The Passions (And Perils) Of Pamela Geller

Doug Chandler

Pamela Geller had had enough.

The right-wing blogger, whose vehement opposition to the planned Islamic community center near Ground Zero (a “mega-mosque” in her parlance) has earned Geller national headlines, rose from her seat at a Midtown diner last week and, fed up with the line of questioning, stormed out of a Jewish Week interview.

“Shame on you,” she shouted, “shame on you. Stop slamming the good guys.”

A journalist’s offense? Asking questions about her accuracy and her red-meat rhetoric.

The sense of drama seems, in part, to define Geller, who can be seen on the Internet frolicking in a bikini and posing in a skin-tight Superwoman outfit. Her blog “Atlas Shrugs” has referred to Democrats as “National Socialists,” has sided with Slobodan Milosevic, the late Serbian president charged with war crimes, and has claimed that Elena Kagan, the country’s newest Supreme Court justice and a Jew, admired “an architect” of Nazism. She has also likened President Barack Obama’s opposition to settlement growth on the West Bank to preparations for the Holocaust and has provided space to one writer’s view that Obama is Malcolm X’s love child.

Geller’s politics and tone have drawn a growing number of visitors to her blog, which she uses to promote other projects, including a provocatively named group, Stop Islamization of America, and her recently published book, “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.”

But it’s her opposition to the proposed Islamic center — an effort she helped fuel and now helps to lead — that has arguably won Geller the most attention. Recent articles in the Washington Post and on Salon.com have noted that Geller was among the handful of people calling attention to the project nine months ago, before it hit the national radar and when the host of a Fox News show could still interview Daisy Khan, wife of the center’s leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and wish her well.

Since then, Geller’s right-wing fans have hailed her as prophetic, especially for warning of the dangers posed by Muslims in this country, while progressives, moderates and at least some embarrassed conservatives see her as something entirely different: a radical activist who comes across as shrill, crude and offensive and who fails to distinguish between Islamic fanatics and the religion itself.

Those emotions are bound to escalate in the next week, as Geller plans a Sept. 11 rally in Lower Manhattan to protest the Islamic center, known as Park51.

But few people are likely to guess that the woman who has stirred so much passion is also a Jewish day school mom raised by a Yiddishkeit family in the Five Towns enclave of Hewlett, L.I.

For her part, Geller dismisses any suggestion that she put the whole story in motion as “nonsensical” and as “condescending to the American people, as if they don’t know their own minds. It’s an issue of common decency,” she said while sitting in the back of a Midtown diner. “And you can see that in the [polling] numbers,” which show 70 percent of Americans opposed to the project.

The one thing Geller does acknowledge is that “no one else was talking” about the center as she began addressing the issue on Atlas Shrugs. But no one should assume that Geller’s blog posts made the story the one it is today. Instead, as she sees it, awareness of the matter simply grew and, with it, opposition to the center.

But Geller has done more than simply write about the project. She has also organized much of the opposition, showing up at the May 25 community board meeting that heard public debate over the issue, convening the first rally against the center, in early June, and now, of course, planning next week’s rally. Geller attended the community board meeting with Robert Spencer, an author and fellow blogger with whom she often partners, where they and others often shouted down speakers in favor of the center, creating an atmosphere that reminded one board member, the son of a German Jewish refugee, of the Brown Shirt movement.

She has also debated the issue on Fox News, “The Joy Behar Show” and other TV programs, where she often raises her voice and talks over the other guests.

In person, though, the 51-year-old blogger comes across as charming, demure and even subdued, as long as she isn’t questioned or challenged too vigorously.

Like many New Yorkers, Geller appears to divide her life between “Before 9/11” and “After 9/11.” Before the terror attacks, she worked on the business side of the newspaper industry, spending the 1980s at the Daily News before moving to the New York Observer. She was mostly apolitical, although, if anything, she said, she leaned left, seeing everything “through the prism of abortion.”

All that changed after 9/11, Geller recalled, saying she “felt guilty that I didn’t know who attacked my country.” She began reading all the material she could about Islam, Geller said, citing such authors as Martin Gilbert, the British historian; Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-born scholar whose politics are decidedly right wing; and Ibn Warraq, a former Muslim from Pakistan.

“I spent years studying the matter before I started blogging,” Geller said, adding that the more she read, the more she realized that journalists and historians were “whitewashing Islam.”

Today, Geller describes herself as a keen believer in individual rights — “the well from which all things spring” — and says the name of her blog, launched in 2004, reflects that. The name refers to the title of Ayn Rand’s most famous book, which is an inspiration for Geller. She also calls herself an ardent Zionist.

Much of her blog’s focus, though, springs from Geller’s view of Islam, which, is portrayed as a monolithic religion that can only be interpreted in a single way — the one most scholars associate with radical, Wahhabi Muslims.

“It’s not like Judaism, where you have these different levels of observance,” Geller said. “Islam is Islam. … There’s no way you can be a devout Muslim and not support jihad.”

The only moderate Muslims are those who are secular, Geller said. And she dismisses any Muslim who claims otherwise by insisting that he’s a liar — a follower of taqiyya, the Islamic principle that allows Muslims to mislead their enemies, according to Geller.

Comments such as those, by Geller and others, leave at least one local Muslim in disbelief.

“They talk about Islam as if it’s monolithic,” said Qanta Ahmed, a British-born physician who often writes about religion for the Huffington Post and other sites. “We’re 1.5 billion individuals from 57 countries and countless cultures.”

“‘Devout’ means devotion to one’s faith, and you can be very devout without being radical,” said Ahmed, whose articles have concerned such topics as the friendship and inspiration she has drawn from a number of Jews, including a rabbi; the admiration she often feels for Israel; and the hatred toward Jews conveyed in Palestinian textbooks and TV shows.

Discussing jihad, a word that means “struggle,” Ahmed said it’s not even mentioned in the five pillars of Islam, “the absolute basis of being a Muslim,” and there are three kinds of jihad to which Muslims refer. The most important, known as the “greater jihad,” is the internal struggle within each individual to be good, while the “lesser jihad” concerns the religious permission Muslims need to defend themselves against military attack.

“There is no such thing as a holy war in Islam,”Ahmed continued. “There are only just and unjust wars, and Islam is very clear about that.”

On the matter of faith, Geller herself is not especially observant, calling her children far more religious than she is. She sends two of her children to Jewish day school, although she prefers that any further information about her kids remain private — a consequence, she added, of the death threats she says she has received.

She grew up in a Conservative Jewish home — “more Yiddishkeit than by the book,” she said — and has visited Israel twice: once during college and, again, in 2006, when she blogged about Israel’s war with Hezbollah. But her views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are just as right-wing as her views on American politics.

In Geller’s eyes, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] are Jewish land; there are no settlers, only Jews living in the Jewish homeland; and the area’s Muslims should return the Temple Mount to Jewish hands.

Geller has also taken aim at Jewish leaders in the United States, comparing mainstream organizations to Jews before the Holocaust who ignored all the danger signs. She has also called J Street and the National Jewish Democratic Council “kapos,” a reference to the Jews in Europe who aided the Nazis.

Geller’s fans include Lori Lowenthal Marcus, founder of the right-wing, pro-Israel Z Street, who said “she’s definitely serving a need. She’s an indefatigable fighter and very brazen, which is necessary to raise the profile of the issues.”

Another view comes from Todd Gitlin, a progressive scholar who teaches journalism and sociology at Columbia University, who considers Geller part of “a long history” of firebrands devoted to “this sort of agitation. … These are people who have a fixation on some paranoid scenario,” he said, and they often become a focal point for wider passions.

While not discussing Geller specifically, Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a neoconservative think tank, said the tenor of the conversation regarding Islam in recent months has distressed him. The “good part” is that Americans are now pushing back against Islamacists, or radical Muslims, but the “bad part” is that many are now doing so “in a crude way,” calling Mohammed a pedophile and referring to all Muslims as terrorists.

Many of today’s bloggers, Pipes said, “came of age on 9/11” and haven’t done the serious study of Islam that he and others have. As a result, he added, much of what they write is based on ignorance.

For her part, Geller defends the tone of her blog, calling Atlas Shrugs “my living room and kitchen” — a place where she can kick back and yell, like some people shout at their TV. Her book and opinion pieces “are more studied and more measured.”

“There’s no gray area with me,” Geller said. “I know why I think what I think.”

Rabbi Yizhak Shapira

(hat tip: D. Bartholomew)

How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Israeli Rabbis Defend Book’s Shocking Religious Defense of Killing Non-Jews (with Video)

by Max Blumenthal

August 30, 2010

When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. “Are you sure you want it?” the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. “The Shabak [Israel's internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do.” As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. “See that?” he told me. “It goes straight to the Shabak!”

As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book’s contents as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.” According to the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, “Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country’s rabbinate. “Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened,” Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. “Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up.”

In response to the rabbis’ public rebuke of the state’s legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author’s leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel’s religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

On August 18, a pantheon of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities — even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government’s investigation of Torat Ha’Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well.

Watch the video (article continues below):

“The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah,” bellowed Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. “It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side.”

The government-funded terror academy

The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira’s followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.

Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least thirty thousand to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.

Though he does not name “the enemy” in the pages of his book, Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira’s confederates under suspicion of arson.

Friends in high places

Despite his longstanding involvement in terrorism, or perhaps because of it, Shapira counts Israel’s leading fundamentalist rabbis among his supporters. His most well-known backer is Dov Lior the leader of the Shavei-Hevron yeshiva at Kiryat Arba, a radical Jewish settlement near the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron and a hotbed of Jewish terrorism. Lior has vigorously endorsed Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “very relevant, especially in this time.”

Lior’s enthusiasm for Shapira’s tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF’s top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: “There is no such thing as civilians in wartime… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail!” Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.

Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein’s funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out “to sanctify the holy name of God.” He then extolled Goldstein as “a righteous man.” Thanks to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer’s deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.

Though Lior’s inflammatory statements resulted in his being barred from running for election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council, according to journalist Daniel Estrin, the rabbi remains “a respected figure among many mainstream ZIonists.” By extension, he maintains considerable influence among religious elements in the IDF. In 2008, when the IDF’s chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to revel the officers with his views on modern warfare — “no such thing as civilians in wartime.”

Besides Lior, Torat Ha’Melech has earned support from another nationally prominent fundamentalist rabbi: Yaakov Yosef. Yosef is the leader of the Hazon Yaakov Yeshiva in Jerusalem and a former member of Knesset. Perhaps more significantly, he is the son of Ovadiah Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party that forms a key segment of Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha’Melech, insisting at the August 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. “Does anyone want to change the Bible?” he asked.

Bibi buckles

Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef’s 89-year-old father, Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he  declared: “All these evil people should perish from this world… God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith,” Erekat remarked, “a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction.”

Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement. “If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort,” Zehalka said, “he would be arrested immediately.”

Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by  shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef’s genocidal comments — a feat made all the easier by the White House’s condemnation of the rabbi. But the Israeli Prime Minister ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement instead of a condemnation. “Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views,” the statement read, “nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government.”

By refusing to cut Yosef loose, his party remains a central actor in the Israeli government. Thus the statement by Netanyahu was not only weak. It was false.

More European loonieness. An Austrian right-wing party has created a game that takes aim at minarets and muezzins.

Austrian Anti-Muslim Game Stokes Outrage

A right-wing Austrian political party’s published a flash game in which the countryside is overrun with minarets and mosques and players must stop their construction. Because nationalism and xenophobia’s so much more fun when it’s in the German language!

Moschee Baba (“Bye-Bye Mosque”) is a minute-long, shooting-gallery type game in which a stop sign is clicked on a minaret, mosque, or muezzin (the guys who sound the morning calls to prayer). It’s a political ad for the Freedom Party in the Styrian province; regional elections are coming at the end of the month.

No one’s killed and nothing’s destroyed in the game, but its tone is pretty hateful and paranoid and it’s pissed off political opponents but good. Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Muslim community have demanded the game’s removal and an investigation for “incitement.”

The game is, of course, a gross caricature of the reality of the situation in Austria. Only four mosques with a visible minaret exist in the country. None are in Styria, whose population is 1.2 percent Muslim.

After the game ends, it serves players with a push poll, asking if there should be a ban on minaret construction, wearing of burqas, niqabs or other Islamic garments, and if Muslims should sign some oath accepting Austrian law’s primacy over the Koran. Fun stuff.

Far-Right Anti-Mosque Video Game Triggers Outrage In Austria [Reuters]

Send an email to the author of this post at owen@kotaku.com.

Also see AlJazeera: Fury in Austria at anti-Mosque Game

Imagine if Muslims had put up a similar sign, or if Muslim women were scowling at visitors who dressed in daisy dukes and halter tops. Islamophobes like Bikini Vlogger Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer would be howling to the moon about how Muslims are trying to take over America and impose Islam on the masses. (hat tip: ELi)

Welcome to Kiryas Joel: Please Dress Accordingly

KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y. (CBS 2) – You may never see a more unusual “Welcome” sign in Orange County.

A sign in Kiryas Joel, the Hasidic Jewish enclave, is evoking mixed reaction.

Monroe resident Jessica Pantalemon stopped to cash a check in Kiryas Joel wearing a bright pink tank top and white shorts. She said she noticed scowling faces.

“Just from the women, mostly,” she said. “The guys let me walk by, the women stop and stare, start whispering to each other…I just ignore them.”

The tradition in the village of Satmar Hasidic Jews is modesty. Even on the hottest of days, most residents cover up from head to toe. But visitors don’t necessarily follow that tradition, and now the main synagogue is asking them to comply.

Congregation Yetev Lev posted signs at the village’s entrance – in both English and Spanish – asking outsiders to cover their legs and arms, use appropriate language and maintain gender separation in public.

“It’s a way of respect,” said one resident.

In fact, most residents say it’s simply a polite reminder to respect the local culture, and many visitors take the signs in that spirit.

“It’s nice to request that people behave in a way respect to their beliefs,” said Barry Kaufmann of Wantagh.

But the sign struck a sour note with some.

“They’re telling us that we can’t come into their community unless we dress a certain way,” said Adia Parker, an Orange County resident.

“I feel like my constitutional rights are being violated,” said Tyrone Wheeler, a day laborer in the village seeking work.

A village trustee pointed out the signs said nothing about consequences for violating these guidelines – because there are no consequences.

“We’re not threatening anyone,” said Rabbi Jacob Freund. “Everybody is free to come in and be the same, like all other places in the United States.”

So dressing like Jessica Pantalemon may elicit a scowl, but it won’t earn you a summons.

The New York Civil Liberties Union said because the signs were paid for privately and are not on public land and they pass constitutional muster.

Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson

Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.

Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson.

Special Agent Andy Anderson of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told CBS News that the fire destroyed one piece of construction equipment and damaged three others. Gas was poured over the equipment to start the fire, Anderson said.

The ATF, FBI and Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office are conducting a joint investigation into the fire, Anderson said.

WTVF reports firefighters were alerted by a passerby who saw flames at the site. One large earth hauler was set on fire before the suspect or suspects left the scene.

The chair of the center’s planning committee, Essim Fathy, said he drove to the site at around 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning after he was contacted by the sheriff’s department.

“Our people and community are so worried of what else can happen,” said Fathy. “They are so scared.”

The fire was smoldering by the time Fathy and the center’s imam, Ossama Bahloul, had arrived. Fathy was told that responders had smelled gasoline near the fire.

Fathy was later contacted by members of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, who told him the incident was under investigation and to remain calm.

Digging had begun at the site, which was planned as a place of worship for the approximately 250 Muslim families in the Murfreesboro area, but no structure had been built yet, according to Saleh Sbenaty, a member of the planning committee and a professor of engineering technology at Middle Tennessee State University.

“This is a shock,” said Sbenaty. “We’ve had small act of vandals. But this is going to be a crime and whoever did it, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.”

The center had operated for years out of a small business suite. Planning members said the new building, which was being constructed next to a church, would help accommodate the area’s growing Muslim community.

“We unfortunately did not experience hostilities for the 30 years we’ve been here and have only seen the hostility since approval of the site plan for the new center,” said Sbenaty.

Opponents of a new Islamic center say they believe the mosque will be more than a place of prayer; they are afraid the 15-acre site that was once farmland will be turned into a terrorist training ground for Muslim militants bent on overthrowing the U.S. government.

“They are not a religion. They are a political, militaristic group,” Bob Shelton, a 76-year-old retiree who lives in the area, told The Associated Press.

Shelton was among several hundred demonstrators who recently wore “Vote for Jesus” T-shirts and carried signs that said “No Sharia law for USA!,” referring to the Islamic code of law.

Others took their opposition further, spray painting a sign announcing the “Future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro” and tearing it up.

Earlier this summer opponents criticized the planned mosque at hearings held by the Rutherford County Commission, as supporters held prayer vigils.

At one such prayer vigil, WTVF reported opponents speaking out against construction.

“No mosque in Murfreesboro. I don’t want it. I don’t want them here,” Evy Summers said to WTVF. “Go start their own country overseas somewhere. This is a Christian country. It was based on Christianity.”

So much for the claims of Spencer-Geller that this was probably staged by Muslims to get sympathy from unwitting Americans.

Michael Enright, cabbie-stabber, had “anti-Muslim” diary

By Alex Pareene

Michael Enright, the raging drunk who nearly killed a Muslim cab-driver in Manhattan this week, is being held without bail following his arraignment on hate crime charges. Enright, a film student, is finishing a documentary about Marines serving in Afghanistan, where he was embedded earlier this year for 35 days.

Enright stabbed the man after an apparently civil conversation about the driver’s Muslim faith. Then Enright allegedly yelled, “This is the checkpoint,” and slashed the drivers throat and arm.

According to friends, Enright was usually kind and mild-mannered. He volunteered with Intersections International, a liberal organization dedicated to religious tolerance and peace.

“The person who volunteered for us is a really good guy,” Intersections International executive director Rev. Robert Chase told the media. “He’s responsible, he’s been generous, he’s concerned about the issues in the world.”

“He’s a really nice guy to be around,” a college friend told the New York Post. “He’s a great kid,” a neighbor said.

But: Enright was arrested twice last year, for disorderly conduct and underage drinking. According to the Post: “College friends said Enright had been sober for the last year.”

And a friend tells the Daily News that Enright had seemed troubled and angry since his return from Afghanistan.

The Daily News also reports that cops found a diary on Enright that was filled with anti-Muslim rantings:

The backlash against Muslims continues. I am sure Islamophobes will give this guy a break and say he was drunk, but do you think they would have given Mel Gibson the same break for his drunken anti-Semitic tirade?

‘Drunk’ desecration at mosque

By FRANK ROSARIO and JESSICA SIMEONE

A drunk barged into a Queens mosque last night and shouted anti-Muslim slurs as he urinated on prayer rugs, cops and witnesses said.

Evening prayers were disrupted at the Iman Mosque on Steinway Street in Astoria when the unhinged man “came in with a beer bottle in his hands, clearly very intoxicated,” said Mustapha Sadouki, who was attending services.

“He fumbled over to our rugs where people were praying” and then committed the despicable desecration, Sadouki said,

The man, identified by cops as Omar Rivera, also allegedly shouted slurs, calling the worshippers “terrorists.”

Two men managed to subdue him. They put him a back room and called 911.

Cops took him to a hospital and later charged him with criminal trespass.

“He stuck up his middle finger and cursed at everyone,” said Sadouki, 43.

“No one can pray now because the rugs are completely soiled. It was disgusting.

“He calls us terrorists, yet he comes into our mosque and terrorizes other people.

“This is a true hate crime.”

Mosque vandalized by the American Nationalist Brotherhood (ANB), this time it is explicitly connected to the so-called “mosque at Ground Zero.” Job well done Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

Vandalism at Madera Islamic center called hate crime

Vandalism to a Madera Islamic center and signs found on the property are being investigated as a hate crime, the Madera County Sheriff’s Department said today.

A brick was thrown at the building Friday and three signs were found at Masjid Madera, 16634 Road 26, during two other incidences since Aug. 18, said Erica Stuart, Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman. Two of the signs were found on the center’s property Tuesday afternoon.

The signs read “No Temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero. ANB,” “Wake up America, the Enemy is here. ANB” and “American Nationalist Brotherhood.”

Earlier reports said the brick went through a window. The sheriff’s department said later today that it struck a wall.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call the Sheriff’s Department at (559) 675-7770 or Crime Stoppers at (559) 498-STOP.

The anti-Muslim movement, spearheaded by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller has been ratcheting up the rhetoric against Islam and Muslims. Painting Muslims as an evil fifth column stealthily attempting to subvert our freedoms and impose a draconian totalitarian government upon us.

I mean what else did they expect when they created the Orwellian sounding organization “Stop the Islamization of America” (hat tip: Les):

Police: Cab Driver Stabbed By Passenger Who Asked “Are You Muslim?”

As of late Tuesday, no charges had been filed.

Both the driver and the passenger were taken to Bellevue Hospital.

By: NY1 News

A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1.

Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Police say the passenger asked the driver, “Are you Muslim?” When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

The 43-year-old driver was able to lock the passenger in the back of the cab and call 911.

An excellent article by Nicholas Kristof on the issue of the Park51 Islamic cultural center and mosque. He portrays accurately how those fighting this are feeding into the ideology of Bin Laden and company.

Taking Bin Laden’s Side

Is there any doubt about Osama bin Laden’s position on the not-at-ground-zero mosque?

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores — not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

And this is an earnest effort. I know Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan — the figures behind the Islamic community center — and they are the real thing. Because I have written often about Arab atrocities in Darfur and about the abuse of women in Islamic countries, some Muslim leaders are wary of me. But Imam Feisal and Ms. Khan are open-minded and have been strong advocates for women within Islam.

The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don’t forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.

Remember also that historically, some of the most shocking brutality in the region was justified by the Bible, not the Koran. Crusaders massacred so many men, women and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian chronicler, Fulcher of Chartres, described an area ankle-deep in blood. While burning Jews alive, the crusaders sang, “Christ, We Adore Thee.”

My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor — but her family is Christian, not Muslim.

Precisely because Palestinian violence has roots outside of Islam, Israel originally supported the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials thought that if Gazans became more religious, they would spend their time praying rather than firing guns.

President George W. Bush was statesmanlike after 9/11 in reaching out to Muslims and speaking of Islam as a religion of peace. Now many Republicans have abandoned that posture and are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes. It is mind-boggling that so many Republicans are prepared to bolster the Al Qaeda narrative, and undermine the brave forces within Islam pushing for moderation.

Some Republicans say that it is not a matter of religious tolerance but of sensitivity to the feelings of relatives to those killed at ground zero. Hmm. They’re just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.

On my last trip to Saudi Arabia, I brought in a Bible to see what would happen (alas, the customs officer searched only my laptop bag). Memo to Ms. Palin: Should we learn from the Saudis and protect ground zero by banning the Koran from Lower Manhattan?

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.

Is this getting scarier or what? My gut feeling is the Church will not be able to go ahead with this action considering they were denied a permit by their local fire department.

Armed Christian Group to Guard Church on “Burn Koran Day”

A group that proudly calls itself Right Wing Extreme has pledged to protect a church in Gainesville , Florida that is planning to hold a Koran burning on 9/11, according to WorldCorrespondents.com, which reports as follows.

“This Press Release entitled “Armed Christian Conservative group to protect church during burning of Quran” was shared to us by Prince Shannon Carson of Right Wing Extreme.

The Christian conservative organization Right Wing Extreme has offered its support and protection for the International Burn a Quran day.

Right Wing Extreme was founded in April of 2009 after the Department of Homeland Security’s report titled Right Wing Extremism.”

Unlike the infamous cross burnings of the Ku Klux Klan which were often staged on the property of opponents to intimidate them, the Koran burning will be held on the premises of Dove Ministries International, with their enthusiastic consent. The only laws that could be used against such an event would probably deal with  air pollution rather than objectionable political expression. A case might be made that the Koran burning is a disturbance of the peace.

Unlike the Mohammed cartoon disputeof 2005, which sparked bloody riots, American Muslims have responded to the Dove Ministries provocation with American style media savvy. The Book of Signs Foundation has pledged to distribute 50 free Korans for every copy burned on 9/11. This puts Dove Ministries in a quandary. The bigger and more successful their Koran burning is, the more free copies will be distributed of the Koran.

Most Muslims in America seem to recognize that struggles for the hearts and minds of believers involve arguing and presenting one’s point of view. It is doubtful that a single Muslim will alter or change his or her faith because of the burning of the Koran.

In America, people missionize their religion and their politics. Book burnings of any sort turn people off. The scariest thing to any religious fanatic is the freedom one has in America to practice, change or reject one’s faith.

There are people who get their jollies desecrating the symbol of someone else’s faith, such as Andres Serrano in his infamous “Piss Christ” exhibit, in which he suspended a crucifix in a jar of urine. Most Americans, from devout Christians to avowed atheists and members of non Christian faiths, were disgusted by Serrano’s gratuitous slap at Christian believers. Most Americans feel the same way about the Koran burners at Dove Ministries as well.

This guy was behind the Lord of the Rings as well. Should be something interesting to look forward to.

Matrix Producer Plans Muhammad biopic

Producer Barrie Osborne cast Keanu Reeves as the messiah in The Matrix and helped defeat the dark lord Sauron in his record-breaking Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now the Oscar-winning American film-maker is set to embark on his most perilous quest to date: making a big-screen biopic of the prophet Muhammad.

Budgeted at around $150m (£91.5m), the film will chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings. Osborne told Reuters that he envisages it as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam“.

Osborne’s production will reportedly feature English-speaking Muslim actors. It is backed by the Qatar-based production company Alnoor Holdings, who have installed the Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to oversee all aspects of the shoot. In accordance with Islamic law, the prophet will not actually be depicted on screen.

“The film will shed light on the Prophet’s life since before his birth to his death,” Ahmed Abdullah Al-Mustafa, Alnoor’s chairman, told al-Jazeera. “It will highlight the humanity of Prophet Muhammad.”

The as-yet-untitled picture is due to go before the cameras in 2011. It remains to be seen, however, whether it will be beaten to cinemas by another Muhammad-themed drama. Late last year, producer Oscar Zoghbi announced plans to remake The Message, his controversial 1976 drama that sparked a fatal siege by protesters in Washington DC. The new version, entitled The Messenger of Peace, is currently still in development.

Hate blogger Pamela Geller

(cross-posted from mediamatters.org)

Numerous mainstream media outlets have recently hosted right-wing “Atlas Shrugs” blogger Pamela Geller to discuss the controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic community center set to be built blocks away from Ground Zero. However, Geller’s history of outrageous, inflammatory and false claims, particularly when it comes to issues related to Islam, demonstrate that she cannot be expected to make accurate statements and should not be rewarded with a platform on national television.

Media bring Geller into the mainstream, telling nation she is a credible source

[...]

Geller routinely uses downright outrageous, hateful rhetoric

Geller: Obama “is a third worlder and a coward” who’s “appeas[ing] his Islamic overlords.” In an April 13 blog post, Gellerwrote: “Obama is a third worlder and a coward. He will do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords. All this is going down while Obama plays footsie at his nuclear nonsense campfire — sucking up to Iran’s enablers while beating up our allies.”

Geller: Liberal Jews are “lost souls,” “self-hating wretches.” In her January 25 Newsmax column, Geller wrote that Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League “has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh.” Geller added that this “is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul.” She further wrote, “The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma” and asked, “Which Jews support deleterious characters like Foxman? Which Jews give blood money to these self-hating wretches?”

Geller on Obama’s Israel policy: “Jews Refuse to Get on Obama’s Trains.” In a post apparently responding to Obama’s opposition to settlement growth, Geller wrote, “Jews refuse to get on Obama’s Trains.” She added: “Obama is pressuring Jews to “evacuate” from parts of Israel? And what Warsaw ghetto does the muhammadan [sic] president have in mind? I think I am gonna hurl. The Jews will not go. The Jews will not submit to this century’s nazis [sic] and Mansourian poser. No way, bloodsuckers. Not again. Never again.”

Geller on transgender Obama appointee: “What a freak show this presidency is.” In a January 4 blog post, Geller responded to a report that Obama named a transgender appointee to a Commerce Department position by stating, “Does Obama know anyone who isn’t wacky, radical, militant, judeophobic, socialist, marxist, pedophilic? …… Does he chill with anyone who is normal? Isn’t there one Marilyn Munster in the family? What a freak show this presidency is.”

Geller: Obama “wants jihad to win. That’s what he is doing.” In an April 1 blog post titled, “”President Jihad: Obama Encouraged Violent Palestinian Muslim protests against Israel,” Geller claimed Obama “is agitating Muslims against Jews” and stated, “The President of the United States is advancing jihad against the oath of office that he took.” Geller also stated in an April 11 post, “President Sarkozy called [Obama] ‘a madman,’ ‘a lunatic.’ Perhaps, I don’t know — but one thing is for sure: Hussein is a muhammadan. He’s not insane ………..he wants jihad to win. That’s what he is doing. Of course, to the western mind, the rational mind, the logical mind, the American mind, that is insane.”

Geller called Democrats “National Socialists.” In a March 13 blog post, Geller wrote, ”National Socialists [Democrats] Obamacare: Sheeps to ‘Slaughter Solution.’” She added, “The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Democrats are now considering what is being called the ’Slaughter Solution’ that will allow ObamaCare to be signed into law WITHOUT HOUSE MEMBERS EVEN HAVING TO VOTE.“

Geller: Senate Democrats supporting health care reform voted “to rape the American people.” In a December 21, 2009, blog post, Geller wrote of the cloture vote for health care reform: “The moochers and the looters, the crooks and degenerates voted at 1 am this morning to rip the constitution to shreds, to rape the American people and to nationalize medicine.” She added that passing the bill on Christmas Eve would be “an act of treason and blasphemy.”

Geller declared “VICTORY!” after Swiss established ban on minaret construction. In a November 29 post to her Atlas Shrugs blog — headlined “VICTORY! SWISS BAN MOSQUE MINARETS IN A LANDSLIDE VOTE” — Pamela Geller commented: “The Swiss have hand [sic] enough. They actually had the spine to take back their country. I wonder how the religion of peaceniks will react…in their usual tolerant and pacifist manner?”

Geller: “Obama Goes Full On Nazi.” Geller headlined a November 9, 2009, post “Obama Goes Full On Nazi: Subject: “Democratic consultant says he got a warning from White House after appearing on Fox News.”

Geller: ” ‘Kick a Jew’ days … are part of this growing evil Evil unleashed with an anti-semite in the White House.” In a December 14, 2009, post, Geller wrote:

It’s as if the floodgates of hell have been thrown open. The moratorium on the holocaust is officially over and all the savages are free to incite, hate and destroy. Clearly those “Kick a Jew” days discussed here and here in schools are part of this growing evil Evil [sic] unleashed with an anti-semite in the White House.

Geller: “Obama is bringing his jihad to Illinois.” In a December 15, 2009, post, Geller responded to reports that Guantanamo Bay detainees may be housed at the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois by stating: “Obama is bringing his jihad to Illinois. Has anyone asked the people of Chicago if they want KSM’s soul mates in their state? Obama’s treachery is breathtaking. A killer’s paradise.”

Geller: “It is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth,” and he only visited Pakistan while in college because of “jihad or drugs.” In an August 1, 2009, post, Geller discussed rumors of a Palin divorce being spread by bloggers, including one supposedly tied to CNN and stated:

Let’s understand this. CNN won’t touch the birth certificate issue, the Rezko/Auchi corruption, Obama’s anti-semitism, his ACORN/SEIU ties and corruption, and other legitimate stories that need investigation. But they write fiction about Palin. Daily. So why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections? My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff. Why aren’t they pursuing that story? Find the ho, give her a show! Obama allegedly trafficked in some very deviant practices. Where’s the investigation?

Geller further stated of Obama’s trip to Pakistan during college: “Back in the early 80′s, there were only two reasons to travel to Pakistan. Jihad or drugs. I think he went for the drugs and came back with jihad.”

Geller on Dome of the Rock: “The dome has got to go.” On September 27, 2009, Geller posted an image of Muslims praying at the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holy sites, and stated, “On Erev Yom Kippur, Muslims attack Jews in Jerusalem. The dome has got to go. It is sitting atop the great Jewish temple. The dome has got to go. It’s time to push back and stop indulging evil. Evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction (paraphrasing Rand).”

There’s no reason to expect conspiracy theorist Geller to make accurate statements

Geller claimed Obama’s birth certificate is a “forgery.” In an August 4, 2009 column, Geller claimed that according to a “digital forensic examination specialist” called “Techdude,” the birth certificate Obama posted on his fightthesmears.com website was a “forgery.” She further stated that there is “something on Obama’s birth certificate” that “he does not want us to see” and that “there is know way of knowing” whether “all the documentation on Obama’s birth certificate and citizenship is in order.” Geller also speculated about Obama’s birth certificate at length on her blog, dating back to July 2008. In August 2008, FactCheck.org reported that they had “seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship.” FactCheck.org also noted that “a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961.”

Geller runs with fake Obama quote from fabricated Columbia thesis. After an August 25 post on the blog Jumping in Pools claimed that Obama attacked the Constitution and Founders in his Columbia thesis, right-wing media ran with the “report,” despite the fact that it was tagged as “satire.” In an October 23 post, Geller wrote, “EXCERPTS FROM OBAMA’S COLUMBIA THESIS REVEALS AMERICA’S WORST NIGHTMARE IS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.” She added that the writings revealed ”an America hater.” She also posted the claim on her twitter feed. Geller later posted an update to her blog that stated: “I am looking for the link for the ten pages ………and I can’t find it. But he did say this very thing.” Her blog post has since been taken down.

Geller mistakes AP paraphrase for an Obama quote to accuse him of “a slip of the foreign tongue.” In a May 31 post, Geller quoted an Associated Press article that stated (emphasis in the original): “More than just barbecues and family time, Memorial Day is the chance to honor members of the military who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their country, President Barack Obama says.” Geller responded: “Uh, whose country? Brother Obama’s latest slip of the foreign tongue.” However, the words “their country” can only be attributed to AP’s paraphrase of Obama’s remarks, they do not appear anywhere in his actual address. In fact, in the second paragraph of the address, Obama referred to “our country’s flag.”

In her post, Geller also called Obama “our Nancy boy” because he moved his Memorial Day speech due to rain.

Geller falsely claimed Kagan is “an admirer of an architect of German national socialism, Nazism.” In a July 2 post, Geller wrote, “How broken are we that we would consider an admirer of an architect of German national socialism, Nazism, to sit in one of the most powerful judicial chairs in the world? The Obama freak show continues and we are his victims. Kagan cannot, must not, will not be confirmed.” Geller’s claim was based on a Human Events article that said Kagan’s undergraduate thesis “cited the theories of an influential German Marxist [Werner Sombart] who notoriously switched allegiances to Nazism after Adolf Hitler attained power.” However, at no point did Kagan indicate that she shared or sympathized with Sombart’s ideology. As Media Matters has noted, Kagan’s thesis explored historical questions about socialism and did not express personal support for socialism, or Nazism.

Geller also posted a photo of Kagan – who is Jewish – photoshopped to look like she is wearing Nazi uniform:

Geller claimed Qatari diplomat incident was an “act of Islamic terror” and rushed to attack Obama. In an April 7 post on Atlas Shrugs entitled, “Muslim Tries to Light a Bomb on DC to Denver Aircraft,” Pamela Geller wrote, “NBC is reporting that a muslim [sic] passenger attempted to light an explosive device on board an aircraft from Washington to Denver, sources tell NBC News — this on the day that Obama said jihad and Islamic terrorism does not exist (neither does his birth certificate).” The NBC report to which she linked — a “breaking news” Twitter feed — said only that “a passenger attempted to light an explosive device on board an aircraft from Washington to Denver, sources tell NBC News.” The post made no mention of the passenger’s religion. Geller called the passenger “[t]he jihadi committing this act of Islamic terror.” Before Geller updated her post to reflect new information, she wrote: “Fighter jets were scrambled to bring the plane down. G-d only knows what would have happened if the the [sic] air marshals on board hadn’t tackled him…”

Geller falsely claimed Farrakhan, Ayers and Wright visited White House. In a Marcy 26 post, Geller wrote:

There are consequential, disturbing revelations to be found when flipping through the visitors list at the White House. Bill Ayers is there no less than three times, Louis Farrakhan at least once, but there is also a separate visit for his family, and the infamous hater Jeremiah Wright is there at least five times (four times under Jeremy, one under Jeremiah)

She added, “These are terrorists, inciters to genocide, America haters, the underbelly of an ugly America — and they are in the House.” In fact, the New York Times reported back in October 2009 that the White House said “visitors by the names of William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were not the same two men who stirred controversy for Mr. Obama in his campaign.” In January, White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen stated that the “Louis Farrakhan” in the list is not the well-known individual with that name.

Geller absurdly claimed Obama administration wearing purple as sign of solidarity with SEIU. In a March 26 post titled, “Flying the gangsta colors at the White House: SEIU, The color purple,” Geller wrote (emphasis in the original), “Yes, it seems this can no longer be written off as pure coincidence. The color purple is the fighting color of this administration. It is painfully clear who and what is running the show. Historically the color purple has signified royalty which, ironically, is exactly how the power mad pres thinks of himself. But this is SEIU, all the way. The Chicago way.” As evidence, Geller claimed Obama wore a purple tie when he signed the health care law.  But in other photos and videos, the tie appears to be a grey-ish blue. Geller also posted a photo of Democratic lawmakers who she said were wearing “purple ties,” but they are clearly blue. And she claimed that Robert Gibbs and Andy Stern wore “matching purple bracelets.” However Gibbs had explained in a March 15 tweet that he was wearing the bracelet in support of a family friend who “is bravely fighting cancer.”

Geller baselessly claimed Obama may have visited Louis Farrakhan when he went to Chicago for Memorial Day. In a My 30 post, Geller wrote: “How did the President of the United States spend his Memorial day weekend? Honoring the glorious dead by laying a wreath at Arlington cemetery?? Not a chance. It is unclear, but he may have pow-wowed with race baiter, Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan, a frequent visitor to the White House.” However, Geller provides no information that suggests Obama met with Farrakhan. She noted that Obama attended a dinner at the home of Marty Nesbitt, which is near the home of Farrakhan, and that the press pool reportedly clashed with some of Farrakhan’s men, concluding, “The whole story stinks. Did Obama see Farrakhan or not?”

Geller calls Obama “the Muslim president.” Geller’s blog contains 267 posts tagged, “Muslim in the White House?” In a June 2, 2009, post, Geller called Obama “The Muslim president.” Calling it a “critical issue,” Geller wrote in January 2008 that “Obama went to a madrassa in Jakarta,” that “he practiced Islam” and that “if Obama makes it to the big house, Israel is screwed. Finished.” On May 30, 2009, Geller wrote that with his Cairo speech, Obama “proved everything I said to be true.” In fact, CNN debunked the “madrassa” falsehood back in January 2007 and as Newsweek stated, “Barack Obama has never been Muslim and never practiced Islam.”

TIME has come out with a poll on the prevailing mood amongst Americans toward the mosque and toward their fellow Muslim citizens. What does this mean for the future of religious freedom and the failure of our leaders and the media in tackling this story?

Majority Oppose Mosque, and most Distrust Muslims

Opponents of the planned Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan have public opinion firmly in their corner. According to a new TIME poll, 61% of respondents oppose the construction of the Park51/Cordoba House project, compared to 26% who support it. More than 70% concur with the premise that proceeding with the plan would be an insult to the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Opposition to the project appears to derive largely from the conviction that the proposed site of the project — just two blocks from Ground Zero, in a building that formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory outlet — is so close to “hallowed ground,” as President Obama put it.

Yet the survey also revealed that many Americans harbor lingering animosity toward Muslims. Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — slightly higher than the 24% who mistakenly believe that the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim. In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim. (See TIME’s photo-essay “Muslim in America.”)

And while more Americans are open to the idea of having a mosque built in their neighborhoods than near Ground Zero, it’s still not an overwhelming majority; 55% of respondents say they would favor the construction of an Islamic community center and mosque two blocks from their own homes, and an equal number say they believe most Muslims are “Patriotic Americans.”

As he attempts to shepherd the U.S. through the sluggish economic recovery and galvanize Democratic voters ahead of a congressional election cycle in which the party is expected to sustain heavy losses, Obama’s approval rating has held relatively steady, at a near-even split: 46% of respondents back his job performance, with 45% expressing disapproval. Voters are far less enthusiastic about the President’s policies, however, with 57% asserting the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

That wasn’t the only grim news for Democrats. The GOP has snatched the lead in generic Congressional balloting, with 43% of likely voters saying they would vote for a Republican candidate if the midterm elections were held today, compared to 37% for Democrats. (Last month, Democrats held a slight edge in generic balloting, 43%-42%.) While those figures augur well for the GOP, harping on the mosque issue — a tactic many Republicans appear to have embraced as the overheated debate nears a boiling point — seems unlikely to give the party’s fortunes a significant boost. Nearly three quarters of voters told TIME the issue will not have any impact on their decisions in the ballot box.(Read “Ground Zero: Exaggerating the Jihadist Threat.”)

While the poll revealed that prejudice toward Muslims is widespread, respect for other religions traditions remains sturdy. Respondents held the Jewish faith in the highest regard, with 75% professing to hold a favorable impression-just slightly higher than attitudes toward Protestants and Catholics. Fifty-seven percent say they have a favorable view of the Mormon faith, compared to 44% for Muslims. Despite (or perhaps because of) this widespread antipathy, 62% of respondents say they don’t personally know a Muslim American.

The poll, conducted by ABT SRBI, surveyed 1,002 adults — 89% of whom identified themselves as likely voters — on Aug. 16-17.

Behind Plastic Pam's heavily botoxed face and surgically augmented breasts lies a dark black stone for a heart.

By Danios with contribution from Rosseau

John Roberts recently filled in for Anderson Cooper, and correctly pinned the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy to hate blogger Pamela Geller, a radical right-wing anti-Muslim bigot.  Geller is the one who first blogged about the issue, trumping it up using the fantastic language that she is so well-known for.  Roberts made a point during his interview with Geller that I thought he could have developed a bit more.  He pointed out that Pamela Geller was outraged when her hateful anti-Muslim bus ads were opposed. The New York Daily News characterized her bus ads as “messages of hate masquerading as messages of help.”  Those bus ads carried a link to an anti-Muslim website, one which decried “the falsity of Islam.”

The Miami-Dade transit authority had declared that they were going to remove those ads due to the fact that the ads were deemed offensive to Muslims.  (Ya think?)  Pamela Geller lost her mind, called it a violation of her First Amendment rights, and sued the transit authority.  The Miami-Dade transit authority backed down, and the hateful ads are still found on buses today.  John Roberts pointed out that Geller had cried “First Amendment!” then, but suddenly she can’t see that the Muslim-Americans who own the property two blocks from Ground Zero have their First Amendment right to build a “mega mosque” there.  (It’s actually an Islamic cultural center, not a “mega mosque.”)  When challenged on this point, Geller argued back that it wasn’t about First Amendment rights, but about “being sensitive.”  Said Geller on CNN:

It is a human compassion issue.  It is common decency.  That this is so painful to so many 9/11 families.

Wow, that’s rich.  Where was your “human compassion”, Ms. Geller, when you put those hateful ads up on buses?  Are Muslims not humans?  If they are, are they not worthy of your “human compassion”?  Is it from “common decency” to post hateful ads up on buses, ones which hurt and disparage Muslims?  If someone had put the exact same ad up against Catholics, disingenuously asking “victims of Catholic priest pedophilia” to follow a hyperlink to an anti-Catholic website, would you say this is from “common decency?”  Let us suppose that the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” put up a huge sign in front of their mosque, calling Judaism a “false religion”–just as your ad linked to a website that said the same of Islam–who do you suppose would be at the forefront of the campaign to oppose the mosque?

Is it not interesting, and a sign of our times, that hateful anti-Muslim ads do not garner any national attention, but an Islamic cultural center–dedicated to pluralism and tolerance–is so opposed?  Hateful, bigoted, and intolerant ads are OK, but a cultural center dedicated to peace, love, and interfaith cooperation is offensive to the “sensitivities” of “Judeo-Christian” Americans?  If hate blogger Pamela Geller did not respect the sensitivities of Muslim-Americans when she ran (and continues to run) those hateful anti-Muslim ads, then why should Muslim-Americans care about her sensitivities?

Geller’s hypocrisy with regard to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is clear once we close our eyes and think back to not too long ago when Geller and her sidekick, Robert Spencer (of the “Obama-is-a-Moozlem” variety), promoted the drawing of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.  On display were some of the most disgusting and vile portrayals of a religious figure that even shocked some of those who had initially backed the idea. In that instance it was completely fine for Geller, Spencer and the rest of the anti-Muslim blogosphere to trample on the sensitivities of Muslims all over the world in the name of freedom of speech. However, when Muslim-American New Yorkers decided to create a community center (that happens to include a prayer area) near that which Geller and Spencer consider sacred, then all hell breaks loose. Muslims must then fall prostrate to what Geller considers sacred and holy.

Pamela Geller argues that the decent thing for Manhattan Muslims to do is move the center farther away from Ground Zero, even though they have a constitutional right to create the center. Yet, Geller remains oblivious to the hypocrisy she is engaging in here. Sure Pam, you have the right to mock and desecrate the name of a man that over one billion humans consider sacred, but is it the right thing to do?  The sensitivities of “Judeo-Christian” Americans are to be honored, based on the fact that it is “hallowed ground”, but the sensitivities of Muslims towards one they consider “hallowed” (the Prophet Muhammad) cannot?

And there is a major difference between the drawing of the cartoons and the Islamic cultural center.  The cartoons, and the whole “Draw Muhammad Day” brouhaha, was created for the entire purpose of sticking it to the Muslims, to hurt their feelings.  On the other hand, the Islamic cultural center was not created with that intent.   The Manhattan Muslims weren’t engaging in a disgusting and childish act like Geller and Spencer were promoting on their hate blogs. The Muslims in this instance were engaging in outreach to build bridges with others, not destroy them like Geller did when she put up the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet, despite their noble aim, Geller demands that the Muslims give up their constitutional right to create a religious center. What a world Geller lives in–post disgusting cartoons of a religious figure and then cry about your constitutional rights when anyone opposes your actions. When others exercise their constitutional rights, bark about them trampling upon your delicate sensitivities!

Pamela Geller is one of the worst human beings on earth.  If she were not constrained by the laws of this wonderful land we live in, she would be amongst those who would promote ethnic and religious violence.  If Geller had been living in India during the Gujarat Riots, she would be at the front lines, calling for the slaughter of Muslims.  She’d be wielding  a machete, smeared with the blood of her Muslim victims.  That’s not too hard to believe when we recall that she promoted on her website an anti-Muslim video, from a genocidal group in India held responsible for the Gujarat riots that led to the murder of 2,500 people, mostly Muslims.  She has called for the annihilation of Pakistan, and the nuking of Mecca, Medina, and Tehran.  This is all of course her showcasing to us what it means to possess “human compassion” and “common decency.”

Ms. Geller, we do not need you to tell us about “human compassion” and “common decency.”  You are the last person on earth to speak of these things, as you are completely devoid of them.  You are a despicable hate blogger, and you will be remembered by the eye of history, just fifty or a hundred years from now, as equivalent to those who called for the Japanese to be interned in camps. And people will wonder then, how could those people have been so stupid (and hateful) to think that?

One last slightly (un)related point: I’ve heard many bigots raise the argument that “as soon as there are churches in Saudi Arabia, then we can have a mosque at Ground Zero.”  While of course you will never find anyone more in favor of churches in Saudi Arabia than I (are the Saudis so doubtful of the veracity of their religion that they fear the competition?), I cannot tolerate such bigoted tribalism.  It typifies the “us vs. them” mentality that is in fact the core of Al-Qaeda theology, and is shared by the crazy right-wing nuts in our country.  “The Other”–the Muslims–are The Borg, and they don’t let us build churches there, so we won’t let them build mosques here.  All this ignores the fact that the Muslims in Saudi Arabia are not the same as Muslim-Americans, so there is no “them.”

But if these bigots wish to foist this comparison of “us vs. them” upon the situation, then let us reevaluate where we stand.  They bombed us once, on 9/11.  Do you know how many buildings “we’ve” bombed in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of Pakistan and Yemen?  According to Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt we’ve likely killed “over one million” Muslims, “equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.”  And this, not by terrorists outside the control of the will of the people and the government but by the sanction of the duly-elected government of the United States of America.  As Jason Mustian put it: “In fairness, we’ve been building ‘ground zeros’ near Iraqi mosques since March 2003.” Quite simply, we were fortunate enough to be able to call it 9/11, an infamous day but one day in one year.  “They” have so many “9/11′s” that they would have one every day of the year for several years, making it difficult to name them.  Certainly “they” could not name them based on date or day, since so many dates and days are ones in which we bomb “them.”

If Americans are so outraged by a small Islamic cultural center being built two blocks away from Ground Zero, then how angry do you think Muslim Iraqis are that we built a gargantuan military base in Iraq–one that is actually the size of a small city?  A “mega mosque” arouses our suspicion; what do you think a “mega military base” does to theirs?  If the presence of some Muslim-Americans peacefully praying two blocks away from where “Muslims” attacked us bothers us so much, can you imagine how much “they” hate “us” stationing thousands of troops where “we” bombed “them”?  The point here is not to justify the “us vs. them” viewpoint espoused by Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.  Rather, it is to convince you–the American reader–that such comparisons do not suit us even from a tactical standpoint.  From an ideological and principled standpoint, of course, this “us vs. them” lens is wholly opposed to the American ideal, which is that we are all Americans, regardless of religion.  Ours is a pluralistic society, and we should take pride in that.  “They” don’t win by placing an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero.  We do.

Robert Spencer: Ground Zero Strip Club is OK, No to Islamic Cultural Center

by Rousseau

How a strip club “at” Ground Zero doesn’t cheapen the sanctity of Ground Zero, while an Islamic cultural center does, is only something a wannabe conquistador could fathom.

Robert Spencer is enraged at the wording used by Politico’s Ben Smith in describing the so-called Ground Zero mosque as “actually a few blocks north of the site…” For Spencer, anywhere you can see Ground Zero may be hallowed ground.

Spencer says:

In the first place, the mosque will not be a few blocks away. I have been to the site, and can tell you: walk half a block down the street from the Burlington Coat Factory that is set to be the site of the mega-mosque, turn left, and you will see Ground Zero. Smith and Haberman have apparently never been to the site, as no one who has could characterize it as “a few blocks north.” It is actually just 600 feet away from Ground Zero.

See, since you can walk a half-block down from the proposed mosque site and then turn to your left and see Ground Zero from 600 feet away this means that the mosque is actually “at” Ground Zero. Right.

So next time you’re looking over the New York skyline from the Empire State Building, remember that you’re standing on hallowed ground even though you’re a mile away from Ground Zero. Or hey, looking at Ground Zero from Google Maps could even make your bedroom hallowed ground.

This is a game of semantics. Spencer is arguing that the mosque is not a few blocks away from Ground Zero, but a mere 600 feet away. So? The implication is that by being 600 feet away, the mosque “near” Ground Zero is in fact “at” Ground Zero. Therefore, the mosque shouldn’t be there. What’s silly about all this is that “the actual mosque location is surrounded by delis, coffeeshops, bars, offices — not to mention a strip club a few feet away from the proposed site,” as Danial Luban points out. None of these trivial and even erotic sites enrage Spencer like the mosque does. How a strip club “at” Ground Zero doesn’t cheapen the sanctity of Ground Zero, while an Islamic cultural center does, is only something a wannabe conquistador could fathom.

Read the rest of the article here.

This is Inoconnu’s refutation of Chapter 6 of Robert Spencer’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).  After reading this, check out Danios’ article at SpencerWatch, which analyzes the concept of taqiyya in great detail..

An oft-used intellectual cop-out by many Islam-haters is the so-called doctrine of taqiyya. The Islam-haters, such as Robert Spencer, claim taqiyya is the willful deception of Muslims towards non-Muslims. Whenever a Muslim would say or write something positive about Islam, it is all taqiyya. This is what Spencer has to say in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades):

Muhammad minced no words about the necessity of telling the truth…However, as with so many other Islamic principles, this is largely a matter between believers. When it comes to unbelievers–particularly those who are at war with Muslims–Muhammad enunciated a quite different principle: “War is deceit.” Specifically, he taught that lying was permissible in battle…

When Shi’ite Muslims were persecuted by Sunnis, they developed the doctrine of taqiyya, or concealment: They could lie about what they believed, denying aspects of their faith that were offensive to Sunnis…Closely related to this is the doctrine of kitman, or mental reservation, which is telling the truth, but not the whole truth, with an intention to mislead…Remember that the next time you see a Muslim spokesman on television professing his friendship with non-Muslim Americans and his loyalty to the United States. Of course, he may be telling the truth–but he may not be telling the whole truth or he may be just lying. (pp.79-81)

Clearly, his implication is the latter, not the former: the Muslim is not telling the whole truth or “may be just lying.”

Yet, it is necessary to begin with the principle of truthfulness in Islam, which Spencer himself admitted the Prophet Muhammad stressed. Many thanks to Sheila Musaji for compiling the following verses and Prophetic traditions, of which are posted a few:

“And cover not Truth with falsehood, nor conceal the Truth when ye know (what it is).  (Qur’an, 2:42)”

“If ye are on a journey, and cannot find a scribe, a pledge with possession (may serve the purpose). And if one of you deposits a thing on trust with another, Let the trustee (Faithfully) discharge His trust, and let him fear his Lord. Conceal not evidence; for whoever conceals it,- His heart is tainted with sin. And God Knoweth all that ye do.  (Qur’an, 2:283)”

“O ye who believe! Stand out firmly For justice, as witnesses To Allah, even as against Yourselves, or your parents, Or your kin, and whether It be (against) rich or poor: For Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (Of your hearts), lest ye Swerve, and if ye Distort (justice) or decline To do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted With all that ye do.  (Qur’an, 4:135)”

[...]

Abdullah bin Mas`ud (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Truth leads to piety and piety leads to Jannah. A man persists in speaking the truth till he is enrolled with Allah as a truthful. Falsehood leads to vice and vice leads to the Fire (Hell), and a person persists on telling lies until he is enrolled as a liar”.’

It was narrated from Abu Hurayrah that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “The signs of the hypocrite are three: when he speaks, he lies; when he makes a promise, he breaks it; and when he is entrusted with something, he betrays that trust.” (Narrated by al-Bukhari, 33; Muslim, 59)

Hasan bin `Ali (May Allah be pleased with them) said: I remember (these words) from Messenger of Allah (PBUH): “Give up what is doubtful to you for that which is not doubtful; for truth is peace of mind and falsehood is doubt”.  [At-Tirmidhi].

Hakim bin Hizam (May Allah be pleased with him) reported that: Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said: “Both parties in a business transaction have a right to annul it so long as they have not separated; and if they tell the truth and make everything clear to each other (i.e., the seller and the buyer speak the truth, the seller with regard to what is purchased, and the buyer with regard to the money) they will be blessed in their transaction, but if they conceal anything and lie, the blessing on their transaction will be eliminated.’‘
[Al-Bukhari and Muslim].

It is clear that Islam (and its Prophet) stresses the utmost importance of speaking the truth and being as truthful as possible. Spencer himself admits this, but he inserts a (huge) caveat that it is only “between believers.” As will be seen, this is completely untrue.

Let us begin with Spencer’s first indictment of the Prophet: “War is deceit.”

This statement comes from the Battle of the Trench. After the siege of the city of Medina had lasted for almost 30 days, and the Muslims were in dire straits.  The Prophet Muhammad asked a man named Nuaym ibn Masud to break the deadly siege somehow.  Nuaym said he could do this but that “this requires me to lie.”

Let’s stop here. Why did he ask this permission from the Prophet Muhammad if, according to Spencer, lying to non-believers is standard practice? Because, as noted above, the principle in Islam is honesty. The Prophet gave him specific permission to lie saying, “War is deceit.”

This is the context of the Prophet’s statement, “War is deceit.” Spencer, however, claims that this phrase, “War is deceit,” gives Muslims carte blance to lie to all non-Muslims all the time. Logically, it is pure rubbish.

Yet, when one thinks of it, is not good policy to deceive one’s enemy during war? Is it not good strategy to decieve the enemy in order to defeat him? What is wrong with saying, “War is deceit”? Yet, are there others that have said the same thing?

Of course!

In fact, “War is deceit” is one of the oldest military principles in history. It is found in none other than The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a Chinese strategist from the Sixth Century B.C. This book is the oldest military treatise in the world. In Part I, principle No. 18 says:

All warfare is based on deception.

Was Sun Tzu advocating Taqiyya? Is this something to be condemned, as Spencer condemns the Prophet?

How about the Trojan Horse, a story from one of the oldest poems in Western Civilization?

Still seeking to gain entrance into Troy, clever Odysseus (some say with the aid of Athena) ordered a large wooden horse to be built. Its insides were to be hollow so that soldiers could hide within it.

Once the statue had been built by the artist Epeius, a number of the Greek warriors, along with Odysseus, climbed inside. The rest of the Greek fleet sailed away, so as to deceive the Trojans.

One man, Sinon, was left behind. When the Trojans came to marvel at the huge creation, Sinon pretended to be angry with the Greeks, stating that they had deserted him. He assured the Trojans that the wooden horse was safe and would bring luck to the Trojans.

Only two people, Laocoon and Cassandra, spoke out against the horse, but they were ignored. The Trojans celebrated what they thought was their victory, and dragged the wooden horse into Troy.

That night, after most of Troy was asleep or in a drunken stupor, Sinon let the Greek warriors out from the horse, and they slaughtered the Trojans.

Were the Greeks also practicing Taqiyya? Why doesn’t Spencer condemn the Greeks, the Fathers of Western Civilization, for practicing deceit in times of war?

Not only did Sun Tzu write of deception in warfare, but Italian Renaissance thinker Niccolo Machiavelli wrote:

Though fraud in other activities may be detestable, in the management of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes the enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he who does by force.

How about more recent times? During World War II, there was a military operation called “Operation Fortitude.” It was a disinformation campaign to deceive the Germans about the Normandy invasion:

“Fortitude” was the codename given to the decoy (or disinformation) mission mounted by the Allies to deceive the Germans about the date and above all the place of the landings. The latter were convinced that the British and American attack would come in the Pas-de-Calais area and it was important not to disillusion them. They therefore had to be made to think that a whole group of armies was present in Kent, opposite the Pas-de-Calais.

To deceive the German observation planes, which their antiaircraft defences did their best to avoid, the local estuaries, creeks and harbours were crammed with dummy landing craft, made out of bits and bobs. A giant oil pumping head for PLUTO (made from papier mâché) was erected near Dover, while large numbers of inflatable rubber tanks were positioned in the fields. Plywood vehicles and guns lined the roadsides. At night, convoys of lorries ‑ always the same ones – drove back and forth across the region. For the benefit of the Germans, a team of technicians maintained constant radio traffic between totally fictitious units.

Fortitude succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Long after June 6^th, Hitler remained convinced that the Normandy Landings were a diversionary tactic to induce him to move his troops away from the Pas-de-Calais, so that a decisive attack could then be launched there. He therefore kept his best units in readiness there, until the end of July, desperately scanning an empty horizon, while the fate of the war was being decided in Normandy.

Dr. Joseph Caddell, Lecturer on Military History at North Carolina State University, wrote in 2004:

Deception in warfare is probably as old as armed conflict itself. The logic of confusing an adversary is obvious, and the rewards can be realized very quickly.

On the website of the Air University, the military education system for the United States Air Force, there is a list of numerous books, documents, and periodicals that chronicle deception in WW I and WW II. Here is just some of the examples of the books written about deception in warfare:

Barros, James and Gregor, James. Double Deception: Stalin, Hitler, and the Invasion of Russia. DeKalb, IL, Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. 307 p.
Book call no.: 940.532247 B277d

Basic Deception and the Normandy Invasion. New York, Garland, 1989. 1 vol.
Book call no.: 940.5485 C873 v.15

Breuer, William B. Hoodwinking Hitler: The Normandy Deception. Westport, CT, Praeger, 1993. 263 p.
Book call no.: 940.54 B846h

Breuer, William B. The Secret War with Germany: Deception, Espionage, and Dirty Tricks 1939-1945. Novato, CA, 1988. 318 p.
Book call no.: 940.5485 B846s

As is quite clear, deception during times of warfare is not only standard procedure, but is a laudable and necessary tactic. Our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan use deception every single day to try to defeat the enemy. They would be blameworthy if they did not do so. Why doesn’t Robert Spencer condemn Sun Tzu, or the Greeks, or Allied Forces in WW II, or the U.S. Air Force for advocating deception in warfare? After all, all of these people also believe, as the Prophet Muhammad did, that “war is deceit.”

Robert Spencer’s claim that “war is deceit” to impugn the Prophet Muhammad and Islam is another case of Spenceritis. It is logical rubbish, and makes a mockery of the claim that Robert Spencer is any sort of “scholar” about Islam.

Also check out Danios’ excellent article on the same topic available on SpencerWatch.com. He refutes every single argument the Islamophobes raise about taqiyya.

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.

It seems as though it has been a slow descent into inconsistency and betrayal of values for the ADL. An excellent and poignant article from Hollywood director Kamran Pasha.

The ADL Defames its Jewish Heritage

by Kamran Pasha

People often ask me what it is like being one of the first Muslims to succeed in Hollywood. There is always a hint of surprise in their tone, as if they never expected to meet a Muslim who has made strides in the entertainment industry. Because the real question they are asking is a more uncomfortable one: “How have you managed to succeed in a town filled with Jews?”

My response is one that usually takes them aback. I tell them that the only people who have helped me to succeed in Hollywood are Jews. It was Jewish studio executives who gave me my first writing breaks, and Jewish writers, directors and producers have served as my mentors and allies over the past decade. Without the help of Jews, this Muslim would still be writing scripts in a café somewhere, desperately hoping to find a way to break into Hollywood.

Others are surprised when I say that, but I am not. I grew up in Borough Park, a primarily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, and most of my close friends over the course of my life have been Jews. Despite our often passionate disagreements about Middle Eastern politics, my Jewish friends and I always find common ground in our shared experience of being a religious minority in a predominantly Christian country.

Both American Jews and American Muslims know what it is like to feel out of place, to long for inclusion in a mainstream society that is often filled with ignorance and hate for our faiths. We know what it is like going to elementary school and being reviled by our classmates for not believing that Jesus is the Son of God. We know what it is like being mocked for having different customs at home, for celebrating holidays that our Christian neighbors have never heard of (and often can’t pronounce). We know what it is like to be preached to every day by neighbors trying to convert us and “save our souls.” We know what it is like to be told that our religion is inferior to Christianity by people who do not understand even the most basic tenets of our faiths (as well as their own).

Despite the real political differences that exist over Middle East policy between members of our communities, we have a common bond of being outsiders, of being the misunderstood “other” in a Christian world. And that common bond has always allowed me to transcend political differences with my Jewish friends and meet them on the field of shared loneliness that is the lot of those who are different.

And that is why it breaks my heart to watch a respected Jewish organization like the Anti-Defamation League fall into the abyss of anti-Muslim bigotry over the past several years. Many Americans, including many Jews, have expressed shock at the ADL’s recent announcement that it sides with bigots and fear-mongers who oppose the building of the Cordoba House Islamic center in southern Manhattan.

Regrettably, I am not surprised. The ADL, which was founded in 1913 as a powerful voice against religious discrimination in America, has over the past decade become increasingly xenophobic toward the Muslim community, which its leaders seem to view as a threat to Jews due to its lack of support for Israel. As a Christian friend who works in the Obama Administration lamented to me recently, the ADL has in essence become the “Pro-Defamation League” when it comes to Islam and Muslims.

The recent comments by Abraham Foxman, National Director of the ADL, against the proposed Muslim community center in New York are the latest in a long line of incidents where members of the ADL have promoted bigotry and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims. In 1993, the ADL illegally spied on American citizens who had spoken out in sympathy with Palestinians, generating a watch list of 10,000 names of private citizens and over 600 groups, and then selling the list to South African intelligence agents.

The ADL was sued for violating privacy rights and settled out of court. But the organization did not learn its lesson. Through the past decade, it has regularly organized smear campaigns around Muslim leaders and conferences, falsely imputing terrorist sympathies to some of the most moderate and respected leaders of the community.

In one of its ugliest campaigns, the ADL protested the right of Muslim college students at UC Irvine to wear graduation stoles that carried the Shahada, the basic testimony of Islamic faith: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his Messenger.” The ADL claimed that the Muslim students were supporting terrorist groups like Hamas by wearing a common symbol of their religion. As a Muslim, I was left absolutely stunned at the stupidity of this argument. It was the equivalent of trying to bar Christian students from wearing crosses because the cross is a symbol that has been used by Christian extremists like the Crusaders and the Ku Klux Klan! The ADL was forced to apologize and retract its statements that the Shahada was “an expression of hate.”

To be fair, the ADL has in a few instances spoken up in defense of Muslim civil rights, notably when the topic of Israel is not involved. The ADL publicly denounced the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia and criticized the Swiss government for amending the constitution in 2009 to prevent the building of mosque minarets.

But the preponderance of its actions over the past decade have made it clear that when Muslim grievances against Israel are raised, the ADL will firmly side with its co-religionists rather than adhere to its underlying mission of standing for justice and equality for all humanity. On some level, perhaps that is understandable, if not excusable. But what is particularly shocking about the recent statements against the Cordoba House is that the ADL appears to have moved from a knee-jerk defense of Israel to an aggressive stance attacking American Muslims even when there is no criticism of Israel involved.

I have written at length on the Huffington Post about the founders of the Cordoba House and how they represent progressive Islam and embrace people of all religions, including Jews. I know Daisy Khan personally and she is a gracious and gentle woman who espouses love and wisdom, not hate. The writings of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf continue to inspire me and countless mainstream Muslims to improve our communities and defeat the extremists that threaten to corrupt Islam from within.

The opponents of the Islamic Center have gone out of their way to vilify and defame these honorable people, who are leaders of the moderate Islam that the media is always claiming doesn’t exist. Muslim leaders like Daisy Khan and Imam Abdul Rauf have endured with great dignity the double-pronged attack from their enemies. First, the media spreads the lie that Muslim leaders like them do not speak out against terrorism. And when they do speak out, they are either ignored or lumped in with the very extremists they are fighting. The Cordoba House is exactly the voice of moderate Islam that needs to be highlighted at a time when Muslim extremists and anti-Muslim bigots both want Islam, a spiritual path of great beauty, to be seen as a religion of hate and death.

But what is particularly painful for me as a Muslim is to watch how a group like the ADL, born out of the horrible experience of anti-Semitism and bigotry in America, can so easily turn its back on its heritage in order to join forces with the voices of hate and division. If any community knows what it is like to be branded with false stereotypes, to have the innocent condemned as guilty, it is the long-suffering Jewish people. To have its leaders now embrace the mindless, drunken crowd in its march of hate against a fellow religious minority’s right of worship, it is beyond obscene. And it is a fundamental rejection of everything that Judaism stands for.

In my latest novel, Shadow of the Swords, I delve deeply into the character of Maimonides, the great Jewish rabbi, who was friend and advisor to the Muslim sultan Saladin during the Crusades. In examining the experience of Maimonides, a Jew living as a minority among Muslims, I sought to demonstrate the ancient sympathy and understanding that Jews and Muslims had for each other at a time when both were being targeted by Christian persecutors. And I sought to share with my readers that the tenets of Judaism have always stood for social justice, mercy and wisdom, and that this ethical commitment served as a link of common understanding between Judaism and Islam at a time when Christianity stood for ignorance, murder and barbarism.

People who have read my book have expressed wonder at how two communities that were once intimate friends have become so estranged in the past century. The reasons for these modern divisions are long and complex, and are mainly linked to the trauma of Western colonization of the Muslim world, and the suffering of the Palestinians when Israel was created as the byproduct of that colonial history. Despite efforts by some Christians and Jews (as well as extremists among Muslims) to portray the current tensions between these communities as rooted in theological and cultural foundations, the reality is that Jews and Muslims historically got along much better than either group did with European Christians. When the Spanish Inquisition expelled Jews from Spain, where they had thrived under Muslim rule for 800 years, Spanish Jews found refuge in the Muslim Ottoman Empire and rose to positions of great economic and political power.

What the current leadership of the ADL does not understand is that there is no ancient enmity between Jews and Muslims. If many Muslims have problems with Israel today, that arises from real grievances about the treatment of Palestinians, not inherent hatred for Judaism in Islamic culture. What the ADL appears to fear is that as Muslims become part of the American fabric of life, that their critiques of Israel will lead one day to United States abandoning its long-term ally. This fear is, frankly, insane.

There is a place for dialogue, debate and disagreement about Middle Eastern politics among American citizens, and that discussion will not threaten Israel’s existence. As President Obama made abundantly clear in his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo last year, the bond between the United States and Israel is “unbreakable.” So Abraham Foxman should relax and take a breath. Muslim empowerment in the United States will not lead to a second Holocaust. Muslims praying at a mosque in New York City will not lead to death camps and mass extermination of the Jewish community.

Muslim voices joining the public forum will not add to anti-Semitism in America. But if the Jewish community is seen as willing to join in discrimination against innocent Americans to promote its own agenda – that perception will fulfill every anti-Semite’s ugly and false perception of the Jewish community as a self-serving and hypocritical group that only cares about its own pain and not the pain of others.

That ugly vision is not the Judaism I studied in college, the Judaism of Maimonides and Martin Buber, nor does it reflect the Judaism that I have experienced in my relationships with Jews all my life. But it appears to be the cheap and unworthy vision of the ADL leadership, and as such dishonors the Jewish legacy to this world.

The Judaism that I admire, that I write about in my novel, is the true Judaism of love for mankind, of humility before God, of service and compassion. It is the Judaism that stands for the rights of the weak and the oppressed against the arrogance of those in power. It is the Judaism of Moses standing in defiance of the Pharaoh on behalf of a group of powerless slaves.

It is the Judaism of Rabbi Hillel, one of the greatest religious visionaries of all time. Decades before Jesus Christ proclaimed the Golden Rule, Rabbi Hillel is famed for his response to a questioner who wanted to know the essence of Judaism, of the Torah, in the time it took him to stand on one foot. Hillel responded that the whole of the Torah could be summarized in one sentence.

“Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you.”

To Mr. Foxman and the rest of the ADL leadership, I ask if in your hearts you would want people to accuse innocent Jews of being enemies of the state? Would you want Jews to accept vilification of their entire religion if a handful of Jews ever did something wrong? Would you want Jews to tacitly accept the lies that bigots had projected on to them? And finally, would you want Jews to be forced to shut down their synagogues because of the misguided passions of a mob?

Would you want this done to Jews?

If the answer is no, then I ask as your Muslim brother that you follow the wisdom of Rabbi Hillel and the sages of Judaism.

Do not do the same hateful thing to my people.

Memorial to Marwa Sherbini Vandalised

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

Vandals have attacked an art project erected in honor of Marwa El-Sherbini, a pregnant headscarved Egyptian woman who was murdered in a German court room, organizers said Friday.

The Citizen.Courage group, which sponsored the display in the eastern city of Dresden, said that a few knife-shaped columns used in the open-air show had been knocked over several times and signs explaining the project were stolen.

“Citizen.Courage assumes this was a malicious, politically motivated attempt to destroy the project,” group chairman Christian Demuth said in statement. To warn against everyday racism, we will not restore the destroyed installations. But we will continue the project.” A police spokeswoman said authorities had opened an investigation.

During a trial last July, a Russian-born defendant suddenly attacked Sherbini – who was Muslim and wore a headscarf – plunging an 18 centimetre kitchen knife at least 16 times into her while she was three-months pregnant with her second child. Her son, Mustafa, three years old at the time, watched her bleed to death at the courtroom.

Sherbini’s husband, Egyptian geneticist Elwy Okaz, rushed to her aid but was also stabbed repeatedly and then shot in the leg by a police officer confused about who was attacking whom.

The 28-year-old assailant, who was sentenced to life in prison, attacked her out of revenge after she pressed charges against him for calling her a “terrorist”, “Islamist” and “whore” during a dispute over a playground swing.

The killing, and the initially muted reaction of Germany’s politicians and media, sparked outrage in Sherbini’s home country, as well as in the wider Muslim world. Many newspapers dubbed her the “veil martyr” after her headscarf.

The “18 Stabs” installation, unveiled on the first anniversary of Sherbini’s death on July 1, featured 18 knife-shaped concrete pillars erected throughout the city with signs condemning racism and xenophobic violence.

AFP, 23 July 2010

Joe “nuke ‘em” Kaufman was on Fox and Friends saying Muslim Family Day was a terrorist sponsored event.

Fox & Friends’ latest vicious attack on Islam targets Muslim Family Day

July 20, 2010 1:48 pm ET by Justin Berrier

On what is rapidly becoming a regular feature, Fox & Friends this morning continued their incessant attack on Islam. Co-host Alisyn Camerota this morning hosted anti-Islam blogger and founder of the ironically named Americans Against Hate organization Joe Kaufman to attack Muslim Family Day at Six Flags Great Adventure. Camerota called it “insensitive” that they would host the event on September 12, “just hours after the anniversary of the September 11th attacks,” and added “but what’s even more controversial are the allegations that the Muslim group organizing the event could have been involved in financing the September 11 terror attacks.” Kaufman went further, employing what is becoming a familiar phrase among anti-Muslim bloggers: “The fact that they’re having it on September 12th, I believe they are actually spitting in the face of Americans.”

So what evidence did Kaufman give to back up Camerota’s claim that the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), who is sponsoring this event, “could have been involved in financing the September 11 terror attacks?” His first piece of evidence is a message from former ICNA President Dr. Muhammad Yunus making “a request calling on supporters to give ‘material support to groups associated with al-Qaida and the Taliban.” Here is what Yunus actually said, in an image hosted on Kaufman’s website: “Remember fellow Chechnyan Muslims in Eid Celebrations. President ICNA Dr. Muhammad Yunus has requested all Muslims around the world to include Chechnyan Muslims in their special Eid-ul-Fitr prayers. We must show our spiritual and material support for our brothers and sisters being oppressed by Russian forces.” For Kaufman, this justifies making the claim that “they may be themselves involved in financing 9/11.”

In case the name Muhammad Yunus sounds familiar, by the way, that would be Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus, developer of the microcredit and microfinance concepts.

Kaufman went on to try to associate ICNA with Hamas through more tenuous ties. According to his website, in 2006 ICNA was listed as a donor to the Al-Khidmat Foundation, a Pakistani charitable organization that, according to their website, “is dedicated to the services of humanity all parts of the world without any discrimination of creed, religion and political associaltion [sic].”  They provide funding for clean water projects, diagnostic centers, orphan homes, and other community-based programs. According to Kaufman, while ICNA was one of their donors, the Al-Khidmat Foundation made a one-time donation to Hamas. Kaufman of course has no evidence that ICNA was involved in the gift, or that their money was part of the gift, or that they had anything to do whatsoever with the gift. Kaufman has been pushing this connection for years, and even the Anti-Defamation League isn’t buying it. An October 5, 2007 Dallas Daily News article reported on Kaufman’s allegations. At the time, he was protesting a different Muslim Family Day at Six Flags Over Texas. They reported (accessed via Nexis):

Mohammad Barney, president of the Dallas chapter of ICNA, said the accusations are troubling and untrue.

According to its Web site, ICNA supports Islamic culture and education while promoting justice and understanding.

“It’s disturbing that they are writing false statements like that,” said Mr. Barney. “People have the right to say whatever they want, but that doesn’t make it true.”

The Anti-Defamation League – a pro-Jewish group – seems to agree. ICNA is not listed as a threat on its Web site.

“We don’t involve ourselves in that kind of activity,” said Mark Briskman, regional director of the league, who said his group would not participate in the protest. “He made a lot of claims … without clear documentation of those claims. His statements are problematic.”

So other than making what appear to be baseless accusations about an organization sponsoring a family outing, why would Fox & Friends bring Kaufman on to attack Muslim Family Day? Well, what he lacks in expertise or insight, he makes up for in dedication. What Kaufman failed to mention is that, while Muslims may be “spitting in the faces of Americans” for holding the event on September 12, he attacked the event in 2007, when it was being held on October 14. Kaufman and Fox also ignored that the reason why the event is being held on September 12 this year –the same reason it was held on October 14 in 2007 –is that it falls on the first weekend after Ramadan ends.

In a FrontPage article titled “Fanatic Muslim Family Day” Kaufman wrote of the October 2007 event:

ICNA’s Muslim Family Day that will occur on October 14, 2007 is nothing but a charade, created to spread hatred, but veiled in a way to make the sponsoring organization look harmless. Six Flags will play host to this dangerous farce. If events, such as these, are allowed to continue, more and more Americans could become desensitized to those groups – fifth columns within our borders that wish to do us harm. It is up to those concerned to speak out against these travesties that threaten our way of life.

He may have been on to something. Looking back at previous events, I was able to find evidence of ICNA members spreading hatred. Witness the horror:

Rachel Maddow on the hysteria directed at Elena Kagan from the far right! Frank Gaffney considers Kagan an appeaser of Islam. The Washington Times ran his story accompanied with photoshopped images of Kagan in a turban.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dennis A. Lipkin, an Israeli author, lecturer and future political hopeful thinks Israel is too socialist and wants it to be more like America. He also believes Islam is a “pyschosis” and that there is going to be a final battle between Judeo-Christians and Muslims.

Speaker wants to change Israeli policy

By CALEB SOPTELEAN/The Daily Inter Lake

Although Sept. 11, 2001, was a tragedy, “God sent the Muslim threat as a blessing because it brought together the Jews and Christians,” Lipkin said.

He said he believes many Jews will be killed leading up to the final battle, which he called “Mecca vs. Jerusalem.” The final battle is between Judeo-Christians and the Muslims, he said. “Islam is not a religion, it’s a psychosis,” he said.

“Bring them to the Lord or they’ll bring you to the sword,” he said, citing political scientist Samuel Huntington’s book, “Clash of Civilizations.”

Citing the Biblical book of Deuteronomy 11, Lipkin said God will defend Israel and its borders will run from Lebanan to Saudi Arabia.

Planned Temecula Valley mosque draws opposition

July 18, 2010|By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

Muslims throughout Temecula and Murrieta have saved up for years to build a mosque to replace the plain white industrial building, tucked between a pipeline company and packaging warehouse, where they now gather to pray.

But as the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley moves ahead with plans to build on a four-acre plot of vacant land near Temecula’s gentle hills and invading housing developments, plans for the new mosque have stirred hostility in this mostly conservative community in southwest Riverside County.

Along with increased traffic and noise, opponents fear the mosque would clash with Temecula’s rural atmosphere and, they say, possibly turn the community of 105,000 into a haven for Islamic extremists.

The pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, just across a cul-de-sac from the site of the mosque, said the two religions “mix like oil and water” and predicted a “confrontational atmosphere” if the project moves forward.

“The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don’t want to see their influence spread,” said Pastor Bill Rench.

“There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it’s a religion of peace? Many others have said the same thing,” he said.

Leaders of the Islamic center were surprised by the level of criticism, especially from a few religious groups, saying their current makeshift mosque and Islamic community center have been in town for more than a decade and members always have felt welcome.

“Our children go to the same schools their children go to. We shop at the same stores where they shop,” said Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam of the Islamic center and an instructor at Cal State San Bernardino’s World Languages and Literatures Department.

“All of a sudden our neighbors wake up and they’re opposed to us building the Islamic center there, the mosque. I hope it’s a small group,” he said.

The mayor and members of the City Council did not respond to calls about the issue. Temecula’s city attorney advised them not to comment about the proposed mosque because the Planning Commission’s vote on the application for the facility could be appealed to the council.

The Rev. Joe Zarro, co-chairman of the Interfaith Council of Temecula and Murrieta Valley, said criticism of the mosque in the community is from a very small but vocal minority. The council, made up of leaders of a variety of faiths in the area, including Harmoush, unanimously endorsed plans for the mosque, Zarro said.

“A lot of this has been blown out of proportion,” said Zarro, the minister at the United Church of the Valley. “It’s important for people to see our neighbors, and for them to be part of our community.”

The land for the proposed mosque lies west of the Temecula wine country in a pocket of the city that’s become a mish-mash of ranch homes with large grassy spreads and clusters of encroaching red-tile roofs. Along with Calvary Baptist, the mosque will be a short walk from Grace Presbyterian Church.

The design of the 24,943-square-foot mosque and center reflect a Mediterranean design seen in many Temecula neighborhoods, though the building will have traditional domes topped with crescent moons. The facility will be built in two stages, with the first limited to a 4,100-square-foot mosque to serve about 150 Muslim families living in Temecula, Murrieta and surrounding communities, Harmoush said.

The Islamic center has owned the land since 2000, but the small Muslim community has needed time to raise enough money to build. Harmoush said it could be years before the entire mosque and community center are completed.

The proposal is expected to go before the Temecula Planning Commission in August, and city officials are reviewing the expected effect of the mosque on neighborhood traffic and noise levels and any other environmental concerns.

“We look at land issues, that’s it,” said Patrick Robinson, director of the city’s planning and redevelopment agency. “We don’t take into account the denomination of the religion or any of the political issues that surround it.”

A petition opposing the new mosque is being circulated by a group called Concerned Community Citizens, and other politically active volunteers have started organizing a campaign against the facility.

Karen Fesini, who belongs to a Republican women’s group in the Temecula and Murrieta area, said she’s been making calls to warn her friends about the project.

“They say they’re not radicals, but how do we know?”‘ said Fesini, 68.

“Right now we’re at war with the Taliban and the Muslims and our boys are over there fighting and dying for our freedom. What would it be like if they come home and found out we just let them in the front door?”

phil.willon@latimes.com

Stop the Islamization of America

Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), was created by anti-Muslim bloggers and activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. It was born out of its parent organization Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), an organization led by Anders Gravers (also a leader in SIOA), of whom Media Matters wrote,

Despite having put what she says is the “full video” of the event on her site, Geller actually cut out several comments made by Anders Gravers, the Danish Leader for the Stop the Islamisation of Europe. For instance, Geller’s video edits out Graver’s assertion that “[r]ape is also a part of” Muslims’ efforts to convert non-Muslims in Europe, and that “[d]emocracy is being deliberately removed” from the European Union by “incorporating Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East in the European Union.” Gravers went on to explain (in a portion of the speech that Geller did include) that the purpose was to gain “some European control of oil resources” at the cost of the “introduction of Sharia law and removal of democracy” in Europe. No, really. Check out this exclusively un-edited portion of his remarks (transcript available here)

SIOE’s motto is, “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” It was criticized by John Denham, Labour’s (UK) Communities Secretary, who stated that it was “trying to provoke violence on Britain’s streets” and called it “right-wing.” The group calls for a boycott of all Muslim majority countries and some countries with sizable Muslim minorities such as Cameroon. It calls on its followers to avoid Fisher Price, Asda, Kentucky Fried Chicken and The Radisson Hotel chain for apparently pandering to the Muslim community (via. Wiki).

SIOA’s declared mission is to educate Americans,

about the threat that Islamic doctrine and those who support it present to our freedoms, and the future of our democracy and country.” The 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

The declared mission gives us a scent of the absurdity that is SIOA, what else can “the threat of Islamic doctrine and those who support it” mean except “Muslims.” In other words the groups mission is to educate Americans about the “threat that Muslims present to freedom.”

However, to capture the full extent of bigotry and inciting hatred of Islam and Muslims that is the substance of the organization we have to look no further than its founders, members and supporters. It is a hatred that gives platform to all the destructive rhetoric and conspiracies about Muslims that we have detailed here at Loonwatch, including: nuke and kill all the Muslims and their holy places, Obama is a Mooslim, Muslim demographic take over of the West, extolling the Crusades, etc. The group also seems to bring together radicals from a variety of backgrounds: Christian Zionists, Extreme Jewish Nationalists, Tea Partiers all united in hate for Muslims.

US Government Rejects SIOA Trademark

Soon after SIOA was launched, both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer attempted to have their organization’s trademark patented. They assumed that it would go through without a problem but they didn’t expect what came next. The patent office rejected SIOA’s attempt to patent its trademark because of its anti-Muslim nature,

The applied-for mark refers to Muslims in a disparaging manner because by definition it implies that conversion or conformity to Islam is something that needs to be stopped or caused to cease.

“The proposed mark further disparages Muslims because, taking into account the nature of the services (‘providing information regarding understanding and preventing terrorism’), it implies that Islam is associated with violence and threats,” the government agency said.

“The trademark examining attorney refers to the excerpted articles from the LEXISNEXIS® computerized database referencing how many Muslims view terrorists as illegitimate adherents of Islam. … Therefore, the suggestion that Islam equates terrorism would be disparaging to a substantial group of Muslims,” it said.

Accordingly, the applied-for mark is refused under Section 2(a) because it consists of matter which may disparage or bring into contempt or disrepute Muslims and the Islamic religion

The reaction from both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer was unsurprising, to them it was a signal that Islam had permeated all of our government agencies. Pamela Geller wrote,

It is everywhere, folks, in every aspect of our lives from the big stuff (Major Hasan cover-up) to the minutia (trademark registration)

She doesn’t say what is “everywhere” but one can safely presume based on the written record freely available at her hate site that what she is referring to is the “evil tentacles of the Mooslims.”

SIOA

Undaunted by the rejection from the US Government, SIOA continued with its project. Pushing forward with their now infamous “Leaving Islam” ad campaign as well as opposition to the construction of Mosques and Muslim cultural centers, such as the high profile case of the Cordoba Center or what opponents are dubbing “the Ground Zero Mosque” because of its proximity to Ground Zero.

Both the anti-Mosque and anti-Islam Bus ad campaigns garnered a lot of media attention and were the scene of staunch anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In Miami, where the bus ads kicked off, the city having made a contract to run the ads became aware of the anti-Muslim and Islamophobic nature of the group and upon review made the right decision to remove the ads because they were “offensive.” Of course this riled up Geller and Spencer and they sued Miami which then essentially buckled rather then having to deal with law suits that would cause the city to lose money and time.

In New York, the bus ads went ahead without a hitch though many viewed it as Islamophobic and hateful. Detroit’s transit system however rejected the ads,

Detroit’s SMART bus system has rejected the button-pushing placards that read “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” – and direct Muslims to a Web site urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.”

“It’s a purely anti-Muslim hate issue,” Dawud Walid of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Detroit News on Friday.

“The SMART bus company, or any bus company, should not be used to marginalize a minority group.”

Defenders of the ads, dreamed up by Manhattan-based right wing blogger Pamela Geller and the New York-based Stop the Islamization of America, say it’s a free speech issue and they have sued.

“Americans have a right to know the truth; Islam is a religion of intolerance and violence,” said Michigan lawyer Richard Thompson, who filed the suit.

In New York, the ongoing divisive saga over a planned cultural center has been the scene of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim agitation. Pamela Geller inserted her group into the fray and now SIOA is taking a leading role in the opposition to a planned cultural center which is being dubbed by Geller and company the “Ground Zero Mosque,” though as Reza Aslan put it, it is “neither a mosque nor is it at Ground Zero.”

Some weeks ago SIOA held a protest against the “Mosque” in which protesters attacked two Arab looking men who they mistook for being Muslim. The police had to save them from the crowd, even though they were Arab Christians who came all the way from California to join the protest. That gives you an insight into the kind of people SIOA attracts.

SIOA Facebook Group

SIOA has over 10,000 members on Facebook and it is growing. The SIOA Facebook page is administered by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Anders Gravers,

(Click Image to Enlarge)

It is truly an ode to hate mongering racism, incitement to violence, veiled threats of physical violence against Muslims, conspiracy theories, from birthers to Eurabia clowns.

Nuking Muslims and Mecca

One demented SIOA member believes that the “rules of engagement with Muslims” are “#1: Kill the enemy, #2: There is no rule #2,”

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Another doozie, this time from David Gaston. Apparently the Ghost Busters are out to start World War III,

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Another nuking fantasy from Ben Kjellssecondson (the last name sounds like it was put together by someone blindly tapping away at the keyboard),

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It isn’t only pyscho images, but in discussions members dispute with each other on which option, “nuking the Middle East” and killing all the “diaper heads” or wanting Israel to “conquer the whole Middle East” are better solutions to the Mooslim menace,

(Click Image to Enlarge)

There are more nuking and destroying Mecca and Muslim pics which we have saved but this gives you a taste and flavor of the annihilation of Muslims that many in SIOA want to see.

Murdering Muslims

David Gaston, still a member of SIOA posts what he calls “Army Math” next to a picture of dead Afghan civilians,

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This is particularly disturbing when we read that some SIOA members claim to be in the United States Armed Forces and add images with thinly veiled hints of physical violence against Muslims,

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This is something that the MRFF, Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the military should definitely look into. We are seeing a growing trend amongst members of the military who view Muslims as their enemy, and it is only simple mathematics to note that more than a few will not leave their hatred of Muslims at the battlefield but will bring it home.

Crusader Mentality

You can say that many in the SIOA have Biblical or Medieval mentalities — literally. They believe that Israel has a right to the land because it says so in the Bible, they believe the solution to terrorism is Crusades, they believe all of this is prophecy and that Jesus approves,

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More ghastly calls for violence in the name of Jesus,

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Did we mention that some of them really don’t like the Quran,

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Conspiracy Theorists

The paranoia and fear amongst many of the members of SIOA takes form in a number of ways. They hold all the crazy conspiracies that we are used to by now about President Obama: he is a Muslim, anti-Semite, Communist, anti-Christ, etc. They believe in the conspiracy theories of Eurabia, the myth that Muslim women’s wombs are the most dangerous weapons of all because they spell the demographic take over of the West, etc.

Obama and our leaders are anti-Semitic fascist Nazis,

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Obama wants to make America into a Muslim country,

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Another one from Ron Ben Michael, who earlier said Israel will rule the whole Middle East,

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Ron sees no difference between Obama and the other two. They’re all “evil Mooslims” trying to burn Israel.

Then there is the Muslim demographic time bomb, there were a number of pics related to this topic, but this one summed up all the craziness in one image,

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So what is the solution. Well, SIOA members won’t leave you dissapointed,

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Notice the comments. “Kick Muzzies ass out of Europe” and the prayer to Jesus, “I hope this one day happens.” Delightful.

The Fabulous Duo: Christian Zionists and Extreme Jewish Nationalists

While there are all sorts of wackos on SIOA, and some misguided ones who don’t know what they got themselves into, the majority of those attracted to SIOA seem to be Extremist Christians and Jews with a sprinkling of atheists. The SIOA Facebook page was littered with pics of Jesus, prayers to Jesus, Israeli flags, stars of David, etc.

For instance, what does this pic have to do with SIOA’s mission?

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The guy is totally insane, just look at his crazy comments.

Then there is this gem, from our friend Ron, which extolls the power of the Israeli Air Force,

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Disproportionate power anyone? How aboud David v. Golaith?

Conclusion

There are many more posts and pics that manifest the loonacy that is SIOA, and we have them all saved. The sad thing is that this is no laughing matter, these people are calling for murder and genocide. Some of it may be tongue in cheek but a lot of it reveals the inner depths of hatred that lurks inside and motivates this organization, which is one step removed from being the inspiration for an armed anti-Muslim vigilante group.

Even more reprehensible are the admins and creators of this organization, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller who allow such vile, conspiratorial and dangerous pronouncements from their members. How could we expect any less, as is clear from mounting evidence, both Spencer and Geller share in the above views though at times not as explicitly as their followers.

Stop the Islamization of America is nothing less than a hate group that deserves to be monitored and observed by Homeland Security and the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is one of a plethora of extreme right-wing organizations that have arisen since Obama has taken office and should be included in any further report or update on the rise of right-wing extremism.

Any organization that targets a minority that makes up one percent of the population of America, claiming that the minority is trying to take over is beyond hysterical, it is a threat to the fabric of our nation.

Mark Williams is the same cretin who said, Allah is a “monkey God” and that Muslims were his “animals.”

The animals of allah for whom any day is a great day for a massacre are drooling over the positive response that they are getting from New York City officials over a proposal to build a 13 story monument to the 9/11 Muslims who hijacked those 4 airliners.The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god and a “cultural center” to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult.

Anyway, now he is saying that NAACP is racist though he defeats his point by writing a very racist fictional letter in the name of the head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83X6T8T5JQA 350 300]

Republican Michael Faulkner gets tongue tied here trying to support his view on why the Mosque near Ground Zero shouldn’t be built. I also think Scott Stringer did an excellent job.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Reinhard Werner belongs to the not so Anonymous Mosque Watchers group. Supposedly a group who observes Mosques to make sure there isn’t any terrorism going on. This article is a hoot. (hat tip: Kashmiri Nomad)

Germany’s Anonymous Mosque Watchers

By Hauke Goos

Reinhard Werner doesn’t trust Islam. The 70-year-old German is part of a group which keeps tabs on mosques across Germany, monitoring them for what he calls an “intolerant Islam of terror.” Over the years, he has gained a certain amount of notoriety.

Reinhard Werner is a few minutes early, but because he doesn’t want to be noticed, he stands outside on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

It’s Friday afternoon in Munich’s Pasing neighborhood and men are scurrying past Werner on their way to Friday prayers. All of them, in Werner’s eyes, are enemies. He claims that the mosque is spreading what he calls an “intolerant Islam of terror.”

“Do you see the sign over the entrance?” he says.

The letters “DITIB” are printed on the sign. DITIB, an acronym for the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, is the umbrella organization for roughly 900 mosque congregations in Germany. It is controlled by a Turkish government organization based in Ankara, the Office for Religious Affairs, making it indirectly answerable to the Turkish prime minister. “A military mosque,” says Werner.

“Do you see that the letter ‘I’ in DITIB resembles a minaret? And that the minarets look like missiles?” he asks, beseechingly. It isn’t always easy for Werner to make himself understood.

Feeling a Kinship

Werner is a member of the “Anonymous Mosque Observers,” a group of Muslims who fled to Germany from Muslim countries because they came into conflict with religious rules.

Although Werner is not a Muslim himself, nor is he fleeing anything, he feels a kinship with Muslims who have fled their native countries. These Muslims trust their more settled Muslim counterparts about as much as former US President George W. Bush trusted terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. They keep tabs on what goes on in mosques because they want to be sure that they are still safe in Germany.

Werner came to the group in a somewhat roundabout way. For 30 years, he was a teacher at a secondary school in Munich, where some of his classes consisted entirely of foreign students. According to Werner, most of the Turkish students had a negative-to-hostile attitude toward the West. They were hard to reach and difficult to convince, he felt.

Since then, he has been fighting for religious freedom, but insists that it should come with certain conditions. The most important of those, he says, is that Muslims, like members of other faiths, pledge to uphold the German constitution.

Of the 36 mosques in Munich, nine are in Werner’s “observation area.” He reports everything he sees and hears to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. The BfV, however, doesn’t seem to be taking him very seriously, or at least it hasn’t found his reports to be sufficiently convincing to take any action.

Blood-Soaked Tyrants

After a while, Werner slips into the mosque. In the lobby, about 25 men are drinking tea and eating pita bread as they wait for the service to begin. Werner orders tea, drops three cubes of sugar into his cup and points to a picture next to the tea station. It depicts Ottoman leaders from six centuries. Blood-soaked tyrants are being glorified here, Werner whispers. He points to the second picture from the right in the bottom row and identifies the man depicted as Abdul Hamid II, known abroad as the “Great Assassin.”

A portrait of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic and the Turkish army, hangs on another wall, next to a television set. According to Werner, the state and the church are not truly separated in Turkey because the state influences the church and the military influences the state. “Turkey is a theocracy,” says Werner.

Then he walks up the stairs to the prayer room. The sermons, says Werner, are often about rejecting the Western way of life.

Just before Werner reaches the door to the prayer room, a young man approaches him and asks him whether he is Mr. Werner. Werner nods.

“You are banned from the premises,” the young man says, looking serious. He tells Werner that he must ask him to leave the mosque immediately. It is moments like this that show Werner that his work is at least being taken seriously.

He has acquired a certain amount of notoriety over the years, years marked by the attacks of Sept. 11, the Taliban, the Danish cartoon controversy, the ban on minarets in Switzerland and opposition to the construction of new mosques in Germany. Werner, now 70, had studied the Koran. Suddenly he was considered an expert, and he was in demand.

A Little Disappointed

He is sometimes asked to speak to Christian congregations, but he is hardly ever invited back. Perhaps it’s because Werner is so combative. Germans don’t like conflict.

And perhaps everything would be easier if social coexistence could be organized the way teams are organized on the football field. Then there would be agreements and rules, and anyone who broke the rules would be penalized. Second-time offenders would be sidelined. But that isn’t the way society works, which is why Werner has been fighting his battle for more than two decades.

There are many movements within Islam, he says. The most aggressive, he says, is “Mohammedan Islam,” — and, he claims, it is also the only movement that is building mosques. This, Werner argues, is why it is not the construction of minarets which should be banned, but the construction of mosques.

On his way home, Werner stops at the mosque again to ask why he has been banned from the premises. He hopes to somehow use the ban to reinforce his message. He — as a representative of Germany, the West and democracy — feels excluded.

This time an older man with white hair and a white beard is waiting for him. The ban was a misunderstanding, the old man says, and smiles.

A minute later, Werner is standing on the street below the mosque again, relieved that he will be able to continue observing the mosque in the future. But he also seems a little disappointed.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Another case of: what if they were Muslim?

Tel Aviv Rabbis: Renting apartments to foreign workers violates Jewish law

Twenty-five rabbis from Tel Aviv have signed an edict forbidding the rental of apartments to “infiltrators” and illegal foreign workers.

In a public announcement, the rabbis said that “in the wake of the severe pressure that the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv face and their abandonment by the government, that begins with the Israeli-Egyptian border and ends with the lawlessness and violence that is taking over south Tel Aviv, the residents of the neighborhoods have decided that the present situation cannot continue”.

The authors of a petition on the subject added that “they will not let the neighborhoods in which they grew up to turn into Sudanese neighborhoods, something that has already happened to the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood. After many attempts using acceptable legal means, the residents decided to have the rabbis sign an ‘Edict Forbidding the Rental of Apartments to Infiltrators,’ and hope that this will halt the deterioration of the
neighborhoods.”

An announcement that activists intend to post on bulletin boards around the city states that “we, the undersigned, neighborhood rabbis and synagogue rabbis, hereby warn the public of the religious prohibitions and the foreseeable dangers that would result from renting apartments to these people.” The rabbis added that “may the efforts of those that toil to defend the Jewish character of the City of Tel Aviv be strengthened.”

“This is a sad day for the citizens of Israel, when racism receives legitimization,” said Ran Cohen, the Director of the Migrant Refugee & Non-Status Division of the organization Doctors for Human Rights. “We call upon citizens to fiercely reject this petition and courageously stand in opposition to this display of fear and xenophobia that is gaining traction within our society.”

Meretz MK Ilan Gil’on said that “again, we are witness to racist incitement on the part of the rabbis. The same rabbis that should be preaching love of Israel and all of humanity are attempting to incite hatred and arouse fear among Israeli society. The Attorney General must investigate to find out if these rabbis are on the government payroll.”

Sureyya Ozkaya

A 14 year old Muslim girl recently was brutally beaten and burned by assailants who made racial insults and attacked her for her faith (hat tip: Milda).

Girl attacked burned and robbed in broad daylight

By Mike Didymus

These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.

The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.

She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.

Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.

Mrs Kale said: “My daughter is so scared. She does not want to stay in the house – she is staying at a relative’s now and wakes up crying.

“She comes here and stays for an hour, but only gets to the front door before she wants to go again. I miss her and I want her to come home.”

The family have been critical of the police’s response to the attack, complaining they had to collect hair cut from Sureyya’s head themselves several days after the incident.

Mrs Kale said: “We are doing the police’s job for them. We had a phone call 24 hours after it happened saying they were taking statements from someone on July 22.

“It is too long. I want this to be done and over with.”

A 14-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman have been arrested in connection with the attack and bailed to return to a south London police station on July 22.

Anyone with information can call Croydon police on 03001 231212, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

This highlights just how odious the embrace of Islamophobia by the likes of Robert Spencer and company is. They revel in something that in its worst manifestations can lead to physical harm and even death.

Just recently Spencer posted a piece containing a photo of him holding an “Islamophobia pills” box. At a lecture in Sweden (probably canoodling with Euro-supremacists), a “Muslim” (loonwatcher no doubt) gave him the box to cure him of his Islamophobia. Instead Spencer posted a picture of himself holding the box and then went on to blame Muslims for Islamophobia.

Robert Spencer holding "Islamophobia Pills"

I was speaking in Sweden yesterday, and during the Q&A a Muslim presented with the little box of “Islamophobia” pills I’m holding in the photo above. It’s a clever little piece, if you like that sort of thing, listing the ingredients of this “cure” for “Islamophobia” as “multiculturalism,” “open-mindedness,” and the like.

But of course none of that will cure this disease, which is non-existent in any case.

Official: Mosque Fire Deliberately Set

Fire officials said authorities believe a fire at a Marietta mosque was arson and they are investigating it as a possible hate crime.Asst. Chief Scott Tucker said authorities found vandalism inside the mosque where a fire erupted just after midnight Tuesday. He would no specify what type of vandalism it was.Flames raced through the front entrance and damaged the prayer hall at the mosque on Powder Springs Street in Marietta.The damage to the mosque is extensive. Fire destroyed the front entrance of Masjid Al Head just after a group of Muslim men wrapped up their last prayer and left for the evening.“We locked the door and everything and we left and suddenly he called me and said, ‘There’s fire,’” said Iman Hafiz Inayatullah of Nashid Al Head.“One of them happened to come back by after they left and observed the smoke. He got closer and noticed the structure was on fire,” said Asst. Chief Mark Anderson of the Marietta Fire Department.Arson investigators went through the building looking for a cause.Tucker said ATF agents and the Georgia Fire Marshal’s Office are now involved.No one was injured. Officials continue to investigate.

Update: A Muslim, who attended the mosque is now being charged for burning the mosque. As much as Islamophobes would love to gloat about this, it really doesn’t let them off the hook when anti-Muslims bomb and vandalize mosques.

Debbie Schlussel must have been right, Pamela should be better known as “Scamela.”

Pamela Geller gets on TV, and knowing that she has to act some what normal says, “I love Muslims.” A statement belied by her constant hate and fear mongering about Islam and Muslims. She wants to destroy the Golden Dome in Jerusalem, is that love?

From LGF:

Pamela Geller: I have no problems with Muslims except ‘goodness makes them ill’

I wouldn’t post about this hateful creature again so soon, but this is a case of absolutely classic shrieking harpy hypocrisy. Yesterday Pamela Geller posted this:

“I believe I’m fighting for Muslims here,” she said. “I have no problem with Muslims.”

Today she posts this:

The Muslims are finishing the work of the Mufti al-Husseini, Hitlers ally and mass slaughterer of Jews during the the holocaust. Sixty years later, it’s the Muslims who are dragging the rest of the world with them, in their genocidal dreams of annihilating goodness, creativity, production, inventiveness, benevolence, charity, medicine, technology, and all of the gifts of the Jews.

Our goodness makes them ill.

Right — she has no problem with Muslims at all! They’re just all Nazi-allied genocidal murderers who want to destroy everything good in the world.

Who would ever get the idea that Geller has a problem with Muslims?

Books and memorabilia on the German leader’s life have found a steady market in some sections of Indian society where he is idolised and admired, mostly by the young.

The numbers are small but seem to be growing.

Latest reports say Bollywood is now planning to cash in. A film – Dear Friend Hitler – is due to be released by the end of the year, focusing on the dictator’s relationship with his mistress Eva Braun.

It’s hard to narrow down what makes the dictator popular in India, but some young people say they are attracted by his “discipline and patriotism”.

Most of them are, however, quick to add that they do not approve of his racial prejudices and the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were killed.

But the truth is that books, T-shirts, bags and key-rings with his photo or name on do sell in India. And his autobiography, Mein Kampf, sells the most.

‘Bestseller’

Jaico, the largest publisher and distributor of Mein Kampf in India, has sold more than a 100,000 copies in the last 10 years.

Crossword, an India-wide chain of book stores, has sold more than 25,000 copies since 2000 and marketing head Sivaram Balakrishnan says: “It’s been a consistent bestseller for us.”

The dictator is admired by some for his ‘discipline and patriotism’

And demand seems to be growing. Jaico’s chief editor RH Sharma says: “There has been a steady rise of 10% to 15% in the book’s sale.”

Until two years ago, a typical Mumbai (Bombay) bookstore sold 40-50 copies of Mein Kampf a year. Now the figure is more like several hundred copies annually.

The more well-heeled the area, the higher the sales. For example, the Crossword outlet in Mumbai’s affluent Bandra district sells, on average, three copies a day.

The book has several editions and is available in vernacular Indian languages too. Mannyes Booksellers in the western city of Pune keeps at least four editions. There are at least seven publishers now competing with Jaico.

Global sales figures for Mein Kampf are hard to come by, but the book sells well in other parts of the world too.

In the US, it sold 26,000 copies last year 2009. In 2005 it sold 100,000 copies in Turkey in just a few months. The Arabic imprint is popular in the Palestinian territories.

Mein Kampf is published by Random House in the UK but the company would not give sales figures to the BBC.

‘Positive and negative’

Nearly all the booksellers and publishers contacted in India say it is mainly young people who read Mein Kampf.

[Hitler] mesmerised the whole nation with his leadership and iron discipline – India needs his discipline Student Prayag Thakkar

It’s not just the autobiography – books on the Nazi leader, T-shirts, bags, bandanas and key-rings are also in demand.

A shop in Pune, called Teens, says it sells nearly 100 T-shirts a month with Hitler’s image on them.

Prayag Thakkar, a 19-year-old student in Gujarat state, is one of them: “I have idolised Hitler ever since I have had a sense of history. I admire his leadership qualities and his discipline.”

The Holocaust was bad, he says, but that is not his concern. “He mesmerised the whole nation with his leadership and iron discipline. India needs his discipline.”

Dimple Kumari, a research associate in Pune, has not read Mein Kampf but she would wear the Hitler T-shirt out of admiration for him. She calls him “a legend” and tries to put her admiration for him in perspective: “The killing of Jews was not good, but everybody has a positive and negative side.”

Young people have no sense of history – [Mein Kampf] is not easy to understand unless you know the history of Germany Academic Govind Kulkarni

Shilpi Guha says she started reading the book but could not finish it and she wouldn’t like to dwell on the dictator’s negative side.

In the past, a couple of right-wing Hindu leaders have also expressed their admiration for Hitler.

But young Indians’ fascination for him has been explained succinctly by academic Govind Kulkarni: “The youth look for a hero, a patriot, and Hitler was a committed patriot. He is seen as someone who can solve problems. The young people here are faced with a lot of problems.”

Mr Kulkarni says he believes the young are gullible and fail to see the sinister side of Hitler.

“Young people have no sense of history. The book is thick and not easy to understand unless you know the history of Germany,” he says.

Amit Tripathi, a Mumbai-based scholar, read the book a long time ago but just out of curiosity.

“I didn’t find the book inspiring at all. It was interesting to read how he coped with his days of struggle, but his ideology of racial purity smacked of racism.”

Oh look a Muslim terrorist has struck again in Europe, this time against the Greek “counter-terrorism” minister…except…wait…this just in…the terrorist was likely from the rebel guerilla movement Revolutionary Struggle. Looks like the 99.6% of terrorist attacks has struck again.

Bomb kills aide to Greek counter-terrorism minister

A bomb blast at the offices of Greece’s public order ministry in Athens has killed a close aide to the minister responsible for counter-terrorism.

Police said the victim had opened a parcel bomb.

The explosion happened only metres away from the office of the minister, Michalis Chryssohoidis, who was unhurt.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said the bombing was a terrorist attack. So far no group has said it was beind the bomb.

‘Cowardly murderers’

The blast was so powerful that some in the heavily guarded building thought it had been struck by an earthquake, the BBC’s Malcolm Brabant in Athens reports.

The victim was later identified as Giorgos Vassilakis, a 50-year-old father of two.

Visibly shaken, Mr Chryssohoidis said he had “lost a valuable and beloved colleague”.

“We cannot be scared and we cannot be terrorised. These cowardly murderers will be brought to justice.”

The minister added that the parcel had been meant for him.

Mr Papandreou also branded the bombers “cowards”, adding: “They will get the response that they deserve not only from the state but also from all of society. The terrorists will not reach their objective.”

Greek terrorism expert Dr Athanasios Drougas told the BBC that the bomb was probably the work of Revolutionary Struggle, the country’s most deadly active guerilla group.

In recent months police have made major breakthroughs against Revolutionary Struggle and another militant organisation, Conspiracy of Fire.

Dr Drougas said Revolutionary Struggle was sending a message that its was not defeated and was still capable of striking at the heart of the Greek government.

A mosque has been targeted by vandals once again in Tennessee.

Sign Vandalized at future mosque site

by Mark Bell

A sign marking the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was found vandalized for the second time in less than six months Wednesday, according to an Islamic Center spokesperson.

“At this time we’re going to release one statement and that is that this has been a very unfortunate incident and we are just trying to be good neighbors,” said Carmie Ayash.

Abdou Kattih called the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office Wednesday around 1:30 p.m. in reference to the vandalism. Deputy Trent Givens, who was patrolling the area, responded to the incident.
Givens’ report reads that Kattih said “he had been alerted by someone who lived nearby that the sign had been vandalized again.

“While speaking with Kattih, I observed that both posts had been knocked backward in the ground and the sign was leaning,” Givens reported. “Also the main part of the sign had been ripped. It appeared that someone had used an unknown object to hit both of the posts and then struck the top right of the sign and ripped it in two.”

The deputy noted that the object used appeared to have raised areas that left a very distinct pattern on the wood and metal.

“At this time there are no known witnesses,” he reported. “I had conducted a traffic stop on Millwood Court before this call. I cleared the stop at (1:04 p.m.) and then proceeded down Veals Road from Bradyville Pike. At that time the sign had not yet been vandalized.”

The sheriff’s office has placed an extra patrol on the site “indefinitely” per patrol Capt. Mike Fitzhugh.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the latest vandalism is fitting a “sharp rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in this society.”

The Washington-based civil rights and advocacy group, through spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, said they believe the acts are being promoted by a number of hate groups promoting the demonization of Islam and marginalization of Muslims.

“A mosque was bombed in May in Florida and there was no national media coverage at all,” he said. “We’re seeing opposition to mosques being taken to very hysterical proportions” due to “a number of bizarre conspiracy theories,” including the theory that “Muslims are trying to take over the country.”

Hooper said it is disturbing to see the kinds of things that are happening in communities all around the nation, not just in the south.

“We’re seeing the demonization of Islam in our country and it leads a very vocal minority to take these extremist kinds of actions nationwide,” he said. “This is caused by a lack of knowledge and lack of interaction with ordinary Muslims. When people know more about Islam and interact with ordinary Muslims, prejudice goes down.”

A report put out by CAIR in 2006, the most recent of its kind, states that approximately “one in four Americans believes that Islam is a religion of hatred and violence,” remaining unchanged since 2004. The level of knowledge of Islam also remained virtually unchanged from the 2004 report, indicating that only two percent of survey respondents indicated that they were “very knowledgeable” about the religion.

“A vast majority of Americans said they would change their views about Muslims if Muslims would condemn terrorism more strongly, show more concern for Americans or work to improve the status of Muslim women or American image in the Muslim world,” the report states.

Hooper said CAIR will likely issue a public statement about the vandalism as soon as today.

“You really have to shine a light on bigotry and hope the mainstream people in the community come out against it,” he said.

— Mark Bell, 615-278-5153

Like Momma like Son

Some people seem to think that Muslims building mosques will somehow put them in danger of becoming targets of terror.

Lilburn mosque foes allege harassment

by Shane Blatt

Lilburn’s Hood Road carries new Gwinnett into old Gwinnett. The mile of asphalt begins with a mosque at U.S. 29 and turns into a byway of houses, trees and gardens.

But now, when the sun goes down, tension grows in this tidy, middle-class neighborhood.

Some residents opposed to a mosque expansion on Hood Road say for the past seven months, they’ve been the frequent targets of harassment, mostly by those they describe as “Middle Eastern men”. But a founder of the mosque says the claims are unfounded and the city’s mayor, who lives on Hood Road, hasn’t witnessed anything unusual.

Nonetheless, residents have reported vehicles traveling the road at night with occupants yelling, making obscene gestures, snapping photos, even confronting two women in their driveway.

Since November, when city leaders ruled against a local Muslim congregation’s plans to expand, the Lilburn Police Department has received 21 calls of suspicious activity along Hood Road.

Lilburn police officials say they have investigated every claim and patrolled Hood Road around the clock for two months starting in April, when reports started to escalate.

“We have been unable to substantiate any crime by any person there,” Lilburn police Capt. Bruce Hedley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “[Residents] feel certain people have been driving up and down the road harassing them. Suspicious cars simply driving down the road is not something we can arrest someone for.”

And Wasi Zaidi, a founding member of the Muslim congregation of Dar-E-Abbas, said residents’ claims are “all lies and B.S.,” trumped up by a handful of people who have a political ax to grind against the mayor and the Police Department.

Still, residents say, the harassment is real. Some have installed security camera systems. Others are carrying guns.

“A lot of people are locked and loaded because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” resident Angel Alonso, 46, said. “We have a feeling somebody is going to get hurt.”

Residents say the harassment started Nov. 18, the same day the Lilburn City Council rejected the congregation’s proposal for a 20,000-square-foot mosque, cemetery and gym at U.S. 29 and Hood Road. The council’s decision has since sparked a federal religious discrimination lawsuit against the city.

The congregation has worshipped at two 2,000-square-foot buildings on the same property for nearly 12 years. It owns 1.4 acres of the land and wanted to buy an additional 6.5 acres to accommodate the city’s growing Muslim population. Lilburn Mayor Diana Preston owns four of those acres.

In November, more than 400 residents packed the Gwinnett County courthouse to protest the rezoning. They argued it would pose traffic and parking problems and run afoul of the city’s land-use plan.

After the meeting in Lawrenceville, resident Janie Hood said she was followed and boxed in on U.S. 29 by a van and sport utility vehicle full of “Middle Eastern” males, according to a police report. The vehicles were pulled over. Hood didn’t pursue the matter further, the report said.

But Hood said she didn’t drop it. Since March, she said she has spoken three times to the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office, which is investigating.

Now the 56-year-old Hood, whose father and grandfather built Hood Road, won’t sleep at her house at night, not since an attempted break-in in late December, she said. And on April 23, Hood said five vehicles pulled in front of her property. Two to three men exited and approached, according to a police report. Hood’s daughter, Christi Nichols, who feared for her safety, grabbed a firearm and told the men to leave, the report said.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” Hood said. “All we get from the Police Department is, ‘Stay in your house.’ We will stay in our house, but we should haven’t to.”

Zaidi, of the Muslim congregation, said the 90-plus families who worship at the mosque have “nothing to do with this.”

“They’re saying the mayor isn’t doing her job, the police chief isn’t doing his job,” Zaidi said. “But if they falsely accuse us, we will sue them.”

For months, the mayor was in the cross hairs of the controversy. In January, a group of residents demanded Preston step down or be removed from office for trying to sell her land to the congregation. Preston maintained she had a right to sell her property and refused to quit.

To avoid a conflict of interest, Preston recuses herself from all mosque-related meetings.

As for the harassment claims, Preston gardens close to dusk and up until recently has slept with her windows open. She said she hasn’t seen or heard anything.

“It’s a mystery,” the mayor said. “But every complaint that is made the city is taking seriously and investigating it and giving it due process. A policeman is here quite frequently. I really don’t know what else [the city] could do.”

Yusof Burke, president of the board for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Georgia, said the city’s decision against the rezoning created tension in the neighborhood, but he didn’t think it would boil up into this.

“I’ve never heard of this happening before,” Burke said of the alleged harassment. “The best solution is to meet and talk things out.”

A month ago, a group of residents met with the city manager and police officials.

“We were told that yes, people can take pictures of our houses. Yes, they can stop in front of our houses,” resident Allan Owen said. “The city has essentially been useless.”

Councilman Scott Batterton said the city has tied up significant police manpower to investigate every claim.

“I feel like we need to make no apologies in terms of our efforts to catch or to see what’s going on on Hood Road,” he said. “Policeman like to arrest people for doing wrong. So far, they have not yet been able to identify anyone.”

Capt. Hedley said Lilburn police officers now patrol Hood Road twice a day, and they will continue to investigate all leads.

“I’d love for the community to return to where it was,” Hedley said. “A nice, peaceful neighborhood.”

Two Yeshiva students charged with threatening Arab MK Tibi

Jerusalem police arrested two 18-year-old yeshiva students Monday morning as part of an investigation into threats made on the life of Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi. The two have admitted making threatening calls to Tibi.

Police launched the investigation after the United Arab List lawmaker received a threatening letter claiming he had only “180 days to live”. According to the suspects, they called the MK on his personal telephone numerous times.

Police will ask the court for a conditional release for the two suspects, whose terms will include a court order to keep away from Tibi. Police say the investigation is still underway, as they have more suspects to question.

The death threats were produced by a group calling itself “Pulsa Denura,” a reference to a mystical Jewish ceremony in which a person is cursed. The group was responsible for the June 8 letter sent to Tibi, which made an explicit threat on his life.

“Because of your poisonous stance against Israel and Zionism, the group’s leadership has issued a pulsa denura against you,” the letter read. “You have just 180 days to live. Your death will be sudden and cruel, with great suffering…It is time to prepare your will. Your friends in the terrorist organizations will be happy to care for you in the final days of your life.”

On June 7, Tibi also received a threatening voice mail in Hebrew on his cell phone. The message included a great deal of cursing and the following comments: “Your days are numbered, you filthy Arab. I promise you that your days are numbered. You and all Arabs should die… If a beloved prime minister can be murdered here, what would it be to murder you?”

The hysteria of the anti-Mosque crowd continues in Staten Island.

Another Sunday, another protest against proposed Staten Island mosque

by Virgina N. Sherry

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. –  Midland Beach residents opposed to the sale of the empty convent of St. Margaret Mary parish to a Muslim group rallied yesterday afternoon for the second straight Sunday in front of the 2½ -story building, and this time other Staten Islanders joined them, carrying their own protest signs.

“I’m here to support this community because of how frightened everyone is of this group coming in to the neighborhood — the terrorism factor is a big part of it,” said Suzanne Adamo of Castleton Corners, who was born and raised in Midland Beach. She was referring to the Muslim American Society, a national organization whose Brooklyn/Staten Island chapter signed a contract last month with Rev. Keith Fennessy, the parish pastor, to purchase the convent.

“To me, they’re too closed,” added her husband Sal Adamo. “We don’t know them. It’s up to them to show us what and who they are. It’s very frightening.”

One sign on bright yellow cardboard read in black capital letters: “Muslim Brotherhood You Are Not Welcome Here.”

A major issue that has energized opponents of the convent-to-mosque conversion is the alleged links of MAS founders to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the belief of many neighborhood residents that the Muslim Brotherhood is itself a terrorist organization.

The U.S. State Department maintains a publicly available list of foreign terrorist organizations. The most current list, dated January 2010, includes the names of 45 groups from around the globe. The Muslim Brotherhood is not on the list.

‘NO FOREIGN TIES’

“Everyone in this country has safety concerns, and I think that’s fair and valid, especially in the wake of September 11,” MAS local spokeswoman Lana Safah said in a phone interview on last night.

“We want to reiterate that we have no ties or affiliations to any foreign entities whatsoever,” she added. “And we have maintained the same position from the beginning — we are willing to speak to whoever wishes to speak to us.”

“I’m very against the way this sale went through — it was deceitful and sinful,” said Carolyn Pinto of New Dorp, who attended St. Margaret Mary elementary school. “This is a Christian community. The people here are the church. Archbishop [Timothy] Dolan has hurt the Catholics of Midland Beach, and it cuts like a knife.”

Anthony Sagona, also New Dorp, saw no nuance. “We don’t want the mosque. This is a nice neighborhood and we hope to keep it that way,” he said, adding that he was born in Midland Beach and lived there for 50 years. “I hope the deal falls through.”

Native Islander Christine Marra of Grant City said she was “opposed to the sale of the convent to a non-Christian organization,” and held a hand-written sign that read “Tell the Archdiocese No Mosque. Boycott the Basket.”

“I feel betrayed by the New York Archdiocese,” she commented. “I’ve been donating money my entire adult life with the intention of spreading the Gospel and the Christian message.”

TENSION OVER A BANNER

Some division in the anti-mosque crowd became apparent when a long banner was unfurled, emblazoned with color photographs and the words “We Will Never Forget!” It referenced the killing of Coptic Christians in Egypt, where they remain a beleaguered minority without full civil rights, including freedom of worship and the right to freely build churches.

The U.S. State Department, in its 2009 “Report on International Religious Freedom,” said that Egypt’s constitution “provides for freedom of belief and the practice of religious rites,” but added that “the Government restricts these rights in practice. Islam is the official state religion, and Shari’a is the principal source of legislation.”

One of the people holding up the banner was Magdi Saweres, a Cairo-born Copt who has lived in Midland Beach for the last eight years.

“You see..they [Islamic extremists] killed these kids in Egypt,” he explained to someone reading the large banner.

“That’s not our issue! They should not be here!” said Rosemary Vasquenz, an officer of the Midland Beach Civic Association, who then walked away in disgust.

“We’re not in Egypt — we’re in the U.S.” another resident chimed in.

“They’re on our side, believe me,” intervened Thomas Bosco of Grasmere, who was helping to hold up the large banner.

Unlike the first rally last Sunday, yesterday’s included a uniformed police presence, and officers restricted protestors to the sidewalk after many spilled out onto Greeley Avenue, raising signs and cheering when drivers of passing vehicles slowed down and honked horns in support.

The rally, with about 175 people at its height, was periodically interrupted by a lone counter-demonstrator standing across the street from the convent. His shouts were ignored by the vociferous yet peaceful crowd.

It concluded at 1:30 p.m., with the crowd chanting “USA! USA!” as they dispersed.

MAS REACTION

The Advance received this written statement from MAS in reaction to yesterday’s rally:

“We as Americans understand and fully appreciate the need to feel safe, and the right and necessity to look into the background of any party or group.

“However, it is equally as important for individuals to do their homework, not just rely on the research and propaganda of other parties.

“We have and continue to make ourselves available for any sit downs or questions, be it with the Church board, Community Leaders or individuals in the community. We are committed to communication and dialog, and are willing at any time to address any valid community concerns.”

Archbishop Dolan said it best on his blog: “Yes, it is acceptable to ask questions about security, safety, the background and history of the groups hoping to build and buy… What is not acceptable is to prejudge any group, or to let fear and bias trump the towering American virtues of hospitality, welcome, and religious freedom.”

Imagine if these were two different strains of the same Muslim sect, people would be wailing that Islam and Muslims are racists. As of now I haven’t heard anyone say Judaism or Jews are racists. You can also bet that if these protesters against integration were Muslims, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller would be having a field day.

Orthodox Jews rally against verdict

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have staged mass demonstrations against a court ruling that forces the integration of a religious girls’ school.

The rallies took place in Jerusalem and in other cities on Thursday in a show of mass defiance over the ruling by the supreme court.

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said 10,000 police were deployed to maintain order as demonstrators held posters that read: “The Supreme Court is fascist.”

“The prisoners of Emanuel are the messengers of the Jewish people,” read another.

At the centre of the dispute is an Orthodox school in the Emanuel Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank.

Parents from the strictly observant Slonim Hassidic sect of Ashkenazi Jewry refused to let their children attend school with girls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

They insist they are not racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls are not religious enough.

However, the court rejected that argument and ordered the jailing of at least 43 sets of Ashkenazi parents refusing to send their daughters back to school.

‘Most dramatic clash’

The dispute was described by the Israeli daily Haaretz as “the most dramatic state-religion clash to break out here”.

Sephardi religious leaders have not publicly criticised the demonstration or the parents’ conduct, suggesting a reluctance to drive a wedge within the religious community.

Nissim Zeev, a legislator from the conservative Sephardic political party Shas, said: “This is an example of something that should have been passed to a rabbinical court.

“It’s out of proportion, and a bit puzzling, that the high court should impose a prison sentence on these parents.”

Still, Zeev said the Sephardi girls had the right to choose to attend a mixed school. “If the children are together under one roof, then they are entitled to the same education,” he said.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority of some 650,000 Jews, just under 10 per cent of the nation’s population, is an insular community that has been known to riot over the state’s intrusion into its affairs.

Lord Voldemort, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named

Once again, Robert Spencer responds to one of my articles but refuses to take my name.  I am forever “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”  Spencer says:

And on those rare occasions when the opposition does offer a substantive response, it’s tissue-paper thin. A friend recently told me that he posted a lengthy rebuttal to a pseudo-scholarly presentation purporting to prove false something I said about the meaning of an Arabic word (my friend is a native Arabic speaker); his comment was summarily deleted.

My response is as follows:

1. “And on those rare occasions when the opposition does offer a substantive response”

I’ll take that as a compliment!

2. “it’s tissue-paper thin.”

Of the “ultra soft and strong” variety I hope.

3. “A friend”

I assume you are speaking of Kinana of Khabyar, who like you is an intellectual huckster.

4. “a pseudo-scholarly presentation”

As I said before, this is a bad case of projection: Spencer tries to pass himself off as a scholar despite his lack of scholarly credentials,  so he simply assumes that everyone else is trying to do the same.  I have never claimed to be a scholar, and it truly amazes me that he would even assume that I tried to be “scholarly” considering I used the word “sh*% hole” in the title of my article.  How many scholarly works have you read that speak with such an irreverent tone?  The fact that Spencer would even think this speaks volumes about how little he knows about scholarship.

5. “native Arabic speaker”

Is that supposed to impress me?  Kinana of Khaybar could be a professor in Arabic for all I care or the Queen of England.  None of that changes the fact that he is guilty of academic deceit.

6. “his comment was summarily deleted.”

A lie.  I never deleted Kinana’s comment.  He never posted it on our site.  Instead, he posted it on JihadWatch, and someone posted the link to it on our site, which you will see is still very much there.  But let’s even assume–simply for argument’s sake–that I “summarily deleted” his comment.  Not only is the link posted by an Islamophobe still on our site, but I myself reproduced the link in my counter-response as well as his response itself!

7. “he posted a lengthy rebuttal”

Let’s recap the debate.  First, Robert Spencer claimed in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), that the word “dhimmis” translates to both “protected people” as well as “guilty people.”  He went on to say that non-Muslim residents are called “guilty people” (or “dhimmis”) because they rejected the prophethood of Muhammad and altered their scriptures.  I wrote an article declaring all this to be a bold-faced lie and proof that Spencer is an intellectual huckster who is guilty of wholesale fabrication.

Both Robert Spencer and his friend Kinana of Khaybar responded to my article.  Spencer tried to cover his ass by moving the goalposts: instead of defending his claim that the word “dhimmis” means “guilty people”, Spencer argued that the word “dhimmis” is related to the word “guilt.”  Kinana attempted to strengthen this argument by citing various Arabic dictionaries that linked the word “dhimmis” with “guilt.”  In my counter-response, I exposed the intellectual chicanery that Kinana was engaging in: he quoted only a part of the dictionary definition, purposefully omitting the critical part which clearly explained that the “guilt” was associated not with the non-Muslim residents as Spencer and Kinana claimed, but with the Islamic state should it violate the rights of the non-Muslim residents.

Furthermore, the claim that the non-Muslim residents were called “dhimmis” because they were guilty of rejecting the prophethood of Muhammad and altering their scriptures is complete fabrication from the conspiratorial mind of Robert Spencer.  Neither Spencer or Kinana sought to explain this bit of wholesale fabrication.

My question now is: whose response is “tissue-paper thin”?  Will Spencer or Kinana care to defend their academic honesty (or in this case their lack thereof)?  My guess is that they will try to avoid issuing “a substantive response” as much as possible.

In the same post, Robert Spencer bellows:

The list of the Leftist and Muslim academics and apologists who have refused my challenge to debate is very long; they know they can’t refute what I say on the basis of evidence, so they resort to broad-based smears and personal attacks — and haughty refusals to debate.

I accept your challenge, Spencer.  I agree to a radio debate with you on the topic of jihad and “dhimmitude”, namely chapters 1-4 of your book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).  It will then be seen if you can defend your own writing, which I argue is a load of sensationalist crock.

Will you accept my challenge to debate or cower in fear?  My guess is that you “know [you] can’t refute what I say” and will “resort to…haughty refusals to debate.”

I predict that the JW minions will give excuses to explain away why their master Robert Spencer will refuse to debate me, instead of urging him to enter into a debate as they always do with other people who challenge his ideas.  They already know that Spencer does not stand a chance in a debate with me, which is why they will continue to generate excuses to exonerate him from his intellectual cowardice.  This is because deep down inside they know–as does everyone else who has followed his and my writings–what the outcome would be.

Spencer backing down from a debate with me would be curious, considering that he has already conceded that my writings are “rare occasions when the opposition does offer a substantive response.”  Spencer, are you saying that you can debate with people so long as they don’t give you a substantive response, in which case you flee?

No matter, I’ll continue to pulverize your arguments in my articles.  Speaking of which, I’m almost done with my latest one (on the topic of jihad).  Stay tuned.

Residents watch in anger the peace marchers

The proposed mosque in Sheepshead Bay has been attacked from many sides and we have been covering it from the beginning. The scene is getting quite ugly.

Peace march for new mosque gets ugly

by Stephen Witt

A peace march in support of a controversial proposed mosque in Sheepshead Bay turned ugly last Thursday after residents jeered marchers, most of whom were from outside the area.

“This is a Jewish neighborhood — build a mosque in your own neighborhood,” yelled Stan Yunatanov, who lives across the street from the proposed house of worship and cultural center planned for Voorhies Avenue between East 28th and East 29th streets.

Another woman, who refused to give her name, yelled, “[Muslims] don’t love America. They hate America.”

There were no arrests, but tension — which was already high ever since the Muslim American Society purchased the property earlier this year — was definitely of Biblical proportions during the “Children of Abraham Interfaith Peace Walk,” the seventh annual march for the Park Slope-based group.

The peace group originally planned to have its march in Coney Island, but decided to have it in Sheepshead Bay to support the embattled mosque project.

“It’s a show of support for the right of all faiths to worship,” said Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, one of the event organizers and the head of Kolot Chayeinu, a Jewish congregation that holds its services in a Park Slope church.

Read the rest

Plastic Pam or Catwoman?

And the award for most disingenuous statement of the year goes to…Pamela Geller!

LoonWatch recently reproduced an article by Michelle Boorstein, entitled “How Influential Will the Anti-Muslims Become?”  Ms. Boorstein updated her article, with the following (emphasis is mine):

UPDATE: Ms. Geller and some of her supporters objected to us characterizing their comments as “anti-Islam.” She wrote the following at the bottom of this post, for those who don’t read the comments:

“I am not anti-Muslim. I love Muslims. I am pro-freedom and anti-islamic supremacism.” (ironically, the next line is a threat to sue the Post)

One reader sent a recent report of her comments at a protest of the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan:

“We’re not here today to condemn Muslims or Islam,” but “to condemn the kind of mosque that will teach the very same radical ideology that gave birth to the 9/11 attacks.” She reportedly went on to say that “building a mosque just several blocks away from Ground Zero is an insult and an afford to every single person that was killed on 9/11.”

Pamela Geller saying “I love Muslims”!?  Come on, not even she can say that with a straight face…although maybe all the botox enables her to do just that.

Geller’s truthfulness can be gauged by a statement that I do not think even her die-hard supporters can believe.  It would be the equivalent of David Duke saying “I love blacks.”

On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being extremely dishonest and 10 being insanely dishonest), how dishonest do you think Geller is?  Said another way: what do you think is faker, her statement saying she loves Muslims or her post-botox leather laced catwoman face?

Perhaps Pamela Geller also has a Muslim friend…?

UPDATE:

Just another thought I had: even the phrase “I love Muslims” sounds awkward.  What does that even mean?  Racists and bigots often give bumbling responses when they try to claim they are not racist or bigoted.  There are nearly a billion Muslims in the world, and they are not monolithic enough to say such a broad statement as “I love Muslims.”  You could say “I love some Muslims”, but to say it the way she did it is just uber-weird.

Zahra Billoo, program director for the Santa Clara chapter of CAIR.

To think that this happened not in hickville USA but in one of the most liberal and tolerant areas of the country…

Notice also the link between Antisemitism and Islamophobia:

Sunnyvale: Man attacked for being Muslim, public safety officers say

By Lisa Fernandez

6/14/2010

Sunnyvale public safety officers are trying to track down two young men who struck someone in the face on a busy street, apparently simply for being a Muslim man who was wearing a black cap and holding a Koran.

He might be the third victim in Santa Clara County this year to fall victim to a reported anti-Muslim crime, according to the county’s Office of Human Relations. Last year there were none.

“They asked him if he was Jewish, and when he said, “No, I’m a Muslim,’ they told him that was worse, you must be a terrorist,” said Capt. Dave Verbrugge, a Sunnyvale Public Safety Department spokesman.

Some Jewish men wear a skull cap called a yarmulke or kippah, and some Muslim men customarily wear a cap called a kufi or taqiyah.

The attackers approached the 40-something man on El Camino Real at Sycamore Terrace on Friday. He was waiting for a ride to pick him up and take him to a 1:30 p.m. prayer service, called a Juma’ah, according to Zahra Billoo, program director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Santa Clara.

Billoo talked to the victim by the phone, and helped notify the FBI about the attack. She believes he may have been trying to get to the Muslim Community Association, the Bay Area’s largest mosque, on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara.

One of the young attackers, described as having blond hair and either in his late teens or early 20s, struck the man “three or four times with the open heel” of his hand, Verbrugge said. The man fell to the ground, walked home and called for help 20 minutes later. He reported some facial cuts and bruises, but Verbrugge said he declined any medical treatment.Public safety officers say this attack was unprovoked.

“If this was a regular attack, it would be classified as a simply battery,” Verbrugge said. “But because of what they said, our officers wrote it up as a hate crime.”

The victim, who has asked to remain anonymous, texted a statement Monday to a Council on American-Islamic Relations spokeswoman, which read in part: “The night it happened, I was up most of the night looking out the window making sure I was not followed home. It’s sad we can’t worship God openly. Out of fear, we have to hide it.”

An annual survey by the council found anti-Muslim reported incidents dropped to 116 in 2008 from 135 in 2007 nationwide, a decrease of 14 percent. Those are the most recent numbers available.

In addition to Friday’s Sunnyvale beating, Delorme McKee-Stovall, manager for the Santa Clara County Office of Human Relations, said there were two other anti-Muslim reports so far this year.

She cited an April incident at Luther Burbank Elementary School, where a Muslim teacher was called a terrorist, and her room was vandalized; and a March 31 incident at the As-Safa Academy on Latimer Avenue in San Jose, where a woman made derogatory statements and assaulted two Muslim teachers, and was later arrested…

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?

(cross-posted from New York Daily News)

By Joyce Dubensky

Is it free speech, subliminal stereotyping or hatemongering? It is all three.

Last month, about 30 buses in New York City‘s fleet started running ads professing to assist individuals trying to leave Islam; they’ll continue to run through the middle of next week.

These are messages of hate masquerading as messages of help – and all New Yorkers who believe in peaceful coexistence should reject them.

Sponsored by an organization called Stop the Islamization of America, led by Pamela Geller, the ads read like something aimed at battered women trying to escape abusive relationships: “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” Readers are then directed to a Web site aimed at providing support as they “escape” their religion.

The implication: Countless American Muslims are trapped in an oppressive and violent faith, dying to get out. And if they dare try, they could be injured or killed.

These are lies, and offensive ones at that. We should be clear: Few of the 5 million to 7 million Muslims in America want to escape their faith – and those who do are free to do so. There are extremists of all faith traditions, including those who identify as Muslim. But they are a small minority and do not represent Islam as a whole or American Muslims, for whom Islam is a beautiful and inspiring faith – not a prison.

So should the ads be banned from the buses? No. That’s not the solution. Instead, the message should be countered by informed people of goodwill, who are ready to demand that we treat one another with respect.

In fact, a ban probably wouldn’t hold up to legal scrutiny. Similar ads ran earlier this year in Miami-Dade, Florida. When Miami-Dade Transit yanked the ads from 10 buses because they could be offensive, the sponsoring organization threatened to sue. The county attorney’s office intervened and found that, even though the ads might be offensive, they were within permitted guidelines. They were reinstated.

There is precedent across the country for using public transit ads as the platform for political or religious messaging that is sometimes offensive and targets different groups (including Christians and Jews). Many U.S. cities have recently had pro-atheist advertisements appear on buses – one of which states, “You can be good without God.”

We should recognize the right of diverse voices to free speech – and the corollary responsibility to name the message when it stirs ill-informed hatred. Unless we understand the ads and reject their message, their ultimate impact will be to reinforce prejudice.

Islamophobia and anti-Islam hatred are on the rise in the U.S., especially after the events of 9/11. Even before that fateful day, Muslims were often portrayed in the media as democracy- and America-hating terrorists – a portrayal that, unfortunately, has increasingly seeped into our consciousness. In 2002, 41% of respondents in a national poll admitted to harboring anti-Muslim sentiments (even though only 7% said they understood Islam very well). In 2009, the percentage of those admitting anti-Islam attitudes reached 46%.

The bus ads fuel the fire. Although Geller says that practicing Muslims should simply ignore the ads, and that they are aimed at those who want to leave the religion, the reality is that people frequently switch religions in the U.S., Islam included. Approximately half of all Americans change religious affiliations at some point in their lives.

And violence is not a U.S. response to those who leave a tradition, whether it is Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or any other faith.

Thus, the ad is not really directed at a marginalized group of individuals yearning to leave Islam across the U.S. Rather, these ads subliminally reinforce the fearful stereotype that Islam is a religion of violent coercion. That it is cultlike in its hold over adherents. That it is a dangerous belief system from which people must escape.

A comparison across a wide range of traditions, Islam included, results in one conclusion: Most of our fundamental values are common across religious beliefs – values like compassion, respect for the “other,” charity, peace, forgiveness and, above all, the golden rule. In every case, Islamic texts strongly support those values.

Geller’s group has the right to buy ads that are within the Metropolitan Transportation Authority‘s regulations. And those of us who find the message offensive have the obligation to condemn them for what they are – statements designed to stoke fear and hatred, without cause, without facts, without justice. To do anything less is to let hate win.

Dubensky is CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a secular, nonsectarian not-for-profit organization.

Michael Berry is un-American

I just discussed the profound double standards in the mainstream media here.  Here’s another one: right wing radio host Michael Berry says that he hopes someone blows up a mosque should one be constructed.  Remember when the Revolution Muslim clowns posted on some obscure internet forum saying that the producers of South Park might end up being killed?  These radical Muslims didn’t say they would kill anyone, or even that they hope for that (although you can and should read between the lines).

Yet, now we have someone who has upped the ante and said that he hopes a mosque is blown up.  Imagine the ruckus if a Muslim American leader said that he hopes a church or synagogue should be blown up.  The story would go viral, and the mainstream media would whip up a storm of crazy.  Meanwhile, Michael Berry says that he hopes a mosque should be blown up, and the story barely gets any coverage whatsoever.  It certainly doesn’t evoke a sense of national panic as a similar case would should Revolution Muslim publish a statement saying “we hope such-and-such Jewish synagogue is blown up.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJDizmNgrd0 300 250]

When Berry asks “what is your real name”, by this he means to say that only people with white names are real Americans.  Sorry to say, buddy, but our president is named Barack Hussein Obama.  Don’t like that?  Then you can leave this country.  If you don’t believe in our pluralistic society, then you can go to the Israeli Occupied Territories, the last place on earth where racial apartheid is in place.  But here in the U.S., we believe your name can be Barack Hussein Obama, Sanjay Gupta, or Muhammad Ali…and such people are just as American as Bob, Pete, and Michael.

As for his tribalistic response dividing the world into “us vs. them”, this is the same type of mentality exemplified by the jihadists.  What do Muslim Americans–many of whom were born and raised in the United States–have to do with what happens in Saudi Arabia?  Are all Muslims the Borg?  Are they somehow one sentient being?  If some Muslims in Saudi Arabia do something then that somehow falls on the shoulders of all Muslim Americans?  If some Muslims in Saudi Arabia prevent churches in Saudi Arabia, then Muslim Americans should pay for that and not be allowed to build mosques in America?  What is ironic is that this typifies the tu quoque fallacy that Robert Spencer and the rest of the Islamophobic world invokes when questioned about their two-faced hypocrisy.

Glenn Greenwald responded to this “tribalistic response” by pointing out that we wouldn’t fair so well in such an “us vs. them” comparison when it is considered that we are invading at least five Muslim countries, occupying two, launching illegal attacks against others, killing thousands of Muslim civilians, aiding the state of Israel in the enforcement of the most inhumane blockade today, etc. etc. etc.  The list goes on and on.  If you want the Official List and Score Chart, go ask Usama bin Ladin for it, because he likes tallying up the rights and wrongs of Team Muslim vs. Team Christian, which is the “us vs. them” mentality that is shared by Islamophobes and radical Muslims alike.

Berry’s guest, Tony, is wrong about one thing: Tony is not just as American as Berry.  Tony is way more American.  This country was founded upon the freedom of religion, which includes the right to build mosques.  Michael Berry is quite simply un-American if he can’t understand that.

We did a piece on the statistics of European terrorism quite some time ago, and now more evidence that “terror” from Muslims in Europe is an overblown threat. (hat tip: iSherif)

Terror attacks decrease in Europe

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Fewer than 300 acts of terrorism were registered in Europe last year and only one was an attack from an Islamist group, with most of them committed by separatist organisations in Spain and France, EU’s police agency Europol reports.

A total of 294 terrorist acts were reported in EU member states in 2009, representing a 33 percent drop compared to the previous year and half the number of attacks registered in 2007, Europol said Wednesday (28 April).

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