Daniel Nalliah … ‘Having those same teachings right under our noses is counter-productive to our church.’ Photo: Simon O’Dwyer

(Via IslamophobiaToday.com)

Having a mosque and church in the same street can open the door to many interfaith opportunities yet anti-Islam crusader, Daniel Nalliah, wants to shut every opportunity away.

‘Sharia zone’: Christian pastor fires up over mosque-next-door plan

Anti-Islam crusader Daniel Nalliah and his evangelical Christian church are set to fight a plan to build a mosque in the same street.

Mr Nalliah, a pastor at Catch the Fire Ministries, said his church was weeks away from building a $2 million base at 25 Green Street, Doveton.

He recently learnt of a planning application by an Afghan community group to build the Omar Farooq Mosque next door. The church, along with more than 100 petitioners including adjoining residents, will formally object to Casey Council over the mosque proposal.

No objections had been raised against Catch the Fire’s church, which had been approved by the council, Mr Nalliah said.

Afghan-Australian Association of Victoria president Khaliq Fazal, as spokesman for the mosque proponents, accused Mr Nalliah and his church of distributing “hysterical” anti-mosque leaflets to “agitate” neighbours.

He said the mosque was a “place for peace and for the worship of the same god that we all believe in”.

“The Afghan community has a very good reputation and has assimilated well in a multicultural society since the 1860s. We’ve never had any problem with any other religions. We believe in Jesus Christ as well, so what’s the problem?”

Mr Nalliah — an outspoken figure who sparked outrage for attributing Black Saturday bushfires to Victoria’s abortion laws — said he did not know who was behind the leaflets.

He said his objections to the mosque trailed back to a long-running racial vilification dispute with the Islamic Council of Victoria over a Catch the Fire newsletter about Muslims and the Koran in 2002.

Mr Nalliah said he and his family received death threats during the dispute, which cost the church $600,000. “Not once have we said people should bust up a Muslim or burn down a mosque.

“We don’t approve of Islam as a religion but we love Muslim people. Islam teaches that those who follow other religions are infidels.

“It is a religion that doesn’t value freedom of religion. Having those same teachings right under our noses is counter-productive to our church.”

He said that homes vacated by “fed-up” neighbours would be bought up by Muslims, creating a “sharia [the moral code and religious law of Islam] zone”.

Casey planning manager Duncan Turner said the council would consider any public submissions “received up until it makes its decision”.

Comedian, actor, scholar and award-winning filmmaker Pardis Parker

Afghan is an award-winning short film starring Pardis Parker (Halifax Comedy Festival) and Mark Little (Picnicface), two friends who managed to find inspiration in an unpleasant afternoon surprise.

Ugly Racist Act Inspires Beautiful Short Film

by  Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker

Shortly after 9/11, one of the cars on Pardis Parker‘s street in Montreal was spray-painted with the words “go home Arab.”

The incident deeply impacted the Sri Lanka-born Parker, and inspired him to write his very first film: Afghan.

The award-winning short, which stars Parker (a comedian by trade) and Mark Little of Picnicface, tells the story of a hate crime victim forced to look for humor where none should be found.

We didn’t hear much about this in the news media. Not only that we don’t even know the names of these children because their lives aren’t as valuable as “Western lives.” Let the “Greater Islamophobia” march on: (h/t: Saladin)

US attack kills 5 Afghan kids

The way in which the U.S. media ignores such events speaks volumes about how we perceive them

BY GLENN GREENWALD, Salon.com

(updated below – Update II)

Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:

(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.

(2) Yesterday — a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen — the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet “using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009.” American media outlets — especially its cable news networks — erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night devoted the bulk of his show to this plot, parading the standard cast of characters — former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and terrorist advocate) Fran Townsend and its “national security analyst” Peter Bergen — to put on their Serious and Concerned faces, recite from the U.S. Government script, and analyze all the profound implications. CNN even hauled out Rep. Peter King to warn that this shows a “new level” of Terror threats from Yemen. CNN’s fixation on this plot continued into this morning.

Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world — including repeatedly in Yemen — was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation — why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? – is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business — trying to enjoy our Freedoms — and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).

Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).

This is the message sent over and over by the U.S. media: we are the victims of heinous, frightening violence; our government must do more, must bomb more, must surveil more, to Keep Us Safe; we do nothing similar to this kind of violence because we are Good and Civilized. This is how our Objective, Viewpoint-Free journalistic outlets continuously propagandize: by fixating on the violence done by others while justifying — or, more often, ignoring — the more far-reaching and substantial violence perpetrated by the U.S.

(3) If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S. — or if one of the people involved in this Yemen-originating plot were a relative of one of the dozens of civilians killed by Obama’s 2009 cluster bomb strike — what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency.

* * * * *

This point cannot be emphasized enough.

UPDATE: From the comments:

I was just sitting here thinking “I love reading GG, but I think he is being quite harsh here, it was only 5 kids that died, and that happens in war – its hardly as if it was some really major tragedy”.

And this is despite the fact that I would describe myself as a staunch anti-Imperialist who shuns the MSM – yet still I seem to be getting conditioned that the killing of these 5 kids is “normal”. Scary. Very scary.

We’re all subject to that conditioning, which is why it’s so necessary to pause every now and then to realize what a “really major tragedy” it actually is: one that could be easily avoided with different choices.

UPDATE II: It is now confirmed that the would-be bomber of the civilian jet was, in fact, a double agent working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence. So just as virtually every “domestic Terror plot” is one conceived, directed, funded and controlled by the FBI, this new Al Qaeda plot from Yemen was directed by some combination of the CIA and its Saudi partners. So this wasn’t merely a failed, nascent plot which is causing this fear-mongering media orgy: it was one controlled at all times by the U.S. and Saudi Governments.

In this Aug. 23, 2011 Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System photo, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 1st platoon sergeant, Blackhorse Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division participates in an exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Credit: AP Photo/DVIDS, Spc. Ryan Hallock)

Discussing the motives of the Afghan shooter

(Salon.com)

Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales on March 11 to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including nine children:

† He was drunk.

† He was experiencing financial stress.

† He was passed over for a promotion.

† He had a traumatic brain injury.

† He had marital problems.

† He suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty.

† He saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre.

Et cetera.

Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.

Even when Muslims who engage in such acts toward Americans clearlyand repeatedly explain that they did it in response to American acts of domination, aggression, violence and civilian-killing in their countries, and even when the violence is confined to soldiers who are part of a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country, the only cognizable motive is one of primitive, hateful evil. It is an act of Evil Terrorism, and that is all there is to say about it.

Note, too, that in the case of Sgt. Bales (or any other cases of American violence against Muslims), people have little difficulty understanding the distinction between (a) discussing and trying to understand the underlying motives of the act (causation) and (b) defending the act (justification). But that same distinction completely evaporates when it comes to Muslim violence against Americans. Those who attempt to understand or explain the act — they’re responding to American violence in their country; they are traumatized and angry at the continuous deaths of Muslim children and innocent adults; they’ve calculated that striking at Americans is the ony way to deter further American aggression in their part of the world — are immediately accused of mitigating, justifying or even defending Terrorism.

There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type (meaning: as a deviation from formal American policy), there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible, something other than an act of pure hatred or Evil. When a Muslim engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another manifestation of inscrutable hatred and Evil, and any discussion of any other causes must be prohibited and ignored.

* * * * *

I’ll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks. For now, I’ll note two: (1) this Thursday, March 22, in Philadelphia, I’ll be speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, at 5:00 pm, on “Endless War and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism”; it is free and open the public, and event information is here; (2) on Thursday, April 12, in Ottawa, Canada, at 7:00 pm, I’ll be speaking at an event coordinated by long-time commenter Bill Owen, and in attendance will be the heroicMaher Arar; ticket and event information is here. Over the next few weeks, I’ll also be speaking in Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C. and will post details as those dates approach. Finally, this Friday night, I’ll be on Real Time with Bill Maher.

UPDATE: From today’s issue of Reader’s Express, the Washington Post‘s publication for Metro riders:

Can you even imagine what would happen to someone who wrote or published an article like this about a Muslim killer of Americans?

UPDATE II: I have an Op-Ed in The Guardian today about the removal by the U.S. military of the accused shooter from Afghanistan.

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Yesterday was a day stained in blood.  Two U.S. soldiers were killed in Germany by a lone gunmen.  Meanwhile, nine children were killed in Afghanistan by U.S. armed forces.  Both incidents happened on the same day.  But if you’re an American watching your country’s mainstream media, you’ve probably only heard about one of these attacks.  Is there any question as to which one of these two incidents you’ve heard about?  That you’ve watched endless coverage of the two U.S. soldiers killed in Germany–and that you’ve hardly or never heard about what happened yesterday in Afghanistan–is almost certain.

Once again, American blood is boiling over the killing of two of their military personnel by someone who is suspected to be an Islamic extremist.  The anger is not just expressed on lunatic anti-Muslim websites like Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch or Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, but palpable in the general masses of U.S. citizenry.  How could these Muslim savages kill two of our brave U.S. servicemen? Thoughts of retaliation–perhaps even using a Samson Option (nuking Mecca, Medina, and/or other Muslim-majority cities)–are certainly considered, if but fleetingly.

Meanwhile, hardly any Americans are aware that on this very same day the U.S. military slaughtered nine children in a country we occupy.  Over the course of the next few days, we will get to know the intimate lives of the two fallen U.S. soldiers.  They will become very personal to us, living and breathing people–nay, young boys–proudly serving their country.  Do you think that your government-subservient propaganda machine you call mainstream media will ever spend any time personalizing the nine dead Afghan children, telling us about their childhoods and getting to know their bereaved mothers?

Why is it that nine Afghan children–killed by our country’s military–will be a side story whereas two U.S. soldiers–part of that very same occupying force that killed those nine children–will be covered to no end?  Can you imagine–just for a second–if one of those Muslim barbarians killed nine American children on U.S. soil?  And I don’t mean nine Muslim-American children…I mean, real Americans–you know, the good white Judeo-Christian ones.  The media would lose its mind, stoking the fans of war.  Americans might then expand their knowledge of geography as they get ready to bomb yet another country they’ve never heard of before.

It is difficult not to come to the same conclusion that has been reached in the Muslim world: Americans consider Muslim blood cheap.  Had it been two Muslim soldiers from some Muslim country that had been killed in their beds, the title of the articles in U.S. news reports would have read “two Islamic militants (or insurgents) killed” and that would be the end of that.  American soldiers are always “soldiers” and “servicemen”–never “militants” or “occupiers”.

Yesterday, we saw how two military men became more precious than nine young children.  The idea that U.S. (or Israeli) soldiers are worth more than the civilians in the countries they occupy is an old one: remember that myth that still persists that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved “a million U.S. lives”?  Even though that claim is completely spurious, even if we accept it for argument’s sake, didn’t anyone wonder if the lives of U.S. soldiers were really worth more than that of Japanese children?

The killing in Afghanistan will go unnoticed for a reason that is even more disturbing: we’ve been killing their civilians for a long, long time.  So far, the U.S. military has killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians.  So another nine children dead is just a drop in the bucket–a bucket full of Muslim blood.  Meanwhile, zero U.S. civilians have been killed by jihadists since 9/11 [this article was published in May of 2010, so if this statistic has changed, please let me know; but as far as I know, this is still accurate].  Surely then, two U.S. soldiers being killed is noteworthy.  In other words, so much Muslim blood has been shed that nobody notices when more is spilled.

But of course the American jingoists will say “it’s not the same” and they will explain to us why the killing of two U.S. soldiers “counts” and how the killing of nine Afghan children doesn’t.  Yet, if we wanted to compare the two incidents, then surely the latter is more indefensible.  For one, the Afghan dead were children.  Second, nine is–as far as I know–considered to be a higher number than two.  Third, the U.S. soldiers were killed by a lone gunmen, or at worst by a stateless organization that terrorizes its own populations.  Meanwhile, the nine children were killed by the U.S. military backed by the U.S. government in a war that was supported at its inception by its citizenry.  Fourth, the U.S. is an occupier in a country.  Although the U.S. citizenry may have become accustomed to being in the role of occupiers, history will have absolute disdain for foreign invaders.  Fifth, the lone gunmen may have been deranged mentally and thought he was justified because those U.S. soldiers were en route to join an occupation force–whereas the U.S. is killing Muslim children due to a national hysteria.

Granted, the U.S. military has stated that the strike against Afghan children was “accidental,” so in this particular way the killing of U.S. servicemen may have been worse.  But one wonders how much indiscriminate killing of civilians has to go on before it “counts”?

To understand how little the occupier feels guilty for the deaths caused by its occupation, we can look at the absolutely atrocious comments made by the Commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, who defended the slaughter of the nine Afghan children by blaming the deaths on their parents.  In what can only be described as the most disgusting comment ever, Gen. Petraeus had the audacity to suggest “that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties.”  Did you get that?  He’s claiming that Afghan parents slaughtered and immolated their own children in order to make the U.S. look bad.  How can “an apology” for killing children be taken seriously when it is delivered to parents whom you are accusing of killing their own children?  Absolutely preposterous!

[Update: A reader pointed out a mistake in this article, namely that Gen. Petraeus' comment was not about the incident involving the death of nine Afghan children, but an earlier one in mid-February in which the U.S. military killed sixty-five civilians--including twenty-two women and thirty children.  One Afghan official summed it up best, saying: "Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman."]

Can you imagine if a Muslim Congressman–the one or two we have–dared say such a thing about Israeli children killed in a Hamas rocket attack, i.e. that the Israeli parents burned alive their own children in order to make Hamas look bad?  What do you think would have happened?  Do you remember how the mainstream media–Fox News in particular–dealt with Imam Rauf’s post 9/11 statement where he opined that the U.S. foreign policy might possibly have contributed as a cause to the attack (gasp!, you don’t say!)?  The MSM kept replaying clips of those now infamous words, invalidating all the good Rauf has ever done in his life.

Yet, Gen. Petraeus’ words–which morbidly blamed the parents for the deaths of their own children–will hardly or just passingly be mentioned by U.S. news outlets.  Petraeus will simply issue an insincere apology and the matter will soon be forgotten.  He won’t be fired, nor will he be shamed in the public eye.  After enough Afghans have died and enough U.S. wealth spent (and it will be the latter which will cause a withdrawal, since Americans could care less about the former), Petraeus will come back home and be heaped with the great honors of a war hero.

To be absolutely clear: the murder of two U.S. soldiers in Germany is deplorable.  Such an act is illegal under international law, immoral based on human ethics, and is even forbidden under Islamic law.  Neither do I malign those soldiers who were killed–I understand that they were just doing their job, and my “anger” is only aimed at the government who risked their lives for no good reason.  Whatever deity you believe in–whether it is Jesus, Allah, or Yahweh–or even if you don’t believe in any–we can all pray or take a moment of silence for all those who fell yesterday, including the two U.S. soldiers and the nine Afghan children.  Our compassion as human beings compels us to do that.

Those responsible for the crime of killing the two U.S. soldiers in Germany should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  But will any law touch those responsible for the murder of nine Afghan children in the country we occupy?  Will we at least look inside our own selves before we point all the fingers at the Muslim world?  Will we ever contemplate that our religious right wing–and that in Israel–was a big factor in launching these ill-conceived wars?  One thing is certain: we won’t put Judaism or Christianity on trial as we put Islam on trial.  The double standards in the media against Muslims and Islam are absolutely unacceptable.  Free yourself from this brainwashing and try watching some real news–start by watching Al-Jazeera English–imperfect though it is, it is far better than the government-subservient establishment media in the U.S.

A Muslim man was assaulted after praying by a man who punched him repeatedly in the face and told him to “go back home.”

San Diego Assault Brings Calls for Hate Crime Charges

By Carol Forsloff

SAN DIEGO – The Council on American-Islamic relations (CAIR) is seeking hate charges against a man who assaulted a Muslim.

The San Diego chapter of CAIR on Saturday asked for state and federal hate crimes laws to be used against a white man in his 50’s.

The Muslim man was praying near Mission Bay park last Wednesday when the incident began. A man watched the Muslim pray and then followed him to a taxi stand where he had parked his cab.

When the victim attempted to enter the taxi, his alleged assailant first shouted, “You idiot, you mother f**ker, go back to where you came from.”

The Muslim cab driver was then grabbed by the shirt and punched repeatedly. The victim had to undergo hospital tests including a CAT scan.

“Because of the racial slurs reportedly used during this attack, we urge state and national law enforcement authorities to consider bringing hate crime charges against the alleged perpetrator,” said CAIR-San Diego Public Relations Director Edgar Hopida.

He said the victim believes he was attacked because of the recent failed Times Square car bomb attack.

Authorities have not revealed the name of the attacker or the victim but charges are anticipated.

The failed Times Square bomb plot allegedly hatched by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad has been blamed for a rash of racist incidents.

CAIR is the largest Muslim advocacy and civil liberties organization in the United States.