…manages an impressive stable of Zionist speakers, including several who are Arabs, Muslims, or ex-Muslims: Brigitte Gabriel, Ishmael Khaldi, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Nonie Darwish.
These speakers are not only “Zionist” as described above, but also extremely “anti-Muslim” and “Islamophobic.” Add to that list, Zuhdi Jasser who will be joining “Stand with Us” for a conference titled, “Rescuing Human Rights.” It’s likely as concerned about human rights as Pamela Geller’s Jessica Mokdad ‘Human Rights’ Conference was:
Next week, StandWithUs and the UC San Diego pro-Israel student advocacy group, Tritons for Israel, will host a rather mysterious campus event. According to a speaker contract SWU uploaded to the web in March, it is a conference called, Rescuing Human Rights, featuring the Wall Street Journal’s leading anti-jihadi columnist, Brett Stephens, necon legal scholar Avi Bell who was one of the Goldstone Report’s harshest critics, anti-jihadi “human rights” lawyer Brooke Goldstein, and the anti-jihadi Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser. He was the founder of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, and featured star of several Clarion Fund Islamophobic films including Obsession and Third Jihad.
Mid-May is Apartheid Week across many American campuses and the suitable pro-Israel response seems to be to host events accusing Muslims of being the dark forces of the universe. That appears to be the origin of this pro-Israel campus event on May 15th.
Why is this so mysterious? Because I can’t find any online record of this event. I do know thanks to a tweet in his Twitter timeline that Zuhdi Jasser, at least, will be speaking on campus next week. Jasser is the go-to figure for the pro-Israel neocon right whenever it needs a Muslim who excoriates other Muslims who aren’t sufficiently right-wing or patriotic. He is a devout supporter of Israel and also supported the NYPD’s illegal surveillance of local Muslim community members. Jasser also makes common cause with the Tea Party types and has publicly attacked Muslim Americans running for office as Democrats and engaged in Muslim baiting. In short, Zuhdi Jasser is “our” sort of Muslim, a “moderate” one who can be counted on as a bulwark against the swarms of jihadist Muslims seeking to overrun western civilization.
StandWithUs’ speaker contract guarantees Jasser $4,250 for his May 15th campus appearance plus hotel and travel expenses. These fees will be jointly paid by SWU and Tritons for Israel. However, I found a UC San Diego student fund allocation for $4,280 for this event that went to Tritons for Israel. This may be funding Jasser or the other three speakers listed Students at UDSD will be interested to know that their student fees are paying for an Islamophobic campus hate fest.
Interestingly, I’ve found no online reference to the event itself notifying anyone where or when it will be held. I’m not even sure the conference for which funding was requested in April is still happening (though Jasser is certainly speaking). My guess is the sponsors are trying to keep it under the radar so it won’t generate the off-campus visibility I’m trying to offer to it here. They’re probably trying to isolate the promotion to campus. But I hope the local Arab/Muslim community will find out about this shandeh and turn out en masse to let the community know that it won’t stand still and allow Islamophobes define them.
In researching this post, I discovered that another ersatz pro-Israel human rights group, the UK’s Henry Jackson Society has held confabs featuring the same name for the past few years. They’ve also produced an essay by that name, written by a pro-Israel Tory solicitor arguing that international human rights law as practiced in Europe is fahrkochteh and should be scrapped. Of course, what especially irks him is that Israeli generals and politicians with blood on their hands may be arrested and indicted for war crimes if they step foot on British soil. This is yet another example of the international nexus of pro-Israel advocacy groups who take cover under the guise of human rights, but whose agenda is serving as a promoter of Israel’s nationalist agenda and an apologist for its faltering human rights record.
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)
Yesterday, I noted severalreports 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 movedbeyond 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.
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.
Muslims women gather for a special Eid ul-Fitr morning prayer at the Los Angeles Convention Center on August 30, 2011 in Los Angeles, California (Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)
Only three weeks since Passover, and some people already need refreshers.
Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin argues that Islamophobia in the United States must be a myth because… look! the Muslims are breeding like rabbits. Citing newly released census data showing that the population of American Muslims more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, Tobin asks: “Is it possible or even likely that Islam would be thriving in the United States if it were not a society that is welcoming Muslims with open arms and providing a safe environment for people to openly practice this faith?”
Yes, it’s very possible. Let’s start with the Passover story: in particular, Exodus 1:12, in which the Egyptians discover that, “the more they afflicted [the Israelites], the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.” It looks like Tobin skipped that section of the haggadah.
And this Biblical wisdom holds up well under scrutiny: historically, discrimination and prejudice haven’t done much to hinder population growth. The African American population quadrupled (from under five million to nearly twenty million) between the end of the Civil War and the 1964 Civil Rights Act: does Tobin think that a century of Jim Crow, housing discrimination and the Ku Klux Klan provided Blacks “a safe environment”? The fact is, Islam is growing everywhere: doubling over the last thirty years in Europe, and on pace to reach 2.2 billion worldwide by 2030 (it’s currently 1.6 billion). Its growth in America is just one piece of this broader trend.
What’s sad is that we’ve seen all this before. Muslims aren’t the first religious group to be accused of cooperating with America’s international enemies. Just as Muslims today are called terrorists, American Jews were once tarred as the servants of Moscow. Similarly, attempts to outlaw Sharia recall centuries of anti-Semitic paranoia about Jewish religious law. In every generation, my haggadah teaches me, bigots rise up to discriminate against and attack minorities. If Jonathan Tobin cannot see that, if he continues to turn a blind eye to the oppression of Muslims among us, well then, I’ve got a couple more Bible verses he ought to read.
He grew up in Israel, served in the IDF as a lieutenant and is running for Congress, one of his main goals is to ‘stop the Islamization of America.’
What if a Turk who was born in the US but grew up in Istanbul came to America and said one of his primary goals was to end US funding to Israel? You can bet that he would be accused of stealth jihad and Islamization of the US:
Itamar Gelbman was born in New York 30 years ago and as a child moved with his parents to Herzliya, where he was raised. He studied business management and computer science at Tel Aviv University and served as an undercover reserve officer in the Tel Aviv Police District.
After graduation, Gelbman joined the IDF where he was a lieutenant in what he calls the “army special forces.” He said he could not be more specific about what he did in the army but that he received multiple awards, including a commendation from the IDF chief of staff.
Eight years ago, he moved to Texas. After US President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Gelbman decided to get involved in politics.
Gelbman is running in the May 29 Republican Primary in Texas’s Sixth Congressional District, which is outside Dallas. “I’m the only candidate for the seat who is pro-Israel,” Gelbman said.
Gelbman said he believes American politicians need to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. He does not believe the US should involve itself in the settlement issue and he would work to block foreign aid to Islamic countries that act against Israel and the United States.
“I would defend Israel and be their voice in the House,” he said. “Israel should be allowed to do whatever it needs to do. The Palestinians need to change their education system and accept Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital.” Gelbman said he would work to make sure a law requiring the US to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be enforced.
He received national attention when Muslims in his district were offended by his campaign flyer in which vowed to “fight the Islamization of America.”
Gelbman recently came to Israel to spend Passover with family. While he was in the country, he met with MK Danny Danon and other Likud politicians.
At last week’s Awakening 2012 conference, phony “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem not only detailed a treacherous scheme by President Obama to use immigration reform to legalize terrorism, but also uncovered a liberal plot to use the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade to “bring Sharia law liberally in our face.” Responding to co-panelist Frank Gaffney’s specious allegation that there have been anywhere between fifty to seventy instances where American judges used Sharia law to decide cases, Saleem blamed the Religious Right’s most hated ruling on the supposed proliferation of Sharia law in America.
Here’s a picture, I’m going to draw it very simply. What they’re trying to integrate into our laws is Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade. When they put this Islamic clause, we tracked fifty and now I’m going like there’s seventy, wow, when they establish this what happened is, they will be able to bring Sharia law liberally in our face. That’s why he said fight against those—any court that allows it we need to demonstrate outside and say no Sharia law but our constitution.
The abdication of U.S. federal judges in the post-9/11 era, and their craven subservience to Executive Branch security claims, has been a topic I’ve written aboutseveral times over the past couples of weeks. Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ that John Yoo is — needless to say — fully immune from any and all liability for having authorized the torture of Jose Padilla, on the ground that the illegality of Yoo’s conduct was not “beyond debate” at the time he engaged in it. Everything Iwrote a couple of weeks ago about the identical shielding of Donald Rumsfeld by federal courts and the Obama DOJ from similar claims applies to yesterday’s ruling, and The New York Times has a good editorial today condemning this ruling as “misguided and dangerous.”
In sum, this yet again underscores that of all the American institutions that have so profoundly failed in the wake of 9/11 to protect the most basic liberties — Congress, both political parties, the establishment media, the Executive Branch, the DOJ specifically — none has been quite as disgraceful as the federal judiciary, whose life tenure is supposed to insulate them from base political pressures that produce cowardly and corrupted choices. And yet, just consider these two facts:
(1) not a single War on Terror victim — not one — has been permitted to sue for damages in an American court over what was done to them, even when everyone admits they were completely innocent, even when they were subjected to the most brutal torture, and even when the judiciary of other countries permitted their lawsuits to proceed; and,
(2) not a single government official — not one — has been held legally accountable, either criminally or even civilly, for any War on Terror crimes or abuses; perversely, the only government officials to pay any price were the ones who blew the whistle on those crimes.
That is how history will record the behavior of American federal judges in the face of the post-9/11 onslaught of anti-Muslim persecution and relentless erosions of core rights.
Even worse, if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, your conviction in a federal court is virtually guaranteed, as federal judges will bend the law and issue pro-government rulings that they would never make with a non-Muslim defendant; conversely, if you’re a government official who abused or otherwise violated the rights of Muslims, your full-scale immunity is virtually guaranteed. Those are the indisputable rules of American justice. So slavish and subservient are federal judges when it comes to Muslim defendants that if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, you’re probably more likely at this point to get something approximating a fair trial before a Guantanamo military tribunal than in a federal court; that is how supine federal judges have been when the U.S. Government utters the word “terrorism” in the direction of a Muslim or any claims of “national security” relating to 9/11.
Just to underscore the point a bit further: the Justice Department fileda report this week setting forth its 2011 eavesdropping activities under FISA. Here’s the summary (h/t EPIC):
# of DOJ requests to the FISA court to eavesdrop on and/or physically search Americans/legal residents: 1,745
# of FISA court denials: 0
The DOJ filed close to 1,800 requests for FISA court permission to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans or legal residents or to physically search their property (the vast majority, more than 90%, were for eavesdropping), and the FISA court did not deny a single request, though they did “modify” 30. This is a perfect expression of how the federal judiciary, in general, behaves in the face of claims of National Security from the Executive Branch: as an impotent, eager rubber-stamping servant.
* * * * *
Just by the way: the 1978 FISA law that required court approval before the U.S. Government could eavesdrop on Americans has produced this sort of blindly accepting rubber-stamping from the FISA court since its inception. Nonetheless, it was this FISA process that the Bush administration claimed was too significant of an obstacle to its eavesdropping powers when it decided to violate the law by eavesdropping without asking for FISA court permission, and it’s the same claim which the Democratic-led Congress and then-Sen. Obama made in 2008 when they enacted a new FISA law that dramatically expanded the U.S. Government’s warrantless eavesdropping powers. A 100% victory rate in court is apparently too low for those who see presidential powers as monarchical, and our nation’s federal judges seem all the time to be eagerly attempting to increase that rate.
In National Review, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson — two key figures in the Islamophobia network discussed in CAP’s 2011 Fear, Inc report — write that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) “has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office”:
In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.
A perusal of the authors’ case against Christie reveals it as comically weak, full of highly questionable characterizations and buttressed by links that don’t actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to. In a typical example, they criticize Christie for voicing support for Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, “on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas.” They do not mention that the hearing resulted in Qatanani being cleared of charges.
Pipes and Emerson knock Christie for his concern over revelations of the New York City Police Department’s spying on New Jersey Muslims, suggesting that he should’ve shown “gratitude” for the NYPD operating outside its jurisdiction.
And of course the authors take special offense at Christie’s bold defense of New Jersey state superior court judge Sohail Mohammed against attacks by anti-Islam activists, in which Christie offered the most cogent summation of the anti-sharia movement on record: “It’s crap. It’s just crazy.”
Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.
While Pipes and Emerson fail to demonstrate that Chris Christie has an “Islam problem,” they succeed in demonstrating that National Review still has an Islamophobia problem. Last month the magazine took important steps to rid itself of two writers who had expressed bigoted views toward African-Americans. It’s long past time that National Review do the same with those of its writers expressing similar views toward Muslim Americans.
The director of the Islamic Center of Charlotte holds up an anti-Muslim letter it received.
No religious community should have to endure this.
The article notes that this letter was sent to not only one Islamic center but a few:
Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state.
CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) – The head of the Islamic Center of Charlotte is speaking out after the center received a letter threatening physical violence against Muslims.
According to the center’s director Jibril Hough, the letter was just one of several sent to Islamic centers around North Carolina.
Hough called the letter a “pretty detailed threat” and said the threat was serious enough that Charlotte police and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are now investigating the letter.
The letter, according to Hough, came from a person who claimed to be “part of a large network of folks from the business community, from the public services community, from the public school community that is seeking to make life harder on the public square for Muslims.”
Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state. Hough says he knows the center in Raleigh received the same letter and hopes it will get the same attention as if it was any other house of worship.
“We all need the same protection, under the law, as citizens. We all need that,” he told WBTV. “We deserved the same attention as anyone would receive. We’re not trying to make more out of this than it deserves, but we’re also concerned that it gets the attention it truly deserves.”
Hough says it isn’t unusual for the center to get, what he calls, “minor threats” based on current events, but this letter appears to be more serious.
“It goes on to give some very derogatory and racial epitaphs, using the ‘N’ word a couple of times in different phrases, Hough says. “And then it ends with the threat that if we decide for any kind of retaliation based on this letter – that they have no problem killing Muslims legally, if we tried anything, so consider yourselves advised.”
The letter ends, in part, “We are prepared for the Muslim war that is going on overseas to begin in the streets right here.”
It was signed, but Hough says he doesn’t know if the name on the letter is actually the person who wrote it.
“We have to remain vigilant and we have to give this the attention that it deserves,” Hough says. “Not sweep it under the rug or ignore it, because who knows? It could more than just a lonely guy in the middle of the night typing up a letter just to let off some steam. It could be much more than that.”
Hough says so far it’s not clear what the motivation behind the letter is, but he is hoping that authorities will find out as a part of their investigation. He also hopes the letter writer will be prosecuted.
“We think that putting an extra eye on something like this – sometimes it helps. A lot of times these types of things go unnoticed and unheard of and you only maybe hear about something after the fact,” he said.
“We don’t want to wait until after the fact that something has actually taken place – something much more harmful than this letter.”
<em>Copyright 2012 <a href=”http://www.wbtv.com/” target=”_blank”>WBTV</a>. All rights reserved.</em>
PROTESTERS who had filled the auditorium seats at an anti-Muslim event on Temple University’s campus Monday night left the room quite empty when they marched out in opposition after the discussion began.
The organization hosting the “Islamic Apartheid Conference,” Temple University Students for Intellectual Freedom, says its mission is to introduce controversial issues often left out of mainstream debates and defends its right to political incorrectness. Panelists at the conference included Robert Spencer, contributor to the blog Jihad Watch, and Pamela Geller, famous for her hostility to the proposed construction of an Islamic community center near the site of the World Trade Center.
After walking out, more than 50 demonstrators, consisting of North Philadelphia residents, campus groups and Occupy Philly protesters, remained outside in the rain, holding signs and confronting attendees as they left the event in Ritter Hall, on Cecil B. Moore Avenue near 13th Street.
Walter Smolarek, a freshman education major at Temple University, said that the content of the conference is “based solely on irrational hatred toward people, in this case, because of their religious faith, and we don’t feel like it falls under the umbrella of free speech, or should be part of political debate.
“An attack against Muslim communities is an attack against all working people,” said Smolarek.
Though Temple University approved the conference for its calendar, it did not promote the event in the daily campus-events email distributed to the student body.
Note from Amago: To be perfectly clear: hate speech must be protected in order to have freedom of speech, that is not in question here. The initial wording of the article was unclear and in response to several inquiries the article was amended.
Joshua Fazeli reacts to his sister Rubiya, played by Sarah Siadat, as she tries on a hijab during the The Mixed Blood Theatre Company's production of "Hijab Tube" at the Cold Spring Library Tuesday , April 24 . / Jason Wachter, jwachter@stcloudtimes.com
COLD SPRING — A unique, touring production that attempts to dispel stereotypes of Muslims in America made a stop at the Cold Spring branch of the Great River Regional Library Tuesday night.
About 40 audience members were treated to a performance of “Hijab Tube,” a production of Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theatre. The library has hosted other Mixed Blood productions.
This is the third year “Hijab Tube” has toured the state. It has made stops in Central Minnesota, as well as Iowa, Canada and Nebraska. The tour continues through May 6. The family show has been performed at colleges, community centers, and middle and high schools.
“The reaction (of audiences) has been tremendous,” said Artistic Director Jack Reuler. The majority of attendees around the region had been learning some basics about Islam. For other audience members, it meant seeing themselves — another Muslim person — on stage.
“When they see this play, they see themselves reflected in a positive light,” he said.
The short play follows a 20-year-old Muslim woman’s journey of identity, exploring what it means to be a Muslim in general and what it means to her.
She’s a second-generation immigrant who takes a comparative religion class at her university. She decides to take on the idea of wearing a hijab, a head covering. Her family doesn’t follow the tradition. But the play looks at a variety of ways that Islam and Muslims are seen in America.
The playwright’s premise is that Islam can be separated from the dogma of a certain country’s politics, Reuler said.
“Islam in American really holds the promise of hope,” Reuler said. The play attempts to debunk some myths and draw comparisons and similarities between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim traditions.
“It’s far more of a cultural play than a religious play,” he said.
The cast of the play comes from Muslim families whose roots are in Iran, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia — but all were born in the U.S.
After the play, they stick around to hold a brief question-and-answer session. There are questions about how a mosque works, the role of an Iman and the difference between Islam and a Muslim.
“Having a conversation is really the start,” said Sarah Siadat, who plays the main character Rubiya. She said the sessions afterward are her favorite part.
Barb Omann, an English teacher at Rocori High School, encourages her students to attend out-of-school activities with a global perspective like “Hijab Tube,” and gives them extra credit for doing so.
Andrea Overman, a Rocori 10th-grader, is doing a school report on Malcom X, who converted to Islam. She came to get a different perspective .
“I wanted to get a perspective other than his,” she said.
European governments must do more to challenge the negative stereotypes and prejudices against Muslims fuelling discrimination especially in education and employment, a new report by Amnesty International reveals today.
“Muslim women are being denied jobs and girls prevented from attending regular classes just because they wear traditional forms of dress, such as the headscarf. Men can be dismissed for wearing beards associated with Islam,” said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s expert on discrimination.
“Rather than countering these prejudices, political parties and public officials are all too often pandering to them in their quest for votes.”
The report Choice and prejudice: discrimination against Muslims in Europe, exposes the impact of discrimination on the ground of religion or belief on Muslims in several aspects of their lives, including employment and education.
It focuses on Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland where Amnesty International has already raised issues such as restrictions on the establishment of places of worship and prohibitions on full-face veils. The report documents numerous individual cases of discrimination across the countries covered.
“Wearing religious and cultural symbols and dress is part of the right of freedom of expression. It is part of the right to freedom of religion or belief – and these rights must be enjoyed by all faiths equally.” said Marco Perolini.
“While everyone has the right to express their cultural, traditional or religious background by wearing a specific form of dress no one should be pressurized or coerced to do so. General bans on particular forms of dress that violate the rights of those freely choosing to dress in a particular way are not the way to do this.”
The report highlights that legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment has not been appropriately implemented in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Employers have been allowed to discriminate on the grounds that religious or cultural symbols will jar with clients or colleagues or that a clash exists with a company’s corporate image or its ‘neutrality’.
This is in direct conflict with European Union (EU) anti-discrimination legislation which allows variations of treatment in employment only if specifically required by the nature of the occupation.
“EU legislation prohibiting discrimination on the ground of religion or belief in the area of employment seems to be toothless across Europe, as we observe a higher rate of unemployment among Muslims, and especially Muslim women of foreign origin,” said Marco Perolini.
In the last decade, pupils have been forbidden to wear the headscarf or other religious and traditional dress at school in many countries including Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
“Any restriction on the wearing of religious and cultural symbols and dress in schools must be based on assessment of the needs in each individual case. General bans risk adversely Muslims girls’ access to education and violating their rights to freedom of expression and to manifest their beliefs.” Marco Perolini said.
The right to establish places of worship is a key component of the right to freedom of religion or belief which is being restricted in some European countries, despite state obligations to protect, respect and fulfil this right.
Since 2010, the Swiss Constitution has specifically targeted Muslims with the prohibition of the construction of minarets, embedding anti-Islam stereotypes and violating international obligations that Switzerland is bound to respect.
In Catalonia (Spain), Muslims have to pray in outdoor spaces because existing prayer rooms are too small to accommodate all the worshippers and requests to build mosques are being disputed as incompatible with the respect of Catalan traditions and culture. This goes against freedom of religion which includes the right to worship collectively in adequate places.
“There is a groundswell of opinion in many European countries that Islam is alright and Muslims are ok so long as they are not too visible. This attitude is generating human rights violations and needs to be challenged,” said Marco Perolini.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - She’s best known for her satirical comedy on Saturday Night Live. Twenty years after leaving the hit show, Victoria Jackson is back in the spotlight, but this time it’s for her political views.
She’s now a controversial conservative commentator and she’s in Middle Tennessee taking a critical look at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.
Victoria Jackson is best known for her dim-witted characters on Saturday Night live which brought her a lot of laughs, and fame. She now works as a citizen journalist.
“I’m trying to use my fading SNL fame to shine a light on the topic that nobody in the media will talk about,” said Jackson.
That topic is Islam. Jackson came to Middle Tennessee to produce a story on the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro and its new mosque now under construction. The comic-turned- conservative political activist doesn’t mince words about why she thinks this building is rising in the middle of rural Tennessee.
“This is the Bible Belt, and Murfreesboro is the buckle on the bible belt. And it’s a college town. So my feeling is they came here to convert people to Islam,” said Jackson.
Jackson brought her camera to the current Islamic Center offices in Murfreesboro — but no one was available for an interview. No luck either at the construction site just outside town.
Jackson did recently interview Congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik for her story. Zelenik has been an outspoken opponent of the mosque. Jackson claims there’s a fatwa , or Islamic decree ,calling for her death because of her criticisms.
“I tolerate all religions. Except the ones that want to kill me,” said Jackson
Jackson plans to post her story on the conservative web site Patriot Update.
OSLO, Norway — With a defiant closed-fist salute, a right-wing fanatic admitted Monday to a bomb-and-shooting massacre that killed 77 people in Norway but pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, saying he was acting in self-defense.
On the first day of his long-awaited trial, Anders Behring Breivik rejected the authority of the court as it sought to assign responsibility for the July 22 attacks that shocked Norway and jolted the image of terrorism in Europe.
Dressed in a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smiled as a guard removed his handcuffs in the crowded court room. The 33-year-old then flashed his salute before shaking hands with prosecutors and court officials.
“I don’t recognize Norwegian courts because you get your mandate from the Norwegian political parties who support multiculturalism,” Breivik said in his first comments to the court.
Eight people were killed in Breivik’s bombing of Oslo’s government district and 69 were slain in his shooting massacre at the left-leaning Labor Party’s youth camp on Utoya island outside the capital. Breivik has said the attacks were necessary to protect Norway from being taken over by Muslims.
“I admit to the acts, but not criminal guilt,” he told the court, insisting he had acted in self-defense.
The key issue to be resolved during the 10-week trial is the state of Breivik’s mental health, which will decide whether he is sent to prison or into psychiatric care. Anxious to prove he is not insane, Breivik will call right-wing extremists and radical Islamists to testify during the trial, to show that others also share his view of clashing civilizations.
Norway’s NRK television was broadcasting parts of the trial live but was not allowed to show Breivik’s testimony.
During Monday’s opening session, he remained stone-faced and motionless as prosecutors read the indictment on the terror and murder charges, with descriptions of how each victim died, and when they explained how he prepared for the attacks.
But Breivik suddenly became emotional when prosecutors showed an anti-Muslim video that he had posted on YouTube before the killing spree, wiping away tears on his cheek with trembling hands.
After a lunch break, Breivik was again expressionless as he watched prosecutors present surveillance footage of the Oslo explosion. The blast ripped through the high-rise building that housed government headquarters, blowing out windows and filling surrounding streets with smoke and debris.
He didn’t flinch as prosecutors played a three-minute recording of a young woman’s frantic phone call to police from Utoya.
“Shots have been fired,” Renate Taarnes, 22, said with panic in her voice. “I’m pretty sure that there are many injured.”
More than a dozen shots in close succession could be heard as Taarnes fell silent.
“Are you still there?” the police officer asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. She fell silent again, breathing into the phone as more shots cracked in the background.
Taarnes escaped the massacre unharmed and is scheduled to testify later in the trial.
Breivik also announced he doesn’t recognize the authority of Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen, because he said she is friends with the sister of former Norwegian Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The anti-Muslim militant described himself as a writer, currently working from prison, when asked by the judge for his employment status.
He claims he targeted the government headquarters in Oslo and the youth camp to strike against the left-leaning political forces he blames for allowing immigration in Norway.
If deemed mentally competent, Breivik would face a maximum prison sentence of 21 years or an alternate custody arrangement under which the sentence is prolonged for as long as an inmate is deemed a danger to society.
Breivik wants to be judged as a sane person and will call radical Islamists, and extremists on the right and left to testify to support “his perception that there is a war going on in Europe,” his defense lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told the court. Lippestad said Breivik wants to read a new document he’s written at the start of his testimony on Tuesday.
While Norway has a legal principle of preventive self-defense, that doesn’t apply to Breivik’s case, said Jarl Borgvin Doerre, a legal expert who has written a book on the concept. “It is obvious that it has nothing to do with preventive self-defense,” Doerre told The Associated Press.
Police sealed off the streets around the Oslo court building, where journalists, survivors and relatives of victims watched the proceedings Monday in a 200-seat courtroom built specifically for this trial.
Thick glass partitions were put up to separate the defendant from victims and their families, many of whom are worried that Breivik will use the trial to promote his extremist political ideology. In a manifesto he published online before the attacks, Breivik wrote that “patriotic resistance fighters” should use trials “as a platform to further our cause.”
After he surrendered, Breivik had told investigators he is a resistance fighter in a far-right militant group modeled after the Knights Templar – a Western Christian order that fought during the crusades. Police, however, have found no trace of any organization and say he acted alone.
“In our opinion, such a network does not exist,” prosecutor Svein Holden told the court on Monday.
In his manifesto, Breivik described the supposed group’s initiation rites, oaths and the “clenched fist salute” that he used in court, symbolizing “strength, honor and defiance against the Marxist tyrants of Europe.”
After blowing up parts of the government building and shooting dozens to death on Utoya island, Breivik surrendered to police 1 hour and 20 minutes after he arrived on Utoya. The police response to his terror spree was slowed by a series of mishaps, including the lack of an operating police helicopter and the breakdown of an overloaded boat carrying a commando team to the island.
Breivik called police twice, saying he wanted to turn himself in. In one of the calls, played in court Monday, he identified himself as a commander of “the Norwegian resistance movement” and said he had “just completed an operation on behalf of Knights Templar.”
When the operator asked him to repeat himself, Breivik sounded irritated and hung up.
___
Associated Press writers Bjoern H. Amland and Julia Gronnevet contributed to this report.
Members of the Spiritual Life Center of Sacramento have their Easter morning services for their Christian church, at the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims (SALAM) auditorium next to their mosque in Sacramento, Calif., April 08, 2012.
SACRAMENTO – A Sacramento congregation was facing an Easter without a home this year until the most unlikely of locations opened their doors and welcomed them inside.
The Spiritual Life Center of Sacramento lost the lease to their church a month prior to their biggest service of the year, but Reverend Michael Moran said a dream offered hope in the face of despair.
“We were desperately looking for a place to hold our Easter services. I had a dream and in the dream I saw a newspaper headline that read, ‘Easter at the Mosque’,” reveals Moran. “But when I awoke, I said that will never happen.”
But in an act of compassion and generosity, the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims (SALAM) turned Moran’s dream into reality.
Ifran Itaq of SALAM said the decision to allow Moran’s congregation to celebrate their faith at the mosque was simple.
“For us, mosques, churches, synagogues are places where God’s name is mentioned and they are holy places, and this is the sharing of those faiths in one of those institutions.”
Beyond the surface-level expression of hospitality and good will, Moran believes the interfaith congregation on Easter Sunday holds much greater significance.
“Our mission from the very beginning was to bring the different faith traditions together in cooperative efforts,” Moran explains. “I love what the Dalai Lama said, he said, “Until there’s peace among the world’s religions, there will never be peace on earth. I think this is one of those steps towards peace.”
News10/KXTV
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At great personal risk, John Oliver witnesses Muslims praying in a church’s all-purpose room.
Here is still more reason why Western countries should take off the multiculturalist straitjacket and ban the burqa and niqab.
Spencer is unable to make legitimate criticisms about Islam or Muslims because underlying all of his half-baked arguments is a weak, fact-less, and hate-mongering core.
In this instance, in order for Spencer to attempt to make his point he succumbs to a baseless ridicule-centered argument by calling the niqab and/or burqa a “multiculturalist straightjacket”.
If one were to go along with Spencer’s logic of why the burqa and niqab should be banned, then he would paradoxically also be an advocate for banning the “habit,” i.e. the traditional catholic garb for nuns.
Just as the burqa/niqab has been used by criminals during bank robberies so has the habit:
The two suspects were both dressed in black sweat pants and sweatshirts and wore nuns’ habits and identical ghoulish rubber masks, with small slits for eyes.
No one calls for the banning of the habit. No one ridicules that religious garb as a symbol of oppression because that would be illogical.
Of course, when Spencer wants to make an anti-Islam/Muslim point he won’t allow common sense or logic to get in the way. This is just another instance of silly Spencer.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is planning to build a Museum of Tolerance on the Muslim Mamilla cemetery. This project is a grotesque attempt to erase the well-established history of a continuous Muslim presence in the city that dates back over a millennium.
For over six centuries, many of my ancestors have been buried in an historic cemetery that holds the remains of some of the most prominent public figures and military leaders ever to live inside the Holy City of Jerusalem. The Mamilla cemetery is said to contain the remains of Muslims who walked alongside the Prophet Muhammad, fought in the Crusades, and influenced the city over many centuries. It is one of the most important remaining Muslim heritage sites in the Holy Land.
In recent years, however, I and surviving members of many of Jerusalem’s oldest families have witnessed the desecration of the cemetery. The efforts of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a “Museum of Tolerance” on the site have already tarnished the cemetery and damaged its integrity.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been disinterred and carted off for disposal in unmarked mass graves in unknown locations, or worse. The Jerusalem municipality has enabled this effort with the approval of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. This project is a grotesque attempt to erase the well-established history of a continuous Muslim presence in the city that dates back over a millennium.
Last month, new images surfaced that confirm excavations in the ancient Cemetery continue in secret, proving false the repeated claims of the Wiesenthal Center that there would be no further digging on the historic site. Footage made public by the Center for Constitutional Rights shows new power equipment and electrical supply within a fenced-off and covered pit, that borders an as-yet undisturbed portion of the cemetery. As an American from New York who can trace the burial of my own ancestors at Mamilla back to the 14th century, I can only hope that the news of likely additions to the hundreds of remains already wrongfully disposed of increases the urgent calls to stop this abuse of the dead before the site is entirely desecrated.
Since the plans to construct the Museum of Tolerance on Mamilla Cemetery began in 2004, nearly 60 other descendants of those buried at the cemetery and I have made repeated appeals to try and stop the disinterring and destruction of the remains of our ancestors. We have appealed directly to the Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Marvin Hier, to the Jerusalem Municipality, and to the UN. We have received the support of over 80 prominent archaeologists from Israel and around the world, who have petitioned for the preservation of the site, while others have filed legal appeals in Israeli courts.
Israeli courts have not provided a remedy, and our suggestions of compromise, including relocating the Museum to a new location—a move that would showcase genuine tolerance—have been met with silence. Meanwhile, the Wiesenthal Center has skirted responsibility, initially disavowing knowledge of the graves, and now clinging to a flimsy defense that the sanctity of the site has long since diminished.
To show that these claims are patently false, one need only look to the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry’s 1948 declaration of Mamilla as “one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars… Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” As recently as 1986, in response to a UNESCO investigation regarding Israel’s development projects on the site, the Israeli government stated that “no project exists for the deconsecration of the site… the site and its tombs are to be safeguarded.”
There is no justification for these desecrations. If they were occurring in any other place on earth, the outcry would be deafening. Unfortunately, the treatment of Mamilla is not an anomaly; Muslim and Christian sites of cultural, religious and historical significance continue to be systematically disrespected by Israeli authorities. The Protection of Holy Sites Law in Israel now covers 137 sites. Not one of these is Christian or Muslim.
At a time when Americans are engaged in a national dialogue about division along racial and cultural lines, a time when discrimination and the marginalization of minorities are subjects of public protest, it is disheartening to see some individuals and institutions exporting and abetting division elsewhere. The Wiesenthal Center’s mission statement says its goal is to promote human rights and dignity. People of conscience everywhere must press the respected and influential Rabbi Hier, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to adhere to those goals, and to allow the thousands still buried at Mamilla cemetery to rest in peace.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and a former advisor to Palestinian negotiators. Khalidi is the author numerous books, including Palestinian Identity and The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. He currently serves as the editor of theJournal of Palestine Studies.
Allen West not only believes that there is a stealth movement among Muslim Americans, but is convinced that there are 80 house Democrats that are alleged communists.
WASHINGTON — As many as 80 House Democrats are communists, according to Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).
West warned constituents at a Tuesday town hall event that he’s “heard” that dozens of his Democratic colleagues in the House are members of the Communist Party, thePalm Beach Postreported. West wouldn’t elaborate beyond that, however, and didn’t offer up any names. There are currently 190 House Democrats.
A request for comment from West’s spokeswoman was not immediately returned.
During the same event, which took place at Jensen Beach, the freshman Republican said President Barack Obama wouldn’t have a public debate with him over their policy differences because he was “scared.” The president was in Florida on Tuesday giving remarks about the economy and holding campaign events.
“I really wish that, standing here before you, was Allen West and President Obama,” West said, according to the Palm Beach Post. “We could have a simple discussion. But that ain’t ever gonna happen.”
When an audience member asked why, West said in “a mocking voice” that it was because Obama “was too scared.”
WATCH West’s comments in the video above.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that West made the remarks at Florida Atlantic University. He made the statement at Jensen Beach.
People charged in connection of setting a building on fire weep inside a police vehicle as they are taken to a prison after their hearing in a court at Mehsana, about 60 km (37 miles) north from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. (File Photo - November 9, 2011)
In India, a court has convicted 23 people in connection with the killing of 23 Muslims during deadly religious riots that swept through Gujarat state in 2002. The massacre was investigated by a special team after allegations that the probe by state police was not impartial.
A special court Monday found the 23 people guilty of setting fire to a house in Gujarat’s Ode village where a group of Muslims had taken shelter to protect themselves from rioting mobs.
Twenty-three others were acquitted for lack of evidence. Most of those who stood trial are Hindus.
The massacre took place a decade ago, when towns and villages in Gujarat were convulsed with riots that targeted Muslims homes and neighborhoods. The violence erupted after a train fire, blamed on Muslims, killed 60 Hindu pilgrims and prompted retaliation by Hindu mobs.
The prosecutor, P.N. Parmar, called it a historic judgment in the mass killings in Ode village.
“Nine children, nine women and five men burnt alive in this heinous crime,” he said.
The sentences will be announced later. Defense lawyers say they will appeal the verdict.
The massacre in Ode village is one of nine incidents into which the Supreme Court has ordered a special investigation, following allegations that the Gujarat police were not impartial in their probe into the deadly riots. About 1,000 Muslims died in the violence.
This is the third judgment to be handed down in connection with the riots. In two separate judgments last year, 31 people were sentenced for burning 39 Muslims to death, while 31 Muslims were found guilty for setting fire to the train that killed the Hindu pilgrims.
Gujarat is ruled by the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, has often been accused of not doing enough to stop the riots or bring the perpetrators to justice.
After Monday’s verdict, senior BJP leader Balbir Punj said justice has been handed to the riot victims.
“It is a victory for the people of Gujarat and it is a slap on the face of those people that [say] justice cannot be done in Gujarat,” said Punj.
Although the 2002 violence tarnished Narendra Modi’s image, the controversial leader remains one of BJP’s top leaders. He has won state elections in Gujarat twice since the riots and hopes to play a larger role in national politics.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the latest victim of an intricate web of half-truths and outright lies woven for political profit and as part of a broad, well funded, Islamophobia network. The Congresswoman was slated to be the keynote speaker at an April 21 event for the group EMERGE USA, but backed off after a scathing blog post by Joe Kaufman, who happens to be running for a Congressional seat for Florida’s District 20.
EMERGE USA is a non-profit committed to empowering minorities through increased civic engagement and education about the political process. The organization has strong roots in the community and has been publicly supported by one of Florida’s senior statesmen, former Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham, an expert on terrorism and intelligence. However, the fact that EMERGE USA was founded and is run by Muslims seems to be the proverbial bee in Kaufman’s bonnet. Ultimately, Kaufman’s Glen Beck-esque acrobatics in trying to link EMERGE USA board members and staff to “questionable” organizations and associations can be easily dismissed because of factual errors and deliberate obfuscation.
The truly insidious aspect of this entire incident, however, is that it can be linked to a multi-pronged attack on Muslims nationwide through the creation of an Islamophobia network with deep pockets and an agenda to marginalize American Muslims at every turn. The Center for American Progress’s 2011 report “Fear, Inc.” thoroughly documents this network’s funding, messengers and reach. Its efforts have manifested in anti-sharia legislation in dozens of states, bigoted trainings for law enforcement and intelligence communities, the character assassination of mainstream national Muslim organizations and even promotion of the idea that President Obama is a Muslim.
The nightmarish narrative disseminated by the numerous think tanks, pundits and self-appointed “experts” on Islam and terrorism has not only successfully influenced the American discourse on Islam and Muslims, but has had significant political impact. The Islamophobia network focuses much of its time and energy on influencing and supporting politicians who promulgate its world view. It provides politicians with talking points, platforms and agenda items to keep the suspicion and fear of Islam and Muslims in the news. Examples of such politicians cited by the “Fear, Inc.” report include the following:
Rep. Peter King: held numerous hearings on Islamic radicalization
Rep. Sue Myrick: called for congressional inquiry on the CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, held hearings on influence of Muslim Brotherhood, leading Congressional fearmonger against Muslims
Rep. Trent Franks, Rep. John Shadegg and Rep. Paul Broun: supporters of the CAIR congressional investigation
Rep. Allen West: declared Islam as the enemy, claimed it is not a religion and held a briefing called “Homegrown Jihad in the USA”
Rep. Renee Ellmers: made the Park51 into an issue, calling it a ground zero victory mosque
Rep. Michelle Bachman: frequently raises concerns over homegrown Islamic threat and engages in anti-sharia rhetoric
While the influence of the Islamophobia network on right-wing politicians is more visible, the pressure it exerts on progressives is more troubling. Left-leaning politicians are also vulnerable to manipulation, as can be seen in Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s case. The Congresswoman is not the first Democrat to distance herself from a Muslim organization after being attacked by Islamophobes. To American Muslims who are mostly progressive in their politics, abandonment by Democratic politicians feels like betrayal.
The politicians who continue to be used to spread or confirm the network’s ugly narrative must realize something very important: while winning small battles, they are losing the war. History has proven that bigots, racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites and other variations on the same brand of fear and suspicion have never succeeded — socially or politically. Even genocide, the extreme expression of bigotry, has left nothing but failed ideology in its wake.
A simple understanding of the human psyche tells us that people tire of living in fear, worn out from perpetually being “anti-other.” Over time, we make up and move on. The battle of the Islamophobes will also eventually be lost because American Muslims and their allies will continue to push back against false narratives. The lifespan of Islamophobia in the United States will undoubtedly end up a sad blight on our history like other failed “anti” movements — but politicians, both Republican and Democrat, should ask themselves on what side of history they wish to be.
Rabia Chaudry is an attorney, President of the Safe Nation Collaborative, and an Associate Fellow of the Truman National Security Project.
France’s interior ministry says an arsonist has partially destroyed a Muslim prayer room in the Mediterranean island of Corsica’s capital city.
A ministry statement said racist inscriptions were found Monday on the front of the building housing the prayer room in Ajaccio after it was damaged in the early morning fire.
French Muslim leaders have voiced fear of renewed stigmatization following March attacks that killed seven people in southern France that were attributed to an Islamist who claimed al-Qaida links. Mohamed Merah was shot dead by police.
Rivals of conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in presidential elections starting April 22 claim a recent sweep of terror suspects is an electoral ploy.
Berlin’s largest mosque has been targeted in an Islamophobic attack in the German capital’s predominantly migrant district of Neukölln.
Unknown assailants threw several paint bombs at the Sehitlik mosque Saturday night. They also placed an insulting anti-Islam picture at the entrance to the building.
Berlin police said that a threatening letter had been sent to the mosque recently.
The Sehitlik mosque has been the target of four arson attacks over the past three years. Berlin mosques have been the scene of at least seven fire bombings since June 2010.
German Muslim leaders have time and again called for stepped up security measures for the country’s mosques and Islamic centers.
They also accuse the center-right government of Chancellor Angela Merkel of trying to downplay the danger of anti-Muslim crimes caused by the wave of Islamophobia in Germany.
Last September the mosque in the Welsh town of Llanelli was attacked. Thugs racially abused a group of elderly women who were entering the mosque and kicked the door in. As a result, extra CCTV cameras were installed.
We are told that there was a second attack on the mosque in February, when the windows were smashed while someone was praying inside. As you can see from the photo, the building has now been fitted with a window grille in addition to the existing steel gate in front of the door (cf. earlier photo here).
The Llanelli Star did, rather belatedly, get round to covering the September attack, but the February incident was apparently not considered important enough to merit a report in the local press.
The EMRC study Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: UK Case Studiesfound that Muslims and their mosques face a higher level of violence and intimidation in UK market towns and suburbs than in big cities. See also the Al Jazeera report here.
Nonie Loonie Darwish‘s new book, “The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East” pretends to provide insight on the Arab Spring. For Darwish, this is just another ample opportunity to spew her well-worn (phony) tale of woe and Islamophobic diatribe.
Surprisingly C-Span allowed itself to be used as a platform for this hatred, featuring her over one and a half-hour speech rant at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute (a Conservative group, amongst who’s goal is to produce more “Sarah Palin’s.”)
Here are some of the choice quotes that I caught in just the last 20 minutes (if anyone has the stomach to listen to the rest of it and provide us quotes we’ll be happy to add it):
When asked about Obama’s relationship with the Muslim world her response was as the following. ”From his [Barack Obama] books and from what he says, he doesn’t unfortunately. He has a lot of sympathy towards Islam and a lot of closing the eyes like apologizing a lot for things that we should be apologized for.”
“Where are the Muslim leaders who will stand up and say ‘We apologize for 9-11?”
“All the ills of Muslim society go back to Sharia.”
She repeatedly says “Islam has already been interpreted.”
“In America, we have a growing population of Muslims who are now, many of their leadership is calling for sharia. The application of Sharia.”
“The ultimate goal of being a Muslim is living under an Islamic state.”
“Our college campus is becoming like the West Bank and Gaza. They are not allowing the freedom of speech of people like me.”
“Another generation of America who have been brought up with a lot of guilt about their country, have been brought up with an educational system that told them that there bad, you’ve hurt the world. Islam is a religion of peace. Christianity is bad. Your constitution should be changed. American constitution is no longer, it’s an old document. “
“In fifty years, we can have a Chechnya in America, which means, we can have a population, a majority population of Muslims in a certain state or certain area and they might say they want to live under sharia.”
“We want to call our state, Islamist Republic of Michigan.”
“There is no feminist movement in the Middle East, in the Muslim world.”
“Women who call themselves Muslims are not standing up.”
At the core of Darwish’s rhetoric is that Muslims are taking over America. She full-heartedly claims that there is a systematic way in which Muslims are working to achieve the dissolution of the USA. First, they act passive, and then they demand rights. Once we succumb to the evil Mooslims’ demands, they will rise to power and implement Sharia and have states that will be called…“Islamist Republic of Michigan.” Darwish’s loony conspiracy that Muslims want to secede from the states and over throw the constitution is an insult to intelligent Americans.
She forgets that we live in a country that is supposed to protect the rights of all citizens. In reality, what Americans are, and need to be skeptical about are individuals like Darwish who write books and speak on Conservative platforms for the twin goals of: self-enrichment and driving fear of the other.
This type of Islamophobic rhetoric hearkens to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of old: They control the media. They control the banks. etc… Such conspiratorial language is non-nonsensical, illogical and unproductive toward making this country one that we can be proud of.
Thousands of Spanish mothers have similar stories of stolen children. (AFP/Getty Images) (ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)
Where is the outrage and outcry from the hate peddlers?
Thousands of newborns have allegedly been stolen from their parents by Sister Maria Gómez Valbuena, obstensibly for good, wholesome “Christian” motivations, making a pretty penny in the process.
BARCELONA, Spain — “Where is my baby?” Luisa Torres wondered after waking up from general anesthesia on March 31, 1982.
“Your baby is dead,” Sister Maria Gómez Valbuena told her as she lay in bed at the Santa Cristina Maternity Hospital in Madrid. “You gave birth to nothing,” the nun said.
It was a lie, with consequences that would span almost three decades.
Torres alleges that her daughter was stolen at birth by a mafia of nuns, doctors and other officials who sold children for profit.
Thousands of Spanish mothers recount similar stories. Enrique Vila, a Barcelona lawyer who specializes in adoptions, estimates there might be as many as 300,000 cases, about 15 percent of total adoptions that took place in Spain between 1960 and 1989.
Since GlobalPost first wrote about the spate of stolen babies last year, the number of cases being handled by Spanish prosecutors has jumped from 900 to 1,500.
A trickle of complaints began decades ago, but turned into a flood two years ago. But the nun, now in her 80s and known as Sister Maria, is the first to be indicted in the scandal since complaints began to pour in two years ago. Her trial begins today, April 3.
About one-quarter of the cases have been dismissed due to a lack of documents or other evidence, which is often hard to provide when decades-old birth certificates have been forged, or when the parents and children haven’t yet found each other.
Torres and her daughter are just one of a dozen who have, and it is their reunion that has led to the first indictment.
‘Like a horror film’
Like hundreds of mothers who believe their babies had been stolen at Santa Cristina Maternity Hospital, Torres met Sister Maria, a social worker, in her fifth month of pregnancy after seeing an ad in a magazine offering help for expectant mothers in need.
“It said she had access to nurseries and foster homes, and that she would take care of the children until we had enough resources to take care of them by ourselves,” Torres recalled. “I went to see her with my mom and she was very nice — we didn’t suspect anything.” She said she was given a “special card” to show at the hospital when going into labor.
But it became “like a horror film,” she added.
After first saying that the baby girl was dead, Sister Maria changed her story, Torres said. The nun admitted that the child was alive, and told the 24-year-old woman that she would give the child up for adoption to a French family. She implied that Torres, who had given birth out of wedlock, would be an unfit mother.
And she told Torres, who wanted to name her child Sheila, that such a name was not “Christian,” and that the baby girl would be called Maria, “after herself.”
Torres said she became increasingly hysterical, and began cursing at the nun. She climbed from her bed and stumbled to the neo-natal unit. There, one girl lay in an incubator with a name tag on her crib: Maria.
“You saw nothing,” the nun told her. Sister Maria dragged Torres back to her room and threw her onto her bed, Torres said. “I will report you to the authorities as an adulteress and you will go to jail. Then I will also take away your 2-year-old daughter,” said Sister Maria, according to Torres.
Torres says she was terrified. Inés, her first child, was the result of a failed marriage. Separated from her husband, she started a new relationship, but that man left her once she became pregnant. In a country that was still waking up from a 40-year dictatorship and was extremely socially conservative, Torres didn’t know that anti-adultery laws had already been repealed in 1978.
Her new child had been born slightly premature, at eight months, and had some health problems. The infant was taken to another floor to receive special care, and Torres wasn’t allowed to visit her because she had never been officially identified as the child’s mother. She lost track of her baby, and was too afraid to approach Sister Maria again.
A devastated Torres left the hospital nine days later “with empty arms,” and the pacifier and baby blanket she had bought for her baby Sheila. She kept them for almost three decades, never losing hope that she could one day give them to her.
Obsessed for three decades
Months before Torres’ daughter was born, Alejandro Alcalde and his wife learned they could not have children and began considering adoption. But the adoption process was difficult. They had almost lost hope until they were told by Madrid’s regional council, which handled adoptions, to contact a woman named Sister Maria.
The adoptive parents paid 200,000 pesetas for Maria Pilar — the equivalent of about $6,600 today. The nun told them it was for hospital costs and for the mother to stay at a home after the birth. They arranged everything at a public hospital, which was why Alejandro Alcalde says they were never suspicious.
Maria Pilar Alcalde, now 30, recounts how she had looked for her biological mother since she was 15 years old, when her adoptive parents divorced.
“I spent nights crying, looking at my adoption documents over and over, trying to see a way to find my mother,” said Maria Pilar, who says she had a very “lonely childhood.” She described her adoptive mother as “a very dry woman” and said that her adoptive relatives never made her part of the family.
“I always missed that love in families,” she said. “When I was a teenager, I used to wonder: ‘How will my real family be?’”
After her parents’ divorce, Maria Pilar lived with her adoptive father, who helped her hunt for her mother. He spent a fortune on detectives and lawyers. Seven years ago, they appeared together on El Diario TV talk show, where they told Maria Pilar’s story. But it resulted in no leads.
“If my father thought he had been involved in anything illegal, he would have never helped so much in my search,” Maria Pilar said. Her adoptive mother, with whom she has a distant relationship, never liked the fact that Maria Pilar wanted to look for her biological parents.
At the beginning of their search, Maria Pilar and her father even went to see Sister Maria, who had kept in touch with the adoptive parents over the years. “I swore to God in front of your mother that I would never reveal her identity,” she told Maria Pilar. “She was probably a drug addict or a prostitute, it would only hurt you to find her.”
Ten miles away, Torres mourned her little girl.
“I was obsessed for 30 years…I used to stare at babies on the street when [my daughter] would still have been a baby, at young couples when she was still a teenager…sadness was always with me, especially on her birthdays,” Torres recalls, shaken at the memories.
Afraid that her other daughter would be taken away from her, Torres didn’t do much for years. She also didn’t know where to begin looking. According to Spanish privacy laws, parents who give their children up for adoption don’t have the right to get information about their whereabouts or new identities.
A year-and-a-half ago, when other “stolen babies” cases started appearing in the media, Torres says her determination to find her missing child was renewed. Her oldest daughter, Inés, eventually told the story to Spanish daily El Mundo.
Soon after the story appeared, a journalist at Antena 3 recalled the appearance of Alejandro and Maria Pilar on El Diario show seven years before, and realized that Maria Pilar and Torres’ stories matched. She dug into the matter. Eventually, she managed to contact both parties.
An “unbelievable” moment
On June 30, 2011, Torres, 54, and Maria Pilar, were brought on El Diario TV show after having had their DNA tested. They had been at the studio the entire day prior to the appearance, being interviewed separately, never crossing paths. They sat tense on the set until the TV host read out the result of their DNA test results on air: It was a match.
As they threw themselves at each other, Torres repeatedly murmured through tears, “I love you, forgive me.” Her daughter, sobbing, replied: “I have nothing to forgive.”
Many months later, they recall that pivotal moment as if it were yesterday.
“I almost fainted, my legs buckled. …It was a very beautiful and happy day, but too intense,” Torres said.
“I just threw myself in her arms,” said Maria Pilar. “I still cannot believe it.”
Still, settling into the reunion has taken time.
“I look at my mother and at the physical warmth she has with my sisters, and I wish it could be the same [closeness and naturalness] with me,” said Maria Pilar, who says it is still “strange” for them to be around each other.
Even so, she says she now has a “mom,” two “wonderful” half-sisters, two nephews and “a loving grandmother” she is getting to know and love.
Day of reckoning
Hundreds of women have named Sister Maria as the woman involved in the theft of their babies. The nun dealt with about 3,000 adoptions per year between 1967 and 1983, says Guillermo Peñas, the lawyer who represents Torres and Maria Pilar as well as 50 other families as plaintiffs.
Her name was first linked to the theft of babies in 1982, when investigative magazine Interviú uncovered several cases at another clinic in Madrid where Sister Maria used to work. Authorities closed the clinic down, but no one was prosecuted then.
The reunion of Torres and Maria Pilar offers the first mother-and-child pair who can accuse an alleged abductor, and have made it possible to indict the nun. She is currently charged with illegal detention, fraudulently faking another’s pregnancy, forgery of public and private documents, threatening behavior and coercion, according to Peñas.
So far, Sister Maria hasn’t responded to the prosecutor’s charges in court. GlobalPost’s attempts to reach Sister Maria for a comment were unsuccessful.
The public prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the case.
Torres and Maria Pilar will first appear in front of the judge on April 3.
“This is a very important step because it [is taking on the Church] – [Sister Maria] represents the Church, and that is sacred in Spain,” said Flor Diaz, one of the representatives of SOS Stolen Babies, a support organization that Torres also belongs to.
Both Maria Pilar and Torres say that no matter what happens in the courts, they will never be able to recover the 30 years they lost. “I want that nun to pay for all the pain she has caused,” said Torres.
But at her age, it is unlikely that Sister Maria will end up behind bars.
“There have to be many more people involved,” said Peñas. “It is a matter of common sense to realize that a social worker does not have enough legal authority to do whatever she wants — she had superiors and the hospital director had to authorize the adoptions in the end.”
“But Sister Maria is the only thread we have to untangle the tangled web,” he added.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s newly installed minister of justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, said last week that resolving these cases “will be a priority” for his department, although advocates in the case are skeptical.
“For the government, this is like holding a screaming child,” said Peñas. “If it is held that civil authorities were in the end responsible, the state will have to compensate [thousands of families], and these are not the best times for that.”
But most of these mothers and their children, like Maria Pilar and Torres, say they don’t want any money, just to find their loved ones and recover the lost time.
As they work on that, Maria Pilar keeps the still-new pacifier and the baby blanket on her bed. In the days that followed her first meeting with her mother, she says she would fall asleep “like a baby,” grabbing onto them.
While that phase has passed, Maria Pilar says she plans to get a tattoo with her mother’s name — her way to make sure that Torres is never far from her again.
A threatening letter containing a mysterious powder sent the Iowa Capitol into lockdown and delayed action in the House for several hours on Tuesday.
Ultimately, a hazardous materials team found the substance not to be dangerous and released a crowd of perhaps 300 lawmakers, staffers and observers who had been sequestered in the House chamber and elsewhere at the Statehouse.
The letter was received by Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, late Tuesday afternoon and was opened on the House floor in the midst of debate.
Abdul-Samad told reporters Tuesday evening that the letter contained “very threatening” language but declined to describe it in detail, citing an investigation now under way by state police.
“I cannot talk about what was in the letter at this point, because it’s turned over now to the State Patrol and also to DCI, but it was a threatening letter,” he said, referring to the state Division of Criminal Investigation. “This has now become a very serious legal matter.”
Abdul-Samad’s clerk, Drake Law School student Michael McRae, opened the letter after retrieving it from the lawmaker’s mailbox in the Capitol rotunda. The powder billowed out, he said, covering the area around Abdul-Samad’s desk, McRae’s clothing and hands, and even being inhaled by Abdul-Samad.
Rep. Kevin Koester, R-Ankeny, who said he was sitting near Abdul-Samad after the letter was opened and saw a white powder spill from an envelope, said the substance looked like flour or powdered sugar. Others described it as resembling a powdered detergent.
Abdul-Samad and Iowa State Patrol Capt. Mark Logsdon declined to identify the substance.
The letter apparently was hand-delivered to the Capitol, Logsdon said.
House leaders paused the debate that was then under way at about 3:45 p.m. and directed Abdul-Samad and McRae to the vestibule separating the House chambers from the Capitol’s second-floor rotunda.
They remained there throughout the afternoon and early evening. The entire building was locked down shortly before 5 p.m.
A hazardous materials team — wearing bright yellow plastic suits with orange boots and breathing apparatus — arrived around 5:30, and appeared to collect samples both inside the vestibule with Abdul-Samad and McRae and at the lawmaker’s desk on the House floor.
The two-man team’s fluorescent safety garb and Darth Vader-like exhalations contrasted sharply with the crowd of lawmakers and staff, who milled about on the floor in shirt-sleeves. Some even stood within an arm’s reach of Abdul-Samad’s desk, snapping photos as the hazmat workers conducted their work.
At around 6 p.m., House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, reported that preliminary testing indicated the substance was not hazardous. Officials with the 71st Civil Service Team, an inter-agency cooperative responsible for dealing with potentially hazardous situations like this, completed further testing, finally giving an all-clear at 7:50 p.m.
“With the sensitivity of government, it’s a realistic threat,” said Brian O’Keefe with the Des Moines Fire Department. “That’s why we’re going to this level of security and testing.”
Lawmakers resumed considering legislation before the all-clear, and even before Abdul-Samad returned to the chamber, wrapping up debate and holding a final vote on a bill to bar cities from using traffic cameras. The decision to get back to business didn’t sit well with everyone in the chamber.
“Continuation of this debate tonight is dumb, disrespectful and in poor taste,” Rep. Nathan Willems, D-Lisbon said, addressing Paulsen from the floor.
Others criticized the manner in which the incident itself was handled.
The initial response was uncontrolled and overly dismissive, potentially exposing an unknown number of Iowans to highly lethal agents like anthrax, said Sen. Bill Dotzler, a Waterloo Democrat who is trained in toxic threats.
More than an hour after the powder was discovered, state representatives and others were moving freely out of the House chambers to other areas of the Capitol and outside the building. Some senators even joked that their House peers should be banned from the Senate chambers.
But Dotzler, who was a volunteer with the John Deere Fire Brigade and fully trained with the Waterloo hazmat team, said the situation was no laughing matter.
House members should have been immediately isolated and even removed from the chambers to an isolated area to avoid further possible exposure, he said, rather than allowed to move freely inside and outside the building.
“In the world we live in you have to take every case seriously,” he said. “People said, ‘Well, it smelled like soap.’ Well, you can mix toxic biological agents in with soap and it could be something that’s pretty bad.”
Law enforcement and Abdul-Samad himself, however, defended the way the situation played out.
“Everything was handled properly, and I’m really happy with how things were handled,” Abdul-Samad said.
Logsdon, the state patrol captain, said it was easier to second-guess the response than to manage a potentially dangerous situation in a crowded and public place.
“It’s easy to question and armchair quarterback people, but the fact of the matter is once the letter was open and the substance was airborne, then it literally contaminated everyone in there,” he said.
House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer said the situation was unprecedented for most, if not all, of the lawmakers now serving.
She said the response will be reviewed to determine if additional procedures are necessary for dealing with such situations.
“We’ll do a look back and make sure we have the systems in place that we need and the processes that make sure everyone gets here safe,” Upmeyer said.
Among the first people out of the Capitol were Michael Mericle and his grandparents, who had been visiting the building.
Mericle, who was visiting Des Moines from Omaha, said the ordeal wasn’t what he expected for his first visit to the Capitol.
“It was long,” he said. “We were walking out, and they told us to go back in. It was boring, but everyone is OK.”
Mericle passed the time by playing with his smartphone and sending text messages to friends, he said. He said he wasn’t nervous, and others in the Capitol didn’t seem to be either.
“But his mom was,” put in Julie Almquist, Mericle’s mother, who had been waiting outside the building for her son.
Almquist, who said she had interned at the Capitol while growing up in Des Moines, said she initially didn’t think the incident was a big deal, until the hours began dragging on.
They missed their dinner reservation at Splash, she said, but once they left the Capitol, they headed there anyway to try to get a table.
Israeli journalist Yossi Gurvitz describes himself as a former Orthodox Jew who claims to have seen the “light” and turned atheist at the age of 17. We are unfamiliar with his work but received this tip from a reader regarding one of his recent articles.
It is titled, IDF Colonel-rabbi implies: Rape is permitted in war. Colonel Eyal Qarim was questioned, (seemingly while not in uniform) about whether rape is permitted in war, and his answer implied that it was allowed.
Now I am unfamiliar with halacha or Jewish law, but my guess is it is a system as varied and expansive as Sharia’. Most likely you can find any opinion under the sun within halacha and so I am sure many will insist that the opinion proffered by the IDF Rabbi is not the only one, and is not the position of the IDF.
However, looking at the question and answer it exposes a troubling indication that an IDF Colonel Rabbi who was once being considered for the position of Chief Rabbi held the view that “rape is permitted in war.” More over it is not the first time that extremely problematic views have been expressed by influential IDF Rabbis.
It also brings us back to the question, “what if they were Muslim?” If a prominent Muslim scholar had offered such an opinion one can be assured that it would be all over MEMRI.
Gurvitz omitted the whole question from the reader to the Rabbi, but we provide an approximate translation via. Google for context:
There have been various wars between nations, such as the First World War, for example, different nations fought each other, and no one was particularly good for the Jews or bad for the Jews…
But if they had captured a village and there were Jews and Jewish girls were raped, it is considered, rightly, a disaster and tragedy to the girl and family.
If yes, rape in war is considered a shocker. How, then was I told that a long, beautiful woman is allowed, according to some authorities, even before the process described in the Torah, I mean, surrender and lay with it created, and only then take her home, etc.?
This seems contradictory. After all, if rape is considered a civil war and not something shocking, why, apparently, Jews allowed?
Is it allowed in our days [sic] for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape girls during a fight, or is such a thing forbidden?
Now it’s very clear that the questioner is asking whether or not rape is allowed in war time. This is the answer that Rabbi Qarim gave (translation via. Gorvitz):
“The wars of Israel […] are mitzvah wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is “erased” for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability […]
As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot in the original – YZG), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha’ra in the original -YZG), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.”
Gorvitz comments on this:
Wow. Herein lies a hornet’s nest. The first is that according to Qarim, the rape of female prisoners is not just permitted, it is also essential to war; the success of the whole at war relies on it.
….
Another problem is that Qarim invokes here the usual apologetics of those who speak of “Jewish morality”: he claims war is a conflict between nations, not individuals, and that the individual has no importance at war. The raped woman is not a woman, is not a person, has no feelings and if she feels pain it is unimportant: she is not a woman or a person, just an individual of an enemy tribe whose misfortune was to be captured. Furthermore, Qarim says that rape during wartime is immoral if carried out by a rival tribe – but all Jewish wars are, by definition, mitzvah wars. If the rape of the defenseless is part and parcel of “Jewish morality,” it’s not hard to reach the conclusion it is inferior to all modern morality systems. It is also worth noting (Hebrew) that “Jewish morality” is a by-product of German blood and iron romanticism.
Yet a third problem is that, essentially, Qarim says there is nothing which may be prohibited in war, if it is done “for the success of the whole.” We know that the killing of armed combatants is permitted (this is, after all, the essence of war), and we now learn that, for His Blessed Name, the rape of women is also permitted. Then we must ask ourselves whether it is also permitted, for the sake of victory, to also kill unarmed people. Children, for instance, who we have good reason to think may seek one day vengeance for the death of their fathers and brothers and the torturing of their mothers and sisters. The notorious book “Torat Ha’Melekh” answered in the affirmative; it would be interesting to know what Qarim thinks, and whether there is anything he thinks a Jewish soldier ought not to do for victory.
But the real problem here is that Eyal Qarim is an IDF colonel (Aluf Mishneh), and is a senior officer in the Military Rabbinate, i.e. is in a senior position in the IDF religious edicts apparatus. I’ve sent the following questions to the IDF Spokesman:
Is the rape of women during wartime agreeable to the IDF Ethics Code?
If not, why does a prominent military rabbi promote it?
If not, does the IDF intend to end the service of Col. Qarim, or bring charges against him?
How does the IDF Spokesman intend to deal with the anticipated damage to its image in the international arena, resulting from Col. Qarim’s ruling?
Frankly, I did not expect an answer, but surprisingly enough an enraged officer from IDF Spokesman New Media Unit called me. His official response was that Qarim was not an officer in active service when he wrote that ruling, and furthermore that my question “disrespects the IDF, the State of Israel and the Jewish religion,” and hence his unit will no longer answer my questions.
I told him that, as an Israeli citizen, I considered Col. Qarim to be a ticking time bomb, which will blow up in the IDF’s face should a soldier rape an enemy woman: it would automatically be seen as official policy. I told him this happened in the past. He vehemently denied it, and wouldn’t listen.
I think that the fact that Qarim was on hiatus at the time – earlier he was the religious officer of a crack unit, Sayeret Matkal (commando unit) – is unimportant. What is important is that the Military Rabbinate chose to re-call an officer who wrote such a ruling to active service. Qarim was briefly considered a candidate for the position of the Chief Military Rabbi. This is the face of the IDF in 2012, and this is the face of the rabbis it chooses to employ. There are certainly more humane rabbis than Qarim; yet somehow these are not the rabbis who are promoted.
The security services in Germany are scrambling to track down and arrest far-right fugitives and Germany’s federal and state interior ministers have announced they are taking concrete steps towards banning the country’s far right National Democratic Party, the NPD.
This comes after a public outcry following revelations in November that a neo-Nazi cell had apparently been able to go on a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders over several years, under the noses of the German intelligence services.
The group of three are being held responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.
Yet the existence of the group, dubbed the Zwickau cell after the name of the town where they spent most of their time in hiding, only came to light in November when two of its members died in an apparent joint suicide or murder-suicide and the third handed herself in to the authorities.
The NPD has been linked to the group, though the allegations have yet to be accepted in a court of law.
The trio had made a DVD in which they boasted of the killings and said they had acted to serve the German nation and its people, describing themselves as the National Socialist Underground – echoing the national socialism (Nazism) of Hitler’s Germany.
The story of the killers has dominated headlines in Germany for months now and given rise to one of the biggest scandals in post-war Germany.
It turns out intelligence agencies had had the group under surveillance for years, and even found a bomb-making factory in their garage back in 1998.
So why were the trio not stopped earlier? Why were they allowed to disappear and then stay underground? And why was it that security services blamed the murders on the Turkish mafia at the time? A right-wing motive was never investigated.
The failures have prompted some to ask whether there is more than incompetence to blame, whether Germany’s police and security services contain elements sympathetic to the far right – an accusation the institutions vehemently deny.
A parliamentary inquiry is currently under way into their activities, and Newsnight has seen a secret internal report revealing serious blunders by law enforcement agencies.
Police limitationsWhen we spoke to Peter Altmaier, a senior official in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, he admitted that mistakes had been made:
“You have to know Germany is a federal state, and competencies are shared and divided between federal and state levels… and because we have drawn the lessons from the Nazi dictatorship, we have very limited powers of police and security institutions.
“There have been hints and indications of right-wing extremism that were not taken seriously enough, and therefore we have put this very high on the political agenda.”
Another question that now worries many Germans is just how big a threat the far right poses.
Human rights groups say more than 180 people have been killed in right-wing attacks in Germany over the last 20 years.
Neo-Nazis have murdered more people in post-war Germany than any other single group, including Islamists and the far left. But this is not yet reflected in official data.
French politician Marine Le Pen is among European far-right figures courting the Jewish community. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images
A good piece, reconfirming what we have been saying all along:
On Saturday, in the Danish city of Aarhus, a Europe-wide rally organised by the English Defence League will try to set up a European anti-Muslim movement. For Europe’s far-right parties the rally, coming so soon after the murders in south-west France by a self-professed al-Qaida-following Muslim, marks a moment rich with potential political capital.
Yet it’s also a delicate one, especially for Marine Le Pen. Well before the killings, Le Pen was assiduously courting Jews, even while her father and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was last month convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying that the Nazi occupation of France “wasn’t particularly inhumane”. Marine must disassociate herself from such sentiments without repudiating her father personally or alienating his supporters. To do so she’s laced her oft-expressed Islamophobia (parts of France, she’s said, are suffering a kind of Muslim “occupation”) with a newfound “philozionism” (love of Zionism), which has extended even to hobnobbing with Israel’s UN ambassador.
Almost all European far-right parties have come up with the same toxic cocktail. The Dutch MP Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigrant Freedom party, has compared the Qur’an to Mein Kampf. In Tel Aviv in 2010, he declared that ”Islam threatens not only Israel, Islam threatens the whole world. If Jerusalem falls today, Athens and Rome, Amsterdam and Paris will fall tomorrow.”
Meanwhile Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party, which grew out of the Vlaams Blok Flemish nationalist party, many of whose members collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war, has proposed a quota on the number of young Belgian-born Muslims allowed in public swimming pools. Dewinter calls Judaism “a pillar of European society”, yet associates with antisemites, while claiming that ”multi-culture … like Aids weakens the resistance of the European body”, and “Islamophobia is a duty”.
But the most rabidly Islamophobic European philozionist is Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Austrian Freedom party, who compared foreigners to harmful insects and consorts with neo-Nazis. And yet where do we find Strache in December 2010? In Jerusalem alongside Dewinter, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself.
In Scandinavia the anti-immigrant Danish People’s party is a vocal supporter of Israel. And Siv Jensen, leader of the Norwegian Progress party and staunch supporter of Israel, has warned of the stealthy Islamicisation of Norway.
In Britain EDL leader Tommy Robinson, in his first public speech, sported a star of David. At anti-immigrant rallies, EDL banners read: “There is no place for Fascist Islamic Jew Haters in England”.
So has the Jew, that fabled rootless cosmopolitan, now suddenly become the embodiment of European culture, the “us” against which the Muslim can be cast as “them”? It’s not so simple. For a start, “traditional” antisemitism hasn’t exactly evaporated. Look at Hungary, whose ultra-nationalist Jobbik party is unapologetically Holocaust-denying, or Lithuania, where revisionist MPs claim that the Jews were as responsible as the Nazis for the second world war.
What’s more, the “philosemite”, who professes to love Jews and attributes superior intelligence and culture to them, is often (though not always) another incarnation of the antisemite, who projects negative qualities on to them: both see “the Jew” as a unified racial category. Beneath the admiring surface, philozionism isn’t really an appreciation of Jewish culture but rather the opportunistic endorsement of Israeli nationalism and power.
Indeed you can blithely sign up to both antisemitism and philozionism. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described himself as “pro-Zionist” while claiming that Europe has a “considerable Jewish problem”; he saw himself as simultaneously anti-Nazi and pro-monoculturalism. The British National party’s Nick Griffin once called the Holocaust the “Holohoax”, subsequently supported Israel in its war “against the terrorists”, but the day after the Oslo murders tweeted disparagingly that Breivik was a “Zionist”.
Most Jews, apart from the Israeli right wing, aren’t fooled. They see the whole iconography of Nazism – vermin and foreign bodies, infectious diseases and alien values – pressed into service once again, but this time directed at Muslims. They understand that “my enemy’s enemy” can easily mutate into “with friends like these …”.
The philozionism of European nationalist parties has been scrutinised most closely by Adar Primor, the foreign editor of Haaretz newspaper,who insists that ”they have not genuinely cast off their spiritual DNA, and … aren’t looking for anything except for Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power.”
Similarly Dave Rich, spokesman of the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors antisemitic incidents in Britain, told me that far-right philosemites “must think we’re pretty stupid if they think we’ll get taken in by that. The moment their perceived political gain disappears they revert to type. We completely reject their idea that they hate Muslims so they like Jews. What targets one community at one time can very easily move on to target another community if the climate changes.” Rich’s words, spoken before the murder of Jews in Toulouse, now sound chillingly prescient. The president of the French Jewish community, Richard Pasquier, judges Marine Le Pen more dangerous than her father.
French Muslim leaders rallied round Jewish communities last week. Next week sees the start of Passover, a festival celebrating the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt, when Jews often think about modern examples of oppression. Let’s hope that French Jewish leaders use the occasion to rally round Muslim communities, and to remember that ultimately, racism is indiscriminate.
• This article was amended on 28 March 2012. It originally referred to the Community Security Trust as the Community Service Trust. This has now been corrected
Robert George was recently appointed to the USCRIF along with Zuhdi Jasser. In the video below George is clearly unwilling to answer the question about whether or not he sees a contradiction between his stated position of “supporting Muslim rights” while at the same time serving on the board of a foundation well known for funding anti-Muslim organizations:
As we noted, prominent Catholic intellectual Robert George sits on the board of this foundation and hasn’t reconciled this position with his ostensible public commitment to defending the religious freedom of Muslims
Nick caught up with Robert George today at an event hosted by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and asked about this contradiction:
Here’s what Nick asked and George’s response:
FAITH IN PUBLIC LIFE: So you don’t see a conflict between your being on a board that has funded these things, as public knowledge, and your personal beliefs about this?
GEORGE: My record is very clear. I will not discuss with you confidential matters that go on in the Bradley Board. The Bradley Foundation does fund many, many different organizations. Some of them are run by Muslims, some of them are trying to advance good relations between Muslims and other American citizens and that’s all I have to say on the matter.
As you can see, George refused to discuss the issue, but didn’t deny the facts. He apparently thinks it’s acceptable to simultaneously stand up for Muslims’ religious freedom in public and participate in the work of an organization that’s trying to dismantle that very right. George might not see an ethical conflict here, but we do, and we’d be interested to see if the Muslim Americans he works with see that contradiction as well.
Here’s a reminder of who the people the Bradley Foundation funds, via the Fear, Inc. report:
David Horowitz
Described Muslims in the Middle East as “Islamic Nazis” who “want to kill Jews, that’s their agenda.”
Alleges that Muslim Student Associations at American schools “are Wahhabi Islamicists, and they basically support our enemies.”
Promulgates the debunked smear that 80% of U.S. mosques are controlled by radicals
Daniel Pipes
Describes his Legal Project website as “a source of information on ‘Islamist lawfare’–that is, attempts by supporters of radical Islam to suppress free discourse on Islam and terrorism by (1) exploiting Western legal systems and traditions and (2) recruiting state actors and international organizations such as the United Nations.”
Said “It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”
Alleged that there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”
Believes that conservative paragon Grover Norquist is running a “Muslim Brotherhood influence operation” to infiltrate the conservative movement.
WASHINGTON — Iranian-backed Hezbollah agents, not al Qaeda operatives, may pose the greatest threat on U.S. soil as tensions over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program ratchet up, according to the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
“As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons and there is increasing concern over war between Iran and Israel, we must also focus on Iran’s secret operatives and their number one terrorist proxy force, Hezbollah, which we know is in America,” said New York Rep. Peter King at a Wednesday hearing of his committee.
The hearing, which featured former government officials and the director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department, follows a foiled plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., and testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in late January that Iran’s leaders are “more willing to conduct an attack inside the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”
Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”
But Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said he was concerned that the testimony he was about to hear was based on outdated information and not current intelligence. He noted that “no current federal officials” were asked to testify on Wednesday.
“A word of caution is in order,” Thompson said. “When we examine our relationship with another country, we cannot look at any particular moment in time and pretend that it tells the whole story. We cannot view the politics, history and culture of any other country clearly by seeing a snapshot version.”
Referencing Clapper’s earlier testimony, Thompson said the director of national intelligence should be called in for a classified hearing, but added, “We should not engage in a public discussion that creates fear and delivers misinformation.”
King rejected the Democrat’s objections. “We’re not focusing on foreign policy,” he said. “We’re talking about an internal threat to this country.”
Most of the testimony — which came from former officials at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Treasury, among others — concerned Iranian-linked attacks in other countries that dated back decades in some cases. However, Mitchell Silber, head of the NYPD intelligence unit that has come under fire for spying on the city’s Muslim community, said that between 2002 and 2010 his agency and federal authorities detected “at least six events involving Iranian diplomatic personnel that we struggle to categorize as anything other than hostile reconnaissance of New York City.”
The suspicious events, some of them publicly revealed for the first time, involved security guards at the Permanent Mission of Iran to the United Nations and Iranian diplomats stationed in New York. Among the cases Silber cited:
On Nov. 16, 2003, at 2 a.m., uniformed NYPD officers on a subway train observed two men filming the train tracks. The men, who initially claimed diplomatic immunity, were security guards at the Iranian Mission who had recently arrived in New York.
In May 2004, despite warnings from the State Department, two more Iranian Mission security guards were observed videotaping infrastructure, public transportation and New York City landmarks. A month later, the guards were expelled by the United States, Silber said, for “engaging in activities that were not consistent with their duties,” or spying.
In May 2005, six individuals “associated with the Government of Iran” were interviewed by the NYPD after a call to a city hot line reported suspicious behavior. The individuals on a sightseeing cruise were reportedly photographing and videotaping landmarks such as the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges as well as “reportedly speaking on their cellphones in an unusual manner.” One of the individuals worked at the Iranian Mission while the other five had diplomatic immunity based on their positions within the Iranian government. They were later released.
In September 2008, during the U.N. General Assembly, several members of the Iranian delegation were seen taking photos of railroad tracks inside Grand Central Station. After questioning, they were “released without incident.
In September 2010, again during the U.N. General Assembly, federal air marshals reported suspicious behavior at the Wall Street Heliport, where four people were seen taking “still photos and videotaping the water line and structural area of the heliport landing pad” from a nearby parking lot. The four produced press cards showing they worked for the Iran Broadcasting Co. and were released.
Although authorities could link none of the incidents to actual plots, “Iran has a proven record of using its official presence in a foreign city to coordinate attacks, which are then carried out by Hezbollah agents from abroad, often leveraging the local community — whether wittingly or not — as facilitators,” Silber testified.
By Josh Israel Newly released FBI documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, suggest that the bureau illegally spied on the religious practices of Muslim Americans, under the guise of community outreach. An FBI spokesman defended the information gathering as “within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity, whether investigation or liaison, including activities designed to strengthen relationships in various communities.” The ACLU explains:
The FBI’s targeting of American Muslim religious organizations for secret intelligence gathering raises grave constitutional concerns because it is an affront to religious liberty and equal protection of the law. The bureau’s use of outreach meetings to gather intelligence also undermines the trust and mutual understanding necessary to effective law enforcement. Additionally, the FBI’s retention of information gathered through “mosque outreach” in its intelligence files violates federal Privacy Act prohibitions against the maintenance of records about individuals’ First Amendment-protected activity.
But this would hardly be the first time the FBI spied on peaceful Americans. Here are just a few recent examples:
Iraq War Opponents — A 2002 FBI memo showed the bureau investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice, as the pacifist group leafleted against the Iraq War.
Environmentalists — The FBI improperly investigated two planned Greenpeace corporate protests, a three-year inquiry extending long after the protests were over.
Animal Rights Supporters — The bureau also improperly investigated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.This intelligence, while not useful for public safety, was at least better than the virtual restaurant reviews gathered by the New York Police Department’s spying operation.A 2010 Inspector General’s report lambasted the FBI for equating nonviolent protests with terrorism and for “false and misleading statements to the public and to Congress.”Of course, these groups are in good company. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was spied on regularly by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The COINTELPRO investigations into whether the civil rights leader might be a Communist including tapped phone conversations, bugs at his house, and even a 1964 infamous poison-pen letter warning him he would be exposed as a fraud. But nearly 50 years later, it seems perhaps the FBI should have learned from its mistakes.
On May 1, 2010, Pascal Abidor was riding an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York. His parents live in Brooklyn, and he was on his way to visit them. The school year at McGill had just ended, and he felt relieved and calm as the train rolled south towards America.
At about 11 a.m., the train arrived at the U.S. border and made a routine stop. A team of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers boarded the train and advanced through each car, questioning passengers. Pascal had made this trip countless times before, so when a customs officer approached him, he didn’t give it a second thought.
But Pascal had never met Officer Tulip.
After looking over Pascal’s U.S. passport and customs declaration, Officer Tulip asked two simple questions: Where do you live, and why?
Pascal answered that he lived in Canada. He lived in Canada because that’s where he was pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies.
Next, she asked him where he had traveled in the previous year, and he answered Jordan and Lebanon. He showed her his French passport (he’s a dual citizen) with the “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” stamp, and the Lebanese stamp with the little cedar tree on top.
That didn’t help. Officer Tulip immediately told him to grab his things and follow her to the train’s cafe car. Pascal gathered his luggage, but Officer Tulip carried the bag containing his laptop. At the time, he thought she was just being helpful.
In the cafe car, they were joined by five or six more CBP officers. Pascal sat across from Officer Tulip as she took out his laptop, turned it on, and asked him to enter his password, which he did.
As she scrolled through the contents of his computer, Pascal could only see her reaction. Officer Tulip signaled to her colleagues and pointed at something on the screen. She then turned to Pascal and demanded an explanation.
Pascal was now surrounded by half a dozen suspicious American border police, staring at photos – on his laptop – of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies.
Where had he gotten “this stuff,” Officer Tulip asked. Pascal explained that his PhD research is on the Shiites of modern Lebanon. This was not, in her books, a good answer. Finally, the officers told Pascal that he would have to leave the train with them.
“Take me off the train, I’ll walk back to Montreal,” Pascal offered. Given what he would go through in the next few hours, Pascal might well have preferred the walk.
Instead, he was frisked, with particular vigor around his genitals. Then he was handcuffed. Pascal winced.
As they led him off the train, the officers draped a coat over his bound wrists. They claimed it was to spare him the embarrassment of a perp walk. But as Pascal walked past the train’s windows, he tried to show the passengers that he was cuffed. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he wanted witnesses.
Pascal was then loaded into the back of a van. Oddly, as one of the officers tried to close the van’s side door, it fell clean off. It could have been a moment of levity in a grim situation. But Pascal didn’t dare laugh.
The Detention Cell
When they arrived at the Champlain Port of Entry, Pascal was put in a five-by-ten foot cell with cinder block walls and a steel-reinforced door. He was told to wait. He stayed in the cell for about an hour. Officers came in at random intervals to ask him questions.
“I thought I was going to throw up,” he said. “I thought I was going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.”
Pascal was then removed from the cell and brought to an interrogation room, complete with florescent lighting and a two-way mirror. He sat across from two CBP officers – Officer Tulip and a man named Officer Sweet – while another officer sat at the end of the table, seemingly in case Pascal got violent.
“They thought I was straight-up dangerous,” Pascal said.
Then the real interrogation began, an hour and a half of intensive questioning. Where was he born? Where were his parents born? What religion was he raised with? Had he ever been to a rally in the Middle East? Had he heard any anti-American statements in the Middle East? Had he ever seen an American flag burned? Had he ever been to a mosque? But the questions always came back to the same point – why Islamic Studies?
“I want to be an academic – this is just what I happen to be an academic in,” Pascal told them.
His answers seemed to fall on deaf ears. The interrogation continued. It was the same questions, over and over. They were looking for him to make a mistake.
They soon fell into a good-cop, bad-cop routine.
“He thought I was cool,” Pascal said of Officer Sweet. Officer Tulip, on the other hand, “thought I was the most evil person. She thought I was a movie villain or something.”
They claimed Pascal’s dual citizenship made him untraceable. They suggested he was attractive “to both sides.” Pascal was baffled. Both sides of what?
Finally, after about three hours in detention, he was released. But there was a catch – the CBP was keeping his laptop and hard drive.
Pascal was enraged. While he had been waiting in the cell, Pascal had given some thought to what he would say to the officers once he was free. Now, with his anger compounded by the loss of his computer, Pascal delivered a blistering speech, directed at his arch-nemesis, Officer Tulip.
“I ripped into her,” he said. “She just stood there, [then] walked away.”
When an FBI agent came up to him and attempted to apologize, Pascal stopped him mid-sentence. “I don’t want to hear your apology,” he told the agent.
Before he left, he was given his camera and his two cell phones. There was a scratch on the back of one of the phones, as if someone had tried to open it.
Taking Legal Action
After being released from detention, Pascal hitched a ride on the next bus with an open seat that came through the checkpoint. He arrived in New York at midnight. That night, he had trouble sleeping, as he would have for the next week or so.
The next morning, he sat down and wrote eleven single-spaced pages detailing exactly what had happened to him. The day after that, he began making phone calls to state senators and advocacy organizations in the hope of finding someone who would help him. Lots of them were interested in his case, including Anthony Weiner, the former New York Congressman.
Finally, Pascal settled on the ACLU. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the oldest and largest civil liberties organization in the United States. Free speech cases are its bread and butter. And they told Pascal that his right to free speech, protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, had been violated.
Two days after his first phone call with the ACLU, Pascal was in downtown Manhattan, sitting in a meeting with a team of lawyers. The first thing they did was to write a letter to the CBP demanding that they return Pascal’s laptop. The day after the letter was sent, Pascal got a call from the CBP asking him where they should overnight his belongings.
But at this point, the damage was done. When the laptop arrived in the mail, the seam between the keyboard and the outer case that led to the internal hard drive appeared to have widened. The warranty seal on his external hard drive had been broken open, too. The government had already searched, and, they later conceded, made copies of Pascal’s electronic life.
Pascal and the ACLU were incensed. His laptop contained intimate personal information: chat logs with his girlfriend, university transcripts, his tax returns.
The problem was, everything Homeland Security had done was completely by the book.
The Policy
In August 2009, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a policy that allows for the search and seizure of electronic devices at the border without reasonable suspicion. Under the policy, the DHS can detain any electronic device indefinitely, and copy and share the information it contains. Between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, more than 6,500 people had their electronic devices searched at U.S. border stops.
It was under this policy that Pascal’s laptop and hard drive were searched and detained.
Upon the enactment of the policy, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that, “keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States. The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers, while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”
The policy makes a point of specifying that, “at no point during a border search of electronic devices is it necessary to ask the traveler for consent to search.”
This struck the ACLU as deeply unconstitutional. So they and Pascal decided to sue Janet Napolitano, Director of Homeland Security, to challenge the constitutionality of the policy.
In September 2010, they filed their “complaint” against Napolitano, the legal document that kicks off a lawsuit. The ACLU argued that the DHS policy violates the First and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech and protection against unreasonable search and seizure respectively.
The U.S. government tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that while Pascal’s story was true, the government’s actions had not broken any laws.
On the question of the Fourth Amendment, the government effectively said that just about any kind of search is legal at the border, in the name of national sovereignty.
“Searches made at the border, pursuant to the long standing right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border,” the government wrote in its Motion to Dismiss, the legal maneuver for getting a case thrown out.
With regard to the First Amendment, the Motion to Dismiss stated that, “an otherwise valid search under the Fourth Amendment, does not violate the First Amendment rights of an individual – even a completely innocent individual – simply because the search uncovers expressive material.”
In other words, a border search is a border search is a border search.
And it’s true that all travelers are subject to a routine search at the border, whether or not there’s suspicion of wrongdoing.
But while the U.S. government argues that the search of laptops should be considered a part of these routine searches, the ACLU says these searches are more invasive and therefore must be held to a higher standard.
“It is different to go through someone’s shoes and contact solution, than to go through all the documents on their computer,” said Catherine Crump, one of Pascal’s ACLU lawyers.
Last July, Pascal and his ACLU lawyers went to a courtroom in Brooklyn to argue against throwing out their case. The judge has still not come to a decision.
Meanwhile, the DHS policy remains on the books. Laptops and cell phones continue to be detained and searched without reasonable suspicion at the U.S. border.
Pascal, for his part, hasn’t had a normal border-crossing since that May 1 morning. “Now, every time I cross the border, I get harassed,” he said.
In December 2010, he was crossing the border with his father. The border guards began interrogating him in unusual ways. “They refused to believe my dad was my dad,” he said. “If you saw my dad, you could not believe we were not related.”
The guards then searched the car top to bottom, and made the Abidors wait at the checkpoint for two hours.
“This is about lowering the threshold of what is acceptable to us,” Pascal said of his treatment at the hands of the CBP. “You can’t have rights and then selectively apply them.”
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)
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 repeatedlyexplain 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.
Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau’s more ethically murky practices
Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.
“They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did,” Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.
It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.
Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of “confidential informants” in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist “attacks” at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.
In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.
In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant’s criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.
Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. “The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed,” he said.
But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. “They don’t have the humility to admit a mistake,” he said.
Monteilh’s story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.
He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.
Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County’s Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.
Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southernCalifornia. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.
By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.
It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. “It was a bad time in my life,” he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.
Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.
Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. “Paul Allen said: ‘Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America’,” Monteilh said.
The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.
Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.
“Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: ‘OK, now start to ask questions’.”
Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.
He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. “The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say “jihad”,” he said.
Of course, the chats were recorded.
In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.
Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.
He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County’s Muslim population.
He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.
None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.
At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: “Kevin is God.”
Monteilh’s own attitude evolved into something very similar. “I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: ‘You are an untouchable’,” he said.
But it was not always easy. “I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist,” he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.
But he was wrong about being untouchable.
Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.
A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.
But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.
He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)
What is not in doubt is that Monteilh’s identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.
The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden “an angel”. That was Monteilh’s work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.
Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. “I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot,” he said. The FBI’s charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.
Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.
That has now put Monteilh’s testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.
The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.
But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh’s lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.
In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.
Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI’s use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.
FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh’s – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.
In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: “Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again.”
For Steve Emerson, the danger is very clear and very present: A surprising number of American officials and institutions are in the tank to Islamic extremists and their handmaidens.
Emerson accuses the Obama administration of being infiltrated by radical followers of Islam inside our own country and throughout the world.
That’s right. Infiltrated.
Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, spent an hour last week with the Review-Journal editorial board and was accompanied by Elliot Karp, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. In the short time Emerson spent at the newspaper, he managed to indict a number of law enforcement institutions and officers as patsies for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic extremists in our midst.
For one, there’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Emerson said the FBI is so focused not offending Islamist and Arabic groups with allegiances to Hamas and Hezbollah that it’s getting in the way of anti-terrorism investigations.
“The agents on the ground understand exactly what’s going on,” Emerson says cryptically of the bureau’s political atmosphere. When asked to elaborate, he replies, “I have to protect my sources.”
Forgive me, but I thought the FBI was doing a pretty good job on the terrorism front. Turns out they’re falling down on the job.
It’s OK, though. Emerson has confidence in his own ability to spot the terrorists among us. He brags that his sources are “sometimes even better than the bureau.”
He adds that his field intelligence was superior to the FBI’s in part because “informants are more likely to work for us.”
That’s not all. He also has the sneaking suspicion that a talk he was scheduled to give to a group of CIA operatives was derailed by the Obama administration. Who knew President Barack Obama had enough hours in the day to dispatch CIA Director David Petraeus to teach Emerson a lesson?
Then there’s Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca. In 2010, Baca was honored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR also actively challenges Muslim stereotypes and presents the Islamic side of issues.
“He believes CAIR is a wonderful organization,” Emerson says sarcastically. ” I’m not calling him evil, or fundamentally stupid, but he is in bed with the bad guys.”
Obviously, Emerson isn’t shy about pointing fingers. Nor is he simply a sign-waving conspiracy theorist. His allies on the right consider him a Cassandra who warns us about the dangers of Islamic extremism at home and abroad, and especially as it affects Israel. He pens op-ed pieces in major newspapers, is often quoted on television and radio talk shows, is cheered on the speaking circuit, and has a loyal following on his website. He is a leading firebrand from the school of thought that goes something like, “Not all Muslims are plotting terrorist acts, just most of them.”
He claims he is the victim of “a fatwa by NPR” largely because National Public Radio officials don’t invite him on their programs these days. But you can still catch plenty of Emerson’s opinions in a variety of media and networks.
Lest you think he’s just a right-wing extremist out to frighten people, Emerson repeats often that his work is dangerous and he has received many threats. He says things like “I’ve got to look over my shoulder every day,” and “If I had a wife and kids, I couldn’t do this.”
Certainly not. He made it sound a little dangerous just sitting in the room with him.
That’s Emerson’s problem whether you believe he’s full of facts or fudge. His hyperbolic rhetoric plays well on the fundraising circuit, but it does nothing to forward the understanding of complex issues.
The Middle East is a political tinderbox. There’s heated talk of possible U.S. and Israeli military intervention in Iran to halt its development of nuclear technology.
At the risk of becoming part of a vast conspiracy to silence Steve Emerson, that complex conversation isn’t improved by his shouts of conspiracy at the highest levels of our government.
John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
But she didn’t ban this hateful freak, and he promptly re-posted the comment — with the direct advocation “Kill him” edited into something a bit less direct.
This was the comment as it appeared yesterday:
Goes to prove the psychopathological hesperophobics, product of fourteen-hundred years of the manifestation of evil that calls itself both “submission” and a “religion,” are not gunna provide fierce competition for the sub-Saharan Africans (mean-IQ: 67) in the ‘If Brains Were Dynamite Would Yours Even Blow Off Your Bloody Kufiya On A windy Day? Stakes!’
Unless it was Missus Billy-Bubbah Blythe (“Cli’ton”) – no-one – not even Plugs, the one-time most dangerous dullard in the senate, who at least – best I can tell – doesn’t loath us all – could be less competent that the mobbed-up marijuana-mumbling murtadd-Muslim modified Marxist mother’s milquetoast presently pretending to what his perilously-pernicious predatory pack passes off as the “presidency.”
Kill him and kill any chance to – this century or so, anyway – inflict any further serious harm upon America.
Posted by: Brian_R_Allen | Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 07:39 AM
The re-posted comment is just as full of racism and insanity, but the last sentence has been edited — and he refers to the “meat-locker-IQ’d LGF-Cyber-Terrorist Gang,” so very obviously, Geller and her commenter are aware of our whistle-blowing post:
Goes to prove that – just like the meat-locker-IQ’d LGF-Cyber-Terrorist Gang – the psychopathological hesperophobics, product of fourteen-hundred years of the manifestation of evil that calls itself both “submission” and a “religion,” are not gunna provide fierce competition for the sub-Saharan Africans (mean-IQ: 67) in the:
“If Brains Were Dynamite Would Yours Even Blow Off Your Bloody Kufiya On A windy Day? Stakes!”
Unless it was Missus Billy-Bubbah Blythe (“Cli’ton”) – no-one – not even Plugs, the one-time most dangerous dullard in the senate, who at least – best I can tell – doesn’t loath us all – could be less competent that the mobbed-up marijuana-mumbling murtadd-Muslim modified Marxist mother’s milquetoast presently pretending to what his perilously-pernicious predatory pack passes off as the “presidency.”
If the Osamaniacs had killed him, they would have killed, with him, any chance, in this century or so, anyway, of the followers of the mass-murdering Muhummud inflicting any further serious harm upon America. Buraq Hussayn Zero is their best ever ally!
Posted by: Brian_R_Allen | Monday, March 19, 2012 at 06:01 AM
Shaun Winkler, a member of the White Knights of the KKK, is running for sheriff in Bonner County, Idaho.
Shaun Winkler, running for Bonner County Sheriff a bonafide ‘white supremacist’ claims that if elected he will not push his ‘white supremacist agenda.’
On the flimsiest of associations hatemongers pounce on any Muslim even contemplating running for office. They will go to great lengths to create and fabricate guilt-by-association smears, trying to cast the said Muslim as a ‘evil-scary-Islamizing-terrorist.’ Spencer in fact wants Muslims running for office to be subjected to a ‘special test’ to determine whether they should be allowed to run or take office.
SANDPOINT, Idaho — A white supremacist in northern Idaho wants to be the next Bonner County sheriff, saying federal overreach motivated him to run for the office.
Shaun Winkler of the White Knights of the KKK will go up against incumbent Sheriff Daryl Wheeler and Ponderay police officer Tim Fry in the Republican primary on May 15. The winner of that contest will face independent candidate Rocky Jordan in November.
But the 33-year-old says he’s not running to push a white supremacist agenda.
The Aryan Nations is long gone from northern Idaho, but its reputation has lingered to the embarrassment of locals.
The circus that is known as the GOP presidential primary is still undecided, and may likely remain that way up until the Republican convention. Rick Santorum has been one of the surprising success stories in this race, going from polling at 2% early on to now emerging as the greatest challenge to Mitt Romney.
This is shocking because many considered it a bygone conclusion that Santorum was an outlier, someone so far to the right that there was no way that he would have a chance with the mainstream in the Republican party.
Santorum’s problematic stances range from birth control and abortion to his interventionist position on Iran. When it comes to Muslims it is clear that he is a bigoted Islamophobe. He was featured as a regular speaker in David Horowitz’s “Islamofascism week” and also supports profiling Muslims.
Now here he is being introduced by Rev. Dennis Terry, delivering an unequivocal message that America is a Christian nation and implying that all who don’t agree with that can “get out.” For some reason I imagine Santorum, who believes the Church should have a role in the operation of the government, probably wholeheartedly supports such a proposition:
“I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation…There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”
Christians, according to Rev. Terry, are the conscience of the state and even the key to turning the economy around. The pastor offered some pointed words about abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in schools, shouting about ‘sexual perversion’ and putting God back in Washington, D.C., as Senator Santorum was seen clapping, if not cheering, in the background.
“I know what’s in his heart. It’s the fact that he’s a Christian,” said Vickie Raabe, a 69-year-old Baptist who told the Washington Post she would be voting for Santorum in 2012. Evangelicals have become Sen. Rick Santorum’s major source of support in the 2012 election as they turn out in record numbers for the Catholic candidate.
But as then Presidential hopefuls Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Sarah Palin, and Senator John McCain found out, endorsement from pastors can be a double edge sword.
At the end of the evening Rev. Terry prayed over the presidential hopeful asking for God’s will to be done in the upcoming election intoning: “God, have favor on Rick Santorum.”
About 20 minutes after David Horowitz began speaking Monday, nearly all the students in attendance walked out of Hamilton Hall in protest. The action came in response to what participants said were slanderous remarks about Muslims and members of Arab nations.
Committee for a Better Carolina, along with Christians United for Israel, sponsored Horowitz to speak at UNC in a lecture titled “Why Israel is the Victim in the Middle East.”
Horowitz is a pro-Israel activist who has been the subject of controversy in the past for buying anti-Palestine ads in college newspapers. In Monday’s lecture, Horowitz argued that Palestine is trying to destroy Israel and that Israel fights back only in self-defense.
Horowitz criticized groups like the Muslim Students Association, linking them to various terrorist groups. He also compared Muslims to Nazis. “There are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims,” he said. “But there were good Germans too, and in the end they didn’t make a damn difference.”
Appearing on WCBS in New York this morning, Representative Peter King offered a strong defense of NYPD’s spying on mosques and Muslim businesses and student groups in several states. Criticism of the recently revealed program has intensified in recent days, but King said he was proud of the police department.
“[Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly and the NYPD should get a medal for what they are doing,” he said. “This is good police work. If you are going after radical Muslims you don’t go to Ben’s Kosher Deli.”
This is perhaps not surprising coming from the man who held highly controversial Capitol Hill hearings into Muslim Americans last year, which many people saw as essentially profiling by public relations; his colleague, Representative Keith Ellison invoked the specter of Joe McCarthy in criticizing King’s efforts and said they served to “vilify” Muslims.
But, alas, King announced last week that he would hold more hearings into domestic radicalization among Muslim Americans in the coming year. “The series of radicalization hearings I convened last March has been very productive,” King said in a statement. “I will definitely continue the hearings in 2012.”
This is a good time to flag a recent study by Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and member of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. His comprehensive examination of crime statistics found that terrorism-related incidents by Muslim Americans has declined markedly, and that Muslim-Americans represent “a minuscule threat to public safety.” He wrote:
The limited scale of Muslim-American terrorism in 2011 runs counter to the fears that many Americans shared in the days and months after 9/11, that domestic Muslim American terrorism would escalate. The spike in terrorism cases in 2009 renewed these concerns, as have repeated warnings from U.S. government officials about a possible surge in homegrown Islamic terrorism. The predicted surge has not materialized.
Repeated alerts by government officials maybe issued as a precaution, even when the underlying threat is uncertain. Officials may be concerned about how they would look if an attack did take place and subsequent investigations showed that officials had failed to warn the public. But a byproduct of these alerts is a sense of heightened tension that is out of proportion to the actual number of terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.
If King calls Kurzman to testify at his hearings I’ll eat my hat, but it’s possible Democrats on the committee could arrange for his appearance. He would provide a substantive counterweight to King’s typically anecdote-driven hysteria. Last week the FBI foiled a plot in which a Moroccan man wanted to bomb the US Capitol—you can bet King will give that episode a prominent role at his hearings.
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.
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.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham called President Barack Obama’s religious views into question on Tuesday, stating that he does not know for sure if Obama is a Christian.
Graham, who is the son of Billy Graham and the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Obama “has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.”
“All I know is I’m a sinner, and God has forgiven me of my sins… you have to ask every person,” he said about whether he could say for sure that Obama is indeed of the Christian faith.
However, when asked about GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s religion, Graham gave a much more concrete answer.
“I think so,” Graham said when asked if he believes Santorum is a Christian. “His values are so clear on moral issues. No question about it… I think he’s a man of faith.”
MSNBC’s panelists questioned the reverend’s double standard, but Graham continued to draw distinctions between the candidates on the issue of faith. On Mitt Romney, Graham was again evasive, stating that “most Christians would not recognize Mormonism as part of the Christian faith.”
But Graham was more willing to label Newt Gingrich’s faith. “Newt’s been married several times… but he could make a good candidate,” Graham said. “I think Newt is a Christian. At least he told me he is.”
Later in the segment, Graham also said he could not be sure that Obama was not a Muslim.
“All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries,” he said.
He continued, ”Islam sees him as a son of Islam… I can’t say categorically that [Obama is not Muslim] because Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama.”
Graham drew the criticism of the White House last spring when he suggested in an interview with ABC that Obama had not been born in the United States.
During that same interview, Graham also questioned whether Obama’s actions and values matched up with his identification as a Christian.
“Now he has told me that he is a Christian. But the debate comes, what is a Christian?” Graham said of Obama. “For him, going to church means he’s a Christian. For me, the definition of a Christian is whether we have given our life to Christ and are following him in faith and we have trusted him as our lord and savior.”
Over the last month, multiple scandals have leaked that show the extent to which the NYPD has violated the civil liberties of thousands of New York Muslims under the banner of counterterrorism efforts. Protecting the homeland must remain central in all of our policing and intelligence-gathering efforts, but it should not, and does not have to result in the alienation of hundreds of thousands of New York Muslims. Equally important, counterterrorism efforts must operate on sound and factual analysis of the threat posed by the Muslim community, and collaboration with Muslim community leaders and citizens should be a top priority.
The damage that these scandals have caused in severing the lines of trust between law enforcement and the Muslim community may be irreparable in the short term, but it is not too late for the NYPD to begin assessing the policies that led us to where we are today.
In a recently exposed white paper published by the NYPD entitled, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” we find the basis of an entire philosophy of counterterrorism that operates on several myths that must be addressed.
Let’s examine each of these myths in turn.
1. Extremist Muslims have permeated New York Muslim communities. The white paper states:
“New York City has a diverse Muslim population of between 600,000 and 750,000 within a population of about 8 ½ million–about 40% of whom are foreign-born. Unfortunately, extremists who have and continue to sow the seeds of radicalization have permeated the City’s Muslim communities.”
To suggest that the Muslim community of New York is being overran with violent extremism is far from the truth. The New York Muslim community makes up an estimated 1 million people throughout the entire state. The community has incredible racial, socioeconomic, and ethnic diversity, and is very well integrated into the larger society.
The threat this community poses is similar to the threat that American Muslims pose nationwide: very little to none. Since 9/11, over 40% of the cases where criminal charges were brought upon an American Muslim for suspicion in a terrorism related case, the Muslim community was responsible for turning that individual, or individuals, over to the authorities. Muslims see counterterrorism as their duty according to recent public opinion polls, and they are more concerned about preventing terrorism then are the rest of the non-Muslim American public per capita. Don’t we want to increase this trend of Muslims serving on the front line of counterterrorism efforts? Increasing it has the dual benefit of making Muslims an integral part of the solution, and making them feel like a valued collaborator in the war on terrorism.
According to the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s comprehensive terrorism database, of the 49 Muslim domestic and foreign based plots against the U.S. since 9/11 – there were over 105 terrorist plots from non-Muslim groups and individuals – nearly 1 in 3 of these plots were turned over to the authorities by the American Muslim community.
2. A Muslim’s level of religiosity is a sign of radicalization and support for terrorism. The second myth that the document supports is the so called “conveyor belt theory” of terrorism, which argues that terrorism is based on a continuum of religiosity, where the more religious a Muslim gets, the greater likeliness they may adopt violent extremism. This is a major misnomer that has unfortunately been taught to hundreds of thousands of police and intelligence agents nationwide as exposed in a recent investigative report by Political Research Associates entitled Manufacturing the Muslim Menace.
The white paper describes the ideology that supports terrorism as “jihadi-Salafi Islam” but never defines these terms, especially what they mean for Muslims. Instead, they exaggerate what a “Salafi Muslim” is, and neglect to point out that the majority of Salafi Muslims in western Europe and in America are not in favor of using violence and are generally peaceful. It also refuses to look at competing studies of radicalization. For example, Quintan Wiktorowicz, National Security Agency Director learned in anextensive empirical research project he headed up on radicalization of Muslim youth, that there is no correlation between religiosity and a willingness to become radicalized. In other words, the more religious Muslims became, the less likely they would be to join radical movements.
Wiktorowicz insight supports what Policy Analyst Alejandro Beutel has recently discovered in his careful analysis of Osama bin-Laden’s recruitment rhetoric. In a careful analysis of the content of each lecture that bin-Laden gave, MPAC discovered that al-Qaeda’s recruiting “pitch” was overwhelmingly political/policy-oriented, not religious.
Let’s be realistic. The threat from al-Qaeda is concerning. Despite the controversial nature of his assassination, Anwar Awlaki’s death and disappearance from the scene is a welcoming sign in the ongoing recruitment that Al-Qaeda is attempting, mainly online, to American Muslims. The fact that we no longer have a charismatic, English speaking figurehead of al-Qaeda to brainwash American Muslims to commit acts of violence is a great thing. Awlaki’s model seemed to be fairly effective in turning about two-dozen American Muslims towards a commitment to violent radicalization against the west andAmerica in particular. Importantly, this was happening in anonymous chat rooms online, not in mosques, or mainstream religious institutions in America.
3. Profiling Muslims is possible and necessary. The third myth that the white paper supports is that Muslims must be profiled; suggesting not only is it necessary, but that it is possible. Here is an excerpt from the paper:
“Radicalization makes little noise. It borders on areas protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. It takes place over a long period of time. It therefore does not lend itself to a traditional criminal investigations approach.”
When we analyze the homegrown cases of Muslim terrorists since 9/11, we find vastly different ethnic origin, age, ideological affiliation, and motivations. While the policy grievance remains consistent in each case, the idea of profiling based on religiosity or the outward expression of religiosity is just plain wrong and nonsensical. Like we saw from Wiktorowicz’s research, religious Muslims should be seen as allies, as there is no empirical relationship between religiosity and support for terrorism.
4. Muslim community leaders and citizens do not need to be consulted in counterterrorism efforts. Nowhere in the 90 plus page report do we find details or best practices for policymakers and intelligence officers in building partnerships with New York Muslims.
In an ironic way, the controversies coming out of the NYPD, while they hurt the relationship between Muslims and law enforcement, they help engage Muslims in the political process and in speaking up for their rights. The New York Muslim community is fed up, and many point to the rising trend of Islamophobia as the cause for this wanton disregard for Muslim civil liberties.
One of the key recommendations that Charles Kurzman, a leading expert on Muslim radicalization of the Triangle Center for Terrorism Research proposes is that Muslim Americans be given the means to express themselves politically in American society. The fight against Islamophobia as a healthy way for Muslim Americans to stand up for their rights and in the process demand equal respect. Like the civil rights movement for Black Americans, many politically engaged Muslims feel that the fight against bigotry and misunderstanding of their faith will result in a greater level of integration into the American experience.
From 2005 to 2011 we have witnessed an increase in the so-called “lone wolf” phenomenon of extremism – an isolated individual becomes indoctrinated by a charismatic pseudo religious leader and seeks to act out violence against the American populace. Thankfully, this threat is relatively minor, and unfortunately often caused by FBI entrapment.
What we have not yet seen is the climate of growing Islamophobia serving as the cause for a lone wolf attack on America, or even the turn to radicalization itself. Since it is always best to be ahead of the storm, we must encourage large-scale movements against Islamophobia because they help to further a healthy civic alternative to American Muslims that are somewhat prone to lunatic false prophets on YouTube like Anwar Awlaki. It is through fighting Islamophobia and standing up for civil rights that we can create a vehicle whereby Muslims can vent their anger and develop a new language that ties the values of Islam to a unique American and democratic narrative. This sort of action has already begun, and when scandals emerge like these, Muslim Americans should be vocal and demand justice.
When the New York Police Department was doing some spying on Muslim students outside the city (that’s a thing it does, we learned from the Associated Press on Monday), an apartment officers used to spy on Rutgers students got a visit from the FBI on a report that it was a terrorist cell itself. This is the kind of reporting that won the AP a Polk award Monday for its series on the NYPD spying on Muslims. Not only did the department go well outside its jurisdiction to “get a better handle on what was occurring at” Muslim Student Associations, as spokesman Paul Browne told the AP, it did so in a pretty Keystone Kops manner at times:
Police also were interested in the Muslim student group at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2009, undercover NYPD officers had a safe house in an apartment not far from campus. The operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell, called the police emerency dispatcher.
The FBI responded and determined that monitoring Rutgers students was one of the operation’s objectives, current and former federal officials said.
Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author atamartin@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
MURFREESBORO, TN — A group that states on their website that the “Islamic Movement” is a “threat to our civil liberties” is training deputies in Rutherford County this week.
Deputies from the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department are getting three days of training from Strategic Engagement Group, a Washington-based nonprofit that says its purpose is to counter the Unified Islamic movement in the United States.
The debate concerning construction of an Islamic Center in Rutherford County has been the subject of much debate over the last few years. The project’s faced a court fight, vandalism and arson. Tennessee Freedom Coalition, which openly opposed the new mosque, hired the Washington-based nonprofit.
On Monday, Strategic Engagement Group held a free seminar for the community, but Channel 4′s cameras were not welcome. John Guandolo, the vice president of the Strategic Engagement Group, spoke at the event and pushed a Channel 4 camera that attempted to record the seminar.
Channel 4 was allowed to listen to him speak but could not record it. Guandolo talked about Hamas and its plan to destroy Western civilization from within, and spoke of Islamic centers as potential military compounds.
The local sheriff’s department would not talk on camera about its decision to train deputies using this company. Deputies are able to use the training toward their Post Commission required annual training.
Monday’s event was held at the World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, which has been a vocal opponent of the new Islamic Center being built in Rutherford County.
Channel 4 checked with the Post Commission, which develops and enforces training and standards for all police officers in Tennessee. According to the Post, they allow individual law enforcement agencies to determine what training can count for the yearly minimums required of every officer.
One bill, HB825 from Republican Del. Bob Marshall of Prince William County, would have prohibited judges and state administrators from using any legal code established outside the United States to make decisions. [...]
But when legislators started hearing from business groups concerned about how the proposal could affect their dealings abroad and foreign companies located here, they sent the bill back to committee.
“I had some business concerns,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, after making the motion Thursday to kick back the bill. “It’s just something that needs some work.”
It’s unfortunate, if far from unexpected, that similar protests from religious groups, both Islamic and otherwise, were not enough to kill the bill. Nevertheless, the emergence of business opposition to these sorts of bills is a very important development.
A long list of S.C. lawmakers plans to send a message to Palmetto State courts: Don’t apply foreign laws here.
A proposed law, which a House panel will consider this month, is part of a growing movement in legislatures around the country.
Twenty other states are considering similar measures to ban judges from applying the laws of others nations, particularly in custody and marriage cases. Three states — Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona — already have added the laws to their books. Oklahoma put it in its state Constitution in 2010, a move now being challenged in federal court.
Proponents say the S.C. measure will ensure only U.S. and S.C. laws are applied in Palmetto State courtrooms, and foreign laws do not trump constitutional rights guaranteed to Americans.
Opponents say the proposal addresses a nonexistent issue and, while not specifically naming Islamic Sharia law, and smacks of anti-Islamic sentiment. They say such bills target the practice of Sharia, a wide-ranging group of Islamic religious codes and customs that, in some countries, are enforced as law.
While Sharia law provides followers of Islam guidelines on everything from crime to politics to hygiene and food, many Muslims also disagree on its interpretation.
State Rep. Wendy Nanney, R-Greenville, the bill’s sponsor, said she introduced the proposal after speaking with several family court judges around the state about problems with child-custody cases.
“I asked them if they had issues with custody cases decided outside of the country. They all said ‘Yes,’ ” Nanney said, adding one judge told her of a custody case brought before him that originally had been handled in Venezuela. The judge, who Nanney declined to name, said he struggled to find common ground between S.C. and Venezuelan laws, and how to apply them.
“It would simplify things to say, ‘We’re in a South Carolina court, and let’s use South Carolina law.’ It’s meant to help our judges not to be pushed and pressured and prodded to enforce other countries’ laws,” Nanney said.
Nanney said her bill does not target Sharia law or any other specific foreign code or law. Her proposal has 27 House co-sponsors, including House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, R-Lexington, and 26 other Republicans, who control the General Assembly.
A similar bill was introduced in the Senate last year by another Greenville Republican, state Sen. Mike Fair. It failed to clear the subcommittee level.
Subcommittee members sent a letter to the state’s family court judges to gauge whether Sharia or other foreign laws were impacting S.C. custody and divorce cases.
“We heard no indication from any of the judges that there was a problem,” said state Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens.
Liberal groups, including the S.C. Progressive Network, say the proposal is a waste of legislative time.
“I’m much more concerned with laws being imposed by aliens from the Planet Oz,” said Brett Bursey, the group’s director. “A stealth-alien invasion of the minds of our legislators is the most plausible explanation for their obsession with fixing things that aren’t broken.”
At least one national group, the New Jersey-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which works to promote understanding of Islam, says the intent of the state proposals is devious.
“There’s no mistaking the intent of these bills. It’s to provide a mechanism for channeling and cultivating anti-Muslim sentiment,” said council attorney Gadier Abbas.
Recent versions of the bills — like South Carolina’s — do not specifically mention Sharia law, but the intent is clear, Abbas said.
“There are some misconceptions about Islam in the United States,” he said. “That, coupled with a very vocal and well-organized minority of organizations and figures that have had for their mission, for years now, to ensure Muslims are not treated as equals in the United States, is creating this new effort to bring inequality into the laws. It’s alarming.”
Abbas said there are no valid fears of foreign laws being applied in U.S. courtrooms. “Only if American law allows for it does religious tradition or foreign laws even come into play.”
But proponents of the legislation, including the American Public Policy Alliance, point to several court cases as proof that Sharia law is seeping into the U.S. court system.
In one 2009 example, a New Jersey judge denied a Muslim wife’s request for a restraining order after she claimed her husband repeatedly raped her. The court said the man thought it was his religious right to have nonconsensual sex with his wife and, therefore, he did not meet the criminal-intent standard needed to issue the restraining order.
An appellate court reversed the ruling in 2010, granting the restraining order.
In a 1996 case, a Maryland appellate court deferred to a Pakistani court in granting custody of a child to her father in Pakistan instead of her mother in Maryland. One factor mentioned in the ruling was an Islamic belief that a father gets preference in custody cases.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan government officials who traveled to the snowbound village where seven children and a young adult reportedly were killed in a NATO airstrike this week said that the bombing was based on incorrect information.
The officials said that after talking to local residents and seeing the area, they concluded that an informer had misled the French troops who control the area.
The airstrike took place on Wednesday in the village of Geyaba in the eastern Afghan province of Kapisa. Seven boys under 14 and an 18-year-old were killed in the attack, according to Abdul Mubin Safi, the administrative director of Kapisa Province. They were herding sheep less than half a mile from their homes when the bombing happened.
NATO representatives and Afghan officials traveled to the area by helicopter to investigate and returned Friday, said Maj. Jason Waggoner, a NATO spokesman. He said there was no word yet from NATO officials on the findings of the joint Afghan-NATO team.
One member of the team, Mohammad Hussain Khan Sanjani, the chairman of the provincial council who was reached by telephone in Kapisa, said that after talking with people in the village, it seemed that misinformation had been passed to NATO forces.
“These people are involved in animal husbandry, they own sheep and goats, and their children went out to feed the animals behind their village under some oak trees,” Mr. Sanjani said.
“The French troops had a secret report from one of their agents who told them that in that area there were armed men preparing to attack the government and the French soldiers in Kapisa,” he said. “We talked to locals and found that the intelligence was wrong and they targeted civilians.”
The French soldiers, who are largely responsible for Kapisa Province, have faced stiff resistance from the insurgents there and in the Sarobi district of neighboring Kabul Province. Eighty-two French soldiers have been killed in combat since 2001, mostly in those two areas.
France’s military high command did not respond to requests for comment on the airstrike in Kapisa.
The province is divided ethnically, with some areas heavily Tajik and others Pashtun. The Pashtun areas have had a strong insurgent presence that includes both Taliban fighters and fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an insurgent leader.
The Najrab district, where the airstrike occurred, is mixed with Tajiks, Pashtuns and Pashai, and while local officials said it was not held by insurgents, their presence could not be ruled out since Najrab is adjacent to less stable districts.
“The area is not influenced by the Taliban, but there was some sort of illegal weapon smuggling,” said Abdul Saboor Wafa, the Kapisa governor’s chief of staff.
Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the United States-led military coalition and the Afghan government. Civilian deaths caused by NATO and Afghan forces dropped last year, although the number of civilians killed by airstrikes that were intended to hit insurgents rose, to 187, the United Nations has reported.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the loss of life in Kapisa and blamed a NATO airstrike in a statement on Thursday.
Bangladeshis in Kensington said they are living in fear after Muslim hate graffiti was found on a storefront in the neighborhood’s bustling shopping strip.
The manager of TDS Insurance on Beverly Road near McDonald Avenue, came to work Monday and spotted a nauseating sight:
“It was written on the outside – ‘Allah is s–t,’” said Abu Chowdhury, 51, who immediately called the cops.
“I have no enemies,” he said. “We are not a religious business.”
Although the hateful message was erased hours later, Bangladeshis said the sight left them emotionally scarred.
“It is just shocking,” said Mamnunul Haq, a Bangladeshi community leader. “No one wants to see anything like that.”
“We are a very peaceful people,” Haq added.
Kensington is one of the most diverse areas in the city – home to a Muslim stronghold mainly comprised of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, living among Mexican families and Orthodox Jews.
Bangladeshis joined their Hasidic neighbors in July during the search for Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old boy who went missing in Borough Park and was later found dead.
They also blasted the vandal or vandals who painted a half dozen swastikas around Midwood last month.
“It happened in the Jewish community. And now it is happening in ours,” Haq said.
Hoping to quell the growing anxiety, Councilman Brad Lander (D-Kensington) held a meeting Wednesday night with Bangladeshi, Jewish, and Latino residents discussing ideas about how to prevent future hate crimes in their hood.
Lander wants to put a set of trees and benches in front of TDS Insurance, calling it “Kensington Plaza,” serving as a mixed race meeting spot.
“In the face of hatred, this community is coming together,” Lander said. “When these things happen, you have to stand up.”
The Clarion Fund, an organization which produces Islamophobic documentaries, came under renewed scrutiny last month when news broke that their film “The Third Jihad” was screened at an NYPD conference. Facing calls for his resignation, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, after some dissembling, admitted he was interviewed for the project and apologized for his role, calling the film “inflammatory.” Clarion, however, bragged about the attention.
Now, Clarion appears to be throwing caution to the wind — along with any plausible defense that the group is not Islamophobic — by promoting a comment from a reader seeking to redeem the views of the anti-Muslim right-wing extremist who terrorized Norway this summer, killing 77, including 69 people at a youth camp. In an e-mail newsletter to supporters, Clarion Fund quoted the reader suggesting that a recent report that militant Islamic extremism posed the top threat to Norway redeemed the unheralded warnings of Anders Breivik, the anti-Muslim killer.
The newsletter, published by the organization’s radicalislam.org website, promoted the comment from a “reader in Norway.” It read:
What a hot current topic this is! Just today the news came out in Norway, “officially” and in spite of all the PC-ness of this government, that according to the national security forces, the threat of Islamist terrorism is the foremost threat against Norway. You probably remember the July 22 shootings. One of Breivik’s arguments was that the authorities were not taking this threat seriously because you musn’t offend a Muslim. Interesting development.
Clarion’s willingness to promote and publish an e-mail sympathetic to Breivik seems a bizarre move for an organization under fire for Islamophobia, especially when the comment obfuscates the bigoted point Breivik was making about Islam at-large — the very same conflation between extremism and the whole faith the Clarion Fund has repeatedly been accused of making.
Breivik’s warnings did not focus on Muslim extremism, but rather on Islam at-large. Breivik’s1,500-page manifesto is littered with comments about Islam in general, for instance arguing that the Muslim veil “should more properly be viewed as the uniform of a Totalitarian movement, and a signal to attack those outside the movement.” He called Islam a “totalitarian, racist and violent political ideology,” and said its holy book, the Koran, should be banned. Breivik’s warning was not about, as the reader wrote, “Islamist terrorism,” but about Islam:
What is likely to happen to the West, if it continues to follow its present policy of ‘political correctness’ and apathy towards the hostile teachings of Islam, [will be like] “the Islamic conquest of India…”
“In order to wake up the masses,” the soon-to-be killer wrote before attacking government offices and a political youth camp, “the only rational approach will be to make sure the current system implodes.”
Breivik went on in his manifesto to cite the writings of numerous American right-wing Islamophobes and recommended the Clarion Fund’s film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” for “further studies.” He even included a link to it.
While the Norwegian security services’ report did indeed cite Islamic-inspired extremism as the country’s top threat, that assessment actually proves Breivik’s assertion wrong: Norwegian authorities seem rather well-attuned to the serious threat posed by the few radicalized, extremist Muslims in Norway.
Despite the citations, Clarion is not, of course, responsible for Breivik’s attack. But by singling out and publishing a reader comment that whitewashed and sought to exonerate Breivik’s murderous ideology, the Clarion Fund may be tipping their hand as to how closely their views dovetail with his. (HT: Demographics United)
With Sue Myrick's departure in 2013, the 9th Congressional District seat will shift to another person for only the fifth time since Republican Charles Jonas went to Washington in 1953. DIEDRA LAIRD - 2008 CHARLOTTE OBSERVER FILE PHOTO
Here are the top three reasons why we are happy Sue Myrick will not seek another term:
She wrote the forward to “Muslim Mafia”, a book that argues that Muslims crept into our government by an orchestrated network of spy interns.
By Tim Funk and Jim Morrill tfunk@charlotteobserver.com, jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com
U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick’s surprise announcement Tuesday that she’ll leave Washington after nine terms sparked a scramble by would-be successors that reached halfway around the world – literally.
Mecklenburg County commissioner Jim Pendergraph, a Republican and longtime Myrick ally, is expected to announce his candidacy this morning – apparently with Myrick’s blessing.
“Sue and I have been friends for 25 years and she’s very close,” said Pendergraph, a former Mecklenburg sheriff and one-time Democrat. “And I just would expect that she would (support me).”
Former GOP state Sen. Robert Pittenger, who is also among those mulling a run in the predominantly Republican 9th Congressional District, was notified by a reporter while on a mission trip in China.
“I … will discuss with my wife and family when I return,” he said in an email.
And Andy Dulin, a GOP Charlotte City Council member whose district overlaps with Myrick’s in southeast Charlotte, said he’ll make a decision on whether to run by week’s end.
Other Republicans mentioned: Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James, who said he will decide soon; and Dan Barry, mayor pro tem of Weddington, who has been running in the crowded 8th District race but actually lives in the 9th.
Former Republican Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory would have been a sure candidate for the seat if – after years of waiting for it to become vacant – he had not decided to try instead for the N.C. governor’s mansion.
Mecklenburg County commissioner Jennifer Roberts, who’s a Democrat, also is considering a run. So may Jeff Doctor, a Democrat who challenged Myrick in 2010.
But the 9th District has historically been a safe GOP seat – and one that rarely changes occupants.
With Myrick’s departure in 2013, the office will shift to another person for only the fifth time since Republican Charles Jonas went to Washington in 1953. Since then, the seat was held by Jim Martin, Alex McMillan and Myrick.
Its boundaries have changed over the years, and it shifts shape again under the reapportionment map approved last year by the N.C. legislature. The Charlotte-centered district is even more Republican, with Mecklenburg County comprising a larger slice. It no longer includes Gaston County. Instead it takes in southern Iredell County and northern Union. Still, seven out of 10 district residents live in Mecklenburg County.
About 40 percent of the voters are registered Republicans, with Democrats comprising 32 percent and independents, 28 percent.
It’s also a predominantly white district (83 percent).
‘Grateful for the privilege’
Myrick, who will turn 71 this year, made her announcement on Facebook just days before Monday’s start of filing.
“After thoughtful discussion with my family, I have decided not to run for another term in Congress,” Myrick wrote. “I’m grateful for the privilege of serving. … We will spend the rest of the year working on the issues that are important to all of you – and I hope to be a positive influence.”
Myrick gave no reason for her decision. She and her staff did not return phone calls Tuesday.
Many GOP stalwarts expected her to run for a 10th term.
“I was quite surprised by her decision,” said state Sen. Bob Rucho, a Matthews Republican. “I talked to her the other day and never got an inkling about it. … I applaud her for her great job and wish her the very best as we move forward.”
Myrick’s road to Washington began in Charlotte, where she served on the City Council before defeating Democrat Harvey Gantt in the 1987 mayoral race. She served two terms, then ran unsuccessfully for her party’s U.S. Senate nomination in 1992.
Two years later, Myrick was elected to Congress as part of a GOP tidal wave that ended the Democrats’ 40-year control of the House. She won with 66 percent of the vote, becoming only the second woman to be elected to a full congressional term in North Carolina.
Her platform that year called for term limits for members of Congress. But Myrick never got around to limiting her own terms, going on to easily win eight more times.
A staunch conservative, Myrick also managed to move up the leadership ladder in the House. By 2004, she was both a member of the powerful Rules Committee, which decides which bills go to the floor, and chair of the Republican Study Committee, whose members are often to the right of the House’s GOP leaders.
Over the years, she emerged as a fiscal conservative, but one who favored federal money for road projects in her district. As a breast cancer survivor, she became a champion for increased coverage of mammograms. And, especially in recent years, Myrick waged high-profile, often controversial, campaigns against illegal immigration and radical Islam, which she charged had infiltrated the U.S. government.
On Tuesday, Republicans praised her record; some Democrats criticized it.
“Sue Myrick has been an incredibly effective leader,” said N.C. Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes, a former congressman who served with Myrick. “Throughout her time in Congress, she earned the respect of the leadership by always being a strong voice for her district.”
But N.C. Democratic Party spokesman Walton Robinson said voters in her district will now “have the opportunity to elect a responsive, constituent-oriented representative who will take their concerns to Washington – not the other way around, as Sue Myrick has done for so many years.”
‘Not just NO, but HELL NO!’
Myrick was not the kind of House member to show up on national talk shows every Sunday.
But, in 2006, she did made national news – and seemed to speak for many around the country – when she sent a one-sentence letter to President George W. Bush, then had her office email a copy to reporters.
“In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab Emirates,” she wrote, “not just NO, but HELL NO!”
Myrick also demonstrated her toughness in a more personal way, by surviving breast cancer.
Diagnosed in 1999, she agonized over whether to make the news public.
“I have a very public job, so was concerned about what to tell the media about my surgery,” she wrote in a 2005 blog for the website Yahoo! Health. “My husband and I discussed it and decided that I had a ‘bully pulpit’ and should go public if it would help others. It was the best thing I did.”
She also served as a mentor for other GOP congressmen, including Cherryville’s Patrick McHenry, who was the youngest member of Congress when first elected to represent North Carolina’s 10th District in 2004.
“I have always been amazed by how hard Sue works,” McHenry said in a statement Tuesday. “Her leadership on health care and our national security will be sorely missed.”
Critics, foes welcome news
Myrick also had her share of foes, including Charlotte area Muslims and Hispanics who often criticized her outspokenness on issues relating to national security and immigration.
“We lost someone who worked tirelessly to fuel the flames of fear against the Muslim community and worked to make it hard for us to practice our faith openly,” said Jibril Hough, spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte, who welcomed the news that Myrick was retiring.
Local Muslims criticized her for writing the foreword to a book – “Muslim Mafia” – whose researcher called Islam a disease. And in 2003, during remarks about domestic security threats, Myrick upset U.S. Arabs and Muslims by saying: “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.”
She publicly faulted the U.S. intelligence community for failing to see a connection between al-Qaida and Samir Khan, a radical Charlotte blogger who left for Yemen to edit a magazine for the terrorist group and was later killed in a U.S. strike.
Last year, the congresswoman made headlines when she cancelled appearances at 9/11 memorial events because, she told the Observer, intelligence sources had alerted her that her name had turned up in a threatening Iranian news agency article.
Some criticized her, saying she was exaggerating the threat for political gain. But with the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, many members of Congress have been more concerned about their safety.
Appealed to GOP base
Some of the stands that upset Myrick’s critics delighted her Republican base.
She put getting tough on illegal immigration near the top of her agenda, for example.
In 2005, she managed to include her amendment to deport any illegal immigrant convicted of drunken driving in a bill that passed the House but died in the Senate.
She forged on, later reintroducing the “Scott Gardner Act” – named for a Mount Holly teacher killed in a 2005 wreck caused by an undocumented immigrant driving drunk – in the House.WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FRANCO ORDONEZ AND STAFF WRITER DAVID PERLMUTT CONTRIBUTED.
According to the Sikh Society of Michigan, the Sikh temple (known as a Gurdwara) in Sterling Heights has been under construction for several years, without any incidents or controversy.
That changed when someone vandalized the building sometime on Sunday night.
The vandals spray painted “don’t builed” [sic] on an outside wall. They also left images of a cross, a gun, and a misspelled version of the name “Mohammed.”
Muslims revere Mohammed as a prophet, but it has nothing to do with the Sikh religion. The word leads many to believe to believe the vandals thought they were targeting Muslims.
Dawud Walid, executive director for the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), calls the vandalism a hate crime.
“We joined the Sikh community in calling for local and federal law enforcement to use their full resources to investigate this recent hate crime,” Walid said.
The US Justice Department in Detroit says the incident is on their radar. They’ve met with members of the Sikh community about it.
But a DOJ spokeswoman says it’s yet how they’ll be involved in the investigation, or any potential prosecution. Anyone with information about the incident should contact Sterling Heights Police.
Walid also suggests the incident could stem from politicians’ “fanning the flames” of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in an election year.
“We hope that they will be a little more responsible,” Walid said. “They should understand that their statements and ads may push people over the edge, and they do have consequences.”
The US Sikh community has fallen victim to anti-Muslim sentiment before. A Sikh man was murdered in Arizona soon after the September 11th attacks. The killer thought he was Arab or Muslim.
IOWA – The Muslim community in Iowa is frustrated and angry over FBI’s sending informants into mosques to spy on worshippers, seething with a sense of betrayal that has undermined trust between American Muslims and security agencies.
“That was really surprising, very sad that somebody would come or the FBI or Homeland Security would send somebody here to pretend to be Muslim and try to find out what goes on here,” Dr. Hamed Baig, president of the Islamic Center of Des Moines, told CNN on Friday, February 3.
“I feel there is no need for that.”
In Des Moines, Iowa, a small yet diverse Muslim community is divided into four mosques from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, among other nations.
Frustration among members of the Muslim community began after 42 year-old Arvinder Singh, who has been attending their mosques over the past seven years, was revealed to be an FBI informant.
Charged with “selling or transferring precursor substances for an unlawful purpose” in March of 2002, Singh said he was approached by FBI officers who told him, “‘You look Middle Eastern, and we need your help for the war against terror.’”
Singh, currently in Hardin County Jail in Iowa, where he’s been awaiting deportation, said the FBI came to him with a simple tradeoff: We’ll help you get your citizenship if you help us get some terrorists.
Having no information about Islam, Indian-born Singh was surprised to be approached by FBI agents.
“I was surprised. I said, ‘Me? I have no idea about this’ And they said ‘We’ll train you. You’ll get used to it. We’ll make you go and do some work for us.’”
Later on, he assumed a Muslim identity, Rafik Alvi, and went into the mosques pretending to be interested in converting.
He says sometimes the FBI gave him pictures of persons of interest and he would confirm that they were at the mosque. On a few occasions, Singh says he taped his conversations with congregants.
“They wanted me to go investigate some people in the area,” Singh told CNN in a jailhouse interview.
“See what they’re doing, who they’re meeting. Who’s their family member, who’s attending them, what they are talking about. That kind of work.”
Anger
The mosque infiltration has angered Iowa Muslim community, saying that the FBI just took a step backwards in building trust with the Muslims in his community.
“To know that somebody made an intrusive entry into the masjid for purpose other than prayer, or other than socializing or taking care of anybody who is in need makes me very much nervous and embarrassed, too, that I belong to a community where we have a member who has come for some other purpose,” Anis Rehman, executive board treasurer of the Islamic Center of Des Moines and a college professor, told CNN.
“But later when we saw that he was not actually a member but a pretender then it made me more angry,” Rehman said.
Rehman says the idea of a FBI informant in their tiny mosque is not only offensive but baffling.
“I find that to send an impostor into our community which is so small where not only we know each other but (where) the law enforcement agents can perhaps pick each one of us by name and by family, I don’t think that the incident [on] 9/11 could warrant such action in a small community like ours.”
Since 9/11, Muslims, estimated between six to seven million, have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights, with a prevailing belief that America was stigmatizing their faith.
FBI tactic of sending informants into mosques have deteriorated relations with the US Muslim community over the past few years.
In 2009, Muslim groups threatened to suspend all contacts with the FBI over sending informants into mosques.
US Muslims are particularly wary of the FBI’s history of targeting members of their community.
Basim Bakri, another Iowa Muslim, noted that if Singh’s claims are true, the FBI has just destroyed any chances of building trust with the Muslims in his community.
“I think the FBI owe[s] us an apology because they did violate our civil rights,” Bakri said.
“It wasn’t right at all, it wasn’t right from the beginning and they have no right to do that.”
The former House speaker regularly calls for treating Muslims differently — and his discriminatory remarks are mostly forgiven.
It’s interesting to observe what qualifies as beyond the pale in American politics. For bigoted newsletters written two decades ago, Ron Paul is deemed by many to be disqualified from the presidency. I don’t fault anyone for criticizing those newsletters. I’ve done so myself. They’re terrible. So is the way he’s handled the controversy. But isn’t it interesting that Paul has been more discredited by years-old, ghostwritten remarks than has Newt Gingrich for bigotry that he’s uttered himself, on camera, during the present campaign? It’s gone largely ignored both in the mainstream press and the movement-conservative organs that were most vocal condemning Paul.
That’s because Muslims are the target. And despite the fact that George W. Bush was admirably careful to avoid demonizing a whole religious faith for the actions of a small minority of its adherents — despite the fact that Barack Obama too has been beyond reproach in this respect — anti-Muslim bigotry in America is treated differently than every other kind, often by the very same people who allege without irony that there is a war in this country against Christians.
In the clip at the top of this post, Gingrich says, “Now, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I’m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I’d like them to respect our religion.” Of course, the U.S. government is compelled by the Constitution to afford protection to religion generally, and “our” religion includes Islam, a faith many Americans practice. That’s just the beginning of what Gingrich has said about this minority group. In this clip, he likens Muslim Americans seeking to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan to Nazis building next to the Holocaust Museum. He once suggested that the right of Muslims to build mosques should be infringed upon by the U.S. government until Christians are permitted to build churches in Saudi Arabia, a straightforward suggestion that we violate the Constitution in order to mimic authoritarians. He favors a federal law that would pre-empt sharia law — though not the religious law of any other faith — from being used in American courts, which would be the solution to a total non-problem.
And no surprise, for he regularly engages in the most absurd kind of fear-mongering. To cite one example:
I think that we have to really, from my perspective you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for Sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the U.S. Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam, I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.
If Gingrich believed all of this it would be damning. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it is more or less damning that his tone, and much of his substance, is in fact a calculated pander. Justin Elliott at Salon demonstrated as much when he delved into how Gingrich used to talk about these issues:
Gingrich’s recent rhetoric represents a little-noticed shift from an earlier period in his career when he had a strikingly warm relationship with the American Muslim community. As speaker of the House in the 1990s, for example, Gingrich played a key role in setting aside space on Capitol Hill for Muslim congressional staffers to pray each Friday; he was involved with a Republican Islamic group that promoted Shariah-compliant finance, which critics — including Gingrich — now deride as a freedom-destroying abomination; and he maintained close ties with another Muslim conservative group that even urged Gingrich to run for president in 2007.
The article goes on to note:
Gingrich’s warm relations with the Muslim community continued well into the mid-2000s. Around 2004, for example, he participated in a planning meeting of the Islamic Free Market Institute, according to an activist who also attended the meeting. “His tone was nothing like what you hear today,” recalls the activist. “He was very positive, very supportive. His whole attitude was that Muslims are part of the American fabric and that Muslim Americans should be Republicans.” By the standards of the Gingrich we know today, the Islamic Free Market Institute was essentially engaged in “stealth jihad.” The now defunct group, founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist in 1998 to woo Muslim Americans to the GOP, was involved in educating the public and policymakers about Islamic or Shariah-compliant finance. Its 2004 IRS filing reported the group spent tens of thousands of dollars to “educate the public about Islam[ic] finances, insurance, banking and investments.” To most people, there’s nothing nefarious about Islamic finance — there is a large international banking business centering on special financial instruments that are compliant with Islamic strictures against interest, and so on.
So in 2004 Gingrich attended a planning meeting of a group devoted to promoting Shariah-compliant finance. Fast forward to 2010 and here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute: “[I]t’s why I think teaching about Sharia financing is dangerous, because it is the first step towards the normalization of Sharia and I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”
If an American politician suggested, of Christians or Jews, that they should be required to take a special loyalty oath before assuming office; that the government should restrict where they’re permitted to build houses of worship; that laws should be passed singling out their religious law as odious; that they don’t count when Americans talk about “our” religion; that their main lobbying group should be aggressively investigated: if any American politician said any of those things, they’d be regarded as an anti-religious bigot engaged in a war on Christianity.
Whereas the accusation that there’s something wrong with Gingrich’s rhetoric is met on the right with righteous indignation, as if he is the put-upon victim of political correctness or the elite media.
In the 1980s, the Ron Paul newsletters played on white anxiety about urban crime and racism toward blacks. It was awful. And apparently America didn’t learn its lesson, for Gingrich 2012, like Cain 2012 before it, is playing on majority anxieties about terrorism and xenophobia toward Muslims. This is particularly dangerous in the civil-liberties climate produced by Bush and Obama, where American citizens can be deprived of their liberty and even their life without charges or due process, a protection that is especially valuable to feared minorities.
Construction crews should be putting the finishing touches on the Mubarak Blessed Mosque in Chantilly. Instead, they are repairing the work of vandals.
Sometime between Sunday evening and 6 a.m. Monday morning, the mosque was pelted with stones and masonry blocks. Nearly all the custom made windows and glass doors on the first floor were shattered. Damage has been estimated at $60,000.
Investigators found beer and liquor bottles in the woods behind the mosque, and they believe teenagers may be responsible.
“It is very sad,” said the mosque’s general secretary, Usman Ghumman. “But at the same time, our community is very resilient. We have asked our community members to fervently pray that we are able to overcome this hurdle.”
Mubarak Blessed Mosque has been under construction for a year, and was scheduled to open in just weeks.
Jerrold Foltz, pastor at the Wellspring United Church of Christ, said acts like this are an affront to area’s entire religious community. “Its an insult to the whole religious establishment,” Foltz said, “whether its a church or a mosque or a synagogue.”
Investigators say there is no evidence that it is a hate crime – nothing was taken and no graffiti was left behind. However, because of the extent of the damage, those responsible face felony charges.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of a bias motive in the incident.
Barack Obama plays the same old dirty political trick of being irresistibly appealing, the Navy trains dolphins to sweep for mines, and the U.N. receives 35 pounds of cocaine. (06:11)
Recently speaking at a town hall meeting at an American Legion Hall in Lady Lake, Florida, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum fielded a question, or rather, a comment from a woman in the audience who forcefully proclaimed: “I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not. He constantly says that our constitution is passé, and he ignores it as you know and does what he darn well pleases. He is an avowed Muslim, and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president!”
Though Santorum opposes President Obama on many of the issues, he had a magnificent opportunity to take an ethical stand when addressing this woman, but he chose instead to virtually play into her obvious Islamophobic statements by merely responding to issues she raised related to the Constitution.
“Well look, I’m doing my best to get him out of the government right now, and you’re right about how he uniformly ignores the constitution,” Santorum responded. “He did this with these appointments over the recess that was not a recess, and if I was in the United States Senate I would be drawing the line.”
As the old truism goes, “If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.” By not standing up to this woman’s obvious Islamophobia, Santorum was complicit in the demonization, marginalization,, and victimization of Muslims and those perceived as Muslim.
Islamophobia can be defined as prejudice and discrimination toward the religion of Islam and Muslims who follow its teachings and practices. Like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, for example, Islamophobia is much more than a fear, for it is a taught and often learned attitude and behavior, and, therefore, falls under the category of oppression.
Islamophobia routinely surfaced throughout the last presidential election. Members of the political right challenged and spread rumors regarding Barack Obama’s cultural, social, and religious background, political philosophies, U.S. birth status, and patriotism. Insinuations flew about his supposed Islamic background connected to his explicit Marxist and fascist (which is a contradiction) political influences.
Opponents referred to him as Barack Hussein Obama — with emphasis on “Hussein” — in their attempts to connect him not only to the Muslim faith, but also to the former ruler of Iraq. In actuality, his middle name is indeed “Hussein,” which in Arabic translates to “good” or “beautiful.” Furthermore, since this country is founded on the principle of freedom of religion, whichever religious or non-religious background any candidate, or any individual, follows should in no way disqualify or call into question their credentials.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released its 2006 report finding that approximately 25% of U.S.-Americans consider Islam as a religion of hatred and violence, and that those with the most biased attitudes tend to be older, less educated, politically conservative, and are more often to belong to the Republican Party.
Today, especially since September 11, 2001, we see growing numbers of violent acts directed against Muslims. During the single year of 2005, for example, CAIR listed a total of 1,522 civil rights violations against American Muslims, 114 of which were violent hate crimes. The report included incidents of violence, as well as harassment and discriminatory treatment, including “unreasonable arrests, detentions, and searches/seizures.” For example, the CAIR report included an incident in which a Muslim woman wearing a hijab (the garment many Muslim women wear in public) took her baby for a walk in a stroller, when a man driving a truck nearly ran them over. The woman cried out that, “You almost killed my baby!,” and the man responded, “It wouldn’t have been a big loss.”
Nearly one-quarter of all reported civil rights violations against American Muslims involve unwarranted arrests and searches. Law enforcement agencies routinely “profile” Muslims of apparent Middle Eastern heritage in airports or simply while driving in their cars for interrogation and invasive and aggressive searches. In addition, governmental agencies, such as the IRS and FBI, continue to enter individuals’ private homes and mosques and make unreasonable arrests and detentions.
I find the current political tenor very disconcerting as candidates attack, demonize, stereotype, and scapegoat not only other candidates, but also entire groups of U.S. citizens whom they blame for causing the problems of our country.
Democracy demands an educated electorate. Democracy demands responsibility on the part of the electorate to critically examine our politicians so they can make truly informed decisions.
But I observe a certain anti-intellectualism within current political discourse. How often do we hear politicians “accuse” other candidates or those serving in public office of being part of some so-called “elitist” intellectual establishment, or talk about some “elitist” media who are all out of touch with “real” Americans.
And what about the gendering of politics when we are told either that women don’t have the temperament to lead or when a politician calls an opponent’s manhood into questions by demanding them to “man up”? Or blaming those who support marriage for same-sex couples as contributing to the eventual downfall of not only the institution of marriage, but for the ultimate collapse of civilization as we know it? Or blaming working class and poor people who occasionally need a helping hand from the government?
During economic downturns, charismatic and not-so-charismatic leaders attempt to exploit the fears of the public in their quests for power and control. Conservative political discourse centers on “F” words: Faith, Family, Freedom, and the Flag. This set of buzz words comprise the foundation on which politicians tell us we should decide who is truly worthy of our votes.
It does us all a great disservice, though, when we vote either for or against candidates based in large measure on their religious backgrounds. How many of us oppose Mormon, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu candidates? How many of us would even consider atheist, agnostic, Pagan, Wiccan candidates?
We must cut through the coded xenophobic, racialized, and classist language, for often when politicians use the words “poor,” “welfare,” “inner city,” “food stamps,” “entitlements,” “bad neighborhoods,” “foreign,” they tap into many white people’s anxieties and past racist teachings of people of color. Though white people comprise the largest percentage of current food stamp recipients, 34 percent, the common perception and societal stereotype depicts black people as abusing the system. In addition, the buzz phrase, “personal responsibility,” now has become a catch phrase to justify cutting benefits to people with disabilities, older people, and those who have fallen on hard times and need assistance.
So-called “social issues” become wedge issues to attract people to a particular candidate. In the final analysis, though, when middle and working class people vote for these candidates, they essentially vote against their own economic self-interests.
After careful and continuous vetting to plow through the reality from the show; the truth in their message from their appeals to fears and insecurities; their sincerity and ability to bring people together from their overt and covert attempts to divide; their talents and strengths from their bravado and performance; their attempts to maintain their integrity, their compassion, their humanity, and their empathy from their insincerity, manipulation, half-truths, lies, and complicity in perpetuating public fears; their attempts to answer questions honestly rather than giving answers derived from polling data saying what they think we want to hear rather than what they actually believe, these are the things we need to consider when judging our candidates. We must rate them on the quality of their characters, on their policies, and how well we believe they will follow through on what they promise.
As I travel across our country, I observe a large number of homes proudly displaying American flags, the red, white, and blue flying and rippling in the wind on poles or porches in front yards. But patriotism and true commitment to our democracy takes more, much more; for it demands of us all the needed time, effort, and commitment to critically investigate all aspects of the great gift we have been given in our representative form of government: the gift of our vote. Anything less would be to waste our enfranchisement, to silence our voices, and to slap the faces of all who have gone before to envision and protect our form of government.
“One second I’m comfortable in bed, and the next second I’m running out of the house in the freezing cold, running for my life,” recalls Mohamed Soltan.
Soltan, a sixth-year in economics at Ohio State, and his roommate Ahmed Mahmoud, a third-year in finance, were victims of arson in their Hilliard home on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The FBI, along with the Hilliard Division of Police, have yet to identify the culprit of the arson that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs.
On Jan. 16, Norwich Township Fire Department responded to a 911 call made by Soltan at about 5:30 a.m.
Mahmoud, the first of the two to discover the fire, said although he did hear what he described as a “loud banging noise,” it was not until the smoke detectors went off that he realized the house was on fire.
“I immediately ran into Mohamed’s room and woke him up. That’s when we realized the situation and what’s going on, and we got out of the house,” Mahmoud said. “At first, I figured it was Mohamed moving around. I was laying in bed and all of a sudden the smoke detectors went off.”
Soltan said he was in a deep sleep, and it wasn’t until Mahmoud woke him up that he became aware of his surroundings.
“I’m a very heavy sleeper, and I remember Ahmed coming into my room shouting ‘Soltan, Soltan, there’s a fire’,” Soltansaid.
Both men said they did not actually see the fire, but they were surrounded by thick clouds of smoke as they made their way out of the burning house.
Soltan calls the arson a hate crime, saying there was no way the fire was an accident.
“We don’t use the fireplace; I make sure that (when) I cook, I turn everything off, so there is no way this could’ve been anything else but a hate crime,” Soltan said. “So for someone to purposefully set the house on fire while people are sleeping at five in the morning, there is no other explanation for it that these people are attempting to kill my friend and I.”
Doug Francis, chief of police for the city of Hilliard, said the origins of the fire seemed “suspicious,” due to the lack of burn patterns, the fire’s point of origin and the use of flammable materials.
“Our investigations show that there was in fact an accelerant utilized in the home, and they ruled out any natural cause of the fire, and so with utilizing their tools, they determined it was an arson,” Francis said.
Francis said the FBI and the Norwich Township Fire Department are also involved in the investigation.
Francis contacted the FBI because there have been previous reports of Soltan’s home and car being painted with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slurs.
“We immediately brought in the FBI simply because if we did determine it was in fact an arson, we also wanted to look at it as a potential hate crime,” Francis said.
Francis also said in order to determine the arson as a hate crime, the individual responsible for the fire must be captured.
Despite media reports saying the motive behind the arson was to target the 24-year-old’s father, Salah Soltan, who is said to be a controversial Muslim scholar, Mohamed Soltan said his father’s opinions and views are “irrelevant.”
“My father’s views are 4,000 miles away,” Mohamed Soltan said.
Eric Manske, fire marshal at Norwich Township Fire Department, said the fire originated at the “back half of the house.”
Francis called the arson a form of “ethnic intimidation,” and said the case is “very unique” because Hilliard has never experienced cases of hate crime in the past.
“Not only has it destroyed a home, but it has provided a lot of fear in the victim and that’s what happens with these ethnic intimidation and hate crime issues,” Francis said.
Jennifer Nimer, legal director for the Ohio chapter of The Council on American-Islamic Relations, said she has called the FBI to report the arson as a hate crime.
Nimer also said there is only one hate crime incident she’s come across in her seven years with CAIR that was as “drastic” as Mahmoud and Mohamed Soltan’s case.
“A couple of years ago a woman that was sprayed in the face with pepper spray, that’s probably the most egregious incident other than this one that I’ve come across since I’ve been working here,” Nimer said.
The Danish People’s Party (DPP) wants to put a stop to immigration from Muslim countries, according to a new press release by the party. The party says Muslims don’t integrate and cause big problems with shariah zones, parallel societies and social control.
The announcement followed the release of marriage figures for immigrant groups. According to the new figures, just 20% of non-Western 2nd generation immigrants marry Danes. Among Pakistanis and Turks the figures are less than 10%.
“We must work towards bringing down the immigration from Muslim countries to zero. There can naturally be some exceptions, but there’s a need for political ambition to bring Muslim immigration close to zero,” says the party’s integration spokesperson Martin Henriksen.
“The 24-year old rule is now no longer enough. We have to deal with people who consciously decide to opt out of marrying Danes. It’s problematic. If we are to hope these families will be integrated in the future, we must introduce new and significant restrictions on immigration from Muslim countries,” says Henriksen.
The racist and fascist EDL want to march in Leicester this Saturday, 4th February, to spread their racist poison.
To counter their unwanted presence and to stop them intimidating the local communities the antiracists will also take to the streets on the same day.
This is the second time in less than two years that the EDL thugs want to stir up racism and divisions among the city’s diverse community. Last time when they showed up in October 2010, they caused much violence and disruption.
Despite the Stephen Lawrence verdict and the racist murder of Anuj Bidve in Manchester on Boxing day, once again they want to parade through the streets of Leicester. But Leicester has a proud history of challenging prejudice and promoting equality and people of the city have worked and campaigned together for many years to build a successful, multicultural city where different communities live peacefully side-by-side.
That’s why when the EDL showed up the last time the people of Leicester gathered in their thousands to show to the EDL that they are not wanted. Now again black, white and Asian people are set to show their unity against the EDL again at a ‘Love Leicester, Hate Racism‘ demonstration.
The demonstration is being organised by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) who have urged for a wider support. Thus the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ would be supporting this demonstration.
The ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ group was formed last year in response to some mis-guided Sikh youth supporting the EDL. They used to carry Sikh flag on the EDL marches and use Sikh insignia and emblems in their vile propaganda.
However, most of those Sikh youth have now left the EDL, largely due to the campaign lead by the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ but also after the EDL decided to make an alliance with British Freedom Party (BFP), a breakaway group from the BNP but with equally openly fascist policies.
Balwinder Singh Rana, spokesperson for the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ said, “We had always warned that the EDL are no different from the BNP. They are targeting the Muslims today but would turn against all of us tomorrow. I am glad that those Sikh youth who used to support them have learned the error of their ways, but our job is not done yet. We must support the people of Leicester to stand up to these racists & fascists so that they would think twice before they decide to turn up somewhere else”.
Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”
This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.
A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.
During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.
News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out terror plots.
But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.
“The department’s response was to deny it and to fight our request for information,” said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. “The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us.”
Tom Robbins, a former columnist with The Village Voice, first revealed that the police had screened the film. The Brennan Center then filed its request.
The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.
Commissioner Kelly is listed on the “Third Jihad” Web site as a “featured interviewee.” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that filmmakers had lifted the clip from an old interview. The commissioner, Mr. Browne said, has not asked the filmmakers to remove him from its Web site, or to clarify that he had not cooperated with them.
None of the documents turned over to the Brennan Center make clear which police officials approved the showing of this film during training. Department lawyers blacked out large swaths of these internal memorandums.
Repeated calls over the past several days to the Clarion Fund, which is based in New York, were not answered. The nonprofit group shares officials with Aish HaTorah, an Israeli organization that opposes any territorial concessions on the West Bank. The producer of “The Third Jihad,” Raphael Shore, also works with Aish HaTorah.
Clarion’s financing is a puzzle. Its federal income tax forms show contributions, grants and revenues typically hover around $1 million annually — except in 2008, when it booked contributions of $18.3 million. That same year, Clarion produced “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The Clarion Fund used its surge in contributions to pay to distribute tens of millions of copies of this DVD in swing electoral states across the country in September 2008.
“The Third Jihad” is quite similar, in style and content, to that earlier film. Narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona, “The Third Jihad” casts a broad shadow over American Muslims. Few Muslim leaders, it states, can be trusted.
“Americans are being told that many of the mainstream Muslim groups are also moderate,” Mr. Jasser states. “When in fact if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”
Footage of an interview with the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, is used in the movie.
The film posits that there were three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today.
This is, the film claims, “the 1,400-year war.”
How the film came to be used in police training, and even for how long, was not clear. An undated memorandum from the department’s commanding officer for specialized training noted that an employee of the federal Department of Homeland Security handed the DVD to the New York police in January 2010. Since then, this officer said, the video was shown continuously “during the sign-in, medical and administrative orientation process.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it was never used in its curriculum, and might have come from a contractor.
As it turned out, it was police officers who blew the whistle after watching the film. Late in 2010, Mr. Robbins contacted an officer who spoke of his unease with the film; another officer, said Zead Ramadan, the New York president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, talked of seeing it during a training session the previous summer. “The officer was completely offended by it as a Muslim,” Mr. Ramadan said. “It defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for.”
When the news broke about the movie last year, Mr. Browne called it a “wacky film” that had been shown “only a couple of times when officers were filling out paperwork before the actual course work began.”
He made no more public comments. Privately, two days later, he asked the Police Academy to determine whether a terrorism awareness training program had used the video, according to the documents.
The academy’s commander reported back on March 23, 2011, that the film had been viewed by 68 lieutenants, 159 sergeants, 31 detectives and 1,231 patrol officers. The department never made those findings public.
And just one week later, the Brennan Center officially requested the same information, starting what turned out to be a nine-month legal battle to obtain it.
“It suggests a broader problem that they refuse to divulge this information much less to discuss it,” Ms. Patel of the Brennan Center said. “The training of the world’s largest city police force is an important question.”
Mr. Browne said he had been unaware of the higher viewership of the film until asked about it by The New York Times last week.
There is the question of the officers who viewed the movie during training. Mr. Browne said the Police Department had no plans to correct any false impressions the movie might have left behind.
“There’s no plan to contact officers who saw it,” he said, or to “add other programming as a result.”
In a recent article Eric Allen Bell Chooses to Retain “Ridiculous Prejudice”, I discussed an article this individual posted on Daily Kos claiming that the Loonwatch site was “in fact a terrorist spin control network.” I discussed his arguments and the reasons that I believe them to be Islamophobic. In about a week, he has posted a total of three such articles, and been joined in his rantings by Robert Spencer. You can see all of the updates with links at the bottom of my article about this saga.
In his second article Eric Allen Bell says:
But what about the rational and legitimate concerns that people, such as myself, voice about the theology of Islam and some of the ways it is practiced, in certain parts of the world, which violate human rights? Is the expression of such concerns something that should be dismissed and branded as yet more “Islamophobia”?
According to Loonwatch.com – a well known Islamophoiba [sic] watchdog site – there is no distinction. Loonwatch unconditionally attacks criticism of Islam but they refuse to criticize the many, many Islamic clerics and terrorists who are hurting people in the name of Islam. Should a person have something to say publicly questioning the funneling of monies from Islamic charities to Islamic terrorist networks, Loonwatch is there to call them a “Loon” for even raising the question. That’s quite a clever system – a form of radical Islamic McCarthyism it seems – with the first line of defense being a blogoshere of misinformed infidels who will blurt out the word “Islamophobe” at the slightest mention that within Islam there might be a problem brewing. What a clever design.
Should an article be written about forced marriages of Muslim child brides overseas or the stoning to death of a Muslim woman as punishment for being raped, or the many young boys who are brainwashed in Islamic madrasas only to become radicalized Islamic militants, or the Muslim men who were arrested in the UK for distributing fliers to Londoners saying that Homosexuals should be punished by hanging because their lifestyle is against Islam – any article written to express concern about these developments will likely lead the writer of such article to be branded a “Loon” by Looonwatch.com and have his name put out on the street.
Bell also said “But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad – even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them – even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a ‘Loon’ – thus the title of their blog, LoonWatch.com.”
And, his new friend Robert Spencer found this statement to be “entirely true observation”.
This particular claim is often made by Islamophobes, and it is becoming tiresome. Voicing legitimate concerns is not a problem, bigotry is a problem.
In this case, a claim was made first about Loonwatch whose sole purpose is narrowly focused on discussions of anti-Muslim bigotry. However, by Bell’s third article, and in the course of Spencer’s entire career, it is obvious that the claims are actually being made against the entire Muslim community and all of Islam.
However, even though Loonwatch is not in the business of themselves publishing anything other than information on Islamophobia, is it true that they would not tolerate criticism of Muslims?
Would writing or publishing articles raising any criticism of extremism or terrorism within the Muslim community lead to being labeled a “loon”? Would any criticism of extremist interpretations of Islam lead to being labeled a “loon”?
Here on The American Muslim, we have published thousands of articles, many of them discussing issues such as:
On TAM, we regularly call out those within the Muslim community that I identify as the “lunatic fringe”, discuss various interpretations of aspects of Sharia, condemn any interpretations that violate human rights. The list above is a very short list of the thousands of articles on such subjects that we have published, many of which I have written myself.
According to Bell any article written to express concern about these developments will likely lead the writer of such article to be branded a “Loon” by Looonwatch.com and have his name put out on the street.
And yet, what has been the result of my discussion of all of these concerns on TAM been? Loonwatch named me one of the “Anti-Loons of 2011”.
Muslims themselves discuss all of these issues and are more than happy to align with others who are concerned about a particular human or civil rights issue to work cooperatively to solve the problem. As one example among many, Muslims are working actively with representatives of other faith groups as part of an Interfaith Coalition against domestic violence. We are not interested in giving any credence to those who are not really concerned about a particular issue, but only in using it to further their bigoted Islamophobic agenda.
We have seen this sort of devious tactic too many times. Just one example was that two years after American Muslims had initiated a statement Apostasy and Freedom of Faith in Islam initially signed by 100 Islamic scholars and activists, a group called “Former Muslims United” produced their own pledgeand demanded that Muslims sign it. And, as I said at that time “This FMU pledge is simply another attempt to create propoganda (planting the idea that American Muslims have not taken a position against punishments for apostasy) and to attempt to make it seem as if only former Muslims can stand for what is right, and frankly to attempt to increase the visibility of the FMU at the expense of the Muslim community. This is shameful behavior (although typical of members of this group who go beyond denouncing Islamic radicalism to denouncing all of Islam) and is simply another example of attempting to marginalize the Muslim community and bolster the false claim that Muslims don’t speak up against injustices, extremism, etc.”
This particular claim that “truth tellers” are being accused of Islamophobia for no reason other than their legitimate concerns about real issues and that in fact there is not even such a thing as Islamophobia is nonsense. The further claim that the fact that there are fewer hate crimes against Muslims than against Jews also proves that Islamophobia doesn’t exist is more nonsense.
The reason that this is so obvious to so many is that rational people can tell the difference between legitimate concerns and bigoted stereotypes. The Islamophobia of these folks is very real.
At a Rick Santorum town hall meeting in Lady Lake, Florida moments ago, a woman stood up to declare that she doesn’t like to refer to “President Obama as president because, legally, he is not.” While the audience gasped and clapped at the comment, Santorum restrained himself, refusing to utter a critical word.
The lady continued, Obama “totally ignores” the Constitution, prompting a nod of approval from Santorum. Then she went even further with her conspiracy rant:
He is an avowed Muslim. [applause] And my question is: why isn’t something being done to get him out of our government? He has no legal right to be calling himself President.
In an exemplary show of cowardice, Santorum did not tell the woman that she had her facts wrong or even bother to distance himself from the previous comments. Instead, he did the opposite, giving sanction to her views. “I’m doing my best to get him out” of office, Santorum said, “and you’re right about — he uniformly ignores the Constitution.”
The tail continued to wag the dog as the lady pressed Santorum for tougher language about Obama’s unconstitutionality. Santorum meekly responded, “I agree with you in the sense that he is – he does things that are against the values and the founding principles of our country.” Watch it:
First, of course, Obama is not an “avowed Muslim.” He is a Christian.
And he certainly has every right to be calling himself President as he was soundly elected by the people and has sworn an oath (twice) to uphold his duty to serve and protect the United States.
For Santorum, who frequently touts the need for strong “leadership” in this country, today’s profile in weakness shows he’s unable to stand up to his own right-wing fringe.
Yerushalmi is beating a dead horse these days. Does he realize that this bill undermines our constitution? Or maybe the issue is that he has forgotten that the court in Oklahoma found the anti-Shariah bill discriminatory to foreign law.
RICHMOND – A leading American civil rights group has criticized a new proposed Virginia bill to ban courts from considering any religious codes in litigation, confirming that the bill was a new step towards effort to stigmatize Muslims and undermine their religious traditions.
“Bigotry needs to be repudiated, not legitimized through the introduction of a bill that has such hate-filled and un-American origins,” Gadier Abbas, staff attorney at the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a press release on Friday, January 20.
Titled Morris’ HB631, the new bill was introduced by Virginia General Assembly Delegate Rick L. Morris (R-House District 64) on January 11.
The anti-Shari`ah new proposed law would ban courts from applying religious traditions to proceedings, such as the execution of a will among Muslims.
Not only the religious Muslim code, the new bill would also prohibit the application of the Catholic equivalent, canon law, and other religious guidelines.
The suddenly controversial bill is scheduled to be heard by a Virginia legislature House subcommittee next Monday.
In Islam, Shari`ah governs all issues in Muslims’ lives from daily prayers to fasting and from, marriage and inheritance to financial disputes.
The Islamic rulings, however, do not apply on non-Muslims, even if in a dispute with non-Muslims.
In US courts, judges can refer to Shari`ah law in Muslim litigation involving cases about divorce and custody proceedings or in commercial litigation.
Defended
Sponsoring the bill, Morris said that he aimed at enforcing US laws only.
“It’s definitely not an anti-Muslim bill,” Morris told the Virginian-Pilot in a brief phone interview Friday.
He said his goal is to make it clear that Virginia judges can rely only on state and federal law in their rulings.
However, CAIR confirmed that the bill was drafted by anti-Islam activist David Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam, managed to gain the support of prominent Washington figures.
He is head of the anti-Islam hate group Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which on its now password-protected website offered a policy proposal that would make “adherence to Islam” punishable by 20 years in prison.
The proposed Virginia legislation is just one of more than 20 similar bills that have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide in the past year.
Over the past few years, lawmakers in at least two dozen states have introduced proposals last year forbidding local judges from considering Shari`ah when rendering verdicts on issues of divorces and marital disputes.
The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.
Earlier this January, a US federal court upheld an injection on a proposed ban on Islamic Shari`ah in the state of Oklahoma, saying the drive was unconstitutional and discriminates against religion.
An Alabama state senator plans to introduce a constitutional amendment that would ban state courts from looking to Islamic Shariah law in adjudicating cases, Hatewatch has learned.
Republican Senator Cam Ward pre-filed the “American and Alabama Laws for Alabama Courts Amendment” with the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 4.
The amendment’s language is clearly drawn from model legislation drafted by anti-Muslim lawyer David Yerushalmi, who equates Shariah with Islamic radicalism so totally that he advocates criminalizing virtually any personal practice that is compliant with Shariah. His “American Laws for American Courts” initiative enjoys support from Muslim-hating blogger Pam Geller, who plumbed new depths of foulness this week by expressing her “love” for the U.S. marines who were videotaped urinating on dead Taliban combatants.
Yerushalmi, who says the “War on Terror” should be a war against Islam “and all Muslim faithful,” has also proposed to outlaw Islam and deport Muslims and other “non-Western, non-Christian” people to protect the United States’ “national character.”
Ward, who could not be reached for comment, apparently shares Yerushalmi’s dislike of immigrants. The Alabama lawmaker is a member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), a national coalition that attributes to “illegal aliens” what it describes as “[i]ncreasingly documented incidences of homicide, identity theft, property theft, serious infectious diseases, drug running, gang violence, human trafficking, terrorism and growing cost to taxpayers.”
Since its founding in 2007, SLLI has taken a leading role in fostering xenophobic intolerance in statehouses across the nation. The group works hand-in-glove with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant hate group whose legal arm devised the draconian immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, portions of which have been enjoined by courts concerned about their constitutionality. Though Ward did not introduce Alabama’s immigration enforcement law, he has been a vocal supporter of the measure, which is widely viewed as the harshest of its kind.
Ward is not the first Alabama lawmaker to introduce an anti-Shariah measure. In 2011, Republican state Senator Gerald Allen sponsored SB 62, a virtual replica of Oklahoma’s notorious anti-Shariah “Save Our State” amendment, which was struck down on Tuesday by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Allen’s proposal, which singled out Shariah law as its principle target, was not taken up for consideration before last year’s legislative session ended.
Ward may stand a better chance of success. According to the Public Policy Alliance, which hired Yerushalmi to write the “American Laws for American Courts” model legislation, versions of the law have already been passed in Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona. Unlike Oklahoma’s amendment, none were immediately enjoined. The Public Policy Alliance describes its creation in explicitly anti-Muslim terms, claiming on its website, “we are preserving individual liberties and freedoms which become eroded by the encroachment of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, such as Shariah.” But the legislation itself does not contain any reference to Shariah law or Islam, thus avoiding the issue that immediately flagged Oklahoma’s legislation as unconstitutional.
Ward has not commented publicly about his proposal, so it is impossible to know what inspired him to think that Alabama needs to worry about Shariah law in the first place. The various state proposals banning Shariah, in effect, attack a problem that does not exist and will not under the U.S. Constitution.
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, less than 1% of Alabamans are Muslim. And of all the states in the union, Alabama has unique insight into what happens when theocrats get it into their minds to bring their religion into the courts.
In August 2001, Roy Moore – then-chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – hauled under cover of night a 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments into the building that houses the state’s appellate courts and law library. A coalition of civil rights organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (which publishes Hatewatch), sued, leading U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson to rule that the monument created “a religious sanctuary within the walls of a courthouse” and had to be removed. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision on July 1, 2003. When a defiant Moore refused to comply with the order, he was removed from office for ethics violations, and that was that for Alabama courts’ experiment with mingling secular and religious law.
The monument went too. It now resides at a church in Moore’s hometown of Gadsden, Ala.
Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum provoked an angry response from the Council on American-Islamic Relations Saturday for saying equality “doesn’t come from Islam“ but ”from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
“I get a kick out of folks who call for equality now, the people on the left, ‘Well, equality, we want equality.’ Where do you think this concept of equality comes from?” Santorum said during a South Carolina campaign stop Friday, ABC News reported. “It doesn’t come from Islam. It doesn’t come from the East and Eastern religions, where does it come from? It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that’s where it comes from.”
The former Pennsylvania senator, a Catholic, has spoken openly about faith on the campaign trail.
“So don’t claim his rights, don’t claim equality as that gift from God and then go around and say, ‘Well, we don’t have to pay attention to what God wants us to do. We don’t have to pay attention to God’s moral laws.’ If your rights come from God, then you have an obligation to live responsibly in conforming with God’s laws, and our founders said so, right?” Santorum asked.
In a statement, CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper called Santorum’s remarks “inaccurate and offensive,“ and said the organization was sending the candidate a copy of the Quran so he could ”educate himself.”
“The Quran, Islam’s revealed text, is the best refutation of Mr. Santorum’s inaccurate and offensive remarks, which are unbecoming of anyone who hopes to hold our nation’s highest office. Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God and share religious traditions that promote justice and equality,” Hooper said. “We suggest that Mr. Santorum educate himself about Islam and the American Muslim community by reading the Quran that we will send to his campaign headquarters next week.”
Anti-Muslim zealot Pam Geller announced this week the formation of a new international organization, Stop the Islamization of Nations (SION), for which she will serve as executive director. This “new global force” will merge the work of the two major anti-Muslim groups in the U.S. and Europe – Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), run by Geller and co-founded by another anti-Muslim fanatic, Robert Spencer, and Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), run by Anders Gravers out of Denmark. Spencer will serve as SION’s vice president.
This is not the first time these organizations have worked together. In the past, they have tried to hold events in Europe to protest what they see as a coming “Eurabia.”
Geller has a long track record of anti-Muslim activities. Most recently, Geller, whose blog Atlas Shrugs once suggested that President Obama is the “love child” of Malcolm X, celebrated a video that appears to show U.S. soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. “CAIR has whipped itself up into an Islamic frenzy because a video surfaced that appears to show US Marines [in] combat gear urinating on several dead jihadis,” Geller’s website said last week, referring to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group. “Would anyone have CAIRed if Marines urinated on dead Nazi soldiers during WWII? (Anyone besides CAIR and Nazis, that is)?”
Gravers’ organization, which inspired SIOA, was cited byNorwegian terrorist Anders Breivik in his manifesto as an organization that people should support and that should have far more members than it has. Breivik blamed the lack of support for SIOA on multiculturalism and political correctness. Spencer was a particular favorite of Breivik. His manifesto cited Spencer and his work dozens of times.
The new group intends to create a “common American/European coalition of free people” to “oppose the advance of Islamic law,” which it describes as in contradiction with “Western laws and principles.” It plans to publicize the names of politicians, activists and others “that promote the Islamization of Western policy and culture.”
SION’s board includes notable anti-Muslim activists, including Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychologist who has called Islam a “brainwashing machine,” and Hindu nationalist Babu Suseelan, who is published on Spencer’s hate site, Jihadwatch. Gravers will also serve on the board. SION plans soon to hold a worldwide summit to further its efforts.
Newt Gingrich’s statement that he would only support Muslim presidential candidates if they “would commit in public to give up Sharia” was met by harsh comments from both Muslim American organizations and academic experts on Islamic law. “Newt Gingrich’s vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat,” said Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Legislative Director Corey Sayolor.
But Gingrich’s anti-Muslim crusade found an ally with noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, leaped on Gingrich’s anti-Shariah comments yesterday in a column for National Review Online and on his radio show, Secure Freedom Radio. His column reads:
Newt is absolutely right in making such a distinction [between a "moderate person who worships Allah" or "a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us]. The danger we currently face from the so-called Muslim world arises not from the fact that people are Muslim, but from the extent to which they adhere to the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine of sharia.
With his successive warnings about sharia…Newt Gingrich has, in my judgement, rendered a real public service. We must know who are enemies are and we must defeat, not accommodate, those who in the name of Sharia are obliged to wage Jihad against us. And we must keep America Sharia free.
But Gaffney’s concerns about religious and personal freedoms rarely extend to Muslim Americans. Last year, he said:
A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.
Newt Gingrich makes no secret of his hostility toward Muslims but Frank Gaffney’s defacto endorsement — he also picked up an endorsement from anti-Muslim activist and Gaffney ally Pamela Geller — might not be helpful as Gingrich attempts to appeal to moderate voters and chip away at Mitt Romney’s momentum in the primaries. Gaffney is a noted member of the Islamophobic far-right and his organization, the Center for Security Policy, was highlighted as a major nexus for the anti-Sharia initiatives sweeping the country in the Center for American Progress’s report, Fear, Inc.
In The Washington Post yesterday, Law Professor Jonathan Turley has an Op-Ed in which he identifies ten major, ongoing assaults on core civil liberties in the U.S. Many of these abuses were accelerated during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, but all have been vigorously continued and/or expanded by President Obama. Turley points out that these powers have long been deemed (by the U.S.) as the hallmark of tyranny, and argues that their seizure by the U.S. Government has seriously called into question America’s status as a free nation: “They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian.” All ten of these powers are ones very familiar to readers here: Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.
I’ve written volumes on all of those powers over the last several years, but — especially today — I want to focus on one narrow but vital question: who are generally the victims of these civil liberties assaults? The answer is the same as the one for this related question: who are the prime victims of America’s posture of Endless War? Overwhelmingly, the victims are racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals). And that is a major factor in why these abuses flourish: because those who dominate American political debates perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War (all civil liberties abuses in fact endanger all citizens, as they inevitably spread beyond their original targets, but they generally become institutionalized precisely because those outside the originally targeted minority groups react with indifference).
To see how central a role this sort of selfish provincialism plays in shaping political priorities, just compare (a) the general indifference to Endless War and the massive civil liberties assaults described by Turley (ones largely confined to Muslims) to (b) the intense outrage and media orgy generated when a much milder form of invasiveness — TSA searches — affected Americans of all backgrounds. The success of Endless War and civil liberties attacks depends on ensuring that the prime victims, at least in the first instance, are marginalized and easily demonizable minorities.
The fundamental interconnectedness between war and civil liberties abuses on the one hand, and the targeting of minorities as part of those policies on the other, is, of course, nothing new. It was most eloquently emphasized in the largely forgotten, deliberately whitewashed 1967 speech about the Vietnam War by Martin Luther King, Jr. (who himself was targeted for years with abusive domestic surveillance by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover). Dr. King devoted that extraordinary speech generally to the way in which the war in Vietnam was savaging not only the people of that country but also America’s national character. He specifically sought to answer his critics who were objecting that his increasingly strident opposition to the Vietnam War was a distraction from his civil rights work; instead, he insisted, his war opposition and advocacy of civil rights are, in fact, causes that are inextricably linked:
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. . . .
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through [Lyndon Johnson's] poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such . . . .
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. . . .
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. . . .
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
King notably added another reason why he felt compelled to prioritize issues of war: “another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission.” As he put it: “ This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.” If only that award were similarly understood today. His essential point was that nothing good could possibly happen in America so long as it continued on its path of warfare and bombing and invading foreign countries, and it was therefore necessary to prioritize protests against the war on at least equal footing with every other issue.
Over the weekend, I recorded a BloggingheadsTV session with The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt in which several of these same themes were discussed; it was a good, civil, constructive discussion, and the video is below. Part of the debate over the last couple weeks among progressives regarding political priorities, the Obama presidency, the Ron Paul candidacy and the like has entailed a litany of accusations — smears — hurled at those of us who insist on the prioritization of issues of war and civil liberties abuses, and who vocally highlight the ways in which the Democratic Party generally and President Obama specifically have been so awful on these matters. Some Democraticloyalists have explicitly argued that contrasting Obama with Ron Paul on these issues is warped because issues of war and civil liberties are, at best, ancillary concerns, while others have gone so far as to claim that only racial and/or gender bias — white male “privilege” — would cause someone to use the Paul candidacy to highlight how odious Obama has been in these areas.
Leaving aside the fact that (as I detail in the discussion with Pollitt),numerouswomen and peopleofcolor have made the same points about the vital benefits of Paul’s candidacy — voices which these accusers tellingly ignore and silence — these accusations are pure projection. Those who were operating from such privilege would not seek to prioritize issues of war and civil liberties; that’s because it isn’t white progressives and their families who are directly harmed by these heinous policies. The opposite is true: it’s very easy, very tempting, for those driven by this type of “privilege” — for non-Muslims in particular– to decide that these issues are not urgent, that Endless War and civil liberties abuses by a President should not be disqualifying or can be tolerated, precisely because these non-Muslim progressive accusers are not acutely affected by them. The kind of “privilege” these accusers raise would cause one to de-prioritize and accept civil liberties abuses, drone slaughter, indefinite detention and the like (i.e, do what they themselves do), not demand that significant attention be paid to them when assessing political choices.
As I noted the other day, it isn’t white males being indefinitely detained, rendered, and having their houses and cars exploded with drones — the victims of those policies are people like Lakhdar Boumediene, or Gulet Mohamed, or Jose Padilla, or Awal Gul, or Sami al-Haj, or Binyam Mohamed, or Murat Kurnaz, or Afghan villagers, or Pakistani families, or Yemeni teenagers. In order to get the full depth of the oppression and injustice of these ongoing War on Terror policies, one has to do things like listen to this amazing — and tragically rare — interview conducted by Chris Hayes this weekend with Boumediene, as the former GITMO detainee explained in Arabic how his life was devastated by indefinite detention. It’s easy to convince yourself that these abuses are not an urgent priority if, like those above-linked accusers, your non-Muslim privilege (to use their accusatory terminology) enables you to be shielded from their harms.
This is the primary point made so brilliantly by Falguni Sheth, the Political Theory and Philosophy Professor, in arguing that white progressives throwing around these accusations are themselves the ones guilty of it by virtue of their willingness to subordinate these issues to partisan gain — in other words, no longer desiring that these abuses be vested with prime political priority now that it’s their Party and their President guilty of them:
But HERE FOLKS! I am a brown woman (in case my bio didn’t clue you into that), and I am downright livid at policies passed during the Obama administration (which a number of folks will attest that I anticipated before the 2008 election), which are even worse than expected. I am as livid with progressives who affect a casual? studied? indifference to the Administration’s repeated support for warrantless wiretapping (remember Obama’s vote during the 2008 election season when he took a break in campaigning to return to Washington to vote for the renewal of FISA; for his support of the Justice Department’s withholding of evidence (and even habeas corpus) from detainees on grounds of national security; his commitment to indefinite detention (NDAA was not the first time it’s arisen. We saw his support in the gesture to move Gitmo detainees to a federal prison in Illinois—with only a casual suggestion that they might receive civilian trials—only to watch it die quickly under even modest resistance. Guantanamo is still open with detainees languishing); the expansion of troops into Afghanistan in the first part of his term; the unceasing drone attacks in Pakistan, etc. . . .
Here’s my other question: Why does this have to turn into a “guilt by association” debate? Why can’t we discuss the questions that are being raised as serious and important questions, rather than referendums on voters’ or pundits’ moral character? I don’t have to like Ron Paul (and why do we need to LIKE our politicians?). I don’t have to have dinner with him. He doesn’t need to be a friend. He is raising the questions that every other liberal and progressive and feminist (yes, including you, Katha) should be raising and forcing the Democrats to address. As Greenwald has pointed out, these issues only become outrage-worthy when the Republicans are spearheading human rights violations, because it gives the libs and progs a lever by which to claim political superiority. The silence on the Democrats’ record of human rights violations is deafening. And they’re more than cherries on a blighted tree. They’re dead bodies on the blighted conscience of Americans.
As I said the other day, I don’t run around accusing progressives who have different political priorities than I do of being driven by racial and religious bias. I genuinely recognize that there are all sorts of benign and even noble reasons why one might have different political priorities or might even value partisan loyalty more than I do. But there is one thing I know for certain: to smear with this kind of innuendo those insisting on the prioritization of war and civil liberties issues or devoting oneself to these causes is indescribably irrational and reckless. One driven by racial or other forms of privilege would seek to de-prioritize or ignore these issues, not highlight them. Indeed, a primary reason why these fully bipartisan policies of Endless War and civil liberties assaults largely go unchallenged is precisely because their primary victims are anything but privileged. That’s exactly why these issues are not a distraction from the cause of equality; they are an embodiment of it.
* * * * *
On a related note, International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller reviewsthe debate raised here and elsewhere last week about the murder of Iranian scientists and argues that these acts, definitively and without question, are acts of Terrorism.
Here is the 55-minute discussion I had with Pollitt this weekend, one which, as I indicated, I thought was quite constructive and helpfully illuminated the key points:
UPDATE: The always smart Freddie De Boer has some poignant insights on all of this – on progressives, war and civil liberties — that are well worth reading.
Two stories coming out of Ohio related to Islamophobia. The first is still being investigated for a possible hate crime, and the second story shows that even within the prison system there is a double standard when it comes to Muslims.
A deliberately set fire at the Hilliard home of the son of a controversial Islamic scholar is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
The arson fire heavily damaged a house at 4907 Britton Farms Dr. once occupied by Salah Soltan, but now the home of his 24-year-old son, Mohamed, authorities said.
The younger Soltan and a friend escaped the fire without injury after it was reported to Norwich Township firefighters at 5:24 a.m. Monday.
Firefighters arrived to find flames coming from the rear of the $290,000 house, which sustained extensive damage, said Fire Chief Dave Long.
The house was painted with anti-Islamic slurs a couple of months ago, authorities said.
The elder Soltan, who now lives abroad, is a native of Egypt and formerly was a professor at Cairo University and president of Islamic American University in suburban Detroit.
Some conservative critics have accused Soltan of being sympathetic to terrorist causes. He has said while he supports Palestinian rights, he condemns terrorism as a violation of Islamic law.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations yesterday called on the FBI to assist in the investigation of the motive behind the fire.
The FBI is working with Hilliard police in investigating the circumstances of the fire, said Special Agent Harry Trombitas, spokesman for the Columbus field office.
Hilliard police called in state fire marshal investigators yesterday to assist in the probe and determined it was arson.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A Muslim death row inmate has settled a lawsuit that accused the Ohio prison system of denying him meals prepared according to Islamic law while providing kosher meals to Jewish prisoners.
Ohio had previously decided to remove all pork products from prison menus in response to the lawsuit, though inmates weren’t seeking a ban on pork.
Details of the settlement announced Wednesday afternoon weren’t released. Neither the inmate’s lawyer or the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction would comment.
The state argued as recently as last month that providing the meals, known as halal, could bankrupt the state’s food service system because thousands of inmates have declared themselves Muslim.
Attorneys for Abdul Awkal (ab-DUHL’ AW’-kuhl) and a second inmate argued that the state was exaggerating the cost.
This past week Eric Allen Bell posted an article on Daily Kos attacking the Loonwatch site
I was startled when I read the article, and sent an email “heads up” to Danios at Loonwatch in case he hadn’t seen the article yet. He replied that he had not seen it, and he was equally surprised at the content and at the venue in which the article was printed.
I had previously heard the name Eric Allen Bell only in relation to a documentary he had made One Mosque Too Many on the Murfreesboro Mosque. That documentary was well received in the American Muslim community, and in the interfaith community. Bell said himself about this documentary and why he made it
It was on this past 4th of July that I decided to make a documentary about the backlash against the building of a new Islamic Center here in Mufreesboro, TN. At that time I had no idea that a chilling wave of anti-Islamic hysteria was about to sweep over the country, strengthen the far right and send the civil rights movement several decades backwards all in the matter of just a few short weeks.
The documentary is titled “Not Welcome” and chronicles events in Murfreesboro concerning the backlash against the Mosque from the 4th of July to 9/11 of 2010. I have interviewed nearly everyone on all sides of this issue here. And along the way I have been threatened repeatedly but I have also made many new friends. I have learned a lot about how my own ridiculous prejudices about the South have distorted my point of view. I have been surprised repeatedly at how often the most unlikely of people can defy their stereotype with acts of kindness, courage and compassion. I have come to know many members of the Islamic community here, known them as friends, broken bread with them and watched as they faced persecution without striking back, without getting consumed with anger, watched as they prayed for those who oppose them, asked for God’s mercy on them and trusted that, in the end, whatever happens will be God’s will.
Because of that background, this current article of Bell’s was particularly puzzling. How could the person who said I have learned a lot about how my own ridiculous prejudices about the South have distorted my point of view. also be the person who showed ridiculous prejudice against the same American Muslim community he seemed to respect? I thought that perhaps there are two different individuals with the same name – one opposed to bigotry, and one encouraging it, and so I did a little research.
There is only one Eric Allen Bell. He has a website, and one of the sections of that site is Freedom From Religion. Scrolling through the posts in that section, it became obvious that this individual is not fond of religion. Bell’s posted comments are not just anti-Islam, but anti-all religion. One of his posts is titled “God” is part of the 1 percent, and seems to sum up Bell’s position:
Once upon a time a very, very angry man named “god” created the world, got pissed off at everybody and killed them all with a flood, except for his buddy Noah and his 2 live crew. Later God decided everyone is so lame that he chose his “chosen people” to give a plot of real estate to while telling everyone else to f*ck off, ordered some ethnic cleansings to clear out the area and so forth. Still finding nearly all people to be unbearable (and who can blame him, really?) this god person decided, out of the kindness of his heart, to send his only son to be brutally tortured and savagely murdered so that he won’t have to send us all into a lake of hell fire for all eternity, because he loves us.
About 600 years later, god met this slave owner named Mohammed who also hated most people and the two of them really hit it off. God told Mohammed to wipe out the Jews, the Christians, basically everyone who did not see the the world the way that he did, and together they decided to call this new way of thinking, “the religion of peace”. But now the religion of peace wants to wipe god’s chosen people off of their plot of real estate and the followers of god’s poor brutalized son – whom the chosen people killed (oops, epic fail there guys) see this as a good thing because it will bring about the end of the world, and god’s son will appear in the clouds while the rest of us can go to hell. What does this all mean? It means god must be stopped and his followers need to give us back our planet before they blow the whole damned thing up in one big rapturous apocalyptic orgasm of self fulfilling prophecy. In other words GOD IS PART OF THE 1 PERCENT. “He” must be stopped.
On his site he promotes films like “Islam, What the West Needs to Know” about which he says “I cannot say that I am in 100% agreement with everything said in this documentary. However, having read the Koran, visited a few mosques and produced a documentary on Islamophobia in the Bible Belt, it is my feeling that fundamentally what is being put forth here in “Islam – What the West Needs to Know” is correct.”
As Colm O’Broin has pointed out about this particular “documentary”
The documentary Islam: What the West needs to know, which features many of the most influential anti-jihad writers, makes this point clear. A short TV ad is shown of ordinary Muslim Americans describing their backgrounds and finishes with the statement that “Muslims are part of the fabric of this great country and are working to build a better America.” The contributors to the documentary warn ominously however that the Koran allows Muslims to deceive non-believers in the service of Islam.
This is possibly the most reprehensible claim made by the anti-Muslim writers. If you accepted what they say it would mean that you can’t trust your friends, relatives, neighbours or work colleagues if they happen to be Muslim. In fact, all Muslims are suspect according to this poisonous allegation.
Bell’s admiration for films like this, and for individuals like Robert Spencer of the hate group SIOA makes some sense after scrolling through Bell’s site. Although Spencer is a devout Catholic, and Bell would have no more respect for his religious beliefs than he would have for my religious beliefs, in Bell’s war against religion, it seems that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is his philosophy.
The newly coined term Islamophobia describes an irrational fear of Islam. But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad – even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them – even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a Loon.
What does Bell provide as way of evidence for the claim that Loonwatch opposes “any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad?” Does he provide quotes or statements from Loonwatch articles or writers? You know, facts?
The answer is a glaring and resounding, NO.
Instead, Eric relies on guesswork. According to him Loonwatch doesn’t speak out against “Islamic Terrorism,” that, to him, is enough to declare that it is “in fact a terrorist spin control network.”
A pretty bold and probably libelous claim when measured next to the absence of facts Bell provides.
When one takes a look at the mission statement of Loonwatch, it becomes clear that their focus is on challenging bigotry against Muslims,
Loonwatch.com is a blogzine run by a motley group of hate-allergic bloggers to monitor and expose the webs plethora of anti-Muslim loons, wackos, and conspiracy theorists.
What’s wrong with that? As many commenters pointed out to Bell there are “thousands” of sites tracking “terrorism” and “jihad.” In fact there is a whole “Terrorism Industry” that is in existence feeding off of the fear of “Islamic Terrorism,” to make sure that Americans have a new “green” menace to replace the old “red” menace. Prof. Charles Kurzman, who has actually done empirical evidence on this topic gives us some perspective on this exaggerated threat,
As it turns out, there just arent that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
Bell seems to have a schizophrenic personality, on the one hand he defends religious liberty (such as in the case of Murfreesboro Mosque) but on the other hand he agrees with many of the irrational attacks leveled at Islam and Muslims:
1.) He conflates Radical Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism with Islam. In the comment section he made clear that he believes “Islam IS Islamic Fundamentalism.”
4.) He cherry picks verses, quotes them out of context, and when it is pointed out that the same could be done with other scriptures he resorts to a popular argument amongst Islamophobes; stating that while it may be true that other scriptures hold violent passages they “are rarely carried out” in contrast to Islam. There is nothing further from the truth as the website, WhatIfTheyWere Muslim.com? details quite vividly. All the crimes that are considered uniquely “Islamic” are still committed by Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc.
Spencer, whom I don’t see eye to eye with either entirely, presents himself in a rather rational, sober and scholarly fashion and I might add that neither he nor the other “Loons” have bombs strapped to them – only words.
Now, should we likewise, per the logic of Mr. Bell, be afraid of the scary Christian Americans, and make broad sweeping generalities about Christianity? Or Jewish Americans? Or Israeli Jews?
This is just a slither of what I found wrong with Eric Allen Bell’s article. It was reliant on not only a highly dubious methodology of critique, sourced poorly, but also filled with Orientalist and prejudiced tropes that ironically were the same ones used by the anti-Mosque opponents Bell documented in Murfreesboro, TN.
In 2009, the Daily Kos published a positive review of our website. So imagine my surprise whenThe American Muslim emails me a link to a recently published article on Daily Kos which is nothing short of a hatchet job against LoonWatch. This article was authored by Eric Allen Bell and is entitled Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam. Bell had the temerity to accuse LoonWatch of being “a radical Islamic front, covering up for terrorism”; he writes: “Loonwatch.com is in fact a terrorist spin control network.”
We would hardly bat an eye at this loony stream-of-consciousness article–Islamophobes have been accusing us of this since our site launched–except that this screed was published on the Daily Kos. Why would a fellow progressive website take a swipe at us out of the blue?
This mystery solves itself when you look into who wrote the article. His name is Eric Allen Bell, and he professes a soft spot for Robert Spencer, a man who was ranked by FAIR as the #2 leading Islamophobe in the country (losing out the number 1 spot to his boss, David Horowitz). Spencer is the leader of the SIOA group, deemed by the SPLC to be a hate group. Spencer’s organization has links to Neo-Nazi and skinhead groups in Europe. Among other things, Robert Spencer joined a genocidal Facebook group and posted a genocidal video on his website. This is the man that Eric Allen Bell calls “rational, sober and scholarly.” Bell imagines some difference between Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller even though they are close friends and colleagues-in-crime:
That explains why Bell’s article looks like something out of a loony anti-Muslim blog likeBareNakedIslam, AtlasShrugs, or JihadWatch. Bell uses the exact same talking points against us. His main gripe seems to be why our site “ignores” the violent acts of terrorism committed by Islamic terrorists. The answer to that is painstakingly obvious: our website’s mission statement is to document and expose Islamophobia. To ask us why we don’t document Islamic terrorism would not be very different from asking us: why doesn’t your site talk about world hunger? Whereas this might be a worthy topic to bring attention to, it is simply not part of our mission statement. Surely, Bell understands that websites oftentimes specialize in one particular topic and simply do not have the resources to dedicate to every noble cause.
Bell’s accusation itself is steeped in his Islamophobia. Imagine, for instance, if some white guy accused the NAACP of being “a black supremacist group” because they only fought racism against blacks instead of documenting violence and crime committed by blacks. What would anyone call such a person but racist?
Eric Allen Bell tries to shield himself from accusations of bigotry by pointing out that he made some documentary about a mosque in Murfreesboro. Yet, this would be like someone being opposed to segregated schools for black people on the one hand but on the other hand becoming absolutely livid against anyone who dared to deny that blacks are more violent than white people. Readers can go to the racist website Stromfront to find plenty of people compiling lists of black violence and criminality just like Bell reproduced his list of Muslim violence and terrorism.
Bell argues that Muslims are more violent than people of other religions, which is in fact the exact same argument raised by–you guessed it–Robert Spencer. My response to this is two-fold:
1) The threat of Muslim terrorism has been extremely exaggerated (in order to justify our wars in the Muslim world). According to the FBI’s own database (available from 1980-2005), of the terrorist attacks in America less than 6% were committed by Muslims. Readers should also refer to my May 2010 article which noted that since 9/11, there have been zero U.S. civilians killed from Islamic terrorism. The situation is the same in Europe. For the past several years, Europol has released an annual terrorism report, which showed that Islamic terrorism accounts for less than 1% of terrorism in Europe and has resulted in zero deaths. In the half decade documented in these reports, the only injuries sustained from Islamic terrorism were to a security guard who “was slightly wounded.”
For the past several years, zero civilians in America and Europe have been killed by Islamic terrorism. Yet, we are indoctrinated into thinking that Islamic terrorism represents some existential threat: you should be scared out of your wits and be losing sleep over Islamic terrorism. This is war propaganda at its finest. The reality is that you have a far greater chance of dying from being struck by lightning (about 67 Americans die of lightning every year) than being killed by an Islamic extremist (a whopping average of zero).
When confronted by this reality check, Islamophobes are quick to shift gears and insist that they are talking about Islamic terrorism in the “rest of the world.” Yet, almost all of this Islamic terrorism takes place in countries that have been bombed, invaded, and occupied by the United States or its proxy Israel. (India is the notable exception, although it should be noted that India has sustained a brutal occupation of Kashmir for many decades.) Iraq currently leads the list. If you look at Iraq before we started dropping bombs on it, Islamic terrorism was virtually non-existent in that country. Is it Islam then that is to blame for this terrorism or our bombing, invasion, and occupation?
2) The type of terrorism that is included in such comparisons is what I call Amateur Terrorism (strapping a bomb on yourself to injure a security guard and kill yourself); it excludes the greater form of terrorism: Professional Terrorism (carpet-bombing an entire civilian population). This is the violence committed by nation-states. The United States and Israel are guilty of committing, in the words of the Nuremberg trial, “the supreme international crime”: waging wars of aggression. When this form of violence is factored in, then the argument that Muslims are more violent seems untenable. As Prof. Steven Walt noted, Americans have killed anywhere from 30 to 100 times as many Muslims as Muslims have killed Americans.
I find it difficult to lecture Muslims about how violent they are when my own government, with the backing of its people, have killed so many Muslims (and continue to do so on a daily basis).
In a way, our violence is worse than theirs, because ours is sanctioned by us: our duly elected members of government are the ones who launch these wars, with our blessing and support. It is our uniformed soldiers who kill those Muslims. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and such groups operate without governmental authority, without any sanction or permission from the Muslim population. In fact, the Muslim population is often the victim of such terrorist groups.
Since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years, or 91% of her existence. Meanwhile, the country in the Muslim world we vilify the most, Iran, has not initiated a war since 1795, over 200 years ago. (It was, however, attacked by its neighbor with the aid and encouragement of the United States.) Who is the more violent one again?
Here is a map of the Greater Middle East, showing countries that the U.S. has bombed or has bases in:
Meanwhile, the modern state of Iran has never attacked any of its neighbors or any other country in the region (or world). But, Eric Allen Bell wants us to say that Islam and Muslims are the violent ones?
These two points constitute my argument, and if Eric Allen Bell wants to produce something more than a screed that belongs on Pamela Geller’s AtlasShrugs, that’s what he needs to refute.
One should also recognize that I am making a radically different claim than the Islamophobes when I point to American aggression. There is nothing intrinsically different between the United States and the rest of the world that makes it more violent–or, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”–other than the fact that it has the power to do so. I truly believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely: those vested with great power almost invariably abuse it, and it is for this reason that they must be held to account the most.
Compared to the United States, the forces of Radical Islam have virtually no power. Since 9/11–more than a decade ago–the collective strength and resources of the “worldwide jihad” have been unable to kill a single civilian on American soil. That’s how powerful they are. In the grand scheme of things, Islamic terrorism is a nuisance of modern day existence, a threat akin to that of gang violence or drug cartels–it is not an existential military threat as it is made out to be.
There is no doubt that Radical Islam is repugnant to the senses and must be intellectually fought. But attacking all of Islam and Muslims in general–targeting their religion and labeling Islam as uniquely violent–is the most counter-productive way of doing so. More than that, it’s intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.
Newt Gingrich who has been on a racist role, calling the president of the USA the “greatest food stamp” president, and implying that Blacks are more prone to “food stamps” than other groups is also displaying his bigotry towards Muslims and Islam again. He wants any future Muslim presidential candidate to be given a “sharia test.”
Newt Gingrich told a South Carolina town hall audience on Tuesday that he would be open to seeing a Muslim-American run for president, as long as the candidate denounced Sharia law and didn’t seek to impose his or her views on others.
At a town hall meeting in West Columbia, S.C., a man asked Gingrich if he would ever “support a Muslim-American running for president.”
“Would you endorse…a Muslim-American, [who] could possibly be running for president, given that we had a woman running for president in Hillary Clinton, and we had a Jewish-American, in Joe Lieberman, running for vice president?” he asked.
“A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat,” Gingrich replied. “A person who belonged to any kind of belief in Sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat.”
“I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia,” he said, referencing his support for the bill and drawing cheers from listeners at the event. “If they’re a modern person integrated into the modern world, and they’re prepared to recognize all religions, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if they’re the Saudis, who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow either a Jew or a Christian to worship in Saudi Arabia, that’s something different.”
He pointed to an acquaintance as an example of a “truly modern” Muslim.
“We have a friend in Arizona who serves in the U.S. Navy, who’s a medical doctor, who’s Muslim — but he’s a totally modern person, trying to find ways to bring Islam into modernity,” Gingrich said.
Former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said he wouldn’t be comfortableappointing a Muslim to a judgeship or cabinet position. He later apologized.
Pat Scanlon of Andover, coordinator of Chapter 9 Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace, shows Al-Zubeydi his signs in support of the restaurant.
The owners of Babylon restaurant in Lowell, Massachusetts, were understandably shaken last Wednesday when a man hurled a 20-pound rock through the window of the downtown Iraqi eatery, fearing he may have acted out of hate.
“This solidarity gives us the courage to stand,” Babylon owner Leyla Al-Zubaydi told the Sun. “There is no more fear in my heart because there are such nice people behind us.”
A victim of hate crimes in his home country, Al-Zubaydi told the Sun that when his restaurant was threatened last week, it brought his wife to tears and made her consider the possibility of closing the restaurant for good.
Luckily, as soon as he heard about the incident, Vietnam veteran Patrick Scanlon, coordinator of the Greater Boston chapter of the Veterans for Peace, organized the rally for the following Tuesday and was delighted to be joined by a number of veterans in the area who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With Lowell Mayor Patrick Murphy by their side, the vets took turns holding signs for the sit-in and eating at the restaurant. By 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, more than 100 people had come in to eat at the restauraunt, Al-Zubaydi told the Sun.
Lowell police have since identified the man who threw the stone and say he has confessed to the crime, but claimed not to have known the restaurant was owned by Iraqis. He is scheduled to be summoned from his home in New Hampshire later this month to appear in court on misdemeanor charges.
Being in a place such as the Quad-Cities, where most residents tend to be tolerant and some are interested in the world’s major religions, makes it possible to host joint classes on Islam, Judaism and Christianity in a special three-week series, a local religious leader said.
“I feel we have a unique situation here, among the United States,” the Rev. Mike Schaab from St. Pius X Catholic Church in Rock Island said. “People of different faiths in other parts of the country and the world would be loath to walk down the street with one another.”
The Inter-religious Dialogue sessions begin Thursday and will be led by Schaab, Imam Saad Baig from the Islamic Center of the Quad-Cities in Moline and Rabbi Tamar Grimm of the Tri-City Jewish Center in Rock Island.
“Seeing what is beautiful about another faith tradition is a life skill,” said Grimm, who also appreciates the fact that the Quad-City community is a place where such lessons can be held openly and celebrated.
This area is a very good location for interfaith dialogue, Baig agreed.
“We are blessed to have people from every walk of life here in the Quad-Cities,” he said. “We try to inform those individuals who come and who see value and potential in this kind of program.”
A rarity at first
Such cooperation between faiths was a novelty when it began many years ago. But it has evolved over time, Schaab said, including special commemorations of 9/11, and the recent 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, an event that attracted an overflow crowd to Augustana College in Rock Island.
The interfaith sessions are designed with a tone free from politics.
“Our goal is to educate, to give people information,” Grimm said. For example, the first session will be on the separate calendars, holy days and celebrations of the three faiths. It will take place at the Islamic Center.
Grimm intends to talk about the cycle of the year in Judaism and how it begins in the autumn. She also will speak about symbolism in the Jewish holidays. Catholics are on the Gregorian calendar, Schaab said, while many Muslims follow a lunar calendar.
A tour that will wrap up the first event at the Islamic Center will include time to witness Muslims in prayer, Baig said. Visitors will see inside the building, its special setting, and then be invited to watch as evening prayers are conducted.
The classes should be appealing, Schaab said. During the Feb. 16 session, visitors will see an actual Torah scroll at the Tri-City Jewish Center, and they will be able to view a copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
“Looking at sacred scriptures will be very interesting to many Christians,” Schaab predicted.
“Each one offers something unique,” Grimm said. “But at the same time, it amazes me how much we share, in every one of our traditions.”
Schaab, the Catholic priest, believes that knowledge gained from the Inter-religious Dialogues deepens faith. “We want to be supportive, appreciative and sensitive to one another,” he added.
Baig, a Muslim imam, said such education teaches respect for all faiths. There also is value in seeing leaders of these faiths together on one stage, he pointed out. Baig cited a phrase that he believes is central to the outreach effort: “The more you sweat in making peace, the less you will bleed in war.”
Grimm, who took over her part in the forum from her predecessor, Rabbi Michael Samuel, hopes to find continuing acceptance for the lessons.
“People are curious, people want to know and people want to understand,” she said.
As tensions grow between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Israeli state, the scholar discusses Jewish identity and extremism.
When ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters recently clashed with Israeli government officials over gender segregation in public places, many of the demonstrators played on a link between Israel and Nazism by dressing up as Nazi concentration camp inmates.
Such clashes have become more frequent in recent years, as ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up 10 per cent of the country’s population, are said to be growing increasingly aggressive in their attempts to impose their conservative ways on others. So is the religious divide in Israel growing? And is there a link between the Holocaust and the existence of the state of Israel?
Earlier last year, before the recent demonstrations, Talk to Al Jazeera met Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who says that the foundation of the state of Israel and its link to the Holocaust is weak. In fact, he says, the Holocaust almost prevented the establishment of the state by destroying much of the population the Zionist movement had expected to move to Israel.
On the question of how to achieve peace with the Palestinians as Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stands firm on his demand that the Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state, Bauer says: “I think that is proof of his [Netanyahu's] internal insecurity. If you are secure in your Jewish identity you do not need Abu Mazen or Saeb Erekat to tell you that you are a Jew. Do they need me to fortify their belief that they are Palestinian?”
Bauer believes Palestinians and all other minorities living on Israeli soil should be given equal rights to Israelis, because a national state “should grant absolutely equal rights, not just formal rights, to the minorities that are within it”.
On this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Yehuda Bauer talks to Teymoor Nabili about being a historian in a region where there are as many versions of history as there are people telling them, Jewish identity and extremism and navigating between conservative Jews and Palestinians.
“There is a certain closeness in attitudes, in outlooks, in social psychology …. We are cousins. Cousins very often quarrel in a very unpleasant way, but I think that we could arrive at an arrangement where live and let live could become a viable option – it is not now, obviously, but it could become that. There is a danger of a violent Jewish radical, genocidal nationalism with a minority of Israeli Jews. There is such a minority, it’s very dangerous, I think we have to exert great pressure on these people to limit that, and finally to conquer it. This group of radical Jewish nationalists, genocidal radical Jewish nationalists, are a mirror image of radical Islam that wants to annihilate all the Jews in the world. But on both sides there is a danger. Here it is a minority, but that could change ….”
A black metal band nominated for Norway’s top music prize has rejected claims that lyrics on its latest album go too far in their criticism of Islam.
Taake’s nomination for the Spellemann Prize in the Best Metal Album category has sparked a strong reaction from listeners who find some of the band’s lyrics objectionable, newspaperAftenposten reports. In the song Orkan (“Hurricane”) on its latest album, Noregs Vaapen, the band sings: “To hell with Muhammad and the Mohammedans” and their “unforgivable customs”. It ends with the line: “Norway will soon awaken”.
Marte Thorsby, chairman of the prize committee’s board, denied any assertion that the jury must not have listened to the album properly before announcing the nomination. “We enjoy full freedom of expression in Norway and a Spellemann jury is not going to censor content in any way,” she told Aftenposten.
Søderlind said the lyrics were presumably written prior to last summer’s terror attacks in Norway, “and in the aftermath of July 22nd they’re completely over the edge”. “I’d imagine Taake aren’t particularly proud of these lyrics after Utøya,” he said, referring to the massacre of 69 young people at a summer camp by anti-Islam extremist Anders Behring Breivik.
In a written response to the newspaper, Taake front-man Ørjan Stedjeberg said his sole intention with the contentious lyrics was to criticize religion. “Our view, in the name of freedom of expression, is that it is shameful to adhere to Christianity or Islam. Incidentally, Christianity is mentioned in the same lyrics, but that doesn’t seem to have been given any emphasis,” he wrote. “Taake has never been a political band, and we do not encourage either violence or racism.”
Stedjeberg previously landed himself in hot water in 2007 when he appeared onstage with a swastika painted on his chest in Essen, Germany, where any use of the former Nazi symbol is strictly prohibited. In a statement released after the incident, Stedjeberg said: “Taake is not a political Nazi band, etc. We certainly didn’t expect the current threat reactions, as everyone should know by now that our whole concept is built upon provocation and anything evil- and death-related.”
The Spellemann Prize winners will be announced at a ceremony on January 14th.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Taake, after subsequent concerts on the band’s German tour were cancelled due to the Essen incident Stedjeberg posted a statement on the Taake website in which he wrote: “we truly apologize to all of our collaborators who might get problems because of the Essen swastika scandal (except for the Untermensch owner of that club; you can go suck a Muslim).”
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An amendment that would ban Oklahoma courts from considering international or Islamic law discriminates against religions and a Muslim community leader has the right to challenge its constitutionality, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.
The court in Denver upheld U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange‘s order blocking implementation of the amendment shortly after it was approved by 70 percent of Oklahoma voters in November 2010.
The amendment read, in part: “The courts shall not look to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.”
Backers argued that the amendment intended to ban all religious laws, that Islamic law was merely named as an example and that it wasn’t meant as a specific attack on Muslims. The court disagreed.
“That argument conflicts with the amendment’s plain language, which mentions Sharia law in two places,” the appeals court opinion said.
The court also noted that the backers of the amendment admitted they did not know of any instance when an Oklahoma court applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other countries.
Awad argued that the ban on Islamic law would likely affect every aspect of his life as well as the execution of his will after his death. The appeals court pointed out that Awad made a “strong showing” of potential harm.
“When the law that voters wish to enact is likely unconstitutional, their interests do not outweigh Mr. Awad’s in having his constitutional rights protected,” the court said.
DENVER – A giant electronic billboard that went up off 58th Avenue and Interstate 25 when the Broncos had an embarrassing record at the beginning of the season.
It begged Denver Broncos head coach John Fox to start Tim Tebow at quarterback instead of Kyle Orton.
Shortly after it went up, the Broncos reached 1-4 and then Tebow took over and led the team to the playoffs.
As the Broncos have evolved, so has the sign.
On Monday, the huge LED sign said, “Tebow’s trigger is right on target,” referring to John Elway’s request that Tebow throw the ball during Sunday night’s game.
Tebow threw for 316 yards and his 80-yard pass in overtime won the game for the Broncos over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The people behind the sign are not Christian or a conservative group plugging Tebow’s faith.
It’s three Muslim brothers who are just big fans of Tebow and the Broncos.
“It adds to the fun, at least for us,” Tariq Suleiman said.
“We wanted to be part of the excitement,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
After Sunday night’s thrilling overtime victory, the Suleiman brothers’ latest message asks doubters, “Now Do You Believe” in Tebow?
“For me personally, I never doubted him. I knew he could pull off a Steelers win,” Tariq said.
The Suleiman brothers have been creating new messages after each game, all from an office which has a window view of the sign.
Mohammad Suleiman is the youngest at 26, Ali, 28, is the middle brother, and Tariq, 30, comes up with most of the messages.
They all sell wholesale goods at their father’s store which is next to the billboard.
As most fans know, Tebow is a devout Christian who thanks the Lord during most interviews.
The Suleiman brothers are devout Muslims, also proud of their faith.
“We do like the fact that he practices what he preaches,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
“I am also a big believer in God as a Muslim, there are some differences but when Muslims and Christians get together, miracles can occur. We just had the Mile High miracle!” Tariq Suleiman said.
After Tebow threw for 316 yards last night, people quickly made the religious connection to John 3:16, which is Tebow’s favorite Bible verse.
Tebow also wore the verse on his eye black when he was quarterback in college at the University of Florida.
After the connection surfaced Monday morning, John 3:16 became the most searched Google term on Monday.
“I went to check the Quran, chapter 3, verse 16 to see what it said, and it talks about salvation and believing in God, very similar to what the Bible says,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
But the Suleimans say they didn’t start running the billboards for religious reasons, it was all about rallying for their favorite quarterback and team.
“It’s been great, obviously with the wins, and the way the fans have been coming in and reacting, they’ve been coming in and thanking us,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
“We love the Denver Broncos, we’ve always been fans, and this year has been just an amazing year,” Tariq Suleiman said.
9NEWS got a preview of the next sign the brothers will unveil. You can see it tonight on 9NEWS at 9 and 10 p.m.
When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew” by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the comment as a disgusting tribal dig.
However, ignoring these comments wouldn’t just be dangerous, it would be to allow a growing brand of hatred coursing through America’s veins – produced on the fringes – to continue infecting our public discourse (and public opinion) on matters both foreign and domestic.
It’s a hate-filled islamophobia that masquerades as patriotic, as anti-terrorism, as proudly American and Zionist (as though the two are synonymous). It’s a brand of hatred that the current GOP seeks, a hatred it feels it needs, a hatred it foments for perceived political gain at great cost to civil society. And, as much as it pains me as a progressive Jewish American to say, it’s a hatred right-wing American Jews are often solicited to be spokespeople for on venues like Fox News, with claims of anti-Semitism at the ready should they be critiqued by people such as, well, Jon Stewart.
So, wait – what happened to Jon Stewart, exactly? – you ask. Here is the context:
Jason Jones and The Daily Show crew produced this rather brilliant segment on how Broward County Republicans orchestrated a campaign to block membership of a Muslim Republican to the Broward Republican Party’s executive committee. This was done with the help of the Muslim-hating group ironically called Americans Against Hate (headed by Joe Kaufman, who is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for Congress).
This is not the first time that The Daily Show made fun of, ridiculed, and smeared proud Americans and passionate zionists. What’s he doing? And why? Does he know how much CAIR raised for their home office, Hamas, whose stated goal is to destroy the Jewish homeland, through the Holy Land Foundation? Stewart missed his calling. He would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany. Smug self-loathing Jew.
Yes, Geller is a nut. And yes, this particular display has been limited – so far – to her personal site. But Geller, just one of many fringe figures who inexplicably get airtime aplenty, knows what she’s doing. She knows the game: play the anti-Semitism card.
And not just any anti-Semitism card – the self-hating-Jew card. And she plays it against one of our country’s most important media critics and defenders of reason. Why? Because he represents exactly what she and her right-wing minions loathe: someone willing to call out islamophobia for what it is, even when promoted by American Jews.
While it would be easy to dismiss all this due to the messenger, does Jon Stewart shy away from railing against hatred and bigotry when it is perpetrated by the unhinged?
Justin Elliot wrote a piece on Nezar Hamze’s attempt to join the Broward County Republicans not too long ago. The anti-Muslim response Hamze got from members of the Grand Old party received national attention at the time.
Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones was funny as usual and skewered Joe Kaufman in the video below. Kaufman was looking dolt-like as ever, unable to provide a definition of the word “against;” he also readily admitted that he used ‘guilt-by-association’ assumptions to label individuals such as Hamze ,and organizations such as CAIR, as “terrorists” or “terrorist supporters.”
Jason Jones heads to Florida to help a Muslim Republican gain the acceptance of the Brower County GOP. (05:21)
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The video certainly deserves to be in the annals of our Kaufman-o-meter series, so we will consider this Kaufman-o-meter #6!
Who is Joe Kaufman?:
Joe Kaufman, has been on the Anti-Muslim scene for quite a while now and is dubbed by the far Right-Wing FrontPageMag as, you guessed it…another one of their ”Investigative Journalists.” That he has been influenced by Meir Kahane and the Kahanist ideology is well documented, as is his love and angst for Kahane.
In the past he has been accused of contributing to the terrorist organization founded by Kahane known as JDL (Jewish Defense League) while others accuse Kaufman of at the very least holding views that parallel JDL positions.
Kaufman’s unsavory associations and views are quite real and they are only dangerous to America if you’re stupid enough to swallow his conspiracy theories but other than that he is simply a half-baked paranoid conspiracy theorist, some what along the lines of the “9/11 Truthers.”
In every nook and cranny there is a “Mooslim”…hiding and ready to get ya…so beware and be afraid. Be veryyyy afraid goes his story.
In this special LoonWatch series we will detail the exploits and punchlines that Krazy Kaufman throws out there and attempts to pass on as serious journalism, commentary and investigation.
One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.
A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome. The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:
“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim.Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”
Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future. (HT: @GregFrayser)
GOP presidential hopeful and former senator Rick Santorum found himself amid a flurry of new attention after placing a close second in the Iowa caucuses. One of the fiery right-wing politician’s views coming under increased scrutiny is his attitude toward Islam. Already in this campaign, Santorum endorsed profiling in airport security and, when pressed, said, “Obviously, Muslims would be someone you’d look at.”
Now, journalist Max Blumenthal unearthed a 2007 speech Santorum gave to a Washingtonconference at the invitation of David Horowitz. In the speech (audio can be found at anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller‘s site), Santorum outlined the “war” against “radical Islam”:
What must we do to win? We must educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate. …
The other thing we need to do is eradicate, and that’s the final thing. As I said, this is going to be a long war. There are going to be pluses and minuses, ups and downs. But we have to win this war to — fight this war to win this war.
Santorum insists that he’s “not suggesting that we have to go in there and blow them up.” But, later in the speech, he compares the “long war” to World War II, adding, “Americans don’t like war. They don’t like suffering and dying. No one does.”
Both in this speech and in other writings and remarks, Santorum often specifies that he’s speaking of “radical Islam.” But what does “radical Islam” mean to Santorum? In fact, the former senator often times conflates extremists with the entire Muslim faith at-large and, at other times, he states outright that radicals dominate Islam. In the 2007 D.C. speech, Santorum compared Muslim wars from hundreds of years ago to 9/11: “Does anybody know when the high-water mark of Islam was? September the 11th, 1683,” he said to gasps from the audience.
As to what “losing” the war with “radical Islam” looks like, Santorum discussed Europe. “Europe is on the way to losing,” he said. “The most popular male name in Belgium — Mohammad. It’s the fifth most popular name in France among boys.” The other data point he cited was larger birthrates among “Islamic Europeans” as opposed to “Westernized Europeans.” Nowhere did he indicate a growing “radical” threat in Europe.
In October 2007 at his alma mater Penn State, Santorum gave a speech and failed to break out the radical strain from the faith at-large: “Islam, unlike Christianity, is an all-encompassing ideology. It is not just something you do on Sunday. … We (as Americans) don’t get that.” The quote is particularly ironic from someone who, among other such statements, has said, “[O]ur civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God’s law.”
In a January 2007 speech, Santorum suggested Islam at-large was responsible for religious freedom issues and put the onus Muslims to deal with these issues to end the “war”:
Until we have the kind of discussion and dialogue with Islam — that democracy and freedom of religion, along with religious pluralism, are essential for the stability of the world and our ability to cohabit in this world. Unless Islam is willing to make that conscious decision, then we are going to be at war for a long time.
If Santorum’s discourse sounds like some of the Islamophobia network outlined in CAP’s Fear, Inc. report, that should be no surprise. Horowitz has repeatedly hosted Santorum for “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week” events and Geller and her associate Robert Spencer cite his work approvingly.
In a 2008 appearance at the Christians United For Israel confab, Santorum outflanked even Daniel Pipes. When Pipes mentioned that radicals only constituted about 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, Santorum, before wondering whether Muslims are capable of making moral decisions at all, challenged him:
It’s not a small number. OK? It’s not a fringe. It’s a sizable group of people that hold these views. [Pipes' notion of 'moderate' Islam] is the exception, I would argue, of what traditional Islam is doing.
No decent American — or anyone across the globe — should oppose “eradicat(ing)” extremist ideologies like militant, “radical Islam.” But Santorum’s history of statements raises questions about just exactly what and who he’s targeting for eradication.
OSLO, Norway — Prison psychiatrists monitoring confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik say he is not psychotic and he has not been put on medication, a prosecutor said in a court filing Wednesday, adding fuel to calls to reassess whether he is legally insane.
The original finding by two court-appointed psychiatrists has been fiercely debated by mental health experts and several lawyers representing the victims of the massacre that rocked Norway over the summer have demanded the Oslo District Court order a second evaluation.
But, prosecutor Svein Holden said Wednesday in a letter to the court that despite the new information he would not seek another evaluation. Breivik has recently been given access to media in prison and could try to manipulate new experts in ways that would be favorable to him, he said.
Prosecutors say they would rather let experts testify at the upcoming trial.
Breivik, 32, has confessed to setting off a bomb that ripped through Oslo’s government district on July 22, killing eight people, then opening fire at the summer camp of the governing Labor Party’s youth wing, killing another sixty-nine.
The Nov. 29 finding by two psychiatrists said Breivik was insane during the bomb-and-shooting rampage. In that report, the psychiatrists, who spent 36 hours talking to Breivik, described him as a man living in a “delusional universe” – a paranoid schizophrenic who had lost touch with reality.
However, in his letter to the court, Holden says four psychiatrists at Ila prison in Oslo, where Breivik is held in pretrial detention, informed him they have not observed any signs that he is psychotic.
The prison has not started medication of Breivik or seen any need to move him to another facility, Holden added.
The deadline for parties to file their demands is on Friday and the court will decide some time next week whether a new evaluation should be made, court spokesman Geir Engebretsen said.
The trial is set to begin April 16. If declared mentally fit and convicted of terrorism, Breivik would face up to 21 years in prison or an alternative custody arrangement that could keep him behind bars indefinitely.
If the courts declare him insane, he would be given three-year terms of psychiatric care that can be extended for as long as necessary.
By Madeleine Crum, Huffington Post: The American perception of Muslim women is sadly narrow: We imagine heavily cloistered beauties, submissive to their male counterparts who, we assume, they married because of an agreement between parents rather than love. To expose readers to the true spectrum of Muslim American dating experiences, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi compiled “Love, InshAlla: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women,” [$15.95, Soft Skull Press] an anthology of romantic relationships, gay and straight, arranged and spontaneous, monogamous and not.
In this telling excerpt, “The Birds, the Bees, and My Hole,” Zahra Noorbakhsh re-hatches her mother’s brusque sex talk and how it changed the way she perceived her male friends:
Finally. My first year of high school was over, and summer was here. My mother was dropping me off to go to the movies with Jen, Kim, Laura, and Ryan. Wait. Oh, crap, I had forgotten about Ryan! There he was, walking with my girlfriends to the ticket booth. I knew that if my mom saw him, she would never trust me again and would confine me to the house for the rest of the summer.
My parents were so strict that I couldn’t go anywhere without their practically doing a background check on everyone who would be there. Regardless of how chaste the event was, they had to be sure there wouldn’t be any boys present to tempt me down the path of loose women. The thing is, I was a late bloomer and had absolutely no interest in dating—what I knew of it, anyway, based on Molly Ringwald’s characters in John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink. Though I could barely admit that I “liked” guys, my days of blissful ignorance about the world of dating were about to be over.
I had told my mom that it would be just my girlfriends and me at the movies. How could I forget that Ryan was coming? There was no adjective in the world that would make my mom see past my geeky, lanky, pasty, computer nerd, Mormon classmate Ryan’s Y chromosome. She was totally going to freak. She was going to remind me that we were Iranian Muslims, not Americans. These lectures always reminded me of when she’d explained to me in kindergarten that Christians believed in Santa and got presents, and we didn’t . . . so we simply didn’t. It just wasn’t fair.
There was no way she was going to let me go to the movies with a man. Ryan was only fourteen, but to my mom, he was a man. He could’ve been eight or forty; it was all the same. When I was in middle school, she didn’t approve of all the “men” exercising with me in gym class. She didn’t like that I was friends with so many of the “men” in my sixth-grade history class, or that girls and eleven-year-old “men” were playing coed T-ball at recess.
As we made our way through parking-lot traffic in our Danville, California, suburb, I strategized about ways to navigate our argument. I could already hear her in my head: Zahra, what do you mean this man is just your friend? A young girl is not friends with a man! It is not right. Mageh Kafir hasti? You want to be like these filthy American ladies who go home with dis guy and dat guy, and blah blah blah…?
This is such bullshit! I thought to myself.
I had a pretty good feminist rant stashed away that just might hit home: “Mom,” I’d begin, “you didn’t raise your eldest daughter to stay quiet and avoid making friends or talking to people because of creed or stature or even sex…” Wait, I can’t say “sex.” She’ll flip out. “Gender.” Remember “gender” . . . Forget it. Take the easy way out: Lie. Just lie and say you don’t know him. He’s not with you. You don’t even know whose friend he is.
I snapped back to reality when I realized how close we were to where my friends were now standing . . . without Ryan. I looked around, scanning the crowds feverishly, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Perfect!
“Zahra! Hey, Zahra!” It was Ryan, tapping on my window. “I got your ticket.”
Godammit, Ryan, you polite-ass Mormon, I thought. You don’t need to come say hi!
My mom rolled down the window.
“Is this your mom? Hi, my name’s Ryan! I’m a friend of Zahra’s. We’ve got Algebra together. Hey, Zahra, I got your ticket already and saved us seats. You saved me on my math test, so I figured I owe ya. Anyway, great to meet you, Mrs. Noorka-baba-kaka-kesh.”
He shook my mom’s hand, gave me my ticket, and ran into the theater, waving.
Thanks, Ryan. You just ended my summer and any hope I had of a normal adolescence.I couldn’t even look at my mother, so I kept staring straight ahead. I could feel her glaring at me.
“Zahra,” she began.
Here we go, I thought.
“Zahra, are you going to go?” she asked.
“What?” I asked, confused. Was this some kind of reverse psychology?
“Maman jaan, there’s traffic behind me—get your bag,” she complained.
I grabbed my bag, undid my seat belt, and reached for the door handle of salvation.
“Wait,” she said.
F*&%! I waited too long.
A spot opened up in front of us, so she rolled in and parked the car. We sat in silence for what felt like forever. What the hell was going on? She didn’t seem mad. I didn’t know what to think or what to prepare for.
Maybe Ryan’s politeness impressed her, I thought. Maybe she’s going to take back everything she’s said about men. Maybe she’s going to apologize for all the times she yelled at me, because she now realizes how great my friends actually are. Wow. I really underestimated my mom. I guess the toughest thing about being the firstborn daughter of immigrant parents is that they have to catch up to you as they assimilate into a foreign culture.
Maybe I needed to initiate this dialogue, to tell her it was okay if she felt bad about all the mean things she’d said before about my guy friends or the “American ladies.”
“Mom—”
“Zahra,” she cut me off, “I just wanted to tell you…” She had a distant look in her eyes, but then suddenly zeroed in on me with intense concentration.
“Zahra, you have a hole. And for the rest of your life, men will want to put their penis in your hole. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, who is your ‘friend.’ Even at the movies, maman jaan, wherever—it does not change. Ri-anne seems like a very nice man, but he is a man. And all he wants is your hole. So, I will pick you up here at five o’clock. Have fun, maman jaan,” she said.
I got out of the car and staggered toward the theater. I was horrified and astounded. I have a what?! A hole? Where? Was that what I had missed in sex ed the one day I had the flu? Was I the last girl on Earth to find out about my hole?
I’d never felt so completely clueless about or protective of my body in my entire life. I’d thought I had a pretty clear idea of sex. It didn’t look all that complicated: a lot of kissing and touching and groping and people mashing their bodies together under bedsheets. There were no “holes” in Sixteen Candles!
Suddenly, crossing the parking lot to the theater was like being a scared, limping animal in a wide-open meadow with sleazy holehunters lurking about. I couldn’t look a single guy in the face.
I busted my way through the double doors of the theater and accidentally made eye contact with the concessions guy, who was lasciviously filling up a large swirly snow cone and staring at me. I imagined him halting mid-ICEE, flinging it in the air, and then leaping across the counter, making a beeline for my hole.
I had to find my friends.
I saw Ryan sitting third-row center, with an empty seat saved for me next to him. Nothing about my relationship with him felt platonic anymore. I felt awkward and clumsy. I felt like… like… like I was on a date. Omigod, was this a date? My vision was
blurring. I couldn’t think fast enough.
He bought me my ticket.
He met my mother.
We’re sitting next to each other.
Did he ever really need help with algebra?
I sat through all of Johnny Mnemonic with my jeans pulled up to my waist and my legs crossed tightly together. Every time my legs started to relax and slide open, I felt like I was exposing my hole to the world, and clamped them back together again. The longer I held my legs together, the angrier I became at Ryan. Look at him, all stupid-faced and smiling, sitting there dipping his disgusting hands into the greasy popcorn. This movie sucks. Why is he smiling? He’s probably thinking about holes. Gross! All I knew at that point was that, date or not, he’d better not be thinking about my hole, or I was going to kick his a**.
In yet another disgusting post filled with typos, hate group leader Pamela Geller makes excuses for terrorism by saying that Muslims in Queens probably firebombed their own mosque.
Color me skeptical. We find time and time again, in the rare instances when a mosque has graffit [sic] or some prank, the perp is Muslim. More times than not.
Here’s the a [sic] sketch of the perp, looks like a CAIR member.
It’s amazing and sickening how much Geller’s smears of Muslims resemble antisemitic libels of Jews.
A stun gun apparently was used on a woman at a New Tampa Walmart on New Year’s Day, and police are investigating whether she was the victim of a hate crime.
The victim, a Muslim who was wearing a traditional ethnic dress known as a salwar, told investigators she was hit by a stun gun fired by another shopper shortly before 9 p.m. Sunday at the store at 19910 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.
A video of the incident does not show the victim being hit by the stun gun, said McElroy. But she did have marks “consistent” with being hit by a stun gun, McElroy said.
“She has two marks on her back,” McElroy said. “We have no reason to doubt what she is saying.”
The video shows the suspect and another woman following the victim through the store as if she were being targeted, McElroy said. The video does not show an exchange between the women, the stun gun incident or the victim being hit, but that may have occurred off-camera, said McElroy.
Before police can determine if the incident rises to the level of a hate crime, they must first find the suspect, described as a heavy-set white female, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall and between ages 30 and 49, said McElroy.
Investigators, she said, will have to determine if the offense “was based on prejudice against victim’s race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”
McElroy said the victim’s daughters raised the issue of whether she was being targeted because of her religion.
Another possibility, said McElroy, is that the victim may have been targeted because of the big purse she had in her shopping cart.
Efforts to reach the victim by phone were not immediately successful.
Hassan Shibly, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, said, “If indeed this was a hate crime it is a clear sign that anti-Muslim rhetoric is not cost free and may unfortunately lead to senseless attacks against law abiding American Muslims.”
Shibly said via email that regardless of the motive, he hopes the suspect is caught.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Robert Spencer and his fellow Islamophobes are fond of asking Muslims impossible questions, demanding that Muslims “admit” to something or another, and developing tests for Muslims to “prove” that they are “one of us”. Daniel Pipes had a test, David Horowitz had a petition he wanted Muslims to sign, Former Muslims United had a pledge against punishment for apostasy (created two years after an actual Muslim statement on this topic was issued) , the list goes on and on. None of these are serious attempts at understanding anything. They simply demand simple answers to complicated questions, or include some bigoted assumption within the question that no Muslim would agree with and demand a yes or no answer.
This is the infamous legal tactic exemplified by the question “Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!”
The most recent prove to me you’re not a radical Muslim test came out of a simple reqest for an interview with Robert Spencer by the Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah. Loonwatch lays out the background of this incident very well
Dean Obeidallah is working on an Islamophobia documentary and asked Robert Spencer if he could interview him. A simple request one would think? Spencer of course is chicken (as we have shown before), he doesn’t want to be exposed for the buffoon he is, and so he responded to Obeidallah with an inquisition-like (pun intended), 1,000+ worded questionnaire.
Isn’t this extremely odd? Spencer attempted to pass off his fear of this interview by claiming that Obeidallah was “running” from his questions. When Obeidallah called him out on not presenting the truth, Spencer begrudgingly published Obeidallah’s response:
Robert – I dont have the time to answer all ur questions in the midst of editing a film and all the other projects Im working on – in fact I didnt even finish reading all of them.
You dont know me but Im a rather direct person so so let me make this easy: If you are interested in being interviewed for our film, I can assure you that we will not quote u out of context or play any games with you- we will ask u straightforward questions – most of which Im sure u have been asked before.
If ur interested then lets please lock in a date when u will be in NYC and conduct the interview. If you’re not interested then lets not waste any more of each other’s time-I know we are both busy people.
Thanks, Dean
That’s pretty direct in my opinion. What is Spencer so scared of? Isn’t he the “champion of freedom,” defending the West against the Muslim hordes?
Here is an opportunity Spencer for you to put your cape on and be the champion of the “counter-Jihad” world!
Here is the 1,000 word plus questionnaire required by Spencer in order to consider being interviewed by Obeidallah, and I have taken the liberty of responding to the questions myself.
1. True or false: No comedy show, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings — all in the U.S. in the last couple of years
The only Americans who are concerned only about Muslims who have carried out or plotted terrorist actions are those who have fallen for Robert Spencer and other “greasy Islamophobe’s” big lie about the actual terrorism threat coming primarily from Muslims. All of us need to be concerned about all such actions, including those by non-Muslims such as — Ray H. Adams, Jim Adkisson, Alabama Free Militia, Chad Altman, Animal Liberation Front, Army of God, Samuel Arrington, Jonathan Avery, Sergio Baca, Daniel Barefoot, Philip Bay, John Patrick Bedell, Kody Brittingham, Seung-Hui Cho, Demetrius Van Crocker, Daniel Cowart, Samuel J. Crump, James Cummings, Matthew Derosia, Jeremy Donahoe, John Earl, Earth Liberation Front, Paul Ross Evans, David Anthony Fuselier, Matt Hale, Jeffrey Harbin, Kevin William Hardham, Lucas John Helder, Patricia Hughes, David Hull, Hutaree Christian militia, Idaho Mountain Boys Militia, Vadim Ignatov, Bruce Ivins, JDL, Jerry and Joe Kane, KKK, Joseph Konopka, William Krar, John F. Lechner, James Lee, Ryan Daniel Lewis, Thomas Hayward Lewis, Jared Lee Loughner, Davvie Love, Keith Luke, Dennies & Daniel Mahon, Alberto Martinez, David McMenemy, Jonathan Maynard, Justin Carl Moose, Donny Eugene Mower, Patriot Movement, Robert Pickett, Richard Andrew Poplawski, Project 7, Charles Carl Roberts, Daniel & Timothy Robinson, Dan Roberts, Scott Roeder, Daniel James Schertz, Paul Schlesselman, Kyle Shaw, Joseph Stack, Rossie L. Strickland, Roger Stockham, Texas Militia, Frederick Thomas, Bruce & Joshua Turnidge, omar Falu Vives, James von Brunn, Lonnie Vernon, Clayton Waagner, Jeffrey Weise, Byron Williams, Alexander Robert Youshock..
2. True or false: The fact that there are other Muslims not fighting jihad is just great, but it doesn’t mean that the jihad isn’t happening. This comedy show simply doesn’t address the problem of jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.
This is not a true or false question. The question contains more than one element, and requires a more complex answer than is possible with a simple true or false.
3. What do you make of the fact that Islamic supremacists from the Muslim Brotherhood invented the term “Islamophobia” in order to deflect attention away from jihad violence and Islamic supremacism, and intimidate opponents thereof?
Spencer believes that he knows who coined the term “Islamophobia”. There are certainly a number of different theories about when the term was first used. It really doesn’t matter who used the term first. The term itself has come to be used to describe a particular form of bigotry against Muslims and Islam, just as anti-Semitism has come to be used to describe a particular form of bigotry against Jews and Judaism. It’s primary use is to direct attention towards outright bigotry.
4. What do you have to say about the fact that FBI statistics show that there is no “Islamophobia”?
Actually, FBI statistics do not show that there is no “Islamophobia”. What the most recent “hate crime statistics” do show is that there have been fewer hate crimes committed against Muslims in the U.S. than there were against Jews. Whether this might also reflect a reticence to report such crimes on the part of members of some refugee communities particularly has been discussed. And, the same report documents the fact that the actual hate crimes against Muslims, while still lower than those against Jews, have increased by 50% over the last year. Hate crimes statistics are only one of many possible indicators of prejudice and bigotry.
Other possible indicators of Islamophobia including EEOC complaints about work related discrimination, and a trend towards an increase of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam rhetoric from public figures, Christian andJewish clergy, and even elected representatives would appear to show that this is a word describing a real phenomenon.
5. What do you have to say about the fact that many “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have been faked by Muslims, and that Jews are eight times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate attacks.
For every category of hate crime there have been people who have taken advantage of an opportunity to further their own agenda and claim a hate crime where none existed.
There are hundreds of such cases. Here are just a few:
— In Florida LB Williams, a 50-year-old black man, his wife of nearly seven years Donna Williams, who is white, and their bi-racial daughter found a cross burning in their driveway. This was reported and investigated as a hate crime, but it turned out that Mr. Williams faked the whole thing in an attempt to stave off a divorce.
— In Anderson, California, a black high school student staged a fake hate crime because she was angry with her father for not picking her up on time.
— A Jewish student at George Washington University faked an anti-Semitic hate crime
The issue is not that there are some despicable individuals who will lie about hate crimes, but that there are far too many legitimate hate crimes against minorities.
6. True or false? Since the Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” one easy way to do that would be to guilt-trip non-Muslims into being ashamed of resisting jihad activity and Islamic supremacism, for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia.”
Another impossible true or false question. To think that every American Muslim is somehow privy to internal Muslim Brotherhood plots, or has ever even met a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for that matter is nonsense. The Muslim Brotherhood document that Spencer refers to has had a lot of questions raised about its authenticity.
7. True or false: Negin Farsad, with her “eye-catching mini dresses,” etc., has more to worry about from observant Muslims than she does from “Islamophobes.”
Negin Farsad is a competent Muslim woman who can speak for herself. Ask her the question. My guess (as a Muslim woman myself) would be that she would say that Muslim women have as much to worry about from Muslims holding extremist interpretations of Islam, as from Islamophobes. Being an extremist and being observant are not the same thing.
8. What do you think of this: When you call Geller (and by implication, me) a “Muslim hater,” I believe that you are ascribing people’s legitimate concerns about jihad and Islamic supremacism to “hate,” and that the only effect of this will be to make people who have those legitimate concerns to be even more suspicious of Muslims, which will only lead to more of what you call “Islamophobia.”
Geller is called a “Muslim hater” because of the hateful things she herself is documentedas saying. — ”Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?” — I would like to feel all warm and fuzzy and embrace the moderate Muslim/ meme but they show no evidence of their existence – not in any real number anyway. The only voices of reason in the Muslim world are lapsed Muslims or apostates. — We can pretend or we can strategize on how to defeat our mortal enemy. — Muslims have no right to invoke Moses and Abraham. — Muslims have no right to invoke Moses and Abraham. — There are no moderates. There are no extremists. Only Muslims. — Islam is not a race. This is an ideology. This is an extreme ideology, the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.
And, here are a few of your own quotes, Mr. Spencer — Islam itself is an incomplete, misleading, and often downright false revelation which, in many ways, directly contradicts what God has revealed through the prophets of the Old Testament and through his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh… For several reasons… Islam constitutes a threat to the world at large. — no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an, since—as we have been pointing out here for over three years now—there are so many elements of traditional and mainstream Islam that are at variance with our system of government, our Constitution, and our entire way of life. — there is no reliable way to distinguish a “moderate” Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a “radical” Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn’t acting upon them at the moment. — The misbegotten term “Islamo-fascism” is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state. — there has been no widespread, sustained, or sincere Muslim outcry against the jihad terrorist enterprise in general. — there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.
Geller and Spencer’s hateful rhetoric could fill a book. Refusing to acknowledge this sort of speech as hatred will only make Muslims not only suspicious of those who engaged in such speech, but proves to us that Islamophobia really does exist.
9. Is there a plan behind your demonizing and smearing of all anti-jihadists? Do you want to create “Islamophobia” in order to claim privileged victim status for Muslims and exempt them from reasonable law enforcement scrutiny?
Actually, no we would like to shine a bright spotlight on Islamophobia and it’s purveyors so that decent people can see it for what it is and reject it as bigotry pure and simple, so that we can stop wasting time responding to bigotry against all Muslims and use that time to work together to fight against actual Muslim and non-Muslim extremists.
10. What kind of work have you done to raise awareness about the escalating persecution of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim societies, which is far worse in Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere than Muslims have it here? Why not?
Dean Obeidallah is an American Muslim comedian. He is not responsible for solving all of the problems of the world, even those directly involving Muslims anymore than every Christian is responsible for solving all of the problems of the world directly involving Christians. Spencer, you are Catholic, what have you done to raise awareness about the pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church, or about the genocide of Muslims by Christians in Bosnia, or about brutality and slaughter by the Christian Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, or about numerous other crimes involving Christians? It’s ludicrous to believe that every individual member of any religious group is personally responsible for every injustice committed anywhere in the world by anyone who shares the same religion.
11. On what basis do you imply that those who are defending freedom against jihad are “exhibiting behavior which is less than consistent with the values of this nation”? What have you done to resist the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated agenda of “sabotaging” this nation “from within”?
You are not defending freedom against jihad, you are consistently demonizing Muslims. And, it is not only Muslims who are openly stating that this is bigotry. There is a reason that the ADL (A Jewish anti-defamation group) has said that Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer’s Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) is a “group that promote an extreme anti-Muslim agenda”. There is a reason that The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated SIOA as a hate group, and that they are featured in the SPLC reports Jihad Against Islam and The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle. There is a reason that Geller and Spencer are featured prominently in the Center for American Progress “Fear Inc.” report on the Islamophobia network in America. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the People for the American Way Right Wing Playbook on Anti-Muslim Extremism. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the NYCLU report Religious Freedom Under Attack: The Rise of Anti-Mosque Activities in New York State. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the Political Research Associates reportManufacturing the Muslim menace: Private firms, public servants, and the threat to rights and security. There is a reason that the SIOA’s trademark patent was denied by the U.S. government due to its anti-Muslim nature. There is a reason that they are featured in our TAM Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry. There is a reason that Gellerand Spencer are featured in just about every legitimate report on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred.
12. Aside from the murder of a Sikh by an idiot shortly after 9/11, what evidence do you have of any backlash against Muslims to which you refer so off-handedly in the WaPo? Where are Muslims suffering violence, discrimination, harassment of any kind? Even you expected far worse than you got when you went to the South — and the level of harassment you did get was no worse than what I get in my email every day. So why the overblown claims about it?
You need to do a little research yourself, and might start with the following collections of resources:
13. And yes, what do you think about these recommendations?
Do Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah really want to eradicate “Islamophobia”? As long as Islamic jihad and supremacism continue, a comedy tour will never do the trick. But here is an easy way. They can call on Muslims in the U.S. to do these things:
1. Focus their indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.
2. Renounce definitively, sincerely, honestly, and in deeds, not just in comforting words, not just “terrorism,” but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Sharia even by peaceful means. In line with this, clarify what is meant by their condemnations of the killing of innocent people by stating unequivocally that American and Israeli civilians are innocent people, teaching accordingly in mosques and Islamic schools, and behaving in accord with these new teachings.
3. Teach, again sincerely and honestly, in transparent and verifiable ways in mosques and Islamic schools, the imperative of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis, and act accordingly.
4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach sincerely against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.
5. Actively and honestly work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities
1 and 2. Please see the thousands of fatwas, statements, articles, etc. by Muslims denouncing extremists committing violent acts in the name of Islam in our TAM collection Muslim Voices Against Extremism and Terrorism. Type “lunatic fringe” into the search engine of TAM for numerous articles denouncing particular extremists and extremist groups. See my article American Muslims must defend the Constitution of the United States in which I said America is a secular and democratic nation with a clearly marked wall between church and state (thank God!). One of the reasons America has been a beacon to the world is the freedom that all Americans have to practice any (or no) religion. As an American Muslim I don’t believe that America can be defined as anything but a secular democracy (secular meaning neutral towards religion, not devoid of religion or hostile to religion) in which all religions are free to worship. I don’t want to see Shariah, or Biblical law, or any other religious law replace the Constitution, and I don’t want to see any kind of a theocracy in place based on any religion. I agree with Rabbi Arthur Waskow that “When those who claim their path alone bespeaks God’s Will control the State to enforce their will as God’s, it is God Who suffers.” All civilians are innocent including Americans, Israelis, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
3. There are numerous existing studies, polls, and statements about radicalization in the Muslim community and how the community is working to counter attempts by extremists to radicalize individuals here. The efforts within the Muslim community are numerous. MPAC alone has many ongoing efforts including the NATIONAL GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGN TO FIGHT TERRORISM and BUILDING BRIDGES TO STRENGTHEN AMERICA: BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE COUNTERTERRORISM ENTERPRISE BETWEEN MUSLIM AMERICANS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT. Also type “radicalization” into the TAM search engine for numerous articles, etc.
4. Why would American Muslims be responsible for building comprehensive programs in other countries. We are Americans.
5. Muslims have already done this. And, in fact, many of the actual arrests made of individuals plotting some terrorist act were made because of tips from American Muslims.
To sum up, yes you are an Islamophobe. The fact that you and your partner Pamela Geller have shown time and time again that you have a tenuous grasp of the concept of “truth telling”, and haveattempted to conceal evidence when you’ve been caught in lies and distortions is shameful. The fact that you have also shown time and time again that you have no qualms about exploiting a tragedy to further your own agenda is shameful. The Belgian shooting tragedy, and the Hollywood shooting tragedy are just two of the most recent examples.
The fact that you are a middle aged man whose primary means of earning a living comes from being paid to churn out anti-Muslim propoganda is shameful.
A little comedy, preferably satirical about Islamophobes and their tactics wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Update Robert Spencer and David Horowitz jointly published another version of these 5 questions on Front Page Magazine.
The book banners never sleep. I’ve received a note that the Valley View School Board in Jonesboro will meet at 5:30 p.m. today while others watch football games to consider two complaints from school district residents about the teaching of “The Kite Runner” to honors English classes. As you might know, “good Christians” do not countenance literature that presents Muslim people in anything but an unflattering light.
We reported on this controversy earlier. The ACLU is keeping watch. Some School Board members had taken a “middle ground.” Let the book be read, but not aloud.
UPDATE: A Jonesboro correspondent reports that the board met to hear the complaints, but took no action, thus leaving the curriculum including the book in place. The public was invited to speak but only supporters of the book spoke. A round of applause followed the board’s decision to take no action, I was told.
A note before the meeting from ASU professor Norm Stafford and ACLU Board member about tonight’s meeting. There’s still time to join the throng on the side of free expression:
I am writing to urge you to attend a special meeting of the Valley View School Board tonight, Monday, January 2nd at 5:30 pm, at the office of the superintendent on the Valley View campus.The Board will decide on the complaints of two patrons opposing the teaching of Khaled Hosseneini’s The Kite Runner to senior English classes. The book has won numerous awards and is a novel recounting the redemption of a man, who as a young boy witnessed his male friend being sexually assaulted and out of fear did nothing. The novel provides insight into modern Afghanistan and the effects of war on the area and its people as well as into the brutal Taliban.
Although the central goal of those complaining is to eliminate this single text from the curriculum, they have support of strong religious forces in the area and want a homogenized curriculum. In a story in the Jonesboro Sun , one of those complaining said that students’ belief that America is one country under God would be undermined by reading the novel.
The teacher, whose abilities I know and respect, has taught the novel in the past, and now her job is at stake.
The announcement for this called meeting appeared on page 7 of the Sun on December 31st. It appears that the Valley View Board and those opposing the teaching of the novel want the issue addressed with as little publicity as possible.
Those opposing the teaching of the novel will be out in force. Those wishing to prevent this censorship need to be present as well. Please let others know of this meeting and its time and place.
HATFIELD, Pa. (AP) — Lisa Abdelsalam said she feels “like she swallowed poison” in the days since the threat of parental protests caused the Muslim mother and author to cancel a talk with students at A.M. Kulp Elementary School in Hatfield.
“I have a such a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Abdelsalam, 48, who lives in Colmar with her husband and children, all of whom were or are North Penn students.
Born in Lansdale, the 1981 North Penn High School graduate converted to Islam at 19, when she married her husband, who is from Egypt.
As she has many times at many North Penn schools, she was scheduled to meet with several Kulp classes over four days earlier this month to discuss how she wrote and published her book, “A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” based on her son Yoseph’s experiences at York Avenue Elementary in the 1990s.
“A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” has illustrations based on pictures of the York Avenue school and details a Muslim boy’s efforts to fit into the holiday spirit at Christmastime.
A few days before her appearance at Kulp was to take place, Principal Erik Huebner called her.
The principal, according to Abdelsalam, told her a few parents had complained about the program and threatened to bring in an outside group to protest if the classes went forward.
“They did not want a Muslim or a Muslim book read in their classrooms,” she was told. Huebner could not be reached for comment.
Abdelsalam, a longtime volunteer at Kulp where she previously served as president of the Home and School Association, and a current member of the district’s diversity committee, was taken aback. “I was serving pizza with these people last year,” she said.
Huebner was supportive, said the author, and said she was welcome to come regardless of the protests. However, both she and the principal decided it was best to cancel, for the sake of the young students.
“I didn’t feel it would be right; it wasn’t one day, it was four days over two weeks,” she explained. “It’s not a battle that should be fought in an elementary school parking lot.”
Christine Liberaski, a spokeswoman for the North Penn School District, said she hopes the program can be rescheduled in the spring.
“I can’t speak to why some people objected,” said Liberaski, who noted that Abdelsalam previously received praise for her book and her presentation on publishing.
The idea for the book came when a music teacher approached Abdelsalam years ago when Yoseph, now 21, was in elementary school. She was asked if she could find a Muslim holiday song for the school’s annual concert. Finding none, she wrote one herself and also wrote the story. She now has two CDs of music she sells online with her book.
“It’s about inclusivity and the child being happy he’s in a school where everyone is accepted,” said Abdelsalam. “I don’t go and talk about religion.”
Between 2005 and 2010 mosques in the Netherlands were defaced 117 times, according to research by social researcher Ineke van der Valk. The acts of vandalism were motivated by a hatred of Islam, the researcher is quoted as saying on VPRO radio programme Argos.
In 43 cases, the mosques were daubed with offensive symbols or slogans. In 37 instances, the mosques sustained material damage. In 99 of the incidents the police failed to find any of the culprits. In the United States there were 42 similar incidents during the same period. Most of the vandalised mosques in the Netherlands are located outside the major cities.
There are some 450 mosques in The Netherlands, which has a population of more than 16.5 million. Some five percent of the population is believed to be Muslim, some 44 percent Christian and over 41 percent agnostic. As a percentage of the population, the Netherlands has Europe’s second-largest Muslim community, inferior only to France, which has a Muslim community of more than nine percent.
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We don’t not support censorship unlike the hypocrites in the Islamophobesphere who for instance advocate bans on the Qur’an. However, when you cross the line into open calls for genocide and violence against another group of people you have entered very murky water. WordPress for instance has guidelines against such things and that is the reason the genocidal hate site BareNakedIslam was pulled down, they violated WordPress’ guidelines. Now they are crying victim and martyrdom for Free Speech, something they want to strip away from Muslims. Expect Robert Spencer to come to their aid once again.
A hate site hosted on WordPress.com has been pulled down by the popular blog host, reported CAIR yesterday.
The vicious blog had hitherto featured a number of violent threats against mosques and Muslim American citizens, including the words “I want (Muslim) blood on my hands!”
WordPress took notice that the Islamophobic site violated a number of its stipulated terms of service, including blogs that “contain threats or incite violence towards indiviudals or entities” and took appropriate action.
Last year, a similar blog was taken down by WordPress that shamelessly advocated burning mosques, calling in fake bomb threats implicating Muslims, desecrating Muslim cemeteries, and recommending “the proper way to shoot a Muslim.”
The Sun newspaper has come over a bit modest. Following a Channel 4 documentary about media reporting of Muslims, the paper accepts some of its stories were “distorted”. But they’re not doing themselves justice. They weren’t distorted – they were entirely made up. For example, a story about a Muslim bus driver who ordered his passengers off the bus so he could pray was pure fabrication.
But if reporters are allowed to make up what they like, that one should be disciplined for displaying a shocking lack of imagination. He could have continued, “The driver has now won a case at the Court of Human Rights that his bus route should be altered so it only goes east. This means the 37A from Sutton Coldfield will no longer stop at Selly Oak library, but go the wrong way up a one-way street and carry on to Mecca. Local depot manager Stan Tubworth said, ‘I suggested he only take it as far as Athens but he threatened a Jihad, and a holy war is just the sort of thing that could put a service like the Selly Oak Clipper out of business’.”
Then there was a story about “Muslim thugs” in Windsor who attacked a house used by soldiers, except it was another invention. But with this tale the reporter still claims it’s true, despite a complete absence of evidence, because, “The police are too politically correct to admit it.” This must be the solution to all unsolved crimes. With Jack the Ripper it’s obvious – he was facing the East End of London, his victims were infidels and he’d have access to a burqua which would give him vital camouflage in the smog. But do the pro-Muslim police even bother to investigate? Of course not, because it’s just “Allah Allah Allah” down at the stations these days.
Maybe Muslim newspapers should retaliate by publishing their own made-up stories. So it will be reported that “Barmy PC teachers in Leicester have banned children from playing Noughts and Crosses, claiming the cross reminds Church of England kiddies of the suffering undertaken by Lord Jesus. A spokesman for the Board of Education said, ‘We have to be sensitive. Which is why we’ve replaced the game with ‘Noughts and Hexagons’. We did look into calling it ‘Noughts and Crowns of Thorns’ but decided Hexagons was more appropriate.”
Or, “Doctors have been told that patients are no longer to be referred to as ‘stable’, as this is offensive to followers of Jesus, who was said to have been born in one. So medical staff have been informed they must use an alternative word, or if they can’t think of one just let the patient die.”
The most common justification for ridiculing Islam is that the religion is “backward”, particularly towards women, as a fundamental part of its beliefs. The Sun’s old political editor suggests this as a defence of his newspaper’s stance, saying that under Islam, “women are treated as chattels”. And it’s true that religious scriptures can command this, such as the insistence that, “a man may sell his daughter as a slave, but she will not be freed at the end of six years as men are.” Except that comes from the Bible – Exodus, Chapter 21, verse 7.
The Bible is packed with justifications for slavery, including killing your slaves. So presumably the Sun, along with others who regard Islam as a threat to our civilisation, will soon be campaigning against “Sunday Schools of Hate” where children as young as seven are taught to read this grisly book. And next Easter they’ll report how, “I saw a small child smile with glee as he opened a Cadbury’s egg filled with chocolate buttons. But behind his grin I couldn’t help but wonder whether he wanted to turn me into a pillar of salt, then maybe sprinkle me on his menacing confectionary treat.”
In his defence of making stuff up, the Sun’s ex-political editor spoke about the amount of domestic violence suffered by Muslim women. But there’s just as much chance of suffering domestic violence if you’re not a Muslim, as one of the 10 million such incidents a year that take place in Britain. Presumably the anti-Islam lobby would say, “Ah yes, but those other ones involve secular wife-beating, which is not founded on archaic religious customs, but rational reasoning such as not letting him watch the snooker.”
And finally the Sun’s man defends the line of his paper by saying that, after all, these Muslims “are trying to bomb our country”. So it’s their civic duty to make stuff up – the same as keeping a look-out for spies during the Second World War.
So we should all do our bit, and every day send in something, until the press is full of stories like “Muslims in Darlington have been raising money for semtex by organising panda fights.” Or “In Bradford all nurseries have been ordered to convert their dolls’ houses into miniature mosques so that Muslim teddies have somewhere to pray.”
A group of prominent Muslim figures in New York City have said they will boycott an annual meeting on Friday with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in order to protest against police surveillance of their communities.
In particular, the group says it is outraged at details that emerged earlier this year of a concerted effort by the New York police department to monitor activities of Muslims in New York. A series of reports by the Associated Press detailed the activities of a unit within the NYPD, called the Demographics Unit, that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, including eavesdropping in businesses and infiltrating mosques.
“According to the investigation, the police department monitored and collected information on New Yorkers at about 250 mosques, schools, and businesses throughout the city, simply because of their religion and not because they exhibited suspicious behavior,” the letter said.
It added: “Mayor Bloomberg, the extent of these civil rights violations is astonishing, yet instead of calling for accountability and the rule of law, you have thus far defended the NYPD’s misconduct. We, on the other hand, believe that such measures threaten the rights of all Americans, and deepen mistrust between our communities and law enforcement.”
The letter was signed by 15 prominent Muslim New Yorkers, including Khaled Lamada, head of the Muslim American Society, Omar Mohammedi, president of the Association of Muslim American Lawyers, Aisha al-Adawiya, founder of Women in Islam, and Iman Al Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, who president of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York.
Another signatory, Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab-American Association of New York, told the Guardian that the AP reports had confirmed her worst fears. “This confirmed what we already knew. It gave validity to our concerns that we are being spied upon just because of our religion. That undermines the security of all New Yorkers,” Sarsour said.
Sarsour added that lawsuits against the NYPD were being considered in the wake of the AP investigation, and called for an independent inquiry into the activities of the department when it came to monitoring Muslim communities.
So far, that call has fallen on deaf ears. Senior police figures have denied that they targeted Muslim communities in general, claiming they only followed leads. Bloomberg has also strongly and consistently backed the city’s police department and its tactics.
An investigation by the CIA had looked at its role in helping the NYPD and recently concluded no wrongdoing had taken place.
But Sarsour remained unsatisfied.
“How can someone from the CIA be the one to investigate the CIA? We are asking for an independent investigation,” she said, saying it should be carried out by the Department of Justice or a Congressional committee.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office downplayed the impact of the letter and the boycott, saying that other Muslim leaders were still planning on attending the breakfast gathering. “We have a couple dozen Muslim community leaders who have RSVP-ed that they will be at the breakfast, which is about the same as previous years,” said Stu Loeser.
NYPD officials also weighed into the spat, saying that the AP story had exaggerated its activities. “The NYPD lawfully follows leads in terrorist-related investigations and does not engage in the kind of wholesale spying on communities that was false alleged,” said Paul Browne, an NYPD deputy commissioner.
But the revelations about the Demographics Unit are not the only controversy surrounding NYPD actions around Muslim Americans and terrorism. An NYPD operation last month arrested a suspected “lone wolf” terrorist in the shape of New Yorker Jose Pimentel. NYPD officials hailed the arrest, which occurred after a lengthy undercover operation that saw an NYPD informant supply Pimental with bomb-making equipment, as a major triumph.
However, it later emerged that the FBI had passed on co-operating on the case, because it believed the target was not a viable threat. That has led to accusations that the NYPD “entrapped” Pimental.
Former “Saturday Night Live” actress Victoria Jackson, working on confidential information she as a web talk show host has special clearance to obtain, has claimed that the United States is being overtaken by radical Muslims bent on bringing the nation under Sharia law.
“I just went to a briefing in Washington DC, across the street from the Capitol, at the Longworth building at 8:30 am two days ago and it changed my life,” Jackson said last week on her web show, “Politichicks.” “For six hours, I saw pictures and names and dates and facts and Islamic law books and Korans, Surahs for six hours and they proved to me… that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our highest positions in government and this is serious.”
Jackson also detailed the meeting in an earlier blog post this December. In that post, she details testimony given by John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who worked on the case against former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. Guandolo resigned from the FBI in 2008 after he was caught trying to score a $75,000 donation for an anti-terrorism group from a wealthy Jefferson case witness with whom he was having an affair. Guandolo now gives speeches on the existential threat of Islam, claiming that Muslim groups are using political correctness and political insurgency to stop FBI and police officers from stopping their spread of Sharia law.
The actress-turned-pundit also reported testimony from Maj. Stephen Coughlin, who in 2008 was effectively fired from his post at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because, many conservatives believe, he was a staunch anti-Islamic extremist advocate. Wired reports that his contract was not renewed after a staffer for Gordon England, then the deputy secretary of defense, raised questions about his work. Last January, Coughlin gave a maligned speech during an FBI presentation on Muslim extremism.
Claiming that it was strongly hinted that President Obama was a Muslim — his policies all favor Muslims and are against Israel, she claims to have been told — Jackson says in the video that the ultimatum pushed by terrorist groups in America is “You have to convert or be killed.”
While she says that the meeting forever changed her, Jackson has already long claimed that Muslims — led by secret Muslim and terrorist sympathizer President Obama — are quietly taking over the United States government. She also has famously taken umbrage with gays and “Glee,”including a highly publicized string of attacks last March.
“This new al-Qaida magazine for women has beauty tips and suicide-bomber tips! Gimme a break!” she wrote in a blog post for World Net Daily. “That is as ridiculous as two men kissing on the mouth! And I don’t care what is politically correct. Everyone knows that two men on a wedding cake is a comedy skit, not an ‘alternate lifestyle’! There I said it! Ridiculous!”
“Michelle [sic] Bachmann and Rick Santorum are the only GOP candidates so far to acknowledge the above facts and warn against the present threat of Islamic Law replacing our Constitution,” Jackson concluded in her blog post on the ex-FBI briefing. In a Fox News appearance early in December, she called Bachmann “my girl” and said, “Very few people in America are informed and educated as I am.”
Lowe’s is taking a lot of heat this week for pulling their ads that air during the show, now their CEO has stepped up to respond to all of the controversy.
Lisa Abdelsalam said she feels “like she swallowed poison” in the days since the threat of parental protests caused the Muslim mother and author to cancel a talk with students at A.M. Kulp Elementary School in Hatfield.
“I have a such a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Abdelsalam, 48, who lives in Colmar with her husband and children, all of whom were or are North Penn students.
Born in Lansdale, the 1981 North Penn High School graduate converted to Islam at 19, when she married her husband, who is from Egypt.
As she has many times at many North Penn schools, she was scheduled to meet with several Kulp classes over four days earlier this month to discuss how she wrote and published her book, “A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” based on her son Yoseph’s experiences at York Avenue Elementary in the 1990s.
“A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” has illustrations based on pictures of the York Avenue school and details a Muslim boy’s efforts to fit into the holiday spirit at Christmastime.
A few days before her appearance at Kulp was to take place, Principal Erik Huebner called her.
The principal, according to Abdelsalam, told her a few parents had complained about the program and threatened to bring in an outside group to protest if the classes went forward.
“They did not want a Muslim or a Muslim book read in their classrooms,” she was told. Huebner could not be reached for comment.
Abdelsalam, a longtime volunteer at Kulp where she previously served as president of the Home and School Association, and a current member of the district’s diversity committee, was taken aback. “I was serving pizza with these people last year,” she said.
Huebner was supportive, said the author, and said she was welcome to come regardless of the protests. However, both she and the principal decided it was best to cancel, for the sake of the young students.
“I didn’t feel it would be right; it wasn’t one day, it was four days over two weeks,” she explained. “It’s not a battle that should be fought in an elementary school parking lot.”
Christine Liberaski, a spokeswoman for the North Penn School District, said she hopes the program can be rescheduled in the spring.
“I can’t speak to why some people objected,” said Liberaski, who noted that Abdelsalam previously received praise for her book and her presentation on publishing.
The idea for the book came when a music teacher approached Abdelsalam years ago when Yoseph, now 21, was in elementary school. She was asked if she could find a Muslim holiday song for the school’s annual concert. Finding none, she wrote one herself and also wrote the story. She now has two CDs of music she sells online with her book.
“It’s about inclusivity and the child being happy he’s in a school where everyone is accepted,” said Abdelsalam. “I don’t go and talk about religion.”
WASHINGTON — Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”
Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials. The anti-Shariah theorists say that just as communism posed an ideological and moral threat to America separate from the menace of Soviet missiles, so today radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a “stealth jihad” that is no less dangerous than the violent jihad of Al Qaeda.
“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Mr. Gingrich said in the speech. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.”
Echoing some Republicans in Congress, Mr. Gingrich blasted the Obama administration’s policy of declining to label terrorism carried out in the name of militant Islam as “Islamic” or “jihadist.” Administration officials say such labels can imply religious justification for a distortion of doctrine that most Muslims abhor, thus smearing an entire faith.
But to Mr. Gingrich, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, the administration’s language smacks of the willful blindness of an earlier era. “The left’s refusal to tell the truth about the Islamist threat is a natural parallel to the 70-year pattern of left-wing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union,” Mr. Gingrich said.
Shariah (literally, “the path to the watering place”) is a central concept in Islam. It is God’s law, as derived from the Koran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and has far wider application than secular law. It is popularly associated with its most extreme application in societies like Afghanistan under the Taliban, including chopping off a hand as punishment for thievery.
But it has always been subject to interpretation by religious authorities, so its application has varied over time and geography, said Bernard G. Weiss, professor emeritus at the University of Utah and an authority on Islamic law.
“In the hands of terrorists, Shariah can be developed into a highly threatening, militant notion,” Professor Weiss said. “In the hands of a contemporary Muslim thinker writing in the journal Religion and Law, Shariah becomes an essentially pacifist notion.”
The Arab Spring has set off a lively political and scholarly debate over the growing power of Islamists in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. But those are all overwhelmingly Muslim countries. The idea that Shariah poses a danger in the United States, where the census pegs Muslims as less than 1 percent of the population, strikes many scholars as quixotic.
Even within that 1 percent, most American Muslims have no enthusiasm for replacing federal and state law with Shariah, as some conservatives fear, let alone adopting such ancient prescriptions as stoning for adulterers, said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, who spent a year traveling the United States and interviewing Muslims for his 2010 book “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”
The notion of a threat from Shariah to the United States “takes your breath away, it’s so absurd,” Dr. Ahmed said. He sees political demagoguery in the anti-Shariah campaign, which fueled rallies against mosques in the last two years from Manhattan to Tennessee.
All of the Republican presidential candidates have been asked about the supposed threat from Shariah. Representative Michele Bachmann told the conservative Family Research Council in a November speech that Shariah “must be resisted across the United States,” endorsing moves by several states to prohibit judges from considering Shariah.
Mitt Romney said in a June debate: “We’re not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts. That’s never going to happen.” He immediately added, “People of all faiths are welcome in this country.”
For Mr. Gingrich, concern about Shariah has been a far more prominent theme. He and his wife, Callista, produced and narrated a 2010 film on the threat from radical Islam, “America at Risk,” that discusses the danger of both terrorism and Shariah against a lurid background of terrorist bombings, bloody victims, wailing sirens and chanting Muslim crowds. (Mrs. Gingrich does say, at one point, “This is not a battle with the majority of Muslims, who are peaceful.”)
One Muslim activist who is shown in the film calling for “separation of mosque and state,” Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, said he appreciated Mr. Gingrich’s support in an ideological contest with large Muslim advocacy groups in the United States that he believes have an Islamist slant.
But Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said non-Muslims like Mr. Gingrich were not the most effective advocates for what he believes is really a debate within Islam.
“Unfortunately, as long as a non-Muslim opens the discussion, whether it’s Gingrich or someone else, it’s going to hit a brick wall in the Muslim community,” Dr. Jasser said.
Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim and an adviser to law enforcement agencies in Texas and to the Department of Homeland Security, is a conservative Republican who said he once idolized Mr. Gingrich. He said he no longer did.
He said the anti-Shariah campaign in the United States was “propaganda for jihadists,” offering fuel for the idea of a titanic clash of faiths. Those who truly want to protect American values should talk to Muslims, he said, not demonize them.
“There are plenty of American Muslim patriots who will defend American freedoms,” Mr. Elibiary said. “But you can’t be anti-Islam and find those allies.”
Yaqub Bham’s visit to a residence in Tomball on Wednesday was supposed to be routine for the 61-year-old ADT salesman, who had come to inspect a client’s property before installing a home security system.
Instead, the homeowner, David L. Nienberg, allegedly tried to stab Bham with a fork, bit off part of his ear, and beat him so badly that he broke 10 ribs.
Nienberg, 42, of Tomball, is charged with aggravated assault. If convicted, he could serve from two to 20 years in prison.
Bham’s distraught family members want the incident investigated as a possible hate crime against Bham, a Muslim native of Pakistan who became an American citizen in 2007.They say an agitated Nienberg became violent after asking Bham about the origin of his name and where he was from.
Harris County sheriff’s deputies who responded to a 911 call from Nienberg’s family about 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday did not mention the questions about Bham’s name and origins in their report, said Deputy Thomas Gilliland, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.
Gilliland said Nienberg apparently became angry while reviewing the contract for a security system in his four-bedroom home on Everhart Pointe Drive. When Bham offered to make another contract, or change it, “the defendant took the backpack that Mr. Bham had and wouldn’t give him the backpack, which contained the keys to his vehicle,” Gilliland said.
The two men’s verbal disagreement then became physical, the deputy said.
Nienberg lunged at Bham with a fork, Gilliland said he was told. Relatives took the implement away, but Nienberg allegedly managed to get Bham in a choke hold, beat him, and bite him while muttering about military operations.
When deputies arrived, Nienberg refused to let go of Bham until they “secured the perimeter” and “secured women personnel,” Gilliland said.
It took three deputies to pull Nienberg off Bham, he said. They deployed Tasers on Nienberg twice, and even then, the furious man continued to kick and spit after they wrestled him into a patrol car, said Gilliland.
Victim hospitalized
Bham, who was recovering Friday in a local hospital, immigrated to Houston in 1997 and is the married father of three adult children. He and his family proudly became U.S. citizens four years ago, said his daughter, Shazdeh Bham, 23.
“When we moved to the States, it was for educational opportunities and just a better living, a better life,” she said.
Every once in a while, the Bham family hears negative comments like, “Go back to your country where you belong,” Shazdeh Bham said, “but it’s never bothered us. It never made us think twice about anything.”
The attack on her father was different, though, and frightening.
“I’m just really angry, and I’m extremely confused because I still don’t understand why this happened, and what triggered this … and why this person caused this much harm and this much hurt to my father,” she said. “Now I just want to see justice. I want to see this person punished for what he did.”
Shazdeh Bham said her father is a hardworking citizen who would never say anything negative about anyone.
“He is a patient and positive person,” she added. “He is very easy to work with. His family is his entire life, which is his only priority.”
Nienberg’s questions about Bham’s name and background suggest that the attack might have been motivated by racial or religious bias, said Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group on Friday joined Bham’s family in calling on local law enforcement and the FBI to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
“It’s because of what precipitated the attack that makes us think it has all the elements of a hate crime: ‘What does your name mean? Where are you from?’ And then boom, he jumped on him,” Carroll said.
“The level of hate speech and rhetoric that we hear on a fairly regular basis in society – the baseless accusations that Muslims are trying to take over America, or they’re trying to bring Sharia law, or they’re trying to subvert the government – this baseless rhetoric keeps the environment heated for something like this to happen, for the possibility of violence,” he said. “When you say that stuff over and over and over, it begins to play on your psychology toward a certain group of people.”
Motives a mystery
Nienberg has no prior criminal history in Harris County.
After hearing about his use of military terms, deputies asked Nienberg’s relatives if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, Gilliland said. They were told that Nienberg is a veteran but that he had never served in any type of conflict, nor had he ever been deployed overseas.
Neither Bham nor Nienberg’s family members offered a clue as to what went wrong, Gilliland said.
He said deputies are looking into whether Nienberg was under the influence of narcotics or alcohol or had suffered a mental break, “because it was just incoherent, the things that he was saying.”
It will be up to prosecutors to decide whether to upgrade the charges to a hate crime, Gilliland said.
As it is, Nienberg is charged with a second-degree felony.
He is being held in a Harris County Jail on $30,000 bail.
Gingrich reasserts his commitment to the Sharia Hysteria and now suggests “a federal law that says ‘no court, anywhere in the United States, under any circumstances, is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.”
Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael GersonexaminesNewt Gingrich’s history of anti-Muslim fear-bating and concludes that “those views demonstrate a disturbing tendency: the passionate embrace of shallow ideas.” But Gerson fails to acknowledge that Gingrich’s “shallow ideas” are more than just rhetoric. Gingrich has a plan to put them into action.
It’s time we had a national debate on this. And one of the things I’m going to suggest today is a federal law that says ‘no court, anywhere in the United States, under any circumstances, is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.’ Period.
Watch it:
And Gingrich’s 2010 documentary, “America At Risk: The War With No Name,” portrays a disturbing vision of the world in which the U.S. and its western allies are at war with Islam. “This war will go on until either the entire world either embraces Islam or submits to Islamic rule,” says historian Bernard Lewis, while appearing in the film.
Further exemplifying his anti-Muslim sentiments, In an interview last week, Gingrich explained that the Palestinians are an “invented people,” a statement effectively denying the right of Palestinians to a state. Such a position would end U.S. support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rejects the policy positions of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations.
Gerson’s effort to flag Gingrich’s anti-Sharia rhetoric as “simplistic” is a welcome pushback against the growing Islamophobia in the far-right. (We addressed this problem in our recent report “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America.”) But Gerson fails to acknowledge the potential domestic and foreign policy implications of Gingrich’s anti-Muslim statements.
Jerusalem Mayor denounces arsonists’ attack on burial site of noted Muslim figure, saying zero tolerance should be shown to violence of any kind, and that coexistence in the city must be kept.
Arsonists set fire to a deserted mosque in central Jerusalem during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday. There was no structural damage reported and the damage mainly consisted of the blackening of walls and graffiti reading “Price Tag,” and anti-Islamic phrases.
The Nebi Akasha mosque, apparently built under the Ayyubid dynasty in the 12th century with additions made under the Mamluk dynasty in the 13th century. It is believed that the mosque was founded on the burial site of combatants in Saladin’s army, though an ancient tradition designates the site as the place where Akasha, a friend of the Prophet Muhammad, was buried.
The mosque is uniquely located in central Jerusalem in the midst of a Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. It was abandoned in the Israeli War of Independence. Its was recently renovated and turned into a municipal storage facility.
Graffiti spray painted on the historical site included inscriptions such as “Muhammad is Dead,” “Muhammad is a Pig,” and “Price Tag.”
The Jerusalem municipality closed off the entrance to the mosque, and the police and Shin Bet began an investigation.
On Friday, there was a tragic incident in Hollywood, California. A man began shooting people randomly near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and injured two men, one critically, before he was finally shot and killed by police.
Pamela Geller had an article online right away titled HOLLYWOOD JIHAD: SHOOTOUT, GUNMAN CALMLY TARGETED DRIVERS AND PEOPLE WHILE SHOUTING ALLAHU AKBAR! She said in her lede “What is most disturbing about this story, apart from the obvious horror, is that not one news account reported what one witness said the shooter was screaming: “allahu akbar.” Not one news account. The media is the enemy.”
The initial local news video about the incident did include one witness saying that the shooter shouted “Allahu Akbar!” but at this point no other witness has confirmed that. Whether or not that one witness was accurate about what he thought he heard, no one yet knows, and none of the cell phone videos of the incident as it happened at this point confirm this allegatioin. Other witnesses said that they heard the shooter shout “Is this the end?” and “kill me” and “I’m gonna die” during the rampage. Witnesses also identified the shooter variously as “white” and as “hispanic”.
Of course, as soon as Geller posted her story, the Islamophobic echo chamber reposted her story with their own sensational headlines. Geller’s partner Robert Spencer posted his own article referring to Geller. Sheikh Yermami called it “Hollywood Jihad”, Bare Naked Islam called it “Sudden Jihad Syndrome”. Debbie Schlussel called it a “terrorist attack”. Free Republic re-posted, Creeping Sharia re-posted. Even the Grant County Tea Party site re-posted Geller’s article. Gateway Pundit said“Once again the media hid the truth from the American public.” The Muslims are Terrorists site posted the headlineMuslim goes on shooting spree in Hollywood! Shouts allah akbar, media omits that detail to protect jihadists! with the lede “Thankfully one less muslim is wandering the streets tonight!”
More often than not, Geller is the first to churn out some anti-Muslim meme, and then her willing accomplices echo her message and pass it on. It takes on a life of its own. Geller is one of the key players and in our Who’s Who of Islamophobes and it is almost impossible to keep up with her rantings and update our backgrounder on her as fast as she can churn out her hateful messages.
On Saturday the identity of the shooter was released by the authorities. According to KTLA News“The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office has identified the man police shot and killed Friday after he opened fire on unsuspecting cars in the middle of a busy Hollywood intersection. The 26-year-old man was Tyler Brehm. Few details about the man are available but a Facebook page belonging to a man bearing the same name reveals that man ended a relationship four days ago. It has not yet been confirmed that the Tyler Brehm depicted on the Facebook page is the same Tyler Brehm involved in Friday’s shooting, but the Facebook page indicated its owner lives in Hollywood and was originally from Carlisle, Penn. The Baltimore Sun reports that Brehm’s ex-girlfriend, Alicia Alligood, told KTLA 5 she and Brehm dated for four years before breaking up this month. The end of their relationship may have acted as a trigger that led to Friday’s fatal events, she said in a phone interview with KTLA 5’s David Begnaud. … She said Brehm was “really stressed out lately.” He met a woman he thought was a pharmaceutical saleswoman, who had given him some kind of pills, Alliegood said. He began taking the pills, which was alarming because he never took drugs before. One of Brehm’s neighbors described him as unstable.
The actual story as far as what anyone knows to date is that a young man named Tyler Brehm went on a shooting spree. Witness reports are varied. The police are investigating. Little is known about the shooter beyond his name, the fact that he is from Pennsylvania, is unemployed, and recently broke up with his girlfriend. He may have been emotionally distressed. He may have been taking drugs. The Hollywood Reporter has the most recent information and an interview with one of the victims..
Outside of law enforcement, only Pamela Geller and her echo chamber “know” more than this. Publishing such baseless speculation is irresponsible, and only proves that the only motivation is pure hatred.
This sort of behavior on the part of Geller and her cohorts in the Islamophobia echo chamber is not new, and we even have a collection of some of Geller’s previous false claims here and of the attempts by Geller and friends to cover up evidence of their false claims here. Here is just one example of this pattern of jumping to false conclusions
In July of 2011, Pamela Geller published a post titled Vehicular Jihad in Arizona which was Geller’s take on a simple story about a terrible car accident in Arizona in which the driver of a vehicle crashed into 3 parked vehicles in a parking lot and was killed. The man was a physician named Ajaz Rahaman. As soon as the man’s name was released, Geller posted her article. This was before there were any autopsy findings released, before police investigations were completed – before anyone knew what happened. The name of this man sounded as if he might be a Muslim. However the name Walid Shoebat might also be identified as a Muslim name. That’s all the proof Geller needed to call this “vehicular jihad”. I published an article giving the facts titled “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Discover Muslim Vehicular Jihad Plot” and within a day Geller pulled the original article from her site but that the article still exists on google cache. Why did they try to cover this up. Because the doctor simply had a heart attack and died at the wheel which is why the car crashed.
This gleeful rush on the part of the Islamophobes to connect any violence to Muslims is also a pattern, as happened with the Virginia Tech shootings. Pamela Geller, the Queen of the Islamophobes promoted the non-existent Muslim connection in the Virginia Tech massacre, in an article Ismail Ax and the Prophet Moe with the lede “Release the damn transcripts. Enough with the cover up. Don’t the dead and America, a country at war, deserve to know was is really happening? As I wrote here previously, we know Ismail Ax was written in red (color of blood) on his arm, we know he signed his suicide note Ismail Ax and sent an overnight package to NBC from A Ishmail, he made sure he had no other ID on his person after he martyred himself so you can be sure he wanted to be remembered as Ismail Ax. This is in and of itself very telling. Shaving his head and from what I can see in his pictures and martyr video- his body (that’s what they do – remember the 9/11 hijackers?) , must have added to law enforcement’s suspicions, which is why it so damning that they would say so early on that horrible day that “it was not tied to terrorism.” And, she comments The tie-in is carefully explained at Prophet of Doom here. It’s lengthy – read it. I’ve excerpted here. “Every aspect of Cho’s rage, every nuance of his twisted and inverted morality, was lifted from the pages of Islam.” Geller never did post an apology or a correction.
The only effect that all of this propaganda has is to stir up the readers of these sites into a frenzy of anti-Muslim hatred. And, it works.
Here are a few of the readers comments on this Hollywood shooting incident from Gateway Pundit -The “sudden” jihad syndrome began months or years ago with the satanic infestation of this man’s soul by islam. – Unless you want US cities to look like Kandahar…the Muslim cancer in the US must be dealt with swiftely and forcefully. Allowing these morons to bring their terror onto our soil should not be tolerated. Here are a few comments from Geller’s site - Muslims don’t need a motive..they are born as murderous scum! - This is just the beginning. This will most likely be the false prophet of Rev 13. Watch out, it will be coming to your town sooner than you think. Resist now or forever hold your peace. Here are a few comments from Creeping Sharia - Now we are seeing these MUSLIM THUGS going after any AMERICAN here in the U S A yelling ALLAHU AKBAR so why not retaliate with ALLAUH AKBAR with there MOSQUES OF HATE and NEUTRALIZE THEM AND THERE IMAM’S!!!! Lock AND LOAD. – Who do we have to blame for the growth, and infiltration of these terrorist? I would prefer to classify them as Muslim dirt bags. .The filth and actions connected with this group are beyond human comprehension. God help us to destroy the filth that is invading our country.Lord expose the plan behind the intent and people involved in the overall desire to introduce this religion. What would America have to gain by acceptance of these people? We must determine who, why. and what. – Joke what God has a name like Allah. You insult God with that handle.Your god has made a pact with the devil to destroy those he fears the most.Christians and Jews are the friends of GOD . Your so called Allah is a prophet that is dead and burning in hell with the rest of his Muslim buddies.Thank God that many Muslims are being visited by the Son of God Jesus in dreams and visions, and are bending their knees, and being set free. Protect them Lord, and allow them protection from the crazies.
And, here is an email that I received from one of these folks who takes this sort of hateful anti-Muslim propaganda as “real journalism”: We dont want your kind here..we dont need your radical opinions..we want you out of our beautiful country and back to your camels and women beating and hostile islamic bullshit..you arent part of the human race as far as we’re concerned..you belong on another planet where you can blow shit up…LEAVE!!!! I hope and pray that all you radical assholes are buried in hell…you are not welcome or wanted in U.S. soil, unless its 6 feet under..go back and wash your fucking camels and beat your women..die motherfuckers, die!!!!
This is the effect the sort of hate spewed by the Islamophobia echo chamber has on the “minds” of their readers. I have by the way saved this email along with lots of others provoked by previous Islamophobic rants.
And, no matter what the actual facts turn out to be, it won’t make any difference for most of these folks who so desperately need someone to look down on. After all, they and only they know the “truth”. I would hope to see some of these folks stop for a moment and really think about what sort of effect their words have on others, and perhaps reconsider or even feel some shame. But, I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.
‘There’s no need to be more liberal than Europe,’ PM says of move that would ban loudspeakers in calls to prayer.
By Barak Ravid
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday voiced support for a law that would ban mosques from using loudspeaker systems to call people to prayer.
The so-called Muezzin Law, propos[e]d by MK Anastassia Michaeli (Yisrael Beiteinu ) applies to all houses of worship but the practice is prevalent only in mosques.
“There’s no need to be more liberal than Europe,” Netanyahu said in reference to the law during a meeting of his Likud ministers.
After intense pressure from Likud ministers Limor Livnat, Dan Meridor and Michael Eitan, who harshly criticized the bill, Netanyahu announced that he was postponing the scheduled debate in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation.
Michaeli has said hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens routinely suffer from the noise caused by the muezzin’s calls to prayer.
“The bill comes from a worldview whereby freedom of religion should not be a factor in undermining quality of life,” she said.
Netanyahu made similar comments to the Likud ministers.
“I have received numerous requests from people who are bothered by the noise from the mosques,” he said. “The same problem exists in all European countries, and they know how to deal with it. It’s legitimate in Belgium; it’s legitimate in France. Why isn’t it legitimate here? We don’t need to be more liberal than Europe.”
Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said there was no need for such a law and that it would only escalate tensions.
Michael Eitan, minister for the improvement of government services, agreed with Meridor, adding that this law was just a pretext for those wishing to legislate against Muslims. “If the desire was to combat sound, then a law against sound in all areas should be introduced,” said Eitan. “But the MK proposing the bill wants to combat religion. I met with her and she tried selling it to me as an environmental law. I said to her, ‘Look me in the eyes. You are not interested in the environment, but in Islam.”
Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat joined Eitan and Meridor, saying anyone who wishes to serve a complaint over noises coming from Mosques can already do so under existing law. “There is an anti-noise law that is supposed to deal with the problem of noise from mosques, if such a problem even exists, but that law is not enforced. There is no need for a new law, rather the proper enforcement of the existing one,” said Livnat.
“None of the ministers came to Netanyahu’s defense or supported his position,” said one minister who participated in the meeting.
Netanyahu realized he would not be able to muster a majority in support of the law among his Likud ministers, and announced that the bill would be removed from the agenda of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, which convened a few hours after the Likud meeting.
Netanyahu added, however, the matter would be debated over the coming days and that the bill would be brought before the ministerial committee next week.
As a resident of Caesarea, Netanyahu is particularly familiar with the struggles that exist over noises emerging from mosques. For some time now, Caesarea residents have been acting against the use of loudspeaker systems by mosques in the neighboring village of Jisr al-Zarqa. In the past few years, “round table” teams comprised of members from both villages have been set up to find solutions to various issues. One of the representatives from Jisr al-Zarqa told Haaretz the issue of mosques using loudspeakers has arisen in their meetings.
Head of the Jisr al-Zarqa local council Az-a-Din Amash said Netanyahu did not intervene in the discussions, adding, “We have no desire to clash with Caesarea residents over the matter, quite the opposite. As such, we established a joint committee for dialogue, in which numerous issues relating to mosques use of loudspeaker systems arise.”
The former IRA Terrorist supporter, Peter King is holding his fourth hearing on “Muslim-American Radicalization,” this time focusing on the “military.” Expect it to be an Islamophobiapalooza.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is hoping his panel’s hearing on the radicalization of Muslim-Americans within the U.S. military will reveal how the armed services can better protect itself against homegrown attacks.
Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) is holding a joint hearing on Wednesday, along with Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), as the next stage in his series of efforts to address the radicalization of American Muslims. Pointing to the 2009 shootings at the Fort Hood military base in Texas and at a military recruiting station in Arkansas, which killed a total of 14 people and wounded more than two dozen, King said the issue of radicalization within military communities is one that is grossly under the radar.
“There is an attempt by Islamists to join the military and infiltrate the military, and it’s more of a threat than the average American is aware of right now,” said King in an interview with The Hill on Monday.
Lieberman said his committee has held 13 hearings over the past five years on the issue of violent Islamic extremism and, based on what he has learned, the military is an increasingly large target for attacks.
“Clearly, the threat of homegrown terrorism has increased dramatically, and clearly, members of the armed services are a high-value target,” Lieberman said in a statement.
The issue was brought to the front burner for King after it was raised by Paul Stockton, the assistant secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs. King said he feels the Obama administration is just as concerned with the issue as he is, and hopes to develop a working partnership to address some of the inadequacies that will come up at Wednesday’s hearing.
“I think more can be done,” he said. “But this is not going to be any attempt to bash the administration, necessarily. From my perspective it’s going to be a productive hearing and it’s not going to turn into a partisan fight.”
King gave several examples of issues that need more attention, such as whether the military needs to provide more security for recruiting centers and bases in the U.S. or whether local and state law enforcement should play a larger role in coordinating security with the military.
He said he also hopes to address the minutiae of radicalization on military bases. He used an example of how he has heard of at least one instance in which a copy of the radical Islamic magazine Inspire — which has been used as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups — was found in a barracks and allowed to remain. But Confederate flags are rightfully banned, he said.
“I’m using that as an example about whether or not we need to be more aggressive in facing up to the reality. It’s Islamic terrorism. It’s not just a nondescript, anonymous type of terrorism.”
King has held three hearings so far this year on the issue of radicalization of Muslim-Americans within the U.S. The first one drew the most scrutiny, as nearly 100 members of Congress asked him to cancel it or widen the breadth of the radicalized groups he was probing. King lauded the hearing as a success, saying that it brought attention to a taboo subject that is a serious and growing security concern.
The other two hearings focused on the terrorist group al-Shabbab’s influence within the U.S., and the radicalization of Muslim-Americans within U.S. prisons.
Carlos Bledsoe is serving life in prison for waging a shooting spree in 2009 at an Arkansas military recruiting center that killed Army Pvt. William Long.
Bledsoe’s father — who testified before King at a previous hearing, saying that his son was influenced by radicalized Muslim ideals — is planning to be at Wednesday’s hearing, where the slain soldier’s father, Daris Long, is slated to testify. King said each knows the other will be at the hearing and that Bledsoe is attending to show his support for Long.
Also expected to testify are Jim Stuteville, an Army senior adviser for counterintelligence operations and liaison to the FBI, and Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point military academy.
King is planning to unveil a committee report on the issue at Wednesday’s hearing and another joint report with the Senate panel afterward.
He said his next hearing will likely be next year and focus on the use of certain mosques by al Qaeda and Iran in their efforts to radicalize people within the U.S.
After people heard that the owner and coach were replaced by a Pakastini-born Muslim and an African American, there was an uproar of Islamophobic and racist comments. If we want this country to prosper once again, we need to grow up, but when we allow comments like this to filter in, my hope diminishes:
“I wonder if Khan has any friends who are terrorists?,” asks forgotten man on www.FreeRepublic.com. “Rush Limbaugh was not allowed to buy into the Rams, but a Muslim from Pakistan can buy the Jaguars. Go figure.”
[Jacksonville, FL] Last week, it was announced that the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team had been sold to super-successful Illinois businessman Shahid Khan. The deal was reported to be worth $760 million and includes a somewhat controversial first for the league.
Khan is a Pakistani-born Muslim, and will be the first of his faith to own a National Football League team. NFL team ownership is considered to be the ultimate trophy for American billionaires.
The sale is not 100% final, however, it still has to get approval from the league and the other owners, but Khan has had an ongoing relationship with the league for ten years so it seems a sure thing.
The Muslim-American community, which has been under attack since 9-11, no doubt sees Khan’s ownership as a sign that America is moving in the right direction, despite a vocal minority hell bent on demonizing all Muslims.
“He is the first … shows how American Muslims are integrating,” said Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American Islam Relations.
The Jacksonville Jaguars press release talking up the sale didn’t mention the fact that Khan was Muslim. That was probably a good thing – on the same day the sale was announced, it was also revealed that long-time head coach Jack Del Rio had been fired and assistant coach Mel Tucker – an African-American – would be taking over.
This year, the Jacksonville Jaguars have made a bigger impact in the news than on the field
For redneck racist types – and in North Florida there are more than a few – the fact that the white owner and white coach of their hometown NFL franchise were replaced by a Pakistani-born Muslim and a black guy was just too much to take, especially in ONE DAY.
This Jaguars ownership change could be the final straw that sends Confederate flag flyers fleeing pro football for the warm, white blanket of NASCAR.
Just last year, members of the Jacksonville City Council jumped on the Muslim hate train in what was described as a huge embarrassment for the region. Parvez Ahmed – a University of North Florida professor, Fulbright Scholar and Muslim – had his Human Rights Commission nomination sent back to the Rules Committee because of “constituent concerns.”
It had already been approved, mind you. But that was before the Islamophobes in the ACT! For America organization made a bunch of noise and the spineless jellyfish on the city council caved to their concerns.
Almost on cue, conservative news sites were rife with ugly comments about Khan’s big play.
“I wonder if Khan has any friends who are terrorists?,” asks forgotten man on www.FreeRepublic.com. “Rush Limbaugh was not allowed to buy into the Rams, but a Muslim from Pakistan can buy the Jaguars. Go figure.”
Forgotten man must have forgotten that Limbaugh has made multiple controversial racist remarks about black athletes over the years and that many players indicated that they would not play for Limbaugh’s team if he was even a part owner.
Khan just happens to have a religion in common with some people who have committed terrorist acts in the name of their god. The same could be said about any of the major religions.
When CNN ran the story, the comments sections was literally boiling over with stupidity, hate and a bit of Star Trek movie related humor (1982′s Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan features Captain Kirk famously yelling “KHAAANNNN!,” a familiar refrain in the comments section).
The awful stuff was counteracted by some progressive Jags/NFL fans protective of their city/league and of the new owner.
On CNN, Terri surmised, “That is how the Pakistani’s will get even with the United States. They plan to buy the NFL, one team at a time, and move it to Pakistan.”
Also on CNN, someone calling themselves Pakastani [sic] wrote, “The name of the new team will be the Jacksonville Jihadis. Expect the cheerleaders to show some ankle during games!”
DisgustedNY was concerned that, “Now you have some guy who grew up in Pakistan dictating what happens with an American tradition.”
But they weren’t all an embarrassment to America’s melting pot philosophy. JaxFan noted the political ramifications of Khan’s ownership, saying that, “The level of religious ignorance and intolerance represented in some of the city’s supposed leaders will make it absolutely hilarious to see those same anti-gay, anti-Muslim religious righties having to kiss the butt of a Muslim who now holds the keys to the Jaguars and their possible relocation.”
The Jacksonville community loves their team (and t-shirt cannons)
“I think any comments challenging the prospective buyer’s ‘credentials’ as an American are immature,” offered Jeremy. “The guy has been here 40+ years, went to school for engineering here (actually did a degree that is USEFUL), worked for an American company, started his own American company (notice from the link posted above, that ALL the factories for his company are in the US?), and finally has had a dream of buying an NFL team.”
“America was founded based on principles of freedom of religion,” continued Jeremy. “I say let him take the team and see what he can do with it!”
Things were about the same on Yahoo! News … Mac offered: “A new way to launder money to the terrorists. Wonderful.” And from John: “Sold to Islamic Terrorist from Pakistan.”
Jake was downright racist in saying that, “schweet! sell them to a Sand Monkey.” And from Thomas: “I think he got the money to buy the team by tipping off where Bin Laden was hiding.”
DEF appeared to be a buoy of reason in a sea of hate and stupidity, analyzing that, “As a 20-year resident of Jacksonville, I can say that this is the most conservative bible belt town I have ever lived in. It has a huge redneck/conservative Christian base not to mention that many of them have their predisposed prejudices against Muslims.”
“This new owner … has a great opportunity to change Jacksonville for the better,” he said.
Although DEF cautions Khan – and he makes a good point in doing so that if Khan moves the team from Jacksonville (as has been widely speculated) that he, “could certainly see many in Jacksonville reacting by building a much deeper hatred for Muslims. … It could get ugly.”
Members of a role-play team after their act at a local community event in London, on June 26, 2011. The play explored many problems that young Muslims face (right) and how they can live a better life by following the examples of ancient Islamic leaders (left).
To view all the images click on the link right below:
“Osama! Osama!”— yelled a pair of complete strangers, as photographer Bharat Choudhary walked to his apartment from the University of Missouri campus in 2009, where the photographer was pursuing a Master’s degree in photojournalism. Islamophobia is a personal issue for Choudhary, who is an Indian Hindu.
“I had a big beard at that time,” adds Choudhary, who used the incident as inspiration for his current project, which documents Muslim life in the United States and England. Titled The Silence of Others, the series captures similar situations and their effects on the project’s participants, as well as the lives of young Muslims and the communities to which they belong.
Choudhary traces the origins of the idea back to his time as a student in India, where he worked with CARE India in Ahmadabad in 2004. The organization provided rehabilitation to victims of ethnically charged violence, who lost limbs or were paralyzed in the 2002 riots in the Indian state of Gujarat. The images he saw there formed an experience that Choudhary says “will always be there with me.”
He began working on the project in the Midwest, where he documented stories in small towns across Missouri and Illinois, as well as larger cities like Chicago. Choudhary is continuing the second phase of the project in England, broadening the geographic reach of the body of work and expanding it as a platform to help Muslims and non-Muslims understand each other.
Though the growing body of work represents a variety of life stories—a Missouri couple’s efforts to establish the state’s first Mosque, a Caucasian woman’s conversion to Islam and the development of Muslim communities in Chicago, London and elsewhere—Choudhary says he has found similar themes of alienation and ostracism of his “Others” on both sides of the Atlantic. But it’s precisely the challenge of breaking through their silence that captivates Choudhary and pushes him to continue the project.
“It’s finding the right kind of people who would be willing to talk and be photographed—that is one thing that keeps me awake all night,” Choudhary says. “It’s been quite an interesting journey so far.”
The FBI is using its extensive community outreach to Muslims and other groups to secretly gather intelligence in violation of federal law, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged Thursday.
Citing internal bureau documents, the ACLU said agents in California are attending meetings at mosques and other events and illegally recording information about the attendees’ political and religious affiliations. FBI officials denied the allegations. They said that records kept from outreach sessions are not used for investigations.
The documents reveal new details of the FBI’s efforts to build a more trusting relationship with Muslims and other communities — a major priority since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Federal officials have said that the effort is aimed at protecting Muslims’ civil rights and smoothing lingering resentment over the law-enforcement crackdown after the attacks, along with helping the government fight terrorism.
Some of the papers describe agents speaking at career days, briefing community members on FBI programs and helping them work with police to fight drug abuse. But the files also depict agents recording Social Security numbers and other identifying information after they meet people at the events and, in at least one instance, noting their political views. It appears that the agents are conducting follow-up investigations in some instances, but heavy redactions in the documents make it impossible to determine how far any examination might have gone.
In one case, an agent wrote that he checked California motor vehicle records on someone the agent encountered at a Ramadan dinner at a San Francisco Islamic association. An attendee is described as “very progressive.” Another is called “very Western in appearance and outlook.”
At another Ramadan dinner in San Francisco, an agent recorded the names of Muslim groups listed on pamphlets distributed at the event — and appeared to note that several people associated with one of the groups were under investigation.
The FBI turned the heavily redacted documents over to the ACLU as part of a lawsuit filed by the civil rights group and two other organizations to uncover what the groups consider to be inappropriate or illegal FBI tactics in the fight against terrorism.
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said some of the actions depicted in the documents violate the Privacy Act, a law that bars federal agencies from maintaining information about activities protected by the First Amendment, such as freedom of speech and association. FBI officials said the law allows agencies to keep information that is considered relevant and necessary to their mission, in certain circumstances.
A dangerous ‘guise’
“It’s one thing for the FBI to say to a community group, ‘We’re going to come and meet you to establish ties,’ ” Shamsi said. “But it’s a very dangerous way to proceed to collect intelligence under the guise of community outreach.”
FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan said the bureau’s meetings with community leaders are not designed to gather intelligence but rather “to enhance public trust in the FBI in order to enlist the cooperation of the public to fight criminal activity.” He said that the practice provides “information to the public in support of crime prevention efforts, and opens lines of communication to help make the FBI more responsive to community concerns.”
Kortan said FBI policy requires that an “appropriate separation be maintained between outreach and operational activities” and that although “facts surrounding an outreach meeting or event may be documented,” that is only for internal purposes to ensure “that personnel time and resources are being used effectively and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, policies and program requirements.”
Some Muslim groups reacted to the documents with anger. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the FBI’s actions will have a “chilling effect” on Muslims’ constitutionally protected activities.
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, said the papers “confirm the worst fears of Muslim community members.”
The FBI, under intense pressure to prevent another attack on U.S. soil, has sought to strike a balance between civil liberties and law enforcement in the decade since the Sept. 11 strikes. Civil liberties groups have long accused agents of overreacting, but FBI and Justice Department officials say they have helped safeguard the nation from another attack.
The documents released Thursday show agents in a variety of settings in Muslim and other communities. In one 2009 memo, an agent in Sacramento appears to be monitoring the Saudi Student Association at California State University through the outreach effort.
The agent writes of meeting with someone at the student union building and records that person’s birth date, Social Security number, telephone number and address — all in the same sentence. The person is described as giving the agent detailed information about the association.
Yet some of the documents are more mundane, including a 2009 memo detailing FBI contacts with Assyrian organizations in San Jose, which notes how the Assyrian language is “very similar to ancient Aramaic.”
Another memo describes a 2007 meeting hosted by the FBI in San Jose for 27 Muslim organizations that featured FBI presentations, a question-and-answer session and lunch catered by a local kabob restaurant. The writer provides a detailed “demographics” breakdown of participants, including what percentage are Sunni Muslim versus Shiite, and lists all the organizations in attendance.
One group listed was the Oakland-based Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California. Sara Mostafavi, a board member, said she found that troubling.
Just before Thanksgiving, a 32-year-old industrial designer was leaving a Lucky store in San Jose with some turkey broth and salt when he was assaulted by a group of men who broke his jaw and called him a “terrorist.”
This week, the man, who asked this his name not be used for fear of retaliation, underwent jaw surgery, and he is still in need of dental care for the six teeth that were knocked out about 9 p.m. Nov. 21 in the parking lot of the Lucky at 3270 S. White Road near Aborn Road.
“I believe they hit me with the tequila bottle,” he said. “Then they spit on me and called me a terrorist.”
None of the suspects, possibly three or four men, who were all wearing dark, hooded sweatshirts during the attack, have been arrested.
San Jose police confirmed the assault, but aren’t saying much more.
The victim’s family, originally from Calcutta, India, moved to Silicon Valley more than 30 years ago. They are Hindu, and the victim has no criminal record in Santa Clara County, according to a review of court records. He said he graduated from San Jose State with a degree in industrial design.
In 2010, FBI statistics show there were 24 hate crimes reported in San Jose, compared with about 140 hate crimes reported in Los Angeles, a city about four times the size.
A detective this week met the victim, police confirmed. The detective is trying to track down witnesses and find out whether the grocery store’s security camera documented.
A Minneapolis man who lost his job with the Transportation Security Administration for an off-duty assault of an elderly Somali man has been sentenced to six months in prison for the hate crime.
George Thompson, 64, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Minneapolis under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Thompson’s case was the first prosecuted under the act.
Signed into law in October 2009, the act was named after Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming teen who died after being kidnapped and beaten in 1998, and James Byrd, Jr., a black man who was dragged to death in Texas that same year.
“Physical violence motivated by racial or religious hatred exacerbates fear and tears at the fabric of our society,” B. Todd Jones, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said in a statement issued after Thompson’s sentencing. “Here in Minnesota, we have vibrant and diverse communities and should be celebrating that fact, not assaulting people because of it.”
Thompson also was charged in state court about three months after the May 4, 2010, assault in another bias-inspired attack on the same street as the earlier incident, but that allegation was dropped once the federal case was filed.
According to the criminal complaint in the dismissed case:
Thompson approached a man and asked him whether he was Somali. The man said he was, prompting Thompson to chase and threaten to kill him. The man found refuge with police officers who were nearby.
Thompson then went into a neighborhood bar, where he was arrested. He was drunk and had two loaded firearms with him and a permit to carry them.
Both incidents cost Thompson his job with the Transportation Security Administration. He worked for eight years with the federal agency that provides security to the nation’s airports.
According to court documents in the federal case:
Thompson was leaving a bar in his Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and “punched or shoved” an 82-year-old Somali man without provocation. The man nearly fell.
“You Muslims, go back to your country,” witnesses reported Thompson as saying, along with, “You Somali, go back to your country.”
The defense acknowledged that Thompson was embarrassed and sorry for the assault, but also noted that the defendant was frustrated by trouble that Somali youth had been causing in his neighborhood.
The defense pointed out that Thompson and others were subjected to threats, assaults, robberies and indecent exposure from Somali youth.
(CNN) – The man accused of killing 77 people in a terrorist rampage that shook Norway last summer is insane and cannot be sentenced to prison or preventive detention, but can be confined to a mental hospital for the rest of his life, police said Tuesday.
Anders Behring Breivik suffers “grandiose delusions” and “believes he is chosen to decide who is to live and who is to die,” Prosecutor Svein Holden announced.
Police said psychiatrists had determined that the 32-year-old man was psychotic at the time of the attacks and during 13 interviews experts conducted with him afterward. The doctors also found him to be paranoid and schizophrenic, police said.
The experts reached their conclusions after 36 hours of interviews with Breivik, police said.
The extension of Breivik’s confinement under a compulsory mental health care order will be reviewed by a court every three years, police said. The court will consider whether he still represents a danger to society.
Breivik had not been told of the psychiatrists’ findings, police said. His lawyers were expected to relay the news.
The decision underscores the difference between the justice system in the United States and that in Norway, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
“In the United States, it is extremely difficult to establish successfully an insanity defense,” he told CNN in a telephone interview. “You can be paranoid, yet still able to control your behavior and be legally responsible.”
In cases like the mass killing in Norway, “there tends to be a tremendous amount of pressure from the public and maybe politicians as well to lock someone away for as long as possible, and bring justice to the victims,” Fox said.
Breivik is accused of killing eight people in Oslo and 69 who were among 700 mostly young people attending a Labour Party youth camp on nearby Utoya Island.
He has pleaded not guilty but admits carrying out the attacks, the judge handling his case has said.
Breivik is described by authorities as a right-wing Christian extremist. A 1,500-page manifesto attributed to Breivik posted on the Internet is critical of Muslim immigration and European liberalism, including the Labour Party.
The manifesto predicts that a “European civil war” will lead to the execution of “cultural Marxists” and the banishment of Muslims.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said in the aftermath of the attacks that his country had been fundamentally changed, but vowed that Norway would remain “an open society.”
Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang said Norwegians would respond to the violence with equally powerful weapons: “We’re going to punish him with democracy and love,” he told CNN shortly after the killings.
Still, memories of the slaughter on the island, where many of the campers survived by hiding behind rocks, remained acute on Tuesday.
“I will always have mixed feelings when I go back, of course,” Labour Party member Eskil Pedersen told a reporter. “I think about the 22nd of July and the dreadful things that happened that day, but I have been here every year and every summer since 2000. A lot of my time as a youth has been here on this island. I have very many good memories as well.”
He said a memorial will be built there. “Our aim is to reclaim Utoya, take it back as an island, have activities, have a summer camp here,” he said.
Relatives of some of the victims expressed disappointment at the decision on Breivik, a journalist from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. told CNN. “They have looked forward to seeing him getting a sentence for the rest of his life for the acts he has committed,” correspondent Tomm Kristiansen said.
Public reaction is mixed, said journalist Olav Mellingsaeter. Most people are surprised, not angered, by the findings, he said.
“We must trust that the psychiatrists have done a thorough job,” a 30-year-old student told the reporter.
A 36-year-old woman said, “As long as he does not escape, I do not care where he’s kept.”
At his trial in April, Breivik will have the opportunity to present evidence, police said.
He has been in custody since his arrest on Utoya Island on the day of the killings, which marked the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II.
In today’s Muslim threat news: Some New York cabbies are Muslims! And they pray, to their Muslim god! And when they do, they illegally double-part their taxicabs on the street, because Muslims “obey religious laws over parking rules.”
That salacious headline comes via DNAInfo, a normally reliable local New York news site. Apparently, a mosque on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is popular with cab drivers. During prayers, they “double- and triple-park outside the house of prayer, forcing northbound traffic…to veer into the oncoming traffic lane.” The mosque’s neighbors—including Donald Trump, who owns four nearby towers—don’t like that, so naturally they complain to the police about it: “311 records show at least nine complaints this year about illegal parking at that intersection.”
Nine complaints! In just one year? It’s a full-blown scandal.
If you live in New York, anywhere, you spend an average of 15 minutes per day mad about some asshole double-parking somewhere. The fact that some Muslim cab drivers double-park to pray doesn’t mean they “flout the rules of the road in order to observe the rules of their religion.” It means they flout the rules of the road because, like everyone else who drives an automobile in Manhattan, they are asshole drivers.
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.
Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson Inquiry that he received threatening phone calls, text messages and emails after he leaked his outspoken resignation letter to the Guardian newspaper.
Mr Peppiatt said the messages included, “We’re doing a kiss and tell on you”, “You’re a marked man until the day you die”, and “RD will get ya” – a reference, he suggested, to Express Newspapers owner Richard Desmond.
“It worried me enough to get my girlfriend to move out for a couple of days because I didn’t know at the time where it was coming from and the frequency, all through the night, got me thinking for her safety it’s best that she lets this cool off,” he told the inquiry.
The journalist said he was also emailed details of a voicemail left on his phone by a friend cancelling an arrangement to see Arsenal play Barcelona after the message was apparently deleted.
“I see no way that the information could have been known unless my voicemail had been accessed,” he said in a witness statement.
Mr Peppiatt, who worked as a full-time freelance journalist for the Daily Star for two years, claimed that editorial decisions at the paper were “dictated more from the accounts and advertising departments than the newsroom floor”.
Giving an example, he told the inquiry: “I did a feature about M&S skinny pants and it was because they were trying to get an advertising contract with M&S.
“There was no journalistic merit in this – it involved me posing for pictures in my pants.”
He also said public relations had a “huge influence” on journalism.
“In two years I went on four free holidays from PR companies in order to give their stories an extra push,” he said.
“I was not alone in this, and certainly the higher up the chain you were, the greater the incentives that may be offered.”
Mr Peppiatt claimed that the Daily Star shaped stories to fit its “ideological perspective” and that quotes and details of articles were regularly made up.
He read out a series of misleading headlines run by the paper, including “TV King Cowell Is ‘Dead”‘, “Chile Mine To Open As Theme Park”, “Angelina Jolie To Play Susan Boyle In Film” and “Bubbles To Give Evidence At Jacko Trial”.
The reporter said he did not think newspaper regulator the Press Complaints Commission – from which Mr Desmond withdrew in January – was “held in esteem” at the Daily Star.
Mr Peppiatt said the Daily Star “did not really use” private detectives, adding: “I don’t think that was some sort of ethical decision as much as a financial one.
“Their budget is significantly smaller than some of their rivals, and often they are quite happy just to follow up other people’s news rather than be too bothered about actually getting genuine exclusives themselves.”
Geller decided to incite some festive hate with this post on Monday, in which she repeats her accusations that the US meat industry does not separate halal from non-halal meat, and accuses popular turkey supplier Butterball of sneaking birds prepared according to Muslim requirements onto non-Muslim tables.
Geller claims halal slaughter methods are “torturous and painful” for the turkeys, and an assault on everyone else’s freedom to have them killed in whichever way they choose:
“Across this great country, on Thanksgiving tables nationwide, infidel Americans are unwittingly going to be serving halal turkeys to their families this Thursday. Turkeys that are halal certified — who wants that, especially on a day on which we are giving thanks to G-d [sic] for our freedom? I wouldn’t knowingly buy a halal turkey — would you? Halal turkey, slaughtered according to the rules of Islamic law, is just the opposite of what Thanksgiving represents: freedom and inclusiveness, neither of which are allowed for under that same Islamic law.”
Geller is calling on those who agree with her to boycott Butterball’s “stealth halal turkeys” and write to the company to register their disapproval.
Those who don’t have been responding to Geller’s arguments in the comments section of her website.
Her readers’ ripostes range from the factual – ‘Gothelittle’ points out the similarity of halal slaughter methods to kosher ones, and the arguable benefits of both compared to non-religious mass meat production – to the pragmatic, courtesy of ‘JonathanMurray’:
“If someone was actually concerned about this silliness, they’d need to know *before* it was time to start thawing that frozen bird. Four days in the fridge… today is three days before Thanksgiving. Dumb.”
Meanwhile, Adam Serwer of Mother Jones points out that if all Butterball turkeys are indeed certified halal, it’s presumably because meat sellers are responding to market demand:
You might even be tempted to observe that Muslim Americans marking a secular, American holiday celebrating pluralism and freedom from religious persecution might be a sign of the extent to which American Muslims have assimilated into American culture. What you didn’t know was that when markets respond to the demands of Muslim consumers, freedom dies.
And Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim expresses her surprise that halal turkeys are apparently so freely available, having struggled to find them in previous years – and invites Geller to come and share a kosher turkey with her and her family this Thanksgiving.
Those halal turkeys must be stealthier than even Geller could imagine.
Project co-sponsored by they Muslims Against Hunger Project, Rutgers University Shalom-Salaam, and the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
On Sunday morning, the kitchen of the Muslim Foundation Inc. Mosque in Somerset was filled with good smells and friendly conversation as a group of volunteers prepared 350 meals for homeless folks in New York and New Jersey.
The event was part of a larger “Weekend of Twinning,” held from Nov. 18 – 20.
The purpose of the weekend is to facilitate events between Muslim and Jewish people to promote greater understanding and community between the two, according to Walter Ruby of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
According to a release from Muslims Against Hunger, more than 125 events are being held around the world as part of the Weekend of Twinning.
“Each Jew and each Muslim is obligated to help those most in need,” Ruby said.
Adult and student volunteers, as well as a group from Rutgers University prepared tandoori chicken, rice pilaf, salad, vegetables and fruit. A kosher and vegetarian option of chickpea salad was also prepared, as well as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Zamir Hassan, founder of the Muslims Against Hunger Project said about 100 meals would be taken to a shelter in Basking Ridge, while another 150 would be taken to Manhattan, where they would be handed out to homeless on the street.
Ruby said the group planned to visit 53rd St. and Lexington Ave. in New York, a spot where many homeless people congregate.
An Orthodox Jewish outreach group called “Masbiah” would be meeting them in New York to assist in handing out the meals, he said.
Additionally, the volunteers held an interfaith luncheon and prayer service following the morning preparation.
Marshal Anjum, 26, of Shalom-Salaam, a Muslim and Jewish student organization at Rutgers University said the group is working to build bridges between the Jewish and Muslim communities.
“We thought community service was a great way to go about it,” she said.
Chicago – Roy Egan, an O’Hare Airport baggage handler who allegedly spewed racist and bigoted rants against Muslims, African Americans, Latinos and homosexuals on his Facebook page has been fired, according to the Chicago Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR said Egan had worked at the airport for nine years, was suspended in October and terminated this month.
Egan used his Facebook page, where he openly identified himself as a TSA officer, to post comments such as: “FILTHY MUSLIM,” Muslims “need to be exterminated”, “BURN ISLAM”, “Islam, a cult that glorifies death,” and ”Does anything at all make you smile more than a Muslim burning by his own hateful hand.”
He also posted remarks about President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Attorney General Eric Holder.
CAIR-Chicago representatives met with Transportation Security Administration leadership in Chicago three weeks ago to voice the concerns of the Muslim community about the incident and to ask that more be done to prevent future incidents from happening.
“We made it clear that Egan’s discourse was as much an embarrassment to the agency and the values it stands for, as it was an affront against Muslims and other minorities,”
“By the end of the meeting, we felt convinced that the TSA leadership takes such violations of its code of conduct very seriously and that they genuinely set out to do their utmost to ensure that all constituents are treated with fairness and respect.”
“The TSA works hard everyday to keep Americans safe,” Amina Sharif, TSA communications coordinator said in the release. “When such egregious behavior is flagged on the part of one of their agents, it breeds confidence in us as passengers that it is dealt with as swiftly and as seriously as it was in the case of Roy Egan.”
Egan was in violation of the TSA code of conduct which stipulates that its employees — on or off duty — behave in a manner that avoids causing the public to raise questions about their judgment and ability to enforce the mission of the agency, the release said.
… Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim, either in your cabinet or as a federal judge?
Cain: “No, I would not. And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there is this attempted to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government. … The question that was asked that ‘raised some questions’ and, as my grandfather said, ‘I does not care, I feel the way I feel.’ …
“I immediately said, without thinking, ‘No, I would not be comfortable.’ I did not say that I would not have [Muslims] in my cabinet. If you look at my career, I have hired good people regardless of race, religion, sex gender, orientation and this kind of thing.”
BECK: So wait a minute. Are you saying that Muslims have to prove their, that there has to be some loyalty proof?
CAIN: Yes, to the Constitution of the United States of America.
BECK: Would you do that to a Catholic or would you do that to a Mormon?
CAIN: Nope, I wouldn’t. Because there is a greater dangerous part of the Muslim faith than there is in these other religions. I know that there are some Muslims who talk about, “but we are a peaceful religion.” And I’m sure that there are some peace-loving Muslims.
On Wednesday, Cain met with four Muslim leaders in Sterling, Va. He said in a statement later he was “truly sorry” for comments that may have “betrayed” his commitment to the Constitution and the religious freedom it guarantees.
He also acknowledged that Muslims, “like all Americans,” have the right to practice freely their faith and that most Muslim Americans are peaceful and patriotic.
CAIN: Call me crazy. … Some people would infuse Sharia Law in our courts system if we allow it. I honestly believe that. So even if he calls me crazy, I am going to make sure that they don’t infuse it little by little by little. … American laws in American courts, period.
AMANPOUR: American laws are in American courts. So the people of this country should be safe for the moment.
Now Cain gives us another quote for November:
I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views
I wonder who it was who told you. Maybe, Zuhdi Jasser, who was a star witness in the Peter King Trials?
Herman Cain said that he believes a majority of American Muslims share extremist views in an interview published on Monday.
In an interview that included a few eyebrow-raising comments, Cain’s exchange about American Muslims may get the most attention.
“I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” Cain said in an interview with GQ.
Asked if he thought this individual — whom Cain would only identify as “a very prominent voice in the Muslim community” — was right, Cain said that although he found it hard to believe, ultimately he trusted his adviser.
“Yes, because of the respect that I have for this individual. Because when he told me this, he said he wouldn’t want to be quoted or identified as having said that,” Cain said.
In March, Cain made waves when he said that if he were elected, he would not feel “comfortable” in appointing Muslims to his Cabinet.
The interview — which included questions from GQ‘s food critic — also touched on some of the culinary themes that have permeated the Republican nominating contest. Cain famously described himself as not the flavor of the week or month after his rise to the top of the polls, joking that instead he was Häagen-Dazs’s black walnut, a flavor that “tastes good all the time.”
The GQ writers challenged Cain to assign flavors to his competitors and Cain obliged, labeling Mitt Romney plain vanilla and Texas Gov. Rick Perry rocky road. He was then asked what flavor Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) would be:
“Michele Bachmann … I’m not going to say it. I’m not going to say it,” Cain said.
But pressed by his interviewers, Cain relented, saying that Bachmann would be “tutti-frutti.”
“I know I’m going to get in trouble,” Cain said.
The interview was conducted at Capitol Hill pizzeria Seventh Hill, and Cain — the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza — was asked what he could tell about a man from the toppings he ordered.
“The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is,” Cain responded. Pressed, he laughingly elaborated that “the more manly man is not afraid of abundance” and that a pizza piled high with vegetables was “a sissy pizza.”
The GQ comments were the latest in a string of questionable jokes and comments that might have derailed other candidates. Cain acknowledged as much, asking the GQ writers, “That probably wasn’t politically correct, was it?” at the conclusion of the interview.
At last week’s Republican presidential debate, Cain referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as “Princess Nancy,” but walked back the name almost immediately after the debate.
So far, Cain’s candid remarks and allegations of sexual harassment that have surfaced in recent weeks have done little to ding his popularity. A pair of polls released Monday from NBC and Battleground both show Cain still leading the Republican field.
It turns out, when Herman Cain said the majority of Muslim Americans hold extremist views, he didn’t mean “Americans” as in Americans. Not at all. What he really meant, his campaign spokesman has clarified, was Muslims from some other country.
Cain just shut up!
Update II: We just can’t keep up with Herman Cain’s fails; check out the latest:
The parents of a 17-year-old Indiana high school student say the constant bullying their son suffered due to his Middle Eastern ethnicity culminated in a beating that injured his brain, and are suing the school district for failing to intervene as his physical and verbal abuse escalated.
“The principal [Robert McDermott] turned a blind eye to the repeated bullying and harassment of this student,” the Haddad family’s attorney Kenneth Allen said in a press conference Monday. “The principal was notified on several occasions of the situation, but did nothing. Inaction by those in charge in the face of injustice cannot be tolerated.”
In January, the teen’s parents say a group of boys showed up at the family’s home in St. John, Ind. and tried to lure Haddad outside to beat him up, prompting his parents to inform the school of their concerns, which they say only escalated the problem, NBC reports. Hind Haddad said her son quit the football and baseball teams in part due to harassment, but the bullying only intensified.
The district’s Superintendent Larry Veracco is named in the lawsuit, along with School Board President George Baranowski, Principal Robert McDermott, and Assistant Principal Sean Beasley Jr., according to the Sun-Times. Several students are also named in the assault.
The Haddad family is seeking monetary compensation for their son’s injuries and have accused the school of violating his civil rights and failing to intervene, the Northwest Indiana Times reports. They filed a temporary restraining order Monday to prevent the video surveillance of the beating and prior complaints they had filed from being tampered with or altered. The students accused are junior and senior football and baseball players, Allen told the Times.
The Haddad family say their son’s injuries were severe, but the school failed to provide him medical treatment or call the police. Allen told the Times that none of the students involved in the beating were disciplined, but that David Haddad was suspended for 10 days for throwing one defensive punch while trying to get off the floor.
Haddad’s mother Hind says she’s afraid to send her son back to school.
“This is a parent’s nightmare, when they call you to tell you your son has been beaten up,” Hind Haddad told the Times. “It’s unbelievable.”
Richard Dawkins, well known biologist and pop-atheist-guru (add goofball) recently brought up the question of whether or not atheists should support Christian missions in Africa. (hat tip: Rob)
He believes the answer is “still no,” (he doesn’t say why) but since Islam according to him is an “unmitigated evil” and atheism is not going to be making any inroads into Africa anytime soon it is a question worth “raising.”
July of 2011: Here’s the comment he left on a thread that discussed sexism. It isn’t cute, reasoned critique of religion anymore, just plain vile:
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
Dawkins is at again. This time he cannot understand why young, white British women are converting to Islam, so the urge to comment on the article published in The Independent, “Women & Islam: The rise and rise of the convert”, was hard to resist:
“Whenever I read an article like this, I end up shaking my head in bafflement. Why would anyone want to CONVERT to Islam? I can see why, having been born into it, you might be reluctant to leave, perhaps when you reflect on the penalty for doing to. But for a woman (especially a woman) voluntarily to JOIN such a revolting and misogynistic institution when she doesn’t have to always suggests to me massive stupidity.”
In Dawkins’ asinine mind, he wonders why would anyone, especially women, join this “revolting and misogynistic institution.” Due to his lack of in depth research regarding women and Islam, it suggest to me massive stupidity on his end. Due to this orientalist outlook on Islam and it’s treatment of women as only being inclusive to the religion, you are moving up in ranks for your anti-Islamic rhetoric.
ThinkProgress filed this report from the “Preserving Freedom Conference” in Nashville, TN.
State representative Rick Womick (R-TN) has made no secret of his anti-Muslim views. A New York Times article from July described Womick on the statehouse floor, warning his constuents that Islamic law was the most urgent threat to their way of life. But in an interview on the sidelines of the “Preserving Freedom Conference” at the Cornerstone Church in Madison, TN, Womick went to new extremes to paint Muslim Americans as dangerous and seditious.
In the interview, which took place on Veterans Day, Womick told ThinkProgress that “I don’t trust one Muslim in our military” and “if they truly are a devout Muslims, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.” When asked if Muslims should be forced out of the military, Womick responded “Absolutely, yeah.” Read the exchange:
FANG: What about the thousands of Muslims that are still in the military that are veterans, that are translators, that are active personnel. Is there some sort of policy solution that you’re advocating? […]
WOMICK: Personally, I don’t trust one Muslim in our military because they’re commanded to lie to us through the term called Taqiyya. And if they truly are a devout Muslim, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.
Do they really have to use a dead pig, four pig heads and 120 liters of pig’s blood to make a statement? Are there any other mediums to get your message across? Maybe having a meeting and discussing things over like fashionable citizens? Just a suggestion you know. Instead of the abuse and misuse of dead animals.
A dead pig and four pig heads have been found buried on the site of a future mosque in an anonymous anti-Islam attack, police say.
The attackers sent anonymous letters to the media in the region near the mosque site in the town of Grenchen in canton Solothurn.
In the letter they said they had also poured 120 litres of pig’s blood on the ground, saying it was a test of Muslim faith whether the mosque would be built on the land afterwards.
The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland said it “condemned the profanation of the site of a future mosque”, adding: “With this act, a line has been cross and Islamophobia has attained a new level.”
Grenchen mayor Boris Banga described the attack as “horrible and abominable”.
Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller have had a lot to say about the Occupy movement, except when a group they wholeheartedly support were planning to attack peaceful protesters.
Anti-Muslim demagogues Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have expressed their unqualified support for the fascist English Defence League on many occasions, despite the EDL’s frequently violent demonstrations and the presence of many outright neo-Nazis among their ranks.
This is the kind of thuggish, violent bigotry Geller and Spencer are working to bring to America.
Police arrested 179 members of the English Defence League after reports of repeated threats to attack Occupy protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Armistice Day.
Scotland Yard said they believed a breach of the peace was about to take place after they got intelligence that the EDL were planning the Armistice Day attack. The law states officers can arrest if they believe the breach of the peace to be “imminent.” …
The English Defence League had issued statements and made threats on Facebook to burn down protesters tents if they were still outside St Paul’s on Remembrance Sunday, according to Phillips.
Some members of the EDL had also attempted to enter the encampment, most recently on Thursday night.
A statement by the EDL on Thursday was read to the Occupy LSX general assembly on Friday morning to make people aware that there was a threat being made. “They called us all sorts of names in the statement and said we should leave “their” church and stop violating their religion,” said Phillips.
If you are a Muslim or have an Arabic sounding name and have been elected to public office or appointed to advise a government official, then be prepared to have your name smeared by the far right-wing.
For example, Rep. Keith Ellison’s victory as the first Muslim elected to Congress is routinely used by the right-wing as evidence of the “Muslim Brotherhood” agenda to subvert and “Islamicize America.” Who can forget the widely-lampooned exchange between Rep. Ellison and Glenn Beck asking the congressman to “prove that he is not working with the enemy?”
Even if you are not yourself a Muslim, but are the son of a Muslim, you are not immune. The President of the United States is a practicing Christian, but one born to a Muslim father. That was enough for the far-right hacks to dish the same Islamophobic whack job on Barack Obama, i.e: accusing him of being a terrorist-sympathizer and a secret Muslim hell bent on destroying the United States through “stealth Jihad.”
Such conspiracy theories have now reared their ugly head in Illinois. A blogger by the name of Warner Todd Huston takes issue with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s appointment of Safaa Zarzour to the Illinois Muslim American Advisory Council.
After mocking the formation of the council, Huston goes on to write:
Among those appointed by the Governor to this board is ISNA Secretary-General Safaa Zarzour, a man who has been linked to organizations that fund Islamist terrorism.
Zarzour is known as a supporter and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group well known for pushing extremist Islamism and for funding terror throughout the world…Why has our governor appointed a terror supporter to a state board of advisors?
What evidence does Huston provide to support the quite serious claim that Zarzour is a “known supporter and member of the Muslim Brotherhood” or that he is a “terrorist supporter?” Zero. Not a quote, not a video, nothing but innuendo and poorly connected guilt by association smears.
Such lies and indulgences in conspiracy theory are especially egregious when one considers who Safaa Zarzour really is and what he stands for. He is the perfect example of a civically engaged citizen: an elected official, a prominent interfaith leader, an educator and an advocate for civil rights.
Safaa Zarzour at a Northwestern University panel with Cardinal Francis George and Michael Kotzin, VP of the Jewish Federation
There isn’t exactly a ton of Muslim elected officials in Illinois, but Safaa Zarzour happens to be one: he was elected as a trustee of the Bridgeview Public Library several times, each time with an emphatic victory margin. In fact, he is twice elected, having also been chosen by voters as the Commissioner of the Bridgeview Park District where he currently serves.
Throughout his career, Zarzour has made a reputable name for himself as a civic leader in Chicago, a national interfaith leader, and a trailblazing educator having served as a High School principal for many years.
Mr. Zarzour’s civic and educational work has been featured in many media including 60 Minutes, PBS Front Line, Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and many others. Mr. Zarzour has received several honors and awards for his public service.
It goes to show the extreme cluelessness of the far-right hate bloggers that they see fit to question the credentials of such an established name, one who is the recipient of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations’ 2009 Outstanding Service Award, handed to him by Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley at a prominent ceremony.
But Warner Todd Huston’s shoddy attempt to fear-monger about a Muslim adviser to Gov. Quinn comes as less of a surprise when one considers Huston’s own, very real and problematic associations and beliefs.
Anti-Muslim Right-Wing Blogger Warner Todd Huston
Huston is part of the nefarious Islamophobic network of bloggers that includes the likes of the far right loon Pamela Geller. Geller is the co-founder of SIOA, an organization labeled by the SPLC as an anti-Muslim hate group. One of its co-founders, John Jay has openly called for the annihilation of Muslims. Geller’s work was also cited by the anti-Muslim/anti-Left Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik as inspiration in his terrorist manifesto. A simple glance at Geller’s beliefs and activism reveals a radicalism that has earned her the appellation of The Looniest Blogger Ever.
Huston’s blog, Publius Forum has been featured on various far-right vitriolic hate sites with extreme and radical leanings, such as: Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CandaFreePress.com, RightPundits.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, Human Events Magazine, American Daily Review, etc.
Huston’s bias against the enfranchisement of qualified American Muslims like Safaa Zarzour are even less of a surprise when you consider that he has called for the “criminalization of Islam” (Wikiquote). In an article titled, “Making Islam Illegal—Is it the only Choice,” Huston goes on to answer his own question by writing,
The best course of action is to make public displays of Islam and certain of its practices illegal in Western nations.
He goes on to compare Islam to the KKK and calls for the USA to put Islam “down” by not affording it the status of being a religion, a regular meme amongst Islamophobes and their fascist counterparts in Europe such as Geert Wilders.
What is evident is that Safaa Zarzour and Warner Todd Huston are polar opposites. While Zarzour works in the interfaith world, contributes to society, stands up for civil rights and is the epitome of moderation, Warner Todd Huston represents those anti-Freedom voices who seek to sow discord amongst different faiths and undermine one of our most cherished freedoms: the freedom of religion. The notion that an extremist hatemonger would call for the marginalization of an award-winning and established community builder is testimony to the self-delusional farcical worldview of Islamophobes and of how little respect they have for the intelligence of the public and elected officials alike whom they hope to scare into compliance.
If anything Governor Quinn should be lauded as a role model of American integrity and inclusiveness and emulated from coast to coast. It is only by standing up for what’s right, that the cowardly forces of hate, divisiveness, and fear-mongering can be duly undermined.
Paris – A mosque in eastern France was damaged after unknown attackers set fire to the building using a burning rubbish bin early Thursday, France 3 television reported.
The head of the mosque in Montbeliard, located about 170 kilometres south of Strasbourg, near the German border, discovered the fire when he arrived to open the building for morning prayers, the report said.
One wall was badly damaged. The attack on the mosque is the second in a month, according to France 3.
A group calling itself Les Echappees Belles (The Lucky Escapes) claimed responsibility for the incident in tracts left near the mosque. The group – believed to be a group of women loosely influenced by right-wing extremists, according to France 3 – had claimed responsibility for setting fire to the mosque’s van in October.
Police were investigating the incident.
Muslim groups say the number of attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions is on the increase.
The Collective Against Islamophobia in France recorded 188 Islamophobic acts in 2010, mostly against institutions such as mosques.
Carla Lewis had never been in a mosque before and she wasn’t sure what to expect.
“Because I’m a Christian, and you hear all this propaganda that if you’re not Muslim, you’re their enemy,” she said.
Still, she entered, a little confused for a moment about where to go and how to behave until someone showed up to assist her.
“Are you here for the clinic? Let me show you the way,” someone offered.
Lewis, a 47-year-old truck driver, said her private health insurance lapsed in April after she took a leave of absence to care for her ill child. She needed a physical exam before returning to work, so a flier in the library piqued her interest.
It was advertising a free medical clinic at the Islamic Center of Tucson.
“I came and found it was not what I thought,” Lewis said. “People were very friendly and professional and welcoming.”
When organizers first conceived of the clinic, they hoped to reach people who, like Lewis, never had direct experience with Tucson’s Islamic community.
The clinic was the brainchild of Yahya Nomaan, 20, a pre-med student at the University of Arizona and the son of a pediatrician.
With hostile rhetoric about Islam growing to a crescendo in recent years over the building of mosques in communities from New York to California, Nomaan saw the need to highlight the contributions of Muslim Americans.
“You go to any hospital, you have a Doctor Khan, you have a Doctor Hassan,” he said. “Clearly medicine is our forte.”
So Nomaan and his father, Dr. Mohammed Nomaan, decided to start a free monthly medical clinic. The Islamic Center of Tucson offered its space, and local doctors from the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America volunteered to staff it.
During a recent clinic, the younger Nomaan and other volunteers circled the brightly lighted waiting area, taking vital signs and making small talk with patients.
Maryam Tanbal – an earnest 17-year-old with a disarming smile – greeted patients and gave them the requisite paperwork.
She said sometimes people seem a little hesitant when they first arrive because they’re unsure how to behave in a mosque. They wonder if they need to take their shoes off, for example.
She assures them that while shoes should not be worn in the rooms where prayers are held, the clinic is located in a separate area, and patients should keep their shoes on.
October marked the sixth clinic at the Islamic Center, and the younger Nomaan said the operation goes smoother each time. In the past, tiny glitches have arisen – one of the rooms in the mosque was locked, or a blood pressure cuff broke.
“Today was the first clinic with no hiccups,” Nomaan said. “We have God to praise for that.”
If you go
• Clinic location: Islamic Center of Tucson, 901 E. First St.
• When: Last Saturday of every month, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Contact: 329-1428
• Cost: Free
• Appointments: Recommended but not required
Anissa Tanweer is a University of Arizona student who is an apprentice at the Star. Contact her at starapprentice@azstarnet.com or 573-4117.
The cemetery dates from the 12th century and is the resting place of several Sufi saints (AFP, Ahmad Gharabli)
The “Price Tag” vandals attack again.
Early in October they vandalized a mosque by setting it on fire. And also, last year around the same time, Safed, a small town in Israel had grafiti that the “Price Tag” vandals are known for:
In a city park next to a college building on a recent afternoon, “Death to Arabs” was scrawled on a gatepost. The park is a hangout for the Arab students, who were scattered on benches during a break between classes.
Let us imagine if these “Price Tag” vandals were Muslims. They would be considered a terrorist group threatening the state of Israel’s existence. Spencer and Geller would make claims that they are here in America terrorizing our citizens daily.
This time around, the vandals thought to ante up their game and vandalize a Muslim cemetery instead.
JERUSALEM — Racist slogans were sprayed over gravestones in an old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, site of a dispute between Palestinians and supporters of a museum being built alongside, police said on Thursday.
An AFP photographer, who arrived at the cemetery in the city centre, said he saw graffiti on 15 tombs reading “price tag” and “death to the Arabs.”
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that “the slogans were painted several weeks ago” and had not yet been erased by municipal authorities.
Hardline Jewish settlers have adopted what they call a “price tag” policy — a euphemism for revenge attacks against Palestinians and their property following Israeli government measures against settlements.
In recent months, the scope of such attacks has broadened, with vandals targeting Israeli army vehicles, mosques and cemeteries inside Israel and Israeli anti-settlement activists.
On Wednesday, police said they had arrested a suspect in a graffiti attack and bomb hoax at the Jerusalem offices of Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now on Sunday, in which a wall was daubed with the words “price tag”.
In the Jerusalem cemetery dispute, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, is building what is termed a “Museum of Tolerance” alongside the disused graveyard.
The project has sparked controversy because it is being built on land belonging to the Ma’man Allah cemetery, commonly called Mamilla, which dates from the 12th century and is the resting place of several Sufi saints.
Descendants of those interred in the west Jerusalem cemetery say it also houses the remains of soldiers and officials of legendary Muslim ruler Saladin.
Texas is on a roll these days. It wasn’t too long ago that the right-wing nut in Texas Crockett Keller, who is certified to teach people to obtain and use a concealed gun, said the following in an ad:
If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame; I am Crockett Keller, thank you and God bless America.
The Texas Dept. of Public Safety will not revoke or suspend the license of a handgun instructor…
Now Texas creates this racist poster. Will Texas come down hard on the people who created the poster or in the end will they pretend like nothing happened?
New York, NY: IAAB’s 2011 Student Summit, held this past weekend in Washington, DC, included representatives from 42 universities nationwide and in Europe. Given the news on Friday afternoon of the “Let’s Play Cowboys and IRANIANS!” poster in a restaurant in Katy, Texas, the workshop on Media Representation focused on this issue. Summit participants discussed the history of such racist representations of communities of color in the United States. Students issued the following statement to condemn the poster’s display:
Iranian Alliances Across Borders’ (IAAB) 2011 Student Summit addressed the current state of the Iranian American diaspora community. Over 70 Iranian American student leaders from 42 universities around the nation and abroad expressed outrage over the bigoted content of the 1979 poster titled “Let’s play cowboys and IRANIANS!” displayed in John Nonmacher’s restaurant in Katy, Texas. This image displays a group of gun wielding cowboys under an American Flag, proudly encircling a lynched Iranian man. In Nonmacher’s words, this poster is purely a historical artifact; however, the image recalls a time of high xenophobic animosity towards Iranian immigrants within the United States.
The IAAB Summit participants condemn both the violent image portrayed in the poster and its bigotry towards Iranians, as well as indigenous groups. Fundamental American values of tolerance, diversity, and respect for all human beings are not in accordance with the offensive nature displayed by the poster. We believe that the ideas represented in this incident are detrimental to civil society, especially at a time when democratic dialogue is critical to mitigating political tensions. We stand in solidarity with communities of color that have and continue to experience this kind of demonization. We firmly believe that the propagation of such hostile ideas should not exist within any society.
Signed by students from the following 42 universities:
Bentley University, Boston College, Boston University, Bucknell University, College of William and Mary, Columbia University, Duke University, Emory University, Fairfield University, Fordham University- Lincoln Center, George Mason University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, INSEAD, New York University, Northern Virginia Community College, Oxford University, San Jose State University, Stanford University, Syracuse University, The Commonwealth Medical College, The George Washington University, The New School, Tufts University, University of Baltimore, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Central Florida, University of Connecticut, University of Illinois Springfield, University of Iowa, University of Maryland – College Park, University of Maryland – Baltimore County, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley College, Westminster College, Yale University
About Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) – IAAB is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization with a young, dedicated staff spread across the United States, Europe and Iran. The mission of the organization is to address issues of the Iranian diaspora community while raising awareness of the Iranian community, promoting leadership, and connecting Iranians across borders. For more information about IAAB, please visit www.iranianalliances.org.
The FBI wasn’t just wrong in teaching its agents that average Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress Tuesday. That bigoted Bureau training undermined the government’s efforts to stop the next terror attack.
The FBI briefings, given to Bureau counterterrorism agents at its academy in Quantico, were not only “flat-out wrong,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee. They “really have a negative impact on our ability to communicate effectively” with American Muslims on counterterrorism, civil rights and other issues.
An array of elected and appointed government leaders have denounced the FBI training, since it was first revealed by Danger Room in September. Holder’s comments were the most strident — and highest-level — official condemnation yet. And it reinforces a key point that critics of the Islamophobic briefings have made all along: that tarring “mainstream” Muslims as “radical” and “violent” only helps the real terrorists evade their government pursuers.
That kind of training, Holder insisted, was “inconsistent with what we have been trying to do here at the Department. Those views do not reflect those views of the Justice Department [and] the FBI.”
Without using his name, Holder also rebuked FBI counterterrorism analyst William Gawthrop, who conducted the training at Quantico and in New York. Gawthrop, as Danger Room has extensively reported, likened Islam to the Death Star and said al-Qaida was “irrelevant” compared to the threat of Islam itself. Holder told the panel: “We have distanced ourselves from that person and those statements.”
The statements, maybe. But not the person.
Nearly two months after Danger Room began its FBI expose, Gawthrop is still employed at the Bureau. He’s been put on a leash, prevented from teaching at Quantico or delivering freelance lectures — though the FBI says it won’t comment on what he teaches to veterans in his side gig at the online American Military University.
But Holder went further in his rebuke of the FBI training materials than did Bureau Director Robert Mueller. Last month, Mueller told a House panel that the instructions were “very unusual.” Holder, by contrast, said flatly that he hesitated to distinguish U.S. Muslims from non-Muslims. American Muslims are “American citizens who have the same desires as we have,” he said.
Holder’s argument echoes that of Texas Muslim leader Mohamed Elibiary, who received a September commendation from Mueller himself to recognize his partnership with the FBI on counterterrorism. The anti-Islam training “makes my job — and the FBI field offices’ jobs — much harder,” Elibiary told Danger Room recently.
Anti-gay sentiment in Africa is creating a new kind of refugee (Credit: Reuters/James Akena)
Can you imagine if they were fleeing because of the insidious and all encompassing horror of Sharia’? It would be international news and the Islamophobes would be all over it, their silence on the matter is quite telling. (Hat tip: Daniel Bartholomew)
As Uganda revives anti-gay legislation, gays seek haven in other countries
I first met Fred at a prayer service for gay men in an industrial part of Nairobi where even on a Sunday morning, the noise was deafening. The service was part biblical study and part support group. The other men who were worshipping with Fred in the dingy and cavernous room that day were Kenyans, but he was not.
Fred, a lanky Ugandan, became a refugee in December 2009 after he was brutally assaulted by a mob in Kampala for being gay.
Fred, who asked that his last name not be used, bought a one-way ticket to Nairobi days after the assault with the intention of never returning. “It’s OK to kill me,” he said. “People would be happy to see me dead, even some of my family.” I asked what he meant by OK, and he explained that no one would ever have to pay a price for his murder.
Within the last decade, rancorous anti-gay rhetoric has infiltrated public discourse in many African countries. Just last week, the Ugandan parliament revived a proposal to legalize capital punishment for people who engage in homosexual acts. This is new for Africa. In the past, homosexuality was rarely brought up privately let alone in the public sphere. The new acrimonious tone against homosexuality espoused by politicians and religious leaders has percolated across all strata of African society including the media. It has also given rise to increasing homophobic and transphobic violence, which for a growing number of gay Africans has meant that life in their own countries has become untenable.
Fred’s journey from Uganda to Kenya followed the same logic as that of other Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) African refugees I spoke to. They move to urban centers in neighboring countries not necessarily because these places are any less hostile to homosexuals but for the anonymity that comes with being a newcomer in a densely populated area.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, went on record last May saying that anti-gay hate crimes are increasing around the world and now account for a high percentage of all reported hate crimes.
Homophobia is not necessarily a new attitude for most African societies. Being gay is a crime in 38 of the 54 countries in Africa. Many of these laws have been on the books since colonial times. But it’s a stretch to think, as some have claimed, that homophobia is simply a vestige of colonial times.
However, some pundits believe that the shift to a more sinister form of homophobia in many African countries over the last decade has its root in conservative religious indoctrination. Some reports suggest that U.S. evangelical groups have had a hand in creating the venomous anti-gay attitudes and violence that have swept over the continent and pushed gay Africans out of their countries.
“It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we saw Africans with the help of American conservative religious groups using this issue (homosexuality) as an organizing tool,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who has studied the U.S. evangelical influence on African societies.
Fred, who looks a decade or so younger than his 48 years, said that for most of his life he had guarded his sexuality with the utmost care for fear of social retribution and becoming estranged from loved ones. He lived his life relatively undisturbed until 2009 when the “Kill the Gays” bill, which sought to legalize capital punishment for homosexuality, was first introduced. Fred says it was during this time that he started to fear for his life.
His neighbors began to suspect he was gay and threatened to turn him in to authorities or to kill him themselves. On the night of his near fatal assault, he says, a large group of people from his neighborhood stood outside his bedroom quietly waiting to get the final proof they needed to confirm their suspicions. When they had heard enough, they broke his window and attacked him and his partner.
“People don’t leave their countries on a lark seeking more gay bars,” says Cary Alan Johnson, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. He adds that in places like Uganda it is because of an overwhelming sense of fear for their lives.
Kaoma says Uganda is unique only in that it has gotten more international attention. Other African countries continue to take steps to criminalize homosexuality. This, he says, will increase the flow of LGBT refugees if the international community doesn’t put pressure on these governments.
Also, because some gay African advocates have chosen to become more visible in their fight for equality, anti-gay factions have become more vehement. Some gay rights advocates have been driven into hiding.
Larry, a leading Kenyan gay rights advocate who now lives in Texas after being granted political asylum, was forced to relocate to Uganda in 2007 after he appeared on Kenyan national television as an openly gay man. “I left for Uganda because I needed to go undercover since there were multiple threats to my life.” He says he chose Uganda because of its proximity to Kenya and because he had friends there.
Neil Grungas, executive director of Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, a San Francisco-based organization assisting LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, says that while there is no way of knowing exactly how many LGBT African refugees there are, it is a growing problem. “We know that it’s an enormous issue in Africa because the continent has the most concentrated persecution against gay people,” he said in a phone interview.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. State Department do not track refugees who are displaced because of their sexual orientation. But even if those numbers existed, Duncan Breen, senior associate at Human Rights First, a D.C.- and New York City-based human rights organization, says the numbers would be grossly inaccurate given how many of these refugees might be afraid to reveal their sexuality.
But those working on refugee issues believe that the flow of LGBT refugees is on the rise. They point to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees issuing guidelines for working with LGBT refugees and providing sensitivity trainings to its field staff. Also this past summer, the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services funded the very first LGBT resource center, at Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, a Chicago-based organization that provides services to immigrants and refugees. Under the grant, the group is to come up with best practices for resettling LGBT refugees in the U.S.
Still, advocates and some U.S. politicians say the U.S. government should do more to expedite the resettlement process for refugees fleeing antigay persecution. In a February 2010 letter addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) urge Clinton to take decisive steps to protect LGBT refugees, who are targets of violence in the countries they have escaped from as well as the ones they’ve escaped to.
Danny Dyson, one of the first African refugees to be resettled in the United States because of the anti-gay persecution he faced in Uganda, went back and forth between Uganda and Kenya before his arrival in San Francisco. “It was a nightmare in Kenya,” he said. “At first I didn’t have any help, and I had to leave the refugee camp I went to because other refugees started harassing me for being gay.” Dyson finally found help with a U.S. nongovernmental refugee assistance group, which asked that it not be named because they feared recriminations for their work with LGBT refugees.
Dyson and Fred met in Kenya as refugees. Fred awaits a decision from the U.S. government on his application for resettlement. Having heard about Danny’s successful resettlement in America, he asked me, “Is it true there are lots of us there and I don’t have to hide?”
Naomi Abraham is a multimedia journalist in New York City. She reported from Kenya and Uganda as part of a project sponsored by the International Center for Journalists. The Ford Foundation provided funding for this story. More Naomi Abraham
In “Islamophobia,” Vanguard correspondent Adam Yamaguchi examines the rising tide of Islamophobia on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten years after 9/11, the fear of future attacks paired with the growing number of Muslims across Europe and America has given birth to an aggressive new network of anti-Muslim alarmists.
Watch the premiere of Vanguard’s “Islamophobia” on Monday, November 7, at 9/8c.
“Vanguard” is Current TV’s no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show’s correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world’s most important stories.
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday the Obama administration is striking all references to Islam from Justice Department training manuals, exaggerating a directive from federal officials to evaluate procedures for religious and cultural sensitivity.
Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, equated the effort to strike offensive references to Islam from material to removing suspicion of Islamic terrorism from department policy.
A conservative popular with tea party activists and evangelical conservatives, she later linked President Barack Obama with “4,400 American lives” lost in Iraq. However, the death toll in the 8-year-old war that began under President George W. Bush had already reached 4,229 when Obama was inaugurated in 2009. It now stands at no fewer than 4,481.
As she campaigned in Iowa, now the focus of her effort to win the Republican nomination, Bachmann accused the administration of making changes in training manuals under pressure from pro-Islam groups with terrorist links.
“And now Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she told about 75 Republican activists in an eastern Iowa hotel conference room.
The FBI has not removed Islam from training material, said an FBI official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity.
The FBI has been conducting a comprehensive review of its training materials after it was revealed that what officials termed an inaccurate description of Islam, one that linked the religion to terrorism, was being used in some of the bureau’s training programs. Last month, FBI officials said the agency was undertaking the review in light of an analyst’s criticism of Islam during a lecture last spring.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole said last week he had asked that all aspects of the department be broadly re-evaluated for “sensitivity for all peoples of faith” in its training efforts.
“Examples include the efforts of our law enforcement components to ensure that their interactions with the community – whether in responding to an attack on a mosque or arresting a suspect in a counter-terrorism investigation – convey a sense of basic respect to the rule of law and the rights of all who have made this nation their home,” Cole said.
In her remarks Friday, Bachmann broadly painted the effort as trying to remove the link between Islam and anti-American terrorism sponsored by radical Islamic extremists.
“And so now the White House has scrubbed all Islamic terms from the national counterterrorism strategy. The White House has removed all Islamic terms from the Pentagon’s report on the Fort Hood shooting. And now, Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she said.
The White House declined to respond to Bachmann’s criticism.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Bachmann said Obama’s foreign policies were worse than his economic ones and linked Obama to the war’s overall death toll as well as its cost.
“Under Barack Obama’s watch, we’ve expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives,” she said.
Bachmann is on the first leg of a three-day campaign trip to the leadoff caucus state.
___
Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.
Fox News is now actively concealing a link between an Alabama-based blogger repeatedly featured on the network as an expert and allegations of a domestic terrorist plot.
This morning on America’s Newsroom, Fox News ran an extensive report on yesterday’s arrest of four Georgia men accused of plotting an attack on federal employees and U.S. citizens using explosives, guns, and the biological toxin ricin. At the end of the segment, correspondent Jonathan Serrie pointed out that one of the defendants “allegedly cited the online novel Absolved, which discusses small groups of citizens attacking U.S. officials,” with the defendant allegedly “saying that the attacks would be based on events in that novel.”
Charging documents indeed state that accused plotter Frederick Thomas repeatedly cited as an inspiration the novel Absolved, in which underground militia fighters declare war on the federal government over gun control laws and same-sex marriage, leading to a second American revolution. But Fox’s report neglected to mention the allegedly inspirational novel’s author, who is no stranger to Fox viewers.
Indeed, the author, Mike Vanderboegh, has been mainstreamed by the network, which has repeatedly featured him as an expert on the ATF’s failed Operation Fast and Furious. Fox has identified Vanderboegh as an “online journalist” and an “authority on the Fast and Furious investigation,” and has consistently failed to acknowledge his extremist views, actions, and affiliations.
Watch:
Vanderboegh, a former member of the militia and Minuteman movements and now a leader of the “anti-government extremist group” the Three Percenters, which claims to represent the three percent of gun owners who “who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act” but will instead, “if forced by any would-be oppressor, … kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution.”
The complaint against Thomas details a similar scenario:
THOMAS described a scenario in which he felt would be the “line in the sand” that would result in the activation of militias. THOMAS believed that soon, during a protest action, a protestor would be shot. It is his opinion the militias would act and respond by openly attacking the police. He then openly discussed having complied what he called the “Bucket List” which is a list of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and members of the media he feels needed to be “taken out” to make the country right again.”
Vanderboegh has stated that “another civil war in this country is the last thing I want,”writing in the introduction to Absolved that the novel is “a cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF,” who “need to know how powerful” the “armed citizenry” “could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.”
Fox News has repeatedly presented Vanderboegh as a credible source. Their failure to mention his authorship of a novel that allegedly inspired a terrorist plot is telling.
UPDATE: In a subsequent report, Fox’s Serrie said that Absolved was written by “the former leader of an Alabama militia,” and briefly flashed an image of the book’s cover that showed Vanderboegh’s name. Serrie did not note Vanderboegh’s connection to Fox News.
(Reuters) – The owner of a large southwest Alabama car dealership derided as “Taliban Toyota” by a competitor has been awarded $7.5 million in damages after a jury trial for his slander claim.
Iranian-born Shawn Esfahani, owner of Eastern Shore Toyota in Daphne, Alabama, sought $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Bob Tyler Toyota, claiming employees at that Pensacola, Florida-based dealership falsely portrayed him as an Islamist militant to customers.
“The feeling I received in the courtroom for the truth to come out was worth a lot more than any money anybody can give me,” Esfahani told Reuters on Tuesday.
Esfahani’s lawsuit said that Bob Tyler sales manager Fred Kenner told at least one couple considering buying from Eastern Shore Toyota in 2009 that Esfahani was of Middle Eastern descent and was “helping fund the insurgents there and is also laundering money for them.”
Esfahani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, fled his native Iran in 1980 following the Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed Shah and swept Shi’ite Muslim clergy to power, his lawsuit said. He opened his car dealership in 2007.
The Taliban, by contrast, are hardline Islamists in the central Asian nations of Afghanistan and Pakistan who follow an austere interpretation of Islamic law.
A Bob Tyler salesman was accused of telling the same couple that Esfahani was from Iraq and calling him a “terrorist” who put soldiers including the salesman’s brother in harm’s way.
“(Esfahani) is funneling money back to his family and other terrorists. I have a brother over there and what you’re doing is helping kill my brother,” the salesman told the couple when he called them on the Eastern Shore sales floor, according to the suit.
The jury deliberated for three hours before awarding Esfahani $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages on Monday evening.
Bob Tyler’s attorney Jeffrey Ingram could not be reached for comment on Tuesday, and Tyler and Kenner both declined to comment on the verdict through a dealership spokesman.
Esfahani said the dollar amount awarded by the jury was irrelevant unless the case sets a precedent by which other business owners can seek recourse against tactics he considers “un-American.”
“This case didn’t take aim at just Mr. Tyler,” he said. “It was intended to address any other business that resorts to those kinds of actions to win at their game unfairly.”
Gaffney and McCarthy, who both are mentioned in CAP’s report as part of the influential “Islamophobia network,” make a series of unfounded allegations against CAP and the report.
McCarthy, the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has made no secret of his dislike for Muslims and progressives. His eagerness to create a grand-conspiracy between the two was on full display during the interview.
But Gaffney and McCarthy take a turn into uncharted, and wildly unsubstantiated, territory when they float the theory that the CAP report was, as Frank Gaffney declares, a product of “a red-green axis between George Soros’ friends and beneficiaries on the radical left like the Center for American Progress and the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood most notably.”
Listen here (Gaffney’s theory of a “red-green axis” starts at 3:45):
Gaffney, and his allies like Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, have been desperate to paint Fear, Inc. and CAP as a radical institution aligned with violent Islamists. But their attempts to make their fantasies a reality has resulted in some bizarre attempts at guilt-by-association.
Gaffney, McCarthy, and most critics of the report — Islamophobe Pamela Geller said the authors should “choke on their own vomit” — are eager to discredit CAP and the report’s authors using factually baseless attack and wildly speculative conspiracy theories. McCarthy responded to Gaffney’s “red-green axis” theory that, “the evidence [that radical Islamists and the Center for American Progress] cooperate is so strong, that the real question that the interesting quesiton is ‘why this happened’ not ‘whether it happened.’
Conveniently, neither McCarthy nor Gaffney provide any actual evidence of this bizarre theory. But the report does show plenty of evidence of their hostility toward American Muslims. In 2009, Gaffney announced there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims but may actually be one himself” and, after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) banned Gaffney for making baseless accusations against board members, he declared that the Muslim Brotherhood had “infiltrated” CPAC.
While Gaffney might be finding fewer friendly audiences for his anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, he and his friends still have a home on AM radio, every weeknight.
“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal. Murder,” Thomas said during the meeting, court records show.
Imagine if these militia men were Muslims, Spencer and Geller would be on Fox News telling the world how dangerous Islam is. Yet there is no mention of their religious affiliation. The article refers to these men with the use of two main adjectives: militia and Georgia. It would seem “Christian” the ostensible faith of the arrested is an an unnecessary adjective that creates a bias towards a religion.
And so imagine once again if these militia men were Muslims, Islam would be the main adjective in the story.
(Reuters) – Federal authorities on Tuesday arrested four Georgia men accused of plotting to buy explosives and produce a deadly biological toxin to attack fellow U.S. citizens and government officials.
The Justice Department said the men were members of a fringe domestic militia group and had planned to manufacture ricin for use in their attacks.
The men attended meetings starting in March where they discussed carrying out crimes, including murder, in order to undermine federal and state government, prosecutors said. The targets included local police, federal government buildings and employees of agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service.
The meetings were monitored by FBI agents with the assistance of a confidential informant, according to prosecutors. Two of the men also met with an undercover agent to discuss buying explosives and weapons parts, prosecutors said.
The men are Frederick Thomas, 73; Dan Roberts, 67; Ray H. Adams, 65; and Samuel J. Crump, 68. Thomas is from Cleveland, Georgia, and the other three men are from Toccoa.
At a meeting at Thomas’ house in March, Thomas said he had enough weapons to arm everyone at the table and that he had compiled a “Bucket List” of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and media members he felt needed to be “taken out” to “make the country right again,” according to court documents.
“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal. Murder,” Thomas said during the meeting, court records show.
During a meeting in September, Crump said he wanted to make 10 pounds of ricin and disperse it in various U.S. cities, according to prosecutors. Authorities said he described one scenario in which the toxin would be blown from a car traveling on Atlanta highways.
Last month, Adams allegedly gave Crump a sample of the beans used to produce ricin, prosecutors said.
Ricin can cause death from exposure to as little as a pinhead amount. Most victims die between 36 hours and 72 hours after exposure, and there is no known antidote.
The most famous case of ricin poisoning was in 1978 when dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was killed when an assassin in London jabbed him with an umbrella that injected a tiny ricin-filled pellet.
“These defendants, who are alleged to be part of a fringe militia group, are charged with planning attacks against their own fellow citizens and government,” Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.
“While many are focused on the threat posed by international violent extremists, this case demonstrates that we must also remain vigilant in protecting our country from citizens within our own borders who threaten our safety and security,” she said.
(Additional reorting by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by Greg McCune)
WICHITA - A Muslim mosque in west Wichita that was heavily damaged by fire early Monday had received anti-Islam letters in recent months.
Somebody also had begun turning on its outside water faucet overnight to hike its water bill, its leader said.
Abdelkarim Jibril, president of the Islamic Association of Mid Kansas at 3406 W. Taft, said the letters put down Islam, called the prophet Muhammad a pig, and enclosed drawings that mocked him.
The mosque received about eight of the letters starting four to six months ago, but they had stopped about a month ago, he said.
Jibril said the mosque hadn’t turned the letters over to authorities before the fire.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined the fire investigation Monday.
The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
Investigators are aware of the letters.
“We don’t know if any of the letters have any relationship to the fire at this point. It’s something we’re looking into though,” said Wichita fire Lt. Troy Thissen.
“We’re not ruling out anything,” Wichita fire Capt. Stuart Bevis said.
The blaze was reported at 12:45 a.m. at the association, southeast of Maple and West streets.
The fire spread quickly and gutted the attic, Bevis said. Damage was set at about $130,000.
“It’s a fairly good-sized structure,” he said. “We had fire get up in the attic space early on.”
Firefighters had to assume a defensive posture soon after arrival because of the danger posed by being inside the structure with upper levels on fire, Bevis said.
The fire may well have totaled the mosque, he said, because of the extensive damage to the attic and roof support structure.
“We’re going to be taking a lot of steps” to review evidence because the fire involves a religious meeting place, Bevis said.
Jibril, who has been president of the association for most of its 32-year history, said he was called to the scene about 4 a.m.
“It’s devastating to see something like that, or see somebody even try to do something like that, “ he said.
Jibril said the anti-Islam letters appeared to have been sent by the same person because they contained the same types of pictures and same handwriting. Among the messages: “I don’t need to know anything else about you but 9/11”, Jibril said.
Enclosed pictures included drawings of prophet Muhammed with a beard, Jibril said.
“We don’t allow pictures of the prophet,” he said.
Most of the letters were mailed from somewhere in Texas with the mosque’s return address on the envelopes, Jibril said.
Some letters were sent to cities in the east, such as Boston, with the mosque’s return address on them.
Mosque leaders were talking about turning them over to the FBI and had decided to do that, but didn’t do it before the fire.
Jibril said the letters would still have been in the office at the mosque at the time of the fire.
The mosque’s outside faucet began being turned on during the night at about the time the letters stopped a month ago, Jibril said.
That action raised the association’s monthly water bill, normally about $30, to $500, Jibril said.
Jibril said the mosque will be rebuilt.
“We need a place on the west side for the people that live and work on the west side,” he said.
Hussam Madi, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Wichita, who also delivered sermons at the mosque, said the fire was “ very, very sad” for the people who prayed there.
The mosque was the first to open in Wichita.
Muslims bought the building, formerly a Mennonite community center, in 1979. Muslims had held prayer services in homes or other churches until then.
About 30 or 40 people attended Friday services at the mosque, which also held Sunday school classes, classes in Arabic, holiday prayers and other gatherings, Jibril said.
Although there are two mosques on the east side of Wichita, the mosque on the west side served members of the Muslim community who live on both sides of the city, Madi said.
Muslims from the east side who flew out of town on Fridays often would stop there to pray before they left town, he said.
The fire already has caught the attention of one national organization.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American/Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., said he will be monitoring the investigation to see whether it is deemed to be a hate crime. “This is the kind of thing that happens all too often,” he said, “but it’s hard to predict.”
In the past year, arsonists have targeted mosques, or mosque construction sites, in Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Michigan, he said.
In May of last year, a bomb exploded at a Florida mosque.
Update: Geller withdrew from the “Shariah Conference,” (read below) and she also just withdrew from the Tea Party Convention in Florida. She is claiming victim status.
MURFREESBORO — Former congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik said Monday she has found a place to hold a freedom conference after getting turned down by 20 hotels.
Cornerstone Church in the Madison community on Nashville’s northeast side agreed to hold the event, “The Constitution or Sharia Conference.” The event will be held at 10 a.m. Nov. 11.
“There was no room in the inn for freedom, but pastor Maury Davis of Cornerstone Church opened his doors for free speech,” said Zelenik, who lost the 2010 Republican primary to U.S. Rep. Diane Black of Gallatin.
However, headliner Pamela Geller, who runs the Atlas Shrugs anti-Islam blog, has bowed out because the event is no longer at a secular venue.
“While I have nothing against speaking in a church per se, I refuse to have my message driven from the public square,” she wrote in an email.
Geller and Zelenik referred to Hutton Hotel’s decision last week to cancel booking for the event in Nashville, citing safety concerns.
“It was a poor decision by Hutton Hotel when they changed their story three times from what they initially told me,” Zelenik said. “Our goal is to expose and disclose the differences between Constitutional and Shariah law. Our conference recognizes the freedoms of all Americans, including Muslim women, because they have equal protection under our Constitutional law. I reject Islamic Shariah for any woman.”
Zelenik also criticized Islamic Center of Murfreesboro member Saleh Sbenaty, who described the conference as “hate speech.”
“Hate speech for what?” she said. “Does he hate our Constitution or does he hate Shariah law? I wonder how he would feel in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Iran with constitutional law competing with Shariah? Anyone who would try to bring in constitutional law in these countries would be imprisoned and/or put to death.”
Sbenaty, who works as a 19-year professor at MTSU in the Engineering Technology Department, said he referred to the gathering as a hate group because he’s concerned with the reputations of the speakers Zelenik has invited.
“I’d like to ask her does she want to associate herself with those who inspired Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 93 people in Norway?” Sbenaty asked. “In his manifesto of more than 1,5,00 pages, he was inspired by the people she invited to this conference. He mentioned Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Why would we need these people who are coming here to town to preach hate?”
Events such as these can hurt tourism, Sbenaty added.
“Why would you want to bring in people who would damage the reputation of Nashville and Murfreesboro?” he asked. “It’s ironic that she is damaging our community in the name of freedom.”
Sbenaty said there’s always a small sect in any religious group that’s dangerous and can commit tragic acts in the name of their religion.
“Extremists can interpret any religion they way they want,” said Sbenaty, noting that he grew up in Damascus, Syria, with Christian and Jewish friends before becoming a U.S. citizen after moving to Tennessee in 1982. “This is my country. This is where I want to live. This is a country that is founded on freedom, and it’s founded on equality. It’s not founded on bigotry.”
The Rev. Maury Davis of Cornerstone said he agreed to host the conference because he wants to learn more about Shariah law and its impact on American culture. Earlier this year, the church hosted a speech by Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who is highly critical of Islam.
He said speakers will not be allowed to promote hatred toward Muslims.
“I am not going to have any hate speech,” Davis said. “And I define hate speech as inciting people to hurt people or mistreat people.”
Tickets to the conference are $20 and can be purchased at shariafreeusa.com.
Saudi Arabia convicts individuals for practicing sorcery and when they do Spencer and Geller blog about how it is proof of Islam’s backwardness and repression. Where is their outcry over this? (hat tip: DE)
Rabbinical court penalizes a woman for witchcraft. And no, it’s not Monty Python
The rabbinical court of Haifa ruled against a woman whose husband claimed she practiced witchcraft in their home. The court acquitted the woman of refusing to cook for her husband, as the latter committed adultery, which the court found constituted mitigating circumstances in the woman’s dereliction of culinary duties. (Hebrew)
The woman denied being a witch, but she failed a polygraph test – which is not accepted as evidence in regular Israeli courts. Presumably the duck test was unavailable. The court, composed of rabbis Yitzhak Shmuel Gamzo, Michael Bleicher, and Meir Kahan, admitted they found no legal precedent for reducing the woman’s ktuba – the money her husband pledges her in case of divorce – presumably since the Halachaic punishment for witchcraft is death. They nevertheless relied on the dubious book of Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, which is not generally considered to be law book (much more of a moral tale) to deprive her of some 90,000 NIS. Impressive.
And no, this isn’t mythical medieval England. This is Israel, 2011. And the court is funded by the government.
'We're a culture, not a costume': This campaign to counter racist Halloween fancy dress was created by a student group at the Ohio University called Students Teaching Against Racism
When did a suicide bomber become traditional garb for Muslims?
Halloween is a time for parties, dressing up and having fun with a bit of harmless – but scary – make-believe.
But a group of college students are taking a stand against some costumes which, they say, can cause hurt and humiliation to people from minority ethnic groups.
Students Teaching Against Racism in Society, an Ohio University student group, have created a poster campaign to highlight the racial stereotyping all too common in Halloween party dress.
The campaign, headlined ‘We’re a culture, not a costume’, shows images of people of different ethnic groups holding up images partygoers whose costumes they say lampoon their cultures.
Above each image, the posters read: ‘This is not who I am, and this is not okay.’
They have provoked an online row over whether the costumes are actually racist, or whether they are just in good fun.
One blogger who wrote about the posters two days ago had to disable comments on her website after she got 3,000 views and comments from ‘rude, racist people.’
On the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind blog, Melissa Sipin wrote of the campaign: ‘These posters act as a public service announcement for colored [sic] communities.
‘It’s about respect, human dignity, and the acceptance of other cultures (these posters simply ask people to think before they choose their Halloween costume).’
She added: ‘What these costumes have in common is that they make caricatures out of cultures, and that is simply not okay.’
‘This is not who I am, and this is not okay’: The posters highlight the crass racial and cultural stereotypes that emerge in Halloween fancy dress each year
One poster shows a young Arab-American man holding up an image of a Halloween reveller wearing Arabic dress and a suicide bombers vest.
Another shows a Native American man holding a picture of two women with paint on their faces and feathers in their hair holding a sign reading, ‘Me wantum piece [sic]… not war.’
A third poster shows an Asian American woman holding up a picture of a woman dressed as a Japanese geisha girl, with silk kimono and heavy white foundation.
Row: Online comments have urged the students behind the campaign to ‘get a sense of humour’
On the Huffington Post, where the story has also been reported, website comments were split over whether the costumes could be judged offensive.
Many could see nothing wrong with dressing according to racial stereotypes: A user going by the screen name Masterkcb1 wrote on the site: ‘People need to get a sense of humour, and quit taking everything so seriously.
‘If I can’t dress like a bandito then nobody can dress like a ghost because I don’t have a tan and I find it offensive.’
One of the earliest formal portraits of an African American – a well-known oil painting of a kufi-wearing free black man painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1819 – has been sold by the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The striking portrait of Yarrow Mamout, an elderly Muslim and former slave living in Washington, is the most recent in a string of art and artifact sales made by the history museum, largely to finance its $5.9 million building renovation project.
Timothy Rub, Art Museum director, declined to discuss the painting’s price, but other sources speculated that it would be at least $1.5 million.
“You boys were so much fun on the 8th grade trip! Thanks for not bombing anything while we were there!” read the yearbook inscription penned by the middle school teacher.
The eighth grade yearbook was littered with similar remarks by classmates linking Omar to a “bomb.”
“To my bomb man!” read one note. “Come wire my bomb,” read another.
“What is this?” asked Omar’s mother incredulously. He had handed the yearbook over to her moments earlier when he arrived home that afternoon.
Omar answered quietly, “I know, Mom, I know.” He stared down at the kitchen floor. His eyes could not meet his mother’s but he began to tell her what had happened just one month earlier.
In May 2009, Omar joined his classmates on a school trip to Washington, D.C. As they toured the Washington Monument, visited area museums and passed by the White House, the kids repeatedly told Omar they hoped he wouldn’t “bomb” any of the sites. A teacher chaperoned the children, heard the comments and responded by doing… well, nothing, except leave a denigrating remark in Omar’s yearbook a month later.
It was clear to Omar’s mother that her American born and raised son was harassed because of his Muslim faith and Arab ancestry.
Unfortunately, this was not the first bias-based bullying incident involving Omar that school year. Only several months earlier a peer was intimidating Omar, calling him a “terrorist,” during an elective trade course. Omar finally told his mother about the bullying when his report card indicated that he was failing that same class, while acing the others where he was not subjected to such humiliating treatment.
Omar’s mother had addressed the bullying with the school Vice-Principal immediately afterwards.
But, when she spoke to her son’s school Principal regarding the D.C. trip and subsequent offensive yearbook comments (by a school teacher), the Principal was shocked to learn that Omar had been a prior victim of bullying earlier in the academic year. He had no knowledge of that incident in his school.
While the Principal assured her that he would take proper action against the offending teacher, nothing actually happened. The teacher denied hearing the bomb-related comments during the field trip to D.C. and excused her yearbook note as a “joke.”
Omar’s incensed mother took her case to the school Superintendent who in turn suggested scheduling a cultural sensitivity training about Arabs and Muslims for faculty.
That never came to pass, however.
In a written complaint Omar’s mother filed with a state government agency (with jurisdiction over such bias-based bullying incidents as the one involving her son) she observed:
“[O]ne day, there will be a child who is pushed beyond their limits, as we have seen in tragic events throughout the country, like Columbine and suicides of children being picked on for no other reason than being “different.”
What will we do then?
Must we wait for tragedy to create a safer and more open society for our community?”
By now Omar was a freshman in the public high school where the bullying continued, unabated.
In school, Omar was frequently referred to as “faggot.”
Omar never told his parents.
The verbal harassment culminated into physical “touching.”
A male student rubbed Omar’s shoulder while calling him “faggot.”
Still, Omar said and did nothing seeming paralyzed by his fear and shame.
Then, during a fire drill at school a group of boys yelled out to Omar, “Call off your tribe so we can go back into school!”
That was it.
Omar told his parents what was happening. He explained to his mother that he tried to keep the bullying a secret because he did not want to “hurt or upset” them.
Omar’s mother complained to the Principal, Superintendent and state agency… again.
This time, the high school held a cultural sensitivity training focusing on American Arabs and Muslims and geared towards faculty members, only.
Some mistakenly believe that bullying is a rite of passage which children must endure. It is worth noting the American Medical Association, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identify school bullying as a “public health problem.”
In fact, bullying has been recognized as a form of child abuse when perpetrated by other children. Studies have shown that victims of bullying may suffer school phobia, increased truancy and reduced concentration and classroom achievement. Bullying victims may also suffer sleep disturbances, bedwetting, abdominal pain, high levels of anxiety and depression, loneliness, low self-esteem and heightened fear for personal safety.
While anti-bullying legislation plays a critical role in protecting bullying victims, proper implementation and enforcement of those laws is key. Case in point: over 45 states have such legislation in effect (including Omar’s home state) yet bullying — and bias-based bullying — persists in epidemic proportions.
And, what happens when a disappointing report card or offensive inscriptions in a child’s yearbook does not tip off a parent that his or her child is a target of such bullying conduct? Many children refrain from sharing such details with family members sometimes out of a sense of shame and embarrassment but often because they are attempting to shield parents from being hurt or upset, as we saw in Omar’s case above.
Preventative measures geared at faculty, students and administrators are necessary to stop bullying from occurring in the first instance. Indeed, evidence suggests that bullying behavior can be significantly reduced through prevention curricula.
According to a new report published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) titled, “Global Battleground or School Playground: The Bullying of America’s Muslim Children,” bias-based bullying against American Muslim children (or those perceived to be Muslim) is on the rise and such school bullying is largely attributed to cultural and religious misunderstanding.
The report finds that a primary factor underlying the persistent harassment, ridicule and discrimination against American Muslim children is the American mainstream’s general misperception of Islam and Muslims.
The ISPU paper calls for intensive and pervasive efforts to educate American society about Islam and Muslims. It suggests that such cultural information should be provided to libraries, knowledge bases, teachers and school administrators.
Such facts and figures about Muslims and Islam — compiled with the assistance of diverse community groups and advocates — should also be featured in educational materials and resources, school curricula, popular Internet sites, television and films.
Not surprisingly the report identifies the media as a problem source for stereotyped images of Muslims as terrorists and the outside group in the “us” versus “them” dichotomy.
Perhaps it is time for “Hollywood” to consider positive associations for the Muslims it portrays on the big screen and in our family rooms. American Muslims are doctors, lawyers, engineers, make-up artists, photographers, engineers, information technology specialists, law enforcement agents, teachers, professors, bankers, community advocates, humanitarians, etc. — isn’t it time we portray them that way?
Children’s programming can also play a critical role in addressing this issue.
Note the influence of Sesame Street, for instance: a 1996 survey found that 95 percent of all American preschoolers had watched Sesame Street by the time they were three. More recently, in 2008, an estimated 77 million Americans had watched the program as kids.
In my view, Sesame Street should feature more American Muslim, Arab American and South Asian celebrities, children and characters in its regular programing.
The children’s show has made great strides in promoting diversity and multiculturalism and recently introduced its first South Asian character to the regular cast. To further promote increased diversity, it could throw a party with authentic Middle Eastern food and music for its American viewing audience, for example.
Musicians could play the tabla — an Arabic percussion instrument which produces a great beat — while guests enjoy pita chips and hummus. Mangos, a popular fruit in the Arab and Muslim world, could also make an appearance where celebrating children learn how to count all the mangos.
And, during ‘The Word on the Street’ segment, Murray could imaginably interview a young Sikh man with a turban or a young American Muslim girl or woman who wears a hijab or headscarf. This may help address the growing phenomenon of “hijabophobia.”
Further, The Daily Show‘s Asif Mandvi, who happens to be an Indian-American Muslim in addition to being funny, could make a cameo appearance to help define and explain a new word (e.g. the word jocular) to the young viewing audience. I am willing to offer my consulting services free of charge to help realize progress in this way.
The answer does not lie with Sesame Street alone, however. Countless other children’s programming could help as well and impact continued positive change. For instance, in addition to Dora, Diego and Ni Hao, Kai-lan, perhaps Nickelodeon could consider adding similar programming with Arab, Muslim and South Asian heroes and heroines.
You may be wondering about Omar and his family. His mother organized and conducted cultural competency training on American Muslims and Arab Americans for her son’s school district. It was well-received.
As for Omar — with the help of his family he has a great new attitude towards bullying which prompts him to stick up for other children targeted in the way he was.
Please note that names have been changed to protect the child’s identity according to his parent’s wishes.
A new eight-part series on TLC that premieres November 13 will try to answer that question by following the lives of five very different Muslim-American families. The show, “All-American Muslim”, was filmed in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit that’s known for it’s large Arab-American population. It promises to go “inside the rarely seen world of American Muslims to uncover a unique community struggling to balance faith and nationality in a post 9/11 world,” according to a press release.
Producers picked a diverse crowd to profile, from sisters who are polar opposites (one wears a headscarf and prays daily, the other has tattoos –generally frowned upon in Islam – and is married an Irish Catholic) to a high school football coach to newlyweds, in order to show people who “share the same religion, but lead very distinct lives that often times challenge the Muslim stereotype.” The series will also address issues such as the post-9/11 life for Muslims and gender roles in Islam.
The show, which is rare for its focus on Muslims, has generated much buzz in the Muslim-American community as well as non-Muslims. Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he is looking forward to watching the series.
“It’ll give us a taste of the lives of Muslim-Americans in both their aspirations and concerns. I think the show will be good and humanizing for the Muslim community of Dearborn,” said Walid, who is friends with one of the cast members. Walid cautioned that, in terms of ethnic background, Muslims are “much more diverse than what Dearborn may show. Dearborn is an anomaly in the American Muslim landscape for its large Arab-American population and concentrated Muslim population.”
The first episode of “All-American Muslim” airs at 10 p.m. Eastern time on TLC.
Here is a run-down of the show’s characters, courtesy of TLC.
Suehaila and Shadia: Suehaila wears a traditional headscarf and follows daily prayer rituals – while Shadia, her outspoken sister, is decorated with piercings and tattoos and recently married Jeff, an Irish Catholic who is converting to Islam.
Nader and Nawal: Newlyweds expecting their first baby, Nader and Nawal are working to strike the right balance between their traditional Muslim roots and American culture.
Fouad: As head coach of the Fordson High School football team, Fouad has pioneered a shift in his team’s summer practice schedule by flipping to night workouts from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. since a majority of his team are Muslim and are fasting for Ramadan.
Mike and Angela: Mike, a deputy chief sheriff, and his wife Angela, a consultant to a major auto manufacturer, are juggling their busy careers with raising their four children in a modern Muslim family.
Nina: A strong, independent Muslim businesswoman, Nina’s family runs the premier wedding and banquet hall in Dearborn — but against their advice, she is trying to venture off on her own to open a nightclub.
Samira and Ali: Samira and her husband of seven years, Ali, struggle with fertility issues and are pursuing numerous options including conventional fertility techniques, dietary alternatives and Muslim supplication prayers. After years of unsuccessful attempts, Samira considers putting on the Hijab in order to be closer to God and hopefully be blessed with a child.
CLARIFICATION:An earlier version of this story stated that tattoos are illegal in Islam. This has been clarified to reflect that most Islamic scholars consider tattoos illegal and that the legality is debated among a minority of scholars.
Islamic scholars tired of conservative charges that Muslims in the United States constitute a radical fifth column bent on subverting American values and obligated by their religion to launch jihadist terror attacks are fighting back by issuing a fatwa.
The Islamic religious ruling, a “Resolution On Being Faithful Muslims and Loyal Americans,” is a response to what its authors call “erroneous perceptions and Islamophobic propaganda” that has built up for a decade following the 9/11 attacks and subsequent terrorist plots by adherents of al-Qaida and other extremist groups. It was issued in Virginia late last month by the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA), a group of Islamic scholars who meet several times a year to draft opinions on issues of concern to American Muslims.
“As a body of Islamic scholars, we the members of FCNA believe that it is false and misleading to suggest that there is a contradiction between being faithful Muslims committed to God (Allah) and being loyal American citizens,” the fatwa declared.
“Islamic teachings require respect of the laws of the land where Muslims live as minorities, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so long as there is no conflict with Muslims’ obligation for obedience to God. We do not see any such conflict with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The primacy of obedience to God is a commonly held position of many practicing Jews and Christians as well.”
Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the nation, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, yet the fast-growing community has been a constant target of right-wing groups. From protests against the so-called “ground zero mosque,” to efforts in more than a dozen states to ban Sharia lawin courts, to recent Capitol Hill hearings on Islamic radicalization that brought comparisons to McCarthyism, Muslims have had to assert their loyalty.
And that troubles members of the Los Angeles Police Department, who in recent years have been at the forefront in building bridges to the Muslims in order to combat radicalization and enlist the community in the fight against terrorism.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck and other law enforcement officials will attend a meeting Thursday at the Islamic Center of Reseda to talk about the new fatwa as part of his department’s Muslim Community Forum. Muzammil Siddiqi, director of religious affairs of The Islamic Society of Orange County and the president of the Fiqh Council of North America, will be on hand to discuss the origins of the fatwa.
For many non-Muslims, perhaps the best-known fatwa was the one against authorSalman Rushdie for his book ”The Satanic Verses.” Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared it blasphemous and called for Rushdie’s death.
This new decree might face a warmer welcome.
“We’re always fighting two sides of extremism. There’s the violent ideological side and the neo-conservative side that is creating hate campaigns against American Muslims …which is a bunch of BS,” said Michael Downing, commander of the LAPD’s Counter Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau. “The majority of American Muslims are as patriotic as you and I. This declaration says it is not a conflict to be a faithful Muslim and loyal American.”
When NATO backed rebels entered Tripoli in late August, it spelled the end of the Gadaffi regime. His reported death today marks the symbolic end of the Gadaffi era. There is no shadow of a doubt that Gadaffi was a dictator, that much is clear from numerous human rights and amnesty reports.
Now marks a new beginning for Libya.
Unlike the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan uprising was tainted by Nato’s involvement; it was not a victory purely by the people, of the people and for the people. It is hoped that the forces of self-determination and true democracy will prevail over those trends that are either open to, or already have been co-opted by foreign interests.
Needless to say, the Islamophobes are already instigating the doomsday scenario. Robert Spencer says in a blog post titled, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Gaddafi has been captured”:
It is likely that the new America-backed regime will compete with the Gaddafi regime in its hatred for America and the West, and become noted for being even more anti-American than he was.
It goes without saying that one should take Spencer’s words with a heavy grain of salt, after all such pessimism on his part is born not out of a true analysis of Libya as it is today but out of a deep seated hatred for Islam and Muslims. For Spencer Muslims can only ever live under dictatorship and oppression.
Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the body of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi following his death in Sirte.
Al Jazeera has acquired exclusive footage of the body of Muammar Gaddafi after he was killed in his hometown, Sirte.
Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of Libya’s National Transitional Council, confirmed that the ousted leader had been killed on October 20, 2011 near Sirte.
“We announce to the world that Muammar Gaddafi has been killed at the hands of the revolutionaries,” Ghoga told a news conference in Benghazi.
The news came shortly after the NTC captured Sirte after weeks of fighting.
(RNS) Two recent books argue that explorers Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama were more like Christian crusaders than greedy mercenaries or curious adventurers. Other historians, however, remain skeptical.
The books, released in the weeks leading up to Columbus Day (Oct. 10), claim the reason the famous navigators sought a direct trade route to India was to undermine Islam.
“I think historians have known about this, but they haven’t taken it seriously,” said Carol Delaney, author of “Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem.” Delaney, a retired anthropologist, is currently a research scholar at Brown University.
Delaney’s book argues that Columbus wanted to find gold to finance a new crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims, believing that Jerusalem must be in Christian hands before Jesus’ Second Coming.
“People don’t usually look at Columbus in the religious context of his time, which was very powerful,” said Delaney.
Nigel Cliff, the author of a new book on Columbus’s Portuguese contemporary Vasco da Gama, agrees that seeing the explorers through a religious lens is “a change of emphasis.” Historians in the 19th century tended to regard Columbus as a heroic figure who embarked on a “disinterested intellectual adventure,” whereas those in the 20th century tended to “focus on economics, to the exclusion of much else,” he said.
Cliff said mere economic advantage wasn’t a medieval concept.
“Faith is the burning issue that impelled the great Portugal (exploration) campaign for 80 years,” said Cliff, a British writer and amateur historian.
Da Gama became the first person to reach India directly from Europe by sailing around Africa in 1498, six years after Columbus discovered the Americas for the king and queen of Spain.
Cliff’s book, “Holy War,” claims that da Gama’s arrival in the East marked a turning point from Muslim to Christian ascendancy in global trade against the backdrop of an ongoing “clash of civilizations.”
But other historians say the new books’ bold claims are backed by poor scholarship. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a historian at the University of Notre Dame who has written extensively on Columbus, harshly criticized the books in The Wall Street Journal.
In his view, Cliff and Delaney “assume the veracity and authenticity of sources of doubtful authorship and unreliable date” and make the mistake of taking Columbus at his word although he was notoriously disingenuous.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a historian at UCLA who has written on da Gama, said religion for da Gama was “significant, but not the sole motive.” The explorer was more interested in “personal advancement,” as well as ensuring that trade routes would be controlled by the Portuguese nobility rather than the crown.
Fernandez-Armesto called Cliff’s theory of a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam “a figment of contemporary imaginations”; Subrahmanyam said it is “sensationalizing history by linking it with contemporary events.”
According to Subrahmanyam, there is “no evidence whatsoever” that da Gama wanted to take back Jerusalem and prepare for Christ’s return, although there is some evidence that Columbus may have had those ambitions.
For instance, Delaney points to the mysterious “Book of Prophecies,” a gathering of mostly biblical pronouncements that seem to lend divine significance to Columbus’s voyages. The book was supposedly compiled by Columbus himself.
Fernandez-Armesto also points out that the Spanish court that commissioned Columbus’s voyages had long been obsessed with the idea of Jerusalem.
However, “there is no evidence that Columbus was particularly religious until … he turned to God following the failure of his worldly ambitions,” he said. Columbus died a disappointed man because he had not found the quantities of gold and the passage to India he had sought.
Ibtihaj Muhammad is the first practicing Muslim to represent the U.S. in women's fencing. She's ranked second in the U.S. and 11th in the world. Ibtihaj stands out because she wears her hijab headscarf that is worn by Muslim women.
Ibtihaj Muhammad jogs lightly across the second floor gym at the Manhattan Fencing Center in New York. She’s warming up, eager to get some work in.
Ready! Fence!
Fencers are already on the strip, a narrow fighting lane, and they’re going at it, the air filled with little razor-like hisses and whispers. Many are Olympic hopefuls, like her, preparing for the World Championships Saturday in Italy. The competition is another chance for Muhammad to earn qualifying points in her quest to make the 2012 London Olympics in July.
“I don’t think I ever wanted anything so much,” said Muhammad, 25, of Maplewood. “I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to make this Olympics.”
When it’s her turn to spar, she slips the fencing mask over her hijab, the headscarf Muslim women wear. In a room full of fencers, it’s the one thing that makes her stand out. If she makes the Olympics, she’ll stand out even more. Fencing officials believe Muhammad is likely to be the first American Muslim woman wearing a hijab to compete at the games. The United States Olympic Committee doesn’t track athletes by religion, but the demographic is something Muhammad thinks about, knowing what an accomplishment it would be since few Muslim women compete in sports.
“I didn’t have female Muslim role models to look up to in the athletic world,” she said. “It’s really important for people to know my story. I think it’s something I have to do, because I want Muslim female youth to believe they can do something like this.”
Muhammad is ranked number two in the United States and 13th in the world in women’s sabre, a fencing style in which strikes are made above the waist with any part of the weapon. Locally, she represents the Peter Westbrook Foundation in New York City, training at the Fencers Club on West 28th Street, where she is coached by Akhnaten Spencer-El, a 2000 Olympic fencer. Under him, she’s a tactical, cerebral fighter who caught the fencing world off guard in 2009.
She won the U.S. national title that year, cracking the top 16 world rankings. Last year, she won a bronze medal at the Pan American Championships and a coveted spot on the U.S. women’s national team.
“She’s still young in the game and she’s only going to get better,” Spencer-El said.
Back to the strip. She goes against a member of the U.S. men’s national team, then her teammate, Dagmara Wozniak of Avenel. You can hear the constant ping of saber blades colliding. Everyone has cat-like footwork that is lickety-split quick, calculating and aggressive. They duel back and forth trying to outsmart each other, snapping their weapons at the wrist to score. The long electrical wires attached to the edge of their fencing jackets register hits. All of them look like puppets dancing on a string, lunging toward each other and their their shot at gold.
Ibtihaj Muhammad, left, and Damara Wozniak, of Avenel, face off during practice match in New York.
Getting to Italy isn’t easy. Each country is allowed two spots for women’s sabre and Muhammad and her teammates are the top four fencers in the U.S. The best of them is two-time Olympian Mariel Zagunis of Oregon, and she’s number one in the world.
Muhammad is unfazed. She trains daily, except for Sunday, running in the morning before conditioning at a women’s gym. In the evening, she’s in New York City fencing for four hours.
“I just keep going,” she said. “I don’t want to get to a competition and lose a bout, because I didn’t work out that extra hour.”
You can see she’s super-competitive, hating to lose, constantly critiquing herself. She’s all business for this once in lifetime shot, but Muhammad does pause for what’s important.
The third of five siblings in an athletic family, Muhammad finds strength in her faith. In August, she stayed focused through Ramadan, the annual Islamic month of fasting during the day. But Muhammad wants no sympathy, saying her sacrifices are not unlike anybody else’s. She kept hyrdrated, waking up every 90 minutes at night to eat and drink. If she makes the team, Muhammad will be used to the regimen since Ramadan next year falls during the Olympic competition.
It doesn’t matter at this point. Muhammad has come a long way in a career that started when she was a high school freshman. She stumbled on the sport driving past Columbia High School with her mother, who could see the team practicing through the large cafeteria windows. Inayah Muhammad didn’t know what they were doing but thought her daughter should try it because the uniform would cover her body and that was suitable to Islam’s tenet of modesty for women.
“I had know idea it (fencing) would take us this far,’’ said her mom, a Newark schoolteacher. “She’s so in love with the sport. I don’t think she really understands how good she is.’’
Muhummad was an epee fencer with Columbia until her former coach, Frank Mustilli, saw she was a better fit for sabre’s combative vein. At practice one day, Mustilli said his mild mannered athlete got upset after she got hit hard and lashed out.
“She showed me a little bit of fire. She screamed and attacked,’’ said Mustilli, head of the New Jersey Fencing Alliance.
At Columbia, Muhammad also played softball and volleyball but was captain of two state championship fencing teams before going to Duke University. She became a three-time NCAA All-American, earning dual degrees in International Relations and African-American studies with a minor in Arabic.
Ibtihaj Muhammad is seen during a September practice in New York.
After graduation in 2007, her father, Shamsiddin Muhammad, said his daughter’s passion for fencing did not wane. The family supports her financially and she chipped in what she could last year as a substitute teacher at Shabazz High School in Newark and fencing coach at Columbia.
“I know this is her dream and inspiration,’’ said her dad, a retired Newark cop. “We believe that what is written is going to happen.’’
That belief helps her deal with distractions on this journey. At times she’s wondered if her race or religion played a role in a judge scoring unfairly. When traveling, she has been treated as a foreigner who can’t speak English, and worse, she feels the stares that say terrorist.
In Belgium this year, security officials told her to leave the airport unless she removed her hijab. Muhammad would not. Her mother interceded and there was a compromise to have her head patted down. Muhammad said it’s frustrating making others comfortable, but she’s not going to let “closeted views” derail her purpose.
“If God wants me to succeed, no one can take it from me,’’ she said. “That’s the way I approach it and I think that’s what keeps me sane and grounded in this sport.’’
Thanks to the vigilance of the American Library Association (ALA), the list of books banned or challenged in 2010-2011 isn’t as long as it could be, but it’s long enough to keep a person out of books for at least a year. Every year during Banned Book Week the ALA works to keep books considered controversial, obscene or profane on library shelves and in schools.
In the past year, books in danger of censorship include Suzanne Collins’ popular “Hunger Games” series, which was adapted into a screenplay and will arrive in theaters sometime in 2012 to torment parents and others who think it numbs kids to violence. A Virginia school system also tried to ban “The Diary of Anne Frank,” when it received a complaint that the book “sexual material and homosexual themes.”
The ALA asks that from Sept. 24 – Oct. 1, lovers of literature read a banned book. Below, some titles from the 2010-2011 list to get you started:
“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Anne Frank
“Water for Elephants,” Sarah Gruen
“Brave New World,” Alduous Huxley
“The Koran”
“The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger
“Push,” Sapphire
“Slaughter-house 5,” Kurt Vonnegut
“Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Joseph Lelveld
A teenager shouted racial abuse as he kicked and stamped on a 71-year-old grandfather’s head for 10 minutes. And he later sent a sickening text boasting about his horrifying actions.
At Kilmarnock Sheriff Court on Monday, the 16-year-old – who cannot be named for legal reasons – pleaded guilty to carrying out the vicious attack outside the Ayrshire Central Mosque in July.
His victim, who had already suffered a stroke, sustained severe facial injuries in the unprovoked attack which took place in the early hours of the morning.
Nancy Beresford, prosecuting, said that the former Crosshouse shopkeeper had gone to the mosque, in Hill Street, Kilmarnock, to prepare for Friday prayers at around 1.40am. As he approached the door, clad in white robes, he noticed a male and two females, along with young children, standing in the street, with another group of females nearby.
The 16-year-old then came towards him shouting abuse, including “Paki bastard”. He punched the pensioner in the chest, causing him to fall to the ground. The teenager continued the assault, while still shouting abuse.
Interviewed, he denied the assault and racial abuse. The 16-year-old told police that he couldn’t understand “why somebody was praying at that time in the morning”.
The Ayrshire Central Mosque was opened earlier this year after the conversion of a former pub – a development that was fiercely opposed by the Scottish Defence League. Back in 2009, when the EDL was planning to extend its Islamophobic campaign north of the border, Osama Saeed reported:
“Mosques in Glasgow and Kilmarnock have been identified by the far right Scottish Defence League and their English counterpart as possible scenes of protest. In Glasgow, we understand that they have discussed George Square, Pollokshields and the Sheriff Court as possible locations. The latter seems like a strange place to hold a demonstration till it is understood that it is across the street from Glasgow Central Mosque. Also discussed has been a pub in Kilmarnock, the Hillhead Tavern, which is the subject of interest from a Muslim group to buy and convert into a mosque.”
The SDL eventually settled on Glasgow for their first demonstrationbut went on to organise a protest in Kilmarnock in June last year. Although it was billed as a demonstration in defence of “free speech”, the SDL’s main target was clearly the conversion of the former Hillhead Tavern.
About 30 Muslim graves have been desecrated in Carcassone, south-west France. A legal inquiry has been launched to find the perpetrators and punish them.
The caretaker of the military cemetery of Saint-Michel de la ville discovered racist and Nazi slogans daubed on the gravestones when he closed up on Saturday.
The graves belonged to Muslims killed fighting for France during World War I and were immediately repainted and restored.
The graffiti were “really racist” and “particularly disgusting”, according to Carcassonne prosecutor Antoine Leroy, who has opened an inquiry into the incident.
Imagine if this incident involved Muslims. We would not hear the end of it from these Islamophobes about how Sharia is taking over. (hat tip: Alfred J from Kenya)
Anders Breivik’s manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called “the Vienna school of thought”, which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against “the Islamisation of America”.
But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward “Ned” May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.
All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:
“The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy.”
Spencer’s jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik’s manifesto; May’s Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.
Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him “a profound and subtle thinker”. Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer’s works, especially if they believed that Islam was “a religion of peace”. Last week, Spencer’s blog re-ran a piece from Geller’s Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is “a front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
As well as the “counter-jihad” websites such as Spencer’s and May’s, analysis of Breivik’s web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People’s party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.
One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal’s masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.
To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik’s crime. Peder “Fjordman” Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.
It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that “Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying“, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the “counter-jihad” belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. “It’s a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you’ve never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you’re on the right side: you’re another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades.”
This clearly mirrors Breivik’s self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.
Lansing — Terry Jones, the controversial Florida pastor, returned to Michigan on a rainy Wednesday night for a 30-minute speech on the steps of the Capitol where he railed about radical Islam.
The pastor’s speech was greeted by more police, media and protesters than supporters or curious onlookers.
About a dozen protesters started chanting “Say No to Hate” during Jones’ speech before police quieted them down.
“Terry Jones is not welcome here,” said protester David Mitchell, 30, of Lansing, who held a banner with others saying: “They shall not pass.”
Jones, wearing jeans and a Harley Davidson black bomber jacket, decried Islam as a not a peaceful religion and oppressive to women. The Islamic law, Sharia, should not be tolerated, he said.
“Islam is a religion that hates freedom of speech,” Jones said.
He was in Lansing to support a new organization, Operation Freedom’s Tree, founded by James Terpening. The political group denounces Islam as evil.
Jones supporter Eugene Connors, 40, of Lansing agrees. One sign he held said: “Stop Burning Christians.”
“People don’t realize the threat Islam poses to everyone,” he said.
Afterward, Jones said he doesn’t have a problem with Muslims, just the radical element and Sharia. Jones lamented the low turnout, including the no-show of state Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, who authored legislation to ban foreign law.
“He chickened out,” Jones said.
Asked if he has plans to burn the Quran again, Jones said no.
Jones, who caused a hubbub for burning the Quran in March, also caused a stir with a visit to Dearborn during the Arab International Festival this summer.
The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.
Greece’s parliament on Wednesday approved the construction of a new mosque in Athens to satisfy a long-standing demand by thousands of Muslim residents, a government source said.
The project to build the Greek capital’s first official Muslim place of worship in decades was supported by 198 deputies from the centre, right and left (out of 300) against the objections of 16 nationalist MPs.
The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.
Thousands of Muslims from Arab nations, Africa and the Indian subcontinent live and work in Athens without official prayer sites or a cemetery, despite years of promises by successive Greek governments.
Muslim faithful have crafted mosques out of rented flats and disused warehouses which are regularly targeted in racist attacks.
Anger towards migrants and attacks have escalated on the streets of Athens in recent months as the debt-hit country battles a growing recession that has brought thousands of job layoffs.
A staunchly Orthodox state with bitter memories of nearly four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule, Greece currently offers sanctioned Muslim religious sites only near its northeastern border with Turkey where a Muslim minority of Turkish origin lives.
All traces of Islam were eradicated in Athens in the early 19th century when Christianity was restored, and bureaucratic wrangling and opposition from local church leaders and mayors have since stalled plans for a mosque and cemetery.
The Obama administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday in a speech blasting the president’s new counterterrorism strategy.
Lieberman said that Obama’s strategy, which was released in June, “was ultimately a big disappointment,” and while it successfully identified the core of the domestic radicalization problem, it did not establish a clear plan of attack to deal with the growing issue.
The four-term senator and one-time presidential candidate said one of the key problems with the Obama administration’s strategy was that it continues to call terrorism that aims to harm the U.S., “violent extremism” instead of “violent Islamist extremism.”
“The administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism,” Lieberman said, speaking at a National Press Club event hosted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
“To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is Al Qaeda and its allies. Now that’s better but it is still too narrow and focuses us on groups as opposed to what I would call an ideology, which is what we’re really fighting.”
Lieberman, who as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has held numerous hearings on the issue of Islamic extremism, said that Obama needs to stop being afraid of offending the overwhelmingly large portion of law-abiding and well-intentioned Muslims with his rhetoric.
“I assume the refusal of the administration to speak honestly about the enemy is based on its desire not to do anything that might feed into al Qaeda’s propaganda that we’re engaged in a cold war against Islam,” he said. “But that is so self-evidently a lie that we can and have refuted it and I think we’ve done so effectively.”
The issue of singling out Muslims in the U.S.’s war against terrorists came to a head earlier this year when Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) held the first in his series of hearings on American-Muslim radicalization.
Nearly 100 Democratic lawmakers wrote to King, who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and asked him to expand the scope of the hearing to include other radical extremists groups, such as white supremacists, environmental extremists, and animal-rights activists. King declined to expand the hearing’s scope and heralded it as a success for drawing attention to an issue that lawmakers and government officials avoid too often.
Lieberman referenced these sentiments on Thursday, saying that though they are extremist groups, they do not constitute the threat the U.S. currently faces.
“We’re not in a global war with those [groups],” he said. “We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists.”
The U.S.’s successful war against terrorists depends on the administration’s ability to correctly identify who its enemy is, Lieberman said.
“To win this struggle, it’s vital that we understand that we’re not just fighting an organization al Qaeda,” he said. “We are up against a broader ideology, if you will, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam, that has fueled this war.
“Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated but when the broader sets of ideas that are associated with it are rejected and discarded. A reluctance therefore to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder I think to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas,” Lieberman said.
A judge ordered a Wichita pastor to stay away from the Islamic Society of Wichita, as part of a sentence for loitering and disrupting business.
Sedgwick County District Judge Phil Journey this morning sentenced Mark Holick to serve 12 months unsupervised probation, pay $300 in fines and stay at least 1,000 feet from the Islamic Center, where he was arrested in August 2010.
Holick, pastor of Spirit One Christian Ministry, and more than a dozen followers had gone to the Islamic Center as members there were trying to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Holick said they were there to hand out Bibles. Police said he was causing a disturbance and blocking access to the center.
Police had said they asked Holick to move to a public sidewalk. In one instance, cited by Journey, Holick marched in place in response to police orders to move.
“The only reason you were the one arrested is because you were the only one who disobeyed the police orders,” Journey told Holick.
The case reached district court on an appeal from a conviction in Wichita Municipal Court. Holick asked for a a jury trial. Jurors found Holick guilty early last month on two counts of loitering and disrupting a local business.
Journey’s sentence followed the recommendations of Assistant City Attorney Michael Hoelscher.
During the hearing, Holick gave a 15-minute speech, quoting Bible verses and accusing the city of violating his First Amendment rights.
“Wichita is confused,” Holick said. “I am not your enemy. Islam is. The Lord said there will be no other gods before me.”
Journey told Holick that the First Amendment guaranteed his rights to express his religious beliefs but allowed laws to regulate how he practices his faith.
“I want you to think about this,” Journey said. “What if the shoe had been on the other foot and someone from the Islamic Center had come to your place and tried to convert your members and had blocked your driveway?”
Spirit One has been a street and online ministry since a month after his arrest, Holick said, when he sold his building in south Wichita to another church. First Freewill Baptist now resides at 1515 E. Harry.
The judge reminded Holick that the Constitution provides protection for people of all faiths, not just Holick’s.
“I hope you will reflect on the choices you made,” Journey said. “There’s nothing wrong the proselytizing or holding your beliefs. It’s the manner of how you carry them out that’s the problem.”
Holick could face a six-month jail term if he doesn’t follow the conditions of his probation.
That Eric Bolling is a terrible host is not a new revelation. Recently he had Islamophobe Steven Emerson on his show to discuss the CAP report on the Islamophobia Network (video below). Bolling once again reveals himself to be a shill for Right-Wing anti-Muslim hacks:
“I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”
What irks me more than Bolling however is Emerson professing he is merely a “messenger.” Messengers generally don’t claim to be scholars or experts. By saying he is merely a “messenger” Emerson hopes to secure the victim card and divert attention away from any responsibility for his Islamophobic statements and actions.
It is no coincidence his Islamophobe contemporaries, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, acted the same exact way during the Norway Massacre.
Last week, the Center for American Progress published a report detailing the network of anti-Muslim “experts” who relentlessly promote Islamophobia in America, as well as the sources of their funding. One of those featured in the report, Steve Emerson, appeared on the August 30 edition of Fox Business’Follow the Money to misrepresent the report and attack CAP in an attempt to discredit the report’s claims.
Emerson said on Fox that he felt “somewhat complimented because they’re attributing to me and four other people the ability to control the minds of 300 million Americans for 15 years.” In fact, the report features a dozen “main players who conjure up and spread misinformation about American Muslims and Islam,” as well as seven major financial contributors and an echo chamber that includes the religious right, the media, politicians, and grassroots organizations.
Emerson went on to suggest that some level of Islamophobia is justified because “65 to 70 percent of all international terrorist attacks are carried out by radical Muslims, so there’s a fear based on that.” He accused CAP of quoting “terrorist organizations” and “a front group for Hamas” in its report, dismissing CAP as a “$38 million-a-year organization that looks like the Democratic Party in exile.”
Emerson also falsely suggested that the report somehow denies that Islam is used as a justification for terrorist acts:
What’s interesting here is that when it comes to looking at Islamic terrorist attacks, what they deny and what they claim is racist is the assertion that Islamic terrorism is motivated by Islamic extremist clerics, mosques, statements –
Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.
During his Fox appearance, Emerson also offered this bizarre comparison: “This reminds me of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or, you know, it reminds me of someone who attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center because they attacked the Ku Klux Klan. Right? I’m the messenger.”
Emerson later said:
They believe that the only reason there exists suspicion against Islam — popular suspicion, and it’s not a majority, it’s a minority — is because of people like me who are orchestrating it like, you know, the Wizard of Oz. The bottom line is it comes from so many rampant sources — if you go on YouTube, on the Internet. Most of the Islamic organizations in the United States, they’re run by the Muslim Brotherhood or they were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that believes in imposing Islam and the sharia around the world. We’re coming out with a documentary –
Host Eric Bolling echoed Emerson: “I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”
A New York amusement park was temporarily shut down Tuesday after a large-scale altercation erupted between Muslim patrons and park rangers over a disagreement on headgear rules.
Muslim women in a tour group at Rye Playland in Westchester County were reportedly denied access to several rides because they were wearing hijabs – their traditional headscarves, MyFoxNY reports.
“Our headgear policy is designed to protect the safety of patrons and safety is our first concern,” said Deputy Parks Commissioner Peter Tartaglia. “This policy was repeatedly articulated to the tour operator, but unfortunately the message did not reach some of the members of his group.”
The altercation began when park officials offered refunds and members of the Muslim group got in a scuffle, Tartaglia told The Journal News. Two park rangers were injured when they jumped in to break it up, he said, and were taken to local hospitals.
Dozens of police vehicles from nine agencies then rushed to the park, where officers arrested 15 people – mostly for disorderly conduct, authorities said. The disturbance involved around 30 to 40 people.
All other visitors were not allowed into the park between 4 and 6 p.m. ET, with exit ramps from I-95 closed as well.
The tour group – the Muslim American Society of New York – was at the park to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr, an Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, MyFoxNY reports.
“Everybody got mad, everybody got upset,” Amr Khater, a Brooklyn resident, told The Journal News. “It’s our holiday. Why would you do this to us?” Khater said park rangers notified him of the headgear rules upon arrival.
The Journal News reports: “Lola Ali, 16, of Astoria said she witnessed a group of girls and women wearing hijabs go to park security to confront them about the headgear issue. She said the women were upset and yelling. She said the security officers started pushing them away and the girls stood their ground, at which point the security officers grabbed them, pushed them to the ground and handcuffed them. Men within the park saw this and tried to intervene, Ali said, and the situation went downhill from there. ‘They were beating down the girls, then they started beating down the guys,’ she said of the security officers.”
Believing that the upcoming 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 is best memorialized in crayon, Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. is publishing a new coloring book entitled “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom.” In offering kids the option of coloring the Twin Towers burning, mourning survivors, or the Navy SEALs shooting Osama Bin Laden, publisher Wayne Bell insists that “the doodles represent patriotism,” a “simplistic, honest tool” to “help educate children on events on 9/11.” But many Muslims describe it as, in a word, “disgusting.”
Pointing out that Muslims are already dealing with an environment of increasing Islamophobia, Michigan Council on American Islamic Relations representative Dawud Walid noted that “nearly all of the mentions of Muslims in the book are accompanied by the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist.’” Indeed, the page depicting a Navy SEAL aiming at bin Laden cowering behind is veiled wife reads “Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.” Bell’s response? “The truth is the truth“:
“Little kids who pick up this book can have their perceptions colored by those images … it instills bias in young minds,” said Walid. He says that some of the narrative and photos aren’t even correct, noting that Bin Laden wasn’t hiding behind a wife when he was shot.
Bell stood by the book as an “honest depiction”.
“The truth is the truth,” Bell said, adding, “It’s unfortunate that they were all Muslim and that’s the part people want to erase … I don’t know what else you can call them.”
Noting that one page depicts a woman mourning with a cross chain dangling from her neck, Walid says “Muslims mothers lost sons too.” He also noted that he’s not an advocate of showing children violent images — a sentiment that many military families share. Shariah Gibbs, a military spouse in Germany, said “This should not be a coloring book.” Another said, “I would not buy a coloring book [about 9/11]…To me, coloring books should be fun….this is not!”
It is important to note that Bell has published other coloring books on topics “from dinosaurs and zoo animals to African-American leaders, President Obama, superheroes of the Bible and even the Tea Party.” He even said that, if asked to print a book reflecting positive images of Muslim Americans, “I’d print it tomorrow.” To which Walid said, “Well, I’m asking him to do it right now.”
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what’s going on.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. Police operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.
“The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.” AP’s investigation is based on documents and interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.
In response to the story, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim civil rights organization, called on the Justice Department to investigate. The Justice Department said Wednesday night it would review the request.
“This is potentially illegal what they’re doing,” said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the organization.
After the terrorist attacks, New York hired retired CIA official David Cohen to transform its intelligence division.
Among Cohen’s earliest moves at the NYPD was asking for help from his old CIA colleagues. He needed someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn’t have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.
CIA Director George Tenet dispatched Larry Sanchez, a respected CIA veteran, to New York while Sanchez was still on the CIA payroll, three former intelligence officials said. Sanchez directed and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information, officials said.
There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that’s supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A 24-year-old man has been arrested on hate crime charges for the November firebombing of a mosque in Corvallis, Ore., where the suspect in a Portland, Ore., bomb plot once worshipped, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.
The suspect in the Corvallis firebombing was identified as Cody Crawford, who lived a block from the mosque. Shortly after the firebombing, authorities searched his home.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sought an investigation Wednesday into the Obama administration’s cooperation with award-winning filmmakers working on a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said too much information already has leaked out about the Navy SEALs raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan in May, and Pentagon officials have cautioned against discussing details of the mission.
King asked the inspectors general of the CIA and Defense Department to determine what consultations occurred in the Obama administration about providing Hollywood with access to covert military operators and clandestine CIA officers.
The picture will be directed by Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter will be Mark Boal, 2009 Academy Award winners for “The Hurt Locker.”
The White House ridiculed King’s request, saying the moviemakers will not receive any sensitive information.
Press secretary Jay Carney told reporters, “When people, including you in this room, are working on articles, books, documentaries or movies that involve the president, ask to speak to administration officials, we do our best to accommodate them to make sure that facts are correct. That is hardly a novel approach to the media.
“We do not discuss classified information. And I would hope that as we face the continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.”
He said information provided about the raid was focused on President Barack Obama’s role and it’s the same information given to anybody writing about the topic.
King said his staff has spoken to CIA officials who were upset about any cooperation with the movie-makers. Among the things he asked the inspectors general to investigate were:
_Any consultations within the administration on the advisability of providing Hollywood executives with access to covert military operators and clandestine CIA officers to discuss the raid.
_Whether a copy of the film would be submitted to the military and CIA for pre-publication review to determine whether special operations tactics, techniques and procedures, or intelligence sources and methods, would be revealed.
_Whether filmmakers attended a meeting with special operations personnel and CIA officers, and whether any such attendance was balanced against the duty to maintain cover for these operatives.
The movie may be released by Sony Pictures Entertainment next fall, shortly before the November 2012 elections.
Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters, “This film project is only in the script development phase, and DoD is providing assistance with script research, which is something we commonly do for established filmmakers.
“Until there is a script to review, and a request for equipment or other DoD support, there is no formal agreement for DoD support.”
Bigelow and Boal said in a statement, “Our upcoming film project about the decade-long pursuit of bin Laden has been in the works for many years and integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, as well as the cooperative strategies and implementation by the Department of Defense and the CIA.
“Indeed, the dangerous work of finding the world’s most wanted man was carried out by individuals in the military and intelligence communities who put their lives at risk for the greater good without regard for political affiliation. This was an American triumph, both heroic and non-partisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”
Two Chechens Movsar Jamaev and Rustam Daudov first met on Wednesday July 19, this year on the island Utøya. They quickly became good friends, and were going to dinner, when the first shots were fired on Friday, July 22 – says on its pages the well-known Norwegian newspaper “Dagbladet”.
With the prior permission of their parents, they told the reporters of this newspaper about the terrible hours spent on the island of Utoya.
“We heard the first shots and saw a group of teenagers standing near an armed man who was shooting them at a point-blank. Three of them were shot in front of us”, – said the young Chechens. “From there the two young men ran towards the woods, pulling a group of terrified Norwegian youth, who did not know how to save themselves.” 16-year-old Norwegian said he was so frightened that he could not move. “Therefore, Movsar took my arm and dragged me into the forest” – he said. From there Movsar called his father, who gave him instructions, how to behave in a similar situation.
“I have witnessed how people were shot earlier in my country by the Russian occupiers, when I was a kid. After talking with my father, I was able to pull myself together. My dad told me that I must possess myself and that I should think not only about themselves, but also about the other children on the island. He told me that I should tried to save as many as possible. “Attack on the offender should be done properly” said dad”- says Movsar.
“The murderer, dressed in the form of a police officer, shouted to us to come to him. At first I thought to do it, until I realized that he was going to kill us. Soon, he began to shoot the children who came to him, believing that he is a policeman. He did calmly and cooldbloodedly kill defenseless children.”- said Movsar. According to his friend, Rustam, they were armed with stones, decided to stop the offender. Rustam states, that both of them with stones in their hands began to move towards Anders Breivik.
“We were maybe a meter away from him and were going to throw stones at him, but he shot one of our friends. Then we threw stones at him and ran to save our lives and the lives of other children who were still alive – said Rustam. Movsar has no doubt that he got the murderer with a stone. He says that after this killer howled and shouted at him “f***ing nigger”.
After that, the young men decided to seek and rescue the remaining children. They found a cave in the rock, where they hid terrified children (a total of 23 people), among whom was even an eight-year boy. Movsar says that he carried him on his shoulders for nearly an hour.
Then they stood on duty at the cave entrance hoping to protect children. From there, they saw several young people drowning in the water. “I could not let them drown, and swam to help them. Three times I did it, but I was totelly exhausted due to the cold water. I did not have the strength to save the boy, who was only ten feet from me. He drowned “. – Movsar said.
This weekend, Gov. Rick Perry will host a mass Christian prayer rally in his home state of Texas. The principal sponsor of the rally, the American Family Association, has a truly vile record on immigration issues. The Association’s principal spokesperson on policy issues, Bryan Fischer, says that Muslims should be barred from becoming naturalized citizens because, he says, Islam requires Muslims to kill Christian Americans.
Fischer has hosted a number of Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty, on his powerful “policy” radio broadcast that is heard nationally. His tarring of all Muslims as destructive of America has not dissuaded Perry and others from seeking Fischer’s favor. For instance, this rant by Fischer was deemed beyond the pale by Republican leaders:
We allow unrestricted Muslim immigration into the United States. We are welcoming to our shores, welcoming to our borders, men who are determined to destroy us. They’ve said it themselves, it’s in their own writings, it’s in their own words; they’re out to eliminate and destroy western civilization. It’s just absolute folly to invite that kind of toxic cancer into our culture, but that’s what we’re doing every single day.
Fischer has said that Muslim immigrants are not protected by the First Amendment. Fisher says there should be “no more mosques, period” because “each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.”
Fischer says that Muslim’s should be ineligible to enter the U.S. and that those who are already here should be deported:
[T]he most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. This will protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values. Muslims, by custom and religion, are simply unwilling to integrate into cultures with Western values and it is folly to pretend otherwise. In fact, they remain dedicated to subjecting all of America to sharia law and are working ceaselessly until that day of Islamic imposition comes.
The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals. Why force them to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?
In other words, simple Judeo-Christian compassion dictates a restriction and repatriation policy with regard to Muslim immigration into the U.S.
Fischer was a harsh critic of evangelicals who endorsed immigration reform as a way of showing compassion to the undocumented. Ladst year he wrote this in The Hill:
But upholding the law is not mistreatment. We do no wrong to the shoplifter by holding him accountable for his behavior. In fact, enforcing the law is the way government shows compassion for victims of crime. Compassion is misdirected if it is targeted toward lawbreakers rather than victims.
Where is the compassion for the residents of Arizona who are forced to cope with drug smuggling, drug-related violence, human trafficking, home invasions, kidnappings and $2.7 billion in annual costs imposed on them by illegals for education, welfare, law enforcement and healthcare?
There’s no way around the fact that my evangelical friends want to reward aliens who break the law.
We should instead deal with the 12 to 20 million illegals currently in the country through attrition, by making access to any taxpayer-funded resource — whether education, welfare or healthcare — contingent upon proof of legal residency.
Once illegals realize they will be sent home the moment they come to the attention of any government agency or any branch of law enforcement, they will immediately stop being a drain on taxpayer resources and will be the most law-abiding residents we have.
Rigorous use of the E-Verify system will dry up the job market for illegals, once again creating incentives for them to self-deport.
Enforcing our immigration policy need not break up families. The president sent spouses and children along when he deported the Russian spies, and we can do the same with every illegal alien. We do not want to separate husbands from wives, or children from parents, so our policy should be to repatriate entire families together to preserve family integrity.
If a member of a family has the legal right to remain in the U.S., he of course should be allowed to exercise that right. But then the family itself would be responsible for dissolving the family unit, not the United States.
NEW YORK (PIX11)— Former presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, is cashing in on the upcoming, 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by marketing an educational “cartoon” about the events that sent the United States back to war.
“You can go to Learn Our History.com,” Huckabee told viewers this week on Pat Robertson‘s “700 Club” cable show. The one-timeArkansas governor is producing a series of DVD’s, and he told the TV audience, “The first one’s $9.95, and then it goes to $11.95.”
“Someone to profit off the worst day in American history is unheard of,” fumed retired, FDNY fire chief, Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son, Jim Jr., on 9/11.
“Three thousand Americans were murdered, and it’s for his personal gain. I think it’s blood money,” Riches told PIX 11.
A preview of Huckabee’s cartoon for the “Time Cycle Academy” shows a plane heading toward the Twin Towers on a clear day, with someone shouting below “No!” before the jet crashes into the first tower. The cartoon also shows a “Wanted” poster for Al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden — long before he was fatally shot by U.S. Navy Seals this past May — portraying an animated Bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, as he proclaims, “The time for jihad is upon us, death to the Americans!”
When PIX 11 traveled to the Tribute Center right next to Ground Zero on Wednesday, a Utah tourist, Heather Robertson, said this about Huckabee’s history lesson: “I don’t know if I like it in cartoon form.” Robertson continued, “I think it diminishes what took place on 9/11.”
A laborer named Frankie, who was working in a hard-hat re-building World Trade Center Tower 4, said this about Huckabee’s efforts, “Then do it for free. He’s about making money. He ain’t about teaching anybody anything. If he’s doing not-for-profit, then that’s a different story. But I’m sure he’s making money on it.”
David Yi, a Korean immigrant who lives in New Jersey, did not think the cartoon was such a bad idea for kids. “We have to teach them freedom to protect ourselves,” he told PIX 11.
Huckabee’s representatives have not been responding to requests for comment.
Jim Riches had plenty more to say, however. “I think for politicians trying to teach our kids, we’re in trouble. Leave it to the teachers, the educators.”
Riches also noted the recently-passed Zadroga Law to help sick, 9/11 “First Responders” leaves certain people out. “The people who have cancer aren’t even going to be covered,” Riches told PIX 11. “And I think that would be another good place to put the money, instead of putting it in his pocket.”
ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, CO.
Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain met with Muslim leaders outside Washington, DC in a laudable attempt to make amends for the Islamophobic positions that had come to characterize his candidacy. Cain had previously declared he will not appoint Muslims in his administration — he later backtracked and said he would only require a special loyalty oath from Muslim appointees — and argued that Americans have the right to ban mosques.
However, not everyone was pleased with the former pizza executive’s recent move.
Last weekend, ThinkProgress spoke with Frank Gaffney, a conservative conspiracy theorist who nevertheless enjoys outsized influence on the right. The Center for Security Policy president had a unique take on the matter: Herman Cain had actually been meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to Gaffney, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, where Cain met with Muslim leaders last Wednesday, is “a prominent Muslim Brotherhood apparatus in Washington DC.” The Center’s Imam, Mohamed Magid, is actually, says Gaffney, “the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States”:
KEYES: Where would you say Herman Cain’s at now?
GAFFNEY: I only saw one press report of it, and it sounded as if some of what you just described was said by people, Muslim Brotherhood people frankly, with whom he was meeting rather than the candidate himself. [...]
KEYES: Those were Muslim Brotherhood people that he was meeting with?
GAFFNEY: Oh yeah. The ADAMS Center is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood apparatus in Washington DC. It’s one of the most aggressive proponents of its agenda in the city. [...] Specifically, meeting with Mohamed Magid who is the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States, who happens also to be the Imam at the ADAMS Center. It’s one of those things, it’s a very problematic departure from what I think had been a generally sensible… I don’t agree everything he has said and some of the positions he has taken, but I think generally speaking he’s been forthright in raising a concern that I think is warranted. And if in fact he’s now changed his position in ways that are being reported, that’s even more troubling than if he was spending time with Muslim Brothers.
Watch it:
Such a charge would be shocking, were it not made by a man who says the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the federal government and CIA chief David Petraeus is submissive to Sharia law.
Despite Gaffney’s outlandish beliefs, he remains an extraordinarily influential figure on the right. Members of Congress regularly appear on his radio show, Secure Freedom Radio. He is anadvisor and close friend to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And along with a small group of like-minded conservatives, Gaffney has turned Islamophobia into an industry.
With his latest accusation against Herman Cain, Gaffney is well on his way to becoming the 2011 version of Rudy Giuliani. Gaffney’s every utterance now boils down to “a noun, a verb, and ‘Muslim Brotherhood.’”
“Ramadan,” said President Obama at a White House iftar dinner in 2010, “is a reminder that Islam has always been a part of America. The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.”
The dinner to which the president referred took place on December 9, 1805, and Jefferson’s guest was Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, an envoy from the bey (chieftain) of Tunis who spent six months in Washington. The context of Mellimelli’s visit to the United States was a tense dispute over piracy on American merchant vessels by the Barbary states and the capture of Tunisian vessels trying to run an American blockade of Tripoli.
Mellimelli arrived during Ramadan, and Jefferson, when he invited the envoy to the president’s house, changed the meal time from the usual hour of 3:30 p.m. to “precisely at sunset” in deference to the man’s religious obligation.
Jefferson’s knowledge of Islam likely came from his legal studies of natural law. In 1765, Jefferson purchased a two-volume English translation of the Quran for his personal library, a collection that became, in 1815, the basis of the modern Library of Congress.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is planning to screen a controversial film on Capitol Hill about attempts to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Manhattan.
The film, “Sacrificed Survivors: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mosque,” was produced by the conservative Christian Action Network (CAN) and has begun to garner criticism from such groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The 45-minute film is largely focused around a series of interviews conducted with survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and members of their family. The interviews, according to CAN’s website, delve into the feelings they experienced last summer when a group proposed building an Islamic center blocks away from where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
Efforts to build the Islamic center, which was set to include a swimming pool and a mosque among other amenities, were the focus of nearly every news agency last summer and brought a slew of politically charged arguments from members of Congress.
CAN attempted to get permission to show the film in New York City parks over the week leading up to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but it was denied out of concern for the content.
According to CAN’s website, West plans to host the event during the week Congress returns from recess, on Sept. 8 in the Rayburn House Office Building.
This will not be the first time a controversial film about Muslims has been shown on Capitol Hill. In 2009, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) hosted the controversial Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders and showed his movie, “Fitna,” which many Muslims have designated anti-Islamic. Following an anti-screening campaign by the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association, no members of Congress reportedly showed up to watch the film.
West came under fire last year for commenting during a conference that terrorists were fulfilling mandates laid out by the Quran.
A spokeswoman for West did not immediately return a request for comment.
When Ibtihaj Muhammad fastens her headscarf, or hijab, around her chin, one of its purposes is to deflect unwanted attention.
But when she wears a hijab in a sporting arena, it often has the opposite effect.
The New Jersey native is currently ranked 11th in the world in women’s sabre, a discipline of fencing. Only one American ranks higher: Mariel Zagunis, the two-time Olympic and world champion.
Both women will compete this weekend at a World Cup fencing event at the New York Athletic Club to earn points toward qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee do not track athletes’ religion, but if Muhammad makes the Olympic team, she would likely be the first practicing Muslim woman to represent the U.S. at the Games.
When she competes, photographers often zoom in on the name Muhammad on the back of her fencing jacket. Her mother, Denise, recently saw such a photo and said, “I realized: my God, she’s representing all of us.
In June 2007, “counter-jihad” blogger Pamela Geller posted the following Email from Norway, from a reader who sounds a lot like the Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik.
This is what the post looks like today:
I am running an email I received from an Atlas reader in Norway. It is devastating in its matter-of-factness.
Well, yes, the situation is worsening. Stepping up from 29 000 immigrants every year, in 2007 we will be getting a total of 35 000 immigrants from somalia, iran, iraq and afghanistan. The nations capital is already 50% muslim, and they ALL go there after entering Norway. Adding the 1.2 births per woman per year from muslim women, there will be 300 000+ muslims out of the then 480 000 inhabitants of that city.
Orders from Libya and Iran say that Oslo will be known as Medina at the latest in 2010, although I consider this a PR-stunt nevertheless it is their plan.
From Israel the hordes clawing at the walls of Jerusalem proclaim cheerfully that next year there will be no more Israel, and I know Israel shrugs this off as do I, and will mount a strike during the summer against all of its enemies in the middle east. This will make the muslims worldwide go into a frenzy, attacking everyone around them.
Before, I thought about emigrating to Britain, Israel, USA, South Africa, etc. for taxes and politics, but instead (although I believe we are the very last generation on earth before the return of God) I will stay and fight for the right to this country and indeed the entire peninsula, for the God-fearing people, just in case this isn’t the end of the world after all. Doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan.
It’s far from impossible to achieve, after all my people has done it every time before, in feats that match the ancient greek, hebrew and british “legends”.
Oslo and the southeast may fall easily, but there are other lines than “state”-borders drawn across this country since long before there was even a single muslim in the world, and we have held them this long, against everyone else too. We are entering a new golden age for my people, and those of a handful other countrys, but only through struggle.
Never fear, Pamela. God is with you too in this coming time.
But Pamela Geller’s guilty conscience is showing again, because as a matter of fact, she edited her post very recently to take out the most incriminating line. The Internet Archive has a copy of the original:
As you can see, the line Geller edited out is:
We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.
Google’s cache also has a copy of Geller’s page, captured on June 30, 2011 — and the line about “stockpiling weapons” was still there at that time.
Obviously, Pamela Geller is going through her archives and scrubbing any violent rhetoric related to Norway, and equally obviously, she’s doing it to cover her tracks.
A book by one of Norwegian terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite anti-Muslim authors.
All this is revealed in a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit(.pdf), which trains new Bureau recruits. Among the 62 slides in the presentation, designed to teach techniques for “successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E. [Middle East],” is an instruction that the “Arabic mind” is “swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts.”
The briefing presents much information that has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with constitutionally-protected religious practice and social behavior, such as estimating the number of mosques in America and listing the states with the largest Muslim populations.
Other slides paint Islam in a less malicious light, and one urges “respectful liaison” as a “proactive approach” to engaging Muslims. But even those exhibit what one American Muslim civil rights leader calls “the understanding of a third grader, and even then, a badly misinformed third grader.”
One slide asks, “Is Iran an Arab country?” (It’s not.) Another is just a picture of worry beads.
“Based on this presentation, it is easy to see why so many in law enforcement and the FBI view American Muslims with ignorance and suspicion,” says Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal aid group. “The presentation appears to treat all Muslims with one broad brush and makes no distinction between lawful religious practice and beliefs and unlawful activities.”
A grainy copy of the PowerPoint was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California chapter and the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, and provided to Danger Room. The two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year inquiring about government surveillance of American Muslim communities.
“In order for FBI training to be effective it has to present useful, factual and unbiased information. This material fails on all three criteria,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU. “Factually flawed and biased law enforcement training programs only expand the risk that innocent Muslim and Arab Americans will be unfairly targeted for investigation and prosecution, and stigmatized in their communities.” [Full disclosure: My fiancee works for the ACLU.]
In response to queries from Danger Room, the FBI issued the following statement about the PowerPoint: “The FBI new agent population at Quantico is exposed to a diverse curriculum in many specific areas, including Islam and Muslim culture. The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced. It was a small part of a larger segment of training that also included material produced by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point.”
It is unclear when the FBI stopped using the PowerPoint.
Among the most provocative aspects of the presentation is its recommended reading list. One book offered is The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, by Robert Spencer. Spencer is one of the ringleaders of the protest against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the co-founder of Stop the Islamicization of America, which “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” in the view of the Anti-Defamation League. A manifesto written by the Norwegian terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik cited Spencer 64 times.
Another book cited is The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai. The volume was briefly infamous in 2004, after Seymour Hersh reported its influence among certain Iraq war hawks in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. According to Hersh, the takeaway of Patai’s book is that “Arabs only understand force” and are susceptible to “shame and humiliation.”
“It’s like asking law enforcement to learn ‘the facts’ about the African American experience by reading a book by the grand wizard of the KKK,” says Khera. “It is deplorable and offensive that the nation’s top law enforcement agency would promote such hateful so-called ‘experts’ on Islam.”
An FBI spokesman said Spencer’s book is no longer on the reading list but was not sure about the others. “We encourage our agents to seek out a variety of viewpoints. That does not mean we endorse or adopt the view of any particular author,” the bureau’s statement continues. “Broad knowledge is essential for us to better understand and respond to the threats we face. Knowledge also helps us defeat ignorance and strengthen relationships with the diverse communities that we serve.”
In recent years, law enforcement agencies around the country have proven receptive to anti-Muslim crusaders. The Washington Monthly recently reported on the “growing profession” of terrorism consultants who get paid to make “sweeping generalizations about Muslims” to rapt audiences of cops. Adam Serwer at the American Prospect reports that another Breivik favorite, Walid Shoebat, also gets government cash to tell police things like “Islam is the devil.”
At a Capitol Hill event on Monday, a Florida-based researcher named Peter Leitner claimed that up to 6,000 Muslims in America are a “fifth column.” According to Leitner’s official biography, he founded a group called the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center; Higgins claims to have provided counterterrorism instruction to “FBI Counterterrorism Special Agents,” various police departments countrywide and even Blackwater.
“These characterizations of Islam and of Arab and Muslim people are not just disheartening — they are frightening,” says Veena Dubal, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. “Degrading and inaccurate characterizations of Islam and of the ‘Arab mind’ don’t help individual agents fight terrorism. Rather, they imbue law enforcement with an extremely biased view of a diverse community.”
The Fox rapid-response team makes a plea to distinguish violence in the name of a religion from the practitioners and tenets of that religion as long as it’s Christianity.
When a tragedy like the one in Norway occurs, it’s human nature to try and explain the unexplainable. This almost always turns into a search for someone to blame. This frequently leads to attempts to guess what media figures the killers in question may have followed, putting those figures on the defensive. That defense is much harder when the terrorist himself cites your work explicitly. Such is the position that Robert Spencer, director of the blog Jihad Watch, now finds himself. Today, he appeared on Alan Colmes’ radio show to defend his site and his work.
Unsurprisingly, they found very little common ground.
This weekend, it was discovered that Spencer’s anti-Jihad (some, not Spencer, would say “anti-Muslim”) writing was cited 64 times in the manifesto of the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Because of this, he quickly received a large amount of unwanted attention, being mentioned on NBC Nightly News and featured heavily in a New York Times article entitled “Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.” Spencer has decried this “blame game” as a “leftist fantasy.”
In this writer’s opinion, Breivik was crazy and you can’t blame any one person for crazy being, well, crazy. I may find much of Spencer’s writings reprehensible and he may have contributed to an anti-Muslim culture that Breivik dwelled in, but he’s no more guilty for this crime than a heavy metal band is for Columbine.
That being said, Colmes got some good points in when he pointed out the difference between the way people like Spencer categorize Breivik to the way they do Islamic terrorists. Why are the latter endemic of a massive Islamic cultural problem whereas Spencer is so quick to describe Breivik as alone gunman. Hypocrisy is just as dangerous as irrational blaming.
It’s a fascinating (and heated) conversation. Watch the clip from Fox News below:
The fundraising race on the Republican side in anticipation for 2012 has claimed several victims in the past few weeks, in, as Jon Stewart joked, “what will definitely be called the most important election of our lifetime,” but few have adequately depicted the swift elimination of each with the violence it deserves. Stewart made up for that tonight, sending off candidates with mini wildlife films after mercilessly tearing them apart for their mistakes.
Rick Santorum got the most traditional way out– a wildebeest eaten by a giant alligator for acquiring so few funds. Then came “old silverback Newt Gingrich,” who Stewart noted was “actually in a lot less debt” than America is, hitting the one million mark in deficit while the nation is still $45,000 in debt per person.
Then Stewart turned to Tim Pawlenty, whose campaign to be taken seriously while being thoroughly boring brought out some of the best in Stewart. “Ooh, Tim Pawlenty,” he mocked, “taking a bold stance against charisma! Saying it’s got no place in politics!” Jokingly mimicking Pawlenty asking whether politics was a “popularity contest,” he answered himself: “oh wait, it is.” Pawlenty’s animal alter ego didn’t even get killed by another animal– it was a mammal chopping down a tree, getting pummeled by the very tree he just cut down. “If a Pawlenty campaign falls in the woods,” Stewart asked, “does it make a sound?”
Then there is Herman Cain, who, Stewart ceded, was not doing bad at all in the money race– but then there is his understanding of the First Amendment. Stewart tore into his statements on last week’s Fox News Sunday, where Cain declared that the First Amendment gave communities the right to ban mosques. “There are some pronoun issues here,” Stewart quipped about Cain describing the struggle as “our First Amendment” protecting against “their mosque.” “the First Amendment protects their mosque from us,” Stewart corrected, similarly going through his claim that Islam is different from other religions in that it has an element of law in it. Cain, perhaps most pathetically, didn’t even get to die in animal form– he is just a domestic cat, head stuck in a tissue box.
Another protest over what organizers call “radical strains” of Islam is planned on Saturday in front of Dearborn City Hall.
The Order of the Dragon, a pro-Israeli group, is planning the 3 p.m. demonstration to call attention to the “implementation of Sharia” or Islamic law in some court rulings, said Frank Fiorello, the head of the group’s Michigan chapter.
“We have a lot of people worried about Sharia creeping into family court,” said Fiorello, a Marlette resident. “There are 23 different jurisdictions where Sharia is being implemented in family court.” Fiorello did not provide specifics, but said there are recent cases in Ann Arbor District Court.
Other groups participating in the rally include the American Defense League, ACT! For America and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center’s Palestinian Wall of Lies, Fiorello said.
Fiorello, a Detroit native, was scheduled to host controversial Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ protest in Dearborn on April 22 but Fiorello backed off his protest after meeting with Dearborn Mayor John O’Reilly and a member of an interfaith group.
Jones ended up protesting a week later after being ordered by a Dearborn district judge that he would have to post a peace bond if he wanted to protest outside the Islamic Center of America on Good Friday.
Fiorello also said he backed away from Jones after a difference of option about how the protest should be handled. ”We’re not wanting to be involved in shock tactics,” said Fiorello. “That is not our route.”
Jones, meanwhile, has planned to protest against “radical Islam” at the Arab American International Festival in Dearborn next month.
A hate message was left on the car of a Muslim family while they were inside a business in Redmond, the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-WA) said Tuesday.
CAIR-WA said a Muslim mother reported that she found the message, which said, “We don’t [want] Muslims in America” in English and “We don’t want Muslims in our country, go away”, in Arabic, stuck to the family’s vehicle when she returned to it Monday afternoon after visiting a Redmond Starbucks.
“I can’t believe someone could hate me because of my religious beliefs,” the victim told KIRO 7. She asked us not to use her name or show her face.
The Muslim mother, who was with her 9-year-old daughter at the time of the incident, wears an Islamic head scarf.
Earlier this month, CAIR’s Michigan chapter called on state and national law enforcement authorities to investigate an incident in which a vehicle was vandalized and defaced with a racially-derogatory phrase and profanity.
CAIR-WA Executive Director Arsalan Bukhari said a coalition of some 60 interfaith and community leaders recently asked Everett Community College to drop an “Islamophobic” speaker scheduled to appear Thursday as part of an “Islam in America” lecture series.
Bukhari said that a growing number of hate incidents targeting American Muslims, those perceived to be Muslim and Muslim institutions have occurred in the days since the death of Osama bin Laden.
“Some of the issues we see happening are an increase in rhetoric against Muslims and an increase in mainstreaming of anti-Muslim speech,” Bukhari said.
CAIR-WA held a news conference Tuesday afternoon with the Muslim mother and her daughter to talk about the incident.
The victim said she isn’t angry about the note, but she’s shocked that it would happen in a community she’s grown to love. ”We are just regular people, and I hope this person realizes that they can’t make us afraid to go out and live our lives regularly,” she said.
Boca Raton officials have condemned a man’s plan to shred a Quran in a downtown park on Memorial Day, but say they cannot stop the event.
“On behalf of the Mayor and City Council and the city administration, we find the prospect of the deliberate desecration of a sacred text to be abhorrently offensive. We request that you not proceed with this act,” Deputy City Manager George Brown wrote Wednesday in a letter to Mark Rowley, who requested a permit to hold the event in Sanborn Square.
City officials determined that the event does not require a permit because it is a free-speech action, Brown wrote. Rowley’s initial request, to burn a Quran in the park, was denied because the city prohibits fires in parks.
Cenk Uygur breaks down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance in the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu’s speech and the reaction from our congress is discussed.
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) to a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, turned 70 years old yesterday. His “protest songs” became classic anthems for many in the civil rights movement and beyond.
Songs such as The Times they are a Changin’ and Blowin’ in the Wind are part of our collective memory and have been played endlessly, having influenced mass culture across generations. Dylan’s songs are diverse: some criticize American politics such as With God on Our Side and Masters of War. Other songs deal with the narratives of injustice and racism, such as the one written about Medgar Evers (Only a Pawn in their Game) and Emmett Till (The Death of Emmett Till). Dylan continued delving into these topics well into the 70′s when he wrote the hit song Hurricane for Rubin Carter.
Dylan also saw Martin Luther King, Jr. during the March on Washington in 1963 and performed for the crowd.
Dylan songs have always been filled with Judeo-Christian imagery that has both fascinated and captivated his audiences. But something nearly inexplicable happened in the 70′s to Dylan that explains the praise from such prominent Islamophobes:
after a visit to Israel in 1971, [Dylan] even pronounced the late far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane “a really sincere guy.”
Rabbi Meir Kahane and his radical, racist, and terroristic views–and his support for extreme Zionist groups–are well known and have been documented by LoonWatch.
Over the past couple decades, Dylan has become a supporter of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, which holds a firm Eretz Israel line regarding the ongoing occupation of the West Bank.
Dylan seems to think that Israel cannot be questioned about how many civilians it kills because God is on Israel’s side:
In 1983, twenty years after he sang, “you don’t count the dead” and “you never ask questions, when God’s on your side,” Dylan penned a song in response to the international outrage over the devastating Israeli assault on Lebanon in 1982, which took the lives of nearly 18,000 Lebanese civilians and wounded about 30,000 others.
Nobody can deny Dylan’s lyrical talent and I don’t think he is a bigot, but his support for Israeli extremism is certainly troubling. Certainly, Dylan does seem to be contradicting himself with regard to civil and human rights. Or are Palestinians not to be included in the human struggle? Perhaps Dylan should heed the message contained in his own song, “The Times they are a Changin’”:
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Meanwhile, Dylan’s song Neighborhood Bully glorifies Israeli aggression and occupation, and for this reason was commemorated by Spencer on JihadWatch. Here are the lyrics:
Neighborhood Bully
by Bob Dylan
From the album Infidels
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighborhood bully
The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He’s always on trial for just being born
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He’s the neighborhood bully
He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
He’s the neighborhood bully
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He’s the neighborhood bully
Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one’s command
He’s the neighborhood bully
Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
He’s the neighborhood bully
What’s anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin’, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed
He’s the neighborhood bully
What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully
The song seems to be a favorite of illegal settlers these days as well:
In 2001, the Jerusalem Post described the song as “a favorite among Dylan-loving residents of the territories“.[7] Israeli singer Ariel Zilber covered “Neighborhood Bully” in 2005 in a version translated to Hebrew.[8]
Nelson Mandela has clearly labeled the Israeli occupation as an apartheid system, saying:
Palestinians are not struggling for a “state” but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa…
Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.
It remains to be seen if Dylan performs in Israel this coming June, or instead “opens his eyes wide” to the racist and apartheid treatment that is being meted out to Palestinians. Will he finally respond to the call to Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel that other brave artists have responded to? Here is a list from Wikipedia of some artists who have:
Folk legend Pete Seger, Musicians Roger Waters and Brian Eno, Writers Eduardo Galeno and Arundhati Roy, film makers Ken Loach and Jean- Luc Godard, American singer Devendra Branhart and Irish Singer Tommy Sands, Guitarist Carlos Santana, Rocker Elvi Constello, Rap arist Gil Scott Heron, British bands The Klaxonss, Leftfields and Gorillaz Sound System, American band Pixies, American actress Meg Ryan, French Singer Vanessa Paradis
Among the celebrities are Stephen Sondheim, Mandy Patinkin, Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City), James Schamus (Ang Lee’s producer), Emily Mann (McCarter Theater), Eve Ensler (Vagina Monologues), Julianne Moore, Lynn Notage (Ruined), Bill Irwin, Kathleen Chalfant, Mira Nair, Oskar Eustis (Public Theater), Hal Prince (Broadway producer), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Sheldon Harnick (Broadway lyricist), Ed Asner (Up), Theodore Bikel, Wallace Shawn, Miriam Margolyes, Ruth Reichl, and Vanessa Redgrave…
Musicians constitute a powerful voice for freedom and liberty that has helped liberate people in the past. It is hoped that the Palestinians are not forgotten.
Editor’s Note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of “God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World,” is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.
Bahloul began his talk by observing that God must have a sense of humor to have given him a name as problematic as Ossama. But the heart of his talk concerned the compatibility of Islam with American values.
What surprised me about Bahloul, in both his public talk and our private conversations, was his deep and abiding faith in America. Signs at the construction site for his planned mosque had been vandalized twice and federal investigators had determined that a fire at the site was intentionally set. Efforts to build that mosque, appropriate for a growing congregation that had been active in the area for roughly two decades, were met not only with protests but also with a lawsuit.
Yet Bahloul continued to believe that what was right would win out in the end.
In the lawsuit, opponents of the mosque argued, among other things, that Islam was not a religion and therefore was not entitled to the free exercise protections and special zoning treatment given to religious organizations. But last week, a Murfreesboro court ruled for the Islamic center.
In his ruling, judge Robert Corlew announced “that Islam is a religion.” The fact that a court of law in the United States would actually have to make such a finding is a sad commentary on where we are today in the United States in terms of religious literacy.
Islam is not just a religion. It is the second largest religion in the world, with over 1 billion adherents. And as the Murfreesboro case demonstrates, some of these Muslims are our neighbors.
There is still one legal issue unsettled in this case—a technical matter concerning whether a prior proceeding allowing the mosque construction had followed the rules of a local open meetings ordinance. But, as the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro noted on its web page yesterday, the building permit is now in hand.
And, at least for now, the First Amendment is still the law of the land in Tennessee.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero.
Well, tomorrow, May 21, 2011, is supposed to be the end of the world. Wait, I thought the Mayans said it was supposed to be December 21, 2012? Either way, it gets a lot of publicity. (This post is a good example.)
A Christian Family Radio station in Oakland, Calif. has been spending of lot of time, money and effort letting people know that if they step up and believe, they will be beamed to heaven when the giant worldwide earthquake hits tomorrow, while the rest will be left to suffer.
So what’s the truth?
The quick and dirty answer is who knows? But these claims have been made for centuries on end, and each time, the next day comes. So my guess is that the probability of this happening is smaller than I can even imagine.
So what is it about the need to find a definitive date in religious or spiritual teachings when all things will come to an end?
Why strike fear into people’s hearts and minds?
It doesn’t get us anywhere to judge the people who are lighting up this movement, but it is more helpful to get curious about it. My guess is that it’s not intentionally vindictive; there is a deep belief that this is true. If a person who believes is reading these lines right now, it’s highly likely that they think I am ignorant and feel sad for me as I will likely go to hell. They’re sure of this.
But how does that happen? How do these deep, unshakable beliefs come to be, and how is it reconciled when the next day comes?
I think these are all important questions to ask because to some degree, we all have deep-seated beliefs that we aren’t even aware of.
We believe we have to dress and act a certain way to belong. We may believe that deep down we’re unlovable, or that we’ll never be able to write a book, get that job or lose weight. Beliefs are probably the most powerful subconscious thoughts that exist as they color the way we see life and influence our behaviors moment to moment.
We don’t know when beliefs start, exactly, but we do know that from the moment we open our eyes in this world, we are sponges for how things work, and we absolutely buy what we see and hear in our environments. Our brains are in critical stages of formation and the wiring is happening quickly. So we wire together beliefs based on our experience. If you were abused as a child, it’s highly likely that you felt unworthy or unlovable. If you were brought up in a loving and attuned environment, you may believe that you can do anything you set your mind to.
However, beliefs can be brought to light, and if they are unhealthy, they can be shattered.
Certainly many African Americans believed deeply that there would be no way they would see a black president in their lifetime, but it happened, and the glass ceiling disappeared.
Practice:
Consider whether you have any beliefs suggesting you are unlovable or unworthy, or that you just can’t do something. See if you can ride the string back to earlier times in your life and see where that message came from. Then each time you experience those thoughts, let the emotion, whether it’s fear, shame, etc., as it comes up in your body, ground you to the reality of the present moment. Then see if you can see an alternative vantage point.
Try this out as a practice over and again and see if you start to see cracks in your beliefs. It’s through these cracks that the light shines through.
And by the way, if you’re reading this post after May 21, congratulations, we’ve all made it!
As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.
This piece is adapted from Elisha Goldstein’s publication on Mentalhelp.net.
At least a dozen states have proposed nearly identical laws designed to ban “Sharia law” in American courts. In South Carolina — despite the testimony of a law professor noting there is no evidence of Muslim traditions being imposed in judicial settings — a group of legislators have joined the anti-Sharia bandwagon and offered a bill. Earlier this month, ThinkProgress sat down with State Sen. Mike Fair (R-SC), the chief sponsor of the anti-Sharia legislation, to hear his views on the issue.
Fair explained that although his inspiration for the bill stemmed from his fear of Muslim influence in America, it would prohibit all foreign laws from being used in American courts. Fair said he began worrying about the Sharia after 9/11, and said that after reading several books on Islam, he came to the conclusion that “99 percent” of terrorist acts since the Beirut Marine barracks bombing were carried out by “Middle Eastern men who happen to be Muslim advocates of the Islam religion.” He went on to say that he would not want to hear the Muslim prayer call made from the building of the South Carolina capitol, and was troubled that some airport already “accomodate Islam” by storing prayer shawls for Muslim taxi drivers:
FAIR: Most, and when I say most, 99 percent probably, acts of terrorismaround the world since at least since the killing of the two hundred plus Marines in Lebanon, in the car bomb or whatever it was, have occurred, all these acts of terrorism, have occurred at the hands of Middle Eastern men who happen to be Muslim advocates of the Islam religion. […]
The prayer shawls in such a public airport, built by public dollars at no cost to the people who want to store their prayer shawls. That’s a stretch by the way, but it is an accommodation of religion. Well anyway, that might help explain some of the thinking behind the popping up.Really the bill we have is an affirmation, it would be an exclamation point behind the law.
Watch it:
Fair’s calculation, that nearly every single act of terrorism for the past couple of decades was committed by Muslim men, is off base. In reality, in the last ten years alone, nearly twice as many terrorist plots were hatched by non-Muslims in America than by Muslims.
Even Fair admits that his bill doesn’t actually change anything and his examples of the Sharia issue are incredibly flimsy. Rather than protecting Americans from some type of creeping religion problem, Fair’s bill threatens to isolate and persecute a minority group that already faces regular smears from both public officials and right-wing media.
Click more for an extended transcript.
FAIR: Most, and when I say most, ninety nine percent probably, acts of terrorism around the world since at least since the killing of the two hundred plus Marines in Lebanon, in the car bomb or whatever it was, have occurred, all these acts of terrorism, have occurred at the hands of Middle Eastern men who happen to be Muslim advocates of the Islam religion. […] There’s a willingness in certain areas of the country. And I think this is what’s stirred a response by people like me, who want to be proactively trying to place barriers around similar kinds of things. In Columbia, South Carolina, that beautiful state house right over there […] you gotta walk through its gorgeous, but no horns sounding five times a day at times of prayer, which I’m told – haven’t been to Michigan in a long time – been told that there are Islamic communities where there have […] in Dearborn, that’s exactly right, where with taxpayer dollars they’re doing certain funded, doing certain things to accommodate Islam. That’s wrong, according to an interpretation of our Constitution, that’s wrong, why they are accommodating them. Are they afraid? I don’t know. Airports where prayer shawls are stored for taxi cab drivers to be given the ability to pick and choose. […] The prayer shawls in such a public airport, built by public dollars at no cost to the people who want to store their prayer shawls. That’s a stretch by the way, but it is an accommodation of religion. Well anyway, that might help explain some of the thinking behind the popping up. Really the bill we have is an affirmation, it would be an exclamation point behind the law. It says you will practice the law. If you need reminding, foreign law does not prevail over South Carolina law, notwithstanding the various exemptions we talked about where federal law does prevail in treaties and so forth.
Along with many American Muslims, my family and I listened to your speech today on the Middle East and North Africa. While I appreciate your encouraging statements to the people of the Muslim world — particularly to those who are currently fighting for dignity and civil rights in their own lands — I also couldn’t help feeling that many Americans are not setting the example of which you spoke when it comes to our own Muslim citizens.
Currently, 20 states have introduced anti-Muslim legislation, with more pending. Some of our country’s lawmakers and politicians have made very bigoted inflammatory comments about Muslims and Islam. Very recently, Tennessee, under extreme pressure, rewrote a bill that would have made it a crime punishable by 15 years in prison for Muslims to worship together in groups of two or more. Organized groups are staging hate rallies against Muslims building houses of worship around the country. Local municipalities are playing the zoning game by zoning Islamic schools and mosques out of the community. Mosque playgrounds are being torched. Muslim family homes, property, and mosques are being vandalized. Children are being bullied and harassed because they are Muslim. Shockingly, last week the Editor of the Gainesville Times in Florida published a letter that called for the expulsion of all Muslims from America. Recently, several Muslim clerics, and also a young Muslim woman were pulled off airplanes for no other reason other than they were dressed in recognizable Muslim attire. This is all being seen through the modern technology’s “window into the wider world” that you mentioned in your speech, but like all windows, you can also look from the world outside and see what’s happening inside.
What does it say to the world when our President speaks about rights for people in the Muslim world that “include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion” when our own people are being hindered from building mosques, and schools, and our right to worship freely is even being threatened?
Mr. President, Muslims in America know that you do not stand with this kind of bigotry and hatred. During your announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden you said,
As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam.
We appreciated this statement, however, judging by the uptick in anti-Muslim incidents since the death of bin Laden, the words weren’t enough to resonate with those in America who feel threatened by their Muslim neighbors.
Mr. President, Muslims need your leadership, your strong voice, and your support in this regard. You are a friend to the world’s Muslims, especially those fighting for their freedom, but Muslims need your friendship here on our own soil. Anti-Islam bigotry is getting worse in America — not better.
In our home, we love and respect you as our President; will you show us the same love and respect as a patriotic American family by speaking out strongly against this growing trend of anti-Muslim bigotry?
At this point in time the Imams are “accused” of material support for terrorism, that doesn’t mean they are guilty, in this country we sill believe in due process of law. Even if they are convicted it does not mean the mosque or the people who pray in it should be punished, that is guilt by association and collective punishment. Also, when corruption leaks in churches or synagogues do we have people demand the site to be closed? No, we put the accused on trial, not the faith or race. (If you haven’t already, join Americans Against Islamophobia fan page on Facebook)
MIAMI (CBS4) – The South Florida Imams accused of terrorism were arrested right in front of their mosques, disrupting the neighborhoods around them. Monday night, one of those neighborhoods saw more commotion.
Mosque protester Mark Dubynsky says standing outside the Flagler Mosque in West Miami-Dade with a sign demanding the mosque be razed to the ground was about self-expression.
“This is not about hate, this is about not keeping a shrine that promotes hate in the neighborhood,” he told CBS4′s Natalia Zea.
“That’s a threat, he’s threatening us,” he told Zea.
Dubynsky drove from Palm Beach to the mosque to make a statement, after the mosque’s imam Hafiz Khan was arrested and charged with funneling money to terrorists.
“I think if your leader, your church, your mosque is supporting terrorism then I think that building, that mosque needs to be torn down,” said Dubynsky.
Nassirya called police Monday evening, saying Dybynsky and his sign were scaring fellow Muslims away from their evening prayer service.
“People come here five times to pray and now all the women and children are scared to come here and we’re gonna lose all our people,” he said.
Nassirya is especially upset, because he doesn’t believe the allegations against his imam.
“It’s ridiculous. He’s a saintly man, he’s a saintly man.”
Neighbors don’t know who is right, but they do know their once quiet neighborhood is now dealing with police presence, protest, and press.
“Wow man, I had to close my door because of everybody knocking on the door,” said Jorge Gonzalez.
It’s affected neighbor Edna Wright too.
“I usually go walking around the neighborhood,” said Wright. “I just stay in my house now because I don’t know what’s going on.”
"I was like, 'What's going on here?' This is not America, that's not why I joined the Army," said one of the men, 34-year-old Khalid Lyaacoubi on the right walking with another Muslim recruit, 27-year-old Yassine Bahammou. (ABC News)
Even while serving in the Army, Muslims suffer harassment and suspicion.
Five Muslims who joined the Army to work as military translators say their lives and careers were ruined after they were falsely accused of trying to poison their fellow soldiers. In an interview for ABC News, two of the men say an Army investigation into the matter has cast a stigma on their lives, preventing them from gaining citizenship and employment.
“I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’ This is not America, that’s not why I joined the Army,” said one of the men, 34-year-old Khalid Lyaacoubi.
The men are all citizens of Morocco who were permanent “green card” residents of the U.S. They joined the Army in 2009 as part of a special program called “09 Lima” that would train them to work as Army translators in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. In return for their service, the men would be fast tracked for U.S. citizenship.
“We want to prove to Arabic nations, ‘we are Arabic and we live here. We lived with Americans and socialized with Americans.’ We know they are good,” said Lyaacoubi.
“The United States is known for fighting for other people’s freedom, and I like it and I wanted to help doing that,” said another Muslim recruit, 27-year-old Yassine Bahammou.
Trouble at Fort Jackson
The five men successfully completed basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, which they say was a positive and rewarding experience. However, it was during specialized training as translators at the Advanced Individual Training school on base that they say their lives were upended. They say it all began in November of 2009 when Major Nidal Hassan opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 31. In the wake of the shooting, Lyaacoubi and Bahammou said some of their fellow soldiers began to turn on them, calling them “terrorists” and “Hajis” behind their backs.
Then in November of 2009, the five Muslim recruits were arrested by the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) over a tip that they were allegedly plotting to poison their fellow soldiers at Fort Jackson. The news of the investigation broke on the Christian Broadcasting Network and quickly became national news.
Without being formally charged with a crime, the men were questioned about the poisoning allegation and accused of larceny, mutiny and conspiracy. The recruits were detained in their barracks building for 45 days and were escorted by guards wherever they went, including the bathroom. They said they were prohibited from speaking Arabic to each other or to family members on the phone. All along, the men said they told investigators they had no idea where the poisoning allegation came from and they vigorously maintained their innocence.
During this time, the men also said they were subjected to anti-Muslim harassment and abuse by authorities. The recruits claim they were told they would be sent to Guantanamo and one of the men said a CID agent told him he would be sent back to Morocco “in a box”.
“They were treating us as a terrorist,” said Lyaacoubi. “I never forget what this agent, she told me. She was like, “We are at war against Islam and you are a Muslim. Well, what are you going to do about that.”
“I see that my religion is the problem, or the part of the world that I am from is the problem,” said Bahammou. “I asked them to take me to church so I can change my religion, if that’s the problem.”
Rabbi Gavriel Bidany was convicted last week of a fondling 23-year-old Israeli soldier sleeping in the seat next to his on a transatlantic flight.
If this rabbi had been an Imam, every major news source would have been reporting this story non-stop, and the anti-Islam blogosphere would have run amock. (hat tip:Disill)
Don’t lock up our dad – he has to help us get married!
That was the plea from the children of an Orthodox rabbi convicted of molesting an Israeli soldier on a plane.
“I have reached an age [22] where I need to find a groom and start a family,” Eden Bidany wrote in a letter to Magistrate Ramon Reyes.
“And without my father it is very difficult,” she added.
Gavriel Bidany, 48, was convicted last week of a fondling the 23-year-old lieutenant sleeping in the seat next to his on a transatlantic flight.
Gavriel Bidany, a marriage counselor and father of 11, faces up to six months in prison when he’s sentenced Thursday in Brooklyn Federal Court.
His son also begged for mercy.
“Today I am 21 and I need to start my own family … and without my dad it is impossible,” said Avishar Bidany.
“It would hurt my match-making possibilities.”
Another son said if he finds a bride soon, having a father in jail would ruin the wedding.
“I would like to get married properly with my father at my side please,” Ariel Bidany wrote.
Also asking for leniency was U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan Gross, an assistant professor of law at West Point.
In a note written on Department of the Army letterhead, Gross said Gavriel Bidany should be held accountable, but not incarcerated.
Gross, who did not return a call for comment, said the rabbi once helped him and his wife “with a particularly difficult situation.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Sarratt urged the judge to punish the rabbi with several months of jail time for the assault and for perjuring himself on the witness stand by claiming he was asleep at the time of the attack.
Imagine if an Islamic country sentenced someone to a year in a labor camp for explicit public performance, we will not hear the end how the Muslim world is trying to suppress the Arts.
Cheng Li, a Chinese performance artist, was sentenced to one year of “reeducation through labor” (NSFW) for an explicit public performance on March 20. Cheng, whose attorney applied for administrative reconsideration last week, had performed “Art Whore,” in which he and a female partner engaged in unsimulated sex acts before a private audience at the Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall in Beijing. The performance included “sex scenes on a balcony and in a basement of the exhibition hall,” reports China’s Global Times (NSFW).
One unambiguous photo of the performance has been circulating, but it is unclear how many people actually saw the acts; Cheng’s case hinges on convincing the notoriously ironhanded Chinese judiciary that his performance, open only to a select group of invited artists, was not intended to create a disturbance and was not harmful to society. The Chinese government has been at the center of another art censorship controversy since April 3, when renowned artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei was taken into custody.
As for Cheng’s message, the artist stated that “the popular trend of commercializing art is nothing but a trade of sex for commercial benefits.”
In the wake of 9-11 many Muslims suffered persecution. Today, in the days after Osama Bin Laden’s death, Muslims in the Shreveport -Bossier community feel they’ve been disrespected again.
They reported to police that a white male in a blue pick-up truck tampered with the doors at the Mosque. When he left, they discovered he had left pork on the door handles so people would have to touch it to go inside. Muslims do not eat pork, and try to avoid it because they consider it unclean.
Mosque members are not pressing charges, but reported the incident to police so it would be on file. Police say it could be considered a hate crime.
“It appears that the individual who did this tried to intimidate the individuals at this location,” said Mark Natale, a spokesman for the Bossier City Police Department.
Local leaders from other religions say they were saddened to hear about the incident.
“It’s kind of chilling. I mean, I know that nobody was physically hurt, but psychologically it’s hurtful,” said Susan Gross, the Executive Director of the North Louisiana Jewish Federation.
“It’s not helpful for anyone. Whether you’re Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t build bridges,” said Paul Martin, the Assistant Rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Shreveport.
Members of the Mosque say they just hope nothing like this happens again.
A publication brushed both women present out of the iconic image
Much ink has been spilled over the now-iconic Situation Room image, showing President Obama, Hillary Clinton and top national security officials watching a brief on Osama bin Laden’s killing.
Particular attention has gone to Clinton’s seemingly emotional expression (which she says may have been due to allergies) and to the one other woman in the shot, Audrey Tomasen, a counterterrorism analyst whom the media had never heard of before.
But instead of analyzing the two female faces in the photo, one Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper, Der Zeitung, took a simpler approach: They just photoshopped them out. The Yiddish publication left two empty spaces in place of the two women. According to the Jerusalem Post, the blog Failed Messiah was the first to pick up on Der Zeitung’s radically edited depiction of the Situation Room.
According to Jezebel, “the religious paper never publishes pictures of women, as they could be considered ‘sexually suggestive’.”
Here is the doctored shot in Der Zeitung, as captured by Failed Messiah:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Two Muslim religious leaders say they were removed from a commercial airliner in Memphis on Friday and were told it was because the pilot refused to fly with them aboard.
Masudur Rahman, who is also an adjunct instructor of Arabic at the University of Memphis, said by telephone from the terminal at Memphis International Airport that he and another imam had already been allowed to board their Delta Connection flight to Charlotte, N.C., before they were asked to de-board.
Transportation Security Administration spokesman Jon Allen in Atlanta confirmed the incident and said it was not initiated by that agency.
A Delta Air Lines spokeswoman said the flight was operated by Atlantic Southeast Airlines, which is also based in Atlanta. ASA didn’t immediately respond to telephone calls seeking comment.
Rahman said he was dressed in traditional Indian clothing and his traveling companion was dressed in Arab garb, including traditional headgear.
Rahman said he and Mohamed Zaghloul, of the Islamic Association of Greater Memphis, were cleared by security agents and boarded the plane for an 8:40 a.m. departure.
The aircraft pulled away from the gate, but the pilot then announced the plane must return, Rahman said. When it did, the imams were asked to go back to the boarding gate where Rahman said they were told the pilot was refusing to accept them because some other passengers could be uncomfortable.
Rahman said Delta officials talked with the pilot for more than a half-hour, but he still refused.
The men were taken to a lounge and booked on a later flight.
They called the Council on Islamic-American Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
“It’s racism and bias because of our religion and appearance and because of misinformation about our religion.” Rahman said. “If they understood Islam, they wouldn’t do this.”
He said a Delta manager apologized for the pilot’s actions, but that he and Zaghloul never spoke directly with the pilot.
Ibrahim Hooper, of the Islamic-American organization, said the group will follow up with the airline and with the TSA to help ensure such incidents do not continue to occur.
Hooper said airline officials at Memphis tried to resolve the situation, but the pilot refused.
A Brooklyn man accused of raping a woman he kept as a sex slave had a chilling list of penalties for her – including flogging and chaining her to a radiator – if she disobeyed his rules, prosecutors said Friday.
John Hopkins, 45, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn court to a litany of charges after prosecutors detailed the graphic “master” and “slave” relationship he had with a 27-year-old Midwestern woman who came to live with him last month.
Hopkins “set up slave rules,” prosecutor Christopher Laline said. “He punished her if she disobeyed.”
Aside from flogging and chaining her, the penalties included forcing her to drink water and barring her from the bathroom and sexual molesting her, the prosecutor said. “This is a henious crime,” Laline said of the 62-count indictment.
After a week, the victim, who was working at an elite sushi restaurant, told her mother she was being held captive, prompting a call to police.
Sikh on Sikh violence. 7 people were charged with disrupting a prayer service and yet where is the media on this? If this were Muslim on Muslim violence imagine what would have happened.
The HuffPo title actually seems to have gotten it wrong, those weren’t swords but musical instruments that they were using.
NEW YORK — A brawl involving cricket bats and small swords at a Sikh temple in New York City has led to riot and assault charges against seven people.
Police say the defendants interrupted prayer services at the Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center in Queens on Sunday. They were arraigned Monday.
Temple president Jamail Singh told the Daily Newsthat the fight was instigated by a dissident group of followers who are opposed to opening up membership.
The dispute is at the center of a lawsuit in state Supreme Court.
Some of those arrested Sunday also were charged with disrupting a religious service.
If an Arab Muslim or Christian perpetrated such an act Islam or so called “Islamic culture,” whatever that means, would be the center of attention. Here we have Haredim, Orthodox Jews stabbing Arabs in a racist assault, what if they were Muslim?
Christian Arab assaulted near Safed says ‘Jews’ racism against us has reached point of real violence’
Alber Halul, who was stabbed Saturday night by a group of masked men he claims are haredim, recounted the attack Sunday. “They threatened to shoot us if we resisted and stabbed me 10 times – in my head, my leg, and my neck,” he told Ynet.
Halul, a 22-year old Christian Arab from the Galilee town of Gush Halav, was assaulted while with a group of friends at Ein Zeitim forest, near Safed.
He says that at around 12:30 am two vehicles arrived at their gathering place and eight masked men alighted, and attacked them. Halul is currently being treated for wounds in his back, head, and legs at Ziv Hospital in Safed.
“At around 12:30 five masked drove up in a Nissan jeep and began driving in circles near us. Then they left and came back with another vehicle, and came closer,” he recalled from his hospital bed.
“They threw stun grenades and fired in the air. Then eight masked men got out of the car and began to attack us. The guys I was with ran away but I stayed to protect a girl who was with us. They stabbed me 10 times in my head, my leg, and my neck until they hit me hard and I fell to the ground.”
Halul says he knows the men were ultra-Orthodox Jews although they wore masks. “While they were attacking us one of the said that if we dared to resist they’ll shoot us and we knew from their accent and their clothes that they were ultra-Orthodox,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time the 22-year old was attacked due to his race. “I won’t return to the forest again. The Jews’ hatred and racism against us has reached a point of real violence that threatens our lives,” he said.
I don’t want to blame anyone and hope that the police will reach the people behind this attack because such people shouldn’t be walking the streets – they are a menace to the Jewish and Arab public.”
But police have not yet made any arrests in the case, and say they have no suspects. “The case is still being investigated,” police said in a statement.
Officer Gavin Hillard writes down contact information at a mosque on Anderson Street in Portland today where someone spray painted graffiti on the wall in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death. The writing says "Osama today Islam tomorow (sic)," and "Long live the West." Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Jirde Mohamed walks past the front of a mosque on Anderson Street in Portland today where someone spraypainted graffiti on the wall in the wake of Osama Bin Laden's death. Bin Laden and Islam are not the same thing, said Mohammed, a member of the mosque who has lived in Portland 10 years. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Fall out from the Bin Laden murder coupled with the anti-Islamic sentiment.
PORTLAND — Portland police are investigating anti-Islam graffiti painted onto the Maine Muslims Community Center on Anderson Street.
The graffiti included: “Osama today, Islam tomorow (sic),” “Long live the West” and “Free Cyprus.”
The letters were written in maroon paint on the mosque’s gray cement block wall. The graffiti was written sometime between late Sunday night and about 7:15 a.m. today, when it was discovered by Portland Housing Authority workers on Anderson Street.
A crew from Graffiti Busters was called in this morning to remove the graffiti, and it had finished the task by 10:45 a.m.
Officials with the community center said they recently completed purchase of the building, where they’ve been since 2007, for close to $1 million.
They said they’re disappointed by the graffiti and concerned about the impact it will have on children.
The mosque, or masjid, caters to a predominantly Somali Muslim community in greater Portland and is the largest Muslim community in the city. Members say it is the first time, the center has been defaced with graffiti.
“It makes me feel like I’m not welcome,” said the group’s treasurer, Abdiaziz Mohamed, who said his wife and four children were born here.
An attack on any holy place is horrendous. But just imagine if these attackers were Muslims and they were attacking a church instead, how much time would the media invest in this story?
RACIST abuse was shouted at worshipers at a busy mosque.
Police were called to Eastern Avenue in Gants Hill after reports of a group of men causing damage to parked vehicles in the road.
Six men were seen heading in the direction Redbridge roundabout towards Redbridge Islamic Centre, also in Eastern Avenue.
As they reached the mosque they shouted racial abuse and threw bricks at the building, which broke glass in the front doors.
The incident occurred at around 7.45pm on Thursday (March 24), near the start of evening prayers.
A number of worshippers had already entered the mosque but there were still some people outside the building when the attack occurred.
One man suffered a minor head injury but did not need any medical treatment.
Six men were arrested by police and remain in custody at Ilford Police Station.
Chief Inspector Stan Greatrick, of Redbridge police, said: “We would appeal for anyone who was in the Eastern Avenue area and saw the group of males to contact us.
“We have spoken to a number of people in the area and continue to liaise closely with members of the Redbridge Mosque.
“We have already secured additional patrols for Eastern Avenue and we would like to reassure the local community, and those who worship at the Redbridge Mosque, that we are treating this case extremely seriously.”
Anyone with information should contact Redbridge CID on 020 8345 2632.
Conservative activist Pamela Geller says the first amendment protects her right to run anti-Islam advertisements on Detroit buses. The local transit authority disagrees. Cue a year-long battle over free speech, with the ball now (temporarily) back in the hands of the bus company.
The saga of the bus banner ads began last May when Geller’s group, American Freedom Defense Initiative, submitted a request to the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) in Detroit to run a banner ad on their vehicles offering support for Muslims seeking to leave Islam.
The banner ad reads: “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers! RefugeFromIslam.com.” Visitors to the website are told not to tell friends or family about their plans to leave the faith and suggests they may be killed. “If you are thinking of leaving Islam, be wary, be careful,” it reads. “The Qur’an commands your death for leaving Islam… and Muhammad is explicit in a hadith: “If anyone changes his religion, kill him.”
While Geller has described the ads as a resource for Muslims, opponents criticize them as a little more than a vehicle for depicting Islam as a violent religion. The ads faced similar controversy when introduced to New York City and Miami.
SMART rejected Geller’s request on grounds that the bus company bars advertisements that are political in nature, or that are “likely to hold up to scorn or ridicule any person or group of persons.”
In response, Geller associate David Yerushalmi and the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) filed a lawsuit against SMART on behalf of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, seeking to reverse the bus authority’s refusal to display the ads.
WASHINGTON — Per his directive, the White Housereleased on Wednesday President Barack Obama’s “long form” birth certificate, the document whose absence has long been at the heart of the conspiracy-riddled discussion over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as the nation’s commander in chief.
The move came as a surprise to the press corps, many of whom had not shown up for Wednesday’s early-morning White House briefing. By the time word had spread that Obama would be making a 9:45 a.m. statement on the matter, however, the top anchors at all the networks had scurried into the briefing room.
Once there, they received a presidential scolding for their concern with “silliness.” Obama began his five-minute statement with the complaint that he wouldn’t be able to get the networks to break into their regularly scheduled programming for a speech on policy proposals.
“I know that there is going to be a segment of people for which no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” Obama said. “But I am speaking for the vast majority of the American people as well as for the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have got better stuff to do. We have got big problems to solve.”
“We are not going to be able to do it if we are distracted, we are not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other … if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts, we are not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by side shows and carnival barkers,” the president declared earlier.
The document released by the White House differs from the one that Obama’s aides made public during the 2008 presidential campaign. Instead of a “certification” of live birth, this was a “certificate,” clearly recording that the president was born on Aug. 4, 1961 in the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.
For years, Obama’s circle of aides had resisted calls to make the latter form public, noting that a certification is legally sound and what any citizen of Hawaii receives upon requesting documents of birth. And indeed, for some time, that explanation — supported by a a wide swath of other contemporaneous evidence – seemed to suffice.
But some who challenged the president’s citizenship remained unsatisfied, and in recent weeks they found a high-profile megaphone for their cause: business tycoon and presidential flirt Donald Trump.
“This issue was resolved in 2008. It has not been an issue,” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said during a morning briefing in which he and other officials took care not to mention Trump’s name. “None of you have asked about it, called about it or reported on it until the last few weeks … [not releasing it] would probably be good for the president politically. Despite that, the president said he was struck by how this was crowding out the debate.”
Last Friday, the president himself wrote Loretta J. Fuddy, the director of health at the State of Hawaii, requesting “two certified copies of my original certificate of live birth.” Fuddy complied. Shortly thereafter, the president’s counsel, Judith Corley of the firm Perkins Coie, flew to Hawaii to pick up two copies of the form. The trip was not taxpayer funded but, rather, paid out of the president’s personal account. Corley returned on Tuesday at roughly 4 p.m. with the copies. The White House announced a “morning gaggle” for reporters shortly thereafter. One aide explained that they did not want to “hold” on to the documents for release on a later date.
Many members of the press confessed to being “stunned” as it became clear what was about to be discussed. White House press assistants handed out a six-page stapled packet of photocopies showing the new and old birth certificates as well as the White House’s legal correspondence with Hawaii’s Department of Health.
And yet it was the press that played a large role in forcing the administration’s hand. CNN’s Ed Henry had pressed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on the issue just one day earlier, despite the fact that his own network had done a thorough investigation debunking the claims of the conspiracy theorists.
“There will always be some selection of people who will believe something. That is not the issue,” Pfeiffer said when asked if Wednesday’s move would silence the doubters. “This issue is, this is not a discussion happening just among conspiracy theorists. It is happening here in this room, on all of the networks, and it is something that every major political figure of both parties — instead of talking about real issues — is being asked about this. So the president decided to release this.”
AMSTERDAM — One of Europe’s first countries to allow Jews to practice their religion openly may soon pass a law banning centuries-old Jewish and Muslim traditions on the ritual slaughter of animals.
In the Netherlands, an unlikely alliance of an animal rights party and the xenophobic Freedom Party is spearheading support for the ban on kosher and halal slaughter methods that critics say inflict unacceptable suffering on animals.
The far right’s embrace of the bill, which is expected to go to a parliamentary vote this month, is based mostly on its strident hostility toward the Dutch Muslim population. The Party for the Animals, the world’s first such party to be elected to parliament, says humane treatment of animals trumps traditions of tolerance.
Jewish and Muslim groups call the initiative an affront to freedom of religion.
“I can speak for the Dutch Jewish Community and I think for the wider Jewish world, that this law raises grave concerns about infringements on religious freedom,” said Ruben Vis, spokesman for the Netherlands’ CJO, an umbrella of Jewish organizations.
Abdulfatteh Ali-Salah, director of Halal Correct, a certification body for Dutch halal meat, said he felt the debate made Muslims in the Netherlands feel Dutch society is more interested in animal welfare than fair treatment of its Muslim citizens.
“If the law goes through now there’s nothing else to do but protest,” he said. “And that’s what we’ll do.”
As in most western countries, Dutch law dictates that butchers must stun livestock – render it unconscious – before it can be slaughtered, to minimize the animals’ pain and fear. But an exception is made for meat that must be prepared under ancient Jewish and Muslim dietary laws and practices. These demand that animals be slaughtered while still awake, by swiftly cutting the main arteries of their necks with razor-sharp knives.
Most Dutch favor a ban, but many centrist parties feel the issue is a distraction from the more serious issue of abuses at regular slaughterhouses. One of the two parties in the Cabinet, the Christian Democrats, opposes the law out of fear for damage to the country’s international image as a haven of tolerance for religious minorities. The other, the pro-business VVD Party, has yet to say which way it will vote.
If the Netherlands does outlaw procedures that make meat kosher for Jews or halal for Muslims, it will be the first country outside New Zealand to do so in recent years. It will join the Scandinavian, Baltic countries and Switzerland, whose bans are mostly traceable to pre-World War II anti-Semitism.
Holland has proud traditions of tolerance and was one of the first countries in Europe to allow Jews to live openly with their religion in the 17th Century.
After years of campaigning unsuccessfully, the Party for the Animals won a seat parliament in 2006, the first time an animal rights party had entered a national parliament. Around the same time, the anti-Islam Freedom Party of maverick politician Geert Wilders was gaining strength. It finished third in national elections last year on an anti-immigration platform.
The Muslim population, built on a wave of migration in the 1990s, is now about 1 million in a country of 16 million. Dutch Jews number an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 after 70 percent of their community died in Nazi concentration camps.
The two political parties pushing hardest for the ban make for an odd couple, falling at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
“Religious freedom isn’t unlimited,” said Party for the Animals leader Marianne Thieme in an interview. She said the law will be “good news for the two million animals that are slaughtered (without stunning) each year in our country. It’s not a small amount.”
Wilders first brought the issue forward in 2007, when he heard that halal meat was being served at a public school in Amsterdam. “Muslims at our schools must adjust to Dutch norms and values and not the other way around,” he wrote in a letter questioning government policy.
Wilders and the Freedom Party did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor have both spoken out against the proposed ban.
“What’s worse is that there is no conclusive scientific evidence that slaughter without stunning is more harmful or painful for animals,” Vis of the CJO said.
Science surrounding animal slaughter is contentious. A 2009 study in New Zealand that monitored calf brain waves during ritual slaughter concluded the animals probably were aware of their pain. That led the country to ban the practice in 2010.
However, noted American animal welfare expert Temple Grandin of Colorado State University has criticized flaws in the New Zealand study, remarking in particular that the knife used was probably too short.
“The special long knife used in kosher slaughter is important,” she wrote in a paper published on her website. In her experience “when the knife is used correctly on adult cattle, there was little or no behavioral reaction,” she wrote – indicating that the animals did not show signs of suffering before falling unconscious.
The Royal Dutch Veterinary Association has come out in favor of banning the practice.
The organization said in a position statement it believes that during “slaughter of cattle while conscious, and to a lesser extent that of sheep, the animals’ well-being is unacceptably damaged.”
Scientists, animal rights groups and religious groups disagree about the amount of pain and suffering animals experience during slaughter under regular conditions – though all say violations of current law are widespread.
Ali-Salah predicted an outright ban would fail not only due to Dutch domestic political considerations, but also because it is not workable in practice.
“How are one million people going to obtain halal meat from a new source?” he said. “They are certainty not going to stop eating meat overnight.”
Coptic Orthodox Cross Reads: Jesus Christ, the Son of God
This is sad news, it will only lead to more sectarian tensions in Egypt. Killing anyone because of their conversion is horrendous.
Imagine if the scenario was flipped around: three Muslims killed their family for converting into Christianity, how would the world react? How many discussions of “shame,” or “honor killing” or “humiliation” would we be hearing?
Three Coptic brothers are arrested on suspicion of murdering their sister, her husband and five-year-old son, allegedly as punishment for her conversion to Islam.
Three Coptic brothers have been arrested on suspicion of murdering their sister, her husband and five year-old son in what seems to be a sectarian hate crime.
The couple’s six year-old daughter, Nada, was the only survivor, even though she sustained neck wounds. The outrageous murder took place in the Cairo district of Boulaq Al-Dakrour.
Salwa Atallah, 33, converted to Islam over six years ago and reportedly that’s the reason why her siblings decided to finish her off, according to initial investigations.
Over the past few years Atallah’s three brothers, two manual labourers and a driver, paid regular visits to their sister without showing any signs of hostility.
Husband, Khaled Ibrahim, was still alive when the police arrived on the crime scene. He was rushed to Boulaq Al-Dakrour Hospital where he was pronounced dead after succumbing to his fatal injuries.
However, police say he was able to give a testimony before his demise at 48.
Ibrahim said his late wife’s younger brother Momen, 22, paid them a visit and stayed till the crack of dawn, before the other two arrived to carry out their murders.
Police have given the following transcript of Ibrahim’s deathbed testimony:
“I was hesitant to open the door but he [Momen] told me ‘open it I am with you’” (meaning that he’s got his back) said Ibrahim.
“I went to the kitchen to bring a knife to defend myself… when I opened the door my wife started to scream.”
“Her elder brother followed her to the bedroom while Raafat [third broteher] punched me in the face and stabbed me many times.”
“Momen also snatched my knife to stabbed me… I lost control, I tried to get up more than once but I was bleeding heavily.”
“After killing my wife, Raafat brought a scarf and wrapped it around my son’s neck. He squeezed till he died.”
The three men reportedly confessed their crime upon being held captive by neighbours.
Atallah converted to Islam on 15 March, 2005.
The crime is expected to contribute to sectarian tensions, which have been rampant in the southern province of Qena since the appointment of Christian Emad Mikhail as governor.
In an exclusive interview with The Brody File, Donald Trump expresses concern about the teachings of the Koran saying, “There’s something there that teaches some very negative vibe.”
Watch below. The transcription is below as well.
I spoke with Trump in New York a few days ago. My full six-minute piece aired across the country on “The 700 Club” this morning. If you missed it, you can watch it again tonight at 11 p.m. on the ABC Family Channel or here anytime of day.
Trump will also be the sole focus of this week’s 30-minute Brody File Show where you can see a lot more of the interview. (The show will be released Wednesday morning along with more, never-before-seen clips)
Transcription:
David Brody: Radical Islam: to Evangelicals, this is a bread and butter issue. You said there’s a Muslim problem in this country. What do you mean by that exactly?
Donald Trump: Bill O’Reilly asked me is there a Muslim problem? And I said absolutely, yes. In fact I went a step further. I said I didn’t see Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center. It was very interesting. I thought that was going to be a controversial statement and somebody, I think it was Dennis Miller introduced me, he was doing like an analysis of me, he said, I love it.
The guy said what the truth is. He didn’t mince his words. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, gee, no there’s not a Muslim problem, everybody’s wonderful.’ And by the way, many, many, most Muslims are wonderful people, but is there a Muslim problem? Look what’s happening. Look what happened right here in my city with the World Trade Center and lots of other places.
So I said it and I thought it was going to be very controversial but actually it was very well received. I think people want the truth. I think they’re tired of politicians. They’re tired of politically correct stuff.
I mean I could have said, ‘Oh absolutely not Bill, there’s no Muslim problem, everything is wonderful, just forget about the World Trade Center.’ But you have to speak the truth. We’re so politically correct that this country is falling apart.
Brody: With some evangelicals there are some problems with the teachings of the Koran. Do you have concerns about the Koran?”
Trump: Well, I’ll tell you what. The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it teaches love and there is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do. I’m certainly not an expert, to put it mildly. But there’s something there that teaches some very negative vibe.
I mean things are happening, when you look at people blowing up all over the streets that are in some of the countries over in the Middle East, just blowing up a super market with not even soldiers, just people, when 250 people die in a super market that are shopping, where people die in a store or in a street. There’s a lot of hatred there that’s some place.
Now I don’t know if that’s from the Koran. I don’t know if that’s from some place else. But there’s tremendous hatred out there that I’ve never seen anything like it.
So, you have two views. You have the view that the Koran is all about love and then you have the view that the Koran is, that there’s a lot of hate in the Koran.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) is so pissed at No New Taxes guru Grover Norquist, Coburn called the guy the “chief cleric of sharia tax law.”
I thought they reserved that kind of language for Democrats.
Do I sense trouble in paradise? Are some conservatives, even those with impeccable credentials,feeling the constraints of the ideological straitjackets put on them by the farther-than-far Right?
Coburn wants to get rid of a $5 billion ethanol subsidy. Norquist says that’s only OK if there are $5 billion in tax cuts to keep it revenue neutral. Which prompted Coburn to call Norquist the “chief cleric of sharia tax law.”
Look at this list of some of the other “renegades” wanting to break free of the No New Taxes shackles.
These include stalwart conservatives such as Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. And on the ethanol issue, Coburn has drawn support from the Heritage Foundation.
Fight among yourselves,guys. Play “More conservative than thou.” Keep up the good work.
This hatred and rhetoric against Obama needs to stop. First, the questioning of his US citizenship. Second, branding him as a Muslim, which he is not though there would be nothing wrong with it if he were. And now, these images that prove nothing but stupidity and racism.
UPDATE, APRIL 17, 3:40 P.M.: Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh determined today that his group’s bylaws prevent a vote to remove Marilyn Davenport as an elected member even though she emailed a racist image of President Barack Obama to fellow Tea Baggers and Republicans.
The most drastic action the party can take is a censure, he said. Meanwhile, Davenport refuses to resign and Baugh continues to seek an apology and her voluntary resignation from the central committee.
UPDATE, APRIL 16, 5:55 P.M.: This afternoon, Marilyn Davenport sent an email to fellow Orange County Republican elected officials, apologizing if anyone was offended by her depicting President Barack Obama as an ape–while also blasting the “liberal media” for reporting the story.
“I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth,” Davenport wrote. “In no way did I even consider the fact he’s half black when I sent out the email. In fact, the thought never entered my mind until one or two other people [Scott Baugh, Orange County GOP boss, and this writer] tried to make this about race. . . . I received plenty of emails about George Bush that I didn’t particularly like yet there was no ‘cry’ in the media about them.”
Davenport continued: “That being said, I will NOT resign my central committee position over this matter that the average person knows and agrees is much to do about nothing.”
(Davenport’s entire statement is at the end of this article.)
Tim Whitacre, a longtime conservative Orange County Republican activist in Santa Ana, defended Davenport: “Marilyn Davenport is a staunch, ethical Republican lady. There is nothing unethical about this from a party standpoint because it wasn’t sent out to the party at large with any racist statements and it wasn’t signed as a central committee member. As a private individual, she is just real big on Birther stuff. One of her passions that drives her is the president’s lack of forthrightness about where he was born. Marilyn believes that nobody knows where he was born and so this picture says a thousand words.”
Whitacre continued: “She is not a perfect lady, but she is no racist. She is a gentle person who would feed you, help you, be there for you if you were in trouble. She is known as a pleasant, loving person, and it kills me that she is being attacked by this non-story knowing her mindset.”
ORIGINAL POST, APRIL 15, 5 P.M.:Orange County might be a beautiful oceanfront locale, but it’s also home to Holocaust deniers, vicious anti-gay bigots and freakish big-haired televangelists.
Here, one of our Republican politicians welcomed the inauguration of the first African American U.S. president in early 2009 by sending out an email that depicted a watermelon field in front of the White House.
That incident drew embarrassing international attention, but now another Orange County Republican has apparently topped the watermelon imagery with another racist attack on President Barack Obama.
The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.
Under the words, “Now you know why no birth certificate,” there’s an Obama family portrait showing them as apes.
(Donald Trump must be elated to finally have an explanation about Obama’s true birth circumstances.)
Here’s the image attached to the email:
Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”
The image did upset several local Republicans.
“It’s unbelievable,” one high-ranking OC GOP official told me. “It’s much more racist than the watermelon email. I can’t believe it was sent out. I’m not an Obama fan but how stupid do you have to be to do this?”
Another GOP official, who also asked not to be identified, said that Davenport is “a really, really sweet old lady so I am surprised to hear about this.”
Scott Baugh, chairman of the OC Republican Party, told Davenport that the email was tasteless, Davenport–a Fullerton-based political activist–admitted to me during the telephone interview.
“You’re not going to make a big deal about this are you?” she asked me. “It’s just an Internet joke.”
But Baugh believes the email is a big deal.
“When I saw that email today I thought it was despicable,” Baugh said. “It is dripping with racism and it does not promote the type of message Orange County Republicans want to deliver to the public. I think she should consider stepping down as an elected official.”
Michael J. Schroeder, an Orange County resident and former chairman of the California Republican Party, also said he was disgusted.“This is a three strikes situation for Marilyn Davenport,” Schroeder said. “She was a passionate defender of former Newport Beach City Councilman Dick Nichols, who stated that he was voting against putting in more grass at Corona del Mar’s beach because, he said, there were already ‘too many Mexicans on the beach.’ She was also on the wrong side of the fence with the Los Alamitos mayor and his White House watermelon patch picture. Now, she has managed to top both of those incidents by comparing African Americans to monkeys. She has disgraced herself and needs to resign. If she doesn’t, the Republican Party must remove her.”
But Davenport does not appear ready to concede she has made a mistake. After this story was published, she sent another email to fellow California conservative activists. It demanded to know the identity of “the coward” who supplied me with a copy of her offensive email.
Several Los Angeles television news broadcasts are planning coverage of this story tonight
(Update: KCAL and KCBS reported during their respective 10 and 11 p.m. broadcasts that in a telephone interview Davenport blamed the media for this controversy and slammed down the phone.)
As a member of the local Republican central committee, Davenport represents an inland section of Orange County: Fullerton, Brea, La Habra, Placentia and, home of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Birthplace & Library, Yorba Linda.
In February 2009, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose, another Orange County Republican, emailed the White House watermelon image and then apologized.
OC Republican mayor's racist greeting in 2009 to newly elected President Obama.
Ironically, Obama reversed decades and decades of tradition by not getting trounced at the presidential election polls in Orange County, long known as Ronald “Reagan Country.” In fact, he won an impressive 48 percent of the vote in 2008. The last Democrat to win a decent showing here: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Orange County is also home to Orly Taitz, the Soviet Union-born dentist who lives in Laguna Niguel and is one of the world’s leading proponents of claims that Obama is killing homosexuals tied to his old Chicago church, was born in Kenya, is personally funding Hamas terrorists and ordered a secret agent to break into her vehicle.
Alas, if you really want to be disturbed, read THIS RECENT RELATED STORY by my colleague Gustavo Arellano.
Just two percent of Orange County’s 3 million population is African American.
(This is a copy of Davenport’s entire 12:24 p.m. Saturday email to other OC Republican leaders: “I’m sorry if my email offended anyone. I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth. In no way did I even consider the fact he’s half black when I sent out the email. In fact, the thought never entered my mind until one or two other people tried to make this about race. We all know a double standard applies regarding this president. I received plenty of emails about George Bush that I didn’t particularly like yet there was no ‘cry’ in the media about them. One only has to go to Youtube or Google Images to see a plethora or lampooning videos and pictures of Obama, Bush and other politicians. That being said, I will NOT resign my central committee position over this matter that the average person knows and agrees is much to do about nothing. Again, for those select few who might be truly offended by viewing a copy of an email I sent to a select list of friends and acquaintances, unlike the liberal left when they do the same, I offer my sincere apologies to you–the email was not meant for you. For any of my friends or acquaintances who were the recipients of my email and were truly offended, please call me so I may offer a sincere verbal apology to you.”) –R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly (rscottmoxley@ocweekly.com)
Read Moxley’s latest coverage of the controversial federal bankruptcy of the Crystal Cathedral’s ReverendRobert Schullerand his national “Hour of Power” broadcastHERE.
Sheriff Lee Baca, a Republican, made LoonWatch’s 2010 list of anti-Loons and is in one of the leaders for 2011. Here he is still doing a tremendous job.
The L.A. County sheriff, a Republican with a strong reputation as a crime fighter, believes in building trust within minority communities. He reads the Koran and shuns hard-line tactics.
By Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times
April 19, 2011
Reporting from New York— Three young women, all wearing delicate hijabs, are gathered outside a TriBeCa lecture hall in eager anticipation. It’s not an actor or a pop star they’re waiting for. The object of their giddiness is Sheriff Lee Baca, in town for just one night.
It might be unusual for a lawman anywhere to have fans, let alone one a continent away from his jurisdiction. But such is the life of Los Angeles County’s chief law enforcement officer since his outspoken support of American Muslims vaulted him into the national spotlight.
“I just want to meet you and thank you,” one young woman blurts out after catching Baca outside a recent speaking engagement on Muslim outreach. “You gave us a voice.”
In an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China kind of way, Baca, a former Marine reservist and registered Republican, has been largely immune to the innuendo that has caused other politicians to distance themselves from Muslims post 9/11. He has bucked the hard-line law enforcement approach of security checks and surveillance in favor of outreach and cooperation.
His law-and-order credentials have made him an irresistible ally for Muslim advocates, earning him shout-outs on national TV shows, including “The Colbert Report” and invitations to the halls of Congress. On more than one occasion he’s been the only law enforcement official willing to mix it up with Republican lawmakers on the issue.
In New York, where Baca preached the benefits of Muslim outreach on a panel about national security, the sheriff seemed energized by his warm reception. “Did you see those girls? Do they look like terrorists to you?” he said of the gaggle of young Muslim women who greeted him. “They’re not terrorists. I know my public.”
Reading the Koran
The events of 9/11 quickly took Baca in an unusual direction. When many politicians chose an arms-length approach to Muslims, Baca chose the Koran — literally. In the black sedan that ferried him from one engagement to another, he pored over the book, reading it from front to back, memorizing passages.
Within days of the terrorist attack, Baca met with local Muslim leaders, promising them protection. Responding to reports that Pakistani store owners were being hassled, Baca ordered his deputies “to go by the 7-Elevens and offer support.”
His empathy for a persecuted minority, he says, isn’t rooted in any sort of shared experience as a Mexican American but in an unusual childhood.
The son of a seamstress who had to care for three children on her own, Baca was sent as a boy to live with his pensioner grandparents in East L.A. His developmentally challenged uncle, then in his 30s, still lived at the home.
“He was a pound and a half at birth,” Baca said. “Couldn’t read, write, speak sentences. My uncle had no faculty, no capacity.”
With no household car, 7-year-old Leroy, his uncle and his grandmother traversed the city by bus. Those rides had a lasting effect.
“People would sneer at my uncle, laugh at him, make fun of him, and I believe that’s wrong,” Baca recalled. “We’re not bothering anyone. So how about just leaving us alone? Is that asking too much?”
His affinity for minority communities had political benefits. A long-shot candidate for sheriff in 1998, Baca got creative in his campaigning, tapping ethnic groups other candidates ignored.
“I had to have other bases of support outside the traditional realms,” he said. Among them were Iranians, Lebanese and other groups with large Muslim populations.
But his decision to intensify those ties post 9/11, he says, wasn’t political. Lapses on the federal level exposed by the attacks put a newfound pressure on local law enforcement. “All of our lives have been changed by 9/11,” Baca said. “We’re the ones who will get slammed if something falls through the cracks.”
Thousands of tips flooded law enforcement agencies after 9/11. Even leads that seemed silly had to be followed. “The one you don’t follow will end up being the one that matters,” Baca said. In one instance, a local group of Muslim men frequenting paintball facilities were investigated as potential terrorist snipers. They turned out to be “a buncha guys who just liked paintballing,” Baca said. “What are you gonna do? Ignore it?”
To pinpoint legitimate concerns, Baca needed his deputies inside Muslim communities. His focus on homegrown terror grew after the 2005 London Underground bombings, when four men, all living and working in England for years, killed 52.
“I realized we didn’t have a strategy for homegrown terrorism,” Baca said. “Cops are not gonna be invited into an extremist plot. That’s rule No. 1…. But if you get people to tell you something that’s troubling them, that’s the first sign of success.”
To build enough trust to be tipped off to extremist plots, Baca needed his deputies to become hyper-responsive to the Muslim community’s more routine crime concerns.
Less upfront tactics have at times backfired on other agencies. In Orange County, the FBI is still suffering from the fallout of a 2006 operation in which a paid informant posing as a Muslim convert infiltrated mosques.
The mole, equipped with a microphone keychain and a hidden camera, was outed soon after his talk of violent jihad became so extreme that one mosque was granted a restraining order. Many Muslims still point to the incident as proof that they’re too often treated by law enforcement as suspects, not partners.
Baca is reluctant to criticize the FBI, but his disdain for its style of covert intelligence gathering shows.
“I think they learned on their own what the plusses and minuses are. I believe terror plots are more sophisticated. I’m more of a chess player,” he said. “There are so few Muslim extremists in America. You can’t burn all the hay to find the needle, because the people are the hay.”
After initial struggles to make inroads, Baca’s Muslim community affairs unit, which staffs two deputies fulltime, has well-attended community exchanges and receives regular calls from Muslims with concerns that are terrorism-related and other issues. Baca’s personal involvement has softened up many of the community’s older, more reluctant leaders. The department employs about a dozen Muslim deputies and half that many Arabic speakers.
“They want to be able to say ‘I know the sheriff,’” said Sgt. Mike Abdeen, who leads the unit. “They like to go back to the community and say I know so and so, I’m a man of influence.”
Baca has been quick to accept their invitations — and fully participates when he does. At a Pakistan Day celebration, he wore traditional garb. With Iranians, he’ll throw in some Farsi; with Pakistanis, a bit of Urdu. He keeps a Koran in his office and another at home and is known to quote passages from memory. Inside mosques, he removes his shoes and during prayers, he joins in, going to his knees and pressing his forehead to the ground.
“He might not understand what he’s doing,” said Deputy Sherif Morsi, the other officer in the unit. “But the point is he’s letting people know ‘I’m your sheriff, I support you.’”
That commitment has taken Baca to more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries since 9/11. The tangible benefits of the trips aren’t always clear, but Baca maintains they give him a unique window into Muslim cultures and to counterterrorism where the fight’s the fiercest.
In Saudi Arabia, he watched hundreds of police recruits march as he and other officials sat in “very elegant seats as if we were heads of state.” Afterwards, they sat on rugs in police headquarters and feasted on a barbequed lamb. “They ripped out the choicest pieces of meat for us with their hands,” Baca raved.
In Egypt, he chatted with the national police chief about his “surgical” approach to beating back the Muslim Brotherhood on the Sinai Peninsula. In Pakistan, then-President Pervez Musharraf agreed to have Baca briefed on two assassination attempts. In one, Pakistani authorities used an Israeli cellphone scrambler to halt a remote bomb detonation. When Baca returned home, the Sheriff’s Department purchased its own.
“I met the police chief of Mecca and I understand who he is. I’m on the street, you don’t learn these things in your office,” Baca said.
Baca’s effort has not been without criticism.
Far right-wing websites have derisively described Baca as an “international” lawman, and a “Hamas-affiliated CAIR” sheriff, referring to the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim group Baca defends. Last year, the innuendo followed Baca to Washington, D.C. One congressman seemed to surprise the sheriff by accusing him at a hearing of cozying up to CAIR despite the group’s “radical” speech. “You’ve been 10 times to [its] fundraisers,” the congressman said.
“And I’ll be there 10 more times,” Baca shouted back.
CAIR is generally considered a moderate, if aggressive, Muslim civil rights group. Attacks against it haven’t dissuaded Baca. Hussam Ayloush, director of CAIR’s regional branch, said Baca is one of the few public officials who have asked for his organization’s side of the story.
“Most politicians I’ve worked with would have avoided the headache. It’s not about the truth, it’s about perception, and they don’t want to touch it,” Ayloush said.
Naive? That’s OK
On a recent evening, Baca strolled along a seedy street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It was his second East Coast trip in as many weeks, both times to speak on Muslim outreach.
Street vendors, unaware that the stick-thin man before them was a major law enforcement figure, tried one after another to sell him knock-off purses and wallets. “How are you?” Baca greeted them, smiling wide.
Pulling in close as if to share a secret, Baca said he knew his post-9/11 stance has been attacked. Even among friends he’s been warned of being naive. He’s OK with it.
“I’m not endorsing Muslim groups. I’m defending them. ‘Oh he’s a Muslim lover, he’s a Jew lover.’ I don’t pay attention to bigots.
“I know I’m a little naive. I know I am overly trusting. That’s who I choose to be. If you’re uncomfortable with others, you’re not in a position to lead. I’ve created somewhat of a palace in my mind because, if you don’t, this world is your prison…. I can take the attacks. Attack me! Am I going to change who I am? No. Because it works.”
April 5, 2011 DAYTON, OH – Sister Cora-Ann, a Catholic nun from the Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Dayton, Ohio got the surprise of her life yesterday, when she was asked to leave the plane she had just boarded at the Omaha International Airport. “I had just sat down in my seat, and started to thank God for our blessings and recite a prayer in Latin”, she recalled, when one of the passengers sitting next to me called the flight attendant. The passenger was Elizabeth Bennet, who later stated: “It is not that we were prejudiced, but she did seem very suspicious. She was dressed in Muslim garb and just before we were about to take off, she started mumbling something in an Arabian or Talibani-sounding language. What was I supposed to do?” Damien Thorn was a passenger seated in the adjacent row and said: “I knew there was something sinister about her, the moment she stepped into the plane. She was wearing those burqa clothes that you see the Iranian women wearing, and she only had a very small carry-on bag.” The flight attendant responded to the call and asked Sister Cora-Ann for her name, boarding pass and a photo ID.
Blanche Dubois was another passenger sitting close to Sister Cora-Ann and explained: “Once I heard that her name sounded like Koran, I got worried. That does not mean that there is anything wrong with me, does it? I just did not want to die. I was so scared, that I just yelled out her name to all passengers.” Mr. Okonkwo was a passenger seated a few rows behind and stated: “Once we all heard that the passenger’s name was Koran, things started falling apart.” Frodo Baggins, a frequent traveler, said he had heard that Muslims do not eat beef. “I did not think that she was Muslim, and to help her out, I took out some of my beef jerky and asked the lady to eat it to prove that she was not a Muslim.”
However, Sister Cora-Ann politely refused the beef jerky and reminded the other passengers that it was the time of Lent, during which Catholics often abstain from eating meat. The unrest in the plane kept growing, because most passengers were now convinced that Sister Cora-Ann was indeed Muslim and they demanded that Sister Cora-Ann leave the plane. “I did not want to cause my fellow humans any distress, so I left the plane”, she said.
“We were so happy that we could continue our journey”, said Frodo Baggins. “Once she de-boarded, it felt like a huge burden was lifted from us.” Apparently, there was indeed a Muslim on the plane, by the name of Abdullah Abdullah the 23rd, sitting in the last row. “Of course I knew that she was a Catholic nun and not a Muslim, because I went to a Catholic school and my favorite teachers were Catholic nuns.” Abdullah Abdullah went on to say “But let us face it: If you are a Muslim on a plane and someone else is being asked to leave the plane, the best thing is to be quiet and enjoy the show!”
What Pastor Terry Jones did was uncalled for, and what the people in Afghanistan did was uncalled for, but in no way can we equate one’s reaction as more barbaric as the other. Terry Jones is living in his little heaven up in Gainseville, Fla. compared to how the people in Afghanistan are living: facing a war, oppression, deep poverty, etc.
The complete apathy of the 'Arab spring' in regards to the burning of a Quran reveals how anger-fuelled riots are borne from suppression of freedom, not the allegedly violent qualities of Islam [REUTERS
The recent violent protests in Afghanistan - a reaction to the burning of the Quran by a small church in the United States last month - recalled an inescapable reality.
Extremists on all sides - whether in free, democratic America, or in corrupt, occupied Afghanistan - create havoc and chaos, demonstrating the danger brought about by a deadly cocktail of ignorance and idiocy. Ultimately, they cause the deaths of innocent people.
Some cite the difference between the two acts: one saw the burning of a book, while the other claimed human lives.
This is of course true, but what exactly did the mastermind of this foolish and hate-filled act expect, other than a reaction somewhere on the Muslim side?
His bark worse than his bite
Pastor Terry Jones, of the formerly obscure Dove World Outreach Church in Florida - a parish of no more than a few dozen weekly followers - has been enjoying fame and possibly even fortune since calling for a ‘Burn the Quran’ day last September.
He was dissuaded from carrying out his act following a worldwide outcry from Christians and denunciation from American political, religious and community leaders.
But it seems that Jones had an itch that simply had to be scratched, and in March, he and some of his comrades burnt a copy of the Quran.
Strangely though, whilst last year’s threat resulted in outrage throughout the Muslim world and mass protests in most Arab countries, the act itself – once carried out – brought almost no reaction from the streets of those same countries, apart from the ones in Afghanistan.
Hundreds of thousands hit the streets of Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Sanaa and many other Arab cities last summer denouncing Jones, burning effigies and flags and calling for a global campaign to ‘protect the Quran’.
I recall receiving hundreds of emails and texts messages expressing outrage, and calling for immediate action in protest against this heinous act.
Yet now that Jones has actually carried out his threat, not one single demonstration was held, no mass protest was called for, no texts or email messages criss-crossed the ether, and no days of anger were organised.
Recapturing a people’s dignity
One would have expected such protests to come easily to the masses already camping on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, Sanaa and Benghazi. Logistically, the scene was set; all would have been ready for such action, but nothing of the sort came to light.
There is no suggestion that those masses revere the Quran any less, or that they see the act carried out by Jones as any less repugnant. So why the apparent inaction? Because the ‘Arab spring’ has elevated minds as well as aspirations, a trend absent still in the contexts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries where corruption is still riding a wave.
One cannot say for sure whether it was the upheavals in the region that had the Arab nations looking elsewhere to exert their collective energies, but it is without a shadow of a doubt that the absence of ‘anti-Terry Jones’ protests was not due to a lack of energy or of ability.
For several years, those studying the Arab world through the mobility and narrative of the masses have emphasised that the number one priority for the Arab people (and Muslims by extension) is the pursuit of freedom and the recapture of their long-lost dignity.
Manifestations of religious, ideological, and cultural extremist behaviour were essentially a reaction to stagnant political climates imposed by despotic regimes, lack of human rights and absence of any hope in a better future.
Thus those people – who considered it their ultimate objective a few months ago to demonstrate anger and outrage for the threat to burn the Quran - today were in no doubt whatsoever that today their priority was to remove those regimes that have ruled them so inhumanely for so long.
Defying political models
Therein lies an important message for those Westerners who make a living from counter-terrorism and eradicating extremism: Supporting despotic regimes and dictators for short-term political and economic gains begets extremism that takes shape in a religious, social, political, ideological or cultural format.
The claim that removing or compromising regimes, such as that of Mubarak, Ben Ali, Saleh, Gaddafi or Assad will inevitably bring an extremist element to government is baseless, as demonstrated by events unfolding before us.
In all of the examples of the nations that revolted against their tyrants, rather than witnessing violence, the world saw protesters insisting on peaceful means despite them being confronted hired thugs and armed security forces.
Those same nations exemplified the meaning of national unity in practise rather than words. Muslims and Christians protected each other, came to each other’s aid and guarded each others’ holy places of worship against the threat of arson and vandalism by elements who had an interest in anarchy and division breaking out.
As soon as the opportunity emerged, those who had lived their lives merely dreaming of living under a democracy someday turned out to be brilliant democrats in practise.
What remains to be seen is whether the West will adapt to the new terrain and change its ways too.
The mood for change
Travelling the region extensively and conversing with people from all walks of life, one cannot miss the the new air of confidence about the Arab citizen.
Whether in Egypt where the revolution is in full swing and some significant fruits have been borne, or in other countries where no mass protests have been reported, there is no doubt that the mood is one for change and transformation.
Conversations in the Arab street are much more bold, brazen and uncaring about who might be eavesdropping. It’s simply a matter of time, but change is certainly now a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
Once free, the Arab and Muslim nations will not resort to violence, extremism and isolationist practises, as some would like the world to think.
Once free, those nations will see the act of Terry Jones as the petty and foolish gesture that it undoubtedly was, and will realise that it brings more damage upon him and his reputation than upon the object of his deranged hatred.
Anas Altikriti is president and founder of the Cordoba Foundation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
CAIRO – Britain’s Prince Charles has complained of abuse during his repeated attempts to promote dialogue among followers of different faiths, The Daily Mail reported on Thursday, April 7.
“I find a certain amount of ridicule has come my way,” the Prince of Wales said in a meeting with Muslim scholars at the Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco.
He said he was met with ridicule for promoting diversity and accepting people of different faiths.
“One of the hardest things is to remind people of the great truth of traditional Christianity, not distorted Christianity,” said the heir of the British throne.
He said the problem lies in the behavior of some people who find it easier to focus on the negative.
“It’s the issue of stereotypes that is difficult,” he said.
“It’s so easy to concentrate on the negative and not the positive. But what I do is remind people of what we share in common.”
Prince Charles is known for his staunch support for the multi-faith dialogue and bridging the gap between followers of Islam and Christianity.
He has championed several initiatives to boost respect and understanding between followers of different faiths and improve inter-faith dialogue.
Through his several speeches on Muslims and the West, he has stressed the need for the two to live and work together.
Prince Charles and his wife Camilla arrived in Morocco earlier this week for talks on trade, environmental and multi-faith issues.
During his visit, he has been shown manuscripts dating from the 12th century, including an Arabic copy of the New Testament.
The Qarawiyyin University, founded in 859, is believed to be one of the oldest continuously operating universities in the world.
Religious Understanding
Prince Charles stressed the importance of religious exchanges in promoting understanding between followers of Islam and Christianity.
“…respecting other people’s cultures is the only way to achieve unity through diversity,” he said.
He said mutual visits from religious scholars from both faiths could give “a better chance in the future of ensuring better tolerance and understanding.”
Prince Charles believes that inter-faith dialogue would be much improved “if (Muslim) scholars can come to universities in Britain to study for a year or two, perhaps broaden their horizons, and people from Britain can come here and understand the context of Islam.”
The Prince of Wales himself is patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford.
“I’m one of those people who respects enormously diversity so I try to encourage the consultation of local people,” he said.
“Human society seems to function much better at a community level.”
The IRA, a terrorist organisation that Peter King supported financially and politically through the 80′s and recently in 2005, has been quite active in recent weeks. Imagine if the bomb that was found was left by a Muslim, we would not hear the end of it. The question one should ask is: why are Muslims being put on trial?
Peter King must be happy to hear about the Homeland Security hearing in Manhattan. King started something “revolutionary,” putting Muslim Americans and Islam on trial and now his minions are following. But King felt it was important to give praise to one special minion, Greg Ball
Here is a good summary from AlJazeera on the IRA and their recent surge in activity.
Police say device was likely set by dissident Republicans to cause disruption ahead of election campaign.
Army bomb-experts in Northern Ireland have defused a 225-kilogramme van bomb near the Irish border.
The bomb, hidden underneath a motorway bridge near the main Dublin-Belfast road, was rendered inactive on Saturday following an 18-hour operation.
Police said that the bomb had been set by dissident Republicans to cause “huge devastation” in the nearby town of Newry ahead of Northern Ireland’s election campaign.
They said that it had likely been abandoned short of its target and before it could be detonated.
Two warning calls were made to police about the bomb on Friday.
“In this case, this bomb may have been on its way to the centre of the town,” David McKittrick, Ireland correspondent for the UK’s Independent newspaper, told Al Jazeera.
“The security forces were successful in stopping that happneing, but at the same time they weren’t successful in preventing the making of the bomb and there were hold-ups, once the bomb was discovered, in clearling the area.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bomb, but police said a phone call to warn about the bomb used a code word previously used by dissident Republicans.
Impatient motorists
Police shut the road following the discovery of the bomb, but impatient motorists unwilling to take a diversion moved the traffic cones and “road closed” signs.
BBC Northern Ireland footage showed dozens of cars driving directly past the van before police reinforced the barriers.
The bomb was double the size of those used in a number of bombings last year by Irish Republican Army (IRA) dissidents, none of which caused serious injuries.
Recent weeks have seen a surge in activity by IRA dissident groups opposed to the 1998 peace agreement which largely ended three decades of violence that killed more than 3,600 people.
A week ago Ronan Kerr, a 25-year-old police constable, was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in Omagh, an attack police suspect was organised by IRA dissidents to scare Catholics from joining the north’s police force.
The killing prompted a public outcry in Ireland.
Detectives said they had detained a 33-year-old near Omagh on Friday night in the third arrest connected with the murder.
New York State Senator Gregory Ball speaks during a hearing on Homeland Security.
Peter King must be happy to hear about the Homeland Security hearing in Manhattan. King started something “revolutionary,” putting Muslim Americans and Islam on trial and now his minions are following. But King felt it was important to give praise to one special minion, Greg Ball:
“This is a first rate hearing,” King said. “I hear some rumblings from people opposed to it. I just wish the Muslim community and the leadership would be much more cooperative on these hearings, not see everything as being an attack on them.”
The same old tired line, when is King going to stop with the baseless accusations of Muslim American non-cooperation, something contradicted by law enforcement, a group conspicuously absent (excepting Lee Baca) from King’s last hearing?
Mr. King prefaced his comments by noting that “99 percent” of Muslims in the United States are “outstanding Americans” and not terrorists.
It seems he can’t make his mind up? Or maybe he realized that people were catching onto the fact that what he said was full of B.S.? At the end of the day watch him squirm and try to claim that he is right on both (contradictory) statements.
If you didn’t catch Loonwatch’s live tweets of the hearings, here is a decent summary:
In a local reprise of a polarizing Congressional hearing last month on the question of Islam and terror, state lawmakers warned in grave terms on Friday of the threats facing the New York area, while other lawmakers and interfaith groups criticized the proceedings as anti-Muslim and incendiary.
The hearing, which was convened by the State Senate’s homeland security committee, was something of a spectacle: Security was ramped up at the office building in Lower Manhattan where state legislators have work space, and television cameramen easily outnumbered lawmakers.
Adding to the theatrics, the hearing began to great fanfare with testimony from the lawmaker who convened the Congressional hearing, Representative Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican, who has promised further federal inquiries into what he describes as the radicalization of American Muslims.
Mr. King prefaced his comments by noting that “99 percent” of Muslims in the United States are “outstanding Americans” and not terrorists.
“But the fact is: The enemy, or those being recruited by Al Qaeda, live within the Muslim community, and that’s the reality we have to face,” Mr. King said. “This is not to put a broad brush over a community, but you go where the threat is coming from, and that’s the reality today.”
Mr. King testified at the invitation of Senator Gregory R. Ball, a Putnam County Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs. Mr. Ball was criticized by Muslim and interfaith groups as well as a group of Senate Democrats for his inclusion of Islamic law as one of the hearing’s topics; they accused him of exploiting the threat of terrorism to incite a fear of Muslims among the broader public.
But on Friday, as reporters crammed into a low-ceilinged meeting room for the daylong hearing, Mr. Ball defended the scope of the committee’s inquiry, saying that he asked lawmakers to propose other witnesses but received very little input.
“There are some who are more concerned about the front-page press than today,” Mr. Ball said. “I understand politics. But we cannot allow our homeland security to become a political football.”
Among the witnesses whose scheduled testimony provoked the most criticism was Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian-born American who is president of a group called Former Muslims United, and Frank Gaffney, a former Defense Department official who has often criticized Islam.
Ms. Darwish testified on Friday that young people in the Arab world are taught as children to hate America and to look favorably on terrorism. “The education of Arab children is to make killing of certain groups of people not only good,” she said. “It’s holy. It becomes holy in our culture.”
Her testimony was met with an angry rebuke from Senator Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, who held up a Koran and said that Ms. Darwish was “bringing hate and poison” to the hearing. Mr. Ball tried to quiet Mr. Adams, and their back-and-forth descended into a shouting match, with Mr. Adams suggesting that Mr. Ball was condoning bigotry and Mr. Ball accusing him of pandering to the news media.
“I’m glad that nobody is between those TV cameras and you, because that’s the most dangerous place in New York City right now,” Mr. Ball snapped.
In his testimony, Mr. Gaffney decried Sharia law as a threat to the United States and said that American efforts to prevent future acts of terrorism have been “hobbled, frankly, by what we consider to be politically correct blinders.”
He added that the Muslim community center and mosque proposed to be built near ground zero “fits the profile of triumphalist mosques built on sacred ground of defeated people elsewhere around the world.”
“I believe it should not be allowed to happen here,” Mr. Gaffney said.
While the testimony on Islam offered the most drama, the bulk of the hearing was spent discussing matters far less politically charged. A parade of law enforcement officials and counterterrorism experts offered what amounted to a verbal encyclopedia of terror threats, and legislators added their own possibilities, too.
Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican, wondered whether someone could shoot down an airplane using a heat-seeking missile. Mr. Ball asked about the safety of the AirTrain system at Kennedy Airport. And Mr. King worried about an attack on the New York City subway system or the use of a dirty bomb.
“I would just say that as we approach the 10th anniversary, not for people to look upon Sept. 11 as just some historical moment like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor or Bunker Hill,” Mr. King said. “It was the first battle in a war which is still being waged.”
At times, however, those at the hearing seemed less than interested in the technical discussion that dominated most of the session. During the testimony of Richard Daddario, the New York Police Department’s top counterterrorism official, at least three people in the audience were fast asleep.
In the past year, a group of conservative pundits and analysts have identified sharia, or Islamic religious law, as a growing threat to the United States. These pundits and analysts argue that the steady adoption of sharia’s tenets is a strategy extremists are using to transform the United States into an Islamic state.
A number of state and national politicians have adopted this interpretation and 13 states are now considering the adoption of legislation forbidding sharia. A bill in the Tennessee State Senate, for example, would make adherence to sharia punishable by 15 years in jail. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives and potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has called for “a federal law that says Sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.”
The fullest articulation of this “sharia threat” argument, though, is in the September 2010 report, “Sharia: The Threat to America,” published by the conservative Center for Security Policy. The authors claim that their report is “concerned with the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time: the legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as ‘Shariah.’” The report, according to its authors, is “designed to provide a comprehensive and articulate ‘second opinion’ on the official characterizations and assessments of this threat as put forth by the United States government.”
The report, and the broader argument, is plagued by a significant contradiction. In the CSP report’s introduction, the authors admit that Islamic moderates contest more conservative interpretations of sharia:
Sharia is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates … whose members embrace the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On this side of the divide, Sharia is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.
The authors later assert, however, that there is “ultimately but one shariah. It is totalitarian in character, incompatible with our Constitution and a threat to freedom here and around the world.”
The initial concession that Muslims interpret sharia in different ways is accurate and of course contradicts the later assertion that sharia is totalitarian in nature.
But by defining sharia itself as the problem, and then asserting the authenticity of only the most extreme interpretations of sharia, the authors are effectively arguing that the internecine struggle within Islam should be ceded to extremists. They also cast suspicion upon all observant Muslims.
It’s important to understand that adopting such a flawed analysis would direct limited resources away from actual threats to the United States and bolster an anti-Muslim narrative that Islamist extremist groups find useful in recruiting.
It would also target and potentially alienate our best allies in the effort against radicalization: our fellow Americans who are Muslim. According to the “sharia threat” argument, all Muslims who practice any aspect of their faith are inherently suspect since sharia is primarily concerned with correct religious practice.
This brief will explain what sharia really is and demonstrate how a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of sharia — put forth in the CSP report and taken up by others — will both harm America’s national security interests and threaten our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
What is Sharia?
The CSP report defines sharia as a “legal-political-military doctrine.” But a Muslim would not recognize this definition — let alone a scholar of Islam and Muslim tradition. Muslim communities continue to internally debate how to practice Islam in the modern world even as they look to its general precepts as a guide to correct living and religious practice.
Most academics studying Islam and Muslim societies give a broad definition of sharia. This reflects Muslim scholars struggling for centuries over how best to understand and practice their faith.
But these specialists do agree on the following:
Sharia is not static. Its interpretations and applications have changed and continue to change over time.
There is no one thing called sharia. A variety of Muslim communities exist, and each understands sharia in its own way. No official document, such as the Ten Commandments, encapsulates sharia. It is the ideal law of God as interpreted by Muslim scholars over centuries aimed toward justice, fairness and mercy.
Sharia is overwhelmingly concerned with personal religious observance such as prayer and fasting, and not with national laws.
Any observant Muslim would consider him or herself a sharia adherent. It is impossible to find a Muslim who practices any ritual and does not believe himself or herself to be complying with sharia. Defining sharia as a threat, therefore, is the same thing as saying that all observant Muslims are a threat.
The CSP report authors — none of whom has any credentials in the study of Islam — concede this point in several places. In the introduction they say, “Shariah is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.” Yet the rest of the report contradicts this point.
The authors, in attempting to show that sharia is a threat, construct a static, ahistorical and unscholarly interpretation of sharia that is divorced from traditional understandings and commentaries of the source texts.
The “sharia threat” argument is based on an extreme type of scripturalism where one pulls out verses from a sacred text and argues that believers will behave according to that text. But this argument ignores how believers themselves understand and interpret that text over time.
The equivalent would be saying that Jews stone disobedient sons to death (Deut. 21:18- 21) or that Christians slay all non-Christians (Luke 19:27). In a more secular context it is similar to arguing that the use of printed money in America is unconstitutional — ignoring the interpretative process of the Supreme Court.
In reality, sharia is personal religious law and moral guidance for the vast majority of Muslims. Muslim scholars historically agree on certain core values of sharia, which are theological and ethical and not political. Moreover, these core values are in harmony with the core values at the heart of America.
Muslims consider an interpretation of sharia to be valid so long as it protects and advocates for life, property, family, faith and intellect. Muslim tradition overwhelmingly accepts differences of opinion outside these core values, which is why sharia has survived for centuries as an ongoing series of conversations. Sharia has served Muslims who have lived in every society and in every corner of the planet, including many Americans who have lived in our country from before our independence down to the present day.
Recent statements from Muslim religious authorities, such as the 2004 Amman Message, show the dynamic, interpretive tradition of Islam in practice. In fact, the Amman Message is a sharia-based condemnation of violence. So if CSP wants Muslims to reject sharia they are effectively arguing Muslims should reject nonviolence.
The fact that the Amman Message is a sharia-based document shows the problem with the “sharia threat” argument: By criminalizing sharia they also criminalize the sharia-based message of nonviolence in the Amman document.
It is surprising that a group claiming to be invested in American national security would suggest that we make nonviolent engagement criminal.
Suspicion Based on Religious Misinterpretation
The CSP report’s contradictions can only be resolved through unconstitutional means. And the authors propose doing so with no sense of irony.
They argue that believing Muslims should have their free speech and freedom of religion rights restricted: “In keeping with Article VI of the Constitution, extend bans currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support Shariah.”
The authors have already conceded that even mainstream Muslims espouse sharia. So by the report’s own analysis, CSP are recommending that even mainstream American Muslims, who follow sharia in their personal lives, be prohibited from serving in the government or the armed forces.
The authors cite Quran verses that “are interpreted under Sharia to mean that anyone who does not accept Islam is unacceptable in the eyes of Allah and that he will send them to Hell,” concluding, “When it is said that Sharia is a supremacist program, this is one of the bases for it.”
It is no secret that many Christians interpret their own faith to mean that non-Christians are destined for Hell. Is this too a form of supremacism?
Many advocates of the “sharia threat” also refer to taqiyya, an Arabic word that means concealing one’s faith out of fear of death, to mean religiously justified lying. Not all Muslims subscribe to the theological concept of taqiyya, however. In fact, it is a minority opinion.
The charge of “taqqiya” is often deployed by “sharia threat” advocates when confronted with evidence that refutes their thesis. Under this methodology one cannot trust any practicing Muslim. Even if a Muslim preaches and practices nonviolence the CSP authors would say that person is either not a true Muslim or is practicing taqiyya.
They have, in fact, used this tactic against Muslim-American leaders who advocate strong civic engagement. Responding to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s assertion that the proposed Park 51 Islamic Center in New York would be a venue for interfaith dialogue, CSP’s Frank Gaffney wrote in The Washington Times: “To be sure, Imam Rauf is a skilled practitioner of the Sharia tradition of taqqiya, deception for the faith.”
While providing a mechanism for critics to ignore any disconfirming evidence, adopting such an interpretation of taqiyya would almost certainly result in every observant Muslim being branded a liar.
The authors of the CSP report are clearly aware of this, and they try to temper their conclusions: “This is not an argument for trusting or mistrusting someone in any particular instance,” they write. “It is, though, an argument for professionals to be aware of these facts, to realize that they are dealing with an enemy whose doctrine allows — and at times even requires — them not to disclose fully all that they know and deliberately to misstate that which they know to be the truth.”
In other words, all Muslims are suspect simply by virtue of being Muslims.
Biased Premises Lead to Bad Policy
The CSP report’s premise is that sharia is the problem and that observance of sharia results in extremism. The authors do not acknowledge that sharia is something the extremists are attempting to claim.
This purposeful misconstruction of the security issues America faces ignores multiple data points and turns all Muslims into traitors. According to a report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 85 percent of all terrorist victims are Muslims. The Muslim community, therefore, has good reason to ally with American interests to defeat extremists. Those who assert the most extreme definition of sharia agree with the extremists’ definitions of Islam and help create an environment of alienation and distrust — which serves extremist interests, not American interests.
Adopting the CSP’s analysis — and the hysteria over the “sharia threat” that it is clearly intended to provoke — will prevent us from working with our natural allies and weaken our ability to protect ourselves. The war against extremism cannot be labeled as a war against Islam. Taking such a civilizational, apocalyptic view could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, we actually allow extremists to operate more freely without a clear identification of the threat and a consistent and constitutionally defensible system for recognizing and tracking extremists.
It is important to recognize that Muslims are in an ongoing conversation to define what their faith will look like. They have engaged in that conversation for centuries. But the challenge of faith and modernity is not unique to Muslims, and we cannot single them out for their beliefs.
Finally, it’s important to note that even if the most extreme interpretation of sharia were the correct one, there is no evidence that the U.S. legal system is in any danger of adopting tenets of sharia.
To put this in perspective, the extreme Christian right in America has been trying for decades to inscribe its view of America as a “Christian nation” into our laws. They have repeatedly failed in a country in which more than three-quarters of people identify as Christians.
It’s extremely unlikely that an extreme faction of American Muslims, a faith community that constitutes approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population, would have more success. We need to both respect constitutional freedoms and understand that the Constitution and our courts guarantee a separation between church and state.
The “sharia threat” argument is so irresponsible as to almost demand a comic response, were it not for the disastrous consequences of adopting it. It’s important that its claims be interrogated rigorously, in order to understand that they should not be taken seriously.
This article was co-written by Matthew Duss, National Security Editor at American Progress. It was first published at the Center for American Progress.
Matthew Duss is the National Security Editor at American Progress and Wajahat Ali is a Researcher for ThinkProgress.
Additional contributions from Hussein Rashid, associate editor, Religion Dispatches, and Haroon Moghul, executive director, The Maydan Institute.
The protester's banner reads 'the veil in front of your eyes is much more dangerous than the veil on my hair'
It is not enough to ban face veils and have that law implemented on April 11, 2001 but Islam as a religion has to be criticized and debated. (hat tip: Europeans Against Islamophobia)
UMP members hold criticised debate about Islam’s place in secular France, days before ban on face veils is implemented.
France’s conservative ruling party has held a controversial debate on the practice of Islam, rejecting charges of bigotry and saying that airing the issue could help stem the rising popularity of the far-right.
President Nicolas Sarkozy had called for Tuesday’s discussion on Islam and secularism to address fears that some overt displays of Muslim faith - including street prayer and full-face veils - were France’s secular identity.
The UMP party were considering 26 ideas officials said were aimed at bringing France’s stringent laws decreeing the separation of church from state into step with the times.
Even before it began, the debate had been tarnished by criticism from religious leaders, a boycott by France’s largest Muslim group, and the absence of Prime Minister Francois Fillon.
“For weeks, everything possible has been done to stop this meeting taking place … but we have not yielded to those pressures … because it is the French people who asked us for it,” Francois Cope, the secretary-general of the UMP party, said.
“One less problem is one less electoral argument for Marine Le Pen,” he said.
With his popularity at record lows a year before a presidential election, Sarkozy has been accused of seeking to woo back right-wing voters increasingly drawn to the National Front party under its new leader Marine Le Pen.
Controversial proposals
The proposals discussed on Tuesday include banning the wearing of religious symbols such as Muslim headscarves or prominent Christian crosses by day-care personnel and preventing Muslim mothers from wearing headscarves when accompanying school field trips.
Another proposal would prevent parents from taking their children out of mandatory subjects including gym and biology.
The debate could lead to a legislative bill in the National Assembly, where the UMP has a majority.
Under the ban, women who wear the face-shrouding veils risk a fine, special classes and a police record.The round-table came as a new law banning garments that hide the face is to take effect on April 11.
Islam is France’s second biggest religion after Roman Catholicism. Interior Minister Claude Gueant says there are five to six million Muslims in the country.
Tuesday’s discussion brought together several ministers, chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim and representatives of other religions, but no Muslim clerics.
Muslim groups have accused the conservative UMP of stigmatising their faith.
Critics from the opposition Socialist party contend the debate is an electoral ploy aimed at appealing to voters who could be swayed by the National Front.
Jean-Francois Cope, the UMP leader, insisted on Monday that France needs clearer rules about how Muslims should adapt their religious practices to French society.
“The practice of Islam in France is not the burqa. It is not prayers in the street,” he said.
‘Easing’ social tensions
In some neighbourhoods with large Muslim immigrant communities, the lack of mosques or prayer rooms means crowds gather on sidewalks and cobblestone streets at prayer times.
Cope tried to distance himself from the National Front. “They denounce [Muslim practices]. We are making proposals” to ease social tensions, he said.
The leaders of France’s main religions have expressed concern about the debate, saying it is not the right forum for such a discussion.
“We were not for this debate in the format that was presented,” France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, told reporters. France has western Europe’s largest Jewish population.
Singh Ranjit, of the group Sikhs of France, said, “This concerns all of us because we all have difficulties as religious minorities when it comes to the relationship we have with the authorities.”
The debate has also taken on an international dimension.
A former foreign minister of the Comoros Islands, a largely Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean, said on the sidelines of the debate that France’s influence goes beyond its geographical limits.
“Unfortunately because of what they call quarrels within France, people don’t measure the impact that France has all over the world.”
NOTE: I originally published this post in reply to a threat of a defamation lawsuit from David Yerushalmi. I temporarily withdrew it in order to consult with counsel. I post this now.
But before I do, since I wrote this, the Anti Defamation League, a group with whom I often disagree, has published a strong denunciation of Yerushalmi’s views under the headline “Extremism,” which is worth noting:
One of the driving forces behind Shari’a-related conspiracy theories and growing efforts to ban or restrict the use of Shari’a law in American courts is David Yerushalmi, an Arizona attorney with a record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.
…Yerushalmi has not only actively promoted his conspiratorial vision of Shari’a law, but has also sought to portray all Muslims as a threat. In one March 2006 article, for example, Yerushalmi even went so far as to claim that “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…The Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.”
That same year, Yerushalmi founded the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), a “think tank” that has published anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and anti-black materials, as well as New World Order-style conspiracy theories.
…Yerushalmi’s main instrument, SANE, is also openly hostile to undocumented migrants in the United States. It advocates somehow sealing all American borders and building “special criminal camps” to house undocumented migrants…
…Yerushalmi [has] defend[ed] people accused of anti-Semitism such as Mel Gibson and Pat Buchanan because they “have the potential to save the West from itself and from Islam.”
The statement doesn’t at all deal with Yerushalmi’s Kahane-like pro-settler views about Israel, which is understandable since the ADL’s difference with him on this subject might be more nuanced. But such as it is, the statement should gain broad visibility and further reinforce Yerushalmi’s reputation as a far-right anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim bigot.
My original post follows:
A short time ago I published a post about David Yerushalmi’s leadership of various state campaigns to ban Sharia law. If you’ve been reading this blog for a few years you’ll remember back to 2007 when I wrote several posts about Yerushalmi’s leadership role in the campaign against New York’s Khalil Gibran Academy and the accompanying demonization and forced removal of principal Debbie Almontaser (which was later found wrongful by an EEOC ruling). I reviewed his then publicly-accessible website, Saneworks, for the overtly racist rhetoric it contained. I called him then a “Jewish white supremacist.”
Mother Jones recently published its own profile of Yerushalmi’s efforts to ban Sharia law and called him simply a “white supremacist.” Apparently, he didn’t like that. Didn’t like it one bit. As a result he sent Mother Jones a message saying that he was compiling a record of the magazine’s coverage of him as part of a legal brief. Not exactly a threat of a lawsuit, but not far from one.
To me he was far more explicit. He sent this to a lawyer representing me in my current libel suit which will be heard in Los Angeles in the coming days:
I am reluctantly forced to revisit the statements your client, Richard Silverstein, has made about me on his blog. When he first attacked me personally and stated that I was a fascist, racist, and Kahanist, I ignored them, even as others of his ilk provided these baseless statements “legs” allowing countless more “eyes” the opportunity to read what your client understood and represented to be carefully calculated factual statements about me. These statements are demonstrably false and your client made them knowing they were false or acting recklessly in this regard. This recklessness I believe was established in his deposition testimony in the Neuwirth case.
I ignored these publications because your client uses this kind of ad hominem invective on a regular basis and I was just one of many people he attacked personally without any real factual basis.
Unfortunately, your client has republished the original articles via links in a most recent piece stating that I am a white supremacist. I might still have ignored this except for the fact that it has now concretely and specifically injured me in my legal profession in Arizona. I have now lost an African American client who was prepared to retain my firm but for your clients defamatory publications, because he could not afford to be associated with someone accused of such beliefs even though he knows I do not hold these beliefs. Much of his business is in public relations and this charge by your client was for him too much to sustain.
My staff and family have prevailed upon me to sue your client for defamation. Again, I am reluctant given the First Amendment issues, but I believe there is a strong basis to assert that his wholly unfounded, false, and defamatory statements, which have now led to concrete damages that I can measure minimally in excess of $100,000 suggests to me that my staff and family have the better argument.
The suit will be brought in Arizona. An interesting and related case is Yetman v. English, 168 Ariz. 71, 811 P.2d 323 (1991).
I certainly understand your client will raise the standard First Amendment defenses: opinion, hyperbole, no actual malice. If we get past these, your client will have the opportunity to test “truth” as a defense. It is to that end and to that purpose I am now drafting my complaint.
Your client may avoid the suit by deleting all articles published on his blog or other forum that refer to me in the defamatory ways described.
I am providing this to you confidentially. If you client chooses to make this public, and he certainly may, this settlement offer is rescinded.
Thank you.
David Yerushalmi
Law Offices of David Yerushalmi, P.C.:
Washington, D.C., New York, California & Arizona
I’ve debated how to address this threat and of course I’ve engaged pro bono legal case in the event he follows through on it. But I will not be cowed by a bully. I stand by the posts I’ve written by him. I will not remove them. I will gladly meet him in court or anywhere in defense of both my right to speak and publish, and the truth of the statements I’ve written about him.
David Yerushalmi is a fraud. His claims about Islam are false, as anyone with any real knowledge of the religion will tell you. His game is political opportunism to advance a strident right-wing anti-Muslim agenda. An earlier iteration of his anti-jihad campaign involved a colleague, Dave Gaubatz, who did a “James O’Keefe” and infiltrated Virginia mosques posing as a new member. They published their supposedly shocking accounts of radical jihadist activity which turned out to be “sky is falling” nonsense. Gaubatz, for those of you who may not remember, was recently successfully sued for arranging for his son to pose as a CAIR intern, whereupon he stole internal organization documents for the purposes of discrediting CAIR. The court ordered Gaubatz to return the documents.
Even Yerushalmi’s name is fake. His family birth name is Beychok, born of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to America. To be clear, I’m not saying that Yerushalmi’s legal name isn’t that. I’m talking about the underlying motivations regarding Jewish nationalist identity that are involved in such a name change. Yerushalmi means “from Jerusalem.” Yerushalmi is as much a resident of Jerusalem as I am. He doesn’t live in Jerusalem nor do I. Let me make clear that I have no problem with Jewisholim changing their name once they move to Israel, taking Hebrew names such as Yerushalmi. But to do so when you live in America is pure preciousness. He wants to tell you that he supports the settler concept of the eternal inviolability of Jerusalem as a Jewish city and capital. He wants to tell you he believes in the whole nine yards of ultra-Orthodox extremism regarding God’s sacred gift of all of the Land of Israel to the entire Jewish people in perpetuity.
Yerushalmi denies he is a white Jewish supermacist, yet writes in his website and other online venues nonsense like this:
…Our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses,democracy has seeped up through the cracks and corroded everything we once deemed sacred about our political order. Prior to the Civil War, the electorate, essentially white Christian men, had access to local government. It was here, where men shared an intimacy born of family ties, shared religious beliefs, and common cultural signposts, that representative government was meant to touch our daily lives. With the social and cultural revolution which followed the emancipation, man’s relationship to political order was radically nationalized and democratized.
And believe me, Yerushalmi doesn’t use the term “democratized” in a flattering way. Here he clarifies that he isn’t opposed to the paternalistic democracy of the Founding Fathers in which selection of senators and even the president was not given directly to the people (or as he calls them, “the masses”):
The founding fathers themselves of course opposed “democracy” in its simple form and created a wonderfully elaborate system to shield government from mass democracy…
Here he expounds on the perniciousness of:
…Raw or radical democracy where all men and all ideas and all cultures are deemed equal and given equal voice. That is of course the agenda of the Left…
Yerushalmi of course opposes Israeli democracy as well, or at least the current version which accords rights to Israeli Palestinian citizens. Larry Cohler Esses, in a series he wrote for Jewish Week on the Stop the Madrassa campaign led by Yerushalmi, noted that the latter called for Israel to “cast off the yoke of liberal democracy.”
It should be noted that Meir Kahane maintained precisely the same dismissive attitude toward Israeli democracy, saying that if given a choice between the latter and a Jewish state he would choose the latter. In fact, Kahane was perfectly comfortable with a Jewish state that was not democratic. It should come as no surprise that during a session in which he deposed me for the libel lawsuit I mentioned above, he revealingly referred to Kahane with the honorific, “the Rov” (or “Rabbi”), a traditional Jewish way by which yeshiva students refer to an honored teacher.
Cohler Esses also notes that Yerushalmi believes that left-wing Jews:
…Destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite…One must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one. Indeed, Jews in the main have turned their backs on the belief in G-d and His commandments as a book of laws for a particular and chosen people.
Most Israelis are raging Leftists, and this includes the so-called nationalists who found a home in the ‘right-wing’ Likud political bloc or one of the other smaller and more marginal right wing parties.
What’s extraordinary here is that even the far-right secular nationalists of Likud come under withering condemnation. The only true Jews and true Zionists can be the ultra-Orthodox like himself.
In a recent NPR interview, he either dissembles regarding his true views or he has radically reversed himself since he published earlier statements I’ve quoted previously in this blog. Here are some of his earlier legislative proposals regarding Islam in American life:
…Islam requires all Muslims to actively and passively support the replacement of America’s constitutional republic with a political system based upon Shari’a.
…Adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People.
HEREFORE, IT IS RESOLVED THAT: It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Shari’a.
The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation.
He has clearly soft-pedaled such extremist views in order to win acceptance for them in the context of this current anti-Muslim national legislative campaign. But compare the following claim about his legislation (from the NPR interview) with the above views and judge for yourself whether this leopard has changed its spots:
The law does not even criminalize the absolute practice of Shariah. In fact, you could go to Times Square and you could print out: I advocate Shariah, I even advocate, in theory, jihad against America and my statute does not touch you. The statute says the attorney general simply designates someone who practices a Shariah with terrorism component.
Given what I quoted above, you tell me whether or not the following statement from the interview is a lie:
Q:…Is your view of the measure [the anti-Sharia law bill] motivated in part by a view that Islam is inherently violent and that its adherents are inherently predisposed to violence because of their commitment to religious Islam?
Mr. YERUSHALMI: No.
And in this statement, he doesn’t exactly lie, but he deliberately deceives the listener into believing in his pro-Muslim altruism, which is in truth anything but:
I have represented pro bono Muslim-Americans.
He is indeed representing, as far as I know, three Muslim-Americans who were allegedly legal clients of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They are suing CAIR. David Yerushalmi is on a political jihad against CAIR, which he views inaccurately as a pro-jihadi Muslim extremist organizations. So yes, he’s representing a grand total of three Muslim-Americans in a single case, but only because he believes it will advance his own anti-Muslim political agenda.
Let’s examine this statement too in light of what I quoted above:
I have stated on the record, the pietistic worship of the divine through Islamic worship, Jewish worship, Christian worship, atheistic worship or humanistic, is protected and absolutely sacrosanct in our system.
How can you claim the above, when you’ve also called for the U.S. Congress to declare war “on the Muslim nation?” There may be a poorly drawn distinction he is trying to make here between Islam as a religion and what he considers radical Islam which professes, again according to him, Islam as a political system. But you’d have to forgive most lay people for missing that distinction and believing he’s at war with all Islam.
In the interview he also makes the statement:
I…certainly can’t be a white supremacist, only because I’m an orthodox Jew…
That’s why I called him a “Jewish white supremacist” since that conveys that he isn’t the same as Richard Butler or the Aryan Nation. Nevertheless, his views, especially those regarding Islam, are not that dissimilar. Yes, he’s dressed up his ideology (or should I say, theology) with a certain level of intellectual rigor lacking in most white supremacists. But the fact that he is a racist cannot be denied without doing violence to the truth.
Of course a Jew can be a white supremacist if he denounces “liberal democracy,” disdains minorities, and believes in waging “war against Islam,” as he has said.
Let me also make absolutely clear, my quarrel with David Yerushalmi is purely political. It is a quarrel among Jews about the meaning of Jewish identity and the role of Israel in Jewish life. It is a battle over ideas. If he wants to have such a battle in a courtroom or any other venue, I’m prepared. Of course, Yerushalmi prefers to hold the battle in the courtroom because he doesn’t trust the rude democracy of the blogs and internet. He knows his ideas will lose in a free and fair debate as our founding fathers envisioned. So he resorts to legal threats. It’s really a reverse form of the term beloved by far-right pro-Israel advocates like Alan Dershowitz, lawfare. That is, it’s a form of political harrassment through abuse of the legal system to bring purely political arguments which should be resolved in the traditional American way such things are resolved; and instead attempting to bankrupt or otherwise intimidate the victim into silence.
Some people also call these legal actions SLAPP (Strategic Limitation Against Public Participation) suits which are often used by companies and other well-heeled individuals to limit discussion of issues sensitive to them.
The anti-jihadi lawyer’s claim of damage or losing business is a twisted version of what he attempts to do to his enemies. He knows how difficult it is for an individual blogger to retain pro bono legal counsel and take the years that such cases can involve. So he holds this over one’s head as a cudgel to stifle free speech and debate. Well, not this blogger. Not now. Not ever.
Finally, I have no personal malice whatsoever against Yerushalmi. I don’t know him personally. I don’t want to know him personally.
NOTE: Yerushalmi has withdrawn his lawsuit threat in a note he sent to my counsel.
Incident took place during at a military base where students were being escorted as part of an ‘IDF preparation’ project, sanctioned by the Education Ministry.
Twelfth-grade students from Herzliya’s Hayovel High School took part in a simulated shooting attack in which the targets were figures decked out with the Arab keffiyeh headdress, Haaretz has learned.
The incident took place at a military base last week during the annual 12th grade trip. The students were being escorted to a commanders’ base in the Negev as part of an “IDF preparation” project, which is sanctioned by the Education Ministry.
According to a person familiar with the details, the event was tantamount to “educating toward hatred of Arabs.”
“Some citizens of the State of Israel wear keffiyehs,” the source said. “Now they are viewed as legitimate targets for a shooting simulation.”
The trip concluded on Thursday. In a notice that was sent to parents, the school said that “the course of the trip is an inseparable part of the educational curriculum in general, and the ‘IDF preparation’ in particular.”
The first day of the trip included “activities with soldiers in commanders’ school,” according to the notice. The students met with soldiers on the base and heard lectures about the army and the importance of conscription.
During one of the discussions, the students were told that whoever does not serve in a combat unit “does not perform meaningful service.”
During the visit to the base, some of the students took part in an “electronic shooting range,” a computer-generated simulation that recreates a setting in which a soldier uses a laser-guided weapon to shoot targets. According to sources, the images in the electronic shooting range were outfitted with keffiyehs.
“From what I understood, the boys were more excited about this visit than the girls, some of whom preferred not to take part,” said the parent of one student on the trip. “I don’t think that it’s the education system’s job to train students to shoot.”
The “IDF preparation” project usually entails the visit of army officers to schools as well as occasional class trips to army bases for educational and instructional activities. This is believed to be one of the first times a visit to an army base has included students’ participation in a military activity. Children who are eligible for conscription usually undergo introductory military training as part of “Gadna Week,” which is not under the purview of the school system.
A school official said that the use of an electronic simulator that depicted a target wearing a keffiyeh “is certainly problematic, but this is a wider and more fundamental issue than our visit to the base. We have no intention of teaching the students to shoot people with keffiyehs.”
The Education Ministry did not issue a comment as of press time.
At the Justice Department, it’s called the post-Sept. 11 backlash — the steady stream of more than 800 cases of violence and discrimination suffered by American Muslims at the hands of know-nothing abusers. These continuing hate crimes were laid bare at a valuable but barely noticed Senate hearing last week that provided welcome contrast to Representative Peter King’s airing of his xenophobic allegation that the Muslim-American community has been radicalized.
Offering federal data rather than mythic scapegoating of an easy political target, the Senate hearing focused on the fact that while Muslims make up 1 percent of the population, they are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases. These range from homicides and mosque burnings to job, school and zoning law abuses, according to the Justice Department.
In running the hearing, Senator Richard Durbin tried to set the record straight about the patriotism of a vast majority of American-Muslim citizens and the continuing assaults on their civil rights. He warned against the “guilt by association” whipped up by Mr. King’s broadsides — that there are “too many mosques” in the nation, that most of them are extremist, and that American Muslim leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement against home-grown terrorism.
It was former President George W. Bush who first warned against turning on Muslim Americans after Sept. 11, 2001, stressing the fact that Islam is “a faith based upon love, not hate,” regardless of the religious veneer the fanatics of 9/11 tried to attach to their atrocities. Since then, American Muslims have served as the largest source of tips to authorities tracking terror suspects, according to a recent university study.
The Senate hearing was not designed as a full refutation of Representative King’s wild thesis, but it put a more human and factual face on a community that has been badly slurred. Mr. King is promising more committee haymakers. This is unfortunate. At least Mr. Durbin’s hearing made clear that the nation’s struggle against terrorism is best served by information, not dark generalizations.
In this photo taken on March 22, 2011, people pay there respects to Imam Souleyman Sissouma and his family at the Bilal Mosque during a funeral service in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Souleymane Sissouma was the third imam slain this month in a wave of anti-Muslim attacks so brutal his surviving family members were too afraid to attend his funeral. At least 10 mosques across Abidjan have been burned, and another was abandoned after attackers threw a grenade through a window during prayers. (AP)
What if the Muslims were attacking churches and killing innocent people, this would reach American channels quicker than we would realize. In the Ivory coast Muslims have been facing attacks for a while but recently these attacks are on the rise.
As dozens of mourners gathered at a mosque, the twisted wreckage of a burned car lay outside — another sign of the growing campaign of violence against Muslims who widely support Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of November’s presidential election.
Ouattara, who is Muslim, is locked in a battle with the entrenched president Laurent Gbagbo for power, and their conflict is veering dangerously toward sectarian violence.
At least 10 mosques across Abidjan have been set ablaze, and another was abandoned after attackers threw a grenade through a window during prayers.
“Us Muslims, we’re not safe. We are the object of every kind of violence. We’re afraid. We don’t know how this is going to end,” said Imam Idriss Koudouss, president of the National Islamic Council. “And we aren’t even involved in politics.” Ouattara supporters also have been beaten to death with bricks, even doused with gasoline and burned alive. Cell phone videos of the horrors are traded on the street and broadcast on state television along with calls to arms.
“It’s the political manipulation of ethnicity,” said Corinne Dufka, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.
“The root of the conflict is competition for political power and the fault lines are drawn along religious, ethnic and national lines.”
November’s presidential election was supposed to reunite the country after a 2002-2003 civil war split it into a rebel-controlled north and a loyalist south. But when Gbagbo refused to recognize UN-certified results showing that he lost, Ivory Coast was plunged back into a cycle of violence.
The UN says up to 1 million people have fled the fighting and at least 462 people have been killed, though Ouattara’s camp puts the toll at 832. The vast majority of these deaths were Ouattara supporters who were abducted and killed by Gbagbo-allied security forces, human rights groups say.
“We’re afraid. Everyone’s leaving,” said Abdias Goita, a father of two who waited outside the Malian embassy for evacuation Friday. “My brother had his door broken down by pro-Gbagbo militias. He gave them all the money he had — about 200,000 francs ($430) — but they slit his throat anyway.” During the presidential campaign, little was made of the fact that Ouattara would be Ivory Coast’s first Muslim president, drawing much of his support from the north. In the aftermath though, pro-Gbagbo police and militias have been widely accused of targeting Muslims because they are perceived as being defacto Ouattara supporters.
Last week, riot police showed up at Imam Sissouma’s mosque, arresting him and his son and taking the offering box. A fellow imam immediately called the interior minister to plead for their release and thought everything would be fine when Sissouma’s wife called to say they were back at home, safe and sound.
But Sissouma’s wife called back a half hour later to say the riot police had executed him and five other people, including his elderly mother.
Interior Minister Emile Guirieoulou acknowledged receiving the call, but refused to confirm the arrests or the killings, because the investigation is ongoing.
“In Ivory Coast, there have never been religious problems, Christians and Muslims live side by side. This tragic incident is a pure result of the political crisis,” said Imam Moussa Drame, whose own mosque was attacked in December.
Some 38.6 percent of Ivorians are Muslim, and 32.8 percent are Christians, according to the CIA World Factbook. An inter-religious council, made up of Christian and Muslim leaders is one of the country’s most respected institutions.
But xenophobia has long been a problem in this country, which has attracted millions of immigrant laborers from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso. They came to work on plantations, especially cocoa farms that produce the raw material that goes into much of the world’s chocolate.
Resolving who would even be allowed to vote in the presidential election took years.
Now armed youth who support Gbagbo are stopping and threatening people at makeshift roadblocks across Abidjan.
Those with northern or Muslim names are accused of being pro-Ouattara rebels, and are beaten or killed, activists say.
Human Rights Watch reported dozens of ethnically and religiously motivated killings earlier this month, often carried out by the police or by pro-Gbagbo youth with police consent. Ouattara supporters were beaten to death “with bricks, clubs, and sticks, or doused them with gas and burned them alive.” Cell phone videos of the incidents have been posted on YouTube and Facebook, often accompanied by dehumanizing and anti-Muslim comments.
Fueling the fire is a relentless campaign of what the UN has called “lies” and “propaganda” on Gbagbo-controlled state television. The Radio-Television Ivorienne (RTI) is referred to by some foreign journalists as TV Mille Collines, in reference to the radio station that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
In one report aired last week, the anchorman smiled as he described a dozen alleged rebels killed by pro-Gbagbo soldiers in central Abidjan as “culled like little birds.” Graphic images of their bloodied bodies were interspersed with images of soldiers giving each other high five and cheering crowds.
“The future Gbagbo proposes for his country is war, anarchy and violence, with ethnic, religious and xenophobic dimensions,” wrote Louise Arbour, president of the International Crisis Group, in an open letter this week.
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
First off I want to apologize for the last post, I actually had not looked closely at the images which were as many of you pointed out, “needlessly offensive” and in fact prejudiced. Thank you for the input and oversight, Emperor informed me of the comments and of my error, I am a new contributor and I hope this does not put me out of favor with the loonwatch family. –Amago
Now the actual study, entitled “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, and the Threat to Rights and Security,” is well worth the read. It recounts the pervasive atmosphere of Islamophobia and reliance on Islamophobes at the most and ignorance at the least amongst security officials, trainers and others and the corrosive effect in can have on our rights and national security.
Here is an excerpt from the “Executive Summary” of the report:
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks by al Qaeda Homeland Security Professionals Conference,on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the fed- eral government has mobilized law enforcement agencies at all levels into a coordinated national defense against future terror attacks. To meet this challenge, the growing ranks of the domestic security apparatus—including local police, transit, port, and other agencies not traditionally involved in counterterrorism—require training. The George W. Bush administration’s declaration of “war on terror” bolstered a private counterterrorism training industry that offers courses on topics ranging from infrastructure reinforcement to terrorist ideology.
A nine-month investigation by Political Research Associates (PRA) finds that government agencies responsible for domestic security have inadequate mechanisms to ensure quality and consistency in ter- rorism preparedness training provided by private vendors; public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous informa- tion about the nature of the terror threat through highly politicized seminars, industry conferences, trade publications, and electronic media. In place of sound skills training and intelligence briefings, a vocal and influential sub-group of the private counterterrorism training industry markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam — a world religion with 1.3 billion adherents—as inherently violent and even terroristic.
Walid Shoebat, a popular “ex-Muslim” speaker used by multiple private training firms, recently told the audience at an International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA) conference, “Islam is a revolution and is intent to destroy all other systems. They want to expand, like Nazism.”1 Another private sector counterterrorism trainer, John Giduck, told a Homeland Security Professionals Conference “Going back to the time of Mohammed, Muslims’ goal has been to take over the world.”2 Walid Phares, who teaches for The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and the National Defense University, argues that “jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates”3 and patiently recruit until “[a]lmost all mosques, educational centers, and socioeconomic institutions fall into their hands.”4 These “jihadists” put off militant action, Phares claims ominiously, “until the ‘holy moment’ comes.”5 Solomon Bradman, CEO of the training firm Security Solutions International (SSI), likewise claims that a Muslim stealth jihad threatens the United States from within. Such assertions are far from benign. Asked by a PRA investigator what she understood to be Shoebat’s solution to the Islamic threat he described at the ICTOA event previously mentioned, one audience member responded, “Kill them, including the children. You heard him.”6
Islamophobic statements like those above have the effect of demonizing the entirety of Islam as dangerous and “extremist,” denying the existence of a moderate Muslim majority, or regarding Islam gen- erally as a problem for the world.7 The private sector speakers and trainers PRA investigated routinely invoke conspiracy theories that draw upon deeply- ingrained negative stereotypes of Muslim duplicity, repression, backwardness, and evil.8 Islamophobia is “an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in prac- tices of exclusion and discrimination” and may include the perception that Islam is inferior to the West and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion.9
The notion that a generalized Muslim menace poses an existential threat to the United States and western democracy contradicts official national secu- rity doctrine and undermines both domestic security and the constitutional rights of our citizens and resi- dents. Nonetheless, PRA’s investigation finds that public resources are being used to propagate this dangerous falsehood to the nation’s first responders, intelligence analysts, and other public servants.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — An Alaskan lawmaker hopes to guard against Islamic Sharia law by prohibiting state courts from honoring foreign law that violates Alaskan or U.S. constitutional rights.
Though the bill’s language does not specifically target Sharia, Rep. Carl Gatto, R-Palmer, said the legislation is a reaction to what he sees as the growing use of international law codes in courts that have robbed people of their constitutional rights.
In a hearing before the House State Affairs Committee, Gatto’s chief of staff Karen Sawyer said Sharia is an example of the type of transnational law that has appeared in family law, divorce and child custody cases nationally, though she knows of instances of it appearing in Alaska courts.
“Sharia is clearly offensive to the U.S. Constitution,” Sawyer said. “It is the foremost foreign law that is impacting our legal system.”
Sawyer added that countries following Sharia law do not allow freedom of religion or equal rights to women.
Gatto called the law a preventative measure necessitated by the religious beliefs of recent immigrants.
“As a kid, we had Italian neighborhoods, Irish neighborhoods … but they didn’t impose their own laws,” Gatto said. “When these neighborhoods are occupied by people from the Middle East, they do establish their own laws.”
Sharia law is a set of Islamic principles and religious interpretations that have been adopted into the laws of certain countries, mostly in the Middle East.
The Alaska proposal is based on the American Laws for American Courts act, which has been proposed in several states and versions of which have been enacted in Tennessee and Louisiana, said David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based attorney who supports the legislation.
In testimony before the committee, Yerushalmi said the law would protect people who are forced to litigate in any country with laws counter to U.S. constitutional protections, not just countries practicing Sharia law.
“Today, we are far more likely than ever before to have foreign laws in American courts,” said Yerushalmi. “There are plenty of occasions in which foreign law informs what Alaskan law could be.”
Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the bill was an unnecessary overreach, and adequate protections for religious freedom in court already exist.
“It’s a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist,” Mittman said.
While Committee chair and bill co-sponsor Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, said he hoped to move the bill out of committee after its first hearing, concerns from lawmakers on how the bill would affect agreements with Alaska Native tribes or neighboring countries led to the bill being held over for further consideration.
DURHAM, N.H. — Rick Santorum on Friday asserted that Sharia law has no place in America.
“Jihadism is evil and we need to say what it is,” he said at the Strafford County Lincoln-Reagan dinner, remarks that show how the former Pennsylvania senator continues to establish himself as the candidate most-aligned with the Republican Party’s conservative base.
“We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.”
Santorum, invoking New York Rep. Peter King’s hearing this week on the alleged radicalization of American Muslims, said that the “vast majority” of Muslims don’t want to it either.
“They left because of Sharia law,” he said, referring to why he believes Muslim immigrants left their home countries to come to the United States.
Santorum added, “Sharia law is not just a religious code. It is also a governmental code. It happens to be both religious in nature an origin, but it is a civil code. And it is incompatible with the civil code of the United States.”
The audience loudly applauded.
Santorum, a devout Catholic, warned about Sharia at CPAC last month, and his latest comments set up a stark contrast between his world view and President Obama’s efforts to court support in the Muslim world.
The question-and-answer session of the dinner turned into a wide-ranging discussion.
Santorum said the Democrats talk about entitlements the way dealers talk about drugs.
“Close your eyes, like you’re listening to a drug dealer outside a school yard,” he said. “They see entitlements as a way to make you dependent, weaker, less of a person than you are, drugging you into submission to a government who promises a high to take care of you.”
And Santorum took a swipe at public schools. “Just call them what they are. Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools,” he said.
Santorum brought up the Head Start program, charging that the program is ineffective even as Democrats object strongly to congressional Republicans’ proposal to cut funding for it.
“They fund it more,” he said of Democrats. “Why? Because it brings more children into their domain. It brings more children out of the household … Their agenda is to socialize your children with the thinking they want in those children’s minds.”
Santroum, who home-schools his own seven children, said he supports voucher programs that would allow parents to send their children to private schools.
“I would support anything that gets the money in who should be in control — or who should be the object — of the education system in this country. And that is not the children but the parents. Because parents have the obligation to raise and educate their children.”
A church pastor has been jailed for 11 and a half years after being found guilty of trafficking children into the UK for use as domestic “slaves” at her home in Barking, east London.
Lucy Adeniji brought two children and a 21-year-old woman to the UK from Africa illegally and used them as servants.
She was convicted of 17 different counts at Isleworth Crown Court.
The mother-of-five is the first person to be jailed for trafficking children into the UK for domestic servitude.
In a case that has been likened to modern-day slavery, Adeniji smuggled the three victims into Britain on false passports, and used them as servants at her home in Ray Gardens, Barking.
An illegal immigrant herself, Adeniji, 44 – originally from Nigeria – had told the victims’ parents they would have a better life in the UK, but instead viciously beat them if they failed to please her.
Benefits inquiry
The abuse only came to light when one of the victims escaped from Adeniji’s home after being beaten.
Adeniji was convicted last month of assault, child cruelty and facilitating illegal entry into the UK of a child.
She also admitted six counts of obtaining false passports for herself and her own children and two counts of facilitating illegal entry.
Adeniji faces a separate investigation into money she claimed in benefits for her own children.
Det Insp Gordon Valentine, of the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Paladin – which targets child trafficking – said the case could be the tip of the iceberg.
“The people who are using this form of slavery in their households know it is wrong,” he said.
“This case is very important because it shows victims that we can have successful prosecutions and that they can find justice.”
The case has echoes of the maltreatment of Victoria Climbié who died at the hands of her guardian, Marie Therese Kouao. She and her boyfriend Carl Manning were found guilty of Victoria’s murder in 2003.
Eight years ago, he moved to Texas. After US President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Gelbman decided to get involved in politics.
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