A very important documentary that puts a face on many of those we’ve killed.

The message sent by America’s invisible victims

by Murtaza Hussain (AlJazeera English)

On the evening of December 27, an Indian immigrant to America named Sunando Sen was pushed by a stranger onto the subway tracks in New York City and struck and killed by an oncoming train. Sen had called New York home for years, and after years of hard work and struggle had recently managed to achieve his lifelong goal of opening a small business of his own, a copy shop in Upper Manhattan.

His roommate, MD Khan expressed shock at the death of his friend, a soft spoken man who liked to stay up late watching comedy shows and listening to music: “He was so nice, gentle and quiet… It’s broken my heart.”

The following day, the NYPD announced the arrest of Erika Menendez, a 31-year-old woman who had been spotted on security footage fleeing the scene after Sen had been pushed. Upon being detained and taken to a 112th Precinct police station for questioning, Menendez confessed to Sen’s murder and revealed as her motivation a desire to commit violence against Muslims. As she told detectives:

“I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims… Ever since 2001 when they put down the Twin Towers, I’ve been beating them up.”

Sunando Sen was not a Muslim, but as a brown-skinned foreigner living in the United States, he was targeted and killed in an act of hate which is the by-product of an ongoing campaign of bigotry and demonisation against Muslims living in America.

Muslim-Americans, as well as Hindus, Sikhs and others who purportedly “look Muslim” have been humiliated,assaulted and in many cases murdered by individuals often galvanised to violence by politicians and media figures who have enthusiastically engaged in public hatemongering against the Muslim community in the country.

Anti-Muslim violence increases

The 9/11 attacks precipitated a surge in hate crimes, but even as the events themselves recede further into history, the level of hatred and violence directed at Muslim communities is paradoxically increasing. Within the past month, in New York alone, police have suspected racial hatred as being the motive behind several crimes.

This includes a string of murders specifically targetingMiddle Eastern storekeepers in Brooklyn, the last of whom, a 78-year old Iranian immigrant named Rahmatollah Vahidipour, was shot to death while closing his boutique and whose lifeless body was then dragged to a backroom and covered over with merchandise from his store.

Within the same week as Vahidipour’s murder another Muslim man was viciously beaten by two men who preceded their attack by asking him whether he was “a Hindu or a Muslim”, while another man was stabbed several times outside of a mosque in a random attack by an assailant who screamed “I’m going to kill you Muslim“, while repeatedly plunging a knife into his victims’ body.

Far from being aberrations, these incidents are in line with national statistics which show anti-Muslim violence in America nearing record highs, a trend which comes in tandem with highly public campaigns against mosque construction as well as fear-mongering by politicians and media figures regarding alleged plots by Muslim-Americans to override the constitution and impose Islamic law on the country.

The US election cycle also saw Muslims used as convenient targets for politicians seeking office, with one example being incumbent Illinois House of Representatives Republican Joe Walsh who told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally that “Muslims are here trying to kill Americans everyday“, before making a baseless and highly incendiary claim that radical Islam had “infiltrated” the Chicago suburbs and that Muslims there were planning an attack that would “make 9/11 look like child’s play”.

While working the crowd into hysterics was a convenient campaign strategy for Walsh, just days later the Muslim community experienced the consequences of his rhetoric. A man opened fire on an Illinois mosque while it was packed with hundreds of congregants for Ramadan. The next day, another mosque was hit with an acid bombthrown at a window while worshippers had gathered for night services.

Despite these attacks against Illinois Muslims in the wake of his statements, Walsh steadfastly refused to apologise for his rhetoric demonising the Muslim-Americans and instead doubled-down on his blanket accusations against them, a reflection of the mainstream acceptability of anti-Muslim rhetoric by political figures in the US today.

Indeed the use of Muslims as a punching bag by opportunistic politicians seeking a minority group to scapegoat has become a regular feature of American political life which shows no signs of abating, despite the “trickle-down” effect by which this bigotry is now manifesting itself in real violence against innocent Muslim-Americans on a regular basis.

Behind this hatemongering lies a deep cynicism, as leading anti-Muslim politicians such as Newt Gingrich who have warned of “stealth jihad” and other nefarious plots by Muslims in America were within recent years helping facilitateSharia-compliant finance programmes in the country and who maintained notably cordial relations with prominent Muslim leaders.

Political hatemongering

With Muslim-bashing becoming politically fashionable in recent years, politicians such as Gingrich have markedly changed their tune and it has been to the detriment of Muslim-Americans, as well as to the general level of social cohesion and tolerance in the country.

In addition to political hatemongering, the past several years have seen a highly organised and well-funded group of anti-Muslim activists who have been sponsoring campaigns targeting Muslims across the country.

Leading figures in this movement such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have led a crusade to vilify Muslims throughout the country and to exclude them from public life through campaigns of smears and hate-mongering which have cast Muslim-Americans as an insidious fifth column within the country.

Their views have gotten considerable popular attention, and thanks to a documented network of funders and media associates they have managed to bring their message to people across the United States.

In the past few months, a major controversy erupted when Geller’s anti-Muslim organisation sponsored the placement of Islamophobic advertisements at major subway stations in New York as well as in other cities across the country.

Some advertisements depicted pictures of the 9/11 attacks with verses from the Quran superimposed, while others called Muslims “savages” and implored people to “fight Jihad”. While the campaign has been challenged by many liberal commentators, including one infamous incident in which Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy was arrested for attempting to cover a sign with pink spray paint, they continue to run across the country and to spread a message of indiscriminate, vitriolic hatred towards Muslim-Americans in a manner unlikely to be tolerated were it to pertain to any other minority group.

While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, the question must be asked – what effect do advertisements such as these have on the psyches’ of people such as Erika Menendez? Was Sunando Sen, a law-abiding, hardworking immigrant who had given his life to achieving the American dream and who was pushed to his death by a woman who “hated Muslims” a direct victim of this campaign of bigotry? That he lost his life on the same subway system which for months has played host to hateful, incendiary advertisements such as Geller’s is a tragic irony but is in many ways the natural result of a national culture of anti-Muslim bigotry that has become mainstream in both politics and popular culture.

The sad, inescapable truth is that Sen will likely not be the last victim of the accelerating phenomena of violence against Muslims in the United States – the only question today is how far into the darkness America must travel before it decides to take a stand against it.

Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics.

Follow him on Twitter: @MazMHussain

(h/t: Saladin aka Big Boss)

The tragic consulate killings in Libya and America’s hierarchy of human life

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian UK)

Protesters attacked the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Tuesday night and killed four Americans, including the US ambassador, Chris Stevens. The attacks were triggered by rage over an amateurish and deeply hateful film about Islam that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as, among other things, a child molester advocate, a bloodthirsty goon, a bumbling idiot, and a promiscuous, philandering leech. A 13-minute trailer was uploaded to YouTube and then quickly circulated in the Muslim world, sparking widespread anger (the US embassy in Cairo was also attacked).

The anti-Islam film was written, directed and produced by an Israeli real estate developer living in California, Sam Bacile. He claimed, in an interview with Haaretz, that the film “cost $5m to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors”. Its purpose, as described by the Israeli newspaper, was to show that “Islam is a cancer” and to provide a “provocative political statement condemning the religion”. It’s hard to believe that the film – which is barely at the level of a poorly rehearsed high-school play – required $5m to make, but the intent seems clear: to provoke Muslims into exactly the sort of violent rage that we are now witnessing.

Events like this one are difficult to write about when they first happen because the raw emotion they produce often makes rational discussion impossible. A script quickly emerges from which All Decent People must recite, and any deviations are quickly detected and denounced. But given the magnitude of this event and the important points it raises, it is nonetheless worthwhile to examine it:

1) The deaths of Ambassador Stevens, a former Peace Corps volunteer and a dedicated Arabic-speaking career diplomat, and the other three American staff, are both a tragedy and a senseless outrage. Indiscriminately murdering people over a film, no matter how offensive it is, is an unmitigated wrong. The blame lies fully and completely with those who committed these murders.

2) Sam Bacile and his cowardly anonymous donors are repellent cretins for producing this bottom-feeding, bigoted, hateful “film” that has no apparent purpose but to spread anti-Islamic hatred and provoke violent reactions. But just as was true of the Qur’an burnings by Pastor Terry Jones (who, unsurprisingly, has a prominent role in promoting this film), or the Danish Muhammad cartoons before that, it is – and it should be – an absolute, unfettered free speech right to produce films no matter how offensive their content might be.

The US has steadily eroded free speech rights in the name of fighting terrorism by criminalizing pure political speech it deems dangerous and prosecuting Muslims who express those prohibited ideas. Attempts to constrain the rights of individuals to produce anti-Muslim films like the trash produced by Bacile and friends are just as dangerous and wrong as all other efforts to constrain free speech. Free speech is a vital liberty – arguably, the central one – and what it means, at its core, is that the right to express even the most repellent and inflammatory ideas is just as inviolable as the right to express inoffensive or conventional ones.

3) It is hard not to notice, and be disturbed by, the vastly different reactions whenever innocent Americans are killed, as opposed to when Americans are doing the killing of innocents. All the rage and denunciations of these murders in Benghazi are fully justified, but one wishes that even a fraction of that rage would be expressed when the US kills innocent men, women and children in the Muslim world, as it frequently does. Typically, though, those deaths are ignored, or at best justified with amoral bureaucratic phrases (“collateral damage”) or self-justifying cliches (“war is hell”), which Americans have been trained to recite.

It is understandable that the senseless killing of an ambassador is bigger news than the senseless killing of an unknown, obscure Yemeni or Pakistani child. But it’s anything but understandable to regard the former as more tragic than the latter. Yet there’s no denying that the same people today most vocally condemning the Benghazi killings are quick and eager to find justification when the killing of innocents is done by their government, rather than aimed at it.

It’s as though there are two types of crimes: killing, and then the killing of Americans. The way in which that latter phrase is so often invoked, with such intensity, emotion and scorn, reveals that it is viewed as the supreme crime: this is not just the tragic deaths of individuals, but a blow against the Empire; it therefore sparks particular offense. It is redolent of those in conquered lands being told they will be severely punished because they have raised their hand against a citizen of Rome.

Just compare the way in which the deaths of Americans on 9/11, even more than a decade later, are commemorated with borderline religious solemnity, as opposed to the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of foreign Muslims caused by the US, which are barely ever acknowledged. There is a clear hierarchy of human life being constantly reinforced by this mentality, and it is deeply consequential.

This is a vital process for enabling and justifying endless aggression. It is a way of dehumanizing those who are killed by the US while venerating American lives above all others. As the media watchdog group Media Lens put it today:

“A crucial task is to perceive how our compassion is channeled towards some and away from others. It’s the foundation of all mass violence.”

The death of Ambassador Stevens and the three Americans who died with him is as tragic as the constant killing of innocent people by the US, but not more so.

4) The two political parties in the US wasted no time in displaying their vulgar attributes by rushing to squeeze these events for political gain. Democratic partisans immediately announced that “exploiting US deaths” – by which they mean criticizing President Obama – “is ugly, unwise”.

That standard is as ludicrous as it is hypocritical. Democrats routinely “exploited US deaths” – in Iraq, Afghanistan, and from 9/11 – in order to attack President Bush and the Republican party, and they were perfectly within their rights to do so. When bad things happen involving US foreign policy, it is perfectly legitimate to speak out against the president and to identify his actions or inaction that one believes are to blame for those outcomes. These are political events, and they are inherently and necessarily “politicized”.

It’s one thing to object to specific criticisms of Obama here as illegitimate and ugly, as some of those criticisms undoubtedly were (see below). But trying to impose some sort of general prohibition on criticizing Obama – on the ground that Americans have died and this is a crisis – smacks of the worst debate-suppressing tactics of the GOP circa 2003. (To his credit, one of the Democrats making those claims today subsequently acknowledged his error and wrote: “Obviously there’s nothing wrong with criticizing the president, even during a crisis.”)

But in this case, what the GOP and Mitt Romney did is substantially worse. As the attacks unfolded, Romney quickly issued a statement, based on the response of the US embassy in Egypt, accusing Obama of “sympathiz[ing] with those who waged the attacks” (the Obama White House repudiated the statement from the embassy in Cairo). The chairman of the GOP, Reince Preibus, unloaded on the world this disgusting tweet: “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic”.

These accusations were all pure fiction and self-evidently ugly; they prompted incredulous condemnations even from media figures who pride themselves on their own neutrality.

But this is the story of the GOP. Faced with a president whose record is inept and horrible in many key respects, they somehow find a way to be even more inept and horrible themselves. Here, they had a real political opportunity to attack Obama – if US diplomats are killed and embassies stormed, it makes the president appear weak and ineffectual – but they are so drowning in their own blinding extremism and hate-driven bile, so wedded to their tired and moronic political attacks (unpatriotic Democrats love America’s Muslim enemies!), that they cannot avoid instantly self-destructing. Within a matter of hours, they managed to turn a politically dangerous situation for Obama into yet more evidence of their unhinged, undisciplined radicalism.

5) Drawing conclusions about Libya, and the US intervention there, from this situation would be unfair and far too premature. This does, however, highlight the rampant violence, lawlessness, militia thuggery, and general instability that has plagued that country since Gadaffi’s removal from power. Moreover, given all the questions, largely ignored, about who it was exactly whom the US was arming and empowering in that country during the intervention, and what the unexpected consequences of doing that might be, it is vital to know how the attackers came into possession of rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy weaponry.

This event also serves as a crucial reminder, yet again, that merely removing a heinous dictator is not proof that the intervention was successful, just or worthwhile. To assess that question, one must know what will follow in that country, for its people, once the intervening powers have removed the government. Declarations of victory and vindication over the intervention in Libya have always been premature, self-serving and baseless – precisely because that crucial fact is yet unknown. We can only hope that Tuesday’s events do not presage a depressing answer to that question.

In sum, one should by all means condemn and mourn the tragic deaths of these Americans in Benghazi. But the deaths would not be in vain if they caused us to pause and reflect much more than we normally do on the impact of the deaths of innocents which America itself routinely causes.

UPDATE: There are two developments in this story which, though they do not affect any of the observations I made, should be noted as they are at odds with some of the earlier reports: (1) although the Haaretz report was (and remains) quite definitive that the filmmaker is an Israeli named Sam Bacile, doubts have now been raised about the identity of the actual filmmaker, and (2) an anonymous US official claims that the attack was preplanned to coincide with 9/11, and the attackers exploited the protests over the film as a diversion. Neither of those claims is proven.

Recently, we’ve had trollish commenters pop up on our site defending the invasion and decimation of Iraq by the USA. It seems that the whitewashing of the war and historical amnesia has already settled in.

Loonwatcher Solid Snake made an excellent point about the way in which we make Muslim victims of America’s wars and aggression essentially “invisible.” Here is a recent two part series from AlJazeera’s Faultline documentary series that puts the focus back on the nation we invaded ten years ago, their reaction to our presence, what they believe they have benefited and lost, and the prospects for the future.

Faultlines: Iraq After the Americans, Part 1:

 

Part 2:

It is heartening to see clear, incisive articles that carry a good deal of facts and strong arguments against Islamophobia. Yousef Munayyer’s most recent piece is one such article. My one quibble with it is that Munayyer says Muslim American’s are a “fairly new immigrant group,” while this is true in some regards it minimizes the long history of Islam going over a century in the United States, including indigenous Muslims, especially African Americans.:

An illusion of security

by Yousef Munayyer (Chicago Tribune)

In seven days this month, at least eight places of worship associated with Middle Easterners or South Asians have been targeted in the United States. A Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., was the site of a massacre where six people were murdered. Later that evening a mosque in Joplin, Mo., was burned to the ground. In the following days, mosques were targeted in Rhode Island, Southern California, Oklahoma City and at two sites in Illinois. In Dearborn, Mich., an Arab-American church was targeted with vandalism.

All of this occurs in the wake of continued Islamophobia peddled by some elements of the American right. Sadly, the failure to condemn such hateful rhetoric by mainstream Democratic leaders has allowed it to perpetuate unchecked.

U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., for example, delivered a xenophobic rant last week: “One thing I’m sure of,” he told a town hall meeting, “is that there are people in this country — there is a radical strain of Islam in this country — it’s not just over there — trying to kill Americans every week. It is a real threat, and it is a threat that is much more at home now than it was after 9/11.” He went on, “It’s here. It’s in Elk Grove. It’s in Addison. It’s in Elgin. It’s here.”

Two days later a mosque had pellet-gun rounds fired at its walls. A few days after that a bottle filled with acid was thrown at an Islamic school as students prayed inside. Both of these incidents happened within 15 miles of Walsh’s town hall meeting only days prior.

The events of the past two weeks are cause for alarm. A spike in Islamophobic incidents and an increase in gun violence suggest it is only a matter of time before this occurs again and possibly with significant casualties.

Make no mistake, this is terrorism. What else can we call this pattern of violence targeting and intimidating civilians, leaving them afraid of practicing their most basic right, their freedom to worship?

The University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism maintains a database of terror incidents around the globe. Since 9/11 through the end of 2010 there have been 155 terror incidents in the U.S., and exactly two of them or 1.3 percent have been attributed to international Islamist terror groups. The majority of events are perpetrated by actors with domestic political motivations like anti-abortionists, right-wing extremists, extreme animal rights activists, and extreme environmentalists.

Anders Breivik, who killed scores in Norway last year, taught us a lesson about the folly involved in disproportionately targeting Muslims. The Norway killer apparently was inspired by U.S.-based Islamophobes like right-wing bloggers Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. The latter’s most recent endeavor is an ad campaign aimed at explaining the Israeli/Palestinian question in terms of overly simplistic and racist dichotomy between the civilized and the savage. Breivik, a disciple of this type of hate, was well-aware that his ethnic background would help him “escape the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent.” I suppose Wade Michael Page, who massacred the Sikhs in Wisconsin, had a similar confidence.

Despite this empirical reality, a vastly disproportionate focus has been put on the Muslim community in response to terrorism; racial and ethnic profiling has been a feature of this response. From the Bush administration’s Operation Frontline in 2004, in which Muslim-Americans were 1,200 times more likely than others to be interrogated by law enforcement and immigration officials, to the persistent manufacturing of plots by the FBI through the infiltration of mosques by entrapping informants, to the spying on the Muslim community done by the New York Police Department to the Israeli-inspired Transportation Security Administration programs (which have recently led 30 whistleblowers to complain about the use of racial profiling), Muslim-Americans have been disproportionately targeted through counter-terrorism measures.

So why is that?

The answer is simple. Muslim-Americans, a fairly new immigrant group still small in number and not yet cohesively organized, are easy targets. For a government that needs to demonstrate its ability to secure the homeland, the targeting of Muslim-Americans is a low-risk, high-reward option. American’s don’t actually have to be safer, they just need to feel safer, and if the government can get them to feel that way by targeting the “big bad Muslim boogeyman” then so be it.

It is easy to curtail the civil liberties of a minority group but far more difficult to curtail the civil liberties of larger groups. That’s why it is commonplace to see Muslim witch hunts advocated in the wake of an extremely rare domestic terrorist act. Yet, after far more common mass shootings, which seem very common these days, there is no political appetite to further regulate the Second Amendment.

Have post-9/11 policies made us safer from the threat of terrorism? Many might see the disproportionate crackdown on Muslim-Americans and think so, to the government’s liking.

But for the Arab, Muslim and Sikh families whose lives will be irreversibly marked by the tragic events of the past weeks, the answer is a very clear and resounding no.

Yousef Munayyer is executive director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, and the Palestine Center, in Washington.

A must read:

What Is the Real Terrorist Threat in America?

by Steve Coll (The New Yorker)

Satwant Kaleka, who served as president of the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, arrived in the United States from India three decades ago with thirty-five dollars in savings. By last Sunday, he owned several gas stations, according to the Los Angeles Times. He turned up early that morning at his temple to oversee worship and preparations for a large birthday party.

Wade Michael Page, a former bassist and guitarist in a white-supremacist rock band, drove to Oak Creek just after 10:15 A.M. He pulled out a pistol and shot worshipers remorselessly. An eleven-year-old-boy, Abhay Singh, watched him shoot one victim seven or eight times.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/08/the-real-terrorist-threat-in-america.html#ixzz23AADveCk

The United States of America celebrates its 236th birthday today.

Is it still possible to celebrate, love and admire aspects of her?

One must first ask the Natives I suppose.

Is it still possible to celebrate, love and admire aspects of her even with her leaders incessant thirst for war, disregard for the rule of law, boastful hubris and claims to superiority, culture of consumption and obsession with entertainment, etc., etc., etc.?

Yes, because there is still beauty in the land and there is still beauty in many of her people.

On this July 4th I hope her citizens see her beauty. Working 9-5 (or longer) with a sprinkling of days off here and there, her beauty is more appreciated by tourists.

As the world looks at the USA on her 236th year, many nations hold deeply anti-American views, seeing her as the chief purveyor of violence and insecurity in their own beautiful lands.

I hope, for them, that the beautiful aspects of the USA and her peoples doesn’t become completely lost in the face of the corruption and avarice of her leaders.

David Bowie’s extraordinary rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”:

Video: Right Winger Frank Gaffney Claims the Muslim Brotherhood is “Trying to Keep Us Stupid’

Self-Proclaimed ‘prophet’ and Morningstar Ministries host Rick Joyner brought on right wing political commentator and ‘birther’ Frank Gaffney to discuss conspiracy theories about how the Muslim Brotherhood is supposedly taking over America.

Gaffney claimed that the American people have “been subjected to a very disciplined, long-term, systematic effort” to condition us to “tolerate and accommodate Sharia law.”  However, Gaffney provided no proof.

Gaffney did say that “the enemy is trying to keep us stupid” through “information dominance.”

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)

Commentary Whitewashes Discrimination

by Raphael Magarik, The Daily Beast

Is it a happy coincidence that both Geert Wilders and Robert Spencer are out hawking their books for sale?

(h/t: Haywood)

Sean Hannity Interview Geert Wilders About Radical Islam (FOX NEWS)