A real "scholar" of Islam: Sherman A. Jackson

Dr. Sherman Jackson of the University of Michigan tackles the issue of Shariah in a brief summary about how misinformation and cultural perceptions of the Islamic legal system have fed anti-Muslim viewpoints.

Shariah: Between Two Popes

By Dr. Sherman A. Jackson via The Huffington Post

While it started out as a minor footnote, opposition tosharî’ah has now morphed into the mantra by which many justify their opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” If we allow this mosque to go forth, so the logic goes, the next thing you know, all the bars in the country will be shut down (and those infidel lushes flogged!), all the women will be draped in sheets, and Muhammad will replace Jacob as the most popular name in America. Allahu akbar!

While some of this hysteria is clearly being peddled by people who know better, most Americans are probably just engaged in a good-faith attempt to understand and respond to sharî’ah through the only prism they have: their own historical experience. I was recently reminded of this on a visit to Cairo, during which time two popes, one Catholic, the other Coptic, expressed almost mutually contradictory sentiments about sharî’ah. The chasm separating their perspectives related not to their different levels of knowledge about sharî’ah but almost entirely to their differences in historical experience.

I arrived in Cairo on the first of June. On 29 May, the High Administrative Court of Egypt had ordered the Coptic Church to issue marriage licenses to divorced Copts who wanted to remarry. The Church demurred, arguing that this went against official Church doctrine, according to which adultery, death or apostasy were the only legitimate reasons for divorce and thus the only basis upon which the Church could issue licenses to remarry. Because the couples in question did not fit any of these criteria, the Church insisted that it could not issue such licenses and that, in the name of religious freedom, the High Court should not try to force it to do so.

For the next three weeks (I left on June 19) Egyptian papers teemed with coverage of what was developing into a constitutional crisis — demonstrations, letter-writing, rallies, the whole nine. Those who supported the secular character of the Egyptian state — Muslim or Christian — argued that in the name of equality(Muslims are free to divorce and remarry) and human rights (marriage is a fundamental right) the Coptic Church should either issue the licenses or be forced to do so by the state. The most interesting position, however, was that of the Church itself. In addition to religious freedom it invoked sharî’ah in its defense! Time and again, Church officials publicly invoked such sharî’ah maxims as, “When confronted with People of the Book (Jews and Christians), adjudicate among them on the basis of their own religion.” The Coptic patriarch, Pope Shanoudah III, even went so far as to quote the Qur’ân directly in his weekly sermon: “Let the People of the Bible adjudicate according to what God revealed therein. And whoever does not adjudicate in accordance to what God reveals, they are among the corrupt” (5: 47). As if these statements were not explicit enough, in an interview published on 10 June in the official Ahramnewspaper, Pope Shanoudah stated plainly and without equivocation, “We simply ask the judges, if they want to reconcile with the Church, to apply the Islamic sharî’ah.”

It would be disingenuous, of course, to read more than tactical sophistication into the Pope’s and the Church’s position. After all, Pope Shanoudah did not rush out to sign up with the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, their statements and protestations make it clear that he and the Church understood that under sharî’ah they would enjoy the right to preserve their way of life as Christians and that the rules governing Muslims do not automatically extend to non-Muslims. One can thus imagine my surprise to read, also in the Ahram newspaper, statements by Pope Benedict XVI in which he expressed, during a visit to Cypress, fears about how Christians in the Middle East would fair under the rising tide of sharî’ah-minded Islamic resurgence. Rather than seeing in sharî’ah any protection for the rights of Christians or other minorities, Pope Benedict could only imagine it to be a threat to his co-religionists. What accounts for this difference between these two popes?

For Pope Shanoudah, sharî’ah took its definitive political character under the pre-modern order, when non-Muslim communities existed before the Muslim state, and rather than obliterate these, the state merely required them to recognize its sovereignty. For Pope Benedict, sharî’ah was seen through the prism of modern Western history, where it was presumed to be the uniform law of a homogenizing nation-state that decides if, how and according to what rules communities are to exist. For Pope Shanoudah, sharî’ah included a palpable element of “live and let live.” For Pope Benedict, sharî’ah was simply “the law of the land” — for everyone.

Most Americans share the perspective of Pope Benedict XVI. While some of this is based on simple prejudice and the massive amount of disinformation being spread about sharî’ah, I suspect that most of it is based on the simple fact that people simply view sharî’ah through the prism of their own experience as citizens of a modern state. Just as the modern state applies a single régime of rules equally across the board to all citizens, so too, they assume, must sharî’ah. This, by the way, is not only the assumption of Pope Benedict and most non-Muslim Americans; many Muslims have also imbibed this understanding. But as Pope Shanoudah’s and the Coptic Church’s tactic demonstrates, this is more indebted to Western success at universalizing its narrative than it is to the intrinsic nature of sharî’ah itself. Bottom line? Sharî’ahaccommodated the existence and lifestyles of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians and countless others. It can live with a few bars and miniskirts and lots of Jacobs in modern America — multiracial, multicultural, multireligious modern America.

Religious freedom must be stood up for

David Bromwich of Yale University looks back at the debates of our Founding Fathers on religious freedom. Then, as now, many wanted to ensure that those with faiths different than the majority be excluded from exercising their religious freedom for the sake of not offending the sensitivities of the majority. Then, as now, such a proposition must be rejected if we desire that our Constitution not ring hollow.

Cordoba House and Religious Freedom

By David Bromwich via Huffington Post

When Nancy Pelosi said the powers and money backing the anti-Muslim protests in New York and elsewhere should be investigated, she had in mind the simplest of political questions. Who benefits? In this case, who benefits from a spectacle of words and images that suggest that right-wing populism in America has now taken a definitively anti-Muslim tone? The message of these protests against more than one mosque is that the fight to defeat al Qaeda has become a war against Islam.

No American benefits from that change of view. It exposes us to an enlarged hostility from the Arab world, heated by suspicion and legitimate fear. The only people who could benefit are those who have an interest in aligning the United States against the Arab countries of the Middle East. Who would that be? Pelosi has sharper instincts than the other leaders of her party. Her distrust of the sudden prosperity of a “grassroots” movement has been borne out by Jane Mayer’s recent investigation of the funding of the Tea Party by the billionaire Koch brothers.

The worst damage of the crowd actions of the summer has come from the faintheartedness of those who knew better, but declined to denounce them. The crowd has been permitted to go on believing it is wrong for Muslims to do something the Constitution gives all Americans a right to do. How did this deformation of public feeling begin? The protests against Cordoba House shifted from a parochial to a national issue on the impetus of two statements. The first came from Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, on July 30. Foxman put the ADL on the record in sympathy with the protest against the planned community center and mosque. His statement conceded the right of the planners, but defended the prejudice, that is, the rooted feelings of the non-Muslims in this case, regardless of reason, right, or law.

Note that the tenor of the ADL statement was not political or moral, but sentimental. The planners had a right to build where the legally-designated authorities agreed they could; but the ADL hoped they would not build quite there — out of respect for the feelings of people close to the victims and the sympathy of Americans for those feelings. Notably absent from this moral arithmetic were the Muslim victims of the attack.

President Obama on Aug. 13 affirmed the right of the planners to build at Park51; they were only using, said Obama, the right of religious freedom that belongs to them as it belongs to other Americans. A decent response and the only thing necessary for a president to say.

Yet Obama spoilt his effect here by extending his remarks. He chose, unnecessarily, to legitimate the religious language of the protesters by asserting that “Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.” The words “hallowed ground” are familiar to Americans because Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, said the soldiers themselves who fought in that battle had hallowed the field, “far above our poor power to add or detract”; the soldiers had hallowed that ground by risking their lives to advance the work of liberty. If Ground Zero is hallowed ground, it must be because the victims were soldiers in a war (they did not know they were, but they were). But what war? A war against al Qaeda, or against Islam? That is the question the demagogues behind the protest are seeking to confuse; and by glibly adopting their piety as an earnest of his sentiments, the president gave the anti-Muslim cause a boost he could have withheld. Obama further diluted his elementary defense of the rights guaranteed by the first amendment when he “walked back” his statement the following day and averred he meant only to recall the right of the planners to build; he did not mean to endorse the wisdom of the choice of a site. The inference was that he, too, might sympathize with the feelings, even if he could not grant the legal warrant, of the anti-mosque protesters.

The “wisdom” theme of the Obama walk-back was soon taken up by Harry Reid (to shore up the bigot vote in a close election), and by Howard Dean (to prove his sagacity as a moderate). The issue has since become a source of intimidation to Democrats and of jeering challenge by Republicans. The odd thing is, almost no one mentions the Constitution. The first amendment is out there; it says something definite on the subject. This is not a matter that anyone would have dared to argue about in 1965, 1990 or 2005. The clarion words of the text, “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” admit no ambiguity at all. This fact has not escaped the attention of the Fox radio hosts. “Now he mentions the Constitution,” said Glenn Beck last week of Obama. And Limbaugh: “Of course they have theright” — as if it were the right of a man to keep an anaconda in his bathtub. Even in the face of such disclaimers, Democrats would rather not defend the Constitution in an election year.

A curious detail in the uproar has been the way that Foxman, Obama (day two), Reid, Dean, and the Foxtalkers chose as their rallying point the idea of “sensitivity.” The Imam has a right to build, but it would be sensitive of him to build farther away, or after some years of sensitive waiting. The geographical coordinates of sensitivity have proved hard to map. The Park51 site, as everyone now knows, is two and a half blocks from Ground Zero. A mosque already stands four blocks from Ground Zero. At what point does the force-field of prejudice release its hold of the Constitution and allow the execution of a permit?

Sensitivity. The term came into the political discourse of America in the 1980s to justify the campus speech codes of the time. It was the soft wrapping around political correctness. The rights of students from the “dominant culture” (it was said) were technically the same as, but ought to be used more sensitively than, the rights of students from “marginal cultures.” So a professor of American history might read aloud from the diary of a slave-plantation owner; but if black students found this a sensitive subject, the teacher should back off and alter the curriculum. In the same way now, the Muslim planners of a community center and mosque in New York City are asked to respect the anti-Muslim sensibilities of unspecified numbers of non-Muslim Americans. The rage for sensitivity was a poisoned gift. The poison has now passed from the cultural Left of the 1980s to the cultural Right of the 2010s.

The language of the American founders contains not one word about sensitivity. “As to religion,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, “I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.” But did Paine and others mean to extend such toleration to Muslims? They did, and they said they did. The question was openly debated whether religious liberty ought to be extended to such outliers as Catholics, Muslims and Jews. In the debate on the Constitution, for example, in the North Carolina convention, on July 30, 1788, Henry Abbot wondered if there were not considerable danger in granting a federal government the power to make treaties. Could not a treaty be made “engaging with foreign powers to adopt the Roman catholic religion in the United States, which would prevent people from worshiping God according to their own consciences.” Abbot pursued his anxious challenge:

The exclusion of religious tests is by many thought dangerous and impolitic. They suppose that if there be no religious tests required, Pagans, Deists and Mahometans might obtain offices among us, and that the Senate and Representatives might all be Pagans.

A conclusive reply to Abbot was given by James Iredell:

How is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for? This is the foundation on which persecution has been raised in every part of the world. The people in power were always in the right, and every body else wrong. If you admit the least difference, the door to persecution is opened.

Later in the same debate, David Caldwell objected that the American Constitution would allow a toleration so sweeping “there was an invitation for Jews, and Pagans of every kind, to come among us”; and he ended by suggesting “those gentlemen who formed this Constitution, should not have given this invitation to Jews and Heathens.” The answer this time came from Samuel Spencer. No religious test, argued Spencer, could possibly exclude the most rightly feared enemies of faith, namely secret unbelievers, who are willing hypocritically to profess a belief they do not hold. Religious tests and the support of prejudice are the surest way to multiply the numbers of liars: “Now is it better to let them honestly follow their own, or encourage them to dissimulate, and found their religious relation to civil society in an elemental dishonesty?” Thus, in 1788 the party of anxiety flourished, just as it does in our time; but in 1788, it was defeated.

American Christians in 2010 (if they are white) cannot easily call on memories of persecution to support a commitment to toleration. Even Catholics, who now have six judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Jews, who have three judges, may find that such fears hardly seem to apply in America. Yet a lively horror of persecution by Americans, thinking about America itself, seems a moral necessity for those who have to imagine ills that have never befallen them. And we all turn unimaginative — and therefore morally lazy — when the tracks of a prejudice favor our fortunes for long enough. We can truly secure ourselves against persecution only by binding ourselves against the privilege of being persecutors.

How far has the American understanding of religious liberty weakened? The ADL statement that did so much to inflame this controversy is a telling indication of the change. The mission statement of the league says that “its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”

Compare that forthright declaration with the sliding casuistry of the July 28 ADL appeal to American Muslims to yield, in this case, to the authority of prejudice:

We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone… However, there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities… counterproductive to the healing process… unique circumstances… legitimate questions have been raised… every right to build… ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.

The solemn final phrase is a sophistry in the shape of a pun; and its shift of gears from principle to manners would make a tax lawyer hang his head. As for the message, it amounts to a confession of inability to pursue the “ultimate purpose” laid down in the ADL Mission Statement.

It has been said that liberty is a political good that is easier to win than to maintain; that the habits necessary for its maintenance are easier to unlearn than to learn. To judge by events of the last three months, we have gone a long way toward unlearning the habits of religious freedom. Yet at this moment two Americans in public life have had the nerve and sense to remind us of the simplicity of the principle. Michael Bloomberg said in a radio address in June:

If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship, they should do it, and we shouldn’t be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can’t. I think it’s fair to say if somebody was going to try to on that piece of property, build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming. And the fact of the matter is that Muslims have a right to do it too.

He added, in his remarks on Governors Island in August:

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values — and play into our enemies’ hands — if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.

Ron Paul said in a statement of Aug. 20:

The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

The comparison is worthy of Paine — and yields not a pious inch to the new apologists for prejudice. There is hope in the fearlessness of Bloomberg and Paul, a hope that derives from their common source. Nothing that any crowd can offer is better than the unhallowed liberty of life itself.

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show continues to take on the mosque controversy. this time Aasif Mandvi was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the site of a different mosque controversy.

Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg is a candidate for anti-Loon of the year due to his consistent defense of religious liberty and steadfast support of the political hot-potato issue of the Park51 Cultural Center, aka the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Bloomberg Launches Another Impassioned Defense Of Cordoba House

by Sam Stein

In a rousing address before a predominantly Muslim audience Tuesday night, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reaffirmed his commitment to the controversial Islamic cultural center near the former site of the World Trade Center.

Bloomberg, who hosted the annual Ramadan Iftar dinner at his official Gracie Mansion residence, did not back away from his position as the most vocal and public defender of the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” If anything, he couched his defense of the project in even deeper moral and political terms, calling the Cordoba House a telling illustration of intrinsic American principles and a valuable tool in the war on terror.

From Bloomberg’s prepared remarks:

But if we say that a mosque and community center should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, we would compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.

We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting. We would feed the false impressions that some Americans have about Muslims. We would send a signal around the world that Muslim Americans may be equal in the eyes of the law, but separate in the eyes of their countrymen. And we would hand a valuable propaganda tool to terrorist recruiters, who spread the fallacy that America is at war with Islam.
Islam did not attack the World Trade Center — Al-Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today we are not at war with Islam — we are at war with Al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.[snip]

The members of our military are men and women at arms — battling for hearts and minds. And their greatest weapon in that fight is the strength of our American values, which have always inspired people around the world. But if we do not practice here at home what we preach abroad — if we do not lead by example – we undermine our soldiers. We undermine our foreign policy objectives. And we undermine our national security.

While some of the cultural center’s other early supporters have backed away from their defense of the project, Bloomberg has emerged as perhaps the least fickle of its supporters. And he’s been hailed for that defense — locally, nationally and among the commentariat — even though a majority of the public opposes the Cordoba House’s proposed location.

Addressing those calling for a compromise location for the center, Bloomberg offered the logical rejoinder. “The question will then become, how big should the ‘no-mosque zone’ around the World Trade Center be?” he remarked. “There is already a mosque four blocks away. Should it too, be moved?”

However the debate ends, of course, there will be hard feelings. Still, the Mayor ended his remarks with an appeal to the lessons of history.

I know that many in this room are disturbed and dispirited by the debate. But it is worth keeping some perspective on the matter. The first colonial settlers came to these shores seeking religious liberty and the founding fathers wrote a constitution that guaranteed it. They made sure that in this country the government would not be permitted to choose between religions or favor one over another.

Nonetheless, it was not so long ago that Jews and Catholics had to overcome stereotypes and build bridges to those who viewed them with suspicion and less than fully American.

UPDATE: Video of Bloomberg’s speech is below.

SIOA's Misleading Chicago Cab Ads

Way to go Chicago!

Chicago’s Yellow Cab is giving hate-mongers Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller‘s campain of hate ads the old Windy City boot.

The so-called “leave Islam safely honor killing” ad campaign was cynical from head to toe given that the phenomenon of domestic abuse and infanticide is not limited to Muslim families, and that within the Muslim community, has not exceeded 12 cases from coast to coast in the US and Canada.

Geller and Spencer had paid for ads through their newly formed hate group, SIOA, pretending to care for the victims of “honor killings.” But rather than advertise a counselling service hotline or guide potential victims to actual professional help, the ads slipped in a Spencer/Geller website that bashed the Islamic faith, painted all Muslims as evil, and had absolutely nothing to do with providing safety for victims as the ad falsely suggests.

Bravo Yellow Cab!

Geller and Spencer are willing to sink so low as to exploit the young female victims of domestic abuse, casting them as pawns in their rabid hate for Islam and Muslims. Worse yet, they had the audacity to think they could get away with it.

Yellow Cab is within their legal and professional rights to pull the plug on the offensive and misleading ad campaign, and while I am sure Geller and Spencer will, as usual, threaten a lawsuit to enforce their hateful ways, they have absolutely no legal recourse and will have to lick their wounds on this one.

Kudos to Chicago. I hope the rest of America follows suit. Let’s give the fraudulent “scholar” and his botox queen a good ol’ American wake up call.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ground Zero 'mosque; protest gets ugly

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com spotlights the core issue with the hysteria surrounding the protest of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero: Islamophobia. Greenwald correctly points out the significant ramifications of this issue and how it has both domestic and international consequences for the United States. Greenwald also aptly makes the important point that if these loons succeed in kicking out the Muslims from the land they own and have a Constitutional right to build on then it will only embolden the Islamophobes to continue protesting and demonstrating (and possibly worse, physically attacking) against mosque construction plans around the country.

Make sure to watch the video of the man at the protest who was incorrectly viewed by the protestors of the mosque as a Muslim. Imagine if he actually were a Muslim – what might have happened to him? It’s a scary thought.

The “mosque” debate is not a “distraction”

By Glenn Greenwald

Opponents of the Park51 Islamic community center held a rally yesterday in Lower Manhattan, and a 4-minute video, posted below, reveals the true sentiments behind this campaign.  It has little to do with The Hallowed Ground of the World Trade Center — that’s just the pretext — and everything to do with animosity toward Muslims.  I dislike the tactic of singling out one or two objectionable people or signs at a march or rally in order to disparage the event itself.  That’s not what this video is.  Rather, it shows the collective sentiment of those gathered, as well as what’s driving the broader national backlash against mosques and Muslims far beyond Ground Zero.

The episode in the video begins when, as John Cole put it, “some black guy made the mistake of looking Muslimish and was harassed and nearly assaulted by the collection of lily white mouth-breathers at the event . . . At about 25 seconds in, he quite astutely points out to the crowd that ‘All y’all dumb motherfuckers don’t even know my opinion on shit’.”  As this African-American citizen (whom the videographer claims is a union carpenter who works at Ground Zero) is instructed to leave by what appears to be some sort of security or law enforcement official, the crowd proceeds to yell:  ”he musta voted for Obama,” “Mohammed’s a pig,” and other assorted charming anti-mosque slogans.  I really encourage everyone to watch this to see the toxicity this campaign has unleashed:

The New York Times article on this rally describes similar incidents, including how a student who carried a sign that simply read ”Religious tolerance is what makes America great” was threatened and told that “that if the police were not present, [he] would be in danger.”  Does anyone believe that their real agenda is simply to have Park51 move a few blocks away to less Sacred ground, or that they’re amenable to some sort of Howard-Dean-envisioned compromise that accommodates everyone?

All of this underscores a point I’ve wanted to make for awhile.  There’s been a tendency, which I find increasingly irritating, to dismiss this whole Park51 debate as some sort of petty, inconsequential August “distraction” from what Really Matters.  Here’s Chuck Todd mocking the debate as a ”shiny metal object alert” and lamenting “the waste of time” he believes it to be, whileKatrina vanden Heuvel, in The Washington Post last week, condemned ”pundits and politicians [who] are working themselves into hysteria over a mosque near Ground Zero” on the ground that it won’t determine the outcome of the midterm elections.  This impulse is understandable.  If you chose to narrowly define the topic of the controversy as nothing more than the Manhattan address of Park 51, then obviously it pales in importance to the unemployment crisis, our ongoing wars, and countless other political issues.

But that’s an artificially narrow and misguided way of understanding what this dispute is about.  The intense animosity toward Muslims driving this campaign extends far beyond Ground Zero, and manifests in all sorts of significant and dangerous ways.  In June, The New York Times reported on a vicious opposition campaign against a proposed mosque in Staten Island.  Earlier this month, Associated Press documented that “Muslims trying to build houses of worship in the nation’s heartland, far from the heated fight in New York over plans for a mosque near ground zero, are running into opponents even more hostile and aggressive.”  And today, The Washington Post examines anti-mosque campaigns from communities around the nation and concludes that “the intense feelings driving that debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted.”

To belittle this issue as though it’s the equivalent of the media’s August fixation on shark attacks or Chandra Levy — or, worse, to want to ignore it because it’s harmful to the Democrats’ chances in November — is profoundly irresponsible.  The Park51 conflict is driven by, and reflective of, a pervasive animosity toward a religious minority — one that has serious implications for how we conduct ourselves both domestically and internationally.  Yesterday,ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour decided to let Americans hear about this dispute from actual Muslims behind the project (compare that, as Jay Rosen suggested, to David Gregory’s trite and typically homogeneous guest list of Rick Lazio and Jeffrey Goldberg and you see why there’s so much upset caused by Amanpour).  One of those project organizers, Daisy Kahn, said this during her ABC interview:

This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism.  That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even Islamophobia; it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims, and we are deeply concerned.

Can anyone watch the video of that disgusting hate rally and dispute that?  That’s exactly why I’ve found this conflict so significant.  If Park51 ends up moving or if opponents otherwise succeed in defeating it, it will seriouslybolster and validate the ugly premises at the heart of this campaign:  that Muslims generally are responsible for 9/11, Terrorism justifies and even compels our restricting the equals rights and access of Americans Muslims, and more broadly, the animosity and suspicions towards Muslims generally are justified, or at least deserving of respect.  As Aziz Poonawalla put it:  “if the project does fail, then I think that the message that will be sent is that bigotry and fear of Muslims is not just permitted, it is effective.”

That’s exactly the message that will be sent, and that’s what makes this conflict so significant.  Obviously, not all opponents of Park51 are as overtly hateful as those in that video — and not all opponents are themselves bigots — but the position they’ve adopted is inherently bigoted, as it seeks to impose guilt and blame on a large demographic group for the aberrational acts of a small number of individual members.   And one thing is certain:  if this campaign succeeds, it will proliferate and the sentiments driving it will become even more potent.  Hatemongers always become emboldened when they triumph.

The animosity and hatred so visible here extends far beyond the location of mosques or even how we treat American Muslims.  So many of our national abuses, crimes and other excesses of the last decade — torture, invasions, bombings, illegal surveillance, assassinations, renditions, disappearances, etc. etc. — are grounded in endless demonization of Muslims.  A citizenry will submit to such policies only if they are vested with sufficient fear of an Enemy.  There are, as always, a wide array of enemies capable of producing substantial fear (the Immigrants, the Gays, and, as that video reveals, the always-reliable racial minorities), but the leading Enemy over the last decade, in American political discourse, has been, and still is, the Muslim.

That’s why the population is willing to justify virtually anything that’s done to “them” without much resistance at all, and it’s why very few people demand evidence from the Government before believing accusations that someone is a Terrorist:  after all, if they’re Muslim, that’s reason enough to believe it.  Hence, the repeated, mindless mantra that those in Guantanamo — or those on the Government’s “hit list” — are Terrorists even in the absence of evidence and charges, and even in the presence of ample grounds for doubting the truth of those accusations.

And there’s no end in sight:  the current hysteria over Iran at its core relies — just as the identical campaign against Iraq did — on the demonization of a whole new host of Muslim villains.  A population that is constantly bombarded with tales of Muslim Evil (they want to kill your children and explode a nuclear suitcase in your neighborhood) will be filled with fear and hatred — sentiments always exacerbated during times of economic strife and uncertainty — and very well-primed to lash out.  That’s the decade-long brew that has led to this purely irrational, hate-driven demand that they not be allowed to desecrate and infect the Sacred, Hallowed Space of Ground Zero (the religious terminology used to talk about 9/11 is both creepy and no accident).  This “debate” over Park51 is many things.  An inconsequential “distraction” from what Really Matters is not one of them.

UPDATE:  Ron Paul issued a statement today excoriating conservative opponents of Park51 for violating their alleged belief in religious freedom and property rights, and added:

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. . . Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam — the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. . . .

The outcry over the building of the mosque, near ground zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. . . . . This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

It is indeed “about hate and Islamaphobia,” and that is the driving, enabling force behind so many of America’s most controversial and destructive policies.

UPDATE II:  Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this entire episode has been the dearth of national politicians willing to stand up to this campaign of bigotry.  Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley became one of the few to issue an unapologetic, principled, unparsed, caveat-free defense of Park51 today, joining Ron Paul, Joe Sestak, Grover Norquist, Russ Feingold, Jerry Nadler,Ted Olson and only a handful of others.  It’s particularly commendable of Feingold and Sestak to do so given the very tight Senate races they are fighting, and there’s added weight when people like Paul, Olson, and Norquist stand up to their own party to do so.

I’ll be on MSNBC, at roughly 4:00 p.m., this afternoon, discussing these issues, along with National Review‘s Cliff May.

UPDATE III:  The group which sponsored this rally has a website — the repellently named StopThe911Mosque.com — which is registered to The Center for Security Policy, the group of Frank Gaffney, one of the most deranged and dishonest right-wing extremists in the country.  So it’s hardly surprising that such a rotted root gave rise to this toxic fruit (I just unintentionally made a nice rhyme).

Speaking of deranged right-wing extremists, I was on MSNBC today debating Park51 with Cliff May of National Review; it largely degenerated into a cable-news screamfest, but for those interested, you can watch it here:

Greenwald on Dylan Ratigan

Counterterrorism experts have said that the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy and the anti-Islam protests benefit Islamic extremists “by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.”  But Muslims should not fall into the trap of thinking of all Americans as a monolithic group, just as they themselves do not want to be viewed that way.  In fact, some of the most vocal supporters of the Islamic cultural center include Jews, such as Rabbis in the Manhattan community and stalwarts like Jon Stewart, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, etc. etc.  And there are Christian supporters of the Cordoba initiative.  And why shouldn’t there be?  Just as Islam is the religion of peace for mainstream Muslims, so too is Christianity a religion of love for its true followers.  Muslim-Americans should not forget that.  Even the Quran, the holy book of Islam, says:

Not all of them are alike.  Of the People of the Book (the Jews and the Christians) are those who are righteous, who recite the words of God, who bow down in worship at night. They believe in God and the Last Day, and enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, and strive with one another in hastening to good deeds.  These are amongst the righteous. (Quran, 3:113-114)

Here is an excellent article on the Huffington Post from one such Evangelical Christian (good to know LoonWatch is being used as a resource by so many people!):

Why Christians Should Support the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’

By Lisa Sharon Harper (Executive Director of NY Faith and Justice, author, poet, and award-winning playwright)

Of the 1366 people who died on 9/11, 59 were Muslims. Yet Reuters reported yesterday that New York Governor David Paterson will pressure the developer of the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan to relocate. This is nuts.

As an Evangelical Christian, three pillars of my faith guide my response to this trumped-up controversy: forgiveness rooted in the Cross, the value for Truth, and the call to love our neighbor.

Evangelicals believe in the power of the Cross, the place where Jesus died at the hands of his enemies; the place where Jesus uttered, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do”; the place that makes radical forgiveness possible. Yet the Muslim world did not perpetrate the terrorist acts of 9/11, so there is actually no need to forgive Muslims for 9/11. The fault sits squarely with Al Qaeda, a small terrorist organization. And therein lies is the irony. We have failed to do the lesser thing. Jesus calls us to follow him into forgiveness of our enemy. But forgiveness isn’t politically profitable. So we have been led by Evangelical hacks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to feed on misdirected bitterness rather than follow Jesus’ lead.

Fear and hysteria are no excuse for muddled language and twisted truths. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Thus, to suppress truth is to suppress Jesus himself. Why would Jesus care about truth? Because lies destroy people made in the image of God, thus destroying the image of God on Earth. We would do well to remember that the next time Newt Gingrich rants that building a mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center is like the Nazis putting a swastika next to the Holocaust Museum. Come on.

So what is the truth?

Dr. Sarah Sayeed, president of Women in Islam, Inc. and program director for the Interfaith Center of New York, explained in a recent interview:

There has been a mosque on Warren Street, four blocks from the World Trade Center site, for many many years. My dad used to go there for prayers when I was a little kid. A lot of the Muslim people who work at City Hall or in the financial district would go to that mosque.

The Warren Street Mosque lost its lease and had to find a new location. Some people in that community came together and were able to purchase the building on Park Place and West Broadway, where the Islamic Community Center is now proposed; two blocks closer to Ground Zero. The people in the purchasing community partnered with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who had another mosque in Tribeca — also close to Ground Zero. Imam Feisal serves on the board of the Interfaith Center of New York.

Their vision included a full-blown community center that serves the wider community, not just the Muslim community. It’s conceived in the tradition of the YMCA, with a pool, a place for seniors to congregate, a place for the arts and a multi-faith chapel and prayer space. So, it’s really a cultural center that is being built by a group of Muslims. They’re also talking about having an interfaith advisory group to help shape the work in the building.

In light of this truth, to ask this long-established community to relocate is a first step down the long road to ethnic cleansing. It is the antithesis of Jesus’ call to love our neighbor.

Governor Patterson and other politicians are trading truth for political points. And worse, without realizing it, they are following the lead of right-wing liar, Pamela Geller, founder of Stop the Islamization of America, a crude website dedicated to stopping the spread of Islam in the U.S. and worldwide. Loonwatch.com lists Geller as “the looniest blogger ever.” The mosque controversy traces directly back to Geller. And it is true to form. During the 2008 elections, Geller claimed that Obama was a Muslim and that purple is the official “gangsta” color of the Obama administration — no connection, just goof-ball.

My faith’s values for forgiveness, truth, and love of neighbor lead me to conclude that politicians using the Islamic community center as an opportunity to score political points are mounting a direct assault against the honor of the dead — not just the 59 Muslim Americans who died but also all those whose lives were stolen by the hands of terrorists on September 11, 2001. They are betraying the heart of our country. Worse, they are betraying the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the free exercise of religion. And this is the one freedom Islamic extremists despise most.

How many of you have heard of taqiyya?  It’s a religious belief of Muslims where they can lie to infidels.  Read all about this fundamental Islamic doctrine right here.

Basically, it allows them to lie about what religion they belong to, among other things!  I didn’t believe it when I read Robert Spencer’s book, but just today a prominent Muslim-American named Wajahat Ali, known for drinking goat milk (that’s what Muslims drink), spilled his guts and wrote a tell-all piece for The Guardian.  Hear it straight from his own words how all Muslim-Americans know that President, or should I say Imam Barack Hussein Obama, is doing taqiyya and has the seed of Islam in him!  Wajahat Ali demands that Obama return the seed if he is not using it.  Will a fleet enema be sufficient to flush out the seed that Obama swallowed?

Check out the amazing article for yourself:

The anti-Muslim movement is gaining momentum

Danial Luban examines the people and ideas behind the growing anti-Muslim hysteria. What he finds is a mixture of crusader-inspired nuts and right wing politicians willing to compromise sanity for electoral success.

The New Anti-Semitism

by Daniel Luban

After Abraham Foxman waded into the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy,opposing ^[1] plans to construct an Islamic community center a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, the Anti-Defamation League chief was assailed by critics who charged that the ADL was giving license to bigotry and betraying its historic mission “to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike.” A week after initially coming out against the mosque, Foxman announced that the ADL was bowing out of the controversy, but the damage to the group’s reputation had been done.

The problem for the ADL is that there simply isn’t much anti-Semitism of consequence in the United States these days. While anti-Semitism continues to thrive elsewhere in the world and to molder on the fringes of American society, Jews have by now been fully assimilated into the American ruling class and into the mainstream of American life. A mundane event like the recent wedding of Protestant Chelsea Clinton and Jewish Marc Mezvinsky drove this point home. What was notable was not the question “will she convert?” but how little importance anyone attached to the answer; the former first daughter’s choice between Judaism and Christianity seemed as inconsequential as the choice between Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism would have a few decades ago.

At the same time, many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.

While the political operatives behind the anti-mosque campaign speak the language of nativism and American exceptionalism, their ideology is itself something of a European import. Most of the tropes of the American “anti-jihadists,” as they call themselves, are taken from European models: a “creeping” imposition of sharia, Muslim allegiance to the ummah ^[2] rather than to the nation-state, the coming demographic crisis as Muslims outbreed their Judeo-Christian counterparts. In recent years the call-to-arms about the impending Islamicization of Europe has become a well-worn genre ^[3], ranging from more sophisticated treatments like Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to cruder polemics like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.

It would be a mistake to seek too precise a correspondence between the new Islamophobia and the old anti-Semitism, which differ in some key respects. Jews have never threatened to become a numerical majority, or even a sizable minority, in any European country, so anxiety about Jewish power naturally gravitated toward the myth of the shadowy elite manipulating the majority from behind the scenes. By contrast, anti-Muslim anxiety has focused on the supposed demographic threat posed by Muslims, in which the dusky hordes overwhelm the West by sheer weight of numbers. (“The sons of Allah breed like rats,” as the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.) It may be that in many ways this Islamophobia shares more of the tropes of traditional anti-Catholicism than classic anti-Semitism.

But if the tropes do not always line up, there is some notable continuity in the players involved. One of the most striking stories of recent years has been the realignment of segments of the European far right behind a form of militant support for Israel. Much of the traditional neofascist right remains both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic, but savvier far-right leaders have realized that by dropping the anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubling down on Islamophobia, they can tap into a new base of support from pro-Israel hawks across the Atlantic. Both the British National Party and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium have gone this route, although it remains questionable whether the move away from anti-Semitism is more than skin-deep. (The Vlaams Belang’s predecessor party, for instance, was disbanded after a controversy ^[4] concerning Holocaust-denying statements made by one of its top officials.) Equally striking has been the rise of Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician whose Islamophobia, virulent enough to draw thecondemnation ^[5] of even the ADL, has made him a darling of “anti-jihadists” in the United States.

Although there was a predictable upsurge in anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks, much of the most virulent Islamophobic discourse remained marginal on this side of the Atlantic in the early years of the war on terror. There are several possible reasons for this, but one of the most important is simply that George W. Bush, as president, was committed to a rhetoric about Islam as a “religion of peace” divided into a moderate majority and an extremist minority. The justification for the Iraq war came to depend heavily on this distinction, and right-wing hawks, with some grumbling, generally fell into line. The election of Obama, however, freed the hawks from any obligation to temper their rhetoric and simultaneously provided ample material for conspiracy theories about Muslims and fellow travelers in the White House. The result has been an intensification both in the amount of Islamophobia and in its political prominence, as ideas that were once marginal have moved to the center of political debate.

***

The two years since Obama’s election have seen a sudden flood of books describing an alleged Muslim conspiracy against the United States. Examples include Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns Or Bombs, Spencer and Pamela Geller’s new The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, Paul Sperry’sInfiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington, and Sperry and P. David Gaubatz’s Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

The works share a set of common themes. Radical Muslims who engage in violence are only the tip of the iceberg, goes the argument; the more insidious threat comes from the far larger group of religious Muslims (most, perhaps all) who aim to subjugate the United States under sharia law through ostensibly peaceful and legal means. In this they are aided and abetted by the leftist elites controlling the government, media, and academy—above all, the ambiguously Muslim Obama himself—and a cast of villains that includes some mix of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jeremiah Wright, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed, ACORN, and George Soros. Some of the authors of these works have ties to the European far right themselves; Geller and Spencer, for instance, have alienated former political allies by championing Geert Wilders and the Vlaams Belang.
Andrew C. McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America is among the most recent, and likely the most comprehensive, contributions to the genre. McCarthy is, on the surface, a credible figure: A former federal prosecutor, he came to prominence by winning convictions against Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and others linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. During the Bush years, he was a vociferous defender of the administration’s detainee policies, while Obama’s election caused him to venture into nuttier territory. (He has speculated ^[6], for instance, that Bill Ayers may have been the real author of Obama’s Dreams From My Father.) His book helps illustrate both the potency of the Muslim-conspiracy myth and the extent to which it has taken hold of mainstream right-wing discourse.

McCarthy’s thesis is simple: Muslims aiming “to supplant American constitutional democracy with sharia law” have joined forces with leftists—including Obama himself—to impose a shared “totalitarian, collectivist” vision. Which Muslims? McCarthy hints that the real problem is Islam itself but that for reasons of political correctness it is wiser to stick to the term “Islamist”—a distinction that loses some of its force given his estimation that two-thirds of Muslims are Islamists. (Indeed, he applies the term to some, like Edward Said, who were not Muslims at all.)

The bulk of the Muslim population, then, aims to impose sharia over every aspect of American life. How will they do this? Through violence, if need be—but McCarthy is keen to note that Islamists are above all master dissimulators who will seek to impose sharia through legal means if they can (“grand-jihad-by-sabotage,” he calls it). This means that even peaceful attempts to follow Islam through strictly private means (for instance, through sharia-compliant finance) are simply precursors to a takeover of the overall system. Muslims who live within religious or ethnic enclaves are not merely trying to remain within a familiar community or preserve shared values; rather, they are presented as deviously following the “voluntary apartheid” strategy of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood—the group whose “global tentacles” extend into nearly every Muslim-American civil society organization. It is too obvious to be worth belaboring that no one would dream of applying a similar logic to Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christian homeschoolers.

At times, McCarthy speaks the language of religious tolerance, arguing simply that Islam should not have a “sacrosanct status” denied to other religions. Yet it becomes increasingly clear that he is in fact arguing for special targeting and discriminatory measures against Islam, and he eventually concedes that he believes it is wrong to place Judaism and Christianity “on a par with an inherently discriminatory, supremacist doctrine.” As a result, “foreign Muslims should not be permitted to reside in America unless they can demonstrate their acceptance of American constitutional principles.” (But how, given the Muslim propensity for dissimulation, can we be sure that their professions of loyalty are genuine?)

The Islamist threat to the United States, McCarthy further argues, would not be so dire if it weren’t for their alliance with the leftists who “dominate policy circles, the academy, and the media.” The most important of these, of course, is Obama himself. Obama “publicly professes” to be a Christian, and McCarthy generously allows that there is no reason to doubt him—although he goes on to include two full chapters on Obama’s Muslim roots—before asserting that the “faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism.” This distinction ultimately matters little, however, for the Marxism of Obama and the rest of the American elite coalesces in key respects with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its American minions.

The overall tone and content of McCarthy’s polemic will be familiar to students of 1850s Know-Nothing anti-Catholicism or 1950s anti-Communism—or, for that matter, late-19th-century European anti-Semitism. It is tempting to dismiss him as a crackpot, and on an obvious level he is one. But his speculations and those of his fellows are far from irrelevant to the political moment. They are not being published in anonymous blog comments sections, but in widely publicized and bestselling books. More to the point, they have already made a notable impact on American political discourse.

The mosque furor is only the most recent and revealing demonstration of the anti-jihadists’ political influence; from the beginning of the controversy, McCarthy and his allies have dictated the terms of debate on the right. In his July 28 statement attacking the Islamic center, Newt Gingrich cited The Grand Jihad and framed the controversy in McCarthy’s terms of Western civilization under siege from creeping sharia. More recently, the American Family Association—a leading fundamentalist Christian group—cited the book to argue that no more mosques should be built anywhere in the United States because “each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.” A campaign spearheaded by Pamela Geller, the right-wing blogger who was previously most notorious for publishing a lengthy piece alleging that Obama is the illegitimate child of Malcolm X, will place ads on New York City buses opposing the Islamic center. On September 11, she and Gingrich will lead a major rally against the center that will also feature Wilders, the Islamophobic Dutch politician. What was once a lunatic fringe now appears to be running the show, aided and abetted by mainstream figures like Gingrich.

It is quite possible that the next Republican president will also be a party to what can justly be called the new McCarthyism; for that reason alone, McCarthy and his allies deserve our attention. But even more important is the impact of this steady stream of anti-Muslim vitriol on the popular consciousness. Cynical politicians like Gingrich may know that all the talk of the Islamic center as a “9/11 victory monument” and of ordinary Muslims as stealth sharia operatives is mere agitprop designed to win votes in an election year, but ordinary citizens may take them at their word and act accordingly.

While activists like Pam Geller have led the anti-mosque campaign and the broader demonization of Muslims that has accompanied it, leaders like Abe Foxman have acquiesced in it. In doing so they risk providing an ugly and ironic illustration of the extent of Jewish assimilation in 21st-century America. We know that Jews can grow up to be senators and Supreme Court justices. Let’s not also discover that they can grow up to incite a pogrom.

Daniel Luban is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago.

Great blog from Matthew Yglesias at ThinkProgress. He also links to Inconnu’s piece on Taqiyyah.

Obama’s Porkilicious Taqiyya

by Matthew Yglesias

Steve M at No More Mr Nice Blog falls for the White House spin hook, line, and sinker:

Anyone remember when candidate Barack Obama was getting grief for going to Philadelphia and sampling expensive Spanish ham? Doesn’t sound like something a secret Muslim would eat — nor is the honey-baked ham the Obamas served along with the turkey last Thanksgiving. The half-smoke he got at Ben’s Chili Bowl a couple of weeks before Inauguration Day is a sausage that’s half-pork, half-beef. Oh, and the beer at that beer summit didn’t quite comport with the teachings of the Koran, did it? But all that was just weaving a web of deceit, right?

I’ll admit that for a long time my own views were along these lines. After all, the very first time I met State Senator (and US Senate candidate) Barack Obama we were at a hotel in Boston (I believe it was the Westin Copley Place) on line at a breakfast buffet fighting for the tongs to grab some bacon. But then I learned all about taqiyya which proves that counter-evidence to the “secret Muslim” thesis only demonstrates how far the conspiracy goes.

Zia Ulahaq

Osman Adnan is a Muslim-American veteran. He is for the mosque near Ground Zero. Is he an Islamic supremacist?  Here’ a great piece by Salon.com:

A loyal Muslim American laments the mosque mess

I am a lifelong resident of Middletown, N.J., the town that lost more victims per capita on 9/11 than anyplace in the state, and the second hardest hit city after New York. Almost 50 of our neighbors died that day, in a town of 60,000. Most of those who died worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. Although I was only 18, I was an enlisted medic with the New Jersey National Guard on that day, and I wound up on many Homeland Security missions in my four-year stint after the attack. My older brother commissioned as a U.S. Army officer after Sept. 11, and was awarded a Purple Heart during his service in Iraq. To this day he has shrapnel lodged in his body from the IED that blew up his convoy.

My brother and I are also Muslim Americans, born in the United States, of Pakistani heritage.

In our town, the wounds of 9/11 haven’t healed. Just this last July 4, I sat with a longtime friend as he cried about a mutual friend who died that day. With tears in his eyes, he thanked me and my brother for our service to our country. Now that we have returned home to New Jersey, my brother and I are sad to see that some of our fellow Americans would like to deprive us of our rights to pray for our country and our loved ones at the proposed Muslim Cultural Center near ground zero. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich even said that building a mosque in that area would be analogous to having a Nazi sign next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Maybe Gingrich should visit Middletown and get a reality check. I do not remember anyone chasing me out of a funeral for one of the 9/11 victims because they were offended by my being a Muslim. In Middletown, we grieved the people we lost together, as a community.

Our town is close-knit, and many of my childhood friends still reside here. I attended public school in Middletown from kindergarten through high school.  I went to grammar school birthday parties, Little League games, bar mitzvahs, proms and now weddings with the same large yet close group of friends. My first cousins are Jewish, as is my older brother’s fiancée. Another first cousin’s last name is Plumb and he is half Irish. My older brother graduated from the local Catholic high school. One of his classmates died on 9/11. He’d been born on the 4th of July; in fact, he’s the same person our friend wept remembering on this past Independence Day. A close high school friend’s father also died in the attacks. I see her from time to time, and she is one of the most remarkable people I know, carrying on with her life the way she does. I still see the pain of family members and those who lost loved ones, or who escaped from the vicinity of the World Trade Center.

In the direct aftermath of the attacks, friends and neighbors checked up on my family, not because they were suspicious, but because they wanted to make sure we were OK. When I am introduced at family or Christmas parties I never hear a bigoted remark. You could always tell how proud my friends and their parents were of me, “This is Osman, he is in the service.”

In Middletown, I belong. But beyond Middletown, it seems as though some people can’t even conceive of my existence: a Muslim American who is a patriot, who served his country, who cherishes its ideals. I am also aware of the low public perception of the United States in many Muslim countries, including Pakistan. After I graduated from law school, I decided to work as an American, building a school on the Pakistani side of Kashmir, an area where terrorists roam freely. As I got on the plane to fly to Islamabad, my mother told me, “Show them what an American is.” Carrying an American flag in my backpack and traveling dangerous roads and mountains, I helped establish a school for Afghan war refugees.

I remember teaching a young girl how to read; she was 11 years old and had never been to school before. Pulling out the American flag from my backpack, I wanted to make sure she knew Middletown, and America, meant her no harm. Later, Pakistan’s national broadcast channel came to interview me. During the interview I told them that American aid was coming to build more of these schools, thanks to the Kerry-Lugar aid bill, passed just prior to my arrival in the area, which funded school construction in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Schools like this keep our troops safe in Afghanistan by limiting the recruiting ability of the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan, as local people begin to see that Americans have a humanitarian mission, they are not just invaders.

I see the impulse that drove me to work as an American in Kashmir in the desire to build the Park51 Community Center. Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and his partners want to combat Muslim extremism, terrorism and anti-Americanism, showing that America’s tradition of religious tolerance extends to Muslims, and that Muslims can live in peace with neighbors of every religion, as well. Imam Rauf, a Sufi, is no “extremist”; he advised the State Department under the past Bush administration, and worked with the FBI after 9/11. Every religion has its own group of fanatics, and extremism is not confined to Islam. New York Rep. Peter King, a Park51 opponent, not too long ago overtly supported efforts to raise money to buy weapons for the Irish Republican Army, which was considered a terrorist organization. We can take strange sections out of every religion’s holy books, if we want to paint the worst picture of that particular group.

I believe Rauf’s goal with Park51 is in harmony with the goals of our nation’s founders. George Washington himself once wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island, reassuring them of our nation’s religious tolerance. “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” I flew halfway around the world to promote that great vision, and my brother came close to giving his life to protect it.

George Washington also reminded us to guard against the “imposters of pretended patriotism.” Mr. Gingrich and Mrs. Palin: Please do not confuse the public and slander all Muslim-Americans as being responsible for 9/11. Please don’t tell my shrapnel-scarred war hero brother that he is no different than the 9/11 hijackers. Sadly, you represent the very spirit of intolerance you attack in others.

Two takes on the issues revolving on Islamic cultural center that has been dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque.” One is a very serious toned and heart felt monologue from Keith Olbermann,

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZpT2Muxoo0&feature=player_embedded 350 300]

The other is a satirical and hard hitting segment of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show called “Mosque-erade,”

A different New York Muslim story.

Once in a while we like to showcase positive stories that reflect the goodness in people and efforts to contribute to bettering society.

Yusuf Ramelize is a devout Muslim who is taking the initiative to make a difference for homeless people.

Graphic designer will be ‘Homeless for one Week’ in Union Square Park to raise money, awareness

by Irving Dejohn

A Queens man is hoping to turn sleeping on the streets into big bucks for the homeless.

Yusef Ramelize, a 33-year-old graphic designer, will leave his Ozone Park apartment Sunday and take up residence in Union Square Park. He won’t shower and he won’t have shelter during his “Homeless for One Week” project.

“My reasoning for doing this is to inspire people to make sacrifices within their own lives,” Ramelize said of his project, now in its second year.

He raised $3,635 in March 2009 and donated it to the Coalition for the Homeless. This year’s beneficiary will be the Food Bank of New York.

Ramelize will hand out flyers and keep a videotaped diary of his experiences in order to help elicit donations on his website, homelessforoneweek.com.

“It’s really about me pushing myself to see how much of a sacrifice I’m willing to make every year to get the word out,” Ramelize said.

Ramelize chose Union Square to pay homage to his biggest inspiration, Mohandas Gandhi, who is immortalized with a statue on the west side of the park.

“That’s one of the reasons I did it here,” Ramelize admits. “He wanted to bring peace around him, and he was willing to sacrifice his life.”

As if braving the elements for seven days wasn’t enough, the slender Ramelize will also be fasting from sunrise to sunset for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

His employer, Informa, gave him the week off without forcing him to dip into his vacation time – something Ramelize said he’s grateful for. His boss, Nora Pastenkos, said it was a “no-brainer” to allow him to take the time to pursue his cause.

“Many people just walk by the homeless. He’s one of those unique people who doesn’t just walk by – he tries to make a difference,” Pastenkos said.

Justin Elliot has a good piece on Salon.com, but he would have benefited from our pieces, Pamela Geller: The Looniest Blogger Ever and SIOA is an anti-Muslim Hate Group.

How the “ground zero mosque” fear mongering began

by Justin Elliot

A group of progressive Muslim-Americans plans to build an Islamic community center two and a half blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan. They have had a mosque in the same neighborhood for many years. There’s another mosque two blocks away from the site. City officials support the project. Muslims have been praying at the Pentagon, the other building hit on Sept. 11, for many years.

In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast?

In a story last week, the New York Times, which framed the project in a largely positive, noncontroversial light last December, argued that it was cursed from the start by “public relations missteps.” But this isn’t accurate. To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Here’s a timeline of how it all happened:

• Dec. 8, 2009: The Times publishes a lengthy front-page look at the Cordoba project. “We want to push back against the extremists,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer, is quoted as saying. Two Jewish leaders and two city officials, including the mayor’s office, say they support the idea, as does the mother of a man killed on 9/11. An FBI spokesman says the imam has worked with the bureau. Besides a few third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site, no one much notices the Times story.
• Dec. 21, 2009: Conservative media personality Laura Ingraham interviews Abdul Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, while guest-hosting “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox. In hindsight, the segment is remarkable for its cordiality. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” Ingraham says of the Cordoba project, adding at the end of the interview, “I like what you’re trying to do.”
• (This segment also includes onscreen the first use that we’ve seen of the misnomer “ground zero mosque.”) After the segment — and despite the front-page Times story — there were no news articles on the mosque for five and a half months, according to a search of the Nexis newspaper archive.
• May 6, 2010: After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father. Seriously.)
• May 7, 2010: Geller’s group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launches “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque!” (SIOA ‘s associate director is Robert Spencer, who makes his living writing and speaking about the evils of Islam.) Geller posts the names and contact information for the mayor and members of the community board, encouraging people to write. The board chair later reports getting “hundreds and hundreds” of calls and e-mails from around the world.
• May 8, 2010: Geller announces SIOA’s first protest against what she calls the “911 monster mosque” for May 29. She and Spencer and several other members of the professional anti-Islam industry will attend. (She also says that the protest will mark the dark day of “May 29, 1453, [when] the Ottoman forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses against the Muslim siege of Constantinople.” The outrage-peddling New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser argues in a note at the end of her column a couple of days later that “there are better places to put a mosque.”
• May 13, 2010: Peyser follows up with an entire column devoted to “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” This is a significant moment in the development of the “ground zero mosque” narrative: It’s the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months. Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a “human-rights group.” Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House’s opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011.

If you listened to Pamela and company who would’ve thought there were New Yorkers for the mosque and cultural center?

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Barack Obama commented on the Cordoba Center that will be near Ground Zero, reaffirming freedom of religion as an essential American value.

Islamophobes were furious about this. For many of them this probably confirmed their belief that Obama is a Muslim.

Robert Spencer was on record writing,

Obama is in effect saying that you can build a triumphal mosque marking Islam’s superiority and victory — which is how the Ground Zero mosque will be viewed in the Islamic world — and you can lie about your funding, and lie about your commitment to interreligious dialogue and harmony, and refuse to denounce jihad terrorists, and all that is just fine with him.

Pamela Geller had this to say through an SIOA news release,

Obama “has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists and told the ummah (at an Iftar dinner on the third night of Ramadan) that he believes in and supports what will be understood in the Islamic world as a triumphal mosque on a site of Islamic conquest.”

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Obama throws support behind controversial Islamic Center

Washington (CNN) — President Obama threw his support behind a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center and mosque near New York’s ground zero, saying Friday that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

“That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances,” Obama said at a White House Iftar dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The president’s remarks drew praise from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who announced his support for the Islamic center last week.

Bloomberg compared Obama’s speech to a letter President George Washington wrote in support of a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. “President Obama’s words tonight evoked President Washington’s own august reminder that ‘all possess alike liberty,’ ” Bloomberg said in a statement.

“I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight,” he said.

To learn more about the “ground zero” mosque, see CNN’s Belief Blog

Critics of the proposed Islamic center quickly denounced Obama’s remarks. “President Obama is wrong,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero. Unfortunately, the President caved into political correctness.”

“While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much,” King said in a statement. “The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero.”

What do you think about this issue? Tell us on video

Obama, who said he was speaking both as a citizen and as president, invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which critics of the Islamic center cite as the main reason for preventing its construction.

“We must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower Manhattan,” Obama said, according to his prepared remarks. “The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.”

“The pain and suffering experienced by those who lost loved ones is unimaginable,” he continued. “So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.”

But Obama said one “reason that we will win this fight” against terrorism is “our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect to those who are different from us — a way of life that stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that September morning, and who continue to plot against us today.”

Repeatedly invoking the nation’s founders and examples of religious tolerance from American history, the president argued that national ideals and the Constitution demanded that the project proceed.

He noted that Thomas Jefferson hosted the the first Iftar dinner at the White House more than 200 years ago and said that the country had previously seen “controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches.”

“But time and again,” he said, “the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues.”

“This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” Obama said. “The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”

The proposed Islamic center has provoked vocal opposition from some families of 9/11 victims and other groups. Nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the plan, according to CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Wednesday.

“Obama came out for the Islamic supremacist mosque at the hallowed ground of 911 attack,” Pamela Geller, a leading foe of the Islamic center, wrote on her blog Friday night. “He has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists.”

Muslim Americans, meanwhile, applauded the speech. “It was pitch perfect and it was cut and dry,” said Eboo Patel, executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core and a Muslim adviser to the White House on faith issues. “He said that our Founding Fathers built a nation on religious freedom where people from different faiths can pray and thrive and that is that.”

Some Muslims said they were surprised to hear the president weigh in on the controversy.

“It’s such a hot potato and he’s already got so much on his plate and people jumping on him for any hint of an Islamic connection,” said Akbar Ahmed, an American University professor who attended Friday’s White House dinner. “But he plunged in and took a very bold position.”

The Islamic center’s leaders say they plan to build the $100 million, 13-story facility called Cordoba House three blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks. The developer, Sharif El-Gamal, describes the project as an “Islamic community center” that will include a 500-seat performing arts center, a lecture hall, a swimming pool, a gym, a culinary school, a restaurant and a prayer space for Muslims.

On Wednesday, the project’s developers declined an offer by New York Gov. David Paterson to relocate the project to a state-owned site.

Earlier this month, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously denied landmark status for the building where the proposed Islamic center would stand, allowing the project to move forward.

Hilarious Jon Stewart once again, this time taking on the growing anti-Muslim sentiment across the nation.

CNN host returns ADL award over group’s opposition to Ground Zero mosque

(Hat tip: Mondoweiss)

Columnist and TV host Fareed Zakaria has returned a First Amendment award to the Anti-Defamation League in protest of the organization’s opposition to a proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Zakaria, a Washington Post columnist and CNN host, has been the editor of Newsweek International, a journal with a circulation of 24 million, for almost a decade. He published a blog on Friday publicly announcing that he had returned the ADL’s Hubert H. Humphrey Freedoms Prize.

“I was thrilled to get the award from an organization that I had long admired. But I cannot in good conscience keep it anymore. I have returned both the handsome plaque and the $10,000 honorarium that came with it. I urge the ADL to reverse its decision. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain a reputation.”

The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement Friday that it was saddened and stunned by Zakaria’s decision to return the prize they awarded him in 2005. ADL National Director Abe Foxman said he hoped that Mr. Zakaria “will come to see that ADL acted appropriately” and would reclaim the award bestowed upon him.

The ADL, a U.S. Jewish civil rights group, has said that the location of the planned mosque is counterproductive to the healing process of the families of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

I haven’t been the biggest fan of Michael Bloomberg, but I have to commend him for his stance on the Park 51 Cordoba Center and Mosque. It wasn’t easy.

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Michael Bloomberg delivers stirring defense of mosque

by Justin Elliot

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has emerged as the unlikely but passionate defender of the planned Muslim community center near ground zero, today traveled to Governors Island off the tip of Lower Manhattan to deliver a stirring plea for sanity in what he called “[as] important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes.”

The Daily News’ Adam Lisberg reports that Bloomberg choked up at one point as he delivered the speech surrounded by religious leaders of different faiths, with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

Rather than attack the bigotry of the opponents of the so-called “ground zero mosque,” Bloomberg made several positive arguments for building the center. He traced the struggle for religious freedom in New York and affirmed the rights of citizens to do as they please with their private property:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

It’s worth noting that three Jewish leaders  — Rabbi Bob Kaplan from the Jewish Community Council, Rabbi Irwin Kula from the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and Cara Berkowitz from the UJA Federation — were present with Bloomberg during the speech, despite the Anti-Defamation League’s opposition to the project. Below is the full text. Video of the speech is here.

“We’ve come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that more than 250 years later would greet millions of immigrants in this harbor. And we come here to state as strongly as ever, this is the freest city in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.

“Our doors are open to everyone. Everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it’s sustained by immigrants — by people from more than 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here or you came here yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here — in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance — was hard-won over many years.

“In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

“This morning, the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted to extend — not to extend — landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building.

“The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

“For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.

“On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ (Bloomberg’s voice cracks here a little as he gets choked up.) ‘What beliefs do you hold?’

“The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

“Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation, and in fact their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. But doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our city even closer together, and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any ways consistent with Islam.

“Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith. And they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for better, the better part of a year, as is their right. The local community board in lower Manhattan voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. And if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city.

“Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure, and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest.”

Do Muslims have equal rights?

By John Esposito

In recent weeks, Republican politics and attempts across America to block the building of mosques have underscored the impact of Islamophobia in American society.

Republican candidates have jumped on a bandwagon, appealing to racist attitudes towards Islam and Muslims as a political wedge to gain electoral votes in the coming November elections. Bogus charges in 2008 that Barack Obama was a Muslim, as if that should discredit him, is an example of an Islamophobia which is still being used as a political strategy today. This form of political hate speech was addressed by Colin Powell in his endorsement of Obama when he asked:

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? … I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ”He’s a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, desperately seeking to recapture his national Republican leader role, tried this past week to create a bizarre national threat about the implementation of Islamic law, shariah, that doesn’t even exist: “One of the things that I am going to suggest today is a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider sharia as a replacement for American law. Period.” Republican Rex Duncan of Oklahoma followed suit, warning there is a “war for the survival of America,” to keep the sharia from creeping into the American court system. In California, a Tea Party Rally in protest of an Islamic Center in Temecula, encouraged protestors to bring their dogs because Muslims hate Jews, Christians, women, and dogs.

Republican politicizing of Islam and Muslims has deep roots from positions taken by their major presidential candidates (John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Guiliani) to unfounded accusations by members of Congress. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican candidate John McCain’s desire to credential himself with the Christian Right, whose votes, he aggressively sought, led him to embrace pastors of megachurches and televangelists with highly divisive views.

McCain received endorsements from Ron Parsley and John Hagee, prominent Christian Zionists. Parsley in his 2005 book Silent No More to warning of a ”war between Islam and Christian civilization.” Parsley decries the ”spiritual desperation” of America’s civil libertarians who advocate the separation of church and state, and identifies Islam as an ”anti-Christ religion” predicated on ”deception.” Muhammad, he writes, ”received revelations from demons and not from the true God.” Parsley says, ”The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. ”Jihad has come to America. If we lose the war to Islamic fascism, it will change the world as we know it. . . . It’s here. . . . They are waiting to respond as terrorist cells against this nation. It is a war between the culture of death and the culture of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” . . . Radical sects, which include about 200 million Islamics, believe they have a command from God to kill Christians and Jews, he said. . . . ”Our crisis is that half of America doesn’t know the war has started,” Hagee said. ”This is a religious war.”

When informed of Hagee’s extreme statements about Islam, McCain initially refused to disassociate himself from this pastor. It was only after the revelation of Hagee’s past anti-Catholic comments, in which he had argued that Adolf Hitler merely built on the work of the ”Roman Church,” which he called ”the Great Whore of Babylon,” that McCain finally severed his ties.

Congresswoman Sue Myrick from NC and Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia charged in an abortive campaign that the American Muslim organization CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) fostered the secret infiltration of Muslim student interns into key national security committees on Capitol Hill.

American Muslims: Myths & Realities

The taint of foreignness and terrorism continues to brushstroke American Muslim as “the other.” But what do major Gallup and Pew polls reveal about American Muslims? They are one of the most diverse communities in the world, representing 68 different countries as well as indigenous African Americans and converts. Over the past few decades, the vast majority of American Muslims have become economically and increasingly politically integrated into mainstream American society. Muslims represent men and women spanning the socioeconomic spectrum: professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and educators), corporate executives, small business owners, or blue-collar workers and laborers. In fact, 70 percent have a job (paid or unpaid) compared to 64 percent of Americans overall. … Muslim women report monthly household incomes more nearly equal to men’s, compared with women and men in other faith groups.

Education is a priority for many Muslims, who, after Jews, are the most educated religious community surveyed in the United States. Forty percent of Muslims have a college degree or more, compared to 29 percent of Americans overall; 31 percent are full-time students as compared to 10 percent in the general population. (See The Future of Islam, pp. 14-15)

Despite their integration as American citizens, their rights of religious freedom and civil liberties are often threatened. Today, opposition to mosque construction, in locations from NYC and Staten Island to Tennessee and California, has become not just a local but a national political issue. Plans to build an Islamic Center near the World Trade Center site have been transformed into a national referendum polarizing political and religious leaders and the media. Right-wing political commentators, politicians, hard-line Christian ministers, bloggers and some families of 9/11 victims have charged that building this Islamic Center is insensitive to 9/11 families (overlooking the fact that innocent Muslims who worked in the WTC were also victims). They characterize this cultural center as a “monument to terrorism.”

Islamophobia threatens the fabric of our American way of life

Efforts to demonize Islam and Muslims have become a political football that now threatens the first amendment rights and freedoms not only of Muslims, but indeed of all Americans. Islamophobia is fast becoming what anti-Semitism is for Judaism and Jews, rooted in hostility and intolerance towards religious and cultural beliefs and a religious or racial group.

Despite the persistent distinction by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama between the acts of terrorists and the faith of the vast majority of Muslims, what we are witnessing today is the tip of an iceberg formed post 9/11. Far right political and religious leaders and media commentators whose hate speech, like Ann Coulter’s comment:

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” would never appear in mainstream broadcast or print media about Jews, Christians and other established ethnic and racial groups in America.

The barrage of similar tirades, like the ones below, create an atmosphere of fear and hostility that is totally unfounded, given what we know about mainstream Muslims in America.

Michael Savage, host of the The Savage Nation, warned: “I tell you right now – the largest percentage of Americans would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on a major Arab capital. They don’t even care which one … I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity. It’s the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.”

Rush Limbaugh, reacting to criticism of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, commented, “They’re the ones who are sick… They’re the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman.”

Leading figures in the Christian Right were not to be outdone. Franklin Graham stated, “The God of Islam is not the same God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and a very wicked religion.” On Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Pat Robertson warned, “This man [Muhammad] was an absolute wild-eyed fanatic. He was a robber and a brigand. And to say that these terrorists distort Islam, they’re carrying out Islam…I mean, this man was a killer. And to think that this is a peaceful religion is fraudulent.”
Impact and Implications of Islamophobia

Across America, Islamophobic hate speech and political grandstanding have painted all Muslims negatively, creating deep negative impressions among those who do not know Muslims personally. Major polling by Gallup and PEW shows that significant numbers of respondents question the loyalty of Muslim citizens and would approve policies that profile Muslims or require them to carry special identity cards. Hate speech has precipitated violent crimes against Muslims, Sikhs and other minorities of Asian and Middle Eastern descent who “look Muslim.” It has led to indiscriminate accusations against mainstream Muslim institutions (mosques, civil rights groups, political action committees, charities). Concerns for domestic security have unfortunately led to the abuse of anti-terrorism legislation, indiscriminate arrests and imprisonments of Muslims that compromise all of our civil liberties. The net result is a growing climate of suspicion and distrust.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The social cancer of Islamophobia must be recognized as unacceptable as anti-Semitism. It is a threat to the very fabric of our democratic pluralistic way of life, one that tests the mettle of our democratic principles and values. Political and religious leaders, commentators and experts must do more to counter hate speech; they must lead in safeguarding and strengthening religious pluralism and mutual respect. They must walk the fine line between distinguishing the faith of mainstream Muslims from the violence terrorists justify in the name of Islam. Blurring this distinction plays into the hands of preachers of hate (Muslim and non-Muslim, religious and political) whose rhetoric incites and demonizes, alienates and marginalizes and leads to the adoption of domestic and policies that undermine the civil liberties of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Brad Burston is one of my favorite writers at Haaretz. His articles are always insightful, analytical and the commentary always makes you think.

In this article he writes about the ADL’s comments on the Cordoba Center as well as his opinions in general about boycotts.

A Special Place in Hell / Rethinking Israel boycotts, the ADL and a N.Y. mosque

by Brad Burston

In theory, the first purpose of boycotts is to cause people to think. To discover or reconsider an issue.

In theory, the first purpose of the Anti-Defamation League is the same. To cause people to discover, to rethink, to become aware of and combat bigotry, within themselves as well as in others.

This week a boycott campaign caused me to rethink boycotts against Israel. And a campaign by the Anti-Defamation League caused me to rethink the Anti-Defamation League.

The boycott was the decision by the Olympia, Washington Food Co-op, to remove Israeli products from the shelves of its two stores.

In a move as courageous as it was overdue, the co-op also featured and published online a pamphlet strongly opposing manifestations of anti-Semitism in leftist movements.

“Unfortunately,” the co-op’s blog observed, “anti-Semitic statements have abounded in a lot of the ‘support’ that the co-op has received in regard to the Israeli-products’ boycott.”

	A protester calling for a boycott of Israel.
	Photo by: AP

The Olympia Food Co-op has taken an important step in distinguishing between opposition to the policies of Israel on the one hand, and anti-Jewish hatred on the other.

It has also worked to identify and distance Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry from the wider discussion of boycotts and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Which makes it all the more curious that when longtime ADL National Director Abraham Foxman chose to publicly oppose the construction of a mosque and Muslim cultural center near the Ground Zero site, his rationale was troubling, to say the least:

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” Foxman, himself a survivor, told The New York Times.

“Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, ‘Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.’”

There is something at once refreshing and destructive about Foxman’s words. Refreshing, in the sense that this sounds like unfiltered honesty. Destructive, in the sense that this is precisely the rationale under which many on the left have justified or excused non-progressive, at times overtly bigoted, statements and actions by militant Palestinians.

It is high time to strike bigotry of all forms – by both sides – from the debate over the Mideast conflict.

It is time, as well, for the Jewish community as a whole to relate differently to those in their midst who have a serious difference of opinion with Israel.

In this regard, it is time for the Jewish community to engage those who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, rather than effectively excommunicating them.

Perhaps what is most profoundly needed is for those who care about the Mideast equation to genuinely say what they think, and to abandon the time-honored codes in which each side attacks the other.

Allow me to begin.

I fully recognize as valid the opinions of those who oppose the idea of a specifically Jewish state. I would only ask that they be honest and open about it.

If you think a Jewish state is a bad idea, an institution that should be disbanded, I believe that it is the honest thing – honest to yourself, before all else – to come out and say so.

As a supporter of the idea of a truly democratic Jewish state alongside an independent and sovereign Palestinian state, what I cannot accept is the idea that formally Muslim states are acceptable, where a Jewish state is not.

In the past I have been vociferous in opposing boycotts. I now realize that it was not the boycott per se that cause me rage, but the tolerance for a double standard that said “While others – including our own United States – commit war crimes, engage in oppression, and have a long history of subjugating, disenfranchising and dehumanizing minorities, Israel will be our sole target.”

Something else angered me as well – not the fact that some of the people who advocated boycotting Israel were actually against the idea of having a state of Israel, but the fact that for tactical reasons, they refused to come out and say so.

In general, I oppose boycotts as a tactic, first because I oppose collective punishment of all kinds, whether practiced by Israel against Gazans, or by progressives against Israelis as a whole. I also believe that boycotts against Israel tend to be self-defeating.

Having said that, I recognize that nearly everyone tends to boycott those they do not care for, while making efforts to support those whom they do. Moreover, some of those who most strongly oppose the BDS movement continually launch boycotts of their own.

I want to thank the Olympia Food Co-op Israel boycott. Something extremely valuable is happening there. Something truly radical. An awareness that people who are truly in favor of social justice must take a stand against bigotry, no matter the target.

The mayor of New York has set an example in this regard, saying of the mosque and its critics, “What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?”

It’s a lesson that Abraham Foxman needs to relearn.

An old, but still interesting and relevant story out of the UK.

The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim

It’s infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie.

A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there’s a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There’s a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew – Ivrit – the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.

But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school’s catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.

At the prize morning Carol Cooper, the RE teacher, says: “Boker tov,” (Ivrit for “Good morning”).

“Good morning Mrs Cooper,” the children chant in reply. The entire school, Muslims, Jews, plus the handful of Christians and Sikhs then say the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer, all together.

The Year Four violin club (five Muslims, two Jews) play “Little Bird, I Have Heard”. Just as many prizes are being distributed to Hussains and Hassans and Shabinas as there are to Sauls and Rebeccas and Ruths. In fact, if anything, the Muslim children have beaten the Jewish ones. Thus does the Elsie Davis Prize for Progress go to a beaming little lad called Walid, the religious studies prize to a boy called Imran wearing a kipah and the progress prizes for Hebrew, to a boy called Habib and a girl called Alia.

Times being as they are, King David doesn’t advertise its presence in a city where its pioneering multiculturalism could raise all kinds of unwelcome attention. There’s a discreet signboard outside that reveals little about the school’s unique nature. There are watchful video cameras high up on the walls, plus two electronic gates to pass through. Sadly, it is, to a significant extent, says Laurence Sharman, the (Christian) chairman of the PTA, “an undercover school”.

The Muslim parents, however, are only too keen to talk in the playground about what might be seen by some in their communities as a controversial schooling decision.

“We actually bought a flat in the catchment area for the children to come here,” says Nahid Shafiq, the mother of Zainah, four, and Hamza, nine, and wife of Mohammed, a taxi driver. “We were attracted by the high moral values of the school, and that’s what we wanted our kids to have. None of us has any problem with it being a Jewish school. Why on earth should we? Our similarities as religions and cultures are far greater and more important than our differences. It’s not even an issue.

“At the mosque, occasionally, people ask why we send the children here, but there is no antagonism whatsoever, and neither is there from anyone in our family. In fact, it was a big family decision to try and get them into King David. This is the real world. This is the way real people do things in the real world. All the violence and prejudice and problems – that’s not real, that’s just what you see on the news.”

Fawzia Ismail (the mother of Aly-Raza, nine, and Aliah, six) is equally positive. “My nephew came here and my brother showed me the school, so it’s a bit of a family tradition now. We’re very, very pleased with the school. It’s so friendly. All the kids mix and go to one another’s parties and are in and out of each other’s houses. They teach a bit about Israel, but we don’t have any problem with that. There are such similarities between our people and our societies.”

Irum Rashid (mother of Hanan, nine, and Maryam, four) says that a lot of people in Small Heath are considering moving to Moseley because of King David. “It’s a very happy school, the behaviour is fantastic, the food is great – because it’s kosher – and so are the SATs results.”

But what about learning Hebrew and the Jewish prayers? “I think it’s great. The more knowledge, the more understanding,” says one of the mothers. “They learn all they need about Islam at mosque school. Actually, the kids often sing Hebrew songs in the bath, which is a bit confusing because we speak Gujarati at home, but I think it’s great.”

The Jewish parents and teachers I speak to are just as enthusiastic. “You know, in these difficult times in the world, I think we show how things should be done. It’s really a bit of a beacon,” says one teacher, whose three children all went to King David and ended up at Oxford University.

Parent Trevor Aremband is from South Africa. “In Johannesburg, we have Jewish schools, but they’re 100 per cent Jewish, so we were a bit shocked when we first came here. But the integration works so well. It’s clearly the way to go in today’s world. My son is eight and has loads of Muslim friends.”

The most important thing, I am told repeatedly, is that the cross-cultural friendships forged at King David last a lifetime. I hear a conversation about how a Rebecca is going to fly over from the States for a Fatima’s wedding. I am told about a pair of lads, one Jewish, one Muslim, who became friends the day they started in the nursery, went to senior school together as well as to university and are now living close to one another with their wives and families and are currently on holiday together.

King David was not designed to be such a beacon of inter-faith cooperation and friendship. Founded in 1865 as The Hebrew School, it was 100 per cent Jewish until the late 1950s.

Then two things began to happen: there was a growth in the Muslim population in middle-income areas such as Moseley, and a shrinking of Britain’s Jewish community, especially outside the main centres of London and Manchester. Muslim children started coming to the school in the early 1960s, but the current position, in which they are in the majority (Jewish children comprise 35 per cent, Muslims 50 per cent, Christians, Sikhs and other, 15 per cent) is very new.

“One of the things that surprises people about this school,” says Langford, “is that it’s not an especially privileged intake. Half of our kids have English as an additional language. But the amazing thing is how well it all works. We have a new little boy here from China, whose only English a few weeks ago was to ask for the toilet. He now speaks English – and can say the Shema perfectly.

“If you gauge success, for instance, by racial incidents, which schools always have to report to the LEA, we have at the most one a term. And that can just mean some harsh words with a racial slant used in the playground. At multicultural inner city schools where I’ve taught, there will be far, far more than that, possibly one or more a week.”

In terms of SATs and Ofsted inspections, King David has also shone. It is rated as good – the second highest possible ranking – in all areas, and Ofsted made a special mention at the last inspection of the integration between children of different faiths and races. In the recent SATs results, the school also came in well above the national average in all subjects.

Steve Langford, a Warwick University economics graduate, is himself a bit of a paradox. He is Church of England on both parental sides and only became interested in Judaism when he worked in a Jewish summer camp in Massachusetts in his gap year. His interest paid off when he got a teaching job a King David. Now he is learning Ivrit at evening classes and goes to Israel for holidays.

The Rabbi of Birmingham’s Singers Hill Synagogue, one of the financial backers of King David, is proud of Steve Langford and of the school’s extraordinary interfaith record.

“King David School is amazing,” says Rabbi Tann. “The reason I think it works well is that racism is engendered entirely by adults. Children don’t have it within themselves. Their natural mode is to play happily with everyone. It’s only when adults say, ‘Don’t play with him, he’s black, or don’t have anything to do with him, he’s Muslim, that troubles begin.’

“We never have any racial or inter-faith problems at all. Not ever. In 20 years here, it’s simply never happened in any significant way. We teach that if you don’t like someone, you avoid them. Don’t play with them. Go to the other side of the playground. I believe that if more people followed the lead of King David School, we’d have a much more peaceful world.”

Newt Gingrich Joins Muslim-Baiting Movement

by Walid Zafar

Early this week, disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich warned that “a commitment to religious freedom and God-given rights is being replaced by a secular oppression…”  Just hours after those words appeared on Human Events, Gingrich issued a statement forcefully opposing the construction of a community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks from Ground Zero.

Gingrich’s affinity for religious freedom and his belief in God-given rights it would seem, doesn’t extend to Americans who are Muslim.  Such outright bigotry and blatant hypocrisy from Gingrich, an avid historian and former college professor, is even more repulsive when you consider his reasoning.

“There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York,” he writes, “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”  Gingrich, who has been railing against the so-called secular socialist machine for trying to take religion out of the public square, and who, like most conservatives, decries the influence of foreign law, wants the U.S. to apply the same standards on Muslims that Saudi Arabia applies to those who are not Muslim.

That’s rich.

As the Washington Monthly‘s Steve Benen, after noting that conservatives continually justify despicable acts of torture on the premise that other nations and non-state actors employ such tactics, points out, “We’re not supposed to lower ourselves to the levels of those we find offensive.”

Gingrich’s clarion call continues: “Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for ‘religious toleration’ are arrogantly dishonest.”  What makes them Islamists, apologists or even dishonest? Gingrich doesn’t say but if you ask him, he’ll likely tell you about the Katusha rockets that Hamas has fired into Sderot or how Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.  Anything and everything to take the subject away from the “religious freedom and God-given rights” to which American Muslims are entitled.

To understand Gingrich’s paranoia that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization,” one must delve deeply into the polarizing, overzealous and paranoid minds of professional Muslim-baiters and the politicians who depend on their support and cater to their illiberal demands.

Many of them are monomaniacs who have made it their life’s mission to defeat Islam and “expose” all Muslims as radical Islamofascists.  If one asks them for evidence to support their claim that no Muslim can be trusted, they will likely mention a purported plot by Muslim Brotherhood operatives to destroy America from within.  The Council on American Islamic Relations and their intern/spies are routinely placed at the epicenter of the evil conspiracy.

Among these folks, any and all Muslims who “refudiate” such insane theories — who denounce violence and terror, profess their loyalty to the American system, take part in the democratic process and who have assimilated into the American landscape — are cleverly employing taqiyya, which, as any Muslim-baiter would tell you, is religiously sanctioned deception.  The same was said about Jews decades ago and anti-Semites once evoked the specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism” the way that Muslim-baiters and politicians like Gingrich today warn of “Islamofascism.” But none of those awful facts really matter, even to a historian such as Gingrich, because facts have long been accused of being part of the secular-socialist machine.

Gingrich’s stand against the mosque project and his attempt to smear its backers as “Islamists” and apologists earns him his anti-Jihad bona fides, and with that, the support of an increasingly mistrustful and hateful electorate which lives off of tying American Muslims to every heinous act that occurs anywhere that remotely sounds Islamic.  In this world, if the media fails to make the connection, they are clearly part of the soft-jihad.

Here is the key: The connection rarely has to be solid.  In fact, the more specious the connection, the more the Muslim-baiter will be seen by others as a patriot and an enterprising investigative reporter.  For instance, the New York Times‘ Robert Wright highlights one smear that has been contrived to defame the man leading the effort to bring the project to fruition.  The imam behind the project is not to be trusted because conservatives say that “[his] wife has an uncle who used to be ‘a leader’ of a mosque that now has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical organization.”  If you can’t keep up with all of that nonsense, then you’re complacent about the Jihad.

Any and all statements against violence made by Muslims must always be placed in the right conservative context: scare quotes.  Gingrich does this masterfully.  That simple act in effect says that Muslims who preach peace are actually jihadists.

As Gingrich and his buddies believe, either you are with them or you are, through your dhimmitude, a proto-Jihadist.  No, you’re worse since you probably support a second genocide against Jews.  (Prominent Muslim-baiters have argued that Muslims instigated the Nazi holocaust!)  Now that you’ve learned all of these made up facts, you simply do not have an excuse to not fight! Wake up and oppose the “Ground Zero Mosque” the “Islamization of America” and prove to those who hate the freedom in America that those freedoms, as Newt argues, don’t actually apply to all Americans.

Cross-posted on PoliticalCorrection.org

A good piece from Jillian York in the Huffington Post.

Paranoid Politics: The Denial of Islamophobia

By Jillian York

Imagine a fairly widespread, fairly mainstream ethos in which politicians, pundits, and academics convened to denigrate practitioners of Christianity or Judaism. Imagine that these commentators picked apart the New or Old Testament to find its most heinous contents, then used those phrases to justify their hatred and distrust. Imagine a world in which this was utterly acceptable, even encouraged. Now turn on your television.

The debate over the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero and the more recent community mobilization against a Muslim group’s attempted purchase of a vacant convent in Staten Island are indicative of the unhealthy Islamophobia that has taken root in right-wing American politics. Far from being a fact-based movement, its leaders and thinkers propagate falsehoods and myths towards the discriminatory goal of silencing Muslims in America.

This type of race and religion-baiting politics is not at all new. The tactics and orientation of those opposing Muslim-American institutions bring to mind what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Hofstadter, writing in 1964, described the hallmarks of this style: “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

The idea that a vast Muslim conspiracy exists to take over the United States and Europe from within is simply ridiculous. Yet it serves as the grounds for their opposition to the freedom of American Muslims to practice their religion in their own communities, such as Staten Island.

The inherent suspiciousness of the anti-Islam movement is so rich that its participants are unable to reconcile the contradiction between their narrative of secretive Islamic terrorists pursuing “jihad” and the high-profile, publicly conciliatory moves such as the Cordoba Initiative’s efforts to purchase a building near Ground Zero and convert it into a public community center. In opposing both the secretive and the public display of Muslimness, they reveal that their actual goal is simply the silencing of Muslims in America. This is most clearly displayed in the way they claim to only target militant extremists, and then proceed to include the most mainstream and popular Muslim organizations in that category.

Within their narrative of a hateful religion bent on the destruction of the West, opposing any form of Islam in America comes out as justifiable. However, it closes them off to the actual practices and beliefs of the vast majority of Muslims in the United States and the world. They are intentionally ignorant because, as Hofstadter wrote, “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.” Though Hofstadter wrote of fears over Masonic and Jesuit conspiracies, his descriptions are easily applied to the anti-Islam movement.

It is ironic that in Staten Island so many Catholic parishioners sought to block the sale of an empty convent to the Muslim American Society (MAS) because they feared the spread of Islamic extremism, or what one group crudely calls “the Islamization of America.” They contend that MAS is the “public face” of the Muslim Brotherhood despite the fact that both organizations deny a link and none has been found by America’s now 900,000-strong intelligence community. Such flimsy evidence is common to the paranoid crowd.

A case about which Hofstadter wrote was the trend of anti-Catholicism in 19th century America, which took the form of heightened suspicion of Jesuits. It was in much the same manner as today’s suspicion of Muslims. Hofstadter cites the example of an 1855 Texas newspaper article, which read, “It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions.”

Such rhetoric is never entirely without evidence. Participants in the anti-Islam movement are often quick to point to the 9/11 attacks, as well as subsequent attacks around the world, as justification for their hatred of Islam. The evidence of linkage is often weak. They may cite these attacks as reasons for denying the sale of the convent without showing that MAS was responsible for any.

The Islamophobe is unable to deal with complexity. They do not mention the fact that numerous Muslims died as victims of the 9/11 attacks, that Muslims have been in the United States for hundreds of years, and that the vast majority of American Muslims condemned the attacks on civilians as contradictory to the tenets of Islam.

They even go to the extent of denying the most clearly formed and documented counter-evidence. For example, in a recent debate over the proposed mosque on Staten Island on Russia Today’s Alyona Show, Pamela Geller–a blogger and self-styled “expert” on Islam and jihad–claimed that backlash against Muslims in the United States following the events of September 11, 2001 has been “non-existent”:

“there is no Muslim backlash…that’s part of this Islamic narrative…you cannot cite any hate crimes…there have been no hate crimes…America has gone out of her way to make sure that there is no backlash.”

In reality, hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims since 2001 and particularly in the years immediately following are well-documented. Just three years after the attacks, a report by the Council on American-Islamic relations found that in 2004, more than 1,500 hundred cases of anti-Muslim harassment and violence occurred, including 141 documented hate crimes, a fifty percent increase from the 2003.

Nine years after the attacks, the attitude toward Muslims in America that allows such attacks to continue, an attitude perpetuated by bloggers like Geller, show no signs of abating. According to a February 2010 report from the The United States Department of Justice, its Civil Rights division, along with the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys offices, have investigated “over 800 incidents since 9/11 involving violence, threats, vandalism and arson against Arab-Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, South-Asian Americans and other individuals perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin.”

Geller is by no means alone in her attempts to deny the existence of Islamophobia. Though Tea Party leader Mark Williams was recently ousted for his racist diatribe directed at the NAACP, comments made months earlier in which he referred to Muslims as worshipping a “monkey god,” went almost unnoticed by the media. Right-wing pundit Pat Robertson has regularly referred to Islam as a “fascist group” on television, and academic Daniel Pipes has denied the existence of Islamophobia entirely, asking:

“What exactly constitutes an “undue fear of Islam” when Muslims acting in the name of Islam today make up the premier source of worldwide aggression, both verbal and physical, versus non-Muslims and Muslims alike? What, one wonders, is the proper amount of fear?”

Even the Wikipedia article for “Islamophobia” contains an entire section on the debate surrounding the term. Of course, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project, but perhaps that makes it all the more telling, and reflective of popular opinion. The page for “anti-Semitism” contains no debate, nor is it likely that any would be accepted by the public; while anti-Semitism means, rightly, social death, Islamophobia might get you a television spot, a column in a newspaper, or academic tenure.

In the paranoid Islamophobic mind, Islam is the perpetrator. Thus, Muslims cannot be victims. Islam is a monolith, acting in coordination towards the nefarious end of overturning Western civilization, according to their paranoid schema. So how could Muslims be anything but ill-willed? How could they be victims of any backlash when the West equals civilization and Islam so clearly conflicts with that idea? Were these views merely flights of personal fantasy, they would be harmless. The danger is that they have become part of the mainstream and are denying the freedom of Muslims to practice their religion, a freedom enshrined in the Constitution.

Luckily, significant portions of Americans who work or study with, live next to, or otherwise interact with, American Muslims, reject the simplistic hate-mongering of these groups. However, if Islamophobes really believe Muslims are a grave threat, the kind of post-9/11 violent backlash against them will grow.

Hofstadter would even predict that Islamophobes, like other paranoid movements in the past, would become more like the enemy they project. He pointed out that the “Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy.” Also, the John Birch Society emulated “Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through ‘front’ groups, and preache[d] a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.”

The best hope is that Islamophobia be pushed back into the fringes and local and federal authorities aggressively prosecute anti-Muslim violence and discrimination. Concerned communities should engage in dialogue with Muslims and their organizations, and learn more about them, rather than rely on the types of prejudices and paranoia being hawked by Islamophobes.

Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss, contributing editor to the Nation Magazine and also a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones has a great blog post about anti-Muslim bigot Robert Spencer of SIOA-fame training and explaining Islam to the FBI and Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force.

This is how Robert Spencer will react: “Robert Dreyfuss is a leftard, dhimmi, who is tarnishing and libeling me!! Wah! Wah!”

Dreyfuss also links to us, and I urge our readers to take time out and comment on Dreyfuss’ blog piece, or at the least thank him for bringing this to light.

Anti-Muslim Bigot and Fanatic Explains Islam to the FBI and the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force

By Robert Dreyfuss

The Council on American Islamic Relations is making noise about the fact that an extremist, right-wing anti-Muslim rabble rouser was “invited to offer training to state and federal law enforcement officers.” It sounds like something that might have happened under the administration of President Bush, but no – this happened on Obama’s watch.

Robert Spencer, co-founder of the group Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), is the culprit.

According to CAIR, Spencer was called in recently to pontificate to the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force. (The JTTF’s are law enforcement and intelligence coalitions that began Washington. Soon every jurisdiction wanted the federal dough for a JTTF, and after 9/11 the number of JTTF’s exploded.)

Says CAIR:

“Our nation’s law enforcement personnel should not receive training from the head of a hate group that seeks to demonize Islam and to prevent American Muslims from exercising their rights as citizens,’ said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “Robert Spencer is the same individual who claims in his new book that President Obama is waging ‘war on America.’”

He noted that Spencer recently co-authored the book, “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America,” that sounds a “wake-up call for Americans to stop the Obama administration from limiting our hard-won freedoms, silencing our democratic forming in the 1990s in key areas thought to be vulnerable to terrorism, such as New York and voices, and irreparably harming America for generations to come.”
According to Loonwatch, the SIOA is so extreme that it seems almost satirical. Like a Tea Party phalanx of radical anti-Muslim bigots, the SIOA says that its goal is educate Americans “about about the threat that Islamic doctrine and those who support it present to our freedoms, and the future of our democracy and country.”  Its  organizers call themselves “scholar warriors/ideological warriors in the cause of American freedom and Constitutional government,” as well as in “the defense of… our society of liberty, knowledge, and human decency.”

Spencer’s co-founder, Pamela Geller, is a piece of work, too. Notes CAIR:

“Geller has posted images on her blog that include a fake photograph of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a Nazi uniform, another fake image of President Obama urinating on an American flag and drawings purporting to depict Islam’s Prophet Muhammad as a pig. In a June 25 blog entry, Geller posted a video claiming that Muslims engage in bestiality.”
This needs repudiation – or, as Sarah Palin would say, refudiation – from the Justice Department, and quick.

An excellent article from Jay Bookman on the parallel between the controversy surrounding Shirley Sherrod and what is happening to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

In some ways, ‘Feisal Abdul Rauf’ is Arabic for ‘Shirley Sherrod’

By Jay Bookman
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjGJPPRD3u0&feature=player_embedded 350 300]

Feisal Abdul Rauf and Shirley Sherrod have a lot in common.

At first blush, that might seem a strange assertion. Abdul Rauf is a naturalized U.S. citizen and a Muslim imam in New York City; Sherrod is a black woman from the American South. But they have been both selected as targets by a conservative media machine that is so intent on creating useful villains that it pays little or no attention to concepts such as truth or accuracy. The goal is to create “Objects of Hate” that can then be used to inflame the American public.

Abdul Rauf, for example, describes himself as “both a Muslim and an American citizen, as proud of the important and fundamental principles that America stands for as I am the important and fundamental principles for which Islam stands.”

In fact, Abdul Rauf argues, the reason so many Muslims flee their native countries to come here is because the United States is actually more true to Islamic principles of “human equality, human liberty and social justice” than many so-called Islamic societies.

He proclaims himself a patriotic American, and has harshly condemned violent extremists who cite Islam as their inspiration. September 11, Abdul Rauf says, is “a day that will live in infamy,” noting that “no nation could suffer such an assault without responding in a very robust way.” In the wake of bombing attacks in Great Britian in 2005, he expressed “a sense of deep revulsion,” said that true Muslims “naturally condemn the brutal attacks in London in the most unequivocal terms,” and urged British Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement in identifying and capturing those involved.

Abdul Rauf has also worked tirelessly to promote better relations among the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths. Rabbi Rabbi David Rosen, who heads the American Jewish Committee’s international interreligious affairs department in Jerusalem, calls him “an important voice of moderation,” and Jewish Week has lauded him as “a key voice of reason among Muslim leaders here.”

In 2003, Abdul Rauf joined Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, along with members of the Israeli Knesset and Palestinian leaders, in an initiative to bring moderate Palestinians and Israelis together to try to find common ground.

In his 2004 book, “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America,” Abdul Rauf writes that the future of Islam will depend on its acceptance of a form of democratic capitalism. Toward that end, he stresses the emergence of what he calls an “American Islam.” Catholic immigrants, he notes, came to this country and in time created a distinctive American Catholicism, which in turn influenced Catholicism as a whole. Jewish immigrants likewise created a distinctly American version of Judaism, which has also influenced the larger faith.

The creation of an American Islam, Abdul Rauf believes, can help modernize Islam globally and in the process ease the strains between his adopted country and his faith.

Abdul Rauf is, in other words, everything that critics of Islam claim they want to see. More importantly, his moderate, pro-American message has proved so appealing to fellow U.S. Muslims that his mosque has outgrown its origins in a lower Manhattan storefront and needs to expand. He and his congregation envision a 13-story complex on Park Street in lower Manhattan, modeled after the 92nd Street YMCA and the Jewish Community Center in New York. The facility would include a community center, auditorium, mosque, swimming pool and restaurants.

The local community board in lower Manhattan, which no doubt includes many who experienced September 11 firsthand, has voted 29-1 to approve the project’s construction, strong testimony to the faith they have in Abdul Rauf’s mission.

“I think they need to establish a place such as this for people of goodwill from mainline Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths so we can come together to talk,” said Father Kevin Madigan of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, located a block away from the proposed facility.

In some circles, however, Abdul Rauf’s proposed mosque has become better known as the “Ground Zero mosque.” (It is actually located two city blocks away from Ground Zero, with no view of the site.) Both Abdul Rauf and the proposed project have become the target of a vicious, concerted smear motivated in part by irrational if sincere fear, and in part by cynical opportunists who hope to profit by that fear.

The ad above, for example, was put together by the Republican National Trust PAC. The group supposedly tried to buy air time to put the ad on CBS and NBC but was rejected. (The Republican National Trust is a major player in the PAC world. In the 2008 cycle, it spent more than $8 million trying to beat Barack Obama, plus another $434,000 helping to elect Saxby Chambliss here in Georgia.)

Interestingly, there is no indication that RNTPAC tried to place the ad on Fox News, which makes sense for a couple of reasons. A rejection by Fox would have undercut the group’s effort to depict itself as a victim of liberal censorship. And besides, why pay for something that you’re going to get for free anyway?

palin’s+mosque+tweet+7-17-2010
Fox has played a major role in ginning up conservative opposition to the mosque. Sean Hannity has shown the ad on his Fox show, condemning Abdul Rauf as an “extremist” and a champion of “radical Islam.” Sarah Palin has gotten involved, using Twitter to beg “peaceful Muslims” to “refutiate” the mosque, as if to imply that Abdul Rauf must be a member of al Qaida.

Rick Lazio, the GOP candidate for governor in New York, has come out in opposition to the mosque, trying to use the issue to boost his campaign. That led the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association to rebuke Lazio, warning that “for any candidate for public office to politicize Ground Zero shows a lack of respect to the families, who will forever live with the terrible memory of that dark day…. This conduct forsakes the memory of all those who lost their lives on September 11th.”

On NPR, Sam Nunberg of the Center for Law and Justice has warned that approving the mosque “would be like removing the sunken ship in Pearl Harbor to erect a memorial to the Japanese kamikazes killed in the attack.” Pamela Geller, a prominent conservative blogger who appeared on CNN to debate the mosque, called Abdul Rauf a “stealth jihadist” and the mosque itself “an act of jihad.” Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, now retired but once the head of U.S. military intelligence in the Rumsfeld Pentagon, told a conference at Colorado Christian College that the mosque was part of “the incremental taking over of our nation.”

In each and every case cited above, opponents of the mosque have refused to allow a distinction to be made between Islamic extremists and Muslims of demonstrated good faith such as Abdul Rauf. Critics of the Islamic community complain repeatedly that they don’t hear enough from moderates, but it’s pretty clear from this example that they do not hear because they refuse to listen.

Karen Armstrong, one of the most respected religious scholars of her generation, wrote something that now seems all too prescient in her foreward to Abdul Rauf’s book.

“It is vital that we know who our enemies are, but it is equally important to know who they are not. Only a tiny proportion of Muslims take part in acts of terror and violence. If our media and politicians continue to denigrate Islam, accepting without question the stereotypical view that has prevailed in the West since the time of the Crusades, we will eventually alienate Muslims who have no quarrel with the West, who are either enjoying or longing for greater democracy, and who are horrified by the atrocities committed in the name of their faith.”

Finally, I’d like to close with a video of the “stealth jihadist” himself, appearing at a public hearing about the proposed mosque. Watch and listen, then compare Abdul Rauf’s message to the message of the video at the top of this post.

Ask yourself: Who is the purveyor of racial hate and fear, and who is the healer? Who is the extremist, and who is the moderate? Who is the danger to this country, and who is its friend?

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xlXMZkF_4w&feature=player_embedded 350 300]

Palin’s Bigoted Twitter Calls on Muslims to “Refudiate”

by Geoffrey Dunn

Echoing the bigoted and right-wing contortions of the National Republican Trust PAC and disgraced Tea Party leader Mark Williams, Sarah Palin has sent the world of Twitter on fire this afternoon, with a series of incendiary Tweets about the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center

She pulled down one of them after concocting the word “refudiate” and then used the word “refute” incorrectly.

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.

She then pulled the second attempt down and took a third swipe at it.

Peace-seeking Muslims pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing

“Peaceful,” “peace-seeking”? Why the qualifier? How about “peaceful Christians“? And as if Sarah Palin knows anything about “healing.” Perhaps that’s the biggest joke of all.

Well, not quite. The Thrilla from Wasilla then compared herself to none other than the Immortal Bard himself (and with indirect reference to her primary obsession, Barack Obama).

‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

As Billy Boy so wisely noted in The Tempest:

You cram these words into mine ears against
The stomach of my sense.

Reza Aslan, an Islamic scholar and an accomplished writer, blogger, and emerging popular culture figure was on CNN opposite Zuhdi Jasser, a contributor to Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and a contributing writer for the virulently anti-Islam Family Security Matters.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOp4O9FwzRw 350 300]

Jon Stewart is one of the last men out there with the moral courage to do the kind of reporting the mainstream media just won’t do. A beautiful segment, that skewers Fox News, and the likes of Steven Emerson and Robert Spencer. Spencer no doubt will be howling at the moon about Stewart being a dhimmi. Nothing makes him more upset than being portrayed like the clown that he is.

Enjoy!

An interesting story about one Israeli who is working to bridge the divide of hate.

Israeli millionaire builds mosque in France

Ofer Petersburg

An unlikely benefactor. An Ashkelon resident who made a fortune in the European real estate business has decided to pay for the construction of a mosque in France for the benefit of the local Muslim community.

Father of four Robert Harush, 58, grew up in Ashkelon and having completed his military service tried his luck in the real estate business in Europe. His success has won him many hotels and buildings and he is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of shekels.

Despite his success Harush did not forget his hometown and has returned to Ashkelon and invested in local building ventures. For the past 10 years he has been dividing his time between Israel and France. His four children all speak Hebrew.

The businessman even chose to stay in the southern city during Operation Cast Lead. He remained in Israel also after a Grad rocket landed near his house.

Surprisingly, he has not harbored any ill-feelings against the Arab side and is a strong supporter of co-existence. He was recently approached by the mayor of Montereau, a French city adjacent to Paris, who informed him of his difficulties in financing the renovation of a large mosque in the city.

“I told myself ‘here is an opportunity to bring the people together’ and decided to donate the money,” Harush said. “People were dumbfounded. What does a Jewish-Israeli man have do to with refurbishing a mosque? The answer is simple: I’m sick and tired of the hatred. A sane voice must emerge.”

Harush explained that he built the mosque in order to promote co-existence. “It wasn’t a cheap venture but I did with all my heart.”

Ashkelon projects

Leaders of the Montereau Muslim community have thanked Harush for the gesture and maintain a warm relationship with him.

The businessman, however, is not interested in supporting the Muslim community alone and has paid for the construction of one of the largest and most grandiose synagogues in Asheklon last year, which was named after his late father.

He is currently working on setting up a mikveh in the southern city to be dedicated to his late mother. “I myself am not a religious person but I feel that in the absence of upstanding politicians it falls on businessmen to bring together Jews and Arabs and seculars and the religious.

An excellent article, and a must read. (hat tip: Justin)

The Myth of Modern Jihad

by Robert Wright

It would be an understatement to say that Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, pleaded guilty last week. “I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over,” Shahzad told the judge. Why so emphatic? Because Shahzad is proud of himself. “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim soldier,” he said.

This got some fist pumps in right-wing circles, because it seemed to confirm that America faces all-out jihad, and must marshal an accordingly fierce response. On National Review Online, Daniel Pipes wrote that Shahzad’s “bald declaration” should make Americans “accept the painful fact that Islamist anger and aspirations” are the problem; we must name “Islamism as the enemy.” And, as Pipes has explained in the past, once you realize that your enemy is a bunch of Muslim holy warriors, the path forward is clear: “Violent jihad will probably continue until it is crushed by a superior military force.”

At the risk of raining on Pipes’s parade: If you look at what Shahzad actually said, the upshot is way less grim. In fact, at a time when just about everyone admits that our strategy in Afghanistan isn’t working, Shahzad brings refreshing news: maybe America can win the war on terrorism without winning the war in Afghanistan.

As a bonus, it turns out there’s a hopeful message not just in Shahzad’s testimony, but in Pipes’s incomprehension of it. Pipes exhibits a cognitive distortion that may be afflicting Americans broadly — not just on the right, but on the center and left as well. And seeing the distortion is the first step toward escaping it.

Here is how Shahzad explained his role in the holy war: “It’s a war,” he said. “I am part of that. I am part of the answer of the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m revenging the attacks.”

Now, for a Muslim holy warrior to see his attacks as revenge runs counter to Pipes’s longstanding claim that Islamic holy war is about attack, not counterattack. Roughly since 9/11, Pipes has been telling us that jihad is “unabashedly offensive in nature, with the eventual goal of achieving Muslim dominion over the entire globe.” This notion of “jihad in the sense of territorial expansion has always been a central aspect of Muslim life” and is now “the world’s foremost source of terrorism.” That’s why you have to respond with “superior military force.”

Now we have Shahzad suggesting roughly the opposite — that the holy war could end if America would stop using military force. He said in court, “Until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”

Should we really take this testimony seriously? It does, after all, have an air of self-dramatizing grandstanding. Then again, terrorism is a self-dramatizing, grandstanding business, and there’s no reason to think this particular piece of theater isn’t true to Shahzad’s interior monologue.

Indeed, it tracks the pitch of jihadist recruiters, notably Anwar Awlaki, the American sheik in Yemen who inspired not just Shahzad but the Fort Hood shooter and the thwarted underwear bomber. The core of the pitch is that America is at war with Islam, and the evidence cited includes Shahzad’s litany: Iraq, Afghanistan, drone strikes, etc.

Of course, this litany amounts to pretty severe terms for peace. Shahzad says terrorism will continue until we end two wars and all drone strikes? And quit “reporting” suspicious Muslims to our government? Anything else we can do for him?

But as a practical matter, taking any of these issues off the table weakens the jihadist recruiting pitch. (Different potential recruits, after all, are sensitive to different issues.) And if we could take the Afghanistan war off the table, that would be a big one.

At least, that’s my view. This isn’t the place to fully defend it (e.g., address the question of whether I’m “blaming” America for terrorism or whether ending the war would amount to dangerous “appeasement”). My point is just that, if you take Shahzad at his word, there’s more cause for hope than if Pipes were right, and Shahzad’s testimony were evidence that jihadists are bent on world conquest.

Now on to the second cause for hope: Pipes’s confusion itself. For these purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Shahzad was telling the truth, because Pipes certainly thinks he was. Pipes applauds Shahzad’s “forthright statement of purpose,” adding, “However abhorrent, this tirade does have the virtue of truthfulness.”

So then why doesn’t it bother Pipes that Shahzad’s depiction of Islamic holy war as defensive counter-attack is the opposite of the depiction Pipes has peddled for years? How can he possibly hail Shahzad’s comments as confirming his world view?

It’s only human nature. Once you decide that some group is your implacable enemy, your mind gets a little warped. Virtually all incoming evidence is thereafter seen as consistent with that model. (In fact, there’s a more specific finding from social psychology that also helps explain Pipes’s world view, as laid out by blogger Dan Drezner in this little video clip.)

This cognitive distortion reared its head in America’s previous cosmic struggle. Just about all cold war historians agree that Americans bought into the “myth of monolithic communism.” Once we decided that the communist menace was a single, vast, implacable force, we failed to appreciate, for example, tensions between Russia and China that in retrospect seem obviously important. We had our model, and we were sticking to it. Pipes has his model, and he’s sticking to it. He needn’t dismiss evidence inconsistent with it, because he can’t really see the evidence to begin with.

This same tendency may now be impeding America’s ability to conduct the war on terrorism wisely.

If you ask people — right, left or center — why we can’t withdraw from Afghanistan, they start talking about the catastrophe that would ensue: The Taliban would take over, provide bases for al Qaeda, and suddenly it’s 9/11 again. Now, the consequences of withdrawal would certainly be messy and in some ways bad — and this subject is way too complicated to deal with in my remaining few paragraphs. But enough holes have been poked in standard catastrophe scenarios (by, for example, Paul Pillar, former deputy chief of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center) without much reducing the grip these scenarios have on people’s minds that you have to wonder whether our fears are grounded in something other than pure reason. You have to wonder whether we’re doing what Pipes is doing: taking a genuinely pretty scary bunch of enemies and making them much scarier — attributing so much unity and relentlessness and cunning to them that it’s hard to imagine beating them without military victory.

To be sure, there is always an ostensibly logical argument that catastrophists summon. (Pipes isn’t wrong to say that there is a doctrine of offensive jihad — he’s just wrong about how it has played out historically and how it plays it out today.) But the reason people accept these arguments so uncritically is that they have a fear of Islamic radicalism that dwarfs the actual threat.

The analogy with communism is worth dwelling on. People warned that if Vietnam fell, the dominoes would keep falling until America itself was under communist control. After all, Russia and China — the sponsors of our Vietnamese enemy — would join with the Vietnamese government to use Vietnam as a forward base if we were chased out. You know — kind of the way al Qaeda would join with a Taliban that controlled any chunk of Afghanistan to torment America.

Well, four years after Saigon fell, Communist Vietnam and Communist China were at war — not with us, but with each other. And a decade after that we had won the cold war.

I’ve been kind of hard on Pipes — in parts of this column and in an earlier column. So I’m glad to have the opportunity to emphasize that he’s just an example of the human mind at work, albeit a particularly revved up example. It’s only natural to attribute to your enemy more cohesion and menace than is in order. We used to do this with communism, and now we do it with radical Islam — and radical Muslims, for their part, do it with us. It’s a temptation we all have to fight. Maybe if we fought it as hard as we fight other enemies, we’d have fewer of them.

What do people think of this story? Haredim demand respect for Muslim grave site, and demand the contractor to pour a layer of concrete before they start building. Is it enough to pour concrete before they build or should it be left untouched? This also brings up the case of the Simon Wiesenthal Center which is building a “Museum of tolerance” over an ancient and historic Muslim graveyard.

Glenn Greenwald

Another excellent piece from the anti-loon Glenn Greenwald. He takes on the crazy and zany remarks from Chuck Schumer, a “mainstream Democrat.”

Chuck Schumer: Mainstream Democrat

by Glenn Greenwald

Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, spoke to an event of Orthodox Jewish leaders on Wednesday and made comments that can only be described as bigoted and disgusting.  Kudos to Zaid Jilani who, despite working for the Democratic Party-serving Center for American Progress, wrote about Schumer’s remarks on CAP’s ThinkProgress blog and explained the reasons they were filled with falsehoods, or — as he put it — “as offensive as they are wrong.”

Schumer told his audience that the ”Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution” and added that “they don’t believe in the Torah, in David.”  As a result,”you have to force them to say Israel is here to stay.”  It’s the Israeli blockade which accomplishes that, he argued.  And Schumer is due some credit for being honest enough (unlike most devoted Israel defenders) to admit that a prime purpose of the blockade has nothing to do with keeping arms away from Hamas, but rather, is to economically strangle the people in Gaza — meaning not Hamas, but the 1.5 million human beings (men, women and children) who live there:

And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense.

So as long as Israel stops just short of starving them all to death, then what Israel is doing is justified — just like John Yoo explained that American torture is perfectly legal and permissible just as long as it stops short of causing major organ failure or death (or, as Juan Cole put it, “anything short of ‘starving to death’, i.e. mass extermination in the camps, is all right as long as it convinces the enemy?”).  I think the most repugnant part of Schumer’s comments is when he spoke about Gazans as though they were dogs needing to be trained to behave properly:  the blockade is justified because it shows the Palestinians living there that “when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement.”  Is that — punish the people of Gaza for the acts of Terrorists — not the very definition of “collective punishment,” which happens to be a war crime under the Geneva Conventions?  The crowd — as the video of Schumer’s speech reflects (below) — erupted in wild cheers at his comments.

Of course, before Israeli propagandists began claiming for the consumption of Americans that the purpose of the blockade was to keep arms away from Terrorists, they freely admitted what Schumer acknowledged; when the blockade was first instituted, Dov Weisglass, adviser to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”  Indeed, Schumer made very similar remarks back in April when — in the middle of condemning Obama for the crime of applying minimal pressure on Israel — he told an interviewer:  ”Israel has blocked off the border and not let anything into Gaza, and I support Israel in doing that, and it may be tough on the Palestinian people, but when they vote for Hamas they are going to have to suffer the consequences.”  If a country doesn’t vote for the leaders Chuck Schumer and Israel want, their children will be malnourished to the point of stunted growth, pervasive anemia, and massive food insecurity.  Aside from how morally repugnant and criminal those actions are, see here for how harmful it is to America’s national interests, something with which Schumer appears completely unconcerned (they hate us for our Freedoms!).

At his personal blog, CAP’s Jilani elaborated on why Schumer’s remarks are so foul, including asking us to imagine what would happen if, say, Rep. Keith Ellison gave a speech urging that all Israelis be denied “fresh meat, basic medical supplies, and a whole host of humanitarian items” as a result of the horrific acts of the government they elected.  Condemnation would pour down on him from all corners.  That’s the same glaring double standard that just ended Helen Thomas’ career even though people as disparate as Mike Huckabee, Dick Armey and Matt Yglesias have said virtually the same exact thing about Palestinians that Thomas said about Israelis without any repercussions whatsoever (indeed, have seen their careers flourish afterward, though Yglesias, who was in college at the time, clearly no longer believes anything like that and now sees his remarks as “terrible”).  Numerous people have written very good posts about why Schumer’s comments are as false as they are repugnant — see Juan Cole, David Dayen, Philip Weiss, and Taylor Marsh (who said, accurately:  ”This is your Democratic Party hierarchy, folks”).

That last point, made by Marsh, is the critical one.  This is why I’ve come to see the Democratic Party (and its apologists and loyalists in the pundit class) much differently now that it’s in power rather than out of it.  Just look at Schumer himself.  He isn’t some obscure Democratic official; he’s one of its leading figures.  He’s not one of those dreaded Blue Dogs or “conservative” Democrats which Party pundit-apparatchiks and reverent Obama loyalists love to exploit to excuse the Party’s flaws (don’t blame the weak and helpless Obama; he is a prisoner to those bad, powerful conservative Democrats); rather, Schumer is considered progressive, or at least mainstream, within the Party, representing one of its largest and bluest states.  If anyone is the face of the mainstream Democratic Party, it’s Chuck Schumer.  That’s why he’s clearly the most likely replacement for Harry Reid to become Senate Majority Leader if Reid loses in November.

But look at what Schumer represents, who he is.  Schumer championed countless, radical Bush appointees (including John Bolton, Michael Mukasey and Michael Hayden), but then sabatoged Obama’s appointment of Chas Freeman due to insufficient devotion to Israel.  As The New York Times documented, he has long served as one of Wall Street’s most loyal and devoted servants, reaping huge benefits for himself and his Party.  As the financial reform package gets negotiated and watered down, Schumer leads the way in doing Wall Street’s bidding.  After spending years sucking up union money, he just congratulated Blanche Lincoln for fighting unions (and, showing how cynical he is, also congratulated her for fighting Wall Street even as business interests almost single-handedly funded her campaign and as he himself continues to serve as the most devoted property of bankers).  So that’s Chuck Schumer:  suffocate Gazans; champion Bush national security appointees; punish those with insufficient devotion to Israel; serve Wall Street.  And that, by definition, is the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

* * * * *

One last, related note:  Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, one of Israel’s most steadfast defenders in Congress, last week demanded, while speaking on a conference call organized by “pro-Israel groups,” that the Justice Department prosecute all American citizens who were on board the flotilla attacked by Israel (for, in essence, providing material support to Terrorists by trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gazans), as well as demanding that Homeland Security permanently ban all the other passengers from entering the U.S.  In this conflict that involved a foreign nation (Israel) against numerous American citizens, one of which ended up being shot four times in the head by the foreign country’s commandos, Sherman sides with the foreign nation and calls for the Americans involved to be imprisoned.  I spent the last week emailing with Sherman’s Communications Director, Matt Farrauto, in an attempt to schedule a podcast interview (or other type of interview) with Sherman about his demands.  Suffice to say, I have some questions to ask Sherman about his ideas.  After repeatedly indicating that he would try to schedule something, Farrauto — who sent me a pro forma statement from Sherman on this matter — emailed last night to say, without explanation:  ”Not sure that I’m going to get him for an interview. Is the statement useful for your purposes?”

I asked Farrauto whether Sherman has agreed to any interviews where he faced skeptical or adversarial questions about his radical call for American citizens to be prosecuted for trying to deliver humanitarian aid in violation of Israel’s wishes.  He hasn’t responded, and I’ll post any response I get.  But that’s Brad Sherman:  cowardly issuing demands like that in front of highly sympathetic Israel activists, but then refusing to answer actual questions about it.

UPDATE:  Earlier in the week, McClatchy obtained internal Israeli documents demonstrating that the purpose of the blockade isn’t about security but, rather, “economic warfare.”  Meanwhile, M.J. Rosenberg writes about the numerous Congressional Democrats lining up to support Israel’s attack on the flotilla.

UPDATE II:  The aforementioned Matt Yglesias, of the aforementioned CAP, has a post condemning what he calls Schumer’s “disgusting” remarks, and he adds some thoughts about Israel and Gaza generally.

Asma Uddin

(cross-posted from the Huffington Post)

By Asma Uddin

Writers, philosophers, professors, and politicians have referred to the United States of America as “a nation founded by immigrants.” This fact can hardly be refuted — especially considering the existence of the term “Native American.” America has dealt with the question and issues resulting from immigration since its birth in the 18th century. The most cancerous aspects of America’s response to immigration are bigotry and racism, and they are flaring up again, this time in reference to Muslims.

America’s unofficial “open-door” attitude during the colonies’ infancy worked to bring the new nation out of economic obscurity. Yet the American legacy, built on the backs of immigrants, has not been historically favorable to its creators. Quakers in colonial Massachusetts were subjected to auto-de-fé (“act of faith”), a ritual associated with the Spanish Inquisition that involved public penance of condemned heretics and apostates. The Blaine Amendments, whose adoption in many states was made an explicit condition for entering the Union, were motivated by anti-Catholic animus and remain on the books in several states today. Anti-Irish sentiment permeated the U.S. during the Industrial Revolution; the Catholic Irish who immigrated to America in the late 1850s faced “No Irish Need Apply” (NINA) notices in New York City shop windows, factory gates, and workshop doors for years.

Mormons, too, faced discrimination. The Missouri Executive Order 44, or “extermination order,” was issued by Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs to ensure that “the Mormons … be treated as enemies, and … be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace. The Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century faced anti-Chinese riots, lynching, murders, and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 — even after helping the nation complete the Transcontinental Railroad. Jewish Americans also faced bigotry and discrimination. And perhaps the most devastating case of racism: the Japanese internment camps starting in 1941, which targeted all Japanese, regardless of citizenship. In each case, the anti-immigrant backlash was fueled by paranoia — a deep-seated fear of those who are different.

The latest outbreak of this paranoia is the anti-Muslim sentiment that is becoming increasingly common and increasingly pernicious. While by no means at the level of interment camps or extermination orders, the anti-Muslim rhetoric nonetheless raises serious concerns. A Houston radio host feels comfortable advocating that a mosque be bombed if built near the site of Ground Zero. A few weeks ago, a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida actually was bombed — the most recent of several mosque bombings that have occurred over the past few year.

Richard Bernstein’s recent New York Times piece, “The Danger of Demonizing Adherents of Islam,” focuses on another egregious incident of anti-Muslim paranoia. He describes a bus ad campaign created by Pamela Geller, the executive director of Stop the Islamization of America and the editor and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com. The Geller bus ads ask questions like “Leaving Islam?” “Fatwa on your head?” and “Is your family or community threatening you?” Geller started her campaign in response to a bus ad campaign in San Francisco intended to inform and educate the general public about the Islamic faith. According to Geller, these informational ads put out by Muslim groups were mere bait to first convert people to Islam and then to violently punish anyone who decided to thereafter leave the religion.

How Geller came up with this bizarre interpretation of the ads is a mystery. As Bernstein rightly notes in his article, there is scant evidence that Muslim Americans hold such a belief, much less actively go out and ensnare innocent Americans into a deathtrap. While in some Muslim countries apostasy is a crime punishable by death, such absurdities do not make the faith.

Geller and others are welcome to pose sincere theological or ideological questions to Muslims, as theological debate about any religion, including Islam, helps keep it vibrant and relevant to changing times. But generalized stereotypes rooted in hate and suspicion simply perpetuate what Bernstein calls a “vicious cycle.” Well-meaning initiatives like the San Francisco bus campaign, a vehicle of a counter-narrative to radicalism, are denounced by Geller-ites as symbols of precisely that radicalism. In turn, “if there are more terrorist attempts by Muslims on American soil, there will be more Americans paying for bus ads and other things to express their rage at Islam itself as well as at Muslims in America, and to encourage the idea that America is, or ought to be, its and their enemy.” Creating that dichotomy then just serves to create more enemy Muslims. Endlessly spiraling downward, such a cycle may lead to the death of “the live-and-let-live civility of American life.”

Undoubtedly correct in his analysis, Bernstein overlooks one point: Americans, generally living in peace with one another, nonetheless created that peaceful coexistence after years of strife suffered by minority groups at the hands of the majority. Geller and her supporters are, in that sense, traditional Americans. What complicates their position, though, is the fact that while roughly half of the Muslim American community consists of first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants, the other half are African-American Muslims who have been here since this country’s inception. The Islam of the Black American had, however, constituted “Black Religion” — what Dr. Sherman Jackson describes in Islam and the Blackamerican as a “holy protest against anti-black racism.” Only with the influx of immigrant Muslims has Islam become a religion to be contended with by the broader culture.

Geller’s relegation of Islam to enemy status creates an Islam to be feared and abhorred. It is a conception that is not grounded in reality, but it is nonetheless propelling American society down the same road it has traveled many times before, to its own detriment. Reflecting upon this historical trajectory should help us see past the present environment, fraught with fear, and move to the next stage of coexistence, where we learn to look past two-dimensional stereotypes and generalizations and see the newcomer not as “other” but as “American.”

Michelle Boorstein

Are we finally hearing some discussion about the “anti-Muslim movement” in the mainstream media? The discussion seems to be getting more play because of high profile protests and news. Michelle Boorstein asks, “How influential will anti-Muslim groups become?”

If Loonwatch has anything to do about it, the answer is, they won’t become influential because we are going to battle them and expose them for the nuts that they are. At the moment, if we are to take the words of Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer at their face value, anti-Muslims are getting a hearing from deep within our government all the way to common wingnut Nazis who proudly displays signs such as, “Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11″

How influential will anti-Muslim groups become?

By Michelle Boorstein

What is the future of the anti-Muslim movement in the United States?

For years there has been a small but passionate group of people concerned with the influence of Islam, and their activism seemed to be largely focused on blogging and lobbying political conservatives. But their presence — and the arguments they raise — seem to be coming into the broader sphere of late.

There’s the fight over a mosque at the Ground Zero site, and this weekend the on-line electronic payment firm PayPal reportedly cut off the anti-Muslim blog Atlas Shrugs, saying it’s a hate site.

Needless to say, this has prompted a roar from Atlas Shrugs supporters who see political bias.

Commentators across the spectrum, from the libertarian Becket Fund to the progressive Media Matters are asking: Where is this anti-Muslim movement going? How significantly will it steer the debate in this country about religious freedom and bias?

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller’s website, Atlasshrugs, (a.k.a AtlasDrugs) according to her has been declared a “hate site” by Paypal, though it is not clear whether PayPal has banned her specifically for “hate” or other violations,

Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.

As far as I am concerned all of the above apply to Atlasshrugs.

Of course for Pamela, the victim, “the Jihad” is to blame,

The little money that Atlas generates (I have no large donors) is about to be cut off. Apparently the jihad is hard at work trying to kill free speech (and the bus ads and the 911 no mosque movement and the book), preventing the truth from making its way to those in pursuit of it. Paypal contributions help pay for bus ads, rallies, live coverage (everything), and I so much as said so when asked repeatedly by the press who paid for the bus ads. Readers do and did.

Paypal is calling Atlas a “hate” site and will close my account if I do not remove the paypal option from my website. Accurate reporting and news is hate.

Pamela has a lot of money, as this snapshot of the house she lived in until at least 2008 makes quite clear (hat tip: JustAFan),

Pamela's Mansion-Courtesy of Zillow.com

This image doesn’t really reflect the poor blogger shtick that she attempts to portray. She might argue that the money that allows her to live in luxury came from her husband, Michael Oshry (now deceased), who along with Pamela ran a car dealership that was raided by authorities, initially as part of an homicide investigation that uncovered a tangled web of financial fraud and deceit,

As part of the homicide probe, Nassau County police raided the dealership, owned by auto czar Michael Oshry, and Oshry’s Hewlett Harbor home and seized business records.

Cops found banking records were sent to the house, though the state requires such files be kept at businesses, according to court papers filed in a civil forfeiture action by the Nassau district attorney.

“The dealership knew what was going on,” an investigator said.

Oshry’s lawyer, William Petrillo, said his client “has not engaged in any criminal activity.”

His ex-wife, Pamela Geller, former associate publisher of the New York Observer and a conservative blogger, burst into tears when told her ex is under criminal investigation.

Now Pamela, in her characteristic excessive verbiage is crying that PayPal has called her out for who she is, a hatemonger akin to the likes of Stormfront and other racists/bigots. For their principled stand of not promoting her hate, Pamela now refers to the people at PayPal as “pussies,” and she is asking her readers to join a campaign in intimidating PayPal, while at the same time affording them the “privilege” of helping to fight “the Jihad” by sending a check to her PO Box.

I say to the Loonwatchers, we should respond to this by thanking PayPal for rightfully denying Atlasshrugs their service as long as it continues to be the bastion of far-right, hateful loonacy that it is.

Acceptable Use Policy Department: aupviolations@paypal.com.

Send us a question by email.

Speak to Paypal

Call us if you can’t find your answer in the Help Center.

Update: Per the suggestion from Kenya Nomad, here is some relevant info on Pamela:

The Dome has to go
“The dome has got to go. It is sitting atop the great Jewish temple. The dome has got to go.”

Israel should Nuke Mecca, Medina and Tehran
“And I pray dearly that in the ungodly event that Tehran or its jihadi proxies (Hez’ballah, Hamas etc) target Israel with a nuke, that she retaliate with everything she has at Tehran, Mecca, and Medina……………

Not to mention Europe. They exterminated all their Jews, but that wasn’t enough. Those monsters then went on to import the next generation of Jew killers.”

Nazis Adopted Jihad
“Nazis adopted the Muslim idea of Jihad – total destruction and complete annihilation in the spirit of a Holy War.”

Obama is our first Muslim President
“And who can forget Obama’s bald-faced lies to the Jews? In February 2008, Obama told Jewish leaders: “If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim.” Yet he was registered as a Muslim in an Indonesian school…And so now we have our first Muslim presidency, just eight years after 9/11. The media can spin their subjugation and adulation a million different ways, but America did not vote for a “Muslim presidency,” which is what this is.”

Update II: Pamela is gloating that her hysterical campaign against PayPal worked,  they have (predictably) reinstated her account. Loonwatchers should continue to email and call PayPal to let them know the character of Pamela’s hate site.

Frankie Martin

(cross-posted from CNN)

Editor’s Note: Frankie Martin is Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service and is a contributor to the new book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.

By Frankie Martin, Special to CNN

As I got off the plane in St. Louis in September 2008, I didn’t realize I was beginning a journey that would change my life.

On that day, I–along with several researchers working with Professor Akbar Ahmed, American University’s Chair of Islamic Studies–began a grueling project aimed at studying America’s Muslim population and its relationship to American identity. Now, nearly two years, 75 cities and 100 mosques later, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam, will be published by the Brookings Institution Press this month.

In addition to providing unprecedented insight into America’s Muslim community, it also led me to look at my own country, the United States, in a different way.

I had taken Professor Ahmed’s class on improving relations between Islam and the West as an underclassman shortly after the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and had traveled across the Muslim world with him for the book Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, listening to Muslim voices in countries including Jordan, Pakistan, and India.

On that trip, during which Muslims in eight countries cited “American negative perceptions of Islam” as the greatest threat to the Muslim world, I was ready for anything and eager to learn. After all, I had spent the second half of my life living and traveling widely around the world, from Kenya to China, and studying foreign lands in my international relations courses.

America was a different matter. This, I thought, was a country that I knew. Yet although I lived in the Baltimore suburbs until I was a teenager and went to college in Washington, DC, like many Americans I was familiar with only a few states, and had never experienced entire regions like the South.

Assisting a world-renowned anthropologist on a De Tocqueville-esque quest would change this. Like that earlier foreign traveler, Professor Ahmed saw his endeavor as a tribute to a nation that had welcomed him so warmly in crafting a study which would examine both the strengths of America and the parts that could be strengthened.

Within a few hours on our first day—which took us to Somali refugees in a St. Louis housing project—I realized I was experiencing something unique. Though I’m a Christian, I was seeing the country through Muslim eyes, including those of my professor.

But this was only part of the story. In order to see how Muslims were fitting into America—and what it meant to fit in—we would need to talk to Americans from all backgrounds and religions. Assisting us would be data from the roughly two thousand surveys we distributed in the field as well as countless conversations on our travels.

Over the next long months, we saw the ravages of inner city Detroit and the mansions of Palm Beach, Florida; the serene, impoverished Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona and a Silicon Valley “hackers conference” with scientists talking of settlements on the Moon and Mars. We spoke at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, spent an afternoon with Mennonites in Texas, were welcomed by the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City, and visited coal miners in the West Virginia wilderness.

The diversity of people and beliefs was striking and inspiring. And, for the first time, I saw the fall colors in New England, the Grand Canyon, and a Hawaiian sunset.

We found the Muslim community to be hospitable and patriotic, as they often said that America was the best place to be a Muslim because of religious freedom. But the community is on edge, divided and facing a leadership crisis—contributing to the “homegrown terrorist” phenomenon—and reeling from post-9/11 hatred and prejudice.

I was shocked to see the challenges American Muslims are facing, from kids beaten up and called terrorists at school to people incarcerated without charge and subjected to inhuman treatment and mosques being firebombed. A Muslim community that feels accepted as true Americans and is encouraged to enter the mainstream will be the best defense against homegrown terrorism.

Witnessing the challenges facing the Muslim community led me to ask a question I never had before: what does it mean to be American? Although we met Americans who had a different idea of the country (one official at a Church of Christ chapter in Austin named “pluralism” as the greatest threat to America and the Founding Fathers as the source of this threat) for me, the team, and my professor, being American means embracing the ideals of the Founding Fathers, which include pluralism, rule of law, and civil liberties.

Today, feelings against Islam are running high, with a prominent radio host recently expressing his hope that the proposed New York mosque near Ground Zero would be blown up. Every week seems to bring a new controversy, from the high emotions of the mosque debate to last month’s discussion about the current Miss USA, a Lebanese immigrant, who was slammed as a Hezbollah agent because her surname was said to be shared by people linked to the organization.

In this environment, I was inspired during countless hours of research into American history to see how clear the Founding Fathers were on the subject of Islam in America. Thomas Jefferson learned Arabic using his Quran and hosted the first presidential iftaar during Ramadan, John Adams named Prophet Muhammad as one of the world’s “sober inquirers after truth” alongside Socrates and Confucius, and Benjamin Franklin, who cited the Prophet as a model of compassion, wrote of his hope that the head cleric of Istanbul would preach Islam to Americans from a Philadelphia pulpit, so passionate was his belief in religious freedom.

Today, America faces a crisis of identity. One focal point at the core of the debate is Islam, which some Americans see as a monolithic threat seeking the takeover of the country. They are fearful and suspicious of the Muslims in their midst. For many of these citizens, being a good American—and, for some, a good Christian—means opposing and fighting Islam.

My journey has led me to conclude the opposite. Being a good American means welcoming Muslims as the Founding Fathers did and following their guidelines on matters of law and security as laid out in the Constitution. As for Christianity, the attitude of the Founding Fathers was shaped by Christian thinkers like John Locke, who declared that the true Christian’s duty was to “practice charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all mankind, even to those that are not Christians.”

Giving us hope for the future was data from our surveys, which showed that over ninety percent of Americans would vote for a Muslim for public office, and the similarly high percentage of people who are open to Muslims living in and being a part of this nation.

Some, however, inserted “if” clauses, indicating they believed Muslims could be American only if they followed narrowly defined rules, such as ceasing to identify as “Muslim” in favor of an exclusive “American” identity. The Founding Fathers set no such qualifications for “Americanness.”

Discovering America over the past few years has made me appreciate the inclusive vision of the Founding Fathers. Having traveled abroad, I know that their ideals also inspire people around the world, especially in Muslim countries. I can now say I am American with an awareness and pride I never had before.

With all of the challenges facing the country, perhaps the most important thing we can do as Americans is to consider who we really are. For me, being American means assuming and implementing the Founding Fathers’ vision of tolerance and religious freedom. The rediscovery of that vision has reaffirmed my belief in the promise of America.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Frankie Martin.

A great article from one of the foremost analysts of racism. (hat tip: iSherif)

Fighting anti-Muslim racism: an interview with A. Sivanandan

By IRR News Team

IRR News spoke to one of the foremost analysts of racism and Black struggle as to how to meet the contemporary challenge of anti-Muslim racism.

Should we look at Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism today as something new and apart, or as a continuation of the racism we have known in the UK?

A. Sivanandan: Every racism is different and every racism is the same.

Western culture, because it is a culture of conquest and subjugation, is impregnated with racist and nativist/anti-foreigner ideas. Such ideas develop into a fully-fledged ideology when harnessed to an economic or political programme such as slavery or apartheid. But they can still become a material social force, justifying discrimination and engendering racial violence, in areas and times of economic hardship when there is competition for jobs, housing etc between indigenous and foreign or immigrant workers

It is ‘natural’ for indigenous, poor, white people who have to compete for housing, employment, social services etc to be hostile to those who look like the obvious cause of their hardship, marked out by colour, foreignness or cultural difference. When such hostility is lent justification by government policies (domestic and foreign) and harnessed by political parties for electoral gain, racial ideas become firmed into a quasi-ideology which, in turn, feeds and justifies popular racism.

The components of racism are always the same – cultural, political, economic and social. But the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society gives the components of racism a different weightage.

The racism of industrial capitalism was connected to exploitation – slavery, colonialism, indenture, immigration. Racism was imbricated in labour exploitation. The economic factor was dominant in the way racism changed and was shaped and became functional. In post-industrial capitalism, where the exploitation of labour in the old sense is concentrated in the periphery; the political and cultural components are dominant. And ideas, in an Information Society dominated by the media, become material irrespective of the economic factor. There is, in other words, very little disjuncture between the racist idea and the racist act; they virtually flow into each other.

Are you saying that before we even look at contemporary Islamophobia, per se, we have to look at the way that the balance within racism itself has changed over the last thirty years or so?

A. Sivanandan: Yes. By and large, under industrial capitalism, racist views, filtered down through slavery and colonialism, were prevalent mostly among the working class. But in post-industrial society racial ideas run through the whole of society and culture. For, globalisation and the market have sundered the ethos of the nation state and opened the door to nativism.

Let me explain. Globalisation has shifted the role of the state from welfare to market. The welfare state was guided by principles of social equality, which made for social cohesion. The market state is guided by the principles of wealth creation and individual success, which fractures society, fragments communities, and reifies personal relationships. There is nothing organic now to cohere the nation. Hence the imposition from above of British values and programmes of social cohesion to hold the nation together – aided now by the politics of fear and the ‘enemy within’, creating in the process a faux nationalism evident in everything from foreign policy to oaths of allegiance in our town halls.

How does this then relate to how we tackle Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, are they really the same thing? Can the terms be used interchangeably?

A. Sivanandan: Yes and no. Yes, Islamophobia is implicated in anti-Muslim racism; but no, the one does not equate the other. I see Islamophobia as a term relating to a set of ideas which indicate an antipathy to Islam – which can range from the crude and direct demonisation we find in the tabloids to the intellectual sophistry we associate with people like Amis. Whereas anti-Muslim racism is the acting out of that antipathy, that prejudice – in violent attacks on the street or, when institutionalised in the state apparatus, in the impact of the anti-terror laws, in racial profiling by the police, and so on.

The distinction is important because Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism reside by and large in two different constituencies – and each has to be fought on its own ‘merits’. Islamophobia, in its most sophisticated form, is the province of middle-class opinion formers, erstwhile liberals, defenders of the true liberal faith against the encroachments of illiberal Islam, as defined by them, the ‘liberati’. Anti-Muslim racism is the province of the working class and is no different from past working-class racisms. Except that now it finds its justification in Islamophobia – suitably translated into the vernacular of stereotype and scapegoat by the tabloids, the carriers of racist culture. Racism is now justified not on notions of racial superiority but on notions of Islamic ‘barbarity’. And religion is racialised.

Hence the confusion that fighting Islamophobic discourse is tantamount to fighting anti-Muslim racism. But, as I have said, Islamophobia is not the cause of anti-Muslim racism but its rationale. Religion is not race. And unless we unravel race from religion and employ different strategies for the different sites of struggle, while still keeping their relationship in view, we will be rendered ineffective on both sites. Conversely, to let the fight against Islamophobia (ideological/theoretical) dictate the fight against anti-Muslim racism (strategic/practical) is to intellectualise both and undermine action. To concentrate on the anti-racist aspect of struggle without missing out on the fight against Islamophobia, however, is not only to be able to draw on the long history of that struggle but also to gain the support of allies that were made on its way, especially – at a time of British National Party (BNP) resurgence – the anti-fascists. Such solidarity is also important to make sure that the liberati’s use of the term Islamofascism does not let the real fascism off the hook.

There are other reasons, too, why we need to focus on the struggle against anti-Muslim racism. Firstly, because anti-Muslim racism has become institutionalised through the government’s ‘Muslim wars’, its anti-terror laws, its use of stop and search and its failure to curb the media’s excesses. (And institutional racism, as we know, reproduces itself at other levels of society.) Second, these in turn breed a culture of fear and suspicion and give groups such as the BNP and the English Defence League a hold on public opinion. Third, the government’s elevation of ‘British values’ (as opposed to universal values) to which we should all aspire – and therefore to British culture – confirms the popular view that Muslim values and Muslim culture are raw and threatening. And this gives a fillip to nativism which, in the hands of the Right, turns into the rough and tumble patriotism of the street.

Do you feel that the extreme Right in the UK has shifted, like other rightwing groups in Europe, towards recruiting on the basis of Islamophobia?

A. Sivanandan: In the past, the extreme Right’s fascist ideology was per se reprehensible to all sectors of society in a democracy. Today, the classlessness of Islamophobia, ie the fact that it runs through the whole of society, from the liberati to the illiterati, and is made respectable by government policies, has given groups like the BNP a new constituency within ‘middle England’ on whom they work for electoral purposes. Hence its two faces: one electoral and the other populist – and its bipolar tactics of putting on a respectable front for the first and a militant front for the second. And the politics of fear engages both constituencies. The middle-England constituency is frightened by the immolation of its culture and values, and the working-class constituency is frightened by the spectre of aliens taking their jobs, homes, shops, and marrying their children.

So are you really saying that activists should be just addressing anti-Muslim racism as it affects poor communities on the streets?

A. Sivanandan: At the risk of repeating myself, we have to fight both Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism when and where they are acted out. But the fights are at two different levels which need two different strategies and weapons. We need to dismantle and critique the intellectual arguments being put forward by Islamophobia’s intellectual protagonists and attack the media at every turn for popularising and disseminating that discourse. And we have simultaneously to take up the other fight, the fight against Anti-Muslim racism, be that at the level of government policy or the level of hate crime on the street.

Why it is important to understand the two fights as different but connected is because of the danger that, in confining ourselves to the religious aspect of the fight against Islamophobia without taking on its political translation on the street, we would once again descend into the inward-looking politics of identity.

Any Asian could be a Muslim. Any Asian wearing a headscarf or a beard must be a Muslim. Every Muslim is a fundamentalist. Every fundamentalist is a terrorist. We are in danger of creating a culture of suspicion and distrust not only between communities but within communities, indeed within families and between individuals – which can hardly count for British values or democracy!

(cross-posted from Barth’s Notes)

by Richard Bartholomew

Apparently this was said with a straight face at Sunday’s anti-mosque protest in New York:

“We’re not here today to condemn Muslims or Islam” said Pamela Geller, executive director of ‘Stop the Islamization of America’, “but we are here today to condemn the kind of mosque that will teach the very same radical ideology that gave birth to the 9/11 attacks…”

As has been widely reported, Geller was speaking at a protest against plans to build a mosque and Muslim community centre a couple of blocks away from the site of World Trade Center. A few days before, Geller had thundered that

“The only Muslim center that should be built in the shadow of the World Trade Center is one that is devoted to expunging the Quran and all Islamic teachings of the violent jihad that they prescribe, as well as all hateful texts and incitement to violence”

Of course, this isn’t a statement made in good faith: a Muslim center with an “expunged” Quran makes about as much sense as a church with the anti-Jewish parts of the New Testament expunged or a synagogue with the more sanguinary passages of the Torah expunged – ancient religious texts may be re-interpreted or contextualised in ways that make them more amenable to the modern world, but they are seldom repudiated by adherents.

Some background to the Cordoba House Muslim centre project was provided by the WSJ‘s Metropolis blog in May:

The project is driven in part by the needs of a growing Muslim population in Lower Manhattan. The nearest existing Islamic prayer space, the Tribeca Mosque, has been holding three evening prayer services on Fridays to keep up with demand.

“New immigrants coming to the area — you see a lot of people coming to Canal Street, a lot of street vendors and laborers,” says Daisy Kahn, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. “But also a lot of people in the financial community coming to prayers as well.”

When Kahn’s organization found a vacant property on Park Place, the former site of a Burlington Coat Factory that had been damaged by airplane debris on September 11, 2001, the potent symbolism of the site also became a compelling rationale for the project. “We decided we wanted to look at the legacy of 9/11 and do something positive,” she explained in an interview. Her group represents moderate Muslims who want “to reverse to trend of extremism and the kind of ideology that the extremists are spreading.”

For Geller and her Stop Islamization of America organization (currently on a roll following the “Leaving Islam?” bus-ad controversy), this is all a ruse – the purpose of the mosque is to gloat over the site of the World Trade Center and to establish Muslim supremacy over America; as reported by the London Times:

“What could be more insulting and humiliating than a monster mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Centre buildings that were brought down by an Islamic jihad attack?” said Pamela Geller, the group’s director. “Any decent American, Muslim or otherwise, wouldn’t dream of such an insult. It’s a stab in the eye of America.”

Ms Geller’s group said that Islam had a history of building mosques on top of the holy places of other religions as a symbol of Muslim dominance. It cited al-Aqsa Mosque on top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Ayasofya Mosque in the former Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus atop what was once the Church of St John the Baptist.

The Times refered to an “anti-Muslim backlash”, which Geller objected to as a “lie” (Geller’s ally Robert Spencer does occasionally refer positively to “Muslims of conscience”, but how exactly they are to be defined is unclear).

Khan’s quote – slightly re-edited - has also been turned against her in a press release:

Daisy Khan has trivialized and insulted the memories of the victims of the 9/11 jihad attacks by saying that the mosque is intended to “make something positive out of 9/11.”

We’re also told that

…Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an open proponent of Sharia, Islamic law, a system that denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law.

Abdul Rauf has said that “an Islamic state can be established in more then just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Shariah that are required to govern.” Thus it is clear that this mosque will teach Sharia, Islamic supremacism, and the denial of basic rights.

Abdul Rauf and other mosque organizers have been inconsistent and deceptive about whether their planned Islamic Center at Ground Zero will contain a mosque; ultimately they have admitted that it will. Belying his claim that this mosque will become a place for interreligious harmony, he has told the Arabic press: “I don’t believe in religious dialogue.”

This information was provided by Walid Shoebat (who was not at the protest himself);  it seems he’s realised that he needs to come up with some new material if he’s going to keep his profile up. However, even Shoebat’s article puts the “religious dialogue” comment into some context; in his translation, it refers to:

Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing.

From the Google translation of Shoebat’s source, it appears that Rauf goes on to praise American diversity and to criticise Egypt. But whether Rauf is secretly an extremist is hardly the main point – it is clear that SIOA objects to any mosque in principle.

The protest itself brought together the usual “anti-jihad” activists, along with a few 9/11 rescue workers and bereaved family members – Geller has posted a number of speeches. The event also gave a politician named Jay Townsend an opportunity to grandstand, and there was an attack on Obama from a certain Bev Carlson, who insisted that America is a “Christian nation”.

The size of the rally has been disputed; a journalist named Mike Kelly puts the figure at 500, Geller herself has declared there were 8,000, while WorldNetDaily rounds the number up to 10,000. Sentiments expressed on some of the protest signs made further mockery of Geller’s claim that “we are not here today to condemn Muslims or Islam”, and Kelly notes one telling incident:

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.

“Get out,” others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

Ahead of the protest, there were various objections, ranging from some Muslim criticisms of the project through to the most vitriolic spewing. As was widely reported, a Texas radio host named Michael Berry expressed the hope that the mosque would be bombed, and his excess was matched by the Tea Party leader Mark Williams, who denounced the Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, as “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank” because he supports the project. Across the Atlantic, atheist comedian Pat Condell fired off another of his hectoring (and curiously joke-free) rants, insisting (I paraphrase) that the mosque was obviously being built to celebrate 9/11 and as part of a strategy to take over the USA, that Islam ought to be suppressed as a political ideology akin to Nazism, and that anyone who can’t see this is a fool (Condell objects to religion in general as being authoritarian and supported by people who are self-righteous).

The Forward carried a thoughtful editorial on the subject a few weeks ago. While backing the project, it notes that

Some families of those who perished on September 11, 2001, have displayed great courage by supporting the proposal to create a 13-story hub for Muslim religious and cultural life, two blocks north of where the twin towers stood. But other families have not and — unlike some of the bigots who oppose the project for unjustifiable reasons — their qualms and resistance need to be respected.

But with so much overheated rhetoric on the subject, it is difficult to see how the project organisers could make any revisions to their plans without opponents trumpeting alterations as climb-downs that supposedly prove extremist intent.

Meanwhile, Geller’s motives have been derided by her equally-unpleasant rival “anti-jihadist” Debbie Schlussel; she dismisses the protest as “a cleverly designed PR vehicle”, and claims that Geller is expressing

…faux-outrage in a “battle” that we already know won’t be won.  It’s already lost.  They have the property.  Move on to something we can win, not a… attention-whore trick, just weeks before her book is about to be released and needs to earn back a bloated advance.  If you think it’s anything other than this, you are a malleable tool, easily manipulated and not of much substance.

Schlussel, who has been in a feud with Geller for some time, also makes reference to the p0lice investigation into Geller’s ex-husband’s business affairs (I noted Geller’s book – which has a Foreword by John Bolton – here).

(S0me links H/T Loonwatch)

UPDATE: Ed Brayton has some fun with one detail:

Geller added, “There is a large piece of an airplane in that building. That is a war memorial”… That’s funny, there were pieces of airplane and debris in pretty much every building for many blocks in every direction after 9/11. And yet the only one she demands be made into a museum is the one owned by Muslims.

English Defense League Hooligans holding up Israeli Flag

The EDL has created a Jewish division, obviously playing off of the narrative they have created for themselves as big backers of Israel. Many Jewish organizations are truly appalled by this, and rightly see this as a ploy by the EDL, and that their support for Israel is in fact founded on a foundation of Islamophobia and intimidation.

A while ago we reported about a strange new nexus that has developed amongst right-wing Islamophobes. The hoisting of the Israeli flag as a badge of honor that is supposed to make them immune to accusations of bigotry,

one sees an emerging trend amongst some right-wing and fascist groups proclaiming their unconditional support for the state of Israel. What is likely is that many of these organizations, whose roots are steeped deep in a history of anti-Semitism are recreating themselves; dropping a now unpopular prejudice (anti-Semitism) for one more in vogue–anti-Muslim Islamophobia. Gone are the days when what they claimed to champion were the “Christian values and traditions of Europe” now they have added “Christian-Jewish” values to their slogans.

I wonder how Pamela Geller feels about this, considering she gives her unconditional support to the EDL? Will she accuse these groups of being dhimmis?

Jewish Leaders Condemn the English Defense League

by Daniel Trilling

The Jewish Chronicle reports that the English Defence League has established a Jewish division. The far right, anti-Islam protest group whose violent nature was exposed by the Guardian last week (and covered by the NS here) has professed support for Israel in the past and is now urging British Jews to “lead the counter-Jihad fight in England”.

But its advances have been swiftly rebuffed by Jewish leaders. Mark Gardner, communications director for the Community Security Trust, told the Chronicle:

The EDL intimidate entire Muslim communities, causing tension and fear. Jews ought to remember that we have long experience of being on the receiving end of this kind of bigotry.

Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said:

The EDL’s supposed ‘support’ for Israel is empty and duplicitous. It is built on a foundation of Islamophobia and hatred which we reject entirely.

Sadly, we know only too well what hatred for hatred’s sake can cause. The overwhelming majority will not be drawn in by this transparent attempt to manipulate a tense political conflict.

Hey Loonwatchers, there are Spencer’s out there who aren’t loons when it comes to Islam! Spencer Dew reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s most recent book and sheds some much need light on her agenda driven Islamophobia. A real eye opening review.

An Atheist’s Idealized Christianity: The Dangerous Theological Fantasies of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

By Spencer Dew
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch politician based now at the American Enterprise Institute, draws on her own harrowing childhood and journey from Islam to atheism (or, as she calls it in the subtitle of her most recent book, Nomad: From Islam to America, a Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations) to argue that Islam poses a grave threat to Western civilization, which she identifies as rooted in the legacy and ideals of the Enlightenment, specifically in individualism, free expression, and rational inquiry.Yet Ali’s work is as much an argument for a specific understanding of Christianity as it is a specific understand of Islam. Ali holds to radically distorted visions of each religion such that Christianity emerges as a private, more or less secular set of beliefs about divine love while Islam emerges as a monolithic, oppressive system of group-think. Christianity is rational and science-friendly; Islam is a continuation of a perverse pre-medieval mindset.

Ali, of course, is an atheist, and she frequently cites 9/11 as the tipping point in her own rejection of religion, claiming in her new book that “I found it impossible to ignore [bin Laden’s] claims that the murderous destruction of innocent (if infidel) lives is consistent with the Qur’an. I looked in the Qur’an, and I found it to be so. To me this meant that I could no longer be a Muslim.”

Building a Straw Horse

Religious terrorists justify their actions via scripture and tradition: from racist militias citing Genesis to Muslim groups drawing on the words of the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet. Ali, however, insists that the exegesis of Islamic terrorists is correct, true to Qur’anic intent and the history of Islam. She dismisses Muslim protests against such justifications as naïve and uninformed. “Most Muslims do not know the content of the Qur’an or the Hadith or any other Islamic scripture,” she argues, going on to insist that while “the much-quoted edict promoting freedom of religion is indeed in the Qur’an… its authority is nullified by verses that descended upon the Prophet later, when he was better armed and when his following had grown to great numbers.” Her own vision of Islam thus shapes her interpretation.

Likewise, in the face of repeating Qur’anic refrains about the compassionate nature of the divine, Ali argues that “Muslims who say that Allah is peaceful and compassionate simply do not know about other concepts of God, or the concepts they do have are wrong.” Nevermind that Islamic thinkers have, since the dawn of the tradition, had much to say about the paradox of a God at once compassionate and just; Ali’s interest here is in constructing a straw horse. Thus, while she holds that “uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Qur’an” poses a threat to civilization, she simultaneously opposes any exegetical work that offers alternatives to her own (and the terrorists’) simplistic, violent interpretations—theological work she dismisses as “reinterpreting the Qur’an so as to tone it down.”

Idealizing Christianity

While Ali is eloquent in her admiration for the ideals of the Enlightenment, she is equally indebted to the Reformation. Recognizing that some humans may still need religion “as a source of comfort,” she is willing to allow them that, yet she rejects what she sees as more problematic manifestations of religion, notably “religion as a moral gauge, a guideline for life,” which function she sees as applying “above all to Islam.” Acceptable religion, in other words, is “protestant” with a small ‘p’—individual piety— something, Ali argues, that should remain in the individual heart and house, but not seek to effect political change.

In contrast to her monolithic fantasy of Islam, Ali offers a vision of Christianity that is equally fantastic, a religion of individualism and critical reflection where the old superstitions have been replaced with humanist abstractions. “Nowadays,” she writes, “God is referred to as ‘love’ or as ‘energy,’ and those who believe in Him have done away with the concept of hell.” While she admits that there are certain “freak-show churches” opposed to, for instance, the theory of evolution, Christianity is presented by Ali as, all for all, a force for the good. Indeed, in her new book, this atheist calls on “the community of Christian churches” to act as “a very useful ally in the battle against Islamic fanaticism.”

One terrifying aspect of Ali’s developing thought on Islam, however, is that “Islamic fanaticism” is no longer presented as an extreme but as the norm. While in earlier writings, Ali made parallels between Christian fundamentalists and their claims about the Bible with “fundamentalist Muslims [who] consider the Qur’an a perfect, timeless representation of the unchanging word of God,” she has now revised her thinking and insists that “Anyone who identifies himself as a Muslim believes that the Qur’an is the true, immutable word of God. It should be followed to the letter.” While some Muslims may not “obey” in this way “they believe that they should.” Thus, seemingly “moderate” Muslims among us are in fact a potential threat, wolves in Western clothing, their religion necessarily in conflict with the ideals of the contemporary Western state. As she chillingly phrases her stance: “Can you be a Muslim and an American patriot? You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim.”

A War Between Theologies?

Thus, atheist Ali, in her crusade against Islam, turns to her idealized vision of a Christian community. Arguing that the world is undergoing a clash not so much of civilizations but of theologies, Ali actually begins to resemble none other than the fundamentalist Islamists whom she credits with prompting her religious turn, who likewise frame the current moment in terms of a war between theologies. “I feel we now need a Christian school for every madrassa,” she writes, basing this policy prescription on the assumption that Christian schools “teach not only the full range of sciences and the humanities, but also about a God who created reason and told humankind to let reason prevail.”

Convinced that radical jihadist interpretations represent the true intent of the Qur’an, Ali perceives her own mission as a public intellectual as alerting non-Muslims to the danger in their midst while persuading Muslims to “admit that the Prophet Muhammad’s example is fallible, that not everything in the Qur’an is perfect or true.” In this regard, however, she has arrived at

a theory that most Muslims are in search of a redemptive God. They believe that there is a higher power and that this higher power is the provider of morality, giving them a compass to help them distinguish between good and bad. Many Muslims are seeking a God or a concept of God that in my view meets the description of the Christian God. Instead they are finding Allah.

“Many Muslims… need a spiritual anchor in their lives,” Ali writes, but since Islam must be as she insists that it is, this atheist thinker has, oddly, become a sort of proselytizer for her own idealistic vision of Christianity. “This modern Christian God is synonymous with love,” she writes, “His agents do not preach hatred, intolerance, and discord; this God is merciful, does not seek state power, and sees no competition with science. His followers view the Bible as a book full of parables, not direct commands to be obeyed.”

It is unlikely that many American Muslims will find Ali’s hateful characterization of their own religion convincing—let alone her dreamy musings about a utopian Christianity. Ali may well be preaching, so to speak, to the choir, but it is a choir poisoned by distorted visions of Islam and a dangerous recapitulation of the terrorist fantasy of the world as a battleground between religions and gods.

Worn Proudly by Some

Just yesterday there was an excellent book review in ReligionDispatches by Bruce B. Lawrence, a Humanities professor and director of the Islamic studies program at Duke University. In it he reviews two books, one is Paul Berman’s, Flight of the Intellectual and the other is Andrew Shyrocks, Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend.

His review is thoughtful, insightful and a must read for those truly interested in the topic of contemporary Islam and Muslims. It obliterates the shallow discourse that many pseudo-Intellectuals and their patrons engage in while at the same time giving a much a needed nuanced perspective sorely missing from the discussion.

The Polite Islamophobia of the Intellectual

by Bruce B. Lawrence

• The Flight of the Intellectuals
  by Paul Berman
  (Melville House, May 2010)

  Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend
  Andrew Shryock, ed.
  (Indiana University Press, June 2010)

  Lauded by Foreign Affairs as “one of America’s leading public intellectuals,” Paul Berman was recently identified in a flattering New York Times review as “a man who identifies ‘with the liberal left.’” If Berman inhabits and projects the liberal left, then the conservative right has lost its claim to being at the forefront of Islamophobia.

  The huge mistake of the Times (and almost every outlet of mainstream media reporting) is to assume that Berman is a public intellectual who can speak about Islam, that his is an authoritative voice to be heeded, his insights accepted and thus, perhaps most importantly, his warnings followed. In fact, the message in Flight of the Intellectuals, Berman’s latest polemic which hit the bookstores last month, is so insidious, his knowledge of Islam so shallow, that it must be addressed through the one major category of public discourse into which it fits: Islamophobia/Islamophilia.

  Since 9/11, the American and European publics have been assaulted by Islamophobic writing from those who know little or nothing about their subject yet claim to speak with authority. In August, for example, I wrote a review of Christopher Caldwell’s neoconservative lament for Europe’s growing Muslim population, in which he warns that the “innocent, naive, unsuspecting” West will find that the new wave of Muslims has “ended a way of life, Western civilization as we know—and were once taught to love—it.”

  Caldwell’s work, in both its tone and message, is helpful to recall in addressing this latest siren on ‘the Islamic danger.’ Like Caldwell, Berman is a journalist whose fast-paced, breathless prose is meant to locate him as an omniscient authority; his innocence of Islam or knowledge about Muslims is worn as a badge of honor. Writing in a stream of consciousness, without footnotes or source citations, he speaks as an ‘enlightened’ and ‘outraged’ partisan, not of civilization (as did Caldwell), but of liberalism.

  Islamophobia has already been arrayed in some of the more lucid analyses that followed the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005–2006. In Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (Rowan & Littlefield, 2008), Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg used political cartoons to show how Muslim difference was always portrayed as exceptional; Islam was not American, and Muslims could not fit into the American or Western way of life. That trajectory of irreducible difference has now been challenged in Andrew Shryock’s even more ambitious volume, Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend.

  Berman’s book, with its hidden genealogy and flawed logic, fits rather neatly into the Islamophobia/Islamophilia construction. A veritable American strobe light of Islamophobic utterances, it stands forth as a notable specimen of Islam hatred, though that classification would be admitted neither by the author nor by most in the mainstream media. The single most salient point here is the pervasiveness of Islam hatred or Islamophobia. It is an ideological project and is not limited to cartoons. It is not the purview of the political right, nor is it a Zionist conspiracy, nor an evangelical polemic. It draws on, even as it enlarges, the specter of uncertainty about Islam and Muslims that continues to pervade the American public square and afflict many stakeholders in the American project since 9/11 (and, in no small part, because of 9/11).

  Had Berman Read a Bit More Widely in al-Ghazali…

  Berman’s book begins with an epigraph from the 11th century Iraqi doyen of religious sciences, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, arguably the most prominent premodern Muslim intellectual. Evoking the human search for the divine as “the quest for man’s chiefest bliss,” the quote sets the stage for his blistering, unrelenting excoriation of Tariq Ramadan which, as an earlier Times review put it, is “essentially a booklong polemic against one magazine article.” Here’s Berman on Ramadan from an interview with Guernica:

  Despite the many different opinions in the Muslim world and a virtual civil war in the Muslim world, there’s a fantasy among a good many people in the West to think of the Muslim world as a single place, where it has a single problem and that some messianic figure is going to rise and straighten it out. And if you’re looking for that great messianic figure, the Great Muslim Hope, then Ramadan seems kind of plausible if you don’t listen to him too carefully. He has this royal lineage. He has a very marvelous and impressive demeanor. He claims to speak in the name of the religion itself. And so you can place this sort of fantastical hope on him.

  Why does al-Ghazali loom so large in this effort to unmask Ramadan as the wannabe “Great Muslim Hope”? Because, in Berman’s eyes, al-Ghazali was the William James of his age, etching the importance of religious experience on two levels: the empirical domain called ‘this world’ and the mystical domain broaching the world beyond senses and time.

  Berman does to al-Ghazali what he does to Ramadan: invokes him, quotes him, examines him, and then skewers him. There is no such thing as a convincing argument or a satisfying insight from either Muslim luminary. Berman assumes that his readers will trust his judgment as an amateur intellectual, one who can read in any field without expertise or experience, whether the figure is the premodern al-Ghazali, or his latter day successor, Ramadan.

  What is not disclosed in the torrent of Berman’s ramblings, however, is his own genealogy. It is disguised because he offers no index of themes, topics, or places—just names. He cites two Muslim scholars whom he deems to be genuine liberals (Abdullahi an-Na’im and Bassam Tibi), yet they garner only a handful of references.

  Al-Ghazali himself does enjoy several pages of exposition, though they’re exceeded by those accorded harsh critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and early Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi; the former is lauded, the latter berated in Berman’s needling sarcasm. Christopher Caldwell is the one name that we would expect to appear in the roll call, yet he never surfaces. Since there is no bibliography, the reader is left to imagine who or what Berman read in arriving at his fulminations.

  Berman does note the several French journals and books extolling Ramadan. He even mentions the controversial critic of Islam, Daniel Pipes, but chiefly to scold him for having first praised one of Ramadan’s books before retracting those plaudits and replacing them with broadsides. None of the French authors, however, nor Pipes, hone in on the three figures central to Caldwell’s—and later Berman’s—diatribe against Islam: Sarkozy (the catalyst), Ramadan (the villain) and Hirsi Ali (the heroine).

  It is Caldwell too who asks the question central to Berman’s entire exposé:

  Since Ramadan is the most broadly listened to contemporary explainer—to both Muslims and non-Muslims—of Islam’s most troubling doctrines, it is important to figure out whether his reflections on Muslims’ role in the West are workable and sincere. Does he believe Muslims can be real European citizens or does he believe they will always remain somehow foreign?

  Caldwell answers the question emphatically: the otherness of Islam, the foreignness of Muslims, is irreducible, which is precisely why the ex-Muslim, now anti-Muslim Hirsi Ali is so attractive to both Caldwell and to Berman. When an interviewer dares to challenge some of Ali’s bona fides Berman hectors him:

  Surely she (Hirsi Ali) is making people think. People with backgrounds like her own. Meanwhile we have a bunch of Western journalists running around saying, ‘Oh, don’t listen to her. She is the one responsible for bringing the violence.’ She’s not. She’s the one making people think for themselves, sometimes more skillfully, sometimes less skillfully. Ramadan is telling people, ‘Don’t think. I’ll say all the nice-sounding blather that you want to hear against bigotry, against violence, and on the other side of my mouth I’ll tell you to revere these terrible sheiks and look to them for guidance, and finally I’ll say we can’t even discuss these issues like stoning women in public.’

  It is on the issue of stoning women in public that Berman feels confident he has ‘caught’ Ramadan in his own verbal trap, though Berman, of course, is not the agent responsible for the snare. “Sarkozy caught Ramadan off guard [on the question of stoning women in public],” gloats Berman, “and he had no time to drape a discrete and modern curtain across his salafi convictions, and his thoughts came tumbling out undisguised and naked, for all to see.”

  Yet Ramadan’s actual statement conceals an element of Muslim juridical logic that eluded Berman as surely as the vision of al-Ghazali had eluded him earlier. After saying that he personally did not think the law that allowed stoning should be applicable, Ramadan argued that the law could not be delegitimated for most or, preferably, all Muslims unless and until “we arrive at a consensus among Muslims.”

  In effect, Ramadan wanted to have a debate that would show the inadequacy of this practice from an Islamic perspective in order to reach a consensus among Muslims to ban it. What outraged first Sarkozy and then Berman is that Ramadan refused to agree with Western liberal thought and to disavow any connection to his own, or his contemporaries’, Muslim past.

  Had Berman read a bit more widely in al-Ghazali, he might have discovered that the major Ghazalian tome, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam, addresses the same topic as Ramadan; namely, the diffuse nature of authority in Islam. Al-Ghazali argues that there is no such thing as orthodoxy or a single right view, only authority derived from consensus, which may be formal or informal. One informal way to reach consensus is to encourage debate about critical topics, though one cannot preempt that debate by declaring its outcome in advance. One must first invite others, no matter how divergent their outlook, to express their view on the debate topic—e.g., stoning of women for adultery.

  And so Berman, in emulation of Sarkozy, has laid his own trap and insists on making him the Muslim Anti-Hero who stands in for all contemporary Muslims. It is a game that Muslims can never win. Berman’s agenda is not about ascertaining right and wrong or defending a liberal or conservative norm, but about preserving his own privileged podium as a critic who can hector other liberals, like Timothy Garton Ash or Ian Buruma, who wrote the article to which the book is a response. Berman uses Ramadan as a surrogate to denounce all Islamic discourse and to disavow any semblance of Muslim compatibility with Western ‘liberal’ norms and values. The real debate, never declared, is between Islamophobia and Islamophilia.

  The Singular Islam that Must Be Evoked and then Defeated

  Andrew Shryock, a cultural anthropologist specializing in religious ethnography, engages the debate about what Islam is and what it is not. His collection of essays attempts to move beyond the dichotomization of Islam into bashers (Islamophobes) and admirers (Islamophiles). The goal of Islamophobia/Islamophilia, in his own words, is:

  to expose the tactical ignorance, malign and benign, that suffuses educated opinion on all things Muslim. Neither Islamophobia nor Islamophilia has cornered the market on mis/representation. [What is needed is] a deeper, more critical understanding of how patterns of anxiety and attraction are continually reinvented… and how they relate to prevailing ideas—of race, gender, citizenship, secularism, human rights, tolerance, and pluralism—that are important to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

  The essays range from North America to Lebanon to France to Germany; their authors are as intent about urban renewal as they are about ethnic comedy. It is a collection at once serious and sensible in its scope, ambitions and outcome.

  Few readers will move from Berman’s diatribes to Shryock’s distilled insights without a jolt. Can there really be this many ways of thinking about Islam and Muslims? There are if you’re willing to shelve binaries and prejudgments long enough to consider the actual diversity within the Muslim community worldwide, as within the United States. Two essays in particular throw into sharp relief how flimsy and distortive Berman’s views of a singular Islam are, making him a bad faith Muslim spokesman.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali is as much a product of her environment as Berman. Brooklyn College English professor, Moustafa Bayoumi’s “The God that Failed: The Neo-Orientalism of Today’s Muslim Commentators” situates Hirsi Ali within a cohort that more nearly matches our own experience and outlook than the arch proponent of Muslim difference, Tariq Ramadan. Bayoumi compares her to two figures like her: Irshad Manji and Reza Aslan. All are immigrant Muslims to the United States. All attempt to explain Islam to others from their own experience of its excesses. Each draws “a singular narrative account of Islam, where the faith is both a singular system and a singular force in the world.”

  That Grand Narrative not only frames their life stories but more importantly, it is used to explain history. Hirsi Ali’s story, as recounted in her bestseller Infidel, and in the recently released Nomad [see Spencer Dew’s review, An Atheist’s Idealized Christianity—ed.], invokes the trope of the slave narrative, and “like the slave narrative, hers is also one about achieving consciousness under a system of oppression.” To achieve freedom she must escape slavery, not only her own but the slavery of all people ‘captivated’ by Islam. Bayoumi’s principal paragraph on Hirsi Ali reveals more about her motivation and quest than the 35-40 pages of uncritical adulation from Berman. Bayoumi writes:

  Just as the Bible has the power to move the spirit in the slave narrative, so the Atheist Manifesto loaned to her by her boyfriend becomes Hirsi Ali’s path to emancipation. But the emancipation she details is not hers alone, for what would it matter if one Muslim gives up her faith? Hers is instead a broad prescription for all her co-religionists, and by the end of her narrative it is clear that she is lecturing to all the Muslims of the world. If they are to enter modernity, they must give up God within their creed, not just individually but theologically. According to Hirsi Ali, Islam’s salvation is atheism.

  Is that sound of Christopher Hitchens clapping somewhere, or are we just seeing the shadow, once again, of Paul Berman?

  The notion of a singular Islam that must be invoked, and then defeated, permeates almost all the narratives and strategies of Islamophobia. The opposite stance informs Qasim Zaman’s contribution in which the Princeton Islamicist sees a diffuse Islam, one that both requires and enjoys a complex intellectual engagement with the modern world.

  Among Zaman’s foremost subjects is no less a figure than Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a dark figure in Berman’s account. In the book by Ramadan (the one that Daniel Pipes had initially praised), Berman claims that Ramadan links his intellectual project to Qaradawi’s and that the connection runs far deeper: “Ramadan reveres Qaradawi. The veneration is unmistakable. Ramadan appears to hold Qaradawi in higher regard than any other present-day Islamic scholar.”

  So one might be surprised to find that Zaman imputes subtlety and ambiguity to Qaradawi’s thought. Indeed Zaman reviews Qaradawi’s endeavors with sympathetic nuance. Why the sympathy? Because of Qaradawi’s expansive effort to find a consensus (yes, that is the same term used by Ramadan) among Muslims, not just scholars trained in madrasas, but also journalists, lawyers, and even Islamist leaders.

  The effort to find such an unprecedented consensus in modern Islam has been channeled through the International Union for Muslim Scholars that Qaradawi helped found in 2004; it operates out of both London and (since 2008) Cairo. The real divide among this huge array of voices and perspectives is not between those calling for reform and those opposing it, but “rather between different kinds of reform—one genuine, because it is anchored in Islam, the other insidious, for serving anti-Islamic interests.”

  Though Qaradawi does strive for an Islamic religio-political order, he also projects “a global Muslim consciousness as an alternate globalization, one charted in the face of the Western neo-imperialist threat.” Should we then fear Qaradawi, as Berman implies we must? Not really, since many of those in the Muslim Scholars Union do not agree with Qaradawi about where and how the line between genuine and insidious reform is to be drawn. After examining all available evidence, Zaman concludes that:

  there clearly is a broad and growing agreement within the ranks of the ulama [Muslim legal scholars] as well as between the ulama and other religious intellectuals that bridging the gulf between different intellectual traditions is desirable and, indeed, a matter of great urgency. Yet there is no unanimity on what precisely is the gulf that most needs to be bridged and why the effort to do so is worth making.

  What does remain clear is “the evolving arena of debate and contestation which… extends well beyond any dichotomous constructions.”

  It is this messiness at the heart of contemporary Islam that needs to be highlighted even if it is less rhetorically gripping than a slavery-freedom narrative or has a less visceral appeal than an account of fatwas for or against public stoning for adultery. All of us—not just academics and Islam watchers—need to recognize the real face (or faces, more accurately) of the 21st-century Muslim world, which is no less diverse and complex, nor less baffling, bemusing, and ennobling than its Abrahamic counterparts who happen to be, or choose to be, Christian, Jewish, or even secular.

  One can opt for Islamophobia or Islamophilia, but either option misses the actual drama of today’s Muslim world, its enduring search for consensus and its multiple contestants for authority—both at home and abroad.

Tavis Smiley, the popular PBS talk show host had Ayaan Hirsi Ali (accustomed to an ignorant American media that usually fawns all over her, and rarely engages her in challenging dialogue) on his show for a classic TV truth moment.

Ayaan was visibly taken a back and unprepared by the facts that Smiley stated to her. I don’t know why Ayaan was so surprised, if she had done a bare minimum of research she would have seen the veracity of Smiley’s statements.

Watch it here:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0YYic_JpY&feature=player_embedded 350 300]

Our website has copiously documented the violence perpetrated by people in the name of the Christian faith as well as the rise in militant Christian supremacist ideology. In fact one of our most popular pieces, “All Terrorists are Muslims, except the 94% that aren’t” stated the facts about terrorist attacks in the United States, which empirically backs up the statement by Smiley,

Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes.  If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims.  It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims.” Muslims and their “leftist dhimmi allies” respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that “nearly all terrorists are Muslims.”

But perception is not reality.  The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion.  On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on U.S. soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005.  That list can be accessed here (scroll down all the way to the bottom).

Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group From 1980 to 2005 According to FBI Database

The right-wing blogosphere has been up in arms over this, Frontpage Mag has dubbed Tavis a “Moron,” Greg Hengler of TownHall says Smiley is a “so-called Christian” who,

[s]ees the world through a left-wing lens–not a Christian one. This is the only way one can explain such idiocy. If leftists continue to succeed in maligning Christians and excusing or exalting Muslims, we can only hope that American pop culture and education will destroy the character of their people as it has done to ours.

It looks like the truth hurts, I hope that Tavis Smiley can stay strong amidst the flood of hate and calls for retractions and apologies that will be hurled his way by people who are upset that their hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali was so badly given a dose of truth and reality. I would encourage everyone to write or email Tavis and his show, commending him for his strong stance against disinformation and bigotry.

Here is a nice article from USA Today:

Our view on religious attire: Europe’s moves to ban veils hand ammo to extremists

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From the realm of truly terrible ideas comes this: Parts of Europe suddenly seem enthralled with banning the burqa and niqab, Islamic attire that hides the face.

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But France, home to a third of Europe’s Muslims, is the epicenter of the debate, and the current proposal is the second round in a longer fight. France banned Muslim head scarves in schools and government offices in 2004. The new plan goes further, applying not just to public facilities or security checkpoints (which would make sense) but to all public places.

Sarkozy and others justify this on the grounds that face-covering veils are a symbol of the oppression of women, an expression of radicalism and, most important, an offense to France’s rigidly secular state. There is some truth to all of this. For reasons deeply rooted in French history, France officially treats religion as something to be practiced in private but muffled in public, and the nation is obsessive about protecting a homogenous culture. The concept is so alien to freewheeling U.S. ways that Americans might be tempted to see the entire debate as just another French anomaly, akin to its worries about the cultural impact of Disney or McDonald’s.

But religion isn’t a Big Mac, and the spreading bans are a marker of desperation as Europe struggles to deal with its large and estranged Muslim communities. The continent is home to more than five times as many Muslims as the United States, and its nations lack America’s knack for assimilating immigrants. Muslims live mostly among themselves as an economic underclass. Many of the young are underemployed, restless and resentful. Zacarius Moussaoui, the 9/11 conspirator, sprang from such roots. So did Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch Muslim who murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Surely, banning any peaceful Muslim religious practice is a needless affront that hands ammunition to radical mullahs who recruit others for similar missions by claiming that there is a Western “war on Islam.”

It is not as if the streets of Paris are teeming with burqa-clad women. The French Interior Ministry estimates that only 1,900 women in the entire country (population: 65 million) wear veils that fully hide the face. In Belgium, it’s a few hundred.

This is a threat?

As for Sarkozy’s claim that the burqas and niqabs oppress women, he is partly right. Men sometimes force them on their wives and daughters. Burqas, particularly, are controversial even in the Muslim world. But there are also plenty of women who wear them by choice.

There’s little the U.S. can do about any of this, even by persuasion. The cultural gap is too vast, and France has no First Amendment guaranteeing individual freedom. All the same, common sense suggests that telling women what they can wear is not only unjust. It seems certain to backfire.

Food for thought for Quran Bashers

By Svend White

Sometimes as a Muslim I feel suspect that the simplest, most effective way to begin to answer the many burning questions Westerners have about Islam and Muslims isn’t to give them a Quran or even the most erudite and engaging book on Islam. For many living in our postmodern world, such a discussion needs to start far closer to home, with a crash course in Western religious history and the basic ideas of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Not only is that often a necessary remedial measure, but in this day of –to borrow an inspired metaphor once applied to U.S.-Iranian relations – “mutual Satanization” I think it is for many probably the only way to begin this critical conversation.

As an undergrad studying French in the early 1990s, I took a class on the Francophone literature of Quebec. Until recently in most Western societies literature was riddled with references to and assumptions of familiarity with the Bible, and this was especially true of Quebec’s literary output thanks to the province’s tradition of being *plus catholique que le pape*.

I was the only non-Christian in the class and my knowledge of the Bible is anything but encyclopedic, yet it sometimes seemed that I was the only student with even a rudimentary familiarity with the famous biblical narratives, events and turns of phrase that were mined at every turn by our Quebecois authors and film makers. During one class room discussion of the wonderful 1989 world cinema classic “Jesus of Montreal”, after painfully obvious Gospel allusion after painfully obvious Gospel allusion had appeared to be zoom over most people’s heads, I remember thinking, “My God, if these guys are so ignorant of their own tradition, what hope is there of explaining the yet more unfamiliar worldview of Muslims?” (For more on this trend, see Stephen Prothero’s stimulating Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t.)

In such a backdrop of abject religious illiteracy, the most effective introduction to Islam for the average American may not be a book on Islam at all, but rather an discussion of the parallels of Islam’s supposedly peculiar doctrines and practices that are to be found in one’s own culturo-religious heritage.

It is for this reason I think that Prof. Phillip Jenkins–a noted scholar on contemporary Christianity, especially in Global South–has made an extremely valuable contribution to our national conversation by taking a sledgehammer to the smug sense of self-evident superiority that Christian chauvinists take for granted in discussions of other religions (e.g., Lou Dobbs’ ignorant mischaracterization of Buddhism), Islam in particular. In his soon-to-be published book Dark Passages Jenkins analyzes the examples of and implicit attitudes towards violence and war present in the Old Testament and in Islam’s holy book and comes to some conclusions that will surprise many Americans and which ought to put post-9/11 culture warriors on the defensive for a change.

Not only does the Quran repudiate aggression – as many Muslims today argue, to guffaws in some quarters of American political life – but it is in his estimation far less violent than the Bible. From an article Jenkins recently wrote for The Boston Globe:

Citing examples such as these, some Westerners argue that the Muslim scriptures themselves inspire terrorism, and drive violent jihad. [...]

Even Westerners who have never opened the book – especially such people, perhaps – assume that the Koran is filled with calls for militarism and murder, and that those texts shape Islam.

Unconsciously, perhaps, many Christians consider Islam to be a kind of dark shadow of their own faith, with the ugly words of the Koran standing in absolute contrast to the scriptures they themselves cherish. In the minds of ordinary Christians – and Jews – the Koran teaches savagery and warfare, while the Bible offers a message of love, forgiveness, and charity. For the prophet Micah, God’s commands to his people are summarized in the words “act justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Christians recall the words of the dying Jesus: “Father, forgive them: they know not what they do.”

But in terms of ordering violence and bloodshed, any simplistic claim about the superiority of the Bible to the Koran would be wildly wrong. In fact, the Bible overflows with “texts of terror,” to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. The Koran often urges believers to fight, yet it also commands that enemies be shown mercy when they surrender. Some frightful portions of the Bible, by contrast, go much further in ordering the total extermination of enemies, of whole families and races – of men, women, and children, and even their livestock, with no quarter granted (more here).

Like Juan Cole, I think the weight of evidence supports Jenkins’ charge – not that it is a damning one when taken in cultural and historical context–however politically and ideologically incorrect such an admission may be in a time where a sizable swath of the Christian Right is demonizing Muslims (in some cases quite literally). I am not fond of religious apologetics, but I must observe that even the most controversial episodes from Muhammad’s political career (e.g., his harsh reprisals against Jewish tribes in Medina after they, according to Islamic tradition, conspired with the his Meccan foes) – much less the handful of allegedly jingoistic Qur’anic verses cited ad nauseam by Islamophobes – compare to the seemingly divinely sanctioned carnage visited upon various non-Israelite peoples in the Pentateuch, much less the genocidal destruction of the Canaanites told in the Book of Joshua and elsewhere.

It’s not a topic I enjoy discussing or find particularly interesting, but how else does one begin the conversation in so polarized and mutually-Satanized an intellectual climate? Moreover, what I find scandalous is not the presence of appalling violence in an ancient scripture – violence which can, it must be said, be interpreted in variety of ways (e.g., many Biblical scholars today believe the conquest of Canaan recounted in the Hebrew Bible to be mythical, more an expression of nationalist ideology than a factual historical account) – but rather the painful absence of self-awareness on the part of many contemporary critics who ignorantly and offensively denigrate the Qur’an on flimsy grounds while instinctively explaining away far more challenging ethical problems to be found within their own sacred scriptures.

Philosophers sometimes speak of the Principle of Interpretive Charity, which I understand to posit that one is more likely to accurately understand the beliefs of others if one assumes said beliefs to be internally consistent at first blush. Rather than declare the Other irrational (or worse) at the first encounter with a notion that strikes one as inconsistent, superstitious or otherwise irreconcilable with what one knows to be true, the cause of scholarly inquiry is usually far better served by making another pass and seeing if there isn’t another interpretive schema which does not ultimately call into question the humanity of those one is studying.

It is the “Golden Rule” applied to the social sciences and philosophy. As with the Golden Rule, a more conscientious application of this profound insight by all parties to these debates would open the door to infinitely more meaningful dialog. And we might even have a chance to begin to figure out what makes each other tick.

source

by Glenn Greenwald

(updated below – Update II)

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media’s most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals — it’s time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here. . . . The problem is more than a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems here.  In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles for the United States in its effort to build a stronger alliance with a country to which it gives more than a billion dollars a year in aid.

Initially, it’s worth asking how these “conspiracy theories” compare to this:  from the front page of The New York Times, September 8, 2002:

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks.

From the front page of The Washington Post, April 3, 2003:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday. Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting 11 days ago, one official said. . . . Lynch’s rescue at midnight local time Tuesday was a classic Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos in Blackhawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound, defense officials said.

Brian Ross, ABC News, the week of October 25, 2001:

[S]ources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons — Iraq. . . . Former UN weapons inspectors say the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994. . . . At the same time those [anthrax] results were coming in, officials in the Czech Republic confirmed that hijack ringleader, Mohammed Atta, had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, raising what authorities consider some extremely provocative questions.

NBC News, April 26, 2004:

Pat Tillman, who gave up the glamorous life of a professional football star to join the Army Rangers, was remembered as a role model of courage and patriotism Friday after military officials said he had been killed in action in Afghanistan. . . . [U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew] Beevers said Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but he had no information about what type of weapons were involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, February 10, 2003:

According to several intelligence officials I spoke to, the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi. . . . In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties . . . I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad. . . . [James] Woolsey, who served as President Clinton’s first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism.

Bernard Lewis, Wall St. Journal, August 8, 2006:

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. . . . This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, January 11, 2002, explaining the treatment of detainees:

I mean, these are people that would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down. I mean, so this is — these are very, very dangerous people, and that’s how they’re being treated.

And that’s to say nothing about the orgies of “conspiracy theories” churned out on a daily basis from right-wing talk radio, blog outlets, Fox News and even establishment Republicans over the years — from Iranian computer viruses, Vince Foster’s murder, the nefarious Muslim-Leftist alliance, ACORN’s omnipotence, and Obama death panels to The Vicious War on Christmas, the DOJ’s “Al Qaeda 7,” Maoist followers in the administration, Obama’s Kenyan birthplace and Islamic beliefs, and the subversive Congressional interns serving at the behest of CAIR.

* * * * *

There’s little doubt that many Pakistanis believe all sorts of things that are false and that some extremist sectors peddle paranoid conspiracies.  Propaganda is a standard tactic used by political and religious leaders of all types to manipulate their followers, as is casting blame on external enemies for those leaders’ failures.  Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to find a society free of extremist paranoia, and Pakistan undoubtedly has its share.  But look at the specific beliefs identified by the NYT as proof of how conspiratorial the Pakistanis are, and decide where the real propaganda is.

First we learn that “no part of the Pakistani state — either the weak civilian government or the powerful military — is willing to risk publicly owning [its] relationship” with the U.S., and that “[o]ne result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies.”  The NYT specifically cites the fact that “the Central Intelligence Agency uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist.”

But isn’t exactly the same true in the U.S., where our most consequential acts in Pakistan — from drone attacks to Special Forces operations — are ones the U.S. Government will not even publicly acknowledge, let alone debate and describe?  Here’s what Hillary Clinton said when asked last December about the deaths of Pakistani civilians caused by U.S. actions in that country:  ”I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”  And the NYT should perhaps check its own front page from yesterday, which detailed a secret order from last fall directing a massive escalation in the use of U.S. Special Forces in a whole slew of Muslim countries — all without any public discussion, debate, or authorization from Congress.  We’re essentially fighting covert, unauthorized wars in multiple Muslim nations — including Pakistan — all while the NYT mocks those silly Pakistanis for failing to publicly discuss their own military policies and for believing that the U.S. is engaged in unknown and unseen conduct in their country.

Then the NYT derides some Pakistanis for their crazy “theory that India, Israel and the United States — through their intelligence agencies and the company formerly known as Blackwater — are conspiring to destroy Pakistan.”  But what the NYT fails to mention is that the U.S. is actually using Blackwater for a wide variety of covert, lethal missions inside Pakistan, as The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill has documented at length.  They may not be “conspiring to destroy Pakistan,” but they are engaged in “targeted assassinations,” “‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan,” and “assist[ing] in gathering intelligence and help[ing] direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.”

Given Blackwater’s history and the secrecy in which its conduct is shrouded, isn’t it more rational to worry about their conduct inside one’s country than to ignore it or assume it’s benign?  After all, if a foreign country were sending its military and intelligence services inside the U.S. to assassinate our citizens, drop bombs on us from robots in the air, and infiltrate our society with shadowy private contractors — as we’re doing to Pakistan — do you think we might be projecting intense hostility toward that country and expressing serious suspicions about what else they were doing inside our country?  Is it conspiratorial paranoia or rational self-interest that leads one to think that way?

As further proof of this pervasive myth-making in Pakistan, the NYT article cites the fact that one Pakistani lawyer with a talk show “argues that Al Qaeda is an American invention.”  While that’s not precisely true, it is a matter of undisputed fact that the mujahedeen who were the precursors to Al Qaeda — as well as Osama bin Laden himself — were supported and funded by the U.S. throughout the 1980s, all the way up to the formal founding of “Al Qaeda” itself:

Thousands of Muslim radicals joined the CIA and mujahedeen, including bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Saudi road builder. Though he didn’t actually take up arms, he helped build roads and arms depots, using his own funds and CIA money.

“We funded him, we and the Saudis,” said Glynn Wood, professor of international policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. . . . Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid reported recently that the CIA funded an underground arms depot, training facility and medical center that bin Laden helped build in 1986 near the Pakistan border. There bin Laden set up his first training camp.

As the BBC said in 2004:  ”Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding” in the 1980s and “[s]ome analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.”  In 2007, Der Spiegel called bin Laden “one of the best customers for the CIA” during that decade.

In light of all that, what’s more irrational and propagandized:  believing that the U.S. was responsible for the birth of Al Qaeda (as some benighted Pakistanis do) or treating that belief as though it’s some wild, unhinged, crazed conspiracy theory with no basis in reality (as the NYT today does)?  The same is true for what the NYT castigates as Pakistani conspiracies “infused with anti-Semitism,” such as the belief that Jewish and Indian lobbies exert influence on U.S. Government foreign policy.  What rational person denies that such groups — along with a slew of others — exert political power in Washington, or that Israel maintains close military and other relations with Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India?

It’s not until the third-to-last paragraph that the NYT article cursorily acknowledges the clear basis which rational Pakistanis would have for being highly suspicious of American involvement in their country:

There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be skeptical of the United States. It encouraged — and financed — jihadis waging a religious war against the Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s education system with Islamists.

And, of course, the U.S. propped up that country’s oppressive Musharraf regime with massive amounts of aid — not to mention the small fact that the U.S. invaded and has been militarily occupying two of Pakistan’s neighboring countries (one of which shares a large border with Pakistan) for almost the entire last decade.  In sum, the U.S. has covertly played a central role in the internal affairs of the region generally and Pakistan specifically for decades.  In light of that, what’s more irrational:  to question what the U.S. is up to or to treat such questions as the by-product of crazed and deranged fanaticism?

Finally, note how the NYT article is framed at the top by a photograph of a Pakistani holding a sign that reads “We Hate America” — as though the only reason someone might harbor such anti-American hostility is because they’ve been misled with false claims and conspiracy theories about Our Noble and Magnanimous Land.  That — about a country where we’ve propped up numerous oppressive regimes and continue to slaughter civilians via sky robots.  Of all the myths identified by the NYT article, the implicit one conveyed by that photograph – Pakistanis harbor anger toward the U.S. only because of false conspiracy theories they’re being fed — is easily the most extreme.

This game of Let’s Mock Those Crazy, Conspiratorial Arabs and Muslims is as useful as it is common:  recall how only the Paranoid “Arab Street” believed that the invasion of Iraq would lead to permanent American military bases in that country, only for this to be revealed, followed by this.  There is a lot of propaganda, paranoia and myth in Pakistan, along with most places in the world.  But the American media’s fixation on pointing to it and deriding it has the principal effect (if not intent) of obscurin