by Daniel Ibn Zayd (Original guest piece)

In May of 2005 I joined a group of students and activists to watch a documentary entitled Paul Robeson: Here I Stand. Paul Robeson was an American political figure, though he remains virtually unknown by most in his home country. Many might recognize him from a booklet of stamps published by the United States Postal Service, entitled “African-Americans on Stamps: A celebration of African-American Heritage”. The booklet opens with Robeson’s smiling face, and states: “By the late 1930s, [Robeson] had become very active and outspoken on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and international peace.” This is true. He was also exiled from the United States, his citizenship revoked and then re-instated; he was poisoned with drugs and tortured with electric-shock therapy, the latter while under American supervision in hospital custody in London. He was repeatedly forced to defend himself during the Communist witch-hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He died in relative obscurity in 1977. For any group that has suffered similar treatment, this will sound all too familiar.

Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat (written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the toil and strife of the black slave working the gambling ferry boats:

Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.

In the score this refrain is marked optional; replaced with “[a] musical part” depending on the whim of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not comfortable with this rendition. This “comfort level” is the driving force of acceptance of Othered minorities as citizens, as well as their presence within cultural manifestations and national mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full freedom.

From this vantage point, the recent presidential election takes on a different significance, the opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic event has taken place with the election of a black American as marking a “post-race” America. Barack Obama’s election instead represents a similar “limit of tolerance”, based on the behavior, thought, and action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new “ideal” on the other hand, wholly separate from actions which make him hard to differentiate from his predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this light, not a contradiction.

One month before the election in 2008 I stopped into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama along with statements of pride and hope. “My President Is Black” read one, against the backdrop of an American flag, and with the words “The American Dream” on the reverse. This explosion in production of T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview of the Democratic National Committee[1] bears witness more to the weight placed on Obama’s shoulders than belief in “Hope” or “Change”. On the wall of the shop was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama’s perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama’s future we simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and globalized nightmare.

Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image as well as in word and deed something much closer to the reality of lived life for many in the country, as stated in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in 1964:

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare….

Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes’s The Dream Deferred[2]; they implicitly contain the projection of what might happen if the dream is put off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an Obama presidency.

Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein as a “lifelong criminal” who did time in prison before his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his assassination, perhaps due to his description of the assassination of John Kennedy as America’s “chickens [coming] home to roost”. This was echoed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright[3] who said the same about the attack on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation.

Full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations

Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto[4], Gilbert Osofsky states:

What was most striking about the Negro stereotype was the way it portrayed a people in an image so totally the reverse of what Americans considered worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and traditional American values were all absent from the Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to take them; childlike in a country of men….Negroes hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations.

The condition of the American black man was a function not just of racism, but of a built-in inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the nature of the problem; an inversion in which the dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted group in question.

It is only relatively recently that we are witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time having defused any revolutionary potential here–along with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In 1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In Dahomey that was so successful it forced the racial integration of many theaters in the States. Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay from 1916 entitled “The Drama Among Black Folk”, he wrote:

In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius into the beginnings of a new drama. White people refused to support the finest of their new conceptions like the “Red Moon” and the cycle apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the growth of a considerable number of colored theatres and moving picture places, a new and inner demand for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk drama built around the actual experience of Negro American life.

This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason it could not be tolerated. Dubois’s appeals for funds for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans, as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own [not] black [enough] faces.

This inversion of Black culture through the mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the jazz-era band leader stated, “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Similarly, when listened to outside of the dominant discourse such as on the radio show L’épopée des musiques noires broadcast on Radio France Internationale[5], such artists speak openly of the racism that they suffered and which continues to plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy and Bess have replaced actual historical memory.[6]

Black to the future
This specter of white men in black face rises every so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a marker of white privilege defended as “free speech”, as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the late ’80s[7]:

The police commissioner’s management authority has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo’s June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the city did not have the right to fire a police officer and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were punished, wrote Sprizzo, “in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.” This “protected speech” involved being part of a float with the banner “Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel 2098,” which the defendants said was a parody of black racial integration into the mainly white Broad Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas two months earlier.

Although we might not remember the vaudeville circuits of the early 20th century, this news item attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an event. This legally protected “free speech” leaves no humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to black stage characters and their disempowering nicknames (Step-‘n’-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon); to the percentage of black blood in a person’s bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one’s renegade slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the “reverse” of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as powerful, and are by contrast comical in their ineffectiveness.

This brings up the main point of any such discussion of representation, which cannot be limited to its visual or aural perception: the power differential involved. Who is the audience, and where do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical, technical, and economic ability to reach them? What are the various legal rights that enable and/or impinge such communication? What is my privilege to make such a statement, and what personal, communal, moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and beyond these other aspects of such expression?

Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in hidden locations out of public view); separated primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of the political parties along racial lines; the voting down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther King (“states’ rights” makes direct reference to George Wallace’s statement of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”); the practice of diluting minority power via the gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the vote for felons; etc.

The equivalent disparity of direct expression within the culture, along similar overt as well as covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile, Alabama for singing Strange Fruit (written by Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently, black students were convicted and imprisoned for their protest and reaction to a noose[8] being hung from a tree on the school lawn; this “warning” to the black student population came after they decided to assemble underneath the “white student’s” tree.[9] A super-mediated* discussion of the word “nigger” took place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the television show Seinfeld), not happy with some black hecklers, informed them that “fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” More disturbing are the commemorative postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these “black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze”, surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses.

A share of the wealth and a piece of the action
It should thus come as no surprise that during the Democratic primaries of 2008 Andrew Cuomo made reference to Barack Obama’s “shuck and jive”, a phrase which has no meaning outside of imposed black vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness, making semantic reference to costume change, rapid dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The attorney general’s disavowal of the term as racist is contradicted by his former statement that voting for his [black] rival for the New York governor’s race, Carl McCall, would result in a “racial contract” between Black and Hispanic Democrats which “can’t happen”.[10] Similar was the statement from Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed “uppity”. Everyone who speaks American English completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that follows, explicitly referring to a black man who should “know his role”.

These terms and images are so loaded that they only need be hinted at to get the message across; even in their denial they hit the target and leave their mark. The resulting backtracking can be seen to be prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged, the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or else by labeling the targets thereof as “oversensitive”, “politically correct”, or “racist” themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble practices and codes of that time most assuredly live on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as “I would never refer to my opponent as a Communist”[11].

Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself against such provocations, and was rewarded with the presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp, indeed, few American history books represent any leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s, and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement at its core:

[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties–terms of “pride”, “ownership”, “private enterprise”, “capital”, “self-assurance”, “self-respect”… What most of these militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power….[12]

The actuality is better known: the former Black Power movement leaders have either been assassinated or put in prison, have come around to parrot the dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less, historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers: Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their white counterparts, especially in terms of politics and culture: “the black Daniel Webster” applied to Samuel Ringgold Ward, or “the black Callas”, attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, “the black Kennedy”, in a reflection of racial privilege, and the one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and political designation.

The rainbow sign
In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God gives Noah the “Rainbow Sign” that ends his estrangement from the land; however the sign comes with a warning that He is done with water, promising “the fire next time”. In his book of the same name, James Baldwin describes Malcolm X’s relationship with the United States thus:

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.

Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby, echoes this when he states that “all the problems [on his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with without violence.” In contrast to the [acceptable] violence of Israel and England (which too has its own “Jerusalem”[13]) Baldwin reveals what is most threatening about the landless or placeless minority nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly, he reveals society’s inherent fear of those who have similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture, Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by the oppressed.

We’re here without any rights
This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern[14] Cohen states:

“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”

In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.

In economic terms, it also reveals the power differential inherent to capitalism and globalization, and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s attacks on “bling”-style rap artists–he doesn’t even admit to their more political precursors–who have managed to acquire wealth and status by following all of the lessons learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but who get punished when they become too competitive (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus rendered docile and brought within the domain of global Capital. “The trillionaire sleeping with models and actresses” is a glorified trope within American culture, so it is odd to find it given populist overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way Sasha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street.

The idea that the struggle against the colonial apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle, might somehow be simplistically reduced to “criticism” of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort. There is no point wasting time considering the cultural “flip”, in imagining an Arab or Muslim “doing the same thing” culturally speaking; there is likewise no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of “reverse racism” when such debates require a thorough examination of said expression along economic and political lines. This, the power differential of the dominant culture as portrayed by that culture’s media, is the central point of this discussion, and however we might examine it, those who are minority, who are Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such representations as they are played out within this mediated system.

A critical black gaze
As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X, despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him, could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image that survives such a pulverization[15], and as such, serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her essays[16] concerning and quoting Malcolm X:

Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.

Proclaimed “hope” or promised “change” should not derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially when this Machine has minimized minority histories to literally belittled images riding on tickets of commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash; to symbolic representations of white privilege embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more reason we must be “fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all images”.

The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism, nor in a homogenizing, “borderless”, “nomadic” neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of resistance to this dominant culture which are able to pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states:

Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation.

This requires, however, that we change our perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we radically re-orient ourselves in terms our relationship to cultural consumption and its source. These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the ability to read them as such, for having been so long out of touch with our own creative potential, and for having forgotten the formerly “local” media manifestations of guerrilla television, public access cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown theater, etc.

True to our native land
On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper[17]. Instead of the Star-Spangled Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the “black national anthem”, resulting in hate mail and an outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her decision was based on “how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person”. Further, she said that she would no longer sing the national anthem because she “often feels like a foreigner in the United States”.

The correct response of the mayor’s office should have been “this is her right; this is her freedom of speech”, like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, Lift Every Voice and Sing (words and music by John Johnson, ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the lyrics: “May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True to our native land.” This takes on a particularly humbling tone given the replacement of the previous attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes with more current almost prideful acceptances of this, their “allowed” place.

This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen’s Hollywood–the scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and described in the music of Bambu[18] among many others, and where a “beautiful” form of dance was created from the “banal” by Tommy Johnston, aka “Tommy the Clown”, borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although performed by both sexes, and used to entertain children and adults at birthday and block parties. The dance is referred to as clowning, and it went on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and reflective of street realities for a generation lost, often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities, called crumping. Both are performed by youth attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future are systemically limited.

In the documentary about this dance form called Rize![19] the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen previous expression from this community. Included in this film is the striking image of a black man now painting his face up in white clown makeup and not minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following Malcolm’s advice to “never accept images that have been created for you by someone else.”

Speak from the street
And so as Arabs and Muslims now targeted with similar minstrelsies, we do ourselves no favor when we simply smear brown paint on our brown features in order to entertain the Master in the Master’s house; we perform no beneficent action by simply parroting endless mediated exchanges with little bark and less bite. Sacha Cohen would ironically represent all of us as tinpot dictators, when it is he, culturally, politically, economically, and in terms of class and avowed ideological affiliation, who has much more in common with this fetid realm of the world stage than does the majority of Arabs and Muslims on the planet. What does Sasha Cohen know about what is going on in his own backyard, much less this world in active revolt? Indeed, it is Cohen who needs to “know his role”.

While we point out this obvious classist and racist arrogance, we must also strive to find the countervailing non-mediated* representatives that exist closer to home and which speak from the street: the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills (not Twitter) led to intifada; similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of the last kufiyyeh factory[20] in occupied and embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their unique creative contributions of craft, art, music, graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and written word, theater, etc.

For of this common resistance might rise the creative manifestations–the “new folk drama”–that feed back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen and his ilk who would define us and confine us; manifestations[21] that do not allow simply for a misconstrued and patently false “comfort level” or status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short, that do not continue to sell us out. In this is perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks of us, once the realization of such mediated deception and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy that would be better put to creative output, once we wean ourselves from the source of our own misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize the creative source all around us; a new nahdah; proving with our creative action what we already know to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in control of his own creative manifestation in concert, changed the formal and staged lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” to better frame his feelings of being an outsider within American society. It is likewise time for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own restaging.

* Mediation
Mediation defines expression as a function of the distance from direct sensorial witnessing, on a spectrum that ranges from non-mediated to super-mediated.

Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of the unsaid.

Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane Katrina, stating: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Super-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such dominant discourse.

Example(s): The television show Cops with an episode concerning drunk driving; drivers’ education movies; a presidential press conference in the aftermath of Katrina.

Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in opposition to the dominant discourse often in its uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the tools, languages, systems, and technologies of super-mediation.

Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of various cities that represent both the individual killed in an accident and their collective whole; the Legendary K.O’s rap song set to mashup videos for “George Bush Don’t Like Black People”.

1 “Dreaming XXL”; Jake Austen. Harper’s, November 2008. pp. 58–59.

2 What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode?

3;

4 Harper Torchbooks, 1966.

5 The Story of Black Musics [sic] < http://www.rfi.fr/taxonomy/emission/187>;

6 Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To note is that “First-day” issue of stamps exists for a very particular audience that collects such stamps for their value; this is a different audience than the subject of the stamps themselves.

7;

8;

9;

10 Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo to claim “whiteness”, as opposed to his formerly equally marking ethnic identity.

11 Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities;;.

12 Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki.

13 William Blake poem and later hymn.

14;

15;

16 Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

17 USA Today, January 31, 2009; “Controversy after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem’ for ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

18 Pull It Back:;

19 Rize!:;

20 Kufiyeh project:;

21;

Daniel Ibn Zayd was adopted in 1963 and returned definitively to his land of birth in 2004; there he teaches art and illustration and in 2009 founded the artists’ collective Jamaa Al-Yad. He has written for CounterPunch, The Monthly Review Zine, Dissident Voice, and The Design Altruism Project, as well as on his blog: danielibnzayd.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Transracial Eyes, a web-based collective of transracial adoptees. He can be reached at @ibnzayd on Twitter and by email: daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com.

Danios wrote recently about Ashton Kutcher’s putting on ‘brown face,’ and ridiculing Indians in a Pop Chips commercial. He pointed out that though Kutcher’s ad was pulled we still have Sacha Baron Cohen’s anti-Arab minstrel show proceeding without much protestation or discussion–until now.

Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah has weighed-in now, and if I didn’t know any better he must have read our article because he raises similar arguments,

To me, this is essentially the same as white performers in blackface portraying black people in buffoonish negative stereotypes for the enjoyment of white America.

But I am not advocating a ban on offensive comments or the telling of culturally insensitive jokes. I certainly am not calling for more PC comedy. I’m not calling for a boycott of anyone nor asking for one more insincere “I’m sorry to all those who were offended by me” from a celebrity.

I’m in no way arguing that Arab culture is off-limits or cannot be mocked. I’m a comedian of Arab heritage and have performed comedy shows not only for Arab-American groups across the United States, but also in the Middle East, from Egypt to Qatar to Saudi Arabia. I find the biggest laughs are elicited when performers hold up a comic mirror to Arab culture.

But for some reason, the entertainment industry appears to truly enjoy ridiculing “brown” people, Arabs and Indians, and has no qualms about casting people not of our heritage to portray us. Indeed, just last week Popchips snack company found itself embroiled in a controversy because an ad showed Ashton Kutcher playing an Indian character in brownface, similar to what Cohen is doing in “The Dictator.”

Sacha Cohen’s movie a minstrel show

by Dean Obeidallah

(CNN) – Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator,” is a modern-day minstrel show judging from the trailer and Cohen’s comments promoting the film while dressed as the film’s star, “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen,” the leader of a fictitious Arab country.

Cohen, who is not of Arab heritage, plays this Arab character while sporting a long fake beard and speaking in a strong Arabic accent, which would be fine, except the character is showcasing the worst stereotypes of Arabs.

For example, at a news conference in New York City this week promoting his film, Cohen exclaimed: “Welcome devils of the Zionist media and death to the West.” He then joked about liking TV shows that showed Arab terrorists killing Americans and admiring fashion designer John Galliano for hating the Jews.

To me, this is essentially the same as white performers in blackface portraying black people in buffoonish negative stereotypes for the enjoyment of white America.

But I am not advocating a ban on offensive comments or the telling of culturally insensitive jokes. I certainly am not calling for more PC comedy. I’m not calling for a boycott of anyone nor asking for one more insincere “I’m sorry to all those who were offended by me” from a celebrity.

I’m in no way arguing that Arab culture is off-limits or cannot be mocked. I’m a comedian of Arab heritage and have performed comedy shows not only for Arab-American groups across the United States, but also in the Middle East, from Egypt to Qatar to Saudi Arabia. I find the biggest laughs are elicited when performers hold up a comic mirror to Arab culture.

But for some reason, the entertainment industry appears to truly enjoy ridiculing “brown” people, Arabs and Indians, and has no qualms about casting people not of our heritage to portray us. Indeed, just last week Popchips snack company found itself embroiled in a controversy because an ad showed Ashton Kutcher playing an Indian character in brownface, similar to what Cohen is doing in “The Dictator.”

Read the rest here…

The new myth is that Islam somehow promotes…*drum roll*…necrophilia!

While you can likely find a fatwa for everything, when the recent story claiming that the “Egyptian parliament was considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death” went viral, the BS meter shot up pretty high for us.

But not for many mainstream media outlets who ran with the story without fact checking, thereby reinforcing Islamophobic myths and anti-Islam talking points.

Despite the ardent desire on behalf of Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer (he saw it as evidence of Sharia’ takeover) for the story to be true it was revealed pretty quickly that it was a hoax.

Spencer still has not updated the story to point out that it was a hoax. Now a lot of the haters have egg on their faces, this is not the first or the last time that such lies will be promoted in the media.(h/t:ZH)

Egypt ‘necrophilia law’? Hooey, utter hooey.

(Christian Science Monitor)

Today, Egypt‘s state-owned Al Ahram newspaper published an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt’s parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death.

It was soon mentioned in an English language version of Al-Arabiya and immediately started zipping around social-networking sites. By this afternoon it had set news sites and the rest of the Internet on fire. It has every thing: The yuck factor, “those creepy Muslims” factor, the lulz factor for those with a sick sense of humor. The non-fact-checked Daily Mail picked it up and reported it as fact. Then Andrew Sullivan, who has a highly influential blog but is frequently lax about fact-checking, gave it a boost with an uncritical take. TheHuffington Post went there, too.

There’s of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt’s parliament. I’m willing to be proven wrong. It’s possible that there’s one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

But extreme, not to mention inflammatory claims, need at minimum some evidence (and I’ve read my share of utter nonsense in Al Ahram over the years). The evidence right now? Zero.

There was a Moroccan cleric a few years back who apparently did issue a religious ruling saying that husbands remained married to their wives in the first six hours after death and, so, well, you know. But that guy is far, far out on the nutty fringe. How fringe? He also ruled that pregnant women can drink alcohol. Remember, alcohol is considered haram, forbidden, by the vast majority of the world’s Muslim scholars. Putting an unborn child at risk to get drunk? No, that’s just not what they do. Whatever the mainstream’s unpalatable beliefs (there are plenty from my perspective) this isn’t one of them.

It’s important to remember that the structure of the Muslim clergy is, by and large, like that of a number of Protestant Christian sects. Anyone can put out a shingle and declare themselves a preacher. The ones to pay attention to are the ones with large followings, or attachment to major institutions of Islamic learning. The preacher in Morocco is like the preacher in Florida who spent so much time and energy publicizing the burning of Qurans.

Stories like this are a reminder of the downside of the Internet. It makes fact-checking and monitoring easier. But the proliferation of aggregation sites, newsy blog sites, and the general erosion of editorial standards (and on-the-ground reporters to do the heavy lifting) also spreads silliness faster than it ever could before.

The above was a recent headline in the Daily Mail. One wonders if the Daily Mail would ever run an article titled, “Christian gang kidnaps and rapes two girls as part of their Christmas celebration?”

The wholesale misattribution of the criminal conduct of these men to Islam fits a long pattern of Islamophobic reporting at the Daily Mail.

Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch breaks it down below :

Another inflammatory anti-Muslim headline in the Mail

That’s the headline to an article in today’s Daily Mail, reporting on the conviction of a group of men for abducting, assaulting and raping two girls, aged 15 and 16.

The article quotes one of the convicted men as claiming that sex with the two girls was consensual: “It was Eid. We treated them as our guests. OK, so they gave us [sex] but we were buying them food and drink.”

And that single quote is the sole the basis for an inflammatory headline that plays to the poisonous far-right racist myth that Muslims are directed by their faith to sexually molest young girls.

It’s worth noting that the report is written by Katherine Faulkner, who last year co-authored the equally irresponsible and misleading report of a drunken assault in Leicester, which led to an EDL protest against so-called “anti-white racism” in the town.

It is no accident that the Mail was one of Anders Breivik’s favourite English-language newspapers. It is cited numerous times in the manifesto he published to justify his terrorist killings and an article by Melanie Phillips is reproduced in its entirety.

Our friend Richard Silverstein at Tikkun Olam was the first to expose the UK Jewish Chronicle’s hosting a White Supremacist blogger by the name of Carlos Cortiglia. It was largely through his efforts that the Jewish Chronicle removed Cortiglia’s posts, but not before Silverstein got screenshots. The UK Jewish Chronicle has not explained why they gave Cortiglia a platform, they seem to be just covering it up (h/t: Jenny):

UK JEWISH CHRONICLE HOSTS BNP WHITE SUPREMACIST BLOGGER

by Richard Silverstein (Tikkun Olam)

UPDATE: I e mailed the Jewish Chronicle editor asking about Cortiglia’s status as a JC blogger.  No one replied, but Ben White has noticed that the BNP leader’s posts are no longer publicly available on the site.  So the response to my inquiry must’ve been to take the posts down.  Their approach seems to hush this up so the embarrassment will not be too public.  Hopefully, we can disabuse them of that notion.

Another JC reader notes that apparently any JC reader can set up their own personal blog on the newspaper’s website, which is what Cortiglia did.  I’ve corrected my post title and text accordingly.  Finally, Cortiglia’s four posts are were still available using these links (here and here).  Whether or not Cortiglia was a featured blogger or a reader-blogger on the JC site, the fact remains that they published four of his posts, made them publicly accessible for eight months, and gave him a platform he wouldn’t otherwise have enjoyed.

UPDATE I: The JC has totally removed Cortiglia’s four blog posts, but we have screenshots for every one.  The JC editor, Stephen Pollard, is lying when he told the Guardian’s Hug Muir that Cortiglia’s blog was taken down in September.  The accompanying screenshot disproves this, as the four posts were on the site and freely accessible till yesterday.  Such lies only exacerbate the offense of the JC hosting BNP PR for eight months.  I don’t understand why, when faced with embarrassment, people don’t admit to the offense and move on.  Lying only focuses more attention on the matter.

*  *  *

Stephen Sizer reports that the UK national Jewish community’s Jewish Chronicle has offered a blog-column toCarlos Cortiglia, a leader of the British National Party, the nation’s leading white supremacist political party.  Cortiglia is the BNP candidate in the London mayoral race.

I asked Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley to put BNP’s politics in a U.S. context, and whether it could be compared to the Tea Party.  He replied that BNP carries more political weight, but its politics are more extreme:

Although they have moved towards a focus on Islamophobia and the counterjihad movement in recent years, their background is in the more traditional European neo-Nazi context and the National Front…

They used to be solidly anti-Semitic and it’s said [their national leader, Nick] Griffin used to deny the Holocaust. In recent years and especially since 9/11, they’ve decided they hate Muslims more than Jews or blacks so have put the focus on agitating against Muslims…

As part of their appeal to unite against Islam, they’ve made more recent attempts to distance themselves from anti-Semitism (although it can’t be far underneath the surface). Interestingly they are also now very pro-Israel.

This seems part of the growing convergence of the European far-right and pro-Israel ultranationalists.  A perfect representative of this is of course Anders Breivik, who’s just gone on trial for murdering 77 young Norwegians.  I’ve also written here about a group of Russian neo-Nazis who were welcomed to the Knesset by two far-right Jewish MKs.  The operative concept here seems to be that the enemy of my Muslim enemy is my friend, even if he’s a Nazi.

But white supremacists?  Is this how low the mainstream UK Jewish leadership are prepared to go?  To make common cause with those who only a decade or so ago admired Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust?

On a somewhat related subject, Electronic Intifada reports that the faux progressive UK Jewish rights group, Engage, surreptitiously accepted funding from the UK Jewish Board of Deputies in order to mount an anti-BDS campaign.  All the while Engage touted itself as an independent Jewish progressive voice, when it was a paid shill of the monied pro-Israel interests of the UK Jewish leadership.  When you’ve been doing this as long as I have you develop a sense of smell about groups like this.  They make a pretence of believing one thing and do something entirely different.  Engage is one, as is StandWithUs.

One of the anti-Loons of 2011, Sheila Musaji dissects the anti-Muslim propaganda of Daily Mail, Telegraph and hate bloggers Pamela Geller and Bare Naked Islam.

Another fake story about Muslims demanding special treatment

by Sheila Musaji

First let’s see how the Islamophobes slanted yet another story, and then we’ll look at the facts.

Pamela Geller posted an article Imposing Islam: London University mulls alcohol ban.  She posts an article from The Telegraph with this introduction Another nail in the coffin. Here again we see the imposing of Islam on the public square, all part of the ongoing campaign of the islamization of the West, as meticulously documented in my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.  The bottom line is, if alcohol is haram for Muslims, then don’t drink it. Period. Don’t impose Islam on non-Muslims.

Bare Naked Islam posted DON’T BAN BOOZE, BAN MUSLIMS! referring to the same Telegraph article, with the introduction You are now entering yet another Sharia-Controlled Zone in England: London Metropolitan University has just announced that it is considering banning alcohol on campus because it is ‘offensive to Muslims.’

Here is a sample of the comments under the Bare Naked Islam story:

— Muslim slaughter innocent people as the devil himself…There is “Nothing” religious about the Muslim Satanic cult! Not only do the Muslim hate non-Muslim, they HATE dogs also…If you would see what Muslim do to dogs this to would make your blood boil! There is NO place for a Muslim on earth…You want peace in the world, then rid the world of the vile creatures called Muslims and Commies!! How many more Million among Millions of innocent people have to die before the vile creatures are killed?!

— Many people are offended by moslems; myself included, so why can’t we ban islam?

— The ENTIRE Western world ought to ban Muslims from entering their countries. Further, they also need to start a crusade to drive Islam out of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and any part of the Americas, Australia/Oceania where it’s taken serious hold. Do them as they have done non-Muslims for 1400 years.

— If Muslims HATE our way of life so much, then why do they come in such huge numbers to our countries? Oh, I momentarily forgot; they come to CONQUER and impose Islamic sharia law where defenseless non-Muslims have NO human rights.

Now we get to the facts that set off this hate-fest.  Once again, just as in the incident at Catholic University when Muslim students were falsely accused of “wanting crosses removed”, no Muslim students made any request to the University in England regarding alcohol.  There was no “imposition”, no “demands”, no “creeping Sharia”, no attempt at “Islamization of the West”.

Engage, a British Muslim group in England published an article outlining what actually happened.

There is coverage in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard on comments by the vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University that the university is considering creating ‘alcohol-free zones’.
He stated that this was to cater for a “21st-Century balance”, given its diverse student population. Almost 20% of the LMU’s students are Muslim, and according to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Malcolm Gillies “For many students now, coming to university is not about having a big drinking experience.”

The Guardian headlines with ‘University where 20% of students are Muslim considers alcohol-free zones’. The article states:

“A London university is considering establishing alcohol-free zones on its campuses because so many of its students consider drinking to be immoral.

“Professor Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said the selling of alcohol was an issue of “cultural sensitivity” at his institution where a fifth of students are Muslim.

“Speaking to a conference of university administrators in Manchester, he said that for many students, drinking alcohol was “an immoral experience”.

“He told the Guardian the makeup of his institution had changed considerably over the past few decades. In the past it had been “substantially Anglo Saxon – now 20% of our students are Muslim,” he said.

““We therefore need to rethink how we cater for that 21st-century balance. For many students now, coming to university is not about having a big drinking experience. The university bar is not as used as it used to be.”

“Alaa Alsamarrai, the vice-president of student affairs for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, said Muslim students wanted universities to be inclusive so that students “from all walks of life can come and share experiences”.

““Alcohol is a barrier to many Muslim students participating in freshers’ events and often in society activities, so we are in support of moves to have alcohol-free zones and events,” she said. “However, if a student wants to drink, we don’t want to ban them from doing that.”

Contrast this reporting with the sensationalist headlines in the Daily Mail and Evening Standard.

The Daily Mail headlines, ‘London University considers stopping sale of ‘immoral’ alcohol on campus because it offends their Muslim students’, whilst the ES headlines, ‘London university to ban alcohol because students say it’s ‘immoral’ ’

Both are factually inaccurate, as the restriction on alcohol selling would only apply to some areas on the campus, the so-called ‘alcohol-free zones’. This is something which is not clarified at all in the LES, whilst the Daily Mail makes it clear much later in its article, where it states, “Professor Gillies said he would work with the student body to move towards having areas on campus where ‘one serves alcohol and others don’t’”.

Moreover, the Daily Mail’s claim that the move is to be considered on grounds that it ‘offends Muslims’ is ludicrous. Nowhere in the comments of Professor Gillies is there the suggestion that the arrangement is motivated because alcohol causes offence to a particular group. Rather he states that it is an issue of “cultural sensitivity”, and that he is “raising the issue of changing values in student populations and the question of how a responsible university responds.”

The Daily Mail’s report is typical of its habit of publishing stories on the latest thing to ‘offend’ Muslims. Such sensationalist, and irresponsible reporting, serves to embed the false impression that Britain’s Muslim communities require ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’ treatment, apart from the rest of society.

Islamophobia Watch reports on another important detail left out of the irrational Islamophobic accounts.

The right-wing press has latched on to an interview with Prof Malcolm Gillies of London Metropolitan University in which he reportedly said he wants to create alcohol free areas on campus out of “cultural sensitivity”.

… Also worth noting is the following statement by the London Met branch of the University and College Union:

1. London Met Uni has some 25,000+ students studying in over a dozen buildings – all of which have alcohol-free coffee bars/student areas, across two distinctly separate campus areas in North and East London, with only a single student bar at each campus (the only places that serve alcohol at the university).

2. There have been no complaints or demands from students directly or via the students union for alcohol to be either banned, or partially-banned, on campus.

3. Gillies is currently selling off large sections of the university estate, including ‘The Hub’ –the student union facility (inc student bar) at the City Campus. The VC’s comments need to be seen in that light – i.e., they are simply a convenient cover for reducing student social facilities.

4. The language adopted by the VC in this regard is extremely divisive and is already stoking tensions where none had previously existed between the multiplicity of London Met’s student constituencies. The fact that the EDL (English Defence League) and other extreme Right and fascist groups have latched on to this is a major concern.

5. If Gillies were serious about student welfare and wider social and cultural equality and fairness, why has he personally defended the following university management decisions:

i) direct links with the Uzbekistan regime – noted for the torture of its opponents (primarily Muslim incidentally), and forced sterilisation of woman (see this week’s BBC report on the issue – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fjx63)

ii) cutting of most of the university’s student chaplaincy service – including the forced redundancy of the Imam;

iii) the drastic reduction in the opening hours of the Women’s Library (down to only 1 day per week), and its eventual closure;

All of this is happening at a time of huge cuts to student courses/modules – including the majority of the ‘critical’ subjects – such as philosophy and history, and mass redundancies amongst staff – both academic and student service related.

At best, Gillies utterances are a crass example of the disconnect becoming more and more evident at London Met between university management and the staff and students they supposedly represent. At worst, it is a quite cynical attempt to stir-up a divisive atmosphere in order to deflect attention from the far more serious issue of the deliberate destruction of a once proud inner city ethnically mixed and vibrant modern university.

After this interview with Prof. Gillies was published, the BBC asked some Muslims  what they thought about possible alcohol free zones.  Here are a couple of the responses:

Alaa Alsamarrai, the vice-president of student affairs for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), said: “We want our universities and unions to be inclusive – where students from all walks of life can come together and share experiences.  “Alcohol is a barrier to many Muslim students participating in freshers events and often in society activities – so we’re in support of moves to have some alcohol-free zones and events.  “Though if a student wants to drink in their lifestyle, we of course don’t want to ban that.”

Farooq Murad, Muslim Council of Britain secretary general, said that thousands of Muslims attended university and as far as he was aware there had never been a demand for an alcohol ban on campuses.  “There has always been a balance between social life and studying. We believe university authorities should be able to decide what works best for them in managing their campus space. Muslims have studied at universities for decades and we cannot imagine that others drinking alcohol will impede them from continuing to attend.”

The Times Higher Education reports on MORE FACTS that completely undermine the Islamophobic take on this story.

The president of London Metropolitan University students’ union has called for the vice-chancellor to apologise after he suggested the sale of alcohol should be banned from parts of the campus because some Muslim students believed drinking was “immoral”.

Claire Locke said Malcolm Gillies had “offended” Muslim students by generalising about their beliefs. There had been no calls from students to create alcohol-free areas on the London Met campus, she said.

Ms Locke argued that London Met’s Muslim students were “respectful of other people’s cultures”. Muslim students’ union officers were currently fighting for a new student bar to be opened at the university’s City campus, she added.

Outright lies or distortions about anything concerning Islam or Muslims is so common among the Islamophobes that on TAM we have an article collection that we try to update regularly called What Everyone “Knows” About Islam and Muslims.  The demonization industry has become so prolific that it is difficult to keep up with the updates as they churn this crap out daily.

The most commonly repeated false claims about Muslims and Islam are that:

Everyone “knows” that most or all terrorists are Muslims, and there are no Christian and no Jewish terrorists (or terrorists of any other religious stripe), and that Muslims are all militant,  inherently violent, more likely to engage in violence against civilians, and more likely than other Americans to be radicalized.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims are not interested in dialogue.  That Muslims don’t help Christians in need.  That Muslims can’t have Christians as friends, and are anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and intolerant of other faiths.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims don’t unequivocally denounce terrorism, that American Muslim leaders have not responded to radicalization in their community,  that mosques are the source of radicalization, that 85% of mosques are run by radicals, that Muslims don’t cooperate with law enforcement.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims are not equivalent to real Americans, that they are the enemy within, and a fifth column,  that good Muslims can’t be good Americans, that Muslims are not loyal to America, that they are not a part of our American heritage,

Everyone “knows” that Islam itself is the problem and makes Muslims “backward”, that Muslims have made no contribution to the West, that Islam is “of the devil”, a Crescent menace, a “green peril”, that was spread by the sword,  an “evil encroaching on the United States”, and not a religion.

Everyone “knows” that this is a Christian nation, which the Muslims are trying to take over, starting with getting an Eid stamp which is the first step towards shariah law which is a threat to America, and a threat to our judicial system, by purposefully having more children than others to increase their numbers, and they will be the majority in this country in 20 years.  Muslims are a threat to America

Everyone “knows” that Muslims have no respect for the Constitution, they don’t obey the laws of the United States,  that they are opposed to freedom of speech, don’t allow and freedom of religion.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims are given a pass by the elite media.  It’s “us versus them”.

Everyone “knows” that the Muslims’ goal is world domination under a Caliphate, and the proposed Cordoba House in NYC is a demonstration of supremacism and triumphalism, and that Muslims planned to open it on the anniversary of 9/11.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims don’t speak out against extremism or terrorism, and even those Muslims who do speak up or seem moderate are simply lying or practicing taqiyyah.

Everyone “knows” that the Qur’an is uniquely violent, that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t include God’s love, and does not include the concept of a Golden Rule,  that Allah is a moon god.

Everyone “knows” that Islam is a monolith and all Muslims are the same, like the “Borg”.  This means that every act committed by an individual who is a Muslim is directly attributable to Islam, and never because the individual is crazy, criminal, or perverted.

Everyone “knows” that Muslims don’t have a sense of humor

Everyone “knows” that Muslims are like the Fascists and Nazis and that in fact they supported those movements.

The problem is that what “everyone knows” is wrong.  These self-righteous and incorrect statements are usually followed by a demand that the Muslim community do something about whatever is the false flag of the day or face the inevitable consequences.

In addition to these “everyone knows” statements of demonization and misrepresentation, there is also a whole industry of simply connecting with Islam or Muslims with any negative idea, event, or societal trend (even when there is no sane connection to make).  These I think of as “Through the Looking Glass” claims.

For example, lots of “news” items never happened, or are simply not true.

— Arabs didn’t celebrate 9/11 at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey.
— Budweiser did not pull all its product from the shelves of a convenience store where there was celebration of the terrorist attacks – this never happened.
— The Muslim statement of faith (Shahada) is not an expression of hate.
— An American Missionary in Africa didn’t face possible murder charges and hanging because of a traffic accident.
— There is no verse of the Qur’an on “The Wrath of the Eagle”.
— The supposed bomb threat made by an Arizona student that led to an evacuation of the school was a hoax by non-Muslim students.
— The story that Iran was considering forcing Jews to wear a yellow star appeared in several publications and it was totally false.
— The story that Iran was going to attack the U.S. and/or Israel with nuclear weapons on August 22, 2006 was a lie.
— The slaying of the New Jersey Coptic family was falsely charged to Muslims.
— The story about the British banks banning piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims never happened.
— Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism and violence than Christians or Jews.
— Muslims did not destroy the Library of Alexandria.
— Nurses in Britain were not “ordered to drop everything and turn Muslims’ beds toward Mecca five times daily”.
— There is no  Muslim sword through the 41-cents mark on the U.S. Eid stamp.
— Sirhan Sirhan is a Christian, not a Muslim.
— The Virginia Tech massacre had no connection with Islam.
— The University of Oklahoma bombing had no connection with Islam.
— A bus driver in Britain didn’t tell passengers to get off the bus so he could pray.
— Rachel Ray’s Paisley scarf is not a symbol of “murderous Palestinian Jihad” (and neither is a Keffiyah).
— A Muslim student in Florida did not refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance.
— There were no Muslims acting suspiciously on Air Tran flight 297.
— Wearing a tee-shirt with Arabic writing on it does not make a person dangerous.
— A Madrassah is simply a school.
— The zebibah (prayer bruise) on some Muslims foreheads is not a sign of a “commitment to jihad”.
— There is no “spit jihad”
— There is no hijabi employment jihad
— There is no Muslim “marriage to important men” jihad plot
— Jihad is not terrorism.
— Ashura is not a “Muslim blood festival”.
— Muslims are not forbidden to have non-Muslims as friends.
— The Shahada (declaration of faith) is not  an “expression of hate” that is “closely identified” with terrorism.
— The Nuclear Security Summit logo is an atom on a circular path, not an Islamic symbol.
— The U.S. Missile Defense Logo is not evidence of ‘Submission To Shariah’, and neither is the Flight 93 memorial.
— The Google Veteran’s Day logo doesn’t display a secret Muslim agenda.
— Muslims also died on 9/11.
— Barack Obama is not a Muslim, but so what if he was?
— Mattel is not promoting Sharia with a subversive doll that supposedly says “Islam is the light”.
— The Hamas “child bride” incident was nothing of the sort.
— The best buy Happy Eid statement on an ad was not a subversive attempt to “water down” American holidays
— The “Muslim plot” to kill the Pope never happened
—The story about a flight from London to Malta being stopped because a Muslim man was praying in the aisle was a lie
— Five American Muslim soldiers never plotted to poison their fellow soldiers.
— There is no devious Muslim plot to groom attractive Muslim women to marry important men or politicians – an Islamic/socialist/left wing plot to advance a pro-Muslim Agenda and take over America.
— Straight prayer lines, beards, hijabs, gender segregation during prayers, wearing a watch on your right hand, wearing “non-western” clothing, etc. are not “Sharia adherent behaviors” that might correlate with the promotion of violence.
— Muslim environmentalists are not part of a sinister plot to colonize the west.
— All of the rapes Oslo, Norway over the past three years were not “committed by Muslim immigrants using rape as a weapon of cultural terrorism”.
— There was no Muslim plot hatched in an on-line forum to attack British Jews over Israel’s actions in Gaza, and there was no “Islamist” named Abu Islam making these fake postings.
—Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazd did not justify and provide Islamic guidelines for the raping of prisoners.  The story was a lie.
— Keith Ellison’s use of the Qur’an in the photo op after his swearing in was not “undermining American culture”
—There is no Muslim scholar named Sheikh Haron, and everything he does or says as a supposed member of the Muslim community is a lie.
—Muslims do not block New York streets to pray every Friday.
—There is no plot to have terrorist babies born in the U.S.
—Stephen Coughlin, a Pentagon anti-terrorism specialist was not ousted because his superiors thought he was too critical of Islam
—The Holocaust museum shooting had nothing to do with Islam.
— Anders Breivik’s terrible massacre in Norway was not “a jihad” or even commited by a Muslim
— The word Slav does not come from the word for slave and has nothing to do with Islam.  Slavery is not only a Muslim problem.
— There is no Muslim vehicular jihad plot
— All rapes in Norway have not been committed by Muslims (not even most)
— Whole Foods offering halal products during Ramadan was not “shilling for jihadist interests”
— There is no plot by Muslim cabdrivers in New York City to impose Sharia on America
— Muslims are not more likely than non-Muslims to approve of violence against civilians (PEW poll)
— Muslims are not intolerant of other faiths (Gallup poll)
— Claims about Muslim inferiority due to “inbreeding” are racist and a misrepresentation of the issue
— The photo of a Yemeni passenger on the Mavi Marmara holding a dagger was totally misrepresented
— There was no assassination attempt on an EDL leader in Britain
— Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did not make a comment blaming “the Jews” for 9-11
— “Islamophobia” is not an “attempt to silence freedom of speech”
— There was no Muslim Thanksgiving turkey “stealth jihad” plot
— The ridiculous complaints about crosses at Catholic University were not made by Muslims
— The White House Iftar was not a “ghoulish” or “disgraceful” attempt to appease Muslims
— Muslims don’t hate dogs
— Muslim handshaking customs are not an attempt to force Sharia on others.
— The tragic Belgian massacre by Nordine Amrani was not a “jihad” attack and Amrani wasn’t a Muslim
— The Hollywood shooter, Tyler Brehm was not a Muslim
— An Eid party for Muslim special needs kids was not any sort of “stealth jihad”
— Requesting reasonable religious accommodation in the public sphere is not “creeping Sharia”.
— Muslim students did not “target Jewish students” with eviction notices at a Florida University.
— A spelling bee for students at Muslim schools was not an example of the inability of Muslims to integrate.
(Note: click on the links to see responses to particular claims or incidents

Where do these false claims come from?  They come from a relatively small group of individuals and organizations involved in an Islamophobia industry.  Please see A Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry where The American Muslim (TAM) has collected information about these individuals in an easy to use format.  Just click on the links provided to go to in-depth articles and backgrounders on these individuals.

Don’t hold your breath:

Time For The National Review To Take A Stand Against Islamophobia

The National Review has been cleaning house over the past week. Last week the conservative publication fired John Derbyshire for a racist rant and today the magazine terminated its relationship with Robert Weissberg for his ties to a white nationalist group.

But while the National Review has decided to very publicly purge itself of white supremacists and racists, bigotry toward Muslims appears to go unchallenged in the pages of the magazine and on its blog, National Review Online (NRO). NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, who accused President Obama of standing with the Muslim Brotherhood against 9/11 families in his post “The President Stands With Sharia,” told Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims:

What “radicalizes” Muslims is Islam — the mainstream interpretation of it. The “radicals” propagating it do not need the “captive audience” provided by the prison environment. The “radicalization” is happening in plain sight.

The denigration of Islam and Muslim Americans isn’t limited to McCarthy’s screeds. A number of noted Islamophobes are regularly given free rein to guest post on NRO’s site or write in the magazine, including:

• Robert Spencer, who just last month concluded that “Islamic supremacists” may have subverted the “U.S. defense against jihad terror,” because the man who heads the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — and is credited with crippling Al Qaeda and other militant networks in Pakistan — was identified as a Muslim in a Washington Post profile.
• David Horowitz, who, in an interview last year, stated, “What has the Arab world contributed except terror?…The theocratic, repressive Arabic states do no significant science, no significant arts and culture.”
• Daniel Pipes, who, in the pages of The National Review in 1990, wrote, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

The National Review has been notified of the Islamophobic statements made by a number of their contributors in the past. To date, they appear to have decided to do nothing. Perhaps now is the time for The National Review to take a hard stance against all bigotry, intolerance and racism.

David Ha'ivri

We have linked several times in the past to articles on YNetNews, a popular Israeli online news source. I am unaware of their “op-ed” policy, but today they published an article by David Ha’ivri titled, The Arab-Muslim Narrative.

Ha’ivri is the “director of the Shomron Liaison Office. He and his wife Mollie live in Kfar Tapuach.” Ha’ivri’s op-ed is racist tripe and generalizes both Arabs and Muslims.

I can understand such an op-ed being published on Arutz Sheva, or the The Israel Times Online but on YNetNews, a leading Israeli online site read by hundreds of thousands daily?

Here are some of the most egregious quotes:

This conversation was a great help to me in understanding the Muslim Arab mindset and culture. Facts are not really so important to them. They can be made up or even changed as needed.

Muslim people celebrate detachment from reality as part of their worship:

Understand that we are dealing with people who celebrate being detached from reality as part of their worship of Allah.

And perhaps the most racist and ridiculous of them all:

It is unrealistic, in my opinion, to believe that we can turn the Arabs into a society that truly embraces western concepts and values – like facts and sticking to truth. It makes much more sense to understand that fantasy and stretching the truth are very deeply embedded in the mindset of the Muslim and Arab culture. I do not mean to say this as an insult, but to suggest that we accept it as a fact, take it as it is and move on.

A great article by Bob Pitt on more DailyMail Islamophobia. What’s most revealing and egregious is the clear lack of concern the Daily Mail has for factual accuracy, they will do anything it seems to demonize Islam and Muslims:

Do young British Muslims support ‘honour’ violence?

by Bob Pitt (Islamophobia-Watch)

Here is a classic piece of Islamophobic reporting by the Daily Mail, featuring the paper’s usual contempt for factual accuracy when it comes to coverage of the Muslim community.

Headlined “More than two thirds of young British Muslims believe ‘honour’ violence is acceptable, survey reveals”, the article begins: “Most young British Muslims support violence against women who ‘dishonour’ their families, a Panorama investigation will claim today.”

In reality the Panorama documentary Britain’s Crimes of Honour does nothing of the sort. The ComRes poll commissioned by Panorama, to which the Mail’s scaremongering headline refers, found that 69% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “Families should live according to the concept of ‘honour’, or ‘Izzat’”. That particular question made no reference at all to violence. Furthermore, the poll was conducted among British Asians of various faith communities. 70% of Muslim respondents said they agreed with living according to the concept of honour, but so did 79% of Sikhs, 64% of Hindus and 62% of Christians.

What the Panorama documentary claims, based on the ComRes survey, is that 18% of young British Asians believe that some forms of behaviour by women which could affect their family’s honour justify physical punishment. And even that figure is based on a one-sided reading of ambiguous findings.

In fact only 6% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “In certain circumstances, it can be right to physically punish a female member of the family if she brings dishonour to her family or community”. The figure was also 6% for respondents aged 16-24 and 7% for those aged 25-34. There were more Christians (8%) who agreed with this proposition than Muslims (6%).

The 18% figure was arrived at by presenting respondents with a number of possible “offences” by young women (disobeying their father, marrying someone unacceptable to the family or community etc) and then asking which of these actions respondents thought were “reasonable justifications for physical punishment”. 18% of British Asians in the 16-34 age bracket said they thought one or more of these actions could be regarded as “reasonable justifications”, three times more than those who thought it was “right” to carry out physical punishments.

Neither ComRes nor Panorama saw fit to try and explain this anomaly, preferring instead to emphasise the higher and discount the lower figure. An obvious explanation for the disparity, however, is that respondents might think that their family or community could regard certain actions as reasonable justifications for physical punishment while disapproving of such punishments themselves. Which puts a rather different complexion on it.

What seems to have happened here is that the Panorama documentary makers set out by assuming that support for “honour” based violence is rife within British Asian communities but found that the ComRes survey provided little support for this assumption. So the poll findings were not interpreted objectively but rather hyped up to suggest that there is solid evidence of widespread support for such violence.

As for the Daily Mail, it couldn’t even restrict itself to publicising Panorama’s dubious claims but had to invent its own.

From Charles Johnson at LGF:

Fox News Commenters React to Afghan Killings: ‘A Dead Muslim Is a Good Muslim’

It’s no longer surprising, but the right wing blogs are full of comments today praising the soldier who allegedly committed mass murder in Kandahar, killing men, women, and children asleep in their beds.

Gateway Pundit:

It’s a start. Now for the rest of the bastards.

[…]

Congratulations to the soldier…give him a heros welcome….buck fobama

[…]

WAAAAAY TO GO!!!!!

But why did he stop? Run out of ammo?

Michelle Malkin’s new site, Twitchy.com:

Good. More, please.

[…]

I don’t think he was unbalanced. I think he was getting some payback. It’s nice to see someone on our side who actually wants to hurt the enemy.

[…]

Forget apologies; Pardon that soldier…

I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama.

But the worst site by far is the right wing’s premier news channel, Fox News:

This is nothing! Wait until you see what happens to the n!qqqers here in the US of A when the new civil war starts!

[…]

THATS 15 LESS AFGAN POLICE WHO HAVE BEEN MUR D ER ING OUR TROOPS AND CIVILIANS

[…]

Obama just announced that he is personally going to provide fe la tio to every Afghani male to compensate for their loss.

[…]

The P O S P apoligizes to moooooooooooooslimes and doesnt have any respect for American solders ! Sent the ragehead obummerdeen and his entire family to Kenya where their dirty s c u m b a g b o d i e s belong !

[…]

This guy only did what the NewBIackPanthers promise to do to white babies.

[…]

What? Our wim mpy prez going, sorry for our troops for getting in the way of your rag head sol diers bul lets. I see the stre ss that our tro ops are under in that f-kin country. Let’s pull out NOW. The only good rag head is a d—d ragh ead

[…]

I don’t see a problem here.

[…]

Obummer what is tragic and shocking that you are a lying P O S P that supports t e r r o r i s m ! Burn in L L E H
moooooooooooooooooooslime

[…]

It’s perfectly okay for the Afghanistan military to mur der our troops, Obama dosen’t even flinch, however, condolences go out when it’s the other way around. I’ll be very glad when the loser-in-chief is on his way out. I hate muslums, big time, in a very big way! Right behind the muslums are the libtards, they’re just as bad.

[…]

What comes around goes around That soldier deserves a medal!!!!!

[…]

Well, that should be enough to start a MASS RIOT. And then that will spiral all thru the middle-east causing more Americans to be killed. We got two choices here…. Keep putting up with this mooslime S H I T..or… Drop a freaking nuke on that islamic radical country and end this cat and mouse game forever. We know its going to happen sooner or later, lets get this World War III started so our economy will come back. Our Industries will come back. Our Jobs will come back. And most important, Our American Patriotism will once again lead…

[…]

I’m tired of apologists, tired of a woosie President and his woosie administration that constantly fall over themselves apologizing. Tell Karzai to pound sand and if one more American is k illed by his crazies, Karzai himself will be assuming room temperature.

[…]

This soldier made a great point. You kiI I our family, we will kil l yours.

[…]

LOL….DUMB_NIGGERS like you are humorous actually. Isn’t there some food stamp line you should be standing in? Oh yes, it’s Sunday and you have to shine your spinners.

[…]

Blahhh, Blahhh, Blahhh…… you’re still just a DUMB_NIGGER. LOL.

[…]

Every M U S L I M that reads the Quran is an enemy combatant…at home or abroad.

[…]

musIim civilians????? Yea Right…Blow Me

[…]

The Muzzie men are P issed they had plans to strap b ombs on the women and childern…just sayin

[…]

Just another day at the office, even up the score

[…]

Must have been one of those G a y soldiers they are letting in now. Probably emotionally distraught that his g a y lover was ki11ed by Taliban rebels in retaliation for Koran burning that the prisoners defaced to begin with. So what? No big deal. Obamao caused this by letting them in the ranks. Now libturds will blame it on our forces and personally attack us for saying so.

[…]

Our mus lum president is on their side

[…]

There is no such thing as a musIim civilian

[…]

A dead Mus lim is a good Mus lim. Give the soldier a medal.

Again, note that these freaks deliberately insert spaces and misspell their racial slurs in order to sneak them past the automatic word filters. Many of the worst comments quoted above had numerous “likes” from other Fox News readers. And this is a tiny selection from more than 2,200 comments; there are many, many more like this.

Andrew Breitbart has died of natural causes according to his website. His image will now most likely be rehabilitated in the mainstream and his contributions to the blog world will likely be highlighted above and beyond his racist and Islamophobic antics.

Many may think it is “tacky,” “tasteless” or even “wrong” for  us to say anything negative about Breitbart on the day of his passing. I don’t agree. While it is sad when anyone passes, and our condolences go out to his family, he was a public figure who did much to divide this nation. Commenting on how people such as Breitbart spent their lives is both appropriate and relevant at the time of their deaths.

He was a pivotal figure in transitioning the Right into the contemporary world of new media, which in itself is not a bad thing, but it is how he used his new media platform that was extremely problematic. He played a part in disseminating hate propaganda, undermining the truth and deflecting justice. Who can forget the fiasco with Shirley Sherrod?

On July 19, 2010, Breitbart posted two short videos showing excerpts of a speech by Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010. The videos ensuing controversy resulted in Sherrod being fired from the United States Department of Agriculture on July 19. After Breitbart was criticized for taking Sherrod’s words out of context, he posted the complete 40-minute video of the speech. The NAACP stated that the video excerpts aired by Breitbart were deliberately deceptive and said that he had “snookered” the group.^[42][43] Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack later apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job.^[44] In 2011, Sherrod brought suit against Breitbart for defamation.

Or his targeting of ACORN?

Breitbart was also involved in the 2009 ACORN video controversy. Hannah Giles^[46][47] posed as a prostitute seeking assistance while James O’Keefe portrayed her boyfriend, and clandestinely videotaped meetings with ACORN staff.^[48] Subsequent criminal investigations by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and the California Attorney General found the videos were heavily edited in an attempt to make ACORN’s responses “appear more sinister”,^[49][50][51] and contributed to the group’s demise.^[52][53] Breitbart then provided a forum for O’Keefe on his BigGovernment.com website^[54] and defended his actions on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program.^[55]

(For more on Breitbart’s aiding of racism, Islamophobia, etc. see Max Blumenthal’s piece, Feeling the Hate at CPAC 2010 with Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles and the Crazy Mob .)

His “Big” blogs are quite popular forums for anti-Islam and anti-Muslim screeds. His website “Big Peace” for instance boasts about featuring seminal loon and “Islamization” fear-mongerer Frank Gaffney. His websites also link to Atlas Shrugs and reproduce many of the Islamophobesphere’s articles, videos, etc.

Here is just a sample of how the looniverse is taking his passing:

Pamela Geller thinks of Breitbart as her “fearless leader”:

Andrew was our warrior, our leader. Fearless, unapologetic, brilliant. I admire few, but Andrew was in a league of his own. His herculean contribution to the war is incalculable.

Robert Spencer:

The forces of truth have lost a great and courageous warrior. Unlike most on the Right, he was not a cringing dhimmi eagerly throwing his comrades under the bus in a futile attempt to appease the Left. I hope that his lasting legacy will be legions of freedom fighters confronting Leftists and Islamic supremacists on their hypocrisy, lies and justifications for evil with just as much fearlessness, verve and good humor as he always displayed.

I wish I could say RIP Breitbart, but the above eulogies from the loons make it clear that Breitbart’s abiding legacy is his contribution towards amplifying the most radical voices amongst the Right. I am more inclined to repeating the words of Johnny Cash,

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light

Afghans carry a protester injured during an anti-U.S. demonstration in the northern city of Kunduz. (Ezatullah Pamir, Associated Press)

More than 30 people have been killed in the violence that erupted after American personnel burned Qur’ans on a US air base in Afghanistan.

In the wake of the protests, many are asking, “Why are Afghan Muslims so angry over burning the Qur’an?”

After all, it’s just a book! Why would Muslims get violent over it!?! 

Glenn Greenwald explains why misleading media coverage leaves the public with a false impression.

The causes of the protests in Afghanistan

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon

(H/T: Saladdin)

Most American media accounts and commentary about the ongoing violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan depict their principal cause as anger over the burning of Korans (it’s just a book: why would people get violent over it?) — except that Afghans themselves keep saying things like this:

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.

“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.

“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

And:

Members of Parliament called on Afghans to take up arms against the American military, and Western officials said they feared that conservative mullahs might incite more violence at the weekly Friday Prayer, when a large number of people worship at mosques.

“Americans are invaders, and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a member of Parliament from the Ghorband district in Parwan Province, where at least four demonstrators were killed in confrontations with the police on Wednesday.

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies.

Meanwhile, the protesters themselves continue to be shot, although most American media accounts favor sentences like these which whitewash who is doing the killing: “running clashes with the police that claimed the lives of another five Afghan protesters” and “in Nangarhar Province, two Afghans protesting the Koran burning were shot to deathoutside an American base in Khogyani District” and “protesters angry over the burning of Korans at the largest American base in Afghanistan this week took to the streets in demonstrations in a half-dozen provinces on Wednesday that left at least seven dead and many more injured.”Left at least seven dead: as As’ad AbuKhalil observed, “notice that there is no killer in the phrasing.”

It’s comforting to believe that these violent protests and the obviously intense anti-American rage driving them is primarily about anger over the inadvertent burning of some religious books: that way, we can dismiss the rage as primitive and irrational and see the American targets as victims. But the Afghans themselves are making clear that this latest episode is but the trigger for — the latest symbol of — a pile of long-standing, underlying grievances about a decade-old, extremely violent foreign military presence in their country. It’s much more difficult to dismiss those grievances as the by-product of primitive religious fanaticism, so — as usual — they just get ignored.

UPDATE: Beyond all these points, it’s perversely fascinating to watch all of this condescension — it’s just a book: who cares if it’s burned?  – pouring forth from a country whose political leaders were eager to enact a federal law or even a Constutional amendment to make it a criminal offense to burn the American flag (which, using this parlance, is “just a piece of cloth”). In fact, before the Supreme Court struck down such statutes as unconstitutional in 1989 by a 5-4 vote, it was a crime in 48 states in the nation to burn the flag. Here is what Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in dissent about why the Constitution permits the criminalization of flag burning (emphasis added):

The American flag, then, throughout more than 200 years of our history, has come to be the visible symbol embodying our Nation. It does not represent the views of any particular political party, and it does not represent any particular political philosophy. The flag is not simply another “idea” or “point of view” competing for recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Millions and millions of Americans regard it with an almost mystical reverence, regardless of what sort of social, political, or philosophical beliefs they may have.

Might one say the same for Muslims and the Koran? Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

And then they wonder why there is Islamophobia? 

Glenn Greenwald first alerted us to this in his tweet:

Here’s how 5 million or so Muslims in US were depicted yesterday in the NY Post

According to the NY Post, all those students, worshippers, shop owners, etc. that the NYPD spied on were Taliban-esque terrorists.

Update I:

Greenwald wrote a short article on the subject which is worthy of reproduction here:

Abject bigotry at the New York Post

By: Glenn Greenwald

As I wrote about on Wednesday, Associated Press over the last year has been publishing an investigative series detailing how the NYPD, often in conjunction with the CIA, has been systematically spying on entire Muslim communities both in New York City and in surrounding areas. Virtually none of those spied upon are suspected of any wrongdoing; they are just innocent people who are targeted for surveillance solely because they are Muslim. That’s why the program is so controversial. This is how this controversy was depicted yesterday by The New York Post, in a cartoon by Sean Delonas (click to enlarge; h/t sysprog):

[see image above]

According to The New York Post, to be Muslim — as between 5-7 million people in America are — is to be a hook-nosed, Osama-worshipping, suicide-bomb-wearing Terrorist. There is no other interpretation for someone justifying a massive, indiscriminate spying program aimed at Muslims generally with this response. It goes without saying that there is not a single other group against whom bigotry this hateful and overt would be tolerated. And that explains a great deal about what has happened with U.S. policy — both foreign and domestic — over the last decade.

The war-mongering calls for the invasion and destruction of Iran are multiplying at a horrific pace.

We saw this in the lead up to the decimation of Iraq, now we have Conservative pundits such as Tucker Carlson blatantly calling for “annihilation” as well as oddly claiming that the USA is the only country that has “moral authority” to engage in “pre-emptive war.”

Eli Clifton has some excellent analysis of all this (H/T: BA):

Tucker Carlson: ‘Iran Deserves To Be Annihilated

by Eli Clifton (ThinkProgress)

As the “drumbeat to war” with Iran, as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) warns of, grows louder, a number of journalists have begun to compare the hawkish rhetoric from pundits with the calls for military action against Iraq in 2002. Scott Shane, writing on the frontpage of today’s New York Times, observed, “Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” Indeed, the ombudsman of The Washington Post and the public editor of The New York Times criticized their own journalists for overstating the evidence of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Over the past week, journalists have raised the alarm about the increasing carelessness of the mainstream media in hyping the calls for war with Iran. But Fox News commentator and The Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson openly called for war against Iran and argued for the full-scale annihilation of the Islamic Republic during an appearance on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. Carlson responded to a question about U.S. military action:

CARLSON: I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.

Carlson, having called for the annihilation of Iran — a country with a population of over 74 million people — went on to acknowledge that “we should assess what will happen to the price of energy were we to do that.” Watch the clip:

arlson doesn’t bother to make a case for why the U.S. should destroy Iran. But presumably he’s referring to the crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. However, neither the IAEA norU.S. intelligence reports conclude that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. The IAEA and U.S. intelligence have expressed concerns about possible military aspects to Iran’s nuclear program and suspicions about Iran’s program intensified after Tehran refused IAEA inspectors access to facilities thought to be used for tests on how to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran also refused to agree to a process by which it would address IAEA concerns about “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear program.

But, much as in the case of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, many journalists and politicians areignoring the facts on the ground and pushing forward with calls for increasingly aggressive actions. Carlson, however, may stand alone in publicly calling for Iran’s outright annihilation.

Update: Tucker emails Glenn Greenwald:

It’s my fault that I got tongue tied and didn’t explain myself well last night. I’m actually on the opposite side on the Iran question from many people I otherwise agree with. I think attacking could be a disaster for the US and am worried that Obama will do it, for fear of seeming weak before an election. Of course the Iranian government is awful and deserves to be crushed. But I’m not persuaded we or Israel could do it in a way that doesn’t cause even greater problems. That’s the main lesson of Iraq it seems to me.

That’s my sincere view, but I’d rather take some lumps and be misunderstood than seem like I’m reversing myself due to pressure from Twitter.

Sean Ali Stone

Twitter and the general looniverse was abuzz with the angry reactions of Islamophobes to  Sean Stone’s conversion to Islam, we covered the episode in our post, Oliver Stone’s Son Converts to Islam: The “Islamization” of Hollywood Continues?

In the most recent update to the story Stone discusses the reaction he has received both in the film industry and at large:

“I’ve already experienced the reverse of anti-Semitism, having people within the film industry express a reluctance to work with me now that I have said a simple prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.’ I am sure I have [bleeped] off some powerful people.”

…..

“I didn’t realize I would be so vilified. It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.

“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”

The below report is from the NY Post, not our favorite news source, but if you get a chance you will see that the majority of the comments are exceptionally Islamophobic and anti-Muslim in tone.

H’wood snubs Muslim Stone

(NY Post)

Sean Stone, son of controversial director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam in Iran last week and says he’s already experiencing a Hollywood backlash.

The ceremony was held in Isfahan, where he is researching a documentary. He now goes by the name of Sean Christopher Ali Stone.

He told Page Six: “I’ve already experienced the reverse of anti-Semitism, having people within the film industry express a reluctance to work with me now that I have said a simple prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.’ I am sure I have [bleeped] off some powerful people.” Speaking over dinner at Barrio 47, Sean told us, “Having read the Koran and having been around the Islamic culture, especially in Iran, I do believe that Mohammed is a prophet of the same god worshipped by other religions.

“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.

“What I am trying to do is open up a dialogue about religion. There is such Islamophobia in the West. Islam is not a religion of violence any more than Judaism or Christianity is.”

He said his dad welcomed the move.

“My dad said, ‘Allah be with you.’ My father understands that I am trying to bridge certain gaps and bring about peace.”

But he has been shocked by the reaction from others. Sean, about to release his horror movie “Graystone,” said, “I didn’t realize I would be so vilified. It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.

“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”

Michael Coren and Robert Spencer

by Ilisha

It was a trial that captured headlines across Canada—the so-called “honor killing” of three teenage sisters and their father’s first wife in a quadruple murder staged to look like an accident.

On January 27, the girls’ brother, Hamed, 21, and their parents, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Tooba Yahya, 42, were each found guilty on four counts of first-degree murder. All received the maximum sentence of life in prison.

On police wiretaps captured in the days following the murders, a remorseless Mohammad Shafia referred to his slain daughters as treacherous whores who had “betrayed Islam.”  The family is originally from Afghanistan, and sweeping statements about their cultural and religious background have put Canada’s Muslims on the defensive.

Imams across Canada and the US responded by issuing a fatwa declaring honor killing, domestic violence, and misogyny as “un-Islamic.” Nevertheless, the murders have prompted a fresh wave of anti-Islamic sentiment, and the usual assortment of crackpots have seized this tantalizing opportunity to vilify Islam.

Pseudo-scholar Robert Spencer recently discussed the case on Sun TV with English-Canadian talk show host and fascist sympathizer, Michael Coren. The 13-minute segment appears at the end of this article.

Spencer’s Five Big Lies about honor killings are refuted in this article, in order of appearance.

1. A Bogus Statistic

Spencer began with the baseless assertion that, “91% of honor killings worldwide take place among Muslims.” What is the source of Spencer’s statistic?

He makes the same claim on his website, Jihad Watch, and links to an article on the Middle East Forum as the source. This is an anti-Muslim propaganda site founded by Daniel Pipes, and the article referenced is authored by Phyllis Chesler, who is yet another rabid Islamophobe. Chesler cites an ill-defined “study” as the ultimate source of this statistic:

This study analyzes 172 incidents and 230 honor-killing victims. The information was obtained from the English-language media around the world with one exception. There were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe. There were 130 additional victims in the Muslim world. Most of the perpetrators were Muslims, as were their victims, and most of the victims were women.

The “methodology” she describes is filled with weasel words, and it’s unclear who actually conducted the study or for what purpose. Culling 172 incidents from self-selected articles in the English-language media does not constitute a valid sample.

In the very same article, Chesler concedes, “Definitive or reliable worldwide estimates of honor killing incidence do not exist.” Then how has she managed to glean a precise statistic of 91%?

We have already covered this alleged “epidemic” of honor killings extensively in a previous article, Honor Killings: The Epidemic that Isn’t, where Chesler’s “logic” was exposed as absurd:

Taking her study at face value, do you think 33 honor killings constitutes an epidemic?  Stinging insects kill more than 40 people each year in the US, which is more than the number of honor killings Chesler reported over the course of her study for all of North America.  Chesler says, “to combat the epidemic [emphasis mine] of honor killings requires understanding what makes these murders unique.”

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations, have all said that honor killings cut across cultural and religious lines. No credible organization cites a statistic that supports Robert Spencer’s assertion, which Phyllis Chesler seems to have pulled out of her hat.

2. Misinterpretation and Misuse of The Reliance of the Traveller

Coren asked Spencer if it’s true that there is Qur’anic and Sharia support for honor killings, and Spencer said, “Absolutely, Michael,” and, ”Islamic Law stipulates there’s no penalty for a parent who kills a child.” As we have already established in a previous article, this is a blatant lie:

In a pathetic attempt to prove Islam sanctions honor killings, the loons have dredged up  ”Reliance of the Traveller,” a classical manual for the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence written over 600 years ago. A convoluted interpretation of select passages has gone viral, and is now routinely cited on the pages of hate sites and in comments on numerous articles related to honor killing.

Geller quotes a section of The Traveller on her website that says certain crimes, including the killing of one’s offspring, are not subject to retaliation, implying Muslim parents have a free pass to murder their children under Islamic Law, which is a bold faced LIE. Retaliation is a form of reciprocal justice, lex talionis, commonly known as “an eye for an eye.”

A crime that is not subject to retaliation can still be punished by other means. Restrictions on reciprocal justice in the Qur’an were meant to reduce blood feuds and the cycle of vengeance. The concept of retaliation is also found in Jewish and Christian scriptures, and like honor killing, traces back to the ancient Code of Hammurabi.

Even if The Traveller sanctioned honor killing (which it doesn’t), it would be the interpretation of one Islamic cleric who lived centuries ago, and not a formal part of Islamic Law. Sharia is drawn primarily from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and neither sanctions honor killing.

Honor killing is a form of murder where the victim is denied a fair trial, which is contrary to Islamic law. Islam forbids acts of murder and vigilantism, and likens the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33).

Is Sharia exceptionally harsh or extremely lenient, even in the case of a serious crime like murder? Apparently it’s whatever suits Spencer’s agenda at the moment. In any case, a “renowned scholar” should certainly understand the ancient concept of reciprocal justice.

Is Spencer ignorant or deliberately deceptive?

3. The Case of Syria and Jordan

Spencer cites “relatively moderate” Muslim-majority Jordan and Syria in an effort to provide real-world examples of Sharia-sanctioned honor killing. His examples fall short in two major ways.

First, although a single honor killing is one too many, these murders are not epidemic. Jordan has around 15-20 honor killings each year, and Syria has about 200. Both of these Muslim-majority countries have low overall homicide rates, in contrast to many countries in the non-Muslim world, most notably in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Central and Southern Africa.

Second, Syria and Jordan have mixed legal systems largely based on French Law, derived from the Napoleonic Code. In Syria, Articles 192, 242, and 548 have historically been invoked to reduce sentences in honor killing cases, and all are derived from the Napoleonic Code, not Sharia.

Syria’s Grand Mufti, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun, has unequivocally condemned honor killing. Hassoun specifically condemned Article 548, which has since been amended as part of Syria’s ongoing effort to abolish honor killings.

In Jordan, Articles 340 and 98 have historically been invoked to reduce sentences in honor killing cases, and they also derive from the Napoleonic Code, not Sharia.

While Spencer was correct when he said some religious and cultural conservatives in Jordan have resisted legal reform, Queen Rania and King Abudllah II have been outspoken advocates. In a report released last November, the United Nations praised Jordan for amending Article 340 so that it no longer exonerates the perpetrators of honor killings.

Spencer’s examples fall short because neither Jordan nor Syria has a high rate of homicides of any kind, and the legal loopholes in question are primarily a legacy of French colonialism, not Sharia. However, Coren asks no questions of substance, so it’s on to the next lie.

4. Khidr in Chapter 18 of the Qur’an

Spencer tries to “prove” honor killings are supported in the Qur’an, citing the well known story of Khidr in the 18th chapter as a justification.  From Jihad Watch:

Blogging the Qur’an: Sura 18, “The Cave,” verses 60-82

Verses 60-82 of Sura 18 contain one of the strangest, most arresting stories in the entire Qur’an: that of the journey of Moses and Khidr, one of the great road-trip stories of all time…

In Islamic tradition this man is identified as Al-Khadir or Al-Khidr, or, more commonly, Khidr, “the Green Man.” Some identify him as one of the prophets, others as a wali, a Muslim saint….

…Khidr murders a young man in an apparently random act, and Moses criticizes him again (v. 74)…

…Khidr killed the young man because he would grieve his pious parents with his “rebellion and ingratitude” (v. 80), and Allah will give them a better son (v. 81)….

…Another point emerges in Islamic tradition: don’t kill children, unless you know they’re going to grow up to be unbelievers. “The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) used not to kill the children, so thou shouldst not kill them unless you could know what Khadir had known about the child he killed, or you could distinguish between a child who would grow up to he a believer (and a child who would grow up to be a non-believer), so that you killed the (prospective) non-believer and left the (prospective) believer aside.” The assumption thus enunciated may help explain the persistence of the phenomenon of honor-killing in Islamic countries and even among Muslims in the West…

Notice the child was not related to Khidr, and there was no honor motive. This “apparently random act” doesn’t fit the profile of a so-called “honor killing.”

The story is meant to convey the message that believers should have faith in God’s wisdom. Events may seem harsh and inexplicable, but when the veil is lifted and the broader truth is exposed, the believer will see that what has happened is ultimately for the best.

Spencer provided no examples of any Muslim citing the story of Khidr as a justification for honor killing, nor did he mention any scholars who have adopted his interpretation. In fact, the story of Khidr has historically been associated with charity and good works in the Islamic world.  

As for the Hadith Spencer quoted (Sahih Muslim Book 019, Number 4457), Muslims are instructed not to kill children, “…unless you could know what Khadir had known.“  Khidr was granted eternal life and bestowed with direct knowledge of God’s will, which no ordinary Muslim can claim. It is simply not possible to know whether a child will grow up to be a believer, so it makes no sense to use this as a justification for murder.

In fact, it is widely known that Islam has always condemned infanticide, a common practice in pre-Islamic Arabia. The Qur’an  forbids the killing of children, expressly in 6:151 and 60:12, and implicitly in 2:49, 7:127, 7:141, 14:6, 28:4, and 40:25. Why would a “renowned scholar” of Islam be unaware of the many verses in the Qur’an that directly contradict his claims?

Is Spencer ignorant or deliberately deceptive? 

5. Islam and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Spencer also claims that the Judeo-Christian tradition sends the “opposite message” with respect to killing children, specifically citing Genesis 22:1-13 as an example.  In this Old Testament story, the Prophet Abraham was poised to sacrifice his son Isaac to the Lord, but just as he placed a knife to the boy’s neck, God sent an angel to intercede, and Isaac was spared.

The same story exists in the Qur’an and carries the same moral message. The major difference is that Isaac is replaced by Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. A “renowned scholar” of Islam should surely be aware of the corresponding story in the Qur’an (The Rank Makers 37:100-109).

In fact, numerous verses in the Bible recount the killing of children, and stipulate harsh punishments, including the death penalty. The following is not a comprehensive list:

Exodus 21:17

17 Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.

Leviticus Chapters 20 and 21 also stipulate harsh punishments for dishonoring parents and committing adultery:

Leviticus 20:9-13

9 If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head.

10 If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife–with the wife of his neighbor–both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.

Leviticus 21:9

9 If a priest’s daughter defiles herself by becoming a prostitute, she disgraces her father; she must be burned in the fire.

Deuteronommy (13:6-10) says if your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” … You must stone him or her to death. Death by stoning is also the punishment stipulated for a “stubborn and rebellious” son in 21:18-21.

In Judges (11:30-40), Jephthah killed his young daughter (and only child) by burning her alive to fulfill his vow to God, in exchange for a victory in battle.

In 2 Kings (2:23-25), when youngsters made fun of the Prophet Elisha’s bald head, he called down a curse “in the name of the Lord,”and two bears came out of the woods and tore 42 of the youths to pieces.

As a Catholic and self-proclaimed religious scholar, it seems reasonable to assume Spencer has read the Bible, so what explains this glaring double standard?

Is Spencer ignorant or deliberately deceptive? 

The bottom line is that honor killings are not Islamic. Spencer’s lies, no matter how often they’re repeated, can’t change that fundamental truth.

*********************************

Is it necessary to turn a story about a rapist into one about the religion he grew up with?

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

‘Strict Muslim’ raped four women at knifepoint to ‘punish them for being on the streets at night’

by Bob Pitt

Thus the headline to an article in today’s Daily Mail. As is almost invariably the case when this newspaper reports on any issue involving Muslims, the headline is intentionally misleading.

If you read the article, you’ll see it is the rapist’s family background that is characterised as “strict Muslim” not the individual himself. In fact the judge in passing sentence made the point that the rapist carried out the attacks despite and in contradiction to his religious upbringing: “The fact that you have attacked these women not withstanding your background must represent your own wholly warped personality.”

But the headline suggests to the reader that it was the man’s strict adherence to his faith which produced the violent misogyny that led him to commit these crimes.

It is an understatement to say that violence against women is a serious issue today, as I wrote in a previous article titled, Rampant Sexual Harassment of Women…in the West, “women are mistreated across the globe, across cultures, races, and religions at unfortunately high and gross levels.” This was proven with empirical evidence and scholarly analysis from various studies.

In the intro of the article I reminded readers that Islamphobes,

love to trot out the talking point that Muslims (due to Islam of course) are unique in harassing and oppressing women. According to them, anytime a Muslim man harasses or otherwise assaults a woman it is considered a result of Islam or somehow encouraged by “Islamic behavior.”

This belief, however, is not limited to anti-Muslim bigots but has also crept into the popular imagination and perception of the mainstream.

It is within that context that we review another recent manifestation of this “anti-Muslim talking point” creeping into the mainstream. As many of those who watched the recent South Carolina GOP Presidential Primary debate are aware, Fox News’s Brett Baier asked Gov. Rick Perry about Turkey’s “Islamist oriented” government, and what our relationship should be towards them (Turkey is one of our oldest allies). He set up the question this way,

“Since the Islamist oriented party took over in Turkey the murder rate of women has increased 1400% there…”

My jaw dropped when I heard that, what an astronomical and frankly unbelievable number! The clear implication was that the “increase in violence” was related to the rule of the so-called “Islamist oriented” AKP party. Once again something “Islam” or “Islam” related was being cast as the source and cause of violence.

Imagine the effect this had on those watching the debate? It either reinforced or created the perception that Islam and Muslims are incredibly violent towards women, and that any “Islam” oriented political party will result in a degradation of women’s rights.

Brett Baier’s question was extremely misleading to say the least. It provided no context or evidence linking the AKP party to the “increase” in murders. To say that the AKP is “Islamist oriented” is misleading as well, a more appropriate analogy may have been to the “Christian Democratic” parties in Europe.

I have found conflicting origins on the source of the “1400% increase” statistic. On some news outlets we learn that the figures were released by Women’s Rights lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan,

The figures are based on data issued by lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan, Co-ordinator of the Istanbul Bar Association Centre for Women’s Rights.

while others claim it was the Ministry of Justice,

According to the data of the Ministry of Justice, the number of women murders increased by factor 14 between 2002 and 2009. While 66 women were killed in 2002, this figure raised to 953 women murders in 2009. The development of the increase was documented as follows: 83 women murders in 2003; 128 in 2004; this figure more than doubled in 2005 with 317 women killings; again a sharp increase with 663 in 2006; a peak of 1011 women murders in 2007 and a small decrease in numbers in 2008 with 806 women murders.

Regardless of the source there seems to be agreement on the numbers. Tuskan in her report also added another startling fact regarding violence towards women,

The data revealed an additional startling dimension of the problem: 85 percent of about 2000 annually registered divorce applications in Istanbul are based on violence.

According to Tuskan the reason for this explosion in the number of divorce applications stemming from violence is, “based on the fact that women do not endure violence as they used to do in the past.”

This however does not address the increase in the number of murders. As Elif Shafak asks in her Guardian article, Turkey Opens it’s Eyes to Domestic Violence,

Are violent incidents against women on the rise in Turkey? Or is it just that we are finally getting a clearer picture of something that has been happening at the heart of Turkish society for some time?

If one were to listen to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it has been his government that has started compiling these statistics, whereas before his administration statistics on the issue were not even “calculated,”

While numerous sources argued over the last week that violence against women increased by 1,400 percent in the past seven years, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said earlier this week that the issue was presented as if violence against women was on the rise. Highlighting that they would not ignore a single act of violence, Erdoğan said: “Before we started keeping track of this, statistics on the issue were not even calculated and no one was aware of these incidents. … I expect a responsible approach from both the opposition and the media over the matter and I say that, with solidarity and responsibility, we can decrease violence to the lowest level.”

I don’t see any reason to doubt Erdoğan’s assertion, however it would be vital to verify.

Either way, the statement from Erdoğan clearly contradicts Brett Baier’s misleading assertion that the so-called “Islamist-oriented” AKP which Erdoğan heads is the cause or root of the violence.

Erdoğan also went on to say,

“Violence against women is remorselessness, ruthlessness and, I say this without hesitation, contemptible”

Not really the evil, misogynist Islamic terrorist that Baier and Rick Perry thought ruled Turkey, aye?

Since the stats came out on the number of murders and incidences of violence directed against women there has been an intense debate on the subject in Turkey. It is no longer a taboo subject locked behind closed doors. There have also been massive grassroots campaigns and new legislation countering the violent trend,

In recent months, both print and visual media in Turkey have been running story after story about domestic violence: ex-husbands who shoot their ex-wives in front of their children, abusive husbands who come back to kill, boyfriends or fiancés who cannot forgive being dumped and seek revenge.

…

As disheartening as the situation is, there is also a growing reaction and a grassroots movement to stop it. Nowadays it is widely acknowledged that violence against women is not only confined to a few uneducated families in remote undeveloped regions. More importantly, until today, it was mainly assumed that such cases were a “family affair”. If a husband was beating his wife, this was their problem. Now this assumption is fully debunked. More and more public figures are coming out to say that domestic violence is everyone’s business and we should, as a society, interfere.

Family and social policies minister Fatma Sahin has announced that abusive husbands will be kept away from their homes with the help of electronic handcuffs. A group of men in the eastern province of Van have organised a significant march to protest at male violence. The group’s speaker proclaimed: “We are ashamed of men who attack women and do so in the name of manhood.”

University students are marching on the streets, women’s organisations are collecting signatures. Through blogs, websites, magazines, fanzines, panels and conferences activists are raising their voices, singers give concerts to honour women who have been victims of killings, writers and poets condemn the violence openly and contest it with their words. And yet, all this is not enough. Unless we change the way we raise our sons and discard our belief that they are superior to our daughters, unless we mothers stop treating our sons as the sultans in the house, nothing will be enough.

Lastly, it should be highlighted that Brett Baier’s misleading question is damaging most of all because it obfuscates the true issue of violence directed at women. It deflects from the root causes (cultural norms, cultural traditions, patriarchy) in exchange for the easy Orientalist scapegoat–Islam.

As Ilisha pointed out in her article on Honor Killing, by focusing on Islam, anti-Muslim Islamophobes are actually doing a disservice to those who are truly challenging violence towards women. Brett Baier’s question had the added effect of dehumanizing a whole nation, and I echo Ilisha’s call that Islamophobes, “give up their vicious campaign against Islam and join us in the struggle to end violence against women from all cultural and religious backgrounds.”

UPDATE I:

For further information on this topic I suggest reading The Journal of Turkish Weekly, which conducted an exclusive interview with Dilek Karal, a specialist at USAK Center for Social Studies regarding violence against women. According to Karal, there is no way to solidly identify whether murders against women have increased or decreased,

How should we read violence against women in Turkey? How accurate is it to say that violence has drastically increased in recent years?

D. Karal: There are a lot of factors which can trigger violence such as sociocultural factors, economic factors, and psychological factors in the environment where people grow up. We need to look at what conditions they become prominent under. The efforts shall target eliminating the roots of these factors. However this is not limited to the motto which is liberally used in Turkey—“education is a must”. Educated people also beat their spouses or commit different kinds of violence against them. Education is just one dimension. The issue should be tackled with integrated multi-agency policies. It is compulsory to operate family and child services efficiently, and formalize different environments where boys and girls grow up to not normalize the violence. All in all, violence as a phenomenon needs to leave our lives altogether.

For instance, Turkish Ministry of Justice 2010 data shows violence against women has increased 1400% during the last seven years. This is a very big number. According to some other data during the first seven months of 2010; 226 women were murdered while 478 women were raped and 722 women sexually abused. There are a lot of similar cases. Over 100,000 women suffered from sexual attacks. Although the numbers are as such, they cannot present us solid data regarding whether the violence has increased or decreased. This is because there are certain problems in evaluating statistical data in Turkey. The fact that they are being presented in a systematic fashion in recent years can be interpreted as the invisible tip of the iceberg slowly surfacing.

In other words, violence against women existed before as well but can now be better measured with in-depth research, which has made the issue more apparent. Without longitudinal studies it is very difficult to understand if the violence has increased or not. However, we need to underline that the existing circumstances in the context of this issue are already too tragic. According to Hacettepe University’s research, 39% of the women in this country (more than a third) are victims of physical violence and 15% are victims of sexual violence. 42% of women say that they have experienced a form of one or the other. The interesting part is the women who experienced violence did not make appeals to official units or to non-governmental organizations. More than half of them shared the situation with just close relatives. Only 8% of the women requested help from official units. This rate is very low. In a society where violence is skyrocketing, this low rate points to ignorance. Women either do not see themselves sufficient socioeconomically or they normalize violence in a sociocultural sense.

UPDATE II:
I also came across figures on murders of women since 2009 in the article, “This is a Civil War…” There is a large discrepancy between 2009 (1,126 murders) and 2010 (217 murders). If one were to be disingenuous regarding the issue, one could claim a massive decrease in murders!:

Here is the number of women murdered by year:

2002 – 66

2003 – 83

2004 – 164

2005 – 317

2006 – 663

2007 – 1,011

2008 – 806

2009 – 1,126

2010 – 217

Muslims ban Christmas and rape white women, in latest Latma satire

From Latma, the Israeli producers of “We Con the World,” comes a new video,“Christmas in Eurabia”:

A couple things struck me while watching this video. The first was how unfunny it was. The second was how offensive it was. Let’s explore the latter:

The “Eurabia” threat

The video’s title, “Christmas in Eurabia,” refers to a conspiracy theory that white Christian Europe is being systematically overtaken by immigrant hordes of brown-skinned Muslims from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. An uninspired cross between “Europe” and “Arabia,” “Eurabia” is the anti-Arab/Islamophobic equivalent of saying “Jew York.”

To these “Eurabists,” the Islamification of Europe is being facilitated by multicultural permissiveness. The Eurabia ideology takes xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and nativism—all traits of classic white supremacism—but combines them with ultra-Zionism, as Israel represents the Western bulwark against the Muslim menace.

The English Defence League

The equivalent in the United States are the pundits, politicians, thinktanks, and officials who rail against the “creeping shar‘ia” threat. Participants in this American, European, and Israeli network of Islamophobic fear-mongering collectively refer to themselves as the “counter-jihad” movement.

The most infamous proponent of the Eurabia conspiracy theory is the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. Although many Eurabists publicly distance themselves from Breivik and dismiss him as a lone extremist, his 1500-page manifesto actually provides a good introduction to basic Eurabist ideology, and the citations clearly identify the most prominent voices in the “counter-jihad” movement. It is instructive to compare the message of Latma’s “Christmas in Eurabia” to the Breivik manifesto in one instance.

First they kill Santa Claus, then they rape your white daughters

As the “Christmas in Eurabia” video goes through its verses, the locale switches from London to Paris to Oslo. When it reaches Oslo, a Norwegian man (portrayed by Latma regular Noam Jacobson) instructs his daughter:

When they rape you, don’t object,
For that is politically incorrect.

The idea that Muslims are employing rape as systematic warfare against white (non-Muslim) women is popular among Eurabists. Breivik’s manifesto is littered with such references. Here is a sampling:

The incidence of rapes carried out by Muslim men in Norway against non-Muslim women is many times higher than rapes by non-Muslim men….

We have had several recent cases where native girls have been gang raped by immigrants in the heart of the EU capital….

Native Swedes are raped, stabbed, killed and chased out of their homes by Muslim gangs….

The massive wave of violence and especially rapes in Western cities now is a form of warfare against whites, and it’s about time it is recognised as such.

Are not the notorious “gang rapes” another example of collective violence to European women….

…Britons whose teenage daughters are being sexually abused and gang raped by various races who hate whites.

The Muslims therefore takes [sic] advantage of their Allah-given prerogative to rape, kill and steal from Europeans as they view this as the spoils of war.

Muslim drug traffickers/dealers all across Europe…mak[e] their subjects addicted to heroin… when “processing” non-Muslim girls for sexual/financial exploitation.

[Muslims] have…raped more than 500,000 European women…

…more than 1 million European women raped [by Muslims]…

Many European girls/women have been raped multiple times. Ratio is an average 200 rapes per 100,000 Muslims annually.

Moreover the connection between “Muslim-on-White rape” and political correctness, as depicted in the video, is expressed frequently in Breivik’s manifesto. The primary facilitator of mixed-race rape is multiculturalism:

Tellingly, when black gang members stab each other or gang rape a white teenage girl or when Muslim jihadists blow up buses and trains filled with innocent people the first concern of the guardians of multiculturalism will be to minimise the racial aspect of these events…

Make no mistake. These Muslims must be considered as wild animals. Do not blame the wild animals but rather the multiculturalist…traitors who allowed these
animals to enter our lands, and continue to facilitate them.

As a result of [multiculturalism]… more than 500 000 European women have been raped…

Fellow Islamophobe and Eurabist Pamela Geller explained that “Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes…”

In the “Christmas in Eurabia” video, mulitculturalism is depicted as permitting Muslims to commit violence against non-Muslims:

     Someone burned my car, oh pity.

     That’s what happens when you tease
Islam, the greatest creed of peace.

     But it makes me feel so jolly,
Proves that multi-culti’s holy

And what is the only “Western” nation not incapacitated by multiculturalism? Israel. Again, from the manifesto:

The truth is that Israelis defend themselves so that their daughters do not have to suffer rape at the hands of Muslim Jihadists, the way the
authorities in Western European countries, and in Sweden in particular, allow to happen every single day.

To be clear, the fear of white women being raped by brown hordes is not based on personal concern for the women themselves, but on concern for the purity of Western heritage. To Eurabists, feminism is as responsible as mulitculturalism for the downfall of Western society:

As a Western man, I would be tempted to say that Western women have to some extent brought this upon themselves. They have been waging an ideological, psychological and economic war against European men for several generations now.

The “Muslim rape wave” myth

Why does the “Christmas in Eurabia” video jump from London to Paris and then to Oslo, where a Norwegian man tells his daughter to let Muslims rape her? Aside from the general tastelessness of the video, isn’t it especially inappropriate to focus on Norway, the site of the recent killings by Anders Breivik, whose crimes were motivated by a fear of creeping Eurabia and the raping of white women by hordes of Muslim immigrants?

A possible explanation lies in a pair of fabricated stories reported by the Israeli settler news site Arutz Sheva. Last June, Arutz Sheva “reporter” Gil Ronen wrote an article entitled “Police Report: All Assault Rapists in Oslo Follow Muhammad,”and he recently followed up on this story with another report, “Muslim ‘Rape Wave’ Reported in Oslo, Ministers Blame Israel.” The articles alleged that Norway was “suffering from an unprecedented wave of rapes that are largely being perpetrated by Muslim immigrants against local women,” based on statistics in an Oslo police report. Moreover, Norwegian “government ministers, most of them avowed anti-Semites, claimed that the report and its publication serve Israel and its policy of occupation,” with Norway’s justice minister declaring, “Israel must be glad to hear about it.”

However, the source for these stories was a single person living in Israel, a blogger named Yehuda Bello who was described by Ronen as “acclaimed,” “well-acquainted with Norwegian culture,” and as someone “who understands Norwegian and has Norwegian contacts.”

Then the story started falling apart. Arutz Sheva inexplicably removed references to the supposed anti-Semitic Norwegian ministers, while Boston University professor and Eurabist nut Richard Landes attempted to corroborate the story about the ministers, to no avail.

Meanwhile, writer Farha Khaled did what Gil Ronen and Arutz Sheva failed to do: she provided a link to the actual Norwegian police report and inquired with the Norwegian justice ministry about the statistics. The ministry’s response:

The Oslo Police District has given a report of rapes in Oslo in 2010. The report shows that for all types of rape, except assault rape, European perpetrators are in the majority, and they are mostly Norwegian. Assault rapes covers only five identified unique person. These have all a foreign origin. The number is however, so low that it does not provide a basis for drawing conclusions with regard to country of origin. Two of them were very young (under 18) and two had severe psychiatric diagnoses and cannot be regarded as representative of their ethnic culture. It is highlighted in the report that generalizations like “Oslo’s rapists are foreigners,” which have been seen in media, are wrong. The report gives no statistics regarding religion of rapists.

While Oslo has indeed been rocked with what has been termed a “rape wave,” authorities are still attempting to identify the culprits and causes, even suspecting the involvement of a serial rapist. Besides, if a “wave” of rapes signals a higher than statistically normal number of occurrences, one cannot necessarily refer to statistics preceding the wave to determine the identities of the current perpetrators.

Interestingly, Gil Ronen had cited another person as an authority on “Muslim rape waves”: the then-pseudonymous Eurabist blogger known as “Fjordman,” who was a primary inspiration for Anders Breivik. Much of Breivik’s manifesto was authored by Fjordman. In the June Arutz Sheva article, Ronen approvingly cited Fjordman’s warning about an earlier “immigrant [and Muslim] rape wave in Sweden,” from back in 2005.

Such reports of hordes of brown-skinned attackers may be familiar to people living in the US in the 1990s, when the media promulgated sensational reports of“wilding” and of African American and Latino “superpredators,” along with today’s recurrent media warnings of “immigrant crime waves.”

As we should be aware, the notion of brown men defiling white women is not a specifically Eurabist scare. It has long been the pinnacle of white supremacist and xenophobic fears, and has long been evoked to justify the oppression and expulsion of brown peoples.

In 1900, South Carolina Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, proclaimed this justification for the lynchings of African American men:

We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.

I am reminded of a white supremacist cartoon that I once had the misfortune to see. The cartoon, attacking miscegenation, depicted a black man hooking up with a white woman—with the act being orchestrated by a Jewish man. Both the black man and the Jewish man were drawn as hideous caricatures that highlighted stereotypical features. The Eurabist scare, whether portrayed through Breivik’s manifesto or Latma’s YouTube video, is an extension of the offensive cartoon, lacking only in the stereotypical Jew.

(Update: Ali Abunimah has more information about the Muslim rape wave myth on his blog.)

Is Latma a fringe group?

If we define fringe solely by the validity of one’s viewpoints, then Latma, which produced the “Christmas in Eurabia” video, would definitely be fringe. However, if we define fringe as lacking in popular representation and influence and thus negligible, Latma would not qualify.

Latma head director Shlomo Blass has worked on projects for the Likud party, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. Earlier this year, Blass collaborated with StandWithUs to produce a propaganda video for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The video, starring Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, was a copy of a settler video for the YESHA Council, with virtually the same storyboard and script, and which was also produced by Blass. The message in both videos were the same: the West Bank belongs to Israel.

Blass was recently commissioned to create another video for the Ministry, again starring Danny Ayalon, and this time purporting to address the issue of Palestinian refugees (of which Ayalon is not one).

Blass also produced the video “Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace”for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. This explained that in any future negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel would retain Jordan Valley, would control the West Bank airspace and roadways, and would reshape the West Bank borders to Israel’s liking.

More prominent than Blass is Latma’s chief editor, Caroline Glick, who also serves as the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Both Glick and Blass starred in Latma’s infamous “We Con the World” video, which ridiculed the Mavi Marmara massacre and portrayed the Gaza flotilla as an Arab/Muslim/Turkish plot to deceive the world into hating Israel.

Caroline Glick, impersonating an Arab or a Muslim or a Turk—or perhaps a crazy Jewish woman from Chicago with a knife. Shlomo Blass can be seen behind her.

The video link to “We Con the World” was distributed to foreign media via the Israeli government press office. After the video was criticized internationally for its racist content, its tasteless response to the killings of nine people, and its contradiction of Israel’s self-portrayal as reluctant killers, the Israeli government claimed that the link was distributed in error. However, press officer director Danny Seaman still insisted that the video was “fantastic,” and Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev said, “I thought it was funny…It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do with it.”

In 2010, Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, based in Tel Aviv University, presented Latma with the NADAV Peoplehood Award, claiming that the “We Con the World” video “made many Jews feel proud in a time of conflict and tension for our people.”

Earlier this year, Israeli Channel One partially funded Latma to film a pilot for aweekly TV program in the style of Latma’s offensive YouTube videos.

Latma’s funder: The Center for Security Policy

Although Latma operates in Israel, it acts as an initiative of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a 501(c)(3) and DC-based think tank, where Caroline Glick serves as the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs. The CSP motto is, no joke, “Peace through Strength.”

Big Eagle is watching you.

The CSP made waves at the start of the Iraq War as part of the neocon network that was planning for US wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed the CSP National Security Advisory Council has at times included prominent Bush era neocons, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Dov Zakheim, as well as Dick Cheney.

CSP’s founder and president is neocon lunatic Frank Gaffney, who accused Saddam Hussein of orchestrating the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. More recently, Gaffney took up the “birther” cause and warned that Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”

Gaffney also railed against “Obama’s pandering to the radical homosexual agenda” and the “Obama/homosexual agenda” (in an article strangely placed under a section of the website titled “The Shariah Threat”).

The CSP helped organize the campaign against the Park51 Islamic Center and has been prominent in pushing the “shar‘ia law” scare in the US. Last year, the CSP published a report, Shariah: The Threat to America, co-authored by David Yerushalmi, who has been paid over $270,000 as CSP’s general counsel.

Yerushalmi, who also serves as the attorney for Pamela Geller and Gaffney, is an Orthodox Jew with a penchant for making the most blatantly offensive statements. In an essay entitled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion,” Yerushalmi attempted to justify addressing “blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City)” and explained that “there is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote,” since these founders had an “understanding of human nature and its affect on political society.”

On his own website, Yerushalmi stated that

The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society… the Jewish problem for conservatives is a…quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate… The conservative variety simply professes to uncover the many and varied ways Jews destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite, especially when the host is a Western nation-state… In response, one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.

And when Mel Gibson made his famous anti-Semitic remarks, Yerushalmi defended him by saying

That Gibson sees Jews in an unfavorable light is only irrational if one wishes to make the argument that secular liberal Jews are not in fact the leading proponents of all forms of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Christian movements, campaigns, and ideologies.

Yerushalmi also campaigned against the Park51 Islamic Center by forming the Freedom Defense Initiative with Pamela Geller and John Joseph Jay, a fellow “counter-jihadist” who advocates killing Muslims and members of the Service Employees International Union(!).

As the Center for American Progress demonstrated, Yerushalmi prepared an “anti-shari‘a” draft legislation that has served as the model for proposed legislation in many states.

Such a congregation of Islamophobic, homophobic, racist whackjobs would be easily dismissed if the CSP and its affiliated network of Islamophobes did not have such immediate access to the media and to government officials, along with access to a multimillion dollar budget. It’s through CSP that Latma’s videos are realized.

The CSP website proudly features “Christmas in Eurabia” on its home page, and Caroline Glick needs an editor.

It is thus no surprise that Frank Gaffney, the CSP, and Caroline Glick are all cited and quoted as authorities in Breivik’s manifesto.

Is Caroline Glick a Nazi according to the Jerusalem Post?

On July 24, two days after the Anders Breivik killings, the Jerusalem Post issued an editorial warning that the massacre should not be allowed to be “manipulated” by the Left in such a way as to raise public concern that right-wing extremism was a “real danger facing contemporary Europe,” since the “real underlying problems faced not only by Norway, but by many Western European nations” was the “abject failure of multiculturalism.” That is, the real danger to Europe was the danger Anders Breivik warned about, and over which Breivik committed his killing spree.

An outcry against the editorial was inevitable, and so was the subsequent apology, which the Post issued on August 4, and which included the following statement:

It later emerged that Breivik, a Christian radical, had posted on the Internet an extremely anti-Muslim manifesto that supported far-right nationalism and Zionism.

He apparently feared that a “Muslim colonization” of Europe would destroy Norway.

This is certainly not the kind of support Israel needs. It is the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews. Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and around the world should be standing together against such hate crimes.

Yet the “Muslim colonization” of the West is exactly what the “Christmas in Eurabia” video is about and is the focal obsession of Eurabists and the so-called “counter-jihadist” movement that includes Caroline Glick and the Center for Security Policy.

Thus, if we are to take the Post’s apology at face value, we would have to accept that Glick’s sentiments, along with Latma’s, are “the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews.”

On August 8, Glick responded in the Jerusalem Post with a piece entitled“Norway’s Jewish Problem.” Regarding the Post’s apology editorial, Glick stated, “I was not consulted about this editorial ahead of time, and the editorial does not reflect my views,” implying that the earlier July 24 editorial did reflect and still reflected her views.

Glick refused to apologize, instead labeling her critics anti-Semites and attacking Norway for its pervasive “climate of hatred towards Israel and Jews.” She reminded her readers that Norway was invaded and occupied by the Nazis, and thus Norwegian officials may still be Nazi collaborators. She produced names of Norwegians she didn’t like, such as the humanitarian doctors Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert. Glick also claimed that “Judaism [is] the only religion that cannot be freely practiced in Norway.”

In a strange expression of moral superiority, she condemned Breivik’s actions, she said, even though Breivik’s victims “had obvious animosity towards Israel and sympathy for genocidal, Jew hating Hamas terrorists.” She concluded by stating that Norway owed her an apology but that no apology from Norway would be enough for her.

Apart from the fact that her long list of things to hate about Norway includes no mention of Norwegian black metal, the main thing that stands out in Glick’s opinion piece is this religious paradox: Glick is more concerned about Christmas being banned in a hypothetical Muslim Norway than she is concerned about Judaism already being banned in a non-Muslim Norway. This indicates either misplaced priorities or an inability to keep her fear mongering “facts” straight. That is, when she wants to criticize Norway, she warns that Jews are unsafe in Norway; when she wants to criticize Muslims, she warns that Christians are unsafe in Norway. Or else, she wants to protect the Jew-hating Norwegians from the Christian-hating Muslims.

Complicated? It’s simply a matter of who Caroline Glick hates most at the moment.

“Christmas in Jewrabia”

For an Israeli group that purports to satirize current events, Latma seems to have overlooked the irony of producing a video about a Muslim war on Christmas while their own government expresses hostility toward Christmas in the name of Jewish nationalism.

Take the case of Nazareth Illit, a suburb of the Nazareth that was the childhood home of Jesus. This year, when Palestinian Christians asked the mayor of Nazareth Illit to permit the placement of festive Christmas trees, similar to the enormous menorahs already on display in the town, the mayor refused. His reasoning:

The request of the Arabs to put Christmas trees in the squares in the Arab quarter of Nazareth Illit is provocative…Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen—not this year and not next year, so long as I am a mayor.

The mayor’s stance was supported by the town’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, who said that Christmas trees were “offensive to Jewish eyes.”

Never mind that the area of Nazareth was Palestinian Arab and largely Christian before Israel seized the land. In fact, during the imposition of the State of Israel in 1948, Nazareth was slated for ethnic cleansing, saved only when an Israeli officer refused to follow orders and instead decided to honor the agreement made with the town’s inhabitants during their capitulation. Nazareth Illit was constructed in the following decade in order to Judaize the area and offset the Palestinian majority.

In 1954, IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman explained that the purpose of Nazareth Illit was to “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.” Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael elaborated that Nazareth Illit would “swallow up” Nazareth proper through the “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and “the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.”

And let’s not forget the Israeli Ministry of Absorption’s own war on Christmas, when it recently produced a video warning Jewish Israeli expatriates in the US to return home, lest their children end up wishing a merry Christmas to the grandparents.

Israel, which side of the War on Christmas are you on?

Even Muslim camels are racially inferior

There’s one final thing to be said about the “Christmas in Eurabia” video. At one point, a camel can be seen walking through the Islamized streets of Norway. The connotation is that Muslim immigration will bring backwardness to European civilization, as represented by the orientalist trope of the Middle Eastern camel.

The irony here is that to diaspora Zionists in the west, the camel has positive connotations associated with the Jewish homeland, as evidenced in these pictures from this year’s “Celebrate Israel” parade in New York.

This can also be seen in Birthright trips, where the camel ride is a staple of the program to induce an emotional attachment to Israel:

How do we reconcile the contradictory connotations? Camels associated with Muslims/Arabs—as in the “Eurabia” video—are a symbol of oriental backwardness, to be contrasted with the technically advanced western Israeli civilization. It is an Israeli rejection of geographical realities, as Israel is seen to have more in common with Europe than with the Middle East.

However, camels associated with Israel—as seen through the idealized eyes of Zionists in the West—are a symbol of exotic wonder, rooting the Western diaspora Jew in a place that is magical and historically profound, symbolizing a deep yet constructed heritage. Here, the camel is part of Israel’s geography, as the camel, like the land, has been conquered by the Ashkenazi pioneers, and so too have the native Bedouins been conquered and thus now prepare the camel rides for the Birthright tourists as part of the contrived Bedouin experience.

Banner from a website promoting Birthright

“The Tribal Update”

When “Eurabia” becomes a reality, who knows what those nefarious Muslims will do? Once they outlaw Christmas, what will follow? Will they ban church bells?Demolish non-Muslim homes? Flatten complete villages? Evict non-Muslim residents for Muslim ones? Impose mass population transfers? Eliminate civil marriages? View non-Muslims in Europe as a “demographic threat”? Establishsegregated roads? Enact laws that favor Muslims? Require loyalty oaths to Europe as a “Muslim and democratic” continent? The possibilities that Latma can take their “Eurabia” scenario are endless, and they just need to look at home for inspiration.

But “Christmas in Eurabia” and “We Con the World” are only samples in the Latma YouTube video series known as “The Tribal Update.” Here are some others.

This video mocks the notion that Palestinians are indigenous to the land:

And in a skit entitled “Palestinian Eskimos,” the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people turns into a gratuitous joke at the expense of another oppressed indigenous population, the Inuit.

Another video depicts the UN as filled with incompetent Third Worlders such as an African ambassador who is so uneducated he can’t find Israel on the map.

And a slant-eyed ambassador eating rice.

Rahm Emanuel is depicted as a Jew-traitor.

Barack Obama is a Muslim anti-Semite.

If the Obama blackface is too subtle, here’s Noam Jacobson playing “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal,” in a skit that ridicules black African “Jews” making aliyah.

In case you don’t understand Latma’s sense of humor, you’re supposed to laugh as Kazabubu babbles in his stupid African gibberish: “Bu ta le bo bo bi de bbbbbbbbb”—thus demonstrating that he is of inferior stock to the real Jews such as Noam Jacobson and Caroline Glick.

Most of the videos are Israeli talking points expressed by critics of Israel (and semi-critics of Israel) in racist caricature. The humor relies on an elitist nationalist perspective that can be boiled down to this: The world hates Israel, but the world outside of Israel is just a bunch of ignorant Africans, rice-eating chinks, bloodthirsty Muslims, self-hating Jews, and white multiculturalists asking to be raped. Ha ha.

The sheer racism of Noam Jacobson is matched only by his cluelessness, as he fails to understand why his offensive “comedy” skits elicit such hatred—concluding that he is a victim of the world’s hatred against Israel and the Jews. The fact that people would hurl anti-Semitic slurs—unjustified yet unsurprising—against him after watching his racist videos somehow proves that he is doing the right thing. As Jacobson explained to a reporter, “When you see the talkbacks, you know what you’re fighting for.”

Such a remark, made without irony, and published in an article with the incredulous headline, “Fighting the New Blood Libel”—against the backdrop of blatantly racist videos such as “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal”—just goes to show what anyone who has sat through a video produced by Noam Jacobson and his Latma colleagues already understands: they have no sense of humor.

Francois Lenoir/Reuters Women lit candles on Wednesday in memory of victims at the site of a gun and grenade attack in Liege, Belgium.

On Tuesday, after the grenade attack in Belgium, Loonwatch exposed Robert Spencer’s feeble attempt to pin it on Muslims here.  He immediately jumped to the conclusion that the perpetrator, Nordine Amrani, was a Muslim with sinister Islamic motives. Spencer wasn’t alone.

All the usual suspects also jumped the gun: Belgium, Islam and the Boomerang of “Multiculturalism” (Frontpage Magazine – thanks for the title idea), Belgium Grenade Attack by Muslim[s] 4 Dead, 75 wounded (Atlas Shrugs), Belgium: Honor Killing Trial Causes Jihad With Hand Grenades (Winds of Jihad).

Apparently the loons are unaware that Amrani is typically a Mizrahi Jewish surname. It is reckless to guess because names can be deceiving, but if Amrani’s Jewish origin is confirmed, will the loons suddenly agree with us that the religious and ethnic heritage of the perpetrator shouldn’t be relevant?

As the bigots are fond of pointing out, Nordine Amrani is of Moroccan extraction, though he was born and raised in Belgium. According to an article in the New York Times, Amrani considered himself Belgian, didn’t speak a word of Arabic, and was not a Muslim.

In the absence of facts, it seems anti-Muslim bigots just manufacture whatever sensational headlines suit their hateful agenda. Authorities say the attack is not religiously motivated:

‘No religious motive in Liege rampage’

The Belgium grenade attack which killed three people and injured 123 has sent shockwaves through the country. However, Glyn Ford, a former Member of the European Parliament, stresses that individual motives are the key to understanding such attacks.

After Nordine Amrani, who also died in the blast, went on a rampage in a central square in the city of Liege on Tuesday, there has been much speculation as to what led him to throw three hand grenades toward a bus shelter and opening fire on the crowd.

Speaking with RT, Glyn Ford said that despite earlier reports, this was not a repeat of the July 22 Norwegian massacre that left 77 dead.

Well, we don’t know, but it would appear that it was an individual incident. Earlier reports that there were three or four gunmen involved have since been discredited and it equally appears that he wasn’t targeting anybody in particular… so in a sense it’s not a replica of what happened in Norway.

Ford was also quick to counter any allegations that Amrani’s attack was religiously motivated.

Earlier reaction in many senses seems to be rather racist. He was not being identified as a Belgium when he was a Belgian citizen. Because of his Moroccan origins, people are talking about killing the Muslims;  it’s all the fault of the Muslims, and the new socialist government that’s been in office now for nearly a week is being blamed for being soft on immigrants and not reacting hard enough.

It was also reported that a rightwing extremist had gone on a shooting spree in Florence, Italy, killing two African traders and wounding three others before taking his own life. While Ford recognizes that these tragic events in Europe are a cause for concern, he argues that the European Union has done a much better job of curbing such violent crimes than the United States.

In a sense, the European track record is far better than that in the United States. The United States has these kinds of rampage attacks happening fairly regularly in schools and elsewhere. I think it’s the rather tougher gun laws that we actually have in the European Union that’s kept it down to the low level that it is, because essentially Europeans are no different than American. It’s the lack of weapons that’s kept this under control to a degree.

Ultimately, Ford says that when confronted with such events, it is better to investigate individual motives rather than jump to any immediate conclusions.

****************************

The latest Europol Data confirms that less than 1% of terrorist attacks in Europe are perpetrated by Muslims. Shooting sprees and violent rampages are usually said to be the work of a “lone wolf” with no religious motive, and they don’t count as terrorism, unless the perpetrator is Muslim. In that case, it’s terrorism done “in the name of Islam,” regardless of actual motive.

The Telegraph compiled a list of similar incidents over the last 10 years, and it appears Amrani would be the token Muslim if the loons were right about his background:

Liege shooting and grenade attack: previous European incidents in last 10 years

September 27, 2001 – SWITZERLAND A man bursts into the local assembly in the central Swiss town of Zug and opens fire, killing 14 members of parliament and local government then turning the gun on himself. ‘Grudge’ behind Swiss gun massacre	Fredrich Leibarcher
March 27, 2002 – FRANCE Eight local councillors are killed and 19 injured when a man opens fire on members of the municipal council of Nanterre, outside Paris. He kills himself the next day while in police custody. The perpetrator in the shootings was Richard Durn, 33, who was originally from Slovenia.	Richard Durn
April 26, 2002 – GERMANY Sixteen people, including 12 teachers and two students, are gunned down at a school in Erfurt in eastern Germany by a 19-year-old former student, apparently in revenge for having been expelled, who then killed himself.	Robert Steinhuser
November 7, 2007 – FINLAND An 18-year-old goes on a shooting rampage in a school in the southern Finnish town of Tuusula, killing eight people before shooting himself. A Deadly School Shooting, This Time in Finland	Pekka-Eric Auvinen
September 23, 2008 – FINLAND Eleven people, including the 22-year-old gunman, die in a massacre at a training school at Kauhajoki, Finland at the hands of Matti Juhani Saari	Matti Saari
March 11, 2009 – GERMANY Nine pupils, three teachers and three passers-by are killed in a school shooting at Winnenden in southern Germanyby Tim Kretschmer a former pupil who then kills himself.	Tim Kretchmer
June 2, 2010 – ENGLAND Twelve people are killed when Derrick Bird, a 52-year-old taxi driver, goes on a shooting spree in the English region of Cumbria, before killing himself.	Derrick Bird
April 9, 2011 – THE NETHERLANDS A gunman opens fire in a packed mall in the Netherlands, killing six people before shooting himself dead. Lone gunman shoots six dead in Dutch shopping mall Van der Vlis left a farewell letter, found by his mother, in which he mostly talked about his suicidal feelings. But it did not give a clear motive for the killings, the town’s mayor Bas Eenhoorn told Dutch television.	Tristan van der Vlis
July 22, 2011- NORWAY A bomb attack on government buildings in Oslo that kills eight is followed by a shooting which kills 69 at a summer holiday camp organised by the ruling Labour party on the island of Utoya, near to the capital. Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist is arrested for carrying out both attacks.	Anders Breivik
December 13, 2011 – BELGIUM Three people, plus the gunman, are killed when a man, armed with grenades, opens fire on a square packed with children and Christmas shoppers in the eastern Belgian city of Liege.	Nordine Amrani
December 13, 2011 – ITALY In ITALY a far-right militant kills two Senegalese street vendors and wounds three people in a shooting spree in Florence after which he apparently kills himself.	Gianluca Casseri

Among all the anti-Muslim hate sites, the most novel is the Roman Catholic Imperialist, which claims Anders Breivik is also a Muslim convert. Notice how frequently the word “Muslim” is repeated [emphasis mine]:

In the Belgian city of Liege known for its love of the Muslim – a Muslim kills 4 in a terrorist attack and wounded at least 75. It is not official that the terrorist is a Muslim, but all bets are that he is. The Modus operandi is the same as in all other Muslim terrorist attacks. This attack is similar to the attack in Norway by the Muslim convert Anders Behring Breivik.

First: the bomb.

Second: the gun.

The Muslim terrorist lobbed grenades into the crowd. After his hands were free the Muslim terrorist pulled out a hand gun and started firing. The Muslim aimed to kill.

The Belgian interior Ministry said the incident was not terrorism-related. Meaning of course that the man was most likely a Muslim.

No Muslims were killed ‘cept of course for the Muslim terrorist who later blew his brains out.

Breivik described himself in his Manifesto as a “culturally Christian” agnostic who wanted to restore the Knights Templar. Breivik despised Islam and viewed himself as a foot soldier in the war against the Muslim hordes. In fact, the site looks like something Brievik could appreciate.

So why does the Roman Catholic Imperialist say Breivik is a Muslim convert? An anonymous comment suggests, “All terrorists are Muslims, therefore all Muslims are terrorists.” Breivik is a terrorist, therefore Breivik is a Muslim.

Take another look at the photos above, folks. According to loon (il)logic, they’re all Moooslems!

Rep. Michele Bachmann paved the way on Oct. 28, when she told 75 Republican faithful in Iowa that "Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI's terror training manual."

(cross post from Salon)

Fact check: GOP candidates err on FBI policy

By PETE YOST, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published 08:11 p.m., Wednesday, December 14, 2011

One of the most thorough and insightful pieces regarding the Lowe’s fiasco and the Muslim reality show, All American Muslim.

Let’s Face it: It’s the Radical Right, not Islam, that is the Greatest Threat to the American Way

by Ahmed Rehab (MindfulOfDreams)

Imagine if a major American advertiser were to pull its ads off of Jersey Shore because they received objections that the show while portraying a group of Italian-Americans, made the glaring error of excluding Mafiosi.

Imagine if the absence of characters “whacking knee caps” and “making offers you cannot refuse” was deemed as an “omission” and therefore pro-Italian propaganda, and as a result too controversial to sponsor.

Pathetic? Incredulous?

Well imagine no more.

Such is the pitiful state that Islamophobia has reached in this country, and it’s very real.

All-American Muslim is an American reality show like any other. It portrays the trials and travails of five Michigan families with typical reality show themes like marriage, birth, business, faith, food and of course drama queens.

There is one problem however, at least for the Florida Family Association:  the characters in the show are American Muslims.

The Florida Family Association got its members to send in dozens of emails to the show’s advertisers based on a pre-written template that stated in part:

“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to the liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

So basically, their objection is that the show is portraying “ordinary Muslims” as – you may need to sit down for this – “ordinary Muslims”! Of course this runs the risk that unsuspecting Americans may come to view their ordinary Muslim neighbors as ordinary. According to this Florida group of nuts, this would be a travesty that American corporations must not contribute to.

We are more or less used to the unfortunate fact that there are anti-Muslim loons lurking about out there. There’s the burn-a-Quran-day pastor from Florida, there’s the group from Florida that tried to ban a Muslim professor from the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission because he was Muslim, and there’s that guy who tried to organize against Muslim family day at a Six Flags Texas theme park in Texas. Yes, yes, he was from Florida.

But what is real cause for alarm is the creeping influence of Islamophobia into mainstream American politics and culture.  From the Peter King radicalization hearings that use taxpayer funds to put mainstream American Muslims and their institutions on mock trial, to the frequent anti-Muslim rantings of the Congressman from Florida, Allen “Islam is not really a religion” West all the way to presidential hopeful Newt “Palestinians don’t really exist” Gingrich. And now, we have the weak-kneed primetime corporate sponsors.

That a group of extremists from Florida would exercise their first amendment right to carry out bigoted campaigns is unfortunate but not all that shocking. That 65 out of 67 advertisers (according to the Florida Family Association’s website of which only Lowe’s is independently confirmed) would capitulate to their nonsensical complaints that “ordinary Muslims are being portrayed as ordinary” is an alarming new milestone in the mainstreaming of bigotry in this country. For that reason, it ought to catch the attention of Americans who, for far too long, have stayed on the sidelines of the Islamophobia horror picture show.

Lowe’s admitted that they cut their ads short as a result of the emails they were receiving and after reviewing some websites and blogs out there (in the “bigotosphere”). Lowe’s is not just a tool in the hands of the far right, it’s the entire hardware store.

What Lowe’s is essentially saying by choosing to pull its sponsorship is that NOT portraying American Muslims as terrorists is just, well, too controversial for its brand:

“We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance. We strongly support and respect the right of our customers, the community at large, and our employees to have different views. If we have made anyone question that commitment, we apologize.”

Lowe’s is putting forth a very dangerous argument: that the far right bigots and the mainstream Muslim voices with their pro-tolerance allies of all faiths are equal opposites; that those who wish to humanize a faith community that comprises 25% of humanity and those who wish to demonize them are equal opposites; that the forces of bigotry and the forces of anti-bigotry are equal opposites. The pervasive assumption that there is a moral equivalency between the two sparring sides is a major factor in the rise of Islamophobia in the US. But Lowe’s goes further than to claim moral equivalency. It actually takes sides, the wrong side: the side of the bigots.

The running complaint used to be that Muslims are always portrayed as terrorists. But now, the message being sent is that “not portraying American Muslims as terrorists” is sufficient for complaint and controversy. It’s moving the goal posts to a dangerous new “lowe”.

There are three lessons to be extracted from this episode:

First, it is a confirmation of what we have been stating all along:  Islamophobia is not merely a reaction to terrorism or radical ideologies (which would have been a welcome exercise), but, in fact, it is a form of bigotry that targets an entire faith community: the religion of Islam itself and its mainstream practitioners.

Second, Islamophobia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s sort of like “we hate you because you are terrorists, but when you’re not terrorists, we want you to be terrorists so we can hate you.” In the case of American Muslim leaders and organizations, the line is “we hate you because you are terror-linked, but when you’re not, we need you to be terror-linked so we can hate you.”

Third, Islamophobia is but a smokescreen, a projection of sorts. We are often told that Muslims are trying to Islamize America and institute Islamic Shariah law (“Sharrorize” America as Imam Suhaib Webb puts it). We are told that the less than 1% of American Muslims is but a fifth column who is here to take over and subjugate the remaining 99% plus. Setting aside the obvious ludicrousness of the claim for a second, ask yourself when was the last time American Muslims organized to pull advertisements off the air from shows that do not conform with their faith values (and trust me there are many)? Our organizing campaigns are themed around anti-bigotry and social justice, not the imposition of our faith.

To the contrary, it is the Christian right, the same folks who comprise many of the leading anti-Muslim alarmists, groups like the Florida Family Association (and trust me there are many) that are time and again organizing to force their way of thinking on other Americans. A quick visit to their website shows that this is not the first time they have successfully harassed advertisers for advertising on shows that do not conform to their ideology. They’ve targeted gays, sexually liberal shows, and others they disagree with.

It is not a coincidence that the organized Islamophobia networks in this country often include the same people who are trying to force-feed the Bible into government, schools, and public life.

And so comes the most important realization:

The organized American Muslim community’s agenda is in fact a social justice agenda. Any objective scrutiny of our organizations, campaigns, projects, and discourse reveals that this is widely and consistently the case.

On the other hand, as I already mentioned, you will find that it is it is none other than the far right that is out to force their narrowly conceived socio-religious ideology and way of life on Americans.

They conveniently promulgate the whole Islamist supremacist takeover fantasy and the Shariah scare as a divergence, a distraction, a smokescreen.

Projection is the name of the game.

They often use soft namesakes like “family” and “freedom” to give the impression of docility, and they inundate their websites and blogs with American flags and eagles to give the impression that they are the tried and true patriotic Americans who are best poised to speak for the majority.

They are not the majority, but they are not less than 1% either. They are in the millions, have access to billions of dollars, and have sufficiently organized at both the grassroots level and onas well as the internet in recent years to start to flex some muscle. (It is often stated that if fascism were to ever come to America, it would be wrapped in the US flag and bearing a cross.)

There is a ray of light. More Americans are beginning to wake up to the Islamophobia disease and the attempts at divergence from the real threat to our freedoms and democracy.

A year ago, the scorching Park51 controversy, while contrived and sensationalized at the end of the day, failed to impress the media or the public. In the case of the Lowe’s controversy, Americans are joining hands in speaking out against bigotry. Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish groups, as well as notable individuals, including 2010 Spirit of Anne Frank awardee Anya Cordell, California State Senator Ted Lieu, music mogul Russell Simmons, actress Mia Farrow, and several other celebrities, have come out strongly to say “enough is enough.”

For Lowe’s and other companies that gave in to bigotry, the choice is simple: own up to your error and do the right thing – or risk being chalked up on the wrong side of history (not to mention the wrong side of an impending boycott).

Right Wing British National Party

The recent case of an assault on a white woman by Somalis in Britain is being fully exploited by loons on both sides of the Atlantic. Islamophobia Watch investigated and exposed the distorted coverage, though as usual, the truth cannot wash away the residue such sensationalism invariably creates.

Daily Mail’s bigoted and inaccurate reporting provokes more right-wing anti-Muslim hysteria

Sexy Bananas

The loons are having a field day spreading a ridiculous rumor about an Islamic cleric who supposedly issued a fatwa warning women not to get near bananas and cucumbers because long, slender fruits and vegetables might inspire “sexy thoughts.” Supposedly he also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

Various anti-Muslim hate sites seized the opportunity to ridicule Muslims, including the infamous Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs. In No Cucumbers or Bananas for you, Slut!, Pamela Geller makes a nauseating attempt at humor at the expense of Muslims:

Obama say, “Respect it!” Jay Leno’s wife Mavis say, “The Qur’an is more liberal with women than the Bible.” Geller say, “One banana split, please, and a side of cukes, with extra whipped creme, thankyouverymuch.”

Hell knows, whenever I am feeling lonely or blue, I head down to D’Agostinos and I perk right up again.

Seriously, this is a war on women, about women and ultimately to control women. Women are the ultimate booty, the spoils of war, chattel.

Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim investigated and concluded the rumor was unsubstantiated and a result of “shoddy reporting”:

Demonstrators from Iran's Green Movement

The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a top tourist destination for most Americans.

Iran is portrayed in the Western media as a country run by fanatical, bloodthirsty Mullahs, ruling in concert with the often outrageous President  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As for the Iranian people, angry mobs are often shown in the streets, burning American flags and shouting “Death to America!”

No wonder it is easy to convince Americans that Iranians are consumed by hatred and eager to reduce American cities to rubble.  Yet Americans brave enough to visit Iran quickly discover Iranians are a friendly, gracious people. They love Americans, and they are not bashful about sharing their  affection. Tourists from California said they were amazed by their experience:

“We were besieged, mobbed almost, by whole classrooms of up to 50 or 60 individuals who would come up to us and smother us with hugs and kisses,” reports Caroleen Williams, of Coronado. “‘Are you Americans?’ they asked. ‘We love Americans.’ Women walking down the sidewalks in full black burqas would wave to us and tap their hearts.”

In fact, Williams says they were repeatedly urged to take home a message: “Tell all Americans we love them.”

The experience is not unusual. An American Rabbi who visited Iran described a similar experience in his blog. He concluded that Iran is misunderstood by Americans, and especially by American Jews, many of whom are convinced the Iranians harbor a special hatred for them:

The most essential thing I’ve learned is in some ways the most basic: Iran is a beautiful country with a venerable history and wonderful, gracious people. It is also a powerfully complicated country, marked by a myriad of cultural/political/religious/historical layers. I am now more convinced than ever that we in the West harbor egregiously stereotypical assumptions about this country – and that we harbor them at our mutual peril.  ~ Rabbi Shalom Rav

A journalist from the Christian Science Monitor confirmed that the affection Iranians have for Americans is not confined to secular liberals:

After speaking with numerous Iranians from all walks of life – lower and upper class, religious and secular, Westernized and traditional, government- affiliated and civilian – I became convinced that this vilified member of the ‘Axis of Evil‘ is actually one of the most welcoming places for Americans to travel in the Middle East. Indeed, all Iranians with whom I spoke shared a positive opinion of Ameri-cans.

Iranian admiration for America is not a new phenomenon. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks more than a decade ago, Iranians held spontaneous candlelight vigils, mourning, praying for the victims, and expressing solidarity with the American people.

The New York Times reported that an opinion poll showed 74% of Iranians want to renew relations and start a dialogue with the US. Iranian authorities were so incensed by the results, they arrested the pollster. The regime has always capitalized on legitimate grievances against Western foreign policy to rally Iranians against America, but many Iranians are no longer listening.

Refusing anti-Americanism is one way to swipe at the hated regime. Iran has an overwhelmingly young, vibrant population fed up with the oppressive theocracy that began more than three decades ago when the late Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies established the system of Vilayat-i-Faqih, “Rule of the Jurist”.

In some ways Iranians are more American than Americans themselves, because Iranians truly cherish liberty and have struggled for over 100 years to be free. ~ Iranians love America – But – Americans Hate Iran

Paradoxically, the US is largely responsible for setting back Iranian democracy and self-rule by decades. In 1953, the US and Britain overthrew Iran’s democracy, imposed the tyrannical Shah of Iran as the new leader, and divided up the country’s oil wealth among themselves. The operation was not a secret, and is chronicled in mainstream sources here, here, and here.

American Protester

In 1979, the Iranian people deposed the Shah. Later that same year, rumors circulated that the US was poised to retake the Iranian government, and the infamous Iranian Hostage Crisis ensued.

In the wake of the crisis, the late Ayatollah Khomeini dubbed America the Great Satan, a term that has been co-opted ever since by Islamophobes determined to portray Iranian leaders as hateful and irrational. The Iranian Hostage Crisis enraged Americans, and spawned Iranophobia, a special strain of fear and hatred that has never entirely faded from public memory.

Apparently emboldened by the dispute, Saddam Hussein subsequently waged war on Iran. The US supported and armed Saddam Hussein, who was an ally at the time. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed during the Iran-Iraq War.

In the years since, US policy has remained aggressive and hypocritical in the eyes of many Iranians, and for good reason. Sanctions hurt the people of Iran and do little to weaken the regime, and frequent saber rattling by the US and Israel is unsettling:

When Iranians burn the American flag in street demonstrations – they are NOT showing hatred toward Americans; they are in fact pointing out the the U.S. government has and is continuing to try to destroy Iran and Iranians.

Who is the U.S. government fooling? Maybe Americans – but not Iranians. We know the truth and understand fully the harm that is being imposed on Iran – every single day.

As much as Iranians despise their current regime and adore Americans on a personal level, they are united in the opposition to foreign intervention. If the US attacks Iran, Iranians will rally around the flag. As the aforementioned article  in the New York Times states:

Left to its own devices, the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad. The ayatollahs’ best hope is that hard-liners in Washington will continue their inept diplomacy, creating a wave of Iranian nationalism that bolsters the regime — as happened to a lesser degree after President Bush put Iran in the axis of evil.

Like the people of Iran, most Americans support diplomacy and are opposed to war. While it’s true that most Americans don’t reciprocate the love Iranians feel for them, it is largely because they glimpse into Iranian society exclusively through the corporate media.

Hardliners on both sides fan the flames of hatred and mutual distrust because it serves their nefarious agendas. The interests of the people lie in recognizing each others’ common humanity.

Leveson Inquiry: ‘Daily Star had anti-Muslim agenda’

A former journalist at the Daily Star told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that he received threats and may have had his phone hacked after he quit the paper in protest at what he claimed was its anti-Muslim propaganda.

By Andy Bloxham

Last month, George Washington University Law Professor John Banzhaf took it upon himself to file a frivolous legal complaint, supposedly on behalf of Muslim students, against The Catholic University of America. Although no Muslim students had complained about their treatment at CUA, Branzhaf  made the absurd accusation that the University was violating their human rights by, among other things, failing to provide them with their own prayer space, devoid of Christian symbols.

Banzhaf, who has been manufacturing controversy for decades, boasts on his website that he has been dubbed the “Osama bin Laden of Torts.” Whether he is a misguided human rights activist or an agent provocateur, his high-profile lawsuit immediately generated howls of furry from anti-Muslim outrage peddlers, who accused “Islamic supremacists” of waging holy war on American Christians.

In the wake of the controversy, Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations assured the Washington Post that Muslims had no complaints against the University, saying:

“Muslim college students are not hothouse flowers that need protection. If they had concerns, we would have heard them.”

Hooper was soon proven right in a refreshing display of journalistic integrity at The Blaze, a right wing website founded by former Fox News host Glenn Beck. After Meredith Jessup‘s investigation revealed that Muslims had nothing to do with the complaint, she published a correction to her previous article, saying:

“Since we brought you news of the legal complaint filed against Catholic University alleging that Muslim students’ rights are being violated as they pray in rooms featuring Christian images and symbols, the story has picked up national media attention.  Last night on Fox News, host Sean Hannity’s panel debated this “holy war being waged in our nation’s capital.” But Hannity and others are missing key facts in this case and, as a result, overlooking the real story.

When I first read about the human rights complaint allegedly filed on behalf of Muslim students at Catholic, I made the mistake of assuming that Muslim students were behind it.  Only after personally speaking with the complaint filer — George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf — did I understand what this story was really all about.  In fact, not a single Muslim student at Catholic University has signed on to Professor Banzhaf’s complaint and he admitted to me that he lodged the complaint against Catholic with the D.C. Office of Human Rights as a concerned individual, not on behalf of any student or group of students.

In fact, Banzhaf sent a letter to the editor of the school’s newspaper soliciting complainants on September 22, yet readily admits that none have have signed on to his case against the school.

“The community here is very respectful of other religions and I feel free to openly practice it,” Wiaam Al Salmi, a Muslim student at Catholic U who recently started the Arab American Association on campus told the school’s student newspaper.

Additionally, Muslim enrollment at Catholic U (and Catholic universities across the country) has been on the rise.”

Anti-Muslim loons everywhere had taken full advantage of this juicy opportunity to spur widespread outrage against Muslims, publishing Raymond Ibrahim’s inflammatory article, Why does the Cross ‘Provoke’ Muslims, on Frontpage Magazine, Jihad Watch, Middle East Forum, and Winds of Jihad. Ibrahim, like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, is part of  an incestuous cadre of  anti-Muslim hatemongers associated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  Ibrahim has his own page, “Raymond’s Intersection,”  at Frontpage Magazine, and also writes a weekly column for Jihad Watch.

Fellow loon Pamela Geller broke away from the hatemonger herd, linking instead to Fox News‘ Do Crosses at Catholic University Violate “Human Rights” of Muslims?  She described Branzhaf’s complaint as an example of “Islamic supremacism,” and made the paranoid prediction that Attorney General Eric Holder would soon file a similar suit, presumably as part of the Obama Administration’s secret Mooslim agenda.

At the time of this writing, only Jihad Watch and The Blaze have published an update absolving Muslims. The ever paranoid Jihad Watch did so only grudgingly, insisting the lawsuit remains, “an equally insidious social engineering effort against CUA.”

Branzhaf’s ill-advised complaint is a setback in already strained relations between Christians and Muslims that cannot easily be reversed. Even if many sites retract their knee-jerk indictment of Muslims, the incident has been a public relations victory for the enemies of Islam and Muslims, reminiscent of the Islamophobiapalooza that boomeranged across the USA during the so-called South Park controversy.

Lord's Resistance Army

Rush Limbaugh the terror supporters.

Rush Limbaugh Endorses the Lord’s Resistance Army

I don’t have a really strong view on whether or not it’s advisable to dispatch a small number of US combat troops to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army. My instinct is to be skeptical. I want to see less military intervention, not more. But Rush Limbaugh’s instinct is to embrace brutal murderers:

Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill. [...]

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

This post is illustrated with a photo of a man who survived a Lord’s Resistance Army machete attack and has the gashes on his head to prove it. You can read more about it courtesy of Human Rights Watch:

LRA forces attacked at least 10 villages, capturing, killing, and abducting hundreds of civilians, including women and children. The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks. The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a 3-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes.

The LRA also killed those they abducted who walked too slowly or tried to escape. Family members and local authorities later found bodies all along the LRA’s 105-kilometer journey through the Makombo area and the small town of Tapili. Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that for days and weeks after the attack, this vast area was filled with the “stench of death.”

I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not chasing a relatively small band of depraved mass murderers around central africa is a reasonable thing for American military personel to be doing. But let’s make no mistake—these are depraved mass murderers. And yet Rush Limbaugh is pleased to welcome them as fellow Christian allies.

Barack Obama

Hilarious piece by Alex Pareene, one of the anti-Loons of the year.

Fox: Why does Obama hate Easter and love Ramadan?

Can we all agree that the worst thing about “Fox & Friends” is how clumsy and obvious they are with their political agenda? (Ok, the second-worst thing, after Steve Doocy’s face. And voice. And the things he says.) Good propaganda is supposed to be sort of covert and insidious, right? Anyway, a couple months ago Fox attacked Obama for not issuing a “proclamation” for Easter, even though the president celebrates Easter every year with a massive party. If you wondered why they did this, the punchline came this morning, when Fox trashed Obama for issuing a proclamation… for Ramadan, the Shariah Easter!

It begins with what in a regular morning show would be “news” — the president recognized Ramadan — and then everyone sort of freezes and Gretchen awkwardly just brings up today’s designated attack line, attributing it to “some people.” “Some people are saying,” she says, more than once, to describe what she is saying. What “some people” are saying is that Barack Obama did not release a “proclamation” for Easter. Why didn’t he tell everyone when Easter was? (No president has released in Easter proclamation in at least 20 years.)

As MediaMatters explains, Barack Obama did not actually issue a proclamation for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. He did release a statement. There is a difference. (Proclamations have actual legal weight behind them!)

But none of that matters. The story is, Barack Obama hates Easter and loves Ramadan. I wonder what they’re suggesting, about the president? That he… doesn’t like chocolate?

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is at it again.

Beck: I Would Be ‘Uncomfortable’ With Muslim In My Administration (AUDIO)

(Huffington Post) Glenn Beck agreed with GOP candidate Herman Cain on his Tuesday show, saying that he would be uncomfortable having a Muslim in his administration. Cain has attracted attention for saying that he is worried about the spread of Sharia law in the U.S., and that he was worried that a Muslim might not be faithful to the Constitution. On Tuesday, Beck said he understood what Cain meant. “Do you feel comfortable in saying, ‘yeah, you know what? I’m not even going to check that guy on his stance on Sharia law,’” Beck said. He started to say that, although it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t ask the same of a Catholic or a Baptist, but then backtracked, saying that, in fact, he might be “uncomfortable” with people from any faith, explaining, “I don’t trust anybody anymore.” However, Beck had a distinction to make. “Would I be more uncomfortable with a Muslim?” he asked. “Yes.” The reason for this, he said, was because Muslim rights group had “wildly deceived” Americans–though he didn’t say about what exactly. “And a Muslim is more likely to want Sharia law in America than any other religion,” Beck’s co-host said. Beck was quick to say that not all Muslims wanted Sharia law. “I have friends who are Muslim who are not for Sharia law,” he said. Beck has made controversial statements about Muslims in the past. He has said that around ten percent of Muslims are terrorists and that some want to bring about the Antichrist. And, in 2006, he famously asked Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Pat Robertson is at it again.

Robertson: Fighting Muslims Is Just Like Fighting Nazis

(via. Right-wing Watch)

On the 700 Club today, Pat Robertson once again spoke out against American Muslims, singling out the construction of mosques and the purported threat of creeping Sharia law. Robertson likened critics of Muslims to opponents of Nazis and rejected claims that his opposition to rights for Muslims is bigotry, asking, “I wonder what were people who opposed the Nazis, were they bigots?”

“Why is it bigoted to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and to say we don’t want to live under Nazi Germany?” Robertson said. “But oh it’s bigoted if we speak out against a force that slowly but surely is trying to exercise domination over the world.”

Watch:

via. Islamophobia Today

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network

By TIM DICKINSON MAY 25, 2011 8:00 AM ET

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

This article appears in the June 9, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive May 27.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Photo Gallery: Roger Ailes, GOP Mastermind

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

Slideshow: An hour-by-hour look at how Fox disguises GOP talking points as journalism

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”

Read about the GOP’s dirty war against Obama

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”

>> Continue reading: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

Farhana Khera did a good job at the Dick Durbin hearings today.

Right-Wing Media Attacked Muslim Advocates for Giving Muslims Common Legal Advice

(Media Matters)

As a Senate subcommittee is poised to begin a hearing on Muslim civil rights, several right-wing media outlets are attacking Farhana Khera, a witness at the hearing and the executive director of the Muslim legal advocacy group Muslim Advocates, for urging American Muslims to have an attorney present when speaking to law enforcement. But this is standard advice given by many legal rights advocacy groups, including the American Bar Association and the Naval Legal Service Office.

Soledad O’Brien had a very interesting special that aired on Sunday, March 27th dealing with the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry in America, specifically the case of the Murfreesboro Mosque and Community Center.

We have covered this story extensively, Eric Allen Bell a close follower of the issue and of LoonWatch has sent us video and tips regarding what has been going on and the morbid ignorance of the Islamophobes in that area.

Soledad did a decent job and all in all the Islamophobes and Muslim-haters come out looking quite malicious if not profoundly ignorant.

We have uploaded the videos to Youtube, please subscribe to our YouTube page LoonwatchTV

Bill Maher is anti-Religion, everyone knows that, well at least anyone who know who Bill Maher is, but as we have documented on our site Maher has a special bias against Islam, Muslims and Arabs. For Maher the Qur’an is a “hate filled Holy book,” and Islam presents a “unique” threat to us all as opposed to other religions which he says are merely “superstitious” nonsense but essentially not violent. He even had the temerity to say that the Bible has less violent passages than the Qur’an. A ridiculous claim that we have utterly debunked.

In this encounter, Bill flings these charges at Rep. Keith Ellison, who in my opinion did a pretty decent job in pushing back against Bill’s claims even though he could have done better:

For instance Rep. Ellison could have attacked the statement that the Qur’an is a “hate filled Holy Book” with more than just verses about peace and justice. But I understand that such a short time is really only good for soundbites and that real intellectual and thorough discussion requires a lot more time. He should have at the very least addressed the idea that Islam was somehow a “unique” threat because that is patently false.

How long will Bill Maher get a pass on his racism and anti-Muslim Islamophobia? Is it acceptable because the targets are Arabs and Muslims and because Maher is a comedian from whom outrageous things are expected?

On his last show Bill Maher went on a speel undermining the Democratic character of Revolutions sweeping across the Arab world. Amongst his ludicrous statements he claimed “women can’t vote in 19 of 22 Arab countries,” that “women who have dated an Arab man, the results aren’t good,” that “Arab men have a sense of “entitlement,” etc. He also went onto forward the argument that “we are better than them,” justifying it by implying he is not a “cultural relativist.”

No, Bill might not be a “cultural relativist” but he sure sounds like a “cultural supremacist.” His factual accuracy about the Islamic and Arab world is akin to Robert Spencer’s. It is patently false that “19 of 22″ Arab states don’t allow for women to vote, a brief trip to Wikipidea would have disabused him of that false fact:

Women were granted the right to vote on a universal and equal basis in Lebanon in 1952^[46], Syria (to vote) in 1949 ^[47] (Restrictions or conditions lifted) in 1953 ^[48], Egypt in 1956^[49], Tunisia in 1959 ^[50], Mauritania in 1961^[51], Algeria in 1962 ^[52], Morocco in 1963 ^[53], Libya ^[54] and Sudan in 1964 ^[55],Yemen (Partly)in 1967 ^[47] (full right) in 1970 ^[56], Bahrain in 1973 ^[57], Jordan in 1974 ^[58], Iraq (Full right) 1980 ^[57] Oman (Partly) in 1994 and (Fully granted) 2003 ^[59], and Kuwait in 2005 ^[57].

The reality, (what is lost on Maher) is that even though nearly all Arab states allow for voting for men and women, their votes didn’t matter in the autocratic kleptocracies that littered the Middle East, and this is what Arabs — men and women — have been fighting against these past few months. It seems Maher just can’t handle all the myths he’s been pushing being shattered.

Bill Maher goes onto talk about how Arab men are bad spouses and boyfriends, to buttress his points he brings up “anecdotal” evidence and his opinion that Arabs have a “sense of entitlement.” How does Bill know? Has he dated Arab men? This is one of those things that is so ridiculous and patently unsubstantiated that it is beyond being laughable, you almost cringe with embarrassment for how stupid it makes Maher look.

Maher also seemed to use “Arab” and “Muslim” interchangeably, perhaps not knowing that a significant number of Arabs are not Muslims. While there are certainly problems in the Middle East and the Muslim world regarding the treatment of women, Maher judges Arabs and Muslims by their lowest common denominator. Ignoring countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan and others that have progressive legislation regarding women and which have had women presidents, prime ministers, parliamentarians, business leaders, sports icons, journalists, etc.

At the end of the day Maher needs to have someone on his show who can push back against the myths that he indulges in and propagates. Someone of the caliber of As’ad Abu Khalil or Juan Cole might be a good start.

You can watch the segment at Mediaite:

Bill Maher Slams Muslim Men’s Treatment Of Women, Gets Heckled By Audience Member

(Mediaite)

Maher was having it out with Smiley over relative treatment of women in Muslim countries and American society – Smiley didn’t argue that Muslim countries often exhibit poor attitudes toward women, but argued treatment of women in America has a long way to go, too. Maher called it a “false equivalency,” and it went on from there. Maher read off a list of the ways women are oppressed in Arab countries – in 19 of 22, they can’t vote; in Saudi Arabia they aren’t allowed to drive; etc.

Then, he got into slightly weirder territory. He asserted that “civilization begins with civilizing the men,” and then, after saying, “I know this is anecdotal” (not an auspicious way to start when you’re trying to make a convincing argument), unleashed this line:

“Talk to women who’ve ever dated an Arab man. The results are not good.”

Maher added they have a “sense of entitlement,” indeed quite the anecdotal piece of “evidence,” and one to which guest Michelle Caruso-Cabrera shot back, “Every man I’ve ever dated has a sense of entitlement.” And Maher kept on having none of Smiley’s argument that Americans shouldn’t act superior about treatment of women and rejected the notion he was “demonizing” anyone by saying Americans’ treatment of women is better:

“They’re worse. What’s wrong with just saying that?”

And it continued on like that until a guy in the crowd started yelling about Hellfire missiles…and yelling, and yelling. He rattled off so much so quickly (though most of it was tough to hear) that Maher guessed it was a prepared speech…a guess buoyed by the fact that the rant, as Maher also pointed out, indeed didn’t have a whole lot to do with what the panel was talking about. Video of the segment below – the interruption begins at the 5:32 mark.

Glenn Beck recently has been harping on and on about the impending doom of Armageddon, and he has figured out who the Anti-Christ is, an “Islamic figure” known as the “12th Imam” or “Mahdi.” To help promote his pseudo-religio-apocalyptic propaganda he had Joel Richardson (fundamentalist Christian) and Zuhdi Jasser, token Muslim beloved by Neo-Cons and wacko Islamophobes.

Beck claims he has been studying this “issue” for nearly five or six years, which is hard to believe when he can’t distinguish between Shi’as and Sunnis:

This hysteria is quite revealing. The Christian right-wing has always scapegoated or somehow cast America’s perceived “enemies” at one time or another as the Anti-Christ. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and its Premieres were the Anti-Christ, during the Gulf War it was Saddam Hussein, at various points throughout history it has been the Pope, and Jerry Falwell thought it obvious that the Anti-Christ was a “male Jew.”

It would almost be an exercise in futility (since they are so obvious) to rebut the horrendous, blatant factual inaccuracies regarding Islamic Eschatology here, but a brief response is necessary.

In the first instance it must be noted that Islamic Eschatology is a debated topic with various theological opinions amongst scholars, and both Sunni Islam and Shia’ Islam have different views of the events and also place different levels of importance on these End Times characters/scenarios. For Shia’ Twelver Islam the Mahdi is a central figure of their Faith whereas amongst Sunnis he is not central to the Faith.

Before we approach this subject it must be made abundantly clear that Muslims believe that no one, not the Prophets, Saints nor the Angels know when the Last Day/End Times will begin. This knowledge belongs only to God because he is the one who has decided it:

“They ask you about the Hour (Day of Resurrection): ‘When will be its appointed time?’ Say: ‘The knowledge thereof is with my Lord (Alone). None can reveal its time but He. Heavy is its burden through the heavens and the earth. It shall not come upon you except all of a sudden.’ They ask you as if you have a good knowledge of it. Say: ‘The knowledge thereof is with God (Alone), but most of mankind know not.’”

[al-‘Araf 7:187]

2 – God says:

“People ask you concerning the Hour, say: ‘The knowledge of it is with God only. What do you know? It may be that the Hour is near!’”

[al-Ahzaab 33:63]

Ibn Katheer (3/527) said:

God tells His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) that he has no knowledge of the Hour and that when the people ask him about that, he should refer the matter to God.

Al-Shanqeeti said (6/604):

It is known that the word innama (translated here as “only”) has the effect of limiting or restricting the meaning, so what the verse means is: No one knows when the Hour will come except God alone.

3 – God says:

“They ask you (O Muhammad) about the Hour — when will be its appointed time?

You have no knowledge to say anything about it.

To your Lord belongs (the knowledge of) the term thereof

You (O Muhammad) are only a warner for those who fear it”

[al-Naaz’iaat 79:42-45]

al-Sa’di said:

Because knowing the time of the Hour serves no spiritual or worldly purpose for people, rather their interests lie in it being concealed from them, the knowledge of that has been kept from all of creation and God has kept it to Himself. “To your Lord belongs (the knowledge of) the term thereof.” (via. IslamQA)

It also must be made abundantly clear that according to Islamic doctrine no one, I repeat no one has the ability to hasten the Last Day/End Times. The logic goes: How can one hasten something God has already decided? Nothing any Muslim or non-Muslim does or doesn’t do has one iota of an effect on hastening or bringing closer the End Times. This is completely and utterly in the power of God. To believe otherwise is considered disbelief and counter to Orthodox Islamic teaching amongst all Sunni groups and schools of thought, and I would venture to say most Shia’ groups and schools of thought as well (Shia’ readers feel free to add comments).

Furthermore, Islamic ‘Aqeeda, belief that Allah knows everything and all things happen through His power and Will is so profound and deeply ingrained that the idea of hastening the Last Days never occurred as a theological possibility, it was unimaginable! There is not much said about it over 1400 years of Islamic history precisely because it was inconceivable and absurd from an Islamic viewpoint.

In fact, throughout history individuals who have claimed to have been mahdis or messiahs have generally not had a very happy end: they have either been persuaded to repent, forced to repent, jailed, killed or castigated as false pretenders. (hat tip: Ahmed)

The cult of Juhayman al-Otaibi is a case in point. He is the famous mastermind behind the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979. He was forwarding the concept that his brother-in-law was the awaited Mahdi. To do so — amongst other things — he attempted to fulfill some of the “signs of the Last Hour” mentioned in Hadith. Juhayman and 67 of his followers were (after being captured) summarily executed.

What we are really seeing from Glenn Beck and the Christian Right crowd that he is pandering to with these insane antics is a classic case of PROJECTION. It is in fact many in the Christian Right who believe that the End Times, the Last Days can be hastened. They actually believe they have a role in bringing Jesus Christ back to Earth!

One of the violent consequences of this disastrous theology is that they believe the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque must be destroyed and the Third Jewish Temple be built for Jesus to return to earth. Imagine the repercussions if they are successful in this mad dash to instigate cataclysm?

The one piece of evidence that Islamophobes, Beck and his ilk use to try to instill fear in the populace is their de-contextualized recital of a hadith (saying of the Prophet Muhammad) and its variations that says, ‘the Last Day will not arrive until the Jews fight the Muslims and the Muslims defeat them.’

Beck and company want to pass off and interpret these ahadith as somehow calling for a hastening of the End Times. Not only is this interpretation antithetical to Islamic creed, not only is it an interpretation NEVER forwarded in the 1400 years of Islamic history by any of the hadith commentators (I have Fath al-Bari by Imam Ibn Hajar al-’Asqalani, Sharh Sahih Muslim by Imam Nawawi, and other commentaries open in front of me right now), but it exposes a profound and disgustingly immense historical amnesia.

Why wouldn’t Muslims over the course of 1400 years, at a time when Christian Europe was murdering and enslaving Jews under the doctrine of Perpetual Servitude have exterminated Jews if Beck and his cohorts are right? Why were Jews thriving in the Muslim world? Why were they being appointed as Viziers, Advisors, Diplomats, Physicians to the Caliphs, Sultans and Amirs? Why was the Golden Age of Jewish thought and culture, the revivification of Hebrew (a previously near dead language) in lands ruled by Muslims? (I am currently writing a book review for LW on The Oranament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal).

No doubt these ahadith have been used in a bellicose and bigoted manner over the past 80 or so odd years due to the political situation in the Middle East, i.e. the conflict between the creation of Israel and occupation and repression of Palestinians. But can the anti-Muslims who forward the claim that Muslims are using these ahadith to hasten the End Times bring one shred of evidence in which these ahadith have been used to instigate or incite pogroms or to usher in the Last Days over the last 1400 years? Maybe Bernard Lewis can help in this regard?

What Beck and co. are saying would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that it was so dangerous. Some nut or group of nuts is going to see his show and start arming himself against the evil Mooslims and think to himself that he has to get the Mooslims before they get him.

What we already knew in empirical form.

Fox News Watchers Consistently More Likely To Have Negative Views Of Muslims

(Think Progress)

Studies have already shown that regular Fox News watchers are “substantially” more misinformed about current events than consumers of other media, and that “greater exposure to [Fox] increased misinformation on a specific issue.” But a new poll suggests the conservative network may not just be harmful to viewers’ knowledge, but to their tolerance as well.

As highlighted by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute reveals “a significant correlation between trust in Fox News and negative attitudes about Muslims. The study’s authors conclude:

Americans who most trust Fox News are more likely to believe that Muslims want to establish Shari’a law, have not done enough to oppose extremism, and believe investigating Muslim extremism is a good idea.

Indeed, more than twice as many Republicans who most trust Fox News think Muslims want to establish Sharia law in the U.S. as Republicans who trust other media outlets — 41 percent of Fox viewers compared to just 23 percent of other Republicans.

As Sargent notes, “we’ll never know whether Fox watchers harbor these views because they watch Fox, or whether they watch Fox because they harbor these views.” Nonetheless, Fox has propagated an “alternate reality” that consistently portrays Muslims as potentially dangerous, foreign, and suspect. For example, Fox disproportionately uses terms that reflect a negative view of Muslims more often than its competitors, as this graph of Nexis data from the last three months demonstrates :

And when these terms are used, they are often part of a story fear mongering about nefarious activities Muslims may be up to, such as imposing sharia law, creating a global caliphate, or plotting homegrown jihad. Other times, Muslims are subject to broad, negative generalizations:

– Host Bill O’Reilly on 1/13/11: “The American people need to know what is going on in the Muslim communities in — in our country because we really don’t. A lot of them are closed communities. We don’t know.”

– Fox legal analyst Peter Johnson Junior 2/7/11: “You have to look at the scholarly research on this issue over the years — is Democracy and Islam, are they compatible? Most scholars on the subject have said they aren’t compatible.”

– Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade 10/15/10: “There was a certain group of people that attacked us on 9/11. It wasn’t just one person, it was one religion. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Given the daily dose of conspiracy and Islamophobia on its airwaves, perhaps it’s no surprise that more than three-quarters of those who trust Fox think Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) McCarthy-like hearings on Muslim radicalization are a good idea, compared to just 45 percent of those who most trust CNN and 28 percent of those who most trust public television.

On point piece from Sarah Posner, another writer who was an extraordinary “anti-Loon” in 2010. It goes to show that despite all of Rep. King’s protestations that his hearings are innocent of bigotry his statements prove otherwise.

On Gaffney’s Radio Show, Rep. King Suggests Muslims Aren’t American

by Sarah Posner (Religion Dispatches)

Lee Fang at Think Progress reports that Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee who plans on holding hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims, said on Frank Gaffney’s radio program last week that Muslims aren’t real Americans in combatting terrorism:

Joining anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney on Gaffney’s radio program last week, King doubled down on his promise to launch a witch-hunt against Muslims. He repeated a falsehood that he stated earlier — that American Muslims never cooperate to combat terrorism. But in addition to this claim, King made the extraordinary smear that American Muslims aren’t “American” when it comes to war. “[W]hen a war begins,” King said, every ethnic and religious group unites as “Americans.” “But in this case,” King continued, referring to Muslims, “this is not the situation. … Whether it’s cultural tradition, whatever, the fact is the Muslim community does not cooperate anywhere near to the extent that it should.”

As I reported last week, Gaffney has disgusted some conservatives with his anti-Muslim bigotry; one Muslim conservative activist, Suhail Khan, told me that is why Gaffney has beenexcluded from next month’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Yet that doesn’t stop CPAC from including a group like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which supportsFront Page magazine, which has promoted Gaffney’s work, including Gaffney’s smear of Khan.

As King’s willingness to appear on Gaffney’s radio show and affirm his notions that Muslims can’t be real Americans shows, Gaffney is not the pariah some in CPAC might contend he is. By way of another example, as I reported, Gaffney was appointed to the advisory board of the Clarion Fund, whose Islamophobic propaganda films have been promoted by current and former elected officials and the Republican Jewish Committee, and which plans to screen its latest documentary, Iranium, to lawmakers early next month.

Gaffney has been peddling the bogus claim that shari’ah law represents a real threat to the Constitution, and has called on Congress to “investigate” that as well. He employs someone who believes being Muslim should be criminalized. He brought that dog and pony show to Capitol Hill late last year for the benefit of House staffers, and spoke to a room of about 50 people. It surely is a deeply troubling development that King is cavorting with Gaffney and pontificating about the “Americanism” of American Muslims, in light of Gaffney’s agitation about fifth columns of shari’ah proponents bent on undermining the Constitution.

Coexistence with Islam will destroy America because the Moozlims are sinisterly planning to undermine Western civilization. That is the message of a new editorial in the Washington Times. Yes, the stealth jihad conspiracy turns its ugly head again as we are warned – without any academic studies or proof – that the imminent “Islamic tsunami” and “Islamic tidal wave” are threatening everything we hold dear.

Is an Islamic tidal wave coming? “There is a plan to take over Western civilization,” warns David Rubin, “and we need to recognize it for what it is.” Mr. Rubin is a native New Yorker who served as mayor of the Israeli town of Shiloh. He spoke to The Washington Times about his new book, “The Islamic Tsunami: Israel and America in the Age of Obama.”

Who is David Rubin and what are his credentials to speak as an expert on Islam? Well, none, unless you consider rave reviews by far-right extremist demagogues like David Horowitz and Pat Robertson something to be proud of.

The entire editorial speaks of a monolithic, singular-minded, totalitarian Islam bent on destroying America. Not just extremists, but Islam itself. This perfectly fits the accepted textbook definition of Islamophobia by the Runnymede Trust:

1.      Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.

2.      Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.

3.      Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.

4.      Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’.

5.      Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.

6.      Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.

7.      Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.

8.      Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Islamophobia (irrational fear of Islam) is exactly what the Washington Times is spreading when they speak of the menacing hoards of Saracens secretly teaming up with Democrats to undermine Western civilization. The Times continues:

Confronting the growing threat to Western civilization first involves admitting the problem exists, something President Obama not only refuses to do but strongly denies. The administration has censored any discussion of the problem in these terms within the government, preferring to focus on ill-defined “violent extremism” when the real extremist threat is only partly violent and wholly Islamicist. Mr. Rubin notes that Mr. Obama‘s vaunted outreach effort to the world’s Muslims has been “a total failure in generating respect for the Judeo-Christian world.” The president keeps reaching out, but Islam is not reaching back.

It is very strange to see how “Islam” (1.5 billion people) can be collectively accused of snubbing President Obama’s outreach. Never mind the research which shows most American Muslims are mainstream moderates citizens. Ignore their insidious attempts at interfaith peace! We can only assume our government officials should stop using the term “violent extremism” and instead declare outright holy war against Islam. The Times continues:

Instead of pandering to Islam in hopes that somehow the threat will go away, Mr. Rubin says the United States needs to rediscover its roots. “The United States is a country built on Biblical foundations,” he said. “The United States needs to cease apologizing for what it is and where it comes from.” That America is a pluralistic nation in which people from many cultures may live, work and flourish doesn’t overshadow the fact that the country was founded on a specific set of ideals that enabled this pluralistic culture to take root. Islamism constitutes a mortal threat to those ideals, just as fascism and communism did for previous generations.

Despite what moral relativists believe, all belief systems are not created equal. A moral defense of the American ideal is possible and increasingly necessary. Mr. Rubin believes Americans “do not have to be ashamed” of the religious basis of the country’s founding. “America is built on freedom of worship, but of a particular religious root,” he says. The United States has to reclaim and defend the civilization on which it is based or risk declining into second-rate status and being overwhelmed by the tsunami steadily building on the horizon.

Now we are told the “threat” will not go away until we stop “pandering to Islam,” whatever that means. We can only assume that America should immediately stop all diplomacy with Muslim nations and forego any attempt at peaceful interfaith coexistence. If we don’t stand up now, the Moozlim hoards will quickly achieve the ¾ majority of states needed to change the Constitution into Sharia law!

So there you have it. Western civilization is under immediate existential threat by a shadowy, vague Islamic tsunami. The sky is falling! How exactly the religion of Islam will bring Western civilization crashing down is left to the imagination. No specific prescriptions are given to deal with this allegedly clear and present danger, so worried readers are left to find their own ways of saving their doomed civilization; such as attacking random Imams, bullying the local Muslim school boy, vandalizing or pipe bombing a random mosque, stabbing a random Muslim cabby, or agitating to nuke Muslim cities.

What can we do to save our civilization? We can only assume.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck puts forward the lie that ten percent of Muslims are terrorists.

Glenn Beck: Ten Percent Of Muslims Are Terrorists (AUDIO)

(Huffington Post)

Glenn Beck said he thinks ten percent of all Muslims are terrorists.

As ThinkProgress pointed out, Beck’s estimate would mean that roughly 157 million Muslims in the world are terrorists.

Speaking on his radio show Monday, Beck decried the relative lack of coverage that the news media is giving to the figures he discusses day after day on his radio and television shows.

“We have revolutionaries here in America speaking — American citizens speaking — about an open violent revolution and no one will cover it!” Beck said. “Would they cover it if you had tape of al Qaeda saying they’re going to get out in the streets, they want violence? Of course you would!”

Beck surmised that the media don’t think that the threats he describes are sufficient enough to cover seriously. However, he said, they should look at the havoc a relatively small number of “Islamic terrorists” had caused:

“What is the number of Islamic terrorists? One percent? I think it’s closer to ten percent but the rest of the PC world will tell you, ‘oh no, it’s minuscule.’ OK, well, let’s take you at your one percent. Look at the havoc one percent of Muslims causing in the rest of the world. You don’t think one percent, half a percent here in the United States of radicals, of people who want to violently overthrow the government, is a problem?”

UPDATE: As The Huffington Post’s Sebastian Howard pointed out on Twitter, Beck’s figure of ten percent is hardly new. In fact, Beck used the same statistic in his 2003 book, “The Real America.” In it, Beck says that he has concluded, after “reading and prayer,” that, while ninety percent of Islam is peaceful, “ten percent wants to see us dead.” The remaining ten percent, he writes, is “composed of extreme radicals who have taken Islam through a time tunnel and twisted it into something ugly and barbaric.”

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

Woman Arrested for Threatening School Violence: FBI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen West Defends Joyce Kaufman (Via Huffington Post)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his latest, as of this writing, blog post on his “Police Blotter,” Robert Spencer highlights a piece by Michael Medved entitled, “Disapproval of Islam is No Indication of Bigotry.” Medved writes:

The real question raised by all such expressions of public opinion should confront the nearly 40% of Americans who say they feel positively impressed by Islam and its influence.

What aspect of Muslim teaching and achievement most inspires such respondents? The daily reports of suicidal violence from every corner of the globe, with fellow-Muslims (invariably) as the primary victims? Or the well-known association of Islamic piety with open-hearted respect for the rights of women, homosexuals and infidels? Or is it the sterling record of economic progress, cutting age technology and social justice achieved by precisely those societies (like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Afghanistan) that take Shariah law most seriously? Or would Islam’s American admirers cite the record of Muslim charities in the U.S., the most prominent of which (remember the Holy Land Foundation?) have been shut down by the government for their lavish support of murderous terrorist groups like Hamas?

Quite naturally, the people who look favorably on Islam feel unconcerned over its ancient teachings or loathsome perversions in benighted corners of the globe, and focus instead on the law-abiding, patriotic, family-loving Muslims who have established benign communities throughout the United States. But even the decent people who reside in those communities rightly worry that their impressionable off-spring may become too religious, too zealous in their fervent commitment to The Prophet and his teachings.

Notice how, in a few short paragraphs, Medved cites such things as suicide terrorists, countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and Islam’s “ancient teachings” and infers that, therefore, Islam itself is bad.

Funny how Medved doesn’t mention all those “ancient teachings” of the Bible that demand stoning to death? Or, the fact that suicide terrorism is not a uniquely Islamic phenomenon? Moreover, Medved says:

There is no real parallel to this fear in Christian or Jewish homes. Christian parents may feel embarrassed by their religiously reborn children suddenly studying the Gospels obsessively, or witnessing obnoxiously to family or friends, but they needn’t worry about wayward kids blowing up themselves or others in the name of Jesus.

Really? What about the “Christian Bin Laden” who was arrested for plotting to blow up a women’s clinic? Or Timothy McVeigh? He was a known Christian. What about the Lord’s Resistance Army? Oh, but these are not Muslims, so they don’t count.

Medved goes on:

Jewish mothers and fathers may hate the scraggly beards and black hats adopted by a suddenly Orthodox generation, or resent the refusal to eat non-kosher food at home, but even the most fanatical of their kids feel scant temptation to travel to remote mountain hideouts as part of an international terror conspiracy.

Wow. Then, Mr. Medved must not have heard about the recent book Jewish Terrorism in Israel, written by two Israeli scholars, that documents Jewish terrorist activity dating from before the creation of the Jewish State. This is from the conclusion of the book:

It is true that radical Islamists to a certain extent justify their terrorism with their aspiration to help the Palestinian nation realize its nationalist goals and by claiming they are responding to the ongoing harm to Palestinians. However, even a movement such as Fatah, all the more so Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda, openly declare that they will not rest until the complete liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is achieved [the Al-Aqsa Mosque is located on the same site in Old Jerusalem as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism].

On the other hand, although in much smaller numbers, there are Jews who regard the very presence of the mosques as an obstacle to the redemption of the people of Israel. A larger number hold a Kahanist worldview, according to which—irrespective of the conflict with the Palestinians—the Jewish state should cast out the Arab minority from within. Some of them are willing to try to implement this goal in a violent way or by means designed to bring about a violent escalation in the relations between Jews and Arabs.

Again, they don’t talk about Muslims, so it doesn’t count. Medved also failed to mention the comments of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator, who said that Gentiles are meant to serve Jews:

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat.

In Israel, death has no dominion over them… With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.

This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said.

“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.

That is why gentiles were created,” he added.

You remember Rabbi Yosef…he called for a plague on the Palestinian people. Isn’t that, like, genocide?

But, wait! Medved exposes more of his worldview:

The spiritual leader of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero insists that the true problem is extremism, not Islam itself. “The real battlefront today is not between Muslims and non-Muslims,” declared Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to the Council on Foreign Relations, “but between moderates of all faith traditions against the extremists of all faith traditions.”

This ignores the huge differences –both quantitative (Islamic radicals are vastly more numerous) and qualitative (Muslim fanatics endorse uniquely murderous rhetoric and deeds) – between extremists in one faith tradition and all others.

A Christian fundamentalist may talk about burning Korans; Muslim crazies regularly burn buildings- and people. Even after Pastor Terry Jones called off his idiotic barbeque of the Islamic holy book, Muslims reacted with deadly riots in Kashmir that killed 16 and wounded sixty, while burning several schools and other government buildings.

Some Americans may dislike the style of worship in Pentecostal or Catholic churches, but the faithful (no matter how tackily dressed) never surge out of their sanctuaries on Sundays with fury and blood-lust, looking for non-believers to stone and property to destroy. Every Friday, however, somewhere in the vast Muslim world, some congregations of the devout react to their uplifting prayer services by going directly from their mosques to rousing orgies of rage and violence.

This last statement is an over-reaching exaggeration at best. And, once again, Medved says these things while seeming to ignore all the atrocities committed by Christians and Jews in the name of their religion. It is all documented on the website: www.whatiftheyweremuslim.com. It goes to show that extremists are all the same – namely, extreme – and come from all walks of spiritual life.

But, that doesn’t fit into the neat little world of people like “Scholar” Robert Spencer and Michael Medved, and so they ingore the facts and continue on with their assertions about Islam.

Medved concludes:

This observation isn’t an expression of bigotry; it’s a factual product of reading the newspaper, and regularly monitoring international news. The lame-brained insistence that all faith traditions deserve equal respect (or equal condemnation) doesn’t demonstrate tolerance or broad-mindedness; it expresses, rather, a refusal to take any religion seriously enough for honest evaluation of its virtues and flaws.

Reservations about Islam, and even fears of the Muslim faith’s influence on the world at large, don’t constitute paranoia or intolerance. These concerns represent an honest and reasonable response on the part of a significant segment of the public to a serious global challenge to the values that Americans hold most dear.

No, Mr. Medved, your “observation” is nothing more than a repeating of the Muslim “Police Blotter,” citing the crimes of those who are Muslim and then projecting their criminality to all of Islam. It is as unfair as judging a town by its own police blotter. Now, I’m not saying that Mr. Medved is a bigot because he, obviously, has a negative view of Islam. I am only showing that the facts are not on his side.

Kevin Fisher has been a staunch and vocal opponent to the planned Murfreesboro, Tennessee Islamic Cultural Center. In this video he responds quite strangely to a normal greeting from documentary film maker, Eric Allen Bell.

VIDEO: Mosque opponent hospitalized following verbal dispute with filmmaker

A well-known opponent of the proposed Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was hospitalized over the weekend following a verbal confrontation with a documentary filmmaker at a Tea Party event, all of which was caught on tape.

Mosque opponent Kevin Fisher can be seen — in a video posted on Youtube by documentarian Eric Allen Bell — telling Murfreesboro Police dispatchers that he was being “racially harassed.”

Watch the video by clicking here.

The video was recorded by Bell Saturday at the Rutherford County Tea Party’s Constitution Day event. It also shows Fisher asking a Murfreesboro Police dispatcher if he could “strike” Bell because he is within “arms reach.”

Bell, who is documenting the controversy surrounding the mosque, contends the only thing he said to Fisher was “Hi Kevin.” The documentary is tentatively entitled “Not Welcome.”

The latest controversy comes at a time of intense debate over the proposed mosque on Veals Road at Bradyville Pike. Hundreds packed into the Rutherford County courthouse last week to make their opinions about the mosque known.

Fisher, who could not immediately be reached for comment Monday, announced the same day that he and others had filed a lawsuit against the county in reference to the planning commission’s handling of the Islamic center. He is represented by attorney Joe Brandon, Jr.

The lawsuit called for a temporary injunction prohibiting further work at the mosque site until the issue could be resolved. Rutherford County Chancellor Robert Corlew denied the request for a restraining order to halt the construction Friday.

A Computer Aided Dispatch report on file at the Murfreesboro Police Department shows Fisher called 911 at 4:18 p.m. Saturday in reference to being “diabetic and feeling faint.” Fisher, a scheduled guest speaker at the event, also told the dispatcher that he was surrounded by four people who were reportedly harassing him.

The video recorded by Bell shows Fisher walking towards the Rutherford County Courthouse on the Public Square. Bell approaches Fisher and says “Hi Kevin.” Fisher responds “You are racially harassing me, leave me alone.”

Later, while on his cell phone, Fisher told dispatchers he was feeling “oppressed. I’m the only African American here …” Someone could be heard laughing in the background after Fisher made the statement.

Fisher then asked the dispatcher if he had the right to strike Bell, whom he said was within arms reach.

“Right now he is within arms reach,” Fisher said. “I have the legal right to strike him, can’t I? Then I suggest you get someone here as soon as possible because I don’t know what he might do.”

He then stressed to the dispatcher again that he was being harassed, the video shows.

“That’s racial,” he said. “I’m the only African American out here and he feels a duty to harass me.”

Read more of this story in Tuesday’s print edition of The Daily News Journal.

— Mark Bell, 615-278-5153

A NOTE TO READERS: Documentary filmmaker Eric Allen Bell is not related to The Daily News Journal reporter Mark Bell.

Islam and Muslim related issues have taken central stage as leading news stories in America with a frequency of coverage that might make other faiths green with envy. Does all this (un)wanted attention serve to bolster the perception of Muslims (as the saying goes, “any publicity is good publicity”) or does it present a scenario of helplessness in which ones faith is gawked and bawked at willy nilly by political opportunists and an overwhelmingly complicit uncritical media? Or both?

The answer to the first question is that it is not always true that “any publicity is good publicity,” if you believe that then there is a New York City Cab driver with whom I would like you to speak. The attention that has been levied on Islam and Muslims has taken stories that were really “tempests-in-a-tea-pot” and made them into hurricanes that only highlight the helplessness American Muslims face when it comes to their relationship with the media and society.

Take the example of the NYC Mosque and Cultural Center. This story was whipped up into a frenzy by a pair of bigoted anti-Muslim bloggers, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, two individuals who should be summarily dismissed as loons that have zero influence in the mainstream media or amongst any of our politicians.

Yet, we are reaping the fruits of their persistent and belligerent disinformation campaign about a “mosque at Ground Zero,” smears against an Imam who has been sponsored by the State Department as a diplomat, and a Muslim community that is being indicted as collectively guilty for the crimes perpetuated by a fringe extremist organization. Muslims are told to be sensitive to the those who are insensitive, to quietly take the bigotry and move elsewhere. For some, the heavily accented Dutch neo-fascist politician Geert Wilders’ cry of “no mosque here” resonates and is far more familiar than appeals to the Constitution and the rights of their neighbors.

More egregiously however has been the silencing of Muslim voices in the face of the perpetuation of stereotypes resulting in the witting and unwitting explosion of prejudice directed at Muslims. Muslims are only brought on TV to respond to crises, sometimes these crises are wholly manufactured by an uncritical media. A case study on this is needed but let us take the example of the threat against the South Park creators by Revolution Muslim and the International Burn the Koran Day by Pastor Terry Jones and his Dove Outreach Church.

The controversy that swelled around South Park was initiated by Revolution Muslim, a fringe group even amongst extremists, composed of about 4 morons with below zero credibility in the Muslim community. In fact, they were kicked out of the mosque they attended and were relegated to being scraggly street side loons with a bull horn. Most people with common sense who passed them by on the street viewed these people for who they were, a bunch of nuts.

However, for whatever reason the media took it upon itself to give them a voice. These nobodies became the spokesmen for Muslims, and in an even worse move Comedy Central lent credence to the threat by canceling the South Park episodes that included the Prophet Muhammad. No one asked Muslims for their opinion, Comedy Central didn’t bother to consult Muslims, instead they chose the path of self-censorship (or what some cynically term a PR stunt) at the expense of Muslims. The result was a perception that Islam not only can’t take criticism, not only do they react violently to such criticism but they can’t even handle their Prophet being depicted by people who don’t hold the same opinion as they do about pictorial representations of holy figures.

This perception metastasized into a phenomenon that pitted false paradigms against one another, leading to the willful deafness of one group so consumed by its perceptions that it ultimately resulted in the wrongheaded and thoroughly Islamophobic “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”

What did the media do to correct the ignorance it helped to perpetuate? Nothing. The damage was done, the story that was headline news for a while faded into the abyss of old news but the residue of perception remained.

Fast forward to the past few weeks and the debate over whack job Pastor Terry Jones’ call for an International Burn the Koran Day on 9/11. He based his action on Acts 19:19 in which the early Christians burned the books of witches. He believed he was doing the Godly, righteous thing since Islam was “of the Devil” and leading people to the doom of Hellfire.

But notice the difference in the coverage of the Revolutionary Muslim crackpots and this Terry Jones character. Even though both are fringe groups/individuals with unbelievably small followings, only one group, Revolutionary Muslim, was allowed to define a whole religion.

The distinction was made consistently and repeatedly from the top echelon of our government all the way down to our media that Terry Jones and his followers were a minority who don’t speak for Christianity or America, but the same point was given scant time or attention when it came to the South Park Controversy.

This double standard has to end because it is intellectually and morally dishonest and only perpetuates a perception of Muslims as backward primitives defined and represented by their least common denominator, a myth that can, as we have seen in the past, have dire consequences.

On the heels of the Salon.com article that traced the Ground Zero mosque controversy back to Pamela Geller, CNN ran a special segment on the anatomy of this story. In it Pamela Geller is called out for who she is, an “anti-Muslim blogger.” The evidence for that abounds,

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 is more where this came from, please read our profile of Geller, The Looniest Blogger Ever. The sad thing is that this segment on CNN had Pamela Geller on unopposed. The host, John Roberts, obviously didn’t do his research and didn’t press her enough with the tough questions that Geller should be asked.

Instead, the show in effect gave Pamela Geller an opportunity to lie and cover up the fact that she is a Muslim hater. It is now common to see Pamela in her TV appearances claim that she “loves Muslims,” though the type of love she seems to be talking about is some twisted love in which the only good Muslim is one who doesn’t practice Islam, or believe in the Quran or the Prophet Muhammad.

The fact is she is against the building of mosques. Even in this CNN program she exposes herself by equating terrorists as representatives of “pure Islam,” echoing her friend, Euro-supremacist demagogue Geert Wilders who wants to tax the Hijab, ban Muslim immigration and outlaw Islam in the Netherlands.

The truth is Geller is opposed to the building of mosques, as is clear when she triumphantly claims victory after the Swiss ban minarets and when she calls for the destruction of mosques like the Golden Dome.

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

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

Nonie Darwish

Our MSNBC debut!

Nonie Darwish was on MSNBC along with CAIR-New York representative Zead Ramadan (hat tip: JustAFan). Darwish was her usual self, blathering about how she “is against this frenzy of Mosque building,” trying to legitimate her putrid and irrational stance by putting up her bona fides as a “former Muslim,” you know the usual spiel we are used to from clowns like Walid Shoebat and company who parlay their too often made-up-out-of-whole-clothe ex-Muslim stories into big bucks and easy living.

However, this time she was stopped dead in her tracks, and her soft tone quickly turned shrill when Ramadan pointed out to her that she is featured on “Loonwatch.com for fibbing.” Yes, Darwish, you are featured on our site for being “Caught in a pool of lies,” an article written by Professor Jim Holstun,  and trust me we are not done exposing you, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

In response Darwish was slightly incomprehensible, and cried “those people at Loonwatch are Imams.”

Watch it:

Transcription:

Ramadan: “Ms. Darwish is on Loonwatch.com because of fibbing, she tells stories all the time, she fabricates information in order to push her ultra-right concept. She’s an extremist.”

Darwish: The people who are on Loonwatch are those Imams who are tyring, who are trying to fool the American people, who don’t want to stand up for our rights and freedoms in America.

So not only are we George Soros funded, one-half of the Leftist Mooslim-alliance, but we are also Imams trying to fool Americans. This gets funnier by the minute.

Finally someone has taken the time to bring up loony Pamela Geller’s crazy quotes to her face. She seemed surprised and dumbfounded…again.

I really love the Alyona Show! Wasn’t that host awesome? Why is Russia TV doing a better job at challenging the Geller’s of the world then our own oblivious and slow mainstream media?

There was a plethora, a million things that the host could have brought up, all in all she did a pretty good job. How silly does Pamela look with her hypothesis that Islam inspired Hitler. She did not leave that interview feeling good about herself.

Please take some time out and thank the host, Lauren Lyster for the great job that she did. She needs encouragement and positive feedback because the haters are going to be contacting her and spitting all sorts of vile.

Contact:

U.S. bureau

Phone: + 1 202 775 2305/06
Fax: + 1 202 775 2309
E-mail: RT-US@rttv.ru

Pamela “The Looniest Blogger Ever” Geller was on The Alyona Show (Russia TV) with Palestinian Muslim Rapper, Will Youmans. Pamela was her usual shrill conspiratorial self. This must have been her worst nightmare: a Palestinian, Muslim and a rapper!

The nice thing about this episode was that at least someone was challenging Pamela, and I bet if Will had more information on her (read our site Will) he would have completely obliterated her.

Notice Pamela still claiming to love Muslims.

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Anything with the word “Muslim” in it is bound to whip Conservo-freaks and their associative wingnuts into a frenzy.

This is exactly what happened when Charles Bolden, NASA administrator was visiting the Middle East and appeared on Al-Jazeera. (hat tip: Les)

Conservatives Furious Over NASA Muslim ‘Outreach’

by Max Fisher

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently traveled to the Middle East. That was his first mistake. His second was giving an interview to the Middle Eastern satellite news station Al Jazeera. But his third and fatal mistake came when he suggested that he traveled to the region in part to “reach out to the Muslim world.” Conservatives are apoplectic over this interview. The video, key quotes, and media reaction are all below.

Bolden: I am here in the region – its sort of the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s visit to Cairo – and his speech there when he gave what has now become known as Obama’s “Cairo Initiative” where he announced that he wanted this to become a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. When I became the NASA Administrator – before I became the NASA Administrator – he charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.Question: Are you in some sort of diplomatic role … to win hearts and minds?

Bolden: No no, not at all. Its not a diplomatic anything. What it is – is that it is trying to expand our outreach so that we get more people who can contribute to the things that we do – the international Space Station is as great as it is because we have a conglomerate of about 15 plus nations who have contributed something to that partnership that has made it what it is today.

• Islam and Science Don’t Mix The Washington Times argues that the U.S. has nothing to gain in scientific discourse with Muslim nations. “What’s unclear is what Mr. Bolden believes the United States has to gain by reaching out to a part of the world that has been technologically stagnant for centuries. The Muslim world has nothing to offer the United States as a space-faring nation. If anything, America should be discouraging Middle East space programs. … Islam’s meager contribution to human technological advancement is no accident.”

• ‘Psychobabble’ and ‘Imperial Condescension’ The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer says on Fox News, “This is a new height in fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of to feel good about their past scientific achievements, it’s the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension, and adolescent diplomacy. If I didn’t know that Obama had told this, I’d demand the firing of Charles Bolden the way I would Michael Steele. This is absolutely unbelievable.”

• Proves Muslims Should Love America More Fox News host Sean Hannity professed, “look, I have a hard time with the president’s, quote, ‘outreach’ to the Muslim community in this way. When he spoke to the Muslim world, he didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kuwait. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Kosovo. He didn’t talk about America’s contributions to Indonesia or Iraq. Doesn’t — I don’t hear America being praised enough by the Muslim world. Does the Muslim world give America the credit it’s due?”

• Bush’s NASA Head Condemns Fox News’ Judson Berger reports that Bush-era NASA Administrator Michael Griffin “described as ‘deeply flawed’ the idea that the space exploration agency’s priority should be outreach to Muslim countries. ‘NASA … represents the best of America. Its purpose is not to inspire Muslims or any other cultural entity.’”

• ‘Ravages of Islamism’ Hostile to Science National Review’s Daniel Pipes writes, “Muslims at present do lag in the sciences and the way to fix this is not condescension from NASA but some deep Muslim introspection. Put differently, accomplished scientists of Muslim origin — including NASA’s Farouk El-Baz, who is of Egyptian origins — do exist. The problem lies in societies, and include everything from insufficient resources to poor education to the ravages of Islamism.”

• Waste of Tax Dollars Reason’s Michael Moynihan writes, “Poor dears, feeling bad about their underappreciated contributions to science, math, and engineering. Seems to me an entirely reasonable way to fritter away tax dollars, on the mental health of Yemeni undergraduates.”

• Explains Tolerance of Iran’s Nuclear Program Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey makes the connection, “Hey, maybe that’s why Obama hasn’t taken the Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb all that seriously until now. He just wanted Iran to make the Muslim world feel good about their achievements in science!”

Jonah Goldberg, hardcore Republican idealogue saw a Nazi hand in the whole event:

Jonah Goldberg Sees Nazism Behind NASA Administrator’s Outreach to Muslims

by Blue Texan

In case you hadn’t heard, wingnuts are freaking out that Charles Bolden, the head of NASA (and a former astronaut and Marine Corps General), said a few nice things about Muslims. And naturally, the Pantload discovers swastikas at the root of the problem.

Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn’t have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means “coordination.” The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay “independent.” If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state’s ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.

Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.

So true. I mean, what kind of Nazi would impose a political agenda on NASA?

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Or the surgeon general?

Former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona yesterday accused the Bush administration of muzzling him on sensitive public health issues, becoming the most prominent voice among several current and former federal science officials who have complained of political interference.

“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” he said.

Or the Justice Department?

The Justice Department advocated in early 2005 removing up to 20 percent of the nation’s U.S. attorneys whom it considered to be “underperforming” but retaining prosecutors who were “loyal Bushies,” according to e-mails released by Justice late yesterday.

There’s a reason Pantload was dubbed, “one of the stupidest people in our public discourse.“

David Wood Rambles

In my last article I debunked the lies and disinformation in the first half of David Wood’s anti-Muslim/anti-Mosque diatribe. Since then we have received a lot of comments and tips regarding David Wood’s background. Apparently David Wood is a Teaching Fellow at Fordham University where he is pursuing his PhD in Philosophy. I wonder if the administration at Fordham would consider Wood’s anti-Muslim activities as being in line with its Jesuit traditions and values? Maybe we should start a campaign to let them know?

Paul Williams, of the Muslim Debate Initiative has also stated that David Wood told him during a debate, in front of an audience of a hundred or more, that he attempted to murder his father and that he was sent to a mental institution for the attack which left his father permanently disabled,

About a year ago I moderated a debate at Westbourne Park Baptist Church (my old church here in London), between Wood and a Muslim. In front of an audience of probably one hundred people, mostly Christians, Wood told the audience of some of the more disturbing aspects of his past including his unspeakable attack on his own father with a hammer. Happily his father did not die (though Wood says he really wanted to kill him). His father is permanently disabled however. Wood spent time in a mental institution.

Yahya Snow, an Islamic apologist who has been following David Wood’s work also commented that Wood told him that, “his blog is not about evangelising to Muslims but about ‘warning’ non-Muslims about Islam.” This would explain why he and his group were the sole Christian Evangelical group arrested at the Dearborn Arab Festival, slamming on its face the argument that they were being “persecuted” for preaching Christ.

In fact, a few Evangelical Christians who witnessed the event wrote on David Wood’s blog (via. MDI),

Spiffy the Basset said…

‘This is a complete and total lie and David and Nabeel should be ashamed of themselves. Tonight, just as last night, there were dozens of Christians and former muslims at the festival witnessing to muslims. None of them had problems with people. None of the other several dozen “Christian preachers” were arrested. Lies, lies, and more lies.

The same happened last night. I saw Nabeel and David showboating and trying to cause a scene and know they were not only expecting to be arrested, but to some degree, trying to get arrested.

They care more about their hatred for islam than their love for muslims. I have evangelized in many continents and in places far more hostile than the dearborn festival, but can say with experience that they did not at all suffer for the cross, they suffered for their egos.’

June 19, 2010 10:52 PM

All of this makes me wonder if I should waste time even debunking the rest of the anti-Mosque video. David Wood is an obvious huckster with real problems. Maybe a longer stay at the mental institution was in order?

Anyhow, someone has to drudge through the swamp and refute the lies, lies, lies.

Of Mosques and Men

Picking up from the 3:00 mark David says,

This is when I first realized that there were two forces at work within Western Muslims like Nabeel. On the one hand he was born and raised in the United States, his father was in the US military, he loved America, but on the other hand, even though he came from the most peaceful sect of Islam there was something in Nabeel that allowed him to smile when there were terrorist attacks. Now those of you who know personally, who know Muslims close enough to where they can tell you what they really think, you know that this is really quite common, good citizens in public, not so good citizens in private.

What words can describe the above verbal barf and pseudo-psychological sewage spewed by Wood? He uses Nabeel, a Christian apologist and leader in Wood’s organization, (who seems not to mind being used as his ex-Muslim-mascot-that-evidences-the innate-evil-of Muslims-example) to drive the point home that even if you are a “peaceful Muslim,” there is something hidden, something stealth about you.

If this doesn’t sound eerily similar to the anti-Semitic racism and sinister conspiracies about Jews that were propagated in the past then you need to read up on history. Wood’s entire monotone delivery has the timbre of a sleazy used car salesman combined with a soothsaying Nazi propagandist trying hard to sound like Captain Kirk.

The hypocrisy is also glaring, someone needs to tell David Wood that if he really wants to talk about “good citizens in public, not so good citizens in private” he should look towards his Christian brethren; to the likes of Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, not to mention those family value politicians who love to trumpet their Christian bona fides while fondling male pages at the same time. I think there was once a Jewish carpenter who summed it up best, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

Wood is not content to end the disinformation and pseudo-psychological babble about “dual-Muslim natures,”

Interestingly, this duel Muslim nature is advocated in the Quran. If you turn to Surah 3, verse 28, you will see that the Quran says, “Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them, taking (as it were) security.” So if you’re a Muslim you are not supposed to be friends with unbelievers unless to protect yourself.

What this means is that if Muslims feel threatened by a stronger advisory, say the United States of America, they can pretend to be friendly in order to protect themselves, in order to guard themselves against these unbelievers. The greatest Islamic  commentator of all time, Ibn Kathir comments on Surah 3:28, and he says, that when Muslims are outnumbered by a stronger advisory, “…believers are allowed to show friendship outwardly but never inwardly.”

He goes on to quote Muhammad’s companion, Abu Darda who said “we smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.”

Wood again propagates half-truths and lies to further mislead his audience into viewing Muslims as a sinister bunch not to be trusted even when they smile. He throws out context, history, theology and the polyvalent interpretations within Islamic canon. All with the aim of portraying Muslims as a deceiving group of untrustworthy criminals who telepathically communicate taqqiyah with each other like mindless ants as part of a plot to destroy the West.

THE FACTS:

The Literalist Ultra-Conservative interpretation:

The truth is there is a minority of Literalist ultra-Conservative Muslims who hold the opinion that Muslims should not be intimate friends with non-Muslims (I would venture to say 1% or less), because they fear Muslims will be put into a position of harm (physically and spiritually), will lose their religion, and take on the ways and mores of other religions.

However, even here there is a necessary caveat that must be made, this literalist minority while espousing the belief that one should not be close intimate friends with non-Muslims also states that one should deal justly and kindly with them, they say this based on the verse,

Allah does not forbid you to deal justly and kindly with those who fought not against you on account of religion nor drove you out of your homes. Verily, Allah loves those who deal with equity. (60:8)

As for the latter part of the verse, the interpretation and selective quotation from Ibn Kathir, (presumptuously labeled the “greatest Islamic commenter ever” by Wood when no such position or authority exists) does not support Wood’s theory. In fact, it is an intellectually deceptive attempt that leaves out the true import of the verse and is even a clumsy handling of the Ultra-Conservative interpretation.

The ellipses that Wood inserted is the key to understanding the context. No where does Ibn Kathir mention “when Muslim are outnumbered by a stronger advisory,” (David Wood made that up whole-cloth). What he actually writes is, ‘do not take disbelievers as friends in preference to Muslims,’ and the portion in question, unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them, is rendered as unless you indeed fear a danger from them. Ibn Kathir then interprets it as “meaning, except those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers. In this case, such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly.”

So clearly we see that the ellipses purposely inserted by Wood hides the true interpretation given by Ibn Kathir. Ibn Kathir was essentially saying that Muslims who fear for their lives may be friendly in order to guard themselves from harm.

Think for example of the Spanish Inquisition, that was a time and a place where Muslims (and Jews) might have put the above into practice. Fearing for your own and your families safety is cause enough to show a “dual nature.” In fact, many Jews and Muslims under intense persecution proclaimed outwardly to have converted to Catholicism, while inwardly they remained Muslims and Jews, these crypto-Muslims (Moriscos) and crypto-Jews (Marranos) were known as Conversos.

Can David Wood honestly find fault with a verse that gives a dispensation to Muslims to save their lives and protect their religion by hiding it or acquiescing to their enemy in the face of danger or persecution?

David Wood bastardizes the verse by attributing an interpretation to Muslims that does not exist. He does this by asserting half-truthfully the minority ultra-conservative literalist interpretation.

The lie comes in the second half of the verse, where he attempts to say that when Muslims are “outnumbered,” they can be friendly with non-Muslims but inwardly they must hate them until a time comes when they have the numbers to take over, a position that the ultra-conservatives don’t advance. We have demonstrated that the literalist ultra-conservatives are in fact referring to a situation of danger that Muslims may find themselves in and not a tactic of domination.

The Context:

When we analyze this verse and its surrounding verses in context we learn that the verse was directed at the “hypocrites” (Munafiqoon), a group who entered Islam in outward appearance only in an attempt to destroy it. They had allied themselves with the sworn enemies of Islam, the pagan Meccans and their allies.

The Prophet Muhammad was speaking to his community in Medina and prophesied to them that one day they would hold sovereignty over the lands of Persia and Byzantium. The hypocrites responded by saying, “How preposterous!”

In response to this, verses 3:26-29 were revealed,the Tafsir al-Jalalayn, written about 100 years after Ibn Kathir’s exegesis explains,

When the Prophet (s) promised his community sovereignty over the lands of Persia and Byzantium, the hypocrites said, ‘How preposterous!’, and so the following was revealed, “Say, ‘O Allah , Owner of Sovereignty, You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will. You honor whom You will and You humble whom You will. In Your hand is [all] good. Indeed, You are over all things competent.’” (3:26)

“You cause the night to enter the day, and You cause the day to enter the night; and You bring the living out of the dead, and You bring the dead out of the living. And You give provision to whom You will without account.” (3:27)

…

The hypocrites in particular and humanity in general is then told,

Say, “Whether you conceal what is in your breasts or reveal it, Allah knows it. And He knows that which is in the heavens and that which is on the earth. And Allah is over all things competent. (3:29)

Tafsir al-Jalalayn explains,

Say, to them: ‘Whether you hide what is in your breasts, in your hearts, of patronage to them, or disclose it, manifest it, God knows it and, He, knows what is in the heavens and what is in the earth; and God is Able to do all things, and this includes punishing those who patronise them.

The above is indicative of how the majority of Muslims explain these verses; revelation in a context of war and betrayal. Particularly in response to the hypocrites who claimed to be Muslims but concealed their alliance and patronage with enemies who wanted to annihilate the nascent Muslim community.

We also see that the dispensation referred to in verse 3:28 pertains to particular situations Muslims might find themselves in when they are in danger.

This becomes even more evident when we realize that at the time of the revelation of this verse there were Muslims who lived in pagan Mecca who concealed their religion and had to show patronage to the enemies of the Muslims due to fear of death or torture. Referring to them the Quran says, ‘you may outwardly show that you are allied with those who are at war with Muslims and may harm you for being Muslim, but inwardly you should feel differently.’

To drive the point home we look at one more verse that puts this subject into context,

For Allah loves those who are just. Allah only forbids you with regard to those who fight you for your faith, and drive you out of your homes and support others in driving you out, from turning to them for protection (or taking them as wali). Those who seek their protection they are indeed wrong- doers. (60:9)

Also, logically we have to question, if Islam doesn’t allow Muslims to befriend non-Muslims, why would it allow Muslim men to marry non-Muslims? Marriage is even more intimate than friendship, it is based on love and friendship.

Abu Darda’s statement: “We smile in the face of some…”:

David Wood then goes on to quote Muhammad’s companion, Abu Darda who said, “we smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.”

The above quote from Abu Darda, which Wood employs as a means to bash us into the belief that Muslims have a “dual nature” actually comes back to bite him in the butt.

Abu Darda’s (hadith) statement can be found in Saheeh Bukhari, under the chapter heading, Al-Mudaaraah ma3 An’Naas which means “Politeness/Gentleness with the People.” So rather than being something Taqqiyah or Jihad related, this statement actually pertains to polite manners and etiquette!

In explaining the statement, Imam Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani, writer of one of the seminal explanations of Saheeh Bukhari wrote,

Ibn Battaal  said: Politeness is part of the attitude of the believers, and it is lowering the wing of humility to people, speaking gently, and not speaking harshly to them, which are among the best means of creating harmony.

Ibn Muflih, an eminent 14th century scholar of the Hanbali school wrote concerning Abu Darda’s statement,

This attitude of Abu Darda does not mean approving of something haram (prohibited); rather it is politeness that may achieve some purpose.

Ibn Abd’ al-Barr, an eminent scholar and jurist who predates Ibn Kathir also quoted Abu Darda’s statement with regard to the virtues of good manners.

Abu Darda’s statement was intended to be a spiritual teaching, meant (in Islamic theological semantics) as a “heart softener” toward those who have “hard hearts.” The context given is that some individuals have brash and very rude manners, and the best way to deal with them, even though you dislike them in your heart is through politeness and good manners, because that may eventually lead to the rude individual reforming him or herself. It is the actualization of the Quranic verse, “Repel evil with that which is better,” i.e. respond to evil with goodness.

“Don’t trust those evil Mooslims, please!”:

Wood continues,

What’s my point you ask? Well, the Muslims who want to construct a massive mosque here, assure us that they are doing it to honor the victims of 9/11 and not to construct a symbol of Islamic supremacy. They assure us that they are going to build a beacon of understanding and harmony. A place where people of all faiths to gather and condemn extremism.

[Pause]

Do you believe that?

If so, I would like to sell you a bottle of Wood’s magical cure all, from the miracle springs of Poland for the low low price $870.

This mocking and very ineffectual attempt at a joke falls dead on delivery. In this instance David Wood may not be selling “magic” holy water like many of his televangelist preacher/prophet brethren are want to do, but he is selling something else — hate.

Wood is pitching the idea that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a supporter of American intervention in Afghanistan and a Sufi is in cahoots with Bin Laden. You see, David Wood tells us, Muslims are all the same at the end of the day, when they speak of harmony and peace, and when they condemn terrorism they are not to be trusted.

What makes this especially ironic is that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf knew people in the Twin Towers! Many of his congregants worked there, but in Wood’s world those facts just don’t matter because the “Muslim other” cannot be allowed to share in the tragedy and suffering of 9/11, that would humanize them, that you would make them Americans.

Of Churches and Men?:

Wood then attempts to prove his point,

My friends, what did Muslims do when they conquered Mecca? They went to the Ka’ba, the center of pagan worship and they claimed it for Islam, what did Muslims do when they took Jerusalem, where did they build their mosque, they built it on the Temple Mount, when Muslims conquered Damascus, where did they build their mosque? They demolished the Church of St. John the Baptist and replaced it with a mosque. Why?

Cordoba Mosque with the Cathedral in the Middle

While Muslims have had their share of taking over Churches or other places of worship and converting them into Mosques (Hagia Sophia), in that age and time that was the practice of most religions, including Christianity. The Spanish did it when they invaded Cordoba and transformed the famous Cordoba Mosque into a Catholic Church by plopping a Cathedral right in the middle of the Mosque.

As far as the capturing of Mecca goes, then the uniqueness of the circumstances and context must be elaborated. According to Arab tradition, the founder of the Ka’ba was Prophet Abraham who dedicated it to the One God. The Muslims, whether we view them as correct or not, believed essentially that they were only restoring the Ka’ba for its original purpose as the House of the One God, similar to the Temple created by Solomon in Jerusalem. They did not believe that by abolishing the practice of idolatry at the Ka’ba that they were supplanting the old and original religion with a new one.

As for Jerusalem, we must note that when Muslims gained sovereignty over the city, the Temple Mount was being used as a trash dump by the Christians. There was no Jewish Temple and it is highly likely there was no Church. In fact, it was only under Muslim rule that Jews were allowed to come back to Jerusalem to worship, having previously been banned by the Byzantine Christians.

As for the Church of St. John the Baptist or what is known as the Umayyad Mosque today, then we are about to give David Wood a history lesson. Damascus is one of the, if not the, oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The site of the Umayyad Mosque has an interesting and unique history of conquerors building religious structures devoted to their specific God(s) and cults,

It was 1000 BC at the latest when the Arameans built a temple here for Hadad, the god of storms and lightening. A basalt orthostat dating from this period, depicting a sphinx, has been discovered in the northeast corner of the mosque.

In the early first century AD, the Romans arrived and built a massive temple to Jupiter over the Aramean temple. The Roman temple stood upon a rectangular platform (temenos) that measured about 385 meters by 305 meters, with square towers at each corner. Parts of the outer walls of the temenos still survive, but virtually nothing remains of the temple itself.

In the late fourth century, the temple area became a Christian sacred site. The Temple of Jupiter was destroyed and a church dedicated to John the Baptist was built in its place. The church was (and is) believed to enshrine the head of the Baptist, and the site became an important pilgrimage destination in the Byzantine era.

Initially, the Muslim conquest of Damascus in 636 did not affect the church, as the building was shared by Muslim and Christian worshippers. It remained a church and continued to draw Christian pilgrims; the Muslims built a mud-brick structure against the southern wall where they could pray.

Under the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid, however, the church was demolished and the present mosque was built in its place between 706 and 715. An indemnity was paid to the Christians in compensation.

The Mosque still contains relics attributed to John the Baptist. It is a beacon of interfaith interaction and draws Christians (such as Pope John Paul II) and Manadeans. One notices also that the Church of St. John the Baptist itself was built after the destruction of a Roman Temple dedicated to Jupiter! Will David Wood say that act was a practice of Christian supremacy? Can we link that action with current projects by American Christian missionaries in Iraq and say that they are a sign of Christian supremacy?

In contrast to the Byzantines, the early Muslims who conquered Syria left the Christian Holy places untouched. If it was a practice of Muslims to convert the Holy places of non-Muslims into mosques to “show that they are in control,” surely the zealous companions of Muhammad would have immediately gone to the Church and made it into a mosque? However, it was 70 years later that the Mosque was built in its place, and quite out of pattern for conquerors, the Muslims actually paid an indemnity to the Christians as compensation for demolishing the Church.

The Conspiracy Theory Rears its Ugly Head:

Keep in mind, this was in the mind of Muslims all along, right after the September 11th attacks, Muslims were joking about filling the city with mosques and now they tell us that they are doing it to honor the victims of 9/11. Smiling in our faces while cursing us in their hearts. Come out of the cave America, it’s dark in there.

This brutally long and disgusting ode to disinformation, Islamophobia and bigotry finally comes to a close with one final outright and bold embrace of the conspiracy theory that has been the theme of this whole video: “keep in mind, this was in the mind of Muslims all along.”

Those crafty Muslims have been conspiring this whole time to take over our country and subjugate us to Islam! Somehow, in David Wood’s world the so called proposed Cultural Center and Mosque which he repeatedly and falsely refers to as “massive” was in the “mind of Muslims all along.” Bin Laden and his goons were working with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to build this Mosque. The plans announced by Cordoba Initiative that this is not a “massive mosque” but a center that will honor the victims (which by the way included 300 Muslims), contain a mosque, theater, gym, etc. cannot be believed because what Muslims say should never be trusted.

Why do I get the feeling that the only one who is truly smiling in our faces and cursing us in his heart is David Wood? A loon trying by any means possible to sow seeds of hate and suspicion. Such a person would benefit from the teaching of another famous Jew who was instructing his flock, “what­ever a man sows, this he will also reap.”

David Wood is a Christian apologist who attempts to save Muslim souls through his organization Acts 17 Apologetics and www.answeringmuslims.com. In the past Wood and his entourage, including Nabeel Qureshi, have targeted the Dearborn Arab Festival in Michigan for proselytism.

At the 2009 Arab Festival, David Wood made a controversial, and some claim one sided video that received over a million hits on YouTube which showed them getting kicked out of the festival. They claim that they were just engaged in free speech, whereas security at the festival stated that they were insulting and harassing festival goers.

Other Evangelical Christians criticized Wood and his group as being agitators,

“The Rev. Haytham Abi Haydar, a Christian evangelical convert from Islam with Arabic Alliance Church in Dearborn, said that a Christian group called Acts 17 Apologetics caused the problems at this year’s Arab festival.

They put cameras in their faces and were very antagonistic,” Abi Haydar said of the group that produced the controversial video that has drawn almost 1.4 million views on YouTube.

Just recently at the 2010 Dearborn Arab Festival, David Wood, Nabeel Qureshi and two others were arrested for disorderly conduct. Obviously intending to make a scene in an attempt at more YouTube success by portraying themselves as being persecuted.

Now David Wood, whose “love of  Muslims” seems to be akin to Pamela Geller’s (who he links to favorably a number of times) is joining arms with the anti-Muslim hate group SIOA in opposing the mosque and cultural center that is to be built a few blocks away from Ground Zero.

In the following video, filled with disinformation, falsehood and inaccuracies he expounds his reasons as to why he is against the mosque, and why he sees Muslims as a lurking evil attempting to take over the West. We expose it all in this series.

Of Mosques and Men

10 years later, two groups of Muslims, the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement are planning to build a Massive 13 story mosque right here behind me.

Right off the bat we see the disinformation at work, this isn’t a “13 story mosque,” (why would Muslims need 13 stories to pray in the middle of Manhattan?). The fact is this is a cultural center, that along side a space for a mosque will contain a theater, swimming pool, restaurant and other facilities with the expressed goals of promoting tolerance and mutual co-operation between people of different and varying backgrounds.

“Understandably, many people here in the West are concerned…”

WTF? Many people in the “West” are concerned? I highly doubt the masses of people in Europe or Canada really care about this particular Islamophobia-driven agitation, unless the “many people” he is referring to is the small hate group SIOE (Stop the Islamization of Europe and parent organization of SIOA) whose main campaigns revolve around opposing mosques and other anti-Muslim initiatives.

“…this isn’t an attempt to honor the victims of 9/11 instead, it may be an attempt to build a symbol of Islamic victory. Now, I have the same concern, but mine is slightly different, my concern is slightly different, it is based on a photograph I saw, while I was still in College.

While I was in College my best friend was a Muslim named Nabeel Qureshi. Nabeel showed me some photographs shortly after the September 11th attacks, and I found them quite surprising. Muslims were passing these photographs around and Nabeel thought they were absolutely hilarious. The first photograph was a picture of George W. Bush as a Muslim, and I have to admit that was actually pretty funny,

The second photograph wasn’t so funny, it was a photo shopped picture of the Statue of Liberty covered in a full veil.

Now, this one bothered me a little bit. The Statue of Liberty, the symbol of freedom and justice, covered by a full veil, a symbol of oppression and Shariah Law, now these two pictures actually worked their way around the internet and lots of people are familiar with them.

The third picture, is the one that disturbed me however, it was a photo shopped picture of New York City covered in mosques and minarets, in the bottom corner it said New York City 2006.

The idea was that the terrorist attacks had cleared the ground for the construction of new mosques.

David Wood makes some audacious claims that we are supposed to take as veritable truth upon his word. First, that the photographs he saw originated with Muslims. Second, that Muslims at his College were passing them around, (ostensibly in “celebration of 9/11″). Third, that a burka is a symbol of Shariah Law, and fourth, that the third picture was meant to convey the “idea that the terrorist attacks had cleared the ground for the construction of mosques.”

The truth is that all three of the photographs originate from a comedy website called “www.joe-ks.com,” (a fact conveniently hidden by David Wood in the video) which claims to be the “largest source of internet humor.” The site is definitely not Muslim or terrorist sympathetic, essentially it is a website that has jokes about everything, and a lot of the jokes lampoon terrorists and extremists, and some of them even lampoon whole countries such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.

For example one of their posts is titled Afghan Humour:

Q: What do Kabul and Hiroshima have in common?
A: Nothing,…. yet.

Q: How do you play Taliban bingo?
A: B-52…F-16…B-1…

Q: What is the Taliban’s national bird?
A: Duck

Q: How is Bin Laden like Fred Flintstone?
A: Both may look out their windows and see Rubble.

Q: Why does the Afghanistan Navy have glass bottom boats?
A: So they can see their Air Force.

Q: What do Osama Bin Laden and General Custer have in common?
A: They both want to know where those Tomahawks are coming from.

Q: Why aren’t there any Wal-Marts in Afghanistan?
A. Because there’s a Target on every corner.

David Wood must have seen the original post on Joe-KS which would put the pictures above into their proper context instead of the deceptive context that he has created. The pictures weren’t created or disseminated by Muslims after 9/11 as a means of celebrating or “dealing with the tragedy through humor”, in fact the post that first contained the pictures was lampooning terrorists. The post published in October 2001 was titled, If the Taliban wins the War #1, #2, #3.

David Wood makes a claim that Muslims were passing these pictures around when the truth is they were created by and disseminated by non-Muslims who were making fun of terrorists and extremists. He doesn’t provide any evidence of Muslims passing these pictures out, instead we are supposed to take him at his word.

In reality it is a clever ploy that omits the fact that not only were Muslims also victims of 9/11 but all major American Muslim organizations condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms. However, he wants to caste Muslims in a dehumanized image: ‘they are not part of our suffering, in fact they are mocking our suffering and enjoy and support 9/11.’

His disingenuous claim that the third picture is meant by Muslims to convey the idea “that the terrorist attacks had cleared the ground for the construction of mosques” is a cynical attempt to link the humor piece deriding the Taliban to the current construction of the Cordoba Cultural Center.

He attempts to instill in the minds of his watchers the idea that this was the plan all along. In doing so he asserts the interesting, if off the wall conspiracy theory that Osama Bin Laden was somehow in cahoots with the founder of the Cordoba Initiative Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, (a Sufi Imam who has condemned Bin Laden and supported the War in Afghanistan).

You see, the plan all along to subvert and take over the West was that Bin Laden’s goons would fly planes into the Twin Towers, then ten years later Imam Abdul Rauf, (who has never spoken to or met Bin Laden) would telepathically (through secret Muslim Taqqiyah radar) communicate with Bin Laden to receive orders to stealthily build a gigantic 13 story Mosque a few blocks away from Ground Zero!

Stay tuned for part 2…

Tina Anderson

We have often heard about horror stories from Saudia Arabia where a woman is raped and along with her attacker is accused of committing fornication and then flogged or at least sentenced to be flogged. Some might think that this sort of thing could never happen anywhere else, but something equally egregious occurred here in the USA.

A Christian church found out that one of its parishioner raped a fellow parishioner twice, impregnating her. What did they do? They sheltered the rapist, made him apologize for raping the girl and made the girl apologize for becoming pregnant.

Police: Girl raped, then relocated

By Trent Spiner / Monitor staff

After being raped and impregnated by a fellow churchgoer more than twice her age, a 15-year-old Concord girl was forced by Trinity Baptist Church leaders to stand before the congregation to apologize before they helped whisk her out of state, according to the police.

While her pastor, Chuck Phelps, reported the alleged rape in 1997 to state youth officials, Concord police detectives were never able to find the victim. The victim said she was sent to another church member’s home in Colorado, where she was home-schooled and not allowed to have contact with others her age. It wasn’t until this past February that the victim, who is now 28, decided to come forward after reading about other similar cases, realizing for the first time it wasn’t her fault that she had been raped, she told the police.

The police arrested Ernest Willis, 51, of Gilford, last week in connection with the case, accusing him of raping the girl twice – once in the back seat of a car he was teaching her to drive in and again after showing up at her Concord home while her parents were away. He was charged with four felonies – two counts of rape and two counts of having sex with a minor, court records show.

In a statement to the police, the victim said Willis came to her home in the summer of 1997 without warning.

“He said he wanted to talk to me about something so I let him in the house,” she wrote. “He locked the door behind him and pushed me over to the couch. I had a dress on and he pulled it off. I pushed my hands against his shoulders and said ‘No,’ but he didn’t stop.”

At the time of the alleged rape, Phelps was in touch with the police, who told him to contact the Division for Children, Youth and Families.

But moving the girl out of state prevented the police from collecting evidence or a statement, the police said yesterday.

“Without a victim, it makes it very difficult to have a case,” said Lt. Keith Mitchell. “That basically made the investigation very difficult.”

At the time, Willis also refused to give a statement, police records show.

So for 13 years, a file on the case sat closed and marked “unresolved” at the Concord police station.

Police records do not show whether detectives asked church leaders to help them get in contact with the victim or if information was withheld.

“If somebody tried to cover this up or not cover this up, that’s a separate issue,” Mitchell said.

Phelps did not return a message seeking comment yesterday. He no longer works at the church.

“The leadership of Trinity Baptist Church reported this alleged crime within 24 hours of hearing the accusations on Oct. 8, 1997,” said spokesman Peter Flint from a prepared statement. “We continue in our commitment to cooperate with authorities so that justice is served.”

‘Completely in shock’

The victim said she came forward after getting in touch with Jocelyn Zichterman, who runs an online group for victims of church abuse.

In a seven-page statement to the police, the victim recounted the moments leading up to her departure from New Hampshire.

At 14, she began babysitting for Willis, a well-known member of the church. She told the police she would often stay the night if he got home late.

Just over a year later, he offered to give her driving lessons. While in the parking lot of a Concord business, Willis asked her to pull over to switch seats, she told the police.

But instead he pulled her into the backseat and raped her, according to a statement to the police.

In the summer of 1997, Willis raped her again, this time while at her home while her mother was out, according to police records.

“I was completely in shock, but too scared to go and tell anyone because I thought I would get blamed for what happened,” she said.

Over the next few months, the girl became suspicious she was pregnant. She called Willis, who brought over a pregnancy test that came up positive, she told the police.

“He asked me if I wanted him to take me to a neighboring state where underage abortions were legal . . . and he would pay for an abortion,” she told the police. “He then asked me if I wanted him to punch me in the stomach as hard as he could because that might cause a miscarriage.”

She declined both.

‘Church discipline’

The victim told her mother about the pregnancy. Soon after, Phelps was also alerted.

The victim said Phelps told her she would be put up for “church discipline,” where parishioners go before the congregation to apologize for their sins.

She asked why. “Pastor Phelps then said that (Willis) may have been 99 percent responsible, but I needed to confess my 1 percent guilt in the situation,” the victim told the police.

“He told me that I should be happy that I didn’t live in Old Testament times because I would have been stoned.”

Fran Earle, the church’s former clerk, witnessed the punishment session.

At a night meeting of the church’s fellowship in 1997, Phelps invited Willis to the front of the room. Willis apologized to the group for not being faithful to his wife, Earle said.

“I can remember saying to my husband, I don’t understand it’s any of our business why this is being brought up,” Earle said.

Phelps then told parishioners a second matter was at hand; he invited the victim to apologize for getting pregnant.

“I can still see the little girl standing up there with this smile on her face trying to get through this,” Earle said.

A day after the session, Earle called the pastor’s wife, who said the victim had decided not to press charges for statutory rape.

“You’ve got to understand, we trusted our pastor and his wife to be telling us the truth,” Earle said. “They told us it had been reported. He reported it as a consensual act between a man and a woman. Well, I didn’t know a 15-year-old was a woman.”

Earle, who left the church in 2001 after 19 years, said it was regular to see young girls who were pregnant called to the front of the congregation to be humiliated.

Rob Sims, another former member, said the discipline sessions were formulaic – Phelps would read Bible verses, give a limited overview of what happened and then each person would read a statement.

“(The) statement agreed that they had done wrong and why they ‘now believed’ that they had sinned,” he said. “Then Pastor Phelps would give a few closing remarks and then a vote would be taken to remove the guilty party from membership or to keep them in membership but under discipline, or something to that effect.”

The police said the victim’s family asked for her to be moved to Colorado.

“I think that she clearly did not want to go to Colorado, and I’m quite sure she expressed that to the church, her mother and the pastor,” said Concord police Detective Chris DeAngelis. “However, she was a juvenile. Her mom requests assistance and that was what they came up with.”

Mitchell said the police are looking at pressing other charges.

Willis was released on $100,000 personal recognizance bail. He faces an arraignment June 16 in Concord District Court.

Trent Spiner can be reached at 369-3306 or tspiner@cmonitor.com

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

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

Watch it here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEAD: No stars in "Prince of Persia" are of Middle Eastern or Muslim descent, including Jake Gyllenhaal.

A whitewash for ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’ and ‘The Last Airbender’

Two of the season’s most expensive films spark controversy by casting white actors in ethnic parts, a practice seen before in Hollywood.

By Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times

Since its release, the video game franchise Prince of Persia has become notable for the acrobatic grace of its dagger-wielding, balloon pants-wearing hero as well as for what the games didn’t do: affront gamers of Middle Eastern and Muslim descent with stereotypical depictions of people from the region as terrorists or religious zealots.

Independent filmmaker and blogger Jehanzeb Dar, to name one such player, remembers his favorable first reaction to the swashbuckling action game, which is set amid the sands and ancient cities of Persia (as ancient Iran is known) and follows a hero with a magic sword caught between forces of good and evil. “You could see clearly the protagonist had distinct Middle Eastern features and darker skin,” said Dar, 26, who pens the blog Muslim Reverie from Langhorne, Pa. “People could develop some respect for that culture instead of seeing it vilified.”

So when Disney studios announced plans for a live-action adaptation of Prince, Dar held out hope it would be a “serious story that would dispel a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions.” Then came the bad news regarding “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” (the movie which arrives in theaters on Friday). None of its principle cast members are of Iranian, Middle Eastern or Muslim descent. And playing Dastan, the hero and titular heir to the Persian throne in the $200-million tent-pole film, is none other than Hancock Park’s own Swedish-Jewish-American prince, Jake Gyllenhaal.

“My first reaction was, ‘Really?!’ ” said Dar. “It’s insulting that people of color — especially Middle Easterners or South Asians — are not allowed to portray ourselves in these roles. That’s a big problem a lot of people in the community are having with this film.”

Of course, Hollywood, has a rich history with this kind of thing. Think: John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror,” Peter Sellers’ bumbling Indian character in “The Party” or even more notoriously, Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi character from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the grandfather of all “Yellowface” stereotypes.

Although these portrayals took place decades ago, their legacy lives on. Even now, in the age of Obama — when the newly installed Miss USA Rima Fakih is Lebanese American, Will Smith is the biggest movie star in the world and Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina to sit on the Supreme Court — the movie industry can still seem woefully behind the times when it comes to matters of race.

Consider the latest evidence. This summer, two of the season’s biggest budgeted films have sparked controversy by installing white actors in decidedly “ethnic” parts. And some early fan reactions have varied from indignation to righteous fury to organized revolt over a perceived “whitewashing” of multi-culti characters, a practice that has come to be known as “racebending.”

In addition to Gyllenhaal and British actress Gemma Arterton’s portrayal of Iranian characters in the swords-and-sandals action epic “Prince of Persia,” Paramount has come under attack for its live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series ” Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Directed by “Sixth Sense” auteur M. Night Shyamalan, “The Last Airbender” (as the movie is called to distinguish it from a certain James Cameron-directed 3-D blockbuster) has enraged some of the show’s aficionados by casting white actors in three of four principal roles — characters that fans of the original property insist are Asian and Native American.

And with just weeks until the movie’s July 2 release — after a year-and-a-half-long letter-writing campaign to the film’s producers and a correspondence with Paramount President Adam Goodman to underscore the importance of casting Asian actors in designated Asian roles — members of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans and an organization called http://www.racebending.com are urging fans to boycott “Airbender.”

The movie’s detractors have spoken against the film at six college campuses, including M.I.T., New York University and UCLA, also setting up booths at events such as San Francisco’s WonderCon pop culture expo to publicize their discontent. At last count, the group’s Facebook group had 7,125 supporters and attracted petitioners against the movie’s casting in 55 countries. The stated goal: to prevent “Airbender” from blooming into a lucrative three-part franchise via negative word of mouth.

“It’s unfortunate that it’s come to this,” said Racebending.com spokesman Michael Le. “They’ve constructed a film that is contrary not only to what fans expected to see but is also contrary to what America expects to see in a film released in 2010 featuring Asian culture and Asian and Native American characters as heroes.

“We want to raise awareness of the discriminatory practices of Hollywood,” Le continued. “We want to tell people this is important. It really matters.”

Guy Aoki, head and co-founder of MANAA — a crusading organization that has skirmished with TV networks and movie studios for a decade for more positive representations of Asian Americans — put a finer point on the boycotters’ concerns. “If ‘The Last Airbender’ does really well, it sends the message in Hollywood that discriminating against Asian Americans works,” he said.

Although the studios behind both “Prince of Persia” and “Airbender” have taken costly steps to not seem insensitive toward — or out of touch with — the minority constituencies represented in their respective films, no Disney or Paramount executives would comment for this article. Nor would the producers — “Prince of Persia’s” Jerry Bruckheimer or “Airbender’s” Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Directors Mike Newell and Shyamalan similarly declined.

Camille Alick, project manager for MOST — Muslims On Screen & Television, a resource center providing Hollywood productions with connections to Muslim actors and accurate information on Muslim populations — had not seen the films but remains sympathetic to the studios’ decisions, and contends that her experience in the field allows her insight into such casting choices.

“The hope is to have an authentic depiction, but casting directors have huge jobs in front of them,” Alick said. “They’re trying to find the best person for the part. And when it’s a big budget movie, it’s going to come down to a business decision. If a major actor can carry a film, that plays a big part. It’s not malicious intent.”

Still, those among the anti-racebending camp feel that such rationalization provides a convenient excuse for keeping the prevailing system — a glass ceiling for actors of color in major movies — firmly in place.

“Hollywood can make anybody into a hero,” Aoki said. “And yet these people continue to use a conservative attitude. When are they ever going to put an Asian American as a star to disprove that thinking? For Paramount to assume people wouldn’t pay to see Asians as leads is presumptuous and insulting.”

For the uninitiated, the cartoon series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” was aimed at children but enjoyed broad crossover to all ages — earning a zealous Asian American following — during its 2005-08 TV run. Set in a Pan-Asian universe, identifiably Asian and Native American, anime-inspired characters battle one another using martial arts manipulation of the four elements. The series follows a 12-year-old named Aang (played by non-Asian actor Noah Ringer in the movie) and his band of youthful cohorts who must save the world by toppling the evil Fire Lord and ending war with the Fire Nation.

But when word leaked out last year that a casting call had gone out for the movie version requesting “Caucasians and other ethnicities,” “Airbender” fans freaked. Moreover, many of the film’s detractors felt that Shyamalan, an Indian American, had betrayed his own.

On the “Airbender” set in Philadelphia, Shyamalan took issue with the accusation that “Airbender” was anything less than inclusionary to characters of color. “Ultimately, this movie, and then the three movies, will be the most culturally diverse tent-pole movies ever released, period,” he told The Times last summer.

Paramount provided a statement about “Airbender’s” casting choices. “The movie has 23 credited speaking roles — more than half of which feature Asian and Pan Asian actors of Korean, Japanese and Indian decent,” it reads. “The filmmaker’s interpretation reflects the myriad qualities that have made this series a global phenomenon. We believe fans of the original and new audiences alike will respond positively once they see it.”

(In an effort to short-circuit further criticism, the studio says it will screen a print of the film to Racebending.com boycotters once its last-minute conversion from 2-D to 3-D is complete.)

During “Prince of Persia’s” scripting process, Disney hired BoomGen Studios, a consultation and niche marketing firm specializing in creative content about the Middle East, to help address issues of historical congruity and cultural contexts. Consultants advised the filmmakers to avoid specifically characterizing religion by setting “Prince” in a “mythological time” before the arrival of Islam. As well, the company worked to assure members of the Iranian American community that the film was the antithesis of a recent action-adventure movie felt to vilify the people of Persia.

“We said, ‘This is the anti-’300,’ ” said BoomGen’s co-founder Reza Aslan.

Asked point blank by the Times of London, “Isn’t Gyllenhaal a bit pale to play a Persian?” Bruckheimer delivered this history lecture. “Persians were very light skinned,” he said. “The Turks kind of changed everything. But back in the 6th century, a lot of them were blond and blue-eyed.”

Aslan confirmed the veracity of Bruckheimer’s historical appraisal. “Iranians are Aryans,” Aslan asserted. “If we went back in time 1,700 years to the mythological era, all Iranians would look like Jake Gyllenhaal.”

Gyllenhaal maintains that “Prince of Persia” is simply a slice of old-fashioned Hollywood fantasy, a bit of cinema escapism that’s as light in spirit as the vintage serials. That heritage — along with the fact that it’s based on a video game — took precedence over any real-world context for his character.

“To me, it’s not something I gave a lot of thought because all of it such a fantasy,” Gyllenhaal said last month at San Francisco’s WonderCon. “It’s based on a video game, not something out of history. There’s nothing real about this. It’s just an adventure and it’s fun and it’s strange in a way to hold one part of it and say, ‘That’s not real or right.’ ”

Jack Shaheen, author of “Reel Bad Arabs” and a frequent commentator on Hollywood’s distortions of Muslim cultures and people, refused to condemn “Prince of Persia’s” depiction of ancient Iranians until seeing the film. But he critiqued the film industry’s conventional wisdom that mainstream audiences won’t shell out to see a non-white lead in a big-budget film.

“Hollywood is making a mistake,” Shaheen said. “As a society, we’re not seeing color like we used to. We’re more integrated than we used to be. The country is changing. But I don’t think Hollywood is at the forefront of that change.”

chris.lee@latimes.com

Times staff writer Geoff Boucher and freelance contributor Sam Adams contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

I was astounded when I came across this debate on RussiaToday’s CrossTalk between Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a thorn in the pro-Occupation extreme Zionist camp and Raanan Gissin, an ex-official with the Israeli Government. Raanan Gissin was formerly a senior adviser to Ariel Sharon and currently works as a PR man for Israel, making frequent public appearances on various cable and international networks.

He made statements that many Israeli spokesmen and PR gurus are reticent to make, at least to American and European viewers. If I was the Israeli Media Defense Force (yes, such groups exist) I would be praying and hoping he wont make anymore appearances on TV. In the encounter, Gissin essentially said the reason that Jews have rights over those of the Palestinians who lived on the land is because it was written in the Bible. He says his grandfather tried to be nice to the Palestinians and do business with them after taking their land but some of them had to meet his gun. He also goes on to justify the take over of Palestinian land by Jewish Eastern Europeans and Russians by saying American settlers did the same thing to Native Americans.

Norman Finkelstein calmly and logically obliterates him. This is high voltage ownage that you don’t want to miss. (Below is the video and a transcript of the relevant portion.)

Transcription begins from 6:20 of video one, up until 0:55 of the second video. Enjoy.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Ranaan Gissin: When my great parents, came from Russia in a hundred and fifty years ago they came because there was a Bible in one hand, my grandfather came with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in another, and his hand was extended to the Arabs who lived here, some did make business with him and others who fought him had to meet the wrath of his rifle, and that’s how you live in the Middle East.

Norman Finkelstein: It is an oddity that you say you are coming and that you want to live in peace with someone you come with a rifle in one hand. I often have friends visit me at home and when they come to my home they don’t come with a rifle.

Ranaan Gissin interrupts: So did the settlers in America…

Norman Finkelstein: That’s correct. I appreciate Dr. Gissin’s comparison because I think it is exactly right, the first Euro-Americans who came to North America, came with rifle in hand because they came with the intention of displacing and replacing the indigenous population, that’s why they needed a rifle, and most Americans now a days at least acknowledge that what was done to the indigenous populations of North America was wrong and it’s exactly for the same reason that Jews from Eastern Europe had to come to Palestine with a rifle in hand because their intention was not to live with the indigenous population but to displace and dispossess it in order to create a Jewish state in an area that was overwhelmingly Arab, and uh, I think everything pretty much ensued after that, followed that basic fact. Now a days I would say there are possibilities for Israel to live at peace with what remains of the indigenous population but unfortunately Israel is unwilling to resolve the conflict along the lines of international law which would allow for some sort of co-existence between Israel and the Palestinian population that was displaced and dispossessed.

Peter Lavelle: Let’s go back to Tel Aviv, does Israel want to have peace with its neighbors and can the Palestinians have their own state as well? I mean, consistently the United States and Israel are the only two countries in the world that block this, consistently, consistently at the United Nations. So does Israel want to have peace? Go ahead Dr. Gissin.

Ranaan Gissin: Dr. Finkelstein’s formula is a formula for committing suicide, not for living in the Middle East. You have to live with the realities in the Middle East. I would like the Middle East to be like North America, I would like the Middle East, after four hundred years of bloody wars to be like Europe, but it’s not, it’s still a young region, it’s fraught with conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the only one, there are more conflicts than states in the Middle East, there are 22 states with one Israel and over thirty armed conflicts. Let’s face it, the largest conflicts are not between Israel and its neighbors but between Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Israel came with good intentions. Israel came with the intention to live alongside the Palestinians and let me say the way, when my great grandfather came from Russia, you know what he said, he had it very right and he had the Bible as his guide, he said the rights of the land are ours because this is our land. This is why I came back because this is our ancestral homeland, people who live on the land have rights and we tried to live with those people.

Peter Lavelle: We’re going to a break. Norman would you like to have a quick word before we go to the break?

Norman Finkelstein: Yes, I wonder Mr. Gissin if I came with a Bible in one hand and came to your home, I knocked on your door and said “according to my Bible, my family lived where your home is, my family lived there two thousand years ago,” would you pack up your bags and leave?

(Shouting)

I am waiting for your answer.

Gissin for some reason becomes obsessed with bringing his great grandfather into the picture. Maybe he was feeling nostalgic or reminiscing on olden’ time stories that he use to hear growing up, but it is quite chilling that he would think that the Bible is sufficient to justify taking another’s land. Just imagine a Muslim saying the same thing, “my grandfather came with a Quran in one hand and a rifle in another,” he would be branded a Jihadist terrorist in a split second. In fact, this is one of the stereotypical caricatures propagated by Orientalists and Islamophobes regarding Islam; the image of a Muslim warrior on an Arabian horse with a Quran in one hand and a sword in another.

Gissin has no intelligent rebuttal to Norman Finkelstein’s responses, his only retorts come in fumbling, high decibel, off topic spiels, at times he mumbles and stumbles over words. The most amazing portion might be where he justifies taking over Palestinian land by comparing what Jewish settlers did in Palestine to the actions of Euro-American settlers in North America. This is quite interesting because many pro-Israel defenders claim that it is not a correct analogy, and they say you can’t make that comparison; “it isn’t the same thing” we are told. There was just such a discussion in the comment section of a  previous article by our very own intrepid Danios, and yet here is an ex-Israeli official and one of their main PR men not only admitting that the comparison is true but using it as justification.

In my last article on Bill Maher I noted that one of the reasons for the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the claims that religious Jews hold on the land. For them there is no room to maneuver because as Gissin states, using the Bible as his guide, “the rights of the land are ours because this is our land.”

____________________________________________

For purposes of full disclosure, here is the third and final portion of the debate between Finkelstein and Gissin:

We haven’t done many pieces on Islamophobia in Australia but it is very prevalent there as was manifest by the race riots that took place a few years ago. The video below dissects one example of provocation by the media against Muslims to reinforce the caricature of an angry young Muslim.

This piece was taken from a Dutch website. We took the google translation and made it a little more understandable.

A Terrorist in Three Steps

Are you a cameraman trying to capture an image of an angry Muslim to deliver the news that night, then this the formula for success: 1) Put your camera as annoyingly as possible in the face of a Muslim and say that you are “only” doing your work. 2) Repeat step 1 several times. 3) Call him a “f *** ing terrorist”. It’s also nice that you do not have to take security measures, because no one will attack you and you come out rather well. Note here that no other camera crew present to captured all this. That’s it. Seriously … as easy as that. Look:

Makes you wonder what you’re actually watching.

Bill Maher and George Bush: Closer in thought than we ever knew?

You might be reading the title, Bill Maher Sounds Like Jerry Falwell and thinking to yourself, “What?! Bill Maher hates religion, and if I recall he blasted Jerry Falwell at the time of his death for being an intolerant, huckster con-man.” It is true that Maher has made a lot of money out of mocking religion, all religion, he made a movie about it called Religulous. In fact, Maher is constantly seen with his anti-religion crew promoting atheism and agnosticism.

So how could he possibly sound like a Christian fundamentalist such as Jerry Falwell? An analysis of Maher’s work and comments about Islam reveal he has a special and unique bias against Islam that goes well beyond his condemnation or mocking of other religions, which is unfortunate because he has a lot of hilarious and witty things to say about various topics.

Maher’s bias leads to moments where he loses his rationality and rather than comment with his usual sardonic logic, he falls into emotion and repeats worn out stereotypes and caricatures of Islam and Muslims. If that weren’t egregious enough, he also makes statements that are flat out empirically false.

So how does an atheist who prizes rationality and empirical evidence fall so hard off of the beaten path? Some might say it’s the weed but let’s look at the evidence for a second.

The first piece that I want to draw to your attention is a five minute section of the New Rules portion of Bill Maher’s Real Time.

Maher is on the wrong foot from the very beginning. He starts his monologue by creating an exclusive frame that depicts Islam as the “other,” something that is “outside” and does not belong to the West. This might have something to do with Maher’s ignorance of history since Islam has been a part of the West for over a millennium now. There is no need for me to go into detail about the historical interplay and exchange of commerce, goods and ideas between the Muslim world and the West, nor of the presence of Muslim communities, but if the construct of the “West” is to mean anything it has to include Islam and Muslims.

Omar Baddar makes just such a point and a further rebuttal in his excellent article in the Huffington Post on Maher’s recent confusion,

The implied premise that Judaism and Christianity belong to a cohesive unit called “the West” which stands in distinction from another cohesive unit called “the Muslim world” is absurd. But even if one accepted this false dichotomy, why did Maher’s example of “the craziest religious wackos we have here in America” stick to nonviolent fanatics? Why not abortion clinic bombers?

And what about Jewish extremists in the Palestinian territories? I haven’t heard an argument for why their brutal attacks on western human rights activists accompanying children to school, routine vandalism, and other violent acts coupled with chants of “we killed Jesus we’ll kill you too” are any less wacko.

Structural constraints are another obvious factor to consider. You see, the Taliban can act like they do because they live in a lawless state, and extremist settlers can act like they do because of a culture of impunity provided by the structure of Israeli apartheid. So while Pat Robertson may seem harmless, by comparison, when he issues a death fatwa on Hugo Chavez, or when he blames a hurricane or an earthquake on gay sex or a pact with the devil or something, a useful question to contemplate is whether he and his followers would be as benign (if one could describe them as such) if they could get away with worse behavior. Thankfully, we live in a system that can enforce law and order; and our wackos have the alternative outlet of lobbying the government for wars against Iraq and Iran, and they send over 100,000 emails to the White House for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so direct violence from them is somewhat less likely.

I would just add one more comment to the prescient points raised by Baddar above. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did and do have an active religious component in them. How else can we characterize the war briefings read by Donald Rumsfeld that were always headlined with quotes from the Bible? The Daily Times reported at the time,

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a fight for freedom against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

But for former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his elite Pentagon strategists, it was more like a religious crusade.

The daily briefings about the progress of the war that Mr Rumsfeld gave to President George W Bush were illustrated with victorious quotes from the Bible and gung-ho photographs of U.S. troops, it has emerged.

….

One of the top-secret ‘worldwide intelligence updates’, which were hand-delivered to Mr Bush by Mr Rumsfeld, includes an image of an F-18 Hornet fighter jet roaring off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

On it were the words of Psalm 139-9-10: ‘If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast, O Lord.’

The cover of another featured pictures of U.S. soldiers at prayer with a quote from Isaiah: ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Here I am Lord, Send me.’

A photograph of Saddam Hussein included a quotation from the First Epistle of Peter: ‘It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.’

The religious theme for briefings prepared for the president and his war cabinet was the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a committed Christian and director for intelligence serving Mr Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the days before the six-week invasion, Major General Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers for the briefings to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle.

But as the body count rose, he decided to introduce biblical quotes.

…

Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, believed the invasion was a ‘mission from God’.

Another of his briefings included the words ‘Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed’ alongside a photo of a U.S. marine with a machine gun.

And on an image of U.S. tanks rumbling through the Victory Arch monument in Baghdad was a quote from Isaiah: ‘Open the gates the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps the faith.’

A photograph of U.S. tanks in Iraq used a further passage from Isaiah: ‘Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung, their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels are like a whirlwind.’

…

These are wars that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and were instigated and supported in large part by right-wing Christians and Zionists. It is also salient to mention the involvement of Erik Prince the leader and founder of Blackwater, a security service hired by the State Department and who many consider to be nothing more than a squad of mercenaries. Prince himself is a Christian supremacist and in an affidavit from a former employee is accused of viewing “‘himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,’ and that Prince’s companies ‘encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.’”

There are many more examples that we can give, the Lord’s Resistance Army,  Christian witch-hunts, American Evangelical collusion in the Uganda gay death bill and the war on Gaza in which Israeli soldiers were told by Rabbis in  pamphlets to be “cruel” and not to “spare” the Gazan population, even “innocent civilians.”

So the claim that Muslim “wackos” are somehow uniquely more dangerous or wacky than extremists in other faiths is not only false, it is disingenuous.

However, Maher’s bigoted rant didn’t stop there, it also included his preaching about how “our culture” is better than their “culture.” I thought Maher would have realized by now that NOT ALL MUSLIMS are alike. Not all Muslims speak Arabic, live in caves, beat their wives 24-7, etc.  It’s a point that As’ad Abu Khalil made painfully obvious to Maher and his guests ten years ago when Maher hosted Politically Incorrect (video at bottom). Did Maher just forget that convenient fact or is he just fulfilling the buffoonish American caricature he so often loves to lampoon?

Omar Baddar commented on Maher’s incoherence quite succinctly,

I described Maher’s tirade as incoherent because the “them” in Maher’s equation shifted from “the developing world” at one point, to people whose culture “makes death threats to cartoonists,” to “the Taliban,” and eventually to “Muslims” (not exactly interchangeable terms). None of these categories can be lumped into a “Muslim culture” because the Muslim world is simply too vast to collapse into a cultural category. From Eastern Europe to Africa, from Lebanon to Pakistan, and from Iran to Indonesia, we are talking about completely and fundamentally different cultures. In all five Arab/Muslim countries where I grew up (and went to school with girls in all of them), women are an integral part of public life, and many of them dress like Western women do. So I can assure Maher that many of these societies are not waiting for “the West” to lecture them on whether women can work.

The incoherent ramble got even more incoherent, after making a mealy mouthed and half-hearted disclaimer that “in speaking of Moslems we realize that the vast majority are law abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace” Maher went on to preach to Moslems saying,

“but I got to tell ya, civilized people don’t threaten each other…threatening, that’s some old school desert s***, and I am sorry, you can’t bring that to the big city. I am very glad that Obama is reaching out the Moslem world, and I know Moslems living in America and Europe want their way of life assimilated more, but the Western world has to make some things clear, somethings about our culture are non-negotiable and can’t change and one of them is Freedom of Speech, seperation of Church and State is another, women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them, not negotiable, this is how we roll, and this is why our system is better, and if you don’t get that and you still want to kill someone over a stupid cartoon, please make it Garfield.”

The fact is Muslims didn’t react to the South Park cartoon. This was a controversy completely whipped up by the media that gave a group of four-nobody-morons far more attention than they deserved. If Bill Maher and his staff had done a little research, instead of focusing on Revolution Muslim, they would have asked the far more penetrating and relevant question of why so much attention was given to an unknown group that has zero credibility or support amongst American Muslims. Of course this would not fit into the preset narrative that the “Godzilla of crazy religions” (as Maher would put it) “must be offended and threatening.”

Bill Maher also should be put on notice, about how people who don’t believe in his “us vs. them” mentality roll. He should be put on notice about what democracy really is about. It isn’t about high voltage diatribes, and self-congratulatory head nodding, or putting down “the other”. There is also a duty to uphold justice and equality. Muslims don’t want to “assimilate more,” (last I checked that isn’t a condition for being Western) they are already here, they are integrated and they are contributing, and he should know the highest incidences of domestic violence occur here in America, where 2 to 4 million women are the victims of domestic violence every year and in which a quarter of the population will have been victims of domestic violence in their lifetimes.

After this show Bill Maher was on Anderson Cooper 360, and in my opinion it was one of the worst interviews I have seen in a long time. It was so bad that I wished I was watching Bill O’ Reilly or Glenn Beck. On the show Bill Maher repeated many of things he said on Real Time, but one thing was exceptionally noteworthy:

“I haven’t read the Quran in its original, when you read the translation there are many, many, many passages that are not peaceful at all, that are about killing the infidel and so forth, there are many passages like that in the Bible too, not as many.”

Is he serious? The Quran itself is about the size of the Psalms, and only a few hundred of the 6,000 verses relate to fighting and all of them have a context and explanation. None of them command a Muslim to just “slay the infidel.” However, the Bible is filled with exhortations to violence, wiping out whole nations, slaying pagans, enemies and non-Jews who live in Israel. This is one of the reasons that the Israel-Palestine conflict is so intractable, the view by religious Jews that not one centimeter of historic Israel should be owned by a non-Jew.

I would challenge Bill Maher to find one verse in the Quran equal or even a quarter equal to this odious commandment in the Bible,

“How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.” Psalm: 137:9

He will be unable to as there are no verses that come close to advocating such horrendous behavior in the Quran. As far as his retort that Jews and Christians don’t follow such things, a simple search on the internet will disabuse him of that and reinforce the fact that there are people who take the Bible literally and are willing to exact Biblical commandments such as the one above (see Sabbath breakers getting stoned, and license to murder babies).

Part of me believes all of this is for attention.  It seems that Maher desperately wants a fatwa on his head.  He wants the status it would give him: the fame and the soaring ratings. He’ll have ensured himself a position next to Salman Rushdie as one of the victimized on the pantheon of atheist stardom. Maybe it will give him some meaning in an utterly purposeless life?

This whole episode reminds me of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a story in which the pigs lead the other animals in a coup overthrowing the human beings who rule the farm. Once the pigs come to power, they take on the same odious traits of the human beings that had led to the revolt in the first place. The pigs became intolerant, manipulative, chauvinistic, and shallow. Orwell meant it to be a story about the failures and potential flaws of communism but the analogy could be applied equally to many of the new atheists, of whom Bill Maher is one, who rant and rave about the intolerance, shallowness, and wide sweeping claims of the religious but like the pigs are taking on those very same traits.

————————————————————————————————————————-

Please check out this very instructional episode of Politically Incorrect a few months after 9/11. It is very interesting and highlights the psychology of Islamophobia that languishes deep even in self professed liberals. As’ad Abukhalil really lays it into them,

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

(hat tip: Islamophobia-watch)

Nowadays, racists and bigots usually come up with justifications to cover up their racism and bigotry, to give cover to it and to package it in something nicer.  Bans on the Muslim headscarf (hijab) were no doubt a reflection of deep-seated Islamophobia, yet we heard politicians claiming that the bans were not targeting Muslims.  Rather, we were told, it is a reflection of Europe’s secularism, and would apply equally to religious gear of all faiths.

A recent poll, however, says otherwise: over fifty percent of Europeans favored banning the hijab from schools, but were meanwhile perfectly fine with (and in fact supported) the placement of crucifixes in classrooms.  To us Yankees, that seems downright backwards.  The hijab is something the individual chooses to wear, not the state–and therefore does not at all impinge on secularism.  Meanwhile, the crucifix is placed in the public school classroom, thereby breaching separation of church and state.

Belgium and France lead the pack when it comes to hijabophobia, and France even seems to be considering a law banning hijab in public altogether.  Secularism my ass (forgive my French).

50% of Europeans opposed to Islamic veil in schools: Study

MADRID – Just over half of Europeans surveyed opposed allowing Islamic headscarves in schools but backed the presence of crucifixes in classrooms, according to a Spanish study obtained by AFP Wednesday…

Opposition to the veil was highest in Bulgaria with 84.3 per cent against and France with 68.7 per cent opposed and it was lowest in Poland with only 25.6 per cent against followed by Denmark with 28.1 per cent opposed.

By contrast 54.4 per cent of those polled were in favour of classrooms displaying crucifixes.

In Spain and Italy, two nations with a strong Roman Catholic tradition, support for the use of crucifixes in classrooms stood at 69.9 per cent and 49.3 per cent respectively.

Support for the use of crucifixes in classrooms shot up to 77 per cent in Britain and 78.8 per cent in Denmark.

The issue of the use of Islamic headscarves has been thrust into the spotlight once again in Europe due to controversial moves by France and Belgium to ban Muslim full face veils.

Last week France announced it would seek a law to ban Muslim residents and visitors from wearing a burqa or a niqab in public, while Belgium was poised to pass a similar ban until its ruling coalition collapsed on Thursday…

source

Apparently, many European Christians don’t like this headscarf thing too much, but love the crucifix.  I’m pretty sure that’s a bit strange considering that the man who they believe died on the crucifix was born to this woman here:

If the Virgin Mary was alive today, Europeans would say to her: you have to take that heathen headscarf off!  You can keep the crucifix, though.

"I'm just a regular guy trying to make money"

This is the male Sarah Palin and even saying that might be too big of diss to Sarah Palin. One can clearly see that he has been prepped by his agent to deliver talking points and repeat them over and over. Does he have an original thought in his head?

This is an awesome satirical song brought to us by Lucien Van Rooy that will be the new anthem for those opposing the Euro-supremacism of Geert Wilders and his buddies.

Enjoy! (For some of our sensitive viewers be aware that there are some raunchy pictures)

Translation:

Our Geert

I know exactly how things stand,

Don’t bore me with the facts.

Give me one of those lefty newspapers,

So that I can sh*t on it.

The Dutch broadcasting corporations,

Pretend to be journalists,

They don’t do anything but lie,

Those dirty socialists.

They hate our Geert,

We hate the government,

That is secretly heading

For islamization.

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

The government doesn’t do anything

About all those Moroccans

Who are on the dole

And stealing our jobs.

They also have a god,

But ours is better.

Their women are all ugly,

Ours are much hotter.

They don’t have any respect

For rules and legislation,

But Geert is not at all afraid,

He’ll throw them out of the country.

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

As soon as Geert is Prime Minister,

As he’s told us oftentimes,

He’ll ban the Koran,

Allah and His prophets.

But that’s not all,

Geert is not easily satisfied,

The Imams will have to go

He’ll close down all their mosques.

And if the Muslims

Start protesting

Geert will shoot them through the knee

And we’ll all chant:

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

© Lyrics: Lucien Van Rooy

For more on the exposition of Geert Wilders please visit: Krapuul.nl (Use Google Translator)

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is up to her old antics, employing more over the top hyperbole peppered with frequent cases of verbal diarrhea.  Now she is saying that the Holocaust was the fault of the Mooslims, and that the Nazis were just adopting “Jihad.”

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

Of course this was the next step for Pam, demonize the Muslims and Islam to its logical end, next she will be saying that Hitler was a Muslim. Where does she get this wild stuff, and then she claims that she isn’t a conspiracy theorist?

Pamela Geller seems to have stumbled on something that World War II scholars and Holocaust historians didn’t know, a fact that has been “suppressed” by the world in a conspiracy to further Islamic Jihad,

As the leading role the Islamic world played in the Holocaust comes out of the shadows and into the fore, and decent peoples recoil in repulsion, it is necessary for Islamic media, “scholars” and asshats-in-residence to rewrite history — as Islam has done so exceedingly and singularly well all throughout history.

Pam wants us to believe that the colonized Muslims in Africa and Asia somehow made the regular trip to Concentration Camps to gas Jews, and then went back home to be ruled by Europeans? Insane.

Other Insane stuff on her blog:

The not so new crusade against Muslim Chaplains in prison is also making the rounds on the anti-Muslim sites, and Pamela Geller is no exception. She lays it out succinctly as only a proud bigot can,

All Muslim Chaplains are Jihadists

Her insanity on Barack continues, calls him an “Usurper,” “Megalomaniac”, and something called “L-Dopa.”

This is the face of the Tea Party right wing, and Conservative blogs love her because she gives them what they want to hear; hate.  At least it’s a good laugh.

Here is a blast from the past from Keith Olberman who recognized the insanity of Pamela Geller a long time ago.(hat tip: Pamela Geller)

The three stooges

You’re a complete moron if you watch this show, or if anyone you know watches it:

This guy (and his wife) are so unbelievably stupid that it hurts.  Does he (and she) not realize that the Muslim Americans who are upset over this issue are not one and the same as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban? So this “mommy, they started it” routine doesn’t work.  It only works for those who view the world in a binary way, Team Christian vs Team Muslim.

And does something become legitimate to do because Al-Qaeda or the Taliban do it?  Way to take the moral high ground, douchebag.

Ed Koch

You might remember Ed Koch as the mayor of New York or as the judge on People’s Court but now he seems to be a not so wise pundit on Fox News.

‘Hundreds of Millions’ of Muslims are Terrorists

Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Thursday that “hundreds of millions” of Muslims are terrorists.

Taking up the now-standard conservative political talking point, in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, that political correctness prevents the US from identifying Muslim terrorists as such, Koch said:

We’re afraid of calling them Muslim, Islamist terrorists. We’ll call them anything but. Because we don’t want to alienate Muslim countries. That’s ridiculous. Of course the vast majority of Muslims — there are a billion, four hundred million — are not terrorists, but there are hundreds of millions who are. They want to kill every Christian, every Jew, every Hindu who won’t convert. And we ought to put it on the table.

Host Neil Cavuto did not attempt to correct or even question Koch’s claim.

Joshua Holland at AlertNet gives Koch “the benefit of the doubt” and assumes Koch meant to say “hundreds of thousands” of Muslim terrorists. Even so, Holland argues, that suggests Muslim terrorists aren’t doing their job very well.

“Given that there were a total of around 9,000 fatalities worldwide resulting from Islamic terrorism in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available), those hundreds of thousands must have been pretty damn incompetent,” he quips.

Koch was a Democratic member of Congress in the 1960s and 1970s, and was the Democratic mayor of New York for much of the 1980s. But in recent years he has taken to endorsing Republican candidates, including endorsing George W. Bush for president in 2004, although he endorsed Barack Obama in the general election in 2008. In his interview with Cavuto, Koch said he would fire National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter over the Christmas Day bomb attempt.

The following video was broadcast on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto, January 7, 2010, and uploaded to YouTube by user therightscoop.

There is a eye widening new documentary out called “Waiting for Armageddon” which explores the Faith and ideology that close to 50 million Americans hold dear to their hearts and which also has a tremendous effect on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

Waiting for Armageddon

By RONNIE SCHEIB

Doggedly nonjudgmental docu “Waiting for Armageddon” delves into the faith of some 50 million Americans (including more than one president), exposing the central role of Israel in end-of-days scenarios, their impact on the volatile situation in the Middle East, and the confluence of national policy with biblical prophecy. From interviews with families awaiting the imminent arrival of the Rapture to evangelical tours of Israel, where Texans reverently sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the Sea of Galilee, the pic explores beliefs as pervasive as they are largely unexamined. “Waiting,” which bowed Jan. 8 at Gotham’s Cinema Village, could spark strong urban response.

Filmmakers Kate Davis, Franco Sacchi and David Heilbroner structure their docu around the four stages of the apocalypse, each headed by numbered scriptural placards: 1) the Rapture, when, in a microsecond, all true believers, living and dead, will be transported into the clouds with Jesus; 2) the Tribulation, during which untold horrendous catastrophes, ecological and man-made, will rain down upon those haplessly “left behind”; 3) Armageddon, when Christ will return with a sword to judge the sinners and the blood will gush as “high as a horse’s bridle,” to quote one comely software engineer, and 4) the Millennium, encompassing the 1,000-year reign of heaven on earth reserved for Christ and his followers (along with 144,000 converted Jews).

Within this general framework, the filmmakers capture adherents calmly discussing “future history” at church, around the dinner table, at “Pre-Trib” conventions, at Christian telethons raising millions for Israel, and, especially, on junkets to the Holy Land.

The unlikely alliance between Christian evangelicals and right-wing Israelis is predicated on their shared conviction that Jerusalem must remain entirely in Jewish hands. The pic’s representative of the Israeli wing of this coalition is a sneer-afflicted rabbi (dismissing Jesus as a second-rate skirt-chaser), in charge of rebuilding the temple supposedly predestined to supplant the Muslim Dome of the Rock. In the words of a savvy political researcher, one of the pic’s few dissenting voices, the evangelicals “want the Muslims to be evicted by the Jews, the Jews to rebuild the temple of Solon and then Christ to return and trump everybody.”

Waiting” sometimes plays like Bill Maher’s “Religulous,” minus Maher’s snarky mediating p.o.v. In their zeal to not misrepresent evangelicals, the filmmakers tend to record every discussion in mind-numbing C-SPAN-like detail and, more problematically, sometimes unintentionally wind up enabling an evangelical agenda; a shot of men praying in a mosque inadvertently reads as an example of “Islamofascist” behavior.

Still, the docu’s open-endedness offers something for everyone. For believers, it provides a sympathetic portrait of sane, educated families coping with what they perceive as the suffering of the world. For Jews, it sounds a wake-up call to the dangers of supporting a faction that counts as necessary an Israeli future of wholesale destruction and a choice between conversion or death. Lastly, for unrepentantly cynical secularists, it serves up delicious ironies (one “saved” Christian’s barely disguised glee at the prospect of a front-row seat for the upcoming carnage).

Camera (color, HD), Sacchi, Davis; music, Gary Lionelli; sound, Heilbroner, Roberta Dougan, Rich Cutler. Reviewed on DVD, New York, Jan. 2, 2010. (In 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival.) Running time: 74 MIN.

Is Joyce Kaufman related to Joe Kaufman by any chance? Florida seems to have a high percentage of loons!

Cerabino: Publix Calendar Yanked through Political Mischief

Hey, don’t bother looking for your free Publix calendar.

The coupon-loaded calendar, which had been a yearly giveaway for the past five years, was yanked this past week from all of the chain’s South Florida supermarkets.

Why? Collateral damage of today’s political climate.

On Dec. 7, the 2010 calendar lists Islamic New Year, not Pearl Harbor Day.

There are two ways to react:

1. To get into a xenophobic tizzy while weaving this into a narrative of a vast anti-American conspiracy that leads right up to the subversive undercover-Muslim, Kenyan interloper in the White House.

Or …

2. To assume that the grocery store chain has no reason to offend people, and that Publix, in an effort to be inclusive, inadvertently became a victim of a synchronicity of dates and an unconscious omission.

Publix pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day had never been listed in the store’s calendars . And the Islamic New Year had been on the Publix calendar since 2006.

And nobody complained.

Not a political document

The rub is that this year the Islamic New Year, which changes dates because it is based on a lunar calendar, falls on Pearl Harbor Day.

And why does the calendar list Islamic New Year? For the same inclusive reason it lists the Jewish High Holidays, Chinese New Year and an international array of other dates, including Puerto Rico Commonwealth Constitutional Day, Haitian Flag Day, Boss’s Day and Administrative Assistant’s Day.

It’s not a political document. It’s a calendar with pictures of animals that you get for free, along with discount coupons. To make more of it is to engage in political mischief.

“I was driving home Tuesday night and Allen West told me to look at the Publix calendar,” said Joyce Kaufman, a WFTL-AM talk-show host.

West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a Republican candidate running for the congressional seat held by Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton.

Radio host urges audience uprising

Kaufman, who advertises her radio show with the words “America first. No apologies,” didn’t require much arm twisting to parlay the quinella of Islamophobia and flag waving to her audience the next day.

“What relevance does Islamic New Year have in my country?” Kaufman told me. “Islam is an ideology, and it’s not friendly to me.”

She said World War II veterans were “terribly offended” and she urged her audience to show up at their local Publix to complain.

“You show this calendar to the manager and say, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ”

Meanwhile, a “Dear Fellow Americans” e-mail was urging a boycott, citing an “un-American attitude” of Publix for “recognizing the Muslim New Year over Pearl Harbor Day.”

Publix wisely yanked the benign calendar, which had become a talking point in a cartoonish alternate universe.

“Based on feedback we have received this year, if a free calendar is produced for 2011, we will also include Pearl Harbor Day,” Publix spokesman Kim Jaeger said in a statement.

~ frank_cerabino@pbpost.com

Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert says all young Muslims should be given a colonoscopy.

David Edwards and John Byrne
Raw Story
Wednesday, January 6, 2010

In a desultory rant Tuesday night, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert jabbed conservatives who are promoting racial profiling and more radical techniques after the failed Christmas bomb plot against a commercial jetliner.

“Every time a young Muslim man arrives at the airport, the TSA should respectfully take him aside and give him an involuntary colonoscopy,” Colbert quipped. “This cannot fail. Everyone knows that terrorists are all young, poor, disenfranchised Arab Muslims. Well, except the Christmas bomber, who is a middle-class well-educated Nigerian. Which, frankly, I don’t think is fair.

“We elected a black guy. What more do Nigerians want? I mean, ever since we elected JFK, the Irish haven’t terrorized us… So i guess we have to profile anyone who looks like a Nigerian too. Basically, all black people.

“And, I’m not saying all black people look alike,” Colbert continued. “I’m saying I can’t tell them apart. I mean, which of these guys is Kenyan? Of course, there was the dirty bomber Jose Padilla, so we’ll have to go after Hispanics too. Then there’s shoe bomber Richard Reid. God only knows what he is. Belgian? Patchouli? To be safe, let’s profile anyone named ‘Reid.’”

“Ben Franklin did say, ‘Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither,’” Colbert added wryly. “Then again, Franklin said a lot of things.”

This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast Jan. 5, 2010

Does this mean that Christianity calls for forced conversions? Imagine if a “Mooslim” had said the same thing while disparaging another religion.

Fox News’ Brit Hume says Tiger Woods Needs to Become a Christian

Fox News’ Brit Hume has obviously spent some time worrying about the ultimate fate of Tiger Woods’ soul.

He apparently felt compelled to share his concerns with a national audience Sunday.

“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” Hume said. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Remember, that’s a newsman offering advice to the beleaguered golfer, not a religious pundit. Hume is a senior political analyst, so why is he doing his Bible-thumping on one of the station’s news programs?

Thomas McInerney, a retired US Lieutenant was on Fox News advocating that Muslim men between the ages of 18-28 be strip searched. The Fox host Julia Banderas surprisingly takes him on, which leads the the lieutenant to contradict himself in the worst way.

He goes from saying that “we should use profiling, and I mean we have to be very serious and harsh about the profiling, if you are an 18-28 year old Muslim man then you should be strip searched” to saying “I don’t want to racial profile, I want to profile on that group that we have enough evidence, from 9/11 and other cases, Moussoui, etc. that we know what we’re looking at.” He doesn’t make any sense, but that isn’t anything new for Fox pundits.

Retired US general wants Muslim men strip searched at airports

Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney wants to get young Muslim men naked in the worst way.

Awkward as that sentence sounds, it is an accurate description of the former US Air Force general’s comments during a recent Fox News broadcast.

“We’ve got to go to more than just the normal process that they’re talking about now,” he opined on Saturday. “We have got to go to very, very strict screening and we’ve got to use profiling. And I mean, be very, very serious about the profiling. If you are an 18-28-year-old Muslim man, then you should be strip searched. If we don’t do that, there’s a very high probability that we’re gonna lose an airliner.”

McInerney said that “in the next 30-100 days,” there is “very high probability a US airliner will come down.”

When the Fox host blandly objected that racial profiling would not go over in the United States, he replied, “I agree, that’s the problem.”

The general’s comment comes one day before that the Transportation Security Administration announced new, “enhanced screening” tactics at U.S. airports, with a renewed focus on foreign travelers.

All passengers flying into the United States from abroad will be subject to random screening or so-called “threat-based” screens, the TSA said Sunday.

It further mandated that “every individual flying into the US from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening” that includes a thorough inspection of luggage and pat-down searches.

“If you lose 300 Americans, and then people are gonna say ‘Why didn’t we do this?’” the general insisted.

McInerney, who has been a Fox News military analyst for years, was Director of the Defense Performance Review during the Clinton administration and reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. He is currently chairman of the Iran Policy Committee’s advisory council and co-author ofthe book “Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror”.

In his book, the general advocates a scenario of nearly endless war, urging the conditional invasions of Syria, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. He also argues that deceased Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein hid his weapons of mass destruction in Syria; a primary reason he calls for their destruction.

“The authors’ ambitious schedule of ultimatums and conquests leads them to focus almost exclusively on the U.S. military, for which they recommend the Rumsfeld doctrine of light, mobile forces, supplemented by additional weapons spending,” reads a Publishers Weekly review of “Endgame”. “Homeland security gets scant attention beyond vague proposals for a Terrorist Security Department and Special Terrorist Courts involving substantial infringements on due process.”

“Broad-based ethnic profiling creates in turn panic and the false sense of security that airlines are actually preventing terrorist attacks,” wrote Earl Ofari Hutchinson in a commentary for New Media America. “It also causes law enforcement resources to be squandered chasing the wrong targets. Worse, it’s a witch hunt against a group based solely on their religion and ethnicity. This fuels even greater racial division, fear and hysteria.”

To her credit, Fox News host Julie Banderas pushed back against the former general, insisting that racial and religious profiling at airports is “not going to go over — not in this country, anyway.”

“The sound of the latex glove snapping shut against a hairy wrist — that’s the sound of Freedom itself, ringing out in tile-walled rooms with the abrupt harshness of a fluorescent light and the unforgiving tightness of arm restraints,” mocked the Inside-Out the Beltway blog. “God Bless America.”

This video was broadcast by Fox News on Jan. 2, 2009, as snipped by Mediaite.

From Left to Right: Andrew Bostom, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller

One of our readers, isherif who if I recall has been commenting on our site for quite some time now really took the initiative and provided us with a cool short montage of some of our best hits. We really love it when readers interact with us and are pro-active in joining us in exposing Islamophobia.

Take a look and enjoy:

[Zingel: "Tis the season to be hateful, fa la la la, la la la la! sing along kids!"]

It seems the attention mongers at Dove Outreach Ministries, you know that group that came up with “Islam is of the Devil” T-Shirts is at it again, this time they are trying to get their message out by transforming Christmas from a “Merry Holiday” into a “Hate Islam Holiday.”

Christmas Display Targets Islamic Faith

This video, a compilation of Christmas lights displays from Gainesville, Florida, starts off like any other. You’ll see a nice selection of lights and houses decorated for the holidays. But the last display, from the controversial Dove World Outreach Center, is causing a bit of a stir in the neighborhood. It reads “Islam Is Of The Devil” and is clearly offensive to some residents.

You might remember Rev. Rod Parsley from the 2008 election when Sen. McCain was forced to repudiate his endorsement due anti-Islamic comments.

From Mother Jones:

Rod Parsley, a fundamentalist pastor who John McCain praised as a “spiritual guide” during the 2008 presidential campaign, is in big trouble—demonic trouble. Parsley has claimed that Islam is “the greatest religious enemy of our civilization and the world,” and argued that the historic mission of America is to see “this false religion destroyed.” (You can watch a video highlighting those comments here. After weeks of controversy, McCain finally repudiated Parsley in May 2008.) But it’s not Islam that’s causing Parsley problems these days. It’s Satan himself. The Columbus Dispatch reports that Parsley is saying his ministry is under a “demonically inspired financial attack.” Here’s the clip from his television program, “Breakthrough”:

The proximate cause of Parsley’s trouble, it seems, is a $3 million deficit for the fourth quarter and a $3.1 million legal settlement over a 2006 incident in which a two-year-old child in a Parsley-affiliated daycare center was spanked so hard that his “buttocks and legs were covered with welts and abrasions”:

The boy, then 2, said he was spanked with a “knife” by a substitute teacher. His parents, Michael and Lacey Faieta, believe it was a ruler…. The Faietas said Parsley refused to meet personally with them and that the church did not apologize or take accountability for the beating…. Mr. Faieta said he and his wife were “disgusted” and “saddened” by Parsley’s words.

The devil works in mysterious ways.

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

Martin Ssempa

A prominent evangelical pastor in Uganda, Martin Ssempa has proposed and received wide backing for a law which would jail homosexuals and murder “flagrant” homosexuals. He has received support for this from the president of Uganda and a large number of politicians. Ssempa, is connected to a number of American Evangelical organizations and politicians. What would happen if it were an Imam or a Muslim country proposing this legislation, you could be sure Spencer and company would be howling to the wind about it, but on this news story we hear not a peep from them.

From Advocates to Outlaws

KAMPALA – If Uganda?s recently tabled Anti-Homosexuality Bill becomes law, Frank Mugisha and other individuals found campaigning for gay rights will face the choice of going to jail or leaving the country.

Mugisha heads Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a leading sexual rights advocacy group that could soon be classed a criminal organization.

“I have never really considered moving out of Uganda. But if I cannot work within the country, then I will have to leave,” said Mugisha.

The bill has baffled legal experts who read it as the product of an over-zealous Evangelical community that is clueless about both Uganda?s constitution and international law.

But for the bill?s proponents, chief among them Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo, who has repeatedly alleged that there exists an organized, western-backed plot to recruit people into homosexuality, the law is necessary to confront a national emergency.

Homosexuality is spreading, Buturo argues, and if people like Mugisha aren?t stopped they will continue to lure impressionable youths into their sinful lifestyle and thereby threaten the perpetuation of the Ugandan people.

“Who is going to occupy Uganda in 20 years if we all become homosexuals? We know that homosexuals don?t reproduce,” Buturo said last year when announcing plans to table the bill.

In one of its most curious provisions, the draft law calls on Uganda to nullify any international treaty or convention that is inconsistent with the spirit of anti-homosexuality.

“You cannot as a country say we will nullify all the treaties we have ratified in the past,” Sylvia Tamale of Kampala?s Makerere University Law School told AFP.

For Tamale, the bill?s composition reveals an absence of qualified legal input and an unhealthy amount of input from people like Martin Ssempa, a prominent Evangelical pastor and internationally known anti-gay crusader who has confirmed having contributed to the bill.

“It would be political suicide for any Ugandan politician to vote against this. Leaders will have to ask themselves, do I listen to my own people, or … to top down orders coming from New York and the UN,” he added.

Ssempa seems to relish the criticism hurled at him by western rights groups, but he is concerned the proposal will create a fissure within the Evangelical Church.

“The western church is going to find itself increasingly at odds with the African church and find itself in a situation where there is a split like in the Anglican Church,” he said.

Ssempa told AFP he was disappointed by a recent statement by American mega-Pastor Rick Warren, who delivered the convocation at US president Barack Obama?s Inauguration.

Warren did not mention the Anti-Homosexuality Bill specifically, but said he and his wife ended their relationship with Ssempa, “when we learned that his views and actions were in serious conflict with our own”.

Mugisha is an unlikely candidate to be at the centre of such politically charged debate.

From SMUG?s humble three-room office in a Kampala suburb he explained he never wanted to become a political advocate.

While in university, he volunteered as an undercover health researcher, finding out which clinics could treat certain conditions and where gay men could access the things necessary for safe sex.

He distributed the information on-line and through a small support group he founded.

When SMUG?s leadership learned about his work, they lobbied him to get involved.

At first reluctant, he eventually gave in, and was appointed chairperson of the group in 2007.

He smiled when recounting his earlier health work.

“These young boys, they didn?t know anything about being protected,” he said, half-laughing.

If the new bill had been in place at the time, Mugisha?s attempts to promote safe sex could have qualified as a crime. “Aiding and abetting homosexuality” attracts seven years in prison.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

This is hilarious! For our UK viewers, I hope you can see this.

Frank Schaeffer

There is a new prayer going around in Evangelical Christian circles and beyond for President Barack Obama. It is quite controversial as it seems to be calling for his death.

In this video Rachel Maddow discusses (at 57 seconds) the issue with former Evangelical Christian leader, Frank Schaeffer.

Cenk, posing as a Bollywood hero

Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks, rips this closet Islamophobe a new one.  I especially like how he made sure to mention George Bush’s intention behind invading Iraq (the Biblical prophecy of Gag and Magog), which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.  (But of course those civilians don’t count, since they are brown Moozlems.)

Cenk could have sealed that argument by mentioning the Christian version of Al-Qaeda, none other than the fundamentalist Evangelical Blackwater group, which has killed scores of civilians.  And he could also have mentioned the thousands of Christians who believe in the Joel’s Army theology and the general surge of Christian fanaticism in the U.S. military.

One other point: the conservative loon mentioned the idea that 90% of mosques in America are owned and operated by Saudi Arabia.  This is a blatant lie commonly peddled by Islamophobes.  “But you can google it!”  Believe it or not: but not everything on the interwebs is true.  *gasp*  In fact, the vast majority of mosques in America run on local donations.

Joy "7 million Muslims in the World?" Tiz

Then in that same breath she says that they are funded by the Muslim Brotherhood, when in fact the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood runs contrary to that of the “Wahhabi” (Salafi) strain of Islam followed in Saudi Arabia.

But anyways, I must say that Cenk did a great job (and I give him a 10 out of 10).  Here is the debate:

Cenk vs Conservative [Loon] on Muslims in the Military

The Young Turks

Many of us here at LoonWatch.com are fans of The Young Turks, so we decided to post some of their videos on the Ft. Hood Shooting along with some commentary:

Crazy Conservative Bloggers on Fort Hood

My comments: There were two Muslim American soldiers who shot their fellow soldiers, compared to tens of thousands of Muslim Americans who serve in the military, and millions of Muslim Americans who live in the country.  But surely two of them define them all, right?

Fox “News” Un-American Take on the Fort Hood Shooter

My comments: At about four minutes into the video, the Fox “News” lady host argues that “political correctness” is the problem: the U.S. military knew about his radical postings online and didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to be PC about it.  Of course conservatives love to be politically incorrect–or rather, pathetically incorrect–and this is one of their favorite talking points.  They use the euphemism of “I’m going to be politically incorrect” instead of just saying “I’m going to be bigoted.”  Anyways, the entire theory is bogus because his military command already said that they didn’t know about his radical postings online.

Also, at the very end of the video, Cenk mentions the most important point: so many right wingers unfortunately think that they are “allowing” Muslims to be Americans.  We’ve had a few similar comments on LW, where a few posters would say something along the lines of “if Muslims want to be treated as Americans…”, not knowing that Muslims in this country are already Americans!  You didn’t “gift” that Americanness to them, and they are just as American as you are.  And your entire attitude of thinking that you get to decide who is and who is not a real American is the most un-American of all.

America was a country founded upon immigration, a melting pot by definition.  Unless you’re Native American, your ancestors were also immigrants to this country, and what difference does it make that they were from a European country as opposed to an Asian or African one?  Why is it that a third generation Arab American is treated as being a foreigner/immigrant, whereas an immigrant who just moved from Italy to the United States some three years ago is considered more American?  It’s absurd.  Get this through your thick skulls: you will treat every single American as a fellow American regardless of his race, religion, or ethnicity.  And if you don’t believe that, then you should be treated as being un-American.

Should Ft. Hood Shooter Been Racially Profiled?

My comments:  Cenk, I think you missed the point here.  There was absolutely no need for racial or religious profiling here at all.  The fact is that if anyone had said the things Major Nidal Hasan had said–be it his radical postings online or his rantings in person–then that’s a red flag no matter what race or religion he is.  So that’s not racial or religious profiling if you pull a guy aside for saying those things.

Let me clarify: if there is a guy going through airport security and he says something like “I love Al-Qaeda,” then you can and should pull him aside for saying that.  This is regardless of his race or religion.  On the other hand, if you simply pull aside those who are of a certain race or religion, then that’s racial profiling.  Nobody on earth would have a problem with the former, but the latter is racist and 100% un-American.

The thing that is being missed here, with the Ft. Hood Shooting, is that there was no reason to racially profile this guy!  He could have been caught and stopped if people had just paid attention to the numerous red flags.  Major Hasan was saying crazy things, and doing crazy things (giving absurd and out of place presentations at work)…It was just a matter of picking up on those numerous cues and then looking into that.

If you start racially or religiously profiling people, then you alienate the same community within which the problem exists.  It’s counter-productive.  Instead of wasting time trying to screen tens of thousands of Muslim Americans, why not just investigate those people that are saying and doing things that are questionable?  And that’s the American thing to do: judge people based on their words and actions, not their race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.  It’s about judging people for the content of their character.

Crazy Conservatives on Ft. Hood

My comments: Of course, any sane person knows that it’s a lie that Muslims believe they must “kill all infidels.”  Pious Muslim Americans believe that they must obey the U.S. laws, and are thus not a threat.

The Islamophobe says “this is not Islamophobia, it’s Islamo-realism.”  That’s exactly what bigoted people say.  Cenk of TYT interviewed a racist guy earlier on his show, and that guy would call himself a “racial realist” instead of “racist.”

Anyways, the key point that Cenk raises is at 4:00 when he talks about how truly un-American these guys are, and how they really and truly don’t understand the ethics and purpose of this country.

UPDATE:

Pat Roberson: Islam is Not a Religion

My comments:  A bit over the top?  I don’t know.  But yes, I do agree that these right wingers shouldn’t throw stones when they live in glass houses.

Alright, that’s it for now.  Thanks a lot, TYT Nation!  Keep up the good work.

More myths about Barack Obama being a Mooslim and other nonsense from Tel Aviv streets documented by Max Blumenthal.

A great remix by Cassetteboy for Nick Griffin’s controversial appearance on Question Time.

Lindsey Graham, senior Republican senator proves that even when the GOP tries to get it right they can manage to mess things up. In condemning the wackos Graham does a good job but he has an epic fail when he lets out a (freudian?) slip that, “[Obama] is not a Moslem, he is a good man.” It reminds us of John McCain’s sorry answer to the crazy lady who asked him during the presidential election if Obama was an “Ayrab, a Mooslim.”

Talk about having an agenda, in this case the shameless attempt to play on people’s fears to make a few bucks. It is only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the next episode when TownHaller’s like Pamela Geller have their veiws of Obama being a Muslim parroted by Bill Keller.

Michael Savage

Michael Savage’s flagship station in California has decided to drop him. Savage, you may recall, is the genocidal radio personality who has amongst other things called for the “nuking of Muslim countries,” the “killing of millions of Muslims,” and more. He is so over the top you wonder if people take him seriously, but judging from the size of his listeners it seems that enough do for him to be considered a dangerous demagogue.

Zaid Jilani for Think Progress reports,

Earlier today, the conservative blog Patriot Axom noted that far-right radio host Michael Savage has been taken “off the air” from his San Francisco-based flagship station, Talk 910 KNEW. Now, a representative from the station has issued a statement explaining why it will no longer air Savage’s show:

I’m going to answer the very first question many of you have.

“Why did you take Michael Savage off the air?”

Here’s your no-spin direct answer; we have decided to go in a different philosophical and ideological direction, featuring more contemporary content and more local information. The Savage Nation does not fit into that vision.

910 KNEW’s decision is the latest blow to Savage’s efforts to spread hate. Last winter, following a campaign by the Council On American-Islamic Relations and Brave New Films, numerous advertisers ended their relationship with Savage, including Geico, Union Bank of California, and ITT Technical Institute. Savage has in the past advocated killing 100 million Muslims, compared President Jimmy Carter to Hitler, and has said that the U.S. Senate is “more histrionic than ever” because of the addition of female senators.

Cenk Uygur of Young Turks has some commentary that hits the nail on the head:

Reeling from this fresh blow from his flagship station dropping him, Savage’s company was also forced the very next day to apologize to Brave New Films as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by Savage,

Yesterday’s news that Michael Savage was dropped in his hometown market, by KNEW, is followed today by news that he and his company, Original Talk Radio Network (ORTN) have reached a settlement in a lawsuit filed by Brave New Films (BNF).

Last year BNF produced a short film, “Michael Savage Hates Muslims,” which was posted on YouTube, consisting mostly of audio clips of Savage ranting against Muslims on his syndicated radio show. ORTN subsequently demanded that YouTube remove the clip from its site; as a result, YouTube took down all of BNF’s online content, and BNF filed suit for damages and free speech rights.

BNF was represented pro bono by Bingham McCutchen LLP and Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s “Fair Use Project,” which was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of “fair use” in order to enhance creative freedom.

On Aug. 21, Savage and OTRN settled, which included the following written apology:

OTRN acknowledges that it made a mistake by asking YouTube to remove Brave New Films’ video “Michael Savage Hates Muslims” from the YouTube site. Upon further examination, it is clear that video should not have been included in OTRN’s September 29, 2009 takedown notice. OTRN apologizes for this error.

Savage, of course, has taken numerous anti-Muslim stances over the years, many of which can be heard in the film in question:

It looks like the loons are taking some big hits, but it is going to take a lot more to make people realize that individuals such as Michael Savage are so radioactive that you don’t want to be associated with them.

Jim Quinn is very fond of Neanderthals

In an insane rant, Jim Quinn, who we reported on earlier attempted to use the  emotive memory of the tragedy of September 11th by asking his audience to remain “angry.” Just remain “angry” and everything will be alright, don’t channel that anger into positive action but just remain angry. He then tells his listeners that we have “to stoop as low as the enemy because that is the only way to defeat them.” Pretty much asking us to disregard our laws and make it open season to profile, torture, deport American Muslims.

In the middle of this coarse and illogical, a-la-Glenn-Beck rant, Quinn also states his black and white vision of the world, and calls for Americans to “fight Islam on the battlefield…Kill Islam before it kills you.” He believes you can take tanks, jets and guns and defeat a set of religious beliefs. This is sort of like when Rick Santorum the former Pennsylvania Senator said “Muslims speak Islamic.” How many times do people like Jim Quinn and Santorum have to be reminded that Islam is not a person, Islam is a fourteen hundred year old religion with followers all over the globe including America.

Jim Quinn: “We have to kill Islam”

Rep. Steve King who recently cast the sole vote against a memorial for slavery which unanimously passed the house believed that if Obama got elected AlQaeda would be dancing in the streets. He also believes that Obama’s middle name matters because Muslims will be dancing in the streets.

Neanderthal

Jim Quinn who hosts The War Room with Quinn and Rose on Clear Channel did a segment in which he was discussing the proposed Burqa ban in France. During the discussion he went into a rant about how he can’t understand why any Black person would want to convert to Islam. He chalks up Black conversions to Islam as nothing other than an attempt to “reject our culture.” Yes, it has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality Quinn? It is also condescending and a bit amusing to see Quinn who is a white male and has no knowledge of what it is like to be Black opine on the personal choices of Black people in America.

He goes on to call Islam a “neanderthal religion…this throw back to a thousand years ago.” So the fact that it’s an old religion makes it neanderthal? It seems like Quinn is the one using neanderthal logic here! What would that make Hinduism, Judaism and even Christianity which no doubt Quinn must think is “our culture,”  would they also be considered “neanderthal?”

Jim Pinkerton

It’s hard to take these people seriously anymore and part of me just wants to give up on them because it really seems like those people who believe Obama is a “Mooslim” will continue to believe in that fairy tale no matter what you tell them or how compelling the fact is that he isn’t a Muslim.  Do these claims ever get old?

We’ve written about this phenomenon before and as this video demonstrates there is no dearth of poor old white haired ladies trembling from the prospect that Obama is Muslim. It’s such an absurd prospect that it reminds one of those who think the world is 6,000 years old or assert that the earth is flat.

The most sinister aspect of the accusation is that it assumes being Muslim is a sin or an automatic “got-ya” card that disqualifies and delegitimizes an individual from public office or the public square. It is the height of prejudice, and the way it is nonchalantly bandied about, such as in the case of Jim Pinkerton underscores our point — no matter what you do or say people will continue to push this Islamophobic lie.

Eric Boehlert, in a great post titled Fox News and Obama as the Muslim Manchurian Candidate points out that Pinkerton, a regular contributor to Fox News is part of the mainstream of Conservatism and is still propagating this looniness,

That’s the premise Pinkerton is pushing on national television; that Obama kept his Muslim roots hidden during the campaign, but that signs of it are starting to show now, and when he’s safely elected he’ll finally feel comfortable practicing Islam out the open.

Behold the ‘mainstream’ conservative movement in America!

It is high time that people got over the idea that Obama is an evil “Mooslim” or that being a Muslim and holding public office is somehow helping our enemies take over our country or in the immortal words of Glenn Beck leading America to stand at some sort of “Boiling point.”

The truth is Obama isn’t a Muslim and it wouldn’t matter if he was one, these conspiracy theories hold less water than sightings of Big Foot and are closer in spirit to the discourse that Jews faced around the early 20th Century. Let the strange saga continue!

Words of Ginny Brown-Waite Wisdom: “Except for Timothy McVeigh every terrorist has been a Moslem.” Way to go Ginny, you sure paid attention in school.

Geert Wilders

We recently wrote about the Freedumb of Speech Summit that was held in Delray Beach, Florida hosted by Republican Representative Adam Hasner (!) and republican hopeful Allen West.  The guest of honor giving the main speech was European Fascist Geert Wilders. 

Geert Wilders is a controversial European legislator who has amongst other things called for the Quran to be banned in the Netherlands and for the enacting of discriminatory laws in regards to immigration that would target and exclude Muslims from the West. Wilders has also been prosecuted for “hate speech” and “inciting discrimination” by an appeals court in the capital of the Netherlands: Amsterdam.

In a racist screed that Wilders delivered over the weekend at the summit, he declared:

“Islam is not a religion… the Quran is a book that calls for hatred, that calls for violence, for murder, for terrorism, for war, and submission…We should also stop pretending that Islam is a religion…the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam.

Wilders also called for “stopping Muslim immigration to the West, for stopping the building of mosques, for closing down Islamic schools because they are “fascist” institutions.”

The obvious contradictions and hypocrisy seem to be going right over the heads of Wilders and his supporters such as Robert Spencer, Brigitte Gabriel and Representative Adam Hasner. In a summit dubiously dubbed as Freedom of Speech they want to curtail the rights of others to practice Freedom of Religion - a pillar of all self-respecting modern Democracies.

One must consider the implications of Wilders’ call and the collusion of American hatemongers with his project.  How does he want to translate his call for Muslims to be denied religious freedom into practical policy?  Will he ask all Muslims to renounce Islam or face deportation, even those born in the West? Would he and his supporters force Muslims to convert from Islam to Christianity or another religion?

Only in the hate world of the far right are insinuations made that, a religion that has been around for over 1400 years - Islam – is in fact not a religion at all.  It is also a world where one finds no contradiction in proclaiming freedom of speech on the one hand but then proudly declaring opposition to freedom of religion on the other.

Do these loons seriously consider themselves the “defenders of Western Civilization” against the “barbaric Muslim hordes” when they proudly flaunt the very foundations of that civilization?  In light of  this contradiction the more accurate description for this group of loony racists and neo-fascists might be ”defenders of delusions.”

From Wilders own mouth:

Nuclear Holocaust

Loons come in many shapes and sizes but you can usually identify them because they utter stark raving mad things that normal mainstream people would never say and would likely find objectionable.  One of those things that might make you flinch is when someone calls for the application of nuclear weapons upon a whole populace or nation.

In a previous post I exposed Joe Kaufman’s wish to launch nukes onto the Middle East, and how he wonders ” if we got nukes, why aren’t we using them?”  This is not an isolated incident but in fact is part of a larger trend that links many of the Islamophobes and instigators of anti-Muslim agitation. 

In the recent presidential race, former Republican Representative Tom Tancredo from Colorado was on the record stating,

If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Because that’s the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do.

Does Tancredo believe that instead of emboldening terrorists and pouring fuel on the fires of conflict, a strike on the holy places of a quarter of the world’s population would be a “deterrence?”  Can someone from Colorado talk to Tancredo and convince him to go on the same quest as the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?

Robert Spencer, the self-described “Islamic expert” wrote in his article Nuke Mecca? Nope that he believes the only reason bombing Mecca wouldn’t be a good idea is because it would become

[a] source of spirit, not of dispirit. The jihadists would have yet another injury to add to their litany of grievances.

Why can’t Spencer who easily proclaims that bombing Mecca is wrong for strategic reasons not come out and denounce the idea of bombing close to a quarter of humanity’s most holiest site for moral reasons? Maybe because Spencer wouldn’t mind seeing Mecca bombed. 

He grudgingly suggests that due to the exigencies of Realpolitik we can’t do it because it will become a source of “spirit for the Jihadists” but without condemning it he leaves the possibility that we might be capable of doing it in the future.  He never stops to consider that this might anger more than just the Jihadists but also every single Muslim in the world.

One must ask Spencer how he would feel if someone proposed that the only reason bombing the Vatican might not be a good idea is because it will become a source of spirit for extremist Catholics? Wouldn’t he think that Catholics of all stripes and shades would be angered and not just the extremists targeted amongst them?

Michael Savage

In one of the most recent episodes of using the nuclear card we have Michael Savage echoing Kaufman by asking on his radio show the Savage Nation, ”if we got nukes, why aren’t we using them, what are they good for?”

CALLER: We in the Western world and the United States — I don’t see how we’re gonna win this, because we do not have the guts, we don’t have the stomach to do the things it takes to be violent enough, to fight fire with fire and give these — I mean, basically, we need to exterminate them like rats, and we’re so worried about –

SAVAGE: Yeah, we know where they’re coming from, we know they’re coming out of the — the training, at least, is probably coming out of the area where Osama bin Laden is hiding. If we can believe our intelligence agencies — of course, we have no real knowledge as to whether they’re really intelligent intelligence agencies — they’re in the tribal areas of western Pakistan. What the heck do we have nuclear weapons for? What are tactical nuclear weapons for but to wipe out an enemy? The enemy lives there — kill them and their families, and show them that the terror they inflict on the West will come home to roost and will be inflicted on them. Why must we sit here waiting for the New York subways to go up in flames?

CALLER: Yes, sir, but what are we gonna do? Instead of what you just said, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna cut our nuclear arsenal.

[...]

SAVAGE: The only way to defend ourselves against these fanatic Islamists is with strength. Not with hand-wringing, not with the United Nations, but with a strong and swift attack on the tribal regions of western Pakistan. Now, I will not quibble with you as to whether they should be with nuclear — that is, tactical nuclear weapons, which are limited in their scope and limited in their power — or with cluster bombs or with weapons I’m not even aware of. But there’s no question that entire region needs to be annihilated and stripped off the earth.

Such statements are the logical end of the extremist thought of the anti-Muslim crowd and one wonders considering the evidence how prevalent this apocalyptic call is amongst those who think nuking countries, regions and holy places is a swell idea.

Which begs the question can “an Arab” be “a decent family man”? Hmm, the taxing questions of the 21st century…