Hatef Mokhtar of The Oslo Times had a very interesting interview on a wide range of subjects with Tarja Cronberg, a member of the European Parliament, the whole interview is well worth the read if you are interested in European issues that effect the whole world.

Cronberg states explicitly links Islamophobia in the context of Western nations response to 9/11:

Islamophobia had been fuelled by the response of the West to 9/11 – Tarja Cronberg Member of European Parliament

(The Oslo Times)

TOT: Apart from the critical economics and political situations the Europe is going through, there is one more of major concern that now has been doing rounds of politics, has also been felt as a pinch in the speeches of various European leaders during elections and among the very European native society as well as even in certain decisions taken by some European countries. We are talking about the growth of Islamophobia in Europe.
a.) Why Muslims and their conservative nature of their culture are being seen as threat to the native European society?
b.) What are steps that are being introduced by European Parliament to accommodate and integrate Muslims and their culture in the European system and the society?
c.)  Does the government of Finland and your party are working to formulate any policy framework in order to address the issues by this Islamic influx in the country and in the region that has changed the demographics of many countries in Europe?

Tarja Cronberg: Islamophobia had been fuelled by the response of the western governments to 9/11 . The measures of “war on terrorism” have been alleviated, and this change in the policies hopefully will soften also some prejudices in Europe.   It will be a long process as the policies have breached human rights.

Unfortunately, also some of the far-right groupss have taken advantage of fuelled islamophopbia and they have used their own means to provoke it.

The European parliament has called EU to abolish religious intolerance. This includes islamophobia.

In Finland the immigration has been small-scale compared to many countries. Anyhow the immigrants that have come, have found it difficult to get employed. We have proposed to deal with the problem by integration measures such as language and other training, and with different forums for cultural exchange.

Stop saying targeted killings protect Muslim women

A justification for targeted killings in the middle east was to shield women from violence. They’ve made it worse

BY EMAAN MAJED

In 2001, first lady Laura Bush discussed the need “to kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network” as a principal justification for the Afghanistan War. Following that line of thinking, President Bush repeatedly referred to “women of cover” who needed reprieve from the misogyny of Islamic extremists, and war hawks seized upon the issue of helpless Muslim women to advance conflict in the Middle East through the 2000s.

The truth is that in our post 9/11 world, Muslim women are not beneficiaries of violence in Muslim countries, but a gimmick used to justify it. Indeed, women are themselves major, underappreciated victims of the war in terror, including the recent incidence of drone strikes.

The disastrous effect of drone attacks on women is threefold. First, Muslim women themselves are killed devastatingly. Though their deaths have been largely ignored by the Western media and denied by the U.S. government, the wealth of data on drone strikes is clear: “targeted” killings murder scores of civilians, including many women and children (a report by the Investiture Bureau of Journalism put the civilian death toll between 411 and 884). In late spring 2011, the women of Mir Ali village in North Pakistan were encased in their modest stone houses when the sky starting falling. Though they did not know it then, five of those women were about to die in U.S. drone attacks that have proliferated over the past two years.

Moreover, the deaths of Muslim men have an additional negative impact on Muslim women. The male civilians killed in drone attacks (and they are often civilians) do not exist in a vacuum; they are the husbands, fathers and sons of Muslim women. They are breadwinners, community leaders and parts of families. Their killings dissolve and disintegrate whole communities. Their absence can lead to economic ruin in places where instability has already made economic prosperity impossible. Paying the resulting medical bills of men injured by strikes can put untenable financial burdens on women. Interviewees in the tribal area of Pakistan report that drones often destroy the buildings upon attack, and rebuilding these structures is another monetary strain in a region dominated by poverty.

The FBI has manufactured the most terrorist plots in the USA.

Most Terrorist Plots in the US Aren’t Invented by Al Qaeda — They’re Manufactured by the FBI

Trevor Aaronson (AlterNet)

Antonio Martinez was a punk. The twenty-two-year-old from Baltimore was chunky, with a wide nose and jet-black hair pulled back close to his scalp and tied into long braids that hung past his shoulders. He preferred to be called Muhammad Hussain, the name he gave himself following his conversion to Islam. But his mother still called him Tony, and she couldn’t understand her son’s burning desire to be the Maryland Mujahideen.

As a young man, Martinez had been angry and lost. He’d dropped out of Laurel High School, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent his teens as a small-time thief in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. By the age of sixteen, he’d been charged with armed robbery. In February 2008, at the age of eighteen, he tried to steal a car. Catholic University doctoral student Daniel Tobin was looking out of the window of his apartment one day when he saw a man driving off in his car. Tobin gave chase, running between apartment buildings and finally catching up to the stolen vehicle. He opened the passenger-side door and got in. Martinez, in the driver’s seat, dashed out and ran away on foot. Jumping behind the wheel, Tobin followed the would-be car thief. “You may as well give up running,” he yelled at Martinez. Martinez was apprehended and charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle—he had stolen the vehicle using an extra set of car keys which had gone missing when someone had broken into Tobin’s apartment earlier. However, prosecutors dropped the charges against Martinez after Tobin failed to appear in court.

Despite the close call, Martinez’s petty crimes continued. One month after the car theft, he and a friend approached a cashier at a Safeway grocery store, acting as if they wanted to buy potato chips. When the cashier opened the register, Martinez and his friend grabbed as much money as they could and ran out of the store. The cashier and store manager chased after them, and later identified the pair to police. Martinez pleaded guilty to theft of one hundred dollars and received a ninety-day suspended sentence, plus six months of probation.

Searching for greater meaning in his life, Martinez was baptized and became a Christian when he was twenty-one years old, but he didn’t stick with the religion. “He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn’t understand it,” said Alisha Legrand, a former girlfriend. Martinez chose Islam instead. On his Facebook page, Martinez wrote that he was “just a yung brotha from the wrong side of the tracks who embraced Islam.” But for reasons that have never been clear to his family and friends, Martinez drifted toward a violent, extremist brand of Islam. When the FBI discovered him, Martinez was an angry extremist mouthing off on Facebook about violence, with misspelled posts such as, “The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah.” Based on the Facebook postings alone, an FBI agent gave an informant the “green light” to get to know Martinez and determine if he had a propensity for violence. In other words, to see if he was dangerous.

The government was setting the trap.

On the evening of December 2, 2010, Martinez was in another Muslim’s car as they drove through Baltimore. A hidden device recorded their conversation. His mother had called, and Martinez had just finished talking to her on his cell phone. He was aggravated. “She wants me to be like everybody else, being in school, working,” he told his friend. “For me, it’s different. I have this zeal for deen and she doesn’t understand that.” Martinez’s mother didn’t know that her son had just left a meeting with a purported Afghan-born terrorist who had agreed to provide him with a car bomb. But she wasn’t the only one in the dark that night. Martinez himself didn’t know his new terrorist friend was an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that the man driving the car—a man he’d met only a few weeks earlier—was a paid informant for federal law enforcement.

Five days later, Martinez met again with the man he believed to be a terrorist. The informant was there, too. They were all, Martinez believed, brothers in arms and in Islam. In a parking lot near the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike, Martinez, the informant, and the undercover FBI agent piled into an SUV, where the undercover agent showed Martinez the device that would detonate the car bomb and how to use it. He then unveiled to the twenty-two-year-old the bomb in the back of the SUV and demonstrated what he’d need to do to activate it. “I’m ready, man,” Martinez said. “It ain’t like you seein’  it on the news. You gonna be there. You gonna hear the bomb go off. You gonna be, uh, shooting, gettin’ shot at. It’s gonna be real. … I’m excited, man.”

That night, Martinez, who had little experience behind the wheel of a car, needed to practice driving the SUV around the empty parking lot. Once he felt comfortable doing what most teenagers can do easily, Martinez and his associates devised a plan: Martinez would park the bomb-on-wheels in the parking lot outside the military recruiting center. One of his associates would then pick him up, and they’d drive together to a vantage point where Martinez could detonate the bomb and delight in the resulting chaos and carnage.

The next morning, the three men put their plan into action. Martinez hopped into the SUV and activated the bomb, as he’d been instructed, and then drove to the military recruiting station. He parked right in front. The informant, trailing in another car, picked up Martinez and drove him to the vantage point, just as planned. Everything was falling into place, and Martinez was about to launch his first attack in what he hoped would be for him a lifetime of jihad against the only nation he had ever known.

Looking out at the military recruiting station, Martinez lifted the detonation device and triggered the bomb. Smiling, he watched expectantly. Nothing happened. Suddenly, FBI agents rushed in and arrested the man they’d later identify in court records as “Antonio Martinez a/k/a Muhammad Hussain.” Federal prosecutors in Maryland charged Martinez with attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He faced at least thirty-five years in prison if convicted at trial.

“This is not Tony,” a woman identifying herself as Martinez’s mother told a reporter after the arrest. “I think he was brainwashed with that Islam crap.” Joseph Balter, a federal public defender, told the court during a detention hearing that FBI agents had entrapped Martinez, whom he referred to by his chosen name. The terrorist plot was, Balter said, “the creation of the government—a creation which was implanted into Mr. Hussain’s mind.” He added: “There was nothing provided which showed that Mr. Hussain had any ability whatsoever to carry out any kind of plan.”

Despite Balter’s claims, a little more than a year after his indictment, Martinez chose not to challenge the government’s charges in court. On January 26, 2012, Martinez dropped his entrapment defense and pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction under a deal that will require him to serve twenty-five years in prison—more years than he’s been alive. Neither Martinez nor Balter would comment on the reasons they chose a plea agreement, though in a sentencing hearing, Balter told the judge he believed the entire case could have been avoided had the FBI counseled, rather than encouraged, Martinez.

The U.S. Department of Justice touted the conviction as another example of the government keeping citizens safe from terrorists. “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement announcing Martinez’s plea agreement. “That is what the American people expect of the Justice Department, and that is what we aim to deliver.”

Indeed, that is exactly what the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been delivering throughout the decade since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But whether it’s what the American people expect is questionable, because most Americans today have no idea that since 9/11, one single organization has been responsible for hatching and financing more terrorist plots in the United States than any other. That organization isn’t Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden and responsible for the spectacular 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And it isn’t Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any of the other more than forty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations. No, the organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other is the FBI. Through elaborate and expensive sting operations involving informants and undercover agents posing as terrorists, the FBI has arrested and the Justice Department has prosecuted dozens of men government officials say posed direct—but by no means immediate or credible—threats to the United States.

Read the rest…

White Evangelicals, Islam and American Values

By Paul Louis Metzger

Listen to this piece.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s survey, “What it Means to be American: Attitudes towards Increasing Diversity in America Ten Years after 9/11,” “Nearly 6-in-10 white evangelical Protestants believe the values of Islam are at odds with American values, but majorities of Catholics, non-Christian religiously unaffiliated Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans disagree.”

If the percentage is accurate, what does this say about American Evangelicalism? That white Evangelicals’ skin color often shapes their perception of Islam? Could it be that white Evangelicals are biased against Arabs and that this prejudice shapes their view of Islam, even though there are, I believe, more Asian Muslims than Arab Muslims? Could it be that white Evangelicals often have nostalgic and/or narrow views of what it means to be American—’white and Christian like me’?

Some white Evangelicals might think they are simply more spiritually and culturally discerning than other Christian groups and the broader populace, and that they understand better what Christian values, American values, and the values of Islam really are (the last set of values being viewed as out of step with the former two). But do Christian values and American values really line up well together? It seems as if many white Evangelicals think they do. Still, could it be that what has gone on for so long is really a subsuming of Christian values under those of America? If so, perhaps the conversation with Islam will cause the church to perceive well where their real fight can be found–not with Islam, but with the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12) that often distort the church’s vision and cause it to align itself with this power or principality rather than the person of Christ and his kingdom reality.

These questions reflect my own consternation with what I find to be a certain kind of cultural hegemony within American Evangelicalism. My hope is that Evangelicalism in this country will become increasingly diverse and expand its vision, missional values, and public witness to the kingdom of God in Christ in view of the Bible even while developing greater openness to various people groups and religious traditions in American society today.

Yup, Fox is really trying to dredge this “issue” up again.

Fox News Reignites Islamophobic Campaign Against The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’

By Hamed Aleaziz on Dec 10, 2012, ThinkProgress

Fox News is again trying to drum up “controversy” around the Park51 Islamic community center in Manhattan. On Sunday, Fox Nation re-published a New York Post article claiming that “community programs” no longer exist at Park51, just Muslims praying. From there, Fox and Friends discussed the latest “development” on Park51. “It’s all pray and no play,” host Gretchen Carlson said and complained that the center isn’t hosting community programs and is instead attracting Muslims for prayer. Noted Islamophobe Donald Trump cited the oft-repeated far-right claim that Muslims built the community center to celebrate victory on 9/11:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: It’s all pray and no play. The controversial Ground Zero Mosque was supposed to be a cultural center, but it turns out it’s now an empty space with no community programs. Dozens of worshipers gather at the site for prayer services, but that’s pretty much the only activity in the building aside from a small martial arts class.

BRIAN KILMEADE: … Donald, do you want to finance the mosque downtown?

STEVE DOOCY: The Mosque-erade

DONALD TRUMP: No, I don’t think so, I’d certainly buy the site. But I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the site. A lot of people don’t. You know, in the Arab world, when they have victory, they like to build a Mosque at that site. It’s very strongly out there. I think this is a terrible idea. It shouldn’t be done and let’s see what happens…

Watch it:

Fox is recycling rhetoric from more than two years ago when anti-Islam activists like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer led an all-out war in their attempt to prevent the cultural center from opening. At the time, Fox News became a major broadcaster of their Islamophobicagenda. Back then, Fox gave anti-Islam activists a platform to make their virulent attacks against the proposed Park51 community center.

Multiple news organizations, like the Washington Post, debunked the fearmongering, pointing out that the “stated point of the project is creating a world where Jews, Christians and Muslims connect again in a way that builds mutual understanding and respect. This is precisely the opposite goal of the 9/11 terrorists.” Conservatives like Orrin Hatch supported Park51. And New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke up in favor of the center as well, saying that freedom of religion should be tolerated.

As far as Fox’s new angle goes, it’s hardly a new development that the center serves as a place of worship; it was always slated to provide a home for Muslim worshipers in Manhattan. And the lack of cultural events likely has more to do with the center’s perceived financial issues than with a sinister plot: last year, a rental dispute between the center and its landlord went to court.

But unlike two years ago, the center faces no legal hurdles from the city to continue operating in the site. New York City’s Landmark Preservation Commission approved the center in 2010 and Mayor Bloomberg agreed. Park51 opened up last year without protests and little to no fanfare.

(Via IslamophobiaToday.com)

By Samuel Burke and Claire Calzonetti, CNN, December 11th, 2012

Aasif Mandvi’s job title as a TV correspondent is both a complete joke and utterly realistic: Senior Muslim Correspondent.

He works for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the highly rated comedic news program that, at its best, can be even more influential than real American newscasts. And his work under that title, as well as countless others (“Senior Middle East Correspondent,” “Senior Asian Correspondent”) has propelled him to prominence.

But the comedian is no longer just going for laughs. In his new play, “Disgraced,” Mandvi takes a serious look at the tensions between Muslims, Jews and Christians that linger in post-9/11 United States.

The show breaks just about every taboo about the interface between East and West culture. Seated in an American living room, Muslim, Jewish, black and female characters discuss social issues like racial profiling and Islam in America.

“The identity of Islam and the way Islam is viewed by the West has changed after 9/11,” Mandvi said.

He was inspired to do the play by its writer, Ayad Akhtar, who sent Mandvi a draft two years ago.

“I read it and I thought, wow, this is an amazing play and very rare are there roles for brown actors and especially Muslim American actors that sort of deal with the identity issue in this way and in such a sophisticated, nuanced way as this play does,” Mandvi said.

The issues discussed in the play, Mandvi said, are universal – not unique to Muslims. “Jews, Christians and other people have come up to me and said, I identify with this Muslim character on stage and his own identification with his tribal identity. And the fact is that, you know, the way we were raised and the things we were taught shape us.”

Mandvi, who was born in India and raised in England and the United States, will continue his satirical reports for the The Daily Show.

Over the years he has made it clear on the show that he is not afraid to use his ethnicity to make a joke, and a point. But is there any line he will not cross?

“I’ll exploit the brownness as far as I can,” he joked with Amanpour. “Sometimes, through satire, I get to sit on that fence between cultures, between East and West and comment on it and just by virtue of the fact that I am ethnically who I am.”

Original post: Daily Show correspondent takes on Muslim stereotypes

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer cozy up to Islamophobes who echo their own sentiments about wanting to see “Islam wiped off.” Spencer laughs at Hindu nationalist speaker at SION 9/11 event who compared Islam to bacteria, Muslims to rats and said “Islam will be wiped out.”

A few choice words by Dr. Babu Suseelan, a Hindu activist in Pennsylvania, provided one of these occasions.

“If we do not kill the bacteria,” the jowly Suseelan scolded the audience, “the bacteria will kill us.” Otherwise, he warned, “Muslims will breed like rats and they will be a majority.” Still, he concluded hopefully, “Islam can be stopped! And it can be wiped out.”

Spencer laughed, but Geller covered her face, as if witnessing the antics of a naughty child.

Pamela Geller’s 9/11 gathering features speaker calling for Islam to be ‘wiped out’

by Alex Kane (MondoWeiss)

On September 11, most Americans carried on with their day, perhaps pausing for a moment to reflect on the terrorist attacks in 2001. But not the crew of Islamophobes who have exploited the attacks as an opportunity to foment hatred of Muslims and profit off that hatred.

Leading anti-Muslim bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer held a September 11 gathering in New York City titled “D-Day in the Information Battle Space.” An initiative of what they call the International Freedom Defense Congress, the conference focused on “Islamic supremacist attempts to restrict the freedom of speech in the free world, and the smear campaigns against freedom fighters in newspapers and media institutions in the West,” in the words of Geller.

The gathering brought together speakers from anti-Muslim movements around the globe, including Tommy Robinson of the English Defense League, a violent far-right group. David Yerushalmi, the racist Orthodox Jewish lawyer who has lived in an illegal Israeli settlement, was a speaker as well. And David Storobin, the Brooklyn state senator who created some buzz after being photographed in an Israeli army uniform, spoke to Geller’s conference too.

It was the latest attempt by Geller and her cohort to forge cross-continental links to other anti-Muslim activists. The precursor to this event was a gathering in Stockholm, Sweden that likewise brought together a host of anti-Muslim activists from around the world. Before that, there was the founding of the Stop Islamization of Nations group, “designed to promote an umbrella network of counter-jihad groups across Europe and the US,” as The Guardian reported.

Brooklyn-based writer Aaron Labaree attended the New York September 11 gathering for Guernica Magazine. Labaree reports that Geller opened up the conference with a speech to attendees that called on “every single one” of them to “be a soldier” in the battle to “save the republic.”

By far the most disturbing aspect of Labaree’s report is this snippet:

A few choice words by Dr. Babu Suseelan, a Hindu activist in Pennsylvania, provided one of these occasions.

“If we do not kill the bacteria,” the jowly Suseelan scolded the audience, “the bacteria will kill us.” Otherwise, he warned, “Muslims will breed like rats and they will be a majority.” Still, he concluded hopefully, “Islam can be stopped! And it can be wiped out.”

Spencer laughed, but Geller covered her face, as if witnessing the antics of a naughty child.

Geller may have covered her face, perhaps in slight embarrassment that the activists she cavorts around with have no problem calling for the “wipe out” of an entire religion. But these are her allies.

But the fact that this rhetoric was inevitable may have caused the most high-profile speaker scheduled, John Bolton, to decide it was against his better interest to attend the conference. Bolton is a top neoconservative and a former official in the Bush administration, and is now advising Mitt Romney.

Bolton is an ally of Geller, as The Nation’s Wayne Barrett noted. “Bolton, who has campaigned repeatedly with Romney, is so close to Geller and Spencer that he wrote the foreword to their 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, and has done several interviews with Geller, cozily discussing Middle East policy in couch videos,” reports Barrett. In the midst of a campaign season, though, Bolton appearing at a conference like this was bound to attract attention that the Romney campaign could do without. So even though Bolton was advertised as being a speaker at the conference, he never planned on showing.

I emailed an assistant to Bolton, Christine Samuelian of the American Enterprise Institute, before the gathering took place. Samuelian told me that the event was “not on his calendar…He has done it in the past and they may have assumed he was going to do it again this year but he did not commit to anything.”

But think again if you take this as a sign that the GOP is trying to ditch its anti-Muslim wing. The optics of a Romney adviser meeting with people who call for Islam to be “wiped out” would not be good, but the larger alliance is still there. As Labaree explains:

National politicians generally don’t get photographed with anyone who talks like Geller or Spencer, but they are happy to be associated with them at just one level of remove. Last weekend, the Family Research Council held its annual conference in Washington, D.C. The FRC’s Executive Vice President, retired General Jerry Boykin, has gained notoriety for his paranoid rants against Islam, which he has called “the religion of Satan.” The FRC conference’s featured speaker this year was Paul Ryan. And the Ground Zero Mosque affair of 2010 drew plenty of politicians of national stature, including Newt Gingrich and Rep. Peter King, of New York, who made opposition to the “mosque” his signature issue.

These politicians take SION’s position because it’s popular. Most Americans don’t get high on outrage the way Geller and Spencer do, but many are receptive to their ideas about Islam. A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that almost half of Americans surveyed believe the values of Islam are incompatible with American values; the same percentage would be uncomfortable with a mosque being built in their neighborhood. This is theoretical, of course. Most people don’t have a mosque in their neighborhood: as of 2011, Muslims made up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population (Jews account for 1.6 percent, Mormons 1.9 percent, atheists and agnostics 15 percent). So far, the struggle in which SION attendees are supposed to be soldiers is a fantasy. But if Israel and Iran go to war, if there’s a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil—counter-jihadists and their allies will likely see their star rise. Meanwhile, Geller instructed the troops assembled to keep on blogging.

Some articles to remind us of Bill Maher:

Bill Maher Proves Why He is an Idiot Again: Defends Fascist Geert Wilders

Bill Maher and Keith Ellison Spar Over the Qur’an and Islam

It’s Official: Bill Maher is a Racist

Bill Maher: A Loon Among Liberals

Tell Bill Maher About a Mohammed You Know

Muslims are no Different, or why Bill Maher’s blood libel is Bigotry

Comedian Bill Maher puts himself in the company of “9/11 liberals” who believe that Islam as a religion is different and decidedly worse than all other religions. He said Friday that ‘at least half of all Muslims believe it is all right to kill someone who insults ‘the Prophet.’ His bad faith is immediately apparent in the reference to 9/11, not the work of mainstream Muslims but of a political cult whose members often spent their time in strip clubs.

Now, it may be objected that Maher has made a career of attacking all religions, and promoting irreverence toward them. So Islam is just one more target for him. But that tack wouldn’t entirely be true. He explicitly singles Islam out as more, much more homocidal than the other religions. He is personally unpleasant to his Muslim guests, such as Keith Ellison. His reaction to the youth of the Arab Spring gathering to try to overthrow their American-backed dictators was “the Arabs are revolting.” Try substituting “Jews” to see how objectionable that is.

Maher ironically has de facto joined an Islamophobic network that is funded by the Mellon Scaife Foundation and other philanthropies tied to the American Enterprise Institute, etc. which is mainly made up of evangelical Christians, bigoted American Jews who would vote for the Likud Party if they could, and cynical Republican businessmen and politicians casting about for something with which to frighten working class Americans into voting for them.

Maher is a consistent liberal and donated $1 million to the Obama campaign, so he is in odd company in targeting Muslims this way. So what explains this animus against Muslims in particular? The only thing he has in common with the Islamophobic Right is his somewhat bloodthirsty form of militant Zionism. He strongly supported the Israeli attack on helpless little Lebanon in 2006, in which the Israelis dropped a million cluster bombs on the farms of the south of that country. He talks about how the besieged Palestinians of Gaza deserve to be “nuked.” His interviews with Likudnik Israeli officials are typically fawning, unlike his combative style with other right wing guests.

In short, Maher is in part reacting as a nationalist to Muslims as a rival national group, and his palpable hatred for them is rooted not in religion but in national self-conception. It is a key tactic of militant Zionism to attempt to demonize and delegitimize Muslims; you don’t have to apologize for colonizing or imposing Apartheid on Palestinians, after all, if they aren’t really human beings. In addition, like many Americans, Maher sees the United States, Europe and Israel as ‘the West’ locked in a rivalry with an alien, Islamic civilization that is intrinsically fanatical and backward (his fellow-traveller on this issue, Pamela Geller, uses the word ‘savage.’) Maher is aware of the history of Christian bloodthirstiness, of course, but he often speaks of it as being in the past. He seems to see contemporary Muslims as having the same sorts of flaws (Inquisition, Crusades) as medieval Christianity.

Maher is not important, but his thesis is widely put forward, and it matters in real people’s lives. There is a nation-wide campaign by religious bigots (most of them sadly evangelical Christians) to prevent American Muslims from building mosques in their communities, and one of the reasons often given is ‘fear’ that the Muslims are homicidal and so the mosque is a conspiracy to commit murder waiting to happen. Maher’s singling out of Muslim as different willy-nilly encourages people to treat them as different, i.e., to discriminate against them.

It is significant that Maher tries to pin the label ‘murderer’ on the Muslims (or half of them?) Because one of the centerpieces of classical Western hatred of Jews was the blood libel, the allegation that they stole the babies of Christians and sacrificed them in secret rituals. It is hard to see what the difference is between that and arguing that some 3 million American Muslims are walking around like a grenade with the pin pulled out. Both blood libels configure a non-Christian group as homicidal, and locate the impulse for their alleged killing sprees in secret religious beliefs opaque to the normal Christian.

Refuting Maher would be tedious and, as others have noted, like nailing jello to the wall, since he doesn’t have a cogent set of testable theses about Muslims, he just despises them. For what it is worth, It is fairly easy to show that Maher’s specific assertions about Muslims, and more especially about American Muslims, are simply not true. Most reject militant groups, and nearly 80% want a two-state solution on Israel and Palestine, i.e. they accept Israel assuming Palestinian statelessness is ended.

Crowd politics is different in various parts of the world and it is certainly true that riots can be provoked in each culture by different things. It is a straw man to say Muslims “would” kill people for insulting Muhammad. How many such killings happen each year? where? And it stacks the deck against them to single out their motive from other possible impetuses to violence. Is the complaint that they are more violent than other people (not in evidence)? Or that their motives for violence are peculiar (depends on how you classify them)? In the United States, the police beating of Rodney King resulted in 3000 shops being burned down in Los Angeles. Race seems to be the thing that sets off riots in the US. Rioting over race relations is so common that major such incidents, as in Cincinnati, often do not even get national press.

The touchiness of Muslims about assaults on the Prophet Muhammad is in part rooted in centuries of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism during which their religion was routinely denounced as barbaric by the people ruling and lording it over them. That is, defending the Prophet and defending the post-colonial nation are for the most part indistinguishable, and being touchy over slights to national identity (and yes, Muslimness is a kind of national identity in today’s world) is hardly confined to Muslims.

In India, dozens of Christians have sometimes been killed by rioting Hindus angry over allegations of missionary work. Killing people because you think they tried to convert members of your religion to another religion? Isn’t it because such a conversion is an insult to your gods?

In Myanmar, angry Buddhists have attacked the hapless Muslim minority, sometimes alleging they were avenging an instance of the rape of a Buddhist girl (i.e. these are like lynchings in the Jim Crow South).

Or then there have been Sri Lanka Buddhist attacks on Tamil Christians. In fact, Sri Lanka Buddhists have erected a nasty police state and shown a propensity for violence against the Tamil minority, some elements of which have had revolutionary or separatist aspirations (not everybody in the group deserves to be punished for that).

And, militant Israeli Jews have set fire to Muslim mosques in Palestine and recently tried to “lynch” three Palestinians in Jerusalem. If Maher thinks only Muslims are thin-skinned, he should try publicly criticizing Israeli policy in America and see what happens to him.

Since Iraq didn’t have ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and wasn’t connected to 9/11, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that 300 million Americans brutally attacked and militarily occupied that country for 8 1/2 years, resulting in the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the wounding of millions, and the displacement of millions more, mainly because Iraq’s leader had talked dirty about America. Now that is touchy.

Americans tut-tutting over riots in the Arab world appear to have led sheltered lives. In most of the world, crowd actions are common over all kinds of issues, beyond the ones of race, class and college sports teams that routinely provoke them here. When I was living in India there were always items in the newspaper about a bus driver accidentally running over a pedestrian, and then an angry mob forming that killed the bus driver. Neighborhood nationalism. The same sort of crowds gather when a blaspheming author drives his discourse into the sanctity of their neighborhood. It is appalling, but I’m not sure what exactly you would do about that sort of thing. It certainly isn’t confined to Muslims.

In fact, the crowd that attacked the US embassy in Cairo was just 2000 or so people, tiny by Egyptian standards. A demonstration that only attracted 2000 people would usually be considered a dismal failure in Cairo. Likewise, for all its horror and destructiveness, the crowd that assaulted the US consulate in Benghazi was very small, a few hundred people. Many of them have now been chased out of town by outraged Libyans disturbed at this affront to their city’s reputation as a cradle of a revolution made for the sake of human rights. Acareful comparison in percentage terms of the size of the crowdsthat protested Mubarak’s rule in Cairo (hundreds of thousands) with the size of those who protested the so-called film attacking the Prophet Muhammad, shows that the latter is hardly worth mentioning.

Maher is using his position as a comedic gadfly to promote hatred of one-sixth of humankind, and that is wrong, any way you look at it.

On this 9/11 let it be remembered that American Muslims do not bear collective guilt for the crime of 9/11, and let us remember those who died in the attacks. (h/t: Abdallah C.)

List of Muslim Victims of 9/11

(via. Some Random Thoughts Blog)

“American Muslims bear no collective guilt or blame for the crime of 9/11. We have nothing to apologize for and everything to be proud of, including our loyalty and hard-earned livelihoods. We are not guest citizens, we are not second-rate citizens; we reject marginalization and require no validation. We are equal citizens living and worshipping in our country.” (Ahmed Rehab, Huffington Post)

1. Samad Afridi
2. Ashraf Ahmad
3. Shabbir Ahmad (45 years old; Windows on the World; leaves wife and 3 children)
4. Umar Ahmad
5. Azam Ahsan
6. Ahmed Ali
7. Tariq Amanullah (40 years old; Fiduciary Trust Co.; ICNA website team member; leaves wife and 2 children)
8. Touri Bolourchi (69 years old; United Airlines #175; a retired nurse from Tehran)
9. Salauddin Ahmad Chaudhury
10. Abdul K. Chowdhury (30 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald)
11. Mohammad S. Chowdhury (39 years old; Windows on the World; leaves wife and child born 2 days after the attack)
12. Jamal Legesse Desantis
13. Ramzi Attallah Douani (35 years old; Marsh & McLennan)
14. SaleemUllah Farooqi
15. Syed Fatha (54 years old; Pitney Bowes)
16. Osman Gani
17. Mohammad Hamdani (50 years old)
18. Salman Hamdani (NYPD Cadet)
19. Aisha Harris (21 years old; General Telecom)
20. Shakila Hoque (Marsh & McLennan)
21. Nabid Hossain
22. Shahzad Hussain
23. Talat Hussain
24. Mohammad Shah Jahan (Marsh & McLennan)
25. Yasmeen Jamal
26. Mohammed Jawarta (MAS security)
27. Arslan Khan Khakwani
28. Asim Khan
29. Ataullah Khan
30. Ayub Khan
31. Qasim Ali Khan
32. Sarah Khan (32 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald)
33. Taimour Khan (29 years old; Karr Futures)
34. Yasmeen Khan
35. Zahida Khan
36. Badruddin Lakhani
37. Omar Malick
38. Nurul Hoque Miah (36 years old)
39. Mubarak Mohammad (23 years old)
40. Boyie Mohammed (Carr Futures)
41. Raza Mujtaba
42. Omar Namoos
43. Mujeb Qazi
44. Tarranum Rahim
45. Ehtesham U. Raja (28 years old)
46. Ameenia Rasool (33 years old)
47. Naveed Rehman
48. Yusuf Saad
49 and 50. Rahma Salie & unborn child (28 years old; American Airlines #11; wife of Michael Theodoridis; 7 months pregnant)
51. Shoman Samad
52. Asad Samir
53. Khalid Shahid (25 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald; engaged to be married in November)
54. Mohammed Shajahan (44 years old; Marsh & McLennan)
55. Naseema Simjee (Franklin Resources Inc.’s Fiduciary Trust)
56. Jamil Swaati
57. Sanober Syed
58. Michael Theodoridis (32 years old; American Airlines #11; husband of Rahma Salie)
59. W. Wahid

Queue the claims of “cultural-Jihad” in 1, 2, 3… (h/t: Wanderer)

Arab-Muslim to join ‘Green Lantern’ comic series

DETROIT (AP) — When DC Comics decided to blow up its fabled universe and create a brave, diverse future, Geoff Johns drew from the past for a new character: his own background as an Arab-American.

The company’s chief creative officer and writer of the relaunched “Green Lantern” series dreamed up Simon Baz, DC’s most prominent Arab-American superhero and the first to wear a Green Lantern ring. The character and creator share Lebanese ancestry and hail from the Detroit area, which boasts one of the largest and oldest Arab communities in the United States.

“I thought a lot about it — I thought back to what was familiar to me,” Johns, 39, told The Associated Press by phone last week from Los Angeles, where he now lives. “This is such a personal story.”

The Green Lantern mantle in DC Comics is no stranger to diversity with its ranks made up of men, women, aliens — animal, vegetable and mineral — from across the universe.

Earlier this year an alternate universe

after being laid off from his automotive engineering job. He steals the wrong car, which inadvertently steers him into a terrorism probe and, eventually, an unexpected call to join the universe’s galactic police force.

The olive-skinned, burly Baz hails from Dearborn, the hometown of Henry Ford and the capital ofArab America. His story begins at 10 years old, when he and the rest of his Muslim family watch their television in horror as airplanes fly into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Events unfold from there as U.S. Arabs and Muslims find themselves falling under intense suspicion and ostracism in the days, months and years following the attacks.

“Obviously, it’s affecting everybody,” said Johns, who grew up in nearby suburbs in a Lebanese Christian household and got into comics when he discovered his uncle’s old collection in his Arab grandmother’s attic. “One of the things I really wanted to show was its effect on Simon and his family in a very negative way.”

Baz is not the first Arab or Muslim character to grace — or menace, as has historically been the case — the comic world. Marvel Comics has Dust, a young Afghan woman whose mutant ability to manipulate sand and dust has been part of the popular X-Men books. DC Comics in late 2010 introduced Nightrunner, a young Muslim hero of Algerian descent reared in Paris. He is part of the global network of crime fighters set up by Batman alter-ego Bruce Wayne.

Frank Miller, whose dark and moody take on Batman in “The Dark Knight Returns” in 1986 energized the character, took a different tack in his recent book, “Holy Terror,” which tells the story of The Fixer and his efforts to stamp out Islamic terrorists. The graphic novel initially took root as a look at Batman’s efforts to fight terrorism, which grew out of Miller’s experiences of being in New York on 9/11.

A broader mission to bring Islamic heroes and principles to the comic world comes from Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of “The 99.” The U.S. educated psychologist from Kuwait has been gaining followers across the globe since the 2006 debut of the comic book that spawned a TV series. “The 99″ is named after the number of qualities the Quran attributes to God: strength, courage, wisdom and mercy among them.

The series gained a wide audience in 2010, when it worked with DC on a six-issue crossover that teamed the “The 99″ with The Justice League of America.

Johns, who also has written stories starring Superman, The Flash and Teen Titans, said going diverse only works if there’s a good story, and he believes he found that with Baz. But don’t mistake him for a hero in the beginning: Baz disappoints both devout Muslims — his forearm tattoo that reads “courage” in Arabic is considered “haram,” or religiously forbidden — and broader society by turning to a life of crime.

“He’s not a perfect character. He’s obviously made some mistakes in his life, but that makes him more compelling and relatable,” he said. “Hopefully (it’s) a compelling character regardless of culture or ethnic background. … But I think it’s great to have an Arab-American superhero. This was opportunity and a chance to really go for it.”

Of course, Johns hopes Green Lantern fans accept Baz, who joins other humans who have been “chosen,” including Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner. The overall relaunch has been good for DC, which has seen a solid gain in sales and critical reception — as well as some expected grumbling — since coming out with the “New 52″ last year.

Johns also sees the debut of Baz as a chance to reconnect with people in his home state: He’s scheduled to visit Dearborn this weekend for events related to the release that include a signing Saturday at a comic book store and a free presentation Sunday on his career and characters at the Arab American National Museum. He worked with museum staff to make sure he got certain details right about his character and the Arab-Muslim community.

“It doesn’t completely define the character but it shapes the character,” he said. “My biggest hope is that people embrace it and understand what we’re trying to do.”

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