Nonie giving a passionate anti-Muslim lecture

Nonie Darwish, a staple of the Right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobia network has been invited to speak by the George Mason Law School. She is scheduled to speak at the law school on October 5. [5 p.m., Room 121]. Her address, titled “The West’s Clash with Radicalism,” is sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Jewish Law Students Association. We urge all loonwatchers to contact the school and ask that she be disinvited.

Recently Nonie Darwish let loose her radical and violent rhetoric at an SIOA rally. (Bear in mind that SIOA has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the SPLC and was denied a trademark patent by the US government.)

Islam is a poison to a society. It’s divisive. It’s hateful. Look what Islam is doing on our college campuses. It’s full of anti-Semitism. It’s going to turn us against one another. It’s going to produce chaos in society. Because Islam should be feared, and should be fought, and should be conquered, and defeated, and annihilated, and it’s going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, Islam is going to be brought down. . .Because Islam is based on lies and it’s not based on the truth. I have no doubt whatsoever that Islam is going to be destroyed.

We have also dealt with Nonie Darwish’s radicalism in past articles. One of the most recent articles dealt with the fact that she was called as a witness in a New York State Senate hearing on “preparedness since 9/11″:

Like most in the anti-Muslim business, Nonie has a greatly exaggerated personal sob-story backed up by book deals and speaking engagements in all the typical “hating on Muslim” venues. She sells herself as a “human rights activist,” as do so many other virulent Muslim-bashers, though she doesn’t seem to care too much about the human rights of Muslims. This time, however, she will be using the pseudonym “Nahid Hyde,” perhaps as a not-so-clever way of avoiding government inquiry into her association with other bigots and white supremacists. Yet, even a cursory view of her ridiculous book titles should cause any serious security official to question her credibility as a fair and impartial witness.

The reviewer of her latest book, “Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law,” (which sells for a whopping $28.99) stated:

In her estimation, Islam is a backward and authoritarian ideology that is attempting to impose on the world the norms of seventh-century Bedouin life. For Darwish, Islam is a sinister force that must be resisted and contained.

It must be difficult to pack so many stereotypes into 272 pages, but Ms. Darwish has done it, making such bold generalizations and demonstrably false claims as:

Sharia is incompatible with any state that has as a foundational principle the equality of the sexes before the law.

Perhaps she should “educate” the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who recently remarked:

Egypt’s religious tradition is anchored in a moderate, tolerant view of Islam. We believe that Islamic law guarantees freedom of conscience and expression (within the bounds of common decency) and equal rights for women. And as head of Egypt’s agency of Islamic jurisprudence, I can assure you that the religious establishment is committed to the belief that government must be based on popular sovereignty.

But disclosing some enlightening and nuanced facts about contemporary Islam or the multivalent, non-monolithic view and relationship Muslims have with Islamic Law would ruin her book sales and speaking tours, wouldn’t it?

Like other Islamophobes, she is careful to make a distinction between Islam and Muslims, so as not to appear like the plain bigot she is:

Darwish is careful to distinguish between people and ideas: “The purpose of this book is not to spread hatred of a people but to tell the truth about the wickedness of Islamic Sharia law.”

Such distinctions are disingenuous, pro-forma statements that only fool the naïve into thinking she isn’t a professional hate-monger. (Right, just like how Pam Geller loves those Moozlims so much she wants to drop nuclear bombs on them, out of love, of course.)

Contrary to her assertion, Ms. Darwish regularly engages in dehumanizing rhetoric about all Muslims, not just extremists. She even told the New York Times:

A mosque is not just a place for worship. It’s a place where war is started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur. It’s a place where ammunition was stored.

That was one of her tamer statements dressed up before a liberal audience. Such sweeping outright lies have been instrumental in the spread of anti-Muslim, anti-Sharia, and anti-Mosque hysteria in our country, materializing in over 800 documented cases of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination. When confronted about her lies, she will likely attempt to dismiss her critics as agents of the Mad Mullah Conspiracy, rather than owning up to the falsity of her claims.

It is sad that Darwish is still getting a pass on her bigotry and lies and finding mainstream audiences willing to listen to her spout her desire to see the demise and destruction of Islam. For more on Darwish read the article, Nonie Darwish Caught in a Pool of Lies.

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s close ally, John Jay (a founding member of SIOA) is calling for the mass murder of all Muslims–again. We reported on him previously in our piece, SIOA Co-Founder: Kill Your Liberal Relatives and All Muslims.

Anders Breivik redux anyone? And yes, he is a US citizen.

If John Jay inspires someone to kill a bunch of Muslims will we need drones to hunt him down?

Pamela Geller Associate John Jay Openly Calls for Mass Murder

(Little Green Footballs)

One of the groups founded by anti-Muslim demagogues Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer is called the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an “umbrella” group that provides cover for their other activities and funding for their anti-Muslim advertisements.

John Jay, one of the founding members of the board of AFDI and a very frequent commenter at Pamela Geller’s website, has posted a manifesto very reminiscent of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s — a deranged, violent fantasy of mass murder: summer patriot, winter soldier: start the revolution …

start the revolution …

first things first.—

1.)take out the talking head media, and burn the new york times, the los angeles times and the washington post to the ground.  draw and quarter the media, and shoot their remains from canons in the four directions of the prevailing winds.

rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

2.)take out all the incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress, and every self avowed socialist and communist in congress.  give them all proper muslim burials at sea, just like osama bin laden.

eliminate pensions for congressional service.  rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

3.)eliminate the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara.  boil bill ayers, bernie dorhn and angela davis in canola oil, and feed their remains to the fishes.

“send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice”— John Jaythey are all physical cowards.  they should fall into line pretty quickly.  repeat every ten years as a prophylactic, on general principle.

and,

4.)now that the “arab spring” has brought enlightenment to the middle east, send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice.

burn all the mosques.  period.

just sayin’.

john jay @ 09.26.2011

p.s.  burn the editors and contributors to “the daily kos” at the stake.  i’ll think of something suitable for hilary clinton.  bill, he has to room with jimmy carter in a clapped out pickup & camper on the edge of a southern peanut field, somewhere in arkansas: that’s about as close to a living hell as i can imagine for him.

and, throw all the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits, from which there is no escape.  sorry, jeb.  but, i think that you were a skull & bones internationalist, too, weren’t you?

A stunning level of hatred and incitement, even for these crazed bigots. Let’s hope the authorities are keeping as close an eye on this lunatic as they are on radical Muslims.

The title may offend some, but here at Loonwatch we do not believe in any sacred cows. By now we have all heard reports about the killing of accused terrorist and mastermind behind the “underwear bomber” and “Fort Hood shootings,” US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. The fact that he was on a “hit list” that included other US citizens was reported back in January:

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.

After several unsuccessful attempts by the US government Anwar al-Awlaki is finally dead. The indefatigable Glenn Greenwald spells out the tendentious nature of the hunt for Awlaki and all the resultant shadiness:

No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.  When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

Awlaki once was a marginal figure, on the run in the mountains of Yemen, his operational role in AlQaeda was nill, now he has been transformed into a martyr with a little help from our brutal friend, the President of Yemen:

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.).  It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its.  The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world.  The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

The implications for our civil liberties and checks and balances on the power of the Executive are clear:

What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.  Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists — criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture.  It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

Greenwald’s evaluation is dark because of the uncomfortable truth he relates: we are cheering the destruction of the very liberties that safeguard us from the abuses of power.

This is all being done under the guise of defending our “freedom” and “security.” In reality, as terror expert Professor Charles Kurzman points out, very few Muslims were interested in Awlaki’s message:

Given that Awlaki’s messages is sitting on the internet, easily accessible to millions of English speaking Muslims, it’s very interesting how few have taken him up on his demand that Muslims join the revolutionary movement.

It is time that US citizens stand up for their rights and say we will not allow the government to take the life of our citizens without due process. We are not going to buy the line that our civil liberties and freedoms must be bargained in the interest of “security,” especially from a threat that is overblown in the first place.

Banned Books Week: Read ‘The Hunger Games’ or the ‘Koran’

By Liz Kelly Nelson

Thanks to the vigilance of the American Library Association (ALA), the list of books banned or challenged in 2010-2011 isn’t as long as it could be, but it’s long enough to keep a person out of books for at least a year. Every year during Banned Book Week the ALA works to keep books considered controversial, obscene or profane on library shelves and in schools.

In the past year, books in danger of censorship include Suzanne Collins’ popular “Hunger Games” series, which was adapted into a screenplay and will arrive in theaters sometime in 2012 to torment parents and others who think it numbs kids to violence. A Virginia school system also tried to ban “The Diary of Anne Frank,” when it received a complaint that the book “sexual material and homosexual themes.”

The ALA asks that from Sept. 24 – Oct. 1, lovers of literature read a banned book. Below, some titles from the 2010-2011 list to get you started:

• “The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins
• “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Anne Frank
• “Water for Elephants,” Sarah Gruen
• “Brave New World,” Alduous Huxley
• “The Koran”
• “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger
• “Push,” Sapphire
• “Slaughter-house 5,” Kurt Vonnegut
• “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Joseph Lelveld
• “My Mom’s Having a Baby,” Dori Hillested Butler

Follow Zap2it on Twitter and Zap2it on Facebook for the latest news and buzz 

Anti-Loon Tony Mijares

Tony Mijares is an unsung hero and definitely one of the anti-Loons of the year. He has been a strident opponent of the Islamophobic Rutherford Reader which gins up anti-Mosque and anti-Islam rhetoric.

I hope all those of conscious from amongst Muslims and non-Muslims help him in his time of need.

A Murfreesboro paper and a Smyrna citizen do battle over Islam

by Jonathan Meador (Nashville Scene)

The idea that he would become an activist for Muslim rights never occurred to Tony Mijares, who is not a Muslim. But then, destiny rarely raps on the doors of the overprepared. Shortly after retiring from the international freight forwarding industry in 2005, the 54-year-old Mijares relocated from bustling cosmopolitan Los Angeles to the considerably smaller and more conservative town of Smyrna, Tenn. — not to spark a new front in America’s culture wars, but to take care of his elderly mother, Josephine.

“That,” Mijares tells the Scene, “and the cheap rent.”

Prone to speaking his mind in a fashion unbecoming to most definitions of Southern gentility, Mijares nonetheless managed to keep a low profile in a town of approximately 39,000, spending his days caring for Josephine and trying his best to enjoy the retiree’s life in small-town America — a big leap for the native Chicagoan.

“I’m an Italian-American,” Mijares says. “I have black hair, I have a big nose, I have olive skin, and I have this accent. I look pretty different than most people here.” So different, he says, that he and his mother have gotten an odd vibe sometimes when they’ve gone to a store or restaurant.

“They look at us like, ‘You don’t fit in here — how dare you walk in here, what are you even doing here?’,” he says. “I thought, what the hell is this? I’ve lived in LA and it’s like the United Nations over there. If people there don’t like you, it’s because of something you’ve said to them, not because of how you look. That really grated on me, and it still does.”

Some degree of culture shock was inevitable. “I’m already sick of biscuits and gravy,” Mijares jokes. But his aspirations for idyllic retirement began to evaporate in April 2010, when he opened a copy of a local weekly publication, The Rutherford Reader.

Mijares was familiar with the Reader. Founded in 2000 by career newspaperman Peter Doughtie and employing several of his family members, the Murfreesboro-based community newspaper often caught Mijares’ attention with its ultra-conservative editorial content. To Mijares, it “went off the rails” after Barack Obama was elected in 2008 — but that wasn’t what caught his attention this time.

“While I respect the works of moderate Muslims … I wholeheartedly, unfortunately, must assert that the U.S. must halt all future Muslim immigration, until Muslims acquiesce to living within the legal structures of their host nations rather than striving to restructure nations under an evil, de-humanizing, backward and defiling 12th century ideology, even should this take the next 50 years,” wrote Reader guest columnist Justin O. Smith in the April 8, 2010, edition.

Reading it in disbelief, Mijares says, “My mouth just dropped open, because all you have to do is substitute the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Islam’ and this would be a Nazi paper.”

Alarmed by the Reader‘s increasingly anti-Muslim bent amid the ongoing controversy over a proposed 52,000-square-foot Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Mijares decided to take action. He began calling the Reader‘s advertisers and distributors about what he was reading. And one by one, they began withdrawing their support.

Mijares’ efforts garnered local headlines last year as a result of his campaign’s success. Multiple Rutherford County businesses, including Kroger and Kentucky Fried Chicken, refused to carry the Reader after actually reading its articles, which frequently detail the threat of Sharia law and radical Islam to the freedoms of small-town Smyrna. Conservative websites like the New English Review and even Fox News portrayed the campaign as yet another example of political correctness and liberal censorship in the Obama era, despite the fact that the decision of former advertisers and distributors to end their business relationships with the Reader were entirely voluntary.

As the headlines died down, Mijares continued to sporadically write letters to the Reader‘s diminishing advertisers, which by then were largely limited to local businesses. Many of them either defended the paper’s right to free speech, or just ignored Mijares altogether.

“This is not my job,” he says. “This is not even a hobby. I have an elderly parent I gotta take care of, and in my spare time, if I happen to look at it, I’ll do something about it. This is not something I do everyday, every week or even every month.”

But beginning with its August 2011 editions, the Reader turned the tables on Mijares. For three consecutive weeks, the paper published a letter he sent to one of its advertisers, Music City Medical Supply. That letter included Mijares’ home address, which was highlighted on page 20-B with the following speculation: “[Is Mijares] working for or being funded by a Muslim group to harass local businesses?”

“Phone calls are being made and letters sent because of the large number of businesses that have chosen to advertise with The Reader and carry it in their stores,” the paper declared. “We appreciate any support you can give our advertisers to combat the bullying and harassment they are receiving.”

Mijares was terrified. Living in the same county where the construction site for the aforementioned Murfreesboro mosque expansion was vandalized and construction equipment set ablaze in August 2010 didn’t bode well for the reluctant activist, whose elderly mother had now been implicated in the feud.

“This is not some paranoid fantasy of mine,” he says. “Just because I’m alive right now doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some incident coming up. It’s not just a local paper. They published this on their website, which is read across the country, so that any Aryan or skinhead or redneck from Montana to West Virginia could get it into his head that I’m supposed to be a target. Even then I could still handle it, but what pisses me off is that [Doughtie] put my family at risk.”

Doughtie tells the Scene via email that Mijares has “spent a year and a half trying to harm our publication, our livelihood, and our family. I do not feel I owe Mijares any consideration whatsoever.” Whether that justifies publishing Mijares’ home address, Doughtie declined to say, adding instead that he has retained an attorney who sent a cease-and-desist letter to halt Mijares’ protest. Mijares, protected by the First Amendment, has ignored the letter.

“My philosophy is that if a bully pushes you, you push back immediately and kick him for good measure,” Mijares says. “If you do nothing, he’ll be encouraged to keep bullying you.” He’s since contacted the Smyrna Police Department, who declined to comment for this story, and is actively seeking legal representation.

But others who say they’ve run afoul of anti-Muslim opponents in Rutherford County have retained more than lawyers. In 2010, documentarian Eric Allen Bell found himself in Smyrna during a period of disillusionment with Hollywood.

“I went to a wedding in Murfreesboro, and while I was there I walked around the neighborhood and [was charmed by] the old houses in the historical district and the town square,” Bell says. “I grew up in LA, and we don’t have anything like that there. I thought I could do about six months or a year here to just write a script and take a break from Los Angeles.”

Bell’s idyll didn’t last long, though. As controversy over the proposed Murfreesboro mosque expansion turned the county into a new frontline in the culture wars, he began filming a documentary titled Not Welcome.

His confrontational tongue and critical eye evidently didn’t sit well with some members of the community. As Bell’s project began picking up steam, he says, so did the threats against his life.

“You never know for sure how seriously to take it when someone threatens you,” Bell says. “I felt that my life might be in danger, and it was hard to know if I was overreacting or not. But there were enough threats from a large group of people, so that when I filmed group scenes I had to have armed security on more than one occasion. Eventually I just decided I have enough footage [and went back to LA].”

At a September 2010 county commissioner meeting, Bell cornered then-Republican congressional candidate and Rutherford County Planning Board member Lou Ann Zelenik on the sidewalk outside the Murfreesboro town square. The filmmaker hammered her with questions about her claims that the mosque expansion was nothing more an Islamic training camp, as Zelenik had insinuated on a Fox & Friends appearance in June 2010.

“A man stepped out in front of [Zelenik] and right into my camera and said, ‘Get out of here! I’m gonna stuff that camera right up your ass!’ ” Bell recalls. “And police were there and said something inaudible and the man said to them, ‘I don’t care, I’m stuffing that camera up his ass if he doesn’t get out of here!’ ”

A couple of days later at a Tea Party event, the man who threatened Bell introduced himself as Peter Doughtie. Bell says Doughtie apologized, but more so with an aim of keeping the footage of his outburst off of YouTube. (Doughtie did not deny that the encounter took place, but added a note of clarification: ”I was referring to his microphone that was attached to the camera.”)

“He’s very much a Southern gentleman,” Bell says of Doughtie. “He’s very easy to talk to. He comes across as really harmless and really simple, but he’s actually pretty Machiavellian, because his full-time occupation is getting these Muslims out of the country, because they’re all terrorists, right?

“I’ve had enough conversations with [Doughtie] off the record, and I can see this is a really personal issue for him,” Bell adds. “He actually really believes this stuff. That said, he can be vicious. If you grab the Rutherford Reader, if you evaluate that magazine on the basis of ‘what’s the feeling I get from this,’ every page is fear, fear, fear. Ironically, it’s also supposed to be Christian. Everything about it is pointing the finger. It’s ugly.”

To be sure, not all of Doughtie’s unpaid columnists rage against the Islamic fundamentalist machine. Along with news content provided by Murfreesboro radio station WGNS-1450 AM, the paper provides a few inches each week penned by a token liberal. That is offset by a 4-to-1 ratio, however, in favor of topics such as “No Sharia, no minarets,” “Who is the Muslim Brotherhood?’ or, as a recent columnist stated, “Islam has caused more harm than Communism and Nazism combined.”

“We do not share the same opinions as the Reader,” says WGNS Vice President Scott Walker. “We allow for the Reader to publish our stories in the Reader as a way for more people to be informed about news in our community. At WGNS, we believe in individual freedoms. Although the Reader has different opinions then ours at WGNS, we value the fact that they are allowed the freedom to publish their own opinions in the great country of America. We are big believers in the freedom of speech. We value that freedom that all Americans have, even if a person’s personal views are different from ours.”

Indeed, a recent editorial penned by Doughtie himself, titled “We have our work cut out,” practically oozed “freedom of speech.”

“I am not in awe when the Imam glides by, being soft spoken and with the burkas and the robes,” writes Doughtie. “Dress like that any time in your home, and on Friday in the mosque but that dress is offensive to me in public. I’m sick and tired of not being counted when I’m offended. So many of us are offended every day but we do not speak up, we just smile and take it yet if you are something other than ‘white American,’ you are allowed to demand things be YOUR way. And the sad thing is, you get what you demand. Well, it’s time WE demand a few things.”

When asked by the Scene why his publication possesses such hostility toward a faith not unlike his own, Doughtie writes that “you may find it useful to read up on Islam by authors who are not apologists and defenders of Islam. I am not a bigot or a hater. I just have my eyes open.”

In an interview in the June 10, 2010, issue of the New English Review’s staunchly anti-Muslim blog The Iconoclast, Doughtie says the terrorist attacks of 9/11 prompted him to initiate the Reader‘s own jihad against radical Islam.

“After [9/11], I knew we could no longer ignore the fact that Islamic terrorists were carrying out their plans with a vengeance for the destruction of the West,” he says. “We reflect a Christian perspective throughout the paper. When I got into Sharia law, I knew we were in trouble.”

In the same interview, Doughtie lists the books that opened his eyes to the true nature of the Muslim faith. First was Shelley Klein’s The Most Evil Secret Societies in History, which describes the 12th century Muslim order the Hashishin (from which the term “assassin” is derived) alongside such strange conspiracy-theory bedfellows as the Bavarian Illuminati, the Ku Klux Klan and Aleister Crowley’s Argentum Astrum. Then came Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs by Robert Spencer, founder of Stop Islamization of America, which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spencer’s work has been criticized by a broad spectrum of academics and journalists for selectively using passages from the Qur’an.

Armed with this perspective, the Reader‘s reactionary slant on Islam and immigration seems almost inevitable, given the demographic shifts that have occurred in Rutherford County over the past decade. According to data from the 2010 U.S. Census, Rutherford County is significantly less Caucasian than it was just 10 years ago. Despite the total population growing by 40 percent, from 182,023 in 2000 to 262,604 as of last year, the white population has shrunk by 7.5 percent in the past decade alone. The growth is attributable to a rapid and sustained influx of minorities, whether Hispanic, African-American or Arab, minorities that now comprise 20 percent of Rutherford County’s overall population.

Meanwhile, the Reader boasts 400 distribution points with nearly 40,000 online subscribers. In light of the county’s demographic shifts and the unease reflected in the Reader, the candidacy of an anti-Muslim grandstander like Zelenik isn’t surprising.

Yet even if her 2010 bid for the 6th Congressional District failed, it exposed the extent of the divide now yawning between the Reader‘s fatwa-fearing readership and people like Mijares and Bell. To those who consider the Murfreesboro mega-mosque a Trojan horse, Zelenik is a noble crusader sounding clear and present danger in our midst, bleeding hearts be damned ­—while freedom-of-religion advocates like Bell regard her as a Southern-fried Goebbels clad in JC Penney power suits, whose guilty-until-proven-innocent campaign rhetoric echoes the screeds found within the pages of the Reader.

One of Zelenik’s campaign fliers draws the line: “Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them.”

Dr. Ossama Mohamed Bahloul, imam of the Murfreesboro Islamic Center, which received a fake-bomb threat in the week preceding the 10th anniversary of 9/11, thinks that such political and media-induced divisiveness is designed to distract all Americans from larger issues.

“You and I and everyone, at heart we want to care about our country and our life,” Bahloul says. “Some try to distract and increase the level of anger in people’s hearts. It’s how some of the politicians choose to deal with the serious challenges we have, like the deficit, or competition from China, or health care reform. I feel that sometimes if politicians can’t fix the issue, [they] try to distract people away from serious business.”

Bahloul isn’t the first person to suggest this.

In an era of contextual fragmentation wrought by mainstream mass media and the short attention spans they foster, you’d be forgiven for assuming the following passage recently appeared on Daily Kos as a wonky critique of the Tea Party.

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated … how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. I am not speaking in a clinical sense … the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

In fact, this is the lead paragraph from a 45-year-old essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” that ran in the November 1964 edition of Harper’s Magazine. Its author, historian Richard Hofstader, sought to analyze the racially charged, anti-Communist rhetoric of the John Birch Society within a historical framework. If there’s any comfort to be found in Hofstader’s words, it’s that America has a long, well-documented tradition of vitriolic misinformation, and still the Republic stands.

About this, Tony Mijares has no illusions.

“There is always going to be a Rutherford Reader or something like it,” he says. “My goal is not to put this guy out of business. If I have any kind of an agenda, it’s to continue what I’ve done already, which is to strip away this facade of it being a mainstream newspaper.”

Despite it all, Mijares’ sense of humor remains intact.

“Remember, I come from Los Angeles,” he says, “where you have the Bloods and the Crips and the Mexican Mafia and the Russian Mafia and the Chinese triads. LA is one of the most violent cities in the world — and I come to the South and I find myself endangered here, compared to all of the dangerous shit I had to put up with out there? It’s insane.”

The hollow words of Netanyahu are even more pronounced when we realize his government is in fact funding extremist radical Yeshivas (Jewish religious colleges) in West Bank settlements.

Can you imagine if this were a Muslim country? We wouldn’t hear the end of “state funded terrorism.” (hat tip: T.H. and MrIslamAnswersBack)

Israeli agency urges funding to be cut from extremist settler college

by Donald MacIntyre (The Independent)

Israel’s domestic intelligence agency is urging the government to stop funding a religious college in a Jewish West Bank settlement after warning that its senior rabbis are encouraging students to attack Palestinians.

The intelligence agency, Shin Bet, pressed a month ago for an immediate block on the annual £226,000 grant for the religious college, or yeshiva, in the notoriously extreme settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus. The Education Ministry has reportedly yet to take a decision despite two meetings with Shin Bet.

Residents of the nearby Palestinian village of Asira El Qbilya say the masked, club-wielding teenage settlers who invaded it last week came from Yitzhar.

The Israeli military disclosed last month that it had issued restraining orders on 12 settlers from the Yitzhar area for “violent and clandestine activity” targeting Palestinians in the West Bank, including endangering lives by “igniting… mosques, vehicles and buildings”.

The head of the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva complex in the settlement, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, has been filmed accompanying students who threw stones at a Palestinian village. Rabbi Shapira is the author of The King’s Torah, a book which suggests that Jewish law on occasion permits the killing of non-Jews.

There was heightened tension in parts of the West Bank last week as Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, submitted his application for UN recognition. A Palestinian was shot dead in Qusra, also near Nablus, by Israeli troops after confronting villagers who gathered in response to a settler invasion. A Jewish settler and his one-year-old son were killed in a car crash near Hebron, which the police say was probably caused by Palestinians throwing stones.

Meanwhile, the US joined Palestinian leaders in condemning Israeli government approval yesterday for the construction of 1,100 new homes in the Jerusalem area settlement of Gilo. It came only days after the international quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN urged the parties to “refrain from provocative actions” that might jeopardise future negotiations.

A US State Department official said Washington saw the “continued expansion of settlements” as “corrosive not only to peace efforts and a two-state solution, but to Israel’s future itself”.

Anders Breivik

Inspired by Breivik.

Two men charged for Breivik ‘tribute’ attack

(the Local)

Two men, aged 25 and 26, were charged in Västerås on Friday for attempted murder in connection with attacks on two men of south Asian origin at the end of July.

According to the prosecutor the case concerns a hate crime with the men targeting their victims due to their foreign origin.

Four days after the attacks in Oslo and Utøya which left 77 dead, a man sleeping on a bench in the town of Västerås was attacked. He was seriously injured and was relieved of his mobile phone.

Two days later another man, this time of Sri Lankan origin, was stabbed and seriously injured while completing his paper round.

According to the police report on the case, the accused, who deny the charges, expressed hatred of immigrants in the attack with one screaming “Go home” to the bleeding victim and then pausing to draw a swastika on the man’s bag.

According to the Dagens Nyheter daily the police report details that one of the defendants sent the follow text message to the other shortly after Behring Brevik’s terror attack on July 22nd:

“A Norwegian ‘Nazi’ has killed like, around 84! From the left who, like, cheered on Islam. HAHAHA!! WHITE POWER!”

The men were arrested shortly after the second attack.

A police inspection of computers seized in the defendants homes has revealed pictures of the men raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute in front of the Swedish flag.

Furthermore the men’s internet history showed that they spent time immediately prior to the attack in the early hours of July 28th visiting a racist YouTube channel.

My previous article describes how anti-Muslim bigots use young Muslim murder victims as props in their campaign of hate.  Sensational headlines, haunting photographs, and lurid tales of cold blooded murder are indispensable tools in their campaign to vilify Islam.   This campaign is bolstered by a set of core themes that are reinforced through tireless repetition.

Islamophobes portray honor killings as a special kind of evil that is unique to Islam, and greatly exaggerate the prevalence of these crimes.  Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Frontpage Magazine rarely miss an opportunity use the phrase “Islamic honor killing,” which has joined “creeping sharia” and “stealth jihad” in an endless parade of misleading slogans and catchphrases.  All of these themes converge in paranoid conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over and imposing barbarism in the Western world.

Most of their arguments depend on casual acceptance and do not stand up to scrutiny.  With the help of some grade school math, relevant facts, and a healthy dose of global context, it is fairly easy to set the record straight.

The term “honor killing” was not coined by Islamophobes, even though it serves their agenda well.  Many human rights organizations track honor killings as a subcategory of homicides or femicides (killing of women).  For our purposes, that’s a good thing because it allows us to refute the idea of widespread honor killings using statistics from credible sources.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates there are 5,000 murders classified as honor killings each year worldwide, and they are not all perpetrated by Muslims.  To put that into perspective, consider that the World Health Organization says there are over half a million annual homicides in the world. Using basic math, we can conclude that honor killings make up less than 1% of all murders.

If 1% of the world’s Muslims perpetrated an honor crime each year, we could project at least 1 million incidents.   The number is far lower, and leaves 99.99% of the Muslim population innocent of this crime.  Why should all Muslims be indicted for the actions of a negligible minority?

Pamela Geller says, “over 90% of honor killings worldwide are Islamic,” and Robert Spencer quotes the exact figure at 91%.  Spencer links to an article on the Middle East Forum as the source of this statistic. This is an anti-Muslim propaganda site founded by Daniel Pipes, and the article there is authored by Phyllis Chesler, who is yet another rabid Islamophobe.

Chesler quotes the same estimate of 5,000 annual honor killings worldwide, but she says the true number is “much greater.” “Definitive or reliable worldwide estimates of honor killing incidence do not exist,” she concedes, yet she is somehow certain the the number is much greater.

She cites a study of the media throughout her article, which found, “there were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe.” Taking her study at face value, do you think 33 honor killings constitutes an epidemic?  Stinging insects kill more than 40 people each year in the US, which is more than the number of honor killings Chesler reported over the course of her study for all of North America.  Chesler says, “to combat the epidemic [emphasis mine] of honor killings requires understanding what makes these murders unique.”

In the US, an estimated 1200 women are killed by their spouse or partner each year.  Chesler herself states that, “In the non-immigrant West, serious domestic violence exists which includes incest, child abuse, marital rape, marital battering, marital stalking, and marital post-battering femicide.” Yet for some reason, she feels it is more important to focus on the unique nature of honor killings than to address the broader issue of violence in her own country.

To her credit, Chesler does not blame honor killings on Sharia, nor does she say these crimes are religiously sanctioned in Islam. Instead she resorts to blaming them on Islamic culture. The Director of Human Rights Watch says that honor killings cut across cultures and religions, and that dowry deaths and crimes of passion have a similar dynamic.

Dowry killings actually outnumber honor killings, and they are on the rise. Women with insufficient dowries are murdered or driven to suicide in what are often disguised as kitchen accidents. For this reason they are sometimes called “bride burnings.” In 2008, there were over 8,000 dowry deaths reported in India alone.

Murders for crossing caste boundaries are also similar to honor killings in that they are a cultural inheritance, victims are usually killed by their own family members, and the crimes are often endorsed or encouraged by village-based caste councils. The caste system is outlawed, but it remains entrenched in parts of India and Nepal, neither of which has a Muslim majority.

Honor killings also share features with other forms of femicide outside of the Middle East and South Asia.  Just a 10-15 minute drive from El Paso, Texas, USA, there is a border town in Mexico called Ciudad Juarez. Over the last two decades hundreds of women have been kidnaped, brutally raped, tortured, and murdered in Juarez, and the perpetrators remain free.  Femicides in Mexico have nearly doubled from 1,085 in 2007 to 1,926 in 2009.

There were nearly 700 murders of women in neighboring Guatemala in 2010, and 1,110 reported cases of femicide in Honduras between 2008 and 2010.  Of the cases in Honduras, only a 211 made it to court, and a mere 4.2% resulted in a conviction.

High rates of homicide and femicide also plague many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.  In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rape is used as a weapon of war in a systematic pattern of destruction that has claimed an estimated 2 million victims. The conflict in the Congo has resulted in more deaths than the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur (Sudan) combined.

The United Nations says, “The brutality and scale of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo almost defies imagination.” Over five million people have died in the last 10 years in what 60 Minutes described as a “War Against Women.”

Imagine the photos Geller could harvest for “Islam’s Gruesome  Gallery,” featured on her website Atlas Shrugs, if only this were an Islamic country.  Since the overwhelming majority of the people in the Congo are Christians, these crimes don’t receive the spotlight on anti-Muslim hate sites.

How can anyone genuinely interested in the rights of women ignore the situation in the Congo? Even if Islamophobes could substantiate their claims that honor killings are exceptionally barbaric and unique to Islam, that would not be a justification focusing on them exclusively.

True human rights activists don’t discriminate among murder victims.  All major human rights organizations address honor killings in context, and they do not promote these crimes as a way to spread fear and hatred toward Islam.  Islam also takes a universal approach, likening the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33).

In her book proposal for Stop the Islamization of America, Geller described herself as, “One of America’s foremost activists for human rights and freedom.” If she were sincere, she would give up her vicious campaign against Islam and join us in the struggle to end violence against women from all cultural and religious backgrounds.

Nezar Hamze

Florida County Republican Party Appeases Islamophobia And Denies Muslim Republican A Spot On Executive Committee

(ThinkProgress)

Nezar Hamze is both a Muslim American who is the executive directorof the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a self-identified Republican. As a way to further his activism in the Republican Party, Hamze campaigned for a position on his local Republican party’s executive committee in Broward County, Florida.

During a “raucous meeting” of the party on Monday night, Hamze’s bid for committee membership was rejected by a vote of 11-158, as he was attacked with offensive questions about his faith and even compared to a terrorist by Islamophobic attendees.

Before the vote even took place, the local party changed its rules to require that each new applicant to the executive committee answer questions for five minutes, a rule change Hamze jokingly told a reporter could be called the “Hamze rule.” And as audience members stepped up to interrogate Hamze, he was told that his organization CAIR was identified as a terrorist organization and asked if he supported terrorism. Following the lead of GOP audiences who have booed gays and condemned the uninsured, one attendee yelled out “terrorist!” as Hamze was trying to speak:

At times, when he addressed the packed room at the Sheraton Suites in Fort Lauderdale, a few members shouted out among the crowd of about 300.

“Terrorist!” said one man.

After the vote, Hamze said he wished he had received a letter of denial rather than face such a barrage of hostile questions. One Republican member remarked that Hamze had effectively been “singled out“:

“Wow,” [Hamze] said afterward. “If I had realized it would be like that, I wish they had just sent me a letter saying I was denied.” One Broward Republican member, blogger Javier Manjarres, objected to the process. “They singled him out,” Manjarres said. “It was a set up.”

Before seeking a spot on his local party’s committee, Hamze told the Florida Independent that the main reason he was making his bid was to bring “Muslims to the mainstream political process.” Yet it appears that the Broward County Republican Party seems to believe that Hamze has to be either a Muslim or a Republican, but not both.

by Farha Khaled

Gates of Vienna the notorious white supremacist blog which published Fjordman and inspired Anders Brievik, recently published a three part essay which calls for the Holocaust of Muslims.

This is the same far right cesspool-of-bigotry-website notorious for publishing Pedar Jensen who vented his Islamophobia for many years under the pen name of Fjordman, and who has now gone into hiding after being interviewed by Norwegian police over the Anders Breivik massacre. Gates of Vienna is run by a couple in the USA, one Baron Bodissey whose real name is thought to be ‘Ned May’ and a woman calling herself Dymphna.

This is not first time Gates of Vienna has published screeds supposedly written by other anonymous contributors calling for the genocide of Muslims. A few years back a similar lovingly written piece inciting for the genocide of Muslims was published as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs noted in Gates of Vienna Toys with Genocide:

‘If violence does erupt in European countries between natives and Muslims, I consider it highly likely that people who had never done anything more violent than beat eggs will prove incapable of managing the psychological transition to controlled violence and start killing anything that looks remotely Muslim. Our unspoken conviction that we, in 21st-century Europe, ‘

On 20th September 2011,  Dymphna Of Gates of Vienna posted a three part series by one Zenster with the introduction:

 This is the first of a three part essay dealing with Islamic terrorism and what can be expected regarding Islam’s ultimate fate.

Moving on to Part 1, titled  ‘When Will It End?’ the essay begins by setting the tone with:

‘Short answer ― It will end when the tipping point is reached. This tipping point can be defined as follows:

When living with Muslims becomes more trouble than living without Muslims.‘

A long rambling justification about the costs of policing airlines from terrorists, and how that money could be better spent on fighting aids and other social ills follows, in an obvious attempt to find some sort of moral justification as to why there is no other way. It ends  with the ominous warning ‘The tipping point is approaching swiftly’

Part two of the essay has the presumptuous title Why it will End? and answers the question by stating ‘Islam has “unhappy ending” written all over it’ before going on to elaborate with hyperbole and lies including one manufactured on Gates of Vienna by Fjordman:

‘Throughout Europe, Muslims are disproportionately represented in rape, violent crime and imprisonment statistics. The expense of this criminality reaches into extra billions of Euros per year and does not cover property damage, victim rehabilitation and other ancillary expenses. Nor does this speak to the same criminal practices and consequences resulting from ostensibly legal immigration into Europe by tens of millions of Muslims over the past few decades.’

The rapes statistics in Scandinavia that Fjordman published at Gates of Vienna which were then repeated on the Islamophobic blogosphere were proven to be lies. Zenster continues his mental masturbation:

The reputation of Muslims as predatory criminals and intensely parasitic occupiers all combines into a damning indictment of Islam. Its presence on earth only promises increased conflict, more atrocities, new genocides and unwarranted diversions of wealth that could better serve far more deserving causes. Finally, Islam is assembling too many enemies too fast to where they cannot be expected to keep pursuing their own petty quarrels instead of addressing the overarching threat of jihad. The complete and total inability of Islam to coexist with any legitimate faith or other culture presages a day when its numerous victims will band together in pursuit of an ultimate victory.

That is why it will end.

In the concluding Part three, How it will End? Zenster sums it up briefly: ‘The Muslim holocaust.‘ He then continues exhibiting more megalomania and what clearly appears to be a projection of his own fantasies:

‘Suffused with delusions of adequacy, Muslims think nothing of constantly antagonizing Western powers who long ago perfected industrialized warfare to an extent that Islam can only dream of, despite its supremacist fantasies.’

This could explain why the far right white supremacists see Israel as an ally. They see Israel as doing their dirty work for them, and as if on cue Zenster trots out the Samson option:

‘Neither is this the end of it. Iran’s reckless pursuit of genocide against the Jews could precipitate the Muslim holocaust all by itself. Little known to most people is Israel’s Samson Option. If true, the Jewish state has quietly informed its Arab neighbours that a single WMD strike against Israel will result in the entire MME (Muslim Middle East) being incinerated in nuclear plasma. Hundreds of fusion warheads along with newly acquired Dolphin class submarines and cruise missiles back this up.’

Contradictions galore! Elsewhere in this three part essay the author talks of the plot to establish the world Caliphate, but here he says he is convinced it won’t come about. Freudian slip? :

‘Now, consider how America rolled up Iraq’s sidewalks in two weeks. This is the “reality gap” confronting Islam and its delusory vision of world domination. No such thing will ever happen.’

More ramblings, perhaps to justify his own dreams of nuclear warfare

‘It is more than safe to say that an industrially and militarily unlettered Islam is not going to take over the world using such a feeble tool as terrorism. As was also noted in Part II, Islam is assembling too many enemies too fast and that pace far outstrips any ability of theirs to perfect the mass production of intricate nuclear weapons nor muster fighting forces of even marginal proficiency. Chronic overreach is a hallmark of Islam and its habit of poking at the Western nuclear dragon with its terrorist pointed wooden stick bodes especially unwell for Muslims everywhere.’

The essay is full of dire warnings, rants about liberals who are complicit in Islamising the planet, of the political establishment for being too weak, but more gravely, it even condemns the ‘counter jihad’ movement for not calling for a ‘solution’ and for being too soft.

When you hear of so called ‘counter jihadis’ accused of being ‘soft’ and the whole of western civilization embroiled in a plot whose aim it is to – err- destroy themselves – it is safe to assume you are reading from someone not quite right in the head, to put it politely. Someone who doesn’t deserve a second thought and should ordinarily be dismissed as a raving loon. Except that it was at this very website, where a writer with the same Islamophobic rhetoric inspired a loner to kill tens of children on a holiday island!

Farha Khaled is a columnist for the Saudi based Arab News.

http://farhakhaled.blogspot.com  http://twitter.com/farhakhaled

Congressman Mike Quigley addressed a crowd at the American Islamic College and apologized for the “rising Islamophobia” in the United States. Many in the Right-Wing took exception to this with Quigley being castigated as a dhimmi-leftist pandering to “the Mooslims” about a fictional “rise in Islamophobia.”

Bill O’Reilly even thought it fit to do a segment on his show about it, having anti-loon Ahmed Rehab on. At the end of the segment O’Reilly admitted that Rehab’s stats on the “rise of Islamophobia” bolster his argument.

(hat tip: Francis)

Congressman’s Remarks Stir the Blogosphere

by James Warren (New York Times)

Mike Quigley knows about cheap shots on ice. Now he’s an expert on being blindsided on the Internet and cable TV.

Mr. Quigley, a Democratic Chicago congressman, had a relatively light Saturday recently. He played ice hockey in the morning, did a beach cleanup with the Sierra Club and hit four block parties in the 32nd, 43rd and 44th Wards. Along the way he surfaced at a conference held by the American Islamic College. It was a quick in-and-out, with remarks to perhaps 100 attendees about the strengths of American pluralism, the sort he makes to many groups. They included:

“Forms of discrimination come in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think that it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face.”

He then bicycled to the first block party. The Islamic College audience was apparently grateful but didn’t find his appearance especially notable as they returned to the business of their meeting.

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found the address nice and patriotic. “What we’d expect of a congressman,” he said.

Neither he, Mr. Quigley nor anybody else there was prepared for the response initiated in the conservative blogosphere, then intensified on radio and TV.

The congressman was attacked harshly, with at least one death threat on a Fox News site that by week’s end was still not taken down despite requests.

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative activist, blogged that Mr. Quigley made a “surprise appearance”  before “the primarily Muslim audience. He rambled on about the typical racism and discrimination that the liberal left is so convinced America is rampantly infected with.”

The appearance was not a surprise, even if not on the formal program. But the nefarious implication was repeated on blogs and the Fox News Channel. Video links included the lines above but not related comments about the legacies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

Social media posts and hundreds of nasty calls, e-mails and faxes poured in to his offices, which deleted profane and violent posts and passed direct threats to law enforcement.

But the conservative echo chamber was in high dudgeon. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, decided that Mr. Quigley’s remarks were a story and thus conferred high-profile legitimacy to the bloggers’ vituperation on Tuesday. Mr. Quigley could not appear, but Mr. Rehab did, initially nonplused that the remarks were deemed newsworthy.

With “Questionable Apology” emblazoned on the screen, Mr. O’Reilly repeated the same two sentences Mr. Quigley had uttered and declared: “Wow! What discrimination?”  Statistics don’t support claims of bias against Muslim Americans, he said.

Much data and polling contradicts him. As an unabashed Mr. Rehab told him, “You’d have to be living under a rock” to miss the overarching reality.

Mr. Rehab cited federal figures on rising workplace complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination and polls showing both that 39 percent of Americans would require Muslims to carry special identification and that one-third don’t think Muslims should be allowed to run for president.

“O.K., those stats bolster your argument,” Mr. O’Reilly conceded. “But in economic realms, Muslim Americans are doing well, pretty well,” he said. “We don’t want anybody to be anti-Muslim. Thank you for coming on here,” Mr. O’Reilly concluded brusquely, with Mr. Rehab having clearly failed to fulfill a role of self-righteous liberal piñata.

But Fox wasn’t done.

On Wednesday, its morning “Fox and Friends” show saw Mr. Quigley, 52, called a “silly old fool” by Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and advocate of aggressive military actions. He belittled Muslims with a series of mock apologies like “We should apologize for preventing them from beating their daughters to death for flirting.”

Eboo Patel, an Indian-born Muslim and former Rhodes Scholar who runs the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Corps, found the response offensive. But he noted a Gallup poll finding that American Muslims remain very optimistic despite facing discrimination.

He mentioned that his nephew in Houston was hassled when, for religious reasons, he wouldn’t eat school pizza with pork.

Well, at least we occasionally try to curb school bullies. We clearly don’t when it comes to the bullies who can drive our public dialogue.

Ul Haque said many good relationships began Sunday despite “friction” he heard about in connection with the event. He referred to aspersions cast against the meeting by the leader of a local ACT! for America chapter.

Dorrie O’Brien of Grand Prairie, a Tarrant County Republican Party precinct chairwoman, said the idea of Christians and Muslims making friends or having fun together is “repulsive and impossible.”

O’Brien doubted that 1,000 Muslims would show up at the Keller church, because they’ve been told not to mix with Christians or Jews.

Obviously, she was wrong.

Muslim Students Convicted of Being Mean to Israeli Ambassador

(Gawker)

Last year, when Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren announced his intention to speak at the University of California at Irvine, some members of the school’s Muslim Students Union plotted to inform Oren of their feelings about some of Israel’s policies. They used their voices to do so. This is illegal!

Today 10 members of the so-called “Irvine 11″ (charges against one of the original eleven students were dropped) were convicted on misdemeanor charges of disrupting a meeting and conspiracy to disrupt a meeting in a Santa Ana, Calif., court. Here’s what they did, which is a crime:

In February 2010, as Oren began to speak about the U.S.-Israeli relationship at a campus speech, the students rose one-by-one to object to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. One shouted, “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!” As the offender was removed from the audience, a designated compatriot shouted, “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide!” And so on. According to an attorney for one of the students, the longest of the interruptions lasted roughly 8 seconds, and the total amount of time taken up by their outbursts—combined—was roughly one minute.

That’s one minute too long when you’re talking about Muslim students interrupting the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. to inform him that some people think his country’s policies are unjust, which is illegal, so don’t do it.

Should all Catholics be judged by this fringe group who are challenging modern science? What if they were Muslim? There would be ceaseless discussion about how Islam is incompatible with science and modernity. (hat tip: Ahmed)

Galileo got it wrong: Catholics

(The West Australian)

Scientists have got it wrong – Earth really is the centre of the universe, according to a group of staunch Catholics who refuse to believe otherwise.

“A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church’s original teachings as proof that Earth is the centre of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church’s clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago,” The Chicago Tribune has reported.

“The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among those who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of early church doctrine.

“By challenging modern science, proponents of a geocentric universe are challenging the very church they seek to serve and protect.

“Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church’s influence.”

Robert Sungenis, the leader of a movement urging scientists to reconsider their opinion, said believing in heliocentrism was dangerous.

“False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions – thus the state of the world today,” Mr Sungenis told The Tribune.

“Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Astrophysicists at Catholic university Notre Dame in the United States said there was good reason why the concept of geocentrism was extinct.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich told The Tribune.

“There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s.”

Professor Garnavich said geocentrism “violates what he believes should be a strict separation of church and science”, according to The Tribune.

“One answers why, the other answers how, and never the twain should meet.”

The FBI’s incompetence is becoming ever more clear. One of the anti-loons of the year, Spencer Ackerman takes them apart once again.

Books, Lectures, Websites: Fresh Evidence for FBI’s Anti-Islam Training

by Spencer Ackerman (wired.com)

Following months of denials, the FBI is now promising a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials” after Danger Room revealed a series of Bureau presentations that tarred average Muslims as “radical” and “violent.”

But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.

The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.

“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”

The FBI declined to respond directly to such questions from Danger Room. But what’s clear is that the anti-Islam sentiment in the FBI’s training and orientation isn’t the marginal problem that the Bureau portrayed in its previous public statements and press releases. It’s not a historical problem, it’s ongoing. And it will require substantial effort to root out. Not even a July warning from the office of a powerful senator was able to spur the Bureau to purge itself of its anti-Islam material.

One example is found in the mandatory orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs. Those task forces are a nationwide partnership between the FBI, intelligence analysts and state and local police. As of late last week, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the program, new members or those needing a belated orientation saw this description of Sunnism — the largest branch of Islam — as part of their online training course:

Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.

That paragraph is contained in orientation material, known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force Orientation v2 course, distributed online through a secure intranet for every member of the JTTFs. That’s approximately 4,400 officials, according to FBI figures, all charged with stopping terrorism. The orientation course is mandatory for every member of the task force.

The passage is especially odd because most of the orientation consists of practical, mundane information, such as the proper forms to fill out during an inquiry or FBI standards for investigations, according to the source. It consists of five sections, one of which is about Islam, Muslims and Arab culture. The supervisor of each JTTF has to certify that all his or her personnel have completed the online orientation course, and then must pass that certification up to FBI Headquarters’ Counterterrorism Division.

The FBI would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the JTTF orientation material.

The excerpt from the JTTF orientation material was provided to Danger Room by a concerned law enforcement official, who says the material contains 20 paragraphs about Islam in a similar vein. Several Bureau and law enforcement officials who spoke to Danger Room on condition of anonymity believe that such instructions are detrimental to uncovering and thwarting terrorist plots, and that the FBI continues to be less than forthright with the press and the public about the extent of its teaching that Islam is at the root of the menace of terrorism. Evidence for this continuing belief can be found in Quantico, Virginia, at the FBI’s elite training academy.
Within the sprawling campus of that academy, Quantico maintains a library befitting the FBI’s status as America’s most important law enforcement agency. It stacks thousands of books, from heavy tomes containing the U.S. criminal code to forensics reference material that could be out of CSI, across three unclassified floors. The library is open to all FBI agents, plus intelligence officials and police from across the country, for a single purpose: to provide background material for cases, guidance material for intelligence analysis and other tools meant directly to aid law enforcement. In other words, it’s not your public library.

There’s a section on religion — in which Islam, perhaps understandably, predominates. A law enforcement source provided Danger Room with a photographic catalog, compiled in late August, of approximately 100 books on Islam out of around 150 stacked at Quantico. Many of them are innocuous or contain unquestioned scholarship, ranging from authors like Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

But, significantly, the library also contains books by anti-Islam authors that portray the religion as devoted to murder and world domination.

There’s Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes, who claims to have “confirmed” that President Obama was once a practicing Muslim, and whose book asks, “Why would terrorists oppress women if this did not have something to do with their Islamic outlook?” A book called Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology ties “normative Islam” to “horrendous cruelty and inhumanity.” The editor of the anthology Muhammad’s Monsters has previously written that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible, and are mutually inconclusive. The same applies to Modernity, which is perceived as a threat to Islamic civilization.”

And there is also Onward Muslim Soldiers by Robert Spencer. Spencer is one of the U.S.’ leading opponents of Islam. Along with the blogger Pamela Geller, Spencer leads a group called Stop Islamicization of America, which “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Spencer’s work was cited 64 times in the political manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo terrorist who killed 69 people earlier this year.

When Danger Room presented the FBI in July with recently declassified material showing that its Law Enforcement Training Unit recommended one of Spencer’s other books to agents, its response was unequivocal: “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.” Onward Muslim Soldiers was available for checkout in the Quantico library as recently as late August.

The FBI’s dalliance with Robert Spencer is not limited to the stacks of Quantico. In July 2010, Spencer presented what he described as “two two-hour seminars on the belief-system of Islamic jihadists” to the JTTF in Tidewater, Virginia. He presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office. When a coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter protesting the FBI’s embrace of Spencer, the Special Agent in Charge of the Norfolk FBI, Alex J. Turner, replied, “Seeking broad knowledge on a wide range of topics is essential in understanding today’s terrorist environment, and helps us to defeat ignorance and strengthen relationships with the diverse communities we serve.”

Spencer was only one of an array of self-anointed experts delivering similar messages about Islam to Bureau audiences.

On January 11, the FBI’s Washington, D.C. Field Office held a seminar on Islamic extremism. In the conference room of its Judiciary Square offices, about 60 of the Field Office’s agents and intelligence analysts spent the morning hearing two presentations — one from terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka, a fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and another from a self-identified expert on Islamic law, Stephen Coughlin, a former consultant to the military’s Joint Staff. The takeaway of Coughlin’s presentation, according to an attendee: Islam is out to take over the world and there is no such thing as a loyal American Muslim.

Coughlin was described to Danger Room as presenting a far more extreme take on Islam than Gorka, who spoke separately on the subject of “Core Texts of Salafi Jihad.” But Coughlin allegedly told the agents that Muslims believe Islamic law to be all-encompassing, preventing an either/or choice to U.S. Muslims: either reject the U.S. Constitution or fall into apostasy. Sharia law, Coughlin instructed in the tone of a neutral reporter, was a threat to the agents in the room. He explored an obscure Islamic concept known as “abrogation,” the supposition that some Koranic verses supersede others, to argue that the Koran’s non-violent passages are overtaken in Muslim eyes by commands to wage war against “non-believers.”

It’s a line Coughlin has long pushed. During a presentation at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010 — in which he shared a stage with Spencer and Geller — Coughlin asserted that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the geopolitical organization of Muslim nations, has a “ten-year plan” to make “defamation of Islam a crime” worldwide. One of his briefing slides read, “The SILENCE in the mainstream media on this DIRECT ASSAULT is DEAFENING! — not just on speech — but on thought itself!!” Coughlin’s 2007 master’s thesis at the National Defense Intelligence College claimed that President George W. Bush’s reassurance that the U.S. was not at war with Islam had a “a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine by effectively placing a policy bar on the unconstrained analysis of Islamic doctrine as a basis for this threat.” (.pdf) In 2008, his Joint Staff contract wasn’t renewed after a staffer for Gordon England, then the deputy secretary of defense, raised concerns about his work. (Through a spokesman, England declined to comment.)

Coughlin did not respond to requests for comment.

The presentation to the Washington Field Office wasn’t mandated by FBI Headquarters. It was set up on the initiative of a well-intentioned agent. But not everyone was comfortable with the presentation. Some walked out in boredom or disgust, according to the source.  Others made fun of it.

But some voiced worries that the presentation sent an implicit message to agents that they should be targeting Muslims in the name of stopping terrorism. And in the past few years, the FBI has accelerated its monitoring of mosques, community centers, businesses and other organizations run by Muslims. Several observers suspect that the persistence of training materials that casts Islam in a threatening light helps explain the increased surveillance. Others — including many counterterrorism professionals within the FBI who say they are disgusted by the bigoted material they’ve received — fear that the presentations will drive a wedge between the Bureau and the U.S. Muslim communities whose assistance it needs to prevent terrorism.

“Inappropriately enlarging the characterization of the threat to include all of Islam,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former official with the National Counterterrorism Center, “may inadvertently increase al Qaida’s ideological resonance and could facilitate recruitment of would-be terrorists.”

Books in a library and presentations in a field office will only reach the agents who visit the library or work in the field office. A Joint Terrorism Task Force orientation will only reach JTTF members. But every FBI agent can access the bureau’s intranet. And until Danger Room’s expose, that network hosted material purporting to demonstrate “the inherently violent nature of Islam.”

Two law enforcement sources with access to the intranet — sections of which are classified — described to Danger Room its page on “Islamic Law.” FBI intranet users type in “Islamic Law” or “Islam” into a Google-like search function. Up pops what’s called a Subject Matter Expert page, or SME, pronounced “Smee.” Usually, an agent seeking a SME will be searching for material directly relevant to an ongoing investigation or a timely intelligence product. But the SME for “Islamic Law” recently featured uploaded documents stretching all the way back to the 19th century, with titles like “The Personal Law of The Mahommedans.”

One such document is a text from 1915, titled “Mohammed Or Christ: An Account Of The Rapid Spread of Islam In All Parts of The Globe, The Methods Employed to Obtain Proselytes, Its Immense Press, Its Strongholds, & Suggested Means to be Adopted to Counteract the Evil.” That explicitly religious and archaic tome instructs that its purpose is “to set forth the appeal of that [Muslim] world for the Gospel. It is a decisive hour!”

Another is a Regent University master’s thesis called “Devoutly Violent or Nominally Peaceful? The Justification for Violence in Islam.” It asks: “[S]eeing as the foremost goal of Islam (which literally means ’submission’) is to subject the entire world to Shari’a law and Allah’s guidance, can a devout Muslim who witnesses to a Christian (who rejects his invitation to Islam) really not become violent? … In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the inherently violent nature of Islam.”

In the image above, formerly available on the FBI’s “Islamic Law” SME, a thermometer represents a correlation between the Muslim population of a country and its “violence level.” As Muslims accumulate in a given place, they incline toward “grievance fabrication,” then “chronic terror attacks,” and even “state-run ethnic cleansing.” The final stage is “peace” — in an all-Muslim state.

Two law enforcement sources told Danger Room that after our coverage of the FBI’s training materials ran, the “Islamic Law” SME and similar FBI intranet sites were scrubbed of such material. Danger Room was able to acquire some of these documents before they were removed.

Other materials reinforced the message delivered on the FBI’s internal network. A 2006 FBI intelligence assessment judged that “conversion” to Islam or intensifying Islamic faith (.PDF) could be early-warning signs of terrorism — a judgment that would apply to millions of American citizens. That assessment is still in official use, according to the FBI, even though one of its public responses to our expose was a public assurance that “Strong religious beliefs should never be confused with violent extremism. Views that are contrary should not and will not be taught to FBI employees.”

Asked to reconcile that statement with the 2006 assessment, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen replied, “The assessment you cite includes a series of indicators of radicalization. These indicators do not conflict with our statement that strong religious beliefs should never be confused with violent extremism.”

The FBI is now in damage-control mode. On Thursday afternoon, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for its offensive training materials and admit that they were more extensive than it previously acknowledged. The FBI did not make any commitments on which outside experts or organizations it would consult for an updated training curriculum. But according to one participant, the FBI representative on the call said that many people within the Bureau disapproved of the anti-Islamic rhetoric. The FBI’s Allen declined to comment.

“We are glad that this very serious issue has finally received the attention of FBI leadership,” says Farhana Khera, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates, “but an internal review is insufficient at this stage. In the last year, the FBI has either defended its use of bigoted trainers or emphatically assured the public that the various trainings were one-time, isolated incidents. Each time those assurances were later revealed to be false.”

Muslim Advocates sent a letter to the Justice Department Inspector General last week seeking an investigation. It has yet to receive a reply. However, the chairs of the Senate’s homeland security and intelligence committees have separately told Danger Room they will subject the FBI’s counterterrorism training to scrutiny.

For months, in fact, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), has raised concerns that law enforcement at all levels lacks “meaningful standards” for counterterrorism training. In the course of his ongoing inquiry on the subject, Lieberman’s staff became aware of a particularly problematic individual: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop.

In April, Gawthrop presented a three-day briefing at the FBI’s Quantico training facility to counterterrorism agents in which he equated “mainstream” Islam with terrorism. In earlier interviews, he mused about triggering a “deteriorating cascade effect” upon Islam, convincing Muslims to abandon their religion by attacking “soft spots” in the Islamic faith. And he has lectured widely about the “threat” of Islam, ostensibly as a private citizen.

Lieberman staffers were appalled by the “inappropriate materials being used by Mr. Gawthrop and notified the FBI in mid-July of their concerns,” says Leslie Phillips, Communications Director of the Homeland Security Committee.

The FBI wouldn’t directly comment on the committee’s warning, instead reiterating the Bureau’s new commitment to a wide-ranging review — one that will stretch from Quantico to the FBI’s many field offices to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, its Washington headquarters.

“The senator hopes the FBI will take appropriate action to prohibit these and any other inaccurate training materials from being used in the future,” Phillips adds.

In the meantime, Gawthrop is, as of this writing, still an FBI counterterrorism analyst. And the message he helped inculcate in the Bureau lingers.

More retreating from the anti-Muslim bigots. Pamela Geller will probably scream censorship, however this just underscores how obscene and twisted Pamela Geller’s anti-Muslim crusade during the Rifqa Bary case was (hat tip: W. Ruiz):

Tarazi had argued that New York-based blogger Pamela Geller defamed him by alleging he has terrorist ties. One posting linked him to Hamas, for example, which the State Department has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

That blog and four others will be removed permanently from Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” blog under the settlement, which did not involve any money.

Anti-Islamic blogger to delete posts as part of settlement in Rifqa Bary lawsuit

By Ashley Lopez (Florida Independent)

Pamela Geller, an anti-Islamic blogger based in New York, settled a lawsuit filed by one of Rifqa Bary’s attorneys this week.

Bary, a minor, fled from her parent’s house in Ohio to Florida because she converted to Christianity. According to Bary’s attorneys, she moved to Florida in an effort to practice Christianity away from her disapproving parents. A website created about the case claims that Bary left “after her father threatened to kill her for apostasy, a crime under Islamic Sharia law.”

Geller — along with a small group of anti-Muslim advocates in Florida, including a U.S. Senate candidate — fought to keep the young girl away from her parents. An attorney for Bary’s parents, Omar Tarazi, later sued some of those involved in the case for defamation.

Florida Family Policy Council President John Stemberger was sued by Tarazi for saying Tarazi was unqualified. Stemberger also alleged that Tarazi had terrorist ties in a 2009 TV interview. Last month, the defamation lawsuit was dropped after the two men reached an undisclosed agreement.

Geller and Rifqa Bary’s attorney were also sued for defaming Tarazi, a case that was settled this week.

According to the Associated Press:

Columbus attorney Omar Tarazi represented Bary’s parents, who denied intending to harm their daughter. Investigators in Florida and Ohio documented tension in the family but never found evidence that Bary was in danger.

Police recommended criminal charges be filed against adults in Ohio and Florida, including Christian ministers, who helped Bary run away, but prosecutors declined to pursue the charges.

Tarazi had argued that New York-based blogger Pamela Geller defamed him by alleging he has terrorist ties. One posting linked him to Hamas, for example, which the State Department has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

That blog and four others will be removed permanently from Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” blog under the settlement, which did not involve any money.

Atlas Shrugs was described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.” According to the Times, Geller “has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by ‘Islamic supremacists’; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.”

In court documents, Geller argued “that many of the postings singled out in the lawsuit also could fall in the realm of hyperbole and not defamation.”

Bary was eventually returned to Ohio. She has yet to reconcile her with her family. She turned 18 last year and is no longer embroiled in a public legal battle.

Even Ivy League Universities such as Princeton are not immune from radical anti-Muslims. A Christian man by the name of Adam Pyle interrupted a Muslim Student “welcome back dinner,” telling them that “Muslims are going to hell.”

One can only imagine the hysteria this would have caused in the anti-Muslim blogosphere if a Muslim had barged into a Christian, Jewish or any other faith’s “welcome back dinner.”

This is also noteworthy in the backdrop of the terrorist attacks in Norway. Anders Behring Breivik claimed to be a member of the Knight Templars as well. While we should not extrapolate excessively from this one incident we should keep in mind that there is a rise in the appropriation of Christian Crusader theology, symbols and rhetoric amongst the anti-Muslim movement.

One need only look at Robert Spencer’s extolling of the Crusades and reiteration of its call, “God Wills it,” and to the fascination in anti-Muslim groups of Crusader symbols, vividly brought to the fore in our piece, SIOA is an Anti-Muslim Hate Group.

Threats arise at Muslim Students Association event

by Henry Rome (DailyPrincetonian)

A local man claiming to be part of the Knights Templar was arrested on Saturday night after allegedly interrupting a Muslim Student Association welcome back dinner and telling students that “Muslims are going to hell,” according to multiple witnesses and police reports.

While the incident reflects a nationwide spike in bias crimes in the wake of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, MSA members say they are treating it as an isolated event and do not plan to scale back any of their events in response.

The man, Adam Pyle, 26, of Princeton Township, had apparently been present for part of the actual dinner at Campus Club, said Sohaib Sultan, the University’s Muslim life coordinator. Toward the conclusion of the dinner, Pyle left the dining area and allegedly started going through the backpack of Jihad Al-Jabban ’14, the MSA public relations chair.

When Al-Jabban walked over, Pyle explained that he was a Christian but still a member of the “ummah,” the global Muslim community, according to Al-Jabban. Pyle then proceeded to bow and ask MSA members if they were members of the ummah, said MSA vice president Areej Hassan ’13. He also allegedly asked a member, “Why do you hate Jews?” Hassan is a  staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“I immediately became a little bit nervous about what his intentions were,” Sultan said. “I realized this could be a potentially violent situation.”

Sultan then ushered the 60 to 70 students attending the dinner into a closed room away from Pyle, and an attendee called Public Safety. In the meantime, Pyle allegedly said, “Muslims are going to hell” and “Death to Muslims,” and began walking toward the students, according to Sultan.

“I stood right in front of him and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to let [you] go inside,’ ” Sultan recalled. During the night, Pyle also allegedly made references to the anti-Christ, University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua said in an email.

At 8:57 p.m., Public Safety officers arrested Pyle and charged him with bias intimidation, criminal attempt, disorderly conduct, harassment and defiant trespass, Mbugua said. Pyle will face the criminal charges on Monday in the Borough Municipal Court. Public Safety ordered Pyle to stay away from campus for the next 90 days, and the department intends to ban him permanently.

A message left seeking comment at Pyle’s home phone number was not returned. Pyle is not affiliated with the University.

“You just never know the type of individual [who] might come in and do something,” Sultan said. “The Muslim community in America has seen a real rise in Islamophobia over this past year in particular, and so it shakes us up. We really did feel threatened.”

It is unclear how Pyle learned of the welcome back dinner, since the event was only advertised via email and with limited on-campus advertising, MSA board members said.

“I don’t even think it was premeditated,” said Sheeba Arif ’14, the MSA events chair. “I feel like he just stumbled in on it actually.”

It is also unknown how Pyle gained access to Campus Club, access to which was limited by prox at the time, Mbugua said.

Sultan said the incident has shaken up some Muslim students, and he is concerned that new students may get the wrong impression about the University.

“To the freshmen and first-year graduate students, please don’t worry. This was an isolated incident and you will find this campus as warm and welcoming to Muslims as anywhere in this country,” Sultan said in an email to the MSA listserv.

Sultan has invited officers from Public Safety to speak with students at Friday prayers this week to thank the officers and to discuss revising any safety protocols. Students praised the responding officers, who also offered to escort the members back to their dorm rooms after the event.

Sultan added, however, that he doesn’t anticipate any increased security as a result of the incident.

“We really do hope and anticipate that this was a completely isolated incident,” he said. “We want to continue being the open community that we’ve become at Princeton.”

Other religious organizations on campus, including the Office of Religious Life, have lent their support and have offered to hold discussions and vigils in response to the incident. MSA board members said they may discuss the issue broadly at the next Religious Life Council meeting, but they want to move forward.

“It’s an isolated incident,” Arif said. “We don’t want to make a bigger deal than it is.”

While advocacy groups noticed a rise in bias crimes around the 9/11 anniversary, Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that colleges and universities are often immune.

“Colleges and universities have typically not been a major factor in our annual reporting on bias-related incidents, just because they tend to be more open, more tolerant and more knowledgeable about Islam and Muslims,” he said.

Indeed, Sultan said he couldn’t recall any similar incident occurring on campus, except for the occasional controversial speaker or offensive email. Mbugua also said this is the first incident of its nature to happen on campus.

“I think it’s still on the minds of students, but I think we recognize this was completely an isolated incident,” Sultan said. “Princeton University has been a wonderful and very welcoming home for Muslim students and faculty for many years.”

Sydney schoolboy was beaten ‘for being a Muslim’

A schoolboy from Sydney’s north was brutally bashed and verbally abused by more than 20 students for being Muslim, the boy has claimed. Hamid Mamozai, 15, was allegedly hit up to a dozen times by two fellow students at Asquith Boys’ High School on Wednesday as several more cheered and hurled racial abuse from the sidelines.

“[They were saying] hit him more, hit him more, he deserves it, you terrorists, go back to where you came from, go blow something up,” Hamid told Channel 10. He said he was kneed in the face four of five times and hit up to 15 times in the face. Hamid was taken to hospital unconscious and with internal bleeding but suffered no serious injuries.

Najia, Hamid’s sister, said he had been subjected to racial abuse at the school for up to two years and was “emotionally and mentally sick” because of it. “The boy is scared … he doesn’t get out of the house,” she said.

His mother, Hosna, who fled war-torn Afghanistan 20 years ago, said she had repeatedly complained to the school to no effect. “I just want to know why this is happening, why the principal doesn’t care that students are being bullied, why don’t they stop it? I want other parents to know why this is happening,” she said.

Asquith Boys’ High declined to comment last night. In response to inquiries from the Herald, a spokesman for the Department of Education said one student had been suspended for 20 days and the police had been informed. Teachers provided immediate assistance to Hamid and called his family and an ambulance when the incident occurred, the spokesman said. Hamid and his family have been offered counselling and the school has arranged to meet with Mrs Mamozai this morning.

“Racism is not tolerated by Asquith Boys’ High School, which disciplines students engaged in such behaviour and supports students subjected to it,” the spokesman said. “Disciplinary action has been taken against students who have previously used racist language to the injured student. Due to the police investigation, it is inappropriate to comment further on the incident at this stage.”

Sydney Morning Herald, 23 September 2011

Poll: Many S.C. Republicans think Obama a Muslim, born in another country

President Barack Obama has released his detailed, long-form birth certificate that shows he was born in Hawaii. And the president has said he is a Christian.

But a Winthrop Poll released today shows that large numbers of S.C. Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party don’t believe him.

Nearly 73 percent said the word “honest” does not describe the president well. Almost 30 percent of self-identified S.C. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say Obama is a Muslim, and 36 percent say the president “probably” or “definitely” was born in another country.

For a few years of his childhood, Obama lived in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Obama, however, has insisted he is a Christian, just as he has maintained that he was born in Hawaii.

With some Republicans arguing Obama was not born in the U.S. – and thus is ineligible to serve as the nation’s chief executive – the president released his long-form birth certificate that showed that he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961.

A birth notice in a Hawaii newspaper also indicates that the president was born where and when he says he was.

But the release of that long-form birth certificate has only partially mollified those who questioned the details of the president’s birth.

A Winthrop poll from April, before the president released the detailed birth certificate, found 43 percent of S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners said the president was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country. About 45 percent said he was “definitely” or “probably” born in the United States. Now, that percentage has crept up to 53 percent.

Whether or not they think Obama was born in the United States, S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners still don’t have much use for the president, the poll shows.

More than three-quarters of those polled say the word “intelligent” describes the president “very well” or “well.” But about 75 percent say the same thing about the word “socialist.”

Original post: Poll: Many S.C. Republicans think Obama a Muslim, born in another country

Muslim artist Kenny Irwin has been featured on our site in the past when he unveiled he “Ultra Christmas Decorations” on Conan O’Brien’s show. This time he microwaves an anti-Muslim 9/11 coloring book and turns it into the “anti-bigotry slug.” (hat tip:pigeonyolk)

Artist microwaves “The We Shall Never Forget 9:11 The Kids’ Book of Freedom” coloring book by Publisher Wayne Bell.

In response to Wayne Bell’s islamophobic coloring book geared at impressionable young children called “The We Shall Never Forget 9:11 The Kids’ Book of Freedom” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nJlk_Em7xY , nationally & internationally acclaimed artist Kenny Irwin & founder of the famous dOvetastic Microwave Theater series has produced Episode #602 in which the coloring book gets microwaved inside a powerful hand built giant microwaving robot called the MALIK 11000 Five Ton Microwaving Robot standing twenty feet tall. The resulting art is transformed into the “AntiBigotSLUG” available on Ebay.

The artist makes a anti-hate statement explaining the hateful content issues at hand in the video & the real facts that the villains that caused the 2001 attacks were not representives of islam. That muslims condemn the attacks whom also lost loved ones & were also first responders. Muslims have been plagued for years by false stereotyping, bigotry & hate as a result of the attacks that occurred in 2001. The artist feels the book is inflammatory showing a narrow perspective of the 2001 attacks, that is hateful against muslims & has included educational links with the video that will hopefully educate people more about muslims & the faith of islam.

Purchase the anti-bigotry slug on E-Bay.

Another great piece from Glenn Greenwald.

Jose Padilla and how American justice functions

(updated below – Update II)

The story of Jose Padilla, continuing through the events of yesterday, expresses so much of the true nature of the War on Terror and especially America’s justice system.  In 2002, the American citizen was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, publicly labeled by John Ashcroft as The Dirty Bomber, and then imprisoned for the next three years on U.S. soil as an “enemy combatant” without charges of any kind, and denied all contact with the outside world, including even a lawyer.  During his lawless incarceration, he was kept not just in extreme solitary confinement but extreme sensory deprivation as well, and was abused and tortured to the point of severe and probably permanent mental incapacity (Bush lawyers told a court that they were unable to produce videos of Padilla’s interrogations because those videos were mysteriously and tragically “lost”).

Needless to say, none of the government officials responsible for this abuse of a U.S. citizen on American soil has been held accountable in any way.  That’s because President Obama decreed that Bush officials shall not be criminally investigated for War on Terror crimes, while his Justice Department vigorously defended John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and other responsible functionaries in civil suits brought by Padilla seeking damages for what was done to him.

As usual, the Obama DOJ cited national security imperatives and sweeping theories of presidential power to demand that Executive Branch officials be fully shielded from judicial scrutiny (i.e., shielded from the rule of law) for their illegal acts (the Obama DOJ: ”Here, where Padilla’s damage claims directly relate, inter alia, to the President’s war powers, including whether and when a person captured in this country during an armed conflict can be held in military detention under the laws of war, it would be particularly inappropriate for this Court to unnecessarily reach the merits of the constitutional claims” (emphasis added)).  With one rare exception,federal courts, as usual, meekly complied.  Thus, a full-scale shield of immunity has been constructed around the high-level government officials who put Padilla in a hermetically sealed cage with no charges and then abused and tortured him for years.

The treatment Padilla has received in the justice system is, needless to say, the polar opposite of that enjoyed by these political elites.  Literally days before it was required to justify to the U.S. Supreme Court how it could imprison an American citizen for years without charges or access to a lawyer, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla — on charges unrelated to, and far less serious than, the accusation that he was A Dirty Bomber — and thensuccessfully convinced the Supreme Court to refuse to decide the legality of Padilla’s imprisonment on the grounds of “mootness”  (he’s no longer being held without charges so there’s nothing to decide).

At Padilla’s trial, the judge excluded all evidence of the abuse to which he was subjected and even admitted statements he made while in custody before he was Mirandized.  Unsurprisingly, Padilla was convicted on charges of “supporting Islamic terrorism overseas” – but not any actual Terrorist plots (“The government’s chief evidence was an application form that government prosecutors said Mr. Padilla, 36, filled out to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000″) – and then sentenced to 17 years in prison, all above and beyond the five years he was imprisoned with no due process.

Not content with what was done to Padilla, the Bush DOJ – and then the Obama DOJ – contested the sentence on appeal, insisting that it was too lenient; Padilla also appealed, arguing that the trial court made numerous errors in excluding his evidence while allowing the Government’s.  Yesterday, a federal appeals panel of the 11th Circuit issued a ruling, by a 2-1 vote, rejecting each and every one of Padilla’s arguments.  It then took the very unusual step of  vacating the 17-year-sentence imposed by the trial court as too lenient and, in effect, ordered the trial judge to impose a substantially harsher prison term:

Padilla’s sentence is substantively unreasonable because it does not adequately reflect his criminal history, does not adequately account for his risk of recidivism, was based partly on an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors . . . .

As the dissenting judge explained, this decision is extraordinary because trial judges — not judges sitting afterward on appeal — are the ones who hear all the evidence and thus have very wide discretion to determine the appropriate sentence.  But more so, in this case, a sentence less than the full maximum was warranted because “the trial judge correctly concluded that a sentence reduction is available to offenders who have been subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions of pre-trial confinement.”  About that point, the dissenting judge documented:

Padilla presented substantial, detailed, and compelling evidence about the inhumane, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and mentally painful conditions in which he had already been detained for a period of almost four years. For example, he presented evidence at sentencing of being kept in extreme isolation at he military brig in South Carolina where he was subjected to cruel interrogations, prolonged physical and mental pain, extreme environmental stresses, noise and temperature variations, and deprivation of sensory stimuli and sleep.

In sentencing Padilla, the trial judge accepted the facts of his confinement that had been presented both during the trial and at sentencing, which also included evidence about the impact on one’s mental health of prolonged isolation and solitary confinement, all of which were properly taken into account in deciding how much more confinement should be imposed. None of these factual findings, nor the trial judge’s consideration of them in fashioning Padilla’s sentence, are challenged on appeal by the government or the majority.

Thus: American officials who are responsible for this “inhumane” and “cruel” abuse of detainees act with full impunity, as usual.  Those who are its victims are not merely denied all redress (though they are), and do not merely have the courthouse doors slammed in their faces in the name of secrecy, national security and presidential power (though they do), but they are also mercilessly punished to the fullest extent possible.

It should be said that part of what happened here is just the typical politicization of the judiciary, as the two-judge majority was comprised of a hard-core right-wing Reagan/Bush 41 appointee from Alabama (Joel Dubina), while the other was one of Bush 43′s most controversial appointees, the former Alabama Attorney General who was filibustered by the Democrats and allowed onto the bench only by virtue of the “Gang of 14″ compromise (William Pryor).  Meanwhile, the dissenting judge was born in Mexico to Syrian parents and, after moving to Miami at the age of 6, became the first female judge (as well as the first Hispanic and Arab American judge) on the Florida Supreme Court (rising to Chief Justice), and was a Clinton appointee to the federal appeals court (Rosemary Barkett); Barkett, incidentally, dissented from an 11th Circuit ruling denying a habeas petition to Troy Davis, the African-American death row inmate scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia this week despitemountains of evidence showing his innocence.  So this episode highlights one of the few genuine differences that remain between the two parties that can truly impact people’s lives: their judicial appointments.

But the overriding theme is what we have seen time and again, that which — as it turns out — is the subject of my book to be released next month: America is plagued by a two-tiered justice system in which political and financial elites enjoy virtually absolute immunity for even the most egregious of crimes, while ordinary Americans (and especially fully stigmatized ones like Padilla) are subject with few defenses to the world’s largest and one of its most merciless systems of punishment.  Thus do Jose Padilla’s lawless jailers and torturers walk free and prosper, while no punishment is sufficiently harsh for him.

* * * * *
Almost immediately after I published this, it was announced that Troy Davis’ last chance for clemency has been denied, virtually assuring that a likely innocent man will be killed by the State of Georgia tomorrow.  Obviously, everything I just wrote applies in abundance to that event.

UPDATE:  As usual, America’s propaganda-spreading, government-serving establishment media spouts blatant falsehoods to justify all this; fromABC News:

From CNN:

Padilla was never even charged with, let alone convicted of, having anything to do with a “dirty bomb.”  “Dirty Bomber” was the villain nickname given to him by Bush officials and mindlessy repeated by its media to justify the treatment to which he was subjected.  The U.S. Government gave up long ago using this accusation to demonize him (NYT on his conviction: ”The dirty bomb accusations were not mentioned during Mr. Padilla’s three-month trial here“), but their lying “watchdog media” servants continue unabated.  Who would possibly object to a longer prison term for A Dirty Bomber who tried to detonate radioactive weapons in American cities?  The fact that not even the Government charged with him that is no deterrent to its media continuing to claim he did.

UPDATE II:  Padilla was consigned to the SuperMax prison in Florence, Colorado to serve his 17-year sentence.  The New York Bar Association last week issued a comprehensive study of America’s SuperMax system and concluded:

But 17 years in a torture system like that — on top of the 5 years of abuse he endured — is insufficient: ”too lenient.”

(Via Islamophobia-Watch)

Teenager admits sickening attack on elderly Muslim outside Kilmarnock mosque

A teenager shouted racial abuse as he kicked and stamped on a 71-year-old grandfather’s head for 10 minutes. And he later sent a sickening text boasting about his horrifying actions.

At Kilmarnock Sheriff Court on Monday, the 16-year-old – who cannot be named for legal reasons – pleaded guilty to carrying out the vicious attack outside the Ayrshire Central Mosque in July.

His victim, who had already suffered a stroke, sustained severe facial injuries in the unprovoked attack which took place in the early hours of the morning.

Nancy Beresford, prosecuting, said that the former Crosshouse shopkeeper had gone to the mosque, in Hill Street, Kilmarnock, to prepare for Friday prayers at around 1.40am. As he approached the door, clad in white robes, he noticed a male and two females, along with young children, standing in the street, with another group of females nearby.

The 16-year-old then came towards him shouting abuse, including “Paki bastard”. He punched the pensioner in the chest, causing him to fall to the ground. The teenager continued the assault, while still shouting abuse.

Interviewed, he denied the assault and racial abuse. The 16-year-old told police that he couldn’t understand “why somebody was praying at that time in the morning”.

Kilmarnock Standard, 16 September 2011

Via ENGAGE

The Ayrshire Central Mosque was opened earlier this year after the conversion of a former pub – a development that was fiercely opposed by the Scottish Defence League. Back in 2009, when the EDL was planning to extend its Islamophobic campaign north of the border, Osama Saeed reported:

“Mosques in Glasgow and Kilmarnock have been identified by the far right Scottish Defence League and their English counterpart as possible scenes of protest. In Glasgow, we understand that they have discussed George Square, Pollokshields and the Sheriff Court as possible locations. The latter seems like a strange place to hold a demonstration till it is understood that it is across the street from Glasgow Central Mosque. Also discussed has been a pub in Kilmarnock, the Hillhead Tavern, which is the subject of interest from a Muslim group to buy and convert into a mosque.”

The SDL eventually settled on Glasgow for their first demonstrationbut went on to organise a protest in Kilmarnock in June last year. Although it was billed as a demonstration in defence of “free speech”, the SDL’s main target was clearly the conversion of the former Hillhead Tavern.

What is the FBI thinking?

The FBI says that Gawthrop gave his last presentation to Bureau counterterrorism classes in April 2011, but the newly disclosed videos would suggest that Gawthrop has continued his career as a terrorism “expert” at FBI sponsored events for at least another two months.

VIDEO: FBI Counterterrorism ‘Expert’ Compared Islam to Star Wars Deathstar

by Eli Clifton (Think Progress)

In video acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, FBI counterterrorism trainer William Gawthrop, who in previously leaked documents was shown to have lectured that the Muslim prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader,” tells his audience that “[After 9/11] we wasted a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon, the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevent… if you have an Islamic motivation for actions.”

Ackerman had previously called attention to Gawthrop’s presentation materials for his lectures at the FBI’s training facilities in Quantico, Virginia, in which the counterterrorism “expert” suggested that Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, hadn’t moderated its “militancy considerations” since approximately 622 B.C.

Gawthrop, much like many of the experts discussed in the Center for American Progress’s new report Fear, Inc., believes that Islam is, at its roots, a violent ideology at war with the West.

In the newly released video, Gawthrop tells his audience at the New York Metro Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan — an FBI sponsored public-private partnership — that even overthrowing Islamic states, like Iran, who threaten the U.S. and its allies, is insufficient since “there are still internal forces that will seek to exert Islamic rule again.”

Watch it:

Gawrthrop, as he advocates in his PowerPoint presentations, pushes for a direct confrontation with Muslims that challenges the underpinnings of their religion and Koranic teaching. Referring to a slide with the words “Holy Texts” and “Clerics,” Gawthrop says:

If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there. That’s a critical vulnerability.

Ackerman and Shachtman report that a different video, which they were unable to recover before it was deleted, showed Gawthrop criticizing outreach programs to Muslims communities:

If we were going back to the 1940s, this would be like the Army and Navy asking Japanese-Americans to participate in the intelligence and operations paths trying to understand the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. That didn’t happen,

The FBI says that Gawthrop gave his last presentation to Bureau counterterrorism classes in April 2011, but the newly disclosed videos would suggest that Gawthrop has continued his career as a terrorism “expert” at FBI sponsored events for at least another two months.

The battlements of Carcassonne's medieval old town Tony Cross

Racist slogans found on Muslim graves in French military cemetery

By RFI

About 30 Muslim graves have been desecrated in Carcassone, south-west France. A legal inquiry has been launched to find the perpetrators and punish them.

The caretaker of the military cemetery of Saint-Michel de la ville discovered racist and Nazi slogans daubed on the gravestones when he closed up on Saturday.

The graves belonged to Muslims killed fighting for France during World War I and were immediately repainted and restored.

The graffiti were “really racist” and “particularly disgusting”, according to Carcassonne prosecutor Antoine Leroy, who has opened an inquiry into the incident.

Cenk, posing as a Bollywood hero

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks analyze the debate between Michael Moore and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck makes almost absolutely no sense:

Once again, “Police Blotter Bob” shows that he could care less about facts when it comes to Islam and Muslims. In his “response” to the Center for American Progress report on Islamophobia, Bob claims that he is not attacking all of Islam, but just the “radicals” and the “jihadists.”

My work…has never been against Muslims in the aggregate or any people as such, but rather against an ideology that denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people.

Yet, statement after statement, and post after post on his website talks about “Muslims” and “Islam” as just that: an aggregate. Take this latest post:

The fact that Muslims do not like Jews and Israel, I know, because many of my correspondents, Islamic leaders, Emirs, the heads of armed groups and ordinary Mujahideen talked about this at every meeting and every interview with me.

The fact that Islam is a nation and that Muslims have no other nationality is what I also heard from religious leaders supporting the Jihad.

The fact that Muslims can adapt and play by the political process more than once I saw myself.

They know how to do represent themselves as the victims of inhumane aggression through the media. And the same information is transmitted to the Islamic world in a different manner — as a victory for Jihad and death for the sake of Allah.

No nuance, no teasing out the particular…no, rather ”Muslims do not like Jews and Israel.” That is a general statement. That is what Spencer and his minions do again, and again, and again.

Yet, the facts tell a completely different story:

A World Public Opinion (WPO) survey done in collaboration at that time with the University of Maryland reported that 51 percent of Americans believe “bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified,” while only 13 percent of American Muslims hold a similar view, with a full 81 percent saying violence against civilians is never justified.

A recent Gallup survey (2011) asks the same question separately — first for a “military attacks against civilians” and then “individuals and small groups attacking civilians.” Muslim Americans came out as the staunchest opponents of both overwhelmingly as compared to their neighbors.

In response to military attacks against civilians, 78 percent of Muslim Americans said such attacks are never justified as compared to 39 percent of Christians and 43 percent of Jews. Only 21 percent Muslim Americans approve of it “sometimes” as compared to 58 percent of Christians and 52 percent of Jews.

Eighty-nine percent of Muslim Americans surveyed by Gallup rejected violent individual attacks on civilians as compared to 71 percent of Christians and 75 percent of Jews. Muslims are the least likely to justify attacks on civilians. Only 11 percent of Muslims justified that sometimes such attacks are acceptable as compared to 27 percent of Christians and 22 percent of Jews.

The same is true when it comes to opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslim Americans are way ahead in their opposition to wars as compared to their neighbors.

However, when the Pew survey first came out in 2007, it did not provide any relief for Muslim Americans from Islamophobic media frenzy. Most reporters used it as an opportunity to fan hatred against Muslim Americans, focusing on the smaller number of Muslim Americans who justified attacks on civilians without comparing it to Christian Americans, who did the same even in a larger numbers.

Right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin proclaimed in the National Review that the poll “should be a wake-up call.” Mark Steyn said it demonstrated the existence in America of “a huge comfort zone for the jihad to operate in,” and on CNN, Anderson Cooper was horrified — just horrified — that “so many” American Muslims would support such violence.

Well, I was also horrified myself until I checked what our neighbors are saying about intentionally targeting civilians. As a peacemaker, I will only be satisfied fully when all Muslims and people of other faiths oppose killing civilians fully, whether that is by a military or a terrorist group. But these statistics do offer me comparative relief.

FBI Evidence

The same evidence of a peaceful Muslim community was provided by Michael E. Rolince, former FBI Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, D.C. Field Office. He said the FBI conducted about 500,000 interviews without finding a single lead which could have helped the agency prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

That number means that almost 40 percent of all Muslim households in the United States were probably touched by this investigation. Here is what this presidential award recipient with 30 years of counterterrorism and counterintelligence experience said on Dec. 17, 2005, one month after his retirement, at the Muslim Public Affairs Committee’s annual convention in a panel titled, “Muslim Americans & Law Enforcement Partnership” (Here is an mp3 of his speech. His statement appears in the Q & A section):

“We conducted about a half a million interviews post 9/11 relative to the attacks of 9/11, and this is important because your community gets painted as not doing enough and you could have helped. I’m not aware — and I know 9/11 about as well as anybody in the FBI knows 9/11 and that’s not bragging that’s just the reality — I’m not aware of any single person in your community who, had they stepped forward, could have provided a clue to help us get out in front of this. The reality of that attack is that 19 people came here with what they needed. They spoke the language well enough to order meals and rent cars and hotel rooms. They had money coming in from overseas. Four people knew how to fly planes and 15 others were willing to be the muscle. They didn’t need any witting help from anyone to do what they did. And thus far, and I’m not saying this is conclusive because 10 years from now someone might find something that changes it, we’ve not found a sitting single witting individual in your community, and that’s a fact that gets overlooked because you get painted and that’s why I’m so committed and remain committed to projects like this because what we are in the business of is facts and the truth.”Anxiety about Muslim Americans is at an all-time high thanks to a well-funded campaign of Islamophobia.

Rand Corporation Findings

A 2010 Rand Corporation report rightfully states that “The volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s than it is today. It is important to note that Rand is mostly a Defense Department-funded think-tank. This report has a whole section called “The 1970s Saw Greater Terrorist Violence.” The report asserts that, “Thus far, there has been no sustained jihadist terrorist campaign in the United States.” And one possible reason for this, according to this Rand report, is, “The local Muslim community rejected al Qaeda’s appeals and actively intervened to dissuade those with radical tendencies from violence.”

But, facts mean very little to “Police Blotter Bob”…

Loonwatchers, please welcome Ilisha our newest contributor. She will be focusing on issues of women and Islam.

This month Pamella Geller published a book entitled, “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance,” which she describes as a “how to” guide for fighting various Islamic menaces, including “creeping sharia” and “stealth jihad.”  She also describes how Muslims, who make up less than 2% of the American population, are “Islamic Supremacists” plotting to take over every aspect of American life.

Geller has also announced plans for a future book tentatively entitled, “Sex, Murder, and Islam: Honor Killing in America. ”  She says the book will be about the “ongoing proliferation” of honor killings among immigrants to the West from Muslim countries.   Honor killings have recently become the centerpiece of Geller’s campaign against Islam, and feature prominently on her website, Atlas Shrugs.

Honor killings are not Islamic, and they are not condoned in the Qur’an.  This is a matter of fact. Honor killing is a form of murder where the victim is denied a fair trial, which is contrary to Islamic law.  Islam opposes acts of murder and vigilantism, and likens the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33).  Honor killing is a cultural inheritance which predates Islam by centuries, and  Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations have all said that honor killings cut across cultural and religious lines.

Nevertheless, “Islamic” honor killings are a public relations bonanza for Islamophobes, especially when they take place in a Western country.  They are used to reinforce the notion that Islam is inherently violent and irrational, and to suggest that Muslim families view a young woman’s adoption of Western culture as a capital offense.  Isolated incidents are amplified through intense media coverage, stoking fears that Muslims are importing barbaric customs into Western countries through immigration.

Anti-Muslim hate sites including Jihadwatch, Atlas Shrugs, and Frontpage Magazine have been weeping crocodile tears for Aqsa Parvez since she was killed by her father and brother in December of 2007 in an apparent honor killing.  Both men received life sentences for their crime in June of 2010, but that hasn’t stopped Pamela Geller from continuing to exploit the incident to advance her agenda.  She recently managed to raise $5,000 in donations she used to fund a controversial memorial plaque for Aqsa Parvez in Israel.

Parvez is the ideal poster child for their campaign to vilify Islam because she was the teenage daughter of Muslim immigrants living in Ontario, Canada.  For similar reasons, Robert Spencer is exploiting the tragic death of two sisters, Sarah Yaser Said, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, who were shot and killed by their father, an immigrant from Egypt, in January of 2008 in Texas.

Geller and Spencer show little interest in similar crimes when they are committed by non-Muslims.  A few months before Aqsa Parvez was killed, a gruesome video surfaced of a 17-year old Du’a Khalil Aswad in Mosul, Iraq being stoned to death by a mob while she cried out for help.  The video garnered immediate attention when it was presumed to be an “Islamic” crime, but quickly dropped out of the spotlight when it turned out the victim was a Kurdish girl from the Yazidi religion who was killed for having an Arab Muslim boyfriend.

In 2008, a man in Chicago killed his pregnant daughter, her 3-year old child, and her husband by burning down their home because she had married a man from a lower caste.  This horrific crime was ignored by the usual hate brigade because the perpetrator was a non-Muslim immigrant from India.  Robert Spencer mentioned the case on Jihadwatch only briefly, and that was to complain that media attention should be going to the murder of the Said sisters instead.

Geller’s Atlas Shrugs features a memorial page entitled, “Honor Killing: Islam’s Gruesome Gallery.”  It is indeed gruesome and serves her agenda of inspiring outrage against Islam and Muslims. Unlike the Memini (“Remembrance”) memorial for victims of honor killings from all religious backgrounds, Geller’s Gruesome Gallery is devoted exclusively to highlighting honor killings associated with Muslims.

Geller and Spencer have also been relentless in trying to get police in Tampa, Florida to reopen the case of  Fatima Abdullah, insisting she was the victim of an honor killing and subsequent cover up.   The 48-year old woman died when she fell and hit her head on a coffee table at her brother’s home.  Her brother was not home at the time of the incident.

Pamela Geller says the death is suspicious because Abdullah could not have “suicided” herself by “banging her head on a table.” Robert Spencer wrote about the Abdullah case on Jihadwatch, saying:

This is the sharia in America. The idea that a woman would die after she ‘threw herself to the floor’ or hit her head repeatedly on the coffee table is institutionalized gender apartheid, the sharia. The idea defies logic, belies reality.

As a self-proclaimed scholar on Islam, Spencer should know that Islamic law (“the sharia”) does not sanction honor killing.  The coroner’s autopsy report concluded the “Manner of Death” was “Accident (Decedent fell and struck head on table).”  The detailed medical report does not mention any evidence of foul play.

Jihadwatch later published a page with the headline, “Tampa Police crime scene tech now admits ‘fear of Muslim reprisal’ in honor killing classified as accidental death,” which was reposted to numerous anti-Muslim hate sites.  This implies police lied when they ruled the case an accident, but a closer look at the details shows this headline is misleading.

A crime scene technician from the Tampa police department called the Florida Family Association (FFA) nearly a year after the initial investigation and asked that her name be removed from their website, which has been stirring up controversy over the case, in concert with Geller and Spencer.  The technician did not want her name posted on a controversial public website, though it is unclear from the reports whether she feared reprisal from angry Muslims, or from “activists” aligned with the FFA.

Although Tampa police have stood by results of their initial investigation, Geller and an assortment of other loony Islamophobes continue to exert pressure on authorities to reopen the case.  They have linked the case to their conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over the country, apparently starting with the Tampa Police Department.  Geller has dubbed the city “Tampastan,” and claims Florida police are engaged in a cover up because, “…murdering Muslim women in America is preferable to offending Muslims or insulting Islam.”

It is tempting to dismiss Geller and Spencer for their outlandish statements and crude publicity stunts, but they have enjoyed surprising success, especially in using the mainstream media as a conduit for spreading their hateful ideas.  If they were targeting any other minority group, they would probably be consigned to the lunatic fringe.

David Shuster gives the FBI an earful for its illegal and discriminatory activities against the Muslim-American community (hat tip: Garo):

The reference to “the FBI’s own database…” seems to be a reference to my article All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 94% That Aren’t.  As for the “discredited blogger,” I’m pretty sure that’s Robert Spencer…

A good article exposing the stupidity and incompetence of the FBI.

The Federal Bureau of Idiocy

by Justin Raimondo (Anti-War.com)

The complete failure of our law enforcement agencies to protect us from real threats of terrorism was confirmed on September 11, 2001, when – in spite of plentiful warnings, including from field offices of the Federal Bureau of Idiocy Investigation – nineteen hijackers armed only with box cutters commandeered three airliners and drove them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

No one paid the price for this – except, of course, the victims of the attacks. No high-ranking US government official, including the head of the FBI, was fired or even called on the carpet.

Instead, our law enforcement agencies were given a free pass – and a blank check. Billions were poured into “anti-terrorist” programs, as a terrified and prostrate Congress authorized unprecedented intrusions into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Surveillance State, already growing at a rapid pace, grew to gargantuan proportions, employing tens of thousands of professional snoops and sneaks to spy on the legal, constitutionally protected activities of American citizens.

The first, but far from only, targets of this massive escalation of spying were Americans of the Muslim faith – and, while the neocon media salivated at the prospect, mosques, religious leaders, and ordinary people were put in the government’s sights. The wholesale targeting of Muslims has become so egregious that agents inside the FBI rebelled, and leaked documents to Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman which reveal the craziness that has not abated since 9/11.

The documents are dozens of pages out of “training” manuals which posit that Islam, per se, is inherently and inescapably violent and subversive. As Ackerman reports:

“The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’

“At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’ under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.’”

This is craziness, and it’s not the craziness of the Bush era, either – Ackerman reports that the last “training session” that utilized these nut-job materials was in March of this year. Yes, folks, it’s all about hope and change – from bad to worse.

Go here and feast your eyes on the actual materials used to “train” FBI agents involved in “counterterrorism” operations in the US: Mohammed, according to the FBI, was a “cult leader,” and torture is part of the Muslim religion, mandated by the Prophet – a weird accusation coming from the US government, which infamously institutionalized torture techniques borrowed from the Communists and the Nazis. Much space is given over to characterizing the prophet Mohammed as psychopath who “heard voices,” “contemplated suicide,” and plotted heinous murders. In short, he’s a medieval version of David Koresh – another FBI target – whose followers presumably deserve the same fate.

The theme of this material is simple: Islam is not a religion but a military-political formation whose goal is world conquest, whose methods are utterly ruthless, and whose followers are mad dogs who can only be shot down with relentless ferocity.

As Ackerman points out, al-Qaeda couldn’t agree more.

The lunacy doesn’t end there, however: a document entitled “Militancy Considerations” has a graph that charts the violent tendencies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to this work of graphical genius, Judaism underwent a very brief period of orienting toward violence that began to be ameliorated starting in 1400 B.C. – a factoid the Palestinians will be thrilled to hear about. Christianity, in contrast, started out pretty violently – which should be news to fans of the Sermon the Mount – and only started to approximate the relative peacefulness of Judaism around the year 1900, where the two lines on the graph representing the two religions meet and merge.

Islam, however, is an entirely different story: here the line goes up very briefly, charting the course of what the FBI describes as the “Meccan period,” but then goes sideways – toward increasing violence – in a straight line, after entering what is termed the “Medina period.”

We have heard all this before, of course – in the ravings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and David Horowitz. Indeed, the author of at least one of the FBI “presentations,” one William Gawthrop, was interviewed by WorldNutDaily – birther headquarters – in which he attributed radical Islamist terrorism to the prophet Mohammed’s “mindset.” In the interview, Gawthrop is described as someone “who until recent months headed a key counterintelligence and counterterrorism program set up at the Pentagon after 9/11.” Islam isn’t really a religion, according to Gawthrop, but a “military doctrine.” The Koran is not only a sacred text but also a manual for world conquest:

“’Today the United States and an increasing number of other governments are beleaguered by an expanding array of states, groups and individuals whose goals, actions and norms are animated by Islamic values,’ Gawthrop said. ‘This places the defenders in the unenviable position of having to fight, at the strategic level, against an idea.’

“How do you attack an idea? By hitting ‘soft spots’ in the Islamic faith that, once exploited, ‘may induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target,’ Gawthrop says.”

“’Critical vulnerabilities of the Quran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,’ Gawthrop said. ‘Similar vulnerabilities may be found in Muhammad’s character.’”

This reads like a rationale for the worst sort of hate-mongering of the kind one sees on far-right-wing blogs, and the obscene excesses of wackos like Pamela Geller, who ascribe every sort of moral and sexual perversion to the most revered figure of one of the world’s three great Abrahamic faiths. The idea is not to win over Muslims, at home and abroad, to the anti-terrorist cause, but to insult and provoke them to higher levels of violence.

Somewhere close to the lowest rung of Hell, Osama bin Laden is smiling.

Gawthrop criticizes the Pentagon for lacking his own “strategic” understanding of Islam, and predicts that:

“As the jihad spreads …  the government eventually will have to get involved in a such a controversial national education campaign, politically incorrect as it may be. ‘If the United States, moderate Muslim governments and the non-Muslim world seek to engage ideological adversaries on their own ground,’ he said, ‘they will have to develop, use and maintain the full range of capabilities in the ideological component of national power, and address Islam’s strategic themes directly.’”

In other words: hire him to direct a national – nay, international – hate campaign directed at Islam, per se, and the memory and image of the Prophet Mohammed.

The anti-Muslim business is one of the few that is booming in Obama’s America, along with the arms manufacturers and the hedge funds. “Homeland Security” is a growth industry, with the prospect of huge amounts of government money flowing into the coffers of frauds like Hawthrop. This is welfare for nut-balls.

See here, here, here, and here for reports on the growing infiltration of Washington’s “counter-terrorism” efforts by Anders Breivik look-alikes. As Dana Priest pointed out in her comprehensive series on the gargantuan “anti-terrorist” bureaucracy that has mushroomed since 9/11:

“In their desire to learn more about terrorism, many departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and others in the intelligence community.”

This is the inevitable result of any government program designed to “study” a religio-ideological phenomenon – an entire industry grows up in the lush atmosphere of plentiful and lucrative government contracts, flowering into the likes of Hawthrop and other crackpots who pose as “experts.” It happened during the cold war, with neoconservative “experts” arising to push their extremist policies – and the same thing is happening today in our endless “war on terrorism.”

These snake oil salesmen gain surface credibility on account of their background in government and the military, or due to their association with a whole sub-universe of fringe “thinktanks,” such as Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP). Gaffney’s CSP is a key node in the nut-job network, and one indication of their credibility level is the fact that Gaffney has endorsed the laughable “intelligence” expertise of Walid Shoebat, who claims Obama is a Muslim. Gaffney and Shoebat once appeared on a panel together discussing the question of whether – or when – Obama became a Muslim. Gaffney, for his part, along with David Horowitz, is convinced that the Republican party – and the US government – have been infiltrated by Islamists due to the efforts of Grover Norquist! Shoebat is also a favorite of the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA), which publishes Hawthrop’s drivel in their journal: he appeared, with Robert Spencer and William Boykin — the “crusader” General — at a “Ft. Hood Memorial” hate-fest. The wacko circle-jerk of cross-endorsements and interlocking organizations serves to buttress the “credentials” of these “experts.”

That they have infiltrated law enforcement at the local, state, and federal level, is horrifying – and unsurprising. They’re just going where the federal dollars flow, springing up like weeds in a sparsely-grown patch of ground. Tax dollars spread generously around breed these phonies like flies after a summer rain: it’s a built-in feature of our bureaucratic approach to “fighting terrorism.”

What’s scary is that the FBI is supposed to be protecting us from “terrorism” – but who will protect us from our protectors? These lazy dolts have nothing better to do than sneak around “investigating” Americans who have broken no law, accusing even this web site – and this columnist – of being “a threat to National Security” and in all probability an “agent of a foreign power.”

The foreign power is in Washington, D.C., where parasites like Hawthrop & Co. feed at the public trough. It’s more than past time to clean the Augean stables of our “counterterrorism” bureaucracy and start defending the nation in a credible way.

In part I, I discussed the new Al Arabiya poll, of questionable validity, that is making the rounds in the anti-Muslim cyber-world.  Another finding of the poll, per MEMRI:

Out of the 220,000 Arabs who participated, 23% believed Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and 26% did not.

Anti-Muslim websites are absolutely beside themselves at how unbelievably gullible Moozlums are, how they are miserably steeped in conspiracy theories, and how they can’t just admit the fact that Moozlums did 9/11.  Yet, as the Al Arabiya article, which the Islamophobes themselves linked to (but can’t read), says: these findings are not much different than those of other places in the world, including the West.

Indeed, we find that outside of the United States there is “no consensus who was behind Sept 11″ as noted in this Reuters article:

No consensus on who was behind Sept 11: global poll

Seven years after the September 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published on Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.

The poll was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative project of research centers in various countries managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland in the United States.

In Europe, al Qaeda was cited by 56 percent of Britons and Italians, 63 percent of French and 64 percent of Germans. The U.S. government was to blame, according to 23 percent of Germans and 15 percent of Italians…

Therefore, the fact that 26% of Arabs don’t believe Al-Qaeda is to blame, according to the Al Arabiya poll, is not completely out of line with world opinion.

That only in the United States is there a consensus that Al-Qaeda did it is not something very surprising, considering that the U.S. government quickly, repeatedly, and emphatically pointed the finger at Al-Qaeda.

But, you know who else the government blamed?  Iraq.

These anti-Muslim bigots are snickering at how these Moozlums are just so absolutely stupid for thinking Israel or America could be involved in the 9/11 attack, when in fact the entire country–led by neoconservatives, Zionists, and anti-Muslim bigots like them–invaded a country on the false belief (the conspiracy theory) that Iraq was linked to Al-Qaeda and had something to do with 9/11.

Indeed, a January 2004 poll by Newsweek found that a majority of Americans (49% vs. 39%) believed that “Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.”  Amazingly, long after even the Bush administration admitted they were wrong, 41% of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was responsible for 9/11 (as seen in a June 2007 Newsweek poll).  This is a belief that Americans continue to cling on to even today!  Oh, but how utterly deluded those Moozlums are for thinking Israel was involved!  

Israel National News says:

Only 23 percent believe that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks, while a large number – 26 percent – think that the terrorist organization did not plan and carry out the hijack-bombings….

In Iran, the percentage of those denying  Al Qaeda’s involvement is even higher. The government controlled press continues to claim that the official version of 9/11 is false and that unaccounted for explosions brought down the Twin Towers in New York City.

How absolutely primitive of a government to issue statements blaming someone other than Al-Qaeda for 9/11!  That is totally unlike completely similar to the U.S. government linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and 9/11.  As Prof. Stephen Walt pointed out, this was all done with Israeli encouragement.  And now, the Israelis are blaming Iraq Iran.

All of this was perfectly depicted in a Family Guy clip:

Interestingly, even in the United States, “more than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.”  So really, what’s the big deal if 26% of Arabs don’t believe 9/11 was done by Al-Qaeda?

Of note also is the fact that it is almost conventional wisdom, often heard even by liberals (implied, for instance, by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 911 and even the dog in the Family Guy in clip above), that Saudi Arabia has responsibility for 9/11 (“it was the Saudis that were involved, not Iraq”).  This utterly ignorant idea is seriously discussed in somber terms.  Whether it’s Israel, Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, the fact is that Muslims do not have a monopoly on 9/11 conspiracy theory.  There is plenty to go around.

In any case, the fact that the United States weaponized 9/11, by using it as an excuse to bomb, invade, and occupy multiple Muslim countries makes more Muslims gravitate towards 9/11 conspiracy theories, for reasons that should be patently obvious.

*  *  *  *  *

MEMRI also notes, commenting on the Al Arabiya poll:

16% considered the assassination of Osama bin Laden a criminal act, 48% did not, and 36% were undecided.

The assassination was definitely illegal under international law, for multiple reasons: Firstly, it involved the flagrant violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty; would there be any question about legality if Pakistani commandos landed on Ellis Island?  The illegality of this act is not limited to the capture of Osama bin Laden, but can be seen in the continued violation of Paksitan’s sovereignty on a day-to-day basis with U.S. drone attacks that maim scores of civilians.

Secondly, Osama bin Laden was unarmed and yet was shot dead.  If we were truly a civilized people, someone wouldn’t really need to explain why it is illegal to shoot unarmed men.  Bin Laden was killed so that he wouldn’t face trial, which is a bedrock of our legal system.  This too is not limited to Osama bin Laden, as the U.S. has a hit-list out for other American citizens too.  Furthermore, the government continues to deny countless number of Muslims the right to a trial.

Thirdly, there is the larger issue, which is all the illegal actions that took place between the time the Taliban agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden, an offer which the U.S. refused, to the time the U.S. assassinated him.  If all of these actions (i.e. the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) were part of America’s strategy to capture Bin Laden, then certainly this entire process is illegal.  This fact underscores the biggest problem with the so-called War on Terror: terrorism should be dealt with using a combination of policing and negotiation, not war and destruction.

Therefore, my question is: if 16% of Arabs thought that the Osama bin Laden assassination was a criminal act, so what?

FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

by Spencer Ackerman

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.

Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.

They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” When Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.”

But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took place on March 21.

The Islam briefings are elective, not mandatory. “A disclaimer accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government,” FBI spokesman Christopher Allen tells Danger Room.

“The training materials in question were delivered as Stage Two training to counterterrorism-designated agents,” Allen adds. “This training was largely derived from a variety of open source publications and includes the opinion of the analyst that developed the lesson block.”

Not all counterterrorism veterans consider the briefings so benign. “Teaching counterterrorism operatives about obscure aspects of Islam,” says Robert McFadden, who recently retired as one of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service’s al-Qaida-hunters, “without context, without objectivity, and without covering other non-religious drivers of dangerous behavior is no way to stop actual terrorists.”

Still, at Quantico, the alleged connection between Islam and violence isn’t just stipulated. It’s literally graphed.

An FBI presentation titled “Militancy Considerations” measures the relationship between piety and violence among the texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. As time goes on, the followers of the Torah and the Bible move from “violent” to “non-violent.” Not so for devotees of the Koran, whose “moderating process has not happened.” The line representing violent behavior from devout Muslims flatlines and continues outward, from 610 A.D. to 2010. In other words, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.

Training at Quantico isn’t designed for intellectual bull sessions or abstract theory, according to FBI veterans. The FBI conducts its training so that both seasoned agents and new recruits can sharpen their investigative skills.

In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even “Islamist extremism.” Islam.

What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include “immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.

On Tuesday, the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), warned that law enforcement lacks “meaningful standards” to prevent anti-Islam material from seeping into counterterrorism training. Some FBI veterans suspect the increased pressure on American Muslims has a lot to do with the kind of training that Quantico offers.

“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.” (Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works for the ACLU.)

The chief of the Training Division, Assistant FBI Director Thomas Browne, came into his current job in January. His official biography lists no terrorism expertise beyond serving as a coordinator for a bureau “Domestic Terrorism Program” in Tennessee sometime in the last decade.

It is unclear what vetting process the FBI used to approve these briefings; if any Muslim scholars contributed to them; and what criteria Quantico uses to determine Islamic expertise. “The development of effective training is a constantly evolving process,” says FBI spokesman Allen. “Sometimes the training is adapted for long-term use. This particular training segment was delivered a single time and not used since.”

Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.

At the time, Gawthrop’s major suggestion for waging the war on terrorism was to attack what he called “soft spots” in Islamic faith that might “induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target.” That is, to discredit Islam itself and cause Muslims to abandon their religion. “Critical vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,” he said. Alas, he lamented, he faced the bureaucratic obstacle of official Washington’s “political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the religion of Islam,” according to the website.

Back then, however, Gawthrop didn’t work for the FBI. He had recently stepped down from a position with the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity. That agency came under withering criticism during the Bush administration for keeping a database about threats to military bases that included reports on peaceful antiwar protesters and dovish Church groups. It is unclear how Gawthrop came to work for the FBI.

Through an intermediary, Gawthrop told Danger Room that he was unavailable for comment before our deadline.

The FBI didn’t always conflate terrorism with Islam. “I never saw that,” says Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s most distinguished counterterrorism agents and author of the new memoir The Black Banners, who retired from the bureau in 2005. “Sometimes, toward the end of my time, I started noticing it with different entities outside the FBI. You started feeling like they had a problem with Islam-as-Islam, because of the media. But that was a few people, and was usually hidden behind closed doors.”

Soufan, a Muslim, has interrogated members of al-Qaida and contributed to rolling up one of its cells in Yemen after 9/11. But by the logic of the FBI’s training materials, Soufan’s religious practices make him a potential terrorist.

McFadden, the former NCIS counterterrorist, has a lot of respect for his FBI colleagues, who he believes are ill-served by these Islam briefings. “These are earnest special agents and police officers who want to know how do their job better,” McFadden says.

Too often, McFadden says, counterterrorism training becomes simultaneously over-broad and ignorant. “Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization of things like, for instance, the Hawala system,” McFadden explains. “It’s a system that most of the developing world and expatriates from it use to move money around, including terrorists. But you can’t say the whole hawala system is about terrorism, just like you can’t say that Islam as a whole has anything to do with bad behavior.”

McFadden, a Catholic, believes that obsessing over obscure Koranic verses is as useful a guide to terrorist behavior as “diving into the rite of exorcism” is to understanding Catholicism.

On April 6, barely two weeks after the “Islamic Motivations for ‘Suicide’ Bombers” briefing at Quantico, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the bureau’s budget before a congressional committee. Among his major points: the FBI needs cooperation from American Muslims to stop the next terrorist attack.

“Since September 11th, every one of our 56 field offices and the leadership of those offices have had outreach to the Muslim community,” Mueller said. “We need the support of that community … our business is basically relationships.” That is exactly the opposite message sent in the training rooms of Quantico, where the next generation of FBI counterterrorism is shaped.

Photos: Flickr/Cliff1066, ISAF

Robert Spencer

Terrorist inspirer Robert Spencer’s proclivity to engage in anti-Muslim Islamophobic conspiracy theories is well known. Recently, he dallied once again in the nutty conspiracy that Barack Obama is a ‘radical undercover Mooslim’ hell bent on destroying America.

In a post titled, Obama reads Biblical passage at 9/11 ceremonies implying that 9/11 was an act of God Spencer writes,

Obama reads Psalm 46, including verse 8: “Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has wrought desolations in the earth.”

The only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being wreaking desolations on the earth are…Islamic jihadists.

Robert Spencer, just like his comrade Pamela Geller believes Obama is a Muslim. They have repeated this claim numerous times, both implicitly and directly, though Spencer has reverted again to not saying it clearly.

Spencer, unlike his friend Geller knows that such a belief is bats*** loony so he attempts to couch his language in euphemism and hints.

It is interesting to note Spencer’s false claim that the “only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being are Islamic jihadists.” Spencer isn’t that stupid, just a week ago he was on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, the same loon pastor who “in the wake of 9/11, had a now (in-)famous exchange with the late Jerry Falwell in which the two religious leaders suggested that the United States ‘deserved’ the attacks for its tolerance of secularism, gays, abortion, feminists and pagans.”

Maybe Spencer thinks that Robertson is an Islamic Jihadist?

However, when have facts ever stopped Spencer in the past? So, with single-minded drive to prove Obama’s radical Islamic Jihadism he continues:

So why did Barack Obama pick this psalm out of 150 psalms, and out of innumerable appropriate Biblical passages, to read at the 9/11 ceremonies? 9/11, after all, was a day when there were indeed wrought desolations on the earth. Did Obama really mean to say that God did it, that it was an act of divine judgment, rather than a monstrous and unmitigated evil?

Or is this just another one of those funny coincidences, of which there are so very, very many when it comes to Barack Obama and his remarkable, unqualified and obvious affinity for Islam?

Robert Spencer long ago went off the rails when he solidified his alliance with Pamela Geller and the fascist anti-Muslim Right-wing network. Ever since then it has been downhill for the anti-Muslim polemicist. No longer does he care to present the facade of impartiality, scholarliness or truth. He has been savaged for it in the mainstream media, it only remains for the national security complex, which still allows him to instruct its employees to catch up to this soon to be bygone “counter-jihad” blogger.

Wallowing in his own self-righteousness, Spencer declares the President of the United States Barack Obama, a professed Christian, the commander-in-chief of forces occupying two Muslim nations and bombing the hell out of several more of being an “Islamist Jihadist.”

Is that called “chutzpah” or just plain right-wing anti-Muslim loonacy?

(from ThinkProgress)

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 14, 2011 at 2:40 pm

On the same day the country gathered together to recognize the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched two F-16 jets to tail a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver after the crew reported “suspicious activity on board.” That “activity”? The existence of three dark-skinned passengers. Two Indian men and one self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” from Ohio — all unknown to each other — made the mistake of boarding a plane on Sept. 11, 2011.

After the crew reported that two people had spent “an extraordinarily long time” in the bathroom, the jets escorted the plane to its destination in Detroit, Michigan. Then, according to reports and the “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” Shoshana Hebshi, a SWAT team of about 10 police boarded the plane with machine guns and three dogs, approached Hebshi and the men’s aisle, handcuffed them, and escorted them off the plane:

Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.

My last tweet: Majorly armed cops coming aboard

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

After interrogating and strip-searching the three passengers, the FBI determined hours later that “there was no real threat,” excusing the wildly disproportionate response by stating, “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.” When Hebshi asked her interrogator what sparked the concern, he replied “that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity.” Hebshi noted that the “activity” was two Indian men “going to the bathroom in succession.”

Hebshi’s situation is an all-too-common example from one of 9/11′s salient legacies: racial and ethnic profiling. Multiple minorities — Muslim or not — have been banned from flights or subjected to humiliating searches solely because of their appearance. Indeed, U.S. officials even spurred diplomatic tension with India last year for detaining its U.N. envoy and demanding to physically check his turban.

Living through this era of Islamophobia, Hebshi wondered whether the mere fact that three minorities “who didn’t know each other” but were dark-skinned will always be “suspicion enough.”

Hate crimes continue.

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

Burnt Qur’an sent to Bronx mosque

A Bronx Imam received a partially burnt Koran, delivered in an envelope to his mosque the day before Sept. 11th.

The Imam found the Koran in a brown envelope, which showed up at his mosque on East 198th Street at around noon Saturday. There were also papers inside the envelope covered with cartoon like drawing depicting hatred towards Muslims.

The Imam also found white powder inside the envelope. Tests determined the powder was actually pieces of the burnt Koran.

The incident is being investigated by the hate NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

WABC, 13 September 2011

We exposed the fraud known as “Kamal Saleem,” two years ago in our article, “Three Stooges Coming to a Campus Near You!”

Loonwatchers in Michigan and elsewhere should not stand for this fakery. They should take action and lodge complaints with their senators and congressional representatives. No longer should those who are clearly out to make a buck while trafficking in hate and lies be given a free pass.

Self-declared ‘former terrorist’ speaks at Agema rally

(Michigan Press)

The appearance of a man who claims to be a reformed terrorist at a rally against illegal immigration at the Capitol building in Lansing is raising questions both about the accuracy of his story and the propriety of his invitation to speak.

Kamal Saleem of Berkley spoke at the rally and testified before the House Commerce Committee supporting legislation introduced by Rep. Dave Agema (R-Grandville) that would require contractors for the state and temporary agencies to use E-Verify, a federal system to verify a person’s immigration status.

E-Verify is a federal program that has been found to return false denials, resulting in people losing jobs. The legislation was tabled by the Commerce Committee for a second time.

“I came to the United States of America not to love you all. I came to be — exactly — to destroy this country as a terrorist. We crossed the Canadian border. We brought weapon caches right through cities, through Windsor,” Saleem told attendees. “This is what is all happening by allowing illegals in here to come through our borders and become a part of our country. They can become legal terrorists in your hometown to kill your children, and your grandchildren and your future as we know it.”

Saleem claims that he was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as well as the Muslim Brotherhood when he came to the U.S. in 1979 “for the first time.” He said the E-Verify system was important to prevent future terror attacks on American soil.

“This (E-Verify) will not allow people like me to come to this country to destroy it and would allow the American people to legally work and have their freedom in this country,” he said.

For Calvin College history professor Douglas Howard, there is much to doubt about the claim to have been a former terrorist. Howard researched Saleem’s background in 2007 when the Calvin College Republican Club invited him to present at the conservative Christian college. Howard said that as an expert in Middle East history, his department tasked him with reviewing Saleem’s credentials and advising the department on whether or not it should co-sponsor the event.

“I concluded this person is a fraud,” Howard says.

Howard tried to get the appearance canceled but it was too late in the process.

In a 2010 Books and Culture: A Christian Review article about Saleem’s book “The Blood of the Lambs,” Howard explains how he first came to question Saleem’s story.

A look at his website told me immediately that he was not who he said he was. The signature of his deception was his statement that “in my family was the Grand Wazir of Islam.” The term is ridiculous, a spurious title meant to mislead the innocent with an aura of authority.

In the conclusion of that article — in which he calls Saleem a fraud and deconstructs errors in his book — Howard writes of Saleem’s book:

“It is insulting to be told that we have to look down the barrel of a gun to see life’s inner meaning, or that only a killer can really understand Islam. Authentic experience comes when we see a man or a woman before we see a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew; when we hear a human voice before we hear ‘a thick Middle Eastern accent’; when the person next to us on the plane is a young man—with a father and a mother waiting for him—before he is a Nigerian or an American. Anything else leads down the road toward extremism. Although Kamal Saleem has forsaken much, he has evidently not yet forsaken that.”

Howard says that while he was doing research on Saleem, he called a former employer. He did not name the employer during the interview with Michigan Messenger, however, he identifies the employer as Focus on the Family in Books and Culture review.

“He claimed to have been a former football player, a placekicker for Barry Switzer (former coach of the University of Oklahoma football program) and claimed that he won a game in the last three seconds with a field goal,” Howard recalled Focus on the Family staff telling him. The problem? No such game existed and while Saleem makes a big deal about hiding his real name, Focus on the Family staff referred to him by his given name — allowing Howard to check Oklahoma rosters.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported in 2008 on Saleem’s history:

Kamal Saleem, whose real name is Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network for sixteen years, and was hired by Focus on the Family in 2003. In 2006, he launched Koome Ministries, whose mission is to “expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world… America must wake-up and set a continued Christian agenda of Liberty and Truth as a standard to follow throughout the free world.”

Focus on the Family staff expressed discomfort with Saleem, Howard said, particularly with his claims of Christian conversion. Saleem alleges that he was in a near fatal car wreck, but Christians cared for him, taking him into their home and provided for him while he healed. That he says lead to his conversion. In an interview with Pat Robertson 700 Club TV show, Saleem says he called out for Allah to answer him, and when he didn’t he decided to kill himself for questioning his faith. At that moment, Saleem claims, the Christian God came to him. Robertson is transfixed by this tale.

Saleem has never identified what city or state this near fatal accident occurred in, nor has he ever identified the Christian doctor who allegedly gave him refuge and helped him pay his bills while he was recovering.

The history professor says that Saleem’s claim on Tuesday to have smuggled weapons into the U.S. is new. “It sounds like he is upping the ante,” Howard said.

The story Saleem tells is bewitching, Howard admits.

“It preys on people’s lack of information and their worries and their fears and their wanting to find a way to justify their own attitudes toward Islam and Middle East policy,” Howard says. “There’s a market out there that wants Kamal Saleem’s story to be true.”

And Saleem is not alone in this new, post 9-11 market. He has appeared with another well known former terrorist, Walid Shoebat. Shoebat was recently the subject of an investigation by CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show. That investigation raised questions about the veracity of Shoebat’s claims to being a former terrorist.

Boyd, the DOJ National Security spokesman, declined to discuss the concerns about Saleem’s accuracy.

“Further, we have no comment on whether Mr. Saleem’s other statements are accurate or not,” he said.

Maria Elena Garcia Upson, spokesperson for the Citizenship and Immigration Services, would not comment on Saleem’s case specifically, citing privacy rules. But she did comment in general about alleged ex-terrorists receiving American citizenship.

“Well obviously it would be a concern in general, but we are not the enforcement arm, you will have to talk to Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Upson said.

An ICE spokesperson did not return inquires by press time.

Others are arguing that if Saleem’s story is true, that raises even more questions both about his citizenship and his appearance at the rally.

“If Representative Agema recruited as a speaker an admitted terrorist who says he brought weapons into the United States my first question is why this guy isn’t in custody or in jail? And why was Mr. Saleem allowed to become a United States citizen?” asks David Holtz, executive director of Progress Michigan. “In trying to make a point about illegal immigration, Dave Agema instead makes you question his judgment and sanity. Perhaps the FBI should be invited to future Agema events since he may decide he needs more terrorists to deliver his talking points.”

State Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Detroit) went even further.

“I am unforgiving for any terrorist,” Talib said in exclusive interview with Michigan Messenger. “He should be deported for that. And you can quote me on that.”

Agema defends Saleem.

“What happened with Kamal is totally different,” Agema says of the reformed terrorist. Agema says following his conversion to Christianity, Saleem helped the federal government track down terror cells in the U.S., a claim that could not be verified.

“As a general rule, the Justice Department does not publicly comment on whether or not someone has provided assistance to the U.S. government in counter-terrorism operations,” said Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, when asked what role, if any, Saleem had played in uncovering terror plots in the U.S.

Howard also called Agema out over Saleem’s appearance and testimony.

“It is really unfortunate that Rep. Agema has decided to align himself with this kind of cynical opportunism,” he said. “That is unbelievable that he could testify before a House committee.”

I recently published two articles: Gallup Poll: Jews and Christians Way More Likely than Muslims to Justify Killing Civilians and Surveys Show in Every Country Muslims Less Likely to Justify Killing Civilians Than Americans and Israelis.

One anti-Muslim critic posted the following comment in response:

Interesting poll carried out by al-Arabiya…..

More than one-third of Arabs justify the 9/11 attacks, and only 23 percent believe Al Qaeda was behind the aerial suicide bombings.

The survey included 220,000 Arabs and was carried out by the Al-Arabia television channel in Dubai and a British research institute.

Thirty-six percent of the respondents justified the attacks, but only 38 percent took the opposite view, leaving another 16 percent undecided or with no opinion.

(You can google for the link)

I did google for the link and could not find it.  Instead, I found link after link of Islamophobic websites all linking to each other.  Finally, it seems I located what seems to be the original anti-Muslim site to make the claim, the Israel National News:

Dubai Poll: More than Third of Arabs Justify 9/11

More than one-third of Arabs justify the 9/11 attacks, and only 23 percent believe Al Qaeda was behind the aerial suicide bombings.

The survey included 220,000 Arabs and was carried out by the Al-Arabia television channel in Dubai and a British research institute.

Thirty-six percent of the respondents justified the attacks, but only 38 percent took the opposite view, leaving another 16 percent undecided or with no opinion.

Only 23 percent believe that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks, while a large number – 26 percent – think that the terrorist organization did not plan and carry out the hijack-bombings.

Slightly less than half of those participating in the survey – 48 percent – do not think that the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was a criminal act…

Forgive me if I take Israel National News with a grain of salt.  The hyperlinks to “the survey” in that article lead nowhere.

On the other hand, it could also be good old MEMRI:

36% of Arabs in Al-Arabiya TV Survey Justify 9/11

Al-Arabiya TV, in collaboration with a British research institute, conducted an online survey on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Out of the 220,000 Arabs who participated, 23% believed Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and 26% did not. 36% said that the attacks were justified and 38% that they were not. 16% considered the assassination of Osama bin Laden a criminal act, 48% did not, and 36% were undecided.

Source: Facebook site of Al-Arabiya TV

That SIOA is an anti-Muslim hate group is well known. After we published our expose on their hateful antics the SPLC designated them a hate group.

Predictably, Geller and co. used the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to fear-monger and spread hate of Islam and Muslims:

(via. Islamophobia Watch)

Geller and friends commemorate 9/11

“There is no smiley face, no whitewash on what happened here ten years ago today. What happened, was murder!” As she peppered her speech with soundbites, Pamela Geller was occasionally forced to pause for chants of “U-S-A!” from the smattering of supporters who had turned out for her Freedom Rally yesterday in Lower Manhattan. It was doubtful that there were any “smiley faces” at the official commemoration at the 9/11 Memorial that morning, but if you spoke with attendees of the Freedom Rally, one might have gotten the impression that Presidents Obama and Bush presided over a mass burning of Bibles and bald eagles.

“This country has become communist,” Sheepshead Bay resident Patricia Randolph told us. “A good way to fight for freedom is to know your history, to know that Muslims build victory mosques in places that they have conquered.” She was referring of course to Park51 a cultural center and mosque that may be built blocks from the World Trade Center site. “And have you heard about that mosque they’re building in Sheepshead Bay near a school? Those women that walk around my neighborhood with black nails? They’re Taliban wives.” Her friend Elizabeth of Midwood added, “The Muslims rape little girls, we have to make it safe for the kids.”

Gothamist, 12 September 2011

See also Media Matters, 12 September 2011

Islamic Center of Murfreesboro

Murfreesboro Mosque Controversy Sparks Islamophobia, Threats And Vandalism

by Janell Ross via Huffington Post

By some accounts, Anthony Mijares is a bit player in the story of Murfreesboro, Tenn., a small city 40 minutes south of Nashville. In Murfreesboro, a growing Muslim community’s plan to build a new mosque has unleashed a public furor, produced threats and counterthreats, and revealed just how far fear of another terrorist attack has spread across the United States.

Since the mosque won local government building approval in May 2010, Murfreesboro’s 250 Muslim families have taken an undesirable spot at center stage. Unidentified individuals vandalized a sign that had marked the future worship space site for months and in a separate incident, someone set ablaze a piece of construction equipment. On Labor Day an anonymous caller threatened the group again. A bomb, the caller said, will explode over the September 11 weekend inside the office space where Murfreesboro’s Muslims currently worship. Local law enforcement, the FBI and ATF are investigating the incidents and will not comment on their status.

But Mijares, a retiree and Roman Catholic, is also the lone voice behind a letter-writing campaign to discourage companies from displaying or advertising in a local paper that he believes is helping to fuel the local controversy. For more than a year, the paper has featured stories about the planned mosque, Islam and the alleged threat they pose to Murfreesboro. And this summer, that publication launched its own campaign against Mijares, publishing his home address in an ad that called for readers to “combat” his efforts.

“Yes, I consider that a threat,” said Mijares, 54. “What else could it be when every local right-wing nut, some militia member in Idaho or some Aryan (Neo-Nazi) in West Virginia can read the words ‘combat’ printed next to my address online? The Rutherford Reader knows what it’s doing. That wasn’t a mistake.”

What is happening to Mijares may be the final proof that the crisis in Murfreesboro has been created by nothing more than irrational fear and hate, not legitimate concerns about safety, said Reavis Mitchell, a historian at Fisk University in Nashville who specializes in 20th Century American history.

“There is a long line of people who have been branded an outsider, a troublemaker of some kind, because they won’t tolerate injustice silently,” said Mitchell.

Historically, community crises like the one in Murfreesboro have been resolved, or at least calmed, after the name-calling, threats, acts of intimidation or actual violence begin national attention turns to the troubled town or ringleader, Mitchell said. During the McCarthy anti-Communist campaign and The Civil Rights Movement, that’s the point at which change occurred, he said.

CNN, Time Magazine and international publications have covered the mosque controversy in Murfreesboro. But Mijares and his campaign have remained largely unknown.

In April 2010, just a few weeks before the new mosque won local government approval, Mijares picked up a copy of The Rutherford Reader, a free weekly newspaper, at a Murfreesboro Kroger. Mijares had scannedThe Rutherford Reader before, but that day Mejares was appalled. In stories, editorials and hard-to-describe items where opinions and facts were commingled, the paper called for a halt on “Muslim immigration” and described Islam as “dehumanizing” and “defiling.”

Mijares decided to contact Kroger. Within weeks, the grocery chain directed its distributor to stop making room for The Rutherford Reader on its free publication racks.

Mijares insists that he isn’t a fan of censorship, arguing that The Rutherford Reader can print what it wants and distribute it anyway that it can. But businesses that keep The Rutherford Reader afloat by supplying advertising revenue and access to consumers should think about this carefully, Mijares said, or they risk offending their own customers.

Over the next year, Mijares sent similar letters to the owners of local stores, restaurants and the local Chamber of Commerce. When seven stores, restaurants and chamber locations decided to stop displaying The Rutherford Reader on their free publication racks, Mijares expanded his efforts to advertisers.

“This is hate speech, pure and simple,” Mijares said. “I thought advertisers should know that The Rutherford Reader has taken a turn.”

Pete Doughtie – The Rutherford Reader‘s editor, publisher and owner — did not respond to multiple requests for comment left at his office and home. But this week, Doughtie’s column posed a revealing challenge.

Muslims are not in America to assimilate. They are here to change our system … Our preachers should go beyond telling us more than ‘we must love our enemies.’ That is simply passing the buck. They should be getting every Christian ready and armed with the Word of God and an understanding of the Quran and Hadith, to defeat those who are out to destroy Christianity, and our American way of life.

(Hadith is a collection of sayings and ideas attributed to the prophet Muhammed.)

Since the mosque project was approved, Doughtie -a self-described white Christian American – has described Islam in his column as a “political ideology,” rather than a religion. He has told readers that Islam compels violence and attempts to implement sharia, a code of Islamic laws. He has described Mijares as a Muslim. And he has described as “terrorists” Mijares and other locals who have objected to The Rutherford Reader‘s content and the vandalism and arson at the mosque.

“Pete Doughtie is a bully and a bigot,” said Mijares. “I may be a 5’4″ Italian-American guy with a big nose and olive skin who gets looks around town. And I know that he cannot fathom that there are non-Muslims who do not agree with his ideas. But I am, in fact, not a Muslim. I am not a terrorist. And I am not afraid of Pete Doughtie.”

Mijares is a retired international cargo expeditor who spent September 11 directing cargo traffic at the panic-stricken Los Angeles Airport, so he does not scare easily, he said. He moved to Tennessee to care for his ailing mother in 2005.

The Rutherford Reader is a right-of-center publication that represents the community’s concerns, said Kevin Fisher, an unpaid Rutherford Reader columnist. Fisher, who is African American, is a corrections officer and also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that aims to stop construction of the new mosque.

“I take civil rights seriously and I wouldn’t participate in anything that tramples on people’s rights. I wouldn’t write anything that intentionally offends anyone,” said Fisher. “If I have, I am sincerely sorry. But I know Mr. Doughtie and I’ve always thought he was a really nice guy.”

Fisher objects to the lack of detail included in the public meeting notice where the mosque project was approved. The notice — which included the same information as other planning commission announcements -– allowed the mosque to escape comment from people who oppose it, Fisher said. But that is not his only concern.

“We don’t know enough about the motivations here. It’s only been 10 years since 9/11,” said Fisher, who has sought and lost two bids for public office since 2008. “In the blink of an eye, foreign students went from students to terrorists. And I think that this is why our whole thinking as a nation changed. We have to judge the issue of terror and the potential for Islamic radicalization a little differently. We certainly have to look at that potential in our own community.”

Fisher would not comment on the ads featuring Mijares’ complete home address. But, Fisher said, Mijares invited the attention when he began his campaign.

When Mijares says that the ads may be dangerous, he is right, said Eric Allen Bell, a documentary filmmaker. In 2010, Bell moved to Murfreesboro planning to take a break. Instead, he wound up making a documentary about the mosque controversy. A full-length version of that film, “Not Welcome,” will be released next year, Bell said.

While Bell was making the film, he wrote a series of editorials that criticized the mosques’ opponents, including The Rutherford Reader. The weekly’s subsequent issue included Bell’s picture beneath a headline that read, “The Rutherford Reader’s Free Speech is Being Threatened.”

Bell began to receive death threats via email, he said. Bell hired a private security to accompany him to certain public events. Then one particularly scary threat arrived over Facebook. When Bell approached local law enforcement, he was reminded that an official complaint would become a matter of public record and would include his home address. A police officer warned him that this might put him in greater danger, Bell said.

“I was advised by people who know that community that you probably need to take this seriously and leave town,” said Bell, who returned to California in November 2010.

It is not a coincidence that when the small but vocal group of Murfreesboro residents who oppose the mosque describe their concerns, the sorts of claims made in The Rutherford Reader often come up, said Saleh M. Sbenaty, a board member of Murfreesboro’s mosque and a professor at Middle Tennessee State University.

“There are people and publications in this city that specialize in making false accusations,” said Sbenaty, who moved to the United States from Syria, 30 years ago around the same time that Muslims in Murfreesboro formed the city’s mosque. “They insist that all Muslims are dangerous. And unfortunately, there are a small number of nut jobs who will take that seriously.”

Late Wednesday, the mosque’s board voted to suspend usual weekend activities at the mosque because of the bomb threat. On Saturdays, the mosque typically holds religious education classes for children. On Sundays, there are sports or community events for kids.

“It is quite unfortunate that our children are bullied in school and now are the subject of a new threat,” said Sbenaty, a father of two.

Threats, or what some people consider threats, are becoming common in Murfreesboro.

Back in May, Mijares noticed a Rutherford Reader ad for a Nissan dealership. Mijares contacted the dealer. And since the Japanese car company’s North American headquarters are located in nearby Franklin, Tenn., he also called Nissan’s community relations staff.

“After he (Mijares) made us aware of the publication where this ad was placed,” said Paula Angelo, Nissan’s director of corporate communications, “it was clear immediately that its content does not align with Nissan’s core values.”

Mijares contacted corporate headquarters on May 24. The dealership makes independent decisions about advertising, but there was a conversation between the business and corporate officials, Angelo said. On June 8, Angleo contacted Mijares to advise him that the dealership had purchasedRutherford Reader ad space in May and June but that additional ads would not be placed, he said.

On July 18, The Rutherford Reader began running its series of full-page anti-Mijares ads.

“Murfreesboro, to borrow a phrase, is the ground zero of Muslim bashing in America right now,” said Faiz Shakir, vice president of the Center for American Progress and one of the researchers behind“Fear, Inc.,” a six-month study released in August by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank that examined the rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment.

The study found that small groups of individuals have funneled the same pieces of questionable research to activists, commentators and politicians, who have then stirred or led groups such as the one that opposes the Murfreesboro mosque, Shakir said. In August, one of those individuals, Frank Gaffney, testified in the Murfreesboro case hoping to help stop the mosque. Fisher first met Gaffney in the courtroom, he said.

“I am nobody’s puppet,” Fisher said.

On August 30, a judge ruled that the mosque’s construction could move forward. The decision will be appealed, Fisher said.

Inside Murfreesboro, some people suspect that The Rutherford Reader‘s interest in covering the alleged threats posed by Islam may be driven by profit. In Tennessee, local governments are required to list public notices -– advisories about government meetings and other activities -– in general interest publications. These ads generate revenue for newspapers.

“I think it may be Mr. Doughtie’s goal to write just enough about this local controversy to drive up his circulation and meet the definition of a general interest publication,” said Ernest G. Burgess, Rutherford County mayor. Murfreesboro is the largest city in Rutherford County and Burgess is the county’s chief executive officer.

In late August, the ads with Mijares’ home address disappeared. Mijares received a few nasty letters and emails. But, Mijares says, he won’t stop his letter-writing campaign.

“I’ve never been terribly social. In fact, some people may call me a misanthrope,” said Mijares. “I don’t mind if some people don’t like me. I just don’t appreciate anyone threatening my family.”

If the ads continue, Mijares said he will post Doughtie’s home address online with a description of Doughtie’s activities and ideas in Arabic.

JihadWatch just published this:

Incitement to violence against Robert Spencer at “Spencer Watch”

Spencer Watch is a site affiliated with an larger propaganda outfit that had to go and steal the name of a perfectly nice site about birds.

Yes, idiotic comments happen, and here, we delete them as soon as we are aware of them. Ordinarily, we have better things to do than read anything Spencer Watch puts out, but a reader kindly brought this comment to our attention, which has remained for over a year on a rather major page within the site, intended to imitate our “Why Jihad Watch?”

Wow. Way to refute everything about Acts 17, “RefutingActs17.” You totally put St. Paul in his place there, dude.

Robert Spencer always enjoys giving himself an air of mystique by boasting that his life is in mortal danger, which is why his books such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) say that “He lives in a Safe, Undisclosed Location.”  This, even though he quite openly says here that “I live in New England.”  Couldn’t his book have said that, instead of the melodramatic “He lives in a Safe, Undisclosed Location” (all capitalized for some odd reason)? It’s not really “Undisclosed” then, is it?

The reason for this fraud is obvious: nothing boosts ratings more than a fatwa on one’s head.  So, it is no wonder then that Robert Spencer has been desperately trying to accuse LoonWatch (or its affiliate site SpencerWatch) of threatening him.  For the first time, Spencer and the Islamophobes have an organization that is really sticking it to them.  He has to find a way to discredit us. Unfortunately, nothing sticks!

The fact that JihadWatch has absolutely nothing to use against us–that Robert Spencer has no substantive responses to issue whatsoever–is painstakingly clear to see when we look at the frustrated, almost pathetic, attacks on our site.  Awhile ago, he published an article condemning a comment Mosizzle posted ["Like all cancers, this one needs to be cut out before it spreads"] which wasn’t even posted by a LoonWatch or SpencerWatch writer.  Not only that, but Mosizzle explained that his sentence was meant to be understood in a proverbial, not literal, way.

Once again, JihadWatch couldn’t find a single sentence written by a LoonWatch or SpencerWatch writer to take issue with, so it has to once again dig up a comment by some random poster–RefutingActs17–who says: “It’s time Robert Spencer got schooled–the hard way.”  Apparently, that’s supposed to constitute “an incitement to violence.”

According to urbandictionary.com, “taking someone to school” means:

Being taken to school means that you have been owned, pwnt, ownt, pwned, beaten, defeated, SHOWN HOW ITS DONE. Nubs usually get taken to school in games such as Counter-Strike.

Oh my God!  Maybe RefutingActs is challenging Robert Spencer to a game of Counter-Strike!  (I’m going to hazard a guess that Spencer will play with the Counter-Terrorists.)

As I pointed out previously in response to Spencer’s spazzing out over Mosizzle’s comment, all of this reeks of profound hypocrisy:

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!

I smell something: it’s the smell of desperation.

All of this desperation coming from JihadWatch just because LoonWatch and SpencerWatch are really getting under their skin.  Most humiliating of all, of course, is that Robert Spencer is scared to debate us here at LoonWatch. But I guess whining about a comment here and there posted by random visitors to our site is just as good as facing me in debate?

Instead of defending the arguments he raised in his book (many of which I have refuted and will continue to refute), Spencer’s site spends time analyzing the name of our website. Oh no, we stole the name of a bird site (even though our site existed beforehand).  To respond using the words of JihadWatch: Wow.  Way to refute everything about LoonWatch.  You totally put Danios in his place there, dude.  You just refuted us, and now we give up.  All our base are belong to you.

Note: Make sure to read our earlier article on a very similar topic, Robert Spencer of JihadWatch Becomes Desperate Against LoonWatch

(Update I below)

Disclaimer:  I would like to point out that the views expressed below are mine alone and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official views of LoonWatch or any of its writers aside from myself (Danios).

Salon’s indefatigable Glenn Greenwald recently wrote (emphasis added):

Worship of the American military and all that it does — and a corresponding taboo on speaking ill of it except for tactical critiques (it would be better if they purchased this other weapon system or fought this war a bit differently) – is the closest thing America has to a national religion.

If worship of the military is America’s national religion, then the U.S. soldier is this religion’s holy warrior.  Greenwald noted that the Navy Seals are “a member of the most sacred and revered religious order.”  Those who die in “the line of duty” are martyrs who must be remembered for all “they have done for this country.”  Any criticism against the rank-and-file holy warrior is considered blasphemous.

There can be no possible profession that is more highly praiseworthy to the American than soldier in the military.  Many U.S. airlines will let soldiers board the plane even before women with children and the disabled.  Being part of the war machine is more respectable than being a doctor, a social worker, a teacher for the disabled, or a volunteer at the local orphanage.  Saving people (what a physician does) can in no way, shape, or form be considered better than killing people (what a soldier does).

A person foolish enough to say that “a soldier kills people” will be beaten into submission and subservience by jingoist mantras such as “you should be thankful that you are able to express such views, because it is only due to the sacrifices of those in uniform–who protect your freedoms–that you are free to say what you want.”  This, even though no rational mind could possibly believe this: how does bombing, invading, and occupying Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, or Yemen “protect my freedoms?”  That is, unless one is naive enough to think that any of these Evil, Foreign Brown People were about to conquer the United States, topple its government, and take away my freedoms.

In any case, I have my own government to do that for me.  Far from “fighting for my freedoms,” the military-industrial complex and those in authority who wage these wars are responsible for clamping down on my civil liberties.  With the rise of the Orwellian-named Patriot Act and its like, there has been a sustained war waged not just against Al-Qaeda but against civil liberties, with dedicated assaults on the First and Fourth Amendments.

Worship of the military and the holy warrior runs so deep that even the most ardent critic of the war must never utter a single word against those who wage it.  Such a common sense thing to do is completely off-limits and beyond the scope of decency and propriety.  To do so would be to open oneself up to the criticisms of being “unpatriotic” and “disloyal.”  Criticism of the war must be couched in “patriotic language:” war critics must ceremoniously acknowledge their support for U.S. troops, arguing that I support the troops which is why I want to bring them home.  It is simply unacceptable to just clearly say: I don’t support the troops because they are shooting at, bombing, and killing people.  To do such a thing would be to commit the highest of sins in the American national religion.

The fact that even war critics would hush you up for saying something against America’s cherished holy warriors says something of how deeply ingrained militarism is in our society.  How can it be that opponents of America’s wars will criticize the war as unjust on the one hand but not be anything but absolutely reverent towards those who wage it?  The United States, after all, uses an all-volunteer military; by joining the military is not one making an active choice to take part in these unjust wars?  And certainly, one can choose not to fight, as many brave soldiers and ex-soldiers have done.

Noting with what absolute reverence Americans speak of their soldiers of war, one wonders how it is that they are simultaneously amazed at how unbelievably warlike those Foreign, Other People are for revering their own men of war.  We are taken aback by how “primitive” the North Koreans are when they mindlessly revere their soldiers, yet somehow mystified when we do the same with our troops.  The North Korean soldiers have certainly killed far fewer and waged far fewer wars than our own military.  But alas, those North Koreans are so primitive, whereas we are so advanced, civilized, and peaceful.

I don’t malign or vilify soldiers in the military (as I partially do accept the idea that “they are just doing their job”), but must we continue to speak of our holy warriors with such absolute reverence, awe, and worship?  Our mindless idolization of the military profession is what is to blame for so many of our impressionable youth choosing to join the military to kill people abroad instead of spending those years going to college to expand their minds.  Placing the military and its soldiers on a pedestal is the only way a society can convince its young boys to risk their lives to go to war for the country–something so illogical, so contrary to the biological drive to save oneself from harm or death, that absent the most compelling of reasons one can hardly find it worthwhile to do so.

Interestingly, even that religious and ethnic minority that is the target of America’s wars is itself affected by this national religion.  Muslim-Americans will often bend over backwards to point out that they too “proudly serve this country” by being a part of the military.  (Even the phrase “serve this country” can only mean one thing: soldiering.)  In order to be accepted as Full Citizens, Muslim-Americans must prove their dedication to America’s war machine.

And so, Muslim-Americans–many of them immigrants or children of immigrants–beg to be included in the same institution that wages endless wars in their ancestral homelands.  It is that same institution that is rife with racism and bigotry against Arabs and Muslims, yet so desperately do Muslim-Americans want to be included in it.

*  *  *  *  *

In this national religion, 9/11 is America’s Karbala.  The Battle of Karbala involved the slaughter of the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants by a tyrannical government–an event that is religiously commemorated each year by Shia Muslims, who will often make a religious pilgrimage (ziyarat) to the site of the battle or to the graves of the victims.  With vigor just short of this, Americans commemorate Patriot Day, the holy day of the American national religion.

Ground Zero, meanwhile, is the “hallowed ground”–a trip here is the ziyarat (religious pilgrimage) of the American religion.  The American flag becomes a symbol not to be disrespected, our nation’s holy book, waved high by people chanting “USA! USA! USA!”, which can only mean one thing: war!  The flag has become a raised symbol of war.

The military is our national religion, its soldiers are our holy warriors, the Navy Seals are our highest religious order, those soldiers who died in war are our martyrs, 9/11 was our Karbala, Patriot Day is our annual holy day, the flag is our holy book and symbol, Osama bin Laden is Lucifer, Terrorism is the greatest Evil, supporting the troops is our greatest religious obligation, and failure to do so is the greatest blasphemy and the highest of sins.

*  *  *  *  *

The problem I have with the cult-like remembrance of 9/11 is that it was the devotion to this day that was used to launch wars of vengeance that killed ten times as many people.  This date, 9/11, has been militarized.  It is a memory we are told that we must never forget lest we slacken in our resolve to wage war against the Forces of Evil, the Satan of our religion: radical Islam and Terrorism.  It is a memory that is invoked to remind the American people why they need to spend more of their taxpayer money to sustain their country’s illegal occupations and immoral wars.

Furthermore, the singling out of this day above all others (including days on which worse acts of violence were perpetrated by the United States), exudes the tribalistic mentality that infects people with strong feelings of national or religious identity–wherein only blood shed against one’s own national or religious group is remembered (and in fact, it is obsessed over), whereas that shed by one’s own national or religious group against others is ignored, denied, or justified.

Lastly, one cannot help but feel that 9/11 would hardly have been considered as important to the national religion had it not been Muslims who were implicated in the attack.  They attacked us.  The deaths of the victims of 9/11 are less relevant than the fact that they–those Foreign, Dark-Complexioned Moozlums–are the ones who caused these deaths.  The horrendous attacks of 9/11 have special significance due to the fact that the perpetrators were radical Muslims, an Existential Threat to our Safety and Freedoms.

The victims of 9/11 certainly ought to be remembered, as should all the victims of war and terrorism (whether the culprit be our enemies or our own country and whether the victims be American or not), but should their memory really be exploited to feed the national religion of warmongering?  Is it not deeply disturbing that an act of violence and the deaths of three-thousand innocents are being used to justify even greater acts of violence and even more civilian deaths?

Disclaimer: I would like to point out that the views expressed above are mine alone and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official views of LoonWatch or any of its writers aside from myself (Danios).

Update I: An interesting Facebook status that is making the rounds:

On 9/11, I’ll mourn the nearly 3,000 lives lost, over 6,000 injuries, the infrastructural carnage and devastation in NYC, and the humiliation of my country, all perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my religion

On 9/12, I’ll mourn the nearly 1,000,000 lives, the 10′s of millions of injuries, the infrastructural decimation in 3 countries, and the humiliation of my religion, all perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.

Update II:  Many readers and fellow LoonWatch writers have pointed out that many young people join the military due to financial reasons.  Additionally, many of them are “trying to serve their country” and “are just following orders.”  I do not completely disagree with these statements.  As I said, I do not malign or vilify soldiers, nor encourage that.  What I am opposed to is the glorification of what they do.

10 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Let this day be one of remembrance for the victims, their families and loved ones. Let it not be a day used as political football to divide, fear-monger and justify war and aggression.

Imagine if this incident involved Muslims. We would not hear the end of it from these Islamophobes about how Sharia is taking over. (hat tip: Alfred J from Kenya)

Two stoned to death over illicit love affair

Mr Mukangu was said to have taken Ms Nkatha to his matrimonial home while his wife was away. Ms Nkatha was in her late 20s.

The wife got wind of the relationship and informed the villagers who confronted the two lovers.

On arrival at the home, they found the two in bed.

Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate

Anders Breivik’s manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.

The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.

As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called “the Vienna school of thought”, which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against “the Islamisation of America”.

But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward “Ned” May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.

All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:

“The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy.”

Spencer’s jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik’s manifesto; May’s Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.

Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him “a profound and subtle thinker”. Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer’s works, especially if they believed that Islam was “a religion of peace”. Last week, Spencer’s blog re-ran a piece from Geller’s Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is “a front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.

As well as the “counter-jihad” websites such as Spencer’s and May’s, analysis of Breivik’s web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People’s party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.

One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal’s masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.

To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik’s crime. Peder “Fjordman” Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.

It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that “Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying“, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the “counter-jihad” belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.

The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. “It’s a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you’ve never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you’re on the right side: you’re another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades.”

This clearly mirrors Breivik’s self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.

Terry Jones returns to Michigan to denounce Islam

by Marisa Schultz/ The Detroit News

Lansing — Terry Jones, the controversial Florida pastor, returned to Michigan on a rainy Wednesday night for a 30-minute speech on the steps of the Capitol where he railed about radical Islam.

The pastor’s speech was greeted by more police, media and protesters than supporters or curious onlookers.

About a dozen protesters started chanting “Say No to Hate” during Jones’ speech before police quieted them down.

“Terry Jones is not welcome here,” said protester David Mitchell, 30, of Lansing, who held a banner with others saying: “They shall not pass.”

Jones, wearing jeans and a Harley Davidson black bomber jacket, decried Islam as a not a peaceful religion and oppressive to women. The Islamic law, Sharia, should not be tolerated, he said.

“Islam is a religion that hates freedom of speech,” Jones said.

He was in Lansing to support a new organization, Operation Freedom’s Tree, founded by James Terpening. The political group denounces Islam as evil.

Jones supporter Eugene Connors, 40, of Lansing agrees. One sign he held said: “Stop Burning Christians.”

“People don’t realize the threat Islam poses to everyone,” he said.

Afterward, Jones said he doesn’t have a problem with Muslims, just the radical element and Sharia. Jones lamented the low turnout, including the no-show of state Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, who authored legislation to ban foreign law.

“He chickened out,” Jones said.

Asked if he has plans to burn the Quran again, Jones said no.

Jones, who caused a hubbub for burning the Quran in March, also caused a stir with a visit to Dearborn during the Arab International Festival this summer.

mschultz@detnews.com

(313) 222-2310

The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.

Greek parliament approves Athens’ first mosque plan in decades

Greece’s parliament on Wednesday approved the construction of a new mosque in Athens to satisfy a long-standing demand by thousands of Muslim residents, a government source said.

The project to build the Greek capital’s first official Muslim place of worship in decades was supported by 198 deputies from the centre, right and left (out of 300) against the objections of 16 nationalist MPs.

The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.

Thousands of Muslims from Arab nations, Africa and the Indian subcontinent live and work in Athens without official prayer sites or a cemetery, despite years of promises by successive Greek governments.

Muslim faithful have crafted mosques out of rented flats and disused warehouses which are regularly targeted in racist attacks.

Anger towards migrants and attacks have escalated on the streets of Athens in recent months as the debt-hit country battles a growing recession that has brought thousands of job layoffs.

A staunchly Orthodox state with bitter memories of nearly four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule, Greece currently offers sanctioned Muslim religious sites only near its northeastern border with Turkey where a Muslim minority of Turkish origin lives.

All traces of Islam were eradicated in Athens in the early 19th century when Christianity was restored, and bureaucratic wrangling and opposition from local church leaders and mayors have since stalled plans for a mosque and cemetery.

Joe Kaufman

Just when you thought Joe Kaufman couldn’t make more of a fool of himself he proves you wrong! Previously, Kaufman eulogized a dead terrorist and racist by the name of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and we thought “well he can’t top that!” Then he called for nuking Muslim countries, and we thought “OK, that’s it, no way he can surpass such lunacy.” Then it so happened we learned he’s been paying homeless people to join his pathetic anti-Muslim rallies to bolster their numbers, and we’re like “golly jee, he keeps setting the bar so low.”

Recently, Kaufman was at a rally to express love for anti-Muslim politician Allen West and condemn CAIR South Florida. I kid you not, Kaufman’s exact words at the rally were “I love Allen West.” But that’s not the real ludicrous bit.

The ridiculous portion is Kaufman’s response to a reporter who asked him about his infamous call to “nuke the Mooslims”:

Reporter: “Do you support the nuclear bombing of Iran?”

Joe Kaufman: “No…um, well, I would never say whether I would support that or not.”

Why is this so ridiculous? Well, Kaufman has had 10 years to reflect and ponder on how he would answer this inevitable question, and the above is the best he could do. Rather then coming right out and saying he “wouldn’t,” as most conscientious people would, he hesitated and dodged. By dodging however, he not-so-subtly implied he is open to supporting such horrific action. That’s wily Kaufman for you I guess.

Who is he?:

Joe Kaufman, has been on the Anti-Muslim scene for quite a while now and is dubbed by the far Right-Wing FrontPageMag as, you guessed it…another one of their ”Investigative Journalists.”  That he has been influenced by Meir Kahane and the Kahanist ideology is well documented, as is his love and angst for Kahane.

In the past he has been accused of contributing to the terrorist organization founded by Kahane known as JDL (Jewish Defense League) while others accuse Kaufman of at the very least holding views that parallel JDL positions.

Kaufman’s unsavory associations and views are quite real and they are only dangerous to America if you’re stupid enough to swallow his conspiracy theories but other than that he is simply a half-baked paranoid conspiracy theorist, some what along the lines of the “9/11 Truthers.”

In every nook and cranny there is a “Mooslim”…hiding and ready to get ya…so beware and be afraid. Be veryyyy afraid goes his story.

In this special LoonWatch series we will detail the exploits and punchlines that Krazy Kaufman throws out there and attempts to pass as serious journalism, commentary and investigation.

Pretty self-explanatory if you ask me. West is at war with Islam:

This took place in the Capitol, September 7, 2011.

Settler crying after his illegal outpost was demolished. Later they went and set a mosque on fire.

Can anyone imagine if Muslims had done this to a so-called “disused” Synagogue, Church, etc.? You can be sure there would be a big brouhaha over how Islam is evil and is trying to destroy the “infidel.”

Earlier in the day, Israeli settlers in the West Bank tried to set a fire inside a disused mosque to protest the Israeli military’s destruction of three settler houses at an illegal outpost.

The police and witnesses said the settlers threw burning tires into the mosque and spray-painted the names of two settlement outposts on the walls, including that of Migron, where the army destroyed three buildings constructed on private Palestinian land. The Israeli Supreme Court determined that the entire outpost was built on such private land, but the three chosen for destruction had been built after that decision was handed down. (Via the NewYorkTimes)

Exposing religious fundamentalism in the US

by Paul Rosenberg

With Representative Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and Texas Governor Rick Perry’s triumphal entrance into the GOP presidential primary, there’s been a sudden spike of attention drawn to the extremist religious beliefs both candidates have been associated with – up to and including their belief in Christian dominionism. (In the Texas Observer, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast, for example.) The responses of denial from both the religious right itself and from the centrist Beltway press have been so incongruous as to be laughable – if only the subject matter weren’t so deadly serious. Those responses need to be answered, but more importantly, we need to have the serious discussion they want to prevent.

For example, in an August 18 post, originally entitled, “Beware False Prophets who Fear Evangelicals”, Washington Post religion blogger Lisa Miller cited the three stories I just mentioned, and admitted, “The stories raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees”, then immediately reversed direction: “But their echo-chamber effect reignites old anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians. Some on the left seem suspicious that a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world.” Of course, she cited no examples to bolster this narrative-flipping claim. More importantly, she wrote not one more word about the real concerns she had just admitted.

Dominionism is not a myth

“What In Heaven’s Name Is A Dominionist?” Pat Robertson asked on his 700 Club TV show, one of several religious right figures to recently pretend there was nothing to the notion. Funny he should ask. In a 1984 speech in Dallas, Texas, he said:

Furthermore, C Peter Wagner, the intellectual godfather of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), actually wrote a book called Dominion! in 2008. Chapter Three was entitled “Dominion Theology”. When pressed, Peter likes to pretend that his ideas are just garden-variety Christianity, based on Genesis 1:26, in which, before the fall, God gives Adam and Eve dominion over the natural world - a far cry from dominion over other people, who did not even exist at the time, as evangelical critics of this dominionist argument have repeatedly pointed out.

Dominionism is not new 

Dominionist ideas have circulated throughout the religious right for decades prior to Robertson’s 1984 speech. A primary source was the small but influential sect known as Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R J Rushdoony in the 1960s, which advocates replacing American law with Old Testament codes. Centrists like Miller make the mistake of thinking that the small size of Rushdoony’s core of true believers is the full extent of his influence. But this is utterly mistaken. As Michelle Goldberg wrote in Daily Beast, “Rushdoony pioneered the Christian homeschooling movement, as well as the revisionist history, ubiquitous on the religious right, that paints the US as a Christian nation founded on biblical principles. He consistently defended Southern slavery and contrasted it with the greater evils of socialism.”

A second source traces back to the roots of the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s, long rejected by orthodox evangelicals because they contradicted scripture and denied primary agency to God – which is why they insist that Christians must actively establish church dominance over all of society, because God can’t do it alone.

The Latter Rain was denounced by the Assemblies of God – the largest American Pentecostal church – in 1949, not solely for dominionist ideology, but for a variety of related beliefs and practices. When similar teachings and practices re-emerged in the guise of the New Apostolic Reformation 50 years later, the Assemblies of God denounced them again in 2000.

This time, however, many Assemblies of God congregations have increasingly accepted the NAR influence. Sarah Palin’s long-time church in Wasilla is one such congregation. The most clear-cut example of NAR dominionism is the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate”, which holds that dominionist Christians should control the whole world by infiltrating and dominating the “Seven Mountains” of culture: (1) Business; (2) Government; (3) Media; (4) Arts and Entertainment; (5) Education; (6) Family; and (7) Religion.

Dominionism is not a left-wing fantasy 

A number of authors made charges similar to or derived from Joe Carter, web editor of First Things, who wrote: “The term ["dominionism"] was coined in the 1980s by [sociologist Sara] Diamond and is never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation.”

However, at the same time Diamond was working on her dissertation – published as the book Spiritual Warfare in 1989 – evangelical writer/researcher Albert James Dager was taking similarly critical aim, though from a different direction. In 1986 and ’87, he published a multi-issue essay “Kingdom Theology” in the publication Media Spotlight. In that text he also used the terms “Kingdom Now” or “Dominion” Theology. In 1990, Dager, too, published a book, Vengeance Is Ours: The Church in Dominion.

While his main focus was doctrinal error and non-Christian practices and influences, Dager’s work traced dominionism back to the 1940s and even earlier. Many more have followed in his footsteps since then. If you Google the words “dominionism” and “heresy”, you’ll get more than half a million hits. It should be obvious to anyone that conventional conservative Christians have big problems with dominionism – if only the United States’ establishment media could figure out how to use Google.

Dominionism is not an imprecise catch-all term

Despite lingering definitional differences that are common with relatively new terminology, those who study dominionism and related phenomenon in a political framework have an increasingly common and precise terminology that most writers and researchers share. Researcher Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates provided a very useful guide, “The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy”, which addresses issues of terminology from several different perspectives – for example, between “generic dominionism” and specific dominion theologies.

Berlet also draws a distinction between “hard” and “soft” dominionists. “Soft Dominionists are Christian nationalists,” he writes. “They believe that Biblically-defined immorality and sin breed chaos and anarchy. They fear that America’s greatness as God’s chosen land has been undermined by liberal secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals … Their vision has elements of theocracy, but they stop short of calling for supplanting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Hard Dominionists add something more to the mix: “They want the United States to be a Christian theocracy. For them the Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely addendums to Old Testament Biblical law.”

Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionists clearly fall into the hard dominionist camp. But the NAR seems to straddle the soft/hard division. On the one hand, they clearly do claim that conservative Christians are ordained to run the world, not just US society. Thus, the Seven Mountains Mandate. On the other hand, Wagner and others have argued that the Seven Mountains is compatible with democracy. The state of Hawaii shows how: Early in the 2010 election cycle, both the Republican and the Democratic frontrunners for governor were associated with the NAR. That changed when long-time Congressman Neil Abercrombie joined the race on the Democratic side, and eventually won the race handily. But for a while, the NAR came tantalisingly close to realising their dream, at least in one state – not just to win power, but to occupy all the possible paths to power.

What’s more, in a recent article at Talk2Action, Rachel Tabachnick draws attention to another hedge on Wagner’s part, quoting from Dominion! In a section entitled “Majority Rules”: “If a majority feels that heterosexual marriage is the best choice for a happy and prosperous society, those in the minority should agree to conform – not because they live in a theocracy, but because they live in a democracy. The most basic principle of democracy is that the majority, not the minority, rules and sets the ultimate norms for society.”

This, of course, is utterly false in a liberal democracy, such as the United States. Liberal democracies combine majority rule as a general governing principle with a framework of rights protecting individuals in political minorities from persecution, political repression, and the like. The fact that Wagner so utterly misunderstands the foundations of American democracy shows just how dangerous such “soft” dominionism can be. This same lesson can be drawn from Uganda as well, where several different strains of dominionist theology have combined to bring that nation to the verge of passing a law that will make homosexuality punishable by death. Such is the nature of illiberal dominionist “democracy”.

Europe’s bloody theocratic wars

This brings us, finally, to the serious discussions that dominionists and their enablers, like Miller, are trying to prevent. The first of those is about the very nature of American democracy. For nearly 200 years, Europe was torn apart by a series of religious wars and their bloody aftermath – the major reason that the United States was founded as a secular republic. We’re potentially on the verge of forgetting all that history and suffering through it again, just as we’re now suffering through forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression. Those centuries of war began with the German Peasants’ War of 1524-26, in which more than 100,000 died; continued through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War on the European continent; and lasted until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). This was the bloody European history of religious intolerance and strife that many, if not most, American colonialists were fleeing from when they came to the New World.

It was also this bloody history that gave rise to the development of classical liberalism, affirming the individual right to religious liberty and replacing the top-down theocratic justification of the state with Locke’s concept of the bottom-up social contract, based on the consent of the governed. The ideas that Locke perfected took generations to develop. Religious tolerance, for example, began as simply a matter of pragmatism: unless people stopped killing each other for differing religious beliefs, war in Europe would never end.

But gradually, the idea took hold that tolerance was a positive good, and key to this new perspective was the recognition that torturing someone to change their beliefs could not produce the desired result of a genuine heartfelt conversion. Thus, the moral rejection of torture – another feature of classical liberalism – had its roots in the evolution of the idea of religious liberty. The idea of utterly forgetting the prolonged bloody history that the United States was born out of is no laughing matter.

The same could be said of the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with laws based on the Bible. Of course most Americans were Christians at the time, but the leading intellects were decidedly less so, much more influenced by Enlightenment thought. There were many, such as Jefferson, who were better described as Deists, who believed that God had created a rational universe, but did not intervene supernaturally thereafter. They deliberately used terms like “the Creator” and “Nature’s God” to affirm their distinctive, non-Christian view.

Moreover, God was not mentioned at all in the Constitution, and religion was only mentioned to exclude its influence, stating that no religious test should be required for office. Finally, US law was based on British common law, not the Bible. The Supreme Court itself is a common law court, following common law precedents and practices. And British common law traces back to Roman law, which first came to England centuries before Rome adopted the Christian religion.

Of course the intolerant religious right wants us to forget this. How else could they ever gain power, except through massive forgetting of who and what the United States really is? Not to mention who and what they are: the most fundamental enemies of the United States, who would, if they could, return us to the centuries of blood before the US was born, the nightmare out of which the United States awakened.

Theocratic thinking threatens the US today

There are very immediate consequences that flow from the theocratic mindset. You’ll note, for example, that the “Seven Mountains” of culture do not include science. That’s not because dominionists intend to leave science alone, but rather because they see no need to dominate what they can simply cut off, ignore and deny. If science tells them that homosexuality is an inborn trait, why fight that in the realm of science when politics, the media, religion and education offer much, much better places to fight? After all, who says that education has to be based on facts? The same holds true for evolution and global warming as well, not to mention the workings of the economy.

One rightwing denier of dominionist influence, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, even framed his attack as “An unholy war on the Tea Party, while another denier complained that instead of describing the Tea Party as a movement united around concern about big government, many journalists seem to be trying to redefine the colour red by overlaying religious intent and purpose on the movement.

Yet the dominionist connection to the Tea Party goes far beyond just the two candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Ron Paul, whose extreme anti-government positions helped to fuel the emergence of the Tea Party, has much deeper dominionist connections than either of the two new darlings. During his first term in Congress, one of his aides was Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law, and a leading Reconstructionist in his own right, who has written extensively on so-called “Biblical Capitalism”, an ideology profoundly at odds with traditional Biblical-based teachings on economic justice.

While libertarians once traced their descent from John Locke, and more recently from the deeply anti-Christian Ayn Rand, Reconstructionism represents an increasingly important foundation for their views. A recently released sociology study, “Cultures of the Tea Party”, found that Tea Party supporters are characterised by four dispositions: “authoritarianism, ontological insecurity, libertarianism, and nativism”. Since traditional libertarianism was purportedly the opposite of authoritarianism, this highlights how radically libertarianism has changed – a conclusion that’s echoed by the 2011 Pew Reaserch Political Typology Poll, which found that religious and economic conservatives had completely merged into one single group since 2006 and all previous polling.

What this means in the long run is far from clear. But it strongly suggests a solidfying outlook with deep Reconstructionist sympathies that actually looks at government failure to deal with major issues, such as restoring the economy, as a positive good. If faith in American institutions collapses entirely, then who wouldn’t give Biblical law a shot? The more loudly such people proclaim themselves patriots, the more loudly they cheer for US collapse. It’s not just Obama they want to fail. It’s the very idea of America.

Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newsletter.

You can follow Paul on twitter @PaulHRosenberg

As someone with anti-establishment and anti-authority views, it is no surprise that I’ve been (and still am) highly critical of the military, the CIA, and the FBI for some time now.  Now I’m adding the police to that list.  I’m critical of police brutality, the racism that runs rife through the force, the heavy-handed tactics they use, and their lack of transparency.  And now there’s this: the NYPD caught spying on Muslims, including college-going students.

What perfectly encapsulates the National Security State is the police illegally spying on citizenry on the one hand (in violation of the Fourth Amendment) while on the other hand working hard to prohibit citizens from taping police officers in public doing their job (a denial of our First Amendment right).  Those in authority have the right to know what websites you browse on the internet in the confines of your bedroom while you have no right to know anything about those in authority even when it directly affects you.

The targets of the National Security State are first and foremost Muslims, who are at the bottom of America’s totem pole.  In any case, here is the article from The Associated Press:

By Adam Goldman, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department compiled lists of mosques and Muslim businesses it saw as potential security risks for reasons that included endorsing conservative religious views or having devout customers, according to hundreds of pages of internal police documents newly obtained by The Associated Press.

The records reveal the extent of an undercover effort that initially studied more than 250 mosques in New York and New Jersey and identified hundreds more “hot spots” in a hunt for terrorists. Many showed obvious signs of criminal behavior, but the police explanations for targeting others were less clear.

A Bangladeshi restaurant, for instance, was identified as a hot spot for having a “devout crowd.” The restaurant was noted for being a “popular meeting location for political activities.”

The documents obtained by the AP, many of which were marked secret, paint the clearest picture yet of how the past decade’s hunt for terrorists also put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, restaurants and social groups. Every day, undercover officers and informants filed reports from their positions as “listening posts” inside Muslim communities.

At the White House, where President Barack Obama recently urged local authorities not to cast suspicion on entire communities, spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment Tuesday on whether it endorsed the tactics outlined in the NYPD documents.

An AP investigation last month revealed that the department maintains a list of “ancestries of interest” that it uses to focus its clandestine efforts. A secret team known as the Demographics Unit then dispatched plainclothes officers into the community to eavesdrop in cafes and chat up business owners.

That effort has benefited from federal money and an unusually close relationship with the CIA, one that at times blurred the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering.

After identifying more than 250 area mosques, police officials determined the “ethnic orientation, leadership and group affiliations,” according to the 2006 police documents. Police also used informants and teams of plainclothes officers, known as rakers, to identify mosques requiring further scrutiny, according to an official involved in that effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the program.

Armed with that information, police then identified 53 “mosques of concern” and placed undercover officers and informants there, the documents show.

Many of those mosques were flagged for allegations of criminal activity, such as alien smuggling, financing Hamas or money laundering. Others were identified for having ties to Salafism, a hardline movement preaching a strict version of Islamic law. Still others were identified for what the documents refer to as “rhetoric.”

Other reasons are less clear.

Two mosques, for instance, were flagged for having ties to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old Egyptian mosque that is the pre-eminent institute of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world. Al-Azhar was one of the first religious institutions to condemn the 2001 terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush’s close adviser, Karen Hughes, visited Al-Azhar in 2005 and applauded its courage.

Al-Azhar was also a sponsor of Obama’s 2009 speech reaching out to the Muslim world.

The list of mosques where undercover agents or informants operated includes ones that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has visited and that area officials have mentioned as part of the region’s strong ties to the Muslim community. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stood beside leaders of some mosques on the list as allies in fighting terrorism.

The documents are a series of internal presentations, including one prepared for Kelly. Following the AP’s reporting, they were provided to the AP and veteran New York police reporter Leonard Levitt, who runs the website NYPDConfidential.com. Because the list of mosques is so long and explanation for the surveillance is so limited, the AP is not identifying the individual mosques that were under surveillance.

An NYPD spokesman did return messages seeking comment Monday, a holiday, and again Tuesday. The police department has said it follows leads and does not trawl entire neighborhoods.

New York police identified 263 “hot spots” throughout the city, the documents show. Like the mosques, the examples of hot spots ranged from businesses that sold untaxed cigarettes and where inflammatory rhetoric was overheard to those with less obvious criminal connections.

The example of the Bangladeshi restaurant flagged for its “devout” clientele further undercuts Bloomberg’s claim that the NYPD does not take religion into account in its policing. Last week the AP revealed that the NYPD maintained a list of “ancestries of interest” that included “American Black Muslim,” which is a religion, not an ancestry.

Police also kept tabs on seven of the area’s Muslim student associations, defined in the documents as “a university-based student group, with an Islamic focus, involved with religious and political activities.” Two were flagged for having Salafi speakers. One was cited for having students who are “politically active and are radicalizing.”

Since the AP reports, several Muslim civil rights groups and a New York congresswoman have urged the Justice Department to investigate the NYPD for what critics see as racial profiling. Under U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has stepped up investigations of local police departments for possible civil rights violations, but none involves national security cases.

Apuzzo and Goldman can be reached at dcinvestigations(at)ap.org or at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo and http://twitter.com/goldmandc

Rep. Allen West is well known to us as the anti-Muslims’ favorite politician. His alliance with terrorist inspirers and MEK terror-linked hate activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer is common knowledge. He is also supported by the likes of the long-time stalker of Muslims Joe “Nuke ‘em” Kaufman and loon Reverend O’Neal Dozier.

We reported a few weeks ago about a letter sent by Nezar Hamze of CAIR South Florida, a constituent of Allen West’s district, expressing his concern at West’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and associations with extremists and hatemongers. West responded to Hamze’s letter with a one word reply, “NUTS!”:

In attempting to explain what the Miami New Times called possibly the “dumbest thing ever written on congressional stationery,” some have latched on to the likelihood that he is “channeling a famous line by an American general fighting the Nazis during World War II. During a battle with German troops in Western Europe, Gen. Anthony McAuliffe was told that the Germans wanted his men to surrender. He replied, ‘Us surrender? Aw, nuts!’”

Instead of condemning the radical company that he has been keeping, Rep. Allen West decided to tell Hamze to ‘go to hell.’ West implies Islam is akin to Nazism and that Muslims are modern day Nazis.  This aligns well with the Islamophobic belief that Islam is not a religion but rather a totalitarian political ideology that seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire world. To say this dehumanizes Muslims would be an understatement.

West and his supporters, perhaps smarting from the blow of this latest PR disaster decided to hold a town hall on “terrorism” as well as a rally against Nezar Hamze and CAIR:

Joe Lieberman

Sounds like something Pamela Geller might say.

Lieberman: Obama’s concern with offending Muslims is hurting the war effort

By Jordy Yager - 09/01/11 02:03 PM ET

The Obama administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday in a speech blasting the president’s new counterterrorism strategy.

Lieberman said that Obama’s strategy, which was released in June, “was ultimately a big disappointment,” and while it successfully identified the core of the domestic radicalization problem, it did not establish a clear plan of attack to deal with the growing issue.

The four-term senator and one-time presidential candidate said one of the key problems with the Obama administration’s strategy was that it continues to call terrorism that aims to harm the U.S., “violent extremism” instead of “violent Islamist extremism.”

“The administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism,” Lieberman said, speaking at a National Press Club event hosted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

“To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is Al Qaeda and its allies. Now that’s better but it is still too narrow and focuses us on groups as opposed to what I would call an ideology, which is what we’re really fighting.”

Lieberman, who as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has held numerous hearings on the issue of Islamic extremism, said that Obama needs to stop being afraid of offending the overwhelmingly large portion of law-abiding and well-intentioned Muslims with his rhetoric.

“I assume the refusal of the administration to speak honestly about the enemy is based on its desire not to do anything that might feed into al Qaeda’s propaganda that we’re engaged in a cold war against Islam,” he said. “But that is so self-evidently a lie that we can and have refuted it and I think we’ve done so effectively.”

The issue of singling out Muslims in the U.S.’s war against terrorists came to a head earlier this year when Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) held the first in his series of hearings on American-Muslim radicalization.

Nearly 100 Democratic lawmakers wrote to King, who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and asked him to expand the scope of the hearing to include other radical extremists groups, such as white supremacists, environmental extremists, and animal-rights activists. King declined to expand the hearing’s scope and heralded it as a success for drawing attention to an issue that lawmakers and government officials avoid too often.

Lieberman referenced these sentiments on Thursday, saying that though they are extremist groups, they do not constitute the threat the U.S. currently faces.

“We’re not in a global war with those [groups],” he said. “We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists.”

The U.S.’s successful war against terrorists depends on the administration’s ability to correctly identify who its enemy is, Lieberman said.

“To win this struggle, it’s vital that we understand that we’re not just fighting an organization al Qaeda,” he said. “We are up against a broader ideology, if you will, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam, that has fueled this war.

“Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated but when the broader sets of ideas that are associated with it are rejected and discarded. A reluctance therefore to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder I think to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas,” Lieberman said.

BY GLENN GREENWALD

By ELIYAHU STERN

MORE than a dozen American states are considering outlawing aspects of Shariah law. Some of these efforts would curtail Muslims from settling disputes over dietary laws and marriage through religious arbitration, while others would go even further in stigmatizing Islamic life: a bill recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly equates Shariah with a set of rules that promote “the destruction of the national existence of the United States.”

Supporters of these bills contend that such measures are needed to protect the country against homegrown terrorism and safeguard its Judeo-Christian values. The Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has said that “Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”

This is exactly wrong. The crusade against Shariah undermines American democracy, ignores our country’s successful history of religious tolerance and assimilation, and creates a dangerous divide between America and its fastest-growing religious minority.

The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)

Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.

The German philosopher Bruno Bauer offered Jews a bargain: renounce Jewish law and be granted full legal rights. He insisted that, otherwise, laws prohibiting work on the Sabbath made it impossible for Jews to be true citizens. (Bauer conveniently ignored the fact that many fully observant Jews violated the Sabbath to fight in the Prussian wars against Napoleon.)

During that era, Christianity was seen as either a universally valid basis of the state or a faith that harmoniously coexisted with the secular law of the land. Conversely, Judaism was seen as a competing legal system — making Jews at best an unassimilable minority, at worst a fifth column. It was not until the late 19th century that all Jews were granted full citizenship in Western Europe (and even then it was short lived).

Most Americans today would be appalled if Muslims suffered from legally sanctioned discrimination as Jews once did in Europe. Still, there are signs that many Americans view Muslims in this country as disloyal. A recent Gallup poll found that only 56 percent of Protestants think that Muslims are loyal Americans.

This suspicion and mistrust is no doubt fueled by the notion that American Muslims are akin to certain extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East and in Europe. But American Muslims are a different story. They are natural candidates for assimilation. They are demographically the youngest religious group in America, and most of their parents don’t even come from the Middle East (the majority have roots in Southeast Asia). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Muslim Americans exhibit the highest level of integration among major American religious groups, expressing greater degrees of tolerance toward people of other faiths than do Protestants, Catholics or Jews.

Given time, American Muslims, like all other religious minorities before them, will adjust their legal and theological traditions, if necessary, to accord with American values.

America’s exceptionalism has always been its ability to transform itself — economically, culturally and religiously. In the 20th century, we thrived by promoting a Judeo-Christian ethic, respecting differences and accentuating commonalities among Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Today, we need an Abrahamic ethic that welcomes Islam into the religious tapestry of American life.

Anti-Shariah legislation fosters a hostile environment that will stymie the growth of America’s tolerant strand of Islam. The continuation of America’s pluralistic religious tradition depends on the ability to distinguish between punishing groups that support terror and blaming terrorist activities on a faith that represents roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Aqsa Parvez

We here at Loon Watch have documented many of the perverse and reprehensible statements of those in the Islamophobic blogosphere. However, sometimes these loons take their disgusting behavior and rhetoric to another level. It is safe to say that these loons have a burning hatred in their hearts for Muslims and the religion of Islam, despite their hollow claims to the contrary (Pamela Geller claiming that she “loves Muslims” or Robert Spencer being pushed to say that Islam molds its followers to be moral and upright individuals).

Previously, Geller and Spencer attempted to exploit the Rifqa Bary incident to their advantage. However, their ridiculous claims that the girl’s life was in danger were dispelled by law enforcement who told all sane individuals that the parents were cooperating and posed no threat to young Rifqa. Despite the police’s claims to the contrary, the loons continued to use Rifqa’s situation to promote their hate fest against Islam and Muslims.

So it is nauseating to read that bigots like Geller and Spencer have decided to “honor” a Muslim girl named Aqsa Parvez who was murdered in 2008 by her father for not practicing her faith the way her father wanted. Geller used the opportunity to exploit the murder of this young Muslim girl for her anti-Muslim agenda by creating a “memorial” in Aqsa’s honor.  In reality, it is nothing but a monument symbolizing “everything that is wrong with Islam” in the mind of Pamela Geller.  She is weaponizing a young girl’s grave site.

Geller raised money, asking her anti-Muslim fans to support the erection of a headstone at the site of Aqsa Parvez’s grave in Canada. “All was going according to plan,” says Geller, until Aqsa’s family refused to use such a headstone from her.  What is amazing is that Geller didn’t seem to anticipate this, and instead raised $5,000 from her supporters anyways.  One wonders why she is so incredulous: does it take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Muslim family wouldn’t want to erect an anti-Muslim headstone on their daughter’s grave site?  A headstone funded by people who absolutely hate their religion?

Says Geller further: “The family (yes, the family that murdered her) had refused to ‘sign off’ on the headstone.”  The family didn’t kill Aqsa Parvez.  Her father and brother did.  They are both serving life sentences for her murder.  I seriously doubt they had any legal say in what is placed on Aqsa’s grave.  It was likely the mother who decided against using such a headstone.  One could hardly expect her to do otherwise, considering she is Muslim herself.

It is even doubtful that Aqsa Parvez herself would support the headstone.  It is quite possible, even probable, that Aqsa would renounce her self-proclaimed benefactor Pamela Geller.  Based on what we know, Aqsa was most likely still a Muslim, and never renounced her religion altogether.  Why would she want to associate herself with people who vilify her own religion and all its adherents?  Like many young Muslims, she might simply have been rebelling against a strict interpretation of Islam–a firebrand, conservative form of it.  Why is it a given that she rejected the entire religion of Islam, as Geller et al. would imagine?

After being rebuffed by the family, Geller shopped around for a place to erect a memorial and finally decided upon Israel.  Writes Geller:

I approached the JNF and worked to plant the Aqsa Parvez Grove in American Independence Park in Jerusalem, Israel, where the plaque before the grove will read: “In Loving Memory of Aqsa Parvez and All Victims of Honor Killings Worldwide.

The irony of the location perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of the whole thing.  The JNF, the Jewish National Fund, is a quasi-governmental organization in Israel that does not sell land to non-Jews, certainly not to Muslims.  Indeed, the JNF has been at the forefront of stripping Muslims of any land rights in the state of Israel.  Quite literally then, the “memorial” for Aqsa Parvez is built on land that she herself could never own.  She could not own her own “memorial.”

But of course that was the point.  The choice of Israel was intended to be especially inflammatory.  With very good reason, no country earns the ire of Muslims more than Israel, which illegally occupies and oppresses its Muslim population.  Choosing Israel as the site for this “memorial” is meant to give the Muslim world the middle finger.  It would be like the KKK selecting apartheid-era South Africa as the site to erect a “memorial” to honor victims of black-on-black violence during the 1960′s.  Nobody would take the KKK’s “memorial” seriously, and everyone would know that they don’t give two damns about the black victims.  The point would be to vilify black people, not honor them.  Likewise, the “memorial” for Muslim victims is not meant to honor them but vilify Muslims.

The idea of career anti-Muslim bigots creating a “memorial” for Muslim victims is truly a laughable notion and people should see through the thin fog of bigotry on display.  This faux memorial is a sadistic propaganda attempt by Geller and Spencer to exploit the death of a young girl for their agenda to link a disgusting crime to Islam and Muslims.

Islamic society of Wichita

Judge orders Spirit One pastor to stay away from Islamic Center

BY RON SYLVESTER

The Wichita Eagle

A judge ordered a Wichita pastor to stay away from the Islamic Society of Wichita, as part of a sentence for loitering and disrupting business.

Sedgwick County District Judge Phil Journey this morning sentenced Mark Holick to serve 12 months unsupervised probation, pay $300 in fines and stay at least 1,000 feet from the Islamic Center, where he was arrested in August 2010.

Holick, pastor of Spirit One Christian Ministry, and more than a dozen followers had gone to the Islamic Center as members there were trying to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Holick said they were there to hand out Bibles. Police said he was causing a disturbance and blocking access to the center.

Police had said they asked Holick to move to a public sidewalk. In one instance, cited by Journey, Holick marched in place in response to police orders to move.

“The only reason you were the one arrested is because you were the only one who disobeyed the police orders,” Journey told Holick.

The case reached district court on an appeal from a conviction in Wichita Municipal Court. Holick asked for a a jury trial. Jurors found Holick guilty early last month on two counts of loitering and disrupting a local business.

Journey’s sentence followed the recommendations of Assistant City Attorney Michael Hoelscher.

During the hearing, Holick gave a 15-minute speech, quoting Bible verses and accusing the city of violating his First Amendment rights.

“Wichita is confused,” Holick said. “I am not your enemy. Islam is. The Lord said there will be no other gods before me.”

Journey told Holick that the First Amendment guaranteed his rights to express his religious beliefs but allowed laws to regulate how he practices his faith.

“I want you to think about this,” Journey said. “What if the shoe had been on the other foot and someone from the Islamic Center had come to your place and tried to convert your members and had blocked your driveway?”

Spirit One has been a street and online ministry since a month after his arrest, Holick said, when he sold his building in south Wichita to another church. First Freewill Baptist now resides at 1515 E. Harry.

The judge reminded Holick that the Constitution provides protection for people of all faiths, not just Holick’s.

“I hope you will reflect on the choices you made,” Journey said. “There’s nothing wrong the proselytizing or holding your beliefs. It’s the manner of how you carry them out that’s the problem.”

Holick could face a six-month jail term if he doesn’t follow the conditions of his probation.

That Eric Bolling is a terrible host is not a new revelation. Recently he had Islamophobe Steven Emerson on his show to discuss the CAP report on the Islamophobia Network (video below). Bolling once again reveals himself to be a shill for Right-Wing anti-Muslim hacks:

“I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”

What irks me more than Bolling however is Emerson professing he is merely a “messenger.” Messengers generally don’t claim to be scholars or experts. By saying he is merely a “messenger” Emerson hopes to secure the victim card and divert attention away from any responsibility for his Islamophobic statements and actions.

It is no coincidence his Islamophobe contemporaries, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, acted the same exact way during the Norway Massacre.

Fox Invites Anti-Muslim “Expert” To Lash Out Against Islamophobia Report

August 31, 2011 2:11 am ET by Terry Krepel

Last week, the Center for American Progress published a report detailing the network of anti-Muslim “experts” who relentlessly promote Islamophobia in America, as well as the sources of their funding. One of those featured in the report, Steve Emerson, appeared on the August 30 edition of Fox Business’Follow the Money to misrepresent the report and attack CAP in an attempt to discredit the report’s claims.

Emerson said on Fox that he felt “somewhat complimented because they’re attributing to me and four other people the ability to control the minds of 300 million Americans for 15 years.” In fact, the report features a dozen “main players who conjure up and spread misinformation about American Muslims and Islam,” as well as seven major financial contributors and an echo chamber that includes the religious right, the media, politicians, and grassroots organizations.

Emerson went on to suggest that some level of Islamophobia is justified because “65 to 70 percent of all international terrorist attacks are carried out by radical Muslims, so there’s a fear based on that.” He accused CAP of quoting “terrorist organizations” and “a front group for Hamas” in its report, dismissing CAP as a “$38 million-a-year organization that looks like the Democratic Party in exile.”

Emerson also falsely suggested that the report somehow denies that Islam is used as a justification for terrorist acts:

What’s interesting here is that when it comes to looking at Islamic terrorist attacks, what they deny and what they claim is racist is the assertion that Islamic terrorism is motivated by Islamic extremist clerics, mosques, statements –

In reality, the report states:

Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.

During his Fox appearance, Emerson also offered this bizarre comparison: “This reminds me of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or, you know, it reminds me of someone who attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center because they attacked the Ku Klux Klan. Right? I’m the messenger.”

Emerson later said:

They believe that the only reason there exists suspicion against Islam — popular suspicion, and it’s not a majority, it’s a minority — is because of people like me who are orchestrating it like, you know, the Wizard of Oz. The bottom line is it comes from so many rampant sources — if you go on YouTube, on the Internet. Most of the Islamic organizations in the United States, they’re run by the Muslim Brotherhood or they were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that believes in imposing Islam and the sharia around the world. We’re coming out with a documentary –

Host Eric Bolling echoed Emerson: “I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”