and me recently, “to eliminate anything Arab or Muslim in the United States.”

A pillar of the local interfaith community and longtime educator, Debbie Almontaser worked with the Bloomberg administration to make Khalil Gibran a reality. The Timescalled Almontaser “arguably the city’s most visible Arab-American woman.” She carries herself tall and wears a simple, tightly-wrapped hijab that covers her hair but not her neck, making her high cheekbones all the more striking. Kind but authoritative, with a girlish lilt in her voice that puts one instantly at ease, “Principal Almontaser” would’ve suited her well.

The summer before Almontaser was to take the helm of Khalil Gibran, Stop the Madrassa spokeswoman Pamela Hall went trolling at New York’s annual Muslim Day Parade. Hall found a t-shirt that read “Intifada NYC” and snapped a picture. Gold mine: Almontaser was on the board of an organization that rented office space to the women’s group that made the t-shirt.

In our post-9/11 landscape of guilt-by-association, a time when every public American Muslim must prove their nonviolence by ritually denouncing radical Islam and Hamas, it was enough of a smoking gun. Department of Education officials pressured Almontaser to do an interview with the New York Post, the city’s preeminent tabloid. The next day, newsstands were plastered with the words “CITY PRINCIPAL IS ‘REVOLTING’: TIED TO ‘INTIFADA NYC’ SHIRTS.” The Bloomberg administration forced Almontaser to resign; in September, Khalil Gibran opened without her. Installed in her stead was an Orthodox Jewish woman who spoke no Arabic. Stop the Madrassa wanted more: specifically, Khalil Gibran’s closure. Staff took precautions not to give them fuel. “We cut pictures of mosques out of the Arabic books,” one teacher told Colorlines magazine as the school year began. “We are afraid that anything could be taken out of context.” But such measures would never be enough; the damage was done. Stop the Madrassa et al., triumphant, had caught a whiff of what they could accomplish.

*

Now that the fervor over Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” has died down somewhat, we can actually step back, take a look around, and consider: the shitstorm that just passed through town is a familiar one. The proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan is the Brooklyn “madrassa” all over again, with the same cast of conservative activists working to block the mainstreaming of Muslims in the public sphere. Imam Abdul Feisal Rauf wants to create essentially a Muslim YMCA in Lower Manhattan? They say he supports Hamas and has terrorist ties. Debbie Almontaser wanted to head a public school that’d specialize in Arabic? Also—you guessed it—a Hamas supporter with terrorist ties. And repeat.

The anti-Muslim voices in the echo chamber are the same now as they were three years ago. They never stopped; they talked amongst themselves, writing books and articles and blog posts, the in-crowd growing larger and more devoted—until another big, ambitious project spearheaded by Muslims came around. Suddenly a mass amplification took place, and we found ourselves asking a question traditionally under the purview of the Right: what is happening to our country?

Khalil Gibran was not the beginning; our local and national history can be read as a grand succession of shitstorms. Yes, nativism is the great American common denominator. And New York has its own specific tradition of reactionary backlashes, in which the majority sees both its safety and entire way of life threatened by minorities. Where to begin?

Suzanne Wasserman of CUNY’s Gotham Center for New York City History points to colonial New York’s fears of slave rebellion. It was a time when 1/5th of Manhattanites were owned by another in what historian Jill Lepore has termed “a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.” Accused of plotting to kill every single white person on the island, dozens of slaves were either burned at the stake or hanged in 1741. In the next century, Wasserman notes New York saw riots against Irish Catholics in the 1830s, the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s, and the draft riots during the Civil War, when angry mobs of resentful working class whites attacked African-Americans, carrying out lynchings in the West Village. Twentieth-century New York saw race riots, and lots of them: 1919, 1935, 1943, 1968, and more. Then there were the hard-hat riots against the New Left in 1970, when construction workers attacked anti-war protestors near City Hall. Lest we be lacking in sympathy for angry mobs, we’d do well to remember the Stonewall riots and the Tompkins Square Park riot, when gays and the homeless did battle with the cops—or rather, in the case of the latter, were outright attacked by NYPD’s finest.

Nowadays, we don’t lynch, and we riot rarely. The occasional individual will stab a Muslim cabbie in Manhattan, beat a Mexican on Staten Island, or kill an Ecuadorian on Long Island. Mostly, we blog. An angry, fearful mob, posting and commenting, commenting and posting, in a town square cobbled with pornography and hate speech: the internet.

And yet, Mayor Bloomberg offers an appealing narrative of progress. In a landmarkspeech on Governors Island in August, he declared his unwavering support for Park51, the Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan. He termed New York “the freest city in the world,” a “hard-won” freedom thanks to a long line of struggles beginning in the 17th century with Jews and Quakers petitioning the Dutch—unsuccessfully—for the right to build a synagogue and hold meeting groups, respectively. “I do agree with Bloomberg that we are the most tolerant city in the entire universe,” Wasserman wrote me in an email—a proud New Yorker, backlashes and all.

From Khalil Gibran to Park51, these last three years can be read as a narrative of progress for Bloomberg as well: finally, some might sigh with relief, he has remembered his own people’s history of discrimination and, seeing the fate of the Jews as irrevocably tied with the fate of all oppressed peoples, seen the light. Not quite. For starters, Almontaser pointed out, Bloomberg still steadfastly refuses to include Muslim holidays in the New York public school calendar.

And then there’s Israel. Objectively speaking, Bloomberg and his administration threw Debbie Almontaser under the bus because of a t-shirt with the words “Intifada NYC.” Almontaser failed to denounce the word to the New York Post. Instead, she’d given the educator’s answer: a history lesson.

“We all know what a huge supporter of Israel Bloomberg is,” Almontaser told me. Exhibit A: the mayor’s trip to the Jewish state during the 2008-09 attack on Gaza. Israel, Almontaser says, is “the elephant in the room” of New York politics. It’s a force that can make the mayor demand a public school principal’s resignation. A force that can make Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, defend Israel’s blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, saying the goal is a honorable one: “to strangle them economically.” Such is the power of Zionism that it asks Jews, the majority of whom lean leftward, “to check their liberalism at [the] door,” as Peter Beinart put it.

Were Abdul Feisal Rauf to say a single critical word about Israel, Almontaser predicted Bloomberg would withdraw his support for Park51 in a heartbeat.

“Anything is possible,” she said.

“When it comes to Bloomberg and Israel?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she replied with a laugh.

It struck me as a very Jewish response, in a way: finding humor in the stuff of the world’s wrongs against you.

*

So: Mayor Bloomberg caved to Stop the Madrassa, and Debbie Almontaser lost her school. So what? In a state in which the mayor is the most powerful elected official, action counts. “Bloomberg has empowered them,” Almontaser said of the constellation of conservative activists who fought Khalil Gibran. It was an emboldening victory, a glimpse of the power of the blog. “His stance of not standing up to them gave them credence.”

Who is “them,” anyway? The dynamic duo of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer deserve an extended introduction, as they were vocal saber rattlers against Khalil Gibran and then emerged the leading voices against Park51—Geller in particular. She is an arch-conservative Upper East Side Zionist Jew, a Tea Partier, a conspiracy theorist, a supporter of the neo-fascist English Defense League, and proprietor of the website Atlas Shrugs, ranked the 16th most popular conservative blog by Compete Site Analytics. There, she Photoshopped a picture of Elena Kagan in Nazi regalia and infamously re-posted another blogger’s theory that Barack Obama could very well be Malcolm X’s lovechild. “I love Muslims,” Geller declares just about as often as she says, “Hitler was inspired by Islam.” With funding from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the ultra-right wing, pro-Israel philanthropists Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, Spencer runs a website called Jihad Watch and is the pseudo-academic of the two. ANew York Times-bestselling author, he is a man Karen Armstrong once described as having “studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it is an evil, inherently violent religion.”

In May, Geller became the first person to write in opposition to what was then called Cordoba House (“Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction”). For months afterward, she led the anti-Muslim bloggers’ brigade against the Islamic center, a clamor amplified by conservative media—until Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich blew it up into a national issue.

Spencer told me their friendship began in 2006, when Geller introduced herself at a conference; they had a mutual friend, Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Brown University medical school professor and, as the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, a semi-professional anti-Muslim. One of Spencer and Geller’s early partnerships was organizing a rally about Rifqa Bary, a teenage Muslim girl who converted to Christianity and ran away from her Ohio home, claiming her family threatened to kill her. The police found no evidence to support her allegations, but Bary’s case has become a focal point for those in the anti-Muslim cottage industry predicated on Islam’s doctrinal mandates to violence.

“There is no justification for so-called honor killing in Islamic law or religion,” Georgetown professor John Esposito emphasizes, calling it a “cultural phenomenon” found among Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and, yes, Muslims. Spencer and Geller are obsessed with the figure of the dead Muslim girl, killed by her family in the name of Islam. On Atlas Shrugs, Geller prominently features pictures of alleged honor killing victims, pretty girls in make-up without hijabs, killed—according to Geller and Spencer’s logic—for becoming Western. Spencer and Geller are interested only in dead Muslims or ex-Muslims: “I fight for the moderates,” Geller told Right Wing News, adding, “I fight for people that are leaving Islam.” At the same time, they cast themselves as “human rights activists,” Muslims’ saviors from the inherent violence of Islam—but what they offer in its stead is unclear.

Together Spencer and Geller now run Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), the stateside offshoot of Stop the Islamization of Europe (motto: “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense”). SIOA is under the banner of the Freedom Defense Initiative (on whose board sits John Joseph Jay, a retired lawyer who blogs in support of violence against Muslims: ‘There are no innocent muslims.  islam is subject to killing on grounds of political expediency on the same basis as islam kills its victims” [sic]). SIOA is responsible for the MTA bus adsdepicting the Twin Towers in flames beside an artist’s rendering of Park51 emblazoned with a star and crescent (SIOA’s addition), and the words “Why there?”

This spring, SIOA advertisements graced buses and taxis in major metropolitan cities across the country, asking, “Leaving Islam? Is your family threatening you?” and directed readers to refugefromislam.com, an empty shell of a website. The ads faced opposition in New York and elsewhere, and their lawyer was the inimitable David Yerushalmi, an ultra-right wing Zionist who advocates 20-year prison sentences for practicing Muslims. He once lamented that one gets unfairly termed a racist when telling the truth “of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights.” And in yet another sign of the Right’s mainstreaming of its fringe, three Republican members of the House recently endorsed “Sharia: The Threat to America,” a reportYerushalmi co-authored. Along with Daniel Pipes, Yerushalmi was a board member of Stop the Madrassa.

It would be much easier if we could write the Robert Spencers and Pamela Gellers of the world off as fringe racist crazies. But their books sell; their blogs get more traffic than Killing the Buddha ever will. Simon and Schuster gave Spencer and Geller a six-figure advance to write their book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, blurbed by Geert Wilders, the nativist Dutch MP who wants to ban the burqa and the Qur’an. Recently in Virginia, the FBI and the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force even had Spencer teach law enforcement agents about the threats of Islam—an educator’s role he often plays for the Army and assorted intelligence agencies. Together, Spencer and Geller are shining examples of successful conservative activism via media punditry.

*

The thread that connects Khalil Gibran and Park51 is something we’ve been facing this whole post-9/11 decade: a sizeable swath of Americans is simply not okay with Muslims in the public sphere. It is an unease that lies dormant, not front page news, but quietly showing its symptoms. In 2002, the Council on American-Islamic Relationsreceived 602 civil rights complaints from Muslims, ranging from hate crimes to mosque vandalism; by 2009, that number was up to 2,728. In explaining the recent outpouring of anti-Muslim hysteria, progressives have been quick to point to Obama’s blackness—a catalyst, to be sure, but let’s not forget who paved the path along which we’ve been traveling. It was the Bush administration who paid lip service to Islam as a “religion of peace” even while rounding up Arab-Americans for detention and questioning. To be Arab-American was and is to be suspect, a potential threat, and Americans believe in defensive offensives, after all.

Over the summer, an internet meme spread: “This is NYC on Madison Ave,” read the subject line, followed by photos of Muslims bowing in prayer in the streets. And a warning: “they are claiming America for allah.” That the pictures were taken at the 2009 Muslim Day Parade was beside the point. They want to take over, and they’re doing it via legal means. They’re using the system against us. Their freedom of religion means we lose control of our country. “They plan this event so we can watch them praying on Madison avenue [sic],” Pamela Hall, the “Intifada NYC” t-shirt photographer, wrote of this fall’s 2010 Muslim Day Parade. It’s the kind of reactionary logic of the Christian Right, complaining about having to suffer the indignity of seeing a gay couple holding hands in public—or worse, a gay teacher (who must surely be recruiting children). And even worse than that, a Muslim principal (who must surely be converting them).

The Madison Avenue meme has been used to rationalize conservative activism. “Synagogues and churches, people do not pray in the streets. They do not take their little carpets out and pray in the street,” a Sheepshead Bay woman named Susan Gerber told me—adding emphatically, “We have pictures.” A former public school teacher, Gerber is a member of a group called Bay People, which is fighting the construction of a local mosque. “I envision people praying all along Voorhies Avenue, like practically in front of my house a block and a half down.” Others express their opposition more forcefully. “If they build a mosque there, I’m going to bomb the mosque,” one man told the Brooklyn Paper at a Bay People rally in June.

*

In July, Tennessee Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey described Islam as a “cult” unworthy of First Amendment rights. The national atmosphere was such that he seemed less like an unhinged politician and more a representative of the unhinged populace, professing to be “all about the freedom of religion,” but “you cross the line when they start trying to bring Sharia law into the United States.” Yes, it’s come to this, and who knows where it’s going.

A week before this year’s 9/11 anniversary, a new protest against Park51 began. A car circled the block, towing a decommissioned missile aimed skyward, toward the thirteen stories that would eventually—hopefully, maybe, if they do indeed raise the funds—comprise the so-called “megamosque.” Along the side, an inscription: “Religion preying on freedom.” After the summer we’d had, was it much of a shocker?

Organized by Stop the Islamization of America, the first rally against the “Ground Zero mosque” was held in a plaza near the site of the Twin Towers on June 6th—D-Day. “We are not hatemongerers!” Pamela Hall proclaimed from the podium. “We just want our families and our future to be safe from the racist, bigoted ideology that murdered 3,000 people.” In the crowd, signs ranged from “Everything I need to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11” to crude drawings of Mohammed with the label “beast.”

Toward the end of the rally, two dark-skinned men were overheard speaking Arabic. The crowd transformed into an angry mob, surrounded the men, and shouted, “go home” and “get out.” The Bergen Record reported that the two scared men, Joseph Nasralla and Karam El Masry, had to be extricated by police. It turned out they weren’t even Muslim. They were Egyptian Coptic Christians who’d trekked cross-country from California to join the cause against the “Ground Zero mosque.” Nasralla later told John Hawkins of Right Wing News that the Record coverage was indeed accurate, adding that he’d been shoved and his camera knocked to the ground. “He said he was worried that things might have really gotten out of hand if the police hadn’t escorted him and Karam El Masry away,” Hawkins wrote.

“I actually caused that by accident,” an evangelical pastor named David Wood told me with a chuckle. He meant the near race riot. Wood is a PhD student in philosophy at a respectable New York institution whose name he didn’t want me to use. Passionate about proselytizing to Muslims, Wood’s expertise is Christian apologetics, the practice of arguing unbelievers into faith. He is best known as the creator of a viral video “Of Mosques and Men,” which argues all Muslims—even those who seem “peaceful,” like “good citizens in public”—had an urge to “smile when there were terrorist attacks.” But Wood allows himself a little laugh about violence when Muslims are on the receiving end.

As he tells the story of that day, “[The Copts] were complaining about not having anything to hand out. And I said, ‘I’ve got some pamphlets on Islam, specifically on whether Islam is a religion of peace.” The pamphlets contained passages of the Qur’an selected to suggest the answer is no. “People thought they were there to defend the mosque and promote Islam,” Wood explained. “Lots of people were fired up about that.” But it was a goofy case of mistaken identity, a funny little mix-up. “The guys who were doing it were actually Christians,” Wood told me as if clearing up the whole matter. “They weren’t Muslims.” In other words: the mob’s anger and actions were justified, but misdirected. Aim better next time?

On Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer winkingly termed the Copt incident a “kerfuffle” and posted a statement from Nasralla. The mob’s violence and his own fear were both magically absent from Nasralla’s statement. “We Coptic Christians wanted to express our full support to your initiative and to this important rally,” Nasrallah wrote in a letter addressed to Spencer and Geller, adding that the confrontation was “blown out of proportion” and the crowd had simply “mistaken” them as “Muslims infiltrators trying to disrupt the event.”

When I asked Spencer about the June 6th rally, he insisted on reading Nasrallah’s statement from start to finish over the phone. Irritation was palpable in his voice, rising as he went along. Reaching the final line, Spencer trilled the letters in the Copt’s last name with a disdainful flourish. “Yours truly, Joseph Nassss-RRRALLL-ahhh,” he said, exasperated.

I invited Spencer to explain how he and Geller are not stirring up anti-Muslim violence. “There isn’t any anti-Muslim violence,” he shot back. “Where is it? Tell me an incident.” The CAIR reports? Those are “false hate crimes, often done by Muslims themselves”—a point Daniel Pipes has been harping on for years. The perpetrators’ motivation, Spencer says, is to “bamboozle people into thinking that Muslims are being victimized.”

Among Pamela Geller’s more incendiary writings on Atlas Shrugs was a piece in which she called for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock. “The dome has got to go,” Geller wrote not once but twice. Definitely not incitement, said Spencer, and here he grew jovial. “If Ms. Geller were leading an army, and they had bulldozers, and they were about to knock over the Dome of the Rock, then you might have a point.” He was clearly amused that I could conceive of such a thing. “It isn’t as if Pamela Geller is the IDF.”

But then he grew serious, concerned for my political salvation. “I’m talking to you as a human being,” he implored, trying to reach some inner part of me that would be receptive. “You keep talking to me as a reporter,” Spencer lamented. (After the interview Spencer devoted a Jihad Watch post to our exchange, calling me “beneath contempt.”) He thought I was missing the point by focusing on hyperbolic rhetoric—that my heart had grown callous to the plight of female Muslim apostates, killed according to the laws inscribed in all Islam.

“I know there’s a soul in there,” Spencer told me solemnly. Our conversation was wrapping up. “I know that you must have some sense of justice.”

*

Debbie Almontaser is now a PhD student at Fordham University, where she studies education policy. Perhaps, she says, she’ll help other educators launch multicultural schools of their own. “At this point, I have chosen to move on,” she explains. But not if the anti-Muslim machine has anything to do with it: Pamela Hall and two other Stop the Madrassa members filed a defamation suit against Almontaser after she delivered a statement on the steps of City Hall saying, “Members of the coalition stalked me wherever I went and verbally assaulted me.” Litigation is ongoing.

In March, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that New York City’s Department of Education had discriminated against Almontaser in forcing her to resign. “It was an absolute vindication for me and others who faced such scrutiny within the Arab and Muslim community,” she concludes. And yet: the ruling only ceded Almontaser the moral high ground, not a just resolution. The Bloomberg administration didn’t offer to reinstate her as Khalil Gibran’s principal. Or even to apologize.

On the eve of September 11th, not an angry mob but rather a vigil formed in Lower Manhattan, organized by a broad coalition that teamed up in support of Park51. Volunteers passed out tall candlesticks with paper cups at the top to catch the wax. A thousand New Yorkers filled up a block on Park Place, each holding a glowing orb on a stick. Behind us, the beams from “Tribute to Light” formed the Twin Towers in the night sky.

A group began singing “Happy Birthday” to their friend who had just turned 80, and everyone nearby joined in merrily. “I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate my birthday,” the woman said as she looked around smiling, holding hands with her white-haired husband. At one point, a friend accidentally set her paper cup aflame, and we all had a laugh as she waved it out like a campfire marshmallow. We were a we. No one was really listening to the speeches, it seemed to me, but a warm feeling of belonging had settled in—a sense of being among kindred spirits who could commiserate silently about the madness taking over this country, briefly escaping it. This was the night before Geert Wilders joined Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller for a rally against the “megamosque” blocks away; no doubt its attendees had similar feelings.

Pamela Hall, the “Intifada NYC” t-shirt photographer, was there with her camera at the vigil, too. Always on the prowl for more fodder for the online mill, Hall planted herself in front of the stage and began snapping photos. Nearby, the “intifada principal” chatted with the other vigil organizers. By now, they recognize one another, of course. Debbie Almontaser looked into the lens and smiled for the camera, weary but defiant.

The "Gun Saint"

John Snyder, a member of the St. Gabriel Possenti Society, a group that honors the “gun saint” brags that he is designated the “senior rights activist in Washington” by Shotgun News. Snyder recently published a news release on the Christian News Wire saying “we must be armed to fight the Islamists.”

Snyder attempts to argue for the use of handguns on the basis that we are under threat from terrorists. It is the same piggyback and fear-mongering argument used by radical Tea Partiers and scions of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller to propagate the conspiracy of Muslim menace and threat. The fact is you are more likely to be hit by lightning, killed in a car crash, drowning, fire, or murder  than to be killed by a terrorist in America. From Reason Magazine,

But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate…in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.

What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they’ve gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.

What are the odds of dying in a terrorist attack?

So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America’s 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America’s 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

For Snyder and his ilk these facts obviously don’t matter. Why let facts get in the way when you need to drudge up support for liberal gun laws? Can we say that Snyder is motivated by religious sentiment and that he in fact feels that he is religiously obligated to own a gun?

Yes.

In his “news release” Snyder writes,

Snyder warned, “Those who work against this freedom in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere should beware. If it so happens that people are murdered because politically correct elitists spoke and worked successfully to prevent citizens from getting, carrying and using self-defense guns, the blood of the innocent will be on their hands.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ tells us that, ‘A man without a sword must sell his cloak and buy one,’ according to Luke (22:36). It’s time to take all of His words to heart.”

Ominous words from Snyder, but does this comport with Christian teaching? Is the old song, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition” on the mark? Imagine if a Muslim had said something similar about Muslim teaching requiring Muslims to own guns, there would be no doubt that individuals in the media and the usual anti-Muslim suspects would be saying that this is the correct interpretation of the religion and therefore Islam is a violent Faith.

JihadWatch, a vitriolic hate site run by pretend scholar Robert Spencer, has propelled itself to the forefront of the Islamophobic movement in the United States.  The fear-mongering Spencer has used his hate site to demonize Islam and Muslims.  To bolster his credibility, Robert Spencer had long ago issued an open challenge to “Muslims and leftists” to debate his ideas.

I accepted Spencer’s challenge to a debate on June 17th, 2010.  Since then, several influential Muslim-American spokesmen have expressed their interest in such a debate between Spencer and I.  This includes Ahmed Rehab (Executive Director of CAIR-Chicago), who issued a scathing statement against Spencer.  However, it has now been over 135 days since I accepted Robert Spencer’s challenge.  JihadWatch has generated excuse after excuse as to why this radio debate cannot take place.

The latest set of excuses was that I must reveal who I am before a debate can take place.  Spencer issued this pre-condition knowing full well that I value my anonymity too much to do that.  He naturally thought that this was a creative way to get out of a debate with me while at the same time saving face.  Said Spencer:

Sorry, I don’t debate fictional characters or pseudonyms. “Danios of Loonwatch” can go debate Scot Harvath or Harold Robbins.

This is of course strange since Hugh Fitzgerald, the Vice President of JihadWatch since 2004, himself operates under an anonymous pseudonym.  Fitzgerald is a co-administrator of the site, alongside Spencer.  Is Fitzgerald then a “fictional character” who is only worthy of debate with Scot Harvath or Harold Robbins?

If that is the case, I challenge Hugh Fitzgerald–co-administer and Vice President of JihadWatch–to a radio debate.  The topic will be Jihad, “Dhimmitude”, and Taqiyya (Stealth Jihad), namely chapters 1-4 of Robert Spencer’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).

Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch uses a pseudonym like myself, and he remains completely anonymous like myself.  Surely two “fictional characters” are worthy of debating each other, right?

Now what excuse will be generated by JihadWatch to avoid this debate with LoonWatch?  I can just see Robert Spencer’s brain churning in order to generate a reason to get out of this one.  The truth is that JihadWatch is a bully, and as soon as someone steps up to a bully and delivers a solid punch to the mouth, the bully backs down like the coward he is.

No Islamophobia here. Seems like another Spencer follower gone off the deep end.

Muslim woman says man cursed, spat at her in Walmart

OXFORD, N.C. — A 66-year-old man is facing ethnic intimidation charges after he allegedly verbally abused a female Muslim-American customer at an Oxford Walmart on Tuesday. The woman is speaking out and says she doesn’t want this to happen to anyone else.

The 31-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified for safety purposes, said she went to Walmart to buy a carton of milk. Instead, she says, James Currin Jr., 66, confronted her and asked: “Hey, are you Muslim?” When she said yes, Currin began swearing, spitting at her and told her to go back “wherever you came from,” she said.

“I was frozen with fear. I was startled. I was frightened,” she said. “He’s actually there glaring at me, just going over me from head to toe, head to toe, head to toe. It was a blood-curdling stare.”

The woman says Currin followed her as she walked to the front of the store to find her mother and notify management. Store officials called Oxford police, who arrested Currin and brought him before a Granville County magistrate.

Police did not charge Currin with any crime since officers did not witness the encounter. However, they asked the woman to file charges – a procedure often used in misdemeanor cases.

Before leaving, the woman said she had one more run-in with Currin.

“(He) began to laugh. He was laughing at us,” she said.

According to the police report, Currin denied having a confrontation with the woman. He received a criminal summons and is due to appear in court on Nov. 29. WRAL News was unable to reach him for comment.

The woman says her faith means everything to her and she hopes pressing charges sends a clear message about how she was treated.

“For someone to attack me solely on the basis of my faith, it’s very alarming,” she said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, is calling for additional hate crime charges to be brought against Currin.

“An American-Muslim woman should be able to go about her daily routine without fear of being assaulted because of her faith,” said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “We urge local prosecutors and the FBI to consider additional charges based on the apparent bias-motive of the alleged assailant.”

Candidates for anti-Loons of the Year, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held their combined Rallies to Restore Sanity and March to Keep Fear Alive on the Washington Mall, Saturday October, 30th. The event was held to promote a dialogue of reasonableness and restore rationality to the divided discourse that exists in America. Over 250,000 people showed up, more than Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor which garnered around 90,000.

Among the many messages, one was explicitly addressing the irrational fears Americans have of Muslims.

Jon Stewart on his intentions for the rally,

JON STEWART: I’m really happy you guys are here, even if none of us are really quite sure why. So, what exactly was this? I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s twenty-four-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the résumé. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate—just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.

Stewart and Colbert also awarded Jacob Isom a medal for his contribution to restoring sanity,

JON STEWART: Our next honoree reacted quickly when he found himself face-to-face with a flammable situation.

JACOB ISOM: Snuck up behind him and took his Quran. He said something about burning the Quran. I was like, “Dude, you have no Quran,” and ran off.

JON STEWART: I like that. Can we hear that again, maybe with a dance remix?

JACOB ISOM: [remixed] You have no Quran. Snuck up behind him and took his Quran. Said something about burning the Quran. I was like, “Dude, you have no Quran. Dude, you have no Quran.”

JON STEWART: Thank you, YouTube. Now, obviously I don’t normally condone ripping things out of people’s hands, but I think in this situation it was the most reasonable thing to do. Ladies and gentleman, our final awardee, Jacob Isom. Sir? Come on up, brother. Oh, there you go.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Boo-ya! Dude, you have no medal! How’s that feel?

Finally, the pair of comedians had an exchange with Karim Abdul Jabbar to highlight the fact that Americans shouldn’t fear Islam and Muslims and those who are doing criminal actions are a very tiny minority:

STEPHEN COLBERT: What about Muslims?

JON STEWART: What? What about them?

STEPHEN COLBERT: They attacked us.

JON STEWART: Stephen, “they” did not. Some people who happen to be of Muslim faith attacked us. But there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Most of them—

STEPHEN COLBERT: Did not, is what you’re saying?

JON STEWART: That is correct.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Oh, Jon, oh, so you’re saying—you’re saying that there is no reason at all to be afraid of Osama bin Laden?

JON STEWART: No, Osama bin Laden is a specific person. He’s bad.

STEPHEN COLBERT: He is a specific bad Muslim person.

JON STEWART: Yeah, but that’s not—there are plenty of Muslim people that are not bad and that you would like, and that’s fine.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Oh, really? Who? Who would I like?

JON STEWART: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

JON STEWART: Yes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Kareem!

JON STEWART: That is someone that you would—

STEPHEN COLBERT: Watch your head. Kareem, my man! Hey, Kareem!

JON STEWART: You know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is Muslim.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Well, that’s not fair, Jon. That’s not a fair example. Kareem is cool. We’re friends.

KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: Well, we’re acquaintances. You know, a real friend understands that no matter what religious position someone plays, we’re all on the same team.

It was an amazing rally, and despite all the attempts to undercut it and underplay its significance by both the media and certain politicians it was a tremendous success! The message at the end of the day was that we can have disagreements in a reasonable manner and that what binds us as humans is stronger than what divides us. As cliche as it sounds, at the end of the day it was a call for peace and love.

I leave you with this duet between Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and Ozzy Osbourne doing their respective Peace Train and Crazy Train: