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

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

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

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

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

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

Sacha Cohen’s movie a minstrel show

by Dean Obeidallah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest here…

The New York Times like many newspapers will not print Guenter Grass’ anti-War poem, I wonder if the hatemongers are going to compare this to the Danish cartoons that were supposedly “silenced” in attacks on “free speech” as they claimed at the time?

Quite a few commenters are calling Grass an “anti-Semite” and making hay out of his being drafted into the Waffen-SS in the final two months of World War II which dented his moral authority in Germany. Grass, for his part claims to have never fired a single bullet.

An opinion article in Haaretz has termed the poem “pathetic” but exonerates Grass from being an “anti-Semite,” which if anyone has read his works knows he is not.

Perhaps Guenter Grass is not the most astute individual when it comes to commenting on the geo-political intrigues playing out with regards to the war rhetoric between Israel and Iran, but it is a mistake to censor his work, not to take his points about double standards and hypocrisy seriously and to label him an anti-Semite.

Laureate accuses Israel of plotting to ‘wipe out’ Iran Israel to build 1,121 settler homes – Hebron squatters evicted

BERLIN: German Nobel literature laureate Gunter Grass touched off a firestorm of protest yesterday with a poem accusing Israel of plotting Iran’s annihilation and threatening world peace. The 84-year-old longtime leftist activist wrote in “What must be said” that he worried Israel “could wipe out the Iranian people” with a “first strike” due to the threat it sees in Tehran’s disputed nuclear program. “Why do I only say now, aged and with my last ink: the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace?” reads the poem, which appeared in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung yesterday.

Grass answers that Nazi Germany’s “incomparable” crimes against Jews and his own fear of accusations of anti-Semitism kept him from openly criticising Israel. But now, “tomorrow could already be too late” and Germany could become a “supplier to a crime”, Grass wrote, referring to a deal sealed last month for Berlin to sell Israel a sixth nuclear-capable Dolphin-class submarine. “I admit: I will be silent no longer, because I am sick of the hypocrisy of the West”.

Israel slammed the poem, which also sparked a fevered debate on German-language news and culture websites. “What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration,” said Emmanuel Nahshon, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, in a statement. “It used to be Christian children whose blood the Jews used to make matza (unleavened bread), today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state purportedly wants to wipe out.” Nahshon said Israel was “the only state in the world whose right to exist is publicly doubted”. “We want to live in peace with our neighbours in the region. And we are not prepared to assume the role that Gunter Grass assigns us in the German people’s process of coming to terms with its history.”

The Israel director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, accused Grass of making himself the spokesman “for anti-Semitic Germans sick of the Holocaust and seeking to rid themselves of any responsibility for its aftermath”. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle released a statement without mentioning Grass by name in which he warned against “making light of the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program”. “Iran obtaining nuclear weapons is not only a threat to Israel and the entire region but also a danger for the world’s security architecture,” he said, underlining Germany’s efforts to prevent Iran from having nuclear arms.

Grass, author of the renowned anti-war novel “The Tin Drum”, shocked his admirers in 2006 when he admitted, six decades after World War II, that he had been a member of the notorious Waffen SS – a revelation that severely undermined his until then substantial moral authority in Germany. Grass said he long kept silent on Israel’s own nuclear program because his country committed “crimes that are without comparison”, but he has come to see that silence as a “burdensome lie and a coercion” whose disregard carries a punishment – “the verdict ‘anti-Semitism’ is commonly used”.

Henryk M Broder, a prominent German Jewish columnist, accused Grass in light of his poem of having become “the prototype of the educated anti-Semite”. “Grass has always had a problem with Jews but he has never articulated it as clearly as with this ‘poem’,” Broder wrote in the daily Die Welt. The country’s most influential media commentators were unanimous in their criticism, saying Grass had offered up a one-sided portrayal of Israel as the aggressor and Iran as a victim of a mortal threat. “Never before in the history of the republic has a prominent intellectual waged a battle against Israel in such a cliched way,” wrote the website of news weekly Der Spiegel. Only Wolfgang Gehrcke of the far-left Die Linke party defended Grass in public, saying he had the “courage” to express “what is widely kept silent”.

Israel, the sole if undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East, has said it is keeping all options open for responding to Iran’s program which it says is aimed at securing atomic weapons, posing an existential threat to the Jewish state. Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently questions Israel’s right to exist, has consistently denied that its sensitive nuclear work is aimed at making weapons.

Separately, Israel’s government yesterday published tenders for 1,121 new settler homes as it faced settler anger over its decision to evict Israeli families from a disputed home in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Documents published on the Israeli housing ministry website showed the government had issued tenders for 872 new homes in Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighbourhood in the southern part of Arab east Jerusalem. Another 180 are to be built in Givat Zeev, just to the north of Jerusalem in the West Bank, while the remaining 69 are to be built in Katzrin in the occupied Golan Heights, the documents showed. Read rest here

The full text of the poem:

Why I am silent, silent for too much time,
how much is clear and we made it
in war games, where, as survivors,
we are just the footnotes

That is the claimed right to the formal preventive aggression
which could erase the Iranian people
dominated by a bouncer and moved to an organized jubilation,
because in the area of his competence there is
the construction of the atomic bomb

And then why do I avoid myself
to call the other country with its name,
where since years – even if secretly covered -
there is an increasing nuclear power,
without control, because unreachable
by every inspection?

I feel the everybody silence on this state of affairs,
which my silence is slave to,
as an oppressive lie and an inhibition that presents punishment
we don’t pay attention to;
the verdict “anti-Semitism” is common

Now, since my country,
from time to time touched by unique and exclusive crimes,
obliged to justify itself,
again for pure business aims – even if
with fast tongue we call it “reparation” -
should deliver another submarine to Israel,
with the specialty of addressing
annihilating warheads where the
existence of one atomic bomb is not proved
but it wants evidence as a scarecrow,
I say what must be said

Why did I stay silent until now?
Because the thought about my origin,
burdened by an unclearing stain,
had avoiding to wait this fact
like a truth declared by the State of Israel
that I want to be connected to

Why did I say it only now,
old and with the last ink:
the nuclear power of Israel
threat the world peace?
Because it must be said
what tomorrow will be too late;
Because – as Germans and with
enough faults on the back -
we might also become deliverers of a predictable
crime, and no excuse would erase our complicity

And I admit: I won’t be silent
because I had enough of the Western hypocrisy;
Because I wish that many will want
to get rid of the silence,
exhorting the cause of a recognizable
risk to the abdication, asking that a free and permanent control
of the Israel atomic power
and the Iran nuclear bases
will be made by both the governments
with an international supervision

Only in this way, Israelis, Palestinians, and everybody,
all people living hostile face to face in that
country occupied by the craziness,
will have a way out,
so us too

(The original German):

Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren – wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt ‘Antisemitismus’ ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?

Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir – als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.

The chief suspect in the murders of three French soldiers (2 North Africans, 1 Caribbean), and four Jews, including three children, is a 23 year old man named Mohammed Merah we are being told. The French interior minister, Claude Gueant alleges that the motive behind the attack was to,

“take revenge for Palestinian children” killed in the Middle East, and [he] was angry at the French military for its operations abroad.

The explanation of a motive will give little comfort to the bereaved families. How can Merah purport to be acting in the cause of Palestine when he TARGETED innocents? What demented, twisting acrobatics enabled him to let go of the innate morals within his humanity and kill children? Did he not realize he was betraying Islam, its core principles and the causes he claimed to be fighting for when he went on this killing spree?

The sort of callousness and cold precision with which he operated reveals the mind of a sickening sociopath.

Islamophobes in their haste had pinned their hopes on this murderer being a Muslim, so that they could once again smear and condemn Islam and Muslims. They attempt to minimize and cover for the role that occupation, war, invasion and murder plays in producing anger and…terrorists.

The double standards from them are expected, when an Anders Behring Breivik exterminates 60+ children he is, according to them, a “lone gunman,” a “nutter.” No discussion about the ideology, the anti-Muslim Islamophobic extremism that inspired Breivik’s terrorist Crusade, and which they propagate daily, is mentioned. When a US soldier goes on a rampage and eliminates 16+ civilians as they sleep, including 9 children we do not even learn their names and the soldier is treated with sympathy in the media and PRAISE amongst the Muslim haters.

If the allegations against Mohammed Merah are true, and they likely are, he should face the full brunt of the law for his crimes, but lets hope that the anti-Muslims do not attempt to use these horrific incidents to shift the focus from the true enemy, radical violent extremism whether Islamist (AlQaeda) or Radical Right (Anders Breivik, EDL, etc.). Life in Europe and particularly France, which is already seeing a campaign feeding off of right-wing populism and anti-Muslim rhetoric, will most likely get more difficult now.

What will be missing from all this is the fact that as long as wars of occupation, daily bombing and hate-mongering persist against Muslim majority nations you can rest assured that you will create more Mohammed Merah’s.

*Update I: If it’s not abundantly clear from the above, let me say it, Merah and the AlQaedah ideology is responsible for this crime, no one else, he stands completely condemned by Loonwatch as he does by nearly every honest and humane person. There is no apology above or blame shifting, just stating the facts. Merah himself claims to be acting out in revenge due to the killing of Palestinians and Afghans, I didn’t say this, the French Interior Minister did. Many seem to think we can’t even discuss the motives of these attacks?

Update II (via B-Boy Blue): Having tracked live updates on various online news outlets all day the contraditory information being released is painting a confusing picture of Merah’s background & history.

It was stated with some authority that he has been to Afghanistan & Pakistan to fight for the Mujehadeen. It was claimed that he’d actually been arrested, jailed & then escaped from prison in a Taliban jailbreak. Here are some excerpts:

“Reuters report that the suspect had been serving a three year sentence when he escaped from jail, quoting the director of Kandahar prison.”

“According to Reuters news agency, the head of Kandahar prison in Afghanistan, says the suspect Mohammed Merah, escaped from the prison in a mass Taliban jailbreak.”

“Details of the suspect’s time in Afghanistan are still sketchy, but Le Monde is reporting that he went twice to Pakistan, once in 2010 and again 2011, to speak with groups of fighters based in the tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan. The paper claims that he trained in the camps there alongside the Pakistani Taliban, foreign jihadis and members of the Haqqani network — and that he even crossed the border into Afghanistan as part of groups sent to fight Nato troops.

It says he is understood to have stopped off in Waziristan before heading to Kandahar and Zabul in the south of Afghanistan. Interestingly, it also says that he was stopped by police on the outskirts of Kandahar city. Although he was not arrested, his presence in the region as a foreign national was unusual enough for the police to report him to the Afghan intelligence services, who reportedly then passed on the information to western intelligence services.”

Jawed Faisal, a spokesman for the Kandahar provincial government, said:

I can’t confirm it was the same person but there was someone in Kandahar prison with the name Mohammed Merah, who was famous as ‘the French guy’. His father and grandfather had Afghan names, and he could pass as an Afghan. His father’s name was Mohammad Seddiq, grandfather was Mohammad Shah.

“His crime was that he was captured laying IEDs, and he was sentenced to three years in jail, but only served five months of it when the prison break happened and he escaped.

“We don’t know which part of Kandahar province he was caught in.”
Faisal added that he didn’t know how long Merah had been in Afghanistan or how long he stayed after prison break.

Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the Nato-led coalition, said he was aware of reports that Merah had been held in an Afghan prison, but refered all questions to Afghan officials.”

This is all extremely detailed & seemingly conclusive. If it wasn’t for the fact the official twitter account of the Kandahar Governor’s Media office refuted the claim that he had been imprisoned there.

https://twitter.com/#!/KandaharMediaOf

@KandaharMediaOf
Security Forces in Kandahar have never detained a French citizen named Mohammad Merah.

@KandaharMediaOf
@SkyNewsBreak He wasn’t the 1 responsible for the school shooting, but another 1 responsible for bomb blasts in Kandahar. 2 separate cases.

@KandaharMediaOf
@MaryFitzgerldIT Toulouse gunman wasn’t arrested in Kandahar, he is not the one that escaped from Kandahar prison, perhaps names r the same.

It appears that a man with the same name was but not a French national. This fact calls into question many of the previous assertions & casts doubt on much of the official narrative up until this point.

Some other pertinent quotes to consider.

“As for political or religious beliefs, he was very discreet. He never said anything that might lead one to believe he had these views.”

“He didn’t have a dad. This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, or with us, and I really hope that all the young people of our type of neighbourhood won’t be sullied by this.”

“He wasn’t into having fun, he became harder. He didn’t really go to the mosque, he seemed more likely to meet people in obscure flats.”

“The North African community is doubly hit, first by the grief for the victims and what happened, and also that we’re from the Magreb and people will be pointing fingers at us. I appeal to the French, don’t mix up the whole community with what has happened. Never never has Islam said to kill people.”

A group of four 24-year-old men who said they were friends of Merah tried to go to his apartment block on Wednesday to persuade him to surrender but were stopped at a police roadblock.

“All told a Reuters reporter he had never talked to them about religion and they had no idea he had been to Afghanistan.”

“He never spoke about Islam but he did pray. But we all pray five times a day. There’s nothing strange about that.”

Another friend of Moroccan origin said Merah had tried to enlist in the French army but had been rejected. He said he had seen Merah in a city centre nightclub just last week.

Merah did not drink “but I don’t think he is any more religious than I am. I think he has just lost the plot,” Danny Dem said.

A third contemporary, who declined to give his name, said he went to primary school with Merah and they had remained friends.

“He likes football and motor-bikes like any other guy his age,” said the man, dressed in a blue French national soccer shirt. “I didn’t even know he prayed.”

The head of the French Muslim Council, Mohammed Moussaoui, says: “These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion”. In remarks quoted by AFP he added: “France’s Muslims are offended by this claim of belonging to this religion.”

A little more background via AFP on the suspected gunman’s attempts to join the French military. The news agency reports that Merah “twice tried and failed to join the French army”.

It quotes the country’s defence ministry saying that Merah first tried to enlist at the age of 19 in the northern city of Lille in January 2008.

The French prosecutor, Francois Molins, has been giving more information on Merah. He told a press conference the suspect in the shooting attacks had been to Afghanistan twice and trained in Pakistan’s Waziristan, a militant stronghold. He said Merah’s brother had been implicated in a network that sent militant fighters to Iraq.

The French interior minister, Claude Gueant, said Merah had told police he belonged to al-Qaida and wanted to take revenge for the deaths of Palestinian children. Gueant said Merah was also angry against French military intervention overseas.

“The mystery here is that he was found to have quite a good arsenal of weapons, war weapons, and given that he was under surveillance it’s not clear how this could have escaped the attention of the authorities.” – Pierre Haski

Was he ever in Afghanistan or Pakistan? If not, why the claims of being under surveillance since returning? Who’s lying? The Government official or Kandahar Media Dept? With his Mother & siblings in precautionary custody surely they can establish his whereabouts during this period.

He has a history of petty theft & thuggery and no overt signs of religious or political militancy. Between 2007 and 2012 he attempted to join the French army twice & visited Pakistan & Afghanistan twice. He supposedly served 5 months in a Kandahar jail yet found his way back to France and was allowed to settle back into society whilst stockpiling weapons under surveillance. Despite being under suspicion for the murder of the soldiers, he was able to carry out the atrocity at the Jewish school.

As I write the siege is still in progress. If Merah doesn’t survive we’ll probably never find out exactly what is fact or fiction, which will no doubt fuel conspiracy talk. The web is already awash with speculation about false flag operations, inside jobs etc allowing Sarkozy to play the hero running up to the election.

What is certain, is that the only people who will suffer due to the actions of Merah and any repercussions are more innocents.

My thoughts are with the victims and their families.

We’ve always noted that Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism are linked and on the rise. (H/T: Benjamin Taghiov)

Sweden’s Jews, Muslims face web hate rise: study

(The Local)

The number of xenophobic web sites have almost doubled since 2007 and Jews and Muslims wearing apparent religious symbols are subjected to significant discrimination in Sweden today, according to a new report from the Living History Forum (Forum för levande historia). 

“Sweden as a whole is a tolerant country but this report shows that racism is growing and is being professionalized on the internet. There is today a small but growing minority that harbour hatred against Muslims and Jews,” minister for integration, Erik Ullenhag, wrote in a statement on Monday.

The report, which was requested by the government and carried out by the Forum, also shows that an increased number of racist web pages have been created in recent years and that prejudice is being spread through schoolbooks.

According to the report, the number of racist sites in Sweden has almost doubled in two years. In 2009 there were around 8,000 xenophobic Swedish sites whereas today the authors of the report estimate an increase to 15,000.

This follows a EU-wide trend where right wing extremist groups are using the internet to spread hate-propaganda.

According to the report, these are characterized by anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views, where conspiracy theories are the most recurring elements.

The Jewish group is often cast as world conspirators whereas the Muslim group is seen as physical occupiers, actively are on their way to taking over society through mass-immigration and rising nativity figures.

The Jewish community in Sweden consists of some 20,000 individuals and the Muslim community of 300,000. Fresh crime statistics show that there were 161 reports of crimes with anti-Semitic motives and 272 with Islamophobic motives last year.

But according to the Forum it is difficult to get a fair idea of the situation from these statistics as they are based on police reports and the authors believe there may be many more unrecorded cases.

“Above all this study shows that research and follow-ups into preventative actions regarding intolerance against Jews and Muslims is sorely needed,” said head of Forum for Living History, Eskil Franck, in a statement.

According to Ullenhag, Swedish authorities must further their knowledge about what causes the hate against these groups to grow in Sweden and how they should meet it. That, he said, is the aim behind the investigation regarding xenophobia that the government launched earlier this spring.

“We have learnt from experiences in other European countries that all the forces who want a tolerant society need to be active in the public debate. Prejudice against Jews and Muslims can never be normalized,” said Ullenhag.

When American research centre Pew recently investigated the development of religious conflicts and oppression worldwide between 2006 and 2009, Sweden distinguished itself as a country where hostilities related to religion are increasing the most.

More French loonieness:

French PM calls on Muslims and Jews to renounce halal and kosher slaughter

France’s prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws and his allies warned immigrants might impose halal meat on French schoolchildren.

Fillon and other conservative leaders linked this tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe’s largest Muslim minority.

“Religions should think about keeping traditions that don’t have much in common with today’s state of science, technology and health problems,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6. The “ancestral traditions” of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. “We live in a modern society.”

Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France’s Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared “without stunning” would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it. “It will stigmatise Muslims and Jews as people who don’t respect the interests of animals,” he said. “That will raise tensions in society.”

Reuters, 5 March 2012

A graffiti depicting a way toward peace on the wall in Bethlehem on the edge of the West Bank shows hope and a wish for reconciliation. Image: Delayed Gratification Flickr

Undividing the Muslim Jewish experience by ignoring difference

by Dr. Ms. Mehnaz Afridi - Women’s News Network

(WNN/CGN): NY, NEW YORK: As I listen to sound bites of news, a swarm of words sting me: Iran, Israel, nuclear, Palestine-Israel at a standstill, Muslims kill Jews, and Jews kill Muslims. As a Muslim woman who teaches classes about the Holocaust at a Catholic college, I am constantly frustrated by the media coverage of the Middle East which overwhelmingly serves to highlight and entrench national and religious tensions, prejudice and conflict.

A recently-aired documentary by filmmaker Karen Ghitis, on Al Jazeera, was an extremely heartening exception to the rule. The film, Jerusalem SOS, showed Jews and Muslims saving each other’s lives.

The documentary, which aired last month, portrayed Arabs wearing orange vests printed with the red Star of David teamed up with haredi (or ultra-Orthodox) Jews with side curls, black skullcaps and tzitziot (knotted ritual fringes on their garments). And both groups have only praise for each other. Working as volunteer paramedics for the Orthodox Jewish organisation United Hatzalah (UH), these Jews and Muslims are taking note of the most important aspects of their faiths: preserving human lives and justice.

I was reminded of the Qur’anic injunction that states that “on that account We ordained for the Children of Isra`il that if any one slew a person … it would be as if he slew the whole humanity: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the whole humanity” (5:32).

Likewise, the Talmud (a repository of the ancient Jewish oral law and wisdom) states, “whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” (Babylonian Talmud, 22a).

In the documentary the UH-trained Palestinian paramedics note that there are often delays in ambulances reaching the sick and wounded in East Jerusalem because Israeli ambulances are not permitted to enter Palestinian neighbourhoods without being accompanied by a police or military escort. Moreover, some of the homes have no addresses. Because the UH paramedics know the area well and drive ambucycles (ambulances on motorcycles), they are the first to arrive at the scene.

The film shows the rescue team transcending physical and political borders in order to save lives. Members of both faiths help each other provide for their communities on their respective holy days: Muslims come to the rescue of Jews on the Jewish Sabbath, and Jews help Muslims in emergencies on Fridays, as well as during Ramadan.

Eli Be’er, the founder of UH, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying: “Jews and Muslims do not oppose working together, despite the invisible boundaries and suspicions that separate their communities. In the beginning, I met a few who were surprised about working together, but after they saw that they are great people and really professional, they all like it.”

These Muslim and Jewish paramedics have embraced the spiritual richness of their faiths and ignored the superficial boundaries of difference. Media outlets should try and take a cue from their story, and focus more attention on hope and cooperation.

Another heartening interfaith story from some months ago comes to mind. On 5 June, ABC News reported that “One Israeli man dying of a failing heart learned today that he would live, thanks to a Palestinian family who donated the heart of one of its members slain in the escalating violence wracking Israel.”

The Israeli who received the heart commented on how their hearts were the same, and ultimately they were the same inside.

Even though the rancour of negative media surrounds us, it is important to acknowledge that grassroots initiatives by organisations like UH, or the personal initiative of the Palestinian family who donated a loved one’s heart, are the key to building understanding between Jews and Muslims.

It is therefore crucial that Jews and Muslims tune into the many positive stories of life and death, faith and justice that occur on a daily basis on the ground.

I am always in search of such heartfelt stories that illuminate the commonalities of our faiths and demonstrate social justice. In the three monotheistic religions we are commanded not to bear false witness. After all, we are all children of God and it is through our actions and perseverance that we affirm our shared values and commitments to one another – irrespective of religious differences.

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

Witness: Jerusalem SOS

Berlin, Germany

Horowitz tool Robert Spencer and his right-wing buddies, Bat Yeor, Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller, etc. have attempted to create a narrative that Muslim immigrants and their children are responsible for most, if not all “anti-Semitic crimes” in Europe. We have shown in the past that this is false, and the below article asserts that it is actually “right-wing extremists” who commit most anti-Semitic crimes–upwards to 90%.

The article also reveals that about 20% of Germans harbor some form of anti-Semitism:

(via. YNetNews)

Study: 20% of Germans harbor anti-Semitism

Sarah Bauder and AP

A new study by a Parliament-appointed commission shows 20% of Germans harbor “latent” anti-Semitism, but anti-Jewish crimes are almost exclusively committed by the far right.

The 188-page report – which draws on several different surveys and other research – puts Germans in the middle of the pack in Europe, with a German university survey showing more latent anti-Semitism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Portugal, and less in Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and France.

The study released Monday said the surveys show that about one-fifth of Germans agree with anti-Semitic statements, such as “Jews have too much power in business.”

The study also showed that 90% of anti-Semitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists, who number about 26,000 according to official estimates.

It recommends better coordination of local, state and federal strategies to combat anti-Semitism.

The report makes reference to “a wider acceptance in mainstream society of day-to-day anti-Jewish tirades and actions”.

“Anti-Semitism in our society is based on widespread prejudices, deeply rooted clichés and on sheer ignorance about Jews and Judaism,” stated one of the report’s authors, Dr. Peter Longerich of the University of London, Holocaust Research Center.

The report cites the Internet as a contributing factor to the spread of anti-Semitic thought.

“With regard to modern forms of communication – we point to the Internet in particular – it is virtually impossible to prevent the spread of such thinking,” Longerich continued.

Reprinted with permission from Shalom Life

“Judenrat Jon” Stewart

by: David Harris-Gershon on January 7th, 2012

Last summer, Pamela Geller was outraged when she discovered some of her fellow far-right haters in the English Defense League are—gasp!—anti-Semitic:  Blog Wars: Pamela Geller vs. Gates of Vienna and the EDL?

The EDL has tried to court Jewish groups with little success. Now they face concerted opposition from Jewish and Muslim communities.

(cross post from Islamophobia  Watch)

Muslims and Jews unite to oppose EDL

The Home Office has written to an umbrella group representing a range of Jewish communal and religious groups in response to statements distancing themselves from the methods and aims of the English Defence League.

Earlier this year the leaders of the United Synagogue, Reform, Liberal and Masorti communities, as well as the Board of Deputies and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ congregation, highlighted their opposition to the EDL’s tactics and called on the far right organisation to refrain from using Jewish and Israeli symbols in its campaigns.

Under the umbrella of the Council of Imams and Rabbis of the Joseph Interfaith Foundation, they rejected in particular the EDL’s “efforts to incite hatred and antagonism in our society”, its attempts to “foment violence” and “drive a wedge between the Jewish community and our Muslim neighbours”.

They attempted to draw a line under the EDL’s efforts to attract Jewish membership, which reached a peak with a rally “to oppose Islamic fascism” outside the Israeli embassy last year where EDL members waved Israeli flags. The EDL has a “Jewish Division”, but it has been beset by infighting and is understood to have only a handful of Jewish members.

James Brokenshire, the Home Office Minister responsible for policy regarding the EDL, has now sent a letter of response to Mehri Niknam, director of the Council of Imams and Rabbis.

“We welcome your positive action to counter the divisive influence and minimise the impact of EDL activity,” he said. “As a government our position is clear, we will not tolerate groups like the EDL who spread hate, seek to divide us and deliberately raise community fears and tensions.”

He said the government would continue to condemn the EDL’s views and actions when necessary and work with police and local agencies. Mr Brokenshire added that the government trusted local agencies to “put in place suitable local measures to counter the influence and minimise the impact of EDL activity. We stand ready to provide advice and support where it is requested.”

The anti-Muslim blogosphere operates as an echo-chamber: one Islamophobic site publishes a story and then the other ones quickly reproduce it.  The latest story to get the Islamophobic juices flowing was with regard to a book that was supposedly published by religious students in Iran.  I wrote about it earlier:

Iran: Yet Another Case Study in Robert Spencer’s Hypocrisy and Double Standards

JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer just posted an article with the following title:

How to Eliminate Israel from the Planet: Iran promotes genocidal book by Muslim seminarians, published by Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance

He’s taking exception to an anti-Israeli book supposedly written by some religious students in Iran, called “How to Eliminate Israel from the Planet.”  Spencer calls this a “genocidal book.”

This is why LoonWatch exists.  We’ve been documenting what loons like Robert Spencer say so that we can pull Jon Stewart moves like the one I am going to pull now…

The reader is referred to Robert Spencer’s post in March 2010 wherein he promoted a “genocidal video” calling for “wiping Pakistan off the map” and nuclear annihilation of Pakistan:

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer: Wipe Pakistan Off the Map

And my article on the topic back then:

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Promote Video by Militant and Genocidal Group

When Iranians/Muslims call to “wipe Israel off the map” or “eliminate Israel from the planet”, then it is a “genocidal book” and all freedom-loving people must be outraged by this.  When anti-Muslim extremists call for the same against Muslims, then that’s a “genocidal freedom-loving video” that all freedom-loving people must support.  As George Orwell put it: “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.”

Robert Spencer’s hypocrisy and double standards are of course shared across the Islamophobic spectrum, from the mild-mannered Jeffrey Goldberg to the foaming-at-the-mouth website BareNakedIslam.

For now, I am assuming that Robert Spencer et al. are accurately reporting the story–a huge assumption considering: (1) I have not found the story reported by any reputable sources; (2)  Loons like Robert Spencer aren’t exactly known for accurately and truthfully reporting anything about Islam or Muslims. (3) Spencer cited Pajamas Media as his source (note: Remember how Robert Spencer and his minions scoff at using a source with silly names like “LoonWatch” or “Danios”…)

Leaving aside for now matters of accuracy, I’d like to expose even more hypocrisy and double standards from not just Robert Spencer but by the Islamophobes in general who are reporting this story in an effort to warmonger against Iran on Israel’s behalf.  They are trying to argue that the anti-Israeli book was not just written by a couple random students, but was in fact endorsed by the Iranian government; their evidence for this is the claim that the “book has been published by the Khorasan branch of the Ministry of Islamic culture and guidance.”

If this is proof of how evil Iran and Islam are, then what about this:

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel is a part of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and “is recognized by law as the supreme halakhic and spiritual authority for the Jewish people in the State of Israel.”  During the Gaza War (Massacre) in 2009, the Chief Rabbinate “gave soldiers fighting in Gaza pamphlets urging them to show no mercy.”  Other pamphlets elaborated on the Chief Rabbinate’s orders, spelling it out in no uncertain terms: kill the civilian population because “it is not innocent.”

Haaretz, the oldest and one of the most established of Israeli newspapers, reported:

An overview of some of the army rabbinate’s publications made available during the fighting reflects the tone of nationalist propaganda that steps blatantly into politics, sounds racist and can be interpreted as a call to challenge international law when it comes to dealing with enemy civilians.

Robert Spencer wrote that the Iranian book was a “book filled with genocidal hate, rooted in the Qur’an”; he bolded the parts of the passage that mentioned the Islamic holy book.  His purpose in doing so is obvious: to smear the entire faith of Islam.

It should be pointed out to Spencer that in the case of the military rabbinate’s violent, racist, and genocidal publications, it was none other than the Bible and traditional Jewish law that was cited.  Haaretz noted:

Following are quotations from this material:

“[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.” This is an excerpt from a publication entitled “Daily Torah studies for the soldier and the commander in Operation Cast Lead,” issued by the IDF rabbinate. The text is from “Books of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner,” who heads the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in the Muslim quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem.

The following questions are posed in one publication: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David?” Rabbi Aviner is again quoted as saying: “A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land … They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country … Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence.”

The IDF rabbinate, also quoting Rabbi Aviner, describes the appropriate code of conduct in the field: “When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers. ‘A la guerre comme a la guerre.’”

To be perfectly clear, if it is true that an Iranian book was published with such offensive material in it, we should condemn it wholeheartedly–just as we should condemn the Israeli publications I mentioned above.  But we shouldn’t vilify Islam as a whole, just as we shouldn’t vilify Judaism as a whole.  Neither should we beat the drums of war against Iran, just as no rational person would use the Israeli publications as a valid justification to attack Israel.

I would, however, point out that there is one major difference between the case in Iran and Israel.  If it is argued that the Iranian book endorses ethnic cleansing as our opponents claim, it should be pointed out that Iranians are not actively carrying out such a thing.  The belligerence is limited to mere words and rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the publications in Israel were handed out to soldiers deployed in a brutal war against Palestinians/Muslims, part of a long campaign of ethnic cleansing that first began in 1948.  Those instructions to show no mercy to the enemy population were actively executed and acted upon by Israeli soldiers.

Leading international human rights organizations condemned “Operation Cast Lead” (as it was called by the Israelis).  Amnesty International, for example, titled their report: “Operation Cast Lead: 22 Days of Death and Destruction”.  The report noted that Israeli forces committed “wanton destruction” and killed “[h]undreds of Palestinian civilians” (whereas Palestinian rocket attacks “only rarely caused civilian casualties”).

Meanwhile, no Iranian publication can be linked to actual Jewish or Israeli fatalities.

Iran cannot realistically go beyond anything more than mere words or rhetoric, because actual acts of violence will be met with overwhelming force and massive retaliation from Israel and/or the United States.  This is so much so that it is being reported, by the likes of none other than Jeffrey Goldberg, that Iran is already under attack by Israel and the United States, and yet the Iranians have not retaliated or declared war.

If bombing Iranian facilities, killing their scientists, and using drones in their territory cannot evoke a military response, then why would anyone assume that they would have the audacity to initiate an attack on Israel?  The reason Iran hasn’t responded to these acts of war against it are that it wants to avoid being “bombed into the stone ages” like Iraq was.  In other words, the last thing Iran would want to do is give Israel or the United States a smoking gun.  Angry but empty rhetoric earns Tehran popular support, whereas action would jeopardize the regime’s very existence.

The Iranian leadership is no doubt despotic, oppressive, and illegitimate; but it is also, like many dictatorships, tenaciously pragmatic when it comes to holding onto the reigns of power.  The desire for self-preservation is an amazing thing.

Meanwhile, Israel can afford to act unilaterally, and it does so quite regularly and with a great deal of impunity, thanks to Uncle Sam, who acts as a shield to any international response.

This is why dwelling on Iran’s rhetoric as opposed to Israeli action is misleading, but that of course is the essence of war propaganda.

Update I:

Prof. Juan Cole worded it best (h/t Believing Atheist):

Moreover, Iran cannot fight Israel. It would be defeated in 72 hours, even if the US didn’t come in, which it would (and rightly so if Israel were attacked). Iran is separated by several other countries from Israel. It has not attacked aggressively any other country militarily for over a century (can Americans say that of their own record?) It has only a weak, ineffective air force. So why worry about it?

What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.

Food is a good way to create friendship. The story below will probably blow the Islamophobes’ mind away, maybe they will start to protest this bagel shop now because it spells the Islamization of Coney Island? (hat tip: Keio Pamudji)

Coney Island Bialys and Bagels, Jewish Bagel Shop, Rescued By Muslim Cab Drivers

(Huffington Post)

A 91-year-old New York Jewish bagel shop about to go under was saved by two former Muslim cab drivers who vowed to keep it kosher.

Coney Island Bialys and Bagels was set to close its doors in September, with longtime owner Steve Ross citing a bad economy as the culprit, the Jewish Daily Forward first reported.

But Peerzada Shah and Zafaryab Ali couldn’t let that happen, so the two former New York cab drivers and one-time roommates bought the store together.

Ali had worked at the shop for about 10 years and didn’t want to see the iconic neighborhood store shut down. Shah went to culinary school in Manhattan and was knowledgeable about ovens and baking equipment, the Jewish Daily explains. Both men immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan.

Ross’ grandfather, Morris Rosenzweig immigrated from Poland and opened the shop in 1920.

Some might wonder whether the “geopolitics that divide Muslims and Jews” pose a problem, but all three men say it doesn’t factor in anywhere.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ali told the New York Daily News. “I make the food for everyone.”

A longtime customer also told WPIX he didn’t have any issues with the religion of the two men.

The new business partners are renovating certain parts of the shop, but plan to use the same recipes, equipment and the kosher menu, MSNBC points out.

Joseph Jackson has worked at the shop for 30 years and decided to stay with the new owners.

“The two men are very, very good-natured, well-intentioned and just good people,” Jackson told MSNBC. “They want to keep the bakery kosher and I want to help them succeed.”

And he’s not the only one who wishes them well.

“I’d like to see them flourish because they’re making a product that my grandfather brought to this country,” Ross told the New York Daily News.

Robert Spencer and Julius Streicher's eerily similar rhetoric

An interesting piece by journalist COLM Ó BROIN comparing quotes from Robert Spencer and and Julius Streicher.

Julius Streicher was a pre-Nazi era anti-Semitic propagandist and his rhetoric eerily echoes that of Robert Spencer’s.

Islamophobia and Antisemitism: Same message, different minority

by Colm O Broin (Middle Class Dub)

Below are quotes which highlight the disturbing similarities between Islamophobic and Antisemitic messages.

Ten statements by ‘anti-jihad’ writer Robert Spencer and Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher are compared.

Julius Streicher was the editor of Der Stuermer, a Nazi paper that spread vicious Antisemitic propaganda from 1923-1945. As Nazi Party leader in Nuremburg he organized the destruction of synagogues in the city.

He was not directly involved in the Holocaust but was convicted of crimes against humanity after WWII. He was found guilty of inciting hatred against Jews in Der Stuermer and was executed in 1946.

Robert Spencer is a prominent critic of Islam who runs the Jihadwatch.org website. He is the author of several best selling books on Islam and he has spoken on Fox News, CNN, NBC and other news channels.

He has organized protests against the construction of mosques in New York. He has advised the FBI on Islam and his books were recommended by the FBI for its agents.

The following is a comparison of their views on Muslims and Jews respectively.

1 Muslims/Jews have a religious duty to conquer the world.

“Islam understands its earthly mission to extend the law of Allah over the world by force.”

Robert Spencer.

“Do you not know that the God of the Old Testament orders the Jews to consume and enslave the peoples of the earth?”

Julius Streicher.

2 The Left enables Muslims/Jews.

“The principal organs of the Left…has consistently been warm and welcoming toward Islamic supremacism.”

Robert Spencer.

“The communists pave the way for him (the Jew).”

Julius Streicher.

3 Governments do nothing to stop Muslims/Jews.

“FDI* acts against the treason being committed by national, state, and local government officials…in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism.”

(Freedom Defense Initiative, Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller organisation).

“The government allows the Jew to do as he pleases. The people expect action to be taken.”

Julius Streicher.

4 Muslims/Jews cannot be trusted.

“When one is under pressure, one may lie in order to protect the religion, this is taught in the Qur’an.”

Robert Spencer.

“We may lie and cheat Gentiles. In the Talmud it says: It is permitted for Jews to cheat Gentiles.”

From The Toadstool, children’s book published by Julius Streicher.

5 Recognizing the true nature of Muslims/Jews can be difficult.

“There is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims.”

Robert Spencer.

“Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal.”

From The Toadstool, children’s book published by Julius Streicher.

6 The evidence against Muslims/Jews is in their holy books.

“What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?”

Robert Spencer.

“In Der Stuermer no editorial appeared, written by me or written by anyone of my main co-workers, in which I did not include quotations from the ancient history of the Jews, from the Old Testament, or from Jewish historical works of recent times.”

Julius Streicher.

7 Islamic/Jewish texts encourage violence against non-believers.

“’And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter…’ — 2:191.”

Koranic verse quoted by Robert Spencer on Jihadwatch.org.

“’And when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally: men and women and children, even the animals.’ (Deuteronomy 7:2.).”

Biblical verse quoted by Julius Streicher in Der Stuermer.

8 Christianity is peaceful while Islam/Judaism is violent.

“There is no Muslim version of ‘love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you’ or ‘if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn to him the other also’.”

Robert Spencer.

“The Jew is not being taught, like we are, such texts as, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ or ‘If you are smitten on the left cheek, offer then your right one.’”

Julius Streicher.

9 Muslims/Jews are uniquely violent.

“(Islam) is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

Robert Spencer.

“No other people in the world has such prophecies. No other people would dare to say that it was chosen to murder and destroy the other peoples and steal their possessions.”

Julius Streicher.

10 Criticising Muslims/Jews is not incitement to violence against Muslims/Jews.

“There is nothing in anything that I have ever written that could be reasonably construed as an incitement to violence against anyone.”

Robert Spencer.

“Allow me to add that it is my conviction that the contents of Der Stuermer as such were not (incitement). During the whole 20 years, I never wrote in this connection, ‘Burn Jewish houses down; beat them to death.’ Never once did such an incitement appear in Der Stuermer.”

Julius Streicher.

Notes:

Robert Spencer quotes;

(1) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-871902797772997781

http://www.ourbeacon.com/cgi-bin/bbs60x/webbbs_config.pl/md/read/id/314123119154008

(2) http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/anders-breivik-and-the-echo-chamber.html
(3) http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/about.html
(4) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-871902797772997781
(5) http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/08/australian-pol-to-oppose-islamic-immigration.html
(6) http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/daniel-greenfield-in-defense-of-robert-spencer.html
(7) http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/08/wapo-do-critics-actually-read-the-koran-uh-yeah.html
(8) http://books.google.ie/books?id=eanFm7hiM1cC&pg=PA27
(9) http://www.jihadwatch.org/2006/01/what-is-a-moderate-muslim.html
(10) http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00hz34g

Sources for Julius Streicher quotes;

http://propagander.tripod.com/js2.html

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/story5.htm

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Streicher.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Giftpilz.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/secretplan.html

www.twitter.com/colmobroin

Well, that didn’t take long.  Fox “News” had Dick Morris on, who claimed that the Evil Muslims are behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Watch the video yourself (h/t Young Turks)–the fun part about “the Moozlums” comes near the end of the clip around 5:15:

Notice how Morris says: “It’s come out that they [Occupy Wall Street] are Anti-Semitic, that the Mozlem groups are involved…”

So, if any Muslim group is involved, that’s bad?  No Muslims are ever allowed to join anything at any time anywhere?  Should American movements from now on have a “No Muslim” Policy like the GOP does?

And I love how he equates “Anti-Semitic” with “Muslim,” as if they are interchangeable.  Occupy Wall Street is not Anti-Semitic, but I’ll tell you who is Islamophobic: Dick Morris, Bill O’Reilly, and Fox “News.”

These people make me furious, and are the reason I spend so much of my very limited free time writing for this site.

By ELIYAHU STERN

MORE than a dozen American states are considering outlawing aspects of Shariah law. Some of these efforts would curtail Muslims from settling disputes over dietary laws and marriage through religious arbitration, while others would go even further in stigmatizing Islamic life: a bill recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly equates Shariah with a set of rules that promote “the destruction of the national existence of the United States.”

Supporters of these bills contend that such measures are needed to protect the country against homegrown terrorism and safeguard its Judeo-Christian values. The Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has said that “Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”

This is exactly wrong. The crusade against Shariah undermines American democracy, ignores our country’s successful history of religious tolerance and assimilation, and creates a dangerous divide between America and its fastest-growing religious minority.

The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)

Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.

The German philosopher Bruno Bauer offered Jews a bargain: renounce Jewish law and be granted full legal rights. He insisted that, otherwise, laws prohibiting work on the Sabbath made it impossible for Jews to be true citizens. (Bauer conveniently ignored the fact that many fully observant Jews violated the Sabbath to fight in the Prussian wars against Napoleon.)

During that era, Christianity was seen as either a universally valid basis of the state or a faith that harmoniously coexisted with the secular law of the land. Conversely, Judaism was seen as a competing legal system — making Jews at best an unassimilable minority, at worst a fifth column. It was not until the late 19th century that all Jews were granted full citizenship in Western Europe (and even then it was short lived).

Most Americans today would be appalled if Muslims suffered from legally sanctioned discrimination as Jews once did in Europe. Still, there are signs that many Americans view Muslims in this country as disloyal. A recent Gallup poll found that only 56 percent of Protestants think that Muslims are loyal Americans.

This suspicion and mistrust is no doubt fueled by the notion that American Muslims are akin to certain extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East and in Europe. But American Muslims are a different story. They are natural candidates for assimilation. They are demographically the youngest religious group in America, and most of their parents don’t even come from the Middle East (the majority have roots in Southeast Asia). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Muslim Americans exhibit the highest level of integration among major American religious groups, expressing greater degrees of tolerance toward people of other faiths than do Protestants, Catholics or Jews.

Given time, American Muslims, like all other religious minorities before them, will adjust their legal and theological traditions, if necessary, to accord with American values.

America’s exceptionalism has always been its ability to transform itself — economically, culturally and religiously. In the 20th century, we thrived by promoting a Judeo-Christian ethic, respecting differences and accentuating commonalities among Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Today, we need an Abrahamic ethic that welcomes Islam into the religious tapestry of American life.

Anti-Shariah legislation fosters a hostile environment that will stymie the growth of America’s tolerant strand of Islam. The continuation of America’s pluralistic religious tradition depends on the ability to distinguish between punishing groups that support terror and blaming terrorist activities on a faith that represents roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Islamophobia

“It isn’t Islamophobia when they really are trying to kill you!,” goes the oft quoted refrain of Islam haters when their bigotry and wild-eyed conspiracy theories are brought to the fore. Setting aside the inherent prejudice implied by the usage of “they,” the heart of the quote is, Islamophobia.

The first occurrence of the term Islamophobia “appeared in an essay by the Orientalist Etienne Dinet in L’Orient vu de l’Occident (1922),” however it did not enter into “common parlance” until the early 90′s.

“Islamophobia”, like many other words in the English language is imperfect and hence subject to criticism. This criticism however does not mean, as some suggest, that it should be discarded and a new word or phrase take its place.

Islamophobia is not as contested a term as it once was, especially since the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy, (Thanks Pamela???). Before the controversy there was much discussion on whether Islamophobia was a term that was imprecisely applied to a wide range of phenomena, from “xenophobia to anti-terrorism.”

The fog on one portion of this debate has been lifted, if not since the Islamophobiapalooza (to quote Jon Stewart) of 2010, then certainly since the killing spree by anti-Muslim/anti-socialist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. It is clear that there are a lot of unfounded and completely bats**t crazy, *cough*, I mean irrational and unreasonable beliefs about Islam and Muslims in the world today.

It is also clearer that a certain segment of critics of the term Islamophobia always had nefarious intentions. Under the guise of the labels “anti-terrorism” and “pro-freedom” they trumped up an Islamic threat that would emerge like the Borg and conquer the Western world, either spectacularly or slowly over a period of many years. The Islamophobesphere, led by the likes of Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch, Pamela Geller’s AtlasShrugs, Fjordman’s Gates of Vienna, Daniel Pipes‘ MiddleEastForum and backed by billionaires such as Aubrey Chernick coalesced into an organized trans-Atlantic anti-Muslim movement that inspired Breivik and will inspire more like him.

Islamophobia is a phobia? Does it Matter?

The supposedly still not-so-clear part about this debate concerns the breakdown of the term Islamophobia. Is Islamophobia a phobia? Does Islamophobia as a descriptor of an existing phenomenon need to be an actual phobia in the same sense as the psychological traumas of arachnophobia, xenophobia or acrophobia? Is the term Islamophobia too vague?

According to Dr. Jalees Rehman, ‘Islamophobia’ is not a phobia. He quips that there is a danger that “without a reasonable effort to delineate what is and what is not ‘Islamophobia’, this term could be easily used to stigmatize or suppress legitimate criticisms of Muslim society, culture or theology.”

This is not necessarily true, there is a fair amount of effort to delineate “what is and what is not ‘Islamophobia.’” We do it on our site all the time (this seems to be true of other sites that tackle Islamophobia as well). As many of our authors have pointed out “mere criticism of Islam and Muslims” is not at issue, what crosses the line into Islamophobia is irrational and unreasonable beliefs, statements or actions directed at Islam and Muslims.

For instance stopping the construction of a Mosque may or may not be Islamophobic. In some cases it may really be a zoning issue, or as in the scenario of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” the attempt by opponents of the mosque to have it stopped by declaring the site a “Landmark” was based on their irrational belief that the developers were building a “victory mosque.”

The argument also suffers because the same could be said of other terms that describe hateful phenomena. We are not going to stop using anti-Semitism because some fail to delineate “what is and what is not ‘anti-Semitism.’” Or because the term excludes Semites who are non-Jews.

The other part of Dr. Rehman’s critique of Islamophobia regards the psychiatric concept of “phobia”:

[a]nother troubling aspect of this neologism is the fact that it invokes the psychiatric concept of “phobia”. Phobias fall under the category of anxiety disorders and describe pathological fears; while many know the term from the infamous expression “arachnophobia” (pathological fear of spiders), many different types of phobias have been observed in patients. The standard manual of the American Psychiatric Association is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) and refers to “Specific Phobia” as a,

“Marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation (e.g., flying, heights, animals, receiving an injection, seeing blood).”

There are additional criteria that characterize a phobia, but I find the following one extremely interesting: “The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable for discussing the term.”

This is the strongest portion of Dr. Rehman’s critique though it misses the point. Is the Islamophobes fear of Islam “marked” and “persistent,” is it “cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation?” Does “the person recognize that the fear is excessive or unreasonable?”

According to Dr. Rehman, “anti-Muslim fears, hostility or prejudice do not really constitute a ‘phobia’ in the psychiatric sense.”

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg in their book, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, on the other hand seem to remark that though Islamophobia is not a “phobia” in the strict psychological sense it nevertheless is a reflection of a social anxiety,

Islamophobia: “anxiety of Islam”? Can this really be compared to individual psychological traumas such as acrophobia, arachnophobia or xenophobia? The authors believe that “Islamophobia” accurately reflects a social anxiety toward Islam and Muslim cultures that is largely unexamined by, yet deeply ingrained in, Americans. Instead of arising from traumatic personal experiences, like its more psychological cousins, this phobia results for most from distant social experiences, that mainstream American culture has perpetuated in popular memory, which are in turn buttressed by a similar understanding of current events. (p.5)

There is another reason to differentiate Islamophobia from the strict psychological connotations of phobia that has hitherto not been mentioned in the discussion. Phobias such as arachnophobia are uncontrolled, and it is not something that the one who suffers from really enjoys. However Islamophobia, in many instances, especially the organized variety is motivated.

Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Anders Behring Breivik, Geert Wilders, the EDL, SIOA and others are motivated by a hate for Islam and its practitioners. They are motivated by the romantic notion that they are a select group of superheroes who are saving Western Civilization from Muslim domination, and they hope in the process to become famous (and rich) in their cause.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the discussion of whether or not Islamophobia is a phobia in a psychiatric sense misses the point. The discussion borders on the pedantic since the term Islamophobia is by now understood to refer to irrational and unreasonable beliefs, statements and actions directed toward Islam and Muslims. The line that distinguishes “Islamophobia” from “criticism” of Islam and Muslims is self-evident.

Furthermore, “Islamophobia” has crossed the threshold of acceptability into the mainstream, and in those instances in which their may be vagueness, employing “anti-Muslim” or “anti-Muslim Islamophobia” suffices to describe the phenomenon. Rather than get bogged down in trivial semantics or useless details, let us remember that language is never perfect. When a word organically captures the sense and reality of an existing phenomenon, as is the case with “Islamophobia,” it is important to understand its imperfections but not to be distracted from all it offers.

The cracks are starting to appear in the hate facade of the transatlantic “counter-jihad.” Another unsuccessful march for the EDL.

Slideshows & video: English Defence League march ends after failed bid to target mosque

Raymond Brown (Cambridge-news)

Members of the English Defence League (EDL) made a failed bid to target a Cambridge mosque after they marched through the city.

>> Click here to read our live updates on how the day unfolded.

The incident came after a relatively peaceful march by the EDL through the city centre Saturday in which scuffles with police broke out along with bottle-throwing.

Officers threw up a cordon around the mosque in Mawson Road and managed to quell the troublemakers. A man was arrested but was allowed to go free after he calmed down.

Police have been heaped with praise for how they handled the two marches on one of the city’s busiest days due to the Big Weekend celebrations on Parker’s Piece.

Officers quelled some of the flashpoints sparked as around 200 EDL marchers were taunted by a small number of counter-protesters from an earlier 1,500 strong demonstration by Unite Against Fascism.

But members of the EDL, who arrived in coaches from across the country to Queens’ Green, also began fighting amongst themselves.

After the march, members of the group attempted to reach the mosque in Mawson Road, off Mill Road.

But they were stopped by dozens of police officers who then threw up a wall of steel to protect the scores of Muslims and their supporters

And at around 3pm, Muslims manning a community stall in Sidney Street were attacked by a group who picked up copies of Korans from the stall and hurled them at the victims – one of whom had his spectacles broken.

More than 650 officers and staff from six forces, including Cambridgeshire, have been praised for handling the relatively peaceful protests.

A total of seven people, all men, have been arrested.

Amjed Sheikh, a Muslim leader, said: “The police have done a great job today. We are a peaceful people and we came to live in Cambridge because the people here accept us no matter what people from the outside who have come here today say.”

Richard Howitt MEP, who was a keynote speaker at the start of the counter-protest, praised police and described the emotional scenes in Mill Road when more than 1,000 anti-EDL protesters marched along the street.

He said: “I would say that many of the counter-protesters stayed around Petersfield thinking to protect the mosque but when all is said and done it was really the police who did a fantastic job throughout the day.

“As we all walked along Mill Road, shopkeepers were all standing outside their shops handing out samosas and drinks. I had a tear in my eye.”

Insp Robin Sissons said: “Cambridge residents are familiar with and generally supportive of protest activity and this was evident on Saturday.

“Their tolerance combined with the joint operation by police and partner agencies meant the protests were largely peaceful with only minor disorder and some minor disruption to residents, visitors and businesses in the city.

“The well-established community and partnership-based relationships were also particularly beneficial in planning for, and during, the operation.

“It was heartening to hear that members of the community who reported tension before the protests, then praised the tone and nature of the policing operation after it was complete.”

Arrest details:

A 36-year-old man from Norwich arrested for being drunk and disorderly was released with no further action taken.

A 48-year-old man from Colchester has been charged with a public order offence and assaulting a police officer and has been given conditional bail to appear at Huntingdon Magistrates’ Court on Thursday (July 14).

A 27-year-old man from Ely arrested on suspicion of a public order offence was released with no further action taken against him.

An 18-year-old man from Peterborough was charged with a public order offence and was given conditional bail to appear before Huntingdon Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.

A 51-year-old man from Luton has been charged with a public order offence and is due to appear at Cambridge Magistrates’ Court on July 25.

A 30-year-old man from Gillingham, Kent, arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and was issued with a fixed penalty notice and released.

A 28-year-old man from Cambridge has been charged with a public order offence and is due to appear at Huntingdon Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.

Forces assisting with the operation were Warwickshire Constabulary, Essex Police, Ministry of Defence, City of London Police, Suffolk Constabulary and Leicestershire Constabulary.

We have been discussing this topic for a while now. We also addressed, Pamela Geller’s hate rally cancellation.

What must be affirmed is that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are compatible, and neither will be sacrificed to the bigots.

Combating Religious Intolerance When Freedom of Speech Enables Hate Speech

(Huffington Post) by John L. Esposito and Sheila B. Lalwani

Religious pluralism, versus the defamation of religion and freedom of speech have become an increasing source of conflict in international politics and interreligious relations. Preachers of hate and activists in America, Europe, and many Muslim countries are engaged in a culture war. Far right anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political leaders and parties warn of the Islamization of America and Europe to garner votes. The acquittal on June 22, 2011 of Dutch politician Geert Wilders on charges of “inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims,” is a political victory for Wilders but also a sign of the times, growing normalization of anti-Islam bashing in the West.

The OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference which represents some 57 countries) lobbied the United Nations for more than a decade to address this issue. Initially targeting Islamophobia, it broadened its request to a resolution on “defamation of religions” that would criminalize words and actions perceived as attacks against religion.

Opponents, in particular the U.S. and E.U., maintained that the resolution could also be used to restrict religious freedom and free speech, and foster religious intolerance and violence against religious minorities. Indeed, in recent years attacks against Christians and other religious minorities have risen in Egypt, Malaysia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan. These conflicts have varied from acts of discrimination to the bombing and burning of churches and murder.

Pakistan’s blasphemy law exemplifies the issue. In 2009 Asia Bibi, a Christian and 45-year-old mother of four was sentenced to death on charges of insulting Islam, a charge she strongly denied. The case sparked international outrage that was heightened in 2011 by the brutal assassination of Salman Taseer — the governor of Punjab and an outspoken critic of the blasphemy law, and the assassination of Pakistani Chief Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian and outspoken opponent of Pakistan’s blasphemy law.

The United Nations Human Rights Council recently ostensibly resolved the conflict over “Defamation of Religions.” After close discussions with the U.S. and E.U., Pakistan introduced a compromise resolution on behalf of the OIC, which addressed the concerns of both the OIC and those of member states and human rights organizations, including the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The “Combating Discrimination and Violence” compromise resolution affirms individual rights, including the freedoms of expression and religion that are part-and-parcel of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, the 47-member state body also called for strengthened international efforts to foster a global dialogue and the promotion of a culture of human rights, tolerance and mutual respect.

But will this U.N. resolution prove to be an effective tool in combating the rise of Islamophobia? A clear sign of the limits of the resolution can be seen in the stunning verdict in Geert Wilder’s acquittal. Wilders’ track record includes the charges that “Islam is a fascist ideology,” “Mohammed was a pedophile,” and “Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible” and warnings of a “tsunami” of Muslim immigrants. Wilders’ “missionary” efforts have extended other parts of Europe to the US where his admirers refer to him as a “freedom fighter.” Plaintiffs had charged that Mr Wilders’ comments had incited hatred and led to a rise in discrimination and violence against Muslims. But Judge van Oosten ruled that although he found Wilders remarks “gross and denigrating”, they had not given rise to hatred. Spiegel Online’s headline of the acquittal read “Wilder’s Acquittal a ‘Slap in the Face for Muslims.’”

The exploitation of freedom of speech to promote religious intolerance emerged only days after the Wilders’ decision. Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), a coalition of far right anti-Muslim European and American groups billing themselves as human rights organizations, had scheduled “United We Stand: First Transatlantic Anti-Islamization” in Strasbourg, France on July 2. On June 28, French and EU authorities’ cancelled the conference. In response, the Islamophobic cottage industry and their websites’ headlines blared: “Free in speech rally cancelled in Strasbourg over Muslim violence threats” and “Democracy Collapses in Europe: EU Cancels SIOA/SIOE Free Speech Rally.”

Freedom of speech is a precious right that must be guarded carefully. But what happens when that right is used to incite hatred and to feed religious intolerance, such as Islamophobia, that is spreading like a cancer across the United States and Europe? While some statements may not immediately be the direct cause of a specific act of violence, they spread seeds of intolerance and anger that lead to legitimizing and accepting acts of bigotry and hate, like the “Burn a Quran day” that took place in Florida, the desecration of mosques, physical attacks against Muslims including women and children. As a result, the public slowly becomes inured to Islamophobic actions and statements. At the same time, this ideology of hatred has a very real effect on the everyday life of Muslims and Arabs: issuing in verbal attacks from their community members, Islamophobic statements by political candidates, or law-enforcement policies that target Muslims and Arabs.

The issue of freedom of speech and the rights of hate groups is not new in American history. Even today, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic organizations are allowed to express their disdain for certain ethnic and religious groups, regardless of how distasteful their ideologies may be. However, their power to attack has greatly diminished and their words have become a social taboo in the public square because our country has created a social environment where racism and anti-Semitism are loudly condemned and discredited in public life and in media. Muslim Americans and Europeans are entitled to the same treatment, rights and protections.

Islamophobia and its impact, like racism and anti-Semitism, must be countered by creating a climate in which hate speech and discrimination in the public square are not tolerated even when bigots exploit freedom of speech. Today, one can engage in anti-Islam and anti-Muslim hate speech and threats in print, media, and protest rallies that promote a popular culture that paints the religion of Islam, not just terrorists, as a threat to America. These preachers of hate and Islamophobia must be rejected and marginalized. Their mission to polarize our society must not be allowed to threaten our belief that religious tolerance and free speech are indeed compatible.

Muslims and Jews don’t know much about one another due to distrust, fear, and anger stemming from the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Muslim-Jewish parley seeks ‘platform for dialogue’

By JEREMY SHARON (Jerusalem Post)

The second annual Muslim- Jewish Conference kicked off in Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday, with 70 students and young professionals coming from around the world to promote mutual understanding between global Jewish and Muslim communities.

The event is sponsored by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding based in New York and the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, among others, with participants coming from Austria, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

“Most young Jews and Muslims never really meet because of the situation, and only learn about each other from their respective communities and through the media,” Muslim- Jewish Conference Secretary- General Ilja Sichrovsky told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

“The conference is designed to be a platform for dialogue between Muslims and Jews to talk to each other instead of about each other,” Sichrovsky said.

Ayse Cindilkaya, vice secretary- general of the organization, said the political conflict can “overshadow” relations between the two communities but that they are not focusing on conflicts.

“We are trying to start from new but we are sensitive to the conflicts,” Cindilkaya said.

“Instead we are focusing on breaking down stereotypes, sharing our religious traditions and culture, and filling in the gaps on our mutual knowledge of each others faith.

One of the major issues that the conference is addressing is the increasing xenophobia and the rise of far-right groups in Europe.

“We are careful not to equate Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,” Sichrovsky said, “although there are commonalities.

The impact often feels subjectively the same and we are trying to find a strategy where young Jews and Muslims come together and stand up for each other.”

“The conference offers the opportunity to bring together some of the most outstanding Muslim and Jewish leaders in their 20s and 30s,” said president and chairman of the FFEU, Rabbi Marc Schneier.

The conference steps beyond non-communication and estrangement and helps participants connect with each other.

The five-day conference will include working committees on the question of religious practice, fundamentalism and citizen loyalty; countering Islamophobia and anti-Semitism; and methods for conducting sustainable dialogue.

Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller

Even the bigoted Roberta Moore is leaving the EDL, now. When will Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller get the memo that it’s time to jump ship? (hat-tip: ZB)

British Branch of the ‘Anti-Jihad’ Movement in Full Meltdown

(Little Green Footballs)

The two most visible “anti-jihad” bloggers in the United States are probably Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. They both appear frequently on Fox News as “experts” on Islam; Geller writes for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, Newsmax, and World Net Daily, and they’ve recently been touring the country showing their “Ground Zero Mega Mosque” horror film. Their anti-Muslim group “Stop the Islamization of America” was recently listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for obvious reasons.

Spencer and Geller are also notorious for their enthusiastic support of Britain’s far right English Defence League, well known for their riots, fascist roots, and thuggish intimidation of British minorities.

Two examples: Geller gushed about the EDL here:

How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League.

And Robert Spencer has called for “all free people” to support the EDL:

The EDL deserves the support of all free people.

So I have to wonder how Spencer and Geller will react to the latest news about their British allies.

First, the news that one of the EDL’s leaders, John “Snowy” Shaw, has suddenly realized that he hates Jews as much as Muslims, and is raving about the infamous antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:” HOPE not hate blog: Infidel leader praises the Protocols.

With “the Protocols” Shaw has immersed himself in one of the most vile and dangerous forgeries of all time.

According to Shaw, the book has already begun to make things “click” in his head, and he advises “all true British patriots take the time to read this”.

Despite the book being discovered as a forgery, it has long been viewed as definitive proof of a Jewish conspiracy by Nazis and antisemites ever since. Adolf Hitler even had put it in the school curriculum in Nazi Germany. More recently, it was even among a selection of books that the BNP recommended for “patriots” during the 1980’s because they insisted it was still of historical interest.

The book is a crude record of the supposed minutes of a meeting of the Jewish community in the late 19th Century where plans for their world domination are discussed.

The book first surfaced in Russia in the early 1900’s and was used as a justification by antisemites to carry out pogroms against the Jewish community. It’s popularity spread as far as notorious Jew-Hater Henry Ford of Ford Motor car fame, who had a further 500,000 printed for distribution in the United States.

Having opened the book, Shaw is convinced by its authenticity. He is now adamant that both Jews and Muslims are conspiring together and that he “must stop them destroying our country”.

And second: hardline activist and leader of the EDL’s “Jewish Division,” Roberta Moore (a sort of British version of Pamela Geller), is very publicly bailing out of the group because of “the Nazis within:” EDL Jewish division leader Roberta Moore quits.

The hardline activist at the forefront of the “Jewish Division” of the extreme right-wing English Defence League has announced that she does not wish to be a part of it any longer because of Nazi elements within it. …

Although she described the EDL as “doing a fantastic job” she said the party had been hijacked by elements who wanted to use it “for their own Nazi purposes”.

Ms Moore said she still supported the EDL leaders and “all the genuine patriots out there who struggle to get their voices heard” but added that she no longer wished to be a part of it. “I sincerely hope that the leaders will get the strength to squash the Nazis within,” she said.

Mark Gardner, from the Community Security Trust, said: “This latest development shows, yet again, why Jews should not be involved in such circles.”

I cut ties long ago with people like Spencer and Geller precisely because they were willing (eager, in fact) to make alliances with the farthest of the far right, up to and including people with neo-Nazi connections — people like the English Defence League.

There’s no comment so far from either Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller on these developments.

The money quote from the article,

“But with Muslims, in Britain today, there is a feeling that the civilised, funny, clever ones aren’t really proper Muslims at all. And don’t think that these civilised, funny, clever people people don’t notice it.

This is subtle and pervasive – more of a smell than a substance – and I’m not sure whether it’s a very diluted version of the stench that comes off Condell or Robert Spencer or something essentially different.”

I couldn’t have said it better than that.

Islamophobia and antisemitism

by Andrew Brown (Guardian)

The great thing about being in Dubai last week was being a foreigner once more. It’s how I spent much of my childhood, how I grew up, and how I feel most at home; but it brings professional rewards as well as personal pleasures. I was for the first time in my conscious life in an environment where the most important thing about Muslims was not that they were Muslims. It gave me a moment of sudden awareness, like waking in a log cabin without electricity when all the background hum and tension of electric motors that you never normally hear is suddenly audible by its absence.

The people I was hanging out, and sometimes drinking, with were Muslim intellectuals whom I know and like in England. They’re not in any way discriminated against in this country, as far as I can tell: their lives are not impeded by the kind of people who think that Muslims are a problem to be solved. The kind of crude and open prejudice that flourishes online – and go and look at comments on the Telegraph website, or the videos of Pat Condell, if you want to know what I mean – is very rare in liberal circles, and when we catch ourselves at it, we feel guilty.

But there is a more subtle and general sort of prejudice which holds that Condell is not an extremist outcast. Richard Dawkins, for example, has praised Condell, and used to sell his videos on his website, which reminds of the way that Oswald Mosley remained a member in good standing of the English upper classes until the outbreak of the second world war, despite his views on Jews.

What I realised in Dubai was that in England today Muslims can’t escape being Muslims, any more than Jews in England in the 20s or 30s could escape being Jewish. They can’t just be unremarkable, as Jews in England can be now.

In Dubai, or neighbouring Sharjah, being a Muslim did not matter in the same way. Obviously, people made a huge amount of fuss about Islam. But when you’re in a room full of Muslim academics and students arguing about culture, or censorship, or why there is so little science in the Arab world, the arguments themselves make one thing wholly plain. Neither side is more Muslim than the other. None of the flaws of the Islamic world are essential or intrinsic to it. They may be widespread, and in some cases quite horrible. But they’re all cultural and not just religious.

I don’t mean by this that all the bad bits are cultural and all the good bits religious. That’s both false and simplistic. Cultures can be both good and bad and both are still authentically Islamic. But the whole idea of an “essential” or “true” way of being Muslim makes little sense when looked at historically, no matter how important, indeed indispensable, that style of argument is between Muslims. The same is of course true about “real” Christianity, or, for that matter, “real” atheism.

We don’t have any real difficulty accepting this about Christians in this country. Except for a few noisy bigots, it’s accepted that nice, good Christians are just as Christian as nasty and vile ones: that Jesus would be just as much at home among the Quakers as in Ian Paisley’s congregation; in fact most Guardian readers believe that he would like the Quakers more. Certainly this is true about Jews. No one really believes that Lionel Blue is less Jewish than the chief rabbi (unless the chief rabbi does).

But with Muslims, in Britain today, there is a feeling that the civilised, funny, clever ones aren’t really proper Muslims at all. And don’t think that these civilised, funny, clever people people don’t notice it.

This is subtle and pervasive – more of a smell than a substance – and I’m not sure whether it’s a very diluted version of the stench that comes off Condell or Robert Spencer or something essentially different. Either way, it is a smell of which I spend most of my life unaware, and Muslims notice much more often. I shall try to flare my nostrils a little more often.

A very worthwhile and important effort.

via. Islamophobia Today

Jewish and Muslim leaders join forces to combat xenophobia

By Shlomo Shamir at Haa’retz

Russian and Ukrainian Jewish and Muslim leaders meet in Kiev to discuss rise in Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as part of month-long European efforts to heighten awareness and fight racism, extremism and discrimination.

80 leading Jewish and Muslim leaders from across Ukraine and Russia met in Kiev on Thursday May 12, pledging to work together to fight a rising cascade of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the two countries.

In the first-ever “Muslims and Jews United Against Hatred and Extremism” conference held in the Ukrainian capital, community leaders from both countries heard chilling accounts of discrimination and abuse.

Conference participants spoke of the beating and harassment of Muslims and Jews in the two former Soviet republics, desecration of Muslim and Jewish cemeteries and bombings as well as other attacks on communal institutions of the two faiths.

The leaders pledged to work together to combat forces of extremism and hate and to put pressure on their local authorities to take a more assertive stand in fighting perpetrators of Islamophobic and anti-Semitic attacks.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (FFEU) and vice president of the World Jewish Congress, hailed the historic event in Kiev, commenting; “The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, together with our partners, is gratified to be standing in support of joint actions by Muslims and Jews in the former Soviet Union and across Europe.

He added that the meeting’s “purpose is to make clear that Jews and Muslims will be there for each other if either is being unfairly attacked, and will stand united in support of principles of democracy and pluralism that will ensure a decent future for all Ukrainians and Russians.”

The Kiev conference was sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and the Institute of Human Rights and the Prevention of Extremism and Xenophobia under the leadership of the noted Member of Parliament and business leader Oleksandr Feldman, in cooperation with FFEU.

80 Muslim and Jewish leaders from across Ukraine and Russia participated in the historic conference.

The Kiev conference was one of nine Muslim-Jewish events being held in countries in Europe during the month of May in commemoration of Europe Day.

Events opposing racism, extremism and prejudice against Muslims and Jews are being held in Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, in addition to the Ukraine throughout May, and are sponsored by FFEU, the World Jewish Congress, European Jewish Congress, World Council of Muslims for Interfaith Relations and the Muslim-Jewish Conference.

The events will culminate in Brussels on May 30, when top Jewish and Muslim leaders are to present a joint declaration to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, committing to “resolve to work together to counter efforts to demonize or marginalize either of our communities. Bigotry against any Jew or any Muslim is an attack on all Muslims and all Jews. We are united in our belief in the dignity of all peoples.”

Original post: Jewish and Muslim leaders join forces to combat xenophobia

The ADL calls out David Yerushalmi, a pretty good expose:

David Yerushalmi: A Driving Force Behind Anti-Sharia Efforts in the U.S.

(ADL 3/25/11)

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.

In recent years, Yerushalmi has created a characterization of Shari’a law (i.e., Islamic law) that declares there are “hundreds of millions” of Muslims who are either “fully committed mujahideen” or “still dangerous but lesser committed jihad sympathizers” who, because of Shari’a law, would be willing to murder all non-believers unwilling to convert, in order to “impose a worldwide political hegemony.”  Meanwhile, Yerushalmi asserts, the U.S. government itself has consciously chosen to turn a blind eye to this threat.

To combat this alleged threat, Yerushalmi has vigorously opposed all perceived “inroads” of Shari’a law in the United States, even entirely innocuous measures such as American financial institutions creating financing packages designed to be compatible with Islamic restrictions against loaning money at interest.

“American Laws for American Courts”

Yerushalmi’s latest weapon is model anti-Shari’a legislation he has titled “American Laws for American Courts,” developed for a group called the American Public Policy Alliance (APPA). The group claims that “one of the greatest threats to American values and liberties today” comes from “foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines,” including “Islamic Shari’ah law,” that have been “infiltrating our court system.”

Yerushalmi’s proposed legislation, which claims to “protect American citizens’ constitutional rights against the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shari’ah Law,” has been the basis for anti-Shari’a measures introduced by state lawmakers in several states in recent years.

For example, a bill introduced by Sen. Alan Hays and Rep. Larry Metz in Florida to outlaw Shari’a (and other non-secular or foreign laws) in March 2011 is strikingly similar to Yerushalmi’s model legislation. Both Tennessee and Louisiana actually passed variations of Yerushalmi’s legislation in 2010.

On its Web site, the APPA cites 17 cases where it claims that Shari’a has been introduced in state courts; this is its evidence of “creeping” Shari’a law within the United States.

Yerushalmi has testified in support of the anti-Shari’a legislative efforts based on his proposal. For example, in a hearing before the Alaska House State Affairs Committee in March 2011, Yerushalmi claimed that “today, we are far more likely than ever before to have foreign laws in American courts…There are plenty of occasions in which foreign law informs what Alaskan law could be.”

Demonizing Islam

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. In 2007, SANE, declaring itself “dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule and a return to a constitutional republic [of the original founders of the US],” launched a campaign fueled by suspicion of all Muslims.

That campaign, “Mapping Shari’a in America: Knowing the Enemy,” sought to determine exactly what type of Shari’a every single mosque and Muslim religious institution in the U.S. was advocating. A June 2007 press release announcing the campaign indicated that SANE would work to “test the proposition that Shari’a amounts to a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government” by investigating and ranking the adherence to Islamic law of mosques and their associated day-schools throughout the U.S. The statement also promised to “advocate for the criminalization of Shari’a” if it felt its targeted investigation into mosques and Islamic day schools proved such a measure necessary.

SANE also proposed legislation that furthering or supporting adherence to Shari’a “shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.” It called on Congress to declare war on the “Muslim nation,” which it defined as “Shari’a-adherent Muslims,” and further asked Congress to define Muslim illegal immigrants as alien enemies “subject to immediate deportation.”

Yerushalmi’s Allies and Associates

Since founding SANE, Yerushalmi, who received his law degree from Arizona State University College of Law, has been involved with several notable anti-Muslim groups and campaigns, often providing legal services for them:

• Yerushalmi works closely with Pamela Geller, head of the anti-Muslim Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). For example, in September 2010 Yerushalmi represented Geller and Florida attorney John Stemberger when Omar Tarazi, a Columbus, Ohio, attorney sued them for allegedly saying he had contacts with terrorists. Tarazi had represented the parents of Rifqa Bary, a Christian teenager who fled to Florida, saying she feared harm from her Muslim mother and father. In his lawsuit, Tarazi said Geller wrongly linked him to Hamas. Yerushalmi reportedly incorporated the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), the non-profit organization through which Geller and Robert Spencer publish their blogs. He also defended AFDI ads on New York City buses opposing a planned mosque near Ground Zero that juxtaposed an image of an airplane headed toward the burning World Trade Center with another building labeled “WTC Mega Mosque” and the words “Why There?” Yerushalmi and Geller were also involved in a bus ad campaign in Miami that read: “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you?”

• Yerushalmi was the attorney for the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition in New York City, which lobbied for the Bloomberg administration to shut down the Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Islamic school, and requested the firing of its founding principal, Debbie Almontaser.

• In December 2008, the Thomas More Law Center filed suit against the federal government, claiming the government’s loan to American International Group (AIG) was illegal because the insurance company had financial products that the group claimed promote Islam and are anti-Christian. Yerushalmi handled the case for the Center.  In an article written around the same time, Yerushalmi even went so far as to suggest that U.S. companies that offer Shari’a-compliant finance measures might violate the Sedition Act.

• Yerushalmi is General Counsel to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank J. Gaffney. Gaffney has been active in opposing mosque construction and has made several statements about Islam that raise concerns. For example, in a 2009 article in the Washington Times, Gaffney claimed that “there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” In 2010, the Center for Security Policy published the book Shari’ah: The Threat To America, An Exercise in Competitive Analysis, Report of Team ‘B’ II, co-authored by Yerushalmi. The book repeated Yerushalmi’s theories about a vast Shari’a threat to America.

• Yerushalmi has for many years been associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS), a right-wing think tank based in Israel and the United States, even serving as its chairman for five years, as well as writing a number of articles for it.  IASPS now primarily supports the projects of SANE.

Other Hostile Views

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, where they would serve a three-year detention sentence, then be deported.  SANE also argues that the “immigration debate” should take into account that America was “founded and made strong by immigrants from western European countries with Judeo-Christian roots.”

Yerushalmi has also claimed, as he wrote in a 2006 article, that the United States is in trouble because it “rejected its Christian roots, the Constitution and federalism,” and because it “embraced democracy” and multi-culturalism. This has rendered it “incapable” of “overcoming the World State ideology of the Liberal Elites.”  These beliefs have caused Yerushalmi to defend 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.”  Liberal Jews, on the other hand, according to Yerushalmi are “the leading proponents of all forms of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Christian movements, campaigns, and ideologies,” and to argue otherwise one would have to be “literally divorced from reality.” Liberal Jews, according to Yerushalmi, have also destroyed “their host nations like a fatal parasite.”

Nor has Yerushalmi neglected the subject of race. Articles Yerushalmi has written for the SANE Web site argue that the “most of the fundamental differences between the races is genetic.” In a 2006 essay for SANE entitled, “On Race: A Tentative Discussion,” Yerushalmi claimed that “some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones.” He also contended that African-Americans are a “relatively murderous race killing itself.”  For Yerushalmi it was obvious: “If evolution and the biologists who espouse the theory are correct, then the idea that racial differences included innate differences in character and intelligence would[,] it seem[,] be more likely than not.”

(cross-posted from The Accidental Theologist)

by: Lesley Hazleton

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples.  Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21^st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.

Does a Holocaust survivor have the right to speak his mind and say ‘what happened to me during the Holocaust, I see it happening again to Palestinians, Never Again for Anyone.’ Should he be labeled an anti-Semite for such statements?

Holocaust survivor’s planned talk at mosque angers Sacramento Jewish leaders

By Stephen Magagnini

(Sacremento Bee)

Sacramento’s carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit by an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who is scheduled to speak at a local mosque about the Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer makes the 11th stop on his national “Never Again for Anyone” tour at the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims Islamic Center at 7 p.m. tonight.

Meyer has equated the Holocaust to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, drawing intense fire from Sacramento’s Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.

“Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is repugnant, anti-Semitic and defiles the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Reuven H. Taff, president of the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, in a civil but emotional exchange of letters with SALAM’s Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez.

The Board of Rabbis praised Azeez for his bridge-building with other communities of faith, but asked him to either boycott the event or stop it from happening at SALAM. If he doesn’t, Taff said in a letter to him, “then all the good work you are doing to foster relations with the interfaith community will be severely undermined.”

“The event is not going to be canceled,” said Azeez, who encouraged “any of our friends in the Jewish community to attend, ask questions and engage the speakers.”

Azeez noted that eight national organizations and nine local organizations are sponsoring it, including the Florin Japanese American Citizens League and the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Azeez said that a member of American Muslims for Palestine reserved the hall and the event is not sponsored by SALAM. He said SALAM’s board investigated the speakers, who in addition to Meyer include UC Berkeley political scientist Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian American.

“You have a Holocaust survivor talking for the first time to the Muslim community about the Holocaust and putting it in a modern context that the rights of all people should be respected,” Azeez said. “The world is changing, and it’s time for us to have more dialogue about these untouchable idols,” such as the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Azeez agrees that the rabbis raise a legitimate concern – “any attempt to equate the Holocaust with what is happening in Palestine is an atrocity.”

Azeez said SALAM’s management will not allow the speakers to compare Israel to the Nazis.

But Taff said Meyer’s views are intolerable to the Jewish community, and added that the rabbis could produce Holocaust survivors to talk to Muslim Americans without inciting Muslim-Jewish hostility.

Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen of Congregation Beth Shalom said Meyer’s speeches and writings are “most offensive – the program promotes hate. It’s an attempt to de-legitimize Israel and Judaism, as opposed to having a meaningful discussion over a political policy.”

Wechsler-Azen said the event isn’t the way to heal people “who have such profound wounds between them … we have forged a very meaningful relation with SALAM, and we’re heartsick about this.”

Meyer, in an exclusive interview with The Bee, said he survived 12 years under Hitler and 10 months in Auschwitz.

“I have a number on my arm and they dare to call me an anti-Semite?” he said.

Because he was not allowed to attend high school in Nazi Germany, Meyer said, “I can identify with those Palestinians who undergo slow-motion genocide when they are not allowed to go to their schools,” which have been bombed.

“Nearly all Jewish religious organizations in the world have mixed up Judaism – which is universal, humanistic and friendly to anybody – with Zionism,” said Meyer, who defined Zionism as an ideology based on a well-defined Arab enemy that must be destroyed.

Jon Fish, president of Sacramento’s Interfaith Service Bureau representing major faiths in the region, said Palestine is a social issue, not a religious one.

“The rabbi and the imam have to work it out,” Fish said, “But this might be a no-win situation.”

Taff said he welcomes a discussion between Jews and Muslims “in an atmosphere of collegiality and respect.” But if SALAM hosts an event that Taff believes is “clearly anti-Semitic,” he said, “it makes it very difficult to sit down at the same table with anyone who supports or endorses a program of hate.”

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/02/16/3406350/holocaust-survivors-planned-talk.html#ixzz1EEagFbNE

The more Geller gets attention, the more her looniness is exposed

The first piece from our newest Geller-watcher and EDL specialist Remora

America is experiencing a painful period of social disharmony and political discourse, yet the vomitous Islamophobic hatemonger, Pamela Geller is desperately finding amoral, unethical, and distasteful ways of keeping the spotlight firmly fixed on her fascist cause, by making false and ludicrous claims.

America is grieving, and Geller pounces on this opportunity to promote her usual anti-Islamic, extreme Zionist rhetoric, yet again blaming Muslims, but this time for the tragic Arizona Massacre.

Muslim Basher Pamela Geller, cannot make her mind up about the political leanings of the deranged sociopath who murdered so many, including a 9- year girl, so she has accused him of everything’ left-wing’ and ‘jihadist’ so far.

Geller is claiming that Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner was secretly a left wing, radical socialist, anti-Semitic, Hitler loving Muslim, who subscribed to communist manifestos and Hitler’s Mein Kampf book, and not to mention, his apparent link to white supremacist publication ‘American Renaissance’. Is it possible to be so many political extremist ideologies in one? Is that not usually referred to as schizophrenia?

Pointing out his mental health is interesting and paramount, since there have been widespread media reports detailing his mental/psychological decline.

Mein Kampf material is usually not a liberal trait, quite the opposite actually, Pamela. Where is the logic to state, that just because Loughner possessed books on the ideologies of Hitler, and communist manifesto’s, he is immediately a Taliban supporting extremist?

Dangerous, delusional misleadings, by a dangerous delusional woman. Pamela Geller is desperate to spark an Islamophobic race war.

Geller is smugly parading the controversial video ‘America: Your Last Memory in a Terrorist Country,’ on her blog, as evidence of victory over her claims of Loughner’s apparent ‘Muslim’ links.

The video does not outline any political convictions of the shooter; it is merely a product of Loughner’s anger at the political, judicial establishment, and his own general failure in life, a fact he blamed on external forces. If anything, Loughner’s political leanings appear coded, and ambiguous.

Let us analyse the grotesque and outlandish world of Jared Lee Loughner, which led him to engage in this heinous crime, and freeze a nation in state of horror.

‘Nihilistic Atheist’

Loughner, was a 22 year old drop out, described by former classmates as an ‘nihilistic atheist’. This would mean that he belonged to no religion, no beliefs, no cause and no God. He deemed human existence and living life as insignificant. This repudiates the claim of Geller that Loughner apparently demonstrated support for ‘Islamism’ in his flag burning video:

‘The friends’ comments paint a picture bolstered by other former classmates and Loughner’s own Internet postings: That of a social outcast with nihilistic, almost indecipherable beliefs steeped in mistrust and paranoia.’

There is much speculation about Loughner’s previous ‘liberal’ convictions that many right-wing institutions and figures such as Geller, have tried to use as a political means of exploitation to justify his actions.

Former classmates cite that Loughner was ‘very liberal’, as detailed by a former class fellow Caitie Parker. She recollects her memories of Loughner, and his then political leanings.

What is clear is that Loughner was never a character who favoured human interaction, and was a famed loner at his high school. His obsessions were an indication of his philosophy, which were anti-authoritarian, from the beginning.

‘@antderosa As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy. @antderosa he was a pot head & into rock like Hendrix,The Doors, Anti-Flag. I haven’t seen him in person since ’07 in a sign language class @antderosa He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was “stupid & unintelligent.’

It is also stated that Loughner mentioned his intense dislike for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.He labelled her ‘stupid’, and ‘unintelligent’.This is a classic case of a failure demeaning those in power, in order to make their own self worth appear relevant.

Washington Post reported that Loughner was a registered Independent voter in 2006, according to the Pima County Registrar of Voters. He also voted in 2006 and 2008 but did not vote in last November’s mid-term elections, which also is indicative of his political stance. The fact that he is not a registered Republican or Democrat suggests a clear breakdown of trust in the mainstream governmental system, seeking answers in alternative political elements, which can always be a cause for concern.

Pam Geller manages to mention that on Atlas Shrugs:

‘Loughner’s decision to affiliate as an independent rather than a Republican or Democrat would seem to affirm the sense that while he targeted Giffords in the attack, it was not a decision born of a set of deeply held political beliefs that fit neatly into either party.’

How very irresponsible of Pam Geller? Backtracking are we?? First she labels Loughner a ‘certified left wing nut’, and then she insinuates that Loughner has Islamist ties, and then she states that he was apolitical. It really would have been easier to just not say anything at all, but hey, who am I kidding, its Pam Geller, she thrives on spreading propaganda and lies.

Liberal or not, it is very possible for an individual to retract from their beliefs and adopt the opposite views, or engage in a 360 degree turn in terms of political ideology.

Ultra rightwing racist, extreme Zionist radio host, Michael Savage, is a famous case in point. Savage himself stated he was once a ‘liberal’, who shifted in his beliefs, due to disillusions with the welfare system when he was a social worker. Witnessing an incident, how he delivered checks to welfare recipients who were given funds to furnish their apartments, while his own abode was empty with nothing but card boxes, was the final nail in the coffin for him to convert. Savage went from partially sane to, spewing hatred against blacks, immigrants, gays, liberals, Muslims, and inciting murder and ethnic violence. Yup, it is possible.

Loughner simply converted to other extremist beliefs, possibly triggered by his lack of success in life, and a lack of answers in the mainstream. Again, there is no ‘Islamist’ connection. The attack was apparently not religiously motivated, but an attack based on the killers personal conflictions and demons.

Pam you got that?

Descent into madness:

Unemployed Loughner, was fired and dismissed from many jobs, due to erratic behavior and a refusal to take orders from the top of the hierarchy. This was also the time his mental health began to wither away.

It has also emerged that; the end of his relationship with his high school sweetheart may have snapped rationality within Loughner. Kelsey Hawkes stated that this love split may have caused Loughner to psychologically deteriorate:

‘The high school sweetheart of the Arizona gunman has said his descent into madness began after she broke up with him.

Kelsey Hawkes described how Jared Loughner, whom she dated for a year in 2005 when she was 15, turned from a normal person into a ‘psycho’ when she ended their relationship.

Many of the people who interacted and met Loughner, neighbors, classmates, and now former girlfriend, have stated that he was seemingly normal, and then turned into a crazed deviant.

Other factors also may have contributed to the insanity of Loughner.He tried to enlist in the Military in 2008, however, due to a failed drug test which is mandatory, he was rejected. This was evidently an unprecedented blow to his ego, and could possibly have been motivation, to rage against, and blame the upper governmental system,

Loughner was also suspended from Pima Community college, after a series of disruptive events:

‘Jared Loughner, the suspected gunman in a Tucson shooting rampage, had five run-ins with Pima Community College campus police and was placed on suspension for violating the student code of conduct, which later led to his withdrawal from the school.’

This included campus, classroom and library disruptions. All this behavior was not at any time sparked by religion or political beliefs. Those who knew Loughner state that he was averse to religion in all its forms.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a leaked memo has stated that there may be a white supremacist connection in this case.

It is reported that Loughner may have had links to the extreme right wing publication ‘American Renaissance’, a white survivalist magazine that has argued in the past, that not all races have the same intelligence, and mental wavelength, and has described the recent success within the Republican Party as the ‘Great white wave.’ It has also been accused of Anti-Semitism.

This has been strongly denied by the founder of the magazine, Jared Taylor, who has denied any involvement with Loughner.

Paranoia, it seems also played its part. It is reported that Loughner believed that the US government was responsible for the 9/11 atrocities, believed in a New World Order, was obsessed with the 2012 Prophecy, believed that Banks and bankers were responsible for the war on terror, and was staunchly anti-government.

This is clearly a case of a mentally disturbed, discombobulated and disillusioned young man, unable to control his own life, and behavioral problems. Blaming the failures on the upper establishment was a means of justification to Loughner, reasoning for his deranged mental state.

The metamorphosis of Loughner would prove deadly.

Sinister Youtube rants:

The many blurred and philosophically vague video posts by Loughner, beg many to question the actions that occurred in the massacre.

In a series of YouTube posts, Loughner makes startling and sweeping statements that are still obscure, to say the least. Loughner emphasizes his distrust of the government and their ‘oppressive’ agenda.

The other videos also have an anti government, anti American undertone to them:

“This video is my introduction to you! My favorite activity is conscience dreaming; the greatest inspiration for my political business information. Some of you don’t dream – sadly.” “The majority of citizens in the united states of America [sic] have never read the United States of America’s constitution. You don’t have to accept the federalist laws,”

“In conclusion, reading the second United States constitution, I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar. No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver! No! I won’t trust in God!”

The bizarre rants do not have any political undertones, actually, what the rants and rebelling demonstrate is a lack of political convictions, anti-religion, anti-establishment, anti-currency, anti-constitution, it is pattern to reject the system that is handed to us as citizens, to assert individual power over the very institution that governs us. Loughner’s specific rant about the illiteracy rates, brainwashing and currency suggest that he was locked in a mental battle of fallacy and isolation.

Loughner’s emphasis on ‘conscience dreaming’, elaborates on his detachment and rejection of reality, and the formation of an alternative world, his own world, functioned by his own control and emotions.

Geller points out that Loughner in his last video, ‘America: Your Last Memory in a Terrorist Country’, is wearing a ‘Burka’ like outfit, and burning the American Flag, so BANG! He is a Mooslim!

Geller writes:

‘UPDATE: This is Jared’s “music video” — this flag burning madness. This is Jared, dressed as a terrorist in the video burning the flag. (FOX confirmed this is Jared in the burka-like get-up.)’

I will explain what I see. A psychopath, wearing a mask and a garbage bag to conceal his identity. Simple. How Geller interprets this as remotely ‘Islamic’ is a pure wonder.

Interpretation and Symbolism sure are not Geller’s strongest intellectual qualities, but thankfully they are mine.

Loughner intended this video to shock and perplex its viewers, and he employs tactics that would inflame the left and the right, from his preference for communist manifesto’s to his link with supremacy, and then eerie hidden video messages.

The video symbolizes barren land, which Loughner is trying to present as the USA, himself as the faceless skeleton, and the burning flag as his response to the concept of America and the Constitution. Flag burning is a very contentious issue, and it is a clear message from Loughner about his position. Flag burning is viewed As Un-American, disloyal, an absence of respect, and that is exactly what Loughner intended. The faceless, silent, skeleton is symbolic of the masses of Americans who abide by the Constitution and law, who do what they are told, and who trust in God and Government, in Capitalism and currency. It is a rejection of nationality, patriotism, and identity.

Shame on Pamela Geller:

The answer is simple: Jared Loughner encompasses a lack of humanity, possesses no moral conscience, and can be defined as a self entitled sociopath.

Loughner was frustrated with his failings in life, and lack of relevance to society, which led to deviance. He held a bitter grudge against Congresswoman Giffords, which translated into violence, a buildup of resentment, which was engineered towards the establishment. Giffords was attacked for being a powerful public figure, attacked for what she represented, not necessarily based on her Jewish faith, but a need for Loughner to exercise power and control.

Loughner is a terrorist. Not a “Jihadist,” or “Islamist,” “pro-medieval Sharia” supporting terrorist, but a crazed, vindictive, homegrown, terrorist. His obsession with Nazi and socialist material, frames his desperation to fit into an ideological mould, which proved to be ineffectual to him.

Geller is desperate to detract from Loughner’s ‘white’ American ethnicity, and somehow, in a weird and bigoted parallel universe, make him appear a ‘Muslim’, even though Islam has no correlation to Loughner, his irrationality, and the events that lead to the massacre. I have never crossed a right-wing nut so obsessed with Islam!

Terrorism comes in all forms, from all religious and political backgrounds, and Pam Geller is afraid that America will see that, it is not just Jihadists that create terrorism, America too can create terrorists.

Pamela Geller’s racist rhetoric and Islamophobic connotative tone, seeks to debase the situation at hand, the Arizona shootings, and promote her own violent agenda, making slanderous and gross assumptions, which are prejudiced and discriminatory. America’s pain, should not be Pam Geller’ gain.

It is appalling that during times of such national hardship, Geller is stirring the pot of fascism, in a typical self-serving manner.

Truly incorrigible.

Third time’s the charm, so they say. Following the last two transparent failures to influence American politics with Islamophobia, the Clarion Fund (Aish HaTorah) is literally counting the seconds down until their “nationwide event” to reveal their newest scare-mongering dud: Iranium.

We have reported on Clarion’s last two anti-Muslim films: Obsession (see: Obsessionforhate) and Third Jihad. Those films featured a number of Islamophobic “experts” we have exposed on this site (i.e. Daniel Pipes, Brigitte Gabriel, Walid Shoebat, Steven Emerson) who specialize in making lucrative careers off Islamophobic fear. Those two films were disturbingly similar to other sophisticated propaganda films that demonize entire populations. Jack Shaheen, an Oxford University research scholar and author of four books on racism, stereotyping and propaganda, describes the film Obsession as “very convincing.” He says:

“Goebbels would be proud. This film has a place in cinema history with the racist film Birth of a Nation and the Nazi film Triumph of the Will because it so cleverly advances lies to vilify a people.”

Those are the old films. But with this new film will Clarion reform its alarmist ways and instead present us with an insightful, balanced, and objective analysis of the situation in Iran? A quick look at some of the film’s interviewees tell us, no.

Iranium, like its predecessors, seems to rely on a highly edited mix of expert and pseudo-expert commentary. Among the most glaring pseudo-experts is Frank Gaffney; noted on this site for his adherence to the “stealth jihad” conspiracy. Gaffney is founder of the Center for Security Policy where he lobbies for hardline neoconservative security policies. Gaffney is a prolific writer on the Washington Times’ anti-Muslim editorial page where he has seriously argued that President Obama is a secret Muslim, lambasted Obama for daring to reach out to the Muslim World, and accused Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan of facilitating a Sharia take-over… twice.

Due to his obvious conflict of interest, Gaffney’s presence as a film expert raises serious doubts about the credibility of the film. Since Gaffney is a neoconservative lobbyist, he writes security “analysis” that favors neoconservative policy prescriptions. In other words, it is not in his policy interest to provide us with an objective analysis. Hence, he has been duly noted for the idiocy of his hyper-inflated anti-Sharia report.

If all of Clarion’s films have relied on pseudo-expert testimony that supports a pre-defined policy prescription, then why should we take seriously their hyping the Iranian threat? Is the purpose to inform the public or to influence them to vote a certain way? Iranium appears to be just another expensive attempt to influence American politics by scapegoating the Islamic/Iranian boogeyman.

People who are inspired by the Clarion Fund should flip the scenario around. Would it be acceptable for me to create a serious documentary entitled Israelanium featuring Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu? Would it be right if my film deliberately blurred the line between extremism and Judaism? Somehow I think charges of anti-Semitism would immediately ensue, but this same crowd of people has no problem using the same cut, paste, and smear tactics against Muslims.

Don’t get me wrong. The Iranian government should be subject to all the international laws and standards that all nations are held to. There are important concerns about which people need to get good, balanced information. So for this reason the film Iranium promises to harm our national debate even more by injecting inflammatory, one-sided propaganda into the discourse at a time when people need clear-headed assessment.

So while Clarion prepares for another Muslim-fearing mulligan, let’s hope that this film follows its cousins as another embarrassingly epic failure. Perhaps our efforts to restore sanity will overcome their march to keep fear alive.

Robert Spencer before the tummy tuck

Cyberpath Robert Spencer can’t get over Reza Aslan.

Aslan irks Spencer, bothers him to no end, Spencer views him as his arch-nemesis. In dozens of posts over the past few months, Spencer has at times nervously, at other times excitedly and feverishly used all the JihadWatch talking points and obfuscation at his disposal to attack or hurl personal insults and wild inuendo at Aslan. The dozens of posts have been long winded thousand worded epic Spencerian bile.

The reality behind this Spencer obsession is that Aslan is an outspoken critic of the anti-Muslim Islamophobia machine in which Spencer is a leader, and at the same time is also an advocate for Islamic reform and greater freedom in Muslim nations.

Aslan represents all that Spencer isn’t and therefore is a personality that confounds him, no longer is it easy for him to sling the allegation of Islamic supremacist, or Stealth Jihadist at someone who has an air of respectability and visibility in the mainstream such as Reza Aslan commands.

Spencer’s most recent outpouring of invective against Aslan was due to a few words Aslan said about Islamophobia,

RA: And the crazy thing about it is that we’re seeing that same sort of playbook, that made European Islamophobia so successful and mainstream on the continent, now being adopted by these groups like Stop Islamization of America and Jihad Watch, which are also very successful about creating a mainstream sense of anti-Muslim sentiment.

In the margins of this country there will always be racists and bigots; it’s just that they were always on the fringes; now, hence we have people like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer appearing as regular guests on mainstream television….

For this Spencer calls Aslan the “new” Fritz Kuhn, who was the leader of the American Nazi party back in the 30′s. Insane hyperbole and ad hominem attack? You bettcha!

Among other inane assertions, in a feat of hubris not uncommon for Spencer he not only compared Aslan to an American Nazi leader he also compared Islam to Nazism and levied the assertion that he is on par with those who criticize “Nazism.”

Imagine if Kuhn had given a similar address denouncing critics of Hitler and Nazism as “bigots” and “Germanophobes,” and claiming that anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States was a recrudescence of the ugly nativism that had victimized Catholics in America in the nineteenth century, and was leading up to a wholesale persecution and possibly even a genocide of innocent German-Americans.

Spencer’s off kilter analogy falls on its face when we realize that in fact Spencer is engaging in projection, as he himself has been an ally of Fascists and neo-Nazi groups such as: Geert Wilders (Right-wing Dutch neo-Fascist), EDL (English Defense League),SIOE (Stop the Islamization of Europe), BPE (Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa), Ewald Stadler (Far right Austrian politician), BZO, Sergei Trefkovic (Serbian Nationalist, genocide denier), etc.

Spencer’s argument as to why Aslan is the “new Fritz Kuhn” gets even weaker from that point. In trying to make his obscene case he says that Aslan is the new Fritz Kuhn because he is,

1. A “board member” of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) which Spencer says is, “a group that genuine Iranian pro-democracy forces regard as an apologetic vehicle for the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

First of all the NIAC is considered one of the best Iranian pro-Democracy organizations out there. In truth, the link that Spencer provides goes to an organization that not only doesn’t support democracy but displays an image of the Shah Reza Pahlavi on its site, not really a scion of democracy.

NIAC, Terrorist Apologist or pro-Democracy advocates?

2. He claims Aslan is uncritical of Ahmadinejad and his anti-Semitism.

Another false claim. If calling someone a “fraudulently elected Megalomaniac” is uncritical as Aslan did in one article then Spencer doesn’t know the meaning of “uncritical.” As it happens Aslan condemned Ahmadinejad’s denial of the holocaust calling it “absurd.”

3. Aslan calls for the US Government to negotiate with Ahmadinejad and Hamas.

What is controversial here? Others have called for the US to negotiate with Ahmadinejad and Hamas as well. Is Spencer implying that because Aslan has called for the US to negotiate with the two he somehow supports them? If so can he show us any proof? Of course he cannot and so he resorts to innuendo.

4. Has “praised” Hizballah by observing that it is “the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon.”

Aslan didn’t “praise” Hizballah as Spencer would have it, implying that Aslan somehow endorses them. He merely observed an obvious point that even Hizballah’s greatest detractors have, that it is the most highly organized and dynamic party in Lebanon.

At the end of the day Spencer is only chasing vague phantoms and attempting to spin terrorists or terrorist supporters out of thin air to suit his morbid agenda of framing “the only good Muslim as a bad Muslim.” The real Fritz Kuhn’s of the world are Spencer and his ilk, individuals who wish to eliminate Islam from the West.

Henry Kissinger, one of the only Nixon officials to escape the taint of involvement in Watergate has officially had his reputation destroyed. A recently released Nixon tape has Kissinger saying that it is not a concern of America if Jews are sent to gas chambers.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” — Henry Kissinger

Christopher Hitchens who I am generally wary of linking to has an excellent piece on this most recent expose of the heinous views of Kissinger. He makes an excellent point that Kissinger should now be shunned by society and that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which is quick to condemn anti-Semitism when it is uttered by Jesse Jackson or Mel Gibson need to break their silence and condemn Kissinger.

Christopher Hitchens: Latest Nixon tape buries Kissinger’s reputation

(Slate)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/14/christopher-hitchens-latest-nixon-tape-buries-kissingers-reputation/#ixzz18ILqW8kA

Robert Irwin wrote an excellent review of Martin Gilbert’s recent book on a history of Jews in Muslim lands. Martin Gilbert you may remember was a pundit on Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West (debunked by the website Obsession for Hate) which essentially claimed Islam was the same as Nazism.

Irwin mentions that Gilbert cites Bat Ye’or favorably a number of times even though she is thoroughly discredited on all fronts and he cites Loonwatch as a source exposing her loonieness and shoddy scholarship, referring particularly to our piece, “Bat Ye’or: Anti-Muslim Loon with a Crazy Conspiracy Theory Named “Eurabia.”

The House of Ishmael: A history Of The Jews In Muslim Land, By Martin Gilbert

by Robert Irwin

The subtitle to Martin Gilbert’s new book (his 81st?) is a little misleading. This is not really a general account of the fortunes and misfortunes of Jews under Muslim rule from the seventh century until the present day. The early centuries are rushed through and, although Gilbert is aware of the magnificent and fabulously detailed account of Jewish lifein medieval Egypt provided by SD Goitein’s five-volume A Mediterranean Society, he makes little use of it.

Similarly, though Gilbert quotes Bernard Lewis once, he has made surprisingly scant use of Lewis’s brilliant articles on the Jews under Turkish rule, which drew both on Hebrew sources and the Ottoman archives. Lewis’s The Jews of Islam (1984) remains the best, most balanced and accessible account of the Jews under Muslim rule.

By contrast In the House of Ishmael reads more like a bill of indictment than a history. It is overwhelmingly focused on the sufferings of the Jews in the Islamic lands in the 20th and 21st centuries in the wake of the foundation of the Zionist movement, the establishment of Israel and the successive victories of Israel over Arab armies. The indictment is damning indeed.

From Afghanistan to Morocco, Jews were made to suffer for the successes of Zionism. They were humiliated, robbed, raped, imprisoned, tortured and killed. In Iraq and elsewhere there were mass hangings of innocent Jews. For one Iraqi Jew driven out by pogroms of the 1940s this was “a tragedy which turned out to be a blessing in disguise – it got us out of that dreadful country and away from its destructive, treacherous and savage people”.

Gilbert makes use of copious anecdotal evidence and statistics to chronicle a shameful side of Arab and Islamic history. In the aftermath of the creation of Israel, 726,000 Palestinian Arabs were made refugees, while 850,000 Jews had to abandon their homes in the Arab lands. With some difficulty, Israel succeeded in assimilating most of the Jewish refugees. By contrast, the Palestinian refugees still languish in crowded camps. The paradox is that violent Arab racism and paranoia helped populate Israel.

Gilbert has so much material and such a strong case that it should not have been necessary to stack the deck. Yet it seems to me that he has done so and his use of sources is sometimes questionable. For his account of how the Jews in 13th-century Basra were forced to wear clothing that marked their lower status he cites a Jewish traveller, Jacob of Ancona, who allegedly travelled from Italy to China. But when in 1997 the purported narrative of Jacob’s travels was published by David Selbourne as The City of Light, the Sinologists Jonathan Spence and Tim Barrett, the Jewish historians David and Bernard Wasserstein and myself all challenged the authenticity of the text. Since then no original manuscript has turned up. It would have been safer to have relied on Goitein’s material.

Gilbert’s notes cite Bat Ye’or with approval several times. When, in 2002, her book Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide appeared, I reviewed it and then threw the book away. Bat Ye’or is not an academic and her books are poorly ordered assemblages of facts, real or alleged, that relentlessly show Islam and Arabs in an unfavourable light.

She believes that there is an Islamic conspiracy to turn Europe into something she calls “Eurabia”. Those interested to get a fuller sense of the dementedly Islamophobic polemics of this woman should consult the website www.loonwatch.com.

When Gilbert discusses what was happening in Palestine during the British mandate, he quotes Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine to back up his assertion that more Arabs than Jews entered Palestine as immigrants in the 1930s. But when that book was published in 1984, critics swiftly demonstrated that its use of archives and statistics was seriously flawed and substantially misleading. Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, denounced the book as “sheer forgery”.

Israel can be seen as the salvation of the Jews of the Middle East, but it can also be seen as their curse. One Iraqi Jewish woman confessed that she “nursed a grudge. I felt that all the horrible things that were happening to us were because of Israel, because of your dream and your wars. You celebrated the victories, and we paid the price of those wars. Now I can see that we were saved because of the existence and efforts of Israel”.

In the House of Ishmael, full of vivid accounts of Jewish sufferings in the Middle East, did not need the testimony of false friends to pad its grim story out. Its account of the slow-burning tragedy of the extinction of Jewish communities in the Arab world is moving and important. It should be read.

Robert Irwin’s ‘For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies’ is published by Penguin

The issue of the Rabbis who are urging Jews not to rent to Arabs just won’t go away. They are now calling on the public to “inform” on those renting to Arabs. Those disgusted by these actions held a counter march and rally to protest against racist lawmakers/Rabbis in Tel Aviv.

Public invited to inform on those renting to Arabs

(YNetnews.com)

The Lehava organization issued a notice Sunday evening, inviting the public to call a voicemail service and record the names of Jewish Israelis renting apartments to Arabs. Lehava, identified with supporters of Meir Kahane, thus adds its weight to the recent call by 50 prominent rabbis to avoid renting to Arabs which, the organization says, amounts to no less than assimilation.

According to the notice, the information given anonymously will be verified, after which the names will be published as a mark of disgrace “so the public can decide what to do with them.”

“If we were in the time of (former Prime Minister David) Ben Gurion or (former Prime Minister) Golda (Meir), the organization would undoubtedly receive a governmental citation,” said a Lehava activist to Ynet, claiming the activists were taking the rabbis’ letter one step further.

“The organization wants to apply this important ruling, while our main aim is to counter assimilation. We publish our number, people will call, then we’ll make checks of course, and as soon as we see the information is correct we’ll publish it in a list of disgrace.”

The activist added that the publication of the list of names will not actively include a call to harm the people involved.

He also referred to what he termed “assimilation,” saying, “Unfortunately, this is a serious problem, and we hope the rabbis’ halachic ruling will put a stop to it. This is an existential struggle for the character of the Jewish State, and we don’t intend to give up.”

This new initiative comes just a week after 50 rabbis signed a position paper which stated that renting or selling apartments or land in Israel to non-Jews is forbidden according to halacha.

“The neighbors and acquaintances of the seller or renter must warn him personally first and later they are allowed to make this matter public, distance themselves from him, avoid commercial ties, and so on,” the letter reads.

Communities rallying to support one another.

Deploring vandalism, local Muslims tell Jews: ‘What happens to you happens to us’

(Herald Times)

By Dann Denny 331-4350 | ddenny@heraldt.com

It was a tiny gathering – 11 people huddled around a table in a small room at the Beth Shalom synagogue – eating cookies, sipping hot tea and talking.

But the five Muslims who had come to express their support and solidarity Thursday afternoon to a Jewish community that’s been shaken by a half-dozen anti-Semitic acts of vandalism in recent days – and six members from the Beth Shalom congregation who agreed to meet with them – spoke with palpable passion.

“We are very moved and grateful to all of you for making this visit, but we’re not at all surprised,” said Beth Shalom member Madi Hirschland. “We know the Muslim community is one of great compassion.”

The visit was prompted by recent acts of vandalism targeting the Jewish community – including the tossing of eight Hebrew texts into toilets and several rock-throwing incidents at the Chabad House Jewish Student Center, Helene G. Simon Hillel Center and other Jewish facilities.

For many Muslims, the acts conjured up memories of similar incidents aimed at Bloomington’s Muslim community. After someone threw a firebomb through a window of the Bloomington Islamic Center and set fire to a copy of the Quran in 2005 – and after local Muslims received death threats following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 – Beth Shalom was one of several local faith congregations that reached out with supportive letters, visits, meals and vigils.

“We learned compassion from you,” said Muslim Abdul Sinno. “We think of you as wonderful neighbors. What happens to you happens to us.”

Yusuf Nur, one of the Muslims at the gathering, said it was unfortunate that it took a series of hateful incidents to prompt the meeting between members of the two faith traditions.

“We need to be more proactive and work together as people of faith to educate people,” he said. “These acts of hatred come from ignorance.”

Zaineb Istrabadi concurred, but wondered if some people could ever be enlightened. She said she recently received an e-mail asking her if it was true that a Muslim had to kill a non-Muslim in order to go to heaven.

“We’ve already done a lot of education and some people still don’t get it,” she said. “What’s been happening most recently is one or more persons in Bloomington going bananas.”

Beth Shalom member Deb Allmayer said in addition to education, “We need more opportunities to interact with one another. That helps erase the barriers.”

Hirschland said though she is deeply saddened by the recent incidents, theoutpouring of support for the Jewish community from Muslims and Christians has been a refreshing antidote.

At one point in the meeting, Sinno asked the Jewish members in the group how the Muslim community could help Beth Shalom.

“You’ve already helped,” said Perry Metz. “You have touched us with your compassion and your presence here today. When something like this happens, you wonder, ‘Does anyone else care?’ You have given us your answer very clearly, and it means a lot to us.”

Nur said it’s imperative that tolerance be extended to everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs.

“Actually, we need to go beyond tolerance to acceptance and respect,” he said.

Paul Eisenberg, president of the Beth Shalom Congregation, could not attend the meeting because he and his family were on their way out of town to celebrate Hanukkah with relatives. But he heard about it.

“The meeting is very heartening,” he said. “There are many, many Jews and many, many Muslims in the U.S. and abroad who don’t get along, but in Bloomington we have a much different situation.” Faiz Rahman, president of the Islamic Center, could not attend either, because of teaching commitments at Indiana University. But he was encouraged that the meeting took place.

“There is a view that Jews and Muslims are at each others’ throats, but in Bloomington that is certainly not the case,” he said. “This is our chance to show solidarity with the Jewish community that is being attacked, notbecause it’s politically correct, but because it’s the right thing to do.

The members of the Jewish community are our neighbors and friends and colleagues.”

Rahman said it’s ironic that the recent acts aimed at hurting the Jewish community have in fact triggered an outpouring of support for that community.

“There’s always a silver lining to bad acts,” he said. “When bad things happen, good people show their spirit, and let others know they will not bow down to the forces of evil.”

Yes, anti-Muslim bias is real

By Adam Serwer
Conservative writer Jonathan Tobin argues that the small number of Muslim hate crimes indicates that those wringing their hands about American Islamophobia are making a big deal out of nothing:

Even more to the point, the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes dwarfed again the number of anti-Islamic attacks, as they have every year since such statistics were first kept: 931 anti-Semitic incidents, compared with 107 anti-Islamic incidents, a ratio of better than 8 to 1. The same was true in 2008, when the figures were 1,013 anti-Jewish incidents to 105 anti-Muslim incidents. Indeed, even in 2001, the worst year for anti-Muslim hate crimes, there were still more than twice as many anti-Jewish incidents as those with anti-Islamic motivations. Throughout this period, the vast majority of hate crimes motivated by religion have been directed against Jews, not Muslims.

As I’ve written before, hate crimes are an imperfect metric for measuring anti-Muslim bias. Hate crimes statistics tell us that anti-Muslim bias crimes are thankfully rare and that anti-Semites are more likely to commit bias crimes. But that doesn’t mean anti-Muslim bias isn’t widely shared. Americans are pretty open about their negative feelings about Muslims — almost half the country admits to some level of anti-Muslim prejudice.

This sentiment hasn’t manifested as hate crimes, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t manifested. A Tennessee judge recently had to greenlight the construction of a mosque after weeks of hearings that focused on whether or not Islam is actually a religion, a seemingly absurd question that gets plenty of debate among conservatives. The Tennessee incident isn’t exactly unique. There has been a recent rise in the number of incidents involving people using local zoning laws to prevent mosques from being built, which is illegal under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. There have been eight RLUIPA cases involving Muslims filed in the past six months, almost half as many as in the nearly 10 years prior, with a sharp uptick following the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. These aren’t hate crimes, but they’re disconcerting evidence of anti-Muslim bias.

I’d submit that if liberal magazines and politicians openly questioned whether Judaism was a religion, and that if liberal activists were targeting the seats of Jewish lawmakers based on their being Jewish, Tobin would see that as serious evidence of anti-Semitism. I’d also submit that if there were public protests at synagogues and JCCs all over the country held by people warning of a nationwide conspiracy to subvert the U.S. government, and that if members of Congress were being presented with shoddy national security analysis to that effect, both Tobin and I would be very, very worried about where the country was heading. It’s true that Islamic extremist terrorism is a real threat, if not an existential one. The number of actual terrorists is very small, and these responses only make sense if you want to hold Muslims collectively responsible for terrorism rather than the terrorists themselves.

Tobin writes that “the hallmark of American discourse since 9/11 has been a conscious effort to disassociate Islam from the war being waged against the West by Islamist terrorists.” Rhetorically, that’s more or less true about this administration and the last. But as far as many conservatives today are concerned, that’s old and busted. “Clash of Civilizations” is the new hotness.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The American Prospect, where he writes his own blog.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is on a rampage.  It’s been one conspiracy theory after another, often with an anti-Semitic twist. In June, Beck promoted The Red Network, a book by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Elizabeth Dilling. In September, Beck promoted another book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, written by Eustance Mullin, described in his obituary as a “nationally known white supremacist and anti-Semite.” And lately, Beck has devoted several days of coverage to his crusade against Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Soros is no stranger to criticism, but is it right for a so-called “news anchor” to invoke the holocaust for cheap political points?

Several Jewish groups have spoken out against Mr. Beck’s pattern of anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering, such as the Jewish Funds for Justice and the Anti-Defamation League. Media outlets joined the criticism as well, like Howard Kurtz on CNN, Reason magazine , and Commentary magazine.

Apparently, Beck’s shenanigans have gone too far this time, prompting conservatives like David Frum to complain about the right-wing’s “closed information systems based upon pretend information.” Frum writes in the New York Times:

Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

More like alternative delusions. We’ve seen how quick CNN was to fire Rick Sanchez for his off-the-cuff remarks about Jews and Jon Stewart. Such is the nature of professional news organizations who don’t want to be seen as pandering to anti-Semitism. But has Beck gone too far for Fox News?

Sadly, no. Fox stands by the nutty professor Beck. Apparently their cost-benefit analysis has concluded that Beck’s rabble-rousing anti-Semitic flirtations bring in more profit and ratings than harm to the company’s reputation. So much for “fair and balanced.”

So now I have to ask: what if Beck was Muslim? What if, for example, Fareed Zakaria of CNN had spewed anti-Semitic nonsense on national television?

Following Islamophobic doctrine, as articulated by Pam Geller and company, we’d see the anti-Muslim blogosphere fired up by the same less-than-lazy comparisons between Muslims and Nazis. Then we’d see more of the same outpour of vitriolic hate speech from the Stop the Islamization of America crowd. Fox News would continue to aid and abet the anti-Muslim counter-culture by smearing () ordinary mainstream Muslim leaders. (Yawn). And as usual, missing from the story would be good examples of Muslims saving Jews during World War 2 out of religious conviction to love thy neighbor, or mainstream American Muslims standing alongside Jews under attack by extremists, or the myriad of interfaith initiatives that bring together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others to promote world peace. If mentioned at all, these positive stories would be explained away as silly Muslims who don’t know that their faith equals Nazism or just more ultimate intellectual cop-outs.

What we are witnessing here is the phenomenon of selective outrage, a tribalistic notion of us-versus-the-Moozlims, my country right-or-wrong, a rejection of immutable ethical principles applied evenly to all human beings regardless of race, color, gender, or religion. Rather, we see that when one of “them” is an anti-Semite, it gets projected onto all Islam and Muslims forever, but when one of “us” is an anti-Semite, well… nothing.

Closed information systems based on pretend information, you say? Precisely.

.
Some people will do absolutely anything to fear-monger….

NY Livery Cab Driver littered anti-Semtic notes to frame Muslims

Newsday (New York)
November 4, 2010 Thursday

A former livery cabdriver from Brooklyn told authorities he littered his routes in Nassau with handmade anti-Semitic leaflets because he wanted “the Jews to find them to think it was the Muslims,” officials said yesterday.

On Tuesday, for the second time this year, detectives arrested Dimitrios Apolonides, 37, after tracing 1-by-3-inch notes bearing the slogan “KILL JEWS” back to the livery company where he once worked, police said.

Apolonides wished to create “alarm in the Jewish community” by leaving notes on the street in several Nassau communities since at least September 2009, including Rockville Centre, Port Washington, and West Hempstead, according to Nassau police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith. Similar notes also were found in Melville in March 2009, Suffolk police said, but no arrests have been made.

Apolonides is charged in Nassau with nine counts of aggravated harassment as a hate crime. Yesterday, he pleaded not guilty and was held on bail of $5,000. If convicted, the hate crime charges will be upgraded to felonies carrying a sentence of up to 4 years, police said.

Nassau police said they believed this was happening “across the tristate area.”

In July, New York City hate crimes detectives arrested Apolonides and charged him with aggravated harassment as a hate crime in connection with similar notes found near the Jewish Guild for the Blind on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said an NYPD spokesman.

An NYPD spokesman said Apolonides was believed to have dropped dozens of notes around the borough. Apolonides was released without bail after his July arrest; the case is pending.

As in Nassau, city detectives were able to trace the notes to Apolonides when they discovered they were cut from a log sheet bearing the name of his employer, XYZ Car Service in Brooklyn, authorities said. Prosecutors at Apolonides’ arraignment in Hempstead yesterday said he faces similar charges of aggravated harassment in Westchester County.

Apolonides told Nassau officers, “I wanted the Jews to find them to think it was the Muslims,” according to a criminal complaint.

XYZ owner Mohamed Mowad said Apolonides was hired in 1994 and was a conscientious, polite employee, friendly with people from many backgrounds, including Jewish employees. Apolonides was fired at the time of his July arrest, Mowad said.

“You talk to him, he’s a sweetheart, always polite, he smiles,” he said.

Apolonides’ attorney, Michael Alber of Rockville Centre, said Apolonides is married and has one child. He questioned the timing of Apolonides’ arrest. “Some of these charges date back to 2009. … There is a substantial gap in time,” he said. “Why wasn’t he arrested in 2009?”

Albanian Muslims saved over 2,000 Jews during World War II and Albania was the only Nazi-occupied European country that had more Jews in it than before the War began and now Temple Emmanuel in St. Louis is doing an exhibition on it. (hat tip: Daniel Bartholomew)

Try telling this to Holocaust revisionist and sacred memory blasphemer Pamela Geller, who in an act of insanity has blamed Muslims for the Holocaust, saying “the Nazis adopted Jihad” and that the Mufti of Jerusalem was the prime mover and influencer of Hitler.

Albanian Muslims risk their own lives to save Jews from Nazis during World War II

By Leisa Zigman

Creve Coeur, MO (KSDK) — With rising anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, an untold story is raising greater awareness about the Muslim faith and the teachings of the Quran. That awareness comes from an unlikely source: a small Jewish congregation in Creve Coeur.

Temple Emanuel is premiering a groundbreaking exhibit of photos that reveals Albanian Muslims who saved 2,000 Jews during World War II.

It’s a story you’ve likely never heard. It is a story told through the faces of Albanian Muslims who risked their own lives to live by a code of faith and honor called Besa.

Dr. Ghazala Hayat is a neurologist at St. Louis University and serves as spokesperson for the Islamic Foundation of Greater Saint Louis.

Hayat said while Besa is an Albanian word, it is part of Islamic culture and teachings. According to Dr. Hayat, Besa is an ancient code which requires people to endanger their own lives if necessary to save the life of anyone seeking asylum. To this day, Besa is the highest moral law of the region, superseding religious differences, blood feuds, and even tribal traditions.

The exhibit is opening eyes throughout the world.

“You don’t have to share the same faith. You have to respect each other’s faith,” Hayat said.

Pictures of the Albanian Muslims in the exhibit tell a lifetime of stories. As a young mother, one woman did not have enough breast milk to feed her son. A Jewish woman she hid nursed him instead. She was asked if she minded that a Jewish mother had fed her baby.

“Jews are God’s people like us,” the woman said.

Another man who also hid Jewish families said, “I did nothing special. All Jews are our brothers.”

And the head of the Bektashi sect, with more than seven million followers, tells the story of Albania’s prime minister, who gave a secret order during the Nazi occupation.

“All Jewish children will sleep with your children, all will eat the same food, and all will live as one family,” the order read.

In post-war Europe, it is said Albania was the only Nazi-occupied country to boast a greater number of Jews than before the Holocaust.

“They were among the people who at great personal risk sheltered Jews and protected them in their homes and did so out of a religious obligation,” said Rabbi Justin Kerber, Temple Emanuel.

The Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis and several local Jewish agencies hope the St. Louis community will experience this rare look at the role Albanian Muslims played in sheltering Jews from the Nazis.

“At this time of tension over Islam in America, there is so much more to understanding Islam,” Rabbi Kerber said.

The BESA exhibition at Temple Emanuel is October 21- December 1, 2010
12166 Conway Road
Thursday 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Saturdays and Sundays, 12 p.m. to 4pm and by appointment

For more information, contact Gail at gail@testl.org or call 314-432-5877.

Welcome Gefilte, a loonwatcher with a unique perspective.

The Forward listed Charles Jacobs as one of America’s Top 50 Jewish leaders in 2007. Apparently they were looking more at the range of his activism and less at what mischief he was actually up to.

Jacobs has been a founder of Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the American Anti-Slavery Group, and the David Project, a member of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has now created the oxymoronically named Americans for Peace and Tolerance. Jacobs has taken Abe Foxman to task for being too soft on Muslims.

Long before the Park51 project made news, Jacobs spearheaded opposition to an Islamic Center in Roxbury and slammed governor Deval Patrick and Boston mayor Thomas Menino when they late supported the project and met with Boston community leaders. Despite widespread repudiation Jacobs continues to maintain that the Roxbury center is linked to global terror plots. He has also continued personal attacks in the Jewish Advocate on fellow Jews who extended hands of friendship to the Muslim community, notably Rabbi Eric Gurvis. But in June seventy Boston area rabbis signed a petition supporting Gurvis and denounced Jacobs’ smears.

In a FrontPage Mag interview Jacobs describes how he — and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — views Islam as nothing more than a doctrine requiring adherents to become terrorists:

Two years ago I attended a three day conference in Jerusalem on Global Anti-Semitism sponsored by Israel ‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Senior leaders of American Jewry were present. We all heard how Islamic anti-Semitism – theologically based, was spread with Saudi funding to mosques and madrassas throughout the Islamic world, instructing tens if not hundreds of millions of people that Jews were the sons of monkeys and pigs and that to kill us is a holy deed.

Jacobs is a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace blog and to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag. His “Clash of Civiliations” worldview mesh with pro-Israel advocacy and neoconservatism.

In July of this year Jacobs participated in a panel discussion in Aspen, Colorado, entitled “Conscience and Conflict,” featuring fellow neocons John Bolton, Phillis Chesler and Caroline Glick, at which he bemoaned Europeans as “neopagans” and “socialists,” decried mosques as “victory markers,” and stated “there is no moderate Muslim doctrine.”

Recently Jacobs made a big stink over a visit of students from the Wellseley public schools to an area mosque as part of multicultural education. In an article entitled “Propaganda is not Education,” Jacobs wrote:

Those who care about “religious ignorance and conflict over belief systems” should care about the radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community and the unwitting embrace of radical Muslims by our political and civic leaders.

Not only are Jacobs’ enemies all of the world’s Muslims, the press, Europeans, the United Nations, non-governmental aid agencies, liberals, and academics — but now even political and civil leaders have let him down too.

Ha’aretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer reported on the remarks of prominent Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who said in his weekly radio address:

“May our enemies and haters come to an end. May Abu Mazen [Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas] and all those wicked men be lost from the earth. May God smite them with the plague of pestilence, including all those Palestinians.

Wow. He prayed to God for pestilence to afflict “all those Palestinians.” Pfeffer continued:

No better, no worse than previous utterances by the venerable rabbi, 90 in two weeks and still going strong. He has said similar things over the years about Arabs and other non-Jews, singling out for particular attention not only their leaders, but also some Israeli Jewish ones, including the present prime minister.

Yet, this time was different, because Israeli and Palestininan leaders are currently engaged in peace talks with the goal of reaching a final settlement within one year. Thus, his remarks were widely condemned, as Pfeffer explains:

This week, though, the weekly sermon drew wider attention, thanks to its timing, on the eve of the Israeli-Palestinian summit in Washington. So not only did the local Israeli media record his latest pearls of wisdom, with a couple of left-wing politicians issuing the standard condemnations, but the Palestinian leadership also responded angrily, the U.S. State Department denounced the “deeply offensive inflammatory statements,” and even such august bodies as the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain joined the chorus.

Yet, you know who’s silence has been deafening? Robert Spencer’s, of course!

There has been no such condemnation of the Rabbi’s comments against Palestinians. No condemnation of what appears to be the calling for genocide against an entire people by a very prominent Rabbi. No condemnation of quite inflammatory statements from a religious leader against another people.

Yet, what if he were Muslim? What if a Muslim cleric had recently said something similar about Jews? Spencer would have been all over it. He would have posted it on his blog and spread the contention that this is the true face of Islam, and not just a twisting of its tenes. Spencer would have been screaming, “Islamic Anti-Semitism!”

This is not to deny that such anti-Semitism does exist in the Muslim world, and some Muslim clerics have spewed forth horribly hateful things aginst Jews, Christians, and even other Muslims. Yet, rational people can see that these clerics and fanatics are an aberration, a mutation, and not the norm. Except, it seems, for Robert Spencer.

Chuck Schumer

Helen Thomas made an indefensible and impulsive comment that she subsequently apologized for, and now is being branded an “anti-Semite” and the “scum of the earth.” Not only has she apologized but she has essentially been forced to retire.

It is sad that her whole career will be overshadowed by one statement made by a questionable guy sticking a camera in her face. She let her emotions get the best of her, something we can all relate to, but I don’t agree with those who are impugning from her comment that she implied Jews should be ethnically cleansed.

However, insert Chuck Schumer into the equation, a life long advocate of the belief, “Israel is right no matter what,” who was speaking at an Orthodox Union dinner in which he said ‘we should strangle the Gazans economically until they moderate.’

Think Progress:

This past Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a wide-ranging speech at an Orthodox Union event in Washington, D.C. The senator’s lecture touched on areas such as Iran’s nuclear program, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and several domestic policy issues.

During one point of his speech, Schumer turned his attention to the situation in Gaza. He told the audience that the “Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution,” and also that “they don’t believe in the Torah, in David.” He went on to say “you have to force them to say Israel is here to stay.”

New York’s senior senator explained that the current Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip — which is causing a humanitarian crisis there — is not only justified because it keeps weapons out of the Palestinian territory, but also because it shows the Palestinians living there that “when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement.” Summing up his feelings, Schumer emphasized the need to “to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense”

Read the whole story: Think Progress

Outrageous isn’t it? But do you think Chuck Schumer will apologize let alone be forced into retirement? The truth is that anti-Palestinian remarks will not get you into trouble, in fact they might boost your votes depending on where you live.

An interesting aside here is that Schumer got something else wrong as well. He stated that Palestinians don’t believe in “David or the Torah.” This statement was obviously directed at Palestinian Muslims who make up the majority of Palestinians (he can’t be referring to Christian Palestinians who obviously believe in the Old Testament).

Unfortunately the ignorance of our elected officials know no bounds. Schumer doesn’t know much about Islam, and probably hasn’t read the Quran, because if he did he would realize that David, or in Arabic Dawood, is one of the most revered prophets of Islam. The Quran also calls on Muslims to affirm belief in the Torah and all Heavenly revealed books from God, to do otherwise is contrary to basic Islamic creed and puts one outside the pale of Islam.

If he was following recent news he would also have noted that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas quite controversially stated his belief in the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Israel deriving from the Quran,

Reports of Abbas’s remarks were met with seeming disbelief in the Arab media and led an Al Jazeera reporter later that day to ask him if the reports were correct. Abbas replied, “Jews are there, and when you read the Holy Koran you have it there. That’s what I said.”

Cenk Uygur had some excellent commentary on the hypocritical double standards that this situation highlights,

Bill Maher on the other hand seems to think that Israel is besieged in the press. Here he goes toe to toe with Oliver Stone.

What do you think?

Anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon in the world that can lead to dangerous consequences for its victims. It is serious and should never be employed or utilized by one party to coerce leverage or power over another. The same can be said of Islamophobia or anti-Muslimism.

In this regard Max Blumenthal has documented an organized effort on the part of a few prominent organizations to use anti-Semitism as a tool of propaganda.

Propagandistic anti-Semitism report raises The Linkage issue by Max Blumenthal

The Tel Aviv University/Stephen Roth Institute’s newly released study on anti-Semitism in 2009 is getting loads of media attention. Among the many outlets that have reported its findings are the AP, CNN, and Haaretz.

“Anti-Semitic incidents Doubled Last Year,” blared the AP headline.

Sponsored by the European Jewish Congress and produced with help from researchers around the world, including the Anti-Defamation League’s Aryeh Tuchman, the report’s release was timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Roth Institute’s director, Dinah Porat, who also sits on the board at the Israeli Holocaust research center, Yad Vashem, declared at a recent press conference that anti-Semitism is directly linked to anti-Zionism. This is also the conclusion of her group’s report, which focuses on the alleged connection between anti-Semitic acts and Israel’s assault on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

The Roth Institute identifies the UK and France as centers of anti-Semitism, but also centers in on American targets, including the widely praised Palestinian author Ali Abunimah and the Muslim students at UC-Irvine who heckled Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

Judge Richard Goldstone, a Jewish self-proclaimed Zionist, is also named among the Institute’s gallery of dangerous anti-Semites. “In November, extensive criticism of Israel in the media following the release of the Goldstone Report probably served as a trigger for another spike in hate crimes against Jews,” the report states. Since there is no evidence to back their claim up, the authors slipped in the word, “probably.”

Mainstream Muslim groups in the US like the Islamic Circle of North America could not escape being tagged as Jew haters either, though the report once again provides no concrete evidence to support its characterization. Thus readers must accept on faith — or the basis of their preconceptions about Muslims — that members of the ICNA like to “rail against Jews.”

The report accuses unidentified “contemporary youth” of exhibiting “rampant ignorance” by engaging in Palestinian solidarity activism. “An abundance of Muslim propaganda, well-financed by oil money, exploits this atmosphere, which law enforcement agencies refrain from countering out of ‘political correctness’ and respect for the right of freedom of speech,” the report’s authors write, suggesting that the First Amendment might pose a threat to Jewish life in America.

The only actively organized anti-Semitic faction that the report’s researchers identify inside the US is the fringe-of-the-lunatic fringe Phelps family, which has picketedeverything from soldiers’ funerals to the Sidwell Friends School, holding signs that take bigotry to the point of the sublime. The family’s satire of “We Are The World,” called “God Hates The World,” was so unintentionally funny it became a YouTube hit. Indeed, few outside the Phelps family take its bizarre street theater seriously. Despite the Roth Institute’s dire warnings, that is unlikely to change.

Organized anti-Semitism seemed to have been so absent from American life in 2009 that the Roth Institute felt compelled to lard its report with accounts of murders of non-Jews by right-wing extremists. For instance, the report goes on at length about Richard Poplawski, a deranged young skinhead who killed three cops in Pittsburgh reportedly because he hated Obama and thought he sent the police to take his guns away. Unless Obama had secretly converted to Judaism (wasn’t he supposed to be a crypto-Muslim?), the designation of Poplawski’s killing spree as an anti-Semitic attack is a wild stretch.

Turning its focus to Latin America, the Roth Institute predictably rehashes the widely repeated canard that Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. And like the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Institute appears to have studiously avoided any contact with the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization. That may because the Confederation has already repudiated the notion of a Chavez-incited campaign of anti-Semitism and has condemned the Simon Wiesenthal Center for not consulting it about the reality of Jewish life in Venezuela.

Under pressure from Jewish groups in Venezuela, Jewish members of Congresstorpedoed a 2009 House resolution to condemn Chavez for anti-Semitic incitement. The members of Congress who opposed the resolution included some of Israel’s most hardline allies in the House, from Rep. Gary Ackerman to Rep. Shelley Berkley. Apparently this news was not fit to print in the Roth Institute’s report.

The Institute’s characterization of Chavez’s government recalls a failed Cold War-era tactic, according to the North American Congress on Latin American. In 1983, as the Reagan administration sought to topple the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the ADL churned out a poorly-sourced report accusing the Sandinistas of inciting hatred against the country’s small Jewish community. The report was immediately discredited by American rabbis who had actually traveled to Nicaragua and by Reagan’s own ambassador to the country; he declared, “the evidence fails to demonstrate that the Sandinistas have followed a policy of anti-Semitism or have persecuted Jews solely because of their religion.” As for the accusations leveled against Chavez, the authors of the Roth Institute report seemed most incensed by his furious opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

While the threat of anti-Semitic attacks should not be dismissed, however random and rare they might be in Western society, the Roth Institute and its collaborators appear more interested in insulating Israel from scrutiny for its killing of 773 civilians in Gaza in 22 days than in generating education and dialogue to combat bigotry. Indeed, the main thrust of the report is consistent with one of the key objectives of the Netanyahu administration and its international supporters: to undermine the Goldstone Report and assail any public figures who support its findings. At the same time, the report appears crafted to prevent articulate Palestinian critics of Israeli policy like Ali Abunimah from gaining mainstream traction, speciously and scandalously conflating them with neo-Nazi street thugs and Holocaust deniers.

Three years before Israel’s creation, Jean Paul-Sartre analyzed what he saw as a widespread resentment of Jews, describing it as a pathology rooted in class envy and self-loathing. In his book, “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Sartre impelled Jews to assert themselves through militant means, stopping only once they had won their place in a pluralistic society like France. Among the means he proposed that Jews employ was the founding of “a Jewish league against anti-Semitism.”

Ironically, the Roth Institute’s Porat has rejected “the definitions of learned people” like Sartre. For her, anti-Semitism can be defined by simply describing the behavior of Israel’s critics, not by assessing the mentality of those who openly urge discrimination against Jews.

Following Porat’s line, the Roth Institute report asserted that Israel’s assault on Gaza was practically the only factor driving the supposedly dramatic spike in anti-Semitic incidents that occurred in 2009. “We have never seen such a sustained, organized campaign being waged against Israel’s legitimacy and its supporters around the world,” lamented Arie Zuckerman, whose European Jewish Congress contributed to the report.

But if Israel’s policies towards Gaza have fanned the flames of anti-Semitism, as the report seems to claim, the discussion must turn to whether Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is threatening the safety of Jews across the world. Is there a linkage? The Roth Institute and its collaborators should consider contemplating the troubling issue they have inadvertently raised. Then again, it might be more convenient for them to dismiss it as another anti-Semitic canard contrived by “contemporary youth.”

The Looniest Blogger Ever: Pamela Geller

Lets take a trip over the rainbow into loonyland where we will meet the Queen loon blogger Pamela Geller. Once here we must suspend all reality and truth.  Here Barack Obama is a Mooslim who is furthering Jihad and working to destroy Israel. Israel is light and goodness and vanilla ice cream fighting against the evil, dark smelly hordes of Izzzlaaaaaaaaaam. The Mooslims have taken over everything and must be destroyed before they destroy us.

That is what Geller’s every waking existence is like or at least the existence she purports to believe in on her comical conspiracy site, Atlas Shrugs. Her recent tirades include calls for Israel to nuke Muslim capitals/holy sites and Europe. Enjoy!  Geller rants:

And I pray dearly that in the ungodly event that Tehran or its jihadi proxies (Hez’ballah, Hamas etc) target Israel with a nuke, that she retaliate with everything she has at Tehran, Mecca, and Medina……………

Not to mention Europe. They exterminated all their Jews, but that wasn’t enough. Those monsters then went on to import the next generation of Jew killers. (This New Hatred Comes from Muslim Immigrants. The Jewish People are Afraid Now)

So according to Pam, in response to a hypothetical situation in which Iran hits Israel with a nuke, it should respond with everything it has on not only Iran but Saudi Arabia, and Europe? If you didn’t get it, “Everything she has” is a not so subtle way of saying Israel should unload its stockpile of nukes.

Her hatred of Europe and desire to see it destroyed is very odd as well (she claims to defend Western civilization) and just exposes her genocidal predilections further, she wants the present generation of Europeans to pay for the sins of the Nazis (who weren’t all of Europe by the way). How crazy is she?

She also claims that the rise in anti-Semitism is linked to the “next generation of Jew killers” whom the Europeans imported. An insinuation that Muslim immigrants are at fault for rising violence against Jews in Europe, a statement completely devoid of any basis in fact. On the contrary recent research shows that the growing Muslim population is not linked to the growing anti-Semitism (which parallels growing Islamophobia). One point that illustrates this fact clearly is that Hungary which has almost no Muslim presence has seen the greatest increase in anti-Semitism,

Some commentators have tried to link the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe to a growing Muslim population there. But in Hungary, where there is hardly any Muslim presence, anti-Semitism is both more rabid and crude than anywhere else in Europe.

It seems that Pam’s deep hatred of Islam and Muslims has finally allowed her to complete the trifecta: first she advocated the destruction of the Golden Dome (Islam’s third holiest site), and now she seeks the destruction of Mecca and Medina.

Joe Kaufman

Joe Kaufman, a Kahanist inspired anti-Muslim crusader against “evil” CAIR has been outed by Susan Starkey, Council woman in Davie Town, Florida. This whole drama began when Kaufman’s hate organization (which is him and three other people) became offended that CAIR and some “Mooslims” had participated in a program to pick up litter from the streets. In their insane folly Kaufman and company accused Starkey of being an “Anti-Semite” and a supporter of “terrorism.”

Susan Starkey Responds to Anti-Semitism Allegations

Davie Town Council member Susan Starkey says she never said “Jews try to convert everyone,” as alleged by activist Joe Kaufman, of the Coral Springs-based Americans Against Hate.

The exchange occurred December 18 between Starkey and Jeff Rubinoff, at the holiday party of the Davie / Cooper Republican Club, of which Rubinoff is chairman. He wanted Starkey to take down an adopt-a-street sign that recognized the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim group attacked by conservatives for ties to Hamas. The sign is near the intersection of College Avenue and Southwest 39th Avenue.

In an email, Starkey told Juice:

The statement he alleged ” Jews try to convert everyone”. I am stunned by and offended by the comments and written statements such as this made by Jeff Rubinoff and further perpetuated by Joe Kaufman. I would not say such statements that would offend anyone in this way.

There was at no time any “Anti-Semitic rant” made by me. Mr. Rubinoff is a member of the same activist group as Mr. Kaufman. Many statements made by Mr. Kaufman are hateful, prejudice and outright lies. I have had a wonderful opportunity to serve the town’s diverse population of 92,000 residents as well as a colleges and university professors and students within the town. I had promoted, supported and voted for a $18 Million dollar bond for which the town co-signed with the Broward Jewish Federation, and Davie JCC and Soref no other city in Broward stepped up to help. I have attended at invitation of my Jewish Community many events and functions. I supported Rabbi Pinny’s congregation in the Town of Davie and in fact meet with him and a friend today for guidance on this matter.

We should also note, for the record, that the Jewish faith is not one for proselytizing. In fact, it’s a mighty big hassle to convert to Judaism, at least compared to the ease with which you can become a Christian.

In an email yesterday to Starkey, I asked her to characterize her discussion with Rubinoff.

I would describe the holiday conversation on Dec. 18th a little out of the ordinary in the fact that Mr. Rubinoff was upset that Broward County and the Town of Davie had not immediately removed a sign that he and Mr. Kaufman insisted be removed. He demanded answers and I explained that we were looking into the matter. I have since learned that the sign in question is a part of the Broward County “Adopt a Street” Program to clean up litter on the streets and they are handled administratively by the County and Town Staff. No action is required of the County Commission or the Town Council. This is a volunteer program by organizations to pick up litter.

In yesterday’s post, I ventured a theory that the rupture between the two Republicans, Starkey and Rubinoff, was an illustration of larger statewide trend of conflict between the party’s moderates and its more conservative wing. Starkey’s environmental activism would seem to put her among the party’s moderates, while Rubinoff’s suspicions about CAIR suggests he’s in the more conservative crowd. Starkey responded:

Yes, I am a registered Republican but do not belong to any “clubs”. Municipal government is non-partisan. I consider myself a fiscal conservative environmentalist. I believe in strong family values, community, honesty and integrity and treating everyone fairly as I would like to be treated.I have know that both the Republicans and Democrats have divisions with extreme views sometimes on both sides. I prefer to stay involved with my issues within the town that are important to my residents and stay out of the fray, there is more than enough to keep us busy in trying to provide adequate quality services in these tough economic times.

Kaufman, who admits he didn’t witness the argument between Starkey and Rubinoff, rejects the idea that it was related to any trends of Republican Party tension. In an email responding to yesterday’s post he said:

Mr. Rubinoff’s interaction with Councilmember Starkey had absolutely nothing to do with any type of infighting between members of a political party, and it had absolutely nothing to do with any political issues. Rubinoff did what’s right, and he should be commended for it.

Your spin has absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever.

So there you have it.

Pamela Has a Big Head-Courtesy of Lex, Agent of Chaos

Pamela Geller, is up to her usual game, objecting to Turkish Prime Minsiter Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s statement that Islamophobia is indeed a crime against humanity.

Fear of Islamic Terrorism and Jihad is a Crime Against Humanity

According to the ummah, islamophobia is a crime against humanity. Hmmmmm. Well, perhaps because humanity has become inhumane and good is evil and evil is good. So fear of jihad is a crime against humanity.

Not surprisingly, Pamela illogically argues that anti-Islamophobia means pro-jihad and pro-terrorism. And so being pro-”Islamophobia”  means you’re against those things and it is therefore the common sense approach to Islam. Of course, being against Islamophobia means you’re against intolerance, irrationality, and hatred. But in Pamela’s alternate reality, it means you’re for evil. Islamophobia indisputably exists. In its worst form, it can manifest into a violent movement. What was motivating the murderer of Marwa Sherbini if it was not Islamophobia?

The Runnymede Trust defined eight components of Islamophobia which are widely accepted by racism and xenophobia monitoring organizations. These are:

1.) Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
2.) Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
3.) Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
4.) Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’.
5.) Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
6.) Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
7.) Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
8.) Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Consider that this accurate definition of Islamophobia was developed in 1997. Public perceptions of Muslims have only worsened since 9/11 and these eight components are resonating stronger among the public. I used to think that the anti-Muslim/anti-Islam sentiment would have lessened over time when people were able to examine the situation with a clear and open mind. To my surprise, the opposite is true: Islamophobia is on the rise.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise across Europe, according to a survey of global opinion released yesterday.

In contrast to the US and Britain where unfavourable opinion of Jews has been stable and low for several years at between 7 and 9%, the Pew Survey of Global Attitudes found that hostile attitudes to Jews were rising all across continental Europe from Russia and Poland in the east to Spain and France in the west.

The survey found that suspicion of Muslims in Europe was considerably higher than hostility to Jews, but that the increase in antisemitism had taken place much more rapidly.

Islamophobes like to explain the rising antisemitism in Europe as being a product of rising Muslim immigration. This however does not explain, as an example, the rising antisemitism in Hungary, a country with virtually no Muslim population. It also does not explain, as the Guardian article pointed out, that antisemites also tend to be Islamophobes as well.

Pamela then quotes Robert Spencer, who asks (notice the quotes around Islamophobia):

Is “Islamophobia” really like anti-Semitism? Let’s see. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery. Jews really don’t have a secret plan to control the world. Is concern about Islamic supremacism similarly trumped up? Or does Islam include a political manifestation that teaches world domination?

Yes, it is. The Islamophobes, whether they know it or not, mimic the tactics of classical anti-Semites. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists believe that Jews control the world through banking, by secretly taking over governments around the world, and by causing wars for their own self-interest. Similarly, Islamophobic conspiracy theorists believe that Muslims, through a combination of violent jihad and stealth Shari’ah, are out to “Islamize” world civilization and issue a dhimmi status on those who do not comply.  Both are loony toon theories, however, only one at the moment is socially acceptable to espouse.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was making the humane point that, like antisemitism, Islamophobia must also be socially unacceptable for those who want to live in a tolerant society. Denying the fact that Islamophobia exists, believing it’s only a politically correct fantasy, is not only factually inaccurate, but a dangerous view that is meant to continue tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. After all, correcting the misconceptions and lies against Muslims will put people like Geller and Spencer out of the polemical anti-Muslim business.

I end by sharing an excellent take on Islamophobia by a German cabaret artist (English subs).

Eli Wiesel

Why has Elie Wiesel, the renowned author of Night, a book which many consider to be part of the canon of 2oth century literature spoken at a CUFI (Christians United for Israel) conference? This is astounding considering that CUFI is an apocalyptic organization which holds some very strange, some would characterize Anti-Semitic views. It is also an organization that is virulently anti-Muslim and Islamophobic.

This is a letter that some concerned individuals in the Jewish Community sent to Mr. Wiesel in the hope that he would cancel his speech at CUFI.

An Open Letter to Elie Wiesel

Dear Mr. Wiesel,

Your years of tireless campaigning for human rights and against anti-Semitism have earned our deepest respect. For this reason we have written the following letter in hope that you will reconsider your support of events sponsored by John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. We realize that the outward show of support for Jews and Israel, on display at Hagee’s CUFI events, can be very enticing but there is another aspect of Christian Zionism which we believe runs strongly counter to Jewish and Israeli interests.

John Hagee teaches “theological racism,” the idea that the destiny of peoples is based on their biblical genealogy. Hagee claims Jewish souls are different from those of gentiles and that, according to divine plan, Jews have no right to live anywhere on Earth but in Israel. Hagee’s fellow Christian Zionists predict that a coming, divinely ordained paroxysm of anti-Semitic violence, a “second Holocaust,” will be necessary to force all Jews to make aliyah. From the pulpit, pastor Hagee and his fellow Christian Zionists preach their theological racism that risks provoking such a catastrophe.

When you attend CUFI events, you will receive a great deal of outward affection and participate in singing and celebration that looks and sounds Jewish. However, this is a manifestation of a volatile millennial cycle, an exuberant embrace of “Hebrew roots” founded on the expectation that this generation will bring about the fulfillment of “God’s plan for Israel.” There is some argument among Christian Zionists about the exact timing and details of this plan, but on one point they are absolutely consistent; the ingathering of Jews to Israel, and the elimination of Rabbinic Judaism as part of Israel’s “restoration,” are required for the 1000 year reign of Christ.

Our combined years of research have produced a substantial body of documentation on the anti-Semitic face of Christian Zionism. Last May, one small piece of that documentation was widely publicized through a video by Bruce Wilson that included a quote, from a sermon John Hagee gave in 2005, in which pastor Hagee stated “…then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.” Amidst the ensuing publicity, presidential candidate John McCain rejected Hagee’s political endorsement.

John Hagee’s attacks on Judaism are well documented and have included calling Hillel an extremist whose followers incited both the killing of Jesus and centuries of anti-Semitism. From the pulpit Hagee has claimed that the anti-Christ is “partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler.”

Hagee also preaches that European-based Rothschilds control the US economy, through the Federal Reserve, and conspire to attack the American middle class by devaluing the dollar. According to the ADL, this class of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory, which names Rothschilds, is a “classic anti-Semitic myth.” ADL traces it to Christian Identity, one of the most overtly anti-Semitic sectors of American society but one which uses “Hebrew” symbols and Christianized version of Jewish holidays because, according to Identity theology, Christians, not Jews, are the “true Israelites.”

Christian Identity’s roots are based a millennial movement that was “philo-Semitic,” but which in the early 20th century rejected Jews as impostors descended from Esau and the Edomites. This narrative can still be seen throughout Identity media. In his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee promotes a similar theological claim, that a lineage of “half-breed Jews,” descended from Esau and which included Adolf Hitler, have persecuted full-blooded Jews throughout history. Hagee writes that God intends to exterminate that “half-breed Jew” line.

Christian Identity’s overt anti-Semitism has very limited appeal and reach. Cloaked in the guise of “love” for Jews and Israel, John Hagee’s conspiracy theories and theological racism can be consumed without guilt by listeners in the 190 nations Hagee claims to reach through Christian television and radio broadcast networks.

How can John Hagee so sincerely and convincingly claim to love Israel while introducing theological racism to a international audience?

The widely taught prophecy narrative of the “fishers and hunters” of Jeremiah 16 helps to explain this paradox. Christian Zionists see themselves as the “fishers” who must befriend and cajole Jews, through emotional and financial support, to fulfill their prophetic destiny. Meanwhile, the “hunters” are overt anti-Semites who will force the remaining Jews of the world to flee to Israel. In order for the Christian Zionist prophecy of the “restoration of Israel” to be fulfilled, there must be a future wave of violent anti-Semitism in which the world will turn on Jews and Israel.

The quote which our research team provided to the press from Hagee’s 2005 sermon series, “Jerusalem Countdown,” concerned Hitler’s role as a “hunter” in the “fishers and hunters” narrative. But Hitler did not succeed in forcing all Jews to flee to Israel, and even those Jews who have settled in today’s modern state of Israel have not met the prophetic requirement of “spiritual restoration,” which is acceptance of Jesus. In his 2005 sermon Hagee also stated, “they [the Jews] are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive. Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive…”

Many Christian Zionist leaders describe their prophecy of the “time of Jacob’s trouble” as the second or final holocaust of the Jews. Tom Hess, in Let My People Go, pleads with Jews to leave the U.S. before it is too late, and Hess details his vision of trains all over the world taking Jews from major cities. In her best-selling fictional portrayal of the Jewish people, Israel My Beloved, Kay Arthur has portrayed the coming persecution to be “beyond the horrors of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.” Richard Booker’s Blow the Trumpet in Zion features a list, on the back cover, of the book’s topics, including “Why Christians Should Love Jews” and “The Jews’ Final Holocaust.” Booker explains that nothing less than this “final holocaust” can bring the Jews back to God, and Jesus can not be king of all the world until Jews accept him. Paradoxically, these Christian Zionists seek to “bless Israel” and show their “love” for Jews through fulfillment of a prophecy in which Judaism is eradicated.

All three of these Christian Zionist leaders have become involved in the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus, which is working to raise millennial expectations to a fevered pitch – with the endorsement of the Israeli government. Some may view their support as politically valuable, but Christian Zionists are helping to spread around the globe a dangerous obsession with Jews and Israel.

Mr. Wiesel, you have spent your life teaching the world about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Please do not provide legitimacy to John Hagee and other Christian Zionists who have spent their careers teaching that the elimination of Judaism is the will of God and the divine plan for Israel. Yes, the exuberant singing, dancing, and tears of Christian Zionists are indeed a celebration of their love for Israel – but that is a strange and terrible love, not too far from hate, which seeks a very different Israel than the one of Jewish hopes and a very different future for the world than the vision of peace and coexistence for which you have fought all of these years.

Sincerely,
Bruce Wilson
Rachel Tabachnick

Notes:
Elie Wiesel is scheduled to speak at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church on Sunday, October 25 for a CUFI Night to Honor Israel event.

Bruce Wilson is the co-founder of Talk2action.org and produced the nationally televised video clip on Hagee’s 2005 sermon series, “Jerusalem: Countdown To Crisis”. (Despite Hagee’s comments, the quote came from a 2005 sermon in which Hagee later referred to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.)

Rachel Tabachnick also contributes to Talk2Action.org and is the author of “God’s Plan for Israel, The End Times Prophecy Narrative of Christian Zionism,” a free teaching resource on CD.

"Under his wing": Geert Wilders & Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer, erstwhile ally of neo-Fascists, friend to advocates of genocide, and all around anti-Muslim is once again basking in the light of his own, made up self-importance.

This time it centers around his recent trip to Germany where he gave a speech at a rally in Berlin. Spencer writes,

Today I spoke in Berlin at a rally against antisemitism and Islamization, sponsored by Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE), the most important German human rights organization, seeking to preserve European values, freedom and democracy (emphasis added).

When ever Robert Spencer makes a claim such as some “organization is the ‘most important’ human rights group” in a particular country it throws up all kinds of red flags for us because such a statement coming from him is usually filled with a load of BS.

Spencer, of course, relies on his American audience’s ignorance about the reality of this “human rights” organization. He gives us a link to a German website that most of his readers will be unable to understand, thereby hoping they will stick to the script he formulates about it being the most important German human rights group.

The truth is that, per his track record, this is just another episode in a long list of episodes where Spencer has teamed up with anti-Muslim, Islam-obsessed haters. Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE) is far from being the premier, let alone “most important human rights organization” in Germany, in fact the claim might go down as one of the greatest oxymoron’s in Islamophobia history (on the other hand a group such as Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker is one of the most important and “real” human rights groups in Germany).

Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa

Looking at the BPE site reveals that it is just another organization using the title and badge of human rights to add an air of legitimacy to the real intent behind their work: demonization and marginalization of Europe’s Muslims.

Thanks to one of our German readers, Morakot, we were able to see for ourselves the true nature of this group that Spencer attempts to trump up. It is a group whose aims are undifferentiated from those of neo-Fascists like Geert Wilders and the BNP.

BPE (fake human rights organization)

In “Der Verein” (The Association) section of their website they claim that they are not “anti-Muslim” but the facts speak otherwise. Similar in substance to neo-Fascists and Euro supremacist groups, they take up the mantle of proclaiming themselves to be the vanguard and champions of “European Culture.” They define this as being “exclusively committed to the preservation of the Christian-Jewish tradition of their European culture” and opposed to the so called “creeping Islamization” of Europe, which is nothing less than the perpetuation of the debunked Eurabia and Muslim Demographics conspiracy theories.

Their solutions to the so called problem of “creeping Islamization” are elucidated in a document they released titled De-Islamization program which states amongst its main points,

- Organizations of islam critics as well as of people who left islam shall be funded by the state and have an adaquate say in the media.

Lets think about this for a second. They want the state to reward critics of Islam (who defines “critics of Islam?” Would anti-Muslim Geert Wilders of “tax-the-hijab-fame” be considered an acceptable “critic?”) and people who leave Islam with funding, essentially lobbying the government to take an official position in opposition to Islam. Does this not cross the boundary of separation of Church and State, and the fundamental tenants of secularism? It seems the “Christian-Jewish values” that this organization wants to protect bears more of a resemblance to a theocratic “Holy Roman Empire” rather than a pluralistic Democracy.

-All islamic organizations following a political instead of a religious agenda and/or on behalf of a foreign governement shall be disbanded.

Who will decide if an “Islamic organization is following a political agenda?” This is really a concealed attempt to disband all Muslim organizations. Everything the BPE represents indicates that they agree with a Geert Wilder-esque concept that  ’Islam is not a 1500 year old religion at all but rather a political movement,’ so no matter what you do as an organization you will be labeled a political organization.

It also highlights the double standards they advocate: on the one hand you have the Christian Democrats (CDU) led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, which is “Christian-based, applying the principles of Christian Democracy and emphasizes the “Christian understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God.” CDU is a political party which heads the German government, imagine the firestorm that would be created if Muslims even attempted to create a party which “emphasizes the ‘Muslim understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God.”

-Persons supporting djihad or installment of sharia in Germany shall undergo a de-islamization training or must suffer severe sanctions.

Who would define what “supporting djihad” or installing “sharia” consists of and what would be the scope of these definitions?As we well know Robert Spencer and the advocates of the conspiracy theories of Eurabia believe that many law abiding Muslims, by the very fact of their increasing presence and visibility in the West, are pushing a “stealth djihad.” For example there are people in Europe who think  wearing a headscarf, or installation of footbaths is an act of “djihad,” would such acts entail implementation of the “severe sanctions” being proposed, and of what would these “severe sanctions” consist?

- Quran-schools are to be forbidden.

They should just go a step further with their fascistic ideas and follow their brethren in Europe who have called for the Quran to be banned. If in some fairyland-Democracy-minus-religious-freedom envisioned by these jokers this is okay, then why are: Bible schools, Torah schools,  Bhagavad Gita schools not similarly forbidden?

- Islamic head cloths are to be banned in kindergardens, schools, campusses, workplaces, public buildings and events.

This was another predictable point, the obsession with hijab for Islamophobes is unending. Not only have laws been proposed such as the above (and passed in places like France) infringing on a woman’s right to wear what they want and follow their conscious, not only have proposals been made to tax it, but it also has led to violence such as murder and assault.

- Parents who submit their children to forced marriage or deny them proper education have to be deprived of child custody.

Everyone can agree that forced marriages are terrible and have to be fought, and many Muslims are leading the fight against the practice. It is curious though that this issue is being painted as springing from Islam, which condemns the practice. It is also a phenomenon that is not peculiar to Muslims but rather affects women and men from Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian and Gypsy backgrounds and cultures.

As far as the vague idea of “deny them proper education,” what does that mean? Knowing what we know from the above proposals, would a family that taught their children the Quran be considered as “denying a proper education?” Would they then advocate the child be ripped from their family for studying the Quran?

- Mosques are to be built only with approval of the neighbourhood. Minarettes and the call of the muezzin are to be forbidden. Sermons are to be held solely in German.

No Mosques protester

It is usually a good policy to have the involvement of a neighborhood when any religious structure is built, as it will become a major landmark bringing in more traffic and people into the area. It goes without saying that religious groups should prioritize good relations with their neighbors, something all religions believe in because they all teach the golden rule.

However, the wording in this proposal is very confrontational and seeks to legislatively limit the construction of the traditional mosque with minarets; it is an attempt to make the Muslim presence in essence invisible. What is the difference between such proposals and what goes on in some of the theocratic Muslim nations that Islamophobes regularly complain about when facts seem to indicate that they are two peas in the same pod?

Spencer then writes regarding the rally that,

Leftists and their jihadist allies marched by twice in a counterdemonstration, shouting “Nazis raus” — Nazis, get out. The people assembled for the BPE rally shouted the same thing right back at them. Of course, there were no Nazis among us, and we were standing against antisemitism and in favor of free speech, legal equality, and democratic government, but the facts never stop the Left from making the charge, as we have all learned recently from stateside libelbloggers (emphasis added).

I wonder what in the world could have made the counter-demonstrators call Robert Spencer and his BPE friends “Nazis?” Hmmmm (hint: all of the above). Of course, Robert Spencer is “never wrong,” and don’t ya know he is a “victim,” the well documented fact that he associates with racists and fascists are just accusations from “libelbloggers.” Also note how he labels some of the (presumably Muslim) counter-demonstrators, “Jihadists,” this just further exposes what Spencer thinks about any Muslim, especially Muslims who oppose his degradation of their faith; they’re all….”jihadists.”

Islamophobia the new anti-Semitism

Groups such as the BPE, claim as a cornerstone of their agenda to be opposed to anti-Semitism, that is what part of the rally Robert Spencer spoke at was supposed to be about. They hope that by doing so they will endear themselves to the public and give themselves an air of credibility while deflecting charges that they are fascists or Euro Supremacists.

In fact, one sees an emerging trend amongst some right-wing and fascist groups proclaiming their unconditional support for the state of Israel. What is likely is that many of these organizations, whose roots are steeped deep in a history of anti-Semitism are recreating themselves; dropping a now unpopular prejudice (anti-Semitism) for one more in vogue–anti-Muslim Islamophobia. Gone are the days when what they claimed to champion were the “Christian values and traditions of Europe” now they have added “Christian-Jewish” values to their slogans.

English Defense League Hooligans waving Israeli Flag

This is evidenced by politicians such as Geert Wilders who evokes Israel quite often, while at the same time also calling for taxes on hijabs, banning the Quran, denying religious freedom to Muslims, deporting Muslim immigrants–and in certain circumstances–second and third generation citizens to their countries of origin.

It also brings to mind the wacky English Defense League (EDL), who have been staging anti-Islam protests in various British cities. The EDL, you may recall, was founded by a football hooligan and is composed primarily of hooligans and individuals who bear close resemblance to skinheads. Placards reading No More Mosques and other anti-Islam signs have been pictured at the same rallies which included hooligans holding up and waving Israeli flags.

Probably the most instructional case of an organization publicly dropping their long held anti-Semitism would be the BNP or British National Party, headed by Nick Griffin. This party has a long history of anti-Semitism. If you can think of an anti-Semitic stereotype,  they have held it. Ever since Nick Griffin has taken the reins of power, the BNP has gotten a face lift and pushed a PR campaign which boils down to, “we aren’t anti-Semitic anymore, we are Islamophobic.”

However, as evidence shows, it turns out that these organizations that claim to have dropped and distanced themselves from anti-Semitism are only doing so for strategic reasons and still secretly hold prejudiced views against minorities, including Jews. Bartholomew notes in a piece titled BNP After Jewish Votes,

The one quote from Nick Griffin which sums up the whole strategy – and which reveals Griffin’s true feelings towards Jews – appeared in 2006 in a report for The Forward concerning an American Renaissance conference:

Nick Griffin has been credited with trying to root out antisemitism from the British National Party, which he leads. But in answer to a question at the recent conference, he said: “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.”

By swapping open anti-Semitism for Muslim-baiting, the BNP has managed (to) appear more attractive to some – it has also enjoyed some PR assistance from the “libertarian” right.

So the truth is that these groups haven’t changed their spots over night, it isn’t out of some transformation that most of them oppose anti-Semitism. They hide their old prejudices because it is wiser and more expedient. Their strategy is to pick on Muslims, whom Griffin rightly states are an easier target for abuse than Jews because they are the “most easily” defeated in our current time, when anything associated with Islam automatically brings up negative connotations.

Conclusion

What is clear from this  most recent Robert Spencer foray into the abyss of looniness is his readiness to collaborate with supremacist groups to bash minorities based on the Goebbelsesque argument of cultural superiority and cultural preservation. This is exactly the kind of people and logic that slowly made Nazism mainstream in Germany culminating in disaster for the then Jewish targets.

It is also, sadly the height of irony that this resurgence of the déjà vu supremacist hatred of religious and ethnic minorities in the West is this time happening with the supposed emblem of the former victims of this plague plastered all over it.

Shamelessly, Robert Spencer goes out of his way to boast about hugging and hoisting the Israeli flag as if he believes that this is his automatic redemption card out of any accusations of Euro Supremacist tendencies. Spencer writes,

Many people at our rally had Israeli flags, and as you can see from the photo, I had one also. Not long after this picture was taken I got it mounted on a flagpole and waved it around at the beginning and end of my talk…I went out front, close to the counterdemonstrators, waving the big flag, but the German police moved me back. They may also have said to put the flag away, but I have forgotten all my grad-school German, and so the flag stayed.

Robert Spencer: A "Friend" of Israel

He is in fact announcing an interesting belief he seems to have: that the only thing to worry about with being a pro-Euro supremacist is if you get accused of being anti-Semitic as a result of it; he seems to be telling us in the picture “but look at me, I am clearly not, here’s the Israeli flag. In fact I am actually an Israeli supremacist as bonus.” Two problems with that, first he misses or refuses to acknowledge the fact that being anti-Muslim is a problem no less than anti-Semitism, even if it does not come with the political and publicity backlash–the principle is the same. Second, he fails to indicate why being pro-Israel is redemptive of his racist and bigoted ways in any shape or form or how that absolves him of hurting Jewish moral interests by conniving with Euro-Supremacists (not all Jews put Israel before principle). There are many conscientious Jews in the US, Europe, Israel and around the world who would not be impressed with his misusing and trumpeting a flag in a way that is not necessarily emblematic to them, while trampling on the issues that matter to them most: like “never again” – meaning never again to anyone.

It comes off as sleazy on the part of Spencer, and even insulting, that he thinks he has a chance of fooling anyone. At least now, his true colors are shown for all to see: A small man with a lot of over-compensating to make up for it.

Update: (hat tip: LGF and Elizabeth_Ann) There is more information on the BPE and its direct connection to fascists and Euro-Supremacists. Charles Johnson linked to us and pointed out information that we missed:

[T]he group that sponsored Spencer’s speech, Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE), is also affiliated with the Belgian fascist party Vlaams Belang. In 2007, former BPE leader Udo Ulfkotte was one of the main organizers of the “Stop Islamization” protest in Brussels, at which Vlaams Belang leader Filip DeWinter was a featured speaker.

Pamela Geller

What do you get when you combine the most outlandish gaffes of Anne Coulter, the most awkward monologues of Sarah Palin, the senility of the crazy McCain Lady, filter any remaining logic out of it and give it a keyboard in the Bronx?

The answer is the looniest blogger ever: Pamela Geller. If you are unaware of who Pamela Geller is then we apologize for bringing her being into your world, but she is all too familiar to those of us who browse the internet and have come across her shrill and plainly insane blogging on Atlas Shrugs. (Given the amount of hallucinations on that blog, Atlas Shrugs should properly be renamed Atlas Drugs).

What is it though that Pamela believes in? What does she blog about?

Pam has the distinction of being the originator and pusher of some of the most vile and obscene conspiracy theories on the internet. Mostly dealing with Islam and Muslims but also Barack Obama, and the two are combined — A LOT. In one of her recent tirades titled, CNN Tells, Sells More Lies About Palin — it’s Time to Expose the truth about Obama, Geller writes,

So why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections? My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff. Why aren’t they pursuing that story? Find the ho, give her a show!

Here she calls on CNN to investigate Obama’s “strange sexual predilections.” She also says that it is “well known” but then sneaks in “allegedly” that Obama was “involved with a crack whore in his youth.”  This is just the beginning of the craziness. She then goes on to state that she believes that President Obama’s trip to Pakistan in the 80′s was originally to go for drugs but that he became indoctrinated into Jihad.

Back in the early 80′s, there were only two reasons to travel to Pakistan. Jihad or drugs. I think he went for the drugs and came back with jihad. (He did, after all, change his name to Barack Hussein Obama from  Barry Soetoro, upon his return from that trip).

Real good investigative work Pam! He changed his name to what had always been his name and that shows that he is a Jihadist? For the uber-racist Pam Geller, drugs is a connotation for Black and Jihad is a connotation for Muslim; a Black man can only travel to get drugs, and a Muslim country can only offer travelers Jihad.

Additionally, Pam Geller has an unhealthy obsession with Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. For Pam the old adage do not speak ill of the dead has no resonance, in fact she can’t even stop her self from speaking slanderous lies about the dead.

Pam, that ever-vigilant firecracker of a reporter broke a story that “even CNN didn’t care to touch.” What was this highly neglected breaking story? Obama is the illegitimate son of Malcolm X!  In her 50,000 word rant, Pam Geller toys with all sorts of theories including the suggestion that Obama’s mom somehow had an amorous hook up with Malcolm?

Barack Hussein Obama Jr Malcolm X Barack Hussein Obama Sr. Barack Hussein Obama Sr., Tom Mboya, and Philip Ochieng, all share common physical features of the Kenyan Luo tribe: Modest stature under six feet, round faces, small chins, wide set eyes, slanted back foreheads, and retracted hairlines…none of these features are shared by Malcolm X and Barack Hussein Obama Jr.

She then goes on a long and wide conspiratorial line trying to link Barack’s mother with Malcolm X, and all the possibilities of how they could have hooked up. If you read the post, beware that it is long, like sleuthing through a swamp.

In a most bizarre jab at Obama’s mom, Geller wonders aloud why CNN isn’t pursuing some “story” about the “alleged” nude “pornographic” pictures taken of Obama’s mom by Frank Marshall Davis!

Why isn’t CNN pursuing the nude pornographic photos of Obama’s mom…I never ran the pics, as it was unseemly and wasn’t relevant. But this assault on Palin is too disgusting. It’s time to tell the ugly truth about the enemy in the White House and his whores in the media.

Maybe CNN and the “whores in the media” aren’t running this story because it is a non-story with no news value? Or maybe because it is a figment of a loony blogger’s imagination with no thread of truth in it? Or maybe because it has nothing to do with the job performance of that “Negro Mooslim enemy” in the White House?

That is another card in the loonieness that is Pamela Geller. She believes Obama is an enemy, i.e. according to her he is a Muslim. On the end-of-times loon website World Net Daily, Geller wrote this hysterical post titled Obama’s Islam: Now He Tells Us,

We should have seen all this coming. Obama deceitfully hid his Muslim background and schooling and his agenda. I started writing about Obama’s religious Muslim background in January 2007, and throughout 2007 and 2008 I presented evidence of Obama’s identification as a Muslim when he was a child, his extremist Muslim family and his Islamic schooling. In December 2007, I wrote, “Barack Obama went to a madrassa in Jakarta. A madrassa in a Muslim country. Whether he was devout or secular, he knows what was taught. He knows what is in the Quran. Even if he is ambiguous, he knows the stakes involved. His father was a Muslim who took three wives (without divorcing). His stepfather and close members of his family are devout Muslims. Not an unimportant influence.” And who can forget Obama’s bald-faced lies to the Jews? In February 2008, Obama told Jewish leaders: “If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim.” Yet he was registered as a Muslim in an Indonesian school…And so now we have our first Muslim presidency, just eight years after 9/11. The media can spin their subjugation and adulation a million different ways, but America did not vote for a “Muslim presidency,” which is what this is. Everything this president has done so far has helped foster America’s submission to Islam.

If that weren’t enough then you could predict what comes next. Not only is Obama the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, not born in America, on top of all that it is obvious that since he is a Muslim he must also be an anti-Semite!

Every decision, every move, every policy decision the President has made in regards to Israel has been the act of …. an anti-semite.

So there you have it the Mooslims are taking over! In fact they have already taken over America, so much so that we have a Mooslim president, who is anti-Semitic, sired by the fire breathing Malcolm X, his mom was a whore, and oh yeah somewhere in there he is also a socialist! That comes to you courtesy of the Looniest Blogger Ever!

Her blog remains “popular,” the adjective “popular” however may be a bit misleading as it seems to be popular only with crazies who espouse openly bigoted views. A glance at her comments section demonstrates this,

Posted by: jj | Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 01:24 AM , “Pigs are more humane than Muhammad. And cleaner, too.”

Posted by: En français | Monday, August 31, 2009 at 07:56 AM

What is a man with the name Matthew Polombo doing as the secretaey general of something called the Somali Youth Action? To build this big Islamic style complex exclusively for Moslem Somalis in Minneapolis means someone thinks they are there to stay ….. but as soon as we get rid of the Monster in the White House, we will get rid of them. Since they were imported, the crime rate has soared. They were criminals in Somalia, so they are also criminals in America and have no idea of American ideals and way of life. This sport center would be a hatching center for more crimes against Americans who don’t want them, didn’t ask them to come and want to get rid of them. The people of Minneapolis are insanely stupid if they allow this Obamanation to materialize.

Posted by: Sarastro | Monday, August 31, 2009 at 07:57 AM

WTF?!?!? How many dang Somalis do we have here that they need a frickin’ Youth Center? WhoTF needs Somalis here anyway? What? Are they the world’s best meat-packers?!?!?

Yeah, and I know. . . when the Muslims say “prevent” violence they mean “promote” violence.

Yeah, right. Separate gyms and pools, a place to get married, and maybe a hall or two in which to teach hatred and strategy for Islamic Supremacy?

This article is just more evidence that Muslims, (may their prophet be damned,) have no desire to assimilate or become Americans in support of America.

These comments are just a sampling of what passes as polite discourse on Atlas Shrugs, to get further acquainted with her and the loonieness of her commenters just parse through the comment section there, you will be truly mortified.

Update: Pamela Geller now claims she never penned the Malcolm X article, and that she doesn’t support the theory that Malcolm X is the father of Barack Obama. However, she never made any such qualifier when she originally posted the piece on her site. Which begs the question, why, if she didn’t believe what was written did she post it under her name? How can she not understand how insane it is, even for someone who believes Obama wasn’t born in America, to think he was the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, let alone give credence to such loony conspiracies by posting it on her site?

Update II: Pamela Geller calls for the destruction of the Golden Dome.

Update III: Obama is a Mooslim, Jihadist, Pimp, anti-Semite who is aiding the Iranian Nuclear program

Update IV: Sharia Coke is taking over the world, it is defamation of Judaism and Christianity for Islam to include Moses and Jesus as Prophets of Islam.

Update V: Pamela Geller is a Holocaust Revisionist who claims that Hitler and the Nazis adopted Jihad

Update VI: Not only is Obama a secret Muslim, but according to Pamela Geller, “Obama is bringing his jihad to Illinois…Obama’s treachery is breathtaking.“

Update VII: Pamela Geller calls for the nuking of Mecca, Medina, and Tehran

Update VIII: Pamela Geller promotes a genocidal video

Update IX: Pamela Geller shows sympathy towards white supremacist

Update X: Screenshot of Pamela Geller’s post on June 25th wherein she posted a video claiming that Muslims engage in bestiality

Update XI: Pamela Geller left speechless when called out for drawing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad with a pig’s face

Pew Global Studies Survey

Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are on the rise in Europe according to the Pew Global Attitudes survey (2008). Negative perceptions and views of Muslims range from 32 percent in Britain to 52 percent in Spain. As Muqtedar Khan writes,

There are many consequences for Muslims as a result of the growing Islamophobia, all of them impinging on the quality of the rights they enjoy. New laws that are being instituted or considered as a consequence of Islamophobia are undermining the liberal democratic culture of Europe and making Muslims second-class citizens.

At the same time there has also been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in Europe, with increasing attacks and vilification of the Jewish community.

Anti-Semitism, too, has grown rapidly in the last three years in Europe. The same Pew survey reports that negative views of Jews are now held by more than a third of the population in Germany and France and by by almost half in Spain. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that anti-Semitism has been on the rise. It cites a study by the European Jewish Congress that found that in the first three months of 2009, there were twice as many attacks on Jews as in the previous year. The study pointed to Israel’s war in Gaza and a resurgence of old stereotypes blaming Jews for the current economic crisis as the main causes for the rise in anti-Jewish sentiments in Europe.

Most interesting is that the same Pew study also highlights that those who are Islamophobic are also anti-Semitic, which further strengthens a point that we have made many times over about Islamophobes; when you find one they are not just bigoted against Muslims and Islam but other groups as well. It also proves the lie to the claims by many in the Islam-bashing industry such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or (!) and neo-fascist European politicians like Geert Wilders who state that the rise in anti-Semitism is correlated to the increase in the population of Muslims due to both birth rates and immigration. Again Muqtedar Khan writes,

Some commentators have tried to link the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe to a growing Muslim population there. But in Hungary, where there is hardly any Muslim presence, anti-Semitism is both more rabid and crude than anywhere else in Europe.

The fact that these two expressions of bigotry and racism are on the increase in Europe should be a clarion call to concerned citizens that these phenomenons must be challenged. It should also serve as an impetus for Jews and Muslims to work together so that Europe does not further slip into the abyss of extreme nationalism and discrimination against minorities that will slowly corrode the fabric of it’s democratic system — echoing ominous events from the early 20th century.