Over the past few days, Britain has been preoccupied with the prosecution and imprisonment of nine Muslim men (eight Pakistanis and one Afghani) on charges of being part of a child sex exploitation ring. Much has been said about the religious and ethnic background of the defendants, not to mention their victims, who were all white minors suffering from social problems, to the point that all issues became tangled up and intertwined; criminal considerations, religious and ethnic backgrounds and racial sensitivities. The result was heated discussions that mostly inclined towards unfair generalization, the promotion of a stereotyped image of Islam and false accusations against it.
Islam is a religion that is embraced by over 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe, approximately 2.8 million of whom live in Britain. Islam is Britain’s second largest religion, and Muslims make up nearly 5 percent of the country’s population. Of course, there were some rational and balanced discussions of this case; however this all went out the window amidst the clamorous voices that highlighted the religious and racial features of a purely criminal case in which the defendants are a small handful of people who represent only themselves and their own deviant behavior.
This climate served as the perfect opportunity for racists to exploit, and so some movements staged anti-Muslim and anti-immigration demonstrations in which they raised slogans like ‘No to Islam’, ‘Protect our Children…Expel the Rapists’ and ‘Our Children are not Halal Meat’, in a reference to the sale of halal meat to Muslims. Such movements are now active in numerous Western states, and they are exploiting the financial and economic crises as well as the widespread negative image of Islam since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent terrorist operations, including – of course – the 7 July, 2005 tube bombings in London. This image has contributed to feeding the negative climate which has produced laws banning the niqab and hijab, as well as the construction of minarets in some Western capitals, provoking extremist violence as was the case with the crimes of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway.
The grave problem is that this climate is being strengthened by the statements that are issued by some politicians or so-called specialists, not to mention the superficial articles which promote stereotypical, mistaken, ignorant or sometimes malicious images of Islam and Muslims. In addition to this, there are also some press reports that intend to provoke public opinion or controversy by publishing some defamatory images. For example, a television report screened during the trial session of the nine defendants who were prosecuted on charges of rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, amongst other crimes, showed the defendants standing in front of a mosque.
This represents a dangerous suggestion linking these terrible crimes with Islam, particularly as these defendants were not religious and their crimes were committed in Asian restaurants or empty houses and apartments, nowhere in the vicinity of a mosque! The comparison is truly scandalous when compared with the manner in which crimes involving the sexual abuse of children inside churches at the hands of priests are dealt with, for despite the noise and controversy surrounding such scandals, we have never heard anybody linking this to Christianity as a religion or to the priests’ ethnic background. It is true that there were discussions about deviations within the church, and there were calls for the Catholic Church and others to put an end this phenomenon and uncover its perpetrators, yet no one saw this as something implicating Christianity as a whole or as something that raises moral or ethical questions about all Christians.
The crime of sexual assaulting children deserves the strongest condemnation, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators, their ethnic background or religious affiliation, and this is something that is not confined to individuals of Pakistani or Muslim descent. Statistics and reports prepared by specialists stress that with the exception of Pakistani men being oversubscribed in such crimes, most sexual crimes against minors are committed by ‘white men’. This is how the majority of media outlets used this term in their reports, rather than saying ‘White Christians’, for example, in the same manner that the Pakistanis were described as ‘Asian Muslims.’
One of the striking examples of intentionally linking Islam with the issue of sexual exploitation of children can be seen in an article published by the British Times newspaper last Thursday entitled ‘Let’s be honest. There’s a clear link with Islam’. The title clearly demonstrates that there is an intention to target Islam, distort its image and use the crimes and deviation of a tiny minority to put forward a negative image of all Muslims.
A very good and long overdue article on the right-wing witch-hunt against CAIR.
The conspiracies and vilification of CAIR have been incessant over the years. For instance, in 2009, Newsweek labeled the idea that “CAIR was sending Muslim spy interns into the halls of Congress” one of the wackiest conspiracy theories of 2009!
The is the first in a two-part series on the vilification of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and how the American Muslim community has responded.
There is only one national organization in the United States whose primary mission is protecting the civil liberties of American Muslims, and that is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, commonly referred to as CAIR. Since its inception in 1994, CAIR has battled countless smears and attacks against its work and reputation, which intensified after being named an unindicted co-conspirator in the notorious Holy Land Foundation case in 2007.
In the past five years, this designation has resulted in witch-hunts on Capitol Hill — a repeated talking point for Islamophobes — and most significantly, the severing of ties by the FBI. A concerted effort to marginalize CAIR by certain right-wing groups and individuals, built on the meaningless label of “unindicted co-conspirator,” has resulted not only in the FBI distancing itself from CAIR, but other Muslim organizations doing so as well. The ongoing campaign against the group has succeeded; CAIR has
effectively been turned into the black sheep of American Muslims organizations.
At the root of allegations against CAIR is its inclusion in a list of almost 250 other organizations designated as unindicted co-conspirators by the Department of Justice in a case against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). What exactly is an unindicted co-conspirator? For all intents and purposes, this title is used to identify parties to an indictment for the purpose of immunity or evidentiary concerns, but its use is heavily criticized and warned against by the U.S. Attorney’s Manual itself.
An unindicted co-conspirator has not been charged with any criminal misconduct, and the common legal practice is to keep such identification under seal with the court. Making these identifications public raises serious due process concerns, since it effectively destroys the reputation of an individual or group that has not been charged with any crime, without providing it a forum to defend itself like someone who has actually been charged with a crime. In the HFL case, this list of 250 unindicted co-conspirators, including CAIR, was made public when it should have kept under seal.
CAIR and other groups appearing as unindicted co-conspirators in the HLF case petitioned the court to remove its name from that list, but failed. The stigma of this label continues to haunt CAIR as the lynchpin to a widely propagated narrative that CAIR is the domestic front to foreign terror groups.
It is a talking point that will not die. Recently when Best Buy sponsored a CAIR event, an avalanche of petitions and protests erupted, and the Muslim darling of the Islamophobe industry, Zuhdi Jasser, promptly appeared on Fox news to reiterate the litany of smears associated with CAIR. The investigation of CAIR interns in Congress, the Peter King hearings, and even statements from pundits like former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who recently spoke at an ABA Homeland Security Conference (at which I was personally present), continue to keep the narrative alive.
At the homeland security conference, I took the opportunity to ask Mr. Mukasey, since he spoke at length about CAIR being a front for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, how a terrorist group could openly continue to operate in the U.S. If his allegations held any merit, why hadn’t the FBI shut them down yet? Did Mr. Mukasey have evidence the FBI didn’t?
The response, although vague, did point out that the FBI still bars any official engagement with CAIR, which is the larger problem. The FBI’s stance on CAIR, which feeds into the right-wing conspiracy about the organization, has badly damaged CAIR’s reputation and driven away supporters, stripped CAIR of due process, impaired American Muslims’ access to civil liberties advocacy, and harmed the work of the FBI itself by creating distrust from American Muslims.
The greatest irony of this debacle is that not only does CAIR continue to work with other federal, state, and local governments and agencies, but they also continue to work with the FBI in an unofficial capacity. The FBI is routinely engaged by CAIR when hate crimes against Muslims arise, the two groups appear at events together, and on a local level across the country, FBI agents have expressed their hope to Muslim leaders that the official FBI policy towards CAIR will eventually be resolvedso they can continue to work together.
Although the FBI’s official ban of engaging with CAIR has not impeded the organization’s work in any meaningful way (they continue to strongly advocate and litigate civil rights issues), plenty of damage has been done. The group has lost a tremendous number of members and donors, Islamophobes continue to use this point to validate their smears, and other Muslim organizations have been forced to choose whether to align with CAIR and risk their own reputations and legitimacy, or abandon CAIR to be able to continue their own work.
In 2008, a poll regarding the public’s view of then candidate Obama’s religious beliefs, found that 1 out of 10 people believed him to be a Muslim – despite him stating the contrary. This perception came about, in large part, due to an Islamophobic Network that has been exposed by numerous independent journalists and research teams. These people and organizations used everything “Muslim” about Obama to “discredit” him (because “Muslim” is currently a political slur) in the minds of American voters, both Right and Left (but mostly Right). They said his name Barack Hussein Obama was proof that he was a devout Muslim; as well as the fact that he spent four years of his childhood in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. Some simple-minded bigots even suggested that Obama “has” to be a Muslim regardless if his personal religious beliefs are aligned with Christianity, because according to “Islamic law” a son of a Muslim remains within the fold regardless if his beliefs match another religion. Obama’s father was an Atheist.
To “solve” the problem, Obama’s Indonesian step-father Lolo Soetoro was then used as proof of his Muslim identity. Since Soetoro was a Muslim, so goes the argument, Obama became an “adopted” Muslim son which means he will remain within the fold for the rest of his life. Soetoro, in Obama’s own words in Dreams From My Father, practiced a syncretic universalist form of Islam prevalent in Indonesian culture, wherein Hindu and other pre-Islamic Indonesian beliefs were melded in with Islamic teachings; and even spoke highly of the Hindu god Hanuman, the same deity that former Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams apologized to Hindus for, when he declared that Muslims worship a “monkey god.”
“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.”
I’am not in the habit of declaring who is Muslim or not, but clearly this position is not really in-line with mainstream Muslim teaching, and takes one out of the fold of Islam according to the type of Muslims these conspiracy theorists fear. There is also the pointed fact that classical Islam does not really recognize “adoption” in the Western sense, but rather recognizes “Fostering” children. So either way you depict it, Obama is not a Muslim by “inheritance”; not that it would be wrong if he were a Muslim!
On May 10, 2012, four years later, the Huffington Post released the findings of a new poll which found that 1 out of 6 Americans now believe President Obama is a Muslim.
“After nearly four years in the Oval Office, President Obama is incorrectly thought to be Muslim by one in six American voters, and only one quarter of voters can correctly identify him as a Protestant, according to a new poll.”
“While Americans across the board get the president’s religion wrong, the religious group that most often thinks Obama is Muslim is white evangelical Protestants (24 percent). American unaffiliated with a religious group make the error least often: just 7 percent identify Obama as Muslim.” (Emphasis added)
What I find most disturbing about this article, is that Islamophobia is downplayed as an important factor in the public’s perception. Even the executive director of the American Islamic Congress, Zainab Al-Suwaij thinks it is primarily just a “…lack of information than an attack on him,…” If only this were the case. The belief that President Obama is a Muslim is directly followed with demonization of his character. The two claims are inextricably linked in the minds of those who subscribe to this fantasy.
Research director of Public Religion Research Institute, Daniel Cox, also displays befuddlement at the poll data, and suggests that it is because Obama doesn’t “wear his religion on his sleeve” that 16% of Americans believe he is a Muslim.
“Quite frankly, I’m not really sure what to make of it other than this person, although he speaks quite comfortably about his faith, doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve,…”
“It’s an important part of who he is, but it’s not an important part of his public persona.”
While this may contribute a little confusion among 16% of Americans who believe the President is a Muslim, I think Mr. Cox is ignoring the Islamophobic “elephant in the living room” (there is an Islamic pun there for those who search for it.) As mentioned earlier, there is an entire Islamophobia Industry that ceaselessly turns out blogs, books, public speakers and street thugs to depict all Muslims as evildoers who want to destroy the “Western” way of life, and replace it with an Islamic caliphate or theocracy. Moreover, many of the people who promote these conspiracy theories are religious fanatics themselves, and advocate the very things that they decry Muslims for. Rick Santorum, a prominent Muslim-basher and Birther, for example, will slip in a comment about how American law should reflect “God’s law” as enshrined in the Bible, in the midst of his anti-Muslim diatribe. He also won’t correct his supporters who claim that Obama is a Muslim to his face.
This is more than just a misunderstanding among the majority of the 16% of Americans who believe the President is a Muslim. The “white evangelical Protestant” churches have by and large become hotbeds of right-wing political ideology, and indulgers of wacky conspiracy theories, such as the “Pink Swastika.” This “theory” states that the Nazis, and fascism itself, is the culmination of a culture of “masculine homosexuality.” The more the West “tolerates” homosexuals, at the bidding of the Left, the closer we get to a totalitarian political order whereby the “true believers” will be persecuted for “telling the truth”, which also ties into their opposition to hate-crime legislation. Could this be a possible link to the ramblings of Bradlee Dean of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, that Keith Ellison was trying to implement Sharia law through a “homosexual agenda”?
“They are using the homosexuals as a political battering ram to bring forth what? Sharee [sic] law.”
These are the shared sources of the majority of people who believe the President is a Muslim. It’s not just an innocent misunderstanding as some would have us believe, but part of a well-worn and deliberate effort to attach the slur of “Mooslim” to gain political traction. Obama is the most prominent recipient of this jingoistic bigotry, but for as long as the fanatical anti-Muslim movement in the US exists there will be many more who will receive this treatment.
NABLUS (Ma’an) — A group of settlers on Thursday set fire to a car in Nablus, a PA official said.
Three settlers from Yitzhar settlement set fire to the car in Einabus village, PA official Ghassan Daghlas told Ma’an.
The owner, Zain Mustafa Allan, said the car was parked outside his home when the attack took place.
Earlier, settlers threw rocks at Palestinian cars driving near Yitzhar settlement, Daghlas said.
The Nablus district experienced the majority of settler violence in 2011, The Palestine Center says.
In 2011, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that settler attacks had increased by 50 percent on the previous year.
Settler violence against local Palestinian communities is widespread, but figures compiled by Israeli rights group Yesh Din have repeatedly shown that nine out of 10 police investigations about settler crimes fail to lead to a prosecution.
The Golden Dawn sure are making a name for themselves and I bet the Islamophobes love their antics. (h/t:HSMoghul)
The parliament that was elected on May 6 also convened for a brief session on Thursday, when lawmakers from the far-right Golden Dawn party marched into parliament for the first time.
Deputies from the party, whose members give Nazi-style salutes, refused to stand when three Muslim lawmakers were sworn in on the Koran during the oath ceremony.
You will recall that there was similar outrage in the US, mainly from Right-wingers when Keith Ellison was sworn into Congress with his hand on the Quran. Recall that one of the leading hate-mongers, Robert Spencer remarked,
“I hope there will be some who have the courage to point out that no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an.”
ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek voters are returning to the establishment parties that negotiated its bailout, a poll showed on Thursday, offering potential salvation for European leaders who say a snap Greek election next month will decide whether it must quit the euro.
The poll, the first conducted since talks to form a governmentcollapsed and a new election was called for June 17, showed the conservative New Democracy party in first place, several points ahead of the radical leftist SYRIZA which has pledged to tear up the bailout.
EU leaders say that without the bailout, Greece would be headed for certain bankruptcy and ejection from the common currency, which would sow financial destruction across the continent. The prospect SYRIZA would win the election has sent the euro and markets across the continent plummeting this week.
The poll predicted New Democracy would win 26.1 percent of the vote compared to 23.7 percent for SYRIZA.
Crucially, it showed that along with the Socialist PASOK party, New Democracy would have enough seats to form a pro-bailout government, which it failed to win in an election on May 6, forcing a new vote and prompting a political crisis that has put the future of the euro in doubt.
Polls last week had showed SYRIZA well in front, with anti-bailout voters rallying behind its charismatic 37-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras. First place comes with a bonus of 50 extra seats in the 300-seat parliament, so even a tiny edge would be pivotal in determining who forms the next government.
The election is still a month away, and Greek voters have been fickle. Experts warned against drawing any strong conclusions from a single poll. Nevertheless, a trend that had shown SYRIZA surging ahead appears to have turned.
“It seems people vented their anger in the election and then they got scared. They disliked that there was no government and they got worried about a possible exit from the euro,” political analyst John Loulis said of the surprise poll result.
“Still, voters are far from enthusiastic with New Democracy. Things are still volatile. The outcome of the elections will depend on who will make the fewest mistakes.”
Rating agency Fitch underscored the high stakes, downgrading Greece’s debt a further notch below investment grade to CCC.
“In the event that the new general elections scheduled for 17 June fail to produce a government with a mandate to continue with the EU-IMF program of fiscal austerity and structural reform, an exit of Greece from (the euro) would be probable,” the ratings agency said in a statement.
Earlier on Thursday Tsipras predicted his party would sweep next month’s election and refused to give up his demand for an end to “barbaric” austerity policies he said were bankrupting the nation.
“They are trying to terrorize the people to make SYRIZA cave in. We will never compromise,” the ex-Communist student leader told his party’s lawmakers, often addressing them as “comrades”.
“We will never participate in a government to rescue the bailout,” he said. “The Greek people voted for an end to the bailout and barbaric austerity. They ignored the threats and the cheap propaganda. And we are certain they will do the same now.”
“HUMILIATING EXIT”
An emergency government led by a judge and made up of mainly professors, technocrats and a few politicians was sworn in on Thursday in a ceremony presided over by the Archbishop Ieronimos of Athens.
The government has been tasked solely with taking the country to the next election and will not be permitted to take political decisions, meaning Greece will fall further behind on the reforms it has pledged to carry out to receive rescue loans.
At his first cabinet meeting, caretaker Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos told ministers they would receive no salary and urged them to dispense with frills like limousines or business trips.
The parliament that was elected on May 6 also convened for a brief session on Thursday, when lawmakers from the far-right Golden Dawn party marched into parliament for the first time.
Deputies from the party, whose members give Nazi-style salutes, refused to stand when three Muslim lawmakers were sworn in on the Koran during the oath ceremony.
The parliament is expected to be dissolved later this week ahead of the election in June.
With the current obsession with paedophiles which seems to occupy the EDL’s every waking minute, you would think that English Defence League leader and deputy leader of the British Freedom Party, Tommy Robinson would try and avoid Tweeting fifteen year old girls and telling them they are ‘pretty fit for a Muslim’.
After realising that he had made a ‘mistake’ you would have thought that Tommy would apologise immediately instead of attacking the schoolgirl by calling her scum and setting his vile followers, the EDL casuals including EDL Twitter attack dog, Becky Marsh, on her.
Did Tommy’s need to make racist mysogynistic remarks to a Muslim cloud his judgement or is there something he is not telling us?
Maybe all that time spent with Richard Price has rubbed off on him but we at EDL News feel Tommy has some explaining to do to CEOPs.
What we can guarantee is EDL members will be extremely quiet about this and a stark contrast to how they would foam if a Muslim had Tweeted that.
We await a demo outside Tommy’s house but will not be holding our breath, because the average EDL member have proven time and time again that they have little interest in white paedophiles.
(We have obfuscated the girl’s name, photo and Twitter address because of her age)
Clearly panicking Robinson went on to claim the schoolgirl was not 15, even though her date of birth was on her profile. Robinson then went on to delete the Tweet.
Not content with shaming himself enough on one day and despite knowing her age, Robinson goes on to accuse the schoolgirl of flirting with him. Being a ballsy young Asian women who is not going to put up with sex pests, she went on to kick him from one end of Twitter to the other and the #tommyisapaedo hashtag started trending.
Tommy’s response got more and more vile:
As did the response from many of his supporters including Becki Marsh, cheerleader for the EDL’s football hooligan division, The casuals.
These would be the people who would be calling for the hanging of Muslims if they make sexual advances towards a schoolgirl on Twitter.
A Paterson mosque backs out of a meeting with an FBI official, saying the timing is “too sensitive.”
A community leader who worships in Teaneck says he rarely calls his law enforcement sources anymore.
College students in Piscataway are advised what to do if they are questioned by federal agents.
A sense of anxiety and unease continues to grip some members of the Muslim community in the fallout from the New York Police Department’s surveillance controversy — and that distrust has undermined cooperation with law enforcement agencies that rely on Arab- and Muslim-Americans as partners in the fight against homegrown terrorism, some local leaders say.
“I would tell people not to cooperate,” said Khader Abuassab, a leader of the Arab American Civic Organization in Paterson. “I can’t promise people they will be safe or not be spied on again.”
“You start to wonder after a while: Is everyone out to get us?” said Iqbal Khan, president of the Dar-ul-Islah mosque in Teaneck, noting that people develop a defensiveness that comes from being watched. “Who is going to look after us?”
But some Muslims who live and work in South Paterson said their views of law enforcement have not changed. Samer Abdallah, a business owner, said Muslims have been watched more closely than other communities since Sept. 11, but he does not hold it against police who are doing their jobs.
“We all need law enforcement to help us,” he said. “We’re never going to feel hatred toward those officials. They’re taking orders.”
The NYPD surveillance program targeted Muslims at businesses, universities and mosques, including one in Paterson and several in Newark, as well as student groups at 16 Northeast colleges, including Rutgers University. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Police Department have defended the spying program — first detailed in a series of articles by The Associated Press — as lawful and necessary, while civic groups and some lawmakers have called for investigations into civil rights and jurisdictional matters. The U.S. and New Jersey attorneys general are reviewing the requests, but have made no commitments to investigate.
New Jersey law enforcement officials have expressed fears that any backlash will hurt their counterterrorism operations and information gathering, but NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the idea that law enforcement operations would be harmed is “preposterous.”
“The notion that somehow the Islamic community or Muslim community at large is a wellspring of information about terrorist plots makes no sense,” Browne said in an interview Tuesday.
He said information about terrorist activity was “closely held” and that it was unfair to assume that average Muslims would have insight into terrorist plots.
“It’s not something they’re telling everybody going to religious services or mentioning it at the grocery store,” he said.
Browne said the NYPD had good relations with the Muslim community that extended from holiday celebrations to sports leagues to police officer recruitment. But for tips on terrorism, he said, police rely on other sources, such as people who rent trucks or sell blasting materials.
“What has been most effective, in terms of bringing terrorists to justice, have been undercover operations,” Browne said.
Law enforcement officials in New Jersey, though, have maintained that cooperation from Muslims is a pivotal part of counterterrorism work. Michael Ward, FBI special agent in charge in Newark, said in March that the agency was losing credibility with Muslims who have embraced and aided the counterterrorism mission, creating “additional risks.”
Muslim-Americans tipped off law enforcement in at least a third of the 161 terror plots discovered since the attacks, a 2011 study by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found.
“We can’t rely totally on tips from the community, but the community is a force multiplier and I feel their input is vital,” said Maj. Gerald Lewis, head of state police community affairs.
Despite reports of a backlash, Lewis said he has not noticed a shift in attitudes among Muslim leaders and that they continue to meet and talk by phone.
“Our relationship remains strong,” he said.
Mohamed Younes, president of the American Muslim Union in Paterson, also said the relationship hadn’t suffered. He noted that many of New Jersey’s top state and federal law enforcement leaders were at the group’s March 18 annual brunch in Teaneck. They also held a meeting March 3 in Trenton to talk about the surveillance controversy with Muslim leaders.
“I can see they are really committed to try to solve those problems,” Younes said.
But while Mahmoud Attallah, public relations director for the Omar Mosque in Paterson, said he did not blame New Jersey officials for the surveillance, the mosque canceled a meeting with Ward because the timing was “too sensitive.”
The mosque – a target of NYPD surveillance – wanted to avoid negative publicity, he said.
“We didn’t want to press the point just to bring it into the open,” he said.
Still, he wants a review of the surveillance to learn whether detectives had good reasons for watching the Omar Mosque, and the results must be made public, Attallah said.
Fear of authorities is a real concern for immigrants who grew up in countries where police abuses were rampant, said Samar Khalaf, an Arab-American activist from Paramus. Khalaf, who has done frequent outreach with law enforcement, said people are withdrawing as a result of surveillance concerns.
“We’re talking about people who come from nations with no civil rights at all, and who live daily with secret police,” Khalaf said. “They don’t know the difference. They don’t make any distinction. All they know is police are monitoring us.”
Some Muslim leaders are leveraging their power as participants in the fight against terrorism.
Waheed Khalid, a community activist and member of the Dar-ul-Islah mosque in Teaneck, said conversations with law enforcement – from passing on profiling complaints to courtesy calls to requests for information – had slowed.
“I have contacts in law enforcement and we still talk, with much less frequency,” he said.
Aref Assaf of the American Arab Forum suggested in an April 29 column in The Record that the Muslim community boycott law enforcement until they see a commitment to investigate.
“We believe there is a role this community has and must play in combating radicals, but also we think there’s not reciprocity between us and law enforcement in terms of building trust and respect,” he said in an interview.
Concerns about surveillance and civil rights prompted the Rutgers Muslim Student Association to host a “Know Your Rights” session last month at the Piscataway campus. Civil rights lawyer Engy Abdelkader, who led the session, advised students to have an attorney present when questioned by law enforcement so that questions, and answers, are not misinterpreted.
But Abdelkader also said she didn’t agree with calls for a boycott.
“I don’t think it’s justified discontinuing our cooperation with law enforcement,” she said. “I think we have an obligation to cooperate.”
Everyone knows the Taliban are just the Afghan version of the Pat Robertson’s of the world, right? Pat Robertson was asked on air by a concerned Christian named “Jenny” about a moral quandary she had relating to her roommate’s “Buddha statue.”
Jenny: My friend who is a Christian has a Buddha statue next to her Christian ones. Is this ok?
Pat Robertson, who always speaks Biblically gave a pretty unequivocal answer, “Destroy it.”
Pat Robertson: No its not. Take it away and break it. Break it! Destroy it.
So the message is Christian statues are OK but not Buddhist ones, oh and don’t respect the property of other peoples!
Here at WITWM, we frown upon all acts of religious desecration. When the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March of 2001 it was not only unIslamic but immoral on many levels. Now Pat Robertson is calling for similar measures, can one imagine if a Muslim Imam had said something similar? As of now there is barely a peep about this. (h/t Critical Dragon)
The Greek neo-Nazi party, The Golden Dawn has won 7% of the vote in Greece. According to Neni Panourgia, members of the Golden Dawn were also a part of the massacres in Srebrenica, Bosnia (h.t: HSMoghul),
Golden Dawn gained notoriety after 1991, when it started attacking the first Albanian immigrants and after some of its members participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The organisation registered as a political party in 1993 and first won political representation in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council.
Neni describes the Golden Dawn as a “European problem”:
New York, New York - By now, nearly everybody has been exposed to the phenomenon of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi in Greek), the neo-Nazi organisation that received almost 7 per cent of the vote in the Greek elections of May 6.
After the initial shock, the question “How is this possible?” was followed by the legitimate worry: “Are Greeks becoming fascists?” Some commentators on various blogs (many of them from northern and western Europe) even left messages urging the Greek electorate to feel shame, the deeper the better, for this unsightly and frightening development.
But let’s set a few things straight. First of all, Golden Dawn, despite its recent claims, is indeed a neo-Nazi party. Their ideology, which they describe on their website as “Popular and Social Nationalism”, gives their precise coordinates within Nazi ideology.
So do the origins of their party, which was founded by Nikolaos Michaloliakos in 1985 under a direct order from the imprisoned leader of the Greek junta, George Papadopoulos. And so do their self-representation, language and tactics. The official publication of Golden Dawn runs articles praising the Nazis and often places photographs of Hitler, Himmler, and Nazi gatherings on its front cover. The members of the organisation have the same uneducated, invented, and highly idiosyncratic understanding of ancient Greece as the Nazis did.
And their tactics are virtually indistinguishable from Nazi terrorist tactics: they terrorise immigrants, leftists, and journalists; they beat and maul teachers and students; they have infiltrated athletic clubs and have introduced hooliganism to the Greek landscape; and they have assumed the role of vigilantes and protectors of the general public. Some of those attacks have been documented, and the Golden Dawn-affiliated perpetrators have gone on trial and been imprisoned.
The history of the organisation is inextricably connected to the history of Michaloliakos, whose first public intervention in 1976 was an attack on journalists who were covering the funeral of the junta torturer Evangelos Mallios, who had been executed by the urban guerrilla organisation 17 November. Arrested and briefly detained, Michaloliakos met the leaders of the military junta in jail. Two years after his release he engaged in a series of bombings of public places in Athens, for which he was indicted. Golden Dawn gained notoriety after 1991, when it started attacking the first Albanian immigrants and after some of its members participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The organisation registered as a political party in 1993 and first won political representation in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council.
It is doubtful, however, whether the 21 Golden Dawn deputies will ever enter the Greek parliament (legally, that is). We now know that no coalition government can be formed (without a gross violation of the Constitution), which means that new elections will be held, probably on June 17. Yesterday’s polls showed that 76 per cent of the Greek electorate expects Golden Dawn to lose most of its vote, with a large number of those polled expressing doubts that it would even win the 3 per cent needed to enter parliament.
Two questions remain, however, regardless of whether Golden Dawn ever enters parliament. The first one is a question of democracy: namely, what sorts of legitimate steps are available to democratic polities when they face the development of a totalitarian, racist, exclusionary formulation that actively engages in violent acts that severely restrict the civil and human rights of others? I argue that when a state is faced not simply with ideas but with themateriality of actions, then the state is obligated to outlaw them and the media are obligated to report on them. In Greece this is a multiply complex issue, since what I suggest was used from the beginning of the 20th century as the groundwork upon which the elimination of the left took place, based on fabricated accusations.
A second question remains: Why would Greeks, who fought against totalitarianism in massive numbers and paid one of the heaviest tolls in Europe for their participation in the resistance against Nazi Germany, vote for this despicable, emetic, and deeply anti-political formation, even as a protest?
What we need to keep in mind is that this tolerance of violence in the public sphere, especially violence that is directed towards the unarmed and the unprotected, is the result of the state’s long-term suppression of dissent and the collaboration of the police forces with right-wing extremists whose violent tactics the police have used. This tolerance is evident even in mundane instances, such as when, in 1999, the ludicrous Gerasimos Yakoumatos, a deputy and member of the centre-right New Democracy party, wanting to show the Minister of Public Order that he “meant business”, walked into Parliament brandishing his (legally obtained) revolver as protest for his house having been burglarised by immigrants the previous evening. Not only was this tolerated, but he was not arrested and was not in any way reprimanded.
The Greek polity has always found itself in a tug-of-war. On one end, there is a wide, democratic, proceduralist, but largely powerless (and ultimately apathetic) body politic. On the other end, there is a small but powerful authoritarian class that constitutes the core of state structures. Decades of brutal suppression of dissent has relied upon various para-state and paramilitary organisations. Police brutality, hooliganism, and the deep-seated intimacy between fragments of the police force and Golden Dawn have made the organisation’s temporary surge possible.
There is no right, centre, or left distinction in this, if by left one means the nominally socialist PASOK party. All post-junta Greek governments have availed themselves of this intimate relationship, as all Greek governments, at least from the early years of the 20th century, have invested more energy and resources into producing a polity that relies on snitches and turncoats than in producing responsible, accountable, and democratically minded citizens. For example, in the summer of 2002, as the dismantling of 17 November was taking place, the Greek prime minister – clearly at the behest of the British and the American antiterrorist secret services – asked the citizens to report anyone who appeared to be suspicious and dangerous.
A month ago I wrote in the Anthropology Newsletter about the claim that under the current circumstances in Europe, in which the social welfare state is being eviscerated and the destitute are pitted against the poor, the distinction between right and left is no longer useful. I argue, however, that it is precisely now that the elision of such a distinction is pregnant with dangers that the world has faced before.
The neo-cons, the neo-fascists, and the neo-Nazis have been selectively appropriating leftist discourses and practices in order to obscure and obfuscate the distinctions between left and right. Michaloliakos, the coddled child of the junta, uses the term “junta” pejoratively (to indicate the totally inept but democratically elected Greek government, the press, and the memorandum), calls the actions of Golden Dawn “national resistance” when he instigates violence against immigrants and politicians, and has warned about an “uprising of the masses”.
Europe stands on the head of a needle, steeped in a crisis that threatens the foundational premises of democracy, self-determination, and autonomy. Golden Dawn is a European problem, not a limited and containable Greek one. It is a European problem because its ideology developed and flourished in Germany and Italy of the early 20th century. It is not a “natural”, essential, ontological property of Greece, and it is intractably connected to the moralistic and punitive positions that have organised the actions of the troika that put the bailout packages together.
When people are pushed to the brink, ugly things happen, and the troika (and particularly Merkel) ought never to forget the warning of George Santayana: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it”.
In May of 2005 I joined a group of students and activists to watch a documentary entitled Paul Robeson: Here I Stand. Paul Robeson was an American political figure, though he remains virtually unknown by most in his home country. Many might recognize him from a booklet of stamps published by the United States Postal Service, entitled “African-Americans on Stamps: A celebration of African-American Heritage”. The booklet opens with Robeson’s smiling face, and states: “By the late 1930s, [Robeson] had become very active and outspoken on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and international peace.” This is true. He was also exiled from the United States, his citizenship revoked and then re-instated; he was poisoned with drugs and tortured with electric-shock therapy, the latter while under American supervision in hospital custody in London. He was repeatedly forced to defend himself during the Communist witch-hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He died in relative obscurity in 1977. For any group that has suffered similar treatment, this will sound all too familiar.
Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat (written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the toil and strife of the black slave working the gambling ferry boats:
Colored folks work on de Mississippi, Colored folks work while de white folks play, Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset, Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.
In the score this refrain is marked optional; replaced with “[a] musical part” depending on the whim of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not comfortable with this rendition. This “comfort level” is the driving force of acceptance of Othered minorities as citizens, as well as their presence within cultural manifestations and national mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full freedom.
From this vantage point, the recent presidential election takes on a different significance, the opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic event has taken place with the election of a black American as marking a “post-race” America. Barack Obama’s election instead represents a similar “limit of tolerance”, based on the behavior, thought, and action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new “ideal” on the other hand, wholly separate from actions which make him hard to differentiate from his predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this light, not a contradiction.
One month before the election in 2008 I stopped into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama along with statements of pride and hope. “My President Is Black” read one, against the backdrop of an American flag, and with the words “The American Dream” on the reverse. This explosion in production of T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview of the Democratic National Committee[1] bears witness more to the weight placed on Obama’s shoulders than belief in “Hope” or “Change”. On the wall of the shop was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama’s perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama’s future we simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and globalized nightmare.
Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image as well as in word and deed something much closer to the reality of lived life for many in the country, as stated in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in 1964:
No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare….
Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes’s The Dream Deferred[2]; they implicitly contain the projection of what might happen if the dream is put off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an Obama presidency.
Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein as a “lifelong criminal” who did time in prison before his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his assassination, perhaps due to his description of the assassination of John Kennedy as America’s “chickens [coming] home to roost”. This was echoed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright[3] who said the same about the attack on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation.
Full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations
Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto[4], Gilbert Osofsky states:
What was most striking about the Negro stereotype was the way it portrayed a people in an image so totally the reverse of what Americans considered worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and traditional American values were all absent from the Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to take them; childlike in a country of men….Negroes hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations.
The condition of the American black man was a function not just of racism, but of a built-in inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the nature of the problem; an inversion in which the dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted group in question.
It is only relatively recently that we are witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time having defused any revolutionary potential here–along with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In 1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In Dahomey that was so successful it forced the racial integration of many theaters in the States. Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay from 1916 entitled “The Drama Among Black Folk”, he wrote:
In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius into the beginnings of a new drama. White people refused to support the finest of their new conceptions like the “Red Moon” and the cycle apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the growth of a considerable number of colored theatres and moving picture places, a new and inner demand for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk drama built around the actual experience of Negro American life.
This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason it could not be tolerated. Dubois’s appeals for funds for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans, as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own [not] black [enough] faces.
This inversion of Black culture through the mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the jazz-era band leader stated, “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Similarly, when listened to outside of the dominant discourse such as on the radio show L’épopée des musiques noires broadcast on Radio France Internationale[5], such artists speak openly of the racism that they suffered and which continues to plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy and Bess have replaced actual historical memory.[6]
Black to the future
This specter of white men in black face rises every so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a marker of white privilege defended as “free speech”, as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the late ’80s[7]:
The police commissioner’s management authority has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo’s June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the city did not have the right to fire a police officer and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were punished, wrote Sprizzo, “in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.” This “protected speech” involved being part of a float with the banner “Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel 2098,” which the defendants said was a parody of black racial integration into the mainly white Broad Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas two months earlier.
Although we might not remember the vaudeville circuits of the early 20th century, this news item attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an event. This legally protected “free speech” leaves no humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to black stage characters and their disempowering nicknames (Step-‘n’-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon); to the percentage of black blood in a person’s bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one’s renegade slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the “reverse” of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as powerful, and are by contrast comical in their ineffectiveness.
This brings up the main point of any such discussion of representation, which cannot be limited to its visual or aural perception: the power differential involved. Who is the audience, and where do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical, technical, and economic ability to reach them? What are the various legal rights that enable and/or impinge such communication? What is my privilege to make such a statement, and what personal, communal, moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and beyond these other aspects of such expression?
Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in hidden locations out of public view); separated primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of the political parties along racial lines; the voting down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther King (“states’ rights” makes direct reference to George Wallace’s statement of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”); the practice of diluting minority power via the gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the vote for felons; etc.
The equivalent disparity of direct expression within the culture, along similar overt as well as covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile, Alabama for singing Strange Fruit (written by Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently, black students were convicted and imprisoned for their protest and reaction to a noose[8] being hung from a tree on the school lawn; this “warning” to the black student population came after they decided to assemble underneath the “white student’s” tree.[9] A super-mediated* discussion of the word “nigger” took place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the television show Seinfeld), not happy with some black hecklers, informed them that “fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” More disturbing are the commemorative postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these “black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze”, surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses.
A share of the wealth and a piece of the action
It should thus come as no surprise that during the Democratic primaries of 2008 Andrew Cuomo made reference to Barack Obama’s “shuck and jive”, a phrase which has no meaning outside of imposed black vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness, making semantic reference to costume change, rapid dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The attorney general’s disavowal of the term as racist is contradicted by his former statement that voting for his [black] rival for the New York governor’s race, Carl McCall, would result in a “racial contract” between Black and Hispanic Democrats which “can’t happen”.[10] Similar was the statement from Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed “uppity”. Everyone who speaks American English completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that follows, explicitly referring to a black man who should “know his role”.
These terms and images are so loaded that they only need be hinted at to get the message across; even in their denial they hit the target and leave their mark. The resulting backtracking can be seen to be prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged, the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or else by labeling the targets thereof as “oversensitive”, “politically correct”, or “racist” themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble practices and codes of that time most assuredly live on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as “I would never refer to my opponent as a Communist”[11].
Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself against such provocations, and was rewarded with the presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp, indeed, few American history books represent any leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s, and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement at its core:
[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties–terms of “pride”, “ownership”, “private enterprise”, “capital”, “self-assurance”, “self-respect”… What most of these militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power….[12]
The actuality is better known: the former Black Power movement leaders have either been assassinated or put in prison, have come around to parrot the dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less, historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers: Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their white counterparts, especially in terms of politics and culture: “the black Daniel Webster” applied to Samuel Ringgold Ward, or “the black Callas”, attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, “the black Kennedy”, in a reflection of racial privilege, and the one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and political designation.
The rainbow sign
In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God gives Noah the “Rainbow Sign” that ends his estrangement from the land; however the sign comes with a warning that He is done with water, promising “the fire next time”. In his book of the same name, James Baldwin describes Malcolm X’s relationship with the United States thus:
Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.
Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby, echoes this when he states that “all the problems [on his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with without violence.” In contrast to the [acceptable] violence of Israel and England (which too has its own “Jerusalem”[13]) Baldwin reveals what is most threatening about the landless or placeless minority nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly, he reveals society’s inherent fear of those who have similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture, Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by the oppressed.
We’re here without any rights
This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern[14] Cohen states:
“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”
In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.
In economic terms, it also reveals the power differential inherent to capitalism and globalization, and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s attacks on “bling”-style rap artists–he doesn’t even admit to their more political precursors–who have managed to acquire wealth and status by following all of the lessons learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but who get punished when they become too competitive (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus rendered docile and brought within the domain of global Capital. “The trillionaire sleeping with models and actresses” is a glorified trope within American culture, so it is odd to find it given populist overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way Sasha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street.
The idea that the struggle against the colonial apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle, might somehow be simplistically reduced to “criticism” of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort. There is no point wasting time considering the cultural “flip”, in imagining an Arab or Muslim “doing the same thing” culturally speaking; there is likewise no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of “reverse racism” when such debates require a thorough examination of said expression along economic and political lines. This, the power differential of the dominant culture as portrayed by that culture’s media, is the central point of this discussion, and however we might examine it, those who are minority, who are Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such representations as they are played out within this mediated system.
A critical black gaze
As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X, despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him, could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image that survives such a pulverization[15], and as such, serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her essays[16] concerning and quoting Malcolm X:
Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.
Proclaimed “hope” or promised “change” should not derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially when this Machine has minimized minority histories to literally belittled images riding on tickets of commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash; to symbolic representations of white privilege embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more reason we must be “fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all images”.
The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism, nor in a homogenizing, “borderless”, “nomadic” neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of resistance to this dominant culture which are able to pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states:
Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation.
This requires, however, that we change our perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we radically re-orient ourselves in terms our relationship to cultural consumption and its source. These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the ability to read them as such, for having been so long out of touch with our own creative potential, and for having forgotten the formerly “local” media manifestations of guerrilla television, public access cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown theater, etc.
True to our native land
On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper[17]. Instead of the Star-Spangled Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the “black national anthem”, resulting in hate mail and an outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her decision was based on “how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person”. Further, she said that she would no longer sing the national anthem because she “often feels like a foreigner in the United States”.
The correct response of the mayor’s office should have been “this is her right; this is her freedom of speech”, like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, Lift Every Voice and Sing (words and music by John Johnson, ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the lyrics: “May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True to our native land.” This takes on a particularly humbling tone given the replacement of the previous attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes with more current almost prideful acceptances of this, their “allowed” place.
This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen’s Hollywood–the scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and described in the music of Bambu[18] among many others, and where a “beautiful” form of dance was created from the “banal” by Tommy Johnston, aka “Tommy the Clown”, borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although performed by both sexes, and used to entertain children and adults at birthday and block parties. The dance is referred to as clowning, and it went on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and reflective of street realities for a generation lost, often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities, called crumping. Both are performed by youth attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future are systemically limited.
In the documentary about this dance form called Rize![19] the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen previous expression from this community. Included in this film is the striking image of a black man now painting his face up in white clown makeup and not minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following Malcolm’s advice to “never accept images that have been created for you by someone else.”
Speak from the street
And so as Arabs and Muslims now targeted with similar minstrelsies, we do ourselves no favor when we simply smear brown paint on our brown features in order to entertain the Master in the Master’s house; we perform no beneficent action by simply parroting endless mediated exchanges with little bark and less bite. Sacha Cohen would ironically represent all of us as tinpot dictators, when it is he, culturally, politically, economically, and in terms of class and avowed ideological affiliation, who has much more in common with this fetid realm of the world stage than does the majority of Arabs and Muslims on the planet. What does Sasha Cohen know about what is going on in his own backyard, much less this world in active revolt? Indeed, it is Cohen who needs to “know his role”.
While we point out this obvious classist and racist arrogance, we must also strive to find the countervailing non-mediated* representatives that exist closer to home and which speak from the street: the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills (not Twitter) led to intifada; similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of the last kufiyyeh factory[20] in occupied and embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their unique creative contributions of craft, art, music, graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and written word, theater, etc.
For of this common resistance might rise the creative manifestations–the “new folk drama”–that feed back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen and his ilk who would define us and confine us; manifestations[21] that do not allow simply for a misconstrued and patently false “comfort level” or status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short, that do not continue to sell us out. In this is perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks of us, once the realization of such mediated deception and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy that would be better put to creative output, once we wean ourselves from the source of our own misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize the creative source all around us; a new nahdah; proving with our creative action what we already know to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in control of his own creative manifestation in concert, changed the formal and staged lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” to better frame his feelings of being an outsider within American society. It is likewise time for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own restaging.
* Mediation
Mediation defines expression as a function of the distance from direct sensorial witnessing, on a spectrum that ranges from non-mediated to super-mediated.
Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of the unsaid.
Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane Katrina, stating: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
Super-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such dominant discourse.
Example(s): The television show Cops with an episode concerning drunk driving; drivers’ education movies; a presidential press conference in the aftermath of Katrina.
Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in opposition to the dominant discourse often in its uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the tools, languages, systems, and technologies of super-mediation.
Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of various cities that represent both the individual killed in an accident and their collective whole; the Legendary K.O’s rap song set to mashup videos for “George Bush Don’t Like Black People”.
1 “Dreaming XXL”; Jake Austen. Harper’s, November 2008. pp. 58–59.
2 What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode?
3;
4 Harper Torchbooks, 1966.
5 The Story of Black Musics [sic] < http://www.rfi.fr/taxonomy/emission/187>;
6 Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To note is that “First-day” issue of stamps exists for a very particular audience that collects such stamps for their value; this is a different audience than the subject of the stamps themselves.
7;
8;
9;
10 Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo to claim “whiteness”, as opposed to his formerly equally marking ethnic identity.
11 Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities;;.
12 Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki.
13 William Blake poem and later hymn.
14;
15;
16 Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
17 USA Today, January 31, 2009; “Controversy after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem’ for ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.
18 Pull It Back:;
19 Rize!:;
20 Kufiyeh project:;
21;
Daniel Ibn Zayd was adopted in 1963 and returned definitively to his land of birth in 2004; there he teaches art and illustration and in 2009 founded the artists’ collective Jamaa Al-Yad. He has written for CounterPunch, The Monthly Review Zine, Dissident Voice, and The Design Altruism Project, as well as on his blog: danielibnzayd.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Transracial Eyes, a web-based collective of transracial adoptees. He can be reached at @ibnzayd on Twitter and by email: daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com.
This is supposed to be a positive picture of Tim Wildmon
American Family Association president Tim Wildmon says, “Islam does not teach charity.”
It is a blatant lie, since one of the five pillars of Islam is Zakat, or mandatory charitable giving. The Qur’an, if these right-wingers would ever read it is also filled with exhortations on nearly every page extolling the virtues of Sadaqah or voluntary charity.
American Family Association president Tim Wildmon today used his column praising the admirable works of Christian charitable organizations to criticize Muslims.
If there ever was a contrast in worldviews, it is with Christianity and Islam. One of the most striking differences is that Christianity teaches, practices, and encourages charity. Islam does not. It is the Christians from America who are doing the majority of the private charity and humanitarian work around the world. Just these past couple of weeks alone, I was reminded by several examples of this.
…
American Family Association/American Family Radio has been participating in this project with Gospel for Asia for several years. Why do we care about the outcast people of India? Because in the Bible, Jesus instructs us to do so.
There is no such comparable work being done around the world by Islamic groups or organizations — because the Koran does not teach such charity.
Religion, more than anything else, affects the values and morals of a culture, a society, a country.
In fact, charitable giving is one of the five pillars of Islam. Wildmon could have done a simple Google search to find the names of major Muslim charitable organizations like Islamic Relief, Red Crescent Societies and Muslim Aid, but seeing that the American Family Association is one of the most malicious purveyors of misinformation and bigotry in this country, it should come as no surprise that its leader can twist an article about the importance of charitable work into an attack on the Muslim people.
On the politics of “halal hysteria” in the UK and beyond:
by Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman)
I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.
I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.
The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.
To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.
Last month, MPs in the Commons rejected a ten-minute-rule bill that would have made it mandatory for retailers to label all of the halal and kosher meat on sale and make it clear on the packaging that the animals were “killed without stunning”. The bill’s proponent, the Tory backbencher Philip Davies, claimed that the meat was being “forced upon” shoppers “without their knowledge”. It was defeated by the narrowest of margins – 73 votes to 70.
As is so often the case, the right-wing press is behind much of the fear-mongering and misinformation. “Britain goes halal . . . but no one tells the public,” screamed the front-page headline in the Mail on Sunday on 19 September 2010. The paper claimed that supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, pubs and big sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium were “controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public”.
The following week, readers were treated to two more stories suggesting a sinister plot to inflict halal meat on innocent, animal-loving, non-Muslim Britons. “How 70 per cent of New Zealand lamb imports to Britain are halal . . . but this is NOT put on the label”, said the Daily Mail on 25 September 2010. “Top supermarkets secretly sell halal: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and M&S don’t tell us meat is ritually slaughtered,” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday the next day.
With the threat from terrorism receding, Britain’s Islam-baiters have jumped on the anti-halal bandwagon, and not just the neo-fascists of the British National Party and the English Defence League, which has a page on its website devoted to its (anti-) “halal campaign”, but mainstream commentators, too. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle – who once wrote a column entitled “Islamophobia? Count me in” – has demanded that halal meat be banned and called for a boycott of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and the rest until they agree to stop stocking halal products. “I will buy no meat from supermarkets,” he wrote, rather melodramatically, back in 2010.
When it was first revealed that anti-Islam classes were being taught by the US military we were pretty certain that the anti-Muslim authors that we are so familiar with were likely heavily cited, now it has been confirmed:
A class taught by the military to officers at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, came under fire when a report on Wired’s Danger Room blog last week exposed it for teaching soldiers to engage in a “total war” on Islam and taking a war on Islam “to the civilian population wherever necessary.”
The full set of course materials, hundreds of documents and slide shows obtained by ThinkProgress, reveal just how deep Islamophobia ran through the military instruction. The material contained dozens of citations to the work of some of America’s best known anti-Muslim bigots.
Not all of the material in the course, however, was anti-Muslim. Materials from reputable sources such as the Brookings Institution and RAND corporation also appeared among the readings, and only some of the presenters to the class used blatantly Islamophobic material. (The public affairs officer of the Joint Forces Staff College didn’t respond to repeated inquiries by press time.)
But the “Islamophobia network,” discussed in the Center for American Progress’s report, “Fear, Inc.“ played a prominent role in many of the 266 documents acquired by ThinkProgress.
The Islamophobes named are Robert Spencer, David Yerushalmi and Daniel Pipes, along with Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Right-wing anti-Muslim publications like the Washington Times and the National Review are also cited numerous times in the documents.
Roberta Moore makes a long overdue reappearance on EDL News this week for getting arrested for racial abuse and making a fool of herself at a Nakba commemoration in London on Saturday.
Moore, the former head of the English Defence League’s Jewish Division and supporter of mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, posted a long rambling blog where she claims that she was handcuffed and managed to free herself and a bizarre rant about the weight of the police officers who arrested her.
Moore and her mob, which is thought to have included terrorist supporter Robert Bartholomeus ane Joel Yossi who was also reported as being arrested, went to great pains to explain ‘they were just walking past the demo’ on the way to somewhere else and claimed they were just trying to debate but her own blog post details them throwing abuse at the protesters by calling them ‘Kapos’.
Bartholomeus has previously featured on this website for threatening to rape a female EDL member who he had a fall out with. Last year after the horrific attacks in Norway, both of them were quick to applaud the actions of Breivik and blamed his victims, denouncing them as ‘scum’.
One witness at the event in London emailed us the following:
“First time I have seen Yossi in person, he was every much the vile piece of crap I imagined him to be, He argued with an man of Arab decent and said to the child he had with him something like ‘do not grow up to be a degenerate waste of air like your father kid’ he ran his finger across his throat at anybody who spoke to him, called women “whores, sluts and Leftist animals” shouted Islamophobic hatred and then hurled sickening abuse at the Orthodox Jews who never fail to show their support for our Palestine protest.
I put the video of the arrest on youtube (link below), Yossi is wearing a black cap and coat, obviously he had calmed down a little at that point due to be constantly warned by the police.
Last week the Jewish Division posted this on their Facebook wall.
Moore, a Brazilian immigrant who is not Jewish is believed to have been released without charge. You can read her bizarre rant here:
“The coward Sgt. Walker handcuffed me tightly, as if I was a dangerous criminal, and the handcuffs were hurting my wrists. I got really outraged at this, so I discreetly removed my handcuffs but the policemen did not see it, of course. I kept my hands behind me as if I was still wearing them. When I got out of the car I told Sgt. Walker he was quite incompetent as he did not even realise I was not wearing my handcuffs anymore, and was actually holding it in my hand. If I had been a “dangerous” criminal none of them would have stood a chance!
Grinning and riding in comfort. The two good officers in this photo were outraged at my being arrested.
Once inside the office they started asking me for my details and all that palava, but still Sgt. Walker was unable to state to the officer behind the desk the real reason of my arrest and kept on mumbling that I was arrested for my own safety and for “disturbing the peace”, when I was in fact simply debating with them, and only for a few seconds at that. A disgrace for our police force!! This is a time when people can no longer debate with protesters (Principally Muslims) if they have opposing views, as they get arrested ”for their own safety”, as they claim, simply because the police are far too scared of protecting us from these vermin in our streets.
“Disturbing the peace” is just their pathetic excuse for not having to “work hard” protecting innocent members of the public from random and sudden violence from these communist and Islamofascist groups.
Logically this has once again proven that Muslims are violent scumbags and that the police is AFRAID of dealing with it. Perhaps because most of the police force is obese? This is utterly shameful for the City of London.
While I was at the van I mentioned to Sgt. Walker that I was aware the police force was facing cuts and I hoped to see him and his corrupt comrades sacked as soon as this is implemented, for they are a very useless bunch.
When in custody I noticed and mentioned that many of the police officers were really fat.
We cannot have obese police officers, as they could not even run to catch real criminals. No wonder they were scared of the Muslims. Had it been a proper confrontation, these fat officers would probably faint breathless if they ran 10 meters! And I am not surprised because as soon as I got into the police station I saw at least 4 officers munching away on cakes and biscuits while sitting down on their desks. Lack of exercise while munching non stop causes obesity, didn’t they know that?
What a disgrace for the London police! I had to smirk when I pointed out to them that Brazilian cops are slim and carry guns. Much easier to deal with criminals, but that obviously these incompetent cops could not even be trusted with one, I wouldn’t trust them even with a 22!
Rio Police officers on the beat catching a drug dealer. Fit for the job and armed.
When I got to the station, without my handcuffs on, Sgt. Walker walked in front of me (Stupid moron!) and expected me to follow him inside. I then pointed out to him that I was still holding the handcuffs and that he should have ensured he was BEHIND me, as after all I was the one arrested, right? I was the “dangerous criminal”, right? What a joke they were!
Jokingly I told him, “Ladies first!”, so I volunteered to go in front of him, since he seems to have forgotten his manners in the toilets of his shack, and even his intelligence.
The moron took my phone and took the battery out for a bit, since I was getting calls from my friends. I pointed out to him that I was filming everything and that he had LIED to the officer behind the desk. He had told them I ‘swore’ when I didn’t. The dirty Arab who insulted me swore at me and my colleagues, made threats about raping me, and anti-Semite Sgt. Walker totally ignored it. So he lied and exposed himself as a man without honour or morals. He lied to justify his arrest. I made sure I told him 4 times he was a pathetic individual and understandably he did not argue with me of course.
After taking my belongings, Sgt Walker found some dog biscuits inside my bag. He asked me what was that for, so I told him that I thought he might be hungry and offered him a few. He said: “Very funny”. Well it was, as I could swear he was mouthwatering over those gravy meaty biscuits.
He also removed my camera (The one I used to film everything), my money, my bank cards, etc… and after taking two of my gold rings, one with encrusted diamonds, my gold magen David necklace, and my Michal Negrin’s earrings, oh yes and my belt, I was feeling quite bare. The only thing I did not allow them to take from me was my black and red African “juju” (candomble) bracelet, as it is a powerful magical talisman that was consecrated and given to me by a powerful medium many years ago. Unholy hands cannot touch it.
He had to register everything he took in the police computer to have me sign for it. He referred to my gold rings as ‘Yellow Metal’, instead of gold and after complaining that they were GOLD and not ‘yellow metal’ he refused to change it because according to him I could be telling him anything.
I then had to point out to the ignorant fool the goldmark of my belongings.
I told them I expected to have it all back intact, since these guys can steal your stuff and pretend it disappeared somewhere. Maybe this is why they don’t like to list the proper value of the things they temporarily confiscate.
I was then allocated a cell. Quite nice and clean by the way. I was impressed. Since I had never been arrested before, I was quite amused. The only complaint I have is that these perverts have cameras facing the toilet inside the cells. G-d knows what they do when they watch female prisoners going to the loo. It is creepy.
When inside the cell I started exploring my surroundings… not much of it but still, interesting. Frankly I was a bit tired because of a late night before, so I decided to sleep for a bit. I must have slept for 1 hour or so and when I woke up I started playing with a metal thing with a button on the wall. I pressed it a few times while I was cleaning it with a paper tower. All of a sudden an officer appears at the door and lifts the window. So he says to me: “Hello”. I said hello back and continued to clean the button. He kept looking at me and I asked: “What can I do for you”? He said: “You called me”. I said, “I didn’t. How would I have called you?” He said: “This button on the wall, when you press it, you call an officer.”
I said, “Oh, I didn’t know it! You can go now. I don’t need you”. So he left and I went to meditate in the cell for a bit.
I got disturbed some 20 mins later by someone offering me food. I refused it and told them I don’t eat Halal. And 5 minutes later another officer comes and tells me I am free to go.
I argued a bit because I was expecting them to interview me and charge me with whatever they had accused me of, so I made him call my solicitor. He got me out of the cell and told me the solicitor was on the phone. I spoke to him and the solicitor told me they could not charge me with anything so they had to let me go. Hmmmm….. disappointing really. But they did apologize though. They also apologized for making me late since I was hosting guests for dinner and just about made it in time.
Furthermore they noticed the injuries done on my wrist because of the handcuffs being so tight and offered for me to see a nurse, which I refused. They were just scratches and I did not need a nurse, principally since I did not keep the damn things on for long anyway, as I had removed them as soon as they put them on me.
During my time in custody, two nice officers started expressing their disgust with his colleague for arresting me, and started dishing out some real dirt about the police force. They were outraged that they had to bow to political correctness in several things, including not able to chase after a criminal (They said this when I mentioned that most of the officers I saw inside were obese) and they also mentioned that they are not allowed to stop a druggie from injecting himself with drugs, even in front of them. (The druggies from Antifa, UAF and others might be very excited to hear that.)
Among the few things they told me in confidence, they also mentioned that some of their colleagues were indeed scared of Muslim violence and rather take me away than face their wrath. And to make things worse, they were understaffed and facing huge cuts in the force.
So there you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. These officers just confirmed everything I suspected. It felt good to know that there are still some good guys with a conscience inside, and very sad to know that apart from some, the rest of the force is corrupted by political correctness and forced to bow down to Islamonazis due to fear of their aggressiveness, although it seems the cowards are found more often at the top of the chain.
I have to say, I enjoyed calling the Neturei Karta kapos as “traitors” and telling them in Hebrew: “Atem lo yehudim” (You are not Jewish). I don’t think they could understand Hebrew though. Either that or they were on heavy anti-depressant or other kinds of drugs, which is the norm among their community.
However the good news is that the tide is turning and that he made me aware that there are many disagreements in the force now. The people are waking up and officers are also turning against the political correct government. They are also afraid of Islamization and many of them are standing up against their peers on this matter. So expect some very welcome changes soon.”
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were today (Friday) found guilty of war crimes.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.
The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.
Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.
This verdict does not currently have any sort of enforcement power behind it but the hope is that it will be taken up by the International Court,
War crimes expert and lawyer Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, was part of the prosecution team.
After the case he said: “This is the first conviction of these people anywhere in the world.”
While the hearing is regarded by some as being purely symbolic, human rights activist Boyle said he was hopeful that Bush and Co could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world.
“We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government, then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland. The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.”
Boyle then referenced the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal when asked about the credibility of the initiative in Malaysia. He quoted: “Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.”
The US is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter said Boyle who also believes the week-long trial was “almost certainly” being monitored closely by both Pentagon and White House officials.
Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution said: “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”.
He added that he was optimistic the tribunal would be followed up elsewhere in the world where “countries have a duty to try war criminals” and he cited the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes.
“Pinochet was only eight years out of his presidency when that happened.”
The Pinochet case was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.
Throughout the week the tribunal was packed with legal experts and law students as witnesses gave testimony and then cross examination by the defence led by lawyer Jason Kay Kit Leon.
The court heard how
· Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
· Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall.
· Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
· Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.
The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.
Moazzam Begg, now working as a director for the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners said he was delighted with the verdict, but added: “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember those tried were all prosecuted after the war.
“Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”
In response to questions about the difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations, he added: “If President Bush was the President of extra-judicial torture then US President Barak Obama is the President of extra judicial killing through drone strikes. Our work has only just begun.”
The prosecution case rested on proving how the decision-makers at the highest level President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, aided and abetted by the lawyers and the other commanders and CIA officials – all acted in concert. Torture was systematically applied and became an accepted norm.
According to the prosecution, the testimony of all the witnesses exposed a sustained perpetration of brutal, barbaric, cruel and dehumanising course of conduct against them.
These acts of crimes were applied cumulatively to inflict the worst possible pain and suffering, said lawyers.
The president of the tribunal Tan Sri Dato Lamin bin Haji Mohd Yunus Lamin, found that the prosecution had established beyond a “reasonable doubt that the accused persons, former President George Bush and his co-conspirators engaged in a web of instructions, memos, directives, legal advice and action that established a common plan and purpose, joint enterprise and/or conspiracy to commit the crimes of Torture and War Crimes, including and not limited to a common plan and purpose to commit the following crimes in relation to the “War on Terror” and the wars launched by the U.S. and others in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
President Lamin told a packed courtroom: “As a tribunal of conscience, the Tribunal is fully aware that its verdict is merely declaratory in nature. The tribunal has no power of enforcement, no power to impose any custodial sentence on any one or more of the 8 convicted persons. What we can do, under Article 31 of Chapter VI of Part 2 of the Charter is to recommend to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission to submit this finding of conviction by the Tribunal, together with a record of these proceedings, to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
“The Tribunal also recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of all the 8 convicted persons be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.
“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions if any of these Accused persons may enter their jurisdictions”.
Shouldn’t the United States of America Defence League (USADL for short) spell “defence” with an “s” as in “defense”? Just saying, it doesn’t seem very, as George W. Bush would say, ‘Merican to spell it with a “c.”
Bill Turner
If you thought Captain America was leading this “defence league,” you’d be wrong, it’s a chap by the name of Bill Turner, who used to moonlight in the anti-Islam Twitterverse as “Jihadihunter.” Turner is the “national director” of this offshoot of the UK-based EDL. Turner titled his first press release introducing the organization, “The Crusade Begins.”
Phew, and here I was thinking it was going to be some sort of bigoted, Anders-Breivik-esque, Christian-identity hate group! Glad that’s cleared up!
Bill Turner and the USADL, like all the other extremist anti-Muslim leaders and organizations in the so-called “counter-jihad” claim to be acting in defense of “human rights”:
[USADL is] a human rights organization that was founded in the defense of our nation and to stand in unison with the EDL and other such organizations, to halt the spread of Sharia law.
Defenders of the nation, fighters for freedom, where else have we heard such claims? Oh right, the KKK.
The USADL’s goal is essentially missionary. They seek to “inform” the public about the “true” nature of Islam, to provide a,
“more realistic and less sanitized view of Islam…”
While the USADL’s mission statement gives the necessary caveat, much like the EDL claims to that it is not against “Muslims” and warns against assuming that all Muslims are guilty of committing acts of terrorism (aren’t they merciful!?), it goes on to say that,
“the Islamic book of worship calls for all Muslims to participate in Jihad, in one form or another.”
The ADL (not to be confused with the USADL) notes that Turner is “well known” on right-wing websites already for his conspiratorial rantings about the government,
USADL’s National Director is Bill Turner, who is known for his anti-government and conspiratorial writings, which have been published on a number of right-wing websites and disseminated through his Twitter handle, “JihadiHunter.”
While anti-Muslim bias has been a primary theme in his writings as well, Turner’s role in launching the USADL suggests that he is gearing up to advance a more conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda.
USADL’s website indicates that membership is open to all who “recognize the threat that Sharia Law poses to free people everywhere.” Although it is still too early to confirm the size and viability of the new organization, it already claims to have approximately 60 members.
I expect the USADL’s membership will increase as the usual suspects join its cause.
Already the nut jobs at the hate site BareNakedIslam are celebrating with all caps in the title, you can feel their adulation, FINALLY! USA DEFENCE LEAGUE. You will recall that BareNakedIslam is the same site that called for the murder of Muslim worshippers at mosques, so they will fit in nicely as “Crusader” drones in the USADL.
That the NYPD was profiling Muslims based on their religion is an indisputable fact, but King of course can’t and won’t admit it. His entire political career at the moment hinges on the “radicalization of Muslim Americans” myth:
The lies are not a surprise, but reporters need to do a better job at challenging politicians like King.
Representative Peter King (R-NY) said Monday during an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien that “there is no racial profiling” by the New York Police Department.
The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza asked King first what he thought of profiling as a practice, and then insinuated that perhaps King’s staunch defense of everything NYPD is problematic.
House Democrats Thursday introduced a resolution calling on the NYPD to end programs that infiltrated mosques and spied on innocent muslims.
King responded to Lizza, “First of all, there is no profiling. And that’s the absolute nonsense that people like you and others are propagating.”
Lizza quickly defended his question. “I’m not propagating anything,” he said. “I’m just telling you that there’s been some very good questions raised about what the NYPD’s doing. ”
King replied, “I’m telling you there is no profiling. So, I want you to take that back…. You have no evidence of profiling at all. They use terms like profiling, spying, casually and cavalierly. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And when guest anchor Brooke Baldwin interjected that Izza was just brining up some valid points, King responded emphatically, “They’re not valid points!”
King and fellow New York Republican Rep. Bob Turner demanded Democrats apologize for the resolution Friday, issuing a statement that read, “We are utterly dumbfounded and shocked that after such a slanderous attack, the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats and the entire Democratic leadership voted for the Holt amendment and against the NYPD. We believe the Democrats owe New York and the NYPD an explanation for their shameful surrender to political correctness.”
This isn’t the first time King–who chairs the House’s Homeland Security Committee and who has held hearings on the radicalization of Islam in the US– has defended the NYPD from criticism over its surveillance of muslim communities.
In March, when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie criticized the NYPD’s operations in Newark, King responded, “It’s really disturbing and disappointing to have someone like Chris Christie join on this politically correct bandwagon. I wish Chris Christie was more concerned about keeping people alive than he is about trying to score cheap political points.”
Also in March, King joined the narrator of “The Third Jihad” at a rally held by muslims in defense of NYPD surveillance of muslims.
I am not even sure if Shifren is still a Jew, how can he say this and remain a Jew, perhaps he is a “self-hating” Jew?:
… I AM an Islamophobe, and everything we need to know about Islam, we learned on 9-11! I believe in peace and justice for everybody – but that’s not why they’re here…. We’re getting sucker-punched because we as white – yes I said it! – as white, Christian Americans are being taught that somehow WE are to blame for all the problems.
Clearly he didn’t mean to say that he is a “Christian,” maybe he forgot to add the “Judeo” part?
San Mateo, CA — In the US Senate primary in California on June 5th, where 23 candidates vie to challenge Senator Dianne Feinstein in November, conservative candidates were recorded on videoverbally attacking teachers, Muslims, and minority groups to excite their base at GOP and Tea Party venues.
The video was recorded at a “Get to Know Your Candidates” event hosted by the San Mateo GOP at the American Legion Hall here. Dr. David Levitt, the candidate who recorded the event, reports unmasked homophobia, Islamophobia, and racism in the Republicans’ speeches.
In the video Republican candidate Rabbi Shifren cries, “… I AM an Islamophobe, and everything we need to know about Islam, we learned on 9-11! I believe in peace and justice for everybody – but that’s not why they’re here…. We’re getting sucker-punched because we as white – yes I said it! – as white, Christian Americans are being taught that somehow WE are to blame for all the problems.”
In October 2010 Nachum Shifren visited the UK to express his solidarity with the English Defence League, joining them for ademonstration in support of Israel and against “Islamic fascism” at which he was the main speaker. Fired up by Shifren’s Islamophobic rhetoric – he described Muslims as “dogs” who were trying to “take over our countries” – three EDL members attacked an Islamic literature stall and were later convicted of public order offences, with one of them receiving a seven-day prison sentence and a five-year CRASBO.
Last week, the Kansas Senate became the latest state to enact a discriminatory measure against Muslims in America by passing a so-called Sharia ban. The bill goes before Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who has not indicated whethere he will sign or veto it.
Oklahoma passed a Sharia ban by ballot in 2010, but that measure has been deemed facially unconstitutional by the courts because it specifically targets Muslims for discrimination. Because of Oklahoma’s experience, state legislatures are moving bills that are more oblique about their discriminatory intent. South Dakota, Louisiana, Arizona, and Tennessee have all passed laws that ban “foreign law in American courts” and don’t mention Muslims or Sharia by name.
Kansas’ proposed anti-Muslim law also similarly asserts it is about promoting “American law for American courts.” (Note: the Constitution already establishes this in its Supremacy Clause.) Kansas Republican state Sen. Chris Steineger noted, the measure was “presented” to him as a billspecifically targeting Muslims:
But Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said a marketing campaign by supporters of the bill inundated him with materials that “explain why sharia law is coming and Muslims are trying to take over America.”
“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time, and I still do,” Steineger said. “I pointed this out, because this was not presented as protecting the Kansas Constitution. The proponents of this measure, clearly by the literature they gave me and by the video link they directed me to, they presented this as protecting us against sharia law. Despite the fact that this doesn’t mention sharia, that’s how this whole issue was presented.”
Indeed, Kansas was bombarded by anti-Sharia emails and letters from out-of-staters. The bill’s sponsors and advocates proclaimed that it was really about protecting “women’s rights.” The bill helps “women know the rights they have in America,” said sate Rep. Peggy Mast (R). “To me, this is a women’s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle (R). Nevermind that these same legislators have been engaged in a war against women’s health, Planned Parenthood, the right to choose, and so many other far more relevant “women’s rights” causes.
Right-wing legislators have been pushing Sharia bans across the country; roughly 20 other states are also considering similar legislation. The anti-Sharia legislative movement was spawned by David Yerushalmi, an influential Islamophobic lawyer who we profiled last year in Fear, Inc.
The anti-Sharia movement continues despite the fact that no evidence has been provided that there is any threat that a Sharia takeover is occurring. Kansas Republican state Sen. John Vratil “said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.” As Vratil asserted, “Ladies and gentleman, this isa solution in search of a problem.” True, unless you are someone who views the increasing presence of Muslims in America as the problem.
Books and articles on Islam are pretty good business these days, just ask Robert Spencer.
Tom Holland’s most recent book takes aim at the Meccan origins of Islam, but as Glen Bowersock writes it is one of the most “irresponsible” books on Arabia in recent memory.
Books that take minority revisionist positions appeal to an anti-Muslim culture that is contemptuous of Islam. As one commenter on Bowersock’s review noted,
Commercially-driven bandwagon jumping of the most risible kind is not restricted to popular writings, clearly. Interesting that, today, I struggled to buy a copy of Alexander Kynsh’s readable and erudite Islam in Historical Perspective, a book widely respected and admired within academic Islamic Studies, whilst the literary classes of Britain celebrate having this title on their bookshelves because it is written with such literary panache, willfully oblivious to the ugly cultural current that flows beneath this kind of intellectual partisanism.
*Update: I want to add that Tom Holland is not an Islamophobe or anti-Muslim as far as I can tell. Bowersock’s review of Holland’s book highlighted some crucial issues and questions and was generally spot-on in my opinion. I want to emphasize that writing, investigating, and critiquing the “origins of Islam” and the “literal truth” of orthodoxy does not make one a hate-monger, in fact it is necessary. I would recommend everyone read Holland’s book for themselves and decide.
In his sprawling new book Tom Holland undertakes to explain nothing less than the origin of Islam. This is a subject as relevant to today’s world as it is controversial within it. How Islam began was obscure right from the start, above all to the surprised Christians who first succumbed to the Arab armies that surged out of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. They had seen themselves as confronting a different threat. After all, the Persians had captured Jerusalem in 614 and soon moved into Egypt. At that moment they appeared to be the principal antagonist of the Byzantine empire based in Constantinople. No one could have imagined that a little over two decades later the Persian empire would be in its death throes and that the Patriarch of Jerusalem would be turning over the city to an Arab caliph.
The beginnings of Islam have always been anchored in Mecca in the northwestern part of the Arabian peninsula. Here Muhammad was believed to have received from the angel Gabriel the earliest revelations that became incorporated in the Muslim scripture, the Qur’an. Scholarly debate about the revelations and about Meccan society has gone on for centuries, but no one before has seriously doubted the conjunction of Muhammad and Mecca. Holland wants us to believe that Muhammad did not come from Mecca at all but from southern Transjordan, and that his revelation was a compound of languages and ideas floating around in the Near East.
Holland came to his work on Islam unencumbered by any prior acquaintance with its fundamental texts or the scholarly literature. He modestly compares himself to Edward Gibbon, whom he can call without the slightest fear of contradiction “an infinitely greater historian than myself”. In the Decline and Fall, at the opening of his magisterial chapter 50 on Muhammad, Gibbon had candidly acknowledged his ignorance of “Oriental tongues”, but he also expressed his gratitude “to the learned interpreters who have transfused their science in the Latin, French, and English languages”. Holland seems to have confined himself largely to interpreters, learned or otherwise, writing in English, but his efforts to inform himself, arduous as they may have been, were manifestly insufficient.
He has written his book in a swashbuckling style that aims more to unsettle his readers than to instruct them. I have not seen a book about Arabia that is so irresponsible and unreliable since Kamal Salibi’s The Bible Came from Arabia (1985). Although that work was depressingly misguided in replacing biblical places with their homonyms in the Arabian peninsula, it at least revealed an accomplished scholar who had gone badly astray. Holland has read widely, but carelessly. He starts out with an irrelevant, though arresting, account of a defeated Jewish king in Arabian Himyar (Yemen) killing himself by riding his horse into the Red Sea. It is typical of Holland’s style to lead off with this fanciful story when an inscription from the time of the king’s death records that the Ethiopians killed him.
Holland explodes with indignation over the traditional term, jahiliyya (age of ignorance), for the time before Muhammad. After a tabloid view of Arab culture in that period, he declares: “The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the west, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood.” This was partially true in Gibbon’s time, but it is quite false today. Research and publication on pre-Islamic history, archaeology, art and languages may be found in many western universities, such as Oxford, as well as in many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria.
The past 30 years have seen lively controversies in the scholarship on early Islam, much of it emanating from the revisionist work of John Wansbrough in analysing the text of the Qur’an and its possible links with both Christian and Jewish language and thought. This is catnip for Holland, as is the revisionist work by Wansbrough’s disciple, Andrew Rippin, and, much more idiosyncratically, by the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg, who dares not speak his name. Although these debates are all solidly grounded in close textual study, they can do little more than titillate uninitiated readers because the dust has not yet settled.
Holland’s failure to follow Gibbon in examining French scholarship means that he has missed many of the most important recent discoveries, above all the large number of inscriptions from late antique south Arabia that Christian Julien Robin and his associates in Paris have been publishing in a steady stream. We now know much more about the Judaism of Himyar, the conflict with Christian Ethiopia and the Persian occupation of western Arabia. In discussing early Qur’an manuscripts Holland has missed the collaborative manuscript, in five different hands, which François Déroche has dated to the third quarter of the seventh century. It appears to antedate the Qur’anic inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
The scattershot nature of Holland’s investigations is particularly apparent in his breezy reference to the Qur’an manuscripts that were found in Sana’a, Yemen, in 1973. He hints darkly at censorship to explain publication delays caused by textual variants in a palimpsest but is unaware that the palimpsest itself and two other manuscripts are actually now with the publisher. He is also unaware that a second cache of Qur’an manuscripts was discovered five years ago in renovations of the Great Mosque in Sana’a and that in February 2010 the Yemeni authorities granted permission for them to be studied.
But Holland is at his most irresponsible when he turns to the Meccan origins of Islam. After reasonably supporting Patricia Crone’s argument against the tradition of Mecca as a mercantile centre, he goes on to ask whether the place itself might not be an invention in the story of Muhammad. He raises the possibility that the Qur’anic pagans, calledmushrikun, might be confederate tribes simply because the word is constructed from the Arabic root for “sharing”. He looks for these tribes in southern Jordan and not only thinks of placing Muhammad among them but proposes that his own Meccan tribe, the Quraysh, took its name from the Syriac word qarisha, which, according to Holland, would have been “duly Arabised”. This jaw-dropping idea depends on Holland’s mistaken view that the Syriac word could allude to a confederation. What it means is to clot or congeal.
For some reason Holland’s book was released in the Netherlands in Dutch before it appeared in English. It had a different title then, The Fourth Beast. A marketing strategy of this kind looks like a conscious effort to profit from recent Dutch anxiety over Muslim immigrants. But Holland’s cavalier treatment of his sources, ignorance of current research and lack of linguistic and historical acumen serve to undermine his provocative narrative. In the Shadow of the Sword seems like an attempt by author, agent and publisher to create a very different account of early Islam, but fortunately the quality of the book stands in the way.
A well known axiom in the Muslim world states, “Paradise Lies underneath the feet of your mother,” (h/t: MuslimMatters).
All peoples and cultures can empathize with this reverence and respect conferred upon mothers, and here we’d like to give a special salutation to all the loonwatching mothers out there: Happy mother’s day!
LOCKPORT — Two women from Niagara Falls were sentenced to weekend jail terms Friday for their hate crime assault on a Pakistani woman last summer.
Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Farkas ordered Sheree A. Sabater, 39, to four months of weekends in the County Jail and three years’ probation. Antoinette S. Ivey, 32, drew two months of weekends in jail and five years’ probation.
The 26-year-old Muslim victim, who was walking with her two children July 14 near the Tops Market on Portage Road in Niagara Falls, was wearing a head scarf at the time, police said.
“This woman and her two children were just minding their own business,” Farkas said. “These two drunk, high, out-of-control women, and I use that term loosely, pummeled her to the ground in front of her children.”
The victim said in a later Buffalo News interview that she heard one of the attackers say, “She’s Pakistani and I want to kill her.”
The nationality was just a lucky guess, Assistant District Attorney Cheryl L. Nichols said.
AlJazeera uncovered another “anti-Islam” class in the US military. The class seems to have been lifted directly from the talking points of extremists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer:
The United States military has called for a review of all its training classes after receiving criticism for a course taught to senior officers that allegedly encouraged war against Islam.
The controversial class presented slides that accused dozens of Islamic groups, many widely recognised as mainstream advocacy groups, of infiltrating the US media, education system, government and military.
One slide titled “The Muslim Brotherhood and Violence” showed a photo of an al-Qaeda beheading, erroneously conflating the two groups.
Through the slides and other presentations, the course created a picture of a US government co-opted by subversive Muslim elements.
Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing reports from Washington.
Unfortunately, Pastor Youcef Naderkhani remains jailed in Iran, despite international pressure to secure his release. In March, we published the story of his plight, Message to Iran: Free Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani:
Youcef Nadarkhani should be released from Iranian jail immediately. In fact, he should have never been jailed in the first place.
Nadarkhani faces possible execution in Iran for the “crime” of apostasy and Christian evangelism. In the face of mounting international pressure, the Iranian regime has said Nadarkhani was actually charged with more serious crimes unrelated to religion, but barring new evidence to the contrary, this appears to be a face-saving lie.
The regime in the so-called “Islamic” Republic of Iran urgently needs to reread the Qur’an, including Chapter 109, Surat Al-Kafirun -The Disbelievers, and (among others) verses 2:62, 5:69, and 2:256.
Since that time, the Iranian regime has made the situation worse by arresting his defense attorney. Yet despite the hardship he has faced at the hands of the regime in Iran, Pastor Naderkhani does not blame Islam or Muslims for his ordeal. In a letter he wrote from prison, he thanked his many supporters and spoke out against those who use his cause to bash Islam.
The Christian pastor on death row in Iran has reportedly written a letter thanking his supporters and blasting those who he said use “insulting words” against Islam in what he considers a misguided effort to help his cause.
Washington-based human rights group American Center for Law and Justice released what it says is a letter written by Youcef Nadarkhani earlier this week from a prison in the Lakan Province of Iran, where he is currently being held for charges of practicing Christianity and renouncing Islam. If the letter is real, it is the first time Nadarkhani has been heard from in a year.
“First, I would like to inform all of my beloved brothers and sisters that I am in perfect health in the flesh and spirit,” begins the letter, which is addressed to “All those who are concerned and worried about my current situation.”
“From time to time I am informed about the news, which is spreading in the media, about my current situation…or campaigns and human rights activities which are going on against the charges which are applied to me.” Another passage from the pastor’s letter reads, “I do believe that these kind of activities can be very helpful in order to reach freedom, and respecting the human rights in a right way can bring forth great results in this.”
Nadarkhani also mentions those who have used his cause to attack Islam, saying “burning and insulting” is not “reverent” behavior. He did not specifically mention controversial Florida Pastor Terry Jones, who claims to have burned Korans in April to show solidarity with Nadarkhani.
The letter was obtained by evangelic ministry Present Truth, which operates missions in Iran. The group also had the letter translated into English from the pastor’s native language of Farsi.
“Present Truth Ministries received the letter from its sources inside Iran. We believe the sources providing this letter have proven to be credible throughout this case and, therefore, we believe that Pastor Youcef is the author,” Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the ACLJ, told FoxNews.com.
Nadarkhani has been jailed since being arrested in 2009 after he went to his son’s school to complain about them starting mandatory Koran classes.
He was then charged with apostasy from Islam. He was found guilty by the Iranian Supreme Court and sentenced to death and has been imprisoned ever since.
His attorney in Iran was recently arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison. He has also been barred from practicing or teaching law for ten years.
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.”
(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.”
A Shirley man has been summoned to appear at Solihull Magistrates Court after he allegedly ripped a veil from a Muslim woman’s face in Touchwood.
Police reported that Ian Brazier, 26, had grabbed the victim, also 26, by her head and removed her face covering as she walked past the Disney store, on March 3. It’s alleged that he then threw the veil to the floor and left the shopping centre. A Solihull Police spokesman said the woman had not been physically harmed but was left severely shaken by the incident.
Officers tracked down Brazier following a CCTV image appeal. He will now appear at Solihull Magistrates on June 13.
Chief Inspector Kevin Doyle, from Solihull Police Station, said previously: “Reports of crimes like this are exceptionally rare both in Solihull and the wider West Midlands. We are treating this incident as a hate crime as we believe the woman was deliberately targeted because of her faith symbolised by her attire.”
France’s Muslims may not be flexing their electoral muscle as much as they can be, but according to a recent poll 93% voted for Hollande, which would be a considerable boost for the Socialist.
Juan Cole dissects Sarkozy’s loss and how part of it was due to Islamophobia:
The bad economy in France and outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy’s refusal to do a stimulus program, preferring instead “austerity,” were the primary reasons he lost the election to Socialist Francois Hollande. That and Sarkozy really is an annoying, strutting peacock who wore out his political welcome among voters.
But some of the margin of his defeat came from his pandering to the discourse of the French anti-immigrant far right, which he did especially vocally after he was forced into a run-off against Hollande. Sarkozy said there are too many “foreigners” (he meant immigrants) in France, that police should have greater leeway to shoot fleeing suspects, that the far right are upstanding citizens. He even talked about “people who look Muslim.”
Many observers in France argue that Sarkozy stole so many lines from the soft-fascist National Front of Marine LePen that he mainstreamed it, and made it impossible for the Gaullists of the Union for a Popular Movement (Sarkozy’s party, French acronym UMP) to argue that LePen and her followers should be kept out of national government because they were too extreme. (The irony is that Sarkozy himself is the son of a Hungarian father and his mother was mixed French Catholic and Greek Jewish; and he postured as Ur-French!)
Sarkozy tried to depict the French Left as so woolly-headed and multi-cultural that they were coddling and even fostering the rise of a threatening French Muslim fundamentalism that menaced secular, republican values. Theinfamous daily hour set aside by the mayor at a swimming pool in Lillefor a few years for Muslim women to swim without men present was presented as emblematic of this threat. But it was all polemics. Some Gaullist mayors did the same thing, and for longer.
And, Sarkozy showed much less dedication to Third-Republic-style militant secularism than most Socialists (only 10 percent of the French go to mass regularly and almost all vote for Sarkozy’s UMP, so the Catholic religious right is his constituency). But, he did support the Swiss ban on minarets and he banned public Muslim prayer in France, and the wearing of the burqa’ full veil (popular mainly in the Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and worn by like 4 women in France aside from wealthy wives of emirs in France on shopping sprees).
Sarkozy’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and punitive laws in the end drove centristFrancois Bayrou to repudiate him. Bayrou, leader of the Democratic Movement party, had run for president on a platform of reducing the national debt and reining in public spending, and was more center-right than center. He got about 9% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election.
Late last week, Bayrou made the astonishing announcement that Sarkozy’s obsession with “frontiers” just seemed to him a betrayal of French values, and that he was throwing his support to Hollande. Sarkozy’s political platform, he thundered, “is violent” and is “in contradiction with our values, but also those of Gaullism [the mainstream French right] as well as contradicting the values of the republican and social Right.” I am not and never will be, he said, a man of the left. He said he was sure he would be upbraiding Hollande for his spendthrift ways. But on the issue of republican values, he had to back Hollande.
Only about a third of France’s roughly 4.5 million persons of Muslim descent (mainly North and West Africans) identify as Muslims. Only about 10 percent of Muslims are said to vote. So French Muslims are not flexing their electoral muscles yet in a meaningful way. Probably many more secular French voted against Sarkozy because of his odious language about immigrants than did Muslim-heritage French, in absolute numbers.
Sarkozy, by embracing the noxious language of hatred of immigrants and fear-mongering about secular Socialists spreading Muslim theocracy in the villages of France, failed to convince the hard right to vote for him but managed to alienate the center. Even MPs in his own party began speaking out against his having gone too far.
Of course, the kind of violent, anti-immigrant, and Muslim-hating language Sarkozy used is par for the course in the GOP in the US today. But aside from some Libertarians such as Ron Paul, where are the mainstream centrist Republicans who will openly denounce it? Who among Republicans recognizes that the sorts of things Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney say about a monolithic Muslim Caliphate menace are violent and contradictory to the values of the American Republic. Not to mention the things many of them say about Latino immigrants. Where is our Francois Bayrou?
This photo provided by the Transportation Security Administration shows pistol parts hidden in a stuffed animal found at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I.
Can you imagine if a Muslim or “Muslim looking” person had stuffed animals with gun parts and ammo? You can bet he would be on a one way ticket to Guantanomo! (via. What If They Were Muslim?)
WARWICK, R.I. — Gun components and ammunition were found hidden inside three stuffed animals carried by a passenger at Rhode Island’s T.F. Green Airport on Tuesday, federal transportation officials said.
Authorities later allowed the 4-year-old boy and his father to continue their travel to Detroit after concluding the man didn’t pose a risk, authorities said. He told police that he didn’t know the parts were inside the stuffed toys — which included a Mickey Mouse and a teddy bear.
“It appears to be the result of a domestic dispute,” Rhode Island Airport Police Chief Leo Messier said. “It was jointly investigated by the RI Airport Police, FBI and the RI State Police and it was determined that there was no threat at any time to air safety.”
NBC News station WHDH reported that a magazine loaded with two .40-caliber rounds was discovered inside a bunny and a firing pin was inside Mickey Mouse.
‘Artfully concealed’ Officials with airport police and the Transportation Security Administration declined to comment further, saying the incident remained under investigation.
A TSA officer noticed the disassembled gun components “artfully concealed” inside three stuffed animals. The stuffed animals were inside the child’s carry-on bag, which had been put through an X-ray machine as part of normal security screening.
The parts could have been assembled to make a full firearm, authorities said.
The items were confiscated. Police have not released the man’s name.
Passengers at T.F. Green told WHDH they were thankful the system worked.
“I know a lot of people don’t like the screening procedure, but I’m thankful that they really screen people and we feel much safer because of it,” one woman told the station.
NBC News station WHDH and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
These days it seems even kooky conspiracy theories have gone mutliculti.
Recently a visitor left a comment assuring us he’s not too worried about “the Mooslems” in America, but only because the real problem is the alleged “Mestizo threat,” which is apparently being facilitated by “the Joos,” who are somehow responsible for our “open borders.” Just to be sure we’re clear on his equal-opportunity bigotry, he added that it’s Europe that has the “Mooslem problem.”
Mudéjar-Style Building (aka Mooslamic Architecture Jihad)
Although many bigots seem especially concerned about Mexican Mestizo-Hispanic types taking over the country, a recent report from the Pew Research Center suggests the wave of Mexican immigration to the US has come to a halt, and in fact, the Mexican population in the US is actually decreasing. As it turns out, immigration seems to be influenced largely by economics and labor markets, and not some cabal of puppet masters from a certain religious or ethnic group. But why let facts stand in the way of a juicy, hate-filled conspiracy theory?
Now equal opportunity bigots in America have two contenders for Most Scary Diabolical Plot: The Left-Islamist Stealth Jihad and the Judeo-Mestizo Reconquista. Why settle for just one when you can have both?
While the Left-Islamist alliance seems to be steadily gaining a foothold in the US, where the Mooslems may someday reach a whopping 2% of the population, it seems there are some alarming trends south of the border that also deserve prompt attention: The Mooslems may be taking over Mexico too! Though they still comprise less than 1% of the population, these Mexican Mooslems are concentrated in a handful of cities–where they willfully refuse to eat pork and–¡Ay, caramba!–possibly consort with the Joos.
Although traditionally known for its strong Catholic community, Mexico is also home to a small yet diverse community of Muslims. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the country had about 110,000 Muslims in 2009. That’s less than 1 percent of the population of Mexico. But according to Zidane Zeraoui, professor of international relations at the Technological University of Monterrey, the history of Islam in Mexico goes back to its earliest days. In my interview with Zeraoui here in Madison, he emphasized the fact that Muslims and Jews actually came to Mexico early in the colonial period.
There were ‘false Christians,’ ormarranos who came to Latin America as Catholics converted by force. Officially, they were Catholics, but inside, in their private lives, they were still practicing their religions.
Zeraoui said there are many indications of early Jewish and Muslim migrations in Mexico. For example, many buildings in Mexico (including churches, convents, and government buildings) are built in an architectural style called “Mudéjar,” a term that refers to Muslims living under Christian rule in Spain. The city Zeraoui lives in, Monterrey, was founded by marranos, and even today, Jewish and Muslim influences remain strong in the city. Unlike the rest of Mexico, Zeraoui says people in Monterrey prefer goat meat to pork, an influence of kosher and halal food practices. They even have a type of meat they call “Sarassan meat.”
In Monterray, we don’t eat much pork, but if you were to go to Mexico City, the basis of food is pork.
Muslims in Mexico are generally concentrated in four cities: Tequesquitengo in Morelos, Torreón in Coahuila, San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, and Mexico City. About half the Muslims in Mexico today are converts/reverts. The groups are extremely diverse, and include both Shias and Sunnis.
Nayantara Mukherji is a journalist, editor, Inside Islam radio producer, and a recent addition to the writing team at the University of Wisconsin.
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is a regular guest on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program and is usually brought in to be the token Black man who comes on to legitimate and provide cover for Hannity’s “criticism” (i.e. thinly-veiled racism) of the Black community. Hannity also happens to sit on the board of Rev. Peterson’s organization, BOND. (h/t: Ali)
Rev. Peterson is quite the kook, and of course every religion has ‘em, but here he is bemoaning the progress women have made in the US, saying all of the social ills we have today are due to women:
So I guess Conservatives don’t just believe in the “Islamization” of society, but also the “womenization” of society?
As you can see he wants women to be stripped of the right to vote, taken out of positions of power and essentially returned to being obedient, child producing, housewives who obey and submit to men. He even ridicules his grandmother!
Can one imagine the reaction if an Imam had said something similar to what Rev. Peterson said? Wouldn’t Islam once again be cast as the uniquely and inherently “misogynistic” faith that is irreconcilable with modernity?
Will we hear similar attributions of misogyny and anti-women positions to Christianity now?
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, along with Robert Spencer also happen to be on the list of the Young America’s Foundation‘s (YAF) “Conservative speakers.”
Spencer has appeared as a guest on Rev. Peterson’s radio show, directly after Peterson’s anti-women screed. There goes Spencer and Geller’s so-called concern for the ‘human rights’ of women! They have no problem schmoozing with clerics who want to role back the right of women to vote but will gladly try to smear Muslims as honor-killing-pro-pedophilia-misogynists:
Frequent Fox News guest Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson drew sharp criticism for arguing that women should not have the right to vote in a sermon that was posted on YouTube in March. The minister argued that women are destroying American society and wield too much political power.
Fox News host Sean Hannity has invited Peterson to speak on his show several times, even after the offensive sermon was posted online.
Even News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, corporate master of Fox, disagreed with Peterson’s sexist rant according to theDaily Mail. He tweeted in response, “When? Women voting is best thing in a hundred years.”
“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson said in the sermon.
Peterson even went so far as to associate woman in politics with evil.
“We should’ve never turned this over to women,” he said. “It was a big mistake. … And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees (sic) with them who’re going to take us down this pathway of destruction.”
“And this probably was the reason that they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men,” he continued. “Because men, in the good old days, understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it and they understood that if they let them take over, this is what would happen.”
This is not Peterson’s first controversial and offensive statement. He previously said “thank God for slavery” because it brought African people to the United States.
Peterson has also stated, “Barack Obama hates white people, especially white men.” He argued that men should be legally permitted to hit their wives and expressed a desire to take “all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working.”
During his most recent offensive statement, the sermon titled “How most women are building a shameless society,” he said women are incapable of making good decisions because they get too emotional.
“You walk up to them with an issue, they freak out right away,” he said. “They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love.”
Peterson appeared on Fox News last week after being invited again by Sean Hannity, and was confronted by Democratic commentator Kirsten Power, who called the sermon “misogynistic.”
“I have a responsibility to tell the truth,” replied Peterson. “You’re on the side of lies. Why shouldn’t I be on the side of truth? And it’s the truth that’s going to make us free. Somebody gotta tell the truth, so I’m going to tell the truth.”
Peterson is the president and founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, a group pushing a conservative agenda among African Americans where Hannity sits on the board, and its allied BOND Action Inc. In the past he has hosted a radio talk show and a cable TV program. He is well known for fighting against affirmative action and is a member of Choose Black American, a black group fighting illegal immigration.
…manages an impressive stable of Zionist speakers, including several who are Arabs, Muslims, or ex-Muslims: Brigitte Gabriel, Ishmael Khaldi, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Nonie Darwish.
These speakers are not only “Zionist” as described above, but also extremely “anti-Muslim” and “Islamophobic.” Add to that list, Zuhdi Jasser who will be joining “Stand with Us” for a conference titled, “Rescuing Human Rights.” It’s likely as concerned about human rights as Pamela Geller’s Jessica Mokdad ‘Human Rights’ Conference was:
Next week, StandWithUs and the UC San Diego pro-Israel student advocacy group, Tritons for Israel, will host a rather mysterious campus event. According to a speaker contract SWU uploaded to the web in March, it is a conference called, Rescuing Human Rights, featuring the Wall Street Journal’s leading anti-jihadi columnist, Brett Stephens, necon legal scholar Avi Bell who was one of the Goldstone Report’s harshest critics, anti-jihadi “human rights” lawyer Brooke Goldstein, and the anti-jihadi Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser. He was the founder of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, and featured star of several Clarion Fund Islamophobic films including Obsession and Third Jihad.
Mid-May is Apartheid Week across many American campuses and the suitable pro-Israel response seems to be to host events accusing Muslims of being the dark forces of the universe. That appears to be the origin of this pro-Israel campus event on May 15th.
Why is this so mysterious? Because I can’t find any online record of this event. I do know thanks to a tweet in his Twitter timeline that Zuhdi Jasser, at least, will be speaking on campus next week. Jasser is the go-to figure for the pro-Israel neocon right whenever it needs a Muslim who excoriates other Muslims who aren’t sufficiently right-wing or patriotic. He is a devout supporter of Israel and also supported the NYPD’s illegal surveillance of local Muslim community members. Jasser also makes common cause with the Tea Party types and has publicly attacked Muslim Americans running for office as Democrats and engaged in Muslim baiting. In short, Zuhdi Jasser is “our” sort of Muslim, a “moderate” one who can be counted on as a bulwark against the swarms of jihadist Muslims seeking to overrun western civilization.
StandWithUs’ speaker contract guarantees Jasser $4,250 for his May 15th campus appearance plus hotel and travel expenses. These fees will be jointly paid by SWU and Tritons for Israel. However, I found a UC San Diego student fund allocation for $4,280 for this event that went to Tritons for Israel. This may be funding Jasser or the other three speakers listed Students at UDSD will be interested to know that their student fees are paying for an Islamophobic campus hate fest.
Interestingly, I’ve found no online reference to the event itself notifying anyone where or when it will be held. I’m not even sure the conference for which funding was requested in April is still happening (though Jasser is certainly speaking). My guess is the sponsors are trying to keep it under the radar so it won’t generate the off-campus visibility I’m trying to offer to it here. They’re probably trying to isolate the promotion to campus. But I hope the local Arab/Muslim community will find out about this shandeh and turn out en masse to let the community know that it won’t stand still and allow Islamophobes define them.
In researching this post, I discovered that another ersatz pro-Israel human rights group, the UK’s Henry Jackson Society has held confabs featuring the same name for the past few years. They’ve also produced an essay by that name, written by a pro-Israel Tory solicitor arguing that international human rights law as practiced in Europe is fahrkochteh and should be scrapped. Of course, what especially irks him is that Israeli generals and politicians with blood on their hands may be arrested and indicted for war crimes if they step foot on British soil. This is yet another example of the international nexus of pro-Israel advocacy groups who take cover under the guise of human rights, but whose agenda is serving as a promoter of Israel’s nationalist agenda and an apologist for its faltering human rights record.
We didn’t hear much about this in the news media. Not only that we don’t even know the names of these children because their lives aren’t as valuable as “Western lives.” Let the “Greater Islamophobia” march on: (h/t: Saladin)
Yesterday, I noted severalreports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:
The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.
The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.
This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:
(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.
(2) Yesterday — a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen — the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet “using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009.” American media outlets — especially its cable news networks — erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night devoted the bulk of his show to this plot, parading the standard cast of characters — former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and terrorist advocate) Fran Townsend and its “national security analyst” Peter Bergen — to put on their Serious and Concerned faces, recite from the U.S. Government script, and analyze all the profound implications. CNN even hauled out Rep. Peter King to warn that this shows a “new level” of Terror threats from Yemen. CNN’s fixation on this plot continued into this morning.
Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world — including repeatedly in Yemen — was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation — why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? – is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business — trying to enjoy our Freedoms — and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never movedbeyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).
This is the message sent over and over by the U.S. media: we are the victims of heinous, frightening violence; our government must do more, must bomb more, must surveil more, to Keep Us Safe; we do nothing similar to this kind of violence because we are Good and Civilized. This is how our Objective, Viewpoint-Free journalistic outlets continuously propagandize: by fixating on the violence done by others while justifying — or, more often, ignoring — the more far-reaching and substantial violence perpetrated by the U.S.
(3) If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S. — or if one of the people involved in this Yemen-originating plot were a relative of one of the dozens of civilians killed by Obama’s 2009 cluster bomb strike — what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency.
I was just sitting here thinking “I love reading GG, but I think he is being quite harsh here, it was only 5 kids that died, and that happens in war – its hardly as if it was some really major tragedy”.
And this is despite the fact that I would describe myself as a staunch anti-Imperialist who shuns the MSM – yet still I seem to be getting conditioned that the killing of these 5 kids is “normal”. Scary. Very scary.
We’re all subject to that conditioning, which is why it’s so necessary to pause every now and then to realize what a “really major tragedy” it actually is: one that could be easily avoided with different choices.
UPDATE II: It is now confirmed that the would-be bomber of the civilian jet was, in fact, a double agent working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence. So just as virtually every “domestic Terror plot” is one conceived, directed, funded and controlled by the FBI, this new Al Qaeda plot from Yemen was directed by some combination of the CIA and its Saudi partners. So this wasn’t merely a failed, nascent plot which is causing this fear-mongering media orgy: it was one controlled at all times by the U.S. and Saudi Governments.
This is a recurring thing, in which extremist settlers, who believe that God gave them the land attempt to intimidate and terrorize Palestinian landowners in the hope that they will leave and then the settlers can annex the land. (h/t: Musa)
NABLUS (Ma’an) — Israeli settlers on Wednesday set fire to hundreds of trees in Nablus in the northern West Bank, a Fatah official said.
Ghassan Doughlas said residents of Tappuah settlement chopped down and torched around 250 olive trees in Jammain village. The settlement is built on land belonging to the village.
Settlers also chopped down 17 trees in nearby village Burin and forced shepherds off their pastures in Aqraba and Yanun, also in Nablus, Doughlas said.
I’am not sure if the following is a report of the same incident, but it was reported a week ago, and reports that the settlers came from Etamar rather than Tappuah (via. Occupied-Palestine):
NABLUS, (PIC)– Jewish settlers uprooted 200 olive trees near Aqraba village, Nablus, on Wednesday morning, local sources said.
Hamza Deiriya, a member of the committee for the defense of Aqraba land, said that the settlers came from Etamar settlement and chopped off the trees planted in an area of six dunums.
He noted that the settlers were attacking this same area for the sixth time, recalling that olive trees and water wells in it were destroyed at their hands.
He charged that the Jewish settlers want to terrorize the Palestinian landowners and to annex their land.
Muslims women gather for a special Eid ul-Fitr morning prayer at the Los Angeles Convention Center on August 30, 2011 in Los Angeles, California (Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)
Only three weeks since Passover, and some people already need refreshers.
Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin argues that Islamophobia in the United States must be a myth because… look! the Muslims are breeding like rabbits. Citing newly released census data showing that the population of American Muslims more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, Tobin asks: “Is it possible or even likely that Islam would be thriving in the United States if it were not a society that is welcoming Muslims with open arms and providing a safe environment for people to openly practice this faith?”
Yes, it’s very possible. Let’s start with the Passover story: in particular, Exodus 1:12, in which the Egyptians discover that, “the more they afflicted [the Israelites], the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.” It looks like Tobin skipped that section of the haggadah.
And this Biblical wisdom holds up well under scrutiny: historically, discrimination and prejudice haven’t done much to hinder population growth. The African American population quadrupled (from under five million to nearly twenty million) between the end of the Civil War and the 1964 Civil Rights Act: does Tobin think that a century of Jim Crow, housing discrimination and the Ku Klux Klan provided Blacks “a safe environment”? The fact is, Islam is growing everywhere: doubling over the last thirty years in Europe, and on pace to reach 2.2 billion worldwide by 2030 (it’s currently 1.6 billion). Its growth in America is just one piece of this broader trend.
What’s sad is that we’ve seen all this before. Muslims aren’t the first religious group to be accused of cooperating with America’s international enemies. Just as Muslims today are called terrorists, American Jews were once tarred as the servants of Moscow. Similarly, attempts to outlaw Sharia recall centuries of anti-Semitic paranoia about Jewish religious law. In every generation, my haggadah teaches me, bigots rise up to discriminate against and attack minorities. If Jonathan Tobin cannot see that, if he continues to turn a blind eye to the oppression of Muslims among us, well then, I’ve got a couple more Bible verses he ought to read.
In a recent article, A Journey Out of Islamophobic Darkness, Loonwatcher CriticalDragon1177 told the story of how he embraced Islamophobia for a decade, and how and why he eventually left the quagmire of hate. He has since joined the struggle against Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry, and he suggested we also share the story of former “counter-jihadist,” Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs was at one time a prominent figure in the “counter-jihad” movement, and he also turned his back on bigotry. He has now devoted his resources to exposing his former allies, and in this interview for AlterNet, he shares his story of transformation. (h/t: CriticalDragon1177)
For years, Charles Johnson was a prominent right-wing “war-blogger.” On his site, Little Green Footballs, he coined the term “anti-idiotarian,” wrote frequently of a “leftist-Islamist axis,” called Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas “a fanatical, deadly enemy of Western civilization” and inspired the hawkish Israeli journalist Gil Ronen to gush, “If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson’s site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s site.” His comments section became an infamous hotbed of xenophobia and wingnuttery.
That was then and this is now. Visit LGF today, and you’ll find posts decrying his former fellow travelers’ knee-jerk Islamophobia, debunking the Breitbrats’ steaming piles of nonsense and defending the Obama administration against scurrilous charges from Fox News. Johnson has undergone a remarkable political transformation over the past five years, but it didn’t come without a cost; he is now among the top targets of the right blogosphere – an apostate drawing an enormous amount of venom from people he once considered his allies.
This week, Charles Johnson appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript (you can listen to the whole show here).
Joshua Holland: Charles, I’ll be honest, I used to find you kind of terrifying. Not in a personal way, but as a prominent member of this group of so-called war bloggers. You were prominent in that group. You co-founded Pajamas Media and you were widely credited with helping to bring down Dan Rather after he reported on George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service. You used to be really filled with Islamophobia and xenophobia. James Wolcott of Vanity Fair once compared your site to “a disorganized Nuremberg rally.”
Charles Johnson: Yeah, I’ve heard worse. That’s a fair enough description. If you actually go back before the 9/11 attacks and read what I wrote on my blog you’ll find that I actually was never what you’d think of as a right-winger at all.
JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?
CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.
JH: September 11th was a traumatic experience for the entire country. We all felt that way. Is it fair to say that you kind of snapped?
CJ: In a sense I guess you can say that. It hit me really hard. I grew up in New York and I was actually interested in architecture, so I followed the construction of the World Trade Center. It helped that I had a really personal connection to the area. It hit me really hard.
I don’t know if I snapped so much as I really wanted to know more about what was going on. I tend to focus real intensely on things when I get interested. That’s what happened with the blog. I focused on fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam. Over the years I began to be involved with people like Robert Spenser and Frank Gaffney. If I had known some of the things I know about them now I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been associated with them, but you live and you learn, I guess.
JH: Right. You were a very early entrant into the blogging world. By the time I started reading blogs, maybe in 2002 or 2003, you were very much like Robert [Spencer]. You were using this method common to people who have a fear of Islam which is finding examples of Muslims doing terrible things, and then at least implying, if not stating outright, that these horrific incidents represent the Muslim community outright.
CJ: That’s a fair criticism, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve changed my focus. I’ve realized that to be true. At that point I had to say to myself that this doesn’t really make sense, knowing what I know now about some of the motivations of people like Spenser and the like. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve changed the focus of my blog.
Just to be clear, I was never really known as a right-winger until after the September 11th attacks. On my blog there were some pretty harsh criticisms of George W. Bush prior to the 2000 elections. And I didn’t vote for him.
JH: OK, so along the way you began to see things a little differently and you started to criticize your erstwhile allies. You started calling out Fox News inaccuracies. You called Jim Hoft, the dumbest person on the internet, a “borderline illiterate bigot.”
CJ: I stand by those words.
JH: They’re not even controversial, Charles. Along the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?
CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spenser and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.
When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.
At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.
JH: Geller continues to dance with European far-right-wing parties like the English Defense League as well. And, as you say, she lashed out with lupine ferocity. She wrote at one point that your “campaign to destroy the most effective voices on the right from within has been completely exposed.” That you “have been outed for the mole, the plant, the dis-informationalist” that you are.
CJ: Both her and Robert Spencer question who’s paying me. They have all kinds of conspiracy theories about who bought me out, and is that even really me anymore?
JH: It’s George Soros, right?
CJ: Of course! He’s always behind it. But really what they’re doing is trying to divert attention from the very real issues I bring up about the people they associate with. That’s the bottom line with those people. All these personal attacks are really an attempt to divert attention away from the facts.
JH: On some level, blogging communities do form. It must have been kind of nerve-racking to switch sides when you’d developed these allegiances in these ongoing blog wars. Did you have second thoughts? Were you worried about whether you would be villified?
CJ: Absolutely I had feelings like that. Emotionally, it wasn’t easy to go through all this stuff, but sometimes you have to and hopefully you come out the other side better. I’ve always looked at my blog not as something I wanted to be the most popular place. Believe it or not, I try not to do things that just make my blog more popular on purpose. What I try to do is be as honest, straightforward and factual as I can. That’s kind of always been my intent, and sometimes above and sometimes below the line. Whether a whole bunch of other bloggers suddenly stop linking to me or said bad things about me, I can’t let that influence what I do. It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise I won’t be doing it anymore.
JH: Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies the relationship between cognitive styles and ideology. He says that one of the attributes — and he says it’s a positive attribute — that conservatives display more prominently than liberals is loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing, but it has a dark side, which is tribalism. They’re more likely to have these tribal inclinations. I think you experienced what going against the tribe looks like first-hand.
CJ: That’s evident in my Twitter timeline – even in the last week, it’s been really nuts out there. I think it was Gandhi who said first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win? They tried to ignore me, and now they’re going kind of in the mocking mode and graduating toward the attacking mode. Hopefully we’ll continue on with this analogy.
JH: The New York Times said you moved into a gated community because you were worried about these online threats. Is that true?
CJ: I’ve actually told other people that they kind of exaggerated that. They asked me what caused me to move into this gated community here. Really it was just that I found a nice place that happened to be in a gated community. It really wasn’t because I was worried about the threats, although I have had some threats, including one from a neo-Nazi who is a friend of blogger Stacy McCain. That was a concern, but it wasn’t the primary reason at all.
JH: Now what about the other side? From my perspective, once you shifted the focus of your writing I had no hesitation adding you to my RSS feed, and following you on Twitter. Were there people on the left who you’d tangled with in the past who had a harder time accepting you into their fold?
CJ: Absolutely. There have been one or two, but most people have been willing to just see where I’m at now and see what I’ve said about the stuff I wrote in the past. A lot of it I do regret, there’s no doubt about it. Hopefully all I can do is continue to do what I do, and be as straight and true to what I believe as possible.
JH: You say you have regrets. I wonder is there one thing that you regret more than others? Is there something that stands out in your mind?
CJ: I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That’s one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don’t have that time machine yet. That’s actually one of the main things. I should not have been so ready to accept it. That was one of the things that really woke me up, seeing the truth as opposed to all the lies that were being spread by this blizzard of propaganda.
JH: I had Eric Boehlert on the show a few weeks ago. He’s with Media Matters. He said something really interesting. He said that in the era of Obama, when things have really gone off the deep end on the right, they don’t bother debunking a lot of the right-wing media outlets that they used to track regularly because they’ve become so transparently crazy that nobody pays attention to them.
CJ: That’s a great point. Sometimes I actually stop myself from copying or covering that stuff as well, because it does seem like just another crazy or absurd thing. At this point they’re so far out there that there’s absolutely no concern for reality on these blogs. And they never back down and never correct anything.
JH: They certainly don’t. Do you think that their influence has truly waned? We saw Mitt Romney try to court right-wing bloggers this week.
CJ: I think influence is an interesting thing that’s hard to measure. The effects of the Tea Party on the Republican Party was definitely exacerbated by the right-wing blogs. I don’t really know how much of that Mitt Romney meeting was just pandering and how much of it was a genuine attempt to curry favor with the base. Some of the people they invited are weird choices if you really know their background. Some of these people have been incredibly vicious toward Romney, but that’s politics.
He grew up in Israel, served in the IDF as a lieutenant and is running for Congress, one of his main goals is to ‘stop the Islamization of America.’
What if a Turk who was born in the US but grew up in Istanbul came to America and said one of his primary goals was to end US funding to Israel? You can bet that he would be accused of stealth jihad and Islamization of the US:
Itamar Gelbman was born in New York 30 years ago and as a child moved with his parents to Herzliya, where he was raised. He studied business management and computer science at Tel Aviv University and served as an undercover reserve officer in the Tel Aviv Police District.
After graduation, Gelbman joined the IDF where he was a lieutenant in what he calls the “army special forces.” He said he could not be more specific about what he did in the army but that he received multiple awards, including a commendation from the IDF chief of staff.
Eight years ago, he moved to Texas. After US President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Gelbman decided to get involved in politics.
Gelbman is running in the May 29 Republican Primary in Texas’s Sixth Congressional District, which is outside Dallas. “I’m the only candidate for the seat who is pro-Israel,” Gelbman said.
Gelbman said he believes American politicians need to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. He does not believe the US should involve itself in the settlement issue and he would work to block foreign aid to Islamic countries that act against Israel and the United States.
“I would defend Israel and be their voice in the House,” he said. “Israel should be allowed to do whatever it needs to do. The Palestinians need to change their education system and accept Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital.” Gelbman said he would work to make sure a law requiring the US to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be enforced.
He received national attention when Muslims in his district were offended by his campaign flyer in which vowed to “fight the Islamization of America.”
Gelbman recently came to Israel to spend Passover with family. While he was in the country, he met with MK Danny Danon and other Likud politicians.
By France-Soir News / Service Miscellaneous Facts (with AFP)
En route to the mosque, the two old men were beaten by two men claiming the extreme right.
Two elderly people belonging to the Muslim community have been assaulted in the night from Friday to Saturday at Amiens. The two attackers claimed to be the extreme right, it was learned Sunday from the Regional Council of the Muslim faith of Picardy and the Somme prefecture.
The two victims, two men of 70 and 71, were attacked about five o’clock in the morning when they went to the mosque of Amiens-Nord to the prayer of Fajr, which must take place at dawn. After being manhandled by two men “ with very short hair and claiming to be the extreme right , “the two men were beaten.
Two complaints
Their lives are not endangered, but they were admitted to the hospital of Amiens including injuries to legs and ribs, according to the CRCM-Picardie.Their attackers, meanwhile, had fled.
Two complaints were filed Saturday afternoon at the police station of Amiens and an investigation was opened by the prosecutor of Amiens, the prefecture has confirmed, adding that the area where the assault took place was not equipped surveillance cameras.
At last week’s Awakening 2012 conference, phony “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem not only detailed a treacherous scheme by President Obama to use immigration reform to legalize terrorism, but also uncovered a liberal plot to use the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade to “bring Sharia law liberally in our face.” Responding to co-panelist Frank Gaffney’s specious allegation that there have been anywhere between fifty to seventy instances where American judges used Sharia law to decide cases, Saleem blamed the Religious Right’s most hated ruling on the supposed proliferation of Sharia law in America.
Here’s a picture, I’m going to draw it very simply. What they’re trying to integrate into our laws is Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade. When they put this Islamic clause, we tracked fifty and now I’m going like there’s seventy, wow, when they establish this what happened is, they will be able to bring Sharia law liberally in our face. That’s why he said fight against those—any court that allows it we need to demonstrate outside and say no Sharia law but our constitution.
The abdication of U.S. federal judges in the post-9/11 era, and their craven subservience to Executive Branch security claims, has been a topic I’ve written aboutseveral times over the past couples of weeks. Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ that John Yoo is — needless to say — fully immune from any and all liability for having authorized the torture of Jose Padilla, on the ground that the illegality of Yoo’s conduct was not “beyond debate” at the time he engaged in it. Everything Iwrote a couple of weeks ago about the identical shielding of Donald Rumsfeld by federal courts and the Obama DOJ from similar claims applies to yesterday’s ruling, and The New York Times has a good editorial today condemning this ruling as “misguided and dangerous.”
In sum, this yet again underscores that of all the American institutions that have so profoundly failed in the wake of 9/11 to protect the most basic liberties — Congress, both political parties, the establishment media, the Executive Branch, the DOJ specifically — none has been quite as disgraceful as the federal judiciary, whose life tenure is supposed to insulate them from base political pressures that produce cowardly and corrupted choices. And yet, just consider these two facts:
(1) not a single War on Terror victim — not one — has been permitted to sue for damages in an American court over what was done to them, even when everyone admits they were completely innocent, even when they were subjected to the most brutal torture, and even when the judiciary of other countries permitted their lawsuits to proceed; and,
(2) not a single government official — not one — has been held legally accountable, either criminally or even civilly, for any War on Terror crimes or abuses; perversely, the only government officials to pay any price were the ones who blew the whistle on those crimes.
That is how history will record the behavior of American federal judges in the face of the post-9/11 onslaught of anti-Muslim persecution and relentless erosions of core rights.
Even worse, if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, your conviction in a federal court is virtually guaranteed, as federal judges will bend the law and issue pro-government rulings that they would never make with a non-Muslim defendant; conversely, if you’re a government official who abused or otherwise violated the rights of Muslims, your full-scale immunity is virtually guaranteed. Those are the indisputable rules of American justice. So slavish and subservient are federal judges when it comes to Muslim defendants that if you’re a Muslim accused of any Terror-related crime, you’re probably more likely at this point to get something approximating a fair trial before a Guantanamo military tribunal than in a federal court; that is how supine federal judges have been when the U.S. Government utters the word “terrorism” in the direction of a Muslim or any claims of “national security” relating to 9/11.
Just to underscore the point a bit further: the Justice Department fileda report this week setting forth its 2011 eavesdropping activities under FISA. Here’s the summary (h/t EPIC):
# of DOJ requests to the FISA court to eavesdrop on and/or physically search Americans/legal residents: 1,745
# of FISA court denials: 0
The DOJ filed close to 1,800 requests for FISA court permission to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans or legal residents or to physically search their property (the vast majority, more than 90%, were for eavesdropping), and the FISA court did not deny a single request, though they did “modify” 30. This is a perfect expression of how the federal judiciary, in general, behaves in the face of claims of National Security from the Executive Branch: as an impotent, eager rubber-stamping servant.
* * * * *
Just by the way: the 1978 FISA law that required court approval before the U.S. Government could eavesdrop on Americans has produced this sort of blindly accepting rubber-stamping from the FISA court since its inception. Nonetheless, it was this FISA process that the Bush administration claimed was too significant of an obstacle to its eavesdropping powers when it decided to violate the law by eavesdropping without asking for FISA court permission, and it’s the same claim which the Democratic-led Congress and then-Sen. Obama made in 2008 when they enacted a new FISA law that dramatically expanded the U.S. Government’s warrantless eavesdropping powers. A 100% victory rate in court is apparently too low for those who see presidential powers as monarchical, and our nation’s federal judges seem all the time to be eagerly attempting to increase that rate.
The neocons have been around for decades, first to mobilize support against Soviet-led communism, and then, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to wage a so-called “Global War on Terrorism.”
As the architects of the spectacularly disastrous Iraq War, the necons should have been thoroughly discredited and relegated to the political fringe. Yet it seems these foreign policy hawks have simply retooled their message, founded a new think tank, and are poised to wreak havoc once again.
By Robert Parry
Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney has responded to his lack of foreign policy experience by surrounding himself with clever neoconservatives who are now looking forward to expanding Bush’s “global war on terror” into what neocon ideologue William Kristol calls a U.S. “war with political Islamism.”
In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, Kristol dismissed President Barack Obama’s phased military withdrawal from Afghanistan – and his statement that “this time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end” – as foolish wishful thinking.
“It would be wonderful if Obama’s view of 9/11 and its implications were correct,” Kristol wrote. “But if it’s not going to be true that Afghanistan is where ‘this time of war … will end’ — even if Afghanistan is pacified and we’re no longer fighting there — then the American people should know that.”
What the American people should know, in Kristol’s view, is that a post-Obama administration – presumably headed by Republican Mitt Romney and staffed by neocon hawks – will undertake a grander “war with political Islamism,” a conflict whose full dimensions even “war president” George W. Bush shrank from.
“This isn’t a pleasant reality, and even the Bush administration wasn’t quite ready to confront it,” Kristol wrote. “But President George W. Bush did capture the truth that we are engaged in — and had no choice but to engage in — a bigger war, a ‘global war on terror,’ of which Afghanistan was only one front.
“There are, of course, problems with ‘global war on terror’ as a phrase and an organizing principle. But it does capture what we might call the ‘big’ view of 9/11 and its implications.”
As part of an even “bigger” view of 9/11, Kristol called for engaging in a broader conflict, ranging “from Pakistan in the east to Tunisia in the west, and most visibly now in places such as Iran and Yemen and Somalia.”
In other words, Kristol and the neocons expect a President Romney to let them refocus the United States onto a “war” not simply against al-Qaeda and its affiliates but against nations where “political Islamism” gains power, which could include Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim countries.
One might as well say the United States will be at war with the Muslim world, though Kristol hastily added that this “war with political Islamism” does not always have to involve open warfare.
He wrote: “This doesn’t mean we need to be deploying troops and fighting ground wars all around the globe. [But] unfortunately, the war in which we are engaged won’t end with peace in, or withdrawal from, Afghanistan.”
A Romney Presidency?
Most political analysts say the November elections will turn on the economy with foreign policy a second-tier issue. In addition, many progressives have denounced Obama and his more targeted approach of relying on drone strikes to kill alleged terrorists as unacceptable, with some on the Left vowing not to support his reelection.
But it shouldn’t be missed that a President Romney would reinstall the neocons, including many who worked for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, at the levers of American power. Indeed, Romney’s foreign policy “white paper” was largely drafted by neocons. Even the name, “An American Century,” was an homage to the neocon manifesto of the 1990s, “Project for a New American Century.”
Romney’s foreign policy advisers include:
Cofer Black, a key Bush counterterrorism official; Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security; Eliot Cohen, a neocon intellectual;Paula Dobriansky, a former Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Eric Edelman, a national security aide to Vice President Cheney; Michael Hayden, the ex-director of CIA and the National Security Agency who defended Bush’s warrantless spying program; Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist; former Navy Secretary John Lehman; and Daniel Senor, spokesman for Bush’s Iraq occupation.
Romney’s foreign policy also would restore George W. Bush’s “with us or against us” approach to the world – except that Romney, like Kristol, advocates even a more confrontational style, essentially a new Cold War against “rogue nations,” a revised “axis of evil.”
“A special problem is posed by the rogue nations of the world: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba,” Romney’s white paper declares. “Their interests and values are diametrically opposed to our own and they threaten international peace and security in numerous ways, including, as in the case of North Korea and Iran, by seeking nuclear weapons, or by harboring criminal networks, exporting weapons, and sponsoring terrorists. …
“Mitt Romney would work to protect and advance America’s interests by employing all the instruments of national power at the president’s disposal. He will defend our country, defend our allies, and restore American leadership around the world. It is only American power — conceived in the broadest terms — that can provide the foundation of an international system that ensures the security and prosperity of the United States and our friends and allies. …
“A Romney foreign policy will proceed with clarity and resolve. The United States will clearly enunciate its interests and values. Our friends and allies will not have doubts about where we stand and what we will do to safeguard our interests and theirs; neither will our rivals, competitors, and adversaries. …
“The United States will apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict. In defending America’s national interest in a world of danger, the United States should always retain a powerful military capacity to defend itself and its allies.”
No Apologies
The Romney “white paper” also treats any recognition of past American errors as unacceptable “apologizing” and calls any notion of seeking multilateral consensus on a problem as an admission of weakness.
“A perspective has been gaining currency, including within high councils of the Obama administration, that regards that United States as a power in decline. And not only is the United States regarded as in decline, but that decline is seen as both inexorable and a condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.
“Adherents of this view argue that America no longer possesses the resources or the moral authority to play a leadership role in the world. They contend that the United States should not try to lead because we will only succeed in exhausting ourselves and spreading thin our limited resources.
“They counsel America to step aside, allow other powers to rise, and pursue policies that will ‘manage’ the relative change in our national fortunes. They recoil from the idea of American Exceptionalism, the idea that an America founded on the universal principles of human liberty and human dignity has a unique history and a special role to play in world affairs.
“They do not see an international system undergirded by American values of economic and political freedom as necessarily superior to a world system organized by multilateral organizations like the United Nations. Indeed, they see the United Nations as an instrument that can rein in and temper what they regard as the ill-considered overreaching of the United States.
“This view of America in decline, and America as a potentially malign force, has percolated far and wide. It is intimately related to the torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country. …
“Among the ‘sins’ for which he has repented in our collective name are American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, for committing torture, for fueling anti-Islamic sentiments, for dragging our feet in combating global warming, and for selectively promoting democracy.
“The sum total of President Obama’s rhetorical efforts has been a form of unilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere. A President who is so troubled by America’s past cannot lead us into the future. … Mitt Romney believes in restoring the sinews of American power.”
Hawks in the Middle East
As for the Middle East, Romney’s team advocates unquestioned support for Israel both regarding its treatment of the Palestinians and toward Iran:
“Israel is the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East and a beacon of democracy and freedom in the region. The tumult in the Middle East has heightened Israel’s security problems. Indeed, this is an especially dangerous moment for the Jewish state. …
“To ensure Israel’s security, Mitt Romney will work closely with Israel to maintain its strategic military edge. … The United States must forcefully resist the emergence of anti-Israel policies in Turkey and Egypt, and work to make clear that their interests are not served by isolating Israel.
“With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Romney’s policy will differ sharply from President Obama’s. President Obama and his administration have badly misunderstood the dynamics of the region. Instead of fostering stability and security, they have diminished U.S. authority and painted both Israel and ourselves into a corner.
“President Obama for too long has been in the grip of several illusions. One is that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the central problem in the region. This has been disproved repeatedly by events, most recently and most dramatically by the eruption of the Arab Spring.
“But it nonetheless led the administration to believe that distancing the United States from Israel was a smart move that would earn us credits in the Arab world and somehow bring peace closer. The record proves otherwise. The key to negotiating a lasting peace is an Israel that knows it will be secure. …
“[Under President Romney] the United States will reduce assistance to the Palestinians if they continue to pursue United Nations recognition or form a unity government that includes Hamas, a terrorist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
“The United States needs a president who will not be a fair-weather friend of Israel. The United States must work as a country to resist the worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel. We must fight against that campaign in every forum and label it the anti-Semitic poison that it is. Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is not up for debate.”
Regarding Iran, the Romney “white paper” repeats many of the canards about Iranian intentions that have been debunked even by Israelis, such as the mistranslation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement regarding “wiping Israel off the map.” But Romney’s neocon foreign policy team even suggests using that mistranslation to indict Ahmadinejad for war crimes:
“Romney will also push for greater diplomatic isolation of Iran. The United States should make it plain that it is a disgrace to provide Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the trappings and respect offered to responsible heads of state. He should not be invited to foreign capitals or feted by foreign leaders.
“Quite the opposite. Given his calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, Ahmadinejad should be indicted for incitement to genocide under Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
So, even Americans disappointed in Obama’s foreign policy should recognize what the stakes are in November. They include whether to put hard-line neocons back in charge of U.S. foreign policy and the American military.
[To read more of Robert Parry’s writings, you can now order his last two books, Secrecy & Privilege andNeck Deep, at the discount price of only $16 for both. For details on the special offer, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
Last month, Mother Jonesbroke the story of Yonas Fikre. An American Muslim now living in Sweden, Fikre claims he was tortured in the United Arab Emirates at the US government’s request after refusing to become an informant for the FBI. On Tuesday, less than three weeks after Fikre’s allegations were made public, the Justice Department charged Fikre, his brother Dawit Woldehawariat, and a third man, Abrehaile Haile, with conspiring to hide $75,000 worth of money transfers to the UAE and Sudan from the government, all in violation of federal reporting requirements for large international financial transactions. Woldehawariat, Fikre’s brother, was also charged with failing to file a tax return in 2009 and 2010.
There are no allegations of terrorism associated with the charges.
Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has been working with Fikre, told Mother Jones on Wednesday that the federal charges were retaliation for Fikre’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI. “It is disappointing but not surprising that the FBI is retaliating against Yonas by filing specious charges against him after they promised to make his life difficult after he refused to become their informant,” Abbas wrote in an email. “While FBI agents lied to Yonas about many things, in this case, it seems that they have kept their word.”
Thomas Nelson, Fikre’s Portland, Oregon-based lawyer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday that he was unaware of the charges against his client. But Abbas said he’s been in touch with Nelson since then and the two are working together to decide what to do next.
ALLEGAN, Mich. (WOOD) – Rep. Dave Agema told 24 Hour News 8 he thinks Allegan’s police chief overreacted when he shut down an event the representative and a self-proclaimed former terrorist were both speaking at.
Allegan City Police Chief Rick Hoyer told 24 Hour News 8, he didn’t find out there was a bounty on the head of Kamal Saleem, until his speech at Allegan High School was already underway.
…Hoyer said Commissioner [Willis] Sage actually walked up to one of his officers during the event and told him that Saleem had a $25 million dollar bounty. That officer, a sergeant on the force, checked out the information with Saleem’s body guard. When the armed body guard confirmed it, telling police that Islamic terrorists who follow the teaching of the Quran that have been directed to behead Saleem, that’s when Hoyer said they took action.
Hoyer perhaps did misjudge the situation – but he found himself himself having to make a immediate decision on a matter of public safety based on information given to him at the last moment. It appears that Saleem was a victim of his own self-publicity; the obvious question is why, if the “$25 million” bounty really exists, Saleem is not under round-the-clock police guard, in the same way that Salman Rushdie was for many years.
The Thomas More Law Center has now put its own spin on the event in Allegan, as it announces a lawsuit:
Amid shouts of “What about free speech?” from the audience, the Allegan Police Department ordered the event shut-down. School officials notified police that they had received a letter complaining about the event from Dawud Walid, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI). The letter asked the school to disallow the event despite an existing contract. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism funding trial in U. S. history, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation.
…TMLC’s federal lawsuit was brought on behalf of State Representative David Agema; a chapter leader of ACT! for America, Elizabeth Griffin; Allegan County Commissioner, Willis Sage; and Mark Gurley, one of the event sponsors.
In fact, the TMLC’s lawsuit stinks of bad faith – and here’s why:
193. Defendants’ pretextual claim that the free speech event needed to be shut down subverts the true cause for the closing of the free speech event: complying with the demands of hecklers, evidenced by the letter of Defendants CAIR, People For the American Way, Walid, and Keegan, and valuing the heckler’s veto over Constitutional freedoms of Plaintiffs.
…225. Defendants CAIR, [Dawud] Walid, People For the American Way, and[Michael] Keegan intentionally interfered with the Contract by sending a letter to Defendant [Kevin] Harness requesting that the School District breach its Contract with Plaintiffs.
226. Defendants CAIR, Walid, People For the American Way, and Keegan improperly interfered with the Contract.
First, there is no evidence that Hoyer acted on any “letter” that was sent to the School District – why would he? And if so, why would he have allowed the event to get underway in the first place? But more substantively, the TMLC is seeking to punish groups and individuals for daring to contact the School District with their concerns about Saleem. Neither CAIR nor PFAW had any decision-making power over whether the event went ahead – the only reason they are included in the lawsuit is because TMLC wishes to suppress free speech while pretending to uphold it. It’s a SLAPP, and utter humbug.
In fact, there are very good public interest reasons for interested parties and concerned individuals to have contacted the School District – and PFAW’s liberal political perspective or troubling allegations about some of CAIR’s associations are irrelevant. Saleem presents himself as an ex-terrorist turned Christian whistleblower, when in fact his back-story is extremely dubious, and his claim to be an expert on Islam cannot be taken seriously. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, he spoke a Christian Right/conservative conflab called The Awakening 2012; as Right Wing Watch has documented, he used the occasion (standing alongside Frank Gaffney) to allege that when Obama appears to pledge allegiance to the flag, he holds his hand in a special way which shows that in reality he is praying to Allah. Saleem also statedthat Roe vs Wade was part of a plot to establish shariah, and that plans to reform immigration law involves “sending money to Hamas” in order to import Muslims, with the result “this world will become past tense and one day we’ll be wearing ragheads”. Such extravagances speak for themselves – and demonstrate that Saleem’s presence degrades the dignity any educational setting.
In 2010, Saleem was debunked in a piece published in Books & Culture, a sister publication of the evangelical Christianity Today. According to the article’s author, Doug Howard:
I first encountered Kamal Saleem when he appeared at Calvin College in November 2007. A look at his website told me immediately that he was not who he said he was. The signature of his deception was his statement that “in my family was the Grand Wazir of Islam.” The term is ridiculous, a spurious title meant to mislead the innocent with an aura of authority.
…In The Blood of Lambs, Kamal Saleem writes, “I wanted to be like Bond.” In these pages he is Bond, James Bond, in size 6X. He gets those emphatic rivals, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood, both to recruit him. He recalls the intricate details of raids he carried out at age seven. Abu Jihad himself teaches him how to use an AK-47. He is shown off by Yasser Arafat as a model warrior. In Libya at age 14 he has Muammar Qaddafi gushing in gratitude. In Iraq, he waves to Saddam Hussein… Even if one were disposed to give these entertaining claims the benefit of the doubt, the book’s frequent mistakes give the reader pause. The Islamic umma does not mean one world government, and it is not “coming.” The PLO was a secular organization even though Yasser Arafat prayed and quoted the Qur’an.
Further details appear in a recent article in Mother Jones:
Saleem claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has put a $25 million bounty on his head, and that there have been attempts to earn it: After a 2007 event in Chino Hills, California, he writes in his book, he returned to his Holiday Inn to find his room ransacked and a band of dangerous Middle Easterners on his trail. Saleem describes calling the police to alert them to an assassination attempt. Local law enforcement, however, has no record of any such incident.
The same article contains a quote from someone who knew Saleem in the USA before he was famous:
…[Wally] Winter recalls his former roommate as a devout Muslim whose yarns often lapsed into wild exaggeration. “He could sell swampland in Louisiana,” Winter says. “I really do not believe the story about the terrorism. I totally believe that he would make up something like that to either make money or become well known.”
The City of Allegan, meanwhile, has issued a statement, as reported by MLive:
Attorney Scott Smith, representing Allegan, said in a statement that the city has not been served with the lawsuit, but he reviewed it this morning. It names the city, police chief, police officers, school officials and two advocacy groups as defendants.
…”This lawsuit is disappointing in many ways,” Smith wrote. “It is based on conjecture, logical fallacies, and, more disappointingly, factual inaccuracies. The plaintiffs did not even spell one of the defendants’ names correctly. It is disappointing that the lawsuit wrongly imputes motives to the police officers.”
He said he was disappointed that the lawsuit was filed. He said the city cooperated with Thomas More as it sought information about the Jan. 26 event.
“The City quickly provided the requested information and offered to address any other questions or concerns the Thomas More Law Center or its client might have. But, without any further inquiries or any attempts to address the plaintiffs’ concerns, a lawsuit was filed. If, as seems to be alleged by the complaint, its sole purpose is to ensure the defendants respect First Amendment rights, a lawsuit was unnecessary.”
UPDATE: I note that one of the the plaintiffs, Mark Gurley, is a pastor (at the Healing Rooms of Grand Rapids), and he is a member Rick Joyner’s Christian Right group theOak Initiative. He’s also a birther.
Adam Yauch, aka MCA was a co-founder of the Beastie Boys, one of the all-time greatest Hip-Hop groups ever! After a long battle with cancer he has passed away at 48. May he rest in peace!
MCA was a tireless defender of human rights and fighter for the oppressed.
In this video award,(h/t:Reza Aslan) he speaks prophetic words in 1998 about the cycle of violence that the USA was engaging in across the globe, calling out the unreasonable hatred against Muslims and Arabs (see 6:35):
Transcript of what MCA said at the awards:
“In addition to thanking everybody who worked on all the videos and all the people who have worked with us throughout the years, it’s kind of a rare opportunity that one gets to speak to this many people at once. So, if you guys would forgive me, I would just like to speak my mind on a couple of things. I think it was a real mistake that the US chose to fire missiles into the Middle East. I think that was a huge mistake and I think it’s very important that the United States start to look towards non-violent means to solving conflicts because those bombings in the middle east were thought of as retaliation by the terrorists, and if we thought of what we did as retaliation, certainly we are going to find more retaliation from the people of the Middle East, from terrorists specifically I should say because most Middle Eastern people are not terrorists, and that’s another thing America needs to think about; Its racism. Racism that comes from America towards Muslim peoples and Arabic peoples, and that’s something that has to stop. The United States has to start respecting people from the Middle East in order to find a solution that has been building for many years.”
John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many innocent lives we are sometimes obliged to take lives.”
In a speech on April 30, Brennan did share one profound insight: “Countries typically don’t want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.” His answer to that? “The precision of targeted [drone] strikes.” Does he really mean to suggest that local populations are more accepting of unmanned drones buzzing overhead and firing missiles on the push of a button by a “pilot” halfway around the world?
Beneath Brennan’s Orwellian rhetoric lies the reality that he remains unable (or unwilling) to deal with, the $64 question former White House correspondent Helen Thomas asked him repeatedly on Jan. 8, 2010, about why terrorists do the things they do:
Brennan: “Al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”
Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”
Is it possible he still has no clue? To demonstrate how little progress Brennan has made in the way of understanding the challenge of “terrorism,” let’s look back at my commentary in early 2010 about Brennan’s vacuous non-answers to Helen Thomas. At the time, I wrote:
Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.
After Obama briefly addressed L’Affaire Abdulmutallab and wrote “must do better” on the report cards of the national security schoolboys responsible for the near catastrophe, the President turned the stage over to counter-terrorism guru John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
It took 89-year old veteran correspondent Helen Thomas (now 91) to break through the vapid remarks about rechanneling “intelligence streams,” fixing “no-fly” lists, deploying “behavior detection officers,” and buying more body-imaging scanners.
Thomas recognized the John & Janet filibuster for what it was, as her catatonic press colleagues took their customary dictation and asked their predictable questions. Instead, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and more intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.
She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did. Thomas: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.”
Brennan: “Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”
Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”
Brennan: “I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”
Thomas: “Why?”
Brennan: “I think this is a — long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”
Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”
Neither did President Obama, nor anyone else in the U.S. political/media hierarchy. All the American public gets is the boilerplate about how al Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men. There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks.
Obama’s Non-Answer
I had been hoping Obama would say something intelligent about what drove Abdulmutallab to do what he did, but the President uttered a few vacuous comments before sending in the clowns. This is what he said before he walked away from the podium:
“It is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations … to do their bidding. … And that’s why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress. … That’s the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists.”
But why it is so hard for Muslims to “get” that message? Why can’t they end their preoccupation with dodging U.S. missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza long enough to reflect on how we are only trying to save them from terrorists while simultaneously demonstrating our commitment to “justice and progress”?
Does a smart fellow like Obama expect us to believe that all we need to do is “communicate clearly to Muslims” that it is al Qaeda, not the U.S. and its allies, that brings “misery and death”? Does any informed person not know that the unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced 4.5 million from their homes? How is that for “misery and death”?
Rather than a failure to communicate, U.S. officials are trying to rewrite recent history, which seems to be much easier to accomplish with the Washington press corps and large segments of the American population than with the Muslim world. But why isn’t there a frank discussion by America’s leaders and media about the real motivation of Muslim anger toward the United States? Why was Helen Thomas the only journalist to raise the touchy but central question of motive?
Peeking Behind the Screen
We witnessed a similar phenomenon when the 9/11 Commission Report tiptoed into a cautious discussion of possible motives behind the 9/11 attacks. To their credit, the drafters of that report apparently went as far as their masters would allow, in gingerly introducing a major elephant into the room: “America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” (p. 376)
When asked later about the flabby way that last sentence ended, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission, explained that there had been a Donnybrook over whether that paragraph could be included at all.
The drafters also squeezed in the reason given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as to why he “masterminded” the attacks on 9/11: “By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed … from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”
Would you believe that former Vice President Dick Cheney has also pointed to U.S. support for Israel as one of the “true sources of resentment”? This unique piece of honesty crept into his speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009.
Sure, he also trotted out the bromide that the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world.” But the Israel factor slipped into the speech, perhaps an inadvertent acknowledgement of the Israeli albatross adorning the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Very few pundits and academicians are willing to allude to this reality, presumably out of fear for their future career prospects.
Former senior CIA officer Paul R. Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the few willing to refer, in his typically understated way, to “all the other things … including policies and practices that affect the likelihood that people … will be radicalized, and will try to act out the anger against us.” One has to fill in the blanks regarding what those “other things” are.
But no worries. Secretary Napolitano has a fix for this unmentionable conundrum. It’s called “counter-radicalization,” which she describes thusly: “How do we identify someone before they become radicalized to the point where they’re ready to blow themselves up with others on a plane? And how do we communicate better American values and so forth … around the globe?”
Better communication. That’s the ticket.
Hypocrisy and Double Talk
But Napolitano doesn’t acknowledge the underlying problem, which is that many Muslims have watched Washington’s behavior closely for many years and view U.S. declarations about peace, justice, democracy and human rights as infuriating examples of hypocrisy and double talk. So, Washington’s sanitized discussion about motives for terrorism seems more intended for the U.S. domestic audience than the Muslim world.
After all, people in the Middle East already know how Palestinians have been mistreated for decades; how Washington has propped up Arab dictatorships; how Muslims have been locked away at Guantanamo without charges; how the U.S. military has killed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; how U.S. mercenaries have escaped punishment for slaughtering innocents.
The purpose of U.S. “public diplomacy” appears more designed to shield Americans from this unpleasant reality, offering instead feel-good palliatives about the beneficence of U.S. actions. Most American journalists and politicians go along with the charade out of fear that otherwise they would be accused of lacking patriotism or sympathizing with “the enemy.”
Commentators who are neither naïve nor afraid are simply shut out of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM). Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, has complained loudly about “how our blind, endless enabling of Israeli actions fuels terrorism directed at the U.S.,” and how it is taboo to point this out.
Greenwald recently called attention to a little-noticed Associated Press report on the possible motives of the 23-year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab. The report quoted his Yemeni friends to the effect that the he was “not overtly extremist.” But they noted that he was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Emphasis added)
Former CIA specialist on al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer, has been still more outspoken on what he sees as Israel’s tying down the American Gulliver in the Middle East. Speaking Monday on C-SPAN, he complained bitterly that any debate on the issue of American support for Israel and its effects is normally squelched. Scheuer added that the Israel Lobby had just succeeded in getting him removed from his job at the Jamestown Foundation think tank for saying that Obama was “doing what I call the Tel Aviv Two Step.”
More to the point, Scheuer asserted: “For anyone to say that our support for Israel doesn’t hurt us in the Muslim world … is to just defy reality.”
Beyond loss of work, those who speak out can expect ugly accusations. The Israeli media network Arutz Sheva, which is considered the voice of the settler movement, weighed in strongly, citing Scheuer’s C-SPAN remarks and branding them “blatantly anti-Semitic.”
A vey good piece by Chris Stedman. He invites Sam Harris to leave his comfort zone, the bully pulpit of his blog, and come experience meeting real, life Muslims, the one he’s eager to have profiled (H/T: CriticalDragon):
Sam Harris–I know you’re a busy man, but I’d like to ask you out. Will you go to mosque with me?
I’m not trying to convert you to Islam. Like you, I’m not a Muslim. Like you, I don’t believe in any gods. I’m happily, openly atheist. A queer atheist, even. Like you, I have many significant concerns about Islamic beliefs and practices. But still, I want to visit a mosque with you.
We don’t have to go alone–we could go with Mustafa Abdullah, a young community organizer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina who is currently campaigning against the state’s proposed anti-gay Amendment One. We could attend with Najeeba Syeed-Miller, a teacher and activist who has dedicated her life to peacebuilding initiatives. Or we could go with Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, who is committed to promoting pluralism and opposing bigotry, and who regularly speaks up for atheists as a religious minority in the United States.
Why am I inviting you to visit a mosque with me and my friends? Since I’m asking you publicly (I couldn’t find your phone number anywhere and I’m pretty sure this MySpace page isn’t really you), I should probably give some context.
A few weeks ago I saw you speak at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. Before I go on, I need to confess: your remarks blew me away. In a weekend full of incredible intellects, your frank, contemplative, eloquent speech on death, grief, and mindfulness was easily my favorite. So I was not prepared for the crushing disappointment I felt when, just a few weeks later, you published a piece called “In Defense of Profiling” in which you unequivocally stated: “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”
Never mind that your argument doesn’t hold water–to quote my friend Hind Makki: “What does a Muslim look like? The 9/11 hijackers didn’t have beards and ‘dressed Western.’ The shoe bomber wasn’t Arab or South Asian. Sikhs wear turbans. The majority of American Muslim women don’t wear hijab. The majority of Arab Americans are Christian–though they often share the same names as their Muslim counterparts. Perhaps Harris would support an initiative that required all Muslims to sew a crescent and star onto our clothes. It would make his airport security time a more pleasant experience. (Though, I suppose, it wouldn’t have stopped McVeigh or Breivik.)” Though as a frequent traveler I share your frustrations with the TSA, profiling doesn’t make sense as a solution to its problems.
Instead, while we’re en route to mosque, I’d like to talk to you about something else. As I read your piece, which (along with the clarifying addendum you tacked on a few days later) failed to explain how you would determine who “looks… Muslim,” I thought back to another moment at the Global Atheist Convention a few weeks ago. As you were speaking, rumors began to fly that a group of extremist Muslims would be protesting the convention. Sure enough, a group of less than a dozen appeared just a short while later, holding signs that said “Atheists go to hell” and shouting horrible things. But to my dismay, their hate was mirrored by hundreds of conference attendees, some of whom shouted things like “go back to the middle east, you pedophiles,” tweeting ”maybe the Muslim protesters [are] gay so [they] don’t have wives? … A lot are/were camel shaggers,” and wearing shirts that said “Too stupid for science? Try religion.” Watching the scene unfold, I was reminded of how much work there is to be done in combating prejudice between the religious and the nonreligious.
I’m not sure you share my concerns about this divide. In fact, last year you wrote this about the 2011 attacks orchestrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway that resulted in the deaths of over 70 people:
One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms.
In the wake of an atrocity of unimaginable proportions–one perpetrated by an anti-Muslim terrorist who was influenced by anti-Muslim writers–I could not believe that you decided to write a blog suggesting that the real problem is the fight against Islamophobia.
Whether you think so or not, Sam, Islamophobia is quite real. The American Muslim community experiences disproportionately high rates of discrimination and violence, and Islamophobic rhetoric has a significant bearing on this. This from a detailed report on the network of Islamophobia in America: “According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism ‘is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,’ the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are ‘the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.’”
As a society, we need to acknowledge the reality of the consequences of Islamophobia. As one Norwegian Muslim recently said:
“I think it is good and healthy that this comes out,” he told AFP in a telephone interview, arguing that Breivik built his ideology largely on the basis of Islam-critical writings in the media and online and rumors he has heard about violent Muslims. “This should help show people that this kind of rhetoric can be very, very dangerous. It is a wake-up call, and I think many people will moderate the way they talk about these things.”
We desperately need to discuss these things. An argument I frequently hear from atheists is that if moderate Muslims really exist, they need to speak out more. The problem is that Muslims are speaking out against extremists who cite Islam as their inspiration. Need some examples? There. Are. So. Many. That.I. Can’t. Link. To. Them. All. (But those eleven are a good start.)
The real problem is the Islamophobic misinformation machine, supported by our conflict-driven media. Stories of Muslims engaging in peaceful faith-inspired endeavors don’t sell nearly as well as stories of attempted Times Square bombings. Yet even coverage of violent stories is skewed against Muslims: for example, the mainstream media largely ignores violence against Muslims, such as when a mosque in Florida was bombed. (Just imagine the media frenzy if that had been a Muslim bombing a church.) The press also ignores stories of Muslim heroism, such as the fact that the man who stopped the Times Square bomber was himself a Muslim. Perhaps we perceive Islam as inherently violent, and imagine that an “Islam versus the West” clash of civilizations is inevitable, because our perspective is shaped by the warped way the media reports on Islam.
The feeling that we need to profile “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim,” as you wrote–that Muslim Americans are dangerous and should be viewed with suspicion–is an outgrowth of the Islamophobic misinformation that proliferates our culture. I’m proud to say that nontheist organizations like the Center for Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and the Institute for Science and Human Values recognize this, which is why just last week they signed on to a letter (alongside many interfaith and religious organizations) decrying racial and religious profiling.
The idea that we should single out Muslims is a misguided and damaging one, and it has serious ramifications for the Muslim community. After the thwarted “Christmas tree” bombing by a young Muslim in Portland, OR, Eboo Patel wrote:
It would be perfectly understandable if, in this time of Muslim terrorism and Islamophobia, everyday Muslims tried to slink into the shadows, to hide in the mosque. But it would be a huge mistake. Now more than ever, we need Muslim community leaders to be loud and proud about Islam’s glories, to inspire a new generation to follow in the footsteps of the Muslim heroes who bent the arc of the universe towards justice.
As Muslims become more and more marginalized, that will be increasingly difficult. When I posted a link to Patel’s column on my Facebook page, a friend commented on the FBI’s involvement in the Portland incident, and a subsequent arson attack on a Portland-area mosque: “I’m starting to wonder how any of this makes our country more secure or keeps our citizens safe. It certainly made things more dangerous for Muslims in Corvallis.”
I look around and I see a country deeply divided over the place of Muslims in America’s civic landscape–a nation roiling with fear and uncertainty, where hundreds of people will crowd outside of a benefit for a Muslim relief organization and scream things like “go home” and “terrorist” while waving American flags. That despicable display of anti-Muslim hate didn’t really make the news either, by the way.
Profiling feeds this fear and paranoia, and it plays right into the notion held by the tiny percentage of Muslims who are extremists that all Muslims are under attack and need to be defended. It is truly dangerous territory, and not just for Muslims–the recent congressional “Muslim radicalization” hearings in the U.S. echo the anti-gay “lavender scare” and the explicitly anti-atheist undertones of the “red scare” in the 1950s. As a gay atheist, I recognize that it could just as easily be me who is targeted.
But I do have hope, Sam. I’m currently reading a wonderful book called The Young Atheist’s Handbook by Alom Shaha–I could lend it to you after our mosque visit. In the book, Shaha writes about growing up Muslim and later becoming an atheist. In the fourth chapter of the book, he touches on the tragedy in Norway and delves into a lengthy, must-read exposition of the ugly reality of Islamophobia in the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In it, he points to the major role the media has played in guiding the narrative that says that Muslims are a monolithic, loathsome bloc–or as Shaha wrote, a perspective that “see[s] all Muslims as the same, and completely fail[s] to acknowledge the diversity and differences in values that are held by the millions of Muslims in the world.” Shaha goes on to write:
You may wonder why, if I no longer identify as Muslim, I care so deeply about this… Although I am an atheist, I nevertheless find it distressing that people can be contemptuous of all Muslims based on their own prejudices about what it means to be Muslim. Some atheists are guilty of this ideological categorization, too, and it bothers me that some of those who really should know better feel that Muslims and non-Muslims cannot, by definition, get along. I suspect this is a point on which I differ from more-hardline atheists, but perhaps my own experience of being judged for my skin colour has made me acutely sensitive to such judgments being exercised upon others.
Shaha is definitely on to something. Over the last few years, I’ve watched with despair as an increasing, increasingly-less-subtle xenophobic anti-Muslim undercurrent has spread throughout the atheist movement, cloaked by intellectual arguments against Islam’s metaphysical claims and practices and rallying cries in defense of free speech. Though it has been spreading throughout our broader culture, I’m especially disheartened to see it among my fellow atheists. At my first American Atheists conference, for example, I witnessed a crowd of people shout things like “show us some ankle” at three women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance. It’s one thing to critique Islam; but the glee I saw in some of their faces as people whistled and shouted “take it off” was something else.
Writing about an incident where an American Atheists State Director posted an Islamophobic rant to their official Facebook page, atheist blogger Hemant Mehta said:
It’s always a touchy subject when atheists go after Islam… because people have to be very careful that they don’t stereotype all followers of Islam as if they’re all extremists. Our society does a terrible job of this. Atheists, especially when they’re ‘leaders’ among us, ought to know better than to fall into that trap.
You ought to know better, Sam. Your insistence that Islamophobia isn’t a problem and your willingness to play into the irrational anxieties of those who fear Muslims is irresponsible and dangerous. With your great reach, you have the opportunity to build bridges of understanding–instead, you have chosen to make the dividing lines that keep our communities apart that much thicker.
The uptick in attempted bombings in Northern Ireland is causing concern that there will be a return to heightened sectarian conflict.
Another bomb has been discovered, this time in the grounds of a Presbyterian Church in North Belfast. (H/T: JD)
Can one imagine if Muslims had been behind this? It would be all over international media, and you can bet the anti-Islam haters would lump it in as one more attempted “Islamic terrorist” attack, but they would never call it “Christian terrorism”:
(u.TV News)
A suspect object discovered at a church in north Belfast has been declared a viable device, police have confirmed.
The pipe bomb was found in the grounds of the Ballysillan Presbyterian Church on the Crumlin Road area on Wednesday morning.
Evacuated residents have been allowed to return to their homes and the road has re-opened to traffic.
Chief Inspector Andrew Freeburn, North Belfast Area Commander, said the device was capable of causing injury or death to anyone in the vicinity.
“The people who carried this out have shown a callous disregard for everyone in our community, not least those local residents who have been inconvenienced through being evacuated.
“This incident will be fully investigated with view to bringing criminal charges against those responsible.”
SDLP Oldpark Councillor Nichola Mallon said the object was discovered during the cutting of grass on the grounds of the church.
She continued: “The people of North Belfast have seriously suffered through the years as a result of the brutality of the Troubles. They don’t want or need to live under the renewed threat and fear of disruption and attack as they have been increasingly forced to do in recent days.”
Omar Baddar and a host of other organizations responded to the hateful anti-Islam and anti-Arab conference put on by professional bigots Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. The founders of SIOA crassly titled the event, “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.” Seeking to manipulate and abuse the memory of a young Muslim girl who was murdered by her step-father.
Her murder had nothing to do with Islam, but the hate-mongerers insist on trying to smear Islam at any opportunity.
In the following video we get the facts. We see how discriminatory and racist to the core the anti-Islam brigades behind the “conference” really are! We also see how scared they are of confrontation and being challenged on their hateful bigotry:
Widely (un)reported terrorist bomb attack, would have killed many,
“To put it in perspective – anyone within 50 metres of this device would have been killed and anyone within 100 metres, seriously injured,” District Commander Chief Superintendent Alasdair Robinson told a news conference.
“This was a very significant device. If this had exploded it would have caused devastation.”
BELFAST (Reuters) – Two bombs planted by militant Irish nationalists, including one packed with enough explosives to have killed anyone within a 50-metre (yard) radius, were defused in Northern Ireland on Saturday, police said.
The 600-pound (270-kg) bomb, roughly the same size as one used to kill 29 people in the town of Omagh in the single deadliest attack of Northern Ireland’s three decades of violence in 1998, was left in an abandoned vehicle in the town of Newry.
Police blamed nationalist groups opposed to a 1998 peace deal that largely ended violence in the British-controlled province, and said the device was fully primed to cause devastation.
“To put it in perspective – anyone within 50 metres of this device would have been killed and anyone within 100 metres, seriously injured,” District Commander Chief Superintendent Alasdair Robinson told a news conference.
“This was a very significant device. If this had exploded it would have caused devastation.”
Army bomb disposal experts defused a similarly sized bomb in the border town of Newry this time last year. Another bomb was also found near the main Dublin-to-Belfast motorway earlier this month that police said had the potential to kill.
The other bomb also made safe by the army on Saturday was discovered under a parked car in Belfast where 80 people were moved from their homes for five hours overnight. There was no confirmation yet of its size.
Police investigating dissident activity also found guns and ammunition in the mainly Catholic Ardoyne area of Belfast.
The 1998 peace agreement called a halt to more than three decades of violence between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists opposed to British rule of Northern Ireland and predominantly Protestant unionists who wanted it to continue.
But dissidents, many of them belonging to splinter groups that have broken away from the IRA, fight on with mostly unsuccessful and sporadic gun and bomb attacks.
(Reporting by Ivan Little; Editing by Padraic Halpin/Maria Golovnina)
Sam Harris continues the absurdist act that he has something intelligent to say when it comes to topics other than Neuroscience. We also learn that he possesses a 9mm, and travels with 75 rounds of ammunition, if the religion-bashing industry doesn’t work out maybe he can be the new spokesman for the NRA?
In a recent blog post, the pop Atheist guru writes that “we” should specifically profile Muslims at airports, and “be honest about it.” He is sick of the “tyranny of fairness” in which airport security searches people randomly when we all know that it’s the “Mooslims” who want to kill everyone on the plane. He concedes that he hasn’t “had to endure the experience of being continually profiled…”, and that he would find it “frustrating” if he had, but if someone looks like they may commit a crime (based on their ethnic appearance), they should be targeted for extra scrutiny.He uses the comedian Ben Stiller’s appearance as an example:
“But if someone who looked vaguely like Ben Stiller were wanted for crimes against humanity, I would understand if I turned a few heads at the airport. However, if I were forced to wait in line behind a sham search of everyone else, I would surely resent this additional theft of my time.”
Attempting to speak on behalf of the very people he wants profiled, he implies that Muslims should “welcome” profiling, at the very least it would “save them time!”
He goes on;
We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
Maybe Sam will want Muslims to wear crescent and star badges so as to be identified as “Muslim?” By saying “conceivably be Muslim” Sam is really saying any Brown, Middle Eastern or South Asian looking person, perhaps someone with a turban?
In a very poor attempt to soften the racialist tone, he adds this caveat;
And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?)… (emphasis added)
As with most advocates of procedures that single out specific people for harassment, Sam Harris himself doesn’t have to experience the frustration that comes from this harassment. It’s easy to say, “Muslims should just cooperate and make it easier on themselves and everybody else” when one doesn’t have to experience such situations, multiple times, themselves.
He recounts earlier in the blog post an ironic experience he had at the airport whereby he “accidentally” smuggled nearly 75 rounds of ammunition past the inspectors, while a three-year old was momentarily taken from her family so that her sandals could be inspected.
I once accidentally used a bag for carry-on in which I had once stored a handgun—and passed through three airport checkpoints with nearly 75 rounds of 9 mm ammunition.
Question: What the hell is Sam Harris doing with 75 rounds of ammunition?
As of today (May 1st), he has added an addendum to his blog, complaining that some people didn’t take too kindly to his simply presenting the “facts” as he sees them. One of those basic “facts” is;
“…that, in the year 2012, suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. If you grant this, it follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites would be a dangerous waste of time.”
He must have not read the report which stated that only 6% of terrorist acts committed in the United States from 1980-2005 years were committed by Muslims, and that even in 2012 an American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to be killed/hurt by a Muslim terrorist.
He goes on;
“1. When I speak of profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim,” I am not narrowly focused on people with dark skin. In fact, I included myself in the description of the type of person I think should be profiled (twice). To say that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person’s beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or totally dishonest.”
Well that’s a sigh of relief! It’s not “just” dark-skinned Muslims that he wants to be profiled, but all Muslims! What universalistic spirit!
It has already been established that the more “Muslim” a person looks at the airport, the less likelythey are to attempt anything violent on the plane. It simply would make no sense for a person to raise a thousand red flags in the minds of airport security, before they even board the plane. The entire point of a terrorist is to accomplish their goal, not to raise the suspicions of everyone around them before they get the chance to do so.
Since the stereotypical image of a Muslim in the minds of many is that of a “dark-skinned man of the Orient,” Muslim profiling is for all practical purposes racial profiling.
Juan Cole wrote about this on his blog nearly a year ago, when two Muslim clerics were forced to exit a plane because the pilot refused to fly if they were still on board;
“The terrorist costume is a simulated reality, circulated in Hollywood and countless news broadcasts, that evokes a causal relation between appearance and action. The terrorist costume is familiar to nearly all Americans: a thick beard, an ashen robe, brown skin, sandals holding dirty feet, and some sort of headgear, usually a turban (Sikh style, of course). The terrorist wearing this costume often sports a Qu’ran, so the audience can be certain that he is a Muslim.
Yet the acts of terrorism that have been committed by radicals of Muslim heritage involved perpetrators, like Mohamed Atta, who didn’t at all resemble the image of the Hollywood terrorist. Rahman and Zaghloul dressed in a way that set off alarms in some of their American co-passengers because the latter entertained Orientalist fantasies. Ironically, Muslim-American clerics are among the more law-abiding people in the country.”
Harris’s pro-profiling views are not shocking to anyone who knows his history of loonieness. Harris after all is the same unprincipled and bigoted individual, who has, as Bob Pitt noted;
backed Geert Wilders, joined the hysterical campaign against the so-called Ground Zero mosque and claimed that “the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”
By Eli Clifton on Apr 30, 2012 at 9:30 am, ThinkProgress
Yesterday in Dearborn, Michigan, noted anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer hosted a conference promising to advocate for “human rights” in one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States. Geller, writing on her blog on Sunday, warned, “We will meet fierce resistance by Islamic supremacists who will do anything, say anything to impose the sharia and whitewash the oppression, subjugation and slaughter of women under Islamic law.”
But surprisingly, Muslim women found themselves denied entry to the conference and, after patiently waiting in the corridor after being told to wait, were removed from the Hyatt Hotel by the Dearborn Police Department and Hyatt security.
Several of the young women commented that they shared a similar appearance with Jessica Mokdad, the young women who Geller and Spencer claim was murdered in an “honor killing” (a conclusion not shared by Mokdad’s family or Michigan prosecutors).
ThinkProgress attempted to attend the event and was turned away, and eventually removed from the Hyatt by the police, along with the young women. One of the women commented, “I tried emailing [Pamela Geller to register] and I literally couldn’t get any kind of response back.” That comment seems to contradict Geller’s claim that she wants to help Muslim women and that the conference was in defense of the human rights of Muslim women.
Another woman who tried to attend the conference told ThinkProgress:
Coming in, I was asking where the human rights conference is. [Hyatt Security and Dearborn Police] were like, ‘what are you talking about?’ I’m like, ‘the human rights conference on the second floor.’ They were like, ‘the anti-Islam conference?’ That’s what they’re calling it now.
And another woman expressed surprise that Geller, who has asked to hear from more Muslim voices on human rights issues, was denying Muslims access to her event. “I watched an interview with her [...] and she said, ‘Where are the Muslims?’ Well, we’re here!” Watch it (police arrive to escort the women off the Hyatt premises at 3:58):
Pamela Geller emailed ThinkProgress, “They didn’t register. We’ve been announcing for weeks that only registered attendees would be admitted.”
The above individuals are charged with conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials. Imagine if they were “brown” or “Muslamic” looking, this would be called a terrorist plot from the get go. (via. WhatIfTheyWereMuslim)
This piece was reported not as a “terrorist” plot but rather simply a “bomb plot”:
Federal agents have arrested five people who were plotting to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio, an incident not connected to the anniversary of former al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s death, officials say.
Douglas L. Wright, 26, Brandon L. Baxter, 20, and Anthony Hayne, 35, were arrested by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on April 30 on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce. Also arrested were Connor C. Stevens, 20, and Joshua S. Stafford, 23. Charges are pending against them.
The five were “controlled by an undercover FBI employee,” and agents had them under extensive surveillance for a long period of time. The explosives they allegedly purchased were inoperable.
“There was never any danger,” one federal official said.
Court documents say the FBI became aware of the men in October. A confidential source told the FBI that they were acting suspiciously at a protest event, wearing masks, talking on radios, and saying they didn’t believe in peaceful protest. They carried flags associated with anarchist groups.
From that point on, the informant was in constant touch with the group members. Their goal, one of them said, was to destroy private property “to send a message to corporations.” Last November, they discussed setting off smoke grenades on Veterans Memorial Bridge in Cleveland as a diversion while they would be knocking bank signs off the tops of tall buildings downtown.
Federal officials say Wright, Baxter and Hayne describe themselves as anarchists who considered a series of evolving plots over several months.
As Stevens and Stafford came into the plot, they started talking about using explosives.
The informant brought in two people he said could help them get explosives. These people were actually FBI undercover agents. The group members agreed to buy tear gas and gas masks. Two weeks later, they said they wanted to buy plastic explosives.
A photo of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge taken in 1995 as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record projects for the U.S. National Parks Service.
In late April, they settled on trying to blow up the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. This bridge crosses from Brecksville, Ohio to Sagamore Hills, Ohio over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
On April 29, they met with the undercover agents and bought what they thought were two homemade bombs for $450. They planned to place them on April 30 but were arrested by the FBI.
The members of this group had a strong desire to commit acts of violence but no idea how to do it. At one point, a member of the group says what they needed was “mainly bleach,” because, he said, that’s what land mines and hand grenades were made with during World War II.
“The complaint in this case alleges that the defendants took specific and defined actions to further a terrorist plot,” said U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio Steven Dettelbach. “The defendants stand charged based not upon any words or beliefs they might espouse, but based upon their own plans and actions.”
In National Review, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson — two key figures in the Islamophobia network discussed in CAP’s 2011 Fear, Inc report — write that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) “has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office”:
In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.
A perusal of the authors’ case against Christie reveals it as comically weak, full of highly questionable characterizations and buttressed by links that don’t actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to. In a typical example, they criticize Christie for voicing support for Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, “on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas.” They do not mention that the hearing resulted in Qatanani being cleared of charges.
Pipes and Emerson knock Christie for his concern over revelations of the New York City Police Department’s spying on New Jersey Muslims, suggesting that he should’ve shown “gratitude” for the NYPD operating outside its jurisdiction.
And of course the authors take special offense at Christie’s bold defense of New Jersey state superior court judge Sohail Mohammed against attacks by anti-Islam activists, in which Christie offered the most cogent summation of the anti-sharia movement on record: “It’s crap. It’s just crazy.”
Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.
While Pipes and Emerson fail to demonstrate that Chris Christie has an “Islam problem,” they succeed in demonstrating that National Review still has an Islamophobia problem. Last month the magazine took important steps to rid itself of two writers who had expressed bigoted views toward African-Americans. It’s long past time that National Review do the same with those of its writers expressing similar views toward Muslim Americans.
No surprise that the UKIP is parroting statements like those of Geert Wilders (h/t:githensmazer). I wonder is Julia Gasper like a UK version of Lou Ann Zelenik:
A candidate for UKIP has compared Islam’s holiest book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Political Scrapbook can reveal. Academic Julia Gasper — a former Westminster hopeful and current council candidate in Oxford – said the Koran was “fascist” and compared those who defend Islam to holocaust deniers.
In emails seen by Scrapbook, Gasper ranted:
“Why is it any more wrong to assert that the Koran is a fascist book than to assert that Mein Kampf is a fascist book? The Koran is a lot more explicit in advocating hate and murder than Mein Kampf is.”
Having dismissed comparisons between sections of the Koran and the Old Testament as “not valid”, Gasper responded to suggestions that her hateful bile was demonising Muslims:
“Words like “demonization” are just self-deception. They are being used to persuade you to keep your eyes shut. In fact, the apologists for Islam are really very similiar to Holocaust deniers.”
To compound matters, the rant comes to light as another UKIP candidate is suspended for expressing sympathies with Norwegian mass-murder Anders Breivik – and just days after Julia Gasper herself was slammed for saying gays should stop ‘complaining about persecution’ and start thanking straight people for giving birth to them.
Looks like they’ll be making that a double suspension then.
Yesterday, more than a hundred people gathered at a town hall at the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan to stand in solidarity with the Arab American and American Muslim communities against Islamophobia. The town hall, organized by AAI and local community groups, was held in response to an anti-Muslim conference at the Hyatt in Dearborn, organized by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and other leading Islamophobes.
Islamophobes try to portray themselves as “the real Americans” defending America from the allegedly foreign presence of Muslims, but it was our community town hall that was attended by many elected officials, including Michigan Congressmen John Conyers, Jr. and Hansen Clarke. Elected officials’ presence at our event reiterated the integrality of the American Muslim community in the U.S. and the fringe nature of those who are pushing America to become otherwise.
The town hall opened with an educational panel that included Fear Inc. co-author Eli Clifton, writer Sarah Posner, and AAI President Jim Zogby. Clifton explained in detail the funding sources that finance the anti-Muslim network, while Posner discussed the influence of Islamophobia on American politics. Zogby shed light on the reasons behind the recent rise in Islamophobia, and gave a broader analysis of its implications on U.S. political culture. AAI Executive Director Maya Berry moderated the discussion.
The educational panel was followed by remarks from local community leaders. Noel Saleh of ACCESS talked about the long history of the Arab American and American Muslim communities as an essential part of the fabric of American society. Dawud Walid of CAIR noted how traditional racism played a significant role in the rise of Islamophobia, including the disputing of President Obama’s faith. Osama Siblani of the Arab American News gave a passionate talk about the inevitable defeat of Islamophobes in America because they are working against American values and against history. Others, including Imam Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America, Suehaila Amen of the Lebanese American Heritage Club, Imad Hamad of ADC-Michigan, Nabih Ayad of the Arab American Civil Rights League, and interfaith stalwarts Rev. Dan Buttry and Victor Begg also offered powerful remarks at the event.
Congressmen Conyers and Clarke offered passionate words of solidarity with the Arab and Muslim communities. Congressman Clarke noted that Islamophobia should not be a “Muslim issue,” but an American one that is combatted vigorously by all Americans. He also urged the community not to only criticize elected officials who engage in anti-Muslim pandering, but to press those who are silent to speak out against Islamophobia. The town hall concluded with a lively Q&A which left everyone in a positive spirit, ready to take on the challenges we face.
Because of our presence in Dearborn to challenge the anti-Muslim narrative, virtually all media coverage accurately described the other event as the anti-Muslim event and ours as the community response to bigotry. As long as our community stands up and speaks out against Islamophobia, and as long as public officials and the broader American community continue to stand with us, the bigots will never build momentum that can disrupt the diversity and tolerance that characterize our society.
After the conclusion of our event, my colleague Omar Tewfik and I tried to attend and cover the anti-Muslim conference, but were denied entry (quite the contrast from our open-to-all event). We’ll be sharing our story very soon, accompanied with video footage and interesting details.
When Malcolm X uttered the famous words, “by any means necessary,”it was in the midst of the Jim Crow era. He was making it known that Blacks were not going to take the systematic violence and oppression directed against them in a subservient manner. On the other side was Bull Connor, George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan and organized racism which sought to uphold Jim Crow “by any crooked means.”
In the “fine” tradition of the Jim Crow-era racists, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and other leading anti-Muslim activists have declared war on Muslims by any and all crooked means. In doing so they project their own inadequacies and stealth motives onto Muslims and Islam. They create new definitions of theological concepts such as taqiya (dissimulation to protect oneself from violence and coercion), defining it as lying for the advancement of Islam. In fact, it is Spencer and Geller who are lying to aide their own cause and to line their own pocket books. They put on the mask of defenders of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, when it is they who are a part of the leading regressive force in the US undermining and challenging our liberties and freedoms.
This was on full display yesterday, April, 29 in Dearborn when they went ahead with an anti-Islam conference titled the “Jessica Mokdad Conference.” Jessica Mokdad was a young woman who was murdered by her step-father, a sick man who had been sexually abusing her.
Mokdad’s murder had nothing to do with Islam, but Geller spinned it into an honor killing.
Despite it not being an honor killing, despite the fact that Mokdad’s family requested her name be taken off the conference, (expressing how it pained them that Geller and co. could so thoughtlessly use Jessica’s memory to further hate of the religion she “loved”) the title was kept: “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.”
Geographic Racism
Dearborn, Michigan is home to one of the largest concentrations of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. For this reason it has earned the scorn and undying resentment of the fanatical anti-Muslim movement.
According to these racists Dearborn has ceased to be a part of America because of the “camel jockeys” and “towel heads” who have invaded. In their mind the city has become “Dearbornistan,” and Michigan an “Islamic Republic.”
Such racist notions zeroing in on certain geographic locations isn’t new, it is a similar kind of racism that paints the US’s Southern border as “Third World” and “backward” because of the large percentage of Latinos.
In their nostalgic-looking-back-at-the-50′s-White-bred world when so-called true Americana existed, when America was a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) nation lies the heart of the anti-Muslim movement’s present malaise.
Like most fundamentalists, they hearken to a mythic, purer past, while selling the fear of an impending Armageddon, after which America will no longer be America.
To fight to keep America “pure,” to recreate its glory, the crowd is given the message: “you are the soldiers,” “this is a war,” ”we are the soldiers. It’s up to us.” (via. USA Today reporter Niraj Warikoo):
Standing for Truth
Dearborn’s residents and Jessica Mokdad’s family decided not to protest the conference, instead they held a town hall titled, Rejecting Islamophobia. This is where the anti-Loons gathered, those opposed to bigotry and hate:
“We stand for America,” said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab-American News, at a panel discussion held at a Detroit hotel. “And they (anti-Muslim activists) stand against America and against the American way of life.”
Siblani’s views were echoed by others who gathered for a conference organized by the Arab American Institute and supported by several other Arab-American groups to counter a conference held in Dearborn on Sunday by anti-Muslim activists called the “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings.”
Last year, Mokdad, 20, a Muslim was shot dead by her stepfather in Warren, Mich. Some anti-Islam activists said it was a honor killing because initial reports were that she was perceived as too independent, but Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Cataldo said Friday it was not an honor killing. The family of Mokdad opposed the anti-Islam conference and didn’t want Mokdad’s name on it, Cataldo said.
On Sunday, Imam Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn — the biggest mosque in Michigan — said : “Honor killing has no religious roots in Islam.”
Geller, who blogs against Islam, said: “Our goal is to raise awareness about the phenomenon of Islamic honor killing in order to help bring a stop to it. These girls have rights, too, they’re human beings, and yet they’re completely forgotten in our politically correct culture.”
Qazwini said he believes Geller is motivated by money. He said she wants to make “Islam look like a monster to raise funds.”
Sunday’s anti-Muslim conference in Dearborn is the latest effort by anti-Islam activists to target Dearborn, which has the highest percentage of Arab-Americans in the U.S., according to Census figures. Earlier this month, Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones held a demonstration outside Qazwini’s mosque.
In addition, some Christian missionaries have increasingly targeted Muslims at the annual Arab festival in Dearborn; last year, some yelled at festival goers as they walked by.
James Zogby, who heads the Arab American Institute, said of Sunday’s anti-Muslim conference: “These people are bigots … they are sick.”
The Arab-American conference featured talks by U.S. House Reps. John Conyers and Hansen Clarke, both Democrats from Detroit. Daniel Kirchbaum, executive director of Michigan’s Department of Civil Rights, also spoke at the event, saying that many in Michigan want to make sure “Muslims are treated fairly and equally.”
Try as they may, to spit on the memory of Jessica Mokdad in the name of human rights, the anti-Muslim bigots will not be successful–as long as those who are vigilant speak out against their hatred, fear-mongering, false dichotomies, generalizations, misattributions and lies.
A far-right party on the campaign trial in Germany’s most populous state is threatening to put caricatures of Mohammed outside mosques in a string of cities.
The “Pro NRW” party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia has already shown anti-Islamic caricatures in Essen and Gelsenkirchen, though the police prevented demonstrations taking place directly outside mosques.
Police have also banned “Pro NRW”, which is campaigning on an Islamophobic platform, from using the Danish cartoons that caused massive protests in the Islamic world in 2005.
But “Pro NRW” intends to send activists to 25 mosques throughout the state in the run-up to the election on May 13, staging protests in Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Aachen, Wuppertal and Solingen. Areport in Die Welt newspaper on Sunday said the far-right party intended to post around 100 what it called “Islam-critical” drawings outside the mosques.
Interior Minister in state Ralf Jäger condemned the campaign and expressed support for planned counter-demonstrations. “Pro NRW is committing spiritual arson,” he told the paper. “The party is consciously taking into account that Muslims will feel provoked and upset. The authorities will exhaust all legal avenues to prevent a xenophobic hate campaign.”
The federal Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is reportedly worried about violent confrontations with the Salafists, the fundamentalist Muslims who began distributing free copies of the Koran in Germany three weeks ago. A report in Der Spiegelmagazine over the weekend said his ministry had been in contact with the North Rhine-Westphalia state government in recent weeks to find a way to de-escalate the situation. The election there is on May 13.
“Pro NRW” campaign manager Lars Seidensticker says he did not understand the outrage over the campaign, and says his party would bear no responsibility for any violence.
“If the situation is so tense that you can’t do a campaign like this against Islamist influences any more, then the politicians are responsible for doing away with Germany,” he said, alluding to the title of a 2010 book by banker Thilo Sarrazin (“Germany Does Away with Itself”), which criticized Islamic immigrants in Germany.
“Mosques are potential centres of a new civil war that we have to prevent,” said Seidensticker. “That’s why we have to pull out the Islamist evil by its roots.”
“Pro NRW”, which boasts 250 members, is also planning to award a cash prize for the “best” anti-Islamic caricature, named after Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who was responsible for the 2005 images. Westergaard has distanced himself from the competition and is reportedly considering legal action against the party for using his name.
MSNBC describes it as “dueling in Dearborn.” I think the real story is the rejection of Islamophobia, and the anti-Islam outsiders who arrived only to agitate:
In Dearborn Mich., a Detroit suburb known for its concentration of Muslim Americans, anti-Islam leaders from around the country are gathering to discuss how to rescue women from that faith. The “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings” on Sunday is named for a local Muslim woman murdered one year ago.
But Muslims, civil rights groups and other religious leaders say the conference is merely another event put on by well-known bigots to attack the minority religion. Their response was to schedule a town hall meeting just a few miles away on Sunday called “Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate.”
The honor killing conference, organized by Pamela Geller, who became nationally famous for her vocal opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque, aka Park 51 in Manhattan, is based on the premise that Mokdad, 20 years old when she died in April 2011, was the victim of an honor killing justified by Islam.
Mokdad’s family maintains that the killing was a tragedy that has nothing to do with their Islamic beliefs, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.
“It’s not a case based on honor,” Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Cataldo, chief of homicide, told the Free Press on Friday.
In court, prosecutors have said the motive for Mokdad’s killing was that her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi had “been sexually abusing her,” Cataldo said, according to the report. They argue that when she threatened to go public about the abuse he killed her.
Cataldo said the family strongly objects to the conference using Mokdad’s killing, which they say was a tragedy that had nothing to do with their faith.
Geller insists this was an honor killing carried out by a devout Muslim because his stepdaughter was not following Islam, and that the family is covering it up. She alleges that law enforcers systematically cover up honor killings here and elsewhere under “stealth enforcement” of Islamic shariah law.
On her web site, Geller says: “Despite pressure from the media and members of Jessica’s family who want to cover up the honor killing aspect of her murder, we are not going to change the name of the conference. Unlike those closest to her, we are going to honor Jessica’s memory and stand up against the brutal practice that took her life.”
The Dearborn conference will feature speeches by Geller and Robert Spencer — author of the blog “Jihad Watch” — as well as several like-minded legal and religious figures. They have also invited a young man who says he was Mokdad’s friend to offer “firsthand testimony” that she was a victim of honor killing.
Stop the Islamization of America, which Geller and Spencer founded, has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights watchdog.
“Pamela Geller is the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead,” according to a profile published by SPLC on its web site. ”She’s relentlessly shrill and coarse in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam and makes preposterous claims.”
The Arab American Institute, a decades-old community organization in the Detroit area, discouraged Muslims and their supporters from protesting at the site of Geller’s conference. But they organized a competing event, said AAI president Jim Zogby, because Geller and Spencer have become too prominent to ignore.
“Geller and Spencer have thousands of followers, and are given airtime to spew their hate on major American news networks, as if they are respected analysts with just another viewpoint,” Zogby said on the AAI announcement for the “Rejecting Islamophobia” town hall in Detroit.
Although many Americans have never encountered a Muslim in person, about 43 percent questioned in a recent Gallup Poll said they felt at least “a little” prejudice against Muslims.
“This group, we cannot ignore. This is the time for our community to take a stand, along with all those who value America’s commitment to diversity and freedom of religion, against the politics of division and bigotry promoted by the Islamophobes.”
A variety of community, interfaith and religious leaders and Michigan public on their agenda, for a “community conversation about how to respond to these continued attacks,” said Zogby.
One participant who was just on his way to the town hall was Dawud Walid, who heads the Michigan office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group for Muslims.
“I think firstly we have to better expose who these anti-Muslim bigots are as well as their funders,” said Walid. “We believe that the Islamophobia that permeates our country is being pushed by a well-organized, highly-funded network.”
He says that while Dearborn and Detroit have become a focus for the activities of Geller and others of like mind, the problem is bigger.
We speculated that Wilders star was fading in Europe and that he will try to cash in on the anti-Islam buzz in the USA amongst the “fanatical anti-Islam movement.”
Geert Wilders’ autobiographical book Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me will be presented in New York on Tuesday. Will his message against Islam and the West’s alleged “Islamification” still resonate in the United States? Here in the Netherlands this week’s political upheaval has seriously dented his influence.
Now that Wilders has disqualified himself from governing, relegating his party to opposition status, his political future here is limited. Even if his Freedom Party emerged as the largest in September’s elections, he would find it difficult, if not impossible, to find any coalition partners. No other party will be eager to work with a politician who has proved so unreliable.
So where does a savvy Islam-basher turn when he is down on his luck? To the United States, of course. Following her stint in Dutch politics, Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali embarked on a successful career as Islam-critic in the US. There is speculation that Wilders may follow her example.
Frequent flyer
Wilders is no stranger to American shores. He has travelled there frequently, raising money and giving lectures. He most famously gave a speech in New York in the autumn of 2010 opposing the building of a Muslim Centre a few blocks from Ground Zero. The protest against the centre gave Wilders a platform for his message against Islam. He said New York “must defend itself against the powers of darkness, the force of hatred and the blight of ignorance. …This means we must not give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us.” His speech received broad coverage in the American press.
Changed attitudes
Two years later, however, Wilders will find that attitudes in the US have changed. Anti-Muslim sentiment has been fading. A Gallup poll released in the summer of 2011 showed that Muslims, while still facing discrimination, are more confident about their future than any other group in the US. The standard of living among Muslims is improving faster than among other groups.
Gallup researcher Mohamed Younis: “The debate about Islam flares up when something happens, but the last couple of years have been pretty quiet and the public’s interest has waned. Wilders will have a hard time selling his book right now.”
There is more evidence that the attitude toward Muslims in the US is softening. The most outspoken anti-Islam candidates in the Republican presidential primaries did not do well. Mitt Romney, who is all but certain to win the Republican nomination, is known for his moderate views on American Muslims.
As for entertainment, a reality programme called “All-American Muslim” was cancelled, not because it generated a small controversy, but because it failed to attract viewers. People were bored by the premise that Muslims were everyday, normal Americans, and the show got poor ratings. And the New York Muslim Centre Wilders tried to block is going ahead, albeit in a more modest form. The protests have petered out.
Fringe element
American opinion toward Islam may be evolving, but there’s still an energetic minority of writers and bloggers who continue to warn of the imminent danger that Islam allegedly poses to the US. The small publishing house which is bringing out Wilders’ book is a driving force in such circles.
Regnery Publishing specialises in far-right conspiracy theories and scare-mongering. Books currently featured on the website include: Fast and Furious: Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up,Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why It Can Happen Again, and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.
The author of the last work, Mark Steyn, a fervently anti-Islam journalist from Canada, has written the introduction of Wilders’ new book. Regnery’s head, Marji Ross, says she knows Wilders’ views are seen as extreme, but “that’s what makes the book exciting and bold and newsworthy.”
Judging from the response to review copies of Marked for Death, it fails to fulfil Ms Ross’ expectations. It is reported to be a relatively dry description of how Wilders got to where he is, with hardly anything polemical about it. It also appears to lack the verve of Fitna, his short anti-Islam film of 2008.
Curiously, there is no mention of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who helped elevate Wilders to the powerful position he held for the past 18 months. On the other hand, he refers a few times to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, claiming they think along the same lines.
One reviewer said the book could be considered Wilders’ calling card to America. But in contrast to Hirsi Ali’s books Infidel and Nomad, published by mainstream houses and selling well, Marked for Death is not likely to attract a wide readership outside the fanatical anti-Islam movement.
Deafening silence
When Wilders spoke in parliament earlier this week after bringing down the government, MPs largely ignored him. With one exception, no one bothered to confront him. Apart from a few trusted Islam bashers, the broader public in the US may greet Wilders with the same deafening silence.
Unease is growing in French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party a week before a presidential election over his lurch to the right in pursuit of supporters of anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen.
Some mainstream conservatives have voiced public dismay at his embrace of the campaign themes, language and even some proposals of Le Pen’s National Front. In private conversations, doubts are widespread about the morality and effectiveness of the strategy.
In the last week, Sarkozy has repeatedly declared that there are too many foreigners in France and vowed to reduce legal immigration. Echoing a Le Pen proposal, he has called for police to be given greater license to shoot fleeing crime suspects. He has accused his Socialist rival Francois Hollande of being backed by Islamists and said Le Pen’s voters are respectable and her party compatible with the French Republic.
“Even though I will vote for Nicolas Sarkozy on the second round, it’s clearly my duty to ring the alarm bell about this strategy,” Etienne Pinte, a UMP lawmaker, told Reuters.
He said former prime ministers Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Alain Juppe, Sarkozy’s foreign minister, had made clear in internal meetings their reticence about the rightward drift. ”All through the campaign, we felt there were misgivings among a number of parliamentary colleagues and the two former prime ministers about the exploitation of these extreme-right themes,” Pinte said.
Sarkozy hardened his discourse as soon as the results of last Sunday’s first round showed Le Pen, with nearly 18 percent, had won twice as many votes as centrist Francois Bayrou. The president needs to draw support from both sides to beat Hollande, the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, in the May 6 second-round runoff.
Raffarin hinted at his distaste in an interview with the newspaperLe Monde last week, saying: “If I were to express reservations today, it would weaken my own side … but I remain attached to the humanitarian values of our program.” Asked whether the strategy drawn up by Sarkozy’s political guru Patrick Buisson, a former extreme-right newspaper editor, had not strengthened the far right, Raffarin said the time for analysis would come after May 6. “We are in a battle now, and in a battle, the honorable thing is to be loyal,” he said.
Another former Gaullist prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, deplored what he called “crossing one republican red line after another (in a) shameless seduction of extremist votes”. Without mentioning Sarkozy by name, Villepin warned the mainstream right in an article in Le Monde against betraying its own values.
“One would think there were only National Front voters in France,” he wrote. “As if there were not more important issues than halal meat, legal immigration and (single-sex or mixed) bathing hours in public swimming pools.” Sarkozy has played up each of those issues in his quest to win over Le Pen voters.
Richard Bartholomew points out that the 4 Freedoms Community website run by former English Defence League financier and ideologist Alan Ayling (“Alan Lake”) has updated its Code of Conduct.
Under the heading “Unlawful Killing” this now includes the following: “You must not endorse or encourage people to perform criminal executions. However, you can endorse enforcement of execution by the state (capital punishment) after application of due judicial process.”
The latter qualification is to cover Ayling himself, who has in the past advocated the execution of political opponents like Rowan Williams, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Still, as long Ayling states that their killing should take place after “application of due judicial process” nobody could reasonably object to that, could they? Well, Ayling’s employers, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, evidently did. At the end of last year they suspended him from his job after his identity was revealed.
The ban on endorsing or encouraging “criminal executions”, as distinct from the sort of executions Ayling himself advocates, was imposed after he was contacted by the Norwegian paper Dagbladetin connection with a comment posted on the 4 Freedoms site by Roberta Moore, the former leader of the EDL Jewish division who now heads the Jewish Defence League UK.
Expressing her regret that Anders Breivik had failed to kill Eskil Pedersen, the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth section who escaped from Utøya by boat, Moore wrote: “It seems Breivik missed one. This is precisely the coward that should have been killed. Cowards can run but eventually they meet their fate. May KARMA play its part now.”
Five years ago four Muslim extremists were jailed for four to six years after being convicted of soliciting to murder because they chanted slogans such as “bomb, bomb, Denmark”, “bomb, bomb the UK”, “7/7 on its way” and “Europe, you will pay with your blood” at a protest in London against the Jyllands-Posten anti-Islam cartoons.
The Director of Public Prosecutions said at the time: “Terrorism attacks our way of life and incitement can make a very real contribution to it. We shall continue to take incitement very seriously and prosecute it robustly where there is enough evidence for us to do so.”
Why, then, has Roberta Moore not been charged with the same offence?
Moore is not the only member of the Jewish Defence League UK to advocate terrorist violence against their political opponents. Another is Rob Sims, who posted the following comment on the EDL’s official Facebook page in response to Breivik’s trial:
“We should be supporting this guy, The lot he killed where a bunch of Anti-Semite scum, These left wing idiots and muslims are making europe resemble Germany under NSDAP rule, Whats it gonna take for people to realise that we need more people like Breivik who are willing to actually fight for what he believes in.”
So far as we know no action has been taken against Sims either, even though Durham Constabulary has been notified.
If the police and Crown Prosecution Service can find the time and resources to prosecute a Muslim teenager for posting offensive online comments about British troops, why aren’t the likes of Moore and Sims in court too?
Lynn News has published an update on the controversy over the proposed conversion of a disused King’s Lynn pub into an Islamic community centre.
They interview Stephen Tweed of the British Freedom Party who has been organising a campaign against the development. Tweed claims that his objections to the mosque are concerned only with noise and parking. He states that he is not a racist and that his party is “centre right”.
This from a man who describes King’s Lynn’s Muslim community as “bearded scum”, denounces ”complacent, wishy-washy liberal governments” for having “let Muslim immigrants flood in”, calls for “the banning of the Koran” and “an immediate stop to the building of mosques anywhere”, has a photo of a burning mosque as hisprofile picture on Facebook, and is the Norfolk organiser of a party launched by former prominent figures in the fascist British National Party, one of whom recently commented that he “couldn’t care less” about the young people killed by Anders Breivik because they were “leftist youths” who would “grow up to betray Norway”.
Tweed will be raising his concerns about “noise and parking” on Monday at a meeting of West Norfolk Council’s planning committee, which has been recommended to approve the application to convert the pub into a community centre. Hopefully the committee will take into consideration Tweed’s repulsive political beliefs and treat his arguments accordingly.
Stephen Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson) set to join the BFP (Image credit to Hopenothate.uk)
(Readers, please welcome Haddock, a new contributor to LoonWatch.)
Co-founder of the English Defence League, Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) is to be appointed “deputy leader” of the British Freedom Party come May 5th, 2012, just a few short hours before an EDL demonstration in Luton, according to EDL News.
The BFP, which came about due to a split within the British National Party (which itself came about due to a split within the National Front organization), has increasingly focused their bigotry onto Muslims in an attempt to make racism more “acceptable” in the eyes of a segment of the public who may find some of the “old guard” racism (Blacks, Jews, etc.) problematic.
The two organizations decided to form an alliance in November, 2011 after agreeing that they had a better chance at “helping the Cause” if they worked together. The intended platform for the new alliance is typical fodder for anti-Muslim racists; calls to “ban the Burka,” forbid the establishment of new mosques, “madrassas” (by that they mean any Islamic schools) and “Sharia law” in “all forms”, including “Sharia finance.”
Another strategy they have decided on is to “Focus” on the “non-Islamic” population, in order to convince “useful idiots” of all colors and creeds to set themselves upon the Muslim population; all the while still holding onto their “regular” racist beliefs.
I find it hard, for example, to picture them hanging out with their fellow Black, Jewish, and Hindu Islamophobic cohorts as “buddies,” after everything is said and done.
Some of their other loving policy suggestions include the following vignettes,
“End to mass immigration, except for vital (highly qualified positions). Immigrants must undergo health check, have a sponsor, have sufficient funds to support them and their families and must be able to speak/write English.”
“Have a system in place to regulate all mosques & madrassas”
“Leave the European Union.”
“Promote Christian values.”
The BFP has also decided to be extremely creative and change their name to simply British Freedom, so that people won’t confuse them with the BNP. In a strange twist of irony, the parent organization of the BNP, the National Front, is beginning to see a comeback after jumping on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. The organization was popular among the far-right in the 1970’s, when it was more socially acceptable to advocate “roots” racism. According to Islamophobia-Watch,
“At next month’s London Assembly, local council and mayoral elections it [National Front] is putting up 35 candidates – the highest number it has fielded for 30 years. Among its hopefuls is a businessman once convicted of assaulting an anti-racism campaigner who hopes to be the first directly elected mayor of Liverpool; a former BNP supporter arrested for burning a copy of the Koran; and Derek Beackon, the notorious far-right councillor.”
Classy folks.
This just demonstrates the power of Islamophobia. The fact that a nearly defunct organization that had its heyday in the late 70’s, is able to momentarily drag itself out of bed while in a drunken stupor proves that the anti-Muslim niche works. The same is true for the BNP, who has in recent years hopped onto the “it’s the Muslims vs. the rest of us” bandwagon, despite the fact that its members still hold onto their other racialist beliefs. But hey, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend”, right?
If there is any silver lining in all of this, it is this; most British people simply don’t like thugs who resort to violence to make their points. This is why the EDL is viewed as an embarrassment (at least publicly) even to some racists; they reveal what racism is truly about, and reality face to face makes most people uncomfortable.
That’s bad publicity for people trying to impose an agenda onto others. Recall that Hitler eventually abolished the SA because he realized that his street thugs were making a bad impression on his so-called “noble Cause.” Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch says it better than me:
“Some have suggested that the EDL-BFP lash-up is an example of the classic fascist strategy of building a movement with a physical force and an electoral wing. The theory behind the strategy is that by showing you control the streets and can intimidate your opponents you win admiration as a powerful movement that will be able to impose order on society and this translates into increased votes.
But this strategy is based on the successes of Mussolini and Hitler in situations of extreme economic, social and political crisis, where large numbers of people turned to the leadership of the far right out of sheer desperation. No crisis of such proportions has occurred in Britain and despite the current economic problems there is no sign of it doing so any time soon. Consequently when the far right takes to the streets of the UK with a mob of racist thugs this doesn’t impress people with the strength of the organisation and boost electoral support. Quite the opposite – voters are repelled by a movement whose public face is that of a gang of violent hooligans.”
The new myth is that Islam somehow promotes…*drum roll*…necrophilia!
While you can likely find a fatwa for everything, when the recent story claiming that the “Egyptian parliament was considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death” went viral, the BS meter shot up pretty high for us.
But not for many mainstream media outlets who ran with the story without fact checking, thereby reinforcing Islamophobic myths and anti-Islam talking points.
Despite the ardent desire on behalf of Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer (he saw it as evidence of Sharia’ takeover) for the story to be true it was revealed pretty quickly that it was a hoax.
Spencer still has not updated the story to point out that it was a hoax. Now a lot of the haters have egg on their faces, this is not the first or the last time that such lies will be promoted in the media.(h/t:ZH)
Today, Egypt‘s state-owned Al Ahram newspaper published an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt’s parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death.
It was soon mentioned in an English language version of Al-Arabiya and immediately started zipping around social-networking sites. By this afternoon it had set news sites and the rest of the Internet on fire. It has every thing: The yuck factor, “those creepy Muslims” factor, the lulz factor for those with a sick sense of humor. The non-fact-checked Daily Mail picked it up and reported it as fact. Then Andrew Sullivan, who has a highly influential blog but is frequently lax about fact-checking, gave it a boost with an uncritical take. TheHuffington Postwent there, too.
There’s of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt’s parliament. I’m willing to be proven wrong. It’s possible that there’s one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.
But extreme, not to mention inflammatory claims, need at minimum some evidence (and I’ve read my share of utter nonsense in Al Ahram over the years). The evidence right now? Zero.
There was a Moroccan cleric a few years back who apparently did issue a religious ruling saying that husbands remained married to their wives in the first six hours after death and, so, well, you know. But that guy is far, far out on the nutty fringe. How fringe? He also ruled that pregnant women can drink alcohol. Remember, alcohol is considered haram, forbidden, by the vast majority of the world’s Muslim scholars. Putting an unborn child at risk to get drunk? No, that’s just not what they do. Whatever the mainstream’s unpalatable beliefs (there are plenty from my perspective) this isn’t one of them.
It’s important to remember that the structure of the Muslim clergy is, by and large, like that of a number of Protestant Christian sects. Anyone can put out a shingle and declare themselves a preacher. The ones to pay attention to are the ones with large followings, or attachment to major institutions of Islamic learning. The preacher in Morocco is like the preacher in Florida who spent so much time and energy publicizing the burning of Qurans.
Stories like this are a reminder of the downside of the Internet. It makes fact-checking and monitoring easier. But the proliferation of aggregation sites, newsy blog sites, and the general erosion of editorial standards (and on-the-ground reporters to do the heavy lifting) also spreads silliness faster than it ever could before.
Dearborn, home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Arab Americans, once again will become a focal point for debate over the practice and persecution of Islam in the west.
Pamela Geller, conservative activist and co-founder of Stop Islamization of America, is scheduled to host the “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference” from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn on Sunday at 5 p.m.
The event is named after a 20-year-old woman fatally shot by her stepfather last year in Warren. Initial reports suggested Rahim Alfetlawi shot Mokdad because he believed she had strayed from Islam, but prosecutors have since said that religion did not play a role.
Despite opposition from family members who say Mokdad’s murder has nothing to do with Islam, Geller has refused to rename the conference, suggesting an attempt to cover up what she continues to call an “honor killing.”
“Unlike those closest to her, we are going to honor Jessica’s memory and stand up against the brutal practice that took her life,” Geller said in a statement announcing the conference.
Local leaders say the conference is misleading and argue that Dearborn has become a convenient target for anti-Muslim groups, pointing to recent protests led by activist Pastor Terry Jones.
To counter Geller’s conference, The Arab American Institute and partners have scheduled a competing town hall on Sunday titled “Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate.” It is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn.
“This is clearly not the first time our community in Michigan has had to deal with a hate group,” AAI President Jim Zogby said in a statement. “Despite repeated efforts to target Arab Americans and American Muslims, the community has remained resilient and poised, sometimes choosing to ignore the fervor.
“This group we cannot ignore and this is the time to stand up and make our voices loud and clear in opposition to the politics of division and bigotry.”
International media has been gripped by the trial of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. A self-declared ‘Knights Templar Crusader’ who believed he was acting in ‘defense’ of Norway by killing a future generation of aspiring Leftist leaders he accused of abetting the ‘Islamization’ of Europe.
During the initial reporting of the rampage the speculation of who or what could be behind the attack was rife, most media outlets zeroed in on Muslims with many (mis)attributing the attacks to ‘Islam.’
“AlQaeda”… “the Muslims, who else,” many thought and were told. The rush to judgement was swift.
When the culprit was captured, Breivik’s Scandanavian features and anti-Islam manifesto belied the narratives swirling in the media, shell shocking a media-world expecting the arrest of a “disgruntled, unintegrated, bearded ‘brown’ emigre” from a Muslim majority nation.
Breivik’s ideology was formed in the far recesses of the internet, within the chambers of the blogosphere, where anti-Islam rhetoric coupled with conspiracies about the pending decline of the West created a toxic lethal cocktail of xenophobia and violent bigotry.
Ironically, Breivik claimed to be acting in the name of “Christianity,” claiming to be a scion and reviver of the medieval “Knights Templar” order of Crusaders, defending Europe from Islam while preserving its “Christian” culture and identity.
In the swift “rush to judgement” and the resultant revelation that the actual perpetrator of the atrocities in Oslo and Utoya was a man claiming to act in the interests of “Christianity” lies a lesson for us all.
It is well known that Christianity is a religion that promotes peace. The overwhelming majority of Christians in the world are averse to violence against innocents and view murder in the name of “Christ” as both illegitimate and unchristian. Just as we must recognize that the great religion of Christianity cannot be besmirched by the actions of a lone man, we must also ask the opinion-makers to be consistent and declare that Islam should not be essentialized as a “religion of violence” because of the actions of a lunatic fringe.
There is also another lesson that we can take away from the violence in Norway, and it relates to the response of the Norwegian people to the attacks.
Anger, a natural fiery fuel with the potential to engulf was present early on, but its tide ebbed because of the response of a nation. They were resolved, resolute that their disposition was not going to suffer a paradigm shift because of the actions of one man.
Quickly, the Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg who suffered his own personal loss in the attacks said, “we will respond to hate with our values.” A nation mourned, Christians and Muslims held joint services, healing songs were sung, and flowers left by citizens covered the destroyed, mangled concrete at the scene of the attacks.
A need to cover up the ugly…a need to respond to it with beauty. This characterized the essence of the collective Norwegian spirit, not a turn to fear and hate, but a response that said, ‘we will uphold our values.’ A reminder, it seemed to me, of the oft-repeated Quranic maxim, “return evil with good.”
Beauty will face ugliness and transform it, as the famous tradition relates, “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” In the response of the Norwegians to the nightmare of Oslo and Utoya lies a lesson for all of us, do not succumb to fear and hate, instead respond to it with justice, goodness and love of the most beautiful kind.
Another reason people may be turned off and or leave the anti-Islam bandwagon may be because they appeal to an older, lonely, above 60′s year old crowd.
Youth really don’t seem to care about the ‘counter jihad’ so much, as Reza Aslan pointed out most youth are more interested in Snookie’s “underwear” than they are topics related to bigotry or geo-politics (via. Islamophobia-Today):
Men at home over 65, with little education and no children reportedly represent the average reader of anti-Islam websites.
Klassekampen writes it used Alexa to examine eight sites that allegedly inspired Anders Behring Breivik and his manifesto. It claims its investigations revealed readership groups to websites Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch, The Brussels Journal, Islam Watch, Atlas Shrugged, Tundra Tabloid, Vladtepesblog and The Green Arrow showed a clear pattern.
When presented with the results, Andreas Malm, journalist and author of the book ‘The Hate against Muslims’, told the paper, “The typical profile of conspiracy theorists are elderly, lonely men, who become obsessed with a particular question, and who may be attracted to anti-Islamic conspiracy theories.”
“There is a preponderance of older men, often unemployed, who may feel ostracized from society, and seeking for an explanation and a scapegoat,” he declared.
Tor Bach, editor of the magazine ‘Vepsen’, is not surprised. He adds that the anti-Islam organizations’ groups of older members share a common “mistrust of society and the democratic system, sincerely believing someone wishes them harm.”
“These people [also] fully believe in the existence of a conspiracy, where the Arab world will take over the European one,” concluded Mr Bach.
Every year around the world, an estimated 10 million girls are married before they turn 18, according to Girls Not Brides, an organization devoted to ending the practice of child marriage.
Islamophobes portray the problem of child marriage as unique to Muslims in their relentless effort to demonize Islam. They scour the Internet, cherry picking incidents that serve their agenda–or simply make something up: Anti-Muslim Blogoshpere Runs Amuck: Forced to Eat Crow.
Child marriage is a widespread problem should be tackled for the benefit of girls and young women, not politicized for the purpose to spreading hate. Don’t expect to read about it in the looniverse, but recent events in Rajasthan clearly illustrate this problem is not unique to Muslim communities.
At least six police and administration officials were injured when they were attacked by a group of villagers who was conducting child marriages in Rajasthan’s Jhalawardistrict, police said in India. The villagers even attacked a police outpost later. Police arrested 15 villagers on April 21 and lodged first information reports (FIR) against 50 others.
The incident took place on the evening of April 20 inGhatoli area of the district. “We were on high alert in the wake of Akshaya Tritiya (Akha Teej) that is to be observed April 24,” a police official said.
Akshaya Tritiya or Akha Teej is considered one of the most auspicious days of the year for Hindu and Jain communities. Acting on a tip-off that about 30 minors were being illegally married in a group wedding ceremony at Prithavipura village, a team of district and police officials was rushed to the spot.
The officers asked the villagers to show the birth certificates of the grooms and brides. But when they refused, the team asked the villagers to stop the weddings.
“Enraged villagers then started pelting stones at the officers following which six of them were injured,” said the official.
The state home department had asked the district administration and police to keep strict vigil on child marriages on Akha Teej, which is a rampant practice in the rural areas of Rajasthan.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has suspended a course for military officers that officials say contained inflammatory material about Islam.
Defense Department spokesman Capt. John Kirby said Wednesday that among problems with the course taught at Norfolk, Va., was a presentation that asserted the United States is at war with Islam. Kirby noted that officials across two American administrations have stressed that the U.S. is at war with terrorists who have a distorted view of the religion.
Kirby declined to detail what he said were other problems with the course, called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses don’t use anti-Islamic material.
A few years ago Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito co-authored the book “What a Billion Muslims Really Think.” It relied on quite thorough polling and survey data and was received very well. It also happened to dispel a great many myths and distortions regarding the Muslim majority nations.(h/t: Benjamin Taghiov)
The director of the Islamic Center of Charlotte holds up an anti-Muslim letter it received.
No religious community should have to endure this.
The article notes that this letter was sent to not only one Islamic center but a few:
Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state.
CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) – The head of the Islamic Center of Charlotte is speaking out after the center received a letter threatening physical violence against Muslims.
According to the center’s director Jibril Hough, the letter was just one of several sent to Islamic centers around North Carolina.
Hough called the letter a “pretty detailed threat” and said the threat was serious enough that Charlotte police and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are now investigating the letter.
The letter, according to Hough, came from a person who claimed to be “part of a large network of folks from the business community, from the public services community, from the public school community that is seeking to make life harder on the public square for Muslims.”
Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state. Hough says he knows the center in Raleigh received the same letter and hopes it will get the same attention as if it was any other house of worship.
“We all need the same protection, under the law, as citizens. We all need that,” he told WBTV. “We deserved the same attention as anyone would receive. We’re not trying to make more out of this than it deserves, but we’re also concerned that it gets the attention it truly deserves.”
Hough says it isn’t unusual for the center to get, what he calls, “minor threats” based on current events, but this letter appears to be more serious.
“It goes on to give some very derogatory and racial epitaphs, using the ‘N’ word a couple of times in different phrases, Hough says. “And then it ends with the threat that if we decide for any kind of retaliation based on this letter – that they have no problem killing Muslims legally, if we tried anything, so consider yourselves advised.”
The letter ends, in part, “We are prepared for the Muslim war that is going on overseas to begin in the streets right here.”
It was signed, but Hough says he doesn’t know if the name on the letter is actually the person who wrote it.
“We have to remain vigilant and we have to give this the attention that it deserves,” Hough says. “Not sweep it under the rug or ignore it, because who knows? It could more than just a lonely guy in the middle of the night typing up a letter just to let off some steam. It could be much more than that.”
Hough says so far it’s not clear what the motivation behind the letter is, but he is hoping that authorities will find out as a part of their investigation. He also hopes the letter writer will be prosecuted.
“We think that putting an extra eye on something like this – sometimes it helps. A lot of times these types of things go unnoticed and unheard of and you only maybe hear about something after the fact,” he said.
“We don’t want to wait until after the fact that something has actually taken place – something much more harmful than this letter.”
<em>Copyright 2012 <a href=”http://www.wbtv.com/” target=”_blank”>WBTV</a>. All rights reserved.</em>
PROTESTERS who had filled the auditorium seats at an anti-Muslim event on Temple University’s campus Monday night left the room quite empty when they marched out in opposition after the discussion began.
The organization hosting the “Islamic Apartheid Conference,” Temple University Students for Intellectual Freedom, says its mission is to introduce controversial issues often left out of mainstream debates and defends its right to political incorrectness. Panelists at the conference included Robert Spencer, contributor to the blog Jihad Watch, and Pamela Geller, famous for her hostility to the proposed construction of an Islamic community center near the site of the World Trade Center.
After walking out, more than 50 demonstrators, consisting of North Philadelphia residents, campus groups and Occupy Philly protesters, remained outside in the rain, holding signs and confronting attendees as they left the event in Ritter Hall, on Cecil B. Moore Avenue near 13th Street.
Walter Smolarek, a freshman education major at Temple University, said that the content of the conference is “based solely on irrational hatred toward people, in this case, because of their religious faith, and we don’t feel like it falls under the umbrella of free speech, or should be part of political debate.
“An attack against Muslim communities is an attack against all working people,” said Smolarek.
Though Temple University approved the conference for its calendar, it did not promote the event in the daily campus-events email distributed to the student body.
Note from Amago: To be perfectly clear: hate speech must be protected in order to have freedom of speech, that is not in question here. The initial wording of the article was unclear and in response to several inquiries the article was amended.
Joshua Fazeli reacts to his sister Rubiya, played by Sarah Siadat, as she tries on a hijab during the The Mixed Blood Theatre Company's production of "Hijab Tube" at the Cold Spring Library Tuesday , April 24 . / Jason Wachter, jwachter@stcloudtimes.com
COLD SPRING — A unique, touring production that attempts to dispel stereotypes of Muslims in America made a stop at the Cold Spring branch of the Great River Regional Library Tuesday night.
About 40 audience members were treated to a performance of “Hijab Tube,” a production of Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theatre. The library has hosted other Mixed Blood productions.
This is the third year “Hijab Tube” has toured the state. It has made stops in Central Minnesota, as well as Iowa, Canada and Nebraska. The tour continues through May 6. The family show has been performed at colleges, community centers, and middle and high schools.
“The reaction (of audiences) has been tremendous,” said Artistic Director Jack Reuler. The majority of attendees around the region had been learning some basics about Islam. For other audience members, it meant seeing themselves — another Muslim person — on stage.
“When they see this play, they see themselves reflected in a positive light,” he said.
The short play follows a 20-year-old Muslim woman’s journey of identity, exploring what it means to be a Muslim in general and what it means to her.
She’s a second-generation immigrant who takes a comparative religion class at her university. She decides to take on the idea of wearing a hijab, a head covering. Her family doesn’t follow the tradition. But the play looks at a variety of ways that Islam and Muslims are seen in America.
The playwright’s premise is that Islam can be separated from the dogma of a certain country’s politics, Reuler said.
“Islam in American really holds the promise of hope,” Reuler said. The play attempts to debunk some myths and draw comparisons and similarities between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim traditions.
“It’s far more of a cultural play than a religious play,” he said.
The cast of the play comes from Muslim families whose roots are in Iran, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia — but all were born in the U.S.
After the play, they stick around to hold a brief question-and-answer session. There are questions about how a mosque works, the role of an Iman and the difference between Islam and a Muslim.
“Having a conversation is really the start,” said Sarah Siadat, who plays the main character Rubiya. She said the sessions afterward are her favorite part.
Barb Omann, an English teacher at Rocori High School, encourages her students to attend out-of-school activities with a global perspective like “Hijab Tube,” and gives them extra credit for doing so.
Andrea Overman, a Rocori 10th-grader, is doing a school report on Malcom X, who converted to Islam. She came to get a different perspective .
“I wanted to get a perspective other than his,” she said.
European governments must do more to challenge the negative stereotypes and prejudices against Muslims fuelling discrimination especially in education and employment, a new report by Amnesty International reveals today.
“Muslim women are being denied jobs and girls prevented from attending regular classes just because they wear traditional forms of dress, such as the headscarf. Men can be dismissed for wearing beards associated with Islam,” said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s expert on discrimination.
“Rather than countering these prejudices, political parties and public officials are all too often pandering to them in their quest for votes.”
The report Choice and prejudice: discrimination against Muslims in Europe, exposes the impact of discrimination on the ground of religion or belief on Muslims in several aspects of their lives, including employment and education.
It focuses on Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland where Amnesty International has already raised issues such as restrictions on the establishment of places of worship and prohibitions on full-face veils. The report documents numerous individual cases of discrimination across the countries covered.
“Wearing religious and cultural symbols and dress is part of the right of freedom of expression. It is part of the right to freedom of religion or belief – and these rights must be enjoyed by all faiths equally.” said Marco Perolini.
“While everyone has the right to express their cultural, traditional or religious background by wearing a specific form of dress no one should be pressurized or coerced to do so. General bans on particular forms of dress that violate the rights of those freely choosing to dress in a particular way are not the way to do this.”
The report highlights that legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment has not been appropriately implemented in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Employers have been allowed to discriminate on the grounds that religious or cultural symbols will jar with clients or colleagues or that a clash exists with a company’s corporate image or its ‘neutrality’.
This is in direct conflict with European Union (EU) anti-discrimination legislation which allows variations of treatment in employment only if specifically required by the nature of the occupation.
“EU legislation prohibiting discrimination on the ground of religion or belief in the area of employment seems to be toothless across Europe, as we observe a higher rate of unemployment among Muslims, and especially Muslim women of foreign origin,” said Marco Perolini.
In the last decade, pupils have been forbidden to wear the headscarf or other religious and traditional dress at school in many countries including Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
“Any restriction on the wearing of religious and cultural symbols and dress in schools must be based on assessment of the needs in each individual case. General bans risk adversely Muslims girls’ access to education and violating their rights to freedom of expression and to manifest their beliefs.” Marco Perolini said.
The right to establish places of worship is a key component of the right to freedom of religion or belief which is being restricted in some European countries, despite state obligations to protect, respect and fulfil this right.
Since 2010, the Swiss Constitution has specifically targeted Muslims with the prohibition of the construction of minarets, embedding anti-Islam stereotypes and violating international obligations that Switzerland is bound to respect.
In Catalonia (Spain), Muslims have to pray in outdoor spaces because existing prayer rooms are too small to accommodate all the worshippers and requests to build mosques are being disputed as incompatible with the respect of Catalan traditions and culture. This goes against freedom of religion which includes the right to worship collectively in adequate places.
“There is a groundswell of opinion in many European countries that Islam is alright and Muslims are ok so long as they are not too visible. This attitude is generating human rights violations and needs to be challenged,” said Marco Perolini.
A Holocaust survivor by the name of Helen Brashatsky (Leila Jabarin) who arrived in mandate Palestine in 1948, married a Palestinian and converted to Islam.(h/t:MasterQ)
She likely would be an excellent individual to educate children on the consequences of hate and genocide. Her story would also help dispel Holocaust denial:
UMM EL-FAHM, Israel — For more than five decades, Leila Jabarin hid her secret from her Muslim children and grandchildren — that she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Auschwitz concentration camp.
Although her family knew she was a Jewish convert, none of them knew of her brutal past.
It was only in the past week that Jabarin, who was born Helen Brashatsky, finally sat down and told them the story of how she was born inside Auschwitz, the most notorious symbol of Nazi Germany’s wartime campaign of genocide against Europe’s Jews.
In an interview with AFP to mark Holocaust Memorial Day which begins at sundown on Wednesday, Jabarin, now 70, chuckles as she talks about what to call her.
Her Muslim name is Leila, but in this Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived for the past 52 years, most people call her Umm Raja, Arabic for “Raja’s mother” after her first-born son.
Like most Jewish children, she also has a Hebrew name — Leah — but she just likes to be called Helen.
She was six when she came to live in Mandate Palestine with her parents, just months before the State of Israel was declared in May 1948.
They arrived in a ship carrying Jewish immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, which was forced to anchor off the coast of Haifa for a week due to a heavy British bombardment of the northern port city, she says.
Despite the war which broke out as soon as the British pulled out, it was a far cry from the savage reality the family had witnessed inside Auschwitz, says Jabarin who is dressed in a hijab and long robes, but whose pale skin and blue eyes belie her Eastern European parentage.
Her mother, who was from Hungary, and her father, who was of Russian descent, were living in Yugoslavia when they were sent to the Auschwitz with their two young sons in 1941.
“When they took them to Auschwitz, she was pregnant with me, and when she gave birth, the Christian doctor at Auschwitz hid me in bath towels,” she says, explaining how the doctor hid the family for three years under the floor of his house inside the camp.
Her mother worked as a maid at the doctor’s home, while her father was the gardener.
“They used to come back at night and sleep under the floor and my mother used to tell us how the Nazis were killing children, but that this doctor saved us,” she says, recalling how her mother used to feed them on dry bread soaked in hot water with salt.
“I still remember the black and white striped pyjamas and remember terrible beatings in the camp. If I was healthy enough, I would have gone back to see it but I have already had four heart attacks.
“It is scary and very, very difficult to remember that place where so many people suffered,” she admits, speaking in a mix of Hebrew and accented Arabic.
She also speaks Hungarian, a little Yiddish and some Russian.
The family were finally freed when the camp was liberated in 1945 and left for Mandate Palestine three years later.
At first, the new immigrants were put in camps at Atlit, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Haifa, but two years later, they moved further south to Holon and then to Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv.
Ten years later, when she was 17, Helen Brashatsky eloped with a young Arab man called Ahmed Jabarin, and they moved to live in Umm al-Fahm, which caused a huge split with her family.
“She ran away with me and she was 17 when we got married,” her husband says. “The Israeli authorities used to come to Umm al-Fahm and take her back to her family in Ramat Gan, then she would come straight back here.”
Initially, her family did not speak to her for two years, but later they were reconciled.
In the end, it was her mother who suggested she convert to Islam when her eldest son turned 18 and was asked to do his compulsory military service.
“My mother advised me not to send my son to do military service because if he did, my daughter would also have to do it.
“She said I should convert to Islam to save my daughter from serving in the army because Muslims would not let a girl live away from home on an army camp.”
So she converted.
But she never told her family the full extent of her history.
“I hid my pain for 52 years and the truth about my past from my eight children and my 31 grandchildren. I hid the fact that I was born in Auschwitz and what that painful past means.
“I was just waiting for the right moment to tell them.”
The moment came several days ago when a man turned up from the Israeli social services and got talking to her about her past, just days before the annual ceremonies remembering the Holocaust.
“Whenever it is Holocaust Memorial Day, I cry alone. There are no words to describe the pain that I feel. How can children eat dry bread soaked in water? If this happened to my children, I don’t know what would become of me.”
For her family, the revelation was a huge shock — but it answered a lot of questions, admits her 33-year-old son Nader Jabarin.
“Mum used to cry on Holocaust Memorial Day watching all the ceremonies on Israeli television. We never understood why. We all used to get out of the way and leave her alone in the house,” he told AFP.
But by telling her long-kept secret, it had brought release to both her and her family, he said.
HOLLYWOOD – Cheering up their Muslim teammate, a Floridian high school football team decided to don hijab before their season finale game to show solidarity with their Muslim captain who has been taunted repeatedly over her religious outfit.“Everybody looked at us weird,” West Broward senior Marilyn Solorzano told Sun Sentinel website on Friday, April 20.“I understand now everything she went through and how hard it must have been.“We just wore it for one day, and we noticed the difference. It was hard to keep on. It kept falling and our heads got really hot. You have to give her [credit] for wearing it every day.”
Donning hijab in middle school, Irum Khan, 17-year-old captain of West Broward High flag football team, endured far more than the usual pre-teenage taunting.
Early during her first years of high school, some classmates called her a terrorist and cursed at her.
She had rocks thrown at her and was physically attacked more than once.
“I got a lot of weird looks when I started wearing the hijab,” said Khan, who first donned the modest clothing in fifth grade and wears long sleeves and tights under her uniform.
“Kids at that age don’t know a lot about it. I went through half the year in sixth grade and then I took it off.
“I couldn’t take the name-calling, the strange looks, the racial slurs. It was too much.”
Though she hid the abuse from her family and school officials, she finally spoke up as her parents encouraged her to talk with school administrators and things got better.
Though none of Khan’s team has ever faced this bullying, they decided to take a stand and get a small taste of how difficult life can sometimes be for one of their own.
The idea of wearing hijab was first mentioned by Khan when she jokingly said it would be interesting for the whole team to wear the traditional Muslim dress during a game.
Instead of laughing, Solorzano, a fellow captain, seized on the opportunity.
“Everyone thought it was a really cool idea to support her and her religion,” she said.
“It’s really important to us because Irum is the only one here that’s covered head to toe. We thought it’d be something nice.”
Solidarity
The idea to wear hijab by the whole team was praised by the team coach as showing solidarity that unites the players.
“We’ve been trying to stress that the team comes first. The team always comes first,” Matt Garris, the West Broward coach, told xx
“When they came to me, it made me feel good to see them taking the initiative there. They showed team unity.
“Here they were, displaying something we were trying to get to them. You don’t always see that,” he added.
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.
Committing to her Islamic outfit and favorite sport, Khan will be enrolling at FIU next fall, with plans of attending medical school and studying sports medicine.
“I had to show my family that I could balance work, school, sports, family time and my religion,” she said.
“It took a year to prove myself, but they support me all the way. They’ve let me pursue it and I love them for that.”
Feeling grateful to her teammates, Khan found the strength to continue being true to herself, her sport and her faith.
“There’s always light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
A follow up to our story on the Christians of Palestine. We mentioned that Bob Simon of 60 Minutes was going to do a report on Christians in the Holy Land and I have to say he did a pretty good job.
He covered the plight of Christians in the Holy Land and how there has been a slow exodus over the past few decades due to Israeli occupation policies. He also covered the Kairos initiative and how that is making inroads within Palestinian society.
Most intriguingly, Bob Simon lays the smack down on Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren at the 11 minute mark. Oren also does some blame shifting, saying that it is Muslims who are persecuting Christians not Israelis:
Veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Simon experienced something while reporting a “60 Minutes” piece last night, that he’d never before. His story was on Christian residents leaving the Holy Land and the causes behind it: Islamic extremism? Israeli occupation? or something more? Simon interviewed clerics from the Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran faiths, also Palestinian residents of the West Bank, and Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Dr.Michael Oren. But Oren didn’t like the premise of the story and called Simon’s boss, CBS News chairman and “60 Minutes” EP Jeff Fager long before it story aired.
“Mr. Ambassador, I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve received lots of reactions from just about everyone I’ve done stories about. But I’ve never gotten a reaction before from a story that hasn’t been broadcast yet,” said Simon. “Well, there’s a first time for everything, Bob,” said the ambassador.
BRITAIN is set to go Diamond Jubilee crazy as the Queen marks 60 years on the throne.
But just over a century ago the same celebration for her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was nearly derailed by her scandalous relationship with an Indian manservant.
In fact Her Majesty became so infatuated with tall, handsome Muslim Abdul Karim that senior royal advisers plotted to have her declared insane just days before her Jubilee unless she halted a controversial plan to knight him.
The young waiter — he was just 24 — had begun serving the Queen’s table in June 1887 after being sent to London as a “gift” from the Indian outpost of her empire.
He soon began bewitching her with romantic tales of mysterious India, and cooking up delicious curries for her in the royal kitchens.
But royal biographer Jane Ridley believes Abdul’s striking looks also helped to draw in the Queen.
She says: “Victoria always had a great appreciation of male beauty so when she saw these gorgeous clothes, sashes and turbans kissing her feet, how could she resist?”
Victoria soon promoted Abdul from waiter to her personal teacher — or “Munshi” — and after he began to teach her a few words in Hindi the pair grew ever closer.
She had been starved of affection since the death of her beloved husband Albert in 1861, and Abdul Karim’s great-grandson, Javed Mahmood, says it is not hard to see why she fell for his great-grandad.
Together … Queen Victoria and her manservant, Abdul
He says: “Abdul was a very warm man. He was very jolly, entertaining — a very human person.
“Maybe those were the traits that attracted the Queen eventually, because he came across as a man of flesh and blood, and she wasn’t used to real people around her.”
But as is revealed in a new Channel 4 documentary — Queen Victoria’s Last Love — their growing intimacy did not go down well in the strictly hierarchical world of the royal household.
By 1894, Abdul was elevated to the position of Her Majesty’s Indian Secretary — making him an official member of the inner circle.
Jane Ridley says: “The idea that a servant, an outsider who has none of this pedigree or background, could suddenly leapfrog into a position of great closeness with the Queen is something courtiers found not just threatening but wrong.”
It wasn’t just Abdul’s class that troubled the Queen’s advisers. They were also scandalised by his race.
But the more the royal household attacked Abdul, the more the Queen defended him.
She fired off an angry memo to her Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, saying: “As for Abdul Karim, the Queen cannot praise him highly enough. He’s zealous and attentive, a thorough gentleman.”
The royal household hit back by sending investigators to India who came back with alarming information about Abdul’s origins.
He was not, as he had claimed, the son of a high-flying Army doctor. In fact, his father was a lowly pharmacist who worked in Agra jail — where Abdul himself had worked as a mere clerk.
But the revelation only served to push the Queen closer to Abdul.
She took a stance that was astonishing at the time — accusing her household of racial prejudice.
In a memo to Sir Henry she wrote: “To make out the Munshi is low is outrageous. Abdul feels cut to the heart to be thus spoken of. The Queen is so sorry for the poor Munshi’s sensitive feelings.”
Rumours started to circulate that Abdul was passing Victoria inflammatory advice about India, and that he was a spy leaking secret foreign policy information.
Bow about that … gentleman greets Queen Victoria as she stands with Abdul
She responded by becoming even more intimate with him. When he became ill she would spend long periods in his bedchamber, fluffing his pillows and stroking his hand.
Then in 1897, with just weeks to go until Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the Queen announced she planned to knight Abdul.
The bombshell was one step too far for her ministers and attendants.
The Viceroy of India joined forces with the Prime Minister to oppose the move. In response, Victoria threatened to pull out of the Jubilee celebrations.
With the biggest event that the British monarchy had ever seen under threat, the Queen’s eldest son, Bertie — later Edward VII — stepped in.
He hatched a plan with the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, who wrote to her, saying: “There are people in high places who know your majesty well and say to me the only charitable explanation that can be given is that your majesty is not sane, and that at some time it will be necessary for me to come forward and say so.
“I have seen the Prince of Wales yesterday and he has said he is quite ready to come forward, because it affects the throne.”
Victoria had to admit defeat and Abdul did not get his knighthood.
But he was constantly by her side for the Jubilee celebrations. For the remaining four years of Victoria’s life, she was inseparable from her beloved servant.
When she finally died in 1901, the protection Abdul had enjoyed came to a sudden end.
Just days after the funeral, the royal householders marched into Abdul’s home, seized all items bearing the royal crest and burned all his precious letters from the Queen.
He was exiled to India — where he survived just eight more years, dying at the age of 46.
Queen Victoria’s Last Love is on Channel 4 on Wednesday at 9pm.
On Friday, April, 20 Buddhists protesters threatened violence if a mosque was not removed from the Dambulla region. A fire bomb was also lobbed at the mosque over night. On Sunday Sri Lankan authorities ordered the mosque’s relocation. (h/t: msmrishan)
The Sri Lankan government has ordered a mosque be relocated after Buddhist monks threatened to demolish it because they said the 50-year-old structure had been built illegally in an area sacred to Buddhists.
The order came on Sunday, two days after an estimated 2,000 monks in the island nation’s central town of Dambulla protested against the mosque, forcing it to abandon Friday prayers, and threatened violence if it was not removed.
The monks have also asked that a Hindu temple in the area be removed.
“Following a discussion with the relevant parties, the prime minister has ordered the disputed mosque moved to a suitable location as soon as possible,” Sisira Wijesinghe, media secretary to Prime Minister DM Jayaratne, told the Reuters news agency on Sunday.
He said several Muslim ministers took part in the discussion, a claim rejected by Muslim political leaders.
“It is a false statement and there was no discussion on this and we don’t agree with the mosque relocation,” AHM Fowzie, a senior Muslim cabinet minister, told Reuters.
Buddhist majority
The mosque has reportedly existed since 1962 and regular prayers have been conducted there for the past three decades.
Buddhist monks said the government mistakenly had allowed the mosque to be expanded recently, despite a 1982 state regulation declaring the area sacred for Buddhism.
The chief of the mosque said, however, that the construction was legal and the building was simply being refurbished.
Buddhism is the main religion in Sri Lanka, ahead of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Buddhists make up around 70 per cent of the population.
Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is known for taking on monumental challenges. In 2001 he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. These days, Feingold has turned his attention to another cause—US foreign policy. At a talk in Madison, Wisconsin, about his new book, While America Sleeps, Feingold argued for increased American engagement with the rest of the world. He said 9/11 highlighted the importance of engaging and understanding the rest of the world, and criticized Democrats and Republicans alike for failing to heed the message.
In making his case, Feingold, a Jewish-American, did not lose sight of domestic issues, pointing out the impact 9/11 had on the lives of Muslim Americans. He likened the situation to Japanese internment during World War II.
In the last couple of years, there have been a number of incidents where people have used the issue of alleged Muslim extremism in this country to justify things like outlawing a mosque in Southern Manhattan, the burning of Qur’ans and most despicably, hearings held by Peter King in Washington specifically focusing on so-called Muslim terrorism, as opposed to the terrorism phenomenon in general.
Feingold bemoaned the fact that the post-9/11 era has made Muslims feel like second-class citizens in their own country.
Their hope is that they can once again someday feel like they’re not strangers in their own country. … Naturally, it must be very frustrating for Muslims to have their religion characterized in a way that is essentially wrong. Islam is not a religion of the kind that’s described by the political opportunists in this country.
Feingold also argued against the characterization of Islamic values as contrary to democratic values. He recounted his experience meeting with the Madison-area Muslim community after 9/11, but long before the Arab Spring.
The thing that really angered them was that we spoke of the virtues of democracy and human rights and women’s rights, and yet we supported despots throughout the Islamic world who did just the opposite. … Even though it’s not specifically about the religious element, it’s a very significant thing in terms of the way American Muslims and Arabs think about our international policy.
Nayantara Mukherji is a journalist, editor, Inside Islam radio producer, and a recent addition to the Inside Islam writing team at the University of Wisconsin.
Hardline, right-wing Hindus have rioted over a ‘Beef festival’ put together by Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.(h/t: JD)
Shall we now blame all of Hinduism for their violent response, and remark that Hinduism is innately, uniquely incapable of dealing with ‘offense’ to their religion? Of course not, it is not Hinduism, but the interpretation of a specific group of Hindus with a specific approach to their religious texts that has caused this:
ABVP protested the beef festival on the ground that consumption of beef is against Hindu culture. Ramkrishna, senior ABVP leader told BBC, “Today they are asking for beef, tomorrow they will want alcohol.”
The purpose of the festival was to oppose “food fascism” in university hostels, reports NDTV. The festival organizers demanded beef be included in the university canteen menu as it is part of their “cultural identity.”
“The festival was intended to make the point that upper caste diktats over food habits need to be resisted, however another group of students opposed the idea on the grounds that it is against Indian culture,” a police official said in a quote reported by the NDTV.
The beef festival was organized by the Telangana Students Association, Progressive Democratic Student Union, Student Federation of India and student groups from English and Foreign Languages University.
S. Satyanarayana, Osmania University vice-chancellor announced yesterday that there would be no change in the hostel menu, reports NewsWala.
Despite the violence, the organizers of the beef festival were generally pleased with the large turnout and aim to make this an annual event, reportsDeccan Chronicle.
I have the strange sense that Geert Wilders ‘star’ is fading. The momentum from Fitna, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the calls for deporting Muslims has been blunted by the departure of his former friend Brinkman, the embarrassment over the anti-Polish site his party created and other such incidents. This does not mean that he is less of a force for bigotry but for the moment it seems we may have reached a downward curve in his rise.
In America Wilders will have more luck, and will make tons of money scamming not just poor Christian right-wingers but also the small, rich anti-Muslim cadre who hang on his every word.
If fake ex-terrorist Walid Shoebat can still rake in cold hard cash from Bible thumpers even when it is well known that he is a liar, how much better will the peroxide-dyed anti-Muslim politician do?
Update (via. Al-Bakrastani): The government his (Wilders) Fascist party supported has crashed and most likely new elections will decimate his party.
(via. Hugo Treeds) Today he blew up Dutch governement and yesterday his party blew itself up in his home-district of Limburg. Almost weekly party representatives now leave the party and decimate his powerbase in cities and provinces. So your analysis very probably is correct and he will try to flee the mess he made over here in The Netherlands. So America, beware!
A new book by Geert Wilders aimed at the American market is not due to be officially launched until May 1, but details gleaned from advance and review copies are already doing the rounds.
The book is entitled Marked for Death, Islam’s war against the West and me and according to Wilders’ own website ‘tells the story of Geert Wilders’ fight for the right to speak what he believes: namely that Islam is not just a religion but primarily a dangerous ideology which is a threat to Western freedoms.’
The book will be officially presented at an as-yet secret location in the US, and is regarded by some as Wilders’ calling card to America. The Dutch MP has made no secret of his international ambitions and is keen to launch and International Freedom Alliance, he said last year.
Magazine HP/De Tijd looks at one incident in the book in which Wilders writes how he was robbed by “three Arab youths” in the Utrecht district of Kanaleneiland – an area of poor housing and high unemployment.
In fact, the robbery took place in a more upmarket part of town several kilometres away the magazine says, citing references to the incident in a biography of Wilders published several years ago.
Tom Kleijn, Washington correspondent for television show Nieuwsuur says the book is a dry, almost academic recount of “how Wilders has become what he is”. The book even contains an index and sources, he points out. “Wilders has a small, rich and fanatical group of followers in America,” Kleijn said. “But it remains to be seen if this book will boost Wilders’ popularity.”
Current Dutch president Mark Rutte is not mentioned once, but Wilders states five times that he and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch Somali Muslim critic who now works for a US think-tank, are of the same opinion, Kleijn points out.
Nos correspondent Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal describes how Wilders emphasises his admiration for former US president Ronald Reagan and states current president Barack Obama is a dhimmi – a submissive non-Muslim in a Muslim state.
The above was a recent headline in the Daily Mail. One wonders if the Daily Mail would ever run an article titled, “Christian gang kidnaps and rapes two girls as part of their Christmas celebration?”
The wholesale misattribution of the criminal conduct of these men to Islam fits a long pattern of Islamophobic reporting at the Daily Mail.
Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch breaks it down below :
That’s the headline to an article in today’s Daily Mail, reporting on the conviction of a group of men for abducting, assaulting and raping two girls, aged 15 and 16.
The article quotes one of the convicted men as claiming that sex with the two girls was consensual: “It was Eid. We treated them as our guests. OK, so they gave us [sex] but we were buying them food and drink.”
And that single quote is the sole the basis for an inflammatory headline that plays to the poisonous far-right racist myth that Muslims are directed by their faith to sexually molest young girls.
It’s worth noting that the report is written by Katherine Faulkner, who last year co-authored the equally irresponsible and misleading report of a drunken assault in Leicester, which led to an EDL protest against so-called “anti-white racism” in the town.
It is no accident that the Mail was one of Anders Breivik’s favourite English-language newspapers. It is cited numerous times in the manifesto he published to justify his terrorist killings and an article by Melanie Phillips is reproduced in its entirety.
This is real commitment to religious freedom, in stark opposition to the hackneyed, biased and ineffectual ‘work’ of Zuhdi Jasser and the USCIRF. The USCIRF would do better to promote projects such as the one below (h/t: Kamal):
Last week, ISNA President Imam Mohamed Magid and ISNA Director of Community Outreach Dr. Mohamed Elsanousi met with high-ranking religious authorities and scholars in Morocco and Tunisia to discuss the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries across the globe. Working in consultation with these authorities, they presented the idea of developing Islamic standards and protocols to guarantee equal participation of various religious groups in Muslim-majority countries.
ISNA is deeply concerned about the rights of religious minorities and among those with whom they met were Dr. Ahmed Toufiq, Moroccan Minister of Islamic Affairs and Endowment; Dr. Noureddine Khadmi, Tunisian Minister of Religious Affairs; and Dr. Abdul Aziz Othman al-Tuwaijri, General Manager of the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). All of them remain solidly committed to addressing this issue.
The Kingdom of Morocco has a history of harmonious coexistence between people of diverse religious backgrounds. Under the guidance of original Islamic scholarship stemming from some of the most reputable Islamic institutions in the Muslim world, both the Moroccan government and its majority-Muslim population peacefully coexist with the Moroccan Jewish and Christian communities. Similarly, developments in Tunisia following the Arab spring have re-energized a commitment to a pluralist democracy and to a guarantee of the rights of all people to wholly participate in government and society.
ISNA is committed to religious freedom and seeks to promote it not only in the United States, but also abroad. We deeply appreciate the partnership of religious leaders of all faiths, particularly the way religious leaders and community members from Jewish and Christian faiths have wholeheartedly demonstrated their support for Muslims through the institutionalization of the campaign, Shoulder-to-Shoulder: Standing with American Muslims; Upholding American Values.
Similarly, ISNA is dedicated to standing in solidarity with people of other faiths everywhere, whether they constitute the majority or the minority. Following this trip to Morocco and Tunisia, stay tuned for news about a series of activities, as ISNA works to promote a mechanism for developing standards and protocols on religious freedom and the role of religious minorities in the Muslim world.
Zuhdi Jasser, the useful tool of Islamophobes everywhere has faced increasing and sustained opposition to his appointment to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
The USCIRF was, as the ACLU reported, created and guided by ‘special interests’ and has a history of deep anti-Muslim bias,
[S]ince its inception, the commission’s been beset by controversy. People who watch the commission closely say it was created to satisfy special interests, which has led to bias in the commission’s work. Past commissioners and staff have reported that the commission is “rife, behind-the-scenes, with ideology and tribalism.” They’ve said that commissioners focus “on pet projects that are often based on their own religious background.” In particular, past commissioners and staff reported ”an anti-Muslim bias runs through the Commission’s work.”
In this context it is not surprising that a Zuhdi Jasser should be appointed. However, the biased nature of the USCIRF does not take away from the very troubling aspects of Jasser’s appointment, no US governmental organization should be used and abused in this manner.
What is interesting this time around is that all pretense to objectivity has fallen and the ‘work’ of the USCIRF will forever be tainted.
A petition calling on the Senators to rescind Jasser’s appointment has received nearly 3000 signatures, (I urge everyone to sign it and pass it along. We need to be more active than the hate-mongers!)
In response to the large push back against the biased nature of the USCIRF and Jasser’s appointment, Jasser is trying to hit back, smearing everyone who sheds light on his alliance with hate-mongers and anti-Freedom positions as evil, fifth-column “Islamists.”
Classic case of projecting while deflecting
On the only medium that will let Jasser spew his fact-less innuendo unopposed, i.e Right-Wing media such as “The Daily Caller,” Jasser says,
“You could actually use the list of people protesting us, it’s a pretty good list of some of the leaders of the Islamist movement in America.”
No surprise here, what else do you expect from the main protagonist of what has been lampooned as a bigoted, fear-mongering anti-Muslim film: The Third Jihad.
The article, written by one Caroline May goes on to claim that,
Last week 64 Muslim organizations — including Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) — expressed “deep concern” with Jasser’s appointment in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Hawaii Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin.
The only problem for May and Jasser is that it wasn’t only Muslim organizations (or ‘Islamists’ as they would have it) but also non-Muslim organizations calling on the Senators to rescind Jasser’s appointment. It was a veritable coalition of Muslim and non-Muslim civic and religious organizations:
More than 50 Muslim and non-Muslim civic and religious groups asked leading senators on Thursday (April 12) to rescind the appointment of an outspoken Muslim activist, Zuhdi Jasser, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
But facts, those pesky things, why let them get in the way right? So, Jasser goes on to say,
Jasser contends, however, that the real enemy of religious freedom is the coalition of groups opposing him.
Classic projection and deflection. Instead of answering the very real concerns leveled against him, Jasser clams up, hoping the “Islamist” label will stick on his opponents and that the attention will subside.
To this day Jasser has not answered the following very specific concerns expressed by those dismayed that he would even been considered for the USCIRF:
1.) Most problematically, Jasser allies himself with and receives funding from anti-Muslim organizations and personalities who work tirelessly to curb the religious and civil liberties of Muslims in the USA.
Jasser’s organization has received funding, to the tune of $100,000 from a major backer of Rick Santorum, Foster Friess. Friess was featured as one of the major backers of Islamophobic organizations in the Center for American Progress‘s groundbreaking report, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.
According to the Washington Post,
“Jasser received a $100,000 donation from Christian conservative financier Foster Friess, who is now bankrolling the super-PAC supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential bid. Jasser declined to elaborate on exactly how much Friess had given AIFD, though he said the financier contributed $70,000 to his organization in 2010 for a Muslim youth retreat hosted by the group. (Friess told MSNBC that he was backing Santorum because he is ‘incredibly versed in one of the number one issues of our time—and that is violent Islamic extremism.’)”
Jasser told Mother Jones that the AIFD had accepted $5,000 from the Center for Security Policy:
“Jasser said his group has also received a one-time, unsolicited donation of $10,000 from the Clarion Fund, which is associated with Aish HaTorah, a right-wing Israeli group described by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic as ‘just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today.’
The Clarion Fund has released several films that warn of Muslim conspiracies to reestablish a global caliphate. Jasser is a Clarion board member and in 2008 narrated a documentary bankrolled by the group called The Third Jihad, which darkly warns that Muslim extremists are attempting to “infiltrate and dominate America,” a conspiracy implicating most prominent American Muslim organizations. The New York Times reported that the film was shown to thousands of NYPD officers as part of their counterterrorism training, which the police department later apologized for.”
2.) In another blow to the religious liberties and freedoms of American Muslims, Jasser’s organization the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) supports state wide legislative bans on Muslim personal religious practice relating to: marriage, prayer, wills, etc. Jasser’s organization has published press releases “applauding” such legislation, which many, including US Courts have considered unconstitutional infringements on the religious liberties of Muslims.
3.) Jasser was outspoken in his opposition to an interfaith and Islamic Center in Manhattan, supporting efforts to block it from being built, remarking that, “This center is trying to change the narrative of 9/11 — to diminish what happened at Ground Zero.”
4.) Jasser’s advocacy and support for the NYPD’s illegal profiling and secret surveillance program targeting Muslims for monitoring at their houses of worship, businesses and universities is not only unconscionable but contradicts the USCIRF’s purported goals of reviewing “the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.”
Jasser deflects from the above points and questions about his sordid relationship with those who undermine religious freedom here in the US because his real purpose is to be a shill for the Right-Wing propaganda machine.
Articles like the one in the Daily Caller are not meant to inform or provide analysis, but are geared specifically to justifying Right-Wing and Conservative causes. The Conservative audience is expected to swallow them whole and regurgitate it to the rest of the sheep, preserving and securing the echo chamber.
What if he were Muslim? Spitzer firebombed his neighbor for disagreeing with a Rabbi’s religious opinion. Should Judaism be blamed for this now? Of course not.
Spitzer’s sentence was reduced because of concern about how he will fair in prison life. Hopefully some Muslim prisoners can protect Spitzer while he is in prison, he will certainly need help (h/t: JD):
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A Hasidic teenager was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison for the firebomb attack that badly burned a neighbor during a religious dispute in an insular Jewish enclave.
A defense attorney said the sentence was fair but worried about prison life for an 18-year-old who has “never seen TV, never been on the Internet, doesn’t know who Babe Ruth and Derek Jeter are.”
Shaul Spitzer of New Square had been charged with attempted murder but pleaded guilty to assault as potential jurors gathered for his trial in February. A trial would have brought unwanted attention to New Square, a New York village where nearly every one of the 7,000 residents is a member of the Skver Hasidic sect.
Spitzer admitted that he attacked Aron Rottenberg, a plumber, outside Rottenberg’s home in May. He said he did it because Rottenberg defied New Square’s grand rabbi by worshiping with nursing home residents rather than at New Square’s main synagogue.
Rottenberg, a plumber, claimed in a lawsuit that Spitzer was acting at the direction of the rabbi, David Twersky. The rabbi denied involvement and was not charged. The lawsuit was settled for $2.3 million.
Rottenberg had asked Rockland County Court Judge William Kelly to be lenient with Spitzer, who was also burned, and the judge came down from the 10-year cap he had promised after the plea deal.
Defense attorney Kenneth Gribetz said the sentence was “fair and compassionate.” But he said he fears for Spitzer, who he said will be the rare inmate who has had “no exposure to the outside world.”
“His whole life has been the rabbi and the synagogue and now he’s going to state prison,” Gribetz said. “This is a very severe sentence for a boy from New Square. I hope he can be safeguarded.”
New Square is about 30 miles north of Manhattan. The sect and the village are named for the Ukrainian village of Skver, where sect members were killed during the Holocaust.
Our friend Richard Silverstein at Tikkun Olam was the first to expose the UK Jewish Chronicle’s hosting a White Supremacist blogger by the name of Carlos Cortiglia. It was largely through his efforts that the Jewish Chronicle removed Cortiglia’s posts, but not before Silverstein got screenshots. The UK Jewish Chronicle has not explained why they gave Cortiglia a platform, they seem to be just covering it up (h/t: Jenny):
UPDATE: I e mailed the Jewish Chronicle editor asking about Cortiglia’s status as a JC blogger. No one replied, but Ben White has noticed that the BNP leader’s posts are no longer publicly available on the site. So the response to my inquiry must’ve been to take the posts down. Their approach seems to hush this up so the embarrassment will not be too public. Hopefully, we can disabuse them of that notion.
Another JC reader notes that apparently any JC reader can set up their own personal blog on the newspaper’s website, which is what Cortiglia did. I’ve corrected my post title and text accordingly. Finally, Cortiglia’s four posts are were still available using these links (here and here). Whether or not Cortiglia was a featured blogger or a reader-blogger on the JC site, the fact remains that they published four of his posts, made them publicly accessible for eight months, and gave him a platform he wouldn’t otherwise have enjoyed.
UPDATE I: The JC has totally removed Cortiglia’s four blog posts, but we have screenshots for every one. The JC editor, Stephen Pollard, is lying when he told the Guardian’s Hug Muir that Cortiglia’s blog was taken down in September. The accompanying screenshot disproves this, as the four posts were on the site and freely accessible till yesterday. Such lies only exacerbate the offense of the JC hosting BNP PR for eight months. I don’t understand why, when faced with embarrassment, people don’t admit to the offense and move on. Lying only focuses more attention on the matter.
* * *
Stephen Sizer reports that the UK national Jewish community’s Jewish Chronicle has offered a blog-column toCarlos Cortiglia, a leader of the British National Party, the nation’s leading white supremacist political party. Cortiglia is the BNP candidate in the London mayoral race.
I asked Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley to put BNP’s politics in a U.S. context, and whether it could be compared to the Tea Party. He replied that BNP carries more political weight, but its politics are more extreme:
Although they have moved towards a focus on Islamophobia and the counterjihad movement in recent years, their background is in the more traditional European neo-Nazi context and the National Front…
They used to be solidly anti-Semitic and it’s said [their national leader, Nick] Griffin used to deny the Holocaust. In recent years and especially since 9/11, they’ve decided they hate Muslims more than Jews or blacks so have put the focus on agitating against Muslims…
As part of their appeal to unite against Islam, they’ve made more recent attempts to distance themselves from anti-Semitism (although it can’t be far underneath the surface). Interestingly they are also now very pro-Israel.
This seems part of the growing convergence of the European far-right and pro-Israel ultranationalists. A perfect representative of this is of course Anders Breivik, who’s just gone on trial for murdering 77 young Norwegians. I’ve also written here about a group of Russian neo-Nazis who were welcomed to the Knesset by two far-right Jewish MKs. The operative concept here seems to be that the enemy of my Muslim enemy is my friend, even if he’s a Nazi.
But white supremacists? Is this how low the mainstream UK Jewish leadership are prepared to go? To make common cause with those who only a decade or so ago admired Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust?
On a somewhat related subject, Electronic Intifada reports that the faux progressive UK Jewish rights group, Engage, surreptitiously accepted funding from the UK Jewish Board of Deputies in order to mount an anti-BDS campaign. All the while Engage touted itself as an independent Jewish progressive voice, when it was a paid shill of the monied pro-Israel interests of the UK Jewish leadership. When you’ve been doing this as long as I have you develop a sense of smell about groups like this. They make a pretence of believing one thing and do something entirely different. Engage is one, as is StandWithUs.
We did an article on the ridiculous organization known as the Mosquebusters not too long ago. They have since changed their name to the less sexy, Law and Freedom Foundation. Their whole purpose is to use the UK equivalent of zoning laws to protest Mosque construction.
Below Vice.com interviewed director Spike Johnson went undercover and caught a lot of their extremism and loonieness:
Ever heard of Mosquebusters? It was the original nom de guerre of a gang of jerks who have vowed to help British Islamophobes oppose any plans the Muslims might have to erect big, fat mosques in their particular enclave of Albion.
But Mosquebusters don’t do this by turning at up building sites when all that’s left to do is put the crown on the minaret, or by driving bulldozers menacingly around mostly-Islamic neighbourhoods at night. They use planning permission, or rather they support anyone who wants to protest when planning permission is granted for mosques to be built. They’ve been really, really successful at it, too, citing things like a non-regulation number of parking spaces to baffle mosque planners into bureaucratic failure.
In an attempt to dent Mosquebusters’ 100 percent win rate, last year Spike Johnson (who went to the gypsy eviction at Dale Farm for us last year) spent a day working undercover with the organisation, which has now changed its name to the more corporate-friendly Law and Freedom Foundation. I spoke to Spike about his time with this secretive cabal of white-collar bigots.
VICE: Hey Spike, how are you? Spike: Hey, I’m good thanks.
How did you discover Mosquebusters?
I started looking at extremism for a story. On the EDL website, they have links to all kinds of pseudo-racist things. One of them was an advert asking for people to do volunteer work for Mosquebusters, but it’s gone now – at some point, they just began to shut down all their websites.
So do they still exist?
Oh, they still exist, definitely. They’re using the new name now: the Law and Freedom Foundation. It’s run by the same guys and it’s the same company.
So you applied as a volunteer to try to get access to them?
Yep. Gavin Boby – who runs Mosquebusters – was interviewing me. I was going to accompany him to court hearings and video the proceedings. He was beginning to get a lot of attention and wanted video evidence of things. To start with, I had access for maybe 24 hours and he sent me all of their instructions on how to do what they do and all of that crap. But then he figured out who I was and he shut me down.
So they try to keep what they do secret, despite a logo with a cartoon Abu Hamza on it and a name like “Mosquebusters”?
Yeah.
Is any of what they do illegal?
No, it’s all completely legal. I just think they realised that the majority of the population frown upon what they do.
You used the word “insidious” in your original investigation into what Mosquebusters do. What do you think is more damaging to the Muslim community – Islamophobes using bureaucracy to quash plans for mosques, or EDL numbskulls shouting insults at them in the street?
The former, for sure. And they realise it as well. You know, they’re not stamping their feet, they’re not waving flags. They’re being a bit quiet and cerebral about it. They realise that in order to make a change they have to go about these things from kind of a lateral route.
What did the members of the EDL that you spoke to think of Mosquebusters?
I went to a few rallies and the guys on the street don’t really know about Mosquebusters. Lately, I think Gavin Boby has been trying to distance himself from the EDL. The Mosquebusters don’t want that kind of publicity, they want to keep really quiet behind the scenes.
Did you speak to any of the everyday Islamophobes who’d used Mosquebusters’ petitions to complain about a mosque being built?
Yeah. I followed the case of this mosque that some Muslims were trying to build in West London. The people making the complaints against it sent Mosquebusters’ pre-written petition to the council.
In America, if someone were passing out Qurans it would not be controversial, except in maybe Tennessee or the like, but in Germany it has caused a ridiculous firestorm of controversy. More so you have Chancellor Merkel’s ally, Volker Kauder saying while “Muslim do belong in Germany…Islam does not.” How do you have Islam without Muslims in a country?
A leading conservative politician said on Thursday that Islam did not belong in Germany, fuelling tension at a conference on integrating Muslims that also debated a controversial Salafist campaign to hand out copies of the Koran across the country.
“Islam is not part of our tradition and identity in Germany and so does not belong in Germany,” Volker Kauder, head of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in parliament, told the Passauer Neue Presse.
“But Muslims do belong in Germany. As state citizens, of course, they enjoy their full rights,” he added.
His remarks added to a highly charged nationwide debate about a campaign by an ultra-conservative Salafist Muslim group to hand out millions of free German translations of the Koran to non-Muslims.
The conference was one of a series hosted by the government to improve the integration of the four million Muslims living in Germany, about half of whom have German citizenship.
Kauder’s comments quickly drew fire. “Volker Kauder is the last crusader for the conservatives. He is putting a bomb in the Islam conference,” said senior opposition Social Democrat (SPD) lawmaker Thomas Oppermann.
Two years ago a painful row erupted over a bestseller by former central banker Thilo Sarrazin, who said Turkish and Arab immigrants sponged off the state and threatened German culture.
Soon after, Germany’s then-President Christian Wulff won wide praise from Muslims by saying that Islam was part of Germany.
Muslim students at a university considering banning alcohol from parts of its campus have hit out at the plan – fearing they will be blamed for the move.
Students at London Metropolitan University said banning alcohol in the name of Muslims will cause tension on campus, divide the community, and could be exploited by far-Right groups such as the English Defence League.
Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor of London Met, has said he might stop alcohol being served in parts of the university because some religious students view it as “immoral”. But Syed Rumman, vice president of the Student Union, warned that any ban would be “catastrophic”.
Mr Rumman, who is a Muslim, said: “I do not drink, but it doesn’t mean that I will deprive another student from having alcohol.” He added: “It is unethical, catastrophic and it will isolate Muslims further in society. This will go against the ethos of London Met where students are so diverse but also socialise together. Students who do drink will resent Muslims. It will divide the student body. We must not allow this to become a religious issue. Muslim students never asked for this ban.”
The debate began after a decision was made to close The Hub, a student bar on the university’s Aldgate campus.
In an open letter, Ellie May, president of the university’s Unite Against Fascism Society, said: “We believe that the Vice Chancellor’s comments are insensitive and dangerous, provoking hostilities among students and the wider community.”
Imagine if a Muslim were corresponding with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, expressing support for his terroristic actions, wouldn’t he be locked up for material support of terrorism?
Kevin Forts is not the only US Breivik admirer out there:
The young man has black hair and a piercing gaze, and poses with his arms behind his back. He wants to appear decisive and courageous for the photographer. His parents and friends have tried to dissuade him from taking this step, says Kevin Forts from Worcester in the US state of Massachusetts. “But I want to, so that I can represent the views of Anders Breivik that have otherwise been demonized by the mass media,” the 23-year-old told reporters from the Norwegian tabloid VG, the country’s most-read newspaper.
In a major story the newspaper reveals that Forts shares the views of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. “I represent a nationalist alternative, just like Breivik,” he says. Forts writes letters to the assassin and exchanges ideas with him. As proof he shows off one letter the mass murderer wrote him from his prison cell.
Breivik praises the somewhat haggard looking American. VG quotes from the letter Breivik reportedly sent to Forts, in which he writes: “I have received letters from supporters in 20 countries, but you appear to be someone who can write well. Yes, I am absolutely interested in discussing ideological issues with you and am thinking about how we can work together.”
It could be a craving for attention that is now pushing the young American into the public eye. Since the attacks of July 22, 2011, the right-wing, anti-Islam scene has largely retreated from the digital public sphere. Its protagonists, who until then had used the Internet for regular exchanges, have rushed to distance themselves from Breivik’s acts. Chief among them is Fjordman, a Norwegian blogger, who until the killings had regularly exchanged ideas with Breivik and is considered to be a kind of ideological mentor to him. “It should be painfully obvious by now that Breivik does not care for anything greater than himself,” the anti-Islam author wrote in his blog of the ongoing trial this week.
Most are distancing themselves from Breivik, but not Kevin Forts. In a video of the interview posted on the VG website on Wednesday in which he explained why he is defending the murders, Forts said: “I believe it demonstrates a sense of nationalism and a moral conscience. He’s fighting against cultural Marxism and the Islamization of Norway and he found that the most rational way to accomplish that was through terrorist actions on Utøya and in Oslo.”
When asked how one could defend the murder of innocent children, Forts added: “Because I believe that he used it as an unprecedented attack. I don’t believe that it should occur again, but I do believe that it was atrocious but necessary in that it has raised awareness for it and Breivik did that with the executions.”
Forts says he believes Breivik is a “nationalist and a patriot and not the terrorist neo-Nazi that the media portrays him to be.” He continues by saying, “Now, all you see is the shock and the gore on Utøya and in Oslo, but you do not see the actual political ramifications that will come true in the future. I believe that, at that point, it will be impossible to hate Breivik, and you will see that he was actually acting in a matter of preemptive war.”
She calls herself the “voice of the people,” the anti-system candidate who will ensure social justice for the have-nots and purify a France she says is losing its voice to Europe and threatened by massive immigration and rampant Islamization.
She wants to drastically reduce the number of immigrants – to 10,000 a year – and, a top theme, to crack down for good on what she claims is the growing footprint of Islamic fundamentalists in France. “They are advancing in the neighborhoods. They are putting pressure on the population. They are recruiting young boys” to train for jihad, she said.
Le Pen insisted that fighting so-called Islamization won’t breed a mass killer such as Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Muslim extremist who is now on trial in Norway after confessing to killing 77 people. The fight must not stop “out of fear of a crazy man,” she said.
Le Pen cites as proof of the Islamist threat in France the case of Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman of Algerian origin who last month killed three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren before he was shot dead by police trying to capture him.
She also refuses to be categorized as extreme right, saying that her party is populist.
The image Marine Le Pen projects is less linked to the extreme-right than that of her father, said Nonna Meyer, an expert on the extreme-right vote at the prestigious university Sciences Po.
“She’s younger, she’s a woman, she condemns anti-Semitism. She often says things differently than her father,” Meyer said. “She says she is tolerant, it is Islam that is intolerant … She upends the discourse. But the foundation of the program is the same. If you look at the values her party defends, it is a system at once authoritarian and rejecting of others, rejecting the difference.”
Anti-Islam politician Allen West, who recently caused a firestorm of controversy when he claimed that 80 Congressmen were Communists is not backing down from the claim, he is going even further and claiming that Woodrow Wilson was a Communist as well.
Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks takes apart West’s confused silliness below:
It is not surprising that West continues to put his foot in his mouth, his entire m.o. is to present this tough guy exterior and if he were to take back his words that would be shattered.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - She’s best known for her satirical comedy on Saturday Night Live. Twenty years after leaving the hit show, Victoria Jackson is back in the spotlight, but this time it’s for her political views.
She’s now a controversial conservative commentator and she’s in Middle Tennessee taking a critical look at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.
Victoria Jackson is best known for her dim-witted characters on Saturday Night live which brought her a lot of laughs, and fame. She now works as a citizen journalist.
“I’m trying to use my fading SNL fame to shine a light on the topic that nobody in the media will talk about,” said Jackson.
That topic is Islam. Jackson came to Middle Tennessee to produce a story on the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro and its new mosque now under construction. The comic-turned- conservative political activist doesn’t mince words about why she thinks this building is rising in the middle of rural Tennessee.
“This is the Bible Belt, and Murfreesboro is the buckle on the bible belt. And it’s a college town. So my feeling is they came here to convert people to Islam,” said Jackson.
Jackson brought her camera to the current Islamic Center offices in Murfreesboro — but no one was available for an interview. No luck either at the construction site just outside town.
Jackson did recently interview Congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik for her story. Zelenik has been an outspoken opponent of the mosque. Jackson claims there’s a fatwa , or Islamic decree ,calling for her death because of her criticisms.
“I tolerate all religions. Except the ones that want to kill me,” said Jackson
Jackson plans to post her story on the conservative web site Patriot Update.
Liberals who admire the Democratic Party’s tradition of inclusiveness and civil rights should be troubled by what happened last week in Florida. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has served as the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee since last April, was until then scheduled to speak Saturday at the annual dinner event of the nonprofit group Empowering Motivating Educating Resourceful Grassroots Entities, or EMERGE USA.
EMERGE is a grass-roots group that works primarily with South Asians, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans to empower young people to take part in community service projects, local government and other forms of civic leadership. “Our broad goals are to incorporate minorities generally, Muslim or non-Muslim, into the political system,” EMERGE board member Imran Siddiqui says. Whether it’s running a get-out-the-vote drive or petitioning a city council to stop the construction of an industrial waste dump site next to a mosque, the group’s activities are little different than those of any other classic grass-roots American organization – the only difference being that a large portion of EMERGE’s members are from Muslim communities. Last year, former governor and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., keynoted their event.
Yet Wasserman Schultz decided to abruptly pull out of speaking at EMERGE’s annual dinner last week. “We never agreed to do a fundraiser, nor an event,” claimed Wasserman Schultz spokesman Jonathan Beeton. Yet EMERGE had previously widely advertised Wasserman Schultz’s participation at the fundraising dinner without apparent complaint from the congresswoman’s staff. “We were interfacing with congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s people for about a year to try to get something together,” said Siddiqui. “So when she agreed to the banquet, we were elated.” There’s a much more likely explanation for her abrupt refusal to attend the event than a simple miscommunication. For months, Islamophobic websites and a far-right congressional candidate waged a smear campaign against EMERGE, pressuring Wasserman Schultz to back out of the event. With her withdrawal, it appears that they won.
The smears can be traced back to an article in right-wing McCarthyist David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine. In a February article, Joe Kaufman – who isvying in a Republican primary to challenge Wasserman Schultz for her seat in Congress – teamed up with Militant Islam Monitor’s Beila Rabinowitz to claim that EMERGE was part of a “nefarious agenda of placing Islamists into positions of American power and influence.”
Based on that absurd premise that the community service volunteers and voter registration gurus of EMERGE were out to install an Islamist government in the United States, the bulk of the article’s allegations focused on Khurrum Wahid,one of the group’s founders. Kaufman and Rabinowitz note that Wahid, a civil rights lawyer, represented individuals accused by the U.S. government of terrorism-related crimes. This line of attack was similar to one waged in 2010 against Department of Justice lawyers who represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The group Keep America Safe referred to these lawyers as the “Al Qaeda 7,” a charge so incendiary that even a former Bush official rebuked it, noting that “there is a long-standing and very honorable tradition of lawyers representing unpopular or even uncontroversial clients.”
But it’s not surprising that Kaufman would engage in such outlandish smears. They help distract from his own past of espousing extreme ideas and outlandish rhetoric. Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he endorsed using nuclear weapons against the Muslim world to retaliate, writing, “If the decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do, in response to Pearl Harbor, then why the heck are we saving our nuclear weapons now?” He was even skewered by “The Daily Show” for his crusade to stop a Muslim Republican from getting the acceptance of the Broward County GOP. (Kaufman was at the time ironically leading a group called Americans Against Hate).
So how did a fringe congressional candidate, whose greatest feats have been getting mocked by “The Daily Show” and speaking out against Muslim Family Day at Six Flags on Fox News, cow one of the most powerful Democrats in the country? Unfortunately, he had some help running the smear campaign against EMERGE. His attacks were uncritically picked up by local news bloggers before making their way into larger right-wing publications. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo sensationally wrote an article titled “Debbie’s Date With Radicalism,” playing a bizarre game of six degrees to claim that Wahid was associating himself with groups connected to the financing of al-Qaida because he once spoke at a conference of the mainstream Islamic Circle of North America. (Full disclosure: I attended one of its conferences as an elementary schooler, and so has one of Obama’s faith advisors, which may lead to claims that both Obama and I are secretly associated with al-Qaida.)
The article wondered aloud why a “proud Jewess” like Wasserman Schultz would appear with the Muslim-dominated EMERGE, clearly trying to stoke a racial and religious divide. It also quoted a “prominent Jewish Democrat,” who hid behind anomynity to claim that EMERGE’s leaders have a “soft spot for terrorism.” The Free Beacon topped off all of this reporting with a memo titled, “DNC BOSS TO RAISE MONEY FOR TERRORIST LAWYER.”
It’s easy to play this ridiculous guilt by association game with anyone, of course. Take the Washington Free Beacon, for example. It is run by Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain campaign flack who is also a senior vice presidentat Orion Strategies, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm. Orion Strategies has had as one of its clients none other than George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center. Goldfarb has also worked for the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has a board member who said Palestinians should be thrown into the sea to be “food for sharks” and whose executive director called on the Israeli Defense Forces to use protesters as “target practice.” By their own logic, the Free Beacon is on the payroll of George Soros and has troubling associations with would-be genocidal anti-Arab activists.
The smear campaign against EMERGE should be more comical than respectable – it was led by hysterical Islamophobes and third-rate bloggers – and it would have been, if not for the fact that Wasserman Schultz appeared to give in to it. “Unless the Muslim community has somebody stand up to this,” reflects Siddiqui on the smear campaign, “this is just going to keep happening. And it needs to stop.”
Zaid Jilani is a Washington journalist. Follow him @zaidjilani.More Zaid Jilani
The trial of mass murderer Anders Breivik has confirmed one thing so far: He seems quite mad. Looking plump and dumb, with a slightly receding hairline, the Norwegian gave a right-wing salute as he entered the courtroom and smirked his way through CCTV footage of his handiwork.
Breivik claims that he killed 77 people as an act of self-defense against the Islamification of Norway, that he is a member of the Knights Templar and part of an “anticommunist” resistance to multiculturalism. Reading his insane manifesto, it is tempting to dismiss him as a nut with a gun.
Nevertheless, there’s no denying the political context to what Breivik did. Since 9/11, fringe and mainstream politicians in Europe and America have spoken of Islam as incompatible with Western values. Breivik quoted many of them in his manifesto. This is not to say that he took direct inspiration from those public figures, or that they bear personal responsibility for his crimes. But Breivik’s paranoia does conform to a popular — wholly negative — view of the twin problems of Islam and multiculturalism. Tragically, it is a view that few mainstream politicians have been willing to challenge.
Breivik makes two false claims. The first is that Islam is ethically inferior to Christianity and cannot exist peacefully within the secular democracies of the post-Enlightenment West. That is the open view of the Dutch Party for Freedom, the French National Front, the English Defense League and the Finnish True Finns. It was implicit in Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s aversion to the building of mosques. We might also infer it from much of the testimony presented at Rep. Peter King’s congressional hearings into the radicalization of American Muslim youth. King has opined that there are “too many mosques” in the United States and that roughly 80% of American Muslims are radical.
The mistake being made by all these people is to conflate a tiny minority of political Islamists — whose precise ideology has only really emerged in the last 30 years — with the entire global and historical community of Muslims. It is true that Islam has never undergone a total Reformation, but it has experienced mini-enlightenments. The most celebrated is the Islamic Golden Age (750- 1258), centered in Baghdad, in which the arts and sciences flourished in a manner that left Dark Ages Europe far behind. (You can also find humanist poetry and art in Persia and even a small amount of erotica in Northern Africa.)
Islam never outright rejected scientific empiricism but instead tried to reconcile and integrate it into its religious beliefs, with a surprising amount of debate about the primacy of either faith or reason. It preached that divine revelation could be found in other religions and so practiced tolerance in the lands that it conquered — a kind of Islamic multiculturalism. One of the giants of the European Enlightenment, Voltaire, favorably opined that Islam was more tolerant in its treatment of minorities than Christianity (consider the comparative persecution of Catholics in Ireland or of Jews in Spain).
Today, Islamic society looks different in every region where it is found. The royal families of Saudi Arabia have promoted ultra-conservative Wahhabism, which discourages personal vice, idolatry, veneration of saints, etc. The Bangladeshis prefer the more mystical Sufism, which places greater emphasis upon a subjective experience of Allah and is traditionally more tolerant of human foibles and dissent.
Almost every part of the Islamic world has produced progressive movements, some headed by women. Pakistan gave the world Benazir Bhutto and Indonesia Megawati Soekarnoputri. In all cases, the political development of Muslim countries has been as much shaped by poverty and the legacy of colonialism as it has Islam. Iran might have continued on a course toward liberalism had the West not sponsored an anti-democratic coup in 1953.
In short, there is no monolithic Islamic history or experience, which makes it hard or even disingenuous to talk about the challenge that Islam as a whole poses to the West. Put another way, no American would want anyone to think that the Westboro Baptist Church spoke for all of Christianity.
Breivik’s second, equally fallacious claim is that Islam’s growth in the West has been encouraged by liberal elites as a means to destroy traditional Christian culture. Indeed, multiculturalism has been strongly critiqued by two British prime ministers – Tony Blair and David Cameron. Cameron said that it had “failed” because it did not demand submission to the liberal principles of gender and sexual equality.
But multiculturalism is not a Marxist ideology carefully plotted by the “Saul Alinksy radicals” so loathed by Newt Gingrich. Rather, it was free-market economics and globalization that caused the mass migration of Muslims from East to West — and multiculturalism was simply a policy response. The aim was to protect the cultural integrity of both host and guest populations by allowing them separate spaces in which to develop.
Far from intending to threaten the religious or civil liberties of the majority Christian population (which remains vastly superior in numbers), the goal was to create a common framework of laws but otherwise leave everyone to their own devices. If Christianity has declined in the West, it’s the fault of the Christians who stopped going to church — not the small groups of Muslims quietly attending their local mosque.
And yet Muslims in Western countries now live under the pressures of anti-terrorist surveillance and social ostracism. They are forced to defend their Britishness, their Frenchness or their Americaness — even if they are third- or fourth-generation citizens of those countries. Breivik’s attack has raised the threat level against the West’s Muslims: They are now the target of our politically engaged sociopaths.
Given how widespread the condemnation of both Islam and multiculturalism is across the West, perhaps it is apt to describe Breivik as a symptom of Western psychological angst. It is a condition of neurosis about decline and paranoia about foreign invasion that is in desperate need of remedy.
Coughlan616, a prominent YouTuber who we’ve been following for quite some time now, and whose videos are always direct and in your face, took it a step further yesterday when he unleashed on EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) for not only not knowing what the Taj Mahal is, but for saying it was a sign of “#creepingsharia.”
Coughlin created a video urging viewers to use the #creepingsharia hash tag at Lennon’s expense. #Creepingsharia took off on Twitter, trending as #1 in the UK and then trending #1 in the world. The amazing twitter trend no doubt caught many by surprise and probably exceeded Coughlan’s and everyone’s imagination.
Coughlan and all the Tweeters deserve an immense amount of respect!
SECURITY measures have been taken at Llanelli’s mosque following claims of attacks on the building.
Metal bars have been fitted over the Station Road mosque’s front window after reports were made that the glass was smashed while someone was praying inside.
The incident came just months after the door was kicked through and a group of elderly women were followed in.
And police are now conducting high visibility patrols in the area to calm the concerns of people using the mosque.
Press officer for Llanelli’s Ethnic Minority Help Association Anne Stevens-Bevan said she was working hard to ensure people feel safe when they go to pray.
“I met with the police last week and I am negotiating with them and the Muslim Council for Great Britain to see what advice they can give,” she said.
“There have been problems with things thrown at the window and people being chased and abused physically and mentally.
“The trouble has been on-going for 14 years, but I have made a promise that it won’t happen again because it’s just not fair.”
Mrs Stevens-Bevan said she was “sickened to the stomach” to hear that the window was smashed while someone was praying.
“It should be a world of calmness,” she said.
“Having to put bars over the window takes away from that — it takes away from the sense of peace.”
She added that while lighting would soon be installed near the mosque, efforts were still being made to have CCTV cameras installed.
“The mosque is well used — and by some very elderly people — and they should feel safe,” she said.
“They get mouthy people passing, and these words can build up and rob them of their self-esteem.
“People don’t forget things like that, and for the women who were followed into the mosque it must be in their minds all the time.
“The mosque is a sacred place, like our churches and chapels, and we will not give up until people feel safe to go there.”
PC Dylan Davies said: “When they reported the criminal damage to me I did advise them to think about taking some security measures, which they did by adding the grill to the window.
“Having said that, this is a one-off instance. I am aware of concerns the people using the mosque have, and I am keeping an eye on the building and making sure that there are regular high visibility patrols in and around the area.”
The anti-Muslim/anti-left terrorist known as Anders Breivik has shown no remorse, saying he would commit his evil actions once again. He also said the youth he murdered on Utoya Island were not “innocent” and akin to the “Hitler youth.”
‘Hitler Youth’ is a term that Geller used to describe the youth on the island.
Anders Breivik has tried to defend his massacre of 77 people, insisting he would do it again and calling his rampage the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since the Second World War.
Reading a prepared statement in court, the anti-Muslim extremist lashed out at Norwegian and European governments for embracing immigration and multiculturalism.
He claimed to be speaking as a commander of an “anti-communist” resistance movement and an anti-Islam militant group he called the Knights Templar. There is no evidence the group exists. Maintaining he acted out of “goodness, not evil” to prevent a wider civil war, Breivik said: “I would have done it again.”
Breivik has five days to explain why he set off a bomb in Oslo’s government district last July, killing eight people, and then gunned down 69 others at a Labor Party youth camp outside the Norwegian capital. He denies criminal guilt, saying he was acting in self-defence.
“The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defence on behalf of my people, my city, my country,” he said as he finished his statement, in essence a summary of the 1,500-page manifesto he posted online before the attacks. “I therefore demand to be found innocent of the present charges.”
If found mentally sane – the key issue to be decided in the trial – Breivik could face a maximum 21-year prison sentence or an alternate custody arrangement that would keep him locked up as long as he is considered a menace to society.
Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen repeatedly interrupted Breivik, asking him to keep his statement short. “It is critically important that I can explain the reason and the motive” for the massacre, Breivik replied.
Mette Yvonne Larsen, a lawyer representing victims’ families, also interrupted Breivik, saying some were concerned that he was turning the trial into a platform to profess his extremist views. Her remarks prompted the judge to again urge Breivik to wrap it up.
Breivik rejected suggestions that he has a personality disorder. He said: “July 22, wasn’t about me. July 22 was a suicide attack. I wasn’t expecting to survive that day,” he said. “A narcissist would never have given his life for anyone or anything.”
Asked why he started crying in court on Monday, when prosecutors showed an anti-Muslim film that Breivik posted on YouTube before the attacks, he said: “I was thinking about Norway and Europe, which are ruled by politicians and journalists killing our country. I was thinking that my country is dying.”
Dean Obeidallah and the comedy group that he is a part of created a documentary called “The Muslims are Coming!” It features interviews with such comedic luminaries as Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, and David Cross as well as media personalities Rachel Maddow and Soledad O’Brien.
An attempt to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment by the leader of the English Defence League has spectacularly backfired on Twitter on Monday.
On Sunday night, EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, tweeted a complaint about a picture of a “mosque” on the Twitter front page (it was actually the Taj Mahal), highlighting the image as another example of #creepingsharia.
However, rather than stoke far-right feeling, the Luton-based activist unintentionally started a comedy twitter trend.
Amid traffic about the start of Anders Breivik’s trial in Oslo, the Twitterati hijacked the tag, with #creepingsharia being blamed for everything from “algebra on the curriculum” to “no ham left in the fridge”.
However, rather than stoke far-right feeling, the Luton-based activist unintentionally started a comedy twitter trend.
Amid traffic about the start of Anders Breivik’s trial in Oslo, the Twitterati hijacked the tag, with #creepingsharia being blamed for everything from “algebra on the curriculum” to “no ham left in the fridge”.
The trend was encouraged by stand-up comedian Richard Coughlan, who posted a video on YouTube encouraging users to “f*ck with the EDL” by turning the hash tag to a comedy bent.
You can watch Coughlan’s video here(WARNING: Strong language throughout).
OSLO, Norway — With a defiant closed-fist salute, a right-wing fanatic admitted Monday to a bomb-and-shooting massacre that killed 77 people in Norway but pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, saying he was acting in self-defense.
On the first day of his long-awaited trial, Anders Behring Breivik rejected the authority of the court as it sought to assign responsibility for the July 22 attacks that shocked Norway and jolted the image of terrorism in Europe.
Dressed in a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smiled as a guard removed his handcuffs in the crowded court room. The 33-year-old then flashed his salute before shaking hands with prosecutors and court officials.
“I don’t recognize Norwegian courts because you get your mandate from the Norwegian political parties who support multiculturalism,” Breivik said in his first comments to the court.
Eight people were killed in Breivik’s bombing of Oslo’s government district and 69 were slain in his shooting massacre at the left-leaning Labor Party’s youth camp on Utoya island outside the capital. Breivik has said the attacks were necessary to protect Norway from being taken over by Muslims.
“I admit to the acts, but not criminal guilt,” he told the court, insisting he had acted in self-defense.
The key issue to be resolved during the 10-week trial is the state of Breivik’s mental health, which will decide whether he is sent to prison or into psychiatric care. Anxious to prove he is not insane, Breivik will call right-wing extremists and radical Islamists to testify during the trial, to show that others also share his view of clashing civilizations.
Norway’s NRK television was broadcasting parts of the trial live but was not allowed to show Breivik’s testimony.
During Monday’s opening session, he remained stone-faced and motionless as prosecutors read the indictment on the terror and murder charges, with descriptions of how each victim died, and when they explained how he prepared for the attacks.
But Breivik suddenly became emotional when prosecutors showed an anti-Muslim video that he had posted on YouTube before the killing spree, wiping away tears on his cheek with trembling hands.
After a lunch break, Breivik was again expressionless as he watched prosecutors present surveillance footage of the Oslo explosion. The blast ripped through the high-rise building that housed government headquarters, blowing out windows and filling surrounding streets with smoke and debris.
He didn’t flinch as prosecutors played a three-minute recording of a young woman’s frantic phone call to police from Utoya.
“Shots have been fired,” Renate Taarnes, 22, said with panic in her voice. “I’m pretty sure that there are many injured.”
More than a dozen shots in close succession could be heard as Taarnes fell silent.
“Are you still there?” the police officer asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. She fell silent again, breathing into the phone as more shots cracked in the background.
Taarnes escaped the massacre unharmed and is scheduled to testify later in the trial.
Breivik also announced he doesn’t recognize the authority of Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen, because he said she is friends with the sister of former Norwegian Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The anti-Muslim militant described himself as a writer, currently working from prison, when asked by the judge for his employment status.
He claims he targeted the government headquarters in Oslo and the youth camp to strike against the left-leaning political forces he blames for allowing immigration in Norway.
If deemed mentally competent, Breivik would face a maximum prison sentence of 21 years or an alternate custody arrangement under which the sentence is prolonged for as long as an inmate is deemed a danger to society.
Breivik wants to be judged as a sane person and will call radical Islamists, and extremists on the right and left to testify to support “his perception that there is a war going on in Europe,” his defense lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told the court. Lippestad said Breivik wants to read a new document he’s written at the start of his testimony on Tuesday.
While Norway has a legal principle of preventive self-defense, that doesn’t apply to Breivik’s case, said Jarl Borgvin Doerre, a legal expert who has written a book on the concept. “It is obvious that it has nothing to do with preventive self-defense,” Doerre told The Associated Press.
Police sealed off the streets around the Oslo court building, where journalists, survivors and relatives of victims watched the proceedings Monday in a 200-seat courtroom built specifically for this trial.
Thick glass partitions were put up to separate the defendant from victims and their families, many of whom are worried that Breivik will use the trial to promote his extremist political ideology. In a manifesto he published online before the attacks, Breivik wrote that “patriotic resistance fighters” should use trials “as a platform to further our cause.”
After he surrendered, Breivik had told investigators he is a resistance fighter in a far-right militant group modeled after the Knights Templar – a Western Christian order that fought during the crusades. Police, however, have found no trace of any organization and say he acted alone.
“In our opinion, such a network does not exist,” prosecutor Svein Holden told the court on Monday.
In his manifesto, Breivik described the supposed group’s initiation rites, oaths and the “clenched fist salute” that he used in court, symbolizing “strength, honor and defiance against the Marxist tyrants of Europe.”
After blowing up parts of the government building and shooting dozens to death on Utoya island, Breivik surrendered to police 1 hour and 20 minutes after he arrived on Utoya. The police response to his terror spree was slowed by a series of mishaps, including the lack of an operating police helicopter and the breakdown of an overloaded boat carrying a commando team to the island.
Breivik called police twice, saying he wanted to turn himself in. In one of the calls, played in court Monday, he identified himself as a commander of “the Norwegian resistance movement” and said he had “just completed an operation on behalf of Knights Templar.”
When the operator asked him to repeat himself, Breivik sounded irritated and hung up.
___
Associated Press writers Bjoern H. Amland and Julia Gronnevet contributed to this report.
This past week saw the conviction of Tarek Mehanna for “material support of terrorism,” a special charge these days for those with Arabo-Muslamic sounding names. A charge that earned Mehanna 17.5 years in prison.
Aside from the problematic nature of the case, (Mehanna’s digital history proves he did not fit the picture of the eager-to-be-entrapped-or-turned-informant-wannabe-AlQaede-esque-terrorist, also Mehanna was essentially convicted of “translating documents”), there is another saliently unsurprising point that has been brought to the fore: the hypocrisy of the US government and the elite political class.
Political hypocrisy is a given in our cynical culture, a daily fact of life. We are so used to the double standards when it comes to ‘crime and punishment’ that many of us are blind to it when it occurs.
So, the US government can train terrorists in the Nevada desert that it’s own State Department has designated part of a “foreign terrorist organization” and no one blinks an eye:
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq…M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)
Before Seymour Hersh uncovered the sordid fact that the US government was directly involved in the training of terrorists in Nevada, it was well known (though under-reported), that there was a bi-partisan involvement of current and former government officials in both lobbying and receiving money from the MEK:
Congressmen (including Democrats) and former government officials have met with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization that was designated a terrorist group in 1997 when the list was first compiled, and is STILL ON THE LIST–for now.
MEK has a very aggressive and organized lobby effort in Washington D.C. According to one House staffer, the MEK is “the most mobilized grassroots advocacy effort in the country — AIPAC included.” Their mission is to be delisted as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), push the USA to foment war with Iran, i.e. “regime change,” and have themselves installed into power. Sound familiar?
Again, the hypocrisy is glaring, and as we pointed out in the past, exposes some crucial points:
1.) It is a felony to provide a designated terrorist organization with “material support,” which many elected officials it can be argued have been doing!
2.) “Numerous Muslims inside the U.S. have been prosecuted for providing ‘material support for Terrorism’ for doing far less than these American politicians are publicly doing on behalf of a designated Terrorist group.” Read Glenn Greenwald’s piece for a far from comprehensive list of Muslims who have been charged for doing far less than what these politicians did!
What should we do? Sit idly by while those with power flaunt the rule of law and treat the rest of us like subjects and serfs unworthy of equality before the law? Have we ceded “immunity” to the powerful political class in consequence of their law-breaking?
Recently, the Department of Treasury has announced that it is investigating three former high ranking officials for receiving money from the MEK:
The Department of Treasury is investigating payments to three former top-ranking government officials for speaking on behalf of a group on the U.S. terrorist list…Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, former FBI Director Louis Freeh and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton.
While this is welcome news, it does put the government in the embarrassing position of investigating prominent officials for supporting terrorists while having simultaneously trained the exact same terrorists! The question is, who is going to investigate the government for training MEK operatives in the Nevada desert?
The three officials being investigated were not the only ones receiving money and perks in exchange for lobbying on behalf of the MEK. There are at least “nearly two dozen prominent former officials who have received up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees in exchange for their efforts on behalf of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK).”
This is why I propose a grassroots effort, starting with an online petition and campaign calling for the Department of the Treasury to expand its investigation of officials who have been aiding the US State Department designated “foreign terrorist organization” the MEK.
Those who will be the subject of this petition are as follows:
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former homeland security advisor Fran Townsend: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former White House chief of staff Andy Card: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton: received about $20-30,000 per speech and a variety of perks, including first-class airfare to European cities.
Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean: Lobbied on behalf of, met with and received money.
Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell: received about $20-30,000 per speech and a variety of perks, including first-class airfare to European cities.
Former FBI Director Louis Frieh: received about $20-30,000 per speech and a variety of perks, including first-class airfare to European cities.
Former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson: Received money.
Former General Wesley Clark: Lobbied on behalf of, met with and received money.
Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif.: Lobbied on behalf of, met with and received money.
Former Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Col.: Lobbied on behalf of and met with.
Ted Poe, R-Texas: Lobbied on behalf of and met with.
Dennis Moore, R-Kan.: Lobbied on behalf of and met with.
State Department Ambassador Daniel Fried: participated in phone calls “urging the pro-MEK members to pass along messages to MEK leaders in Paris.”
Former Sen. Robert Torricelli: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former Sen. Evan Bayh: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former CIA Director Porter Goss: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
Former National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones: Lobbied on behalf of, or met with and received money.
If this Department of Treasury investigation has any real teeth behind it, and is not just a mechanism to provide the illusion of justice, it will be comprehensive and thorough, including all those who received money, lobbied on behalf of or met with the MEK. Isn’t that what we have seen with those convicted of “material support of terrorism” for doing far less than these politicians?
One of the anti-Loons of 2011, Sheila Musaji dissects the anti-Muslim propaganda of Daily Mail, Telegraph and hate bloggers Pamela Geller and Bare Naked Islam.
First let’s see how the Islamophobes slanted yet another story, and then we’ll look at the facts.
Pamela Geller posted an article Imposing Islam: London University mulls alcohol ban. She posts an article from The Telegraph with this introduction Another nail in the coffin. Here again we see the imposing of Islam on the public square, all part of the ongoing campaign of the islamization of the West, as meticulously documented in my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. The bottom line is, if alcohol is haram for Muslims, then don’t drink it. Period. Don’t impose Islam on non-Muslims.
Bare Naked Islam posted DON’T BAN BOOZE, BAN MUSLIMS! referring to the same Telegraph article, with the introduction You are now entering yet another Sharia-Controlled Zone in England: London Metropolitan University has just announced that it is considering banning alcohol on campus because it is ‘offensive to Muslims.’
Here is a sample of the comments under the Bare Naked Islam story:
— Muslim slaughter innocent people as the devil himself…There is “Nothing” religious about the Muslim Satanic cult! Not only do the Muslim hate non-Muslim, they HATE dogs also…If you would see what Muslim do to dogs this to would make your blood boil! There is NO place for a Muslim on earth…You want peace in the world, then rid the world of the vile creatures called Muslims and Commies!! How many more Million among Millions of innocent people have to die before the vile creatures are killed?!
— Many people are offended by moslems; myself included, so why can’t we ban islam?
— The ENTIRE Western world ought to ban Muslims from entering their countries. Further, they also need to start a crusade to drive Islam out of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and any part of the Americas, Australia/Oceania where it’s taken serious hold. Do them as they have done non-Muslims for 1400 years.
— If Muslims HATE our way of life so much, then why do they come in such huge numbers to our countries? Oh, I momentarily forgot; they come to CONQUER and impose Islamic sharia law where defenseless non-Muslims have NO human rights.
Now we get to the facts that set off this hate-fest. Once again, just as in the incident at Catholic University when Muslim students were falsely accused of “wanting crosses removed”, no Muslim students made any request to the University in England regarding alcohol. There was no “imposition”, no “demands”, no “creeping Sharia”, no attempt at “Islamization of the West”.
There is coverage in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard on comments by the vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University that the university is considering creating ‘alcohol-free zones’.
He stated that this was to cater for a “21st-Century balance”, given its diverse student population. Almost 20% of the LMU’s students are Muslim, and according to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Malcolm Gillies “For many students now, coming to university is not about having a big drinking experience.”
“A London university is considering establishing alcohol-free zones on its campuses because so many of its students consider drinking to be immoral.
“Professor Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said the selling of alcohol was an issue of “cultural sensitivity” at his institution where a fifth of students are Muslim.
“Speaking to a conference of university administrators in Manchester, he said that for many students, drinking alcohol was “an immoral experience”.
“He told the Guardian the makeup of his institution had changed considerably over the past few decades. In the past it had been “substantially Anglo Saxon – now 20% of our students are Muslim,” he said.
““We therefore need to rethink how we cater for that 21st-century balance. For many students now, coming to university is not about having a big drinking experience. The university bar is not as used as it used to be.”
“Alaa Alsamarrai, the vice-president of student affairs for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, said Muslim students wanted universities to be inclusive so that students “from all walks of life can come and share experiences”.
““Alcohol is a barrier to many Muslim students participating in freshers’ events and often in society activities, so we are in support of moves to have alcohol-free zones and events,” she said. “However, if a student wants to drink, we don’t want to ban them from doing that.”
Contrast this reporting with the sensationalist headlines in the Daily Mail and Evening Standard.
Both are factually inaccurate, as the restriction on alcohol selling would only apply to some areas on the campus, the so-called ‘alcohol-free zones’. This is something which is not clarified at all in the LES, whilst the Daily Mail makes it clear much later in its article, where it states, “Professor Gillies said he would work with the student body to move towards having areas on campus where ‘one serves alcohol and others don’t’”.
Moreover, the Daily Mail’s claim that the move is to be considered on grounds that it ‘offends Muslims’ is ludicrous. Nowhere in the comments of Professor Gillies is there the suggestion that the arrangement is motivated because alcohol causes offence to a particular group. Rather he states that it is an issue of “cultural sensitivity”, and that he is “raising the issue of changing values in student populations and the question of how a responsible university responds.”
Islamophobia Watch reports on another important detail left out of the irrational Islamophobic accounts.
The right-wing press has latched on to an interview with Prof Malcolm Gillies of London Metropolitan University in which he reportedly said he wants to create alcohol free areas on campus out of “cultural sensitivity”.
… Also worth noting is the following statement by the London Met branch of the University and College Union:
1. London Met Uni has some 25,000+ students studying in over a dozen buildings – all of which have alcohol-free coffee bars/student areas, across two distinctly separate campus areas in North and East London, with only a single student bar at each campus (the only places that serve alcohol at the university).
2. There have been no complaints or demands from students directly or via the students union for alcohol to be either banned, or partially-banned, on campus.
3. Gillies is currently selling off large sections of the university estate, including ‘The Hub’ –the student union facility (inc student bar) at the City Campus. The VC’s comments need to be seen in that light – i.e., they are simply a convenient cover for reducing student social facilities.
4. The language adopted by the VC in this regard is extremely divisive and is already stoking tensions where none had previously existed between the multiplicity of London Met’s student constituencies. The fact that the EDL (English Defence League) and other extreme Right and fascist groups have latched on to this is a major concern.
5. If Gillies were serious about student welfare and wider social and cultural equality and fairness, why has he personally defended the following university management decisions:
i) direct links with the Uzbekistan regime – noted for the torture of its opponents (primarily Muslim incidentally), and forced sterilisation of woman (see this week’s BBC report on the issue – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fjx63)
ii) cutting of most of the university’s student chaplaincy service – including the forced redundancy of the Imam;
iii) the drastic reduction in the opening hours of the Women’s Library (down to only 1 day per week), and its eventual closure;
All of this is happening at a time of huge cuts to student courses/modules – including the majority of the ‘critical’ subjects – such as philosophy and history, and mass redundancies amongst staff – both academic and student service related.
At best, Gillies utterances are a crass example of the disconnect becoming more and more evident at London Met between university management and the staff and students they supposedly represent. At worst, it is a quite cynical attempt to stir-up a divisive atmosphere in order to deflect attention from the far more serious issue of the deliberate destruction of a once proud inner city ethnically mixed and vibrant modern university.
After this interview with Prof. Gillies was published, the BBC asked some Muslims what they thought about possible alcohol free zones. Here are a couple of the responses:
Alaa Alsamarrai, the vice-president of student affairs for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), said: “We want our universities and unions to be inclusive – where students from all walks of life can come together and share experiences. “Alcohol is a barrier to many Muslim students participating in freshers events and often in society activities – so we’re in support of moves to have some alcohol-free zones and events. “Though if a student wants to drink in their lifestyle, we of course don’t want to ban that.”
Farooq Murad, Muslim Council of Britain secretary general, said that thousands of Muslims attended university and as far as he was aware there had never been a demand for an alcohol ban on campuses. “There has always been a balance between social life and studying. We believe university authorities should be able to decide what works best for them in managing their campus space. Muslims have studied at universities for decades and we cannot imagine that others drinking alcohol will impede them from continuing to attend.”
The Times Higher Education reports on MORE FACTS that completely undermine the Islamophobic take on this story.
The president of London Metropolitan University students’ union has called for the vice-chancellor to apologise after he suggested the sale of alcohol should be banned from parts of the campus because some Muslim students believed drinking was “immoral”.
Claire Locke said Malcolm Gillies had “offended” Muslim students by generalising about their beliefs. There had been no calls from students to create alcohol-free areas on the London Met campus, she said.
Ms Locke argued that London Met’s Muslim students were “respectful of other people’s cultures”. Muslim students’ union officers were currently fighting for a new student bar to be opened at the university’s City campus, she added.
Outright lies or distortions about anything concerning Islam or Muslims is so common among the Islamophobes that on TAM we have an article collection that we try to update regularly called What Everyone “Knows” About Islam and Muslims. The demonization industry has become so prolific that it is difficult to keep up with the updates as they churn this crap out daily.
The most commonly repeated false claims about Muslims and Islam are that:
Everyone “knows” that Muslims don’t speak out against extremism or terrorism, and even those Muslims who do speak up or seem moderate are simply lying or practicing taqiyyah.
Everyone “knows” that the Qur’an is uniquely violent, that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t include God’s love, and does not include the concept of a Golden Rule, that Allah is a moon god.
Everyone “knows” that Islam is a monolith and all Muslims are the same, like the “Borg”. This means that every act committed by an individual who is a Muslim is directly attributable to Islam, and never because the individual is crazy, criminal, or perverted.
Everyone “knows” that Muslims don’t have a sense of humor
Everyone “knows” that Muslims are like the Fascists and Nazis and that in fact they supported those movements.
The problem is that what “everyone knows” is wrong. These self-righteous and incorrect statements are usually followed by a demand that the Muslim community do something about whatever is the false flag of the day or face the inevitable consequences.
In addition to these “everyone knows” statements of demonization and misrepresentation, there is also a whole industry of simply connecting with Islam or Muslims with any negative idea, event, or societal trend (even when there is no sane connection to make). These I think of as “Through the Looking Glass” claims.
For example, lots of “news” items never happened, or are simply not true.
— Arabs didn’t celebrate 9/11 at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey.
— Budweiser did not pull all its product from the shelves of a convenience store where there was celebration of the terrorist attacks – this never happened.
— The Muslim statement of faith (Shahada) is not an expression of hate.
— An American Missionary in Africa didn’t face possible murder charges and hanging because of a traffic accident.
— There is no verse of the Qur’an on “The Wrath of the Eagle”.
— The supposed bomb threat made by an Arizona student that led to an evacuation of the school was a hoax by non-Muslim students.
— The story that Iran was considering forcing Jews to wear a yellow star appeared in several publications and it was totally false.
— The story that Iran was going to attack the U.S. and/or Israel with nuclear weapons on August 22, 2006 was a lie.
— The slaying of the New Jersey Coptic family was falsely charged to Muslims.
— The story about the British banks banning piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims never happened.
— Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism and violence than Christians or Jews.
— Muslims did not destroy the Library of Alexandria.
— Nurses in Britain were not “ordered to drop everything and turn Muslims’ beds toward Mecca five times daily”.
— There is no Muslim sword through the 41-cents mark on the U.S. Eid stamp.
— Sirhan Sirhan is a Christian, not a Muslim.
— The Virginia Tech massacre had no connection with Islam.
— The University of Oklahoma bombing had no connection with Islam.
— A bus driver in Britain didn’t tell passengers to get off the bus so he could pray.
— Rachel Ray’s Paisley scarf is not a symbol of “murderous Palestinian Jihad” (and neither is a Keffiyah).
— A Muslim student in Florida did not refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance.
— There were no Muslims acting suspiciously on Air Tran flight 297.
— Wearing a tee-shirt with Arabic writing on it does not make a person dangerous.
— A Madrassah is simply a school.
— The zebibah (prayer bruise) on some Muslims foreheads is not a sign of a “commitment to jihad”.
— There is no “spit jihad”
— There is no hijabi employment jihad
— There is no Muslim “marriage to important men” jihad plot
— Jihad is not terrorism.
— Ashura is not a “Muslim blood festival”.
— Muslims are not forbidden to have non-Muslims as friends.
— The Shahada (declaration of faith) is not an “expression of hate” that is “closely identified” with terrorism.
— The Nuclear Security Summit logo is an atom on a circular path, not an Islamic symbol.
— The U.S. Missile Defense Logo is not evidence of ‘Submission To Shariah’, and neither is the Flight 93 memorial.
— The Google Veteran’s Day logo doesn’t display a secret Muslim agenda.
— Muslims also died on 9/11.
— Barack Obama is not a Muslim, but so what if he was?
— Mattel is not promoting Sharia with a subversive doll that supposedly says “Islam is the light”.
— The Hamas “child bride” incident was nothing of the sort.
— The best buy Happy Eid statement on an ad was not a subversive attempt to “water down” American holidays
— The “Muslim plot” to kill the Pope never happened
—The story about a flight from London to Malta being stopped because a Muslim man was praying in the aisle was a lie
— Five American Muslim soldiers never plotted to poison their fellow soldiers.
— There is no devious Muslim plot to groom attractive Muslim women to marry important men or politicians – an Islamic/socialist/left wing plot to advance a pro-Muslim Agenda and take over America.
— Straight prayer lines, beards, hijabs, gender segregation during prayers, wearing a watch on your right hand, wearing “non-western” clothing, etc. are not “Sharia adherent behaviors” that might correlate with the promotion of violence.
— Muslim environmentalists are not part of a sinister plot to colonize the west.
— All of the rapes Oslo, Norway over the past three years were not “committed by Muslim immigrants using rape as a weapon of cultural terrorism”.
— There was no Muslim plot hatched in an on-line forum to attack British Jews over Israel’s actions in Gaza, and there was no “Islamist” named Abu Islam making these fake postings.
—Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazd did not justify and provide Islamic guidelines for the raping of prisoners. The story was a lie.
— Keith Ellison’s use of the Qur’an in the photo op after his swearing in was not “undermining American culture”
—There is no Muslim scholar named Sheikh Haron, and everything he does or says as a supposed member of the Muslim community is a lie.
—Muslims do not block New York streets to pray every Friday.
—There is no plot to have terrorist babies born in the U.S.
—Stephen Coughlin, a Pentagon anti-terrorism specialist was not ousted because his superiors thought he was too critical of Islam
—The Holocaust museum shooting had nothing to do with Islam.
— Anders Breivik’s terrible massacre in Norway was not “a jihad” or even commited by a Muslim
— The word Slav does not come from the word for slave and has nothing to do with Islam. Slavery is not only a Muslim problem.
— There is no Muslim vehicular jihad plot
— All rapes in Norway have not been committed by Muslims (not even most)
— Whole Foods offering halal products during Ramadan was not “shilling for jihadist interests”
— There is no plot by Muslim cabdrivers in New York City to impose Sharia on America
— Muslims are not more likely than non-Muslims to approve of violence against civilians (PEW poll)
— Muslims are not intolerant of other faiths (Gallup poll)
— Claims about Muslim inferiority due to “inbreeding” are racist and a misrepresentation of the issue
— The photo of a Yemeni passenger on the Mavi Marmara holding a dagger was totally misrepresented
— There was no assassination attempt on an EDL leader in Britain
— Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did not make a comment blaming “the Jews” for 9-11
— “Islamophobia” is not an “attempt to silence freedom of speech”
— There was no Muslim Thanksgiving turkey “stealth jihad” plot
— The ridiculous complaints about crosses at Catholic University were not made by Muslims
— The White House Iftar was not a “ghoulish” or “disgraceful” attempt to appease Muslims
— Muslims don’t hate dogs
— Muslim handshaking customs are not an attempt to force Sharia on others.
— The tragic Belgian massacre by Nordine Amrani was not a “jihad” attack and Amrani wasn’t a Muslim
— The Hollywood shooter, Tyler Brehm was not a Muslim
— An Eid party for Muslim special needs kids was not any sort of “stealth jihad”
— Requesting reasonable religious accommodation in the public sphere is not “creeping Sharia”.
— Muslim students did not “target Jewish students” with eviction notices at a Florida University.
— A spelling bee for students at Muslim schools was not an example of the inability of Muslims to integrate. (Note: click on the links to see responses to particular claims or incidents
Where do these false claims come from? They come from a relatively small group of individuals and organizations involved in an Islamophobia industry. Please see A Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry where The American Muslim (TAM) has collected information about these individuals in an easy to use format. Just click on the links provided to go to in-depth articles and backgrounders on these individuals.
The international network of counter-jihadist groups that inspired Anders Behring Breivik is growing in reach and influence, according to a report released on the eve of the Norwegian’s trial.
Far-right organisations are becoming more cohesive as they forge alliances throughout Europe and the US, says the study, with 190 groups now identified as promoting an Islamophobic agenda.
This week Breivik will appear on trial in Oslo after confessing to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July, killings that he justified as part of a “war” between the west and Islamists.
The report, by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, states that since the 33-year-old’s killing spree, the counter-jihad movement – a network of foundations, bloggers, political activists and street gangs – has continued to proliferate.
Campaigners cite the formation three months ago of the Stop Islamization of Nations (Sion) group, designed to promote an umbrella network of counter-jihad groups across Europe and the US, as evidence of a global evolution.
An inaugural Sion summit is planned in New York this year to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. Speakers are set to include Paul Weston, chairman of the anti-Islamic British Freedom Party (BFP), which recently announced a pact with the English Defence League. In the manifesto that Breivik published online 90 minutes before his attacks, he cited blog postings by Weston which discussed a “European civil war” between the west and Islam.
Researchers at Hope Not Hate name the UK as one of Europe’s most active countries in terms of counter-jihad extremism, with 22 anti-Islamic groups currently operating.
In Europe as a whole, 133 organisations were named in the report, including seven in Norway, and another 47 in the US, where a network of neo-conservative, evangelical and conservative organisations attempts to spread “negative perceptions of Islam, Muslim minorities and Islamic culture”.
Nick Lowles, director of Hope Not Hate said: “Breivik acted alone but it was the ‘counter-Jihadist’ ideology that inspired him and gave him the reasoning to carry out these atrocious attacks. All eyes this week will be on what Breivik did last July, but we ignore those people who inspired him at our peril.”
Andreas Mammone, a historian at Kingston University in London and an expert on European fascism, said broader factors had helped the counter-jihad movement to consolidate support. “The economic crisis continues to promote nationalism alongside the need for a common enemy. A fear of radical Islam is being developed, the idea that it presents a threat to our freedom,” he said.
The report also identifies the counter-jihad network’s most influential figures, including EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as Tommy Robinson), but also the more discreet London property tycoon Ann Marchini, whose details surfaced on a leaked list of EDL donors and who is understood to have attended counter-jihad conferences in Scandinavia, Brussels, Zurich and London. She attended a recent meeting where the EDL agreed its electoral pact with the BFP and is also understood to be involved with the UK wing of the Centre for Vigilant Freedom (CVF), and a well-funded US group renamed the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA), which is based in Fairfax, Virginia, and co-ordinates individuals and groups in 20 countries.
The ICLA also runs the Counter-Jihad Europa website, which acts as a “clearing house for national initiatives to oppose the Islamisation of Europe”. Three months after Breivik’s attacks the ICLA organised a counter-jihad conference in London with the help of its European co-ordinator, Christopher Knowles, another EDL co-founder and director of the UK branch of the CVF, which is registered in Wakefield.
New anti-Islamic groups continue to emerge. Two weeks ago in Denmark, Yaxley-Lennon held the inaugural meeting of a Europe-wide network of defence leagues. Another new group, founded in Belgium last month, is Women Against Islamisation, a pan-European network whose launch was addressed by Jackie Cook, the wife of Nick Griffin, chairman of the British National party (BNP).
In Greece, polls suggest the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn could pass the 3% threshold required to enter parliament in elections next month.
Another development concerns the hardening of links between European and US anti-Islamic organisations. US blogger Pamela Geller is a key figure driving closer transatlantic relations. Geller, who is president of Sion, was mentioned in Breivik’s manifesto and was a vociferous protester against the development of a mosque in Lower Manhattan in 2010.
The co-founder of Sion is Denmark’s Anders Gravers, organiser of Stop Islamisation of Europe. Gravers met Yaxley-Lennon in Denmark last month.
Campaigners are concerned that US neo-conservative and evangelical groups will begin sharing resources with the leagues. Images of EDL demonstrations are already used at Tea Party movement fundraising events, while officials from groups such as the Christian Action Network have met EDL activists. Other US and UK links include the Virginia-based anti-Islamic blog, the Gates Of Vienna, which counted Breivik as a contributor. As attention turns to Norway, experts are keen to stress that the country was not unusual in terms of the extent of its counter-jihadist movement. Among the online forums linked to Breivik are the nationalist blog Document.no, on which Breivik posted more than 100 comments.
Breivik – an admirer of the EDL – was also an online supporter of the Norwegian Defence League, which retains close links with its English counterpart.
By Lauren Markoe| Religion News Service, Published: April 12 (The Washington Post)
More than 50 Muslim and non-Muslim civic and religious groups asked leading senators on Thursday (April 12) to rescind the appointment of an outspoken Muslim activist, Zuhdi Jasser, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Jasser, a Navy-trained physician, is decrying the effort – and others to oust him from the independent watchdog panel – as a “smear tactic.”
A separate online petition that began circulating last week, also asking for his ouster, has garnered more than 2,000 signatures.
“Their letter is patently dishonest, deceptive, and continues their unprofessional unbridled smear campaign against anyone who chooses to take on Islamic reform against Islamist ideologies and groups regardless of whether we are observant traditional Muslims,” Jasser wrote in an email to Religion News Service.
The signatories to the letter, sent to three key senators, argue that Jasser’s rhetoric and activism contribute to a culture that treats Muslims as suspects, and that he would subvert the work of the bipartisan commission, which advises federal officials on the status of religious freedom abroad.
“His consistent support for measures that threaten and diminish religious freedoms within the United States demonstrates his deplorable lack of understanding of and commitment to religious freedom and undermines the USCIRF’s express purpose,” they wrote.
They cite Jasser’s effort to prevent the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, his support for the New York Police Department’s spying on Muslim institutions, and his defense of anti-Shariah laws, which most Muslim civil rights groups say unfairly paint Muslims as anti-American.
We have linked several times in the past to articles on YNetNews, a popular Israeli online news source. I am unaware of their “op-ed” policy, but today they published an article by David Ha’ivri titled, The Arab-Muslim Narrative.
Ha’ivri is the “director of the Shomron Liaison Office. He and his wife Mollie live in Kfar Tapuach.” Ha’ivri’s op-ed is racist tripe and generalizes both Arabs and Muslims.
I can understand such an op-ed being published on Arutz Sheva, or the The Israel Times Online but on YNetNews, a leading Israeli online site read by hundreds of thousands daily?
Here are some of the most egregious quotes:
This conversation was a great help to me in understanding the Muslim Arab mindset and culture. Facts are not really so important to them. They can be made up or even changed as needed.
Muslim people celebrate detachment from reality as part of their worship:
Understand that we are dealing with people who celebrate being detached from reality as part of their worship of Allah.
And perhaps the most racist and ridiculous of them all:
It is unrealistic, in my opinion, to believe that we can turn the Arabs into a society that truly embraces western concepts and values – like facts and sticking to truth. It makes much more sense to understand that fantasy and stretching the truth are very deeply embedded in the mindset of the Muslim and Arab culture. I do not mean to say this as an insult, but to suggest that we accept it as a fact, take it as it is and move on.
Barack Obama himself has never had the guts to say it.
Indeed, while it is famously difficult to prove a negative, it seems apparent that few people in all of politics and media have had the guts to say it. Did John McCain ever say it? Did Rick Santorum or Bill O’Reilly?
So let us plant a little flag for, mark with a yellow highlighter, the thing Rep. Raul Labrador said Sunday on “Meet the Press”: that “it wouldn’t matter” if President Obama were a Muslim. And if it seems rather much to be handing out medals for such a modest statement of principle, well … the principle has been under fire for so long that even a modest statement feels momentous.
In recent years, public figures have made news for refuting (like McCain) or failing to refute (like Santorum) the canard that Obama is a follower of Islam. But outside of Colin Powell, who did so a few years back on “Meet the Press,” it is difficult to think of many — or any — who have dared to confront the notion implicit in the lie. Namely, that being a Muslim is incompatible with being an American.
This is taken by some as self-evident truth even as Muslim soldiers risk their lives on our battlefields, Muslim cops risk their lives on our streets, Muslim teachers teach our children, Muslim reporters report our news, Muslim politicians help to make our laws, and Muslim-Americans struggle against those who believe our sacred ideals cover other people, but not them.
Thus, a fleeting statement that should have been obvious to the point of mundanity feels instead like a water station in the Mojave.
Labrador is no fan of the president’s. His comment about Islam was made en route to a contention that Obama’s policies have “weakened” the nation. Labrador is a Republican and a conservative from a very Republican and conservative state, Idaho. It is his political and ideological kin who are most responsible for pushing — and believing — the Obama-as-Muslim narrative. All of which imbues his remark with a welcome patina of political courage and moral clarity.
Perhaps he would agree that what has historically weakened this nation at least as much as any policy the president has ever pursued is the tiresome notion that some of us are more American than the rest of us, that the “all” in “all men are created equal” refers only to those of the right gender, genus, sexual or political orientation, or faith. It is an idea abhorrent to the aforementioned sacred ideals, yet one embraced eagerly in recent years by those who apparently feel bereft without someone to fear.
It is a shameful truth of American history that there has never been a shortage of someones to fear, nor of those who were willing to maximize and exploit that fear. It is an equally shameful truth that Americans, in thrall to that fear, have committed grievous sins against both human rights and those sacred ideals.
And always, it begins with some false, implicit truth, some lie that gains such a foothold in the popular imagination, that becomes so pervasive and persuasive, no one even questions it anymore. Some, because they don’t think to; others, because they don’t dare to.
So someone says the German-Americans are traitors and let’s string that one up — and no one says a thing.
Someone says the Japanese-Americans are spies and let’s imprison them all behind barbed wire — and no one raises a cry.
And someone says all the Muslims are terrorists and we must rid our nation of them by any means necessary — and one hears only the arias of the crickets.
It is in those complicit silences that we lose ourselves, that we betray our ideals and that mobs are born. So there is nothing modest about even a modest statement of principle. And one cannot help but be glad Labrador, being what he is, said what he said.
It’s about time someone did.
(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)
Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate for the French presidential election, accused rival President Nicolas Sarkozy of having sent “a simple message” when some Islamists were arrested on French territory, after French forces assaulted Mohamed Merah’s house last month. Le Pen was speaking at a press conference with foreign journalists in her campaign headquarters at Nanterre, west of Paris.
Responding to a question from The Jerusalem Post, following the surprising absence of mentions in electoral debates of the shootings in the southern French town of Toulouse, Le Pen criticized Sarkozy, calling his crackdown on Islamists “merely electoral agitation after the Merah affair.”
“A few arrested Islamists and that is all… [Sarkozy] is not dealing with the real problem of fundamentalism, although he has been in charge of national security for the past 10 years.” For Le Pen, Sarkozy, like his predecessors, “deliberately downplayed the threat from Islamists who want to see France as we know it disappear in favor of Shari’a.”
Going further, she accused her main rival for the voice of the right wing to have even “opened the door to the UOIF (militant Muslim organization in France) who called for the murder of Jews”. “He provided the first steps to the ladder for the fundamentalists in France and internationally,” she said.
While Robert George has had positive relations with Muslim leaders such as Hamza Yusuf, and has also made positive statements regarding Islam and Muslim in the public, he has still left unanswered lingering questions about his troubling membership on the board of the Bradley Foundation, one of the largest funders of Islamophobia.
George’s unwillingness to answer questions about his position as a board member of the Bradley Foundation since 2006 is one of the main reasons he should not be considered as a commissioner on the USCIRF. His positive statements about Muslims do not give him a free pass in this regard.
Since it was revealed last fall that Robert George sits on the board of a conservative foundation that funds some of the worst anti-Islam extremists, the prominent Princeton professor has remained silent on the issue. Even when asked directly, he refused to discuss the subject.
Monday, his colleague Jennifer Bryson of the Witherspoon Institute tried to defend him. Unfortunately her attempt comes up short.
Bryson starts by conceding that the anti-Islam organizations in question are “in [her] view, misguided” before moving on. But let’s be clear, the people we’re talking about are indefensibly hateful. They describe Muslims as “Islamic Nazis,” tell lies about the President’s faith, and promote elaborate conspiracy theories about secret Muslim infiltration of the United States government and civil society. They also bear some responsibility for the rise in attacks on the religious freedom of Muslims in the last few years. And their work is being funded to the tune of over $4 million dollars by the board on which Robert George sits.
Bryson goes on to allege that critics are charging George with “being anti-Muslim” or being “hostile to Islam” and rebuts these charges with a litany of George’s statements criticizing anti-Islam bigotry. I might have missed something, but none of the posts I’ve written or read on this subject have said any such thing. In fact, I’ve made a point to laud these very statements and suggested his otherwise positive record on this issue is exactly what makes his place on the Bradley Foundation board so disappointing.
After twelve paragraphs refuting this straw man, Bryson finally gets to the fundamental moral conflict at stake, relaying George’s defense:
Yet what about George’s position on the Bradley Foundation board? Is it inconsistent with his advocacy of the rights of Muslims and his work for Christian-Muslim cooperation? The Bradley Board discussions are confidential and, says George, “what I have to say about Bradley grants and grantees I will say to them and my colleagues on the Bradley board.”
But this of course is a non-answer. Under the guise of confidentiality, George refuses to say what (if anything) he says to the board about the Bradley Foundation’s record of funding the Islamophobia industry. Did he show them the disgusting records of the people they’re funding? Was there a fight about this decision? Even if he protested and voted no, is he embarrassed that his colleagues are contributing to the same religious bigotry he opposes in other contexts? We don’t know any of this, because George won’t say.
Bryson, however, jumps to conclusions:
Frankly I am glad that he is part of the Bradley Board. He can have more influence by participating inside than by protesting from outside, and having so prominent a defender of Muslim rights, and of Islam as a faith, in such a visible place of honor and influence in the conservative movement sends a clear message to other conservatives that they need not, and should not, view Islam with contempt or regard their Muslim fellow citizens with suspicion.
If George’s strategy is to influence the board from within, he’s failing spectacularly. The foundation has been giving money to these extremists since 2001. George’s election to the board in 2006 failed to do anything to stop the flow of funds — publicly available annual reports through 2010 show that grants have been awarded in every year since.
Moreover, Bryson has her cause and effect wrong. George is not a prominent conservative leader because he is on the board, his stature comes from his other work and lends the board credibility and visibility. Given that practically no one knew about this situation until a few months ago, can Bryson really argue with a straight face that George’s secret, silent protest of an unknown issue has “sent a clear message” about religious tolerance to his fellow conservatives?
Of course not. George’s silent participation does the exact opposite, sending the message that these organizations are credible and worthy of funding.
What if the groups in question weren’t anti-Islam extremists, but active racists? Would George act the same way if the Bradley Foundation were funding the KKK? Would being a silent advocate for African Americans be morally sufficient? Would conservatives accept George’s “behind the scenes advocate” defense?
Imagine, though, what kind of message George could send by making public his vociferous opposition to his colleagues’ decision and resigning from the board in protest. Now that would be a moral example that might inspire fellow conservatives to refuse to sit by silently while xenophobic extremists hijack their movement.
But instead, George appears content to whistle past the graveyard. That’s certainly a moral and strategic choice he has a right to make. But it’s a choice that deserves to be made public, especially for someone recently appointed to a prominent position defending religious liberty around the globe. And he and his allies shouldn’t be surprised if others determine that his association with anti-Muslim groups disqualifies him from such an important and prestigious role.
Members of the Spiritual Life Center of Sacramento have their Easter morning services for their Christian church, at the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims (SALAM) auditorium next to their mosque in Sacramento, Calif., April 08, 2012.
SACRAMENTO – A Sacramento congregation was facing an Easter without a home this year until the most unlikely of locations opened their doors and welcomed them inside.
The Spiritual Life Center of Sacramento lost the lease to their church a month prior to their biggest service of the year, but Reverend Michael Moran said a dream offered hope in the face of despair.
“We were desperately looking for a place to hold our Easter services. I had a dream and in the dream I saw a newspaper headline that read, ‘Easter at the Mosque’,” reveals Moran. “But when I awoke, I said that will never happen.”
But in an act of compassion and generosity, the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims (SALAM) turned Moran’s dream into reality.
Ifran Itaq of SALAM said the decision to allow Moran’s congregation to celebrate their faith at the mosque was simple.
“For us, mosques, churches, synagogues are places where God’s name is mentioned and they are holy places, and this is the sharing of those faiths in one of those institutions.”
Beyond the surface-level expression of hospitality and good will, Moran believes the interfaith congregation on Easter Sunday holds much greater significance.
“Our mission from the very beginning was to bring the different faith traditions together in cooperative efforts,” Moran explains. “I love what the Dalai Lama said, he said, “Until there’s peace among the world’s religions, there will never be peace on earth. I think this is one of those steps towards peace.”
News10/KXTV
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At great personal risk, John Oliver witnesses Muslims praying in a church’s all-purpose room.
Here is still more reason why Western countries should take off the multiculturalist straitjacket and ban the burqa and niqab.
Spencer is unable to make legitimate criticisms about Islam or Muslims because underlying all of his half-baked arguments is a weak, fact-less, and hate-mongering core.
In this instance, in order for Spencer to attempt to make his point he succumbs to a baseless ridicule-centered argument by calling the niqab and/or burqa a “multiculturalist straightjacket”.
If one were to go along with Spencer’s logic of why the burqa and niqab should be banned, then he would paradoxically also be an advocate for banning the “habit,” i.e. the traditional catholic garb for nuns.
Just as the burqa/niqab has been used by criminals during bank robberies so has the habit:
The two suspects were both dressed in black sweat pants and sweatshirts and wore nuns’ habits and identical ghoulish rubber masks, with small slits for eyes.
No one calls for the banning of the habit. No one ridicules that religious garb as a symbol of oppression because that would be illogical.
Of course, when Spencer wants to make an anti-Islam/Muslim point he won’t allow common sense or logic to get in the way. This is just another instance of silly Spencer.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is planning to build a Museum of Tolerance on the Muslim Mamilla cemetery. This project is a grotesque attempt to erase the well-established history of a continuous Muslim presence in the city that dates back over a millennium.
For over six centuries, many of my ancestors have been buried in an historic cemetery that holds the remains of some of the most prominent public figures and military leaders ever to live inside the Holy City of Jerusalem. The Mamilla cemetery is said to contain the remains of Muslims who walked alongside the Prophet Muhammad, fought in the Crusades, and influenced the city over many centuries. It is one of the most important remaining Muslim heritage sites in the Holy Land.
In recent years, however, I and surviving members of many of Jerusalem’s oldest families have witnessed the desecration of the cemetery. The efforts of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a “Museum of Tolerance” on the site have already tarnished the cemetery and damaged its integrity.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been disinterred and carted off for disposal in unmarked mass graves in unknown locations, or worse. The Jerusalem municipality has enabled this effort with the approval of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. This project is a grotesque attempt to erase the well-established history of a continuous Muslim presence in the city that dates back over a millennium.
Last month, new images surfaced that confirm excavations in the ancient Cemetery continue in secret, proving false the repeated claims of the Wiesenthal Center that there would be no further digging on the historic site. Footage made public by the Center for Constitutional Rights shows new power equipment and electrical supply within a fenced-off and covered pit, that borders an as-yet undisturbed portion of the cemetery. As an American from New York who can trace the burial of my own ancestors at Mamilla back to the 14th century, I can only hope that the news of likely additions to the hundreds of remains already wrongfully disposed of increases the urgent calls to stop this abuse of the dead before the site is entirely desecrated.
Since the plans to construct the Museum of Tolerance on Mamilla Cemetery began in 2004, nearly 60 other descendants of those buried at the cemetery and I have made repeated appeals to try and stop the disinterring and destruction of the remains of our ancestors. We have appealed directly to the Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Marvin Hier, to the Jerusalem Municipality, and to the UN. We have received the support of over 80 prominent archaeologists from Israel and around the world, who have petitioned for the preservation of the site, while others have filed legal appeals in Israeli courts.
Israeli courts have not provided a remedy, and our suggestions of compromise, including relocating the Museum to a new location—a move that would showcase genuine tolerance—have been met with silence. Meanwhile, the Wiesenthal Center has skirted responsibility, initially disavowing knowledge of the graves, and now clinging to a flimsy defense that the sanctity of the site has long since diminished.
To show that these claims are patently false, one need only look to the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry’s 1948 declaration of Mamilla as “one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars… Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” As recently as 1986, in response to a UNESCO investigation regarding Israel’s development projects on the site, the Israeli government stated that “no project exists for the deconsecration of the site… the site and its tombs are to be safeguarded.”
There is no justification for these desecrations. If they were occurring in any other place on earth, the outcry would be deafening. Unfortunately, the treatment of Mamilla is not an anomaly; Muslim and Christian sites of cultural, religious and historical significance continue to be systematically disrespected by Israeli authorities. The Protection of Holy Sites Law in Israel now covers 137 sites. Not one of these is Christian or Muslim.
At a time when Americans are engaged in a national dialogue about division along racial and cultural lines, a time when discrimination and the marginalization of minorities are subjects of public protest, it is disheartening to see some individuals and institutions exporting and abetting division elsewhere. The Wiesenthal Center’s mission statement says its goal is to promote human rights and dignity. People of conscience everywhere must press the respected and influential Rabbi Hier, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to adhere to those goals, and to allow the thousands still buried at Mamilla cemetery to rest in peace.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and a former advisor to Palestinian negotiators. Khalidi is the author numerous books, including Palestinian Identity and The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. He currently serves as the editor of theJournal of Palestine Studies.
Allen West not only believes that there is a stealth movement among Muslim Americans, but is convinced that there are 80 house Democrats that are alleged communists.
WASHINGTON — As many as 80 House Democrats are communists, according to Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).
West warned constituents at a Tuesday town hall event that he’s “heard” that dozens of his Democratic colleagues in the House are members of the Communist Party, thePalm Beach Postreported. West wouldn’t elaborate beyond that, however, and didn’t offer up any names. There are currently 190 House Democrats.
A request for comment from West’s spokeswoman was not immediately returned.
During the same event, which took place at Jensen Beach, the freshman Republican said President Barack Obama wouldn’t have a public debate with him over their policy differences because he was “scared.” The president was in Florida on Tuesday giving remarks about the economy and holding campaign events.
“I really wish that, standing here before you, was Allen West and President Obama,” West said, according to the Palm Beach Post. “We could have a simple discussion. But that ain’t ever gonna happen.”
When an audience member asked why, West said in “a mocking voice” that it was because Obama “was too scared.”
WATCH West’s comments in the video above.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that West made the remarks at Florida Atlantic University. He made the statement at Jensen Beach.
One year after France introduced a law banning women from wearing full-face veils in public, officials report that around 300 have been fined.
The ban on wearing the niqab in any public place was introduced on April 11th 2011. It is illegal for any woman to wear the veil except when they are at home, worshipping in a religious place or travelling as a passenger in a private car. Wearing the veil can lead to a fine of €150 ($200) and forced attendance at a citizenship class.
Interior ministry officials reported that “in one year there have been 354 police checks and 299 fines issued,” reported Le Parisien newspaper.
At the time of the law being passed, officials estimated that around 2,000 women were wearing the full-face veil. In January, interior minister Claude Guéant told parliament that “the number of women wearing the veil has fallen by half” since the law was introduced.
Rachid Nekkaz of the group “Touche pas à ma Constitution” (Don’t Touch My Constitution) claims that 367 women have been fined and questioned in police stations for “between one and a half and three hours.” Two-thirds of the women questioned are divorced or single, according to Nekkaz. He believes this proves the women are not wearing the veil “by force of a husband.”
People charged in connection of setting a building on fire weep inside a police vehicle as they are taken to a prison after their hearing in a court at Mehsana, about 60 km (37 miles) north from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. (File Photo - November 9, 2011)
In India, a court has convicted 23 people in connection with the killing of 23 Muslims during deadly religious riots that swept through Gujarat state in 2002. The massacre was investigated by a special team after allegations that the probe by state police was not impartial.
A special court Monday found the 23 people guilty of setting fire to a house in Gujarat’s Ode village where a group of Muslims had taken shelter to protect themselves from rioting mobs.
Twenty-three others were acquitted for lack of evidence. Most of those who stood trial are Hindus.
The massacre took place a decade ago, when towns and villages in Gujarat were convulsed with riots that targeted Muslims homes and neighborhoods. The violence erupted after a train fire, blamed on Muslims, killed 60 Hindu pilgrims and prompted retaliation by Hindu mobs.
The prosecutor, P.N. Parmar, called it a historic judgment in the mass killings in Ode village.
“Nine children, nine women and five men burnt alive in this heinous crime,” he said.
The sentences will be announced later. Defense lawyers say they will appeal the verdict.
The massacre in Ode village is one of nine incidents into which the Supreme Court has ordered a special investigation, following allegations that the Gujarat police were not impartial in their probe into the deadly riots. About 1,000 Muslims died in the violence.
This is the third judgment to be handed down in connection with the riots. In two separate judgments last year, 31 people were sentenced for burning 39 Muslims to death, while 31 Muslims were found guilty for setting fire to the train that killed the Hindu pilgrims.
Gujarat is ruled by the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, has often been accused of not doing enough to stop the riots or bring the perpetrators to justice.
After Monday’s verdict, senior BJP leader Balbir Punj said justice has been handed to the riot victims.
“It is a victory for the people of Gujarat and it is a slap on the face of those people that [say] justice cannot be done in Gujarat,” said Punj.
Although the 2002 violence tarnished Narendra Modi’s image, the controversial leader remains one of BJP’s top leaders. He has won state elections in Gujarat twice since the riots and hopes to play a larger role in national politics.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the latest victim of an intricate web of half-truths and outright lies woven for political profit and as part of a broad, well funded, Islamophobia network. The Congresswoman was slated to be the keynote speaker at an April 21 event for the group EMERGE USA, but backed off after a scathing blog post by Joe Kaufman, who happens to be running for a Congressional seat for Florida’s District 20.
EMERGE USA is a non-profit committed to empowering minorities through increased civic engagement and education about the political process. The organization has strong roots in the community and has been publicly supported by one of Florida’s senior statesmen, former Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham, an expert on terrorism and intelligence. However, the fact that EMERGE USA was founded and is run by Muslims seems to be the proverbial bee in Kaufman’s bonnet. Ultimately, Kaufman’s Glen Beck-esque acrobatics in trying to link EMERGE USA board members and staff to “questionable” organizations and associations can be easily dismissed because of factual errors and deliberate obfuscation.
The truly insidious aspect of this entire incident, however, is that it can be linked to a multi-pronged attack on Muslims nationwide through the creation of an Islamophobia network with deep pockets and an agenda to marginalize American Muslims at every turn. The Center for American Progress’s 2011 report “Fear, Inc.” thoroughly documents this network’s funding, messengers and reach. Its efforts have manifested in anti-sharia legislation in dozens of states, bigoted trainings for law enforcement and intelligence communities, the character assassination of mainstream national Muslim organizations and even promotion of the idea that President Obama is a Muslim.
The nightmarish narrative disseminated by the numerous think tanks, pundits and self-appointed “experts” on Islam and terrorism has not only successfully influenced the American discourse on Islam and Muslims, but has had significant political impact. The Islamophobia network focuses much of its time and energy on influencing and supporting politicians who promulgate its world view. It provides politicians with talking points, platforms and agenda items to keep the suspicion and fear of Islam and Muslims in the news. Examples of such politicians cited by the “Fear, Inc.” report include the following:
Rep. Peter King: held numerous hearings on Islamic radicalization
Rep. Sue Myrick: called for congressional inquiry on the CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, held hearings on influence of Muslim Brotherhood, leading Congressional fearmonger against Muslims
Rep. Trent Franks, Rep. John Shadegg and Rep. Paul Broun: supporters of the CAIR congressional investigation
Rep. Allen West: declared Islam as the enemy, claimed it is not a religion and held a briefing called “Homegrown Jihad in the USA”
Rep. Renee Ellmers: made the Park51 into an issue, calling it a ground zero victory mosque
Rep. Michelle Bachman: frequently raises concerns over homegrown Islamic threat and engages in anti-sharia rhetoric
While the influence of the Islamophobia network on right-wing politicians is more visible, the pressure it exerts on progressives is more troubling. Left-leaning politicians are also vulnerable to manipulation, as can be seen in Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s case. The Congresswoman is not the first Democrat to distance herself from a Muslim organization after being attacked by Islamophobes. To American Muslims who are mostly progressive in their politics, abandonment by Democratic politicians feels like betrayal.
The politicians who continue to be used to spread or confirm the network’s ugly narrative must realize something very important: while winning small battles, they are losing the war. History has proven that bigots, racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites and other variations on the same brand of fear and suspicion have never succeeded — socially or politically. Even genocide, the extreme expression of bigotry, has left nothing but failed ideology in its wake.
A simple understanding of the human psyche tells us that people tire of living in fear, worn out from perpetually being “anti-other.” Over time, we make up and move on. The battle of the Islamophobes will also eventually be lost because American Muslims and their allies will continue to push back against false narratives. The lifespan of Islamophobia in the United States will undoubtedly end up a sad blight on our history like other failed “anti” movements — but politicians, both Republican and Democrat, should ask themselves on what side of history they wish to be.
Rabia Chaudry is an attorney, President of the Safe Nation Collaborative, and an Associate Fellow of the Truman National Security Project.
France’s interior ministry says an arsonist has partially destroyed a Muslim prayer room in the Mediterranean island of Corsica’s capital city.
A ministry statement said racist inscriptions were found Monday on the front of the building housing the prayer room in Ajaccio after it was damaged in the early morning fire.
French Muslim leaders have voiced fear of renewed stigmatization following March attacks that killed seven people in southern France that were attributed to an Islamist who claimed al-Qaida links. Mohamed Merah was shot dead by police.
Rivals of conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in presidential elections starting April 22 claim a recent sweep of terror suspects is an electoral ploy.
Berlin’s largest mosque has been targeted in an Islamophobic attack in the German capital’s predominantly migrant district of Neukölln.
Unknown assailants threw several paint bombs at the Sehitlik mosque Saturday night. They also placed an insulting anti-Islam picture at the entrance to the building.
Berlin police said that a threatening letter had been sent to the mosque recently.
The Sehitlik mosque has been the target of four arson attacks over the past three years. Berlin mosques have been the scene of at least seven fire bombings since June 2010.
German Muslim leaders have time and again called for stepped up security measures for the country’s mosques and Islamic centers.
They also accuse the center-right government of Chancellor Angela Merkel of trying to downplay the danger of anti-Muslim crimes caused by the wave of Islamophobia in Germany.
Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who confessed to a bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, arrives for a detention hearing at a court in Oslo, Norway, Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. About 100 survivors and relatives of the victims of the July 22 massacre attended the hearing in Oslo's district court - expected to decide to keep Breivik in jail until his trial begins in April. (AP Photo/Heiko Junge, Scanpix Norway) NORWAY OUT
This may get Breivik less years, but terrorist-inspirers will have a harder time trying to deflect the influence their writings had on Breivik:
A second psychiatric evaluation of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has found him sane enough to face trial and a jail term.
The findings contradict a previous evaluation, published in November, that found him legally insane.
Breivik is due to stand trial on Monday over a bomb attack and shooting spree last July that killed 77 people.
The 33-year-old, who insists he is mentally stable, was “pleased” with the new assessment, his lawyer said.
Geir Lippestad told reporters his client would defend his actions during his 10-week trial, adding, “he will also regret that he didn’t go further”.
Both reports will be considered by the court when it decides, at the end of the trial, whether he should be sent to a psychiatric ward or jail.
If Breivik is deemed to have been sane at the time of the killings then he could face 21 years in prison with the potential for indefinite extensions to his term as long as he is considered a danger to the public.
The second evaluation was approved by a court in January following widespread criticism of last year’s assessment that concluded he was psychotic at the time of the attacks and diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic – meaning he would most likely be detained in psychiatric care.
Many of his surviving victims believed he was sane, and that the only proper punishment would be a prison sentence.
“Our conclusion is that he is not psychotic at the time of the actions of terrorism and he is not psychotic now,” psychiatrist Terje Toerrissen, who carried out the second assessment with fellow psychiatrist Agnar Aspaas, told the Associated Press.
The full report is confidential, and the two psychiatrists will give their reasons for arriving at a different conclusion to the first team of experts when they testify during the trial, AP reports.
Breivik was charged with terror offences last month.
Prosecutors said at the time they were prepared to accept that he was criminally insane and would therefore seek compulsory psychiatric care, but they reserved the right to alter that view if new elements emerged about his mental health.
“Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway last year, plans to tell his trial he regrets “not going further”.
The 33-year-old is accused of committing the terrorist attacks on July 22, 2011, and will face court in Oslo on Monday.
“This will be extremely difficult, an enormous challenge to listen to his explanations,” his lawyer Geir Lippestad told reporters. “He will not only defend (his actions) but will also lament, I think, not going further.””
Morocco: Protests for Amina Filali and a change to the law
A 15 year old Moroccan teenager, Amina Filali was raped and subsequently forced to marry her rapist, despairing of justice Filali committed suicide.
Rape victims being forced to marry their rapists is an ancient practice that existed in many cultures throughout history, and is a real problem all over the world today, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
What compounded the crime was that not only was Filali forced to marry her rapist but Moroccan law was not on her side. The legal system in Morocco integrated this abhorrent cultural phenomenon in the 1950′s.
Islamophobes were quick at the time to misattribute the practice to Islam. For instance hate-monger Robert Spencer wrote:
This is done because the focus in Islam is not on the rape at all, but on the shame the woman has brought to her family by her sexual immorality, even if she was forced. That shame is erased if the rapist marries her.
More female empowerment under the sharia (Islamic law).
These were just two of the most prominent Islamophobes commenting on Filali’s death, hundreds of hate-blogs and sites in the Islamophobic looniverse echoed such commentary, sprinkling in their own anti-Muslim spin.
The misattribution of such cases and issues to Sharia’ and Islam is of course part of the well-worn demonization war that Spencer, Geller and their cohorts have been waging for years now. Facts are unimportant in this war, any crime or heinous action committed by a Muslim must be assigned to Islam goes their thinking. Lying to prove their point is not an impediment.
What they and their drone like blind followers will conveniently overlook for instance is that,
“…in 12 Latin American countries…rapist can be exonerated if he offers to marry the victim and she accepts…In Costa Rica, he can be exonerated even if she refuses his offer…” (UNICEF)
The majority of these nations are Catholic Christian, are we then going to blame Christianity for these laws?
If one wished to play a tit for tat it could easily be pointed out to the Islamophobes that it is in fact the Bible which commands a raped woman to marry her rapist, not the Qur’an,
“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” (Deuteronomy 22: 28-29)
Sadly, what is obfuscated and lost when the hate-mongers resort to racist tropes and Orientalist misattributions are the intrepid activists, the Muslim and Arab feminists who are fighting to change laws that can lead to such tragic results in their countries:
Last September the mosque in the Welsh town of Llanelli was attacked. Thugs racially abused a group of elderly women who were entering the mosque and kicked the door in. As a result, extra CCTV cameras were installed.
We are told that there was a second attack on the mosque in February, when the windows were smashed while someone was praying inside. As you can see from the photo, the building has now been fitted with a window grille in addition to the existing steel gate in front of the door (cf. earlier photo here).
The Llanelli Star did, rather belatedly, get round to covering the September attack, but the February incident was apparently not considered important enough to merit a report in the local press.
The EMRC study Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: UK Case Studiesfound that Muslims and their mosques face a higher level of violence and intimidation in UK market towns and suburbs than in big cities. See also the Al Jazeera report here.
Update: I decided to feature this article as it is a timely piece by Sparrow and has generated quite some interest amongst regular Loonwatch readers. There are quite a few gems in the article, though there are certain parts that I don’t necessarily agree with either.
An excellent piece from Jeff Sparrow about the politics of new atheism with a dose of history:
In a few days time, the Global Atheist Convention meets in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a huge building sprawling out next to the Yarra River, just south of the central business district of Australia’s second biggest city.
But walk north for fifteen minutes or so to Victoria Street, Fitzroy, and you’ll find a much less imposing structure with a much older connection to atheism.
From the outside, there’s little to show that what’s now called Brenan Hall, a brick building in the St Vincent’s Hospital site, was once known, rather grandly, as the Hall of Science. Few Melbournians realise that their city boasts one of the second oldest purpose-built Freethought halls in the world, a meeting place constructed by the Australasian Secular Association in 1889.
As non-believers from around the globe come to Melbourne, the Hall of Science reminds us of the city’s long atheist history. But it does more than that. On this spot in June 1890, a man was shot, as a struggle over the direction of Freethought broiled over into a violent brawl. And that long-forgotten conflict over the politics of skepticism has major implications for today.
Both supporters and critics of the New Atheism often tell us that non-belief today is more strident, more aggressive, more polemical than in the past.
They’re wrong, as even a brief acquaintance with nineteenth century Freethought shows.
In Melbourne, a versifier expressed the ASA’s general approach in its journal, the Liberator:
From Pagan Rome and Christian Rome,
To our bright and fair Australia,
Religion’s ever been a cruel
And bloody Saturnalia.
The breezy consignment of the city’s respectable Presbyterians to a category alongside Caligula and Nero reflects an organisation not given to pulling punches.
Joseph Symes, the ASA’s leader, specialized in Hitchens-like confrontations with the pious. We have a record of one Symes lecture entitled ‘Bible Lies’ (a chronicle of the various deceptions pulled by the Lord on his long-suffering followers); on another occasion, he used data from recent archaeological digs (he was a keen amateur scientist) to lampoon scriptural history. Later in his career, Symes embraced pure provocation, bringing slices of bread to meetings so he could, as he announced, ‘have a chew on the body of Christ’.
Atheists back then were as forthright as atheists today. The real difference lies elsewhere. Today, we can identify an atheism that’s not so much militant as weaponised – that is, deployed, all too often, in the service of the extreme Right.
The late Christopher Hitchens provides the most obvious example, a celebrity atheist as famous for boosting wars as for baiting clerics.
Liberal admirers often mentally separated the atheistic Hitchens from the political Hitchens but in reality the two personas were inseparable. When, notoriously, he lauded Bush’s cluster bombs, he did so – typically – by combining his two passions. ‘Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody,’ he chuckled, ‘and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.’
Because Hitchens was so rhetorically intemperate (recall his attack on the Dixie Chicks as ‘sluts’, his description of the war widow Cindy Sheehan as a ‘sob sister’ and so on); because, as Corey Robin says, he often evinced ‘a cruelty and bloodlust, a thrill for violence and apocalyptic confrontation, an almost sociopathic indifference to the victims of that violence and confrontation’ (witness, for instance, his reaction to the Fallujah offensive, his cry ‘the death toll is not nearly high enough … too many [jihadists] have escaped’); he was treated indulgently, even by liberals, as New Atheism’s mad uncle, whose uglier outbursts could excused on the grounds of his very eccentricity.
But his weaponised atheism was no anomaly.
Attendees at the convention can, after all, hear much the same thing from Sam Harris, another of the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’. Harris, like Hitchens, thinks that atheists have a special insight into the war on terror, which should, he says, understood as a conflict against ‘a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise’. Most liberals, he continues, fail to understand ‘how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are’. Indeed, ‘the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.’
Harris calls himself a liberal but his positions on Islam are to the Right of any Australian parliamentarians, with the possible exception of Cory Bernardi, a notorious conservative crank.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another conference speaker, carves out similar territory.
‘We are at war with Islam,’ she says bluntly. ‘And there’s no middle ground in wars.’
Elsewhere, Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the neonconservative American Enterprise Institute, explained the home front consequences of that total war.
‘All Muslim schools. Close them down. Yeah, that sounds absolutist. I think 10 years ago things were different, but now the jihadi genie is out of the bottle.’
Again, it’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to hear from Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer or other sinister representatives of the so-called ‘counter-jihad’ movement.
Such is weaponised atheism: arguments for war and state repression, tricked out as scepticism.
Obviously, not all speakers at the Global Atheist Convention are Hitchensian warmongers. Many denounced the invasion of Iraq. Some oppose the worst excesses of Islamophobia and have the grace to find the polemical excesses of Harris et al somewhat embarrassing.
Nonetheless, the fact remains: leading representatives of the movement express ideas that otherwise we’d associate with the hard Right – and are celebrated for doing so. This is a phenomenon that requires some explanation.
Again, a comparison with the past is instructive.
In the late nineteenth century, religiousity formed the fabric of daily life. Of necessity, the ASA duly offered a secular alternative to familiar Christian rituals, with Symes prompting his followers through a materialist catechism (‘What is science?’ he asked, to which the congregations dutifully chorused: ‘Truth’.) He taught children at a Sunday lyceum, leading them off for excursions with their freethought banners unfurled. ‘It was a picnic in itself,’ gloated the Liberator, chronicling one of those trips, ‘to watch the horrified looks of some of the pious folk as the wagons passed down Brighton Road’.
In other words, while, doctrinally Symes might have shared Hirsi Ali’s hostility to religion, the persecuted ASA could never have adopted her police-state policiies to Muslim schools in Australia because, to all intents and purposes, it was a Muslim school in Australia – organizationally and socially a fringe sect, proselytizing ideas that the mainstream found foreign and threatening.
For atheists back then, state power was obviously problematic, if only because they were usually facing its sharp end. For example, Cole’s Wharf, located only a block or so from where today’s atheists will convene, once provided an unofficial free speech forum, a rare oasis in the desert of Melbourne’s conformity. But when Symes began drawing crowds there, the authorities closed the stumps down. That was why the Hall of Science became necessary: as architectural historian Kerry Jordan explains, the ASA ‘found it difficult to rent premises for their meetings because of their notoriety and opposition to contemporary moral standards.’ The Liberator was singled out for prosecution under the Newspaper Act and regularly seized and burnt by customs officials, while Symes was denounced in the press as a ‘leprous reptile’. Even the Field Naturalists’ Club of Victoria blacklisted him.
The weaponisation of atheism, then, becomes a possibility only with the mainstreaming of non-belief. In the nineteenth century, religious skepticism in Australia barred you from polite society, so that, of necessity, nineteenth century secularists rubbed shoulders with dissidents and non-conformists in a fraternity of the poor and the marginalised. Today, in most circumstances, no-one cares that you don’t believe in God. The Prime Minister is an atheist; in some professions – say, higher education or the arts – it’s considerably easier to be a sceptic than a believer (see many head scarves on Australian TV?). As Sikivu Hutchinson points out, the front ranks of New Atheism consists almost exclusively of ‘elite white males from the scientific community’, a fact that, in and of itself, speaks to the social acceptance of non-belief, at least in the prestigious universities.
These days, it is religion, not atheism, that correlates with poverty. Within Australia, the most fervent believers often belong to immigrant communities; across the world, religion dominates in impoverished states in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
That’s a substantive social shift, and it has obvious consequences for the political orientation of atheism.
But there’s more going on than that.
On 19 June 1890, a group of secularists stormed Melbourne’s Hall of Science and barricaded themselves inside.
Shortly after midnight, another group, led by Symes himself, arrived and fought their way through the doors. After a bloody punch-up, they physically expelled their opponents – and then posted armed guards to keep them away.
A few days later, one of those defenders took out his revolver to clean it. The gun accidentally discharged. The bullet struck a man called William Jackson Brown; he died the next day.
That tragedy didn’t stop the secular in-fighting. Several times over the next year, crowds of freethinkers – sometimes numbering as many as thousand people – gathered at the Hall for prolonged scuffles over its possession.
The anti-Symesites eventually prevailed but their victory proved largely pyrrhic. The divided movement could no longer fund the building’s upkeep – and the prize possession of the movement was forcibly sold, with ownership eventually passing, with tragic irony, to a Catholic-run hospital.
What was the dispute about?
The ASA was initially a very broad organisation, and included in its ranks radicals of all sorts. For a while, those differences could be subsumed into its struggle for freedom of speech. The ASA played, for instance, an important role in the campaign to force open the Public Library on a Sunday, in defiance of strict religious rules that public institutions remained closed on the only day working people might access them.
But the length and intensity of such fights spurred some in the ASA to move left.
At one of the trials of anti-Sabbatarians (yes, secularists actually went to gaol for the right to library access in Melbourne!), a police witness noted a new phenomenon.
‘They don’t confine themselves to the Public Library at all, your worship …’ he said, ‘but they denounce capitalists and even magistrates, your worship.’
These ASA activists increasingly identified the church as merely one amongst many institutions maintaining an oppressive status quo. As one of them declared, ‘Secularism has outlived its usefulness. Our hope … [lies] in Anarchy which is based on rebellion against authority.’
The formation in 1886 of the Melbourne Anarchist Club by ASA members dramatically heightened tensions within Australian freethought, particularly in the context of the massive social polarisations. In 1889, the Maritime Dispute shut down Melbourne and prompted a huge rally on the Yarra Bank, which was very nearly fired on by mounted police. The next year, the shearers strike left the nation on the brink of a civil war, while the world plunged into the deepest economic depression it had hitherto known.
The ASA’s Left began leading Occupy Wall Street style marches through the city, burning government officials in effigy and chanting rude songs about them. Symes, on the other hand, opposed the strikes. Essentially a pre-socialist liberal, his notion of liberty meant, first and foremost, freedom to think. From his perspective, social upheavals were, at best, a distraction from the progress of science and, at worst, a manifestation of incipient barbarism. Increasingly, he turned his polemical powers, like Hitchens denouncing anti-war protesters, on those he called ‘the washed off filth of the association, collected in the Anarchist slough’.
Why should anyone care about an obscure debate amongst minor organisations from long ago?
Because the emergence of Left tendencies in the ASA was indicative of how, all across the world in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, liberal atheism was challenged by a new, more social orientation as labour activists turned, in Marx’s phrase, ‘the criticism of Heaven […] into the criticism of Earth.’ In a few decades time, the Russian revolution cemented an association between atheism and social reform, to the extent that, for many reactionaries, ‘godless’ and ‘commie’ became almost synonymous.
Of course, liberal and even rightwing versions of atheism persisted. But the existence of sizeable left-wing organisations committed to a broadly Marxist approach exerted a huge influence on the politics of atheism in the twentieth century.
That’s the context for the New Atheism, ‘new’ precisely because it emerged only after the traditional Left had more or less collapsed. Its novelty consisted largely of its separation from the communism that had more-or-less owned the movement throughout the twentieth century. In place of that Leftism, the New Atheism repackaged, for a new audience, the nineteenth century liberal positivism that freethinkers like Symes had espoused.
But, of course, the new context made all the difference.
For a start, the New Atheism was turbocharged by 9/11. The heightened, hysterical climate in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks produced some bizarre publishing phenomena – obscure academic studies of the Taliban, for instance, suddenly featured in bestselling lists. Atheist polemics achieved an equal prominence precisely because they provided a simple answer to the newly urgent question that so many anguished pundits posed: why do Muslims hate us?
Again, the political consequences of that particular conjuncture are fairly obvious. Though few care to remember it now, in the early phases of the War on Terror, some of the loudest voices touting for regime change came from so-called liberals, often deploying tropes associated with the social movements and the New Left. Thus the invasion of Afghanistan – as ludicrous as it now seems – was initially shilled, at least in part, as a campaign to liberate women and homosexuals.
Atheism was used in the same fashion. Hitchens, in particular, transformed himself from midlist radical journalist to international celebrity by spinning Bush’s military adventures as a war of liberal tolerance against theocratic backwardness, a claim that, in retrospect, seems almost embarrassingly stupid.
But there were particular reasons why the New Atheist approach was so susceptible to Hitchens’ appropriation. Symes’ project, as we have seen, began and ended with an expose of religious fallacies. For him, as for the New Atheists today, religion was first and foremost a system of ideas – ‘ignorance with wings’, as Sam Harris says. Symes’ project, then, began and ended with its exposing religious fallacies. For if theological ideas were shown to be false, rational and intelligent people would surely abandon their beliefs.
But consider the corollary. If religion is an intellectual doctrine and nothing more than that, the persistence with which so many cling to God faith becomes explicable only in terms of their congenital inability to reason. Or, to put it another way, if religion is purely and simply a fairy tale, then ipso facto those who cling to it are little better than children.
The smugness that so often accompanies New Atheist interventions is not, then, accidental but is bred into the movement’s DNA. Symes rejected the activism of the ASA’s Left explicitly because to him the masses were, at best, dullards. It was very incapacity of ordinary people that made, he said, socialism impossible. ‘The strong, the cunning, the swift … must survive, while the weak, the slow, the dull and those with no artificial advantage must of necessity go to the wall — yes, the brutal truth bids me say, they must be stamped out.’
Back then, Symes’ overt elitism was largely kept in check by his organisation’s marginalisation, since his denunciations were, of necessity, usually directed at powerful clerics and politicians rather than ordinary believers. The New Atheists today find themselves in a rather different position. There’s an obvious rightward dynamic in tremendously wealthy authors (‘Sam’s fee is $25,000 which includes airfare.’) regaling audiences of the well-educated and the well-to-do about the ignorance and stupidity of immigrants and the poor.
Moreover, the West’s engagement with Muslim countries over the last decade provides a context in which the weaponisation of atheism becomes almost inevitable.
The traditional Left approach to belief begins with a recognition that religion is not simply a set of ideas. Religion is a cultural identity; it’s also simultaneously an aesthetic, a system of feeling, a guide to social and sexual conduct, an organizational framework and many other things besides. These different functions contradict and complement each other in all sorts of ways.
That’s why the same holy texts can, in different social settings, give rise to entirely different behaviours and attitudes; it’s why both the Anabaptists and Pat Robertson can claim inspiration from the New Testament.
If, then, you wanted to understand the role of religion in Iraq or Afghanistan, simply assessing the truth claims in the Koran does not get you very far – indeed, in some ways, it’s almost a category error. Islam, like all religions, functions on many different levels. It offers, for instance, meaning to people subjected to death and suffering often inflicted by the advanced countries of the West. It provides charity where no social services exist; it gives voice to nationalist resistance in nations where the secular Left was widely discredited by its Stalinism. And it does many other things besides.
Even put as schematically as that, the argument suggests a particular political response. Atheists and others seeking to fostering secularism in the Arab world might do so by, first and foremost, ending the military interventions that have brought so much suffering.
If, on the other hand, religion is seen simply as a dangerous fairy story, then it’s almost inevitable that the fervent believers of Afghanistan are cast as menacing infants – a trope that reiterates, almost exactly, Kipling’s high imperialist image as the subjects of empire as ‘half devil and half child’. Hence the neocon temptation into which so many New Atheists fall, the conviction that military force is morally justified to free the savages from their own delusions, much as the British empire justified its depredations by contrasting Western science with the natives’ pagan superstitions.
Anti-Muslim writers commonly declare that Islam needs its own reformation.
But that’s a charge that should really be leveled at atheism, a movement that urgently needs the kind of political polarization that separated the Right from the Left in the ASA of 1890.
For, at present, the loudest voices speaking on behalf of atheism trot out a crude nineteenth century positivism, a rewarmed (but far more conservative) version of Symes’ freethought. Meanwhile, the atheist Left seems entirely silent. Where, for instance, are the interventions from progressives as the Global Atheist Convention conducts a session lauding Hitchens’ career under the title ‘A Life Well Lived’? Will anyone point out that the author of God is Not Great devoted his well-lived life to apologetics for a military campaign that led to the deaths of perhaps a million people? For progressives, should the devastation of Iraq not matter at least as much as Hichens’ reputation as a witty conversationalist?
A few weeks ago, the editor of the New York Times editorial page noted that the US effectively now runs an entirely separate judicial system for Muslims. Meanwhile, across Europe, neo-fascist organisations, some of them with lineages stretching back to the Nazis, supplement their traditional anti-Semitism with a new anti-Muslim bigotry. It’s a heartbreaking historical tragedy that, with prejudice rising throughout the world, the loudest voices in a movement that once campaigned for liberty uses a rhetoric indistinguishable from the hatemongers and the racists.
But it’s not just that atheism has a Muslim problem (though it clearly does).
In the US, the Republicans have launched a savage war on women’s reproductive rights, an assault justified in religious rhetoric. How, then, should the Left respond?
We could, perhaps, reply to the bishops who denounce birth control by simply declaring anyone who identifies with Catholicism as an ignorant hick.
On the other hand, we might note that, precisely because religion is a contradictory social phenomenon, the vast majority of those who call themselves Catholics actively flout the Pope’s rulings about sex, something that provides scope for a common front against the Right. Indeed, any successful movement against the war on women will, almost by definition, involve those who consider themselves believers.
That doesn’t mean that leftwing atheists should hide their views about God. It’s simply that say that we’re far more likely to win people from religion by working alongside them against the forces of oppression in this world – and thus showing them in practice that religious consolations aren’t necessary – rather than by dismissing them as dupes and stooges.
If religion is a social phenomenon, it will persist so long as social conditions render it necessary. That’s why the defeat of the atheist Right, and the revival of an atheist Left, matters so much. Denouncing God is easy. What’s harder – and much more important – is creating a world that no longer has need of Him.
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer‘s thugish friend exposed as violent anti-Muslim hate-mongering psychopath, freely admits to targeting, beating, cutting and stabbing Muslims.
CONTENT WARNING: Listener discretion is advised. The following video (audio) contains explicit language, hate speech, racial slurs, and violent rhetoric including descriptions of past incidents of violent crimes as described by the subject.
ADDITIONAL WARNING: Rodan also drops the N-Word towards the end of the audio.
The following is an audio recording of Rodan (real name: Rick Martinez) as described in the captioned text below the audio. The subject is Rodan (aka Trajan 75, Emporer Palpatine, et al). Rodan began as webmaster for Think Progress Watch and is currently the webmaster and primary functionary at The Blogmocracy and The Diary of Daedalus.
The Diary of Daedalus is a site dedicated to the tracking and harassment of Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and members of Little Green Footballs. It has been previously cited in blogs or on Twitter by Andrew Breitbart; Dan Riehl of Riehlworldview; Donald Douglas of American Power; R.S. McCain of The Other McCain; Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch; and others.
Please note that I am not the creator of said video nor am I affiliated with the uploader of said video on Youtube. This is not an endorsement of his or her beliefs whatever they may be. Also note that this is all public information and this video/audio has been present on Youtube since 2009. The purpose of this information herein is to reveal the true nature and background of the creator and webmaster for The Blogmocracy and The Diary of Daedalus most commonly known as Rodan.
The Diary of Daedalus most commonly known as Rodan. (Click here to view the video)
This description is from the original post at YouTube; Rodan and his followers reported the video for “hate speech” and got it pulled from YouTube. (Yes, they reported their own founder for hate speech.) It’s now hosted at LGF so they can’t make it disappear.
Rodan a.k.a. Emporer Palpatine shares his thoughts on Muslims, and gives anecdotes in regards to the Muslims he “sliced and diced” in the early 90’s.
The recording you are about to hear was recorded on the morning of June 6th, 2009 at approximately 3:40 AM.
Swiss Islamic intellectual Tariq Ramadan laid into French President Nicolas Sarkozy in a speech to the annual meeting of a major Muslim organisation Saturday. His call to “unite France” and not “divide it” came after government ministers criticised the Union of Islamic Organisations of France’s (UOIF) invitation to him to speak.
Before the UOIF meeting at Le Bourget near Paris this weekend Interior Minister Claude Guéant said he regretted the fact that Ramadan was on the speakers’ list.
He may regret it even more after Ramadan’s speech, which did not name him or the president but clearly targeted their rhetoric during the presidential election campaign and their reaction to the killing spree of “lone-wolf” Islamist Mohamed Merah.
“Instead of talking about halal meat, the burka, national identity and dividing France, you should unite it,” Ramadan told a packed hall at the conference, which was attended by 41,000 people on Saturday alone.
“Of course [Merah's] murders in Montauban and Toulouse should be condemned without hesitation,” he said. “But … we don’t expect a government to fan the flames.”
Ramadan, who is the grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, thanked the event’s organisers for inviting him “despite the difficulties, the pressure, the accusations” and facetiously told France’s intelligence services “if you could remind the government what we really stand for, you would be performing a useful service”.
Jessica Mokdad "loved Islam" according to her parents.
The decrepit vileness that is Pamela Geller knows no bounds. She is going ahead with her planned anti-”Human Rights Conference.”
Please see our previous coverage of Geller’s egregious attempt to use the suffering of Jessica Mokdad and her family for her own personal anti-Muslim and material advantage:
DEARBORN – A local Arab American family is angry over an upcoming ”human rights” conference that features the name of their deceased daughter, believing that its true goal is to push an anti-Islam agenda.
The Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference is scheduled to take place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn on April 29 at 5 p.m., and marks the one year anniversary of Mokdad’s death.
Mokdad was only 20-years-old when her step-father Rahim Alfetlawi shot her to death in Warren.
Following the fatal incident mixed reports about Alfetlawi’s motive for killing Mokdad were disputed. Family members of Mokdad and a prosecutor on the case say Alfetlawi was controlling, and obsessed with Mokdad.
The family says Alfetlawi wanted to have a romantic relationship with Mokdad. Others say it was a honor killing and religiously motivated, because Mokdad wasn’t following traditional Islamic customs and becoming “Westernized.”
“It wasn’t a honor killing at all,” a close friend of the family said. Speaking to The Arab American News by phone Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor, Bill Cataldo says there’s sufficient proof that religion was not a factor that triggered the crime.
He says days leading up to the incident Mokdad came forward to police with information about Alfetlawi, and also shared that information with a friend. The information is not being disclosed, because those who knew Mokdad well may be sensitive about it.
When Alfetlawi learned Mokdad had shared the information with police and a friend he became angry according to Cataldo. She was found dead afterwards.
Conservative blogger Pamela Geller is hosting the conference. Geller is also the executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and Stop Islamization of America. In a television interview Geller said she’s just trying to save other women from being the next Mokdad.
In a local televised interview, Cassandra Mokdad, the victim’s step-mother said that Geller is, “using Jessica as her poster child for anti-Islam.” Cassandra declined to speak, but has said she might make an appearance at the conference to let Geller know how she feels.
Geller refuses to remove Mokdad’s name from the conference despite requests from the family. Conference speakers include television host and author Michael Coren, human rights activist Nonie Darwish; Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng; David Wood, one of the former Christian missionaries who was charged with preaching the peace at the Arab American International Festival in Dearborn; James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Taskforce, co-cost of the conference. Wood is from the group Acts 17 Apologetics.
The conference is dedicated to exposing what the group says is the plight of women under “Islamic Law in Dearborn.” Organizers say they chose the Hyatt in Dearborn to stand in solidarity with other women in the area who may be in danger or oppressed under Islam. In the past the city’s mayor and officials have took drastic measures to prove the fact that Islamic Law does not exist in Dearborn. There are also misconceptions that women in Dearborn are oppressed, another claim the mayor has rejected.
The Mokdad family friend has lived in Dearborn for 25 years, and says such claims about Dearborn and its women are not true. The Arab American Women’s Business Council is based in the city, and includes well educated Arab American professionals. “Dearborn is home to the 2010 Miss U.S.A.,” she said. “We have a very good community.”
In France a young Muslim woman was threatened, beaten and had her hijab ripped from her head. (via. Al-Kanz)
The below is a rough google translation and video of the victim speaking about the violent experience. The original is in French:
The CCIF (suit against Islamophobia in France) met S., a young woman struck and insulted, her veil ripped off in Juvisy-sur-Orge, near Paris. Treated as a terrorist and threatened by an armed individual, S. relates in the video below the story of the Islamophobic aggression.
Below is a copy of the complaint:
Feel free to contact the CCIF at the slightest Islamophobic aggression. The work done by the watch group since 2003 has, despite a strong desire to hide the reality, created awareness to many that Islamophobia is real.
The Saudi “Grand Mufti,” Shaikh Abdul Aziz Aal-Al-Shaykh caused outrage a few weeks ago when he said all churches in Kuwait should be “destroyed.” It must be pointed out that the Grand Mufti is not popularly elected by a consultative body, nor did he gain the position through any merit, such as being the highest learned Islamic scholar in Saudi Arabia.
The position of Saudi Grand Mufti is actually a political one, harking back to the alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century.
The Saudi Grand Mufti received his position through inheritance, the suffix appended to his name, “Aal-Al-Shaykh” in fact means “family of the Shaikh,” i.e. indicating he is a descendant of the 18th century Muslim reformer and founder of the Saudi Salafi/Wahhabi trend, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab.
It is for these reasons that he is considered a lightweight when it comes to Islamic scholarship and is in fact derided by many Saudis from all walks of life.
Now Turkey’s top Muslim cleric has publicly condemned the Saudi Grand Mufti, declaring his statement to be invalid and a contradiction to Islam and its relations with other faiths (H/T: Ibn Abu Talib):
Turkey’s top imam blasted the Saudi grand mufti’s call to “destroy all the churches” in the Gulf region, saying that the announcement is in total contradiction to the peaceful teachings of the Muslim religion.
Speaking to Today’s Zaman, Mehmet Görmez, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate, said he cannot accept the Islamic religious order –fatwa — issued by Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh, adding that the mufti’s remarks run contrary to the centuries-old Islamic teachings of tolerance and the sanctity of institutions belonging to other religions.
He emphasized that Islam has always respected religious freedom. “The opinion of the grand mufti also obviously contradicts the agreements that the Prophet of Islam signed with the non-Muslim communities both in Medina and in the region. It also plainly overlooks the right of immunity given by Islam to the holy shrines and temples of other religions on the basis of the rule of law throughout its history,” Görmez explained.
Sheikh Abdulaziz reportedly made the controversial statement during a meeting with a delegation from the Kuwait-based Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage in response to a query about Shariah law concerning the construction of churches in Muslim countries.He issued the fatwa in March, saying that further church building should be banned and existing Christian houses of worship should be destroyed.
Görmez slammed Abdulaziz, stating, “We strongly believe that this declaration has left dark shadows upon the concept of rights and freedoms in Islam that have always been observed on the basis of its sources, and it will not be recorded as an opinion of Islam.”
He also added, “We, therefore, entirely reject the aforementioned opinion and hope that it will be amended as soon as possible.”
Turkey’s top Muslim cleric challenged the Saudi grand mufti’s assertions on the established principles in Islam. “We believe that the mentioned opinion is evidently against the aims of Islam, especially in a region that witnessed the descent of the Holy Quran and the first application of the Sunnah of the Prophet. It is against the Muslim tradition’s established practice of respecting non-Muslims’ rights as well,” he noted.
Nonie Loonie Darwish‘s new book, “The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East” pretends to provide insight on the Arab Spring. For Darwish, this is just another ample opportunity to spew her well-worn (phony) tale of woe and Islamophobic diatribe.
Surprisingly C-Span allowed itself to be used as a platform for this hatred, featuring her over one and a half-hour speech rant at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute (a Conservative group, amongst who’s goal is to produce more “Sarah Palin’s.”)
Here are some of the choice quotes that I caught in just the last 20 minutes (if anyone has the stomach to listen to the rest of it and provide us quotes we’ll be happy to add it):
When asked about Obama’s relationship with the Muslim world her response was as the following. ”From his [Barack Obama] books and from what he says, he doesn’t unfortunately. He has a lot of sympathy towards Islam and a lot of closing the eyes like apologizing a lot for things that we should be apologized for.”
“Where are the Muslim leaders who will stand up and say ‘We apologize for 9-11?”
“All the ills of Muslim society go back to Sharia.”
She repeatedly says “Islam has already been interpreted.”
“In America, we have a growing population of Muslims who are now, many of their leadership is calling for sharia. The application of Sharia.”
“The ultimate goal of being a Muslim is living under an Islamic state.”
“Our college campus is becoming like the West Bank and Gaza. They are not allowing the freedom of speech of people like me.”
“Another generation of America who have been brought up with a lot of guilt about their country, have been brought up with an educational system that told them that there bad, you’ve hurt the world. Islam is a religion of peace. Christianity is bad. Your constitution should be changed. American constitution is no longer, it’s an old document. “
“In fifty years, we can have a Chechnya in America, which means, we can have a population, a majority population of Muslims in a certain state or certain area and they might say they want to live under sharia.”
“We want to call our state, Islamist Republic of Michigan.”
“There is no feminist movement in the Middle East, in the Muslim world.”
“Women who call themselves Muslims are not standing up.”
At the core of Darwish’s rhetoric is that Muslims are taking over America. She full-heartedly claims that there is a systematic way in which Muslims are working to achieve the dissolution of the USA. First, they act passive, and then they demand rights. Once we succumb to the evil Mooslims’ demands, they will rise to power and implement Sharia and have states that will be called…“Islamist Republic of Michigan.” Darwish’s loony conspiracy that Muslims want to secede from the states and over throw the constitution is an insult to intelligent Americans.
She forgets that we live in a country that is supposed to protect the rights of all citizens. In reality, what Americans are, and need to be skeptical about are individuals like Darwish who write books and speak on Conservative platforms for the twin goals of: self-enrichment and driving fear of the other.
This type of Islamophobic rhetoric hearkens to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of old: They control the media. They control the banks. etc… Such conspiratorial language is non-nonsensical, illogical and unproductive toward making this country one that we can be proud of.
It seems that the Republican presidential aspirants’ fervor to confront Islam has receded a bit with the decline and fall of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, but one can likely still count on Rick Santorum to come up with some bon mots on the threat posed by Shariah law. Those who fear that hands will soon be lopped off shoplifters caught in Cleveland appear to be making much ado about nothing, but there is a much broader and more insidious agenda that is really playing out behind the scenes. Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum are all smart enough to know that Islamic law is hardly poised to dominate the U.S. legal system, but they are using it as the wedge issue to deny the patriotism of Muslims in general and fuel the demands to exercise a military option against Iran.
Promoting fear of Shariah law is essentially a red herring. There are more than 50 predominantly Muslim countries in the world, and, while most have elements of Shariah in their civil and family law, only two have it as their criminal codes. They are Saudi Arabia and Iran, one a close ally of the United States and the West and the other currently playing the cameo role of a threat to the entire world, to borrow a phrase from the eminent Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. The countries that do not have Shariah as their criminal codes have modeled their laws on European and American models, some borrowing from Roman law and others from British common law.
Depicting Islam as manifestly medieval, backward, and cruel is not new, as it has been going on in one form or another since the Israelis and Palestinians first locked horns. Recognizing that the propaganda that is being ground out in the mainstream media derives from that conflict, it is easy to understand why Muslims are persistently portrayed in negative terms. And it should be equally unsurprising to learn that those who are denigrating Muslims and Islam are almost invariably among the most uncritical supporters of Likudist Israel and all its works.
The list of those who are passionate about how bad Islam is has a familiar ring to it. It is led by the truly vicious and fanatical like Pamela Geller and includes John Bolton, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Krauthammer. Geller has written that there is “a systematic campaign to impose Shariah on the secular marketplace” and to pervert the justice system in favor of Islamic exemptions, a theme that has been picked up by Gingrich and Santorum, both of whom favor pointless laws banning Shariah in any form. In a milder form, the same viewpoint is reflected in both the news coverage and the editorial pages of newspapers like The New York Post, The Washington Post, and even The New York Times. The arguments being made are not necessarily intended to convince anyone other than those who are already more than half onboard, but they are designed to keep the issue of how Muslims are not quite like the rest of us on the back burner to so that the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and other Arabs will somehow always seem suspect. It also fuels other narratives that the neoconservatives and their friends support, like perpetual warfare against Islamic countries to bring about regime changes, suggesting that there is something that is not quite right in the way that Muslim countries govern themselves. The real objective is, however, spelled out in the paper that the neocons presented to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, “A Clean Break,” advocating the breakup of Arab countries into smaller components that would be perpetually at war with themselves, thereby assuring Israeli predominance in the region. As is so often the case, the conversation in the United States is really all about Israel.
The broader agenda of Islamophobia also fuels arguments to continue to stay the course in places like Afghanistan. Urinating on corpses, hunting and killing local farmers for sport, shooting women and children in the middle of the night, and burning Qurans are all justified because American soldiers find themselves in a difficult and stress-filled environment where the enemies are everywhere and are manifestly not quite real people in the same sense that boys from Kansas are. Muslims become abstractions, and there is the undercurrent of “Don’t they know we are there to help them?” The rarely spelled-out subtext in all the narratives that seek to explain or mitigate the barbaric behavior on the part of America’s finest is that the Afghans are not quite like us and they are not being grateful enough. Their otherness comes partly from the perception that they are primitive but even more from the fact that they are Muslims.
Moving beyond Shariah, those who wish to marginalize Muslims in American life point to the terrorism arrests of Muslims who are American citizens or legal residents of this country. There have indeed been such cases, but a careful reading of the court records suggests that the arrests are mostly what once would have been considered entrapment. A disgruntled young man toys with jihadist websites, is identified, and suddenly finds himself with a new friend who presents him with an unusable bomb to blow himself up in Times Square. He is then arrested and finds himself facing 20 years in prison. The reality, however, is that of 14,000 murders in the United States in 2010, not a single one was attributed to a Muslim terrorist.
So why should Americans hate or fear Muslims? If it were only the idiosyncrasies of their culture that were an irritant, one would reasonably observe that the United States has absorbed plenty of cultures and lifestyles equally outside of the Western European mainstream. The fact is that the Islamophobia we are currently seeing really has two objectives. First and foremost it is to protect Israeli interests, making Muslims appear to be a threat and a group that is irredeemably un-American, while Israelis are presented as people who are more or less just like us. That means that only one voice will be heard on the Middle East, which is precisely what has taken place. The second objective is to justify the seemingly unending series of wars in Asia, presenting the local people as lacking in the civilized moral and political values that we all hold dear. Ironically, this latter argument is self-defeating, as it is the foreign wars of the past 11 years that have stripped Americans of many of their liberties and constitutional rights. What we choose to fear in Islam and deplore in Muslim regimes — the lack of individual rights — has come home to us.
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.
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.
New facts emerging in the Shaima AlAwadi murder case reveal a family in turmoil, and though we have not reached the end of the investigation, it seems the turmoil within the family has cast doubt on the likelihood that Alawadi’s murder was a hate crime.
The uncertainty and dearth of facts surrounding the case is why at the time I wrote,
*We cannot conclude anything at this point, some facts have been presented, such as the note but we will have to wait for the police investigation to relay more information on this crime.
Of course the hatemongerers, the same people who were quick to attribute the Oklahoma City bombings to Muslims, the terrorist shooting rampage by Anders Breivik to Muslims and many more such incidents are receiving the news with glee. Islamophobes are already jumping to the conclusion that the murder is an “honor killing” though there is no evidence for such a claim.
In any case lets hope justice is served and the murderer identified and sentenced.
We will pen an update about this case as more facts are presented and also discuss the ramifications and the critical distance necessary when presented with an ambiguous murder:
Police records obtained from the murder of an El Cajon woman nearly two weeks ago suggest the it may not be a hate crime.
The records reveal new information about a possible suspect and a police call made to police — in late January — by the victim herself: Shaima Alawadi.
This case has received national attention because some believe it could be a hate crime. But recently obtained records could paint a different picture.
Alawadi, 32, was found bloodied and beaten inside this home on March 21. Her 17-year-old daughter Fatima found her on the floor of their dining room – a piece of paper nearby. That note and one the family found earlier in the month — has left some fearing terrorism.
“It said this is my country, go back to yours…terrorist,” Alawadi’s son Mohammed said in an interview last week.
But police are continuing to call this an “isolated incident” and no arrests have been made.
Police records reveal on the day of the crime –a neighbor gave police a description–of a possible suspect. An unidentified witness spotted a young man running from the crime scene.
The suspect is described as a “darker skinned boy in his late teens or early 20s … with a skinny build, carrying a donut shaped cardboard box.”
The suspect was seen at 10:30 a.m., about 45 minutes before Alawadi’s 17-year-old daughter called 911.
Police would not comment on these records — which also reveal — Alawadi called the police herself nearly two months earlier to report her 17 year old daughter missing.
On Jan. 31 Alawadi reported the girl had been missing for 2 hours, but the call was cancelled 20 minutes later when the 17-year-old was located.
Thousands of Spanish mothers have similar stories of stolen children. (AFP/Getty Images) (ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)
Where is the outrage and outcry from the hate peddlers?
Thousands of newborns have allegedly been stolen from their parents by Sister Maria Gómez Valbuena, obstensibly for good, wholesome “Christian” motivations, making a pretty penny in the process.
BARCELONA, Spain — “Where is my baby?” Luisa Torres wondered after waking up from general anesthesia on March 31, 1982.
“Your baby is dead,” Sister Maria Gómez Valbuena told her as she lay in bed at the Santa Cristina Maternity Hospital in Madrid. “You gave birth to nothing,” the nun said.
It was a lie, with consequences that would span almost three decades.
Torres alleges that her daughter was stolen at birth by a mafia of nuns, doctors and other officials who sold children for profit.
Thousands of Spanish mothers recount similar stories. Enrique Vila, a Barcelona lawyer who specializes in adoptions, estimates there might be as many as 300,000 cases, about 15 percent of total adoptions that took place in Spain between 1960 and 1989.
Since GlobalPost first wrote about the spate of stolen babies last year, the number of cases being handled by Spanish prosecutors has jumped from 900 to 1,500.
A trickle of complaints began decades ago, but turned into a flood two years ago. But the nun, now in her 80s and known as Sister Maria, is the first to be indicted in the scandal since complaints began to pour in two years ago. Her trial begins today, April 3.
About one-quarter of the cases have been dismissed due to a lack of documents or other evidence, which is often hard to provide when decades-old birth certificates have been forged, or when the parents and children haven’t yet found each other.
Torres and her daughter are just one of a dozen who have, and it is their reunion that has led to the first indictment.
‘Like a horror film’
Like hundreds of mothers who believe their babies had been stolen at Santa Cristina Maternity Hospital, Torres met Sister Maria, a social worker, in her fifth month of pregnancy after seeing an ad in a magazine offering help for expectant mothers in need.
“It said she had access to nurseries and foster homes, and that she would take care of the children until we had enough resources to take care of them by ourselves,” Torres recalled. “I went to see her with my mom and she was very nice — we didn’t suspect anything.” She said she was given a “special card” to show at the hospital when going into labor.
But it became “like a horror film,” she added.
After first saying that the baby girl was dead, Sister Maria changed her story, Torres said. The nun admitted that the child was alive, and told the 24-year-old woman that she would give the child up for adoption to a French family. She implied that Torres, who had given birth out of wedlock, would be an unfit mother.
And she told Torres, who wanted to name her child Sheila, that such a name was not “Christian,” and that the baby girl would be called Maria, “after herself.”
Torres said she became increasingly hysterical, and began cursing at the nun. She climbed from her bed and stumbled to the neo-natal unit. There, one girl lay in an incubator with a name tag on her crib: Maria.
“You saw nothing,” the nun told her. Sister Maria dragged Torres back to her room and threw her onto her bed, Torres said. “I will report you to the authorities as an adulteress and you will go to jail. Then I will also take away your 2-year-old daughter,” said Sister Maria, according to Torres.
Torres says she was terrified. Inés, her first child, was the result of a failed marriage. Separated from her husband, she started a new relationship, but that man left her once she became pregnant. In a country that was still waking up from a 40-year dictatorship and was extremely socially conservative, Torres didn’t know that anti-adultery laws had already been repealed in 1978.
Her new child had been born slightly premature, at eight months, and had some health problems. The infant was taken to another floor to receive special care, and Torres wasn’t allowed to visit her because she had never been officially identified as the child’s mother. She lost track of her baby, and was too afraid to approach Sister Maria again.
A devastated Torres left the hospital nine days later “with empty arms,” and the pacifier and baby blanket she had bought for her baby Sheila. She kept them for almost three decades, never losing hope that she could one day give them to her.
Obsessed for three decades
Months before Torres’ daughter was born, Alejandro Alcalde and his wife learned they could not have children and began considering adoption. But the adoption process was difficult. They had almost lost hope until they were told by Madrid’s regional council, which handled adoptions, to contact a woman named Sister Maria.
The adoptive parents paid 200,000 pesetas for Maria Pilar — the equivalent of about $6,600 today. The nun told them it was for hospital costs and for the mother to stay at a home after the birth. They arranged everything at a public hospital, which was why Alejandro Alcalde says they were never suspicious.
Maria Pilar Alcalde, now 30, recounts how she had looked for her biological mother since she was 15 years old, when her adoptive parents divorced.
“I spent nights crying, looking at my adoption documents over and over, trying to see a way to find my mother,” said Maria Pilar, who says she had a very “lonely childhood.” She described her adoptive mother as “a very dry woman” and said that her adoptive relatives never made her part of the family.
“I always missed that love in families,” she said. “When I was a teenager, I used to wonder: ‘How will my real family be?’”
After her parents’ divorce, Maria Pilar lived with her adoptive father, who helped her hunt for her mother. He spent a fortune on detectives and lawyers. Seven years ago, they appeared together on El Diario TV talk show, where they told Maria Pilar’s story. But it resulted in no leads.
“If my father thought he had been involved in anything illegal, he would have never helped so much in my search,” Maria Pilar said. Her adoptive mother, with whom she has a distant relationship, never liked the fact that Maria Pilar wanted to look for her biological parents.
At the beginning of their search, Maria Pilar and her father even went to see Sister Maria, who had kept in touch with the adoptive parents over the years. “I swore to God in front of your mother that I would never reveal her identity,” she told Maria Pilar. “She was probably a drug addict or a prostitute, it would only hurt you to find her.”
Ten miles away, Torres mourned her little girl.
“I was obsessed for 30 years…I used to stare at babies on the street when [my daughter] would still have been a baby, at young couples when she was still a teenager…sadness was always with me, especially on her birthdays,” Torres recalls, shaken at the memories.
Afraid that her other daughter would be taken away from her, Torres didn’t do much for years. She also didn’t know where to begin looking. According to Spanish privacy laws, parents who give their children up for adoption don’t have the right to get information about their whereabouts or new identities.
A year-and-a-half ago, when other “stolen babies” cases started appearing in the media, Torres says her determination to find her missing child was renewed. Her oldest daughter, Inés, eventually told the story to Spanish daily El Mundo.
Soon after the story appeared, a journalist at Antena 3 recalled the appearance of Alejandro and Maria Pilar on El Diario show seven years before, and realized that Maria Pilar and Torres’ stories matched. She dug into the matter. Eventually, she managed to contact both parties.
An “unbelievable” moment
On June 30, 2011, Torres, 54, and Maria Pilar, were brought on El Diario TV show after having had their DNA tested. They had been at the studio the entire day prior to the appearance, being interviewed separately, never crossing paths. They sat tense on the set until the TV host read out the result of their DNA test results on air: It was a match.
As they threw themselves at each other, Torres repeatedly murmured through tears, “I love you, forgive me.” Her daughter, sobbing, replied: “I have nothing to forgive.”
Many months later, they recall that pivotal moment as if it were yesterday.
“I almost fainted, my legs buckled. …It was a very beautiful and happy day, but too intense,” Torres said.
“I just threw myself in her arms,” said Maria Pilar. “I still cannot believe it.”
Still, settling into the reunion has taken time.
“I look at my mother and at the physical warmth she has with my sisters, and I wish it could be the same [closeness and naturalness] with me,” said Maria Pilar, who says it is still “strange” for them to be around each other.
Even so, she says she now has a “mom,” two “wonderful” half-sisters, two nephews and “a loving grandmother” she is getting to know and love.
Day of reckoning
Hundreds of women have named Sister Maria as the woman involved in the theft of their babies. The nun dealt with about 3,000 adoptions per year between 1967 and 1983, says Guillermo Peñas, the lawyer who represents Torres and Maria Pilar as well as 50 other families as plaintiffs.
Her name was first linked to the theft of babies in 1982, when investigative magazine Interviú uncovered several cases at another clinic in Madrid where Sister Maria used to work. Authorities closed the clinic down, but no one was prosecuted then.
The reunion of Torres and Maria Pilar offers the first mother-and-child pair who can accuse an alleged abductor, and have made it possible to indict the nun. She is currently charged with illegal detention, fraudulently faking another’s pregnancy, forgery of public and private documents, threatening behavior and coercion, according to Peñas.
So far, Sister Maria hasn’t responded to the prosecutor’s charges in court. GlobalPost’s attempts to reach Sister Maria for a comment were unsuccessful.
The public prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the case.
Torres and Maria Pilar will first appear in front of the judge on April 3.
“This is a very important step because it [is taking on the Church] – [Sister Maria] represents the Church, and that is sacred in Spain,” said Flor Diaz, one of the representatives of SOS Stolen Babies, a support organization that Torres also belongs to.
Both Maria Pilar and Torres say that no matter what happens in the courts, they will never be able to recover the 30 years they lost. “I want that nun to pay for all the pain she has caused,” said Torres.
But at her age, it is unlikely that Sister Maria will end up behind bars.
“There have to be many more people involved,” said Peñas. “It is a matter of common sense to realize that a social worker does not have enough legal authority to do whatever she wants — she had superiors and the hospital director had to authorize the adoptions in the end.”
“But Sister Maria is the only thread we have to untangle the tangled web,” he added.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s newly installed minister of justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, said last week that resolving these cases “will be a priority” for his department, although advocates in the case are skeptical.
“For the government, this is like holding a screaming child,” said Peñas. “If it is held that civil authorities were in the end responsible, the state will have to compensate [thousands of families], and these are not the best times for that.”
But most of these mothers and their children, like Maria Pilar and Torres, say they don’t want any money, just to find their loved ones and recover the lost time.
As they work on that, Maria Pilar keeps the still-new pacifier and the baby blanket on her bed. In the days that followed her first meeting with her mother, she says she would fall asleep “like a baby,” grabbing onto them.
While that phase has passed, Maria Pilar says she plans to get a tattoo with her mother’s name — her way to make sure that Torres is never far from her again.
The beds in my orphanage in Beirut lie vacant; the doctors and lawyers have cut the middleman out of the picture to make a bigger profit.
by Daniel Ibn Zayd
To quote from Stephen Sheehi‘s book, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims:
The issue of gender has been a key prong in the strategic trident to unify bi-partisan and mass support for US interventionism in the Muslim world. Both Arabic and English media have been flooded by a slew of contrived, opportunistic, and charlatan Muslim and Arab women, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Brigitte Gabriel, advancing Western-centric attacks on Islam.
As Sheehi points out, these attacks have mostly focused on issues such as the veil, as well as honor crimes, with the advocates so listed vaulted to the top of expert panels and best-seller lists by virtue of their parroting the dominant discourse, as befits the role of the comprador class. To this shameful compendium we can add another woman, as well as another line of attack: Asra Nomani, and adoption in the Muslim world.
As an adoptee who has returned to his birthplace of Lebanon, I have been actively watching the rise of this trope in the media, on online forums, as well as in private online exchanges for the past seven years. For one example, in 2009 the AP reported on a couple trying to adopt from Egypt. Compared to the crime of this couple and the corruption of government officials there, it is nonetheless Islam that bears the burden of opprobrium in the article: Adoption in Egypt is defined as being “snarled in religious tradition”. This became a contentious discussion on the web site Canada Adopts[1], where the given of the argument was basically how to get around these Islamic invocations, as if they somehow were to blame for the legal transgressions of the would-be adopters.
For another example, we need go to Pamela Geller’s web site Atlas Shrugged. Here the tables are turned on would-be adoptive parents of Moroccan children who would be required to maintain the child’s Muslim faith[2]. Ms. Geller describes this as some evil Islamic fifth column in the making, despite the fact that most every orphanage on the planet is Christian-based and missionary in outlook and likewise requires that the parents be of a particular faith in order to adopt.
Similarly, in her article for The Daily Beast, Asra Nomani writes an article which implies that the orphaned children of Pakistan are being recruited by Al-Qaeda as future suicide bombers. Her answer to this problem? To undo the “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture that makes adoption illegal [within Islam]“. This focus on Islam as a problem for adoptive parents who supposedly want to help the orphans of the world is quite loaded, and needs to be deconstructed on two levels, first in terms of the historical and economic/political function of adoption, and second in terms of linguistic and theologic use/misuse of the term.
The Big Picture: Economics and Politics
Whatever the motivation for adoptive parents in the First World, it is a fact that adoption source countries have followed a particular pattern that would quite easily make an additional chapter to Naomi Klein‘s The Shock Doctrine, in which children become just another resource to plunder and export. Geller and Nomani, in their acceptance of adoption as a given institution in the civilized world, follow in the footsteps of the founding spokeswoman for the so-called plight of orphans, Pearl S. Buck, who in 1964 published the book Children for Adoption. In terms that mimic today’s rhetoric concerning these children, which we currently see repeated in the current hype concerning Kony in Uganda, attention is shifted from the needs of parents (to start a family, to procreate) to those of children (need for a nuclear-family environment), while simultaneously castigating the seeming indifference of their cultures and countries and their inability to care for them.
This infantilization of other countries, now requiring the intervention of a “doting Uncle”, leaves unremarked the fact that such countries–Korea in the 1950s; Uganda today–have been targets of First World punishment via war, sanctions, and economic exploitation. This would explain the presence in Nomani’s article of cliched photographs of children in Iraqi orphanages, as the move is made to the last holdout against such wanton appropriation of foreign children. Nine long years after the invasion of Iraq, however, their inclusion here begs the question: Where has Ms. Nomani been for the past five American administrations, the sanctions, warfare, and sponsored internecine battles of which have killed more children outright than could possible ever be adopted to the West? Furthermore, on a list of countries that allow refugees from these Muslim lands, the U.S. remains near the bottom, behind countries such as Sweden, not to mention leagues behind Iraq’s neighbors that have taken in millions of refugees.
To focus on these children without focusing on their families or communities thus becomes an ignoble hypocrisy; as if to say, “give us your huddled masses–but only if they are cute children and can be indoctrinated from an early age.” This brings us to the other propaganda photos used on the Daily Beast, showing children dressed as soldiers, evoking the specter of infants inculcated with anti-American sentiment, the major fear expressed by the article. Similar to the willful ignorance of the plight of women by Islamophobes in their own locales, Nomani seems not to notice her own culture’s use of such imagery and cultural tropes: she need just visit the Intrepid Navy Museum, or any Civil War town, to see the red, white, and blue version of what she claims to fear most.
But we don’t have to dig so deep when Nomani wears her sentiment on her sleeve:
The council, noting that the Prophet Muhammad was an orphan, supports adoption, citing a Quranic verse enjoining us to practice islah, or “to make better,” the condition of orphans. It says: “And they ask you about orphans. Say: Making things right for them (islah) is better.” (2:220) The women argue that adoption encourages ‚Äúthe protection and promotion of healthy minds.‚Äù Indeed. Perhaps it protects kids from becoming terrorists as well.
It might behoove the author to define “terror”, especially given the millions of Arabs and Muslims who have died as a result of overt American attempts to exploit their countries, or of subsidiary attacks from Israel, or via the dictators put in place to keep oil running freely.
This hypocrisy was perhaps best exemplified by an adoption that was lauded in the American press during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 [3]. “Logan”–inauspiciously named after the airport of his arrival–was “rescued” from Lebanon with special visas provided by U.S. Senators, while many Americans waited days and days for evacuation, and in racially profiled order. No mention is made of the 1400+ civilians killed in that conflict, a third of them children.[4] More importantly, nowhere do we read the fact that Lebanon has a long history of trafficking children. Sayyed Mohammad Fadlallah‘s orphanage system in the South, going back to the 1950s, was created in no small part in response to the trafficking of children from the poor and rural areas of the country. In this light, the Spence-Chapin organization exalted in Nomani’s article is no better than the Holt International Adoption Agency of post-war Korea: Not a civilizing entity, but instead a gentle face put on a monstrous industry. That Morocco sees fit to participate in such trafficking should not be seen as a sign of its enlightenment. Quite the opposite.
Most important to note is how one-sided the adoption argument is in all of these cases. Adoptive parents and the agencies and industries that support them speak of adoption as being the given. This ignores all evidence to the contrary, but most importantly the growing number of voices of adoptees, mothers, fathers, extended families, and communities who are speaking out against adoption which has become simply another form of humanitarian imperialism. Whether in the lyrics of the Moroccan-born French rapper YAZ [5], the laws passed by Korean-American adoptees who have returned to their place of birth and have effectively halted adoption from that country as of this year, or the court writs of mothers in Guatemala who are suing to have their children repatriated to them from the United States, the tide is definitely turning against the ongoing efforts of those such as Nomani who would use adoption as a juggernaut against the Third World, and Islam more specifically. In an effort to paint adoption as a given, a marker of civilization, she and others like her revert to the worst tropes of colonialism, Orientalism, as well as Islamophobia.
The Subtleties: It’s All in the Language
The tactics used in this article that attempt to reframe the Qur’an as supportive of Nomani’s claim are disturbing, and they are also with precedence, mostly from within evangelical Christian circles. Comparative use of the Bible to allow missionary inroads into subordinate populations now finds its equivalent in those who would propound the Qur’an as advocating for the equivalent treatment of Muslim communities. On the Christian evangelical side, “adoption” is redefined to mean our relationship to Jesus (pbuh), and by extension, adopting a child is therefore to be seen as “Christ-like”. Nomani gives us the mirrored reflection of this when she states that the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was himself “adopted”.
Nomani further follows this evangelical/missionary lead when she advocates the use of the Qur’an as supportive documentation for such efforts. In both cases, though, the logic used is hugely flawed. Learning Arabic these past seven years and reading Qur’an on a daily basis has given me an idea of what Aramaic might have been like in a purely conceptual sense, both being Semitic languages of the same region. Furthermore, Levantine Arabic differs from Standard Arabic in its use of Aramaic and Syriac words, and thus I am working with a wider possible vocabulary to make the following points. Based on this, I can state that the word used for the modern-day idea of “adoption” is most likely a conceptual back formation from the English or the French–a colonial hand-me-down–or at best is a completely metaphoric use, since it also carries the meaning similar to the English “to start using [something]“, as in “cell phone adoption”.
Most telling is that the word I use in Modern Standard Arabic to describe myself–mutabanna (vaguely, “en-son-ed”)–is not the same words translated in the Qur’an as “adopted”. One such term, translated as “adopted sons”–‘ad‘iya’akum–comes from a root that means to be claimed by, such as a townsperson is claimed by a town; they are an extension thereof, a part of a greater whole. Here we see a positive use of the term. Another word used in the Qur’an (itakhadha) means moreso “taken in”, as in this example from the story of Joseph: “perhaps he might benefit us or we might take him in as a son”. This is more like acquiring a boy servant than it is adopting a child into one’s family. More to the point, Joseph’s “adoption” comes after he is bartered “as a merchandise”, according to the Qur’anic description; furthermore the Qur’an is very explicit that these are temporary and invalidated situations, and here we might say that this is a negative use of the term.
Our analysis here is aided by the English use of “adoption” which has strayed from its original meaning as well, especially since we know that adoption conceptually within the Anglo-Saxon tradition was about indentured servitude, and not family creation. This is made most obvious to me by the fact that the use of this word only has currency within a certain class of the population here in Lebanon, which lives closer to a globalized and globalizing Anglo-Saxon model than anything locally relevant culturally speaking. For everyone else not of this stratum I cannot say “mutabanna“, I have to state that I was an “orphan” (‘atm), or that I was in an “orphanage” (dar al-’aytam). My adoption, as understood locally, involving a “bartering of merchandise”, maps much more closely onto the example of Yusuf–seen as negative–than any other invocation that might be painted in a positive light.
The main point still holds true: The modern-day concept of adoption, as practiced in primarily first-world nations, has no precursor from Biblical times that would allow the imposition of this current notion on Biblical or Qur’anic readings or texts–it’s current use is a fabrication of modern-day needs and conceits. It thus becomes disturbing the lengths to which current interpreters of these Writs will go to twist the language and the stories to suit their purposes, such as the recent example found in the book Reclaiming Adoption, and now in this article by Nomani.
Comparatively speaking, and contrary to Nomani’s analysis, the Qur’an is extremely enlightening in this regard, if only because its language is unchanged and untranslated since its inception. Readings of the Qur’an reveal that its supreme invocation concerning orphans–representing the most vulnerable members of society–is that they be taken care of, that they remain within their community, that their filiation remain intact, that the community preserve their property until they should be of age to make use of it. This is very much in line with the given social fabric of the countries of this region, despite it being stretched to the breaking point by globalization and other foreign pressures.
But Nomani willfully leaves out the following, where the Qur’an also states: “None are their mothers save those who gave them birth” (–Al-Mujadalah, 58:2), and:
God did not give any man two hearts in his chest. Nor did He turn your wives whom you estrange (according to your custom) into your mothers. Nor did He turn your adopted children into genetic offspring. All these are mere utterances that you have invented. God speaks the truth, and He guides in the (right) path.
You shall give your adopted children names that preserve their relationship to their genetic parents. This is more equitable in the sight of God. If you do not know their parents, then, as your brethren in religion, you shall treat them as members of your family. You do not commit a sin if you make a mistake in this respect; you are responsible for your purposeful intentions. God is Forgiver, Most Merciful. –Al-Ahzab, 33:4‚Äì5
This call to communal care is offensive to Ms. Nomani and her advocates because it is preventing them from fulfilling their familial role as proscribed for them by Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, borrowing Margaret Thatcher’s maxim that there is no basis for society but the nuclear family. This way of seeing things is radically different from the majority of the planet that serves as source material for the wishes of those in the First World who plunder their children via adoption and surrogacy. This is best summed up by Mohammad Al-Haddad, after a scandal involving the kidnapping of Chadian children to France:
But why don’t the rich bother themselves with the poor? Now, we forbid immigration to poor adults, but we allow it for their children? All the same, to decide if a child can be adopted, we do not apply the same criteria in the West as in the Third World. In the West, the family is “nuclear”; the conditions that make a child adoptable are therefor the absence of a mother and father. In many African countries, on the other hand, the family is extended–that is to say it includes equally the grandparents, as well as maternal and paternal aunts and uncles: All work in solidarity to take care of the child. [6]
This lack of a strict concept of nuclear family on the scene where I find myself now, or anything outside of what is a given here–extended family and communal solidarity–explains the reaction of most of those who hear my story from this perspective: They apologize that I was removed from my family, my place, my land. They sympathize wholeheartedly with my efforts to re-establish an identity here and find family, because historically and culturally the notion of “adoption” or “guardianship” is, as locally understood, about the importance of place: One’s people, one’s house, one’s community. This is a welcome relief from the endless barrage of statements such as “you were chosen”, or “you are lucky” that most of us grew up hearing; furthermore, it explains why these tropes of being “chosen” or “lucky” are projected onto Biblical accounts, ignoring the historical context of the book and its cultural underpinnings.
The deceit of adoption revivalists is most revealed then by what they omit. In terms of the Bible, each and every invocation concerning the “fatherless” also contains within the same passage a call to care for widows and others who are unable to sustain themselves. Would not a logical conclusion of this be that the expectant mother–especially if she be single, or widowed–be afforded this same zealous care and protection?
In terms of the Qur’an, let’s re-examine the cited reference from the article, but in full this time:
And they will ask thee about orphans. Say: “To improve their condition is best.” And if you share their life, they are your brethren: For God distinguishes between the despoiler and the ameliorator. –The Cow, 2:219
This ayat from the Qur’an, in the deceptively abridged form put forth by Nomani, might support this Western modern-day notion of adoption, but only if one espouses supremacist ideas of certain cultures being better or more valid than others. Obviously, given the inability to read one ayat of the Qur’an out of the context of the whole, this is not valid. Everyone who is claimed to have been “adopted” in both the Bible and Qur’an, most notably Joseph (Yusuf) as mentioned, but also Moses (Moussa) (pbut), in fact pose a contrary argument to those who would read these Books so literally. For both were adopted against the wishes of their parents; their removal caused great anguish to their families; they did not start the true calling of their lives until they were returned to their rightful place, status, and people.
This is especially poignant in the Qur’anic story of Joseph, who is sold to and “taken in” by first a wealthy lord and then the king but whose destiny is to be returned to his family (note the class differential here). The Qur’anic story of Moses is even more pointed, when it states that Moses was taken in by “those who were his enemy, and the enemy of his people”. The Qur’an also forbids forced conversion, one of the primary motivating factors for missionary adoption practice historically speaking.
Analyzing the Qur’an even further, we can state that the removal of someone from their family is an ultimate act of self-inflicted alienation, since the only instances of such separation used in the Qur’an are metaphors for the punishment of removing oneself from the community of God–meaning, the result of one’s own sin. Thus you have the son of Noah (Noh) drowned, the wife of Lot (Loteh) left behind and destroyed, the progeny of Abraham (Ibrahim) as being “on their own” in terms of their deeds and the judgment thereof, etc. The point being that such a separation–as punishment–supercedes the strong familial bond otherwise implied. How then, could there be a willful separation of child from parent, condoned by God at that?
The concept that the orphan should be removed from a given community, however justified, only reveals the moral bankruptcy of those whose primary concern is, in fact, their own nuclear family, their own salvation that might come at the expense of others now “saved”, as well as what is left unsaid in these works: the desired conversion of the heathen multitudes; their civilization, modernization, and the end of the barbarian ways.
This is nowhere more clear than here in Lebanon, where the sordid history of children trafficked from the south and Palestine is starting to come to light. By my observations into paperwork in my orphanage, I can safely say that a full 40 to 50 percent of infants circulating through my orphanage were from Muslim families, myself likely included. Based on stories I know from other countries and locally, as well taking into consideration the Islamic concept of the orphanage, I can state that many of the parents of these children had no idea that they would never see their infants again. In this way missionary and classist disdain for the religion of these children and their families is a prime motivator in their being targeted for adoption/conversion in the first place, despite protests to the contrary.
This brings us back to the originating efforts of those such as Pearl S. Buck who saw the world through this particularly noisome lens of colonialism, conversion, oppression, and universalism. Given that this same Anglo-Saxon culture has done nothing to alleviate poverty, racism, classism, and mono-culturalism on its own home front much less in the world at large, why should anyone believe that it truly desires to improve conditions elsewhere in the world? Can we really imagine a God who would allow some of his gerents on Earth to wage economic and political wars on others, and then claim some state of grace in adopting their children away from them? How is this different from the Romans enslaving the children of the peoples they conquered, if we want a more relevant Biblical analogy?
One of the greatest ironies of Islamophobia is the projection onto Islam of the failures of Western society. Here it is no different. The communal culture that needs to be broken down to make way for individualized/nuclear family-based Capitalism now extends to abducting children from the Arab and Muslim world, now that most of the other supply countries (including the First World’s internal poverty belt) are finally making the morally right decision in preventing their children from being exported wholesale. That Nomani would take such a literal view of the words of the Qur’an in fact reveals her to be the regressive one. We should, as people of good faith, be doing everything in our power to keep families together, and to prevent the conditions of war, poverty, and illiteracy that do more to promote the ills of the world that are decried in this article than any nascent putative extremism. The “charlatans” of Islamophobia wreak more injustice with their words and deeds than any boasted threat that might come from Muslims worldwide.
There is no innocence or objectivity in terms of supporting foreign policies of bombing, pillaging, and marauding, while simultaneously pretending to advocate for “orphans”, and using the Holy Books to support this worldview. Indeed, the only “antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture[s]” that need be undone are those of Imperialism as we live it today. If we are truly hoping to “save the children”, then the despoilers of Nomani’s ilk should stand up as the class and community of power that they are and change the foreign policy of their governments. There is no evidence to support adoption as being a cure-all of any kind, indeed, Ms. Nomani is one in a long line of pyromaniac firefighters who don’t know how horribly they reek of gasoline. Her pretense of speaking for women is offensive to those who work locally via religious, charitable, or civil organizations in order to keep families and communities together. But most of all, she offends those mothers that she finds no common cause with in an egregious classism masked by a selfish and narcissistic career-building Islamophobia.
Any examination of human trafficking in the world points a very accusatory finger and paints a very scathing picture of the majority of First-World nations; this is where religious references might best be applied first–and then the “orphan” problem will take care of itself. Those with an axe to grind concerning Islam such as Nomani would do better than to hide their phobic attitudes behind institutions such as adoption, the actions of which have very real consequences for those of us removed from our place, our families, our communities, our culture, and our faith. For such supposed saving grace is always resented by those on whom it is imposed against their will. And the reaped fruit of such crimes is just as bitter.
Daniel Ibn Zayd was adopted in 1963 and returned definitively to his land of birth in 2004; there he teaches art and illustration and in 2009 founded the artists’ collective Jamaa Al-Yad. He has written for CounterPunch, The Monthly Review Zine, and The Design Altruism Project, as well as on his blog: danielibnzayd.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Transracial Eyes, a web-based collective of transracial adoptees. He can be reached at @ibnzayd on Twitter and by email: daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com.
A threatening letter containing a mysterious powder sent the Iowa Capitol into lockdown and delayed action in the House for several hours on Tuesday.
Ultimately, a hazardous materials team found the substance not to be dangerous and released a crowd of perhaps 300 lawmakers, staffers and observers who had been sequestered in the House chamber and elsewhere at the Statehouse.
The letter was received by Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, late Tuesday afternoon and was opened on the House floor in the midst of debate.
Abdul-Samad told reporters Tuesday evening that the letter contained “very threatening” language but declined to describe it in detail, citing an investigation now under way by state police.
“I cannot talk about what was in the letter at this point, because it’s turned over now to the State Patrol and also to DCI, but it was a threatening letter,” he said, referring to the state Division of Criminal Investigation. “This has now become a very serious legal matter.”
Abdul-Samad’s clerk, Drake Law School student Michael McRae, opened the letter after retrieving it from the lawmaker’s mailbox in the Capitol rotunda. The powder billowed out, he said, covering the area around Abdul-Samad’s desk, McRae’s clothing and hands, and even being inhaled by Abdul-Samad.
Rep. Kevin Koester, R-Ankeny, who said he was sitting near Abdul-Samad after the letter was opened and saw a white powder spill from an envelope, said the substance looked like flour or powdered sugar. Others described it as resembling a powdered detergent.
Abdul-Samad and Iowa State Patrol Capt. Mark Logsdon declined to identify the substance.
The letter apparently was hand-delivered to the Capitol, Logsdon said.
House leaders paused the debate that was then under way at about 3:45 p.m. and directed Abdul-Samad and McRae to the vestibule separating the House chambers from the Capitol’s second-floor rotunda.
They remained there throughout the afternoon and early evening. The entire building was locked down shortly before 5 p.m.
A hazardous materials team — wearing bright yellow plastic suits with orange boots and breathing apparatus — arrived around 5:30, and appeared to collect samples both inside the vestibule with Abdul-Samad and McRae and at the lawmaker’s desk on the House floor.
The two-man team’s fluorescent safety garb and Darth Vader-like exhalations contrasted sharply with the crowd of lawmakers and staff, who milled about on the floor in shirt-sleeves. Some even stood within an arm’s reach of Abdul-Samad’s desk, snapping photos as the hazmat workers conducted their work.
At around 6 p.m., House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, reported that preliminary testing indicated the substance was not hazardous. Officials with the 71st Civil Service Team, an inter-agency cooperative responsible for dealing with potentially hazardous situations like this, completed further testing, finally giving an all-clear at 7:50 p.m.
“With the sensitivity of government, it’s a realistic threat,” said Brian O’Keefe with the Des Moines Fire Department. “That’s why we’re going to this level of security and testing.”
Lawmakers resumed considering legislation before the all-clear, and even before Abdul-Samad returned to the chamber, wrapping up debate and holding a final vote on a bill to bar cities from using traffic cameras. The decision to get back to business didn’t sit well with everyone in the chamber.
“Continuation of this debate tonight is dumb, disrespectful and in poor taste,” Rep. Nathan Willems, D-Lisbon said, addressing Paulsen from the floor.
Others criticized the manner in which the incident itself was handled.
The initial response was uncontrolled and overly dismissive, potentially exposing an unknown number of Iowans to highly lethal agents like anthrax, said Sen. Bill Dotzler, a Waterloo Democrat who is trained in toxic threats.
More than an hour after the powder was discovered, state representatives and others were moving freely out of the House chambers to other areas of the Capitol and outside the building. Some senators even joked that their House peers should be banned from the Senate chambers.
But Dotzler, who was a volunteer with the John Deere Fire Brigade and fully trained with the Waterloo hazmat team, said the situation was no laughing matter.
House members should have been immediately isolated and even removed from the chambers to an isolated area to avoid further possible exposure, he said, rather than allowed to move freely inside and outside the building.
“In the world we live in you have to take every case seriously,” he said. “People said, ‘Well, it smelled like soap.’ Well, you can mix toxic biological agents in with soap and it could be something that’s pretty bad.”
Law enforcement and Abdul-Samad himself, however, defended the way the situation played out.
“Everything was handled properly, and I’m really happy with how things were handled,” Abdul-Samad said.
Logsdon, the state patrol captain, said it was easier to second-guess the response than to manage a potentially dangerous situation in a crowded and public place.
“It’s easy to question and armchair quarterback people, but the fact of the matter is once the letter was open and the substance was airborne, then it literally contaminated everyone in there,” he said.
House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer said the situation was unprecedented for most, if not all, of the lawmakers now serving.
She said the response will be reviewed to determine if additional procedures are necessary for dealing with such situations.
“We’ll do a look back and make sure we have the systems in place that we need and the processes that make sure everyone gets here safe,” Upmeyer said.
Among the first people out of the Capitol were Michael Mericle and his grandparents, who had been visiting the building.
Mericle, who was visiting Des Moines from Omaha, said the ordeal wasn’t what he expected for his first visit to the Capitol.
“It was long,” he said. “We were walking out, and they told us to go back in. It was boring, but everyone is OK.”
Mericle passed the time by playing with his smartphone and sending text messages to friends, he said. He said he wasn’t nervous, and others in the Capitol didn’t seem to be either.
“But his mom was,” put in Julie Almquist, Mericle’s mother, who had been waiting outside the building for her son.
Almquist, who said she had interned at the Capitol while growing up in Des Moines, said she initially didn’t think the incident was a big deal, until the hours began dragging on.
They missed their dinner reservation at Splash, she said, but once they left the Capitol, they headed there anyway to try to get a table.
An Islamic cultural center in the canton of Bern cannot build a minaret, despite having received permission to do so before the controversial ban on minarets.
The Bern Administrative Court ruled today that the minaret in Langenthal was an iconic structure that didn’t comply with municipal regulation on rooftop structures. A complaint against the center’s dome was dismissed.
The challenge to the minaret came from the group “Stopp Minnarett Langenthal,” which said it was satisfied with the ruling.
An appeal can be filed to a higher court within 30 days.
Pamela Geller posted a letter she received from an Atlas Shrugs reader calling himself Scott Sylte. She introduces this letter saying Remember, there is no golden rule under Islam.
Here is the text of the posted letter
I have a disability which requires that I use a service dog. His name is Ray and he helps to counterbalance, alert and guide me. Under Federal Law, The Americans with Disabilites Act of 1990, a disabled person with their service dog must be allowed public accomodation and admittance. Among such places include Airplanes, Public Transportation, Businesses which serve the gerneral public, restaurants, etc.
One evening two friends, myself and my service dog Ray entered a kabob restaurant in Virginia. Within seconds a man, apparantly who was the owner, made a scene about my service dog and asked me to leave. I was fairly certain he was Pakistani Muslim. There were other people in the restaurant who apparantly were also Muslim because of their coverings. Anyhow, I told him about the ADA, which he knew nothing about, and I told him that I was refusing to leave the restaurant and demanded that we be served the food we ordered. He was obviously very, very unhappy about it, yet he did eventually very reluctantly comply.
If he had insisted that my dog and I leave and refused to serve us in his restaurant, I would have filed a Human Relations Complaint of Discrimination or a ADA complaint with the US Dept. of Justice. If that would ever happens I wonder if this Islamization has gone that far that it would limit me from entering a Muslim owned or opperated establishment which serves the public? It’s sad to see our society begin sliding down the slippery slope of making these kinds of self serving accomodations. The people who are in favor of these kinds of accomodations as being in the friendly spirit of Freedom and Liberty are missing the point that our strong tendancies for “cultural” and “religious” acceptance are really being used to undermine our very freedoms and liberties in a very clandestine manner.
The very essence of the Judeo-Christian belief is based upon “Loving our neighbors,” but all to frequently forgotten is another teaching of our sacred writings is that if we know that someone is going to kill us “We are “obliged” to kill them before they can kill us. In the context of this teaching, “obliged is stronger than being commanded.” We are not commanded to murder someone because of their belief system or because they are different, but if they are going to kill us, self defense is an imperative. I believe as many of our fellow Americans would like to believe, is that the majority of Muslims here in our country are not about Jihad; HOWEVER, a belief system which commands its believers to deceive and lie to non-adherants about their murderous intentions is most certainly one that should be closely examined.
Respectfully submitted, Scott Sylte
This individual is claiming that someone at a kabob restaurant in Virginia that he believed to be a Muslim asked him to leave the restaurant with his guide dog. After he explained about the ADA, the man reluctantly served him. He does not say what his disability is, or what kind of a service dog. Since he is describing the appearance of people in the restaurant, it seems that he is not blind, and perhaps his disability was not readily apparent. The law does not require service dogs to wear identifying markings, and if this was the case it is possible that the restaurant employee/owner simply thought it was a man and his dog coming in to eat.
He says that if he had not been served he would have filed an official complaint of discrimination. That is absolutely appropriate, and he would have been well within his rights to do so – if this is an accurate recounting of a genuine incident. If, however, there was no way for the man who worked in the restaurant to know that he was disabled, and that his dog was a service dog, then that would be a very different story.
However, the last paragraph of Mr. Sylte’s letter makes me doubt everything he claims. I’ll repeat that paragraph
The very essence of the Judeo-Christian belief is based upon “Loving our neighbors,” but all to frequently forgotten is another teaching of our sacred writings is that if we know that someone is going to kill us “We are “obliged” to kill them before they can kill us. In the context of this teaching, “obliged is stronger than being commanded.” We are not commanded to murder someone because of their belief system or because they are different, but if they are going to kill us, self defense is an imperative. I believe as many of our fellow Americans would like to believe, is that the majority of Muslims here in our country are not about Jihad; HOWEVER, a belief system which commands its believers to deceive and lie to non-adherents [sic] about their murderous intentions is most certainly one that should be closely examined.
I would have highlighted the genocidal take on what is required of Christians out of their love for their Muslim neighbors, but the entire paragraph would need to be highlighted.
He is saying that he would like to believe that most Muslims are not out to kill “us”, but since their religion (in his view) teaches Muslims to lie about their murderous intentions, then the command to kill Muslims before they kill you mandated in Christianity “should be closely examined”. We should consider that it might be a “Christian mandate” to begin killing Muslims. He does not give any references to particular verses of Christian “sacred scriptures”, but I am certain that whatever passages he believes would justify such genocide are being misinterpreted by him.
That Pamela Geller thinks such hatred is deserving of a positive mention, and of being published on her site is yet more evidence as to why the SPLC lists not only her Atlas Shrugs site, but her partner Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch site, and their joint organizations AFDI and SIOA as active anti-Muslim groups, and why they are listed in our Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry. This is hatred pure and simple.
As to the issue that set off this tirade – Muslims who serve the public refusing service to people with guide dogs – that has happened. There needs to be a clear statement issued by scholars in the U.S. and Canada clarifying this, and that statement needs to be widely distributed and discussed in mosques. The problem is that many immigrants confuse cultural and religious beliefs, and some are not aware of the law.
This process has begun, and Muslim scholars are attempting to educate people, but to avoid any such difficulties in the future, this needs to be much more widely discussed. Here are a few examples of community efforts to educate:
In 2008, the issue of service dogs came up in England and a fatwa was issued
“The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association described the decision as “a massive step forward for other blind and partially-sighted Muslims”. Previously, all dogs were banned from mosques because the Islamic faith historically sees them as being for guarding and hunting only. However, the position was softened because guide dogs could be classed in the “working dogs” category. The animals are still barred from entering the prayer hall for the sake of hygiene but are allowed to guide their owners to the area where shoes are placed, the fatwa says.
A special rest area has been set up in the entrance of the Bilal Jamia mosque for Vargo while Khatri is praying. Previously, the teenager, who attends the RNIB College in Loughborough, had to be accompanied to the mosque by a sighted helper. “
… After issuing the fatwa, Muhammad Shahid Raza, director of the Imams and Mosques Council UK and secretary of the Muslim Law (Sharia) Council UK, said: “I hope that all existing mosques will follow Bilal mosque in serving the disabled people in a similar way by providing facilities to them. I also believe that, in all new mosques, such facilities for disabled people will be an essential part of their design.”
The moral and legal need to accommodate individuals using service dogs far outweighs the discomfort an individual Muslim might feel about coming into contact with a dog, which is one of God’s creatures, said CAIR-MN Communications Director Valerie Shirley.
Muslims believe the saliva of dogs invalidates the ritual ablution performed before prayer. For this reason, it has become a cultural norm for individuals not to have dogs in their houses – not because the dog is unclean.
The Prophet Muhammad allowed the use of dogs for protection and for hunting. He related several traditions (hadith) in which individuals were rewarded by God for protecting animals and punished for mistreating them.
Shirley mentioned that in 2007, a similar misunderstanding took place between Minneapolis cab drivers and passengers with guide dogs. After CAIR-MN facilitated dialogue between the two groups and cleared the misunderstanding, the Muslim taxi drivers offered free rides to attendees of the American Council of the Blind Convention in downtown Minneapolis. Abdinoor Ahmed Dolal, owner of Twin Cities Airport Taxi, said “Islam forbids us to turn away a blind passenger, whether they have a guide dog or not. Their rights come first.”
CAIR-MN says it will continue to work with the Muslim community in Minnesota to educate them about their Islamic and legal duty to accommodate those using service or guide dogs.
In another case in Vancouver, Canada a local Imam issued a clarification
An Iman from the local Az-Zahraa Islamic Centre, Javed Jaffri, researched the dog topic and served as an expert witness for a blind man refused passage by a Muslim taxi driver. Jaffri spent long hours on this, and provided an unbiased interpretation of the Koran that indicated “there is nothing saying that one must refuse service to another person because of the fear of contamination by a dog.”
He also said that “there can be exceptions to blanket refusals to deal with dogs, especially if it means helping someone in need. All that would be required in most circumstances would be for a Muslim person to wash their hands before eating if they have been in contact with a dog. That’s not a terrible task to go through,” he said.
“There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings, but they are communities like you. Qur’an 6:38.
“The Holy Prophet told of a prostitute who, on a hot summer day, saw a thirsty dog hovering around a well, lolling its tongue. She lowered her socks down the well and watered the dog. God forgave her all her sins (for this one act of kindness)” Sahih Muslim
SEE ALSO:
A Fatwa on dogs, Khaled Abou El Fadl http://www.scholarofthehouse.org/tloofesfaond.html
All-American Muslim and Wrigley the Dog, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/wrigley-dogs
Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity, Ikhwan al-Safa http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/books_the_animals_lawsuit_against_humanity
Animals in Islam, al-Hafiz B.A. Masri, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/7368/an1.htm
Dogs in the Islamic tradition and in nature, Khaled Abou El Fadl http://www.scholarofthehouse.org/dinistrandna.html
Islam and Experiments on Animals *, al-Hafiz B.Z. Masri http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islam_and_experiments_on_animals1
Misconceptions About Islam and Dogshttp://misconceptions-about-islam.com/dogs-allowed-muslims.htm
Quotes from Qur’an and Hadith about dogs as service animals http://toledomuslims.com/criterion/Article.asp?ID=288
What’s up with Muslims and dogs?, Dr. Ingrid Mattson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-mattson/whats-up-with-muslims-and_b_1144819.html
Islamophobes often times confuse tribal custom and practice as a reflection of Islam. They cannot concede the view that marriage practices vary across the Islamic world, and that most Muslim countries have age limits on marriage.
The article below highlights quite a few salient points in regards to the high number of girls in Yemen, between the ages of 15-18 being married off, 38%, and girls under 15, 14%, for a total of 52%. It doesn’t say anything about the age of those whom the young girls are marrying, it’s safe to presume that many of them are young men as well. It is also safe to assume however that a significant portion are likely men who are quite older than them (see picture above).
The article reveals that it is Yemeni Muslims, many of them deeply committed to Islam: Imams, scholars, politicians and human rights activists who are attempting to reform this practice within their own culture and society.
Of course this won’t stop the Islam haters from trying to bash Islam and further the “Mo was a pedo” myth that they are so fond of.
SANAA – Yemenis are marrying off their daughters at a very early age, a practice seen by Muslim imams as rooted in tribal traditions, rather than in Islamic teachings.
“Much of child marriages are rooted in tribal tradition and not in Islam,” Sheikh Mohamed al- Iryani, an Imam in Aden, told OnIslam.net.
He blamed poverty and fear of stigma for the common practice in the Arab Peninsula country.
“Poor families see raising daughters as a heavy burden which they are happy to unload on someone else at the first opportunity,” he said.
“It is contrary to our teachings but as long as local Imams agree to perform the ceremonies it will continue.
Child marriages are widespread in Yemen.
Estimates show that 52 percent of Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 and 14 percent before the age of 15.
There are some cases in which young girls as little as 8 were being allowed to enter a marital union.
Well-remembered is the case of Nujud, a young Yemeni girl who challenged her family, demanding that a judge free her from her abusive husband by dissolving her marriage.
“We as a society need to tackle this issue and launch some sort of a national dialogue,” said Iryani.
Marriage in Islam is of utmost importance as it is upon the lawful union of a man and a woman that society grows strong and that moral is preserved.
In Islam it is not permissible for the guardian to compel the one under his guardianship to marry someone she does not desire to marry.
Rather, it is necessary to seek her consent and permission.
Marriage Age
Human rights activists have called for setting a minimum age limit to marriage to help uproot the phenomenon.
“Setting a minimum age limit to marriages will help prevent child abuse and young bride trafficking,” Nadya Khalife, a women’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, told OnIslam.net.
“Yemen’s political crisis has left issues such as child marriage at the bottom of the political priority list.
“But now is the time to move on this issue, setting the minimum age for marriage at 18, to ensure that girls and women who played a major role in Yemen’s protest movement will also contribute to shaping Yemen’s future.”
Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, the highest religious body in the Sunni Muslim world, has recently issued a manual on the rights of Muslim children.
“Marriage in Islam is regulated by certain rules, namely, children must reach puberty and maturity so that they can get married,” the manual said.
A recent HRW report said the repercussions of child marriages reverberate throughout Yemeni society as it prevents women from completing their education, keeping Yemen in a state of prolonged ignorance.
“Education is the key to progress,” said Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashour.
“If we are to build a strong Yemen, we need our people to push on their study, child marriages prevent that.”
An investigation is underway after an arson attack at a mosque in Bury Park in the early hours of this morning (April 2).
Fire crews were called to the Bury Park Jamia Masjid in Bury Park Road at 4.30am, after two large metal bins were pushed up against a door and set alight. The scene has been cordoned off by police while a fire investigation takes place.
Det Con Colin Knight, investigating the incident, said: “We’re keeping an open mind and appealing for witnesses. We don’t know at this stage what the motive was.”
Anwar Hussain, the mosque’s cultural secretary, said its leaders were angry about what had happened. “People are going to be very upset when they come for prayers,” he said. “But we will tell them to remain calm. The investigation is ongoing but my opinion is that it was deliberate. The police response has been very good, they will be checking CCTV footage from the cameras in the street, and we hope they will catch the culprits.”
“Good guy” — the description of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by neighbors that is headlining in the American media — is pretty much the way ordinary Germans saw other Germans who brutalized people in extermination camps in WW2 (See Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). “Good guy” is how most family, friends and neighbors in the USA described John Demjanjuk, the Ukranian-born Nazi extermination camp guard who was deported to Germany for war crimes and who died Saturday, convicted of his crimes but living free in a German nursing home. And “good guy” is how family, friends and neighbors described Ander Behring Breivik, judged by his countrymen to be “mentally unfit” when he massacred dozens of young people in Norway because his government tolerated Muslim immigrants.
Imagine an Afghan who came to the USA and murdered 16 people, mostly women and children, and burned their bodies. Then the Afghan government whisked the guy away and said, “Trust us, we’ll take care of the matter,” and the Afghan press was full of reports saying that neighbors in Afghanistan liked the guy. An American president who allowed this to happen would likely be impeached. And would Americans really care if some foreign terrorist who had just shot or blown up a bunch of kids sitting at a family diner had done it because he had snapped, or was drinking, or was under stress, or for any of a dozen possible motives our press has proffered for Bales’ actions?
I’m not against factoring in such motivations in passing final judgment, but only if consistently applied. The problem is that Americans, just like most other nations and cultural groups, believe that most of what they do is motivated by a morality based on Golden Rule principles of fairness and do no harm (unless first done to you), and that heinous acts committed by one’s own kind occur because the actor has a screw loose or was suffering unbearable social or economic pressure. In fact, recent work in evolutionary psychology indicates the Golden Rule principles operate fairly in all cultures, most of the time, but not between cultures. People in other cultures are generally thought to commit terrible acts for calculated reasons, underscored by some perverse morality that can be readily discounted, so that only the consequences of their actions should be judged, whereas for one’s own group motivation is, and what ought to, mostly count.
What goes for individuals, goes for whole nations: When our country kills and shreds the flesh of others, whether flatly described in technospeak as “collateral damage” involving a few dead individual bystanders or “strategic bombing” that annihilates tens of thousands of civilians, it’s almost always for fine moral reasons and because we want to save lives in the end; but if others do similar things with similar consequences, it’s almost always because they are calculating evildoers. This asymmetric mindset has been with us since our species emerged from the caves, and is a continuing cause of much misunderstanding and distrust between groups in the organized anarchy of our ever-violent world. In this regard, America is unexceptional in its reaction to a massacre perpetuated by any of its own against others.
Now, factor this mindset into to the mundane workings of the extraordinary technocratic bureaucracy behind today’s war-making industries, which has more destructive potential than all of the world’s previous wars combined. Its managers are often the “best and the brightest,” with a lot of nice guys whose team spirit differs little from that found in an advertising firm, cabin crew or Internet company. The flat language of technology and bureaucracy, and the ordinary career trappings of promotions and perks and Christmas parties, only mask (and so make possible the psychologically impossible brutality) of this awesome killing machine.
Steve Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, documents how everyday violence between people has declined markedly since the Stone Age. But this underplays another well-documented trend (known as a “power law distribution”) that big wars (as well as large terrorist attacks) over the last couple of centuries, though increasingly infrequent, are very many times more murderous and catastrophic than those preceding. Each bigger event generates more world-shaking consequences than the last: politically, economically and socially. Lacking the will and means to consistently impose a universal moral code across all peoples (and the human evolution and history of intergroup rivalry says “Don’t hold your breath” on this score), perhaps the only way to ultimately outwit the bad beast of our nature from doing all in all of us in the Space Age is to ignore how nice or not are the guys who prepare the killing, or how good or not may be the guys who do it, and focus mainly on treating the consequences of killing.
Parents, and Adults attend a Hillsborough School Board Meeting
Hillsboroughbilly County, Florida–
In November 2011, a Tampa, Fla., high school invited a Muslim lecturer, Hassan Shibly to speak about Islamic history and tradition to college level advanced placement students. When anti-Muslim extremists David Caton and Terry Kemple found out, they brought dozens of Islamophobes to spread lies, fear and hatred against Islam and Muslims at school board meetings (H/T: A. Lessirey):
David Caton was described in a Tampa Bay Times column as a “theo thug,” and a “Biblical bully” with a history of anti-Muslim activism:
Perhaps the best way to get your hands around this latest example of theo-thugs gone wild is to think of local sanctimonious mouth foamer David Caton as the North Korea of faux piety.
For whenever Caton feels he’s fallen off the publicity-hound radar and isn’t being paid enough attention, the vicar of vituperativeness feels compelled to engage in some really daffy behavior as if to reassure the world he’s just as loopy as ever.
Well, brother and sisters — he’s back! It was this man of fleece who just a few weeks ago managed to persuade Lowe’s, a Fortune 500 company, to drop its sponsorship of All-American Muslim on TLC.
Caton got his sackcloth in a wad because the series revealed Muslims in America are quite capable of living just as stultifyingly boring, law-abiding lives as Protestants, rather than spending their days assembling car bombs.
And Lowe’s fell for it, acquiescing to the Islamaphobic demands of a single illiterate hate-monger who should have about as much influence on the affairs of the day as the defense minister of Groucho Marx’s Freedonia.
Now, fresh off his Florida Family Association campaign to make Lowe’s look like corporate America’s answer to a cowering puppy that just piddled on the kitchen floor, Caton, the Ernst Blofeld of the Bible, has set his myopic sights on Kelly Miliziano, a history teacher at Steinbrenner High School, who committed the unpardonable, unforgiveable sin of (dare it be said) educating her students.
For several years Miliziano has invited speakers representing various faiths to meet with her classes. The idea here is to expose students to a range of ideas and beliefs, which in the end will serve to make them better informed, discerning, well-rounded, independent-thinking, educated members of society.
Miliziano obviously posed a threat to Caton’s recruitment efforts. After all, if these kids learn stuff, well, the next thing you know, they’ll figure out obtuse gasbags like Caton are full of hooey. And that’s bad for the bigotry business, which needs a steady stream of lemmings to keep the flames of malevolence burning.
Another Tampa Bay Times article described the school board meeting as one of “did-I-just-hear-that” intolerance. It went on to criticize Caton and Kemple, saying,
What’s not good is wrapping your hands around the eyes and ears of kids out of fear. What’s not good is assuming a local Muslim leader, a young lawyer raising a family here, comes not to educate but to indoctrinate and steal young minds — and that teachers are either in on it or too clueless to care.
Such rhetoric is unhelpful and it seems that students who actually participated in the class don’t think it was a big deal.
But for those who believe they are on a Crusade against Islam, such as Caton and Kemple the Muslim speaker’s presentation represents the apocalypse!
I have been doing a lot of soul-searching, and I have reached a few important conclusions. Speaking as a moderate Muslim, I realize that my community is primitive, backwards, mired in tradition, and in need of massive help from KONY 2012 people to reform this tradition to catch up with the luminosity of secular West.
I know that there is a trouble with Islam today, and everyday. I also want to have gay-friendly mosques where people can just go have a beer after the optional prayer services, ‘cause that is what it means to be a progressive Muslim.
Because all the secret jihadists (and the FBI people who have infiltrated them) just want to impose this Shari’a thing on us, and for some reason all that beer drinking and hooking up seems to be frowned upon in that Shari’a thing.
With that, and in the name of She who is the source of All-Mercy, here are the fruits of my search. If anyone wants to put me in touch with Fox News or MEMRI, please do so, I’ll recite all these on camera—just contact my agent, and he can tell you my appearance fee. I know that we are in need of a Muslim Reformation, and I am working on my “Martin Luther of Islam” speech. I can’t quite make it up to ML’s 95 theses, but I have got a good head start below. With that, “I give you permission to think freely”:
First, speaking as a Muslim, I am so disappointed in my Muslim brother Barack Hussein Obama. He eats pork, drinks alcohol, regularly attends church service, had his daughters baptized, has yet to set foot in a mosque since becoming president, kisses AIPAC’s behind, authorizes indefinite detentions, and has seen many Muslims killed by his drone attacks and ongoing wars. Really, a pathetic Muslim if ever there was one. I mean, if I wanted a Muslim ruler that would do all the above, I would move back to the Muslim countries where most of the rulers do that kind of stuff anyway, and the food is a little better than here.
Fourth, I have been way too defensive in my criticism of the erosion of civil rights and liberties in America. Fact of the matter is that we Muslims should just be honored to be allowed in this country, to consumer here, and even if we live here as second (or third) class citizen, it’s better to be here than whatever country my parents came from.
When the Prophet Muhammad was doing the prophet thing in the 7th century, he was so sneaky smart that he immediately set about opposing the whole notion of modernity that would emerge in the 17th century. How clever he must have been… It’s like he was a thousand years ahead of his time. We backwards Muslims have to catch up with the times, because all 1.5 billion Muslims are really in a time warp, living in the 7th century. It’s like Islam is a breach in the time-space continuum. It makes perfect sense to me to have people who hate a religion be the ones to help guide us as to how to reform Islam. So I’ll be sure to tune into Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, Franklin Graham, and others.
Seventh, I pledge myself to making sure that Muslims, Hispanics, Gays/Lesbians, women, the Poor, immigrants, the Radical Left, everybody on the coasts, and everybody who doesn’t look like me, talk like me, worship in my church, can leave this country so us proper Americans can have it all to ourselves. And it would be a much less crowded country. Love it or leave it baby!
And one last one: We civilized people have to protect Muslim women from Muslim men. And from themselves. Because Muslim women cannot and should not be trusted to make choices for their own lives, their own bodies. So it’s up to us enlightened people to tell them what to wear, how to dress, and what not to wear. Make sure that we don’t make the mistake of having them tell us what their attire means to them, because they have all been brainwashed.
Ok…. April’s Fools!!!
Take a deep breath. All the above is a little April Fool’s satire about a very serious subject.
It would be all funny, except that as absurd as—I truly pray—all the above sounds, this is actually much of what we hear in today’s public discourse about Islam, from both wannabe Muslim reformers such as Zuhdi Jasser and Irshad Manji (who all too often have no grounding in Islam) to ex-Muslims (Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali), to Islamophobes (Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes) who repeatedly tell Muslims about the true meanings of their tradition. I hope that satire can be a way to recognize the absurdity of the whole situation.
We need to do better than this. May we all be participants in the redemption of our traditions, our communities, our nations. That redemption can only come about through love and participation in a tradition and a community, not by standing outside and voicing one’s shame. Love transforms us towards the better and more beautiful. May our faith traditions, our nations, be redeemed through this love and service to humanity.
Anti-fascist demonstrators outnumbered far-right supporters more than 20 to one in Denmark as an English Defence League-led attempt to form a pan-European movement was humiliated.
Estimates suggested as few as 160 defence league members from several countries gathered at the inaugural far-right summit in Aarhus for the European counter-jihad meeting, devised to “send a clear message to the leaders of Europe” that Islamism would not be tolerated.
EDL leader Tommy Robinson admitted only 15 supporters from England made the trip, despite earlier speculation that hundreds might attend. In comparison, an anti-fascist demonstration in the same city to protest against the arrival of the EDL attracted up to 4,000 people.
Fears of violence had seen local police mount their biggest operation on the Jutland peninsula with the tense atmosphere amplified by the start of the trial this month of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist and anti-Islamist who confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July.
A cohort of the Norwegian Defence League travelled to Aarhus. Although none condoned Breivik’s actions, some said they shared his frustrations. One, who would be named only as Simon, from eastern Norway, said: “He had some important points. There are people who share his thinking, if not his methods.”
The low turnout in Aarhus is in fact the second time the EDL has travelled abroad to try to forge alliances. Its first attempt, in Amsterdam in 2010, was widely dismissed as a “damp squib” attracting about 60 supporters who were met with fierce opposition from Ajax football fans and anti-racist supporters. Robinson, the main attraction at the Aarhus summit, was unrepentant despite even fewer of his followers appearing, saying: “Just wait until there are hundreds of us coming in.”
Picture: EDL leader Stephen Lennon addresses the rather thin ranks of the European “counter-jihad” movement. EDL second-in-command Kevin Carroll is on the left wearing the T-shirt proclaiming that the EDL hates Nazis – a message just ever so slightly undermined by the fact that the individual on the right is former BNP organiser and bodyguard to Nick Griffin, Stuart Bates.
Update: See also “Far right militants fail to strike blow against Islam on their Danish awayday”, Observer, 1 April 2012
Update 3: Over at Atlas Shrugs mad Pamela Geller has reproduced the speech delivered by Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe at the Aarhus rally. Some excerpts:
Most of us here today know we are in a war. A war that has been fought for centuries. Even those who have not yet realised that we are in a war know we face a big enemy that plans to rule the world. This enemy of freedom is called Islam and Muslims are its soldiers….
Islam is not a religion. It is the world’s biggest hate group. Muslims choose to be members of this hate group….
Islam is in reality a political party because it has its own manifesto to rule the world. Islam is a dictatorship. Its manifesto crushes all freedom. It dictates how people should behave for every second of the day.
Islam is the opposite of freedom, just as communism is. But Islam is worse than communism. It is communism with a vicious, violent god attached. This so-called god commands Muslims to make war on the Kuffar who live around them….
The Koran should be banned for being a manual of hate, just as some European countries have banned Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf means “My struggle”. Jihad also means “My struggle”. The difference is for Muslims, the struggle is to make Islam rule the world.
Both Mein Kampf and the Koran are full of Jew-hating…. Recently we saw in Toulouse just what Islam’s Jew-hatred brings to Europe. 70% of attacks on Jews in France are done by Muslims. And this is being repeated across Europe….
Every mosque being built must be protested against. Not only must protests be held outside mosques, but also the building companies making the mosques. Also the councils allowing mosques to be built.
Whenever a woman, or even worse, a child is raped, we must protest outside the mosque closest to where it happened…. The media must be challenged to report our protests or we will accuse them of supporting the violence of the world’s biggest hate group. Islam.
All anti-Islam groups must work together to defeat our enemy and to win this war.
A great article by Bob Pitt on more DailyMail Islamophobia. What’s most revealing and egregious is the clear lack of concern the Daily Mail has for factual accuracy, they will do anything it seems to demonize Islam and Muslims:
Here is a classic piece of Islamophobic reporting by the Daily Mail, featuring the paper’s usual contempt for factual accuracy when it comes to coverage of the Muslim community.
Headlined “More than two thirds of young British Muslims believe ‘honour’ violence is acceptable, survey reveals”, the article begins: “Most young British Muslims support violence against women who ‘dishonour’ their families, a Panorama investigation will claim today.”
In reality the Panorama documentary Britain’s Crimes of Honour does nothing of the sort. The ComRes poll commissioned by Panorama, to which the Mail’s scaremongering headline refers, found that 69% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “Families should live according to the concept of ‘honour’, or ‘Izzat’”. That particular question made no reference at all to violence. Furthermore, the poll was conducted among British Asians of various faith communities. 70% of Muslim respondents said they agreed with living according to the concept of honour, but so did 79% of Sikhs, 64% of Hindus and 62% of Christians.
What the Panorama documentary claims, based on the ComRes survey, is that 18% of young British Asians believe that some forms of behaviour by women which could affect their family’s honour justify physical punishment. And even that figure is based on a one-sided reading of ambiguous findings.
In fact only 6% of respondents agreed with the proposition that “In certain circumstances, it can be right to physically punish a female member of the family if she brings dishonour to her family or community”. The figure was also 6% for respondents aged 16-24 and 7% for those aged 25-34. There were more Christians (8%) who agreed with this proposition than Muslims (6%).
The 18% figure was arrived at by presenting respondents with a number of possible “offences” by young women (disobeying their father, marrying someone unacceptable to the family or community etc) and then asking which of these actions respondents thought were “reasonable justifications for physical punishment”. 18% of British Asians in the 16-34 age bracket said they thought one or more of these actions could be regarded as “reasonable justifications”, three times more than those who thought it was “right” to carry out physical punishments.
Neither ComRes nor Panorama saw fit to try and explain this anomaly, preferring instead to emphasise the higher and discount the lower figure. An obvious explanation for the disparity, however, is that respondents might think that their family or community could regard certain actions as reasonable justifications for physical punishment while disapproving of such punishments themselves. Which puts a rather different complexion on it.
What seems to have happened here is that the Panorama documentary makers set out by assuming that support for “honour” based violence is rife within British Asian communities but found that the ComRes survey provided little support for this assumption. So the poll findings were not interpreted objectively but rather hyped up to suggest that there is solid evidence of widespread support for such violence.
As for the Daily Mail, it couldn’t even restrict itself to publicising Panorama’s dubious claims but had to invent its own.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who is the biggest patron of Newt Gingrich's presidential bid, giving a reported $10m to a Gingrich-supporting Super Pac. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP
Newt Gingrich’s former, and Mitt Romney’s soon-to-be sugar-daddy, Sheldon Adelson recently commented on terrorism, and how he believes all terrorists are “Islamic” or “Islamist.”
Deputy Secretary General Khurshid Khan in a Sikh Temple
Muhammad Khurshid Khan was so upset at the killing of a Sikh man in Pakistan by a Taliban group that he decided to embark on a pilgrimage of service to Sikh and other religious places of worship as a form of penance for their actions.
After spending several hours polishing the shoes of worshippers at Gurdwara Sisganj in New Delhi on Monday, where he was part of a Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association delegation, Muhammad Khurshid Khan left for Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple and the centre of the Sikh religion, to clean thousands more.
He began his service pilgrimage after Jaspal Singh, one of three Sikh men kidnapped by Taliban militants in Peshawar in 2010, was murdered. The other two men were rescued by the Pakistani Army. Since then he has visited Sikh temples or Gurdwaras in Pakistan and India to declare his opposition to terrorism through ‘sevadari’ – service – to other religions.
Mr Khan said he was so upset by the killing and his fear that it associated his own Muslim faith with terrorism that he went to sit on the steps of Peshawar’s Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh. He felt a sense of peace, he told The Times of India, and resolved to visit other places of worship, including Hindu temples and Christian churches to offer his help.
“I am a Muslim, not a terrorist; I am a Khan, not a terrorist; I am from Pakistan, but not a terrorist,” he explained.
The Taliban had damaged Pakistan’s ‘pluralistic’ heritage – there are still Christian, Hindu, Sikh and Jain communities throughout the country – but it was unfair “to tarnish a whole community for the sins of a few,” he said.
He visited his local Gurdwara every day for two months, where he read the works of the Sikh gurus, including Guru Nanak, and polished shoes. In both India and Pakistan, shoes are regarded as dirty, and touching the feet of another is an act of self-abasement and respect.
He was on Monday night travelling from New Delhi to Amritsar after India’s Sikh prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, indicated he had no objection to him continuing his pilgrimage at the Golden Temple.
Paramjeet Singh Sarna, president of Delhi’s Sikh Gurdawara Management Committee, said Mr Khan’s actions had moved Indian Sikhs.
“There is always this underlying impression that every Pakistani is a radical but people like Khurshid have changed this image. His act has a message for the entire humanity. Although he as an individual didn’t hurt or kill anybody he has shown remorse for the innocent victims of the Taliban in Pakistan, including a Sikh, by performing community service. We are thankful to him for everything he has done for the minorities in Pakistan,” he said.
I think someone’s head just exploded in the anti-Muslim movement.
They have zero understanding of the differing histories, philosophies or political thought of the various Islamist trends within the Muslim world. To them Islamists are all AlQaeda or some other such offshoot.
Of course, the hatemongers will revert to form and declare that this is all just taqiya, they will be unable to explain why, when Ennahda has a clear majority and is in a position to implement whatever they want, they instead forge a national unity government. They will also be unable to explain why Ennahda says their position are in line with Islamic values and principles.
TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — Islamic law will not be enshrined in Tunisia’s new constitution, preserving the secular basis of the North African nation, Tunisia’s ruling Islamist Ennahda Party said Monday.
The first article of the new constitution would remain the same as in the 1959 version and it will not call for Shariah, Islamic law, to be the source of all legislation, as many conservatives had wanted.
The decision marks a break between the moderate Islamist Ennahda and an increasingly vocal minority of ultraconservative Muslims known as Salafis who have been demanding Islamic law in a country long known for its progressive traditions.
“We do not want Tunisian society to be divided into two ideologically opposed camps, one pro-Shariah and one anti-Shariah,” said Rachid al-Ghannoushi, the founder of the Ennahda Party in a press conference. “We want above all a constitution that is for all Tunisians, whatever their convictions.”
He added that in his opinion, 90 percent of Tunisia’s existing legislation was already in line with the precepts of Islamic law.
Ziad Doulatli, another party leader, told The Associated Press that decision was taken so as to “unite a large majority of the political forces to confront the country’s challenges.”
“The Tunisian experience can serve as a model for other countries going through similar transformations,” he added.
In Egypt, as well as many other Muslim countries, Shariah is enshrined in the constitution as the source of all legislation.
Under more than 50 years of secular dictatorship, Tunisia stood out in the Arab world for its progressive laws, especially regarding the status of women. Many leftists and liberals feared this would be rolled back with the victory of an Islamist party at the polls.
Ennahda, however, has always pledged to maintain the character of the state and formed a coalition government with two secular parties.
The decision, however, is bound to provoke a backlash from the Salafis — some 10,000 of whom demonstrated Sunday in Tunis, the capital, calling for Islamic law.
Despite their numerous demonstrations, the degree of support that the Salafis have from the broader Tunisian society is not clear. Ennahda’s decision to spurn their demands suggests they do not have widespread appeal.
The first article of Tunisia’s constitution states that “Tunisia is a free, sovereign and independent state, whose religion is Islam, language is Arabic and has a republican regime.”
Tunisians overthrew their dictatorship in a popular uprising last year that inspired pro-democracy movements across North African and the Middle East.
In October, they elected a new assembly to govern as well as write the country’s new constitution. Secular and Islamist groups have been holding demonstrations to influence the new document.
According to Fadhel Moussa of the leftist Democratic Modernist Axis, the agreement on the first article settles a long debate in the assembly and opens the way to creating the rest of the new constitution.
Hundreds of far-right sympathisers are holding a rally in Denmark against what they call the Islamisation of Europe, starting with a moment of silence for the seven people who were killed by an al-Qaeda-inspired gunman in France.
Saturday’s “European Counter-Jihad Meeting” was organised by the Danish Defence League – an anti-Muslim movement claiming to have no neo-Nazis ties.
It has drawn participants from several European countries, including Britain, Germany, Poland and Sweden.
The rally is being held in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, 200km northwest of Copenhagen, the capital. Police spokesman Georg Husted says 300 people are taking part.
Nearby, a much larger group – about 2,500 people – marched in a counter-demonstration, under the banner “Aarhus For Diversity”.
‘No Breivik ties’
The rally takes place a few weeks before the start of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who murdered 77 people in Norway last July.
Breivik claimed to have had contact with the English Defence League (EDL) ahead of the attacks, adding that he had “spoken with tens of EDL members and leaders”.
In response to the killings, the league condemned the killings and added that it had no contact with Breivik.
In a statement on its website, the EDL said it would not associate with any individual or group who did not reject “extremism” and said “racists, neo-Nazis and any other extremists” were not welcome.
It said it had called on participating groups to sign a memorandum declaring that they were “anti-extremist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist”.
“We will protest peacefully, but we will defend ourselves if need be. We will be loud, and we will not back down,” the memorandum states.
EDL leader Stephen Lennon said: “We hope it [the rally] will be the start of a European movement that will continue to grow.”
Various far-right groups have been in Aarhus since Wednesday where they have had a chance to hold meetings and discuss ideas.
Counter-demonstration
Anti-racist groups are worried that hardline anti-Islamic groups are mobilising and gathering support in Europe.
Police in Aarhus said the rally would be kept apart from an expected counter-demonstration by anti-racism campaigners.
Projekt Antifa, a Danish coalition of anti-fascist groups, had booked coaches to take protesters from Copenhagen to Aarhus.
Police Superintendent Mogens Brondum said: “The police can and will handle this situation. We will be out massively.”
Last week, several thousands people turned out for an open-air concert organised to protest against the far-right rally.
A statement issued by city officials said the concert was organised because ”Aarhus does not want to be associated with extremist groups” that represent “everything we want to distance ourselves from”.
Interesting article about the evolving “Obama is a Muslim” myth and the raging Islamophobia in the GOP, as well as the reality of Obama’s relationship with Muslims in both the US and overseas:
Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim generally practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet. Once in a while, they’ll surface in public to remind the news media that no amount of evidence can undermine their convictions.
In October 2008, at a town hall meeting in Minnesota for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a woman called Obama “an Arab.” McCain responded, incongruously enough, that Obama was, in fact, “a decent family man” and not an Arab at all. In an echo of this, a woman recently stood up at a town hall in Florida and began a question for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by asserting that the president “is an avowed Muslim.” The audience cheered, and Santorum didn’t bother to correct her.
Though they belong to a largely underground cult, the members of the Obama-is-Muslim congregation number as many as one third of all Republicans. Arecent poll found that only 14% percent of Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi believe that the president is Christian.
These true believers treat their scraps of evidence like holy relics: the president’s middle name, his grandfather’s religion, a widely circulated photo of Obama in a turban. They occasionally traffic in outright fabrications: that he attended a radical madrasa in Indonesia as a child or that he put his hand on the Qur’an to be sworn in as president. An even more apocalyptic subset believes Obama to be nothing short of the anti-Christ.
By and large, however, this cult doesn’t attract mainstream support from the larger church of Obama haters. Indeed, these more orthodox faithful have carefully shifted the debate from Obama being Muslim to Obama actingMuslim. Evangelical pundits, presidential candidates, and the right-wing media have all ramped up their attacks on the president for, as Baptist preacher Franklin Graham put it recently on MSNBC, “giving Islam a pass.”
The conservative mainstream still calls the president’s religious beliefs into question, but they stop just short of accusing him of apostasy and concealment. What they consider safe is the assertion that Obama is acting as if he were Muslim. In this way, Republican mandarins are cleverly channeling a conspiracy theory into a policy position.
There is a whiff of desperation in all this. After all, it’s not an easy time for the GOP. The economy shows modest signs of improvement. The Republican presidential candidates are still engaged in a fratricidal primary. By expanding counterterrorism operations and killing Osama bin Laden, the president has effectively removed national security from the list of Republican talking points.
One story, however, still ties together so many narrative threads for conservatives. Charges that the president is a socialist or a Nazi or an elitist supporter of college education certainly push some buttons. But the single surefire way of grabbing the attention of the media and the public — as well as appealing to the instincts of the Republican base — is to assert, however indirectly, that Barack Obama is a Manchurian candidate sent from the Islamic world.
Obama and the Muslim World
A succession of Republican candidates have attempted to run to the right of party favorite Mitt Romney by asserting that only a true conservative can defeat Obama in November. Most of them boasted of the same powerful backer. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum all declared that God asked them to run for higher office. Together with Newt Gingrich, they have deployed various methods of appealing to their constituencies, but none is more potent than religion.
Rick Santorum, a Catholic and the favorite of the evangelical community, has been particularly adept at using his soapbox as a pulpit. The president subscribes to a “phony theology,” Santorum has claimed, “not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.” Although he occasionally asserts that “Obama’s personal faith is none of my concern,” he nonetheless speaks of the president’s attempt to “impose values on people of faith”– implying that the president is certainly no member of that community.
In his attacks on the president’s spirituality, Santorum is cleverly attacking Mitt Romney’s Mormonism as well (a theology also based on text other than the Bible). At the same time, the suggestion that Obama is somehow “other” operates as a code word for “Black” in a race in which race goes largely unmentioned.
It’s an odd set of charges. Obama, after all, did everything possible during his first presidential campaign to foreground his Christianity. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches and assiduously avoided mosques. He never made a campaign appearance with a prominent Muslim. He talked about his “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ.
The day after he clinched the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, he gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in which he reaffirmed that he was “a true friend of Israel.” Although he would occasionally mention his Muslim relatives and the time he spent in Indonesia as a child, he generally did whatever he could to emphasize only two out of the three major monotheisms.
As president, Obama has certainly “reached out” to the Muslim world. In Cairo, in June 2009, he spoke of seeking “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”
That new beginning, however, has yet to come. At home, for example, the Obama administration provided federal funds that the New York City Police Department then used to expand its surveillance of Muslim American neighborhoods. (Even the CIA was involved in this “human mapping” project.) The FBI has spent the Obama years rounding up suspected Muslim terrorists in operations that flirt dangerously with entrapment. The administration has expanded the no-fly list, though because the list is secret it’s difficult to know whether Muslim-Americans are specifically profiled. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that they are.
The administration’s record internationally is even more disappointing. The conduct of U.S. troops in Afghanistan — the night raids, massacres (including the recent murders of 16 Afghan villagers), and the Qur’an burnings — have enraged local Muslims. Obama has expanded the CIA’s drone air campaign by a considerable margin in the Pakistani borderlands. Civilian casualties, overwhelmingly Muslim, continue to occur there and in other “overseas contingency operations” as U.S. Special Operations Forces have dramatically expanded their activities in the Muslim world.
Despite right-wing charges, Obama has maintained a tight relationship with Israel and the Israeli leadership. As former New Republiceditor Peter Beinart concludes, “The story of Obama’s relationship to [Prime Minister] Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies is, fundamentally, a story of acquiescence.”
It’s no surprise, then, that surveys in six Middle East countries taken just before and two months after the Cairo speech in 2009, the Brookings Institution and Zogby International discoveredthat the number of respondents optimistic about the president’s approach to the region had suffered a dramatic drop: from 51% to 16%. A 2011 Pew poll found that U.S. favorability ratings had continued their slide in Jordan (to 13%), Pakistan (12%), and Turkey (10%).
Our friendly neighbors to the north seem to have been infected with the same xenophobic, jingoistic, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric sweeping the USA. (H/T: JB)
More than half of all Canadians believe Muslims can’t be trusted and nearly as many believe discrimination against Muslims is “mainly their fault,” say the results of a new national survey released before Wednesday’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The online poll of 1,522 Canadians, commissioned by the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and Toronto-based Canadian Race Relations Foundation, also highlights how Canadians see the Internet as by far the leading conduit for racism in the country.
ACS executive director Jack Jedwab described the results as a “disturbing” sign that racism not only remains a problem in the country but that many Canadians feel comfortable holding transparently discriminatory views, then saying things like: “If we feel this way about you, it’s your fault.”
Ayman Al-Yassini, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said the findings provide more reasons to promote better inter-faith and inter-cultural relations and to “build bridges among different communities” in Canada to combat discrimination.
Asked if Muslims can be trusted, a countrywide total of 52 per cent of respondents said either “not at all” or only “a little.” Conversely, 48 per cent of those surveyed said they trusted Muslims “a lot” or “somewhat.”
No other group asked about in the survey registered such low levels of trustworthiness.
On the question of who deserves blame for such negative feelings, Muslims again fared significantly worse than other groups in Canadian society.
Forty-two per cent of respondents said they agreed (either “strongly” or “somewhat”) with the statement: “If there is discrimination against Muslims, it is mainly their fault.”
By comparison, 36 per cent of those surveyed said aboriginal Canadians were mainly responsible for any discrimination directed toward them, while respondents considered Jewish Canadians (26 per cent), homosexual Canadians (20 per cent) and Black Canadians (19 per cent) less responsible for the discrimination they suffer.
Israeli journalist Yossi Gurvitz describes himself as a former Orthodox Jew who claims to have seen the “light” and turned atheist at the age of 17. We are unfamiliar with his work but received this tip from a reader regarding one of his recent articles.
It is titled, IDF Colonel-rabbi implies: Rape is permitted in war. Colonel Eyal Qarim was questioned, (seemingly while not in uniform) about whether rape is permitted in war, and his answer implied that it was allowed.
Now I am unfamiliar with halacha or Jewish law, but my guess is it is a system as varied and expansive as Sharia’. Most likely you can find any opinion under the sun within halacha and so I am sure many will insist that the opinion proffered by the IDF Rabbi is not the only one, and is not the position of the IDF.
However, looking at the question and answer it exposes a troubling indication that an IDF Colonel Rabbi who was once being considered for the position of Chief Rabbi held the view that “rape is permitted in war.” More over it is not the first time that extremely problematic views have been expressed by influential IDF Rabbis.
It also brings us back to the question, “what if they were Muslim?” If a prominent Muslim scholar had offered such an opinion one can be assured that it would be all over MEMRI.
Gurvitz omitted the whole question from the reader to the Rabbi, but we provide an approximate translation via. Google for context:
There have been various wars between nations, such as the First World War, for example, different nations fought each other, and no one was particularly good for the Jews or bad for the Jews…
But if they had captured a village and there were Jews and Jewish girls were raped, it is considered, rightly, a disaster and tragedy to the girl and family.
If yes, rape in war is considered a shocker. How, then was I told that a long, beautiful woman is allowed, according to some authorities, even before the process described in the Torah, I mean, surrender and lay with it created, and only then take her home, etc.?
This seems contradictory. After all, if rape is considered a civil war and not something shocking, why, apparently, Jews allowed?
Is it allowed in our days [sic] for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape girls during a fight, or is such a thing forbidden?
Now it’s very clear that the questioner is asking whether or not rape is allowed in war time. This is the answer that Rabbi Qarim gave (translation via. Gorvitz):
“The wars of Israel […] are mitzvah wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is “erased” for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability […]
As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot in the original – YZG), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha’ra in the original -YZG), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.”
Gorvitz comments on this:
Wow. Herein lies a hornet’s nest. The first is that according to Qarim, the rape of female prisoners is not just permitted, it is also essential to war; the success of the whole at war relies on it.
….
Another problem is that Qarim invokes here the usual apologetics of those who speak of “Jewish morality”: he claims war is a conflict between nations, not individuals, and that the individual has no importance at war. The raped woman is not a woman, is not a person, has no feelings and if she feels pain it is unimportant: she is not a woman or a person, just an individual of an enemy tribe whose misfortune was to be captured. Furthermore, Qarim says that rape during wartime is immoral if carried out by a rival tribe – but all Jewish wars are, by definition, mitzvah wars. If the rape of the defenseless is part and parcel of “Jewish morality,” it’s not hard to reach the conclusion it is inferior to all modern morality systems. It is also worth noting (Hebrew) that “Jewish morality” is a by-product of German blood and iron romanticism.
Yet a third problem is that, essentially, Qarim says there is nothing which may be prohibited in war, if it is done “for the success of the whole.” We know that the killing of armed combatants is permitted (this is, after all, the essence of war), and we now learn that, for His Blessed Name, the rape of women is also permitted. Then we must ask ourselves whether it is also permitted, for the sake of victory, to also kill unarmed people. Children, for instance, who we have good reason to think may seek one day vengeance for the death of their fathers and brothers and the torturing of their mothers and sisters. The notorious book “Torat Ha’Melekh” answered in the affirmative; it would be interesting to know what Qarim thinks, and whether there is anything he thinks a Jewish soldier ought not to do for victory.
But the real problem here is that Eyal Qarim is an IDF colonel (Aluf Mishneh), and is a senior officer in the Military Rabbinate, i.e. is in a senior position in the IDF religious edicts apparatus. I’ve sent the following questions to the IDF Spokesman:
Is the rape of women during wartime agreeable to the IDF Ethics Code?
If not, why does a prominent military rabbi promote it?
If not, does the IDF intend to end the service of Col. Qarim, or bring charges against him?
How does the IDF Spokesman intend to deal with the anticipated damage to its image in the international arena, resulting from Col. Qarim’s ruling?
Frankly, I did not expect an answer, but surprisingly enough an enraged officer from IDF Spokesman New Media Unit called me. His official response was that Qarim was not an officer in active service when he wrote that ruling, and furthermore that my question “disrespects the IDF, the State of Israel and the Jewish religion,” and hence his unit will no longer answer my questions.
I told him that, as an Israeli citizen, I considered Col. Qarim to be a ticking time bomb, which will blow up in the IDF’s face should a soldier rape an enemy woman: it would automatically be seen as official policy. I told him this happened in the past. He vehemently denied it, and wouldn’t listen.
I think that the fact that Qarim was on hiatus at the time – earlier he was the religious officer of a crack unit, Sayeret Matkal (commando unit) – is unimportant. What is important is that the Military Rabbinate chose to re-call an officer who wrote such a ruling to active service. Qarim was briefly considered a candidate for the position of the Chief Military Rabbi. This is the face of the IDF in 2012, and this is the face of the rabbis it chooses to employ. There are certainly more humane rabbis than Qarim; yet somehow these are not the rabbis who are promoted.
The security services in Germany are scrambling to track down and arrest far-right fugitives and Germany’s federal and state interior ministers have announced they are taking concrete steps towards banning the country’s far right National Democratic Party, the NPD.
This comes after a public outcry following revelations in November that a neo-Nazi cell had apparently been able to go on a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders over several years, under the noses of the German intelligence services.
The group of three are being held responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.
Yet the existence of the group, dubbed the Zwickau cell after the name of the town where they spent most of their time in hiding, only came to light in November when two of its members died in an apparent joint suicide or murder-suicide and the third handed herself in to the authorities.
The NPD has been linked to the group, though the allegations have yet to be accepted in a court of law.
The trio had made a DVD in which they boasted of the killings and said they had acted to serve the German nation and its people, describing themselves as the National Socialist Underground – echoing the national socialism (Nazism) of Hitler’s Germany.
The story of the killers has dominated headlines in Germany for months now and given rise to one of the biggest scandals in post-war Germany.
It turns out intelligence agencies had had the group under surveillance for years, and even found a bomb-making factory in their garage back in 1998.
So why were the trio not stopped earlier? Why were they allowed to disappear and then stay underground? And why was it that security services blamed the murders on the Turkish mafia at the time? A right-wing motive was never investigated.
The failures have prompted some to ask whether there is more than incompetence to blame, whether Germany’s police and security services contain elements sympathetic to the far right – an accusation the institutions vehemently deny.
A parliamentary inquiry is currently under way into their activities, and Newsnight has seen a secret internal report revealing serious blunders by law enforcement agencies.
Police limitationsWhen we spoke to Peter Altmaier, a senior official in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, he admitted that mistakes had been made:
“You have to know Germany is a federal state, and competencies are shared and divided between federal and state levels… and because we have drawn the lessons from the Nazi dictatorship, we have very limited powers of police and security institutions.
“There have been hints and indications of right-wing extremism that were not taken seriously enough, and therefore we have put this very high on the political agenda.”
Another question that now worries many Germans is just how big a threat the far right poses.
Human rights groups say more than 180 people have been killed in right-wing attacks in Germany over the last 20 years.
Neo-Nazis have murdered more people in post-war Germany than any other single group, including Islamists and the far left. But this is not yet reflected in official data.
French politician Marine Le Pen is among European far-right figures courting the Jewish community. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images
A good piece, reconfirming what we have been saying all along:
On Saturday, in the Danish city of Aarhus, a Europe-wide rally organised by the English Defence League will try to set up a European anti-Muslim movement. For Europe’s far-right parties the rally, coming so soon after the murders in south-west France by a self-professed al-Qaida-following Muslim, marks a moment rich with potential political capital.
Yet it’s also a delicate one, especially for Marine Le Pen. Well before the killings, Le Pen was assiduously courting Jews, even while her father and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was last month convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying that the Nazi occupation of France “wasn’t particularly inhumane”. Marine must disassociate herself from such sentiments without repudiating her father personally or alienating his supporters. To do so she’s laced her oft-expressed Islamophobia (parts of France, she’s said, are suffering a kind of Muslim “occupation”) with a newfound “philozionism” (love of Zionism), which has extended even to hobnobbing with Israel’s UN ambassador.
Almost all European far-right parties have come up with the same toxic cocktail. The Dutch MP Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigrant Freedom party, has compared the Qur’an to Mein Kampf. In Tel Aviv in 2010, he declared that ”Islam threatens not only Israel, Islam threatens the whole world. If Jerusalem falls today, Athens and Rome, Amsterdam and Paris will fall tomorrow.”
Meanwhile Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party, which grew out of the Vlaams Blok Flemish nationalist party, many of whose members collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war, has proposed a quota on the number of young Belgian-born Muslims allowed in public swimming pools. Dewinter calls Judaism “a pillar of European society”, yet associates with antisemites, while claiming that ”multi-culture … like Aids weakens the resistance of the European body”, and “Islamophobia is a duty”.
But the most rabidly Islamophobic European philozionist is Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Austrian Freedom party, who compared foreigners to harmful insects and consorts with neo-Nazis. And yet where do we find Strache in December 2010? In Jerusalem alongside Dewinter, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself.
In Scandinavia the anti-immigrant Danish People’s party is a vocal supporter of Israel. And Siv Jensen, leader of the Norwegian Progress party and staunch supporter of Israel, has warned of the stealthy Islamicisation of Norway.
In Britain EDL leader Tommy Robinson, in his first public speech, sported a star of David. At anti-immigrant rallies, EDL banners read: “There is no place for Fascist Islamic Jew Haters in England”.
So has the Jew, that fabled rootless cosmopolitan, now suddenly become the embodiment of European culture, the “us” against which the Muslim can be cast as “them”? It’s not so simple. For a start, “traditional” antisemitism hasn’t exactly evaporated. Look at Hungary, whose ultra-nationalist Jobbik party is unapologetically Holocaust-denying, or Lithuania, where revisionist MPs claim that the Jews were as responsible as the Nazis for the second world war.
What’s more, the “philosemite”, who professes to love Jews and attributes superior intelligence and culture to them, is often (though not always) another incarnation of the antisemite, who projects negative qualities on to them: both see “the Jew” as a unified racial category. Beneath the admiring surface, philozionism isn’t really an appreciation of Jewish culture but rather the opportunistic endorsement of Israeli nationalism and power.
Indeed you can blithely sign up to both antisemitism and philozionism. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described himself as “pro-Zionist” while claiming that Europe has a “considerable Jewish problem”; he saw himself as simultaneously anti-Nazi and pro-monoculturalism. The British National party’s Nick Griffin once called the Holocaust the “Holohoax”, subsequently supported Israel in its war “against the terrorists”, but the day after the Oslo murders tweeted disparagingly that Breivik was a “Zionist”.
Most Jews, apart from the Israeli right wing, aren’t fooled. They see the whole iconography of Nazism – vermin and foreign bodies, infectious diseases and alien values – pressed into service once again, but this time directed at Muslims. They understand that “my enemy’s enemy” can easily mutate into “with friends like these …”.
The philozionism of European nationalist parties has been scrutinised most closely by Adar Primor, the foreign editor of Haaretz newspaper,who insists that ”they have not genuinely cast off their spiritual DNA, and … aren’t looking for anything except for Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power.”
Similarly Dave Rich, spokesman of the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors antisemitic incidents in Britain, told me that far-right philosemites “must think we’re pretty stupid if they think we’ll get taken in by that. The moment their perceived political gain disappears they revert to type. We completely reject their idea that they hate Muslims so they like Jews. What targets one community at one time can very easily move on to target another community if the climate changes.” Rich’s words, spoken before the murder of Jews in Toulouse, now sound chillingly prescient. The president of the French Jewish community, Richard Pasquier, judges Marine Le Pen more dangerous than her father.
French Muslim leaders rallied round Jewish communities last week. Next week sees the start of Passover, a festival celebrating the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt, when Jews often think about modern examples of oppression. Let’s hope that French Jewish leaders use the occasion to rally round Muslim communities, and to remember that ultimately, racism is indiscriminate.
• This article was amended on 28 March 2012. It originally referred to the Community Security Trust as the Community Service Trust. This has now been corrected
Robert George was recently appointed to the USCRIF along with Zuhdi Jasser. In the video below George is clearly unwilling to answer the question about whether or not he sees a contradiction between his stated position of “supporting Muslim rights” while at the same time serving on the board of a foundation well known for funding anti-Muslim organizations:
As we noted, prominent Catholic intellectual Robert George sits on the board of this foundation and hasn’t reconciled this position with his ostensible public commitment to defending the religious freedom of Muslims
Nick caught up with Robert George today at an event hosted by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and asked about this contradiction:
Here’s what Nick asked and George’s response:
FAITH IN PUBLIC LIFE: So you don’t see a conflict between your being on a board that has funded these things, as public knowledge, and your personal beliefs about this?
GEORGE: My record is very clear. I will not discuss with you confidential matters that go on in the Bradley Board. The Bradley Foundation does fund many, many different organizations. Some of them are run by Muslims, some of them are trying to advance good relations between Muslims and other American citizens and that’s all I have to say on the matter.
As you can see, George refused to discuss the issue, but didn’t deny the facts. He apparently thinks it’s acceptable to simultaneously stand up for Muslims’ religious freedom in public and participate in the work of an organization that’s trying to dismantle that very right. George might not see an ethical conflict here, but we do, and we’d be interested to see if the Muslim Americans he works with see that contradiction as well.
Here’s a reminder of who the people the Bradley Foundation funds, via the Fear, Inc. report:
David Horowitz
Described Muslims in the Middle East as “Islamic Nazis” who “want to kill Jews, that’s their agenda.”
Alleges that Muslim Student Associations at American schools “are Wahhabi Islamicists, and they basically support our enemies.”
Promulgates the debunked smear that 80% of U.S. mosques are controlled by radicals
Daniel Pipes
Describes his Legal Project website as “a source of information on ‘Islamist lawfare’–that is, attempts by supporters of radical Islam to suppress free discourse on Islam and terrorism by (1) exploiting Western legal systems and traditions and (2) recruiting state actors and international organizations such as the United Nations.”
Said “It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”
Alleged that there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”
Believes that conservative paragon Grover Norquist is running a “Muslim Brotherhood influence operation” to infiltrate the conservative movement.
A decade after 9/11, the West seems more bitterly divided from the Muslim world than ever. In Afghanistan, there’s been a violent explosion of anti-Western sentiment after last month’s Koran burning at a U.S. base and the slaughter of 17 Afghan civilians by an American soldier two weeks ago. But this hatred is not confined to distant parts of the globe. We’re witnessing a surge of virulent Islamophobia in Europe, especially in the Netherlands and some parts of Scandinavia. And sadly, this seems to have crossed the Atlantic.
In 2002, a survey of Canadian Muslims by the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations found that 56 per cent of respondents had experienced at least one anti-Muslim incident in the 12-month period since 9/11. Mosques or mosque construction sites in Ottawa, Montreal, Hamilton, Waterloo and Vancouver have been targeted by vandals. In January, anti-Islamic graffiti were spray-painted on the walls of the Outaouais Islamic Centre in Gatineau, Que. – the third such attack in four months.
These hate crimes are committed by a small minority, of course. But unfortunately, on both sides of the divide, extremists set the agenda. The news media, for example, inform us of terrorist attacks but don’t give much coverage to those Muslim leaders who regularly condemn them. Between 2001 and 2007, Gallup conducted a massive survey representing the views of more than 90 per cent of the world’s Muslim population. When asked if the 9/11 attacks were justified, 93 per cent of respondents said they weren’t – basing their arguments on religious grounds. This finding wasn’t widely reported and could, therefore, make no impression on the widespread view that Islam is an inherently violent faith.
This belief is deeply engrained. It dates back to the Crusades, when Western Christians were fighting holy wars against Muslims in Syria and Palestine; their brutal ferocity stunned the people of the Near East. Even though Islam had a far better record of tolerance than Christianity at this time, European scholar-monks depicted Islam as a fanatical religion of the sword that was violently opposed to other faiths. They were, perhaps, projecting buried anxiety about their own behaviour onto their victims – Jesus, after all, had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them.
As Europeans fought their way out of the Dark Ages, Islam, a great world power that dwarfed Christendom for centuries, became their shadow self, arousing in them the same kind of complicated resentment as the United States inspires in some regions today – an image of everything that they were not (or feared obscurely that they might be). This distorted image of Islam became one of the received ideas of the West.
During the 12th century, anti-Semitism also became a chronic disease in Europe. It seemed absurd to the Crusaders to travel to the Middle East to liberate Christ’s tomb when the people who had killed Jesus – or so the Crusaders mistakenly believed – were alive and well on their very doorsteps. Those who couldn’t go on Crusade would often do their bit by attacking Jewish communities at home. Jews were said to kill Christian children and use their blood to make matzo at Passover. This image of the Jew as child-slayer, representing an almost Oedipal fear of the parent faith, persisted well into the modern period and regularly inspired pogroms in Europe. Without a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism in Europe, the Holocaust would have been impossible.
We now know what can happen when unexamined prejudice is allowed free rein. 9/11 was a terrible crime. But if it has stained the reputation of Islam, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have equally tainted the image of the West. Islamophobia is also a violation of essential Western values: tolerance, liberalism and egalitarianism. Founded on fear and ignorance, it also flies in the face of Western rationalism. We have created a global market in which, whether we like it or not, we’re interconnected as never before. If we want a peaceful, stable and sustainable world, we have to learn to live with those we instinctively regard as “other.”
Karen Armstrong, a historian of religion and founder of the Charter for Compassion, received Simon Fraser University’s Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue last week.
By Josh Israel Newly released FBI documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, suggest that the bureau illegally spied on the religious practices of Muslim Americans, under the guise of community outreach. An FBI spokesman defended the information gathering as “within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity, whether investigation or liaison, including activities designed to strengthen relationships in various communities.” The ACLU explains:
The FBI’s targeting of American Muslim religious organizations for secret intelligence gathering raises grave constitutional concerns because it is an affront to religious liberty and equal protection of the law. The bureau’s use of outreach meetings to gather intelligence also undermines the trust and mutual understanding necessary to effective law enforcement. Additionally, the FBI’s retention of information gathered through “mosque outreach” in its intelligence files violates federal Privacy Act prohibitions against the maintenance of records about individuals’ First Amendment-protected activity.
But this would hardly be the first time the FBI spied on peaceful Americans. Here are just a few recent examples:
Iraq War Opponents — A 2002 FBI memo showed the bureau investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice, as the pacifist group leafleted against the Iraq War.
Environmentalists — The FBI improperly investigated two planned Greenpeace corporate protests, a three-year inquiry extending long after the protests were over.
Animal Rights Supporters — The bureau also improperly investigated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.This intelligence, while not useful for public safety, was at least better than the virtual restaurant reviews gathered by the New York Police Department’s spying operation.A 2010 Inspector General’s report lambasted the FBI for equating nonviolent protests with terrorism and for “false and misleading statements to the public and to Congress.”Of course, these groups are in good company. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was spied on regularly by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The COINTELPRO investigations into whether the civil rights leader might be a Communist including tapped phone conversations, bugs at his house, and even a 1964 infamous poison-pen letter warning him he would be exposed as a fraud. But nearly 50 years later, it seems perhaps the FBI should have learned from its mistakes.
On May 1, 2010, Pascal Abidor was riding an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York. His parents live in Brooklyn, and he was on his way to visit them. The school year at McGill had just ended, and he felt relieved and calm as the train rolled south towards America.
At about 11 a.m., the train arrived at the U.S. border and made a routine stop. A team of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers boarded the train and advanced through each car, questioning passengers. Pascal had made this trip countless times before, so when a customs officer approached him, he didn’t give it a second thought.
But Pascal had never met Officer Tulip.
After looking over Pascal’s U.S. passport and customs declaration, Officer Tulip asked two simple questions: Where do you live, and why?
Pascal answered that he lived in Canada. He lived in Canada because that’s where he was pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies.
Next, she asked him where he had traveled in the previous year, and he answered Jordan and Lebanon. He showed her his French passport (he’s a dual citizen) with the “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” stamp, and the Lebanese stamp with the little cedar tree on top.
That didn’t help. Officer Tulip immediately told him to grab his things and follow her to the train’s cafe car. Pascal gathered his luggage, but Officer Tulip carried the bag containing his laptop. At the time, he thought she was just being helpful.
In the cafe car, they were joined by five or six more CBP officers. Pascal sat across from Officer Tulip as she took out his laptop, turned it on, and asked him to enter his password, which he did.
As she scrolled through the contents of his computer, Pascal could only see her reaction. Officer Tulip signaled to her colleagues and pointed at something on the screen. She then turned to Pascal and demanded an explanation.
Pascal was now surrounded by half a dozen suspicious American border police, staring at photos – on his laptop – of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies.
Where had he gotten “this stuff,” Officer Tulip asked. Pascal explained that his PhD research is on the Shiites of modern Lebanon. This was not, in her books, a good answer. Finally, the officers told Pascal that he would have to leave the train with them.
“Take me off the train, I’ll walk back to Montreal,” Pascal offered. Given what he would go through in the next few hours, Pascal might well have preferred the walk.
Instead, he was frisked, with particular vigor around his genitals. Then he was handcuffed. Pascal winced.
As they led him off the train, the officers draped a coat over his bound wrists. They claimed it was to spare him the embarrassment of a perp walk. But as Pascal walked past the train’s windows, he tried to show the passengers that he was cuffed. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he wanted witnesses.
Pascal was then loaded into the back of a van. Oddly, as one of the officers tried to close the van’s side door, it fell clean off. It could have been a moment of levity in a grim situation. But Pascal didn’t dare laugh.
The Detention Cell
When they arrived at the Champlain Port of Entry, Pascal was put in a five-by-ten foot cell with cinder block walls and a steel-reinforced door. He was told to wait. He stayed in the cell for about an hour. Officers came in at random intervals to ask him questions.
“I thought I was going to throw up,” he said. “I thought I was going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.”
Pascal was then removed from the cell and brought to an interrogation room, complete with florescent lighting and a two-way mirror. He sat across from two CBP officers – Officer Tulip and a man named Officer Sweet – while another officer sat at the end of the table, seemingly in case Pascal got violent.
“They thought I was straight-up dangerous,” Pascal said.
Then the real interrogation began, an hour and a half of intensive questioning. Where was he born? Where were his parents born? What religion was he raised with? Had he ever been to a rally in the Middle East? Had he heard any anti-American statements in the Middle East? Had he ever seen an American flag burned? Had he ever been to a mosque? But the questions always came back to the same point – why Islamic Studies?
“I want to be an academic – this is just what I happen to be an academic in,” Pascal told them.
His answers seemed to fall on deaf ears. The interrogation continued. It was the same questions, over and over. They were looking for him to make a mistake.
They soon fell into a good-cop, bad-cop routine.
“He thought I was cool,” Pascal said of Officer Sweet. Officer Tulip, on the other hand, “thought I was the most evil person. She thought I was a movie villain or something.”
They claimed Pascal’s dual citizenship made him untraceable. They suggested he was attractive “to both sides.” Pascal was baffled. Both sides of what?
Finally, after about three hours in detention, he was released. But there was a catch – the CBP was keeping his laptop and hard drive.
Pascal was enraged. While he had been waiting in the cell, Pascal had given some thought to what he would say to the officers once he was free. Now, with his anger compounded by the loss of his computer, Pascal delivered a blistering speech, directed at his arch-nemesis, Officer Tulip.
“I ripped into her,” he said. “She just stood there, [then] walked away.”
When an FBI agent came up to him and attempted to apologize, Pascal stopped him mid-sentence. “I don’t want to hear your apology,” he told the agent.
Before he left, he was given his camera and his two cell phones. There was a scratch on the back of one of the phones, as if someone had tried to open it.
Taking Legal Action
After being released from detention, Pascal hitched a ride on the next bus with an open seat that came through the checkpoint. He arrived in New York at midnight. That night, he had trouble sleeping, as he would have for the next week or so.
The next morning, he sat down and wrote eleven single-spaced pages detailing exactly what had happened to him. The day after that, he began making phone calls to state senators and advocacy organizations in the hope of finding someone who would help him. Lots of them were interested in his case, including Anthony Weiner, the former New York Congressman.
Finally, Pascal settled on the ACLU. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the oldest and largest civil liberties organization in the United States. Free speech cases are its bread and butter. And they told Pascal that his right to free speech, protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, had been violated.
Two days after his first phone call with the ACLU, Pascal was in downtown Manhattan, sitting in a meeting with a team of lawyers. The first thing they did was to write a letter to the CBP demanding that they return Pascal’s laptop. The day after the letter was sent, Pascal got a call from the CBP asking him where they should overnight his belongings.
But at this point, the damage was done. When the laptop arrived in the mail, the seam between the keyboard and the outer case that led to the internal hard drive appeared to have widened. The warranty seal on his external hard drive had been broken open, too. The government had already searched, and, they later conceded, made copies of Pascal’s electronic life.
Pascal and the ACLU were incensed. His laptop contained intimate personal information: chat logs with his girlfriend, university transcripts, his tax returns.
The problem was, everything Homeland Security had done was completely by the book.
The Policy
In August 2009, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a policy that allows for the search and seizure of electronic devices at the border without reasonable suspicion. Under the policy, the DHS can detain any electronic device indefinitely, and copy and share the information it contains. Between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, more than 6,500 people had their electronic devices searched at U.S. border stops.
It was under this policy that Pascal’s laptop and hard drive were searched and detained.
Upon the enactment of the policy, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that, “keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States. The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers, while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”
The policy makes a point of specifying that, “at no point during a border search of electronic devices is it necessary to ask the traveler for consent to search.”
This struck the ACLU as deeply unconstitutional. So they and Pascal decided to sue Janet Napolitano, Director of Homeland Security, to challenge the constitutionality of the policy.
In September 2010, they filed their “complaint” against Napolitano, the legal document that kicks off a lawsuit. The ACLU argued that the DHS policy violates the First and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech and protection against unreasonable search and seizure respectively.
The U.S. government tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that while Pascal’s story was true, the government’s actions had not broken any laws.
On the question of the Fourth Amendment, the government effectively said that just about any kind of search is legal at the border, in the name of national sovereignty.
“Searches made at the border, pursuant to the long standing right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border,” the government wrote in its Motion to Dismiss, the legal maneuver for getting a case thrown out.
With regard to the First Amendment, the Motion to Dismiss stated that, “an otherwise valid search under the Fourth Amendment, does not violate the First Amendment rights of an individual – even a completely innocent individual – simply because the search uncovers expressive material.”
In other words, a border search is a border search is a border search.
And it’s true that all travelers are subject to a routine search at the border, whether or not there’s suspicion of wrongdoing.
But while the U.S. government argues that the search of laptops should be considered a part of these routine searches, the ACLU says these searches are more invasive and therefore must be held to a higher standard.
“It is different to go through someone’s shoes and contact solution, than to go through all the documents on their computer,” said Catherine Crump, one of Pascal’s ACLU lawyers.
Last July, Pascal and his ACLU lawyers went to a courtroom in Brooklyn to argue against throwing out their case. The judge has still not come to a decision.
Meanwhile, the DHS policy remains on the books. Laptops and cell phones continue to be detained and searched without reasonable suspicion at the U.S. border.
Pascal, for his part, hasn’t had a normal border-crossing since that May 1 morning. “Now, every time I cross the border, I get harassed,” he said.
In December 2010, he was crossing the border with his father. The border guards began interrogating him in unusual ways. “They refused to believe my dad was my dad,” he said. “If you saw my dad, you could not believe we were not related.”
The guards then searched the car top to bottom, and made the Abidors wait at the checkpoint for two hours.
“This is about lowering the threshold of what is acceptable to us,” Pascal said of his treatment at the hands of the CBP. “You can’t have rights and then selectively apply them.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell‘s choice of Zuhdi Jasser for appointment to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) can only be described as a farce. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser has amassed a reputation as a prominent Islamophobia-enabler and ally of anti-Muslim organizations (well known for their attempts to diminish American Muslims’ civil and religious liberties).
The appointment of Jasser undermines the USCIRF’s purported goals of reviewing, “the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.” The appointment of Jasser is a “contradiction in terms” because Jasser has been a useful ally to some of the most virulent forces working against religious and civil liberties in the USA.
There are several key reasons why this is so:
1.) Most problematically, Jasser allies himself with and receives funding from anti-Muslim organizations and personalities who work tirelessly to curb the religious and civil liberties of Muslims in the USA.
Jasser’s organization has received funding, to the tune of $100,000 from a major backer of Rick Santorum, Foster Friess. Friess was featured as one of the major backers of Islamophobic organizations in the Center for American Progress’s groundbreaking report,Fear, Inc.: On the Roots of the Islamophobia Network:
According to the Washington Post, Jasser received a $100,000 donation from Christian conservative financier Foster Friess, who is now bankrolling the super-PAC supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential bid. Jasser declined to elaborate on exactly how much Friess had given AIFD, though he said the financier contributed $70,000 to his organization in 2010 for a Muslim youth retreat hosted by the group. (Friess told MSNBC that he was backing Santorum because he is “incredibly versed in one of the number one issues of our time—and that is violent Islamic extremism.”)
Jasser told Mother Jones that the AIFD had accepted $5,000 from the Center for Security Policy:
Jasser said his group has also received a one-time, unsolicited donation of $10,000 from the Clarion Fund, which is associated with Aish HaTorah, a right-wing Israeli group described by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today.”
The Clarion Fund has released several films that warn of Muslim conspiracies to reestablish a global caliphate. Jasser is a Clarion board member and in 2008 narrated a documentary bankrolled by the group called The Third Jihad, which darkly warns that Muslim extremists are attempting to “infiltrate and dominate America,” a conspiracy implicating most prominent American Muslim organizations. The New York Times reported that the film was shown to thousands of NYPD officers as part of their counterterrorism training, which the police department later apologized for.
How can an individual who supports the curbing of Muslim civil and religious liberties at home be trusted as a ”commissioner” to review and analyze violations of religious freedoms abroad?
2.) In another blow to the religious liberties and freedoms of American Muslims, Jasser’s organization the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) supports state wide legislative bans on Muslim personal religious practice relating to: marriage, prayer, wills, etc. Jasser’s organization has published press releases “applauding” such legislation, which many, including US Courts have considered unconstitutional infringements on the religious liberties of Muslims.
How can an individual who supports the curbing of Muslim civil and religious liberties at home be trusted as a ”commissioner” to review and analyze violations of religious freedoms abroad?
3.) Jasser was outspoken in his opposition to an interfaith and Islamic Center in Manhattan, supporting efforts to block it from being built, remarking that, “This center is trying to change the narrative of 9/11 — to diminish what happened at Ground Zero.”
How can an individual who supports the curbing of Muslim civil and religious liberties at home be trusted as a ”commissioner” to review and analyze violations of religious freedoms abroad?
4.) Jasser’s advocacy and support for the NYPD’s illegal profiling and secret surveillance program targeting Muslims for monitoring at their houses of worship, businesses and universities is not only unconscionable but contradicts the USCIRF’s purported goals of reviewing “the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.”
Once again, how can an individual who supports the curbing of Muslim civil and religious liberties at home be trusted as a ”commissioner” to review and analyze violations of religious freedoms abroad?
The above points are only a snippet of why the choice of Zuhdi Jasser as a US Commissioner on International Religious Freedom makes a mockery of the legitimacy of the USCIRF.
The US cannot legitimately or conscientiously criticize other nations when one of its own commissioner’s is a flagrant violator of religious liberty at home.
Please take the few minutes required to sign this petition calling on Sen. Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner and the US Congress to repeal Zuhdi Jasser’s appointment to the USCIRF as flagrant oversight that presents a moral contradiction and a likely source of international embarrassment to the US.
Joel Richardson trying to make $$$ off of Islam and Muslims
Last time we checked in on the nutty Joel Richardson he was fear-mongering about the Muslamic “anti-Christ” alongside Zuhdi Jasser on Glenn Beck’s old TV show, looks like he is continuing such efforts:
As before, the prophetic tome will be published by Joseph Farah’s WND Books, and Richardson’s website lists a number of endorsements: Chuck Missler of Koinonia House, who praises Richardson’s “sharp sword of diligent scholarship”; Walter C. Kaiser of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, who tells us there is “much to commend this argument for a final Islamic Empire”; Daniel Juster, Founding President of Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations and Director of Tikkun International, who advises that “prophecy teachers would do well to ask if he his not giving us a new way to look at the prophecies of the last days”; Joshua Lingel, adjunct professor of Christian apologetics to Islam at Biola University, who judges that “Joel Richardson’s thesis cuts to the core of the issues at stake”; and, among others, Billy Humphrey, of the House of Prayer Atlanta Missions Base, who sees “a compelling argument for the Islamic Antichrist position”.
Missler is a veteran in the Bible “prophecy teacher” circuit, and he regularly takes partin events with WND‘s Jospeh Farah; Kaiser, by contrast, is an evangelical with a more scholarly reputation, and he has published in mainstream academic journals. Juster is a significant figure within Messianic Judaism; Lingel was featured on this blog recently when I discussed evangelical worries about “Chrislam”. The “House of Prayer Atlanta Missions Base” has a website here.
Richardson’s previous “Muslim Antichrist” books also come with blurbs; these are mostly by pastors and the owners of apocalyptic websites, along Phil Roberts, the then-president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (“this volume will immerse you in end times, Islamic style”). Both previous books were also graced with cover quotes from Robert Spencer. A number of endorsements are also listed on Richardson’s website, and include Walid Shoebat (blogged here) and Ergun Caner (blogged here).
However, Richardson is generous enough not to want the whole field to himself; he in turn recently endorsed a book by a certain Mark Davidson, entitled Hidden in Plain Sight: The Signposts of the Coming of the Antichrist Revealed.Davidson’s specialty appears to be the splicing together of Biblical symbolism with events of the past few years. Here’s a taste:
The First Signpost would certainly include the ending of the career of the rider on the white horse. That happened early on in America’s occupation of Iraq. Entering Iraq in March 2003 and toppling Saddam in April 2003, American forces finally captured him in December 2003.
Any end of the First Signpost would also include a withdrawal of the force used in Daniel 7 that made the lion stand on its hind legs and replaced its heart. Iraq, the former lion with wings, is now standing erect somewhat like a man, and indeed has a heart of a man, rather than that of a beast. That unnamed source of the force in Daniel 7 was the United States and its international coalition.
It should be noted, though, that not all Christian Right prophecy pundits are enthusiasts of the “Islamic Antichrist” theory – Hal Lindsey, who made his name by offering up a European Anti-Christ for 1970s evangelicals, reportedly complains that Richardson’s position is a “lie”. I suspect that 20 years from now Richardson will be pronouncing similar anathemas against prophecy books proving the existence of a Chinese Anti-Christ.
EL CAJON, Calif. — Shaima Alawadi’s family says they found the first note taped to the front door of their house on a quiet suburban street here. It said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist,” according to her 15-year-old son Mohammed.
Like many others in the neighborhood, Ms. Alawadi and her husband, Kassim Alhimidi, are immigrants from Iraq. Mr. Alhimidi says he wanted to call the police. But his wife said no, insisting the note was only a child’s prank. In 17 years in the United States, they had been called terrorists before, he said.
But last Wednesday, her 17-year-old daughter found Ms. Alawadi in their dining room, lying unconscious in a puddle of blood with a severe head wound. Nearby lay another threatening note, similar to the one the family found a week earlier.
Ms. Alawadi, 32, died three days later, and the police say they are still trying to determine whether she was, indeed, targeted because of her religion or ethnicity, calling that just one possibility.
“At this point, we are not calling it a hate crime,” said Lt. Mark Coit of the El Cajon police department. “We haven’t made that determination. We are calling it an isolated incident, because we don’t have any evidence of anything similar going on at this point.”
Isolated or not, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that many Muslim women in the area were worried that Ms. Alawadi had been targeted because she wore a headscarf in public, as many observant Muslim women do.
“The majority of the community that wears scarves are concerned,” Mr. Mohebi said. He cautioned against a rush to judgment before the police had finished investigating. Still, he added, “the community has gone through some hate crimes before, and the assumption the people have is that they’re going through one now.”
Just two decades ago, El Cajon, just northeast of San Diego, was largely white and English-speaking. But as wars in their homelands pushed more and more Iraqis and other people to emigrate, the Middle Eastern population here has exploded. El Cajon now houses one of the largest Iraqi communities in the country. Middle Eastern groceries and restaurants dot both sides of Main Street, while on the sidewalks, many families stroll by speaking only in Arabic.
Ms. Alawadi and her family moved to the United States from Saudi Arabia in 1995, after fleeing Iraq during the first Gulf War. They have five children, and, for the most part, Mr. Alhimidi said, the neighbors made them feel welcome.
Still, even before this month, he was already familiar with the kind of language he says was on the notes left at his house.
“Some neighbors, I say ‘hi’ to them, and they just turn away,” Mr. Alhimidi said in Arabic, with his son Mohammed translating. “More than 95 percent of the time, I feel welcome. But once in a while, people shout at you. They shout ‘terrorist,’ or ‘go back to your country.’ ”
Most people in town lamented Ms. Alawadi’s killing as a tragedy. Janet Ilko, a middle school teacher, said the news had come as a shock to students.
“It was upsetting to everyone,” Ms. Ilko, 47, said. “Our community is very close-knit. Our students get along very well. People have been here a long time.”
But tension between the newcomers from the Middle East and some of the town’s other residents was also readily apparent on Main Street, even this week. One woman, 30, who was at a park with her children and refused to give her name, called the city’s Iraqi residents “territorial,” adding, “maybe because we are at war with them.” She said her own background was Mexican, though she had grown up in Southern California.
That tension extends to non-Muslims as well.
“I’ve lived here for 32 years, and I’ve been told many times to go back to my country,” said Sascha Atta, an immigrant from Afghanistan. “Here in El Cajon, most of the Iraqis are not even Muslim, they are Christian, but people don’t know the difference.”
One of those Iraqi Christians is Lara Yalda, 18, who fled the country with her family in 2004, living in Syria for six years before coming to El Cajon, where she is now in high school. She said that last year one teacher told all of the Iraqi students to go back to their country, complaining that they took welfare and other money from the United States. That teacher does not teach Iraqi students any more but still works at the school, she said.
Ms. Yalda said Ms. Alawadi’s death frightened her.
“Yeah, I’m scared,” Ms. Yalda said. “I feel sad, because here it is a free country, and there is no reason to kill her. She has a family. So why they kill her? ”
The killing does not make sense to Ms. Alawadi’s son Mohammed either.
“There’s only three people that know what happened,” he said. “God, my mom and the guy who did it.”
Basic Fact: Wearing a hoodie is not an invitation to murder, as Geraldo Rivera suggested it was in the case of Trayvon Martin. In fact, if you think about it, St. Francis of Assisi wore a hood, as did many other saints and monks. In the United States, we don’t kill people for how they dress, but how dressing like St. Francis is a crime is a special mystery.
Basic Fact: And, by the way, there is nothing worse than being both a bigot and a f*ck-up. So for God’s sake leave the poor Sikhs alone. Few Muslim men wear turbans, so if you see someone with a turban and a beard, he is likely from Indian Punjab and not a Muslim. I mean, you shouldn’t be bothering Muslims either, but your sad ass is definitely going to clown hell if you shoot down a Sikh because you mistook him for a Muslim.
Basic Fact: And by the way, all this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns. In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US.
I am unfamiliar with this scholar’s prominence but he seems to have some impact considering this was reported in AlArabiyya. What he said seems pretty uncontroversial, it is similar to what many other Muslims have said and is a point that Suwaidan himself made “three years ago.”
Suwaidan also said that, “If Islamists start to become tyrants in the countries that were hit by the Arab Spring, we will revolt against them just like we did against their predecessors.”
Islamophobes will likely say this is “taqiyaa” or that this man is not following Islam as he should because you know they are the experts on Islamic doctrine:
A prominent Kuwaiti scholar and popular TV talk show host reiterated his belief that freedom must come before Sharia.
Tariq al-Suwaidan, who is head of the Kuwait-based Al-Risala TV station, and has his own TV program, was speaking at the al-Nahdha conference for a graduates association in Kuwait on Saturday when he said “If Islamists start to become tyrants in the countries that were hit by the Arab Spring, we will revolt against them just like we did against their predecessors.”
“Freedom is a holy right and is one of the principles in Islam … Freedom is to do and say what a person wishes but in a polite manner and without hurting others.”
Suwaidan who was later defensive over his remarks, took to his Twitter page and wrote: “I gave the same lecture three years ago, and [my views] do not represent the views the graduates association or the al-Nahdha Conference, but are my beliefs.”
The scholar, who said that it was liberals who eradicated slavery in Islam and not the Islamists, added, “a human being is free in his movements and where he wants to belong, and convictions are what move people, and not force…”
Suwaidan has spoken before on freedom coming before Sharia on his TV program three years ago and was reiterating his belief.
He also questioned how Muslims shun Christian missionaries in their countries while Christians allow Muslims to propagate Islam on their lands.
He also expressed his disdain on not allowing churches to be built in some Muslim countries.
(Written by Dina al-Shibeeb)
*I’d also like to point out that we are not familiar with Suwaidan’s views, and as one commenter has pointed out he has said, “In 2006 he demanded that the European Union, as well as the rest of the world, enact “a law that forbids the insult to religious figures and religious sacred opinions.” A stance which Loonwatch certainly does not agree or support.
CLEVELAND – A Middleburg Heights man pleaded guilty to putting a plastic camel with a noose around its neck on the apartment door of a Muslim person.
Christopher M. Sanford, 25, entered a guilty plea to interfering with housing rights of another based on the victim’s race, religion or national origin.
The U.S. Department of Justice said that on the morning of Dec. 1, 2009, Sanford took a plastic camel and a noose, and hung them on the door of the victim, identified only as A.F.A. The victim is a native of Jordan, who is Arab and Muslim, and lived in the Stonebridge Apartments in downtown Cleveland.
“The freedom of all Americans to live where they wish, without fear or threats based on their religion or race, is central to our way of life as Americans and Ohioans. This conduct violates those core values, values that we will continue to uphold through appropriate federal prosecutions,” said. U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach.
Sanford said he used the plastic camel because of the victim’s race and religion, Dettelbach said.
Sanford will be sentenced on June 18. He faces up to one year in prison and a $25,000 fine.
If Geert Wilders’ consistent and prolonged anti-Islam/Muslim diatribes weren’t enough of a reason to quit supporting him…
If Geert Wilders anti-freedom policies and attacks on civil liberties weren’t enough of a reason to quit supporting him…
If Geert Wilders xenophobic fearmongering about Polish and Eastern European immigrants to the Netherlands weren’t enough of a reason to quit supporting him…
There’s another reason: The defection of a senior Freedom Party (PVV) MP Hero Brinkman, an ideological counterpart who parted ways with Wilders due to his “autocratic nature” and “unqualified stance against immigration.”
At least that is what polling data seems to be showing:
The anti-immigration party would now have 21 seats in parliament, three less than the number of seats it won at the last elections, held nearly 18 months ago. MP Hero Brinkman, seen as a key ideologue, left the party earlier this week in protest at Mr Wilders’ autocratic style and unqualified anti-immigrant stance. However, if elections were held now, Mr Brinkman would lack enough support to gain an independent seat, according to the weekly survey.
The minority government of liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte depends on Mr Wilders’ Freedom Party for a majority in parliament. Now that Mr Brinkman has broken ranks with Mr Wilders, the conservative cabinet may have to rely on other parties as well, in particular on the tiny Christian fundamentalist SGP party.
The minority cabinet has already relied on Labour, the Democrats 66 and the Green Left parties for all those policies not supported by Mr Wilders, such as giving financial aid to Greece and bolstering the euro in general.
We can’t read too much into these sorts of polls, especially when one considers the fickle nature of polling. However, it is significant, in that it exposes not only rifts and cracks in Wilders movement, but also potential fallout.
What remains to be seen is how Wilders and company will react to all this. Will they ignore this trend or just plain dismiss it? Will they become more aggressive and double down? Will they tone down their jingoistic rhetoric?
In the meantime it seems Wilders hatemongering is continuing to have repercussions:
“I don’t just hate the Poles who work in the Netherlands, I hate all Poles” says Geert Wilders.
It’s not the real Wilders, it’s a satirical programme on Polish television. The Freedom Party leader himself hasn’t gone that far. However, his party does have a website where Dutch people can leave their complaints about Eastern European immigrants. It has been stirring up emotions in Poland for weeks, according to our correspondent Ekke Overbeek.
Szymon Majewski is a well-known Polish comedian with a popular show on the country’s biggest commercial station. In front of a backdrop of windmills, ‘Wilders’ begins the sketch by saying good evening in Dutch (goeie avond). The word goeie, however, means something unpleasant in Polish, so the stage is set. He then explains, in Polish, that he hates all Poles because they drink too much.
Another film, posted on YouTube, has an Asian man telling us that all foreigners, even Dutch, are welcome in Poland. Having nearly been run over by foul-mouthed Dutch people on bikes, he invites all Dutch people to come to Poland for the European football championships. “Poles are friendly and helpful. All the ugly, nasty, greedy Poles are over in the Netherlands”. He is joined by the same fake Wilders who says “Holland for the Dutch.”
Jokes about drugs, euthanasia and abortion follow. The final gag: “You may have a world famous Red Light District, but we have something better. Here you get screwed as soon as you step into a taxi at the airport.”
The Freedom Party’s complaints website has regularly made the news in Poland for over a month. The affair drags on because the Dutch government, which owes its parliamentary majority to Geert Wilders’ support, refuses to disown the website. Prime Minister Mark Rutte says it is an initiative by a political party and has nothing to do with his government. He was asked to appear before the European parliament and explain this stance but chose not to go.
The appearance of a Wilders clone on Polish TV shows that the controversy is beginning to affect the Netherlands image abroad. Until recently, most Poles thought of the Netherlands as a tolerant country, with good job prospects. The number of Polish people in the Netherlands is estimated at between 150 and 200 thousand.
(imm)
For those of you who speak Polish (there are no subtitles), here is the second clip:
We’ve done several pieces on the fake ex-terrorist con that Kamal Saleem and his buddy Walid Shoebat have been pulling for years now. No matter how much evidence or facts are shown, gullible folks who so desperately want to believe Kamal’s story continue to fall for it and send him money:
As Michigan state legislators considered a plan to curb illegal immigration last fall, they heard dramatic testimony from a man namedKamal Saleem. He warned the lawmakers that Islamic extremists were sneaking into the country with nefarious plans. “If we don’t pass this bill,” the fiftysomething Lebanese American told them, “we will be legalizing terrorism to be part of our culture.”
Saleem’s testimony was rooted in an extraordinary backstory: He purports to have spent half a decade recruiting Islamists in America—before finding Christ and laying down arms. “I came to the United States of America not to love you all,” he declared at a rally on the Capitol steps after the hearing. “I came to…destroy this country as a terrorist.”
Over the last five years, Saleem’s tale of terror and redemption has made him a minor celebrity among Christian conservatives. Part national-security wonk, part evangelist, he is one of a handful of self-described “ex-terrorists” who have emerged in the post-9/11 era to share their experiences. He has spoken in state capitols, at the Air Force Academy, and at colleges and churches around the country. He has been a guest on Pat Robertson’s 700 Cluband started his own nonprofit, Koome Ministries, of which he was the only full-time employee in 2009. Tax records show Saleem earned $48,000 from the ministry that year—and had a $39,000 expense account—while Koome took in nearly $100,000 in donations and grants.
According to his memoir, The Blood of Lambs, Saleem, who grew up in Lebanon, broke into the terror biz at the age of seven by running weapons—strapped onto sheep—for Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat (who kissed his forehead at a public ceremony, “his breath bearing tales of garlic and onion”). As a teenager, he helped run a terrorist camp in the Libyan desert at the behest of Moammar Qaddafi. He visited Iraq, where he rubbed shoulders with Saddam Hussein. In the late 1970s, he traveled to Afghanistan, working alongside the mujahideen and CIA spooks to beat back the Soviets. A Kansas City Star columnist skeptically dubbed him the “Forrest Gump of the Middle East.”
Saleem claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has put a $25 million bounty on his head, and that there have been attempts to earn it: After a 2007 event in Chino Hills, California, he writes in his book, he returned to his Holiday Inn to find his room ransacked and a band of dangerous Middle Easterners on his trail. Saleem describes calling the police to alert them to an assassination attempt. Local law enforcement, however, has no record of any such incident.
That’s just one of many of Saleem’s tales that don’t stand up to scrutiny. (Through a spokeswoman, Saleem refused to comment for this story.) Doug Howard, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Michigan’s Calvin College, first encountered Saleem in 2007, when he was invited to speak at the school. Howard quickly became suspicious: For starters, Saleem claimed to be a descendant of the “Grand Wazir of Islam,” a position that doesn’t exist. Howard dug deeper and discovered that Saleem’s original name was Khodor Shami—and that for more than a decade before outing himself as a former terrorist he had worked for Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. (CBN declined to comment. Focus on the Family confirmed Saleem was an employee but would not comment further.)
A former friend also sheds light on Saleem’s past. Wally Winter, a nurse in Albuquerque, New Mexico, first met him when they both worked at a hospital in Abu Dhabi in 1979. Two years later, he got a phone call from Saleem; he’d come to the United States and needed help. Winter says he welcomed Saleem into his spare bedroom, opened a bank account for him, taught him how to drive, and helped get him a job at the hospital where he worked near Oklahoma City. When Winter moved to the city, Saleem came along. “He had no money,” Winter says. “I had to drive him wherever he was going.” The two were close; Winter would bring Saleem to his parents’ home on holidays.
Winter recalls his former roommate as a devout Muslim whose yarns often lapsed into wild exaggeration. “He could sell swampland in Louisiana,” Winter says. “I really do not believe the story about the terrorism. I totally believe that he would make up something like that to either make money or become well known.”
A cloud of doubt also hangs over Saleem’s frequent speaking partner, Walid Shoebat, another converted ex-terrorist who runs a ministry and whose books include Why I Left Jihadand Why We Want to Kill You. Shoebat has offered contradicting statements on whether he uses an assumed name. An Israeli bank he claims to have bombed in the 1970s has said it has no record of the incident; a spokesman for Shoebat says that’s probably because the attack “caused no injury and minor damage.”
Wouldn’t authorities have some interest in someone who claims to have been involved in some of the biggest Middle Eastern militant movements of the 1970s and ’80s? Saleem claims that local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have “reached out” to him to learn about “the Islamist mindset and tactics.” But Kathleen Wright, an FBI spokeswoman, says she has “no information that Kamal Saleem has spoken at an FBI-sponsored event.” She could not say definitively whether the bureau had ever been in contact with him. Winter, for his part, says he has never been questioned by authorities about his former roommate.
Ironically, this apparent lack of official scrutiny may be the strongest evidence against Saleem’s credibility. As Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, puts it, “The FBI or the Department of Homeland Security don’t let people who are terrorists into the country and not detain them just because they claim they got the Holy Ghost.”
SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – The Sacramento Valley office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SV) today called on the FBI and local law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for vandalism targeting a West Sacramento mosque.
Vandals reportedly threw three rocks through a window of the almost-completed Masjid Aisha (formerly the West Sacramento Islamic Community Center) last night as two worshippers prayed inside.
“Whenever a house of worship is targeted in this manner, the possibility of a bias motive must be considered,” said CAIR-SV Executive Director Basim Elkarra.
In 2009, vandals broke into the back door of the previous mosque on the site and damaged religious wall hangings and a bookshelf that held Qurans. The vandals also stole items from the mosque.
Earlier this year, a man was sentenced in federal court for vandalizing a Madera, Calif., mosque in 2010. He placed a sign in front of the mosque that read “No temple for the god of terrorism at ground zero.” The man also threw a brick at the front of the mosque and damaged its facade.
Christians helping Jewish settlers cultivate stolen land
Evangelical Christians are heeding the call to help Jewish settlers occupying Palestinian land harvest crops. They are doing so because the “Bible” says so.
So the Bible legitimates the confiscation of other people’s land, driving them out and then aiding the occupiers and initiators of violence in reaping the harvest from land that they stole?:
PSAGOT, WEST BANK — It is a typical, even stereotypical, West Bank settlement scene: bearded young men pruning vines while enthusing about the Chosen People’s God-given right to this region. But in this case it is Jesus, and not Jewish identity, that animates these tillers.
For years, Westerners have flocked to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help Palestinians with their olive harvest, as part of left-wing activist groups like the International Solidarity Movement. Among other things, the activists seek to resist efforts by settlers to disrupt the Palestinians’ reaping.
Now, the settlers have international harvest help of their own. The young Christians working in the Psagot Winery’s vineyards near Ramallah in mid-March were members of HaYovel. Last year, this Tennessee-based evangelical ministry started a large-scale operation to bring volunteers to tend and harvest settler grapes. They attach epic importance to their work.
NATHAN JEFFAY
God’s Work: Volunteers come to the West Bank to further a Biblical mission.
“When you see prophecy taking place, you have the option to do nothing or become a vessel to it,” said volunteer pruner Blake Smith, a 20-year-old farmer from Virginia.
HaYovel preaches the old-school ideology of Religious Zionist settlers with one innovation: a sacred role for Christians.
The group’s members believe that the establishment of the State of Israel, its subsequent conquering of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and specifically the flourishing of agriculture in the occupied areas are fulfillments of biblical prophecies. Like many settlers, HaYovel cites a prophecy by Jeremiah that refers to the Samaria region of the West Bank: “Again you shall plant vines on the mountains of Samaria.” And like them, HaYovel believes that the settlement movement will help to bring the Messiah to Jerusalem — the only difference being that the volunteers anticipate a second coming.
But these Christians also focus on a prophecy rarely cited by settlers, who tend to place ideological value on using only avoda ivrit, or “Hebrew labor,” whenever possible. “And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and foreigners shall be your plowmen and your vine-dressers,” Isaiah prophesized to the Israelites.
Basing itself on this verse, HaYovel — which takes its name from the Bible’s twice-a-century agricultural jubilee — has made reverence of settlers into a central religious virtue.
“Being here, we just want to serve — and to bless the Jewish people in building up the land,” said Joshua Waller, a HaYovel ministry leader and one of the 11 children of Tommy Waller, the group’s founder and spiritual head. During a lunch break, a settler with yarmulke and sidelocks came to address volunteers. They keenly asked him to explain why the international community is wrong and the West Bank is not really occupied, and seemed prepared to accept what they were told. “We are not here to teach anything, just to learn,” Joshua Waller said shortly before the talk began.
To some of the volunteers, becoming settler laborers is a way of righting a historical Christian wrong. “This is a crazy time,” said Joe Trad Jr., a 23-year-old college dropout from Missouri. Over 2,000 years of contention, he said, “we saw Constantine and the Holocaust. Yet today, in this spot of the world, you have Christians and Jews for the first time with the same goal.”
The volunteers are a mix of people who, like Smith, had a mainstream Christian upbringing and were drawn to HaYovel out of curiosity; people from families that gave up the organized church to develop their own brand of religion, one they see as closer to Judaism, and some people who are emerging from personal crises.
Trad, a former alcoholic and cocaine addict, went through rehab and became a Christian two years ago. He described his volunteering as a way of giving thanks “for what the Lord has done for me in my life by freeing me from these addictions.”
Aaron Hood, a 21-year-old HaYovel staff employee, comes from a Tennessee family of 14 children that gave up on any organized church and started observing the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible according to its own understanding. The family observes Saturday, not Sunday, as a rest day.
I was on Real Time with Bill Maher last night and the most contentious debate occurred over the claimed power of the Obama administration to target American citizens for assassination without due process, as it did with Anwar Awlaki. Below is the clip of that discussion. One irony is that it was preceded by a discussion of hate crimes prosecutions (in the context of the Trayvon Martin and Tyler Clementi cases) in which both Maher and Andrew Sullivan insisted that Americans have the inviolable right to express even the most hateful and repellent opinions without being punished for it by the state, yet were both supportive of the Awlaki killing, an act grounded overwhelmingly if not exclusively in the U.S. government’s hatred and fear of his political speech. The discussion also included Brown University’s Wendy Schiller:
A taxi driver today told how he feared for his life after a group of passengers launched a racist attack on him before threatening to “take him down a side street and kill him”.
During the terrifying incident, father-of-five Muhammed Hussain, from Holme Slack, Preston, was spat at, punched in the face, grabbed around the neck and called racist names. His attackers even threatened to cut off his beard.
The Millers taxi driver, who has been in the trade for 10 years, gave evidence in Urdu via an interpreter at the trial of his attackers, Shaun Burns, 19, of Mayfield Avenue, Ingol, and Callum Tennant, 20, who lives with his grandparents on Marshall Grove, Ingol.
Preston Magistrates Court found both men guilty of racially aggravated assault and criminal damage to the taxi, which was kicked and dented when Mr Hussain pulled over to let them out at Lane Ends pub in Ashton.
Burns’ girlfriend Bryanne-Serrita Langham, 22, of Sylvancroft, Ingol, pleaded guilty to criminal damage to a taxi and making off without paying the £4.50 fare.
Today Mr Hussain, 36, told the Evening Post: “I thought they were going to kill me. This is the first time someone has been so violent towards me. It is out of order particularly being spat on – that was an insult. I believe it was because I am a Muslim. I was scared for my life.”
Newt Gingrich thinks being a Muslim is a problem and he believes that it should ‘bother’ Obama that people think he’s Muslim. He also blames Obama for people thinking that way.
Can anyone imagine if you replaced Muslim with “Jew” or “Christian”:
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is amping up his language on President Obama’s faith and his relationship with Muslims. Gingrich told ABC News Friday that that he takes the president at his word that he’s a Christian, but finds it “very bizarre” that Obama is “desperately concerned to apologize to Muslim religious fanatics.”
Gingrich said the president’s apology to the Afghan president for the burning Korans by U.S. soldiers happened last month “while they are killing young Americans,” referring to the two Americans killed during protests over the burned books. Gingrich said at the same time, the administration is “going to war against the Catholic Church and against every right-to-life Protestant organization in the country.”
Asked by a member of the press if it concerns him that a large portion of the electorate believes Obama is a Muslim, Gingrich replied, “It should bother the president.”
“Why does the president behave the way that people would think that? You have to ask why would they believe that? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they watch the kind of things I just described to you,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich said Thursday that “Obama’s Muslim friends” would not be reported on by the “elite media,” in a radio interview with Sandy Rios. Gingrich was asked about Rios called the Washington Post’s “two page” report on Rick Santorum’s ties to Catholic organization, Opus Dei. Gingrich used the question to say that the elite media was protecting Obama from any religious scrutiny.
“You have to understand that the elite media is in the tank for Obama. They are going to do anything that helps re-elect Obama,” Gingrich said. “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic Church?”
On Wednesday, in Port Charles, La., a man asked Gingrich a question and stated that Obama was a Muslim and a student of Saul Alinsky. Gingrich did not correct the man and later said in an interview with Fox News that he didn’t “have an obligation to go around and correct every single voter about every single topic. I also didn’t agree with him.”
A hijab wearing Iraqi woman has been severely beaten and is not expected to recover from a violent attack on her inside of her home near San Diego.
Apparently this was a premeditated attack. A similar note to the one found by Shaima Alawadi’s body was found by the Alawadi family earlier this month, but the family dismissed it as a “prank.”
A family friend, Sura Alzaidy, told the newspaper UT San Diego that the attack apparently occurred after the father took the younger children to school.
Was someone scoping the house out before the attack, waiting for an opportune moment to strike?
A woman’s life has most likely been taken as she is not expected to survive the gruesome attack. What motivated this individual to do something so grisly? If what Alzaidy told the newspaper is true, and we see no reason why it wouldn’t be, clearly we are witnessing an attack motivated by hatred and bigotry.
Islamophobes will try and claim another Muslim did this, but how then do they explain the note?
*I want to point out that we cannot conclude anything at this point, some facts have been presented, such as the note but we will have to wait for the police investigation to relay more information on this crime.
A 32-year-old woman was critically injured and not expected to survive after an assault in her El Cajon home on Wednesday, police said Friday, and a threatening note telling the mother of five to go back to her home country was found near her, a family friend said.
The woman’s 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the house on Skyview Street off Lemon Avenue about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, said El Cajon police Lt. Steve Shakowski. Police identified her as Shaima Alawadi.
“Based on the type of injuries Alawadi sustained, and other evidence retrieved at the scene, this case is being investigated as a homicide,” Shakowski said.
Police did not disclose the contents of the note. Sura Alzaidy, a family friend, said it told the family to “go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.” The family is from Iraq, and Alawadi is a “respectful modest muhajiba,” meaning she wears the traditional hijab, a head scarf, Alzaidy said.
El Cajon police Lt. Mark Coit said the family stated they had found a similar note earlier this month, however did not report it to authorities.
The daughter who found her mother told KUSI Channel 9/51 on Friday night that her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron. She said her mother had dismissed the previous note, found outside the house, thinking it was a child’s prank.
**********************************
Update I: Shaima Alawadi has succumbed to her injuries according to this youtube user who uploaded video of Alawadi’s daughter being interviewed:
Update II:EL CAJON, Calif. (AP) — A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” died on Saturday.
Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he met with Shaima Alawadi’s family members in the morning and was told that she was taken off life support around 3 p.m.
“The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” Mohebi said.
Alawadi, a mother of five, had been hospitalized since her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious Wednesday in the family’s house in El Cajon, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.
The daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said “go back to your country, you terrorist.”
Addressing the camera, the tearful daughter asked: “You took my mother away from me. You took my best friend away from me. Why? Why did you do it?”
Police said the family had found a similar note earlier this month but did not report it to authorities.
Al Himidi told KGTV-TV her mother dismissed the first note, found outside the home, as a child’s prank.
A family friend, Sura Alzaidy, told UT San Diego (http://bit.ly/GYbfB7) that the attack apparently occurred after the father took the younger children to school. Alzaidy told the newspaper the family is from Iraq, and that Alawadi is a “respectful modest muhajiba,” meaning she wears the traditional hijab, a head scarf.
Investigators said they believe the assault is an isolated incident.
“A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,” Lt. Mark Coit said. “We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.”
The family had lived in the house in San Diego County for only a few weeks, after moving from Michigan, Alzaidy said. Alzaidy told the newspaper her father and Alawadi’s husband had previously worked together in San Diego as private contractors for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East.
Mohebi said the family had been in the United States since the mid-1990s.
He said it was unfortunate that the family didn’t report the initial threatening note.
“Our community does face a lot of discriminatory, hate incidents and don’t always report them,” Mohebi said. “They should take these threats seriously and definitely call local law enforcement.”
El Cajon, northeast of downtown San Diego, is home to some 40,000 Iraqi immigrants, the second largest such community in the U.S. after Detroit.
Update III:Reporting from San Diego— El Cajon police are asking for the public’s help in its investigation into the fatal beating of an Iraqi immigrant and have not ruled out the possibility that Shaima Alawadi was the victim of a hate crime.
“We’re investigating all aspects of this crime,” Lt. Mark Coit said Sunday. “The minute you rule out a possible motive, you start to get tunnel vision. As of now, we have not ruled out any of the motives for why people kill people.”
Near the body of the 32-year-old Alawadi, police found what has been described as a threatening note. Police have declined to release the text, but relatives and friends say the handwritten note warned Alawadi to “go back to your own country” and labeled her a terrorist.
The family told police they had received a similarly threatening note several days earlier but considered it a prank by teenagers.
Alawadi was found unconscious Wednesday morning in the dining room of the family’s home by her 17-year-old daughter. She was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed as brain-dead. Her family decided on Saturday to discontinue life support.
Police said that whatever the motive, the attack appears to be “an isolated event,” not part of an overall pattern of violence toward immigrants.
Coit said police are unsure about the murder weapon but that Alawadi was beaten with a large object.
Alawadi’s husband had reportedly left earlier to take the couple’s younger children to school.
Alawadi and her husband had moved to El Cajon from a Detroit suburb several weeks ago. The two areas are considered the most popular destinations for Iraqi immigrants to the United States.
(H/T: JD) How should one even discuss the ethical implications of the “death penalty” when such a consideration is absurd in light of the USA’s abysmal record in prosecuting war crimes committed by its soldiers and leaders.
Usually those involved in massacres are treated with sympathy, given a slap on the wrist and or exonerated in one form or another:
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the death penalty is possible if a U.S. military court finds an Army staff sergeant guilty of gunning down Afghan children and family members. But it isn’t likely.
History shows that the U.S. military system is slow to convict Americans, particularly service members, of alleged war crimes. And when a punishment is imposed, it can range anywhere from life in prison all the way down to house arrest. Other factors can seem to play more of a role than the crime itself.
In the case of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the suspect in the March 11 Kandahar shootings, legal experts say the 38-year-old married father of two young children could face a lengthy prison sentence if convicted of the crime, which has threatened U.S.-Afghan relations. But on his fourth combat tour and with a head injury on his record – the sergeant remembers little about that night, Bales’ lawyer says – he might well be shown some leniency by the military jury, even if convicted.
“Political pressure is going to drive the push for the death penalty. Doesn’t mean they’re going to get it,” said Charles Gittins, a Virginia-based defense attorney who represents service members and has handled capital cases.
Of the long list of alleged U.S. atrocities – from prison massacres in World War II to the slaughter of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam – relatively few high-profile war crimes believed to involve Americans in the past century have resulted in convictions, let alone the death penalty.
In the case of My Lai, President Richard Nixon reduced the only prison sentence given to three years of house arrest. In the 2005 Haditha shooting of Iraqi civilians, eight Marines were charged but plea deals and promises of immunity in exchange for testimony meant no prison sentences.
Prosecution against Blackwater employees in the 2007 shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square similarly floundered as civilian prosecutors tried to assemble the case. Charges eventually were thrown out on the grounds that prosecutors mishandled evidence, although a federal appeals court last year resurrected the case.
Legal experts say a big part of the challenge is assembling forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony from remote, often dangerous parts of the battlefield thousands of miles away from the United States. And there’s an emotional component, too, in prosecuting U.S. citizens who have risked their lives in combat.
“Terms like `fog of war’ mean nothing legally,” said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University. “But there’s a reluctance to invoke the full moral sanction of criminal justice in these cases.”
The military hasn’t executed a service member since 1961. And like that case in 1961, in which an Army ammunition handler was hanged for raping an 11-year-old girl in Austria, none of the six men on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., today were convicted for atrocities against foreign civilians. All of their crimes involved the killing of U.S. civilians or fellow service members.
The military doesn’t even have the equipment necessary to carry out an execution. If a service member were to be put to death, the military would rely on the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.
Of note is that U.S. service members – as well as contractors supporting them in war zones – are subject to a different set of rules than civilians when it comes to capital punishment. Unlike in the civilian world, the president must personally agree to the death sentence of a service member.
Gittins estimates that since 1961, more than half of the death penalty cases involving U.S. service members have been overturned by military appeals courts. He attributes that high percentage in part to the lack of experience that military judges and prosecutors have in pursuing capital cases. Inexperience means making mistakes, he says, which higher courts use to knock down rulings.
“If someone does two (military death penalty cases) in their entire career, that would be miraculous,” he said. The question Panetta and others will have to ask, Gittins says, is whether pursuing the death penalty for Bales is worthwhile, given the likelihood such a punishment wouldn’t stick anyway.
Human Rights Watch in Washington, which opposes the death penalty, says it’s not clear the U.S. has the political stomach to follow through with the prosecution of war crimes involving its own citizens.
Andrea Prasow, the organization’s senior counterterrorism counsel, said there was only one word to describe America’s track record for punishing war crimes: “abysmal.”
She says she is most troubled by a lack of accountability in suspected abuse of detainees, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq and secret interrogations led by the CIA.
“Every time a case is not prosecuted, it contributes to a culture of impunity,” Prasow said.
Much of U.S. policy in recent years has focused on protecting troops from prosecution by foreign states. In the 1990s, the U.S. objected to the creation of an international court to prosecute war crimes, in part because of the potential that such a court might try to claim jurisdiction over American troops fighting abroad.
And while Congress in 1996 agreed that the standards for treating prisoners of war as outlined by the Geneva Conventions should be put into law, lawmakers revised the rules 10 years later under pressure by the Bush administration out of concern that U.S. interrogators could be prosecuted for alleged war crimes.
The U.S. also has insisted on maintaining immunity from local prosecution for its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, signing specific agreements with those countries that preserve the military’s legal jurisdiction in all cases involving service members.
While the U.S. track record for prosecuting alleged war crimes is spotty, some say the tide is changing.
In one 2006 case, four soldiers were given substantial prison sentences for raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her and her family. Steven Dale Green, a former 101st Airborne soldier, is serving five life terms after jurors couldn’t agree on whether to impose the death penalty.
Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor who writes frequently about the ethics of war, notes that many of the cases that are prosecuted are aided by other service members tipping off authorities.
“Nearly all of our military forces serve with enormous honor and courage. It bears mention that at Abu Ghraib, just as at My Lai, it was fellow soldiers who blew the whistle on the perpetrators,” Carter wrote in a Newsweek Magazine editorial.
We must start connecting the dots, racism, which is alive and well in the US is very much related to Islamophobia. The tragic slaying of Trayvon Martin exemplifies the point that the USA’s original sin of “racism” is still alive and well:
(AlJazeera English) by Linda Sarsour and Khalid and Khaled Beydoun
Washington, DC - Trayvon Martin was just beginning his life. Trayvon Martin was a son. He was a high school junior, with college to look forward to, a career and perhaps a family of his own.
Trayvon Martin was many things, but for George Zimmerman, he was just Black.
The teenager’s race was enough to raise “suspicion” and trigger the neighbourhood watchman – who possessed no training or authority, except for his racist prerogatives – to murder an unarmed and frightened teenager running for his life.
On November 28, 2011, no other colour but his Blackness mattered – and his rush for safe haven was intercepted by Zimmerman, and the structurally entrenched demonisation of Black men codified in our laws, perpetuated by our police forces and subscribed to by our friends and colleagues, classmates and family members.
Trayvon Martin is not, as many writers and pundits commented following his death, “a reminder of American racism”. For Africans Americans and most people of colour, racism, xenophobia and religious animus are common, if not expected, parts of their daily lives.
In the case of Trayvon Martin, a twin set of correlated racisms prematurely ended his life: Zimmerman’s view that a young Black male must be engaged in criminal or thuggish activity by virtue of his race alone; and the neighbourhood watchmen and police alike who execute the structural racism embedded in police departments and penal systems nationwide in the name of the law.
The myth of the Obama era
The election of President Barack Obama, for white America, signalled the shift away from America’s racially charged past. After 2008, white Americans have contended that the United States is experiencing the embryonic stages of a post-racial moment; Martin’s murder is a reminder of the fatal consequences of racism that makes the headlines. Yet, the intermediary steps – the institutional racism and empowering of people like Zimmerman – to police our communities either formally or informally are not deemed newsworthy.
Racism, generally understood as a conscious perspective, action or decision, is a salient core of the US’ history and present. American racism is interwoven into the country’s narrative, codified in its law and entrenched in its institutions. Its authors and gatekeepers were, and are, still largely white.
Whites seldom experience racism, either in its fatal, frequent, or latent form. This constructs the political ideology that the rest of the US has entered this racism-free utopia. Citizenship to this colour-blind state, however, is denied to African Americans, Muslim Americans and Latinos by virtue of a triumvirate of suspicions: crime, terrorism and illegal immigration.
However, whites are not the only culprits of racism. On March 10, an Arab American gas station clerk on the Westside of Detroit gunned down and killed a 24-year-old African American customer after a dispute over the high-price of condoms. Racially charged crimes and murders between Latinos and Blacks are all too frequent, and the sometimes-explosive tension between Asian American and Arab American storeowners is well documented.
Institutional and structural racism is still robust in the US. This is evidenced by the disparate incarceration rates of brown and Black Americans, the decimation of affirmative action and race-conscious legislation in the US, the crumbling public education systems in minority-populated communities and the all too common cold blooded murders of people of colour – both in the US and beyond its boundaries, whether by policemen, neighbourhood patrolmen or soldiers.
The ‘worst of a national psychosis‘
Kumar Rao, a defence lawyer for the Bronx Defenders in New York City, stated that: “Martin’s killing reflects the absolute worst of a national psychosis: The view that Black males – young and old alike – are inherently threatening and unworthy of personal security; and that the state’s commitment to enduring that belief is perpetuated and institutionalised.”
Trayvon Martin’s murder was avoidable, but yet perversely justified through the cold silence of the state.
Zimmerman was a neighbourhood patrolman – not a police officer – but the distinction is thin in this instance. Some police officers, from Miami to Oakland, exhibit the same reckless and cavalier behaviour as Zimmerman. What is more troubling is that police officers and entire departments routinely cover up racially charged arrests, the roughing up of individuals under custody and operate with impunity under the cover of the law.
Yet, for Zimmerman, he had no such cover. This makes this case more absurd and baffling, particularly because he was given police orders to “discontinue his chase of Martin”, as revealed by 9/11 tapes released on March 19. If Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watchman – a volunteer with no training – had obeyed the policeman’s order, Martin would still be alive today.
Zimmerman ignored those order, and took the law into his own hands; he has still not been arrested.
The importance of Trayvon Martin’s is also based on the urgency of the current socio-political moment. The New York Police Department makes every Muslim in the City, whether Black or Arab, South Asian or Latino, targets of illegal spying or worse – unjust convictions of terrorism based solely on their religion and ethnicity. The fact that the NYPD so far as to label Black American Muslims as an “ancestry of interest” shows how far law enforcement would go to justify religious and ethnic profiling.
Connecting the dots
Arab and Muslim Americans in New York are connecting the dots – whether it is the stopping and frisking of young Black and Latino men or the illegal spying on the everyday aspects of Muslims, people of colour are being targeted by the largest police force in the country. In order to defeat the institutionalised racism of the NYPD and set a precedent for the rest of the country, we must build coalitions, connect our struggles and in unison demand accountability for our communities. None of us will win alone.
In June 2009, a Miami policeman shot and killed Husein Shehada, a 29-year-old Arab American, after an evening club-hopping with his brother and girlfriend. Shehada, like Martin, was unarmed and posed no threat. Yet, the white policeman, Adam Tavss, believed that Shehada’s ethnicity substantiated the suspicion to shoot and kill.
The value of Arab life – whether nameless Palestinian children bombed by American-funded fighter jets or American youth profiled, questioned and incarcerated for frequenting a particular mosque – is spiralling downwards rapidly in the US and at a more accelerated rate in the Arab World.
Trayvon Martin is not a martyr or a symbol of racial injustice. Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Malice Green or Ramaley Graham, are all other young African American men shot down and killed because of the colour of their skin and countless others that remain unnamed. Most recently, Troy Davis shook the nation as another victim of a broken justice system that continues to fail people of colour not one person at a time but through mass incarceration and mass conviction rates.
Trayvon Martin was his own person and an archetype of our brothers, our sons, our nephews, grandsons. Trayvon is Mohammed walking down Atlantic Avenue, vulnerable to patrolmen wary of his beard. Trayvon is Carlos, donning Dodger Blue in Pico Rivera, mistaken by the LAPD Gang Squad as a gangbanger because of the colour of his skin.
Linda Sarsour is Palestinian Muslim American, non-profit leader, public speaker and community organiser.
Shahed Hussain, a long-time FBI terrorism informant Mother Jones profiled last year, has surfaced again—but this time, Google appears to have foiled his effort to identify a new target. Khalifah al-Akili, a 34-year-old Pittsburgh man, says he was approached by Hussain and another informant in January. Al Akili told the Albany Times-Union that after Hussain “repeatedly made attempts to get close” to him, he googled them. He found Trevor Aaronson’s August 2011 Mother Jonesexpose about the FBI’s massive network of undercover terrorism informants and confronted Hussain on the phone. After al-Akili explicitly asked if he was an informant, Hussain hung up the phone. Now al-Akili awaits trial on a gun charge (but no terrorism charges).
Al-Akili says became suspicious of Hussain because he was friendly, dropping in at al-Akili’s house and, after al-Akili lied that he had a sick family member, dropping off a get-well card.
Hussain’s involvement in two previous FBI counterterrorism cases led to convictions: James Cromitie, a 45-year-old former Walmart stocker from Newburgh, New York, was sentenced to 25 years in the headline-making Bronx synagogue plot. Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain of Albany, New York, an imam and pizza shop owner respectively, were each sentenced to 15 years for, among other charges, conspiracy to provide support to a terrorist organization with which Hussain claimed to have connections.
Hussain became an informant in 2002 after the FBI caught him helping people cheat on DMV tests. For his work in the Cromitie case, Hussain earned almost $100,000. Mother Jones contributor Trevor Aaronsoninvestigated the FBI’s informant-led cases, including those involving Hussain, for more than a year; he found that in a number of cases, “the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.”
Even with the publicity surrounding the Cromitie and Aref cases, Hussain seems to have utilized a tried and true formula in his conversations with al-Akili—claiming he was in the import business, knew people in a terrorist group, and wanted to talk jihad. “He said to me: ‘My people are involved in the jihad, I lived on the border of Afghanistan,’ trying basically to entice me. I said, ‘May Allah give peace to those people.’ He just continued to want to try to take the conversation in that direction…The people he entrapped were either extremely naive or stupid.”
In previous cases, Hussain has admitted that he would often initiate conversations about jihad when seeking out new targets. At Cromitie’s trial, Hussain described his approach: “I was finding people who would be harmful, and radicals, and identify them for the FBI.” Aaronson’s article includes this conversation from 2008, when Hussain told Cromitie he was a part of a Pakistani terror group:
“Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man?” Hussain asked.
“I’m both,” Cromitie said.
“My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly.”
“Who’s your people?” Cromitie asked.
“[Pakistani terror group] Jaish-e-Mohammad.”
Though there are no terror charges in the al-Akili case, the FBI says it discovered ”jihadist literature and books on U.S. military tactics,” at al-Akili’s house. The FBI claims that al-Akili was recorded talking about the fact “that he was developing somebody to possibly strap a bomb on himself” and according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the FBI maintains that al-Akili “expressed sympathy for the Afghan resistance movement in a 2005 conversation with a man he knew in prison.”
Al-Akili himself says this type of thing has happened before. “This is not the first situation that I’ve had involving the FBI attempting to entrap me…I stand out here in Pittsburgh because I do follow a more traditional role of Islam. They feel I pose a threat. I’ve never, ever said that I would do anything against America nor do I hold these beliefs,” he told theTimes Union.
Several thousand people turned out for an open-air concert in Denmark’s second city of Aarhus on Wednesday to protest against a far-right anti-Islam rally planned for March 31, officials said.
Aarhus city officials said they organised the concert as a way of showing the city’s tolerance and because “Aarhus does not want to be associated with extremist groups” that represent “everything we want to distance ourselves from.” Around 5,000 people attended Wednesday’s concert, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said.
Far-right groups from across Europe are scheduled to meet in Aarhus on March 31 for an anti-Islam rally organised by the Danish Defence League, a sister organisation of the English Defence League.
A spokesman for the Danish group, Philip Traulsen, said the programme for the meeting had not been confirmed but that it would deal with “the obvious problems caused by radical Islam.” In an email to AFP, he said some 300 to 1,000 people were expected to attend the rally, which he said would “probably be the biggest anti-Islam demonstration on Danish soil.”
A counter-demonstration organised by the group “Aarhus for Diversity” was to be held at the same time in the town of 315,000 people, located on the Jutland peninsula north of Germany.
Local police, who have requested reinforcements, “will be present en masse”, eastern Jutland police official Mogens Broendum said. But shopowners have expressed concern and a number of restaurants have already indicated they plan to close on the day of the rally, he said.
French far-right hopeful Marine Le Pen hit out at “Islamic fundamentalism” on Israeli radio Wednesday after commentators initially blamed European anti-Semitism for deadly shootings that killed seven people, four at a Jewish school.
Self-declared Al-Qaeda militant Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, was under police siege in the southwestern city of Toulouse after the triple shootings that sparked a wave of soul-searching in France about attitudes towards immigrant communities.
“The identification of the killer only confirms what I’ve been speaking out against for years – there’s growth of Islamic fundamentalism in our country that the powers-that-be have underestimated,” National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen told Tel Aviv private radio 90 FM in a live interview.
“Whole neighbourhoods of the suburbs (of our big cities) have fallen into the clutches of the fundamentalists, weapons are all over the place and foreign funding is pouring in,” she said, speaking in French on the Israeli station.
A spokesperson for Front de Gauche presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon has denounced Le Pen’s Front National as “vultures” feeding at the scene of the crimes. Alexis Corbière stated: “Throughout this campaign, yesterday as today, Marine Le Pen has had the same goal – to feed a Crusader spirit inspired by religious war under the theory of a clash of civilisations.”
American lobbyists make large donations to a foundation set up by the anti-immigration PVV, Hero Brinkman, the MP who left the party on Tuesday, told a television talk show on Tuesday evening.
Brinkman said he could not rule out the money being used to pay for Geert Wilders’ defence on racial hatred charges but declined to comment further on what the money had been spent on. Nor would he comment on the size of the donations.
The PVV is thought to generate significant funding from Israeli and far-right supporters in the US.
Because the PVV has no members, it does not receive government subsidies to run the campaigning side of its operations and relies instead on donations.
Brinkman’s allegation about the PVV’s finances confirms what had already been revealed in the Dutch press. Last year Dutch Newsreported that the two main US sources for the PVV’s funding were David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes.
Eric Allen Bell, the weirdo turned JihadWatch zombie was advertising about how he was going to debate a Muslim apologist by the name of Nadir Ahmed. I am unfamiliar with Nadir Ahmed, his past debates, level of debate proficiency or his positions but listened to it nonetheless to see what went down.
Nadir Ahmed accepted the challenge, knowing full well the deck was stacked against him. For one he was going to be on the hate-mongerers home turf, FrontPageMagRag. Second, the moderator was a hostile Islamopohobe; Jamie Glazov. Third, Eric Allen Bell was already slandering him on his facebook calling him a “Taqqiya artist” and “professional pedophile prophet apologist,” i.e. it was clear the debate wasn’t going to be fact-based or logical but one where Bell would try to slander his way to a self-declared victory.
To top it off the Glazov gang brought in Robert Spencer (By the way when will Spencer ever accept Danios’ debate challenge?), ostensibly to help the child-like Eric Allen Bell, because we know Bell is not only a poor debater who regularly reverts to lying but he is also plain…dumb.
As you can see the tactic blew up in the Glazov gangs face and for the most part they looked ridiculous to even their own fans, one commenter named Damon Whitsell noted,
I felt Nadir won a 3 on 1 and I bet he is gloating all over himself today.
Other such comments were magically deleted. The truth is after listening to this I believe an illiterate 12 year old Afghan child memorizing Quran all day in a madrassa could probably defeat Bell in debate.
Here is the debate:
Bell’s initial reaction to losing the debate:
Bell wants a rematch and is sounding like quite the sore loser:
I am not generally a fan of Press TV, as it is generally heavily biased or lenient towards the Iranian regime, just as Fox News is to the Republican party, as Russia Today is biased towards Putin and AlJazeera to Qatar, etc. However this program below with Muslim scholar Dr. Tariq Ramadan and journalist John Rees is a good one. It discusses how Islamophobia is a cover for war and racism, as well as the peculiarities of the French left and why it is unique in its parlay with Islamophobia.
JihadWatch’s anti-Muslim fear-mongering director Robert Spencer likes to selectively highlight the most egregious and sectarian statements by Muslims to further his hate agenda against Islam/Muslims.
In the wake of the death of the Coptic Pope Shenouda III he posted a piece about how a cleric named Wagdi Ghoneim said that the death of Pope Shenouda was a “relief” because the Pope caused “sectarian strife” and sought to make Egypt into a “Coptic state.”
To address that specifically, I wonder if the irony is lost on Wagdi Ghoneim, he accused Pope Shenouda of having furthered “sectarian strife” but by writing what he did he himself engaged in “sectarian strife.”
While there are small fringe groups of Copts who wish to turn Egypt into a Coptic state, trying to push this concept as emerging from the Pope, or the mainstream of Copts is similar to the “Islamization” myth that ironically Spencer and his acolytes regularly engage in. The Pope himself was a nationalist and opposed “foreign intervention” and stated that while Copts are “marginalized” in Egypt they are not “oppressed.”
That said, the main point I want to highlight is the fact that Robert Spencer is attempting to shift focus from the overwhelming support and expressions of condolences and grief from Muslims for the passing of the Pope. He chooses one cleric and tries to attribute it as the general feeling of Muslim Egyptians.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
High ranking Muslim politicians, scholars, clerics, intellectuals and lay people expressed their sympathy and sadness at his passing.
“His holiness lived and died as a loyal patriot to his country,” Parliament Speaker Saad el-Katatni, an Islamist, told a joint meeting of the two chambers of parliament Saturday.
Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the highest seat of religious learning in the Sunni world, offered his condolences to the Egyptian people for such a great loss, saying,
“Egypt has lost one of its rare men at a sensitive moment when it most needs the wisest of its wise – their expertise and their purity of minds.”
Egypt Mufti Sheikh Ali Gomaa also mourned the deceased pontiff as a great Egyptian and patriot, saying,
“His death is a tragedy and a great loss for Egypt and its people of Muslims and Christians.”
Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm and the party with the largest majority in parliament stated,
“The Freedom and Justice Party sends its deepest condolences to the Egyptian people and our Christian brothers over the death of Pope Shenouda III,” FJP leader Mohamed Mursi said.
Presidential contenders such as Amr Moussa and Ahmed Shafiq also expressed their sadness,
Presidential aspirant Amr Moussa said he was saddened by Pope Shenouda’s death.
“We have lost a great value and a pre-eminent pope,” said Ahmed Shafiq, another presidential contender, and a Mubarak-era prime minister.
Here is a picture of Egyptian Christians expressing their thanks and reciprocating the “love” they received at the death of their leader:
Egyptian Christians stand in front of a picture of the late Pope Shenouda III after receiving condolences from both Muslims and Christians. Signs read in Arabic (H/T: ZH): “We feel your love. Thank you, Muslim brothers and sisters”
In this Aug. 23, 2011 Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System photo, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 1st platoon sergeant, Blackhorse Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division participates in an exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Credit: AP Photo/DVIDS, Spc. Ryan Hallock)
Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales on March 11 to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including nine children:
† He was drunk.
† He was experiencing financial stress.
† He was passed over for a promotion.
† He had a traumatic brain injury.
† He had marital problems.
† He suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty.
† He saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre.
Et cetera.
Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.
Even when Muslims who engage in such acts toward Americans clearlyand repeatedlyexplain that they did it in response to American acts of domination, aggression, violence and civilian-killing in their countries, and even when the violence is confined to soldiers who are part of a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country, the only cognizable motive is one of primitive, hateful evil. It is an act of Evil Terrorism, and that is all there is to say about it.
Note, too, that in the case of Sgt. Bales (or any other cases of American violence against Muslims), people have little difficulty understanding the distinction between (a) discussing and trying to understand the underlying motives of the act (causation) and (b) defending the act (justification). But that same distinction completely evaporates when it comes to Muslim violence against Americans. Those who attempt to understand or explain the act — they’re responding to American violence in their country; they are traumatized and angry at the continuous deaths of Muslim children and innocent adults; they’ve calculated that striking at Americans is the ony way to deter further American aggression in their part of the world — are immediately accused of mitigating, justifying or even defending Terrorism.
There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type (meaning: as a deviation from formal American policy), there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible, something other than an act of pure hatred or Evil. When a Muslim engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another manifestation of inscrutable hatred and Evil, and any discussion of any other causes must be prohibited and ignored.
* * * * *
I’ll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks. For now, I’ll note two: (1) this Thursday, March 22, in Philadelphia, I’ll be speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, at 5:00 pm, on “Endless War and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism”; it is free and open the public, and event information is here; (2) on Thursday, April 12, in Ottawa, Canada, at 7:00 pm, I’ll be speaking at an event coordinated by long-time commenter Bill Owen, and in attendance will be the heroicMaher Arar; ticket and event information is here. Over the next few weeks, I’ll also be speaking in Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C. and will post details as those dates approach. Finally, this Friday night, I’ll be on Real Time with Bill Maher.
UPDATE: From today’s issue of Reader’s Express, the Washington Post‘s publication for Metro riders:
Can you even imagine what would happen to someone who wrote or published an article like this about a Muslim killer of Americans?
UPDATE II: I have an Op-Ed in The Guardian today about the removal by the U.S. military of the accused shooter from Afghanistan.
Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau’s more ethically murky practices
Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.
“They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did,” Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.
It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.
Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of “confidential informants” in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist “attacks” at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.
In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.
In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant’s criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.
Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. “The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed,” he said.
But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. “They don’t have the humility to admit a mistake,” he said.
Monteilh’s story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.
He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.
Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County’s Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.
Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southernCalifornia. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.
By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.
It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. “It was a bad time in my life,” he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.
Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.
Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. “Paul Allen said: ‘Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America’,” Monteilh said.
The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.
Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.
“Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: ‘OK, now start to ask questions’.”
Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.
He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. “The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say “jihad”,” he said.
Of course, the chats were recorded.
In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.
Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.
He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County’s Muslim population.
He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.
None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.
At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: “Kevin is God.”
Monteilh’s own attitude evolved into something very similar. “I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: ‘You are an untouchable’,” he said.
But it was not always easy. “I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist,” he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.
But he was wrong about being untouchable.
Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.
A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.
But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.
He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)
What is not in doubt is that Monteilh’s identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.
The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden “an angel”. That was Monteilh’s work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.
Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. “I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot,” he said. The FBI’s charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.
Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.
That has now put Monteilh’s testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.
The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.
But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh’s lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.
In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.
Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI’s use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.
FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh’s – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.
In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: “Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again.”
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.
@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.
For Steve Emerson, the danger is very clear and very present: A surprising number of American officials and institutions are in the tank to Islamic extremists and their handmaidens.
Emerson accuses the Obama administration of being infiltrated by radical followers of Islam inside our own country and throughout the world.
That’s right. Infiltrated.
Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, spent an hour last week with the Review-Journal editorial board and was accompanied by Elliot Karp, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas. In the short time Emerson spent at the newspaper, he managed to indict a number of law enforcement institutions and officers as patsies for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic extremists in our midst.
For one, there’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Emerson said the FBI is so focused not offending Islamist and Arabic groups with allegiances to Hamas and Hezbollah that it’s getting in the way of anti-terrorism investigations.
“The agents on the ground understand exactly what’s going on,” Emerson says cryptically of the bureau’s political atmosphere. When asked to elaborate, he replies, “I have to protect my sources.”
Forgive me, but I thought the FBI was doing a pretty good job on the terrorism front. Turns out they’re falling down on the job.
It’s OK, though. Emerson has confidence in his own ability to spot the terrorists among us. He brags that his sources are “sometimes even better than the bureau.”
He adds that his field intelligence was superior to the FBI’s in part because “informants are more likely to work for us.”
That’s not all. He also has the sneaking suspicion that a talk he was scheduled to give to a group of CIA operatives was derailed by the Obama administration. Who knew President Barack Obama had enough hours in the day to dispatch CIA Director David Petraeus to teach Emerson a lesson?
Then there’s Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca. In 2010, Baca was honored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR also actively challenges Muslim stereotypes and presents the Islamic side of issues.
“He believes CAIR is a wonderful organization,” Emerson says sarcastically. ” I’m not calling him evil, or fundamentally stupid, but he is in bed with the bad guys.”
Obviously, Emerson isn’t shy about pointing fingers. Nor is he simply a sign-waving conspiracy theorist. His allies on the right consider him a Cassandra who warns us about the dangers of Islamic extremism at home and abroad, and especially as it affects Israel. He pens op-ed pieces in major newspapers, is often quoted on television and radio talk shows, is cheered on the speaking circuit, and has a loyal following on his website. He is a leading firebrand from the school of thought that goes something like, “Not all Muslims are plotting terrorist acts, just most of them.”
He claims he is the victim of “a fatwa by NPR” largely because National Public Radio officials don’t invite him on their programs these days. But you can still catch plenty of Emerson’s opinions in a variety of media and networks.
Lest you think he’s just a right-wing extremist out to frighten people, Emerson repeats often that his work is dangerous and he has received many threats. He says things like “I’ve got to look over my shoulder every day,” and “If I had a wife and kids, I couldn’t do this.”
Certainly not. He made it sound a little dangerous just sitting in the room with him.
That’s Emerson’s problem whether you believe he’s full of facts or fudge. His hyperbolic rhetoric plays well on the fundraising circuit, but it does nothing to forward the understanding of complex issues.
The Middle East is a political tinderbox. There’s heated talk of possible U.S. and Israeli military intervention in Iran to halt its development of nuclear technology.
At the risk of becoming part of a vast conspiracy to silence Steve Emerson, that complex conversation isn’t improved by his shouts of conspiracy at the highest levels of our government.
John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
But she didn’t ban this hateful freak, and he promptly re-posted the comment — with the direct advocation “Kill him” edited into something a bit less direct.
This was the comment as it appeared yesterday:
Goes to prove the psychopathological hesperophobics, product of fourteen-hundred years of the manifestation of evil that calls itself both “submission” and a “religion,” are not gunna provide fierce competition for the sub-Saharan Africans (mean-IQ: 67) in the ‘If Brains Were Dynamite Would Yours Even Blow Off Your Bloody Kufiya On A windy Day? Stakes!’
Unless it was Missus Billy-Bubbah Blythe (“Cli’ton”) – no-one – not even Plugs, the one-time most dangerous dullard in the senate, who at least – best I can tell – doesn’t loath us all – could be less competent that the mobbed-up marijuana-mumbling murtadd-Muslim modified Marxist mother’s milquetoast presently pretending to what his perilously-pernicious predatory pack passes off as the “presidency.”
Kill him and kill any chance to – this century or so, anyway – inflict any further serious harm upon America.
Posted by: Brian_R_Allen | Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 07:39 AM
The re-posted comment is just as full of racism and insanity, but the last sentence has been edited — and he refers to the “meat-locker-IQ’d LGF-Cyber-Terrorist Gang,” so very obviously, Geller and her commenter are aware of our whistle-blowing post:
Goes to prove that – just like the meat-locker-IQ’d LGF-Cyber-Terrorist Gang – the psychopathological hesperophobics, product of fourteen-hundred years of the manifestation of evil that calls itself both “submission” and a “religion,” are not gunna provide fierce competition for the sub-Saharan Africans (mean-IQ: 67) in the:
“If Brains Were Dynamite Would Yours Even Blow Off Your Bloody Kufiya On A windy Day? Stakes!”
Unless it was Missus Billy-Bubbah Blythe (“Cli’ton”) – no-one – not even Plugs, the one-time most dangerous dullard in the senate, who at least – best I can tell – doesn’t loath us all – could be less competent that the mobbed-up marijuana-mumbling murtadd-Muslim modified Marxist mother’s milquetoast presently pretending to what his perilously-pernicious predatory pack passes off as the “presidency.”
If the Osamaniacs had killed him, they would have killed, with him, any chance, in this century or so, anyway, of the followers of the mass-murdering Muhummud inflicting any further serious harm upon America. Buraq Hussayn Zero is their best ever ally!
Posted by: Brian_R_Allen | Monday, March 19, 2012 at 06:01 AM
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.
The circus that is known as the GOP presidential primary is still undecided, and may likely remain that way up until the Republican convention. Rick Santorum has been one of the surprising success stories in this race, going from polling at 2% early on to now emerging as the greatest challenge to Mitt Romney.
This is shocking because many considered it a bygone conclusion that Santorum was an outlier, someone so far to the right that there was no way that he would have a chance with the mainstream in the Republican party.
Santorum’s problematic stances range from birth control and abortion to his interventionist position on Iran. When it comes to Muslims it is clear that he is a bigoted Islamophobe. He was featured as a regular speaker in David Horowitz’s “Islamofascism week” and also supports profiling Muslims.
Now here he is being introduced by Rev. Dennis Terry, delivering an unequivocal message that America is a Christian nation and implying that all who don’t agree with that can “get out.” For some reason I imagine Santorum, who believes the Church should have a role in the operation of the government, probably wholeheartedly supports such a proposition:
“I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation…There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”
Christians, according to Rev. Terry, are the conscience of the state and even the key to turning the economy around. The pastor offered some pointed words about abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in schools, shouting about ‘sexual perversion’ and putting God back in Washington, D.C., as Senator Santorum was seen clapping, if not cheering, in the background.
“I know what’s in his heart. It’s the fact that he’s a Christian,” said Vickie Raabe, a 69-year-old Baptist who told the Washington Post she would be voting for Santorum in 2012. Evangelicals have become Sen. Rick Santorum’s major source of support in the 2012 election as they turn out in record numbers for the Catholic candidate.
But as then Presidential hopefuls Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Sarah Palin, and Senator John McCain found out, endorsement from pastors can be a double edge sword.
At the end of the evening Rev. Terry prayed over the presidential hopeful asking for God’s will to be done in the upcoming election intoning: “God, have favor on Rick Santorum.”
About 20 minutes after David Horowitz began speaking Monday, nearly all the students in attendance walked out of Hamilton Hall in protest. The action came in response to what participants said were slanderous remarks about Muslims and members of Arab nations.
Committee for a Better Carolina, along with Christians United for Israel, sponsored Horowitz to speak at UNC in a lecture titled “Why Israel is the Victim in the Middle East.”
Horowitz is a pro-Israel activist who has been the subject of controversy in the past for buying anti-Palestine ads in college newspapers. In Monday’s lecture, Horowitz argued that Palestine is trying to destroy Israel and that Israel fights back only in self-defense.
Horowitz criticized groups like the Muslim Students Association, linking them to various terrorist groups. He also compared Muslims to Nazis. “There are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims,” he said. “But there were good Germans too, and in the end they didn’t make a damn difference.”
In early March, members of a Muslim group gathered for a press conference at Manhattan’s One Police Plaza to send a clear message to the New York City Police Department about its controversial surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans.
That message was: Thanks for spying on us.
“We are not here to criticize the NYPD,” declared Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), who was joined by House Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.), “but rather to thank them for doing the work that we as Muslims should be doing, which is monitoring extremism, following extremism, and helping counter the ideologies that create radicalization in our communities.”
Jasser later said in an interview that he wanted to provide an alternative voice to the criticism of the NYPD coming from Muslim and civil liberties groups. “We just wanted the media reports to finally show balance, that there’s diversity, that some Muslims don’t have a problem with this.” Several news reports described attendance at the event as light.
An Arizona physician and Navy veteran, Jasser has lately become the right’s go-to guy when it comes to providing cover for policies or positions that many Muslim Americans contend are discriminatory. When controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque erupted, Jasser, a frequent guest on Fox News, accused the builders of trying to “diminish what happened” on September 11, 2001. He has supported statewide bans on Shariah law in American courts and has helped bolster conservative warnings that American Muslims seek to replace the Constitution with a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. “America is at war with theocratic Muslim despots who seek the imposition of Shariah and don’t believe in the equality of all before the law, blind to faith,” Jasser testified during hearings held by King’s committee last year on homegrown terrorism. There he also supported conservative allegations that many American Muslim organizations—and particularly the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—are Islamists seeking to “advance political Islam in the West.” Jasser sometimes refers to other Muslim organizations as “Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups.”
WASHINGTON — Even before President Obama declared this month that “I have Israel’s back” in its escalating confrontation with Iran, pro-Israel figures like the evangelical Christian leader Gary L. Bauer and the conservative commentator William Kristol were pushing for more.
In a slickly produced, 30-minute video, the group that the two men lead, the Emergency Committee for Israel, mocked Mr. Obama’s “unshakable commitment to Israel’s security” and attacked his record on Iran as weak. “I’ll be brutally honest: I don’t trust the president on Israel,” Mr. Bauer, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said in an interview. “I think his record on Israel is abysmal.”
With Israeli leaders warning of an existential threat from Iran and openly discussing the possibility of attacking its nuclear facilities, pro-Israel groups on all sides have mobilized to make their views known to the Obama administration and to Congress. But it is the most hawkish voices, like the Emergency Committee’s, that have dominated the debate, and, in the view of some critics, pushed the United States closer to taking military action against Iran and another war in the Middle East.
“It’s not about Israel,” said Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, the House majority leader and a key Congressional ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
“It’s about the U.S.,” Mr. Cantor said in an interview. “It’s about our interests in the region. There have been a lot of conflicting messages coming out of the White House.”
Among those advocating a more aggressive approach toward Iran are prominent Republicans in Congress, like Mr. Cantor and Senator John McCain of Arizona; the party’s presidential candidates; groups like the Emergency Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac; the so-called “neocons” from the George W. Bush administration who were strong proponents of the war in Iraq; pro-Israel evangelical Christians like Mr. Bauer, who is also active in the group Christians United for Israel; and many Democrats.
Urging diplomacy are liberal groups like J Street, which is helped by $500,000 a year in contributions from the liberal philanthropist George Soros, and Tikkun, a Jewish journal that has begun running newspaper advertisements here and abroad that urge, “NO War on Iran and NO First Strike!” Tikkun, based in Berkeley, Calif., is hoping to link its antiwar message with the Occupy protests.
“A lot of people talk about the ‘Israel lobby’ as if it’s a monolithic thing,” said Dylan Williams, head of government affairs for J Street. “It’s a myth. There is a deep division between those who support military action at this point and those who support diplomacy.”
Clear fissures have developed among pro-Israel groups — not only between hawks and doves over whether to use military force against Iran, but among hard-liners themselves over just how aggressively to confront it.
Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner who is a staunch supporter of Israel, was once a major donor to Aipac. But because of Aipac’s support for American aid to the Palestinian Authority, he has broken from the group. This year, Mr. Adelson has given at least $10 million, along with his wife, to support Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.
Like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Mr. Gingrich has pushed for stronger support of Israel and attacked Mr. Obama’s policies on the Iranian issue as weak. He also described the Palestinians as an “invented people.”
The disagreements over what to do about Iran reflect the divisions among Jews themselves. In a survey of American Jews last September by the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group, 56 percent of those polled said they would support American military action against Iran if diplomacy and sanctions failed, while 38 percent opposed it. Support was down slightly from a year earlier.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, a leader of Tikkun and an affiliated antiwar coalition of religious groups, said backers of diplomacy want to slow what they have seen as a “drumbeat to war” in recent weeks. Rabbi Lerner and other opponents of military action say the debate over Iran echoes the political climate in 2002 before the United States-led invasion in Iraq.
Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who opposes military action against Iran, said, “The rhetoric is overblown.”
Those advocating military intervention “whip up fear and whip up doomsday scenarios,” Mr. Ellison said in an interview. “It has an effect. If nothing else, they’re making Obama talk about military options with regard to Iran.”
But Mr. Ellison is in the minority on Capitol Hill, where the debate over Israel and Iran was largely settled long ago.
The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) on Mar 5 announced that a lawmaker in that state’s legislature will drop a proposed “anti-Sharia” bill written using a template provided by an anti-Islam extremist. That announcement came following a news conference CAIR-MN held on Mar 5 with interfaith leaders to challenge the threat to religious freedom posed by the bill. In announcing his decision to drop the bill, Republican State Senator Dave Thompson said: “It was never my intent to introduce legislation that was being targeted to any one group.”
“We thank Senator Thompson for dropping this discriminatory bill and hope his responsible decision sends a message to all those elected officials in other states who are supporting similarly unconstitutional legislation,” said CAIR-MN Civil Rights Coordinator MunazzaHumayun.
According to media reports, Thompson’s anti-Islam bill (S2281) was a “boilerplate copy-pasted verbatim from a far right policy group.” Last week, CAIR’s national office released a community toolkit designed to assist those seeking to preserve America’s ideal of religious pluralism in the face of similar unconstitutional anti-Sharia bills that have been introduced in more than 20 states nationwide.CAIR’s toolkit includes background on David Yerushalmi, the anti-Islam extremist who authored the template for the anti-Sharia bills.
Murder victim Abel Chennouf (left) was due to become a father with his partner (right)
A killer on the loose on a “powerful moped?” That’s kind of comical but the results have been tragic, as this murderer is going around targeting people of ethnic and religious minorities. (H/T: Zakariya Ali Sher)
This could be a “Muslim”. That the three French troops happened to be ethnic minorities might just be a coincidence. So it could be possible that this is a Muslim extremist who is targeting French troops and Jews.
Of course, the sensible thing is for people not to speculate until more evidence comes through. I did notice at Fox News Forums this morning however that they were all going mental over this, saying it is the fault of the French for letting all those Muslims in and having gun control. So if it ends up not being a Muslim, they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for politicising a horrendous spate of killings.
Three gun attacks which left seven people dead and two wounded have sparked a security alert in south-western France, with fears that the same killer could be at work.
In each case the attacker is said to have been a gunman on a moped, using a weapon of the same calibre, striking in broad daylight.
All of the attacks took place within a radius of about 50km (30 miles), between the city of Toulouse and town of Montauban.
The first two shootings saw soldiers targeted but the third took place at a school.
What the victims have in common is that they belong to, or are associated with, ethnic or religious minorities – North African, Caribbean and Jewish.
That they were singled out is suggested by reports that, in at least one attack, the killer pushed aside a bystander to get to his victims.
A manhunt is under way and France has placed its national judicial police in charge of the investigation, with anti-terrorist investigators and specialists in serial crimes at its disposal.
While little has been reported about the identity or motivation of, in the words of Le Figaro newspaper, the “most wanted man in France”, some of the strongest clues may have been left by the first attack.
Cyber trail
Investigators believe it is “highly plausible” that the same .45 calibre gun was used in the first two shootings, a judicial source told France’s AFP news agency several days before the third.
On Sunday 11 March, Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot dead around 16:00 (15:00 GMT) behind a school in a quiet district of Toulouse.
According to Le Figaro, Sgt Ibn-Ziaten, who was not in uniform, was unwittingly waiting for his own killer.
He had posted a small ad on a website to sell a Suzuki Bandit motorcycle, and the suspected gunman had arranged a meeting to see it.
The sergeant was found shot in the head, his motorcycle beside him.
French cyber police are working to extract clues from the two men’s internet exchanges, Le Figaro says.
Sgt Ibn-Ziaten had a clean service record, prosecutors stressed, rejecting suggestions that there could have been a gangland element to his murder.
‘Tattoo’
In the second attack, in Montauban on Thursday 15 March, 46 surveillance cameras picked up the gunman on his scooter, according to Le Figaro.
They showed “a man in dark clothing wearing a black helmet and riding a powerful moped”.
Sam Harris, considered one of the “four horsemen” (now perhaps the “three horsemen” after the death of Christopher Hitchens) of the cult of new age atheism may be set to debate Dr. Robert Pape, or so he claims on his website:
Almost invariably, I am urged to read the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and the book Dying to Win, in which he argues that suicide bombing is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. No one has done more to convince my fellow liberals that if we just behaved ourselves on the world stage, our problems with Islam would go away. I am happy to say that Pape has agreed to discuss these issues with me on this page in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…
I don’t believe Sam Harris belongs on the same stage or platform with Pape discussing these issues. He has no study in the field of “suicide terrorism,” he is a novice going up against an academic who has researched and critically analyzed the issue from various angles, and whose work has been the subject of intense scrutiny and peer review.
The tone and tenor in which Harris discusses his possible future encounter with Pape is revelatory in the sense that it exposes the fact that Harris’s mind is already made up. He is not interested in a real dialogue or conversation nor does he seem to be open to the possibility of changing his mind. Harris, like all dogmatists, has already arrived at his conclusion, he is entrenched in his belief that suicide terrorism is largely, if not completely a “consequence of religious ideology.” This is mostly the case because “suicide terrorism” being linked to religious ideology is vital to his claim that Islam is “uniquely” violent and should be held to a different level of scrutiny than other religions.
This recalls a prescient point Reza Aslan made in his interview with us when questioned about his encounter with Sam Harris:
There is no doubt Sam Harris is a smart guy, he has a PhD in neuro-science. You can be a smart guy and be ignorant about particular topics and issues. The problem with Sam Harris is that he tends to write about the things he is ignorant about, (laughs) I think Sam Harris should stick to writing about neuro-science, I think his last book was great. When Sam Harris writes about neuro-science, in other words his expertise, I think it’s great, I love reading his work. When he talks about religion, a topic he knows nothing about, that he’s never studied as an academic discipline, that he’s done no field research in whatsoever, and in which he frankly is unqualified to opine about, that’s the problem. I don’t write about nero-Science because I’m not a neuro-scientist.
Either way, it seems Pape has accepted Harris’s request to debate and it will be interesting to see the correspondence between the two. For Harris it may turn into a similar humiliation as the one he received when going head-to-head with Scott Atran:
******************************************
Lastly, I want to say a few words about the article in which Harris reveals he may be debating Pape. Harris titled the article, Islam and the Future of Liberalism, in it he essentially repeats many of his common, uncritical, and by now, well worn attacks on Islam and Muslims.
Like the predictable Islamophobe that he is, he illustrates his post with this image:
Orientalism 101 anyone?
Yes Sam, Afghan women in burqas is a really great way to illustrate the “threat” of liberalism accommodating “evil Islam.” Can somebody send Harris, Edward Said‘s Covering Islam? He’s got some readin’ to do.
Harris writes,
I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different: I think that abandoning these women to the Taliban is one of the things that make our inevitable retreat from Afghanistan ethically problematic. I also believe that wherever we can feasibly stop the abuse of women and girls, we should. An ability to do this in places like Afghanistan, and throughout the world, would be one of the benefits of having a global civil society and a genuine regime of international law.
Here is another instance of Harris posturing as an expert on an issue that he is wholly unprepared to discuss, mostly due to his lack of understanding.
Here are some facts for Sam to ponder: 1.) Afghanistan is a tribally based culture, following tribal customs and norms that are ingrained within society and which formed over thousands of years, you are not going to transform that over night, and you are definitely not going to do so with ‘smart bombs’ 2.) Who did the US replace the Taliban with? Northern Alliance war lords, many of whom are the most egregious violators TO THIS DAY of women’s rights. When they ruled before the Taliban child rape was endemic, as it has become once again today. 3.) Changing attitudes towards women can only happen from within society, unless Harris is advocating the removal of women and girls from their husbands, fathers and brothers? Oh wait, he has pondered such stupidity in the past.
Harris is not finished with the inanities, he writes,
Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.
Excuse me for how inarticulate I am about to become, but this must be said: Sam Harris is a S**THEAD. Harris dehumanizes Afghans, to him they are a bunch of dirty savages who cannot even properly mourn or balance their outrage. Regardless of what Harris says, yes, Afghans are very upset that they are being occupied and murdered by an invading foreign nation. The recent protests were not only in response to Qur’an burnings as Harris would have us believe, but as we noted: the murder, maiming and jailing of innocent Afghan civilians!
Harris continues the Islamophobic, anti-Muslim drivel in the rest of the article. He pushes the myth about the silent “millions” of moderate Muslims who are too “afraid” to speak out against violence in the name of their faith. He says that he finds the concept of a Jewish State “obnoxious,” but he immediately contradicts himself writing, “But if ever a state organized around a religion was justified, it is the Jewish state of Israel, given the world’s propensity for genocidal anti-Semitism.”
Profound double standards but that is something Harris has in common with the rest of his Islamophobic buddies in the anti-Muslim movement and hence comes as no surprise.
Regarding Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s “Israel and the Plight of Mideast Christians” (op-ed, March 9): No doubt, his piece will be compelling for many readers. Christians in North America are generally sympathetic to Christians who suffer elsewhere. More negatively, many respond well when blame for that suffering is placed on Muslims. The biggest problem with Mr. Oren’s analysis, however, is that it stands in sharp disagreement with the perspectives shared by those he presumably wants to protect. Mr. Oren seeks to speak for Palestinian Christians before he has spoken with them.
Palestinian Christians have produced major studies of Palestinian Christian demographic trends. Difficulties created by Israeli occupation policies far outweigh pressure from Muslim neighbors as reasons for Christian migration from the West Bank. According to a study by the Bethlehem-based Diyar Consortium, “most of those who choose to emigrate” are “aggravated by the lack of freedom and security.” At “the bottom of the scale,” they found, “are family reunification, fleeing religious extremism and finding a spouse.”
It is irresponsible for Amb. Oren to make political points among some segments of the U.S. population by intentionally disregarding factors contributing to Palestinian Christian migration away from their homeland. By blaming their condition on Muslims alone, while ignoring the negative effects of Israeli occupation policies, including the debilitating economic effects of the separation barrier, Mr. Oren is using anti-Muslim sentiments among some Americans to hide the effects of Israeli policy. This cynical political rhetoric fuels extremism and does not promote peace.
The Rev. Robert O. Smith
Chicago
I am a Palestinian Christian, and the numbers and facts given by Mr. Oren are erroneous and misleading. With the creation of the state of Israel, 80% of Palestinian Christians were forced into exile. The number of Christians in Jerusalem dropped dramatically since the occupation of the city in 1967, and Palestinian Christians are denied access to Jerusalem. To pretend that their numbers greatly increased contradicts all statistics, including Israeli statistics. Allowing “holiday access to Jerusalem’s churches to Christians from both the West Bank and Gaza” is denying free access, and those permits are given selectively, in small numbers and revoked often with the “closure” of the occupied territories. Pretending to defend the interests of the Christians contradicts facts on the ground, where Christians suffer the same consequences of military occupation as all Palestinians. Most of the land belonging to Christians in Bethlehem is being confiscated with the building of the separation wall. Is that the “respect and appreciation” the Christian community receives from the Jewish state?
Fr. Jamal Khader, D.D.
Dean of the Faculty of Arts
Bethlehem University
Bethlehem
I am one of those Palestinian Christians that Mr. Oren refers to, who live inside Israel. At no time in my life have I ever felt the “respect and appreciation” by the Jewish state which Mr. Oren so glowingly refers to in his last paragraph. Israel’s Christian minority is marginalized in much the same manner as its Muslim one, or at best, quietly tolerated. We suffer the same discrimination when we try to find a job, when we go to hospitals, when we apply for bank loans and when we get on the bus. In my daily dealings with the state, all I have felt is rudeness and overt contempt.
Fida Jiryis
Fassuta, Israel
Amb. Michael Oren presents a distorted and inaccurate account of Christians in Palestine. He conveniently omits gross Israeli violations against the Palestinian Christian community, such as Israel’s revocation of residency rights to many whose birthplace was Jerusalem, or the fact that it restricts their right to worship in their holy sites by imposing an onerous permit system to access the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem or the baptism site on the River Jordan. Even family visitations between Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem are heavily restricted.
It doesn’t stop at that. Recently there has been a spate of attacks by Jewish extremists vandalizing Christian properties and spray-painting slogans denouncing Jesus and Mary and attacking Christianity.
Finally, Palestinian Christians are a vibrant component of Palestine’s social, cultural and religious fabric. Many of our most prominent figures in politics, academia and the arts are Christian. This is the case precisely because of a long history and deeply rooted culture of tolerance and integration in Palestine.
Mother Saly Chowdhury and her daughter Ousha outside the shop where they were attacked
No Islamophobia to see here, no racism. These racist thugs must have appeared out of no where.
It’s also interesting that the Daily Mail chose to highlight the fact that the victim of the racist attack, store owner Saly Chowdhury “refuses to sell alcohol in her store.” Why is that important:
Racist thugs spat on a four-year-old girl and brutally beat her mother in a sickening attack.
Saly Chowdhury was left with a black eye and facial injuries after two men and a woman tried to steal two boxes of crisps from her shop, the Hendon Valley Stores in Sunderland.
The incident took place on last Friday at 4.40pm when the mother-of-four ran out of the shop after the thieves and accidentally locked herself outside.
When the trio started hurling racist abuse at her, she fled to her home nearby.
But they caught up with her and spat on her four-year-old daughter Ousha, shoved her seven-year-old daughter against the wall and thumped her 13-year-old daughter in the face.
The gang then turned their attentions to Saly, 31, punching her in the face, tearing out chunks of her hair and choking her with her scarf.
Saly, who also has a nine-year-old daughter, managed to free herself and get herself and her children inside to safety.
And just 12 hours later the mum-of-four was back behind the shop counter, determined not to let the vicious thugs get the better of her.
Saly, who refuses to sell alcohol in her store, said: ‘I had to close my shop on Friday and I lost business.
‘I’m not letting them do that to me again. It was scary and it’s worrying going back to work but there is no need for this behaviour.
‘I have many great customers who know me and I know them. If this is all about stealing, then please speak to me first and we can see if something can be sorted out.
‘The problem of people coming in here and stealing things is getting worse and worse.’
Northumbria Police yesterday said the incident ‘simply won’t be tolerated’.
An investigation into the attack has been launched and is being treated as racially aggravated.
Sergeant Tom Connor, who covers the area, said: ‘This type of behaviour is despicable.’
“We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig… cow after cow… village after village… army after army…” – Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
Hong Kong - It started way before a lone killer, a US Army sergeant, married with two children, walked into villagesin Panjwayi, southwest of Kandahar city, and “allegedly” went on a shooting spree, leaving at least 16 civilians dead.
This was Afghanistan’s Haditha moment – as in Iraq; or My Lai – as in Vietnam.
It had been building up via the serial drone-with-Hellfire bombings of tribal wedding parties; the serial secret US Special Forces’ “night raids”; the serial “kill team” murders in 2010; the ritual urination onto dead Afghans by “our men in uniform”; and last but not least, the Quran burnings in Bagram. Mission … accomplished?
According to the latest Post-ABC News poll - conducted even before the Kandahar massacre – 55 per cent of Americans want the end of the Afghan war.
US President Barack Obama once again stressed that 10 years into a war that has cost at least $400bn, the “combat role” of NATO troops will end in 2014. According to Obama, Washington only wants to make sure “that al-Qaeda is not operating there, and that there is sufficient stability that it does not end up being a free-for-all”.
Al-Qaeda “is not operating there” for a long time; there are only a bunch of instructors “not there” but in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas.
And forget about “stability”. The “Afghan security forces” that will be theoretically in charge by 2014, or even before, are doomed. Their illiteracy rate is a staggering 80 per cent. At least 25 per cent become deserters. Child rape is endemic. Over 50 per cent are permanently stoned on hashish, on steroids.
The level of mistrust between Afghans and Americans is cosmic. According to a 2011 study that became classified by the Pentagon after it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal - the American military essentially view Afghans as corrupt cowards while Afghans see the American military as coward bullies.
Get a Saigon 1975 moment now or in 2014, the facts on the ground will remain the same: Hindu Kush-rocking instability.
Toss the COIN and I win
Afghanistan was always a tragedy trespassed by farce. Think about NATO’s original 83 restrictions on the rules of engagement, which led, for example, to a rash of French soldiers killed in 2008 because France, pressed by the US, stopped paying protection money to the Taliban; or think about Berlin calling it not a war, but a “humanitarian mission”.
Internal battles – unlike Vietnam – became legend. Such as the COINdinistas – the counter-insurgency gang, supported by then Pentagon chief Bob Gates – invested in a “new mission” and a “new military leadership”, winning against Vice-President Joe Biden’s CT PLUS strategy, as in less soldiers on the ground doing counter-terrorism.
The winner, as everyone remembers, was rockstar General Stanley McChrystal, who insisted that the Biden plan would lead to “Chaosistan”, which happened to be the name of a classified CIA analysis.
Stanley McChrystal – a Pentagon spokesperson during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq – badly wanted to change the culture of NATO and the US Army in Afghanistan. He wanted to destroy the culture of shoot-first-and-blow-shit-up and go towards “protecting the civilian population”. In his own words, he stressed that “air-to-ground munitions” and “indirect fires” against Afghan homes were “only authorised under very limited and prescribed conditions”.
He prevailed – shielded by his rockstar status – only for a brief moment.
Meanwhile, even if on one side the State Department, the DEA and the FBI would be warning about nasty drug smugglers and assorted criminals, on the other side the CIA and the Pentagon, praising them for good intel, would always win.
And everything was fully justified by an array of reluctant warriors/liberal hawks in places such as the Center for a New American Security – crammed with “respectable” journalists.
Hamid Karzai won the Afghan elections by outright fraud. His half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai – then provincial council chief in Kandahar – was free to keep running his massive drug business while dismissing elections (“the people in this region don’t understand it”).
Who cared if the Afghan government in Kabul was/is in fact a crime syndicate? “Loyal” local commanders – “our bastards” – increasingly got funding and even dedicated Special Forces as personal advisors to themselves and their death squads.
McChrystal, to his credit, admitted that the Soviets in the 1980s did many things right (for instance, building roads, promoting central government, education for boys and girls alike, modernising the country).
But they also did a lot of things terribly wrong, such as carpet-bombing and killing 1.5 million Afghans. If only Pentagon planners had the presence of mind to read Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1970-89 (Profile Books), by former British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite, drawing on a wealth of Russian sources from the KGB to the Gorbachev Foundation; from the internet to a spectacular book by the late General Alexander Lyakhovsky.
You have the right to be misinformed
The Pentagon will never accept the withdrawal date of 2014: it goes full-frontal against its own Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, which counts on scores of US bases in Afghanistan to monitor/control/harass strategic competitors – Russia and China.
The way out will be a ruse. The Pentagon will transfer its special operations to the CIA; they will become “spies”, not “troops on the ground”.
This will mean, essentially, an extension ad infinitum of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which carried out the targeted killing of over 20,000 “suspected” Vietcong supporters.
And that leads us to the current CIA director, media-savvy General David Petraeus and his baby – COIN field manual FM 3-24, the Pentagon’s answer to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the marriage of counter-insurgency with the war on terror. And this, even after a 2008 RAND study titled How Terrorist Groups End stressed that the only way to defeat them was through a good old law enforcement operation.
Afghan killings strain relations with US
Petraeus couldn’t care less. After all, his “information operations” – as in all-out media manipulation, coupled with the massive distribution of the proverbial suitcase full of US dollars – had won “his” and George W Bush’s surge in Iraq.
Proud Pashtuns were a much tougher nut to crack than Sunni sheikhs in the desert. They went so low-tech – fabricating tens of thousands of IEDs with fertiliser, wood and old munitions – that they in fact froze US technology dead in its tracks, leading to endless Pentagon newspeak reports on “vast increase in IED activity”.
Since Obama’s inauguration, the Pentagon had been playing extra-dirty to extract the exact war they wanted to carry out in Afghanistan.
They got it. Petraeus went on non-stop spin mode on “progress”. Local populations were “becoming more receptive” to US troops, even as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – the cumulative knowledge of 17 US intelligence agencies – remained grim.
Petraeus did what he does best: he remixed the NIE. He never admitted that the war would be over by 2014. He cranked up airstrikes, unleashed Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, tripled the number of night raids by Special Forces, authorised a mini-Shock and Awe, totally levelling the town of Tarok Kolache in southern Afghanistan.
After yet another US massacre in February 2011 in Kunar Province, with 64 dead civilians, Petraeus even had the gall of accusing Afghans of burning their own children to make it look like collateral damage. Good for him. At the time, his relationship with Obama was even improving.
The Obama administration is, in fact, convinced that Obama’s surge, led by Petraeus and scheduled to finish by September, has left Afghanistan “stable”, at least in the region known as “regional command east”; that’s what Petraeus dubs “Afghan good enough”.
Most of the country is in fact “Talib good enough”, but who cares? As for burning babies, cynics might qualify it as a feature of American exceptionalism. One just has to remember the Amiriya Shelter in Baghdad on February 13, 1991, when no fewer than 408 children and their mothers were burned to death by the US.
I’ll never look into your eyes… again
How not to remember the inimitable Dennis Hopper as the psychedelic photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, talking about Colonel Kurtz/Marlon Brando: “He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense…”
“Poet-warrior” McChrystal was convinced Afghanistan was not Vietnam; in Vietnam the US was fighting a “popular insurgency”, unlike Afghanistan (wrong: the many strands bundled under the moniker “Taliban” have become more popular in direct proportion to Karzai’s disaster, not to mention that in Vietnam the official Pentagon spin was that the Vietcong were never popular).
Generals, anyway, don’t go on Kurtz-style killing sprees. Petraeus was promoted to unleash Shadow War Inc at the CIA. After he was sacked following a profile in Rolling Stone magazine – how rockstar is that? – McChrystal ended up rehabilitated by the White House.
He taught at Yale, went into consulting, is making a fortune on the conference circuit – distilling wisdom about “leadership” and the Greater Middle East – and was made an unpaid adviser to military families by Obama.
McChrystal sees Afghanistan as stuck in “some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare”. Conrad’s “the horror… the horror…” is perennial. The Pentagon’s key lesson from Vietnam was how to seal off the horror, how to put it in boxes, and how to, voluptuously, embrace it.
So it’s no wonder McChrystal could not possibly see that he was starring as the remixed Colonel Kurtz – while Petraeus was a more methodical, but no less deadly Captain Willard. Unlike Vietnam, though, this time there won’t be a Coppola to win the war for Hollywood. But there will be plenty of Hollow Men left at the Pentagon.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan(Nimble Books, 2009).
The presence of the English Defence League failed to disrupt the opening of a new Islamic centre in Luton yesterday.
The Discover Islam Public Information Centre, based in Upper George Street, is a community project which aims to provide a neutral environment for people to ask questions about Islam or Muslims that they would feel too embarrassed or intimidated to talk about otherwise.
But outside, surrounded by police, EDL leader Tommy Robinson and around 20 of his followers handed out leaflets which stated that the centre promoted “Luton In Harm-enemy“. The protest was responding to the views expressed on a blog by the centre’s manager, Yusuf Bonner, which Mr Robinson claims are “extremist”. Mr Bonner was not present at the event.
Inside, those running the centre attempted to ignore the EDL and instead focus on what the new building would bring to the town.
Discover Islam representative, Sufian Sadiq said: “Outside is an act of intimidation. I actually wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea with them, but they refused. I think the only problem is they haven’t had the opportunity to mix in with people like ourselves.”
Speaking about the centre, he said: “We conducted a survey and asked over 500 people, who are predominately non-Muslim, about their views on co-existing. The responses included, ‘I don’t know enough about Islam … I don’t know enough about religious practices … and I feel scared going into Bury Park and intimidated going into a Mosque’. We need to sit down as a community and combat this. We will come out and show that Islam is not intimidating.”
However, Tommy Robinson said: “We’re here to let the residents of Luton know what this centre is really about. We don’t need this form of Islam in our town and it is unbelievable that they are doing it under a banner of peace. We will be stepping up a campaign over the next three months, and we will close this place down.”
Luton council leader, Hazel Simmons attended the launch to show her support for the centre. She said: “A few weeks ago we had another challenge to Luton in the form of two television programmes. They gave an image that doesn’t represent us or the town that we live in or work in. Unfortunately that is the message that has gone out nationally and we’ve got to fight back against it. This is a groundbreaking initiative and a great opportunity for the town.”
A spokesman for Luton in Harmony said: “From what I’ve heard today, this centre is something the town needs, and something the non-Muslim community have said that they wanted. This is a lovely example of the Muslim community engaging, because they recognise they need to come out and dispel the myths and propaganda coming from people who don’t know anything about what Muslims are really about.”
Stephen Yaxly, lennon, tommy robison, whatever his name is now days – its un like him to break the law!! really?!?!?! considering he was a very well known drug dealer in the Wigmore area a few years back, driving around in his pimped corsa that had what can only be described as the worst paint job in the world. this guy would not think twice about stamping on your face regardless of of skin colour or background. how can somebody claim to be defending england when its people like him that give it a bad name?!?! some things the EDL say make sence but this is not the person that they should have fronting them!! i saw him on news night telling us about muslims taking girls and getting them addicted to drugs………..who the hell is he to comment when he made his living from selling drugs to anybody who would take them…….I am proud to be english but i am not proud to have StephenTommyfool speaking on behalf of the ‘english’. he is just a drug dealing thug! he is not defending england! he is giving the working class english man a bad name. On your bike Stephen!!! go back to what you do best and sell drugs to low-lives like yourself!
On Friday March 9 a media team from the Christian Action Network came to London to conduct interviews with various Counterjihad activists about the spread of sharia and the Islamization of Europe. Below is their interview with Paul Weston, the Chairman of the British Freedom Party.
CAN previously interviewed English Defence League members in 2009, during a visit to the UK with Robert Spencer. CAN used the opportunity to invite EDL activists to a private dinner with Spencer and Douglas Murray, to the embarrassment of the two men; Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion sent me a message asking me to clarify that “CAN asked Douglas to do an interview with them – upon seeing the presence of the EDL at the CAN discussion he refused to deal with them and left the venue.”
CAN was primarily known for anti-gay activism prior to taking an interest in Islam; CAN’s president, Martin Mawyer, has a history of virulent statements on the subject (in particular, in 1997 he denounced Ellen DeGeneres’ “FILTHY LESBIAN LIFESTYLE”), which Spencer initially dismissed in 2009 as “not jihad-related”. However, in 2010 Mawyer’s views were reported in Dutch media, prompting Geert Wilders to withdraw from the Los Angeles premiere of a CAN documentary entitled Islam Rising: Geert Wilders’ Warning to the West. The premiere, which had been organised by Pamela Geller and Spencer, was quickly cancelled, and Spencer affected to be shocked at the discovery of Mawyer’s “ugly, vitriolic… hysterical, self-righteous, abusive rhetoric”.
The British Freedom Party and the EDL now have several links with Christian Right activists. Weston and Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) are regular guests on Michael Coren’s Arena TV show; Coren is a member of the more intellectual end of the Catholic right, and, like Mawyer, he is particularly known for his objections to homosexuality. Weston and Lennon are also friendly with the Tennessee Freedom Coalition’s Andy Miller (the TFC was in the news recently after arranging for local police to be trained in Islam at an evangelical church in Murfreesboro; the group alsohas links with the British organisation Christian Concern).
Sabaditsch-Wolff, meanwhile, was recently invested as a Dame of “the Knights of Malta — The Ecumenical Order”, by Nicholas Papanicolaou and none other than Gen William “Jerry” Boykin; the two men are, respectively, the Order’s “Grand Master” and “Grand Chancellor”. Both men are close to the evangelist Rick Joyner, who is a “Deputy Member of the Supreme Council”. Joyner, who receives messages from God about how an earthquake will soon destroy the west coast of the USA, claims that he was introduced to the Order by an “Austrian baron”, and that his books were responsible for a “spiritual renewal” in the Order.
Yesterday, South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) signed an unconstitutional law that purports to target courts applying religious law, but which is almost certainly part of a broader push by Islamophobic advocates to fight the imaginary problem of courts substituting Islamic law for American law. The brief bill Daugaard signed provides simply that “[n]o court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code.”
Although this bill does not specifically call out any particular religion for ill treatment, it violates the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. As the Supreme Court explained in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, “the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs or regulates or prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.”
While it is uncommon for American courts to apply religious law, it is not unheard of. Private parties sometimes enter into contracts where they agree to resolve their disputes under something other than U.S. law, and individuals sometimes write wills devising their property according to the tenets of their faith. Under the bill Daugaard signed, however, courts will be allowed to enforce contracts requiring disputes to be resolved under French law or ancient Roman law or under the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons second edition rules, but they won’t be allowed to enforce contracts requiring disputes to be resolved under the requirements of someone’s religious beliefs. This is discrimination “against some or all religious beliefs,” and is therefore unconstitutional.
Among a series of setbacks for the McCarthyist-style anti-Shariah movement, New Jersey became the newest state to drop its ridiculous A-919 bill penned to prohibit the application of “foreign laws”.
Fabricating an imaginary threat of an impending Shariah law that would somehow take over each US state, leading Islamophobes met with initial success as they attempted to influence various lawmakers into considering such a bill for implementation.
As of late however, anti-Muslim hate tactics appear to be falling flat on their face as NJ becomes the latest state – after GA, FL & MN - to withdraw its so-called foreign law bill drafted to protect it from the non-existent Shariah threat.
“New Jersey need not follow other states that have either passed or attempted to pass similar legislation that has the principal objective of demonizing the faith of millions of American Muslims,” said Dr. Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum.
CAIR-NJ Chair Nadia Kahf had the following to add, “Rather than strengthening constitutional protections, these bills undoubtedly violate religious freedom and weaken the independence of our courts.”
“We thank Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi for her decision in support of religious freedom and constitutional rights.”
And some surprising and even more good news from Flordia:
A critic of the unsuccessful Florida bill to ban Shariah law and other foreign legal codes says its failure to pass is evidence of turning public tides on such measures, though a sponsor is promising to try bringing it back.
Though the bill easily passed the House, it was never called for a vote by the full Senate before the Legislature closed its session, effectively killing the legislation for the year.
“I think we may be seeing the tide turn on this wave of anti-Shariah bills around the country,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which opposes such legislation.
A wave of anti-Shariah bills have been introduced in statehouses across the country. Several have stalled or failed, but dozens more await a verdict.
South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed a foreign law measure Monday, the first victory among advocates for such laws this session.
Three other states — Louisiana, Arizona and Tennessee — previously approved legislation curtailing the use of foreign laws.
Florida’s bill made no mention of Shariah law or any other specific foreign system. It said the use of foreign law would be banned in state courtrooms when it violates rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and in certain domestic situations, such as divorces and child custody cases. It would not have applied to businesses.
Opponents called the law unnecessary and anti-Muslim. Muslim groups were joined by the Anti-Defamation League, a defender of Jewish causes, in their opposition.
“You might as well pass legislation to ban unicorns,” Hooper said. “If it wasn’t so destructive to interfaith relations, to our image around the world, to our commitment to religious and constitutional rights, it would be laughable.”
The most fervently outspoken supporters of such bills caution Shariah law could begin to spread outside of Muslim countries in a slow-speed Islamic takeover of the world. Others say not outlawing Shariah jeopardizes the rights of American women.
Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, who sponsored the Senate bill, said though “wild accusations” have been made about what the legislation would do, its purpose was to ensure only American laws are heard in Florida courtrooms.
“I expect to file the bill again next year if I’m fortunate enough to be blessed by the people of Florida with another term, and I expect it to pass next year,” Hays said.
Israel is not doing enough to stop the large increase in attacks on Palestinians by Jewish extremists, according to an internal European Union report.
The report by the 22 heads of mission of EU countries’ ambassadors in Ramallah said there were 411 assaults in 2011, compared to 266 in 2010 and 132 in 2009, according to Euobserver.com, which saw the report. The Netherlands was the lone country that refused to endorse the report.
The attacks ranged from throwing stones to gunfire, and uprooting olive trees to burning mosques. Three Palestinians were reported dead and 183 injured by the attacks.
Eight Jewish settlers, including five members of the Fogel family, were killed and 37 injured.
The report said that a small “hard-core” group of Jewish settlers carried out the attacks, according to Euobserver. But the diplomats also called the settler attacks part of a broader Israeli campaign to get rid of the Palestinians, saying they “effectively force a withdrawal of the Palestinian population away from the vicinity of settlements, thereby increasing the scope for settlement expansion.”
The EU report said that more than 90 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians ended with no indictment.
Israel has set up a police task force to stop settler attacks and Israeli leaders have roundly condemned such attacks, an Israeli official told Euobserver. The EU report also acknowledged that Israeli soldiers helped prevent attacks during the Palestinian olive harvest last year.
Brookfield - A crowd gathered at the Brookfield Public Library raised questions Tuesday not just about a proposed mosque in the area, but about the faith and ideology of those who plan to use it.
“We’re not fighting against a religion, what we’re fighting against is a tyrannical ideology,” said Janet Spiewak of the conservative Eagle Forum, which hosted the discussion.
She urged residents to raise concerns about the mosque’s traffic impact and other zoning issues at the city’s upcoming meetings on the project, presumably as a way of stopping it from being built.
“We can, through public pressure, force the aldermen and the mayor to acknowledge where the majority of Brookfield stands,” she said.
The project was intended to be discussed inside the library, but more than 30 people showed up, so it was moved outside, while the regular Forum meeting continued inside.
Islamic Society of Milwaukee President Ahmed Quereshi and Executive Director Othman Atta answered a barrage of questions – at times hostile – on the size of the building, terrorism, sharia law, the role of women in Islam, and what is and isn’t in the Qur’an.
Their answers were at times met with derisive laughter and heckling. Some people focused on basics such as traffic; others threw out examples of violence and terrorism done by people claiming to act in concert with Islamic teaching.
Police officers watched from cars nearby.
“We are not advocating extremism,” said Atta, noting that as an attorney he has sworn an oath to uphold the laws of the United States. “We’re here as American citizens. Our goal here is just to provide a house of worship for the community who reside here.”
The Islamic Society is proposing to build a 12,950-square-foot mosque and community center on 4.25 acres east of N. Calhoun Road on Pheasant Drive.
The Society, which operates a 70,000-square-foot complex near S. 13th St. and W. Layton Ave. in Milwaukee, said it has about 100 families who live within a 4-mile radius of the Brookfield site.
Members of the Brookfield-Elm Grove Interfaith Network, which has endorsed the project, attended the gathering as a show of support.
“People were afraid of us, too, when we first moved here in 1961,” said the Rev. Suzelle Lynch of the Unitarian Universalist Church West in Brookfield.
Much of the rancor had abated by the end, with some residents inviting the Muslim leaders to host a local forum and asking that copies of the Qur’an be sent to local churches.
“My question is about what’s being taught there,” said Swannie Tess. “I’m 80 years old, and I’ll be dead in 10 years, but I have children and grandchildren growing up.”
Tess said she’d like to hear more in a different, less-charged setting.
“I thought it was a good exchange,” said Quereshi. “It started out a little bumpy, but by the end, people were having a good conversation.”
Far-right populist Geert Wilders has made a name for himself through his anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric, and for this reason he is, to quote Robert Spencer, one of the “heroes” of the anti-Muslim movement.
We have consistently pointed out however that Geert Wilders and his allies are not one stop bigots. Behind the “acceptable” attacks on Muslims is hidden a wider xenophobia against ‘the other.’ A bigotry which if not born out of any consistent ideological character is definitely a reflection of the realization that playing on the fears of the majority may lead to positive results at the ballot box.
Wilders and his party, the PVV are riding a wave of popularity through the launch of an anti-Polish/anti-Eastern European website which has been the cause of much controversy and embarrassment in the Netherlands. After launching the site it was reported that the PVV,
would gain 24 seats in parliament if elections were held today, the number of seats the party currently holds, says pollster Maurice de Hond. Geert Wilders’ populist far-right party is the third largest party in the Netherlands.
Wilders’ PVV site displays,
news clippings with bold headlines blaming foreigners for petty crime, noise nuisance – and taking jobs from the Dutch. “Are immigrants from Central and Eastern countries bothering you? We’d like to hear from you,” it says.
The Dutch government has distanced itself from the website but this hasn’t ebbed the disastrous PR that Wilders move has generated.
Besides criticism from ten European ambassadors and the European Commission, the Dutch public has also expressed concerns about possible repercussions. Poles are calling for a boycott of Dutch products.(emphasis mine)
The issue was taken to the European parliament which just yesterday announced its ‘dismay’ and formal response to Wilders most recent populist move:
By Gaspard Sebag in Strasbourg | Wednesday 14 March 2012 (Europolitics.info)
Representatives of the political groups in the European Parliament, on 13 March, unanimously called upon the Netherlands’ Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, to condemn a website launched by his far-right political ally, the PVV party headed by Geert Wilders. Said website, up since early February, urges Dutch citizens to report problems they experience with nationals of Central and Eastern European countries. “Unacceptable,” “a disgrace,” “scandalous” – said MEPs. The European Commission, for its part, announced it would not get involved from a legal point of view and leaves the responsibility of assessing the lawfulness of the website to the Dutch authorities. A joint parliamentary resolution will be put to the vote, on 15 March (see box).
The EPP, which counts among its ranks the junior partner in the Netherlands’ government, the centre-right CDA, was particularly vocal. “We cannot tolerate, from a party that takes part in a coalition government, a call to hatred against nationals from another member state. That is unacceptable,” said EPP leader Joseph Daul (France).
Despite the fact that Rutte is part of the Liberal political family, ALDE Chair Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium) was unequivocal about condemning the “silence” of the Dutch government and the message sent by the website. “My group has nothing but contempt for Mr Wilders’ initiative.” Recalling the need to be even-handed in criticising populist tactics, Verhofstadt lumped together French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Wilders. “I wonder who is the extreme-right wing candidate [in France], is it [Marine] Le Pen or Sarkozy?” he asked.
Reactions from other political group leaders all condemned Rutte’s passivity, whose hands are tied by his need for Wilders’ support, and who thus claims it is not a governmental issue. S&D leader Hannes Swoboda (Austria) called for the website to be closed down. Polish deputy Jacek Kurski (EFD) said Rutte’s lack of reaction is “scandalous”. “The prime minister [of the Netherlands] is not taking up his responsibility,” said Marije Cornelissen (Greens-EFA, Netherlands). “The prime minister ought to have directly condemned this website,” said Peter van Dalen (ECR, Netherlands), adding, however, that the EP holding a debate on this issue is “too much honour” for Wilders.
Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who had already condemned the PVV website in February, welcomed the comments made in the plenary chamber. “It is unacceptable that EU citizens become target of xenophobic attitudes because they have exercised their right to move from one state to another,” she said. Reding also called upon on the Dutch authorities to “fully investigate the lawfulness of the website under Dutch law and Union law”.
According to Marie-Christine Vergiat (GUE-NGL, France), this is not enough. “You continue to refer to member states and their tribunals but I thought that the Commission was the guardian of the treaties, that freedom of circulation and non-discrimination were part of the European values,” she said. “I notice that certain values are more important than others and that in economic matters when the free circulation of goods and capital is concerned, competition barriers the Commission is prompter to condemn,” added Vergiat.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if the equivalent of MEMRI were created to monitor Hebrew news outlets and politicians. The selective editing and faulty translations wouldn’t even be necessary:
The Knesset plenum convened Wednesday for a special session titled “the political, economical and social failures of Netanyahu’s government.” The session was called after 40 Knesset members signed a bill mandating the prime minister to face the House.
MK Limor Livnat shouted at her “You shouldn’t even be here!” and MK Ofir Akunis (Syrian parliament.” Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat shouted at her “You shouldn’t even be here!” and MK Ofir Akunis (Likud) added, “You have some nerve.” MK Zion Fanian (Likud) urges Zoabi to “go and join the Syrian parliament.”
MK Yoel Hasson’s (Kadima) speech went a step further: Addressing all Arab MKs, he said, “You are the ones impeding coexistence. You’re the devil. You’re the hurdle. Just wait and see – you will lose.”
He then turned his attention to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and urges him to end Hamas‘ rule of Gaza Strip and strike peace with the Palestinians.
MK Ofir Akunis (Likud) took the podium next, defended the Coalition and blasted the Opposition – especially the “self-hating Kadima Party.” MK Afu Aghbaria (Hadash) interrupted him and was answered with “You hate Israel – go to Gaza.”
MK Alex Miller (Yisrael Beiteinu) also defended the Coalition, saying that the crisis in Syria, the Iranian threat and the volatile political situation in Egypt, “All constitute very serious problems – and dealing with serious problems requires serious people.”
MK Amir Peretz (Labor) surprised the plenum by defending the government’s actions vis-à-vis the latest round of escalation in the south: “To all those who say – ‘let’s topple Hamas’ rule, let’s take Gaza’ – ask yourself one question: what will happen afterwards?
“We could pay a heavy price. The IDFis capable of executing such an order, the question is – do we want the IDF to rule the Strip?”
Peretz also lauded Iron Dome, and urged the Netanyahu to put an end to the Defense Ministry and Treasury’s debate over its budget.
The Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, known as the M.E.K has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Dept. for 15 years.
The M.E.K. are terrorists. They were driven out of Iran and given a home at a place called Camp Ashraf in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who they supported. Saddam Hussein used the M.E.K. to carry out terrorist acts in Iran. Now that Hussein is gone, the Iraqi’s want the M.E.K. out of Iraq as they also see it as a dangerous group. They are not former terrorists, but current terrorists.
Richard Engel & Robert Windrem of NBC News reported just this month that
Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.
The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.
The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.
… Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.” All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.
NIAC reports that
A 2004 FBI report on the Mujahaddin-e-Khalq (MEK) was revealed in June 2011 which states that the MEK “is actively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism,” despite the organization’s alleged renunciation of terror in 2001.
… Some of the highlights (all direct quotes):
•“Los Angeles investigation has determined that the MEK is currently actively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism.” [pg 4]
•“This organization routinely lobbies unwitting members of Congress under the pretext of human rights issues in Iran.“ [pg 5]
•“NLA fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MEK’s Support Network. Investigation has learned that these children are then further indoctrinated in to the organization and are often used for various social benefit fraud such as was revealed during joint FBI/Cologne Police Department investigation in Germany. In one case one of the children was chained to a bed and only after her escape and report to local police was the fraud scheme discovered. Interviews of some of these MEK children found children fully indoctrinated into a “cult-like” organization with no regard to the welfare of the child. These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if the children did not cooperate with the MEK. Open source reporting from defecting MEK members has revealed that MEK fighters are often told the same story about their children should they take issue with MEK leadership and desire to leave the organization.” [pgs 26-27]
•“The MEK, in addition to being a foreign terrorist organization, is a “cult”…MEK members and supporters often indicate that Rajavi makes his decision based on input from God.” [pg 26]
•“MEK members/supporters/fighters have been through years of ideological training and for lack of better word ‘brain washing’.” [pg 31]
•“This (Foreign Terrorist Organization) designation was made due to the MEK’s long and violent history of past terrorist activity directed against U.S. personnel and the U.S. Embassy in Iran during the 1970s, the assassinations of multiple Americans, the MEK’s ongoing acts of terrorism in Iran, and the MEK’s past terrorist activities in Western Countries to include hostage taking and attacks on Iranian diplomatic establishments and officials. This designation was also made to send the message that the U.S. had taken the high road on terrorism and would designate any foreign group engaged in terrorist activity abroad to include not only groups that target U.S. interests, but terrorists groups that target any sovereign nation.” [pg 24]
•“Additionally, the MEK continues to practice misinformation operations in the U.S. and Europe. MEK lobbyist routinely hold press conferences and pass information regarding the current Iranian government that is inaccurate and is designed to influence Western Media and governments.” [pg 18]
•“Interviewers should keep in mind that membership in the MEK is a significant step in the MEK hierarchy or leadership cadre. It is safe to say that only the high echelon leadership will most admit to being MEK members.” [pg 29]
•“ Another tactic that the MEK has been employing is disinformation regarding former MEK members and witnesses who have come forward to testify and speak against the MEK. The MEK will brand these former members and witnesses as Iranian government agents. This information is often picked up by Western Intelligence agencies as factual information and is disseminated as intelligence. This further frustrates criminal investigators as they attempt to interview these former MEK members and potentially use them for testimony.” Pg 18-9
That being the case, it is difficult to understand why it is that elected representatives, and government officials of the U.S. government could support and/or work with, and accept money from this organization freely and openly. It is difficult to understand in the case of support for the M.E.K. as it is difficult to understand in the case of Rep. Peter King’s open support and fundraising for the IRA. The only justification for such an indefensible position must be that these folks believe that the enemy of my enemy can’t be a terrorist.
Glenn Greenwald has written a very detailed article on the hypocrisy of this support for a terrorist organization. Here are a few key points from his article:
In June, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law. In that case, the Court upheld the Obama DOJ’s very broad interpretation of the statute that criminalizes the providing of “material support” to groups formally designated by the State Department as Terrorist organizations. The five-judge conservative bloc (along with Justice Stevens) held that pure political speech could be permissibly criminalized as “material support for Terrorism” consistent with the First Amendment if the “advocacy [is] performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization” (emphasis added). In other words, pure political advocacy in support of a designated Terrorist group could be prosecuted as a felony — punishable with 15 years in prison — if the advocacy is coordinated with that group.
… One can reasonably debate whether MEK actually belongs on the list of Terrorist organizations (the same is true for several other groups on that list). But as a criminal matter, that debate is irrelevant. The law criminalizes the providing of material support to any group on that list, and it is not a defense to argue after one gets caught that the group should be removed.
… What is particularly repellent about all of this is not the supreme hypocrisy and self-interested provincialism of Fran Townsend. That’s all just par for the course. What’s infuriating is that there are large numbers of people — almost always Muslims — who have been prosecuted and are now in prison for providing “material support” to Terrorist groups for doing far less than Fran Townsend and her fellow cast of bipartisan ex-officials have done with and on behalf of MEK. In fact, the U.S. Government has been (under the administration in which Townsend worked) and still is (under the administration Rendell supports) continuously prosecuting Muslims for providing “material support” for Terrorist groups based on their pure speech, all while Fran Townsend, Ed Rendell and company have said nothing or, worse, supported the legal interpretations that justified these prosecutions.
The last time I wrote about these individuals’ material support for MEK, I highlighted just a few of those cases:
•A Staten Island satellite TV salesman in 2009 was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers;
•a Massachusetts resident, Tarek Mehanna, is being prosecuted now ”for posting pro-jihadist material on the internet”;
•a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, Jubair Ahmad, was indicted last September for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube that was highly critical of U.S. actions in the Muslim world, an allegedly criminal act simply because prosecutors claim he discussed the video in advance with the son of a leader of a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba);
•a Saudi Arabian graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was prosecuted simply for maintaining a website with links “to groups that praised suicide bombings in Chechnya and in Israel” and “jihadist” sites that solicited donations for extremist groups (he was ultimately acquitted); and,
• last July, a 22-year-old former Penn State student and son of an instructor at the school, Emerson Winfield Begolly, was indicted for — in the FBI’s words — “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the shootings” at a Marine Corps base, action which former Obama lawyer Marty Lederman said ”does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection.”
Yet we have the most well-connected national security and military officials in Washington doing far more than all of that right out in the open — they’re receiving large payments from a Terrorist group, meeting with its leaders, attending their meetings, and then advocating for them in very public forums; Howard Dean, after getting paid by the group, actually called for MEK’s leader to be recognized as the legitimate President of Iran – and so far none have been prosecuted or even indicted
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has previously expressed concern about this support for a terrorist organization. They noted in July of 2011 that
Congressional supporters of the drive to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. terrorism list defended the organization’s use of violence while dismissing Iran’s nonviolent Green Movement at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week. The hearing was also remarkable in that senior leaders of the designated foreign terrorist organization were caught counseling some of the witnesses before the hearing. It is illegal to coordinate with a foreign terrorist organization to advocate on behalf of the terrorist group.
… Despite the terrorist listing, Ali Safavi, a senior member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, was at the hearing, where he openly counseled witnesses before and during their testimony. The NCRI is the MEK’s political wing and is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
The hearing’s witnesses included three former U.S. officials who have actively participated in pro-MEK conferences, including former Bush Administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
All three witnesses who previously appeared at MEK conferences unanimously called for the MEK to be removed from the terror list, though none were asked to disclose whether they had received money to support the organization, as have other officials who have advocated for delisting the group.
The NY Times reports today that this state of affairs may be changing and that such individuals may now face scrutiny. According to the article’s author Scott Shane Edward G. Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and an outspoken supporter of the M.E.K., said on Monday that William Morris Endeavor, which handles his speaking engagements, received a subpoena last week seeking information on fees he had received for M.E.K.-related speeches.
Shane had reported back in November of 2011 on a long list of officials. At that time, he wrote
The extraordinary lobbying effort to reverse the terrorist designation of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, has won the support of two former C.I.A. directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss; a former F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh; a former attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey; President George W. Bush’s first homeland security chief, Tom Ridge; President Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; big-name Republicans like the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Democrats like the former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and even the former top counterterrorism official of the State Department, Dell L. Dailey, who argued unsuccessfully for ending the terrorist label while in office.
The American advocates have been well paid, hired through their speaking agencies and collecting fees of $10,000 to $50,000 for speeches on behalf of the Iranian group. Some have been flown to Paris, Berlin and Brussels for appearances.
… The M.E.K. advocacy campaign has included full-page newspaper advertisements identifying the group as “Iran’s Main Opposition” — an absurd distortion in the view of most Iran specialists; leaders of Iran’s broad opposition, known as the Green Movement, have denounced the group. The M.E.K. has hired high-priced lobbyists like the Washington firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Its lawyers in Europe won a long fight to persuade the European Union to drop its own listing of the M.E.K. as a terrorist group in 2009.
The group’s spending, certainly in the millions of dollars, has inevitably raised questions about funding sources.
Ali Safavi, who runs a pro-M.E.K. group in Washington called Near East Policy Research, says the money comes from wealthy Iranian expatriates in the United States and Europe. Because “material support” to a designated terrorist group is a crime, advocates insist that the money goes only to sympathizers and not to the M.E.K. itself.
Congress has taken note of the campaign. A House resolution for dropping the terrorist listing has 97 co-sponsors, including the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan. At a hearing this month, senators pressed the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, about the threat to Camp Ashraf
Last month, Congressman Dana Robrahacher spoke in favor of removing the terrorist designation from the M.E.K.
Rep. Ted Poe (R – TX) has praised the M.E.K. as the ticket to regime change in Iran.
John Bolton spoke at an event in honor of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)
Two years ago, Rachel Slajda reported that Rudy Giuliani, Tom Bolton, and Tom Ridge had gone to Paris and spoke at an event in support of the M.E.K.
Jason Ditz has reported that The MeK’s history of terrorist attacks includes repeated attacks on US businessmen and military personnel in pre-revolution Iran, and the group was one of the founding members of the “Foreign Terrorist Organization” list when it was created by the US State Department in 1997. The group is typified by its harsh reaction to any criticism, and was reported by Human Rights Watch to have run a private system of detention centers inside Iraq to detain (and in many cases torture) dissident members.
In addition to all of this open support for a terrorist group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) ran this ad on American television calling for its removal from the State Department’s list of terrorist organization. Former Gov. Ed Rendell, Tom Ridge, and former Mayor Rudy Guiliani are mong the people appearing in the ad. Can anyone imagine any other designated terrorist organization being allowed to purchase television advertising?
During the uproar over the Park51/Cordoba House community center last year, Rep. Peter King called for a “full investigation” of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf because Rauf refused to publicly call Hamas a “terrorist organization.” Imam Rauf hadn’t expressed suport for a terrorist organization, he hadn’t lobbied to get it removed from a terrorist list, he hadn’t accepted money from them, or attended or spoken at their events – but simply because he hadn’t publicly called them a “terrorist organization”, Rep. King thinks he deserves a “full investigation”.
I think it is time to demand the same standards of our elected officials and representatives.
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.
Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”
Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to Al Qaeda figures in part due to his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist. While Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to Al Qaeda, he adds that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.”
While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”
Seven months after the Majala bombing, in July 2010, Sharaf and Shaye were out running errands. Sharaf popped into a supermarket, while Shaye waited outside. When Sharaf came out of the store, he recalls, “I saw armed men grabbing him and taking him to a car.” The men, it turned out, were Yemeni intelligence agents. They snatched Shaye, hooded him and took him to an undisclosed location. The agents, according to Sharaf, threatened Shaye and warned him against making further statements on TV. Shaye’s reports on the Majala bombing and his criticism of the US and Yemeni governments, Sharaf said, “pushed the regime to kidnap him. One of the interrogators told him, ‘We will destroy your life if you keep on talking about this issue.’” Eventually, in the middle of the night, Shaye was dumped back onto a street and released. “Abdulelah was threatened many times over the phone by the Political Security and then he was kidnapped for the first time, beaten and investigated over his statements and analysis on the Majala bombing and the US war against terrorism in Yemen,” says Shaye’s lawyer, Abdulrahman Barman. “I believe he was arrested upon a request from the US.”
Shaye responded to his abduction by going back on al Jazeera and describing his own arrest. “Abdulelah continued to report facts, not for the sake of the Americans or Al Qaeda, but because he believed that what he was reporting was the truth and that it is a journalist’s role to uncover the truth,” says Sharaf. “He is a very professional journalist,” he adds. “He is rare in the journalistic environment in Yemen where 90 percent of journalists write extempore and lack credibility.” Shaye, he explains, is “very open-minded and rejects extremism. He was against violence and the killing of innocents in the name of Islam. He was also against killing innocent Muslims with pretext of fighting terrorism. In his opinion, the war on terror should have been fought culturally, not militarily. He believes using violence will create more violence and encourage the spread of more extremist currents in the region.”
In the meantime, Sharaf was encountering his own troubles with the Yemeni regime over his drawings of President Saleh and his criticism of the Yemeni government’s war against the minority Houthi population in the north of Yemen. He had also criticized conservative Salafis. And he was Shaye’s best friend.
On August 6, 2010, Sharaf and his family had just broken the Ramadan fast when he heard shouting from outside his home: “Come out, the house is surrounded.” Sharaf walked outside. “I saw soldiers I had never seen before. They were tall and heavy—they reminded me of American Marines. Then, I knew that they were from the counterterrorism unit. They had modern laser guns. They were wearing American Marine–type uniforms,” he recalls. They told Sharaf he was coming with them. “What is the accusation?” he asked. “They said, ‘You’ll find out.’ ”
As Sharaf was being arrested, Yemeni forces had surrounded Shaye’s home as well. “Abdulelah refused to come out, so they raided his house, took him by force, beat him and broke his tooth,” Sharaf says. “We were both taken blindfolded and handcuffed to the national security prison, which is supported by the Americans.” They were separated and thrown in dark, underground cells, says Sharaf. “We were kept for about thirty days during Ramadan in the national security prison where we were continuously interrogated.”
For that first month, Sharaf and Shaye did not see each other. Eventually, they were taken from the national security prison to Yemen’s Political Security prison, where they were put in a cell together. “We were transferred to the political security prison built by Saddam Hussein, his gift to Yemen,” he says. “We were moved from the American gift to the Iraqi gift.” (The Nation could not independently verify Sharaf’s claim of an Iraqi role in the building of the prison. And while the US trains and supports Yemen’s counterterrorism force, it is not clear if that aid has been used for the national security prison). Sharaf was eventually released, after he pledged to the authorities that he would not draw any more cartoons of President Saleh. Shaye would make no such deal.
Shaye was held in solitary confinement for thirty-four days with no access to a lawyer. His family did not even know where he had been taken or why. Eventually, his lawyers received a tip from a released prisoner that Shaye was in the Political Security prison and they were able to see him. “When Abdulelah was arrested, he was put in a narrow dirty and foul smelling bathroom for five days.I noticed that one of Abdulelah’s teeth was extracted and another one was broken, in addition to presence of some scars on his chest,” recalls Barman. “There were a lot scars on his chest. He was psychologically tortured. He had been told that all his friends and family members had left him and that no one had raised his case. He was tortured by false information.”=
This cartoon, drawn by Abdulelah Haider Shaye’s friend, Kamal Sharaf, portrays Shaye locked up while US Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein holds the key. The words above the cartoon read: Freedom for the Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye.
On September 22, Shaye was eventually hauled into a court. Prosecutors asked for more time to prepare a case against him. A month later, in late October, he was locked in a cage in Yemen’s state security court, which was established by presidential decree and has been roundly denounced as illegal and unfair, as a judge read out a list of charges against him. He was accused of being the “media man” for Al Qaeda, recruiting new operatives for the group and providing Al Qaeda with photos of Yemeni bases and foreign embassies for potential targeting. “The government filed many charges against him,” says Barman. “Some of these charges were: joining an armed group aiming to target the stability and security of the country, inciting Al Qaeda members to assassinate President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, recruiting new Al Qaeda members, working as propagandist for Al Qaeda and Anwar Al-Awlaki in particular. Most of these charges carry the death sentence under Yemeni law.” As the charges against him were read, according to journalist Iona Craig, a longtime foreign correspondent based in Yemen who reports regularly for the Times of London, Shaye “paced slowly around the white cell, smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.”
When the judge finished reading the charges against him, Shaye stood behind the bars of the holding cell and addressed his fellow journalists. “When they hid murderers of children and women in Abyan, when I revealed the locations and camps of nomads and civilians in Abyan, Shabwa and Arhab when they were going to be hit by cruise missiles, it was on that day they decided to arrest me,” he declared. “You notice in the court how they have turned all of my journalistic contributions into accusations. All of my journalistic contributions and quotations to international reporters and news channels have been turned into accusations.” As security guards dragged him away, Shaye yelled, “Yemen, this is a place where, when a young journalist becomes successful, he is viewed with suspicion.”
In January 2011, Shaye was convicted of terrorism-related charges and sentenced to five years in prison, followed by two years of restricted movement and government surveillance. Throughout his trial, Shaye refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court and refused to present a legal defense. Human Rights Watch said the specialized court where Shaye was tried “failed to meet international standards of due process,” while his lawyers argue that the little “evidence” that was presented against him relied overwhelmingly on fabricated documents. “What happened was a political not judicial decision. It has no legal basis,” says Barman, Shaye’s lawyer, who boycotted the trial. “Having witnessed his trial I can say it was a complete farce,” says Craig.
Several international human rights groups condemned the trial as a sham and an injustice. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
There is no doubt that Shaye was reporting facts that both the Yemeni and US government wanted to suppress. He was also interviewing people Washington was hunting. While the US and Yemeni governments alleged that he was a facilitator for Al Qaeda propaganda, close observers of Yemen disagree. “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of his work,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University who had communicated regularly with Shaye since 2008. “Without Shaye’s reports and interviews we would know much less about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than we do, and if one believes, as I do, that knowledge of the enemy is important to constructing a strategy to defeat them, then his arrest and continued detention has left a hole in our knowledge that has yet to be filled.”
As the US ratcheted up its efforts to assassinate the radical cleric Anwar Awlaki, among the charges leveled against him was that he praised the actions of the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. A key source for those statements was an interview with Awlaki conducted by Shaye broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2009. Far from coming off as sympathetic, Shaye’s interview was objective and seemed aimed at actually getting answers. Among the questions he asked Awlaki: How can you agree with what Nidal did as he betrayed his American nation? Why did you bless the acts of Nidal Hasan? Do you have any connection with the incident directly? Shaye also confronted Awlaki with inconsistencies from Awlaki’s previous interviews. If anything, Shaye’s interviews with Awlaki provided the US intelligence community and the politicians and pro-assassination punditry with ammunition to support their campaign to kill Awlaki. (Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike on September 30, 2011.)
After Shaye was convicted and sentenced, tribal leaders intensified their pressure on President Saleh to issue a pardon. “Some prominent Yemenis and tribal sheikhs visited the president to mediate in the issue and the president agreed to release and pardon him,” recalls Barman. “We were waiting for the release of the pardon—it was printed out and prepared in a file for the president to sign and announce the next day.” Word of the impending pardon leaked in the Yemeni press. “That same day,” Barman says, “the president [Saleh] received a phone call from Obama expressing US concerns over the release of Abdulelah Haider.” Saleh rescinded the pardon.
“Certainly Shaye’s reports were an embarrassment for the US and Yemeni government, because at a time when both governments were seeking and failing to kill key leaders within AQAP, this single journalist with his camera and computer was able to locate these same leaders and interview them,” says Johnsen. “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job, and it remains unclear why the US or Yemeni government refuse to present the evidence they claim to possess.”
In February, Shaye began a brief hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, ending it after his family expressed serious concerns about his deteriorating health. While international media organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, have called for Shaye’s release, his case has received scant attention in the United States. Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers have said he remains in jail at the request of the White House. Some had hoped that when President Saleh stepped down earlier this year, Shaye might be released.
That seems unlikely if the US government has any say in the matter. “We are standing by [President Obama’s] comments from last February,” State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told The Nation. “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin said, “That is all we have to say about this case.”
When Craig recently questioned the US ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, about Shaye’s case, she says Feierstein laughed at the question before answering. “Shaye is in jail because he was facilitating Al Qaeda and its planning for attacks on Americans and therefore we have a very direct interest in his case and his imprisonment,” he said. When Craig mentioned the shock waves it had sent through the journalism community in Yemen, Feierstein replied, “This isn’t anything to do with journalism, it is to do with the fact that he was assisting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and if they [Yemeni journalists] are not doing that they don’t have anything to worry about from us.”
For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicate that simply interviewing Al Qaeda–associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, is a crime in the view of the US government. “I think the worst thing about the whole case is that not only is an independent journalist being held in proxy detention by the US,” says Craig, “but that they’ve successfully put paid to other Yemeni journalists investigating air strikes against civilians and, most importantly, holding their own government to account. Shaye did both of those things.” She adds: “With the huge increase in government air strikes and US drone attacks recently, Yemen needs journalists like Shaye to report on what’s really going on.”
PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claimed on Tuesday that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is inciting racism and Islamophobia in France in order to get re-elected in the upcoming presidential elections. Erdoğan said resorting to xenophobia, particularly Islamophobia, to win elections is very irresponsible.
Depicting a recent bill Sarkozy’s center-right UMP initiated seeking to penalize the denial of Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as an act inciting the French to xenophobia, Erdoğan said the current president adopted a more aggressive stance after the bill was passed into law but then overruled by the French Constitutional Council, which deemed it unconstitutional. Erdoğan said the council had corrected a historic mistake by cancelling the law.
Valerie Boyer, a deputy from the UMP, initiated the genocide bill criminalizing the denial of the so-called Armenian genocide in December 2011. The bill was approved in the lower house of the French Parliament and in the French Senate in January. However, the constitutional council deemed it unconstitutional, stating that it violated the freedom of expression.
“Sarkozy is making xenophobia a matter of domestic politics, and issuing threatening remarks against foreigners in his country. This is in violation of the EU’s universal values and fundamental principles,” Erdoğan said. The French presidential elections will take place between April and May.
Last June, Israel’s Supreme Court reached a ruling that some saw as a compromise to a legal battle that had lasted nearly a decade. Beer Sheva’s Big Mosque that has been closed to prayer since 1948 would be converted into a museum of Islamic culture.
The decision disappointed thousands of Muslim citizens who wished to re-open the Ottoman-built mosque as a place of worship, thereby fulfilling a gaping need: there is currently no public space for Muslims to worship in Beer Sheva.
This month the Big Mosque tried out its new mantle as a museum, but visitors will not find one mention of Islam. Instead passersby can see figurines wearing the military fatigues of the British and Israeli armies, and pictures of Mandate-era governmental buildings in an exhibit titled, “History of Be’er Sheva: From 1900 – 2011.”
According to an Adalah press release, “The building’s signs and pamphlets distributed at the entrance reveal that the Big Mosque has been turned into an architectural museum, recording construction in Beer el-Sabe from the British Mandate until today.”
Nuri al-Uqbi, the director of the Association for the Support and Protection of the Rights of the Bedouin in Israel, told Adalah:
“I went yesterday, on 5 March, on a trip to the Big Mosque, and I felt horrified and furious at this violation of the mosque’s sanctity. In the mosque there are plastic dolls and models wearing British and Israeli uniforms, some of them in shorts, among other exhibits that are irrelevant to Arab-Islamic culture or tradition.”
The Big Mosque was originally built in 1906, and was used accordingly until the Nakbah in 1948. From 1948 until 1953, the newly created State of Israel imposed military rule on its remaining Palestinian population, and used the building as a courthouse and prison. Since 1991, the mosque had been closed for public use of any kind and has subsequently fallen into disrepair.
In August 2002, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the Islamic Committee in the Naqab, and 23 Palestinian citizens of Israel from Beer Sheva petitioned the High Court of Justice to re-open the Big Mosque for prayer.
Arguing against the petition, the Beer Sheva municipality claimed that allowing worship in the mosque would disturb the peace, and argued it should be used as a “general museum” instead.
Justice Miriam Naor, who sided with Beer Sheva’s municipality, said a general museum for all religions and ethnic groups would promote “multiculturalism and coexistence rather than disrupting it.”
A city that refuses to grant its large Muslim population with any place to worship does not appear to care much for “multiculturalism.”
But why does the municipality fear the existence of a single mosque in Beer Sheva? Or an Islamic museum? Is it so insecure with its own identity in the “Jewish State” that it must deny the historical lineage that connects Muslims and Arabs to the land?
Israel consistently denies its Arab and Muslim population with equal rights in what appears to be an anxious effort to assert Jewish supremacy in a land it took by force.
It looks like Israel is once again displaying its neurosis to the world.
Adalah has submitted a pre-petition to the Attorney General, to immediately remove the current exhibition.
Glenn Greenwald, the first nomination for induction in the Anti-Loon Hall of Fame
Greenwald is like the canary in the coal mine, warning about the grave threat to our civil liberties and the abuse of the rule of law at the hand of the political elite:
We now have an extraordinary situation that reveals the impunity with which political elites commit the most egregious crimes, as well as the special privileges to which they explicitly believe they — and they alone — are entitled. That a large bipartisan cast of Washington officials got caught being paid substantial sums of money by an Iranian dissident group that is legally designated by the U.S. Government as a Terrorist organization, and then meeting with and advocating on behalf of that Terrorist group, is very significant for several reasons. New developments over the last week make it all the more telling. Just behold the truly amazing set of facts that have arisen:
In June, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law. In that case, the Court upheld the Obama DOJ’s very broad interpretation of the statute that criminalizes the providing of “material support” to groups formally designated by the State Department as Terrorist organizations. The five-judge conservative bloc (along with Justice Stevens) held that pure political speech could be permissibly criminalized as “material support for Terrorism” consistent with the First Amendment if the “advocacy [is] performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization” (emphasis added). In other words, pure political advocacy in support of a designated Terrorist group could be prosecuted as a felony — punishable with 15 years in prison — if the advocacy is coordinated with that group.
This ruling was one of the most severe erosions of free speech rights in decades because, as Justice Breyer (joined by Ginsberg and Sotomayor) pointed out in dissent, “all the activities” at issue, which the DOJ’s interpretation would criminalize, “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” The dissent added that the DOJ’s broad interpretation of the statute “gravely and without adequate justification injure[s] interests of the kind the First Amendment protects.” As Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, who represented the plaintiffs, explained, this was literally “the first time ever” that “the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment permits the criminalization of pure speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity.” Thus, “the court rule[d] that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be made a crime, and that any coordination with a blacklisted group can land a citizen in prison for 15 years.” Then-Solicitor-General Elena Kagan argued the winning Obama DOJ position before the Court.
Whatever one’s views are on this ruling, it is now binding law. To advocate on behalf of a designated Terrorist group constitutes the felony of “providing material support” if that advocacy is coordinated with the group.
Like most assaults on the Constitution in the name of Terrorism during the Obama presidency, criticism of that Court decision was rare in establishment circles (that’s because Republicans consistently support such assaults while Democrats are reluctant to criticize them under Obama). On the day the Humanitarian Law decision was released, CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer interviewed Fran Townsend, George Bush’s Homeland Security Advisor and now-CNN analyst, and Townsend hailed the decision as “a tremendous win for not only the United States but for the current administration.” Here’s how that discussion went:
BLITZER: There is a related case involved that the Supreme Court came out with today and I want to talk to you about this. The Supreme Court ruling today in the fight against terrorism . . . .The 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court, the justices rejecting the arguments that the law threatens the constitutional right of free speech. You read the decision, 6-3, only three of the Democratic appointed justices decided they didn’t like this. They were the minority. But the majority was pretty firm in saying that if you go ahead and express what is called material support for a known terrorist group, you could go to jail for that.
TOWNSEND: This is a tremendous win for not only the United States but for the current administration. It’s interesting, Wolf, Elena Kagan the current Supreme Court nominee argued in favor of upholding this law. This is an important tool the government uses to convict those, to charge and convict, potentially convict those who provide money, recruits, propaganda, to terrorist organizations, but are not what we call people who actually blow things up or pull the trigger.
BLITZER: So it’s a major decision, a 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court. If you’re thinking about even voicing support for a terrorist group, don’t do it because the government can come down hard on you and the Supreme Court said the government has every right to do so.
TOWNSEND: It is more than just voicing support, Wolf. It is actually the notion of providing material support, significant material support.
BLITZER: But they’re saying that if material support, they’re defining as expressing support or giving advice or whatever to that organization.
TOWNSEND: That’s right. But it could be technical advice, bomb-building advice, fundraising.
So Fran Townsend lavishly praised this decision — one that, as Blitzer put it, means that “If you’re thinking about even voicing support for a terrorist group, don’t do it because the government can come down hard on you.” And while Townsend was right that the decision requires “more than just voicing support” for the Terrorist group, the Court was crystal clear that such voicing of support, standing alone, can be prosecuted if it is done in coordination with the group (“the term ’service’ [] cover[s] advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization“).
But look at what is happening now to Fran Townsend and many of her fellow political elites. In August of last year, The Christian Science Monitor‘s Scott Peterson published a detailed exposé about “a high-powered array of former top American officials” who have received “tens of thousands of dollars” from a designated Terrorist organization – the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — and then met with its leaders, attended its meetings, and/or publicly advocated on its behalf. That group includes Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh — and Fran Townsend. This is how it works:
Former US officials taking part in MEK-linked events told the Monitor or confirmed publicly that they received substantial fees, paid by local Iranian-American groups to speaker bureaus that handle their public appearances.
The State Dept. official, who is familiar with the speech contracts, explains the mechanism: “Your speech agent calls, and says you get $20,000 to speak for 20 minutes. They will send a private jet, you get $25,000 more when you are done, and they will send a team to brief you on what to say.”
As but one example, Rendell, the former Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania and current MSNBC contributor, was paid $20,000 for a 10- minute speech before a MEK gathering, and has been a stalwart advocate of the group ever since.
Even for official Washington, where elite crimes are tolerated as a matter of course, this level of what appears to be overt criminality — taking large amounts of money from a designated Terrorist group, appearing before its meetings, meeting with its leaders, then advocating on its behalf — is too much to completely overlook. The Washington Timesreported on Friday that the Treasury Department’s counter-Terrorism division is investigating speaking fees paid to former Gov. Rendell, who, the article notes, has “become among [MEK's] most vocal advocates.” According to Rendell, “investigators have subpoenaed records related to payments he has accepted for public speaking engagements” for MEK. As the article put it, ”some observers have raised questions about the legality of accepting payment in exchange for providing assistance or services to a listed terrorist group.” Beyond the “material support” crime, engaging in such transactions with designated Terrorist groups is independently prohibited by federal law:
David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, noted that “any group that’s on the list is also, by definition, on the Treasury Department’s list for specially designated global terrorists.”
“Anyone in the United States is prohibited from engaging in any transaction with such an entity,” he said.
While Mr. Cole stressed his personal belief that individuals have a “First Amendment right to speak out freely” for an organization like the MEK, he said that “it is a crime to engage in any transaction, which would certainly include getting paid to do public relations for them.“
Rendell has a lot of company in the commission of what very well may be these serious crimes — including the very same Fran Townsend who cheered the Humanitarian Law decision that could be her undoing. After someone on Twitter wrote to her this weekend to say that she should be prosecuted (and “put in GITMO indefinitely”) for her “material support”of MEK, this is how — with the waving American flag as her chosen background — she defended herself in reply:
How reprehensible is the conduct of Fran Townsend here? Just two years ago, she went on CNN to celebrate a Supreme Court decision that rejected First Amendment claims of free speech and free association in order to rule that anyone — most often Muslims — can be prosecuted under the “material support” statute simply for advocacy for a Terrorist group that is coordinated with the group. And yet, the minute Fran Townsend gets caught doing exactly that — not just out of conviction but also because she’s being paid by that Terrorist group — she suddenly invokes the very same Constitutional rights whose erosions she cheered when it came to the prosecution of others. Now that her own liberty is at stake by virtue of getting caught being on the dole from a Terrorist group, she suddenly insists that the First Amendment allows her to engage in this behavior: exactly the argument that Humanitarian Law rejected, with her gushing approval on CNN (“a tremendous win for not only the United States but for the current administration“; This is an important tool the government uses to convict those . . . who provide [] propaganda, to terrorist organizations”).”
What is particularly repellent about all of this is not the supreme hypocrisy and self-interested provincialism of Fran Townsend. That’s all just par for the course. What’s infuriating is that there are large numbers of people — almost always Muslims — who have been prosecuted and are now in prison for providing “material support” to Terrorist groups for doing far less than Fran Townsend and her fellow cast of bipartisan ex-officials have done with and on behalf of MEK. In fact, the U.S. Government has been (under the administration in which Townsend worked) and still is (under the administration Rendell supports) continuously prosecuting Muslims for providing “material support” for Terrorist groups based on their pure speech, all while Fran Townsend, Ed Rendell and company have said nothing or, worse, supported the legal interpretations that justified these prosecutions.
The last time I wrote about these individuals’ material support for MEK, I highlighted just a few of those cases:
A Staten Island satellite TV salesman in 2009 was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers;
a Massachusetts resident, Tarek Mehanna, is being prosecuted now ”for posting pro-jihadist material on the internet”;
a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, Jubair Ahmad, was indicted last September for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube that was highly critical of U.S. actions in the Muslim world, an allegedly criminal act simply because prosecutors claim he discussed the video in advance with the son of a leader of a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba);
a Saudi Arabian graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was prosecuted simply for maintaining a website with links “to groups that praised suicide bombings in Chechnya and in Israel” and “jihadist” sites that solicited donations for extremist groups (he was ultimately acquitted); and,
last July, a 22-year-old former Penn State student and son of an instructor at the school, Emerson Winfield Begolly, was indicted for — in the FBI’s words — “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the shootings” at a Marine Corps base, action which former Obama lawyer Marty Lederman said ”does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection.”
Yet we have the most well-connected national security and military officials in Washington doing far more than all of that right out in the open — they’re receiving large payments from a Terrorist group, meeting with its leaders, attending their meetings, and then advocating for them in very public forums; Howard Dean, after getting paid by the group, actually called for MEK’s leader to be recognized as the legitimate President of Iran – and so far none have been prosecuted or even indicted. The Treasury Department investigation must at least scare them. Thus, like most authoritarians, Fran Townsend suddenly discovers the importance of the very political liberties she’s helped assault now that those Constitutional protections are necessary to protect herself from prosecution. It reminds me quite a bit of how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman — one of the most reliable advocates for Bush’s illegal spying program — suddenly started sounding like a life-long, outraged ACLU member as soon as it was revealed that her own private communications were legally surveilled by the U.S. Government.
One can reasonably debate whether MEK actually belongs on the list of Terrorist organizations (the same is true for several other groups on that list). But as a criminal matter, that debate is irrelevant. The law criminalizes the providing of material support to any group on that list, and it is not a defense to argue after one gets caught that the group should be removed.
Moreover, the argument that MEK does not belong on the Terrorist list — always a dubious claim — has suffered a serious blow in the last couple of months. An NBC News report from Richard Engel and Robert Windrem in February claimed that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, and that the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service” (MEK denied the report). If true, it means that MEK continues to perpetrate definitive acts of Terrorism: using bombs and guns to kill civilian scientists and severely injure their wives. Yet Townsend, Rendell, Dean, Giuliani and other well-paid friends continue to be outspoken advocates of the group. Even the dissenters in Humanitarian Law argued that the First Amendment would allow “material support” prosecution “when the defendant knows or intends that those activities will assist the organization’s unlawful terrorist actions.” A reasonable argument could certainly be advanced that, in light of these recent reports about MEK’s Terrorism, one who takes money from the group and then advocates for its removal from the Terrorist list “knows or intends that those activities will assist the organization’s unlawful terrorist actions”: a prosecutable offense even under the dissent’s far more limited view of the statute.
But whatever else is true, the activities of Townsend, Rendell, Dean, Giuliani and the rest of MEK’s paid shills are providing more than enough “material support” to be prosecuted under the Humanitarian Law decision and other statutes. They’re providing more substantial “material support” to this Terrorist group than many people — usually vulnerable, powerless Muslims — who are currently imprisoned for that crime. It’s nice that Fran Townsend suddenly discovered the virtues of free speech and free association guarantees, but under the laws she and so many others like her have helped implement and defend, there is a very strong case to make that her conduct and those of these other well-connected advocates for this Terrorist group is squarely within the realm of serious criminal behavior.
As a brown-skinned Sikh with a turban on my head and a long beard on my chin, I deal with my fair share of racist and xenophobic harassment regularly, including in my home of New York City, the most diverse city on the planet. It usually takes the form of someone yelling or perhaps mumbling at me: Osama bin Laden/terrorist/al Qaeda/he’s going to blow up the [insert location]/go back to your country/etc. Less often, someone might threaten me, get in my face, or in one case, pull off my turban on the subway.
My experience is not terribly unique for a turban-wearing Sikh in the United States. Especially since 9/11, we Sikhs have become all too familiar with racial epithets, bullying and violence. Just last month, a gurdwara in Michigan was vandalized with hostile anti-Muslim graffiti. Last year, in what we can assume was a hate attack, two elderly Sikh men were shot and killed while taking an evening walk in a quiet neighborhood in Elk Grove, Calif.
Many talk about the prevalence of anti-Sikh attacks as a case of “mistaken identity.” Sikhs mistaken for Muslims. Indeed, we are by and large attacked because of anti-Muslim bigotry. The Michigan gurdwara was targeted for that reason, and most of us who experience racist harassment as Sikhs in the U.S. experience it through the vilification of Muslims and/or Arabs.
Ironically, many Sikhs themselves vilify Muslims or at least distance themselves from the Muslim community at every possible opportunity. I remember in the days, weeks and months after 9/11, the first thing out of the mouths of many Sikhs when talking to the press, to politicians or even to their neighbors was, “We are not Muslims.” While this is of course a fact, the implication of the statement if it stops there is: You’re attacking the wrong community. Don’t come after us, go after the Muslims! Sikhs believe in equality and freedom and love our country and our government. But Muslims? We don’t like them either.
The roots of anti-Muslim sentiment in the Sikh community run deep in South Asia, from the days of the tyranny of Mughal emperors such as Aurangzeb in the 17th century to the bloodshed in 1947 when our homeland of Punjab was sliced into two separate nation-states. Despite these historical realities, Sikhism has always been clear that neither Muslims as a people nor Islam as a religion were ever the enemy. Tyranny was the enemy. Oppression was the enemy. Sectarianism was the enemy. In fact, the Guru Granth Sahib, our scriptures that are the center of Sikh philosophy and devotion, contains the writings of Muslim (Sufi) saints alongside those of our own Sikh Gurus. Nevertheless, historical memory breeds misguided hostility and mistrust of Muslims, especially in the contemporary global context of ever-increasing, mainstream Islamophobia.
What is it going to take for Sikhs and Muslims to join together in solidarity against the common enemies of racist harassment and violence, racial and religious profiling, and Islamophobic bigotry? Perhaps the recently exposed NYPD spying program (along with the “education” officers have received about Islam) will serve as a wake up call to my community (and other communities for that matter) about how bad things have really gotten. While we Sikhs confront bigotry on a daily basis from our neighbors, classmates, co-workers, employers and strangers on the street, our Muslim American counterparts are systematically targeted by our own government. (I should note that, of course, Sikhs too are profiled by law enforcement in less repressive, though still troubling, ways, especially at airport security).
Sikhism was born hundreds of years ago in part to stand up for the most oppressed and fight for the freedom and liberation of all people. If this isn’t reason enough for us to make the cause of rooting out Islamophobia from the NYPD and other law enforcement and government agencies our own, we only have to return to the bleak reality we Sikhs in the U.S. still face right now in 2012. A time when gurdwaras are still vandalized with anti-Muslim statements, Sikh kids are still being bullied and tormented at school every day, and I am called Osama bin Laden while walking down a Manhattan street for the 258th time (no I’m not counting).
“We are not Muslims” hasn’t been so effective for our community, has it? Even if we do so in a positive way that does not condone attacks on Muslims, simply educating the public about the fact that we are a distinct community and that we in fact “are not Muslim” will not get to the root of the problem. As long as we live in a country (and world) where an entire community (in this case, Muslims) is targeted, spied on and vilified, we will not be safe, we will not be free.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
I hope the NYPD’s blatant assault on the civil rights of our Muslim sisters and brothers propels us Sikhs as well as all people of conscience to action. Perhaps “We are not Muslims” will become “We are all Muslims,” as we come together to eradicate Islamophobic bigotry in all its forms.
LOUISVILLE, KY. (WDRB) – The Iraqi-owned business that police say was the target of a hate crime will not reopen. The business manager for Jacob’s Smoke Shop says he filed paperwork with the secretary of state to officially close the business.
Vandals broke in and ripped apart the Shepherdsville store last month, spray painting “Hate Arab” and “Go Home” on the floors and walls. Community members have now posted words of encouragement on the front of the business.
Owner Ali Alboodi told them he feared for his life and was returning to Iraq. The FBI is investigating.
Swiss Muslims, a 4% minority, are not only worried about lamophobic tactics such as a minaret ban, but the fact that the far right are gaining ground in Sweeden. ( h/t: david livingston)
Last year, in a referendum, the Swiss voted to ban the building of minarets, the towers which for centuries have been an integral part of Muslim mosques.
Peter Marshall has travelled to Switzerland, where he found Swiss Muslims bruised and those who forced the vote unrepentant.
It’s no longer surprising, but the right wing blogs are full of comments today praising the soldier who allegedly committed mass murder in Kandahar, killing men, women, and children asleep in their beds.
I don’t think he was unbalanced. I think he was getting some payback. It’s nice to see someone on our side who actually wants to hurt the enemy.
[…]
Forget apologies; Pardon that soldier…
I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama.
But the worst site by far is the right wing’s premier news channel, Fox News:
This is nothing! Wait until you see what happens to the n!qqqers here in the US of A when the new civil war starts!
[…]
THATS 15 LESS AFGAN POLICE WHO HAVE BEEN MUR D ER ING OUR TROOPS AND CIVILIANS
[…]
Obama just announced that he is personally going to provide fe la tio to every Afghani male to compensate for their loss.
[…]
The P O S P apoligizes to moooooooooooooslimes and doesnt have any respect for American solders ! Sent the ragehead obummerdeen and his entire family to Kenya where their dirty s c u m b a g b o d i e s belong !
[…]
This guy only did what the NewBIackPanthers promise to do to white babies.
[…]
What? Our wim mpy prez going, sorry for our troops for getting in the way of your rag head sol diers bul lets. I see the stre ss that our tro ops are under in that f-kin country. Let’s pull out NOW. The only good rag head is a d—d ragh ead
[…]
I don’t see a problem here.
[…]
Obummer what is tragic and shocking that you are a lying P O S P that supports t e r r o r i s m ! Burn in L L E H
moooooooooooooooooooslime
[…]
It’s perfectly okay for the Afghanistan military to mur der our troops, Obama dosen’t even flinch, however, condolences go out when it’s the other way around. I’ll be very glad when the loser-in-chief is on his way out. I hate muslums, big time, in a very big way! Right behind the muslums are the libtards, they’re just as bad.
[…]
What comes around goes around That soldier deserves a medal!!!!!
[…]
Well, that should be enough to start a MASS RIOT. And then that will spiral all thru the middle-east causing more Americans to be killed. We got two choices here…. Keep putting up with this mooslime S H I T..or… Drop a freaking nuke on that islamic radical country and end this cat and mouse game forever. We know its going to happen sooner or later, lets get this World War III started so our economy will come back. Our Industries will come back. Our Jobs will come back. And most important, Our American Patriotism will once again lead…
[…]
I’m tired of apologists, tired of a woosie President and his woosie administration that constantly fall over themselves apologizing. Tell Karzai to pound sand and if one more American is k illed by his crazies, Karzai himself will be assuming room temperature.
[…]
This soldier made a great point. You kiI I our family, we will kil l yours.
[…]
LOL….DUMB_NIGGERS like you are humorous actually. Isn’t there some food stamp line you should be standing in? Oh yes, it’s Sunday and you have to shine your spinners.
[…]
Blahhh, Blahhh, Blahhh…… you’re still just a DUMB_NIGGER. LOL.
[…]
Every M U S L I M that reads the Quran is an enemy combatant…at home or abroad.
[…]
musIim civilians????? Yea Right…Blow Me
[…]
The Muzzie men are P issed they had plans to strap b ombs on the women and childern…just sayin
[…]
Just another day at the office, even up the score
[…]
Must have been one of those G a y soldiers they are letting in now. Probably emotionally distraught that his g a y lover was ki11ed by Taliban rebels in retaliation for Koran burning that the prisoners defaced to begin with. So what? No big deal. Obamao caused this by letting them in the ranks. Now libturds will blame it on our forces and personally attack us for saying so.
[…]
Our mus lum president is on their side
[…]
There is no such thing as a musIim civilian
[…]
A dead Mus lim is a good Mus lim. Give the soldier a medal.
Again, note that these freaks deliberately insert spaces and misspell their racial slurs in order to sneak them past the automatic word filters. Many of the worst comments quoted above had numerous “likes” from other Fox News readers. And this is a tiny selection from more than 2,200 comments; there are many, many more like this.
History has a horrifically persistent way of repeating itself, almost 106 years ago to the date US soldiers massacred more than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim Moro villagers in the Phillipines. Today we hear news of the bloody massacre carried out by an Army Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan, killing 16 civilians, mostly women and children as they slept in their homes.
I provide a Wiki article below about the Moro Massacre, it might not be the best citation but the article below is accurate:
The Moro Crater massacre is a name given to the final phase of the First Battle of Bud Dajo, a military engagement of the Philippine-American War which took place March 10, 1906], on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising 540 soldiers, along with a detachment of native constabulary, armed with artillery and small firearms, attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcanoBud Dajo. No American soldiers were killed, though sixteen were wounded; more than 600 mostly unarmedMuslimMoro villagers were killed, but none wounded.
Mark Twain’s indignation
The Filipinos were not yet defeated on July 4 1902, when Theodore_Roosevelt|President Roosevelt declared that the war was over. The Muslim Filipinos, or Muslim Filipino|Moros, in the Southern Philippines were as tenacious in opposing U.S. colonization, as they were in resisting Spanish rule during the preceding three centuries. But those whose slaughter is described below were not a military group.
Mark Twain must have felt strongly compelled to comment on the massacre. It provided another opportunity to condemn the brutality of the U.S troops, and Leonard Wood, already the subject of his scorn, was the commanding officer involved. In all of his writings about Wood, Mark Twain emphasized the irony that he was a medical Physician|doctor whose profession, as a soldier, was to kill people. This theme was developed here with references to the “doctor” who led the massacre, the “heroes” who performed it, and the “savages” who suffered it. The savagery was performed by the “heroes,” not the sympathetically-presented Moros, whose slaughtered children represented “our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness.”
The Anti-Imperialist League quickly published two leaflets about the massacre. A photograph [1] of the carnage that it distributed to the press in 1907 was later described as “the most hideous Philippine Picture . . . published in the United States during the subjugation of the islands.”
Mark Twain, however, thought that his own comments were too controversial to publish. They are from his autobiography, which was planned for publication after his death, so he could discuss his contemporaries without restraint. Later in 1906, while choosing sections of the autobiography for publication in the North American Review, he marked these dictations as “not usable yet”.
Part 1: Monday, March 12, 1906
This incident burst upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows: A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a detachment of native constabulary in our pay — their numbers not given — and by a naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending parties were about equal as to number — six hundred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.
Gen. Wood’s order was, “Kill or capture the six hundred.”
The battle began-it is officially called by that name-our forces firing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously returning the fire, probably with brickbats-though this is merely a surmise of mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram. Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual trade-muskets when they had any. [page 172]
The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.
General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been. “Kill or capture those savages.” Apparently our little army considered that the “or” left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there – the taste of Christian butchers.
The official report quite properly extolled and magnified the “heroism” and “gallantry” of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished, and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private had one of his elbows scraped by a missile, and the private’s name was mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His name was also mentioned – by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.
Next day’s news confirmed the previous day’s report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.
Let us now consider two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent. Of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards — far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent. of the enemy killed or crippled on the field.
Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from [page 172] that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred — including women and children — and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.
Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next day’s additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the “battle.” Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion — that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President Roosevelt — and I am sure I do — this utterance cost him more pain and shame than any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him. If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it. There was no help for it. This is what he said:
Washington, March 10. Wood, Manila:- I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the [page 173] brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag. (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.
His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms – and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines – that is to say, they had dishonored it.
The next day, Sunday, — which was yesterday — the cable brought us additional news – still more splendid news — still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: “WOMEN SLAIN MORO SLAUGHTER.”
“Slaughter” is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion.
The next display line says:
“With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together.”
They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children — merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.
The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:
Death List is Now 900.”
I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now! [page 174]
The next heading explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:
“Impossible to Tell Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of Mount Dajo.”
The naked savages were so far away, down in the bottom of that trap, that our soldiers could not tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man — so far away that they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer. This was by all odds the least dangerous battle that Christian soldiers of any nationality were ever engaged in.
The next heading says:
“Fighting for Four Days.”
So our men were at it four days instead of a day and a half. It was a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory. Those savages fighting for their liberties had the four days too, but it must have been a sorrowful time for them. Every day they saw two hundred and twenty- five of their number slain, and this provided them grief and mourning for the night — and doubtless without even the relief and consolation of knowing that in the meantime they had slain four of their enemies and wounded some more on the elbow and the nose.
The closing heading says:
“Lieutenant Johnson Blown from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly Leading Charge.”
Lieutenant Johnson has pervaded the cablegrams from the first. He and his wound have sparkled around through them like the serpentine thread of fire that goes excursioning through the black crisp fabric of a fragment of burnt paper. It reminds one of Gillette’s comedy farce of a few years ago, “Too Much Johnson.” Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since “Humpty Dumpty” fell off the wall and got injured. The official dispatches do not know which to admire most, Johnson’s adorable wound or the nine hundred murders. The ecstasies flowing from Army Headquarters on the other side of the globe to the White House, at a dollar and a half a word, have set fire to similar ecstasies in the President’s breast. It appears that the immortally wounded was a Rough Rider under Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt at San [page 175] Juan Hill — that extinguisher of Waterloo — when the Colonel of the regiment, the present Major General Dr. Leonard Wood, went to the rear to bring up the pills and missed the fight. The President has a warm place in his heart for anybody who was present at that bloody Collision of military solar systems, and so he lost no time in cabling to the wounded hero, “How are you?” And got a cable answer, “Fine, thanks.” This is historical. This will go down to posterity.
Johnson was wounded in the shoulder with a Slug. The slug was in a shell — for the account says the damage was caused by an exploding shell which blew Johnson off the rim. The people down in the hole had no artillery; therefore it was our artillery that blew Johnson off the rim. And so it is now a matter of historical record that the only officer of ours who acquired a wound of advertising dimensions got it at our hands, not the enemy’s. It seems more than probable that if we had placed our soldiers out of the way of our own weapons, we should have come out of the most extraordinary battle in all history without a scratch.
Part 2: Wednesday, March 14, 1906
The ominous paralysis continues. There has been a slight sprinkle — an exceedingly slight sprinkle — in the correspondence columns, of angry rebukes of the President for calling this cowardly massacre a “brilliant feat of arms,” and for praising our butchers for “holding up the honor of the flag” in that singular way; but there is hardly a ghost of a whisper about the feat of arms in the editorial columns of the papers.
I hope that this silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as the most indignant words could be, I think. When a man is sleeping in a noise, his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him. This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the daily newspaper was invented.
At a luncheon party of men convened yesterday to God-speed George Harvey, who is leaving to-day for a vacation in Europe, all the talk was about the brilliant feat of arms; and no one had anything to say about it that either the President or Major General Dr. Wood, or the damaged Johnson, would regard as complimentary, or as proper comment to put into our histories. Harvey said he believed that the shock and shame of [page 176] this episode would eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of the nation and fester there and produce results. He believed it would destroy the Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things, desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true. Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in a good cause — they are so rare that they don’t count.
Day before yesterday the cable-note from the happy General Dr. Wood was still all glorious. There was still proud mention and elaboration of what was called the “desperate hand-to-hand fight.” — Doctor Wood not seeming to suspect that he was giving himself away, as the phrase goes — since if there was any very desperate hand-to-hand fighting it would necessarily happen that nine hundred hand-to-hand fighters, if really desperate, would surely be able to kill more than fifteen of our men before their last man and woman and child perished.
Very well, there was a new note in the dispatches yesterday afternoon — just a faint suggestion that Dr. Wood was getting ready to lower his tone and begin to apologize and explain. He announces that he assumes full responsibility for the fight. It indicates that he is aware that there is a lurking disposition here amidst all this silence to blame somebody. He says there was “no wanton destruction of women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.”
This explanation is better than none; indeed it is considerably better than none. Yet if there was so much hand-to-hand fighting there must have arrived a time, toward the end of the four days’ butchery, when only one native was left alive. We had six hundred men present; we had lost only fifteen; why did the six hundred kill that remaining man — or woman, or child?
Dr. Wood will find that explaining things is not in his line. He will find that where a man has the proper spirit in him and the proper force at his command, it is easier to massacre nine hundred unarmed animals than it is to explain why he made it so remorselessly complete. Next he furnishes us this sudden burst of unconscious humor, which shows that he ought to edit his reports before he cables them:
“Many of the Moros feigned death and butchered the American hospital men who were relieving the wounded.”
We have the curious spectacle of hospital men going around trying to [page 177] relieve the wounded savages — for what reason? The savages were all massacred. The plain intention was to massacre them all and leave none alive. Then where was the use in furnishing mere temporary relief to a person who was presently to be exterminated? The dispatches call this battue a “battle.” In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. In a battle there are always as many as five wounded men to one killed outright. When this so-called battle was over, there were certainly not fewer than two hundred wounded savages lying on the field. What became of them? Since not one savage was left alive!
The inference seems plain. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering those helpless people.
The President’s joy over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet, General Wood, brings to mind an earlier presidential ecstasy. When the news came, in 1901, that Colonel Funston had penetrated to the refuge of the patriot, Aguinaldo, in the mountains, and had captured him by the use of these arts, to wit: by forgery, by lies, by disguising his military marauders in the uniform of the enemy, by pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s and by disarming suspicion by cordially shaking hands with Aguinaldo’s officers and in that moment shooting them down — when the cablegram announcing this “brilliant feat of arms” reached the White House, the newspapers said that that meekest and mildest and gentlest and least masculine of men, President McKinley, could not control his joy and gratitude, but was obliged to express it in motions resembling a dance. Also President McKinley expressed his admiration in another way. He instantly shot that militia Colonel aloft over the heads of a hundred clean and honorable veteran officers of the army and made him a Brigadier General in the regular service, and clothed him in the honorable uniform of that rank, thus disgracing the uniform, the flag, the nation, and himself.
Wood was an army surgeon, during several years, out West among the Indian hostiles. Roosevelt got acquainted with him and fell in love with him. When Roosevelt was offered the colonelcy of a regiment in the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish war, he took the place of Lieutenant Colonel and used his influence to get the higher place for Wood. After the war Wood became our Governor General in Cuba and proceeded to make a mephitic record for himself. Under President Roosevelt, this doctor has been pushed and crowded along higher and higher in the military service — always over the heads of a number of better men — [page 178] and at last when Roosevelt wanted to make him a Major General in the regular army (with only five other Major Generals between him and the supreme command) and knew, or believed, that the Senate would not confirm Wood’s nomination to that great place, he accomplished Wood’s appointment by a very unworthy device. He could appoint Wood himself, and make the appointment good, between sessions of Congress. There was no such opportunity, but he invented one. A special session was closing at noon. When the gavel fell extinguishing the special session, a regular session began instantly. Roosevelt claimed that there was an interval there determinable as the twentieth of a second by a stop-watch, and that during that interval no Congress was in session. By this subterfuge he foisted this discredited doctor upon the army and the nation, and the Senate hadn’t spirit enough to repudiate it.
A young Muslim student was punched in the face and racially taunted as she walked down a Dublin street wearing a head scarf.
A Dublin mother (23) has been convicted for assaulting the young Libyan, who was rescued by a passing motorist who stopped and helped her home.
Helen Doran’s victim was wearing a traditional Muslim hijab or head scarf. Doran followed her across a road after assaulting her and continued to shout racist insults at her.
Doran, of Castlecurragh Vale in Mulhuddart, admitted before Blanchardstown District Court to assaulting a 20-year-old Libyan student on November 2 last year.
Judge Anthony Halpin sentenced Doran to three months in prison, suspended for one year.
Garda Sergeant Maria Callaghan said the victim was walking along Castlecurragh Road when two men and a woman approached her.
The victim had just attended a FAS course and was putting credit into her mobile phone.
The sergeant said the woman was wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, and Doran and her accomplices started taunting her.
The court heard one of the men grabbed the woman’s mobile phone and Doran punched her in the face.
Sgt Callaghan said Doran repeatedly shouted racist slurs at the woman, who crossed the road to get away from her attacker.
However, Doran followed her across the road and continued to shout racist insults at her.
Sgt Callaghan said a motorist stopped and helped the victim, who later reported the matter to gardai.
Ashamed
Defence solicitor John O’Doherty said Doran, a married mum of one, had been drinking heavily and was on tablets.
Mr O’Doherty said Doran was completely ashamed of her behaviour and had never been in this kind of trouble before. He said she was under the influence of one of her accomplices at the time, and he is also before the courts.
Judge Halpin said Doran frightened the young woman and made her feel like a lesser person. He gave her a three- month suspended sentence.
We are told that in Afghanistan they only get upset when the occupying forces “burn Korans.” The protests, we are told, have nothing to do with the bombing and murdering of innocent civilians, you know the Greater Islamophobia.
Now we have one more instance of a soldier liquidating the lives of innocent Muslim civilians in a clearly premeditated fashion. How much do you want to bet he gets off scott free or with a suspended sentence like the last guy?
Sixteen Afghan civilains including three women and nine children have been shot dead in their homes by a rogue US soldier in a pre-dawn rampage.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the slaughter on Sunday as “unforgivable” and furiously demanded an explanation from Washington.
“When Afghan people are killed deliberately by US forces this action is murder and terror and an unforgivable action,” Karzai said in statement.
Senior US officials were scrambling to determine what caused the soldier to go on a shooting spree after leaving his base in southern Afghanistan, apparently heavily-armed and carrying night-vision equipment.
Officials confirmed that the soldier was being detained in Kandahar and that the military was treating at least five wounded.
One US official said the soldier, an Army staff sergeant, was believed to have acted alone and that initial reports indicated he returned to the base after the shooting and turned himself in.
Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, issued a statement pledging a “rapid and thorough investigation” into the shooting spree, and said the soldier will remain in US custody.
The US embassy in Kabul sent out an alert to its citizens in Afghanistan warning that as a result of the shooting “there is a risk of anti-American feelings and protests in coming days”.
An AFP news agency reporter at the scene of the killings counted the bodies of 16 people. In one house, an elderly woman screamed: “May God kill the only son of Karzai, so he feels what we feel.”
The shootings come at a particularly sensitive and critical time for the US, just as violence over the burning of Muslim holy books at a US base was starting to calm down. At least 41 people were killed in the violence.
Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Herat, said the soldier entered three houses near the base and opened fire on civilians.
“We are now being told by the police sources that the US soldier left his base at three o clock this morning. It would have been pitch-black wherever he walked,” he said.
“The soldier went through three separate houses, shooting at people as they slept in their beds. After the soldier shot these people, he turned himself in.”
“It is frankly disastrous. It is not just a disaster for the people who were murdered and killed in their houses, it is disaster for the country I suspect,” our correspondent said.
Najeeb Azizi, a Kabul-based Afghan analyst, said the shooting will have deep repercussions on the already tenuous relations with the US.
“It is a very tragic incident in particular because the Afghan and US governments are trying to sign a strategic agreement for a long term,” he said.
“A very bad message the Afghan people are getting – that if US military remains in Afghanistan beyond 2014 and their attitude and behaviour remains the same – of killing innocent civilians- what will be the consequences, and how will the Afghan people respond to it.”
The New York Police Department collected information on businesses owned by second- and third-generation Americans specifically because they were Muslims, according to newly obtained secret documents.
They show in the clearest terms yet that police were monitoring people based on religion, despite claims from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the contrary.
The NYPD has faced intense criticism from Muslims, lawmakers – and even the FBI – for widespread spying operations that put entire neighborhoods under surveillance. Police put the names of innocent people in secret files and monitored the mosques, student groups and businesses that make up the Muslim landscape of the northeastern U.S.
Bloomberg has defended his department’s efforts, saying they have kept the city safe, were completely legal and were not based on religion. “We don’t stop to think about the religion,” Bloomberg said at a news conference in August after The Associated Press began revealing the spying. “We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.”
In late 2007, however, plainclothes officers in the department’s secretive Demographics Unit were assigned to investigate the region’s Syrian population. Police photographed businesses and eavesdropped at lunch counters and inside grocery stores and pastry shops. The resulting document listed no threat. And though most people of Syrian heritage living in the area were Jewish, Jews were excluded from the monitoring. “This report will focus on the smaller Muslim community,” the report said.
Similarly, police excluded the city’s sizable Coptic Christian population when photographing, monitoring and eavesdropping on Egyptian businesses in 2007, according to the police files. “This report does not represent the Coptic Egyptian community and is merely an insight into the Muslim Egyptian community of New York City,” the NYPD wrote.
Many of those under surveillance were American-born citizens whose families have been here for the better part of a century. “The majority of Syrians encountered by members of the Demographics Unit are second- or even third-generation Syrian Americans,” the Syrian report said. “It is unusual to encounter a first generation or new arrival Syrian in New York City.”
Indeed, just as we need to track the Colombian community for drug trafficking and the Ku Klux Klan for white extremists, I believe we should monitor the Muslim community because we sure don’t police ourselves enough.
Moghul shot back:
The first part of her sentence, about Colombians, is actually right on (by her silly logic); the second part contradicts her own logic (she can call for profiling some Latinos, but she doesn’t have the courage to apply her racializing logic to white America), and everything after “I believe” speaks to how little Asra actually knows anything about the Muslim community, as well as the several seconds of your life which you could have done something better with. For law enforcement to go after white extremism the way it seems to be going after Muslims (at least, with respect to the NYPD), they wouldn’t be going after the KKK, as Asra suggests–unless Asra means to suggest that Muslim student organizations at Yale and UPenn are offshoots of al Qaeda. Law enforcement would instead have to spy on as many white institutions (churches, civic clubs, student organizations, etc.) as they could.
Danios of LoonWatch chimed in: “Will Asra Nomani stay consistent and support spying on white people?”
But, Haroon Moghul and Danios of LoonWatch are way off: it’s not proper to compare peace-loving, good Christian white folk to Muslims or Latinos.
The real million dollar question is: should the police racially profile and spy on the black community? Using Asra Nomani’s sage advice, I think we must. For the longest time though, I have worried that our sense of political correctness has kept us from sensible law-enforcement strategies that carefully look at black male youth, black neighborhoods, and black hangout spots.
The LAPD and other police departments should send “rakers” into the black community–police officers whose racial background (black) and language skills (ebonics) match the places they are monitoring, including black streets, black high schools, and black hangout spots like basketball courts.
Public spaces, especially those protected from police scrutiny due to racial sensitivities, are a natural meeting spot for criminals. If the NYPD was tracking shopping malls or pizza shops where criminal activity is being planned, we wouldn’t complain. Because of racial political correctness, we’re protesting looking into black communities. Alas, criminals and gang-bangers use our political correctness and racial sensitivity as a weapon against us.
There are other black people who believe law enforcement has to do its job and spy on black people. I know at least four different random black people who feel the same way I do.
The last few decades of battling violence in the black community has revealed one truth: black neighborhoods are spaces used by blacks intent on criminal activity. Asra Nomani wrote:
[M]osques and Muslim organizations are institutional spaces used by Muslims intent on criminal activity, not much unlike the pews of a Catholic church or a Godfather’s Pizza might be the secret meeting spot for members of the Italian mafia.
Nomani has done extensive research on this topic. I heard she watched all three parts of The Godfather. If we want to crack down on black crime, I suggest especially high surveillance of watermelon stands, basketball courts, and near white women. As far as I’m concerned, we need plenty of “raking.”
Police and FBI sources reveal that blacks are responsible for much of the violence and crime in our nation. Kevin Alfred Strom went through the FBI Uniform Crime Report and found the following:
According to the FBI, Blacks are more than 3 times as likely to be thieves as Whites. They are more than 4 times as likely to commit assault as Whites. They are almost 4.5 times as likely to steal a motor vehicle. According to the FBI, Blacks are more than 5 times as likely to commit forcible rape as Whites, over 8 times as likely to commit murder, and more than 10 times as likely to commit robbery. For all violent crimes considered together, Blacks are almost 5.5 times more likely to commit violent criminal acts than Whites, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report…
A few more statistics:
85% of all felonies committed against cabbies in New York City are committed by Blacks.
Nearly 25% of all Black males between the ages of 20 and 29 are in jail or on probation. This doesn’t include those wanted or awaiting trial!
Statistically, Black neighborhoods are 3500% more violent than White ones.
Nearly 25% of all Black males between the ages of 20 and 29 are in jail or on probation. This doesn’t include those wanted or awaiting trial!
Statistically, Black neighborhoods are 3500% more violent than White ones.
Well, since blacks won’t police themselves, I think it’s high time the police do it for them. (Does anyone have an Official “I’m Black” card I can use so this sounds less offensive?)
Nomani notes:
Like the NYPD tracking the Newark restaurants where Muslims congregate, Karachi police have a local spot they have on constant surveillance: a restaurant called Student Biryani, selling a rice dish popular in the country. I learned this tracking the police case against the militants involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The mastermind, Omar Sheikh, met with his logistical chiefs at Student Biryani, and the police report reveals the men even took some biryani home as carryout. Militants can easily huddle in Student Biryani’s crowded restaurant space and get a hot meal and much-needed noise.
Damn those wily terrorists and their biryani bellies. Although my extensive googling revealed no evidence for this claim that the popular food chain Student Biryani in Pakistan is under “constant surveillance” by police, I think Nomani raises a good point. In our fight against black violence, I think we need to keep all KFC restaurants under constant surveillance. A tracking and listening device should be included in all takeout boxes. I once heard a gang of Bloods once ate a full 12-piece of crispy chicken at one KFC in one city at one moment in history. Gang members can easily huddle in KFC’s crowded restaurant space and get a hot meal and much-needed noise (and chicken).
Many African countries make no apologies for monitoring their black citizens. Neither should the LAPD or other police departments apologize for monitoring blacks. Blacks should in fact open their doors to the surveillance and help the cops smoke out the criminals in their community, so that black neighborhoods and communities are safe spaces.
Note: If you didn’t figure it out already, the above article is not to be taken seriously and is actually a spoof of Asra Nomani’s article on American Muslims. My purpose was to reveal how utterly revolting Nomani’s expressed views are, something that only becomes apparent when you switch out “Muslim” for black, Jewish, etc.
Addendum I:
I had thought I was being especially creative when I came up with the KFC bit, but then I realized I had missed this gem from Nomani’s original article (I almost spit my drink out when I saw it): Nomani defended the NYPD spying on
restaurants frequented by Muslims, including Kansas Fried Chicken, a place run by folks of Afghan descent, according to the report.
A hardcore of far-right supporters in the UK appears to believe violent conflict between different ethnic, racial and religious groups is inevitable, and that it is legitimate to prepare even for armed conflict, according to a new report.
The study, From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, by Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham, and Jocelyn Evans, of Salford University, was launched at Chatham House on Thursday. The report questioned more than 2,000 supporters of “radical-right” and “far-right” groups and found that many endorsed violence, with a “hostile inner core” apparently willing to plan for and prepare for attacks.
“What we have got here is a group of people who self-identify as supporters of the far right and who are, to quite a large extent, backing ideas about preparing for violence and appear to view violence as a justifiable political strategy,” said Goodwin, who is a specialist in far-right politics.
The findings come ahead of the trial next month of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who has confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway in July. Breivik said he had contact with far-right groups in the UK and that he carried out the attacks on Utoya Island and Oslo to help protect Europe from a “Muslim takeover”.
Goodwin said his report’s findings should also be seen in light of the 17 people affiliated to the far right who have been imprisoned in the UK in recent years for terrorism offences.
“When you go through the transcripts of those cases what they often emphasise is this notion of impending race war, the impending clash of civilisations that meant they needed to stockpile explosives and plan attacks to defend their group from a perceived threat. It is that apocalyptic, almost survivalist notion that goes with far right ideology that we have begun to explore through these exploratory questions.”
The study was based on a survey, carried out by YouGov, of 2,152 people who self identify as supporters of either the British National Party, the UK Independence Party and a smaller sample of English Defence League supporters.
The authors found that almost half of the BNP supporters in their sample thought “preparing for conflict between different groups is always or sometimes justifiable” and two-fifths considered armed conflict to be “always or sometimes” justifiable.
The report states: “The responses point towards a tranche of BNP supporters who endorse the view that both preparing for and engaging in inter-group conflict are always justifiable actions…. the BNP members in our sample appear to view themselves as a core vanguard who are preparing for a forthcoming conflict in a way that the party’s more passive supporters are not.”
In line with previous studies, the respondents to the survey were largely men who had not been to university, were generally dissatisfied with their lives and were mostly concerned about immigration, the economy and a perceived threat from Muslims and Islam. Twenty per cent of BNP supporters and 25% of UKIP supporters who responded said they had served in the armed forces.
Goodwin said the study’s findings should be seen as a preliminary first step towards addressing that shortcoming and warned that the far right in the UK was now at a “fork in the road”.
“On one side, we have a far-right party [the BNP] disintegrating at elections and closing down any chance of a ballot box strategy. On the other we have a more combative and confrontational form of street politics in the EDL. Then for the first time in recent history we have somebody in Breivik who has essentially offered a brand to would-be perpetrators of far right violence.
“Our findings would appear to suggest that within this wider climate and amidst continuing public anxiety over immigration, Islam and economic hardship there is a significant section within the far right who believe violence and armed conflict is a legitimate option should they feel their wider group is under threat.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published the Spring 2012 issue of its Intelligence Report, on “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2011″, which identifies a continued growth in the number of hate groups operating in the United States.
In “The ‘Patriot’ Movement Explodes” Mark Potok states: “The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years.” Potok writes:
The number of anti-Muslim groups tripled in 2011, jumping from 10 groups in 2010 to 30 last year. That rapid growth in Islamophobia, marked by the vilification of Muslims by opportunistic politicians and anti-Muslim activists, began in August 2010, when controversy over a planned Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan reached a fever pitch. Things got worse later in the year, when Oklahoma residents voted to amend the state constitution to forbid the use of Islamic Shariah law in state courts – a completely unnecessary change, given that the U.S. Constitution rules that out. The overheated atmosphere generated by these events also helped spur a 50% jump in the FBI’s count of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2010. Then, in March 2011, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims that seemed meant to demonize them. At the same time, there was a swelling of truly vicious propaganda like this remarkable Jan. 14, 2011, comment from columnist Debbie Schlussel: “They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won’t learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward.”
In connection with anti-gay groups Potok points out:
In another development, most of the religious right groups that started out opposing abortion but moved on to attacking LGBT people have recently begun to adopt anti-Muslim propaganda en masse. The gay-bashing Traditional Values Coalition, for instance, last year redesigned its website to emphasize a new section entitled “Islam vs. the Constitution,” published a report on Shariah law, and joined anti-Shariah conferences.
WEST VALLEY CITY — A billboard along I-215 that says “Bomb Iran!” is meant to suggest just the opposite at a time when tensions between Iran and the West continue to escalate.
Iran halted oil exports to Britian and France on Feb. 19 in the latest move that follows economic sanctions against Iran over the nature of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and support of Islamic extremist groups.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report Friday that Iran has ramped up production of higher-grade enriched uranium in recent months.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Saturday that the report “constitutes additional proof that Israel’s assessments are correct” and that Tehran’s nuclear program is moving ahead unhindered.
“The war drums are beating very loudly,” said bombiran.org organizer Connor Boyack, a 30-year-old Web designer in Lehi, who hopes the somewhat-confusing design of his billboard prompts people who see it to “pause, think about it, ponder it and go read about it.”
Boyack is not suggesting a single, grand conspiracy is pushing the United States toward a war in Iran but believes the combined effects of propagandists and a diverse military-industrial complex could be. He said his objective is to push back.
“It’s hard to see the unintended consequences,” he said, pointing to the speed at which reports about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities led to war before those threats were fully vetted, and later found to be without merit.
“Let’s look at the past and apply those lessons to the future. Let’s slow down and look at this a little,” Boyack said.
He also hopes to unhitch the connection between “supporting the troops” and engaging in war. “We want to support the troops by keeping them home with their families,” he said.
The billboard went up Thursday, and Boyack said traffic to the accompanying bombiran.org webiste has been brisk since then. He said the initiative’s Utah roots have the financial support of about 50 financial contributors so far, many of whom are outside the state.
If financial support continues, Boyack said he and other supporters hope to put up similar billboards elsewhere, targeting primary-election states.
OAK BROOK TERRACE, Ill. — For the first time in public, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy promised his department will never conduct blanket surveillance of Muslims like the New York Police Department did in Newark, N.J., when he was chief there.
McCarthy addressed hundreds of Muslims on Saturday at the annual banquet of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Chicago, a civil rights organization. He said police would follow leads in criminal cases, but the department “does not and will not conduct blanket surveillance and profiling of any community in the city of Chicago.”
“We are deeply committed to respecting the civil rights of all Chicagoans,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have tried to reassure Chicago-area Muslims since The Associated Press revealed the NYPD’s spying in Newark. The AP reported last month that in 2007, the NYPD’s secretive Demographics Unit fanned out across Newark, photographing mosques and eavesdropping on Muslim businesses. Earlier, the AP reported that the department was conducting similar surveillance in New York, building databases showing where Muslims live, shop and pray.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vigorously defended the operations, saying police only follow up on allegations. But civil rights advocates and other critics say the NYPD’s 60-page report on the Newark operations showed Muslims were targeted solely because of their religion.
McCarthy, who was also a top officer in the NYPD at one point, told the AP that his former colleagues in New York notified him as a courtesy that they were sending plainclothes officers to Newark, but none of his officers participated in the operation. New York police say Newark leaders cooperated with the effort.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended his department’s operations again Saturday in a speech at Fordham Law School, as about 60 protesters marched outside. Addressing New Jersey officials’ complaints that the NYPD overstepped its bounds by not fully informing them of officers’ activities, Kelly noted 746 Garden State residents were killed in the 9/11 attacks.
“If terrorists aren’t limited by borders and boundaries, we can’t be either,” Kelly said. “It is entirely legal for the Police Department to conduct investigations outside of city limits, and we maintain very close relationships with local authorities.”
McCarthy met privately last week with community leaders in Chicago to discuss the issue, but he hadn’t stated publicly whether he supported the NYPD’s tactics.
He was warmly received at Saturday’s banquet, held in a Chicago suburb. CAIR Executive Director Ahmed Rehab praised McCarthy for his “heartfelt” sincerity and taking the initiative to attend, and the audience applauded when the chief said police need to work with the city’s communities to prevent crime and terrorism.
“We are focused on our mission of making Chicago the safest city for every resident in every neighborhood, but we can’t do it alone,” McCarthy said. “We must have a positive relationship with the wonderfully diverse communities that comprise Chicago and that make this great country of America as strong as it is today.”
U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat and immigration advocate, also addressed the group, lashing out at the NYPD’s spying methods.
“It makes no sense and is not sensible law enforcement,” Gutierrez said.
McCarthy wrapped up his remarks by saying he is a 9/11 survivor, who was in a command post near the World Trade Center until the towers fell. He told the audience that 13 of the 23 officers lost by the NYPD were personal friends.
“And I want to tell you this,” he said. “In the 10-plus years since that horrific event, which has affected me to my core, I have never once thought ill of the religion of Islam.”
Faith in Public Life (FPL) just interviewed Jihad Watch Director Robert Spencer. I’ve reproduced their excellent article below, which is where you can see the video yourself. In it, Spencer endorses a special loyalty test for Muslims:
FPL: Do you think Muslim appointees to office deserve a special test or a special kind of investigation before they are appointed?
Spencer:Well, I think it’s entirely reasonable.
In light of the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is, in its own words, dedicated to eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house, then certainly any Muslim official that [sic] has ties to the Brotherhood organizations in the United States–of which there are very many–should be vetted very carefully.
FPL: So you think any Muslim that is appointed should be investigated for any of those ties before they are appointed?
Spencer:Yes, certainly.
FPL also points to Robert Spencer’s double standards and hypocrisy when it comes to Islam and his own religion, Christianity (specifically, Catholicism). Those of you familiar with my writing know that whenever I point this out, Spencer starts crying “tu quoque, tu quoque fallacy!” That’s because his own religion can’t withstand the same standard he applies to Islam.
FPL asked Spencer if he found it problematic when Muslims called themselves “Muslims first, Americans second.” Spencer responded emphatically in the affirmative, saying: “It’s a big problem.” Then, FPL asked Spencer if he himself was American first or a Christian first. Spencer was caught off-guard and tried to evade answering the question. When FPL pushed him further on the issue, he refused to answer the question, saying: “Neither one.” Then, he finally admitted that he in fact placed his faith first, even above American law.
Anybody see the glaring hypocrisy here? It’s in fact the same double standard applied by pro-Israel Islamophobes who attack American Muslims for having “dual loyalty” to their ancestral homelands and “the Ummah”, when in fact they themselves have “dual loyalty” to America and Israel, often placing the latter’s interests above the former.
Spencer tries to justify his double standard by arguing that Christianity “isn’t incompatible with the constitutional freedoms” whereas Islam is “is manifestly incompatible” with them. In other words, it simply hasn’t been an issue with his Christianity.
Yet, Spencer contradicts himself in the very next sentence:
FPL: So would you describe yourself as an American first and a Christian second, or Christian first and American second?
Spencer: Neither one. I think it’s a distinction when it comes to Christianity that thus far, there has not been a problematic issue of allegiance. If it comes down to the new Obama directives with the Catholic Church, for example, forcing it to go back on its own policies and its own doctrine…then obviously those are unjust laws that ought not to be passed.
Spencer is here alluding to the issue of abortion. It should be noted that “the Supreme Court ruled that women had a constitutional right to abortion”, yet Catholics like Robert Spencer want to deny this right to women. Isn’t this exactly the sort of conflict that Spencer found to be “a big problem” when it comes to Muslims? Isn’t this, using Spencer’s own standard, “a problematic issue of allegiance” between Catholic doctrine and the Constitution?
But remember: don’t dare apply the standard Spencer does to Islam to his own religion! Only a leftist dhimmi would do that!
Anti-Muslim activists often complain that Muslims living in this country don’t effectively assimilate into American culture, that they consider themselves Muslims first and Americans second. Despite the fact that polling has found that Muslim Americans are actually the most loyal religious group in the nation – 93 percent of Muslim Americans say they are loyal to America, and Muslims have the highest confidence in the integrity of the US election process – far-right pundits continue to further the myth that Muslims lack commitment to this country because their faith puts them in conflict with constitutional law.
In fact, the concept of prioritizing faith principles before the law is not unique to Muslims. Prominent Christian figures such as Pat Robertson have publicly remarked that they consider themselves Christians first and Americans second. Perhaps even more telling is the extent to which the current contraception mandate controversy is dominating the political conversation, with some Catholic leaders suggesting they would shut down their hospitals and schools or perform civil disobedience instead of complying with a law they believe conflicts with their faith.
At the recent CPAC conference here in Washington, Nick interviewed prominent anti-Islam activist Robert Spencer and found this exact double standard. Spencer criticizes Muslims for prioritizing Islam over US law, while going on to say he would put his Christian faith first in a situation where Christianity came into conflict with the law:
FPL: A lot of people point to polls that Muslims in various countries suggest that they’re Muslims first and then loyal to that country second – American second, or Spanish second. Do you think that’s a problem and are you worried about that?
Spencer: It’s a big problem, and it’s something that has to be taken into account…when it comes to Islamic law and the constitution, there are many, many ways in which Islamic law contradicts the constitutional freedoms. Then if somebody has a loyalty to Sharia, to Islam first, then that’s very problematic.
FPL: And would you describe yourself as American first, or as a person of faith first?
Spencer: I’m an American and a person of faith. And I believe that my faith, as a Christian, isn’t incompatible with the constitutional freedoms. But Islamic law is manifestly incompatible with constitutional freedoms.
FPL: So would you describe yourself as an American first and a Christian second, or Christian first and American second?
Spencer: Neither one. I think it’s a distinction when it comes to Christianity that thus far, there has not been a problematic issue of allegiance. If it comes down to the new Obama directives with the Catholic Church, for example, forcing it to go back on its own policies and its own doctrine…then obviously those are unjust laws that ought not to be passed.
FPL: So if there was a conflict between your faith and the law, you would choose your faith?
Spencer: Yeah.
The hypocrisy is apparent. If conservatives are concerned with religious liberty, then that liberty ought to be applied to faith traditions across the board, including Islam. At the same conference, conservative paragon Grover Norquist made this same point (around the 2:42 mark):
FPL: So do you think it harms the conservative argument for religious liberty…when [Republican candidates] have previously expressed some similar concerns to extending this [liberty] to Muslim Americans?
Norquist: You can’t be for religious liberty for some people and not others, or the whole thing falls apart. No one in court is going to rule that way. The court will either go with, yes you can ban synagogues, mosques, missionaries and Catholic hospitals– or you can’t do any of that…I’ve noticed that all faith traditions recognize that an attack on one is an attack on all.
As Norquist points out, Spencer’s duplicitous arguments about Islam fall flat. When it comes to religious freedom, the far right cannot have its cake and eat it too.
Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch rightly questions whether Islamophobes who allied themselves with American Atheists over the Zombie Muhammad issue will now cry that Jews are attacking freedom of speech and expression, as they surely would if Muslims had stopped the billboard:
This time atheists found themselves answering to a higher power – a picky landlord. A Southside loft owner refused to allow a billboard questioning Judaism to be installed atop his S. Fifth Street building on Tuesday amid outrage in Williamsburg’s Hasidic community.
National atheist leaders tried to take out a month-long ad adjacent to Williamsburg’s Orthodox Jewish stronghold with text in English and Hebrew reading: “You know it’s a myth … and you have a choice.” But at the last minute, landlord Kenny Stier refused to allow workers from the advertising company Clear Channel into his building, according to American Atheists president David Silverman.
Silverman claims powerful neighborhood rabbis convinced Stier to block the non-believing billboard and called the religious leaders and the landlord “anti-atheist bigots”. “The Jews have stopped the billboard,” said Silverman. “It’s really ugly bigotry. As a former Jew, it’s repugnant to see Jews act like this.”
Several Hasidic leaders said they had nothing to do with the landlord’s decision to block the billboard, and Stier declined to comment. “I don’t want to get involved in this,” he said.
Councilman Steve Levin (D–Williamsburg) said the billboard showed a “severe lack of sensitivity” at a time when Brooklyn should be striving to have open conversations about religion.
“Even if we were to ignore the antagonistic placement of this billboard near the Williamsburg Bridge, the content of the message is conveyed in a disrespectful manner,” said Levin. “This does not appear to be a genuine attempt to engage in a dialogue, but is here merely to insult the beliefs of this community.”
We look forward to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who have been enthusiastically supporting American Atheists over the “Zombie Muhammad” controversy, joining Silverman in condemning this development as an outrageous attack on freedom of expression – as they undoubtedly would if it had occurred in a Muslim neighbourhood. But don’t hold your breath.
The group responsible for launching Switzerland’s anti-minaret initiative has called the rejection of a motion to ban burqas on public transport and in dealings with authorities “an affront”.
The National Council on Monday rejected a motion by Swiss People’s Party member Oskar Freysinger to ban the wearing of burqa in certain situations. The Council decided with a significant majority that imposing such a ban was unnecessary.
Social Democratic Party spokesman, Hans Stöckli, said that the majority of women wearing burqas in Switzerland were tourists, Swiss news agency SDA reported. Furthermore Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga warned that a blanket ban could violate the Geneva Convention on Refugees, as it would not distinguish between those with and without refugee status.
But the minds behind the anti-minaret initiative, the so-called Egerkinger Committee, believe a burqa ban to be worthwhile. The Egerkinger Committee claims that the rejection of the motion to ban burqas pointedly ignores the majority who expressly reject the “Islamization” of Switzerland.
The Committee maintains that while the Swiss constitution guarantees freedom of expression, wearing a veil is a denial of that freedom. “Freedom of expression is exercised in our country with an undisguised, open, readable face,” the Committee said in a statement.
The Committee said that it was ready to launch a popular initiative for the banning of the burqa “without delay”.
Update: According to the SDA report, it was in fact the Swiss upper house, the Council of State (Ständerat), that rejected the SVP motion on Monday. The lower house, the National Council (Nationalrat), voted in favour of Freysinger’s call for “burqa ban” in September last year.
A Houston Islamic academy was denied membership to the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools after being grilled about the Koran and the mosque located at Ground Zero.
Iman Academy applied for membership to TAPPS in 2010, but the association denied the school’s request. After being rejected two years ago, Principal Cindy Steffens did not go public with the story, but The New York Times uncovered the Houston academy’s name last week and ran an article about the controversy.
TAPPS represents more than 220 private schools in the state. The association drew national attention last week after refusing to reschedule a basketball game for a Jewish Orthodox day school Robert M. Beren Academy in Houston, which could not play at the time because the players observed the Sabbath. After the parents threatened legal action, Beren was allowed to play its semi-final game.
The Iman Academy received a questionnaire as part of their application to apply for the TAPPS. Steffens said the questionnaire had provocative and loaded questions, including how the school addresses Christmas. Among the questions sent to Iman Academy and the other Islamic schools that applied were:
Historically, there is nothing in the Koran that fully embraces Christianity or Judaism in the way a Christian and/or a Jew understands his religion. Why, then, are you interested in joining an association whose basic beliefs your religion condemns?
It is our understanding that the Koran tells you not to mix with (and even eliminate) the infidels. Christians and Jews fall into that category. Why do you wish to join an organization whose membership is in disagreement with your beliefs?
How does your school address certain Christian concepts? (i.e. celebrating Christmas)
Does your school teach that the Bible is corrupt? When was the Bible allegedly polluted? Does the Koran actually state that the Bible is polluted?
What is your attitude about the spread of Islam in America? What are the goals of your school in this regard?
In 2004, two other Islamic schools applied for membership and received a response letter that they perceived as hostile to their faith. They chose not to answer the questions, but Iman Academy did.
School officials were invited to an interview before the TAPPS board in November 2010, and Steffens said one board member said he wanted to discuss the “elephant in the room.” She said the board asked questions that seemed irrelevant to joining an association to play sports, such as asking her opinion about the mosque located near Ground Zero in New York City.
Steffens said another board member told her, “I know all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Asra Nomani, Tarek Fatah and Zuhdi Jasser have ridden in on their clown car to rally in support of being “spied on” by the NYPD. Using their “Muslim” cards they have either written in support of, or participated in a rally in solidarity with the NYPD’s secret surveillance. Such endless stupidity knows no bounds, and is not limited to Muslims. Self-hating loons are part of every culture and faith. (We have already written about why the NYPD surveillance is deceptive, wrong-headed, immoral and ineffective, so no need for us to repeat ourselves here.)
The loons agree with each other, being “Muslim” or “Muslim like” is sufficient just cause to infringe on the civil liberties of all Muslims. For these loons, being Muslim is enough of a reason to be accompanied by undercover agents on whitewater rafting trips, to have your mosque infiltrated, to have a who’s-who of ‘Muslamic’ eateries profiled. For these loons the tricky fact that this deceptive surveillance is probably illegal is to be ignored at all cost.
(Have you ever wondered what interesting terroristic tidbits those gum-shoe NYPD infiltrators gathered at, say, Habib Restaurant in Newark? I can just imagine:
Muslim patron of Habib Restaurant: This shawerma sandwhich is the bomb!
NYPD undercover agent jotting down in notebook: ”Stealth food Jihad!!??” I saw this on the Third Jihad that we watched in an endless loop for months! Check with Ray Kelly.)
It’s okay they say, go ahead and cast a pal of suspicion over the whole Muslim community. They are essentially telling Bloomberg, Kelly, etc.:
“Look at us masta’. We da good Mooslims. You spy on us, entrap us, bomb us wid’ yo bombs, it’s otay.”
The loons’ rally attracted 20 or so supporters and…*gasp*…Rep.Peter King. Whodathunkit? The fact that IRA supporting Peter King would stand with the very same non-expert neo-Con witness he called at his McCarthyesque witch-hunt trials and declare, “you are the real face of Islam in America” is so shocking (note: thinly-veiled sarcasm).
Oh yes, Sheikh Peter King is now pontificating on who the “real” Muslims are. You are a real Muslim if you align yourself with the right-wing, agree with your community being spied on, (thereby undermining every citizens civil liberties), agree with the over-exaggerated “homegrown terrorism” threat, agree with entrapment, agree with the Greater Islamophobia of “bombing, invading and occupying” Muslim majority nations.
Lets continue the myth, they say, that Muslims have not cooperated with law enforcement and are not doing enough to condemn terrorism.(Even though over 40% of all tips regarding potential Muslim terrorists come from Muslims). This will finally convince those Tea Partiers that Asra loves at the Tennessee Freedom Coalition that real Islam is in fact a religion that should be afforded the guarantees of “religious freedom,” and not as they say, a 1400 year old political-fascist-totalitarian-cult threatening to overtake Christianity and “Islamize” the USA.
“just as we need to track the Colombian community for drug trafficking and the Ku Klux Klan for white extremists, I believe we should monitor the Muslim community”
As one astute commenter on her article noted,
The Colombian community should be just as offended as the Muslims at being directly compared to the KKK which is by definition a gang of white extremists.
Nomani of course sees no problem, Colombians and Muslims are just like the KKK in her mind, and that is the true face of self-hating loons.
The sparse number of pro-surveillance and pro-anti-Muslim indoctrination ralliers indicates that most American Muslims are overwhelmingly opposed to the NYPD’s bigoted indoctrination of its officers as well as the warrantless surveillance of Muslims. An opposition that is born not just out of their recent plight, being cast as “today’s enemy,” but out of a consistency of principal; no one should be profiled based simply on religion or race, no group should endure warrantless surveillance.
One can imagine that in a not too distant future, these very same self-hating loons, eager to be profiled and spied on, will also be saying, “please, please intern me, somebody, please intern me!”
Remember when BNP leader Nick Griffin exposed his strategy,
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.
The so-called “Counter-Jihadism” movement is just a euphemism for the new fascism (via. Islamophobia-watch).:
British National Party and English Defence League supporters held a protest outside Burnley crown court on Friday. More than 25 protesters gathered as Judge Beverley Lunt prepared to set a date for a child sex offence case.
Holding Union and St George’s flags and banners reading “protect children, fight grooming gangs”, protesters were monitored by around 20 police officers in and around the Hammerton Street court. Members of the BNP played music and speeches for more than two hours in front of TV news cameras and newspaper photographers.
BNP leader Nick Griffin recently announced that the party hadlifted its ban on co-operation with the EDL, while prominent EDL member Hel Gower has joined a Facebook group advocating unity with the BNP, so it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Fadi Quran is little different from any other Palestinian living in the West Bank, where violence from Israeli settlers is part of daily life. Hailing from the town of Al-Bireh, less than one kilometre from the settlement of Psagot, the 23-year-old Master’s degree student has been forced to deal with attacks and harassment for years.
“Settler violence is a daily occurrence,” he told Al Jazeera. On one occasion, he was playing football with friends when they came under fire from settlers with machine guns. In another altercation, settlers threw stones at him while he was driving. Their guns discouraged him from stopping. “I’m telling you my story, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of other cases that are much worse.”
Last week, Quran was arrested after attending a non-violent protest in Hebron which demanded the re-opening of a street in the centre of the city. The Israeli army had made it a settler-only road 11 years previously, despite the presence of Palestinian families still living there.
Following a verbal dispute, Israeli soldiers pepper-sprayed him, beat him, arrested him, blindfolded him and took him to an interrogation centre at a nearby settlement. Once there, he discovered the arresting soldiers were actually from one of the area’s settlements.
“I asked where they were from and they told me: ‘Kiryat Arba’,” he said. “One of them then asked me if I knew Baruch Goldstein [an Israeli settler who, in 1994, opened fire inside a mosque in the West Bank, killing 29 and wounding over 125 others]. They said he was a hero and they would do the same thing.”
Quran was charged with attacking ten soldiers. In court a few days later, the judge stated there was no proof that Quran did not attack them. The hearing was postponed until the following day, by which point a video capturing the events leading up to Quran’s arrest had gone viral. After the video was presented to the judge (which clearly showed Quran had not attacked troops), he was released on bail.
Settler violence has been forcing people to significantly change their lives, Quran said: “There are communities who don’t use main roads because they are afraid they will be murdered. Many farmers can’t farm anymore because their lands are being burned or vandalised, so they have to find another job.”
A report published in January by the Washington-based Palestine Center revealed a 39 per cent increase in the number of settler attacks – from stone-throwing to arson and shootings – between 2010 and 2011.
Furthermore, in the five-year period between 2007 and 2011, the occupied West Bank has witnessed a 315 per cent increase in settler attacks – while, over the same period, there has been a 95 per cent decrease in Palestinian violence against Israeli settlements and settlers.
The report found ”over 90 per cent of all the Palestinian villages which have experienced multiple instances of Israeli settler violence are in areas which fall under Israeli security jurisdiction”.
The report revealed a geographical shift in violent acts; previously settler violence was concentrated in the southern West Bank city of Hebron and its environs. Over the past few years, the Nablus governorate, in the northern West Bank, has also been on the receiving end of a large proportion of the documented settler violence.
This shift to the north, “where rural villages are predominantly targets, suggested that settlers are exploiting unfettered access to isolated Palestinian villages to perpetrate violence more than ever before”.
‘Open hunting season’
“What we have here is a complete failure to enforce the law and uphold the obligations to protect Palestinians,” Yousef Mounayer, director of the Palestine Center, told Al Jazeera.
“The Israelis really need to uphold their own obligations, otherwise we will continue to see violence and it will be open hunting season for settlers to attack Palestinians.”
International law states that occupying powers have a duty to protect local populations, while maintaining security and ensuring public order.
Issa Amro, a Palestinian from Hebron who heads the Youth Against Settlements activist movement, was forced with his family to leave his home – now designated a “closed military area” – after years of attacks from settlers.
“Every time settlers attack a Palestinian house, they are escorted by the army who protect them,” he explained. “I have filed dozens of cases and complaints, and not one time has anyone gone to court.”
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 90 per cent of monitored complaints filed by Palestinians have been closed without indictment.
“I have death threats against me, and I’ve been attacked many times by settlers,” said Amro. “[The settlers] say to me ‘I hope God erases your name’, and they say this to me in front of the army and the police, who stand by and do nothing.”
‘They are there to protect the settlers’
Ezra Nawi, an Israeli activist who has been working with Palestinians against settler violence for the past decade, said the Israeli military in the West Bank was complicit through inaction.
“Settlers attack Palestinians, but the army has orders preventing them from arresting or stopping them,” he said. “They are simply there to protect the settlers.”
Nawi is no stranger to settler violence, with his work frequently making him a target. He said the attacks “serve the state’s interests”.
“The violence scares the Palestinians into not moving around or using their land for farming and agriculture,” he said.
Further OCHA statistics also state approximately 10,000 Palestinian-owned trees were damaged or destroyed by settlers in 2011, while 139 Palestinians were displaced due to settler attacks.
The UN group also found that “80 communities with a combined population of nearly 250,000 Palestinians are vulnerable to settler violence, including 76,000 who are at high-risk”.
“Every day there are attacks by settlers,” said Amro. “What is new is that they have started burning mosques.”
Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for B’Tselem, an Israeli group which documents violence in the West Bank, told Al Jazeera that increasing violence was a result of a lack of law enforcement.
“The Israeli authorities have an obligation under international law to protect both settlers and Palestinians,” she said. “While they fulfill their obligation to protect the settlers, with the Palestinians, we see a systematic failure to protect them from attacks.”
“It is worth noting that Palestinians who are arrested by the Israeli army are prosecuted and charged through the military court system, which is very low in terms of protection of their rights, while settlers, if they get arrested, are held and tried in the civilian court system, which offers greater protection of their rights,” she added.
‘It’s actually calmer now’
Yet not everyone agrees with the assertions made. David Ha’ivri, spokesperson for the settlement council covering the northern West Bank region, told Al Jazeera he felt the area “is over-exposed in the media in comparison to other areas in the world”.
“I’ve lived here for many years and we have experienced violence, but that is not the situation currently,” he said. “It is strange that someone is saying that there is an increase, while we’ve experienced a decrease in the violence. It’s actually calmer now than in the past.”
Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, reiterated Ha’ivri’s assertion, saying the levels of violence had decreased in the past two years, and that media had a tendency to “inflate and exaggerate things like the price-tag attacks“.
“Life in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical term for the West Bank] is normal,” he told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think violence during the last year has been a crucial problem, not for Jews and not for Arabs.
“Let’s not forget that the numbers provided are actually the other way around,” he added. “There have been at least 12 settlers who were murdered by Arabs in the last 24 months.”
According to B’Tselem statistics 13 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank over the past two years, while four Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians, and a further 22 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army. In Gaza, 173 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military during the past two years.
Both Ha’ivri and Dayan state the Israeli authorities were doing what was required of them in terms of protecting civilians and arresting perpetrators.
“I don’t think there is less accountability, the state and the police are very serious about enforcing the law on both sides,” said Ha’ivri. “For example, there are individuals in some communities in Samaria who have been arrested, or banished from living in this area.”
“If the Arabs feel there is less accountability then they are not aware of the facts.”
While Dayan agreed the authorities were performing their duties, he acknowledged flaws in the judicial system.
“There are very few indictments, if at all, presented to the courts,” he said. “I do not have an explanation as to why there are so few indictments, and it is not my place to provide an explanation, but it does create problems, leading some to believe one side has a sense of immunity and can get off without punishment.”
“I do know the government and police have a high interest in the public opinion, so I don’t think they lack the motivation,” said Dayan. “It’s not a question of leniency, but maybe one of capability.”
‘They want Palestine’
The analysis of the Palestine Center’s Mounayer focused on causes of settler violence and whether it was responsorial (a reaction to either Palestinian violence and/or Israeli government actions), or structural (a product of demographics and security arrangements).
“What we found actually is that instances of Palestinian violence trigger a decrease in settler violence,” said Mounayer. “Palestinian violence tends to receive an official response from the Israeli army, so in these instances the settlers don’t intervene.
“We also found that some of it is motivated by Israeli government actions, but … it doesn’t necessarily have to be provoked by anything. As settlers can get away with it at any given time, they will continue.
“The message the settlers are receiving is that ‘this is okay, and the state is not going to stop them’.”
B’Tselem’s Michaeli, however, was keen to emphasise that violence was not something the majority of the settler community participated in. “The mainstream leaders in settler politics have denounced these attacks,” she said, adding that settler violence and clashes with local Palestinians dated back to the 1970s.
“Having said that, the settlement community as a whole in an occupied area is violent,” she said, referring to the illegal nature of the expanding settlements in the West Bank, frequently condemned by the international community.
Ha’ivri said that in most cases, when there is violence, it happens as a response to attacks on settlers. “I don’t think it happens on a daily basis. All acts of violence that have occurred are isolated on both sides,” he said. “I don’t think either side is going out and actively looking for targets.”
For Israeli activist Nawi, the motivations of settlers are much more straightforward.
“Most of the settlers are motivated by religious ideas; that the Arabs are unwelcome people and they need to leave,” he said. “It is not an argument you can reason with.”
Tonight, right wing heroine Pamela Geller continues spewing twisted sexual hatred at Sandra Fluke, in yet another BOMBSHELL post about a ridiculously lurid article in British tabloid The Daily Mail: BOMBSHELL: PRESIDENT OBAMA’S GAY TRANSGENDER PROSTITUTE NANNY!!!!! – Atlas Shrugs.
I don’t even know what to say about this one. It’s so far into the Tinfoil Zone, you’ll only hurt your brain if you try to make sense of her weird attempt at “connecting the dots.”
Is it any wonder that Obama is calling Sandra Fluke to congratulate her on her rampant promiscuity?
This, too, shaped the worldview of the post-American president.
And as usual, Pamela Geller’s commenters take the prize for the Most Disgusting Troglodytes on the Internet:
I can just picture Evie busting a nut in little ObaMao’s high chair tray and watching him dip a cookie in it.
Keith Mahone (aka Charles Martel)
Posted by: Keith Mahone (aka Charles Martel) | Monday, March 05, 2012 at 02:42 PM
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.”
Another day in being Pamela Geller. Spewing hateful invective at Sandra Fluke, saying that calling her a “slut” was a “softball,” that she is a “prostitute,” etc. Geller also somehow brings Islam into it with the “five times a day” remark which her commenters picked up on. I have a feeling Geller is sexually repressed.
She also calls Obama a “pimp,” and not in the cool, hip urban dictionary sense of the word.
Rush Limbaugh may have “apologized” (disclaimer: not a real apology) for his caveman comments about Sandra Fluke, but the right wing blogosphere continues to spew torrents of venom at her.
Tonight’s case in point is hate group leader Pamela Geller, parroting the latest talking point that Ed Schultz is somehow equivalent to Rush Limbaugh, and calling Sandra Fluke a “prostitute” who is “banging it five times a day:” SLUTGATE: CONTACT CARBONITE – DROP ED SCHULTZ!!!!! – Atlas Shrugs.
A 30-year-old poses as a 23-year-old, chooses a Catholic University to attend at $65,000 per year and can not afford ALL the birth control pills she needs… so she wants the US taxpayers to pay for her rampant sexual activity. By all accounts she is banging it five times a day. She sounds more like a prostituteto me. She must have an gyno bill to choke a horse (pun intended). Slut was a softball.
Obama calls her and tells Sandra Slut Fluke that her parents should be so proud of her.
He’s a pimp.
Did he call the sole survivor of the Fogel family massacre?
He is morally bankrupt.
As for Rush calling a spade a spade, or in this case, a slut a slut, advertiser Carbonite is playing selective outrage. Contact Carbonite here and demand that they drop their ads from Ed Schultz’s program.
UPDATE at 3/4/12 8:20:42 pm
Pamela Geller’s audience comments:
you know what.. I hope fluke gets circumcised totally..
she supports muslims wholeheartedly..
may her clit be sliced to the root..
fuck fluke
Posted by: vangrungy | Sunday, March 04, 2012 at 10:48 PM
Significant numbers of far-right supporters in the UK consider violence and “armed conflict” a legitimate form of political expression, experts will warn this week.
The first audit into the attitudes and beliefs of Britain’s rightwing extremists, collated in a report by the thinktank Chatham House, will reveal that there is a “significant level of support” for planned violent attacks.
Next month the trial will begin of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who has confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July. Breivik, an Islamophobe, said he carried out the attacks on Utoya Island and Oslo to help protect Europe from a “Muslim takeover”.
The report, which polled 2,152 far-right supporters, raises concerns that the path of extremism followed by Breivik, from membership of a mainstream rightwing party to far-right terrorist, should be recognised as a possibility for UK counterparts.
Matthew Goodwin, an associate fellow of Chatham House and the University of Nottingham, said there was a danger that supporters of theEnglish Defence League (EDL), which had links to Breivik, could be tempted to become more militant. “Perhaps some might feel that more direct, more violent strategies are the way forward.”
On 31 March the EDL will stage an international demonstration in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. The “counter-jihad” summit will discuss the formation of a European Defence League. Representatives from defence leagues in Italy, Poland, the United States, Finland, Sweden and Norway are expected to attend, along with the anti-Muslim group, Stop Islamisation of Europe.
The ramifications of a well-organised, European-wide far-right movement, able to share violent ideologies and pool resources, has triggered concern from anti-fascist campaigners. Last week the Czech government warned that extreme rightwing groups were becoming more sophisticated and that neo-Nazis might resort to terrorism.
Goodwin said: “If the EDL links up with similar organisations in Germany and central and eastern Europe, that is quite worrying. Many of the grassroots groups in Germany are often called ‘autonomous nationalists’, but are very, very closely networked with neo-Nazi groups and organisations that engage quite openly in violence.”
MURFREESBORO — With an April 25 court hearing drawing near in the fight over mosque construction here, foes of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro’s plans are taking the battle regional.
But while the court issue next month will focus on whether Rutherford County provided ample public notice for the 2010 meeting in which county planners approved the mosque site plan, opponents remain focused on a religious conflict, sounding a warning about the perceived spread of Islam and the damage they believe it will do to American society.
“This is not a Muslim-bashing deal. I don’t have any problem with Muslims. It’s Islam that’s causing it,” Kingdom Ministries pastor Darrel Whaley told a crowd of about 70 people last Tuesday at the Cannon County Senior Citizen Center.
Whaley warned the group that Woodbury and Cannon County are part of the area the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro plans to cover, based on a 2010 posting on the ICM’s website. It’s one of several counties surrounding Rutherford where Whaley said he hopes to deliver the message.
The minister told the crowd he was glad some Muslims felt free enough to attend the event and noted that when he preaches each Sunday at his Walter Hill church, not everyone is going to agree. “They’ve got that right,” he said.
Yet when the former president of the ICM tried to address the crowd to refute “misconceptions” later in the event following presentations by attorneys Joe Brandon and Tom Smith, Whaley refused to let him speak.
“I came here to say open our hearts to each other,” Ahmed Elsayed said, turning to the audience and pleading for the opportunity to speak. “We want to have mutual respect.”
One man in the audience argued that he had served in the military to help maintain the right to free speech and that Elsayed should be allowed to speak.
Whaley’s presentation in Woodbury Tuesday quickly shifted into a Sunday sermon, in which he told the audience, “There are no other gods with the offer of heaven. It is his will that everyone be saved. God so loved the world that he gave his son – for Muslims … for atheists. To deny his truth is to be willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.”
But moments after saying, “God loves Muslims just as much as anyone in the room,” the minister outlined a seven-step plan by Islam to dominate the world, starting with the 9/11 attack, followed by the destabilization of secular Muslim governments, the toppling of moderate Muslim regimes, a pending confrontation with the West and a declaration of total domination by 2020. “Their goal is to turn our nation into an Islamic republic,” he said.
I hate to see all these folks being indocrinated into the “Islamization” myth. The misinformation and hate that is being pumped here can only lead to negative results (H/T: JD):
Iran’s citizens should be starved in order to curb Tehran’s nuclear program, officials in Jerusalem said Wednesday ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington.
“North Korea is halting its nuclear program in order to receive aid in food, and this is what should be done with Iran as well,” one unnamed official said.
“Suffocating sanctions could lead to a grave economic situation in Iran and to a shortage of food,” the source said. “This would force the regime to consider whether the nuclear adventure is worthwhile, while the Persian people have nothing to eat and may rise up as was the case in Syria, Tunisia and other Arab states.”
“The Western world led by the United States must implement stifling sanctions at this time already, rather than wait or hesitate,” the official said. “In order to suffocate Iran economically and diplomatically and lead the regime there to a hopeless situation, this must be done now, without delay.”
‘Iran has hidden capabilities’
Earlier Wednesday, North Korea said that it has agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and adopt a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.
US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Wednesday the North has also agreed to allow International Atomic Energy inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment and confirm disablement of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
On Tuesday, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said the Islamic Republic has yet to reveal all of its military capabilities, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has many hidden capabilities which are kept for rainy days,” Vahidi said, adding, “We have not yet revealed all our capabilities.”
Addressing Israeli strike threats, the Iranian minister said Washington objects to statements on an Iran strike as the US is aware of Iran’s power and realizes that anyone who becomes embroiled in a conflict with Tehran will be defeated.
Now the loons in the USA have decided to merge with the loons in Europe, combining forces to form a super group, the Voltron of so-called “Counter Jihadism”…Stop the Islamization of Nations.
Wallah! Presto! Let the money flow in and the Crusades begin!
EDL-Stoke
Usually the hate merchants are “careful,” while they believe they can get away with crazy, genocidal and racist rants against Muslims and Arabs, they try their best to hide the anti-Semitic and generally racist core that haunts their inner recesses. (Even though they do a poor job at this, take for example the long standing alliance Geller/Spencer and the EDL had, even while EDL thugs were giving seig heil salutes during “anti-Mosque protests.”) This is one of the reasons that individuals of conscious such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs broke with the “Counter-Jihad” movement, having realized how far down the river it had gone toward fascism.
The fascistic tendency of this movement was reaffirmed when Swiss politician Oskar Freysingerjoined Stop the Islamization of Nations as a board member. Just like John Jay, Freysinger has a history of open and blatant anti-Muslim animus, he was after all one of the leading Swiss politicians spearheading the successful campaign to ban minarets and is currently trying to ban the niqab.
Now if the allegations hold true we can likely check off ”Anti-Semite” next to Freysinger’s list of despicable traits. (H/T OskarFreysingerWatch)
Apparently Freysinger was in a debate with a man named Alain Soral, who seems to be close to Marine Le Pen’s party, the FN or Front National. Soral has been accused of being an anti-Semite, and speaks a lot about “Zionist conspiracies.” Nonetheless Soral claims that before the debate Freysinger stated that“a person has to declare themselves Zionist since this is a requirement to access the media in the West, and to play any type of leading political role.”
You took part in a debate with Oskar Freysinger, which will air next Wednesday on OTVQTV , in partnership with Mecanopolis .How did it go?
Alain Soral: Fine. Especially since Freysinger, which is pretty nice, has had the honesty to recognize, but off the air before witnesses, that was a Zionist state is required to access the media in the West, and to play a leading political role!(Trans. Fr)
When Freysinger was questioned about this he denied that he was the “source of the remarks” and said that he was in fact an ardent supporter of Israel. Indeed, he has in the past expressed his support for Israel in much the same way Geert Wilders does,
Our party has always defended Israel because we know that if Israel disappears, we would lose our front-line of defense. . . . As long as the Muslims are focused on Israel, our struggle will not be difficult. But the minute Israel goes, they will come after the West.
If Soral were the only one claiming Freysinger made the anti-Semitic statements I would chalk it up to a he said-he said, but facilitators of the debate confirm that Freysinger did say verbatim off tape, “a person has to declare themselves Zionist since this is a requirement to access the media in the West, and to play any type of leading political role.”
Asked yesterday by Robert Menard, who is clearly a player Mecanopolis, Oskar Freysinger denied being the source of the remarks just before take the opportunity to pledge allegiance to the Zionist entity.
Unfortunately for him, we contacted Samuel tonight, one of the facilitators of OTVQTV, as well as Zweigt Christopher, host of future circle , who were present during the taping of the show and we have confirmed that Freysinger has indeed stated, verbatim, that “to declare themselves Zionist was a requirement to access the media in the West, and to play a leading political role.”(Trans. Fr)
If the above witnesses and Soral are to be trusted Oskar Freysinger is lying, his belief that Jews run the media is an old anti-Semitic trope, as is the idea that an all powerful Jewish cabal runs the world, that’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion talk. Israeli newspaper Haaretz buttresses this point, having commented on Freysinger and his fellow European anti-Muslim politicians,
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz accused the rightists of “trading in their Jewish demon-enemy for the Muslim criminal-immigrant model” and visiting Israel only to get ”Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power”.
It is not far-fetched to believe the allegations leveled at Freysinger especially considering the trajectory of the anti-Muslim movement, as well as the numerous instances in which many of the members and organizers in the movement have let slip their true hateful attitude toward Jews.
This story once again confirms what we all have known, the European fascists who used to target Jews and have exchanged the old hate for the new more acceptable hate against Muslims have not shed their anti-Semitism. For all the taqiyya talk that the loons love and obsess over it is quite revealing how they are the ones who actually have something to hide.
*Update: Due to some comments, it seems we have to make clear that we do not work with the ADL or the SPLC. I think that much should be obvious? Anyone who knows our website knows our staunch stance against all forms of bigotry and hate. We have consistently called out organizations that have failed in this regard, some betraying their own purported values. The ADL, ever since their Cordoba House debacle and about face has navigated away from “Islamophobia,” this however does not put them in the clear. They still have to answer for accepting money from arch-Islamophobe funder Aubrey Chernick: Conspiracy Theory? Zionist Connection to Organized Islamophobia. As well as their consistent apologia for war crimes perpetrated by Israel.
Bad news for the hate brigades? It looks like the ever shifting poll numbers are indicating that the anti-Sharia’ drive is no longer as popular with Americans now that it impedes upon the free exercise of religion by Jewish and Christian groups and also makes life difficult for business leaders:
Earlier this month, before the furor over several proposed abortion bills threw Virginia into the national spotlight, another controversial bill began moving in the House of Delegates.
House Bill 825 proposes to ban the use of any legal code established outside the United States in U.S. courtrooms. While it is largely understood that the primary target of the legislation was sharia, or Islamic law, the expansive bill has drawn unexpected criticism from other groups that are concerned that, as written, it could easily be interpreted to ban the use of halacha, Jewish law, and other Catholic canon laws. Muslim advocates had already condemned the bill, as they’ve done with the dozens of state-level bills that have explicitly or implicitly targeted Islamic law. But Jewish groups were also speaking out, saying that the law could limit their ability to settle family matters like wills and divorces according to their religious guidelines. Catholic officials also voiced concerns that bills like these could prevent the Roman Catholic Church (based in Italy) from owning parish buildings and schools. Business leaders also added their voices to the clamor against the bill, citing concerns that it could hurt international business relations. Deciding to reevaluate their approach, the bill’s proponents sent the bill back to committee.
But as the debate in Virginia shows, the tide could be changing. Lawmakers have had to revamp their approach since an Appeals court struck down Oklahoma’s earlier version as discriminatory for specifically mentioning sharia law. In order to pass constitutional muster, the new bills are written with broad-strokes prohibitions, which have had the unintended effect of drawing other religious groups and business interests into the fray.
Public opinion is also shifting. While these legal challenges evolved, Americans’ concerns about the threat that sharia law’s threat to the American legal system have fluctuated considerably, largely in response to public events that captured national attention. A year ago, when Rep. Peter King’s congressional hearings on alleged radicalization among American Muslims, 23 percent of Americans agreed that American Muslims want to establish sharia as the law of the land in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) disagreed, while 13 percent said they did not know. In September 2011, near the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and amidst debates around the Park 51 Community Center and Mosque in Manhattan, which opponents dubbed the “ground-zero mosque,” this number rose to nearly one-third (30 percent) of the general population. Over six-in-10 (61 percent) disagreed, while 8 percent said they did not know.
Over the few months, though, these issues have had a much lower media profile. And in the absence of prominent national stimuli, concerns about the threat of sharia have dropped by more than half since September. PRRI’s February 2012 Religion and Politics Tracking Survey showed only 14 percent of Americans agree that American Muslims want to establish sharia or Islamic law as law of the land. More than two-thirds (68 percent) disagree, and nearly 1-in-5 (17 percent) say they do not know.
These two trends suggest that, despite early momentum, the sponsors of anti-sharia legislation may have an uphill battle ahead of them. By widening the bills’ scope to include all laws that originate outside the U.S., sponsors of anti-sharia legislation are wading more deeply into the waters of religious liberty. Given that 88 percent of Americans agree that the U.S. was founded on the idea of religious freedom for everyone, including religious groups that are unpopular, fighting these legislative battles openly on religious liberty terrain may be difficult. It certainly won’t help that the current bills are being considered at a time when Americans’ concerns about the threat of sharia law have ebbed.
Last August, the Associated Press launched aseries detailing how the New York Police Department has extensively investigated Muslims in New York and other states, preparing reports on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses, apparently without any suspicion of crimes have been committed.
The propriety and legality of the NYPD’s activities is being disputed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who claimed last year that the NYPD does not focus on religion and only follows threats or leads, is now arguing that, as he said last week, “Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is constitutional.” Others disagree. In fact, Bloomberg himself signed a law in 2004 that prohibits profiling by law enforcement personnel based on religion.
This week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told a congressional committee that the Justice Department is reviewing whether to investigate potential civil rights violations by the NYPD.
To get a better understanding of the rules governing the NYPD — and whether the department has followed them in its surveillance of Muslims — we spoke to Faiza Patel,co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center at NYU School of Law.
The NYPD did not respond to our request for comment about allegations it has violated the law.
ProPublica: So, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have said everything that the NYPD did was legal and constitutional. Others have disagreed. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, for example, said wholesale surveillance of a community without suspicion of a crime “clearly crosses a line.” What restrictions is the NYPD operating under?
Patel: They are operating under at least three sets of rules. The first and most basic set of rules is the consent decree from the Handschu case — the so-called Handschu guidelines. This was a 1970s-era political surveillance case that was settled through a consent decree. The NYPD had been conducting surveillance of a number of political groups in the 1960s and ’70s. The initial consent decree regulated the NYPD’s collection of intelligence about political activity. It first said the NYPD can only collect intelligence about political activities if it follows certain rules. For example, the NYPD had to get clearance from something called the Handschu authority, which was a three-member board that consisted of two high-level police officials and one civilian appointed by the mayor.
Then, post-9/11, the NYPD went to court and asked a judge to review the consent decree because they wanted greater freedom in their counterterrorism operations. What they wound up doing was adopting guidelines based on the FBI’s guidelines from 2003, issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft. These were different in several important ways. The first was that there was no pre-clearance at all … no requirement that the NYPD get approval from the Handschu authority before they undertook any intel gathering about political activity. The second was that the guidelines explicitly say the NYPD can attend any public event or gathering on the same basis as another member of the public. So, if I can go to a church, the NYPD can go to a church. But it goes on to say that the NYPD can’t retain the information it gathers from such public events unless it is connected to suspected criminal or terrorist activity.
ProPublica: So, if you look at, say, the NYPD’s guide to Newark’s Muslim community obtained and published by AP — which maps out mosques and Muslim-owned businesses without mentioning any suspected crimes — aren’t the police retaining exactly this kind of information?
Patel: There are a couple of documents that suggest they may have violated Handschu — for example, the [2006 NYPD report] on the Danish cartoon controversy, which is a collection of statements in mosques and other places that have been taken by undercover officers or confidential informants.
ProPublica: What other rules does the NYPD operate under?
Patel: The second set is that the NYPD has a profiling order in place, and New York City also has a racial profiling law. They are slightly different. The NYPD order [issued in 2002] does not include religion among the categories that they define as profiling. But the New York City law does. It prohibits police officers from relying on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin as a determinative factor in initiating law enforcement action. Normally, you have quite a difficult time in racial profiling cases showing they’ve used one of these factors as the determinative factor. In this case, if you look at the documents, it seems quite clear that the NYPD had its eyes quite firmly on the Muslim community, so it’s possible it is also in violation of this law.
The third set of rules is, of course, the U.S. and New York state constitutions. Within the [U.S.] Constitution, you’re looking at at least two broad categories of provisions — potential First Amendment claims for free speech, freedom of association and free exercise of religion. The other piece of it would be potential equal protection claims.
ProPublica: Another AP story this week reported that federal grant money and equipment were used in the NYPD surveillance and investigation of the Muslim community. Does that muddy the legal questions about whether the police were following federal rules?
Patel: The federal program that was giving them money is the HIDTA program — High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. It’s geared toward providing funds to combat drug trafficking. HIDTA itself does allow for counterterrorism spending to be an incidental purpose. It requires the HIDTA executive board to basically make sure that funds were being used for the purposes that they were supposed to be used for. So, I think there’s a real issue about accountability and oversight of the use of HIDTA funds here.
ProPublica: So, if the NYPD did potentially violate the Handschu guidelines and city law you mentioned, what are the penalties?
Patel: Well, the Handschu lawyers already went to court last year and told the judge that the documents that had been released by the AP suggested that there had been violations of the Handschu decree. They asked for discovery so they could check the files of the NYPD to see whether they had violated the prohibition on keeping dossiers. I believe that that discovery will likely be starting soon. So, there’s clearly a remedy through the Handschu mechanism. Because it’s a consent decree, it’s an ongoing thing. The judge has supervisory jurisdiction. There are also issues under the racial profiling law and under the First Amendment.
We’ve also turned to the question of oversight. The FBI, for all its faults, does have a fair amount of oversight — an inspector general internally and congressional oversight. We think a similar thing would be a great idea for the NYPD.
Andrew Breitbart has died of natural causes according to his website. His image will now most likely be rehabilitated in the mainstream and his contributions to the blog world will likely be highlighted above and beyond his racist and Islamophobic antics.
Many may think it is “tacky,” “tasteless” or even “wrong” for us to say anything negative about Breitbart on the day of his passing. I don’t agree. While it is sad when anyone passes, and our condolences go out to his family, he was a public figure who did much to divide this nation. Commenting on how people such as Breitbart spent their lives is both appropriate and relevant at the time of their deaths.
He was a pivotal figure in transitioning the Right into the contemporary world of new media, which in itself is not a bad thing, but it is how he used his new media platform that was extremely problematic. He played a part in disseminating hate propaganda, undermining the truth and deflecting justice. Who can forget the fiasco with Shirley Sherrod?
On July 19, 2010, Breitbart posted two short videos showing excerpts of a speech by Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010. The videos ensuing controversy resulted in Sherrod being fired from the United States Department of Agriculture on July 19. After Breitbart was criticized for taking Sherrod’s words out of context, he posted the complete 40-minute video of the speech. The NAACP stated that the video excerpts aired by Breitbart were deliberately deceptive and said that he had “snookered” the group.[42][43]Secretary of AgricultureTom Vilsack later apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job.[44] In 2011, Sherrod brought suit against Breitbart for defamation.
Or his targeting of ACORN?
Breitbart was also involved in the 2009 ACORN video controversy. Hannah Giles[46][47] posed as a prostitute seeking assistance while James O’Keefe portrayed her boyfriend, and clandestinely videotaped meetings with ACORN staff.[48] Subsequent criminal investigations by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and the California Attorney General found the videos were heavily edited in an attempt to make ACORN’s responses “appear more sinister”,[49][50][51] and contributed to the group’s demise.[52][53] Breitbart then provided a forum for O’Keefe on his BigGovernment.com website[54] and defended his actions on Sean Hannity’sFox News Channel program.[55]
His “Big” blogs are quite popular forums for anti-Islam and anti-Muslim screeds. His website “Big Peace” for instance boasts about featuring seminal loon and “Islamization” fear-mongerer Frank Gaffney. His websites also link to Atlas Shrugs and reproduce many of the Islamophobesphere’s articles, videos, etc.
Here is just a sample of how the looniverse is taking his passing:
Pamela Geller thinks of Breitbart as her “fearless leader”:
Andrew was our warrior, our leader. Fearless, unapologetic, brilliant. I admire few, but Andrew was in a league of his own. His herculean contribution to the war is incalculable.
The forces of truth have lost a great and courageous warrior. Unlike most on the Right, he was not a cringing dhimmi eagerly throwing his comrades under the bus in a futile attempt to appease the Left. I hope that his lasting legacy will be legions of freedom fighters confronting Leftists and Islamic supremacists on their hypocrisy, lies and justifications for evil with just as much fearlessness, verve and good humor as he always displayed.
I wish I could say RIP Breitbart, but the above eulogies from the loons make it clear that Breitbart’s abiding legacy is his contribution towards amplifying the most radical voices amongst the Right. I am more inclined to repeating the words of Johnny Cash,
Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light
Here’s an astonishingly paranoid article in the Washington Times by anti-Muslim crusader Frank Gaffney, warning right wingers yet again that shariah law is about to take over America, and arguing that people who criticize Gaffney and his conspiracy theories are “precisely the same” as the Ku Klux Klan. In this persecution fantasy, Gaffney plays the part of the civil rights activist.
In short, we find ourselves in what is, properly understood, the civil rights struggle of our time. Those who stand up for freedom against Shariah are quite literally protecting the rights of women, children, people of faith and other minorities sure to be abused by its misogynistic, intolerant and domineering doctrine. That means protecting, as well, Muslim-Americans who have come to this country to escape the long arm of Shariah law. In due course, though, Shariah’s repressive strictures would not simply be a threat to these communities. They would be a toxic blight upon all of us.
Ironically, today, it is defenders of our freedoms who are being denounced as “racists,” “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Such terms are, in truth, being used in much the same way and for precisely the same purpose as the Ku Klux Klan’s members reviled an earlier generation of civil rights activists for loving blacks: to defame, threaten and isolate their opponents. We cannot, and certainly must not, tolerate the Islamists’ intolerance.
This latest crazy rant was triggered by President Obama’s apology to the Afghan people for US troops mistakenly burning Korans. In fact, that apology has triggered crazy rants from all over the bigoted anti-Muslim blogosphere, including, of course, the always insane Pamela Geller — who wants to see wholesale slaughter of Muslims, not apologies: PAMELA GELLER, WND COLUMN: STOP APOLOGIZING AND START CARPET-BOMBING!!!!! – Atlas Shrugs
The fish stinks from the head down, and this is Obama’s foreign policy. Is it any wonder that jihadist attempts in this country have skyrocketed under this president?
And what is he on his belly for? Why would civilized men apologize for destroying materials that were being used to send jihadist messages to kill our soldiers and our citizens? This is madness. Where are Muslim apologies for 1,400 years of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements? Where are their apologies for the relentless jihad warfare against the Jews, the Hindus, Christians and all non-Muslims? Where are the apologies for 9/11, 7/7, 3/11, the U.S.S. Cole, the Khobar Towers, Beslan and Bosnia?
America does not apologize to savages and cannibals and ghouls.
Stop apologizing and start carpet-bombing. Defeat jihad. What’s it going to take?
Stop apologizing to these savages and start fighting. As an American, I do not apologize. I withdraw Obama’s apology. I withdraw Gen. Allen’s apology. I condemn their apology. I do not submit to a culture that suffocates ideas, critical thinking, women, non-Muslims. I do not apologize that the United States of America is “the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”
The incoherent, hate-obsessed Pamela Geller now has the temerity to place herself above the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen. But then, she’s never lacked for self-esteem.
La Paz, Bolivia - Were I transcribing the wet dream of US Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen – self-appointed bulwark against the alleged Islamo-Bolivarian threat to homeland security – I might describe my arrival to La Paz two weeks ago as follows:
Descending from the city of El Alto into the Bolivian capital, my bus was stopped by a battalion of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
All passengers were required to pledge simultaneous allegiance to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Adolf Hitler, and Evo Morales. Once the Iranians had verified that there were no Jewish businesspeople on board available for kidnapping, the vehicle was allowed to pass.
Our progress was once again interrupted, however, by a parade of Iranian diplomats, whose infestation of Bolivia began when the Islamic Republic made the alarming decision to open embassies in Latin America - something no other country in the world has done. Augmenting the infestation are the more than two dozen Iranian diplomatic offspring who have reportedly been enrolled in the international school in La Paz.
I finally checked into a hostel in the city centre and turned on the television to find that the only available channel was HispanTV, Iran’s new Spanish-language extremist propaganda disseminator.
I turned off the TV, sat back, and waited for the bomb to explode.
The possibility of a bomb in La Paz was raised in December 2011 by Ros-Lehtinen, co-star of a non-factual documentary entitled “La amenaza iraní” (“The Iranian Threat”), in which she insinuates that the US should attack Iran in order to avert bomb explosions in various Latin American capitals. The film was released by Univision, the prominent US broadcast network, which is owned by someone who hosts galas in honour of the Israeli military.
The Iranians meanwhile acquired a new rival in the realm of multilingual extremist propaganda dissemination earlier this month when – as Charles Davis has wryly noted - the Spanish-language Univision re-released its film in English.
Quds Force in disguise
When, after several days in La Paz, Iranian penetration into the Western hemisphere was still not glaringly apparent, I set out for the epicentre of penetrating operations: the embassy of Iran, said to be guarded by the elite Quds Force.
Unable to find the address on the internet, I walked to the office of the Shia Bolivian Islamic Cultural Foundation on Landaeta Street. It was closed for Carnival, however, and I had to extricate myself from the grasp of missionaries in an adjacent office belonging to another entity to which Latin America has shown itself increasingly penetrable: the nutrition and weight-management cult Herbalife.
In the end, I found the embassy thanks to a meeting with a former Bolivian official, during which he happened to mention Evo Morales’ hypocritical authorisation of GMOs in Bolivia after having disapproved of Iranian GMO projects. I took advantage of the opportunity to enquire after the coordinates of Tehran’s mother ship in La Paz; he directed me to the website of the Bolivian Foreign Ministry, which did indeed contain an address – albeit an incorrect one.
My visit to the embassy, located in a house with a yard, revealed that the Quds Force had succeeded in disguising itself as a single Bolivian policeman.
The Bolivian receptionist meanwhile informed me that she was not authorised to divulge the address of the Iranian Red Crescent Society Hospital in the neighbouring city of El Alto, where it was rumoured that female employees wereforced to wear the hijab.
A Shia state within a state
I returned to the Bolivian Islamic Cultural Foundation, which was now open. There, a Bolivian convert to Islam, who introduced himself as both “Sergio Grover” and “Grover Musa”, told me how his dream of travelling to Iran on a religious scholarship had been thwarted by none other than the Univision documentary. According to Grover, there had been a moratorium on such scholarships, following the collaboration with Univision by former Mexican scholar-spies.
A theory put forth several years ago by Ely Karmon of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, according to which Shia ideology might resonate among impoverished sectors of Latin American society, seemed to find confirmation in Grover’s contention that poor inhabitants of El Alto were responsive to the foundation’s discourse.
Though the community currently consists of only approximately 50 members, Grover reckoned that, once membership swells to 3,000, the community might pose a challenge to the modus operandi of the state. For example, he explained, Muslim Bolivian policemen would exhibit superior conscientiousness than regular Bolivian policemen – whose recent achievements include repressing a protest of disabled people.
As for the Iranian hospital, Grover claimed that the hijab had only been required for the inauguration ceremony in 2009, and added that there was a substantial discount for Muslim patients – a slightly subtler approach to conquest, perhaps, than others historically employed on the American continent, such as decimating indigenous populations via infectious disease.
The hijab hospital
The next day, I took the bus to El Alto and found the hospital, a mere several streets away from where Grover had said it was. There were no hijabs in sight.
The hospital’s CEO and general manager, both Iranian, agreed to speak with me after being initially unimpressed that I had failed to bring any form of identification. Over tea and then lunch, they reviewed the institution’s numerous amenities and other contributions to global health by the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
The men claimed that the hospital employees, who were all Bolivian aside from two of them and their wives, were entirely free to pursue their own religious and political beliefs, provided they did not drink alcohol at work. They added that the obligation of the Red Crescent Society was to treat all kinds of people, including enemies of Ahmadinejad.
The general manager declared: “Our concern is lessening the pains of human beings.”
Terror breeding-ground
Less benign motives behind Iranian healthcare initiatives in Latin America were detected in a 2009 Jerusalem Postarticle entitled “The ‘other’ America: A perfect terror breeding-ground”, in which the author invokes the post-World War II flight to Bolivia by various Nazis as evidence that “[d]isenfranchised and marginalised regions are prime targets for fundamentalists and fanatics of all kinds”.
He also curiously mentions Bolivian “dictatorships aided by high-ranking Nazi officials” but manages not to specify that the Nazi official in question is presumably Klaus Barbie - war criminal, torturer extraordinaire, and former head of the Gestapo office in Lyons – whose escape to Bolivia was facilitated by none other than the non-”other” America, ie the United States.
In Bolivia Barbie’s talents were put to use in coordinating events like the so-called “cocaine coup” of 1980, which installed the murderous narco-military regime of Luis Garcia Meza Tejada.
Contemporary peddlers of the notion of a Latin America-based Iranian threat, however, prefer to excise such facts from history – as well as the fact that it was not Iranian-backed overthrows of governments in places like Panamaand, more recently, Honduras that intensified said countries’ respective roles in the international drug trade. Instead, we learn from these experts that the geographic proximity of West Africa to Venezuela facilitates Islamic drug trafficking.
As for Ros-Lehtinen’s logic – according to which bombs on Iran will deter bombs in La Paz – it has yet to be explained why Iran would suddenly bomb its own alleged satellite, especially when the ostensible aim of Iranian penetration of Latin America is to threaten the US, not Bolivia.
At any rate, in the event that Ros-Lehtinen wants to have a little fun and exploit the coincidence that la paz means “peace” in Spanish, she could always convert her illogic into the following catchy war slogan: “Let’s destroy peace before Iran does”.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in November 2011. She is an editor at PULSE Media, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, CounterPunch, Guernica Magazine, and many other publications.
Ray Kelly refers to the organizations that have criticized the NYPD for violating civil liberties, “so-called civil liberties groups.” We have to continue to shine the light on Bloomberg and the NYPD so they realize that this story is not simply going to go away:
GWEN IFILL: Next: More details emerge about a program aimed at preventing terrorism, but which also raises questions about civil liberties.
Ray Suarez has our story.
RAY SUAREZ: The story has been emerging since last summer. New York City police began extensively monitoring Muslims in the city after 9/11.
The operation, revealed by the Associated Press, triggered immediate criticism from civil rights groups.
CHRISTOPHER DUNN, attorney, New York Civil Liberties Union: At the end of the day, it is, pure and simple, a rogue domestic surveillance operation. And that’s a matter of serious concern to us.
RAY SUAREZ: But New York City’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, insisted last year the surveillance is necessary and legal.
RAYMOND KELLY, New York City Police commissioner: We’re doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city. We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties.
And we know that there’s always going to be scrutiny. There’s always going to be some tension between the police department and the so-called civil liberties groups.
RAY SUAREZ: The program used undercover police officers and recruited Muslim informants to keep watch.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg insisted last December the operation wasn’t about racial profiling.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, mayor of New York: The city’s police department has worked very hard to bring crime down and prevent terrorism. And we have done it in a way that is consistent with making sure that we obey the law and don’t target anybody.
RAY SUAREZ: But Muslim activists in the city say surveillance is corrosive and counterproductive.
LINDA SARSOUR, Arab-American Association of New York: It creates mistrust amongst people within their own community. It also hinders what people do in their daily lives. They don’t go — they don’t want to go to the same coffee shops or even pray at the mosques. And what it does is it creates mistrust also between us and law enforcement, which really undermines public safety for all New Yorkers.
RAY SUAREZ: The operation extended beyond New York City limits. This apartment building in New Brunswick, New Jersey, served as an NYPD command center for surveillance throughout that state.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, his state’s former U.S. attorney*, said the whole operation was news to him.
GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE: I may have been briefed about it in ’07. If I was, I don’t remember it. And NYPD’s jurisdiction — they don’t really have jurisdiction here.
RAY SUAREZ: Just yesterday the AP revealed White House funding helped purchase cars and computers used in the surveillance effort.
We take a closer look at the story now with Matt Apuzzo. He’s one of the two reporters who initially reported on the surveillance program back in August for the Associated Press and has continued to follow the story.
Matt, you’ve called the NYPD one of America’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. What was the New York City Police Department doing?
MATT APUZZO, The Associated Press: Well, they have domestic intelligence programs that go far beyond what we would have expected pre-9/11 to see from any police department and in many ways operate in ways that the federal government, the FBI just simply can’t.
They have a program called the Demographics Unit, which the NYPD originally denied even existed, plainclothes officers search that — often Arab officers — who will go out into Muslim neighborhoods, and they are called rakers. They’re going to rake the coals looking for hot spots, meaning they’re going to go out and they’re going to take pictures of mosques. They’re going to take pictures of all the Muslim businesses in the area.
They’re going to go into the Muslim cafes or hookah bars and they’re just going to eavesdrop and listen to people’s conversations, try to gauge the sentiment of the owner, maybe write down his ethnicity, definitely write down his ethnicity. And those goes all into police reports.
So we have seen them for many neighborhoods. We have seen them for Egyptians, Moroccans, Albanians. They are building these profiles of where Muslims live, eat, shop, pray, where they watch sports, where they go to Internet cafes. It’s just — it’s an incredible process by which they’re bringing in information about the Northeast Muslims.
RAY SUAREZ: Now, in this kind of surveillance, in these ongoing investigations, was there first established probable cause, the evidence of an ongoing commission of a crime, some reason to believe that there was a crime going on, or were they just watching?
MATT APUZZO: Right.
In the Demographics — in the Demographics Unit — these are the undercover, the plainclothes officers — their reports mentioned no evidence of crimes. I mean I think we found one evidence, one report that said here’s a store that appears to sell counterfeit DVDs.
So, the Demographics Unit is just out there raking the coals. They’re just building these databases. Then there are these informants, you know, the mosque crawlers who go out into the mosques and are investigating. You know, one, they’re investigating. If there is a lead, they’re following it. But they’re also there just serving as listening posts inside the mosques.
So we’ve seen documents where the informants or the undercover officers inside the mosques are reporting back on even innocuous things that imams are saying at Friday prayers. They’re reporting back, the imam says, hey, we should hold — we should hold a protest about the Danish cartoons. There should be a nonviolent protest. I want everybody to maybe write a letter to a politician.
And this stuff’s ending up in police reports for Ray Kelly. And we have seen evidence of them using surveillance cameras, writing down license plates of people coming to and from mosques. I mean, it’s just — it really is surprising and really shows the transition and the transformation of the NYPD.
RAY SUAREZ: How did this get started?
Over the years, imams have told this program that they have been contacted openly by the FBI, asked for cooperation, which they often gave. Did the New York City Police Department determine that there was no other way to get the kind of information they were looking for?
MATT APUZZO: Yes, I mean, in some of the ways, the Demographics Unit is built on the idea that you’re going to learn more if you go in covertly. You know, you’re going to be able to take a more honest pulse of the community if you go in overtly.
And the idea is, if you create these reports, let’s say, you know, three years from now, there’s a report that, you know, from the CIA that says, hey, there’s an Egyptian and he just came to the United States and maybe he’s going to attack New York, we don’t know, the NYPD can go to their Egyptian folder, pull it off, see all the mosques where the Egyptians are likely to go, where they’re likely to go out to dinner, where they’re likely to pray.
Maybe even they’ve collected phone numbers of people who rent — of Egyptians who rent rooms to rent. And they have got that all at their fingertips. So that’s the reasoning behind it.
RAY SUAREZ: Didn’t your reporting turn up people who thought they were already cooperating with the authorities who it turned out were also under undercover surveillance?
MATT APUZZO: We’ve — we found several instances of imams who have partnered with the NYPD, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Bloomberg, who have been — who have decried terrorism and who have been held up as allies in the war against terrorism in New York City, and we found documents showing that they had undercover officers or informants assigned directly to them or — and their mosques.
RAY SUAREZ: There are rules that govern domestic spying that apply to the FBI, that apply to the CIA. Do they apply to the New York City Police Department? Was the NYPD living within the rules?
MATT APUZZO: Well, I mean, legally, that’s sort of to be determined.
The police department operates under federal consent decree, basically a court order in a longstanding civil rights lawsuit. Lawyers in that case say these documents that we’ve obtained show they have gone beyond that. The NYPD says, absolutely not. We stay within the four corners of that.
But what’s interesting from where we’re coming from and what’s been fascinating the more people we talk to is, we’ve never really approached this as a legal issue. I mean, when you look at the big issues post-9/11 in the United States, whether it’s water-boarding, warrantless wire-tapping, surveillance, Gitmo, black sites, rendition, all of those have been legal.
I mean, nobody is saying — nobody is going to jail for those programs. These programs might be legal. We have actually never said, this is illegal, they’re violating the law. But, I mean, it certainly is worth having this conversation, just like it’s been worth having those conversations.
And what’s interesting about the NYPD is, they have no — almost no oversight. And the city council is not aware of the programs that are going on. Congress is not aware of what’s going on. The attorney general has said that it basically doesn’t have the ability to investigate.
The White House said yesterday, yes, we — our money is being used here, but we’re just a policy office. We don’t actually have operational control. So, you know, these decisions are largely kept in-house at the NYPD and with Mayor Bloomberg.
RAY SUAREZ: We’ll continue this conversation online.
Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press, thanks for joining us.
Rick Santorum on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos
For the past several years Loonwatch writers have repeatedly made the very “significant” (and obvious) point that radical Christian Islamophobes seek to undermine the constitution of the USA by entangling church and state; i.e. undermining the separation of Church and State.
We have also pointed out that the fervent fear-mongering about “Islamization,” a fairytale concept, is nothing more than projection on the part of these radicals. (Propaganda about the “Islamization” of the USA is even more ridiculous when one considers history; the fact that America was forcibly “Christianized” by colonial settlers and their offspring.)
Many Radical Christians today believe America has changed too much and that the superior place of Christianity needs to be reasserted, i.e. re-Christianization. Not only does this thought permeate the GOP, it has infact captured the GOP. This much is clear from the ongoing reality TV circus known as the Republican primary debates.
Take Rick Santorum, it was recently revealed that he “felt like throwing up” when he first read JFK’s famous speech on the separation of church and state. He was questioned about this by George Stephanopoulos, Santorum replied that he felt like vomiting after reading the first substantive line of the speech in which JFK said, “Apparently it is important for me to state again, not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America in which the separation between church and state is absolute.“ Santorum went on to say,
I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.
This is a leading Republican candidate for the presidency saying this, it’s not something that should be simply ignored. Can one imagine if Rep.Keith Ellison, a Muslim Congressman had said the above? For a surety the Islamophobesphere would be flailing wildly about “Islamization” and the impending Sharia take over in Ellison’s home state of Minnesota.
One must also ask where is the condemnation from loons such as Robert Spencer, a fellow Catholic? We can answer our own question, Spencer is not interested in condemning this threat because he likely agrees with Santorum. Spencer in the past has spoken in forums where he has agreed with other speakers attacking the Enlightenment. His attacks weren’t of the philosophical post-modernist variety either but couched in defense of the faith rhetoric. As I wrote at the time,
Spencer agrees with Professor Kreeft regarding the Enlightenment being a threat to Catholicism though he didn’t explicitly say that Islam was less of a threat. I can see how Ultra-Conservative Catholics may rail against the Enlightenment, it was the era which saw a secularist revolt in the name of reason against the Catholic Church and which led to formulas for the Separation of Church and State, it also witnessed the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in the temporal realm.
Coming back to the main topic, I don’t believe Santorum misspoke. I don’t believe Santorum misunderstood what JFK meant or the impetus behind why he gave that famous 1960 speech. I don’t believe Santorum was making a point about how voices of faith need to be heard in the public square, etc.
Santorum believes America is a Christian country, he believes the “founding fathers” meant for it to stay that way and in fact supported such a notion. I am not sure whether Santorum follows the Dominionist ideology, (an ideology that seems to plague Protestants mostly), but he clearly believes the Church has a part to play in the operation of government.
This incident reveals the deep hypocrisy and faux loyalty to the Constitution amongst many of the Islamophobes and the populist politicians who are riding the Islam/Muslim-bashing wave. Islam and Muslims are being used as a distraction that serves to 1.) make us lose sight of the real issues, and 2.) covers a darker intent of reconquista, rechristianization by any means necessary.
Lastly, I want to clarify that this post is obviously not an attack on Christianity and should not be understood that way. The great majority of Christians are as repulsed as any other citizen when they hear such inanities spewing forth from the mouths of politicians speaking in the name of their faith. They are also on the front lines actively fighting this scourge.
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A very good video from the Young Turks on Rick Santorum’s attack on the Separation of Church and State:
The English Defense League (EDL) is a far-right anti-immigration, anti-Muslim organization comprised overwhelmingly of young white men deeply pessimistic about the future.
Since its founding in 2009, the group has held a series of street demonstrations deliberately targeting neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations. The protests have often been marred by violence, racism, virulant Islamophobia, and frequest arrests.
Outreach is increasingly sophisticated, and their mission is global in scope. Next month’s meeting in Denmark may usher in a dangerous new phase in their quest for a fascist, worldwide “counter-jihad.”
They achieve notoriety through a mix of combustible characters and often ugly protests, yet are kept on the political margins due to infighting and ill thought-out policies. But, next month, at a meeting in Denmark, some of Europe’s most notorious right-wing groups will meet for the European Counter-Jihad Meeting.
Those attending could witness the birth of a right-wing movement, the European Defence League – and the beginning of a dangerous new phase in extremist politics.
Representatives from defence leagues in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the USA, Italy, Poland and Finland are due to attend, along with the anti-Muslim groups Stop Islamisation of Europe, Stop Islamisation of the World and the far-right European Freedom Initiative. It is feared the new umbrella organisation could co-ordinate right-wing activities across Europe while politicising and unifying disparate groups. The idea, which is being championed by the English Defence League (EDL), could be modelled on the European Union – with delegates from participating countries meeting regularly.
Weyman Bennett, spokesman for pressure group Unite Against Fascism, said the meeting in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, was the first meaningful meeting of such groups – which were looking at the EDL model and to mimic successful right-wing political parties in Eastern Europe, some of which have made it to government. He said:
The Euro-leagues are a new danger. We should not forget that it was the Norwegian Defence League that gave us Anders Breivik. The growth of a Euro-league in a time of economic crisis threatens to resurrect fascist street armies such as those that destroyed European democracies in the 1930s. The development of this network allows fascists and right-wing populists to share ideas, finance and experience in a way that should worry us all.
Mr Bennett added the groups would be using the euro crisis as a way to pull in new members, particularly from the middle classes.
He added: “We used to have a number of disparate groups. Now we are moving to a stage where we have fewer groups but they are more organised and sophisticated.”
Some 50 EDL leaders – whose members have been involved in violent clashes with anti-fascist groups in the past – will travel to the meeting. “This is the first proper European Defence League meet. We have been building bridges for the last two years and this is going to be the launch pad,” said Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the leader of the EDL, who is also known as Tommy Robinson.
He added the leader of each national defence league would sit on a panel and would meet “every three to four months”. He said: “We will discuss tactics. Each country’s delegates will get time to describe the problems they have. We will try to pool resources. For example, if another defence league wants to run a demonstration in their own country, they are unlikely to get as much media interest as if we were involved, so we would go over there and lend some support.”
Dr Matthew Goodwin, an expert on the far-right at Nottingham University, said a Continent-wide far-right alliance would help extremist groups organise demonstrations, which carry the possibility of violence and provide access to better-resourced and organised groups in eastern and central Europe.
He said:
The strategy is to organise large marches for the media attention and to provoke anti-fascist and Muslim groups, as well as the local population. Wherever these movements go, there is a possibility of violent clashes. With the EDL, there are question marks over where the movement is heading, if not towards elections. This would be an indication of where it sees itself going.
Dr Goodwin added that, historically, the far-right has often tried to build alliances on the Continent. “If there is anything the Breivik experience taught us, it is that the European-level movements, which share ideas and resources, are very dangerous.”
Farooq Murad, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said the move was “worrying”. He added the MCB was trying to bring together Muslim groups to counter an increase in Islamophobia.
Last year, Mr Yaxley-Lennon announced that negotiations to set up a political wing of the EDL were at an advanced stage. An alliance with the far-right British Freedom Party was discussed and Mr Yaxley-Lennon said he hoped to stand candidates in the next round of local elections. That deal has not yet been concluded and it is thought that it has met with some resistance among the EDL’s grassroots.
Yesterday, about 600 people travelled to Hyde, Greater Manchester, to take part in an EDL protest against an alleged attack by Asian youths on two white teenagers in the town. Eleven were arrested for minor public order offences.
Appearing on WCBS in New York this morning, Representative Peter King offered a strong defense of NYPD’s spying on mosques and Muslim businesses and student groups in several states. Criticism of the recently revealed program has intensified in recent days, but King said he was proud of the police department.
“[Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly and the NYPD should get a medal for what they are doing,” he said. “This is good police work. If you are going after radical Muslims you don’t go to Ben’s Kosher Deli.”
This is perhaps not surprising coming from the man who held highly controversial Capitol Hill hearings into Muslim Americans last year, which many people saw as essentially profiling by public relations; his colleague, Representative Keith Ellison invoked the specter of Joe McCarthy in criticizing King’s efforts and said they served to “vilify” Muslims.
But, alas, King announced last week that he would hold more hearings into domestic radicalization among Muslim Americans in the coming year. “The series of radicalization hearings I convened last March has been very productive,” King said in a statement. “I will definitely continue the hearings in 2012.”
This is a good time to flag a recent study by Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and member of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. His comprehensive examination of crime statistics found that terrorism-related incidents by Muslim Americans has declined markedly, and that Muslim-Americans represent “a minuscule threat to public safety.” He wrote:
The limited scale of Muslim-American terrorism in 2011 runs counter to the fears that many Americans shared in the days and months after 9/11, that domestic Muslim American terrorism would escalate. The spike in terrorism cases in 2009 renewed these concerns, as have repeated warnings from U.S. government officials about a possible surge in homegrown Islamic terrorism. The predicted surge has not materialized.
Repeated alerts by government officials maybe issued as a precaution, even when the underlying threat is uncertain. Officials may be concerned about how they would look if an attack did take place and subsequent investigations showed that officials had failed to warn the public. But a byproduct of these alerts is a sense of heightened tension that is out of proportion to the actual number of terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.
If King calls Kurzman to testify at his hearings I’ll eat my hat, but it’s possible Democrats on the committee could arrange for his appearance. He would provide a substantive counterweight to King’s typically anecdote-driven hysteria. Last week the FBI foiled a plot in which a Moroccan man wanted to bomb the US Capitol—you can bet King will give that episode a prominent role at his hearings.
Newcastle police say a two-month long investigation combined with information from the community has led to a 25-year-old man being charged over an attack on a local mosque.
Early last month several men tried to kick in the door of the Wallsend mosque after childrens’ scripture classes. A Maryland man will face court in April after being charged with intimidation, causing malicious damage and entering enclosed lands.
Newcastle Crime Manager, Detective Chief Inspector Wayne Humphrey says the investigation is ongoing. “It’s just another example of the public doing the right thing and giving the information to police. The actions of the person are now subject to Court so I can’t comment on those but a lot of crimes are solved by the information from the public being accurate and timely, and in this case it’s been very successful.”
Detective Chief Inspector Humphrey says the incident was caught on CCTV and police used the footage as well information from the public to make an arrest.
“There’ve been enquiries ongoing and as a result of some good information from the public at least one of the persons has been identified and spoken to by police and he’s been issued future court attendance notices,” he said. “We anticipate that another gentleman who could assist us with our inquiries will be spoken to in the coming weeks when he returns from interstate.”
The director of the Iranian film “A Separation,” which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film Sunday night, delivered a heartfelt plea for the people of Iran to be recognized for their contributions to culture and not just for the harsh words exchanged lately between political officials.
“At this time many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy,” said Asghar Farhadi, the writer and director of the film. “They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or a filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture.”
For the past several months, Iran has become a byword for threat and violence in much of the West, with Israel suggesting the country’s possession of a nuclear weapon would be grounds for war.
In a seeming response to war-like rhetoric from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is often said to have called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” Farhadi added that he offered his award to “the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.”
As it happens, among the films “A Separation” defeated for the Oscar was an Israeli film, “Footnote.”
“A Separation” tells the story of an upper-middle class family living in Tehran and falling apart, as it struggles to balance its daily life with its competing desires to leave the oppressive society of Iran.
Even as Farhadi celebrated a different version of Iran being recognized at the Oscars, he also didn’t hold back in his critique about the regime there itself, accusing it of smothering “a rich and ancient culture…under heavy dust of politics.”
Farhadi’s extended remarks are below:
At this time many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or a filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture. A rich and ancient culture that has been under heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this honor to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment. Thank you very much.
The Right-Wing will add this to there lists of grievances and examples of “appeasement” to the Muslamic-overlord-beast-monster, when in reality it is a face saving statement by Clinton downplaying the very real and viral Islamophobia infecting the USA:
TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton advised an audience in Tunisia on Saturday to “not pay attention” to the comments made by candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination, saying the often overheatedrhetoric of the campaign doesn’t reflect U.S. policy.
Speaking at a town-hall style event in Tunisia, the North African nation that sparked the “Arab Spring” revolts, Clinton said the partisan remarks made during campaign events “certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people.”
Clinton’s remarks came in response to a question from a member of her audience who said he was troubled by some of the comments, which he considered anti-Muslim, made by candidates running for president.
“If you go to the United States, you see mosques everywhere, you see Muslim-Americans everywhere. That’s the fact. So I would not pay attention to the rhetoric,” she said.
Instead, she advised people to listen instead to President Barack Obama.
“I think that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are,” Clinton said.
She added that she is sometimes surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what’s said in U.S. political campaigns than do most Americans.
“I think you have to shut out some of the rhetoric and just focus on what we’re doing and what we stand for and particularly what our president represents,” Clinton said.
Obama has come under fierce criticism from Republicans for apologizing for the burning of Qurans at a military base in Afghanistan.
GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich said while campaigning that the apology was “astonishing” and that Obama “has gone so far at appeasing radical Islamists that he is failing in his duty as commander in chief,”
American military officials say the burning of the Muslim holy books was a mistake, but it has sparked days of violent protests across Afghanistan.
Escaudain Mosque, in northern France, was desecrated. Children have found Nazi symbols, a swastika and a sticker on Islamophobic that read “Stop Islamisation”.
“The mosque was tagged with Nazi symbols and a sticker” Stop Islamisation “was plastered on the front.
Islamophobic discourse of our policies has allowed this kind of cowardice and weakness subservient to the CFCM system does not allow us to count on them to defend ourselves. ”
Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) appeared on Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien to discuss the flare up of violence in Afghanistan.
Durbin says, “And understand, just go back to history a little bit to 9/11, President George W. Bush, I sure had my differences with him, but I thought he got it right, and he stuck with it through his presidency. He said our war is not with the religion of Islam. Our war is with those who would distort it and turn it into terrorism. And I think that was a bright spot kind of a guiding principle. It was adopted by President Obama. Now, listen to these Republican candidates for president. They’re at war with Islam.”
CNN Contributor Will Cain counters, “Senator Durbin, I haven’t heard one thing that backs up what you suggest. Just give me an example, how are they at war with Islam?
Referencing the Quran burnings, Durbin replies, “Newt Gingrich saying that the president is guilty of appeasement…. What you listen to is incendiary rhetoric coming out in a very delicate situation. Lives are at stake here. The president is showing leadership. The president is stepping up, trying to calm a situation. These three candidates are coming on television doing the opposite.”
Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs week mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.
CUMMING, Ga. — Newt Gingrich turned the church pulpit into a history class when he addressed the congregation at First Redeemer Church, comparing the struggle of American colonies under British rule to what he sees as the modern day assault of religious freedom in America.
Gingrich said that the religious foundation of America is being attacked on two fronts: “We have a secular elitist wing that deeply, deeply disbelieves in America, that wants to create a different country based on a different set of principles,” he said. “And we have a radical Islamist one which legitimately and authentically hates us and should.”
He drew a standing ovation for slamming a State Department meeting with the Organization of Islamic countries, which Gingrich said had “the purpose of talking about how to protect Islam from being described inappropriately. I have passionate opposition to the government of the United States lying to us and censoring us as we try to understand those who would kill us.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said after the July 2011 OIC meeting “combating religious intolerance” that the United States remains “focused on interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”
By contrast, Gingrich drew a stark picture of radical Islamists, saying, “Those people who want to kill us want to kill us because from their world view, we are the greatest threat they’ve ever faced because we represent freedom and freedom is the end of their religion.”
Last night, the AP broke the news that the New York Police Department had spent months spying on Muslims in Newark, N.J. “The result was a 60-page report,” AP reporter Adam Goldman writes, “containing brief summaries of businesses and their clientele.” But was it a surveillance file… or just a guide to Newark’s best Muslim restaurants?
“Such surveillance has become commonplace in New York City in the decade since the 2001 terrorist attacks,” Goldman rightly points out. “The documents obtained by the AP show, for the first time in any detail, how those efforts stretched outside the NYPD’s jurisdiction.”
But as he himself acknowledges, “[t]he report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior.” Indeed, it’s just “a guide to Newark’s Muslims.” Nothing creepy about NYPD spending months monitoring Muslims outside their jurisdiction, at all. And what could be more helpful to the aspiring gourmand than a handbook of the best Halal joints in Newark? With that in mind, we’ve re-arranged some of the dry NYPD “notes,” Zagat-style, to bring you: The NYPD Guide to Newark’s Best Muslim Restaurants.
NYPD says: A “medium size fast food restaurant” with “fried chicken, pizza and cold drinks” on its menu, Newark Fried Chicken is said to be “in good condition,” with “seating for 10 to 15 customers.”
NYPD says: This “medium size takeout restaurant” is known for its “fried chicken, pizza and cold drinks.” “Location is owned by persons of Afghani descent,” notes one reviewer.
*****
Mecca’s Halal Restaurant
4 Branford Pl., (973) 824-5600
Yelp Rating: Four stars. (“Shockingly good,” writes Andrew B. of Evanston, Ill.)
NYPD says: A “small restaurant” “in close proximity of Islamic Cultural center” “owned and operated by African-Americans,” Mecca’s Halal Restaurant gets another thumbs-up from our reviewers. It “has seating for 10-15 customers” and “serves Halal food.”
*****
Amin’s Halal Restaurant
57 William St., (973) 621-1111
Yelp Rating: Three and a half stars. (“Very clean,” says Jeff M. of Jersey City, N.J.)
NYPD says: Our reviewers say Amin’s Halal Restaurant, “location below the former Muhammads Mosque” (now closed), is “medium sized” and “owned and operated by Muslims of Chinese descent.” “During visit 3 African Muslim males and an Egyptian male customer were observed dining within,” writes one reviewer. Wild!
*****
Dunkin Donuts
806 South Orange Ave., no phone number
Yelp Rating: No rating. (Average rating of Newark Dunkin Donuts: Three and a half stars.)
NYPD says: “Good condition,” observes one reviewer, who notes that the “store… has a capacity for 15 to 20 customers.”
*****
Utah Fried Chicken
653 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., (973) 792-1993
Yelp Rating: No rating.
NYPD says: Convenience is the name of the game at Utah Fried Chicken, which our reviewers note is “in close proximity of Masjid Rahman.” One drawback: the restaurant is “small.”
*****
Detroit Fried Chicken and Pizza
685 Springfield Ave., (931) 375-0013
Yelp Rating: No rating.
NYPD says: Come to Detroit Fried Chicken and you might be welcomed by its owner, “Egyptian male,” who’s set up “seating for approximately ten customers” right “next door to Masjid Al-Haqq.” “Fast food restaurant,” writes one reviewer, with what we imagine to be enthusiasm.
*****
West Indian American Halal Restaurant
347 Sandford Ave., (973) 373-7333
Yelp Rating: No rating.
NYPD says: “Poor condition” at this restaurant “owned and operated by persons of West Indian descent,” lament our reviewers. Nevertheless, it “has seating for 8-10 customers” and “is in close proximity of Masjid Fallahee… and Al Muslimaat academy.”
*****
Jordan Halal Restaurant
1008 South Orange Ave., (973) 399-7980
Yelp Rating: Four and a half stars. (“Great breakfasts,” writes Karol R. “OMG I would come here everyday if I could!!!!” adds Candy B. of Newark.)
NYPD says: Options for “takeout and dining in” at this “small restaurant” “owned and operated by persons of Jordanian descent.” But be aware that it is “small.”
*****
Chicken Holiday
1036 South Orange Ave., (973) 373-2009
Yelp Rating: No rating.
NYPD says: Reviewers didn’t have much to say about this “small size takeout location” “owned and operated by persons of Pakistani descent” “that serves Halal food” — but their affection was clear nonetheless.
*****
Crown Fried Chicken and Deli
231 Lyons Ave., (973) 923-4466
Yelp Rating: No rating.
NYPD says: Watch out at this “small fast food restaurant” serving “fried chicken and deli sandwiches”: “Location does not have any chairs or tables inside for customers.” Hope you like standing!
NYPD says: Get ready for some food after prayers at this “medium sized Chinese Halal restaurant” “located across the street from Masjid Ibrahim”! “Owned and operated by Muslims of Chinese descent,” Amin’s “has approximately three tables.”
*****
Kings Family Restaurant Inc.
327 Lyons Ave., (973) 926-2177
Yelp Rating: Three and a half stars. (“Sizeable portions,” says Ron B. of Denver.)
NYPD says: How about a party at Kings Family Restaurant Inc., “a large restaurant with seating for 45-50 customers”? This “traditional Halal diner” is “owned by persons of Turkish descent” — and don’t forget to bring some extra change: “location has a donation box inside for unknown Masjid.”
Hatemonger for hire Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American anti-Muslim, anti-Arab “activist” of the “ex-Muslim” variety. She claims to be a champion of human rights, but her real mission is to peddle outrage, fear and hatred:
Islam is a poison to a society. It’s divisive. It’s hateful. Look what Islam is doing on our college campuses. It’s full of anti-Semitism. It’s going to turn us against one another. It’s going to produce chaos in society. Because Islam should be feared, and should be fought, and should be conquered, and defeated, and annihilated, and it’s going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, Islam is going to be brought down. . .Because Islam is based on lies and it’s not based on the truth. I have no doubt whatsoever that Islam is going to be destroyed. ~ Nonie Darwish, at a Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)Rally
Her outrageous statements have generated widespread controversy, and not surprisingly, her public appearances often draw protests. This time, peaceful protesters were met with aggression.
Violence broke out at the University of New Mexico campus during a peaceful protest on February 23rd of a lecture by Nonie Darwish, sponsored by UNM Israel Alliance, an affiliate of StandWithUs.
As you can see, members of the audience assaulted a number of UNM students when they began their ‘mic-checking’ action.
The public lecture, “The Arab Spring: Why it’s Failing and How Israel is Involved,” began at 7PM in the Anthropology lecture hall. UNM students protested against the Islamophobic rhetoric put forward by Darwish, an author and founder of Arabs For Israel. When the students raised their voices, a number of audience members got out of their seats and used force against the students.
Jordan Whelchel, a UNM student:
The response to this non-violent protest was a violent assault by parts of the crowd. The mic-check was shouted down by a few of the pro-Israel audience members who began physically forcing the protestors out of the auditorium. One of the pro-Palestine activists, a young woman who studies at UNM, had her face scratched and her hair pulled. A young man was forcibly pulled over a row of seats. One was nearly punched in the face, though another protestor intervened to stop the assailant by putting himself in the way. A phone was destroyed, and a camera only narrowly avoided the same fate.
This reaction came as a shock to the protestors. They desired to use words to shake people out of their comfort and complacency , they anticipated words in return, but were met with fists and shoulders. The only people who protected protestors from physical assault were other protestors. In the hallway, the ones who used a protest tactic widely endorsed by Arab Spring activists were called anti-democratic, pro-terrorist, and so on.
A student caught much of the event on film before another audience member pushed down her camera. The students were then forced out of the auditorium and called the UNM police, who arrived and filed a report on the incident.
These students were assaulted on UNM campus for simply trying to make their voices heard. It is a shock that a non-violent action was met with such aggression.
**********
UNM Students being attacked at an Israel Alliance event on campus
In this video, Note the man lunge into the protesters at 17 seconds:
It’s going to be interesting to compare what happens here to what happened with the Irvine 11.
As I wrote about on Wednesday, Associated Press over the last year has been publishing an investigative series detailing how the NYPD, often in conjunction with the CIA, has been systematically spying on entire Muslim communities both in New York City and in surrounding areas. Virtually none of those spied upon are suspected of any wrongdoing; they are just innocent people who are targeted for surveillance solely because they are Muslim. That’s why the program is so controversial. This is how this controversy was depicted yesterday by The New York Post, in a cartoon by Sean Delonas (click to enlarge; h/t sysprog):
[see image above]
According to TheNew York Post, to be Muslim — as between 5-7 million people in America are — is to be a hook-nosed, Osama-worshipping, suicide-bomb-wearing Terrorist. There is no other interpretation for someone justifying a massive, indiscriminate spying program aimed at Muslims generally with this response. It goes without saying that there is not a single other group against whom bigotry this hateful and overt would be tolerated. And that explains a great deal about what has happened with U.S. policy — both foreign and domestic — over the last decade.
As the race heats up among Elysee hopefuls, halal meat has become a political issue for France’s presidential candidates for getting support for the country’s top post.
“There is no controversy here,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told supporters in Rungis in the southern suburb of Paris on Tuesday, February 21, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. “Every year we consume 200,000 tons of meat in the Paris region and 2.5 percent of it is kosher or halal.”
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, said last week that all meat in Paris was halal.
“All the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority. We have reason to be disgusted,” Le Pen told a rally in Lille on Saturday.
Adding to the controversy, a documentary was aired by France 2 alleging that slaughterhouses around Paris have switched meat production entirely to halal methods.
The documentary said that all the abattoirs in the greater Paris region were producing only halal meat, selling some without labeling it as such to avoid the cost of running separate lines for halal and non-halal customers.
The concept of halal — meaning permissible in Arabic — has traditionally been applied to food.
Muslims should only eat meat from livestock slaughtered by a sharp knife from their necks, and the name of Allah, the Arabic word for God, must be mentioned.
Halal meat is a booming market in France and growing demand for it on school, hospital and company canteen menus has already caused tension and misunderstandings between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Officials say most of the meat consumed in and around Paris is slaughtered outside the region and much of it still comes from slaughterhouses that use non-halal methods.
Home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, estimated at between five and six million, France has for years been debating how far it is willing to go to accommodate Islam, now the country’s second religion.
The country has come under fire from Muslim groups for a series of measures authorities say are aimed at protecting France’s secular tradition, including a ban on wearing hijab (headscarf) and full-face veils such as Niqab and the Burqa.
The United States spends millions flying diplomats around the planet to bolster America’s relationship with the Muslim world. Meanwhile, its reservoir of trust among the Muslim community at home is rapidly being depleted — courtesy of the New York Police Department (NYPD).
On Feb. 20, Yale University President Richard Levin expressed his anger at the NYPD’s extensive surveillance of American Muslim students, which has included monitoring students’ emails and websites,events and speakers, and activities — not only at Yale, but at universities across the northeast. In one frequently cited incident, an undercover police officer accompanied students from the City College of New York on a white-water rafting trip, noting their topics of conversation and the frequency of their prayers. This type of surveillance, Levin wrote, “is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States.”
New York City’s top officials, however, have shown no inclination to rein in the NYPD’s obsessive monitoring of American Muslims. Mayor Michael Bloomberg made light of the Yale president’s concerns, calling them “cute” and “ridiculous.” He then attacked Levin: “Yale’s freedoms to do research, to teach, to give people a place to say what they want to say is defended by the law enforcement throughout this country.”
Far from supporting academic freedom, the NYPD has done tremendous damage to campus life. Far from “keeping the country safe,” as Bloomberg stated, the NYPD is making us less safe.
I’ve worked with Muslim students across the United States — offering media training, leading workshops debunking common and pernicious myths about Muslim history, and giving lectures on Islamic law, Muslim identity, and the value of civic engagement. These students are bright, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and remarkably civic-minded. Targeting them is not merely offensive and contrary to American values and principles, but clueless. Don’t take my word for it, either. The students on whom the NYPD is spying attend some of the highest-caliber universities in the world: Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and New York University, among others.
American Muslims are, in fact, the most accomplished and educated segment of the global population of 1.5 billion Muslims. Our successes are American successes, and they undeniable evidence of America’s pluralism and promise. Restrictions on our rights fuel extremist arguments that Muslimswill never be accepted as equals in the West. For those like me who have spent years trying to shrink the trust deficit, this is a tremendous setback.
Put yourself in the shoes of an American Muslim student: One day, you learn that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly cooperated in the production of a hateful pseudo-documentary on Islam — the film alleges American Muslim organizations are conspiring to take over the United States — even though his office initially denied his role in the project and hid the fact that the film was screened to some 1,500 officers. Would you feel that law enforcement still has your best interests in mind?
The NYPD’s surveillance efforts seem to be shockingly extensive and targeted specifically at American Muslims. As discovered by the Associated Press, which won a prestigious Polk Award for its investigation, the NYPD under Bloomberg has engaged in a massive effort to compile information on Muslims, including spying on New York City mosques. In the process, the NYPD has exceeded the limits set even by the FBI and has frequently pursued its investigations for no discernible purpose and based on no evident allegations. The only relevant consideration for the NYPD seems to have been that all Muslims are worth spying on.
On Feb. 22, we learned that the NYPD’s activities extend to Newark, New Jersey. The Associated Press’s Matt Apuzzo reported that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not told about what he termed the NYPD’s “disturbing” spying activities across state lines. Christie called for the state’s attorney general to investigate the NYPD’s actions, concluding on a note of frustration: “NYPD has developed a reputation of asking forgiveness rather than permission.” (Read the rest)
Career hatemonger Aayan Hirsi Ali‘s alarmist screed in the February 12 issue of Newsweek is a jumble of half truths culled together with the obvious purpose of demonizing Muslims. Despite her agenda-driven fear mongering, Hirsi has sparked an important debate about the plight of religious minorities caught in the crossfire as the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” continues to escalate.
We previously cross-posted an article from Jadaliyyarefuting Hirsi’s account, and now offer another perspective from John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown University.
Religious minorities in the Muslim world today, constitutionally entitled in many countries to equality of citizenship and religious freedom, increasingly fear the erosion of those rights — and with good reason. Inter-religious and inter-communal tensions and conflicts from Nigeria and Egypt and Sudan, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia have raised major concerns about deteriorating rights and security for religious minorities in Muslim countries. Conflicts have varied, from acts of discrimination, to forms of violence escalating to murder, and the destruction of villages, churches and mosques.
In the 21st century, Muslims are strongly challenged to move beyond older notions of “tolerance” or “co-existence” to a higher level of religious pluralism based on mutual understanding and respect. Regrettably, a significant number of Muslims, like many ultra conservative and fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Hindus are not pluralistic but rather strongly exclusivist in their attitudes toward other faiths and even co-believers with whom they disagree.
Reform will not, however, result from exaggerated claims and alarmist and incendiary language such as that of Ayan Hirsi Ali in in a recent a Newsweek cover story, reprinted in The Daily Beast.
Hirsi Ali warns of a “global war” and “rising genocide,” “a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities” and thus “the fate of Christianity — and ultimately of all religious minorities — in the Islamic world is at stake.”
Hirsi Ali’s account, for surely it is not an analysis, mixes facts with fiction, distorting the nature and magnitude of the problem. It fails to distinguish between the acts of a dangerous and deadly minority of religious extremists or fanatics and mainstream society. The relevant data is readily available. Nigeria is not a “majority-Muslim” country of 160 million people with a 40 percent Christian minority” as she claims (and as do militant Islamists). Experts have long described the population as roughly equal and a recent Pew Forum study reports that Christians hold a slight majority with 50.8 percent of the population.
Boko Haram, is indeed a group of religious fanatics who have terrorized and slaughtered Christians and burned down their churches, but they remain an extremist minority and do not represent the majority of Nigerians who reject their actions and anti-Western rhetoric. Gallup data finds that a majority of Nigerians (60 percent) “reject the anti-Western rhetoric” of Boko Haram.
Curiously, Hirsi Ali chooses not to mention that in the Jos Central plateau area both Christian and Muslim militias have attacked each other and destroyed mosques and churches.
Another example of failing to provide the full facts and context is the Maspero massacre. Coptic Christians have a real set of grievances that have to be addressed: attacks on churches, resulting in church destruction and death and injuries, the failure of police to respond to attacks, and a history of discrimination when it comes to building new churches and in employment.
Hirsi Ali rightly attributes the genesis for the assault against Christians to the Egyptian security forces. Although some militant Egyptian Muslims did in fact join the violence against Christians, she overlooks the fact that increasingly Christians have been joined by many Muslim Egyptians in calling for this discrimination and backlash to be addressed. Thus, she fails to mention the many Muslims marched in solidarity with the Christians against the security forces and were also injured as a Reuters article dated Oct. 14, 2011 reported: “At least 2,000 people rallied in Cairo on Friday in a show of unity between Muslims and Christians and to express anger at the ruling military council after 25 people died when a protest by Coptic Christians led to clashes with the army.”
She also fails to recognize the continuing state violence in Egypt against activists and protestors regardless of their faith.
Thousands of Muslims turned up in droves outside churches around the country for the Coptic Christmas Eve mass, in solidarity with a beleaguered Coptic community offering their bodies, and lives, as “human shields,” making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and build an Egypt free from sectarian strife: “Egypt’s Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as “human shields.”
Ali also points to the “flight” of Christians from the Middle East as proof of widespread persecution. According to Gallup surveys in Lebanon, however, Muslims are slightly more likely than their Christian counterparts to want to flee the country permanently and for Muslim and Christian alike the reason they give is primarily economic.
More problematic and deceptive is Hirsi Ali’s charge that: “What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003.” Sudan has certainly been a battleground for decades, but to say that Darfur is an example of the Muslim-Christian genocide is flat out wrong. The black African victims in Darfur were almost exclusively Muslim. The killers were Arab Sudanese Muslims (janjaweed) who murdered black Sudanese Muslims.
Addressing the issue of religious freedom requires greater global awareness and a concerted effort by governments, religious leaders, academics and human rights organizations, as well as curricula reform in many seminary and university religion courses (particularly comparative religion courses), to counter religious exclusivism by instilling more pluralistic and tolerant visions and values in the next generation of imams, priests, scholars and the general public. However, when lives are at stake and the safety and security of all citizens threatened, accurate and data driven analysis is crucial. Inflammatory statements and unsubstantiated generalizations exacerbate the problem, risk more strife or even violence and do little to contribute to finding a solution.
Women who wear the niqab usually remove it when no men are present, as was the case at the daycare. Photograph by: PHIL NOBLE REUTERS, Freelance
A woman in Canada admits she once held stereotypical views of modest clothing, largely because her impressions of Muslim women were shaped almost exclusively by the media. A 2010 Time Magazinearticle found widespread prejudice against Muslims, though 62% of Americans polled didn’t personally know a single Muslim.
Jenn Hardy’s positive experience with a daycare run by Muslim woman who wears a face veil dramatically transformed her views.
Not too long ago, if I saw a woman walking down the street with her face covered by a niqab, I would feel it was my duty to glare. As a non-religious feminist, I had decided that a woman who covers her face is oppressed – that she is uneducated, and that her husband is making her cover up because he’s crazy and/or jealous.
OK, I’m exaggerating a little, but you get the point.
And yet until two months ago, I didn’t even really know a single Muslim. I went to high school in an Ottawa suburb, where I was baptized a Catholic so that I could qualify for schooling in the Catholic school system, which was considered better than the more open public system.
We had one year of religious education that gave us a glimpse of world religions. But I’m pretty sure my education about Islam came mainly from CNN, or Fox. I went to university in a small town in Ontario. I didn’t meet any Muslims there, either.
My real education about Islam came very recently, courtesy of a Montreal daycare.
Last December, I was seeking daycare for my daughter. At only 10 months old, she was still very dependent on her parents, and we wanted to find a place that would nurture her – rock her to sleep if need be, warm up my expressed breast milk and even be open to using our cloth diapers.
I punched our address into the magarderie.ca database, and the first one that came up was a 30-second walk from where we would be moving in a matter of weeks. The daycare provider, Sophie, had outlined her views on discipline, praise, healthy foods and the child-centred approach of Montessori. She was someone I felt I could get along with.
I phoned her and we talked for an hour, laughing and chatting and eventually deciding on a time to meet. She shared a great many of the values that my partner and I do. She was also highly educated, trained as a civil engineer.
Before we said goodbye, she added, “Oh, just so you know, I’m Muslim.”
I said I didn’t care, because I didn’t.
She assured me that her daycare didn’t teach religion. Cool.
But then she told me that when she’s in public, she covers her face.
She said the last time she didn’t warn a family over the phone that she wears the niqab, they walked into the meeting and then walked straight out.
I said I didn’t care, but when we got off the phone, I realized I did care. The first thing I thought was, “What if my daughter is afraid of her?”
My family drove over to meet Sophie, her husband and son.
She came to the door, dressed in black from head to toe.
It was the first time I had been in the same room as a woman wearing the niqab.
I felt nervous. But my daughter didn’t flinch.
The daycare was cozy; most of the toys were made of natural materials. There were lots of books, a reading corner and a birdwatching area. Books on Montessori activities lined the shelves. Nothing was battery-operated; there was no television.
It was perfect.
We spoke for a bit, all together in the room before Sophie’s husband put a hand on my fiancé’s back and they went downstairs to see the other half of the daycare. Once the guys left, Sophie took off the niqab.
I could feel my heart and my mind open at that very moment.
My daughter has been going to this daycare for more than two months now, and we are very happy with the care she is given.
When they are inside with the children, the daycare providers (the majority of whom are Muslim) are mostly dressed in plain clothes – jeans and a sweater, long hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. These women do not cover their faces in the presence of children, women or close family.
My daughter isn’t afraid of any of the women who take care of her, whether they have their faces covered or not. On the contrary, she reaches out to them for a hug every morning. To my daughter, the women who work at the daycare are simply the women who hold her when she’s sad, wipe blueberries off her face, clean her snotty nose and change her cloth diapers.
My daughter isn’t growing up with the same ideas about Muslim women that I did.
I’m glad she’s learning something in daycare.
So am I.
JENN HARDY is a freelance journalist and blogger who challenges mainstream parenting at mamanaturale.ca.
According to the German intelligence services, up to 30,000 Germans are believed to hold far-right beliefs — and among those, one-third are bent on violence. Critics claim authorities preoccupied with Muslim extremists have overlooked this growing problem.
BERLIN // Germany held a state ceremony and observed a nationwide minute of silence yesterday in honour of the 10 people, most of them Muslim shopkeepers, who were shot dead by neo-Nazis during a seven-year killing spree.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said the murders, uncovered by chance last November, had brought shame on the nation. She apologised to the families for police errors that critics have blamed on institutional racism.
“The murders were an assault on our country. They are a disgrace to our country,” she told a memorial service in Berlin attended by 1,200 people, including relatives of the victims.
The shootings started in 2000 and continued until 2007, targeting small businessmen including a flower seller, a grocer, a kiosk owner and two doner kebab shop managers.
They happened in cities across Germany, from Munich in the south to Rostock on the north coast, and the same handgun was used each time. A German policewoman was also killed.
Police failed to investigate a possible racist motive, instead suspecting that the families might be involved or that the victims had been caught up in illegal activities.
Authorities found out by accident last November that the murders were committed by a terrorist group calling itself the National Socialist Underground and made up of three neo-Nazis who had been on the run for more than a decade.
Two of them, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, committed suicide after a botched bank robbery. A DVD claiming responsibility for all the killings was found in an apartment they had used with the third member, Beate Zschäpe, who was arrested.
The discovery of the trio was a major embarrassment for German security authorities. It exposed them to accusations of having been blind to the threat of far-right violence and preoccupied with Islamist militants since the September 11 attacks.
A parliamentary inquiry has been set up and steps are underway to improve coordination among national and regional intelligence authorities. But critics say deeper change is needed, not only in the organisation of the security services but in the mindset of the police.
“Some of the relatives were themselves under suspicion for years. That is terrible. I ask your forgiveness for that,” said Mrs Merkel. “These years must have been a never-ending nightmare for you,” she said.
For years, the murders were dismissively referred to by the media and the police as the “Doner Killings” because of the stereotype of Turks running kebab shops. The relatives were given little attention.
“Indifference has a creeping but disastrous effect,” said Mrs Merkel. “It drives rifts into our society.”
Turkish immigrants and their descendants make up most of Germany’s almost four million Muslims. Even though the community dates back more than half a century, they are still labelled as “foreigners” by many Germans, and live in parallel communities.
For some, the memorial ceremony was overshadowed by criticism from immigrant groups that the government is not doing enough to fight racism, and by warnings from police that there are further potential terrorists in the country’s far-right, which contains 10,000 people categorised by law enforcement as potentially violent.
“The danger of racism shouldn’t be seen as a peripheral problem or just being linked to neo-Nazi violence,” said Aiman Mazyek, the chairman of the Council of Muslims in Germany.
“Racism, anti-Semitism and hostility to Islam can keep on advancing into the centre of society if we don’t resist that more decisively with all democratic means at our disposal.”
Excellent piece by Spike Johnson exposing the “Mosquebusters.” Their strategy is to stop the building of all mosques using zoning laws, etc. Looks like the Islamophobic argument about “taqiyya” in reverse:
LONDON — It is winter, the middle of December, and I find myself making an odd phone call. Pacing around my living room, I kick at the carpet as I dial the number.
“Hello?” I say.
“There’s no time,” the man on the other end of the line answers immediately. His name is Gavin Boby. We have e-mailed before, but I introduce myself again, explaining my background: education, photography and video experience, that sort of thing.
Boby’s tone is measured and businesslike. “It sounds like you have skills that could be of use. Muslims are very bad losers,” he says matter-of-factly. He’d like me to act as a witness, he tells me, videotaping his court appearances and searching the Internet for “targets.” The conversation is taking me into uncomfortable territory; my voice wavers, and I begin to flounder. Boby doesn’t notice. “I’ll send you instructions on how we work,” he says and hangs up. I have just become a Mosquebuster.
The Mosquebusters, or the Law and Freedom Foundation as they’re officially known,are part of a new wave of anti-Islamic campaigners in England with links to more established anti-immigrant groups such as England Is Ours and Stop Islamisation of Europe.Like many of these groups, the Mosquebusters fear that traditional British culture, laws, and values will disappear with the changing face of Britain and worry that extremist interpretations of sections of the Koran urge Muslims to kill non-believers and take slaves.
Until mid-February, the Mosquebusters advertised for volunteers, under a campaign called “No More Mosques,” on the website of the ultra-nationalist English Defence League (EDL), a group that organizes anti-Islamic street marches that often decend into brawls, riots, and arrests. The EDL and other anti-Islamic groups have no problem convincing their members to parade in public yelling insults like “Muslim bombers off our streets!” and “Allah is a pedophile!,” but the Mosquebusters have a quieter, perhaps more insidious approach: In offices and city halls, they are crafting legal cases against mosque construction applications across the country. It’s a war against Islam, but one that often resembles a bureaucratic turf battle more than a clash of civilizations.
Mosquebusters leader Boby, known as The Lawman, is careful to draw the distinction between religion and race. “It is primarily about the division between Islamic and non-Islamic society, and the lawless violence at the heart of Islamic doctrine and practice,” he says in his manifesto. Boby dressesconservatively, with a black suit, white button-down shirt, and pastel neck tie, done up tight. He is clean shaven, his brown hair cropped close, and his small eyes squint behind wire-framed glasses. He has the look of a typical middle-aged businessman. And most of the time, he is.
From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., he runs a planning application company in Bristol, in western of England. He is a qualified barrister with undergraduate and graduate law degrees. But what Boby really wants is “an army of people, about 500 across the country,” as he says in one of his online motivational videos. As I watched the recording from my flat in East London, while digesting one of his instructional e-mails on bureaucratic mosque-busting, Boby leaned closer to the camera, maintaining eye contact: “It is very important that mosques are stopped.” (Read the rest)
The war-mongering calls for the invasion and destruction of Iran are multiplying at a horrific pace.
We saw this in the lead up to the decimation of Iraq, now we have Conservative pundits such as Tucker Carlson blatantly calling for “annihilation” as well as oddly claiming that the USA is the only country that has “moral authority” to engage in “pre-emptive war.”
Eli Clifton has some excellent analysis of all this (H/T: BA):
As the “drumbeat to war” with Iran, as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) warns of, grows louder, a number of journalists have begun to compare the hawkish rhetoric from pundits with the calls for military action against Iraq in 2002. Scott Shane, writing on the frontpage of today’s New York Times, observed, “Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” Indeed, the ombudsman of The Washington Post and the public editor of The New York Times criticized their own journalists for overstating the evidence of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
Over the past week, journalists have raised the alarm about the increasing carelessness of the mainstream media in hyping the calls for war with Iran. But Fox News commentator and The Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson openly called for war against Iran and argued for the full-scale annihilation of the Islamic Republic during an appearance on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. Carlson responded to a question about U.S. military action:
CARLSON: I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.
Carlson, having called for the annihilation of Iran — a country with a population of over 74 million people — went on to acknowledge that “we should assess what will happen to the price of energy were we to do that.” Watch the clip:
arlson doesn’t bother to make a case for why the U.S. should destroy Iran. But presumably he’s referring to the crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. However, neither the IAEA norU.S.intelligence reports conclude that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. The IAEA and U.S. intelligence have expressed concerns about possible military aspects to Iran’s nuclear program and suspicions about Iran’s program intensified after Tehran refused IAEA inspectors access to facilities thought to be used for tests on how to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran also refused to agree to a process by which it would address IAEA concerns about “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear program.
But, much as in the case of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, many journalists and politiciansareignoring the facts on the ground and pushing forward with calls for increasingly aggressive actions. Carlson, however, may stand alone in publicly calling for Iran’s outright annihilation.
Update: Tucker emails Glenn Greenwald:
It’s my fault that I got tongue tied and didn’t explain myself well last night. I’m actually on the opposite side on the Iran question from many people I otherwise agree with. I think attacking could be a disaster for the US and am worried that Obama will do it, for fear of seeming weak before an election. Of course the Iranian government is awful and deserves to be crushed. But I’m not persuaded we or Israel could do it in a way that doesn’t cause even greater problems. That’s the main lesson of Iraq it seems to me.
That’s my sincere view, but I’d rather take some lumps and be misunderstood than seem like I’m reversing myself due to pressure from Twitter.
Relatives of a Muslim Sri Lankan worker murdered by his Buddhist colleague in Abu Dhabi told court they have decided to pardon the killer, prompting the judge to bring forward hearings for sentence.
An official from the Sri Lankan embassy in Abu Dhabi handed the pardon document from the victim’s relatives to court on Tuesday, the semi official Arabic language daily Alittihad said.
“They just pardoned the Buddhist killer without demanding any diya (blood money) taking into consideration that the killer’s family is poor,” it said.
It said the pardon prompted the judge to bring forward hearings to February 27 to issue a sentence after they were scheduled for June.
Imagine if the Buddhist killer had been Muslim and the Muslim victim been Buddhist, who doubts Spencer would link the killing to Islam, relating it to jihad or some other convoluted made up theology that only exists in the feverish mind of Sheikh Spencer?
Instead, Spencer chooses to focus on another story reported in the same article, about a man who murdered a European woman he was paying for sex. The man murdered her and then went to pray, which certainly is odd (and proves more about his lack of conscious than any link to religion), but the fact that Spencer would try to relate it to Islam is just plain sick yet not surprising.
For Spencer this is another opportunity to denigrate Muslims and Islam while also trying to link the killing to “honor killings” and “jihad.”
Spencer writes in a post titled, Dubai: Muslim murders woman, then goes to mosque to pray,
We have seen this phenomenon in the past with some honor murderers and jihadists: they apparently believe that they have done something pleasing to Allah, and so are almost serene after the murders.
In the most recent update to the story Stone discusses the reaction he has received both in the film industry and at large:
“I’ve already experienced the reverse of anti-Semitism, having people within the film industry express a reluctance to work with me now that I have said a simple prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.’ I am sure I have [bleeped] off some powerful people.”
…..
“I didn’t realize I would be so vilified. It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.
“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”
The below report is from the NY Post, not our favorite news source, but if you get a chance you will see that the majority of the comments are exceptionally Islamophobic and anti-Muslim in tone.
Sean Stone, son of controversial director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam in Iran last week and says he’s already experiencing a Hollywood backlash.
The ceremony was held in Isfahan, where he is researching a documentary. He now goes by the name of Sean Christopher Ali Stone.
He told Page Six: “I’ve already experienced the reverse of anti-Semitism, having people within the film industry express a reluctance to work with me now that I have said a simple prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.’ I am sure I have [bleeped] off some powerful people.” Speaking over dinner at Barrio 47, Sean told us, “Having read the Koran and having been around the Islamic culture, especially in Iran, I do believe that Mohammed is a prophet of the same god worshipped by other religions.
“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.
“What I am trying to do is open up a dialogue about religion. There is such Islamophobia in the West. Islam is not a religion of violence any more than Judaism or Christianity is.”
He said his dad welcomed the move.
“My dad said, ‘Allah be with you.’ My father understands that I am trying to bridge certain gaps and bring about peace.”
But he has been shocked by the reaction from others. Sean, about to release his horror movie “Graystone,” said, “I didn’t realize I would be so vilified. It is almost like I am a criminal for having accepted Islam. I didn’t realize Islamophobia was that deep. People have speculated that I have done this because I am from a spoiled family or that I am lost and trying to find myself. That is ridiculous.
“I don’t care if I get criticized. If I can open up a debate about religion and create some understanding, then it is worth it.”
The NYPD’s secret surveillance and profiling of Muslims continues to be exposed. The most recent example is their quixotic foray into Newark. Mayor Cory Booker of Newark denies any knowledge of the “operation.”
NEWARK, N.J. – Americans living and working in New Jersey’s largest city were subjected to surveillance as part of the New York Police Department’s effort to build databases of where Muslims work, shop and pray. The operation in Newark was so secretive even the city’s mayor says he was kept in the dark.
For months in mid-2007, plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims.
The result was a 60-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, containing brief summaries of businesses and their clientele. Police also photographed and mapped 16 mosques, listing them as “Islamic Religious Institutions.”
The report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior. It was a guide to Newark’s Muslims.
According to the report, the operation was carried out in collaboration with the Newark Police Department, which at the time was run by a former high-ranking NYPD official. But Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, said he never authorized the spying and was never told about it.
“Wow,” he said as the AP laid out the details of the report. “This raises a number of concerns. It’s just very, very sobering.”
Police conducted similar operations outside their jurisdiction in New York’s Suffolk and Nassau counties on suburban Long Island, according to police records.
Such surveillance has become commonplace in New York City in the decade since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police have built databases showing where Muslims live, where they buy groceries, even what Internet cafes they use and where they watch sports. Dozens of mosques and student groups have been infiltrated and police have built detailed profiles of ethnic communities, from Moroccans to Egyptians to Albanians.
The documents obtained by the AP show, for the first time in any detail, how those efforts stretched outside the NYPD’s jurisdiction. New Jersey and Long Island residents had no reason to suspect the NYPD was watching them. And since the NYPD isn’t accountable to their votes or tax dollars, those non-New Yorkers had little recourse to stop it.
“All of these are innocent people,” Nagiba el-Sioufi of Newark said while her husband, Mohammed, flipped through the NYPD report, looking at photos of mosques and storefronts frequented by their friends.
Egyptian immigrants and American citizens, the couple raised two daughters in the United States. Mohammed works as an accountant and is vice president of the Islamic Culture Center, a mosque a few blocks from Newark City Hall.
“If you have an accusation on us, then spend the money on doing this to us,” Nagiba said. “But you have no accusation.”
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not return a message seeking comment about the report. Former Newark Police Chief Garry McCarthy, who is now in charge of the Chicago Police Department, also did not return messages left on his cellphone and with a press aide.
The goal of the report, like others the Demographics Unit compiled, was to give police at-their-fingertips access to information about Muslim neighborhoods. If police got a tip about an Egyptian terrorist in the area, for instance, they wanted to immediately know where he was likely to find a cheap room to rent, where he might buy his lunch and at what mosque he probably would attend Friday prayers.
“These locations provide the maximum ability to assess the general opinions and general activity of these communities,” the Newark report said.
The effect of the program was that hundreds of American citizens were cataloged — sometimes by name, sometimes simply by their businesses and their ethnicity — in secret police files that spanned hundreds of pages:
— “A Black Muslim male named Mussa was working in the rear of store,” an NYPD detective wrote after a clandestine visit to a dollar store in Shirley, N.Y., on Long Island.
— “The manager of this restaurant is an Indian Muslim male named Vicky Amin” was the report back from an Indian restaurant in Lindenhurst, N.Y., also on Long Island.
— “Owned and operated by an African Muslim (possibly Sudanese) male named Abdullah Ddita” was the summary from another dollar store in Shirley, N.Y., just off the highway on the way to the Hamptons, the wealthy Long Island getaway.
In one report, an officer describes how he put people at ease by speaking in Punjabi and Urdu, languages commonly spoken in Pakistan.
Last summer, when the AP first began reporting about the NYPD’s surveillance efforts, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said his police do not consider religion in their policing.
On Tuesday, following an AP story that showed the NYPD monitored Muslim student groups around the Northeast, school leaders including Yale president Richard Levin expressed outrage over the tactics. Bloomberg fired back in what was the most vigorous defense yet of his department.
“The police department goes where there are allegations. And they look to see whether those allegations are true,” he told reporters. “That’s what you’d expect them to do. That’s what you’d want them to do. Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”
The Muslim Students Association said the police department “overstepped its boundaries when it began spying on average American Muslim college students.”
There are no allegations of terrorism in the Demographics Unit reports and the documents make clear that police were only interested in locations frequented by Muslims. The canvas of businesses in Newark mentions Islam and Muslims 27 times. In one section of the report, police wrote that the largest immigrant groups in Newark were from Portugal and Brazil. But they did not photograph businesses or churches for those groups.
“No Muslim component within these communities was identified,” police wrote, except for one business owned by a Brazilian Muslim of Palestinian descent.
Polls show that most New Yorkers strongly support the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts and don’t believe police unfairly target Muslims. The Muslim community, however, has called for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s resignation over the spying and the department’s screening of a video that portrays Muslims as wanting to dominate the United States.
In Newark, the report was met with a mixture of bemusement and anger.
“Come, look at yourself on film,” Abdul Kareem Abdullah called to his wife as he flipped through the NYPD files at the lunch counter of their restaurant, Hamidah’s Cafe.
An American-born citizen who converted to Islam decades ago, Abdullah said he understands why, after the 9/11 terror attacks, people are afraid of Muslims. But he said he wishes the police would stop by, say hello, meet him and his customers and get to know them. The documents show police have no interest in that, he said.
“They just want to keep tabs on us,” he said. “If they really wanted to understand, they’d come talk to us.”
After the AP approached Booker, he said the mayor’s office had launched an investigation.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Booker met with Islamic leaders while campaigning for mayor. Those interviewed by the AP said they wanted to believe he didn’t authorize the spying but wanted to hear from him directly.
“I have to look in his eyes,” Mohammed el-Sioufi said at his mosque. “I know him. I met him. He was here.”
Ironically, because officers conducted the operation covertly, the reports contains mistakes that could have been easily corrected had the officers talked to store owners or imams. If police ever had to rely on the database during an unfolding terrorism emergency as they had planned, those errors would have hindered their efforts.
For instance, locals said several businesses identified as belonging to African-American Muslims actually were owned by Afghans or Pakistanis. El-Sioufi’s mosque is listed as an African-American mosque, but he said the imam is from Egypt and the congregation is a roughly even mix of black converts and people of foreign ancestries.
“We’re not trying to hide anything. We are out in the open,” said Abdul A. Muhammad, the imam of the Masjid Ali Muslim mosque in Newark. “You want to come in? We have an open door policy.”
By choosing instead to conduct such widespread surveillance, Mohammed el-Sioufi said, police send the message that the whole community is suspect.
“When you spy on someone, you are kind of accusing them. You are not accepting them for choosing Islam,” Nagiba el-Sioufi said. “This doesn’t say, `This guy did something wrong.’ This says, `Everyone here is a Muslim.”‘
“It makes you feel uncomfortable, like this is not your country,” she added. “This is our country.”
Over the last month, multiple scandals have leaked that show the extent to which the NYPD has violated the civil liberties of thousands of New York Muslims under the banner of counterterrorism efforts. Protecting the homeland must remain central in all of our policing and intelligence-gathering efforts, but it should not, and does not have to result in the alienation of hundreds of thousands of New York Muslims. Equally important, counterterrorism efforts must operate on sound and factual analysis of the threat posed by the Muslim community, and collaboration with Muslim community leaders and citizens should be a top priority.
The damage that these scandals have caused in severing the lines of trust between law enforcement and the Muslim community may be irreparable in the short term, but it is not too late for the NYPD to begin assessing the policies that led us to where we are today.
In a recently exposed white paper published by the NYPD entitled, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” we find the basis of an entire philosophy of counterterrorism that operates on several myths that must be addressed.
Let’s examine each of these myths in turn.
1. Extremist Muslims have permeated New York Muslim communities. The white paper states:
“New York City has a diverse Muslim population of between 600,000 and 750,000 within a population of about 8 ½ million–about 40% of whom are foreign-born. Unfortunately, extremists who have and continue to sow the seeds of radicalization have permeated the City’s Muslim communities.”
To suggest that the Muslim community of New York is being overran with violent extremism is far from the truth. The New York Muslim community makes up an estimated 1 million people throughout the entire state. The community has incredible racial, socioeconomic, and ethnic diversity, and is very well integrated into the larger society.
The threat this community poses is similar to the threat that American Muslims pose nationwide: very little to none. Since 9/11, over 40% of the cases where criminal charges were brought upon an American Muslim for suspicion in a terrorism related case, the Muslim community was responsible for turning that individual, or individuals, over to the authorities. Muslims see counterterrorism as their duty according to recent public opinion polls, and they are more concerned about preventing terrorism then are the rest of the non-Muslim American public per capita. Don’t we want to increase this trend of Muslims serving on the front line of counterterrorism efforts? Increasing it has the dual benefit of making Muslims an integral part of the solution, and making them feel like a valued collaborator in the war on terrorism.
According to the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s comprehensive terrorism database, of the 49 Muslim domestic and foreign based plots against the U.S. since 9/11 – there were over 105 terrorist plots from non-Muslim groups and individuals – nearly 1 in 3 of these plots were turned over to the authorities by the American Muslim community.
2. A Muslim’s level of religiosity is a sign of radicalization and support for terrorism. The second myth that the document supports is the so called “conveyor belt theory” of terrorism, which argues that terrorism is based on a continuum of religiosity, where the more religious a Muslim gets, the greater likeliness they may adopt violent extremism. This is a major misnomer that has unfortunately been taught to hundreds of thousands of police and intelligence agents nationwide as exposed in a recent investigative report by Political Research Associates entitled Manufacturing the Muslim Menace.
The white paper describes the ideology that supports terrorism as “jihadi-Salafi Islam” but never defines these terms, especially what they mean for Muslims. Instead, they exaggerate what a “Salafi Muslim” is, and neglect to point out that the majority of Salafi Muslims in western Europe and in America are not in favor of using violence and are generally peaceful. It also refuses to look at competing studies of radicalization. For example, Quintan Wiktorowicz, National Security Agency Director learned in anextensive empirical research project he headed up on radicalization of Muslim youth, that there is no correlation between religiosity and a willingness to become radicalized. In other words, the more religious Muslims became, the less likely they would be to join radical movements.
Wiktorowicz insight supports what Policy Analyst Alejandro Beutel has recently discovered in his careful analysis of Osama bin-Laden’s recruitment rhetoric. In a careful analysis of the content of each lecture that bin-Laden gave, MPAC discovered that al-Qaeda’s recruiting “pitch” was overwhelmingly political/policy-oriented, not religious.
Let’s be realistic. The threat from al-Qaeda is concerning. Despite the controversial nature of his assassination, Anwar Awlaki’s death and disappearance from the scene is a welcoming sign in the ongoing recruitment that Al-Qaeda is attempting, mainly online, to American Muslims. The fact that we no longer have a charismatic, English speaking figurehead of al-Qaeda to brainwash American Muslims to commit acts of violence is a great thing. Awlaki’s model seemed to be fairly effective in turning about two-dozen American Muslims towards a commitment to violent radicalization against the west andAmerica in particular. Importantly, this was happening in anonymous chat rooms online, not in mosques, or mainstream religious institutions in America.
3. Profiling Muslims is possible and necessary. The third myth that the white paper supports is that Muslims must be profiled; suggesting not only is it necessary, but that it is possible. Here is an excerpt from the paper:
“Radicalization makes little noise. It borders on areas protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. It takes place over a long period of time. It therefore does not lend itself to a traditional criminal investigations approach.”
When we analyze the homegrown cases of Muslim terrorists since 9/11, we find vastly different ethnic origin, age, ideological affiliation, and motivations. While the policy grievance remains consistent in each case, the idea of profiling based on religiosity or the outward expression of religiosity is just plain wrong and nonsensical. Like we saw from Wiktorowicz’s research, religious Muslims should be seen as allies, as there is no empirical relationship between religiosity and support for terrorism.
4. Muslim community leaders and citizens do not need to be consulted in counterterrorism efforts. Nowhere in the 90 plus page report do we find details or best practices for policymakers and intelligence officers in building partnerships with New York Muslims.
In an ironic way, the controversies coming out of the NYPD, while they hurt the relationship between Muslims and law enforcement, they help engage Muslims in the political process and in speaking up for their rights. The New York Muslim community is fed up, and many point to the rising trend of Islamophobia as the cause for this wanton disregard for Muslim civil liberties.
One of the key recommendations that Charles Kurzman, a leading expert on Muslim radicalization of the Triangle Center for Terrorism Research proposes is that Muslim Americans be given the means to express themselves politically in American society. The fight against Islamophobia as a healthy way for Muslim Americans to stand up for their rights and in the process demand equal respect. Like the civil rights movement for Black Americans, many politically engaged Muslims feel that the fight against bigotry and misunderstanding of their faith will result in a greater level of integration into the American experience.
From 2005 to 2011 we have witnessed an increase in the so-called “lone wolf” phenomenon of extremism – an isolated individual becomes indoctrinated by a charismatic pseudo religious leader and seeks to act out violence against the American populace. Thankfully, this threat is relatively minor, and unfortunately often caused by FBI entrapment.
What we have not yet seen is the climate of growing Islamophobia serving as the cause for a lone wolf attack on America, or even the turn to radicalization itself. Since it is always best to be ahead of the storm, we must encourage large-scale movements against Islamophobia because they help to further a healthy civic alternative to American Muslims that are somewhat prone to lunatic false prophets on YouTube like Anwar Awlaki. It is through fighting Islamophobia and standing up for civil rights that we can create a vehicle whereby Muslims can vent their anger and develop a new language that ties the values of Islam to a unique American and democratic narrative. This sort of action has already begun, and when scandals emerge like these, Muslim Americans should be vocal and demand justice.
When the New York Police Department was doing some spying on Muslim students outside the city (that’s a thing it does, we learned from the Associated Press on Monday), an apartment officers used to spy on Rutgers students got a visit from the FBI on a report that it was a terrorist cell itself. This is the kind of reporting that won the AP a Polk award Monday for its series on the NYPD spying on Muslims. Not only did the department go well outside its jurisdiction to “get a better handle on what was occurring at” Muslim Student Associations, as spokesman Paul Browne told the AP, it did so in a pretty Keystone Kops manner at times:
Police also were interested in the Muslim student group at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2009, undercover NYPD officers had a safe house in an apartment not far from campus. The operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell, called the police emerency dispatcher.
The FBI responded and determined that monitoring Rutgers students was one of the operation’s objectives, current and former federal officials said.
Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author atamartin@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Ever since Eric Allen Bell launched his smear campaign against Loonwatch, he’s become a poster child for far right anti-Muslim bigots impressed by his sad, sad tale of woe. Portrayed as a leftist-turned-”Islamorealist” martyr, he’s been making rounds all across the looniverse.
Bell’s been featured several times on David Horowitz‘s Frontpage Magazine and his interviews have appeared on The Jamie Glazov Show. He’s also been palling around with Robert Spencer, and has updated his Facebook page with photos of loon luminaries such as Aayan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, and the late Pim Fortuyn.
Just for good measure, he included the infamous “cartoon” of the Prophet Muhammad in a bomb-studded turban.
As a newly minted zealot, he’s vowed to continue his crusade against Loonwatch, and he imagines Loonwatch is equally fervent in opposing him. In fact, we don’t really care. He wrote a few articles smearing us, and we wrote a few articles refuting him here, here, and here.
End of story. Or at least it should have been.
The ever paranoid haters are keeping the ball rolling, this time by spreading a completely baseless, sensational rumor:
Ex-Daily Kos writer Eric Allen Bell had written a piece on a 53,000 square foot mosque in the Bible Belt. In response, the Daily Kos banned Bell. Another liberal site, LoonWatch.com, posted Bell’s photograph and information on Islamic websites all over the world.
Are they serious? All over the world!?! Evidence, please!
In a refreshing display of rational skepticism, someone in the Islamophobesphere actually bothered to do a fact check:
Sandcrawler PSA: I’ve Removed the Eric Allen Bell Post
Because I’ve requested some sort of links to the posts that allegedly were given by Loonwatch to Islamist boards.
So until that is cleared up, I’m just going with the Kos fired/banned him for having an opinion of Islam that did not sit well with the Kossacks. That seems to be true to me.
If anyone has info showing the original “personal information” posts on Loonwatch and the subsequent post on any Islamist board, by golly I’ll be first in line to post that. Until then I can’t report anything other than Eric being banned from Kos for speaking his mind.
I just feel that incitement to murder is a fairly strong charge to make without supporting images and links. [emphasis mine]
Yes, “incitement to murder” is a fairly strong charge, and the reason there’s no evidence is because it never happened.
Apparently unconcerned with facts, anti-Muslim hate site Weasel Zipperspublished the rumor, prompting a volley hateful–and sometimes threatening–comments from visitors:
The guy is confessing there that he was a knowing shill for radical Islam, trying to make the Muslims out to be a put-upon minority, even though he shows that he is well aware of what happens, or could happen, if one should dare to express a non-laudatory view of Islam.
He was banned from Daily Kos, not for refusing to be a shill for radical Islam, but for attempting to balance his shill behavior so that it appeared to be somewhat objective.
Loonwatch has apparently pioneered the cowardly fatwa-by-proxy. Bell, by the way, was never “our own.”
The left’s appeasement strategy will fail as fewer folks remain to be thrown under the bus and the “tolerance” of sharia becomes evident to the amoral…
Libs don’t get the fact that their free spirited ways of life will be the first on the block. Islam is on the march and they will destroy all in their path. Let’s see one of those OWS fleabagging idiots go take a dump in a mosque or near one. Wake up libs. It’s us or them. Pick a side because this is for keeps.
Uh oh. Someone has escaped the plantation. I wonder if Lib boy will consider the price of his life to be worth opening his eyes. Now that they’ve put a hit out on him hopefully he’ll start to see and question everything differently. Now maybe he can use his writing for good.
An “accessory to murder”? Muslim hit men? Such drama!
This just shows the violent nature of the Left. They really would like to kill everyone who disagrees with them, though they are loathe to do it themselves.
The Left rails against Islamophobia, but what it really is doing is merely getting Muslim votes. Deep down, they know Islam’s true nature; when they post this guy’s picture and address all over Islamic websites, they know that many among their Muslim colleagues would be more than happy to do the dirty work and kill off their own apostate. The Left is basically playing accessory to murder, hiring out Muslim hitmen. If the Left didn’t also believe in the violent nature of Islam, why post his picture and info as a means of “punishment”?
His story is interesting but not surprising.
Liberals are the most self – righteous,indulgent,violent,intolerant group in the US.
He worked for Daily KOS = Kill on Sight ,and is confused by their firing of him and threats for telling the truth ?
Loonwatch is full of viruses,adware,cowards and lunatics.
…and so on.
The nice thing about Eric Allen Bell is that he took a spectacular plunge into the darkness, leaving no doubt that he is indeed a loon. This is preferable to spawning a new Irshad Manji or Asra Nomani, stealth loons who front as progressives and actually dupe the gullible.
Bell’s campaign will appeal almost exclusively to the far-right paranoid bottom feeders, though he’ll probably have to move a few more notches to the right to take his place on that already crowded stage. It will be interesting to see what happens when the novelty wears off.
We doubt Bell has been threatened by anyone, let alone a Muslim, but in any case, we’d like to make it clear we’re not threatening nor have we ever threatened Mr. Bell, directly or by proxy. In fact, we’d like to thank Bell for the free publicity, and wish him good luck with his “charming” new friends.
“Price tag” graffiti was spray-painted in Jerusalem again Sunday night, with vandals this time targeting a downtown church.
The attack on the Narkis Street Baptist Congregation marks the latest in a series of price tag attacks that have targeted Muslim, Christian and leftist institutions in the capital over the last two months. But police believe most of the vandalism is not the work of an organized group; rather, they say, the spray-painted slogans are largely copycat actions carried out by lone individuals.
The original price tag attacks, in contrast, were thought to be the work of a group of settlers seeking to set a “price tag” on house demolitions in the settlements via retaliatory attacks on Palestinians and/or Israeli soldiers.
The attacks during the past two months have included the torching of cars belonging to Arab residents of Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood; spray-painting slogans on a Christian cemetery on Mount Zion; spray-painting slogans on Peace Now’s office in the capital, as well as the house of Peace Now activist Hagit Ofran; threats against Peace Now secretary general Yariv Oppenheimer; and an arson attack on an ancient mosque in the city’s Geula neighborhood. Over the last week alone, a bilingual school and two churches have been vandalized, including the Baptist church vandalized Sunday.
In both church attacks, the vandals spray-painted slogans denouncing Christianity, Jesus and Mary, such as “Jesus is dead,” “Death to Christianity” and “Mary was a prostitute.” They also included the by-now customary “price tag” slogan.
The Jerusalem police said they have arrested several suspects in this spate of attacks, including one for the attacks on Peace Now and one for the vandalism of the bilingual school. The latter suspect, arrested last week, said he vandalized the school to avenge the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team’s loss to two Arab teams two weeks ago, according to police. Police believe that many of the other attacks are similarly motivated by ordinary hooliganism, rather than ideology.
“It’s intolerably easy,” one senior Jerusalem police officer said. “Any child can take a spray can and spray it, and people know it will be broadcast. Not every case is really nationalistic.”
But to victims, the motive is irrelevant. Jerusalem’s Christian community increasingly feels under assault, and that is especially true for Christians living in Jewish neighborhoods. Priests in the Old City, especially Armenian priests who must often transit the Jewish Quarter, say they are spat on almost daily.
“It’s almost impossible to pass through Jaffa Gate without this happening,” said a senior priest at one Jerusalem church.
The spitting has become so prevalent that some priests have simply stopped going to certain parts of the Old City.
The Baptist church has been attacked twice before: It was torched in 1982 and again in 2007. “We mainly feel sad” about the attacks, said the church’s pastor, Charles Kopp. “It hurts us that anyone could even think we deserve such treatment. They don’t know us, but they apparently oppose anyone who doesn’t identity with them. I wish them well; I have no desire for revenge.”
Baptist priests don’t normally walk around in priestly garb, but Kopp said he would be afraid to walk through the Old City if he did.
Jacob Avrahami, the mayor’s advisor on the Christian community, visited the Baptist church on Monday to condemn the attacks. “They feel besieged; you can see it on them,” he said.
Dr. Gadi Gevaryahu, whose Banish the Darkness organization works to combat racism, said his big fear is that “one day, they’ll attack a mosque or a church with people inside and there will be a terrible conflagration here.”
“Over the last two years, 10 mosques have been torched here, and today it’s clear that it’s not just aimed at Palestinians or Muslims, but at foreigners in general,” he said.
Gevaryahu also offered a practical suggestion: Security cameras, he said, should be installed on every sensitive building in the city.
A papier-mache frog with the text “Islamisation” on its tongue and a butterfly with “Arab Spring” – a float on the traditional Rose Monday carnival parade in the western German city of Düsseldorf on 20 February.
Evidently there is something of a tradition of Islamophobic carnival floats in Germany.
Racist graffiti has been sprayed on a church in Jerusalem on Monday in the third such incident in the past month in the city.
The graffiti included “Death to Christians” and the phrase “price tag” was found on the walls of the Baptist Narkis Street Congregation according to reports from Ma’an News Agency.
Furthermore residents of the area found their car tyres slashed.
This attack follows a similar such incidents, occurring on the same day in early February, where the bilingual school Hand In Hand and the Monastery of the Cross where vandalised, also promoting violence against Christians.
Attacks under this monicker of price tag refer to actions by Israel’s settler population who respond to moves by the State of Israel against illegal outposts in the occupied West Bank.
Despite the dismantling of outposts that Israel deems illegal being carried out by the state, price tag attacks are almost universally against Palestinians, including numerous acts of arson against mosques in the West Bank.
Under the 4th Geneva Conventions, which Israel is a signatory, all construction of civilian property and the transfer of a civilian population by an occupying power is illegal, as is the displacement of the local population. Despite this, Israel distinguishes between it’s settlement activity, with the majority of settlements gaining construction approval by the state, who also provide funding for construction and subsidised loans for Israelis moving to settlements.
In addition to pre-approved settlement construction, many outposts that are constructed in violation of Israeli national law are given retroactive planning permission.
A mosque in Belgium affiliated with Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs has been the target of a racially-motivated attack for the second time in the past year.
Last July, an image of a pig attached to a wooden cross was left in the grounds of the Alaaddin Mosque in the Marchienne-au-Pont neighborhood of Charleroi and the Turkish flag outside the building was torn.
Now, less than a year later, a similar attack has taken place at the same mosque, where a number of racial and İslamophobic slurs, including “Go home foreigners,” have been sprayed on the walls of the building and grounds. Those involved in the attack have not been identified.
A spokesman for the mosque said the local Muslim community felt deeply aggrieved by the attack and the slurs directed towards them and their religion. Further, disappointment was expressed by the DİB that authorities made no effort to follow up on the last attack or bring the perpetrators to account for their actions.
The incident is part of a growing trend of Islamophobic attacks, which have become increasingly common in Belgium over the past decade.
Looks like Brigitte Gabriel‘s loony ACT! for America is seeking to cement ties with Islamophobes from across the pond, the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic Axis continues:
On Thursday night, the Chairman of the newly formed British Freedom Party, Paul Weston, spoke to a group of New Yorkers at a meeting sponsored by Brigitte Gabriel’s Act For America organization. Weston also said he came to warn America that what is happening in Britain today could happen in America in the not too distant future.
This meeting is going to be preceded by a joint event between BFP chairman Paul Weston and the Jewish Defense League (JDL).
Security will be tight on Monday as a controversial leader of a far-right British Freedom Party (BFP) talks to supporters in Toronto about his tough stand against immigration and spread of radical Islam. Toronto Police officers will be on hand as Paul Weston is expected to draw a large crowd at the Toronto Zionist Centre, on Marlee Ave.
The BFP was formed in Oct. 2010 and features a 20-point platform with a priority to “stop immigration to Britain from countries that promote the Muslim brotherhood.” Other points of the platform include abolition of the human rights of foreign criminals and terrorists; deport dual nationality Islamists and illegal immigrants and stop or turn back all aspects of the Islamisation of Britain.
“We have witnessed the spread of fundamentalist Islam across Europe and are witnessing the same trend in North America,” Weston stated in party literature.
Meir Weinstein, of the Jewish Defense League, an organizer of the event, said security will be high when Weston takes to the stage to bash immigration and Muslims. “We are very excited to have him (Weston) here,” Weinstein said on Thursday. “His party wants more stringent rules for people coming from countries that promote the Muslim brotherhood.”
He said police have been notified of the event and private security will be on hand to prevent possible disruptions by protestors. “There has been some chatter on the Internet about protests,” Weinstein said. “We are not taking any chances.”
He said Weston is following in the footsteps of powerful anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, of the Freedom Party of the Netherlands, who holds similar views. “There has to be a change to our immigration policy,” Weinstein said on Thursday. “One of our goals is to stop the spread of Muslim fundamentalism.”
Officials of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said Weston has no criminal convictions to bar him from entering the country.
Last year the JDL organised a meeting in solidarity with the English Defence League which was addressed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) by video link.
Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders is notorious for his hatred of Islam.
He has compared the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamf, referred to the Prophet Muhammad as “the devil,” and warned of a “tsunami of Islamization” in Europe. His Party for Freedom (PVV) rose to third-place status by capitalizing on economic crisis and social anxiety by scapegoating Muslim immigrants, who he has likened to Nazis.
The shock value has worn off, and support for his political party is waning.
So what’s a hatemonger to do?
Wilders has declared a new enemy: Central and Eastern Europeans. His far-right Freedom Party has captured headlines by launching a website where visitors can lodge complaints about fellow Europeans working in the Netherlands:
Reporting Central and Eastern Europeans
Since May 1, 2007 there is free movement of workers between the Netherlands and eight countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries. At present the estimates to the number of people from these countries, which resides in the Netherlands, apart from 200,000 to 350,000 people. As one of the few parties, the Freedom Party from the beginning against the opening of the labor market to Poland and other CEE nationals. Given all the problems associated with the massive arrival of especially Poland, is that attitude materialized. Recently, the PVV whatsoever against further opening of the labor market for Romanians and Bulgarians voted.
This massive labor migration leads to many problems, nuisance, pollution, displacement and integration in the labor and housing problems. For many people, these things a serious problem. Complaints are often not reported, because the idea that nothing is done.
Do you have trouble of CEE nationals? Or have you lost your job on a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian or other Central or Eastern European? We would like to hear. The Freedom Party has a platform on this website to your symptoms to report. These complaints, we will identify and offer the results to the Minister of Social Affairs and Employment.
What’s this got to do with Muslims?
The move clearly demonstrates what we’ve always known. Wilders is an opportunist and a hardcore bigot.
In the current climate, Islamophobia has been normalized to some degree, but the more hatemongers expose their ties to racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, the more likely they are to be relegated to the fringe by mainstream society.
Wilders’ antics have already sparked a firestorm of protest, and ambassadors from ten central and east European countries have complained. In response, the European Parliament has scheduled a debate on the topic next month.
Wilders boasted the site already had 40,000 responses and dismissed the controversy telling reporters:
My reaction to the ambassadors is: Mind your own business. This has nothing to do with your country. We are a sovereign country, we are a democratic political party and we voice the concerns of many Dutchmen.
Opening a new front will undoubtedly dilute Wilders’ campaign to vilify Islam as a “unique threat” to Europe, and may further tarnish the country’s international reputation. Whether the stunt will ultimately boost his popularity or exhaust Dutch tolerance for his peculiar brand far-right fear mongering remains to be seen.
As the war drums beat against yet another Muslim country, the grave and looming threat of Islamic terrorism must be waved before the American public. And so, Joe Sixpack must never be allowed to realize that he has a higher chance of being struck and killed by lightning–or being killed by a peanut–than being killed by those scary looking Moozlums. Instead, the threat must be continually drummed up in order to justify America’s multiple wars in the Muslim world.
Enter the FBI. This organization, tasked with stopping Islamic terrorism in the United States, will serve the purpose of reminding American citizens that they must be afraid–very, very afraid–of the dark threat of Muslim terrorists.
Worse yet, the FBI has been engineering its own Islamic terror plots: the set-up has been repeated numerous times. First, they find an impressionable young Muslim male angry at U.S. foreign policy, and then, using undercover FBI agents posing as Al-Qaeda, goad him into committing acts of terrorism, only to foil the ginned-up plot at the very last minute. They then arrest the young Muslim would-be terrorist and announce to the nation that the FBI has successfully thwarted yet another Islamic terror plot. What is largely ignored by the media is that the plot, from start to finish, was orchestrated by the FBI.
The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon. Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as the FBI describes it. Loyalists of both parties are doing the same, with Democratic Party commentators proclaiming that this proves how great and effective Democrats are at stopping The Evil Terrorists, while right-wing polemicists point to this arrest as yet more proof that those menacing Muslims sure are violent and dangerous.
…
[T]he FBI — as they’ve done many times in the past — found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a “Terrorist plot” which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI’s own concoction. Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts — and an uncritical media amplifies — its “success” to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government’s vast surveillance powers — current and future new ones — are necessary.
Such terrorist plots also “prove” the need to bomb, invade, and occupy the Moozlums Over There–we are told that it’s the only way to Keep Us Safe™ from Islamic terrorism.
Federal authorities on Friday arrested a 29-year-old Moroccan man in an alleged plot to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol, the latest in a series of terrorism-related arrests resulting from undercover sting operations.
For more than a year, Amine El Khalifi, of Alexandria, considered attacking targets including a synagogue, an Alexandria building with military offices and a Washington restaurant frequented by military officials, authorities said. When arrested a few blocks from the Capitol around lunchtime on Friday, he was carrying what he believed to be a loaded automatic weapon and a suicide vest ready for detonation.
The gun and vest were provided not by al-Qaeda, as Khalifi had been told, but by undercover FBI agents who rendered them inoperable, authorities said.
The public nor any members of Congress were ever in danger, police say. Capitol Police say they worked closely with the FBI throughout the entire operation, during which the suspect was closely monitored.
Even though “[t]he public nor any members of Congress were ever in danger”, this same terrorist plot will be used as another proof that Islamic terrorism is a grave danger to Americans. Indeed, Assistant Attorney General Monaco concluded: “Today’s case underscores the continuing threat we face from homegrown violent extremists.”
Greenwald had written of the 19-year old Somali terrorist arrested in 2010:
Finally, there is, as usual, no discussion whatsoever in media accounts of motive. There are several statements attributed to Mohamud by the Affidavit that should be repellent to any decent person, including complete apathy — even delight — at the prospect that this bomb would kill innocent people, including children. What would drive a 19-year-old American citizen — living in the U.S. since the age of 3 — to that level of sociopathic indifference? He explained it himself in several passages quoted by the FBI, and — if it weren’t for the virtual media blackout of this issue — this line of reasoning would be extremely familiar to Americans by now (para. 45):
UndercoverFBI Agent: You know there’s gonna be a lot of children there?
Mohamud: Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m looking for.
Undercover FBI Agent: For kids?
Mohamud: No, just for, in general a huge mass that will, like for them you know to be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays. And then for later to be saying, this was them for you to refrain from killing our children, women . . . . so when they hear all these families were killed in such a city, they’ll say you know what your actions, you know they will stop, you know. And it’s not fair that they should do that to people and not feeling it.
And here’s what he allegedly said in a video he made shortly before he thought he would be detonating the bomb (para. 80):
We hear the same exact thing over and over and over from accused Terrorists — that they are attempting to carry out plots in retaliation for past and ongoing American violence against Muslim civilians and to deter such future acts. Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world — invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries — torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death — and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims — an amazingly small percentage — harbor anger and vengeance toward them and want to return the violence. And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse: that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism — rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism.
Once again, our Muslim would-be terrorist’s motivations revolve around his anger over U.S. military actions in the Muslim world. The ABC report notes–once again something that is only mentioned in passing (with very littleno critical analysis):
In January 2011, he first met with an undercover agent and stated the “war on terror” was a “war on Muslims,” court records show.
Why on earth would Amine El Khalifi or another Muslim from that part of the world think that the U.S. is waging a “war on Muslims”? It is so utterly baffling to me. I mean, why would any Muslim think that? Is it just because the U.S. is bombing, invading, and occupying multiple Muslim countries? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the U.S. and its stalwart ally Israel have bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia, right?
Also of interest is the fact that Amine El Khalifi, at least initially, didn’t want to kill American civilians. The ABC report says:
El Khalifi told undercover agents that he originally wanted to target a building in Alexandria that contained U.S. Military personal but later changed that plan because he found out the building had non-military civilians.
He then discussed killing U.S. generals and would research where they lived, according to court documents, that added he introduced the idea of targeting a restaurant in D.C. that military officials would frequent.
Were the undercover FBI agents responsible for convincing him to attack civilians instead? In the end, El Khalifi’s target was the U.S. Capitol, federal employees he believed were responsible for ordering and orchestrating the “war on Muslims.”
It is interesting that even a Muslim would-be terrorist like Amine El Khalifi expressed a dislike for attacking American civilians, even though the United States bombs and kills Muslim civilians with impunity, without a second thought or national discussion, and on an order of magnitude that El Khalifi could never even imagine to have done himself. Indeed, as Foreign Policy Magazine calculated:
[T]he United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost. The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of “excess deaths” in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.
It goes without saying that Amine El Khalifi’s actions are morally repugnant. But, to put this into perspective: whereas El Khalife had said he “would be happy killing 30 people”, the United States has killed “well over one million” Muslim civilians. As George Orwell wrote:
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage—torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
* * * * *
The FBI needs to engineer and then thwart these terrorist threats because there is not enough real “Islamic terrorism” in the United States to justify the War on Terror. Such FBI-generated terror scares enable not just the stripping away of civil liberties at home, but more importantly, serve to justify America’s wars abroad. There is a need for Americans to fear being attacked by Muslims in order for them to go along with waging wars of aggression against various Muslim countries.
The media has been beating the drums of war against yet another Muslim country: Iran. Glenn Greenwald has dubbed CNN’s Erin Burnett the “worst of the worst” in this regard. (Greenwald’s article and his earlier piece on the subject are must reads.) Burnett’s reporting on the issue is nothing short of war propaganda. In it, she warns of “Iran’s threat to the United States in the United States–right here at home.” Her report asks: “Is Iran planning an attack in America?”
Without any evidence whatsoever, Burnett looms: “[On a] much more real and frightening scale, Iran could attack the United States in a much more fearsome way…Iran’s next target could be here in the nation’s largest city.” Egypt could attack the United States; South Africa could attack the United States; Canada could attack the United States; does that mean we bomb any of these countries? Martians could attack the United States–let’s nuke Mars before they get a chance to do that!
American hawks are clearly looking for a smoking gun–an attack on U.S. soil that could justify launching a war against Iran. There are so few real Muslim terrorists, as Prof. Charles Kurzman argues in his book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, that the FBI needs to generate Muslim terror plots.
There is another related point I’d like to address here: Erin Burnett had on her show the fervently anti-Muslim bigot Peter King, who led the congressional hearings against Muslims. Rep. King warned of the grave Iranian threat and made the case for war against Iran.
From time to time, a few readers have complained that our site, which is designed to expose Islamophobia, has turned “too political”–that we talk about America’s foreign policy too much instead of simply documenting the Islamophobia of the nation’s leading anti-Muslim loons. I take the full “blame” for this: the Erin Burnett segment shows how intrinsically connected Islamophobia and America’s wars are. Peter King, a classic anti-Muslim loon, is on a “respectable” news channel–CNN–to discuss why we need to attack another Muslim country. America’s war cheerleaders and Islamophobes work hand-in-hand.
There is an undeniable link between Islamophobia and American foreign policy: indeed, it is the latter which gave birth to the former, and the former that feeds the latter. Quite simply, America’s wars are Islamophobic in and of themselves. Documenting Islampohobia without mentioning the wars would be like talking about American racism against blacks in the 1800′s without ever mentioning the institution of slavery.
* * * * *
Lastly, I’d like to comment on the ever evolving threat of Islamic terrorism. First, we were told that Afghanistan was the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. Then, it was Iraq. Then, Barack Obama reminded us that it was in fact Afghanistan after all. Then, the “experts” started saying that “everyone knows that Pakistan is the center of Islamic terrorism.” For some time, Syria and Yemen were also considered candidates for this title. And remember when even many anti-war liberals would (ignorantly) argue that in reality it is Saudi Arabia that is the source of Islamic terror (because most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi)? Now, it seems Iran is back at the top of the list.
The target of American belligerence keeps changing from one Muslim country to another–it’s a Madlibs with the blank reading “name a Muslim country”: so far, fourteen different Muslim countries have been used to fill in the blank (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia). But why on earth would Amine El Khalifi or other Muslims come up with the absolutely crazy idea that America is at “war with Muslims”!?
Each time the threat changes and a new Muslim country is named the “center of Islamic terrorism” (everyone knows XYZ country is the real source of Islamic terrorism!), few stop to think or ask “wait, wasn’t it ABC country, not XYZ, that was the ‘epicenter of Islamic terrorism’?” Most Americans acknowledge the War on Iraq was a “mistake” (that’s what it’s called when Western countries commit war crimes–these are “mistakes”–like how failing to stop at a stop sign for a full three seconds is a “mistake”–everyone makes mistakes!–hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians die and this is called a “mistake”). Even though the exact same process unfolds against Iran as it did against Iraq just a few short years ago, Americans continue to impress the world with their goldfish-like memories, with a majority of Americans supporting a military strike on Iran.
We will be told that it is all the media’s fault, and yes, the media has the lion’s share of the blame. But, isn’t there something to be said of the jingoist, nativist, and belligerent attitude that is prevalent among us Americans in general? One can convince our fellow Americans to bomb just about any country on earth–certainly a Muslim-sounding country. And yet, at the same time, we are told how warlike those Moozlums over there are.
Early last year American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer posted a column arguing that a “sensible and sane immigration policy” would model “ancient Israel” and require every immigrant to “convert to Christianity.” Muslim immigrants in particular would be required to “drop his Islam and his Qur’an at Ellis Island.” But in what has becoming a frequentoccurrence, Fischer later deleted both of the sentences, among other sentences, and altered the article to make it a tad less inflammatory.
But today on Focal Point, Fischer repeated his claim that Muslims should “convert to Christianity” in order to become American citizens, saying that immigrants must “got to embrace your God, they’ve got to embrace your faith.”
The man attempting to stir up fears over plans to build a mosque in Purley is a far-right activist and avid supporter of the woman accused of racially abusing people on a tram.
English Defence League member Frank Day proudly claims to have put leaflets through the doors of 600 homes in the area.
It urges residents to fight the application in the belief it will cause traffic issues. But despite his apparent concerns over parking issues in Purley, Mr Day lives six miles away on the New Addington estate – and freely admits he would object to a mosque being built anywhere.
Resident and Purley and Woodcote Residents’ Association member Andrew Frazer was one of those to have received a letter. He said:
“He (Mr Day) dropped a leaflet through the door and came back later after delivering some through other doors. He said, ‘we don’t agree with it, we are dead against it, we want as many people to complain to Croydon Council as possible’. He visited twice and when he came back after the first time he said ‘if you want to find out more go to Mosque Busters by typing it into Google’.”
We tracked Mr Day to his home in Arnhem Drive, which he shares with his 86-year-old mother. Here he told us that the information contained in his leaflets came directly from “Mosquebuster” Gavin Boby. Mr Boby is a professional planning consultant who has posted videos on the internet advising people how to defeat applications for Islamic places of worship.
Mr Day, who was arrested at an EDL rally in November, told the Advertiser that “they” (Muslims) were “taking over” and that “one mosque is too many”. The 64-year-old added he had attended a court appearance of Emma West, who is accused of racially abusing people on a tram, to show his support.
Purley councillor Badsha Quadir has said he believes the leaflets are “racially motivated” and is seeking advice from police. He told theAdvertiser:
“My colleagues and I are concerned about this extremist leafleting. I understand residents are concerned. It is not for people to come from New Addington and say what should happen in Purley. I would not go to New Addington and comment on their amenities. The leaflet appears racially motivated and I will speak to the borough commander about this issue and see what he can do.”
Police advised anyone concerned by the leaflets or the manner in which they were being given out to contact their local safer neighbourhood team on 020 8721 2467.
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
(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.
Newsweek has apparently abandoned any pretense of actual reporting in favor of tabloid-style sensationalism. Career hatemonger Aayan Hirsi Ali‘s alarmist screed in the February 12 issue is a jumble of half truths culled together with the obvious purpose of demonizing Muslims, at the expense of Christian minorities she pretends to defend.
Hirsi ignores US-led invasions–actual wars–against one Islamic country after another, and the impact on Christians, especially in Iraq. In fact, according to her apocalyptic vision, the West must destroy Islam, by any means necessary–in the name of peace and civilization, of course.
For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century. Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.”
Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek. “The War on Christians” is splashed across the cover, but the actual target of Hirsi Ali’s piece becomes more clear in the title provided for the online version of the piece: “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.”
The terms of Hirsi Ali’s argument, such as it is, are all set out in her opening paragraph:
We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.
The criminally careless tossing out of the term “genocide” gives us a clue about what is to come. So too does the style, which is a classic version of her usual mode, that of the lone brave voice crying out about injustice in the wilderness, surrounded by dupes who are too busy portraying Muslims as “victims or heroes.” Fortunately, Hirsi Ali is prepared to offer us “a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends,” leading to what she sees as her inevitable conclusion and allowing her to coin her useful new term: “the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.”
Having already reached her inevitable conclusion in her opening, Hirsi Ali appears to feel little need to support it with anything so mundane as actual facts. Instead he offers a loosely-connected cherry picking tour that ties together incidents of violence against Christians and other religious minorities in Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and Indonesia. All the instances she references are real and terrible acts of violence. And all of them are symptoms of complex political and social situations that need to be analyzed and addressed. This makes it all the more horrible that Hirsi Ali treats them as mere data to be added to her deeply simplistic argument. Indeed, she raises the same two points in each case: first, that Muslims are killing Christians; second, that the world (by which she means “the West”)—apparently distracted by its uncritical admiration for the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and its obsession with stamping out Islamophobia—stands idly by and watches. So Hirsi Ali is forced to beg her readers to help break what she refers to as a “conspiracy of silence.”
Were the consequences of such an argument not so grave—and I will come to those consequences shortly—it would be possible to simply dismiss this article as the nonsense that it is. To reduce the complexity of the political violence in Nigeria and Sudan to instances of “Christophobia,” for example, is simply ludicrous, as is the suggestion that somehow Western political and media figures have been “reticent” or “silent” when it comes to Darfur. This is in no way to downplay the full horror of these situations; indeed, what is most disturbing here is Hirsi Ali’s cursory citing of them—Nigeria merits just two paragraphs of her article, Sudan just one—in the service of her hateful argument.
In other cases, what is striking is the utter thinness of the arguments she tries to marshal. When, for example, she tries to make the case that “not even Indonesia…has been immune to the fevers of Christophobia,” she cites data complied by the Christian Post suggesting an increase in violent incidents against religious minorities of nearly forty percent between 2010 and 2011. Again, this is certainly a cause for concern, but it would be interesting to ask Hirsi Ali how she would compare this increase to the more than fifty percent increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the United States between 2009 and 2010, as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She might also have turned to data on Indonesia produced by Human Rights Watch rather than that of an obscure Christian website, which would have confirmed her point about an increase in attacks on religious minorities (including Ahmadis) in Indonesia—except that rather than attributing this increase to the rise of “Christophobia,” HRW’s conclusion about this key US ally is quite different: “The common thread is the failure of the Indonesian government to protect the rights of all its citizens.”
Of course, these sorts of fact-free claims about the “Muslim world” by conservative commentators are nothing new. What is more worthy of note, however, are those claims by Hirsi Ali that suggest a number of moves taken out of the contemporary neo-conservative playbook. Hirsi Ali’s connections to the neo-con movement—she is, among other things, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—have been widely noted. For example, Hamid Dabashi lists her prominently among the “comprador intellectuals” who have helped sell the neo-con agenda in the United States and Europe. (Indeed, it is clear that the title of her article is meant to resonate in this election season with the claims being made by conservatives about an alleged “war on Christians” here in the United States.)
One strand of this neo-conservative reasoning as it can be read out of Hirsi Ali’s article has to do with her references to Egypt. She only devotes one paragraph to Egypt, but the print version of the article includes four images (including the cover image), some quite graphic, of violence against Copts in Egypt. Hirsi Ali preludes her point by noting that the alleged rise of Christophobia in Egypt comes “in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.” Her key example is the attack by security forces on pro-Coptic protesters outside Maspero on 9 October 2011, which killed at least twenty-four people and wounded more than three hundred. From this example, Hirsi Ali moves forward with her relentlessly superficial line of argument: “By the end of the year more than two-hundred thousand Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be justified.”
The first and most obvious problem here, of course, is Hirsi Ali’s attempt to transform an attack by security forces against protesters—the sort of attack that has marked the bloody fule of the Supreme Council of Armed Force (SCAF)—into yet another example of “Muslims attacking Christians,” driven solely by the relentless power of Christophobia. The deeper problem, and the one that betrays the mark of neo-con logic, is her implication that the source of this violence springs from, not the US-supported and armed military junta currently ruling Egypt, but the forces supposedly unleashed by the Arab Spring. This becomes clear in the final sentence, which resonates with the neo-con mantra that has been constant since the beginnings of the popular uprisings: if they get their democracy, we’ll wind up with the Islamists.
This disdain for the forces of democracy in Egypt (as contrasted to the neo-cons’ own preferred model of “democracy promotion” through military intervention) becomes even clearer in the admiring take on Hirsi Ali’s article posted on the blog of the National Review by Nina Shea. Concurring with Hirsi Ali’s thesis regarding the rise of Christophobia in the region, Shea adds, “Unfortunately, Arab democracy in Iraq and Egypt, the ancient homelands of two of the three largest Middle Eastern Christian communities, seems to be exacerbating the religious persecution.” (“Arab democracy,” we are thus invited to conclude, must be quite different from, say, “Western-style democracy.”)
As Shea notes, Hirsi Ali also uses the example of violence against Christians in Iraq, which is again awarded a full paragraph of attention. “Egypt is not the only Arab country that seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority,” she writes, continuing her “fair-minded assessment.” She goes on to note the rise in violence against Iraqi Christians since 2003, and the fact that thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled the country—“as the result of violence directed specifically against them”—leading to what she calls “an incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.”
And then, she moves on. The fact that 2003 is hardly an arbitrary date is not so much as acknowledged. Here we find yet another example of the almost unbelievable gall exhibited by neo-cons, as part of the larger forgetting of the war on Iraq in the United States. That Hirsi Ali—who was, like her neo-con colleagues, a vocal supporter of the war—can avoid not only accepting responsibility for the shattering of Iraqi society, but can actually use this shattering to advance her own hideous Islamophobic arguments, is simply obscene. Just as she fails to acknowledge that the attacks on pro-Coptic protesters in Egypt need to be understood within the larger framework of SCAF’s systematic attacks on all protesters, so she refuses to acknowledge that the thousands of Christians who have fled from Iraq are part of the one and a half million Iraqis who have been made refugees by the war she supported.
This forgetting of the carnage unleashed by the criminal war against Iraq is especially important today, as some of the same neo-con forces have not ceased to bang the drums for a new war against Iran. Hirsi Ali, not surprisingly, whole-heartedly endorses an attack on Iran. This is one of the clear dangers presented by her article in the current moment. I had decided not to mention another, more intimate connection between Hirsi Ali and neo-con ideology, represented by her marriage to the dean of neo-imperialists, Niall Ferguson. But it becomes impossible not to mention this connection when, in the very same issue of Newsweek—in fact, only four pages away from her article—we find an article by Ferguson, arguing vigorously for supporting an Israeli attack on Iran, using logic that could have been lifted straight out of the pro-war op-eds of 2002 (“Sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement.”) Hirsi Ali only manages to work Iran into her argument regarding “Christophobia” in an indirect way, but given her long-standing views—she has, for example, argued that the Bush administration should have attacked Iraq and Iran after 9/11—her larger framework is clearly intended to support this march towards a new war.
But this is still not the most insidious aspect of Hirsi Ali’s argument. This becomes apparent only as she reaches her conclusion, which begins with a reiteration of her two theses: “It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem.” Helpfully, she goes on to offer an explanation for both aspects of the problem. This “global war on Christians” is not, she suggests, the result of coordination by “some international Islamist agency.” “In that sense,” she goes on, “the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.”
In a word: Muslims are killing Christians because Muslims hate Christians. And if this global war remains “underreported,” Muslims are to blame for this as well: part of the reason for “the media’s reticence on the subject,” she suggests, “may be the fear of provoking additional violence,” but the “most likely” explanation is “the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.” Such groups, she concludes, “have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called ‘Islamophobia’—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.”
We discover a few important things here. The first is that the seeming disconnectedness of Hirsi Ali’s argument is in fact intentional. There is no need to draw logical or factual connections between the various incidents she raises because the logic can be found in the very structure of her thesis: what she cites are simply examples of Muslims attacking Christians, and Muslims attack Christians because Muslims hate Christians. When Egyptian security forces attack Coptic protesters, it is not the army attacking protesters; it is Muslims attacking Christians. When Iraqi Christians flee the violence of a country destroyed by a US-led war and occupation, it is not Iraqis fleeing from carnage; it is Christians fleeing from Muslims. Hirsi Ali has developed the perfect machine for circulating and defending Islamophobia, since it directly implicates every individual Muslim in the actions of every other individual Muslim—not to mention the actions of any government of any Muslim-majority state. And, as an added bonus, it even manages to implicate the imputing of Islamophobia itself as part of the problem, since she sees this as part of the sinister “conspiracy of silence” that allows this global Christophobia to flourish.
Hirsi Ali’s “war,” in other words, guarantees the continuing stigmatization of Muslims in North America and Europe. This is what allows her to speak of a “global war on Christians in the Muslim world.” In addition to resonating with the US’s “global war on terror,” what this phrase signifies is that the Islamic “threat” is a global one. So what might appear to be a minority community under siege in the United States, Hirsi Ali suggests, is in fact part of a threatening wave of genocide; the “spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities” exists, in inchoate form, everywhere. No one (Christian) is safe.
Allow me to state the obvious, which is that Hirsi Ali’s argument has an immediately recognizable pedigree. The attempt to justify the oppression of minority groups by producing them as threats to “our way of life”—including the assertion that the same groups have the mysterious power to bewitch, dupe, and silence the unwary through conspiratorial means and shadowy organizations—has been a standard practice of racism and fascism, those precursors of Islamophobia; Hirsi Ali is a connoisseur of all three. Her supposed defense of an embattled minority is a thinly disguised attempt to extend and expand the ongoing repression of Muslim minority communities. The logic of her argument is precisely the same as that which has underwritten the violent policing of Muslim communities in the name of fighting “homegrown terrorism,” which has had such horrific consequences for these communities (not to mention for civil liberties more generally).
Hirsi Ali, like Ferguson and the rest of the neo-con forces, is eager to wrap herself in the mantle of “Western” virtues such as skepticism and secularism, against the forces of sectarianism and fundamentalism that they see as constitutive of the “Muslim world.” But what could possibly be more sectarian and fundamentalist than Hirsi Ali’s vision of the world, with its terrifying simplifications and generalizations, and its reduction of genuine situations of violence and suffering to data whose only purpose is to power her relentless Islamophobia machine?
France was the first European country to publicly ban the face veil, an “offense” that carries a fine of 150 euros and a compulsory citizenship course. If passed, a new law will force Muslim women in the childcare sector who wear hijab to choose between observing their faith and keeping their jobs.
The controversy surrounding the Islamic headscarf in France is making headlines again as the French National Assembly studies a draft law that will ban religious symbols in all facilities catering for children, including nannies and childcare assistants looking after children at home.
The draft law was approved by the French Senate with a large majority on Jan. 17 and it was sent to the National Assembly to be ratified before being signed it into law by the president.
“Unless otherwise specified in a contract with the individual employer, a childcare assistant is subject to an obligation of neutrality in religious matters in the course of childcare activity,” reads the text of the draft law introduced by Françoise Laborde, a senator from the Radical Party of the Left.
“Parents have the right to want a nanny who is neutral from a religious perspective,” the left-wing senator was quoted as saying by ANSAmed news agency.
Critics of the draft law say Laborde is targeting Muslim nannies and childcare assistants.
The senator said that she was “encouraged to act” after a private nursery, Baby Loup, fired an employee who refused to remove her Islamic headscarf. In Oct. 27, 2011, the appeals court in Versailles upheld the decision to expel the employee as lawful.
“The recent ruling of the Court of Appeal of Versailles in favor of Baby Loup is in the right direction, and I hope that this case is translated into law,” Laborde said in December 20011.
Djamila, a childcare assistant, told Rue89 French website it is “absolutely not her role” to speak of religion with kids. “We look after children of younger three years. Can you you tell me what can they understand at that age?”
An analyst in secularism, Jean Baubérot, wrote in a blog posted on the website Mediapart, that he was outraged by the brandishing of secularism in what he described was a law discriminatory against Muslims.
He accused the ruling Union for Popular Movement and the interior minister Claude Guéant of having torn secularism’s principle of “religious freedom” by reviving links between religion and the state while at same time cracking down on individuals’ links with religion.
If these revelers of the death of children were Palestinian or Muslim you can rest assured that Islam would be blamed!
If one were to employ the cynical and faulty methodology of Islamophobes one could easily find verses in the Bible justifying their happiness with the tragic deaths of the Palestinian Children, “happy is he who dashes children on the stones.”
Ten Palestinian children were killed and at least 20 were wounded on Thursday morning after an Israeli truck carrying a fuel tank crashed into the school bus transporting the kindergarten children near the Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah.
Israelis on Facebook were celebrating the deaths of the Palestinian children, writing derogatory statements on a wall of a news post regarding the accident.
The bus carrying the children collided with the truck at an intersection in Jaba’a, overturned, and caught on fire.
The children immediately died, while a further eight remain in a critical condition, according to medical officials with the Palestinian Red Cross.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has declared three days of mourning.
Ramallah-based journalist Diana Alzeer said the collision was likely an accident due to wet weather, and not politically motivated.
In Bethlehem, a 15-year-old boy died this morning after a truck skidded on a slippery road and ran the boy over.
A statement released by the police said they have opened an investigation and confirmed that the boy died on the spot. Emergency crews arrived to the scene and transferred the boy’s body to a hospital in Beit Jala.
The Israeli comments have gone viral on Twitter, shocking users into disbelief at the level of racism and hatred directed towards the deceased Palestinian children.
Israel maintains a military occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, imposing harsh restrictions on indigenous Palestinians while providing privileges to illegal Jewish settlers.
Palestinians are frequently attacked and harassed by settlers as well as the Israeli military, often with impunity.
(Al-Akhbar, Wafa)
Update: (H/T: Dan15) It must be pointed out that many Jews and Israelis were disgusted by the pro-death statements of their fellow Jews:
Islamophobes are all upset that Oliver Stone’s son Sean Stone converted to Islam.
For some reason the Islamophobes are hurt by this, perhaps they believe that Hollywood is about to be overtaken by Muslims or that it is a symbol of the Leftist-Muslamic axis of evil. First it was Liam Neeson and now Oliver Stone’s director son!:
Tehran, Iran (CNN) – The son of Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone converted to Islam in a ceremony in central Iran, a national news agency reported.
Sean Stone became a Shiite Muslim in the city of Esfahan Tuesday and chose Ali as his new Islamic name, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported.
“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with,” Stone told Fars News Agency. “It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets.”
He did not say why he converted.
Stone, 27, is also a filmmaker and has collaborated on his father’s projects. His father is Jewish and his mother, Christian.
Oliver Stone directed “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “JFK.”
MURFREESBORO, TN — A group that states on their website that the “Islamic Movement” is a “threat to our civil liberties” is training deputies in Rutherford County this week.
Deputies from the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department are getting three days of training from Strategic Engagement Group, a Washington-based nonprofit that says its purpose is to counter the Unified Islamic movement in the United States.
The debate concerning construction of an Islamic Center in Rutherford County has been the subject of much debate over the last few years. The project’s faced a court fight, vandalism and arson. Tennessee Freedom Coalition, which openly opposed the new mosque, hired the Washington-based nonprofit.
On Monday, Strategic Engagement Group held a free seminar for the community, but Channel 4′s cameras were not welcome. John Guandolo, the vice president of the Strategic Engagement Group, spoke at the event and pushed a Channel 4 camera that attempted to record the seminar.
Channel 4 was allowed to listen to him speak but could not record it. Guandolo talked about Hamas and its plan to destroy Western civilization from within, and spoke of Islamic centers as potential military compounds.
The local sheriff’s department would not talk on camera about its decision to train deputies using this company. Deputies are able to use the training toward their Post Commission required annual training.
Monday’s event was held at the World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, which has been a vocal opponent of the new Islamic Center being built in Rutherford County.
Channel 4 checked with the Post Commission, which develops and enforces training and standards for all police officers in Tennessee. According to the Post, they allow individual law enforcement agencies to determine what training can count for the yearly minimums required of every officer.
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is urging houses of worship in metro Detroit to take extra precautions following several cases of vandalism.
Dearborn police are investigating several incidents of possible anti-Muslim vandalism in the city, according to a press release sent out Tuesday by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
According to CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid, the American Moslem Bekaa Center, located on Chase Road north of Ford Road, was targeted in the spray-painting, as well as a building nearby on Chase that is soon to be opened as a restaurant.
Both buildings were tagged with the words “Chaldean Mob” or “MB.”
Walid said the names are related to the Chaldean Mafia, a group that was notorious for drug trafficking in the Detroit area in the 1980s and ’90s. However, any specific ties to that group have not been established in this case.
Also still undetermined is whether the vandalism was motivated by ethnic or racial bias. However, said Walid, “It should be investigated with the potential to be a hate crime.”
The incidents in Dearborn follow a case of vandalism of a Sikh house of worship earlier this month in Sterling Heights.
Though there’s no indication that the cases are related, Walid said it’s enough to cause worry.
“We’re asking all mosques to take extra security precautions,” he said. “It’s a sad commentary on our society that there are (people) who would desecrate houses of worship. It seems that nothing is sacred these days.”
CAIR-MI put out a request to community members to call police with any information on the incidents.
“There’s a lot of traffic in that area, so someone must’ve seen something. I’m hoping that if someone saw any individuals they would immediately call the Dearborn police.”
Walid said that he had spoken with Dearborn Chief of Police Ronald Haddad, who confirmed that the department is investigating the vandalism.
Chief Haddad was not immediately available for comment on the case.
Anyone with information on the vandalism is asked to contact the Dearborn Police Tip Line at 313-943-3030.
An internal FBI investigation into its counterterrorism training has purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism.
The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller. So far, the inquiry has uncovered and purged over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 — some of which were similar to briefings published by Danger Room last year describing “mainstream” Muslims as “violent.” And more disclosures may be forthcoming, as the FBI continues its inquiry and responds to Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents themselves.
FBI spokesman Christopher Allen confirms to Danger Room that the bureau found some of the documents to be objectionable because they were inaccurate or over-broad, others because they were offensive. Allen explains that the documents represent “less than 1 percent” of over 160,000 documents reviewed by the inquiry, which was prompted by a Danger Room investigation in September. The FBI purged documents according to four criteria: “factual errors”; “poor taste”; employment of “stereotypes” about Arabs or Muslims; or presenting information that “lacked precision.”
Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, attended the FBI meeting. He came away worried that the volume of anti-Muslim training documents hands al-Qaida an unnecessary win.
“People will report criminal activity to the authorities, that’s been proven time and again,” Marayati tells Danger Room. “But if we are giving propaganda to al-Qaida, resuscitating this dying ideology that al-Qaida is promoting, by continually exposing anti-Muslim propaganda published by the government, that undermines our pluralism, which is the best defense against any transnational ideological threat.”
Others think that the FBI can’t stop at purging internal documents. “It’s a bit hard to avoid the conclusion there isn’t a problem of culture in the [FBI] training division,” says Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute, whose subordinates also attended the meeting. “It’s one that appears to have some built-in biases when it comes to the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities.” Allen declined to respond.
But the FBI isn’t finished. The bureau plans to publish a “touchstone document” in the coming weeks that explains its criteria to ensure new anti-Islam documents won’t enter counterterrorism training in the future. Similarly, the Justice Department plans on March 21 to release “Cultural Competency” guidelines for dealing with Arab and Muslim communities on counterterrorism, according to Xochitl Hinojosa, a department spokeswoman.
Several civil-rights advocates said they appreciated Mueller’s personal attention. The Wednesday meeting had been scheduled by the FBI’s public-affairs arm, whose deputy assistant director, Jeff Mazanec, briefed the groups for about 40 minutes before Mueller unexpectedly joined.
“Director Mueller acknowledged the seriousness of our concerns and expressed a commitment to maintaining contact with the inter-religious community,” says Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, another attendee at the meeting. Mueller “seemed to understand the hurt and pain as well as the fear, engendered by the offensive, inappropriate and insensitive materials.”
But the worst may not have passed. Allen acknowledged that the internal review, assisted by the Army’s counterterrorism specialists at West Point, hasn’t yet concluded. Several additional organizations have filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the specific offending documents; attendees came away with the impression that their disclosure will be ugly.
The White House ordered a government-wide review of counterterrorism training late last year. A Pentagon document responding to the order cited Danger Room’s series as an impetus for the effort.
Berry says she could “see the seriousness with which [the FBI] has approached this.” But she calls the problem a “systemic” one, with urgent implications for U.S. domestic counterterrorism — a concern voiced by Attorney General Eric Holder as well.
“They’ve never owned this problem. It’s not a problem of outside contractors,” she tells Danger Room. “They’re producing these kind of documents that inhibit our counterterrorism efforts. We need our communities engaged, and these have done nothing but alienate us.”
One bill, HB825 from Republican Del. Bob Marshall of Prince William County, would have prohibited judges and state administrators from using any legal code established outside the United States to make decisions. [...]
But when legislators started hearing from business groups concerned about how the proposal could affect their dealings abroad and foreign companies located here, they sent the bill back to committee.
“I had some business concerns,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, after making the motion Thursday to kick back the bill. “It’s just something that needs some work.”
It’s unfortunate, if far from unexpected, that similar protests from religious groups, both Islamic and otherwise, were not enough to kill the bill. Nevertheless, the emergence of business opposition to these sorts of bills is a very important development.
Sadly Walid Shoebat is still duping and conning crowds across the USA while at the same time lining his pockets with their money.
There is no reason why organizations, churches, synagogues and Holocaust Museums should be inviting characters such as Walid Shoebat as “featured” speakers. Ignorance of the special kind of liar Shoebat is, is no longer a valid excuse as there has been a plethora of exposes on Shoebat, both in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media. Even Islamophobes are repulsed by the snake-oil salesman technique Shoebat has been using to his advantage.
Now it seems the Mazal Holocaust Library has either willfully or ignorantly fallen for the “ex-Terrorist” bait:
Walid Shoebat to speak at Holocaust Museum
It is our duty as loonwatchers to make sure that people who are supposed to safeguard the memory of one of the most evil atrocities ever committed by man against man are not steered into the abyss of Islamophobia, xenophobia and hate represented by the likes of a Walid Shoebat.
I encourage you all to contact the Holocaust library and inform them of the grave mistake they are making.
Here I will reproduce JD’s comment which first alerted us to this travesty:
I think we all should Phone and email them and let them know what they did was a disgrace to the memory of the people who died in the Holocaust since Shoebat has said stuff like…
“many parallels between the Antichrist and Islam” and “Islam is not the religion of God — Islam is the devil”
According to an official who attended a similar Shoebat lecture at a conference in Las Vegas, the solution he offered for the threat of “militant Muslims” was to “Kill them…including the children.”
Sounds little bit like what they said 1930′s about another group right Texas Holocaust Library?
Please email them at :aimee@mazal-library.org Phone: Number on Flyer: (210)-392-5452 Mazal Holocaust Library -(210) 377-2742
An Indian Muslim woman with a Valentine's Day teddy bear at a gift shop in Ahmedabad (AFP, Sam Panthaky)
Many Islamic authorities forbid the celebration of Valentine’s Day since at its root it is a non-Islamic religious holiday. However the topic of love, experiencing love and loving one’s partner are central discussions across the Islamic world.
In this vein we share the following story of Widad Lootah, a woman who wears the niqab and is quite frank and open in writing about sex. The article below highlights the fact that for some the amount of openness from Lootah is breaching taboos within conservative society, however it must be pointed out that open discussion about the joy and importance of sex is obviously not without precedence in Muslim societies or Islamic history. For instance, the great Andalusian scholar and polymath Ibn Hazm wrote a seminal early treatise on the various forms of love, infatuation, etc. (going into quite some detail) titled The Ring of the Dove.
DUBAI — Emirati love guru Widad Lootah is not your typical marriage counsellor. She is an ultra-conservative Muslim who wears the full veil and talks a lot about sex, often quoting the Muslim holy book the Koran.
On the eve of Valentine’s day, Lootah is calling on Muslim and Arab women everywhere to “embrace love and love making.”
“Don’t shy away from it, don’t feel ashamed by it. Enjoy it, you’re supposed to,” she said in an interview with AFP, adding that she is trying to break common misconceptions that sex in Islam is only about conceiving children.
“It’s also about having fun,” she said.
Dressed in a shroud of black revealing only her eyes — a choice, she says, that allows her to emulate the Muslim prophet’s wives — Lootah was frank and explicit about the importance Islam places on a healthy sex life.
“It’s at the core” of a happy marriage, she said.
Lootah noted that her 11 years as a marriage counsellor at the Dubai courthouse made her realise that “what happens (or doesn’t happen) in bed” is the main source of marital problems in the United Arab Emirates.
Public, and in many cases private, discussions about sex are still taboo in much of the conservative Muslim world, a reality she says contradicts Islam’s approach to the subject.
There are only two simple rules for sex in Islam: you must be married “and anal sex is strictly forbidden,” Lootah said.
“Everything else, including all sexually intimate acts below the belly button, is allowed. Feel each other, touch each other, kiss each other all over… it’s OK.”
The problem is, “there is so much shame and disgrace” associated with the enjoyment of sex in the Arab world.
Lootah is an adamant believer in bringing the discussion of sex out into the open, although at times doing so has proven it can be a risky business.
In 2009, she published the much-debated Muslim sex guide “Top Secret: Sexual Guidance for Married Couples.”
Her book, and her comments in interviews on the subject, initially triggered a slew of insults, condemnation and even threats against her life.
“They called me all sorts of things: crazy, vile, immoral, criminal,” she said. “Some even called me a traitor and spy for Israel and America.”
Today, Lootah is probably the UAE’s most prominent marriage counsellor, known by her clients as “Mama Widad.”
Lootah has also vigorously lobbied her home government to introduce sexual education in Emirati schools.
For older teens, “it’s very important that we educate them, both males and females, about sex… we have to prepare them psychologically and emotionally for it, and we have to teach them about the act itself.”
But first, we must “educate the teachers so they can educate the students,” said Lootah, adding that such education would also help protect young children from sexual predators.
They have to be “taught what form of adult-child interaction is appropriate and what’s not,” she said. “We need to teach them so they know to recognise the danger when it’s there.”
She said the taboos surrounding sex have also contributed to high divorce rates in the Emirates and to generally unhappy marriages.
In about a month, Lootah plans to submit her second book, “Top Secret Volume Two,” to the government censors, and in traditional Lootah style, its pages will contain a lot of sex talk.
But this time, the topic of discussion is forbidden sex under Islam.
“It’s about homosexual and lesbian relations and their effect on the institution of marriage,” said Lootah, adding that she had to tread carefully given the sensitivity of the subject and intense emotions it stirs in the Muslim world.
When asked why she has taken on the cause of love and sex in Islam, Lootah argued that it was an issue of “women’s rights.”
“I can’t fix everything… but I can try and fix the role of women (in sex and marriage) in the Arab world.”
As for her opinion of Valentine’s day, she says Islam forbids the celebration of non-Muslim holidays.
“But if you consider Valentine’s day as a mere reminder to show one’s love to another, then why not? I don’t object to it,” she said. But “if that’s the case, then every day should be Valentine’s day.”
Any last words of advice?
“Experience love… even before marriage, that’s OK. But don’t do anything forbidden by Islam.”
Similarities between Judaism and Islam are easy to see. Both are monotheistic religions for whom the Lord is One. Both are religions based on revelation. In both, law is central, and personal and social existence is governed by a divinely ordained legal system.
There are also many obvious parallels between Judaism’s legal system, known as halacha, and the Islamic legal order of sharia. Both purport to instruct us in how to attend to every aspect of one’s life: one’s getting up and one’s going out, one’s sexual practice and one’s business practices. For some adherents of each, religious law also dictates political life, such as for whom to vote.
Despite this kinship, there are those in the Jewish community who would condemn Islam and sharia, arguing that, unlike Judaism, Islam is not worthy of the protections of American law.
David Yerushalmi, author of a model law banning sharia, argues that sharia differs from halacha because of its different “threat matrix.” Sharia, he tells us, requires faithful Muslims to impose Islamic law on the world “violently,” and its adherents should be charged with sedition against the United States. Rabbi Jon Hausman, a self-styled “warrior rabbi” from Massachusetts, tells us that in Judaism, unlike Islam, the law of the state is the law (in Aramaic, dina d’malchuta dina) so you don’t have to worry about such religious “imperialism.”
These commentators’ understanding of both sharia and halacha is markedly defective.
1. As Hausman surely knows, the reach of dina d’malchuta dina is debated among rabbinic commentators. Some limit the application of the Jewish legal system to property issues, others extend it to apply to all secular law that does not violate Jewish law. In any case, Hausman’s suggestion that halacha is a personal legal system—not relevant to civic life and politics—neglects both Jewish history and halacha itself. In Baghdad during the Middle Ages and in Poland during the time of the Council of the Four Lands, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, for instance, Jewish communities had their own courts, and Jewish law was enforced by secular authorities. And even today, thousands of Jews in both the United States and Israel look to rabbinic courts and halacha to resolve all manner of civil disputes.
While clearly some Muslims do view sharia as a hegemonic political force, the vast majority of Muslims, especially those living in the West, view sharia no differently from the way Jews view the halachic system: as an overarching guide to ordering one’s life. Muslim jurists have always drawn on sharia to mandate that fellow Muslims obey the laws of the land in matters that sharia does not prohibit. In numerous instances (see Koran 5:11), Muslims are told to “honor their contracts” and so to honor the “social contract” represented by the law of the land. The Fiqh Council of North America, the leading interpreter of Islamic law in the United States, ruled as recently as September 2011 that “there is no inherent conflict between the normative values of Islam and the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
2. Daniel Pipes recounts in a 2009 article an incident in England when the Indian Muslim owner of an old age home near Manchester proposed to switch to serving only halal food in the facility. After residents complained, the owner retracted the policy. To Pipes, the owner’s desire to remove pork from the menu, even though apparently not implemented, is proof that Islam wishes to impose itself on all around it. But is this drive for “imperium” the only explanation?
Indeed, Jewish law would have great sympathy for the position taken by the Indian entrepreneur. Though there are gray areas, Jewish law generally holds that one cannot benefit (or profit) from the sale of mixed milk and meat products. The legal compendium the Shulhan Aruch forbids Jews from selling non-kosher products on a regular basis (Yoreh De’ah 117.1). And anyone who has read Daphne Barak-Erez’s 2007 monograph Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel will appreciate the difficulties of commerce in pork products (or “white meat” as it is politely called) in Israel.
3. Critics of Islam make much of the Shiite legal doctrine of taqquia and the related concept of kitman, which allow one to dissemble or evade by misdirection in order to save a life or community from imminent destruction (see Koran 16:106). For these critics, the takeaway is that Muslims lie when it is in their interest, so we cannot trust their promises or make treaties with them.
But numerous Koranic references tell the believer to “mix not the truth with falsehood nor conceal the truth when you know what it is” (2:42). And further, “Conceal not [the truth]; for whomever conceals it is burdened with sin” (2:283).
Again, we must look to Jewish law analogues. Even the Chofetz Chaim, the rabbinic scholar most associated with truth-telling, allows “white lies” when they will produce social and interpersonal peace. (No threat of imminent destruction is required.) Maimonides allows one to lie about one’s religion to save one’s own life. And does anyone remember the Marranos?
My point is not to analyze the nuances of halacha, let alone sharia, but rather to underscore the inconsistency of attacking Islam for activities that Jewish law and practice would also permit, or even require.
These broadside attacks on sharia are reminiscent of Jewish polemical literature after the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries designed to show Judaism as superior. Later scholars such as the Meiri, though, moved on from polemics to classify Islam as a monotheistic religion close to Judaism. While there are certainly fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that we rightfully find dangerous and deplorable, it is time that Jews in America go beyond “gotcha” polemics and stop treating sharia and Islam as illegitimate expressions of man’s search for the divine.
Marshall Breger is a professor of law at Catholic University.
A long list of S.C. lawmakers plans to send a message to Palmetto State courts: Don’t apply foreign laws here.
A proposed law, which a House panel will consider this month, is part of a growing movement in legislatures around the country.
Twenty other states are considering similar measures to ban judges from applying the laws of others nations, particularly in custody and marriage cases. Three states — Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona — already have added the laws to their books. Oklahoma put it in its state Constitution in 2010, a move now being challenged in federal court.
Proponents say the S.C. measure will ensure only U.S. and S.C. laws are applied in Palmetto State courtrooms, and foreign laws do not trump constitutional rights guaranteed to Americans.
Opponents say the proposal addresses a nonexistent issue and, while not specifically naming Islamic Sharia law, and smacks of anti-Islamic sentiment. They say such bills target the practice of Sharia, a wide-ranging group of Islamic religious codes and customs that, in some countries, are enforced as law.
While Sharia law provides followers of Islam guidelines on everything from crime to politics to hygiene and food, many Muslims also disagree on its interpretation.
State Rep. Wendy Nanney, R-Greenville, the bill’s sponsor, said she introduced the proposal after speaking with several family court judges around the state about problems with child-custody cases.
“I asked them if they had issues with custody cases decided outside of the country. They all said ‘Yes,’ ” Nanney said, adding one judge told her of a custody case brought before him that originally had been handled in Venezuela. The judge, who Nanney declined to name, said he struggled to find common ground between S.C. and Venezuelan laws, and how to apply them.
“It would simplify things to say, ‘We’re in a South Carolina court, and let’s use South Carolina law.’ It’s meant to help our judges not to be pushed and pressured and prodded to enforce other countries’ laws,” Nanney said.
Nanney said her bill does not target Sharia law or any other specific foreign code or law. Her proposal has 27 House co-sponsors, including House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, R-Lexington, and 26 other Republicans, who control the General Assembly.
A similar bill was introduced in the Senate last year by another Greenville Republican, state Sen. Mike Fair. It failed to clear the subcommittee level.
Subcommittee members sent a letter to the state’s family court judges to gauge whether Sharia or other foreign laws were impacting S.C. custody and divorce cases.
“We heard no indication from any of the judges that there was a problem,” said state Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens.
Liberal groups, including the S.C. Progressive Network, say the proposal is a waste of legislative time.
“I’m much more concerned with laws being imposed by aliens from the Planet Oz,” said Brett Bursey, the group’s director. “A stealth-alien invasion of the minds of our legislators is the most plausible explanation for their obsession with fixing things that aren’t broken.”
At least one national group, the New Jersey-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which works to promote understanding of Islam, says the intent of the state proposals is devious.
“There’s no mistaking the intent of these bills. It’s to provide a mechanism for channeling and cultivating anti-Muslim sentiment,” said council attorney Gadier Abbas.
Recent versions of the bills — like South Carolina’s — do not specifically mention Sharia law, but the intent is clear, Abbas said.
“There are some misconceptions about Islam in the United States,” he said. “That, coupled with a very vocal and well-organized minority of organizations and figures that have had for their mission, for years now, to ensure Muslims are not treated as equals in the United States, is creating this new effort to bring inequality into the laws. It’s alarming.”
Abbas said there are no valid fears of foreign laws being applied in U.S. courtrooms. “Only if American law allows for it does religious tradition or foreign laws even come into play.”
But proponents of the legislation, including the American Public Policy Alliance, point to several court cases as proof that Sharia law is seeping into the U.S. court system.
In one 2009 example, a New Jersey judge denied a Muslim wife’s request for a restraining order after she claimed her husband repeatedly raped her. The court said the man thought it was his religious right to have nonconsensual sex with his wife and, therefore, he did not meet the criminal-intent standard needed to issue the restraining order.
An appellate court reversed the ruling in 2010, granting the restraining order.
In a 1996 case, a Maryland appellate court deferred to a Pakistani court in granting custody of a child to her father in Pakistan instead of her mother in Maryland. One factor mentioned in the ruling was an Islamic belief that a father gets preference in custody cases.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan government officials who traveled to the snowbound village where seven children and a young adult reportedly were killed in a NATO airstrike this week said that the bombing was based on incorrect information.
The officials said that after talking to local residents and seeing the area, they concluded that an informer had misled the French troops who control the area.
The airstrike took place on Wednesday in the village of Geyaba in the eastern Afghan province of Kapisa. Seven boys under 14 and an 18-year-old were killed in the attack, according to Abdul Mubin Safi, the administrative director of Kapisa Province. They were herding sheep less than half a mile from their homes when the bombing happened.
NATO representatives and Afghan officials traveled to the area by helicopter to investigate and returned Friday, said Maj. Jason Waggoner, a NATO spokesman. He said there was no word yet from NATO officials on the findings of the joint Afghan-NATO team.
One member of the team, Mohammad Hussain Khan Sanjani, the chairman of the provincial council who was reached by telephone in Kapisa, said that after talking with people in the village, it seemed that misinformation had been passed to NATO forces.
“These people are involved in animal husbandry, they own sheep and goats, and their children went out to feed the animals behind their village under some oak trees,” Mr. Sanjani said.
“The French troops had a secret report from one of their agents who told them that in that area there were armed men preparing to attack the government and the French soldiers in Kapisa,” he said. “We talked to locals and found that the intelligence was wrong and they targeted civilians.”
The French soldiers, who are largely responsible for Kapisa Province, have faced stiff resistance from the insurgents there and in the Sarobi district of neighboring Kabul Province. Eighty-two French soldiers have been killed in combat since 2001, mostly in those two areas.
France’s military high command did not respond to requests for comment on the airstrike in Kapisa.
The province is divided ethnically, with some areas heavily Tajik and others Pashtun. The Pashtun areas have had a strong insurgent presence that includes both Taliban fighters and fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an insurgent leader.
The Najrab district, where the airstrike occurred, is mixed with Tajiks, Pashtuns and Pashai, and while local officials said it was not held by insurgents, their presence could not be ruled out since Najrab is adjacent to less stable districts.
“The area is not influenced by the Taliban, but there was some sort of illegal weapon smuggling,” said Abdul Saboor Wafa, the Kapisa governor’s chief of staff.
Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the United States-led military coalition and the Afghan government. Civilian deaths caused by NATO and Afghan forces dropped last year, although the number of civilians killed by airstrikes that were intended to hit insurgents rose, to 187, the United Nations has reported.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the loss of life in Kapisa and blamed a NATO airstrike in a statement on Thursday.
Bangladeshis in Kensington said they are living in fear after Muslim hate graffiti was found on a storefront in the neighborhood’s bustling shopping strip.
The manager of TDS Insurance on Beverly Road near McDonald Avenue, came to work Monday and spotted a nauseating sight:
“It was written on the outside – ‘Allah is s–t,’” said Abu Chowdhury, 51, who immediately called the cops.
“I have no enemies,” he said. “We are not a religious business.”
Although the hateful message was erased hours later, Bangladeshis said the sight left them emotionally scarred.
“It is just shocking,” said Mamnunul Haq, a Bangladeshi community leader. “No one wants to see anything like that.”
“We are a very peaceful people,” Haq added.
Kensington is one of the most diverse areas in the city – home to a Muslim stronghold mainly comprised of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, living among Mexican families and Orthodox Jews.
Bangladeshis joined their Hasidic neighbors in July during the search for Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old boy who went missing in Borough Park and was later found dead.
They also blasted the vandal or vandals who painted a half dozen swastikas around Midwood last month.
“It happened in the Jewish community. And now it is happening in ours,” Haq said.
Hoping to quell the growing anxiety, Councilman Brad Lander (D-Kensington) held a meeting Wednesday night with Bangladeshi, Jewish, and Latino residents discussing ideas about how to prevent future hate crimes in their hood.
Lander wants to put a set of trees and benches in front of TDS Insurance, calling it “Kensington Plaza,” serving as a mixed race meeting spot.
“In the face of hatred, this community is coming together,” Lander said. “When these things happen, you have to stand up.”
NEW CITY, NY, Feb 7 (Reuters) – A Hasidic Jewish man from New York state pleaded guilty to assault on Tuesday for setting a neighbor on fire because he wasn’t praying with the rest of the community, leaving the man badly burned.
Shaul Spitzer, 18, of New Square, New York, admitted to lighting Aron Rottenberg ablaze after learning that he had disobeyed a prayer order by the Grand Rebbe of the Hasidic enclave about 35 miles north of New York City.
He pleaded guilty to assault in a New York court and faces up to 10 years in prison, although Judge William Kelly said he would likely receive a 5-year sentence.
Spitzer, who worked for Grand Rebbe David Twersky, admitted in court that he used a heavy duty propane lighter to set Rottenberg on fire in May 2011.
He lit him on fire when Rottenberg confronted him after Spitzer had stuffed gasoline-soaked shirts into a bag, lit it on fire and threw it onto the porch of Rottenberg’s home, he admitted. The family was sleeping inside, court documents said.
Prosecutor Stephen Moore said Rottenberg spent more than a month in the hospital for severe burns.
Under the plea deal, charges of attempted murder and arson were dismissed. Spitzer could have faced a 25-year prison sentence for those charges. Outside court, Spitzer’s attorney Kenneth Gribetz said his client had been trying to cause mischief, not to kill anyone.
“This is a young boy who has no criminal intent,” he said. “He’s not a criminal … He should be given a chance to get back on the right track.”
Spitzer, who will be sentenced in April, entered his plea on the day jury selection was set to begin in the case. Rottenberg was in court and told the judge he consented to the plea deal.
Court documents said Rottenberg’s family had received several threats and had their property vandalized for not praying in the community’s main synagogue.
Rottenburg has a pending civil lawsuit against Spitzer and Twersky stemming from the incident. Gribetz said in court a settlement in the $2 million range was under discussion. (Editing By Ellen Wulfhorst and Cynthia Johnston
Speaking today at the unofficial CPAC panel “Islamic Law in America: How the Obama Justice Department Is Selling Us Out,” sponsored by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Sharia Task Force was “proud to say” that most of the mosques attacked in the US were in the South: CPAC: Anti-Muslim Activist James Lafferty Says He’s ‘Proud’ of Attacks Against Mosques.
Well with what the gentleman was saying about the Justice Department, I went to the briefing, the hate crimes summit, and I went there and it was all Muslim officials speaking and they had all these pictures of some mosque somewhere, and it was usually in the South I’m proud to say where a guy would drive a pickup truck right into the mosque. They had I bet 20—it looked like the same picture after a while because they just kept showing these same pictures, and each Muslim speaker got up, and remember this is a Justice Department meeting, and really ragged on two groups: the FBI and the NYPD. So whatever they’re doing they’re doing something good.
Meanwhile, after ranting earlier this week that no one reads LGF or takes me seriously, and that I was a “boil on the ass of the blogosphere,” Geller blocked me on Twitter, then proceeded to tweet the following to me today — even though, since she blocked me, I was unlikely to even see it. (I only saw it because one of her followers retweeted it.)
Pamela Geller@Atlasshrugs
Breitbart, Geller, Spencer – we’re coming to get you, Chuckie! twitpic.com/8i1kz8 @AndrewBreitbart @jihadwatchRS @Lizardoid
10 Feb 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
This is the picture Geller posted:
It’s nice to know that Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Andrew Breitbart all have a little internalized version of me living inside their heads, making them miserable.
Congressmen (including Democrats) and former government officials have met with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization that was designated a terrorist group in 1997 when the list was first compiled, and is STILL ON THE LIST–for now.
MEK has a very aggressive and organized lobby effort in Washington D.C. According to one House staffer, the MEK is “the most mobilized grassroots advocacy effort in the country — AIPAC included.” Their mission is to be delisted as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), push the USA to foment war with Iran, i.e. “regime change,” and have themselves installed into power. Sound familiar?
This exposed several issues which I touched upon in my July article:
1.) It is a felony to provide a designated terrorist organization with “material support,” which many elected officials it can be argued have been doing!
2.) “Numerous Muslims inside the U.S. have been prosecuted for providing ‘material support for Terrorism’ for doing far less than these American politicians are publicly doing on behalf of a designated Terrorist group.” Read Glenn Greenwald’s piece for a far from comprehensive list of Muslims who have been charged for doing far less than what these politicians did! (H/T: Believing Atheist)
Danios has written several pieces on the “Greater Islamophobia,” i.e. “bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim lands.” His and Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the uptick in war propaganda, covert operations by both the USA and Israel are must reads. It is clear that we are reaching a crucial point from which we will be unable to return: are the wheels turning irreversibly towards war?
According to the Iranian American Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, the fact that there is so much public discussion of “war” against Iran is indicative of a private aversion to confrontation, he told us:
Nobody is going to war with Iran, neither the United States or Israel. I can tell you for a fact that Israel is not going to war with Iran because Israel keeps talking about it. If anybody who has studied Israeli politics at all can tell you anything is if Israel talks about bombing Iran then that means it has no intentions of doing it. When the Israelis want you dead you just die, OK.
Reza’s logic is pretty sound and lets hope he continues to be right, but sometimes, even when no one wants war you get war. History is replete with such a fact.
In the meantime we have the Israeli effort at sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program by targeting and killing Iranian scientists. It has been a not-so-well-hidden-secret that Israel has been using the MEK as a proxy in this war, a claim leveled by Iran for quite some time.
Now we have US officials confirming this fact. Of course, if true, this is nothing less than government sponsored terrorism!
All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.” Iran has long insisted the Israel and the U.S. are using MEK to carry out Terrorist attacks on its soil, including the murder of its scientists, and NBC notes that these acknowledgments “confirm charges leveled by Iran’s leaders” (MEK issued a statement denying the report).
The ramifications for this are disturbing to say the least. The hypocrisy and double standards it exposes once again are evident. Greenwald summarizes the questions and conclusions reached from the NBC report far more eloquently than I could, so I repeat them:
If these senior U.S. officials are telling the truth, there are a number of vital questions and conclusions raised by this. First, it would mean that the assurances by MEK’s paid American shills such as Howard Dean that “they are unarmed” are totally false: whoever murdered these scientists is obviously well-armed. Second, this should completely gut the effort to remove MEK from the list of designated Terrorist groups; after all, murdering Iran’s scientists through the use of bombs and guns is a defining act of a Terror group, at least as U.S. law attempts to define the term. Third, this should forever resolve the debate in which I was involved last month about whether the attack on these Iranian scientists constitutes Terrorism; as Daniel Larson put it yesterday: “If true, the murders of Iranian nuclear scientists with bombs have been committed by a recognized terrorist group. Can everyone acknowledge at this point that these attacks were acts of terrorism?”
Fourth, and most important: if this report is true, is this not definitive proof that Israel is, by definition, a so-called state sponsor of Terrorism? Leaving everything else aside, if Israel, as NBC reports, has “financed, trained and armed” a group officially designated by the U.S. Government as a Terrorist organization, isn’t that the definitive act of how one becomes an official “state sponsor of Terrorism”? Amazingly, as Daniel Larison notes, one of the people who most vocally attacked me for labeling the murder of Iranian scientists as “Terrorism” and for generally arguing that Terrorism is a meaningless, cynically applied term — Commentary‘s Jonathan Tobin — yesterday issued a justification for why Israel should be working with Terrorist groups like MEK. As Larison wrote about Tobin’s article:
In other words, Israeli state sponsorship of a terrorist group is acceptable because it’s in a good cause. . . . Because Israel is overreacting to a perceived threat from Iran, Tobin believes it is entirely defensible for Israel to partner with a recognized terrorist group. In other words, Tobin believes that terrorism is “entirely defensible” so long as it is committed by the right people and directed at the right targets. It’s as if he is going out of his way to vindicate Glenn Greenwald.
Of course, as I documented in my last book, those who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting Giuliani, Rendell, Ridge, Townsend, Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups. But this incident also underscores the specific point that the term Terrorism is so completely meaningless, manipulated and mischievous: it’s just a cynical term designed to delegitimize violence and even political acts undertaken by America’s enemies while shielding from criticism the actual Terrorism undertaken by itself and its allies. The spectacle whereby a designated Terrorist group can pay top American politicians to advocate for them even as they engage in violent Terrorist acts, all while being trained, funded and aided by America’s top client state, should forever end the controversy over that glaringly obvious proposition.
Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissidentgroup that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.
The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.
The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.
The Iranians have no doubt who is responsible – Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.
“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel. “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information. And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”
Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs. In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack.
Much of what the Iranian government knows of the attacks and the links between Israel and MEK comes from interrogation of an assassin who failed to carry out an attack in late 2010 and the materials found on him, Larijani said. (Click here to see a video report of the interrogation shown on Iranian televsion.)
The U.S.-educated Larijani, whose two younger brothers run the legislative and judicial branches of the Iranian government, said the Israelis’ rationale is simple. “Israel does not have direct access to our society. Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have … a good number of … places to get into the touch with people. So I think they are working hand-to-hand very close. And we do have very concrete documents.”
Two seniorU.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.” All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.
As it has in the past, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined comment. Said a spokesman, “As long as we can’t see all the evidence being claimed by NBC, the Foreign Ministry won’t react to every gossip and report being published worldwide.”
For its part, the MEK pointed to a statement calling the allegations “absolutely false.”
Ali Safavi, a long-time representative of the MEK, underscored the denial after publication of this article,
“There has never been and there is no MEK member in Israel, period,” he said. “The MEK has categorically denied any involvement. The idea that Israel is training MEK members on its soil borders on perversity. It is absolutely and completely false.”
The sophistication of the attacks supports the Iranian claims that an experienced intelligence service is involved, experts say.
In the most recent attack, on Jan. 11, 2012, Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan died in a blast in Tehran moments after two assailants on a motorcycle placed a small magnetic bomb on his vehicle. Roshan was a deputy director at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and was reportedly involved in procurement for the nuclear program, which Iran insists is not a weapons program.
Previous attacks include the assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, killed by a bomb outside his Tehran home in January 2010, and an explosion in November of that year that took the life of Majid Shahriari and wounded Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
In the case of Roshan, the bomb appears to have been a shaped charge that directed all the explosive power inside the vehicle, killing him and his bodyguard driver but leaving nearby traffic unaffected.
Although Roshan was directly involved in the nuclear program, working at the huge centrifuge facility between Tehran and Qom, Iran’s religious center, at least one other scientist who was killed wasn’t linked to the Iranian nuclear program, according to Larijani.
Speaking of bombing victim Ali-Mohammadi, whom he described as a friend, Larijani told NBC News, “In fact this guy who was assassinated was not involved in the nitty-gritty of the situation. He was a scientist, a physicist, working on the theoretically parts of nuclear energy, which you can teach it in every university. You can find it in every text.”
“This is an Israeli plot. A dirty plot,” Larijani added angrily. He also claimed the assassinations are not having an effect on the program and have only made scientists more resolute in carrying out their mission.
Not so, said Ronen Bergman, an Israeli commentator and author of “Israel’s Secret War with Iran” and an upcoming book tentatively titled, “Mossad and the Art of Assassination. (Read the rest)
I will end by saying that this hypocrisy and double standards are nothing new to us. We reported back in July on the collaboration between US politicians and the material support they were clearly lending to a “designated terrorist organization.” Muslims and Islamic groups who have far less power than these hypocritical politicians are tarnished with the “unindicted terrorist” label and hence marginalized while the politicians roam free and actually put money into their pocket books from these terror groups.
Israel’s lies, distortions and terror are also well known to us. This is not the first time Israel has delved into “government sponsored terror” and it likely won’t be the last! On a daily basis Israel is terrorizing the Palestinians, a point many seem to miss! The question is when will we wake up and hold our political class to account for the hypocrisy, the double standards, the erosion of our civil liberties or are we willing to give it away for the false mirage of “security?”
To these Marines all Afghans are probably “Sand N*****s” and so they have no issue with posing with a Nazi symbol.
The story below highlights that many Jewish organizations and others are outraged by the photo and are demanding an investigation. My question is how are the above soldiers going to be investigated or held accountable when you have soldiers who have clearly committed war crimes and perpetrated massacres getting off for free or a slap of the wrist?
SAN DIEGO — A leading Jewish organization and others outraged by a photo showing Marine snipers in Afghanistan posing with a logo resembling a notorious Nazi symbol are demanding President Barack Obama order an investigation and hold the troops accountable.
The Marine Corps has said it does not plan any discipline because there was no malicious intent. The Marines mistakenly believed the “SS” in the shape of white lightning bolts on the blue flag were a nod to sniper scouts — not members of Adolf Hitler’s special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
The Marines are no longer with Charlie Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, out of the base north of San Diego, and Chapin said she did not know if they had left the Corps.
Military officials learned of the photograph in November and investigated immediately. It later surfaced on a blog of a military weapons company.
In the September 2010 photo taken in the Sangin district of Helmand province, 10 Marines pose with sniper rifles in front of an American flag above a dark blue flag with the “SS” letters.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he does not believe it was an innocent mistake and insisted the American public has a right to know what happened.
His organization — one of the largest international Jewish human rights groups with more than 400,000 members — is demanding Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta launch another investigation and discipline those involved.
“That 70 years after the United States Armed Forces helped liberate Europe from Nazi Germany, to learn that a unit of the United States Marine Corps serving in Afghanistan adopted the SS insignia alongside the Stars and Stripes, desecrates the memory of some 200,000 Americans who gave up their lives to defend freedom against that infamous symbol,” he said in a statement.
The Corps has used the incident as a training tool to talk to troops about what symbols are acceptable, Chapin said.
“I don’t believe that the Marines involved would have ever used any type of symbol associated with the Nazi Germany military criminal organization that committed mass atrocities in WWII,” Chapin said. “It’s not within who we are as Marines.”
Hier said it clearly shows more training about the Holocaust and the SS unit is needed.
It was the second time this year that images have surfaced showing Marines acting improperly and forcing the Corps to deal with the fallout. Last month, the Pentagon scrambled to contain the damage after an Internet video purportedly showed Marines urinating on Taliban corpses — an act that appears to violate international laws of warfare and further strains U.S.-Afghan relations. Panetta called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to offer assurances of an investigation, and the top Marine general promised an internal probe as well as a criminal one.
Those Marines, like the ones in front of the flag, fought in former Taliban strongholds in Helmand province. They are based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee signaled Thursday he intends to keep investigating the American Muslim community despite a report this week that showed the number of Muslim extremists arrested for terrorism is on the wane.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), said he would resume his controversial hearings on radicalization among Muslim-Americans this year despite critics who say the focus on one ethnic group fuels bigotry and paranoia.
The chairman also said the committee would hold hearings on Islamist money coming into the United States and on “Iran’s intelligence services, proxies such as Hezbollah, and its ally of convenience, al-Qaeda; and the looming Iranian terror threat to the homeland.”
King will also continue his probe of leaks to a Hollywood filmmaker of classified details of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, as well as about operations at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, saying they “could endanger the lives of our intelligence officers and special operators, their families, and the homeland.”
Previous hearings led by King last year on the same topic awakened a storm of controversy, with critics questioning whether Congress should single out a specific minority group as a possible threat to national security.
King held the controversial hearings, bearing the title “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.” Opponents such as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said the hearings dredged up the dark days of McCarthyism and only served to “vilify” a segment of the American population.
Also on the committee’s agenda this year is an investigation of “the possible roles that the deceased al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and his at-large associates, Daoud Chehazeh and Eyad al-Rababah, might have played in facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”
In addition, the committee plans to review security preparations for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and seek obtaining Purple Heart medals for the military victims of the 2009 terror attacks in Little Rock, Ark., and at Fort Hood, Texas.
The committee has scheduled its first hearing of the year on Wednesday, when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will testify on President Obama’s 2013 budget request, expected Monday.
U.S. government officials and their cheerleaders in the community of so-called “Terrorism experts” have spent the last two years justifying Endless War and ever-increasing surveillance, detention and militarism authorities with a steady drumbeat of shrill warnings that the nation faces a new, grave menace: the threat of “Homegrown Terrorism” from radicalized American Muslims:
The government has failed to anticipate the danger from homegrown terrorists, some of whom immigrated to the United States, and now faces the most complex set of threats since the Sept. 11 attacks, analysts on an organization headed by the two 9/11 Commission co-chairmen warned Friday. . . .
“The United States has failed to fundamentally understand and prepare for these threats,” group member Bruce Hoffman said. “Terrorists may have found our Achilles’ heel. We have no strategy to deal with this growing problem and emerging threat.”
A new report to be released later Friday says that in the nine years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the terrorist threat against the United States has fundamentally changed. The biggest threat is no longer coming from the dusty landscape of Afghanistan or the mountains of Pakistan border regions. Instead, experts say, the threat now comes from within our own borders, in the form of homegrown terrorists.
“A key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played in the leadership of al-Qaida and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups,” a new report by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group says.
In a rare and wide-ranging interview, the attorney general [Eric Holder] disclosed chilling, new details about the evolving threat of homegrown terror . . . . What was uppermost on his mind, however, is the alarming rise in the number of Americans who are more than willing to attack and kill their fellow citizens. . . .
“The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born,” he said. . . .
Homeland security and counter-terrorism officials warned lawmakers Wednesday that the nation is increasingly threatened by foreign terrorists who seek to recruit U.S. citizens.
The largest threat to the U.S. is no longer Osama Bin Laden, according to the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCIC), Michael Leiter, but is now Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula group based out of Yemen.
The increased threat that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula poses revolves heavily around its ability to attract and reach U.S.-natives who want to be trained in terrorism techniques, and who could fall beneath the radar of intelligence circles more easily.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told members at the hearing that domestic terrorism and homegrown radicalization is a very large focus of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The proliferation of radicalized followers of al Qaeda within the U.S. has put the nation at a heightened risk of terrorist attacks, though on a smaller scale than the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes, security officials told Congress Wednesday. . . . ”In some ways, the threat facing us is at its most heightened state since” 9/11, [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano told the House Committee on Homeland Security . . . U.S. counterterrorism officials, led by White House terrorism adviser John Brennan, are turning their sights on the threat posed by homegrown extremists . . . . The rise of homegrown threats has occurred despite U.S. successes fighting al Qaeda’s central command, according to a report released this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Several top U.S. counterterrorism officials had the same message: Americans radicalized at home and trained in Pakistan represent a new and disturbing threat to the American homeland.
The number of terror incidents involving Islamic radicals who are U.S. citizens has seen an uptick in recent years. . . . As the list has grown, the question increasingly arises of how to combat Islamist terrorism at home.
Homegrown Islamic terrorists — possibly including radicalized American soldiers — who target U.S. military communities in the homeland are a “severe and emerging threat,” according to a new Congressional report.
The report, released by the staff of Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says there have been at least 33 “threats, plots and strikes” against U.S. military communities since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and the likelihood of another deadly attack by “militant Islamists” is a “severe threat.”
But like virtually every War on Terror threat hyped by government officials, these claims are wildly exaggerated to the point of pure fabrication; from The New York Times today:
A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.
The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.
Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.
Just consider what the constant hyping of this “miniscule threat” has enabled. The once-controversial Patriot Act was extended for another four years with no reforms whatsoever based on these fears (Christian Science Monitor: “National Intelligence Director James Clapper warned the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that failure to renew the [Patriot Act] provisions could stymie important intelligence-gathering operations both domestically and abroad”; ”‘When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected,’ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday. In unusually personal criticism of a fellow senator, he warned that [Rand] Paul, by blocking swift passage of the bill, ‘is threatening to take away the best tools we have for stopping them’”).
The French prime minister and his cabinet have stormed out of parliament after an opposition MP accused the rightwing interior minister of flirting with Nazi ideology.
The Socialist Serge Letchimy, from Martinique, questioned the interior minister and close Sarkozy ally, Claude Guéant, over his controversial comments this weekend that “not all civilisations are of equal value”, and his assertion that some civilisations, namely France’s, are worth more than others.
Letchimy said Guéant was “day by day leading us back to these European ideologies that gave birth to concentration camps”. After a loud interruption of protests, he added: “Mr Guéant, the Nazi regime, which was so concerned about purity, was that a civilization?”
In a rare move, the entire French government stormed out of the question-time session.
The French political class has been at each other’s throats this week over the latest stance by Guéant, who was once Sarkozy’s most senior adviser and is seen as the president’s mouthpiece for rightwing views to court voters from Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National.
Over the past year Guéant has been accused of deliberate anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric after saying the number of Muslims in France was a “problem”, linking immigrants to crime and unemployment, saying the French wanted their country to “remain French”, and that Sarkozy’s drive for military intervention in Libya was a “crusade”.
This weekend he told a meeting with students: “Contrary to the leftwing relativist ideology, for us, not all civilisations are equal. Those who defend humanity seem more advanced to us than those who deny it. Those who defend freedom, equality and brotherhood seem to us superior to those that accept tyranny, subjugation of women and social or ethnic hatred.”
Muslim groups in France sought assurances that Guéant, who is in charge of immigration and religion in the French cabinet, was not referring to Islam and French Muslims. He replied that he had not been targeting any civilisation in particular.
Sarkozy backed Guéant’s comments as “common sense” and dismissed the “ridiculous controversy”.
The French prime minister François Fillon demanded an apology from the Socialist party for the “indecent” and “shameful” Nazi analogy in parliament. The head of the ruling rightwing UMP party’s parliament group, Christian Jacob, said an analogy of this kind was a first in the history of parliament.
The Socialist Letchimy said that as the son of a slave, he refused to apologise. Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialist parliamentary group, said Guéant’s “repeated provocations” had damaged the political climate.
Some in Sarkozy’s own camp had distanced themselves from Guéant in recent days. “He makes a better minister than ethnologist,” said the former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
I don’t think this hooligan should have been jailed for burning the Koran, though in his case he probably meant to send the same message that the KKK sends when “burning crosses.” Either way his actions since being released confirm that he is an unhinged and violent character.
A former Carlisle soldier just released from jail for publicly burning the Koran was among nearly a dozen people who racially abused two takeaway workers.
The city’s crown court heard that Andrew Ryan, 33, and his brother Matthew Ryan, 27, were part of a group who threatened and racially abused two Turkish men at Manhattan Pizza in Botchergate last year.
The Ryan brothers, along with three other men and four women, pleaded guilty to two charges of using racially aggravated threatening behaviour. All admitted that their abuse of the two takeaway workers had been inspired by their mistaken belief that the men were Pakistani.
Before the group are sentenced on Thursday, Judge Paul Batty QC will be shown a video of the ugly incident in which they were involved on May 20 last year.
The CCTV shows the group massing in a threatening manner outside the takeaway shop shortly before 8pm. They are seen angrily remonstrating with the two Turkish workers, some of the group ranting and repeatedly jabbing their fingers as they spill into the shop.
One of the men in the group flicked a lighted cigarette into the shop, and a drinks can is also tossed inside. At one stage, the video shows one of the defendants striding into the shop and throwing a chair.
The terrifying incident came shortly after Andrew Ryan was released from a 70-day jail term for burning the Koran in Carlisle city centre. He claimed he committed that offence with the aim of causing offence to only Islamic extremists.
After he was convicted of burning the Qur’an in April last year Andrew Ryan was treated as a hero by the EDL, who organised a demonstration in solidarity with him before he was sentenced. As the News & Star reported:
“He arrived at the city magistrates’ court flanked by men waving the St George’s Cross and shouting nationalist chants. The English Defence League Carlisle Division had put out a call for members to support Ryan. A group gathered to parade through the city centre with him, carrying a flag with ‘EDL’ written on it. It also bore the scrawled message: ‘It’s our country, we are taking it back’.”
Charles Johnson has for quite some time been a consistent and stalwart opponent of the hatemongers: Spencer, Geller, Wilders, etc. For this he has been on the receiving end of threats and attacks from the hate propagandists.
I just want to point out the difference between Charles Johnson and someone like Eric Allen Bell.
Charles Johnson saw the turn toward fascism and the clear hate of Muslims amongst Spencer, Geller and their alliess across the Atlantic and he called them out on it. Eric Allen Bell on the other hand went from documenting bigotry and hate revolving around the Murfreesboro Mosque community to defecting to the JihadWatch twilight-zone.
Anti-Muslim hate group leader Pamela Geller has seized on the murder of a 20-year old Muslim woman in Michigan, labeled it an “honor killing,” and is now planning to hold a “conference” using the murdered woman’s name — against the wishes of the woman’s family, and even though both the family and the prosecutor in the case say it was the act of an abusive stepfather, not an “honor killing” at all. And to make it even more disgusting, Geller is calling her hatefest a “human rights conference.”
It’s hard to imagine someone so twisted and dysfunctional that they’d intrude on a family’s grief over a murdered child, and use the victim’s name against the family’s wishes. But Geller is defiantly determined to exploit this murder for all the bigoted hatred she can wring out of it: Slain Woman’s Name on ‘Human Rights’ Conference Upsets Her Family.
Jessica’s murder made international headlines. She left Minnesota to escape an allegedly physically and mentally abusive stepfather, but in April of 2011, her stepfather, Rahim Alfatlawi, drove from Minnesota to her grandmother’s Warren home and shot her in the head.
Her family calls it an awful tragedy, but others are calling it an honor killing.
“We know that this is a practice under Islamic law. The honor killing is the final act. People know very little of the terror … that these girls live under,” said Pamela Geller.
She is the head of Stop the Islamization of America. Geller is hosting a conference on the anniversary of Jessica’s death in Dearborn. It’s called the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.
“We cannot sanction this gendercide. We cannot sanction the diminishment and dehumanization of women. We must speak up,” Geller said.
We asked Jessica’s stepmother, Cassandra Mokdad, whether her murder was an honor killing. “Absolutely it was not,” she said. She told us this disgusting act had nothing to do with Islam, a religion she said Jessica practiced proudly.
“It was nothing about religion or anything. It was just about a sick human being,” Mohammed Mokdad said.
“He wanted to have a relationship with Jessica as more than her stepfather. He wanted to have a more romantic relationship with her,” Cassandra Mokdad explained.
“She’s using Jessica as her poster child for anti-Islam.” Even the Macomb County Prosecutor on the case said Alfatlawi murdered Jessica because he was obsessed with her, not the religion, and Jessica’s family wants her name taken off the conference.
“She’s using Jessica as her poster child for anti-Islam,” said Cassandra Mokdad.
“What gulls me is that there is this prohibition on discussing it and the ideology that inspires honor killings,” Geller explained.
She said this conference will happen and the name won’t be changed.
“We’re definitely going to have this conference and it will not be stopped. Their directing their barbs at me. I didn’t kill Jessica. I’m trying to save the next girl. They should be helping me save the next girl,” said Geller.
“Absolutely I’ll go. I won’t let her sit there and misuse Jessica’s name, and I will let her know exactly how I feel,” Cassandra Mokdad told us.
But wait — the story gets even more repellent, because Geller and her followers bullied and harassed the management of the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan into giving her a conference room for free to hold this ugly hatefest, after they canceled a previous Geller hatefest. Unbelievable.
Here’s a page with contact info for the Dearborn Hyatt, if you’d like to let the management know how you feel about this disgusting event: Detroit Metro Hotel – Detroit Michigan Hotels – Hyatt Regency Dearborn. They backed down and tried to appease Geller, and as a result she’s now using their facilities to exploit a murdered woman’s name to spread hatred.
Right-wing Christianity’s favorite self-hating racist, Hanan Tudor, a.k.a Brigitte Gabriel has been making a killing through her anti-Islam organization “ACT! For America,” also better known as Hate! for America.
As you can see Gabriel is up to her usual gimmick, fear-mongering about the deadly and dire “Islamization of the USA,” which is supposedly happening right under the patriotic noses of: good, wholesome, real Americans! According to her the Muslims are being aided in this anti-American endeavor by the liberals who wish nothing more than to see America destroyed!
She says at the 6:00 minute mark about the “Liberal-Islamic axis of evil”:
They’re doing exactly what Hitler did. What did Hitler say, what did Hitler do? “Give me the children and I’ll change society in ten years.”
Really? The Hitler card? Isn’t that played out by now?
Cornerstone Church has a history of giving a platform to this sort of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim propaganda. I won’t be surprised if one of its congregants believes he/she has to take out the Muslims before they take over, or perhaps a la cultural-Christian-Templar-Knight-Terrorist Anders Breivik, take out the liberals who are facilitating the so-called “demise of the USA.”
*********************
While Brigitte Gabriel’s reputation has been severely discredited and she is unable to get the kind of access that she was accustomed to in the past she is still able to weasel her way at times into the mainstream.
Such was the case recently in an article written by Frida Ghatis for McClatchy Newspapers and which was picked up by the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and several other papers. Ghatis’ article was titled, Truly Revolutionary: Arabs Speaking Well of Israel.
The piece is pro-Israel propaganda through-and-through and while maintaining a veneer of objectivity it degrades the successes of the Arab Spring and revolves around the not-so-hidden thesis that a real revolution in the Arab world would be one in which Arabs “speak well of Israel.” No explanation is given of why many Arabs are anti-Israel (i.e. occupation, apartheid, discrimination, war crimes, the bombing of Arab countries, etc.).
Instead the focus is: will Arabs finally love Israel and say nice things about it. All pretense to objectivity is dropped when we come to this sentence:
Pro-Israel Arabs, Muslims, and former Muslims who use their real names are usually people living safely in the West, such as Lebanon’s Brigitte Gabriel, Somalia’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Egypt’s Tawfik Hamid, or Canada’s Irshad Manji.
We have covered all of the loons mentioned above by Ghatis. If Ghatis was willing to do a basic search on Gabriel she would realize that Gabriel doesn’t even consider herself an Arab! In fact, Gabriel believes Arabs have no soul!:
The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil [applause]…. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no SOUL!, they are dead set on killing and destruction. And in the name of something they call “Allah” which is very different from the God we believe….[applause] because our God is the God of love.
One can see why Ghatis would be so enthusiastic about Gabriel, she really speaks so“well” of Israel.
The Clarion Fund, an organization which produces Islamophobic documentaries, came under renewed scrutiny last month when news broke that their film “The Third Jihad” was screened at an NYPD conference. Facing calls for his resignation, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, after some dissembling, admitted he was interviewed for the project and apologized for his role, calling the film “inflammatory.” Clarion, however, bragged about the attention.
Now, Clarion appears to be throwing caution to the wind — along with any plausible defense that the group is not Islamophobic — by promoting a comment from a reader seeking to redeem the views of the anti-Muslim right-wing extremist who terrorized Norway this summer, killing 77, including 69 people at a youth camp. In an e-mail newsletter to supporters, Clarion Fund quoted the reader suggesting that a recent report that militant Islamic extremism posed the top threat to Norway redeemed the unheralded warnings of Anders Breivik, the anti-Muslim killer.
The newsletter, published by the organization’s radicalislam.org website, promoted the comment from a “reader in Norway.” It read:
What a hot current topic this is! Just today the news came out in Norway, “officially” and in spite of all the PC-ness of this government, that according to the national security forces, the threat of Islamist terrorism is the foremost threat against Norway. You probably remember the July 22 shootings. One of Breivik’s arguments was that the authorities were not taking this threat seriously because you musn’t offend a Muslim. Interesting development.
Clarion’s willingness to promote and publish an e-mail sympathetic to Breivik seems a bizarre move for an organization under fire for Islamophobia, especially when the comment obfuscates the bigoted point Breivik was making about Islam at-large — the very same conflation between extremism and the whole faith the Clarion Fund has repeatedly been accused of making.
Breivik’s warnings did not focus on Muslim extremism, but rather on Islam at-large. Breivik’s1,500-page manifesto is littered with comments about Islam in general, for instance arguing that the Muslim veil “should more properly be viewed as the uniform of a Totalitarian movement, and a signal to attack those outside the movement.” He called Islam a “totalitarian, racist and violent political ideology,” and said its holy book, the Koran, should be banned. Breivik’s warning was not about, as the reader wrote, “Islamist terrorism,” but about Islam:
What is likely to happen to the West, if it continues to follow its present policy of ‘political correctness’ and apathy towards the hostile teachings of Islam, [will be like] “the Islamic conquest of India…”
“In order to wake up the masses,” the soon-to-be killer wrote before attacking government offices and a political youth camp, “the only rational approach will be to make sure the current system implodes.”
Breivik went on in his manifesto to cite the writings of numerous American right-wing Islamophobes and recommended the Clarion Fund’s film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” for “further studies.” He even included a link to it.
While the Norwegian security services’ report did indeed cite Islamic-inspired extremism as the country’s top threat, that assessment actually proves Breivik’s assertion wrong: Norwegian authorities seem rather well-attuned to the serious threat posed by the few radicalized, extremist Muslims in Norway.
Despite the citations, Clarion is not, of course, responsible for Breivik’s attack. But by singling out and publishing a reader comment that whitewashed and sought to exonerate Breivik’s murderous ideology, the Clarion Fund may be tipping their hand as to how closely their views dovetail with his. (HT: Demographics United)
With Sue Myrick's departure in 2013, the 9th Congressional District seat will shift to another person for only the fifth time since Republican Charles Jonas went to Washington in 1953. DIEDRA LAIRD - 2008 CHARLOTTE OBSERVER FILE PHOTO
Here are the top three reasons why we are happy Sue Myrick will not seek another term:
She wrote the forward to “Muslim Mafia”, a book that argues that Muslims crept into our government by an orchestrated network of spy interns.
By Tim Funk and Jim Morrill tfunk@charlotteobserver.com, jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com
U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick’s surprise announcement Tuesday that she’ll leave Washington after nine terms sparked a scramble by would-be successors that reached halfway around the world – literally.
Mecklenburg County commissioner Jim Pendergraph, a Republican and longtime Myrick ally, is expected to announce his candidacy this morning – apparently with Myrick’s blessing.
“Sue and I have been friends for 25 years and she’s very close,” said Pendergraph, a former Mecklenburg sheriff and one-time Democrat. “And I just would expect that she would (support me).”
Former GOP state Sen. Robert Pittenger, who is also among those mulling a run in the predominantly Republican 9th Congressional District, was notified by a reporter while on a mission trip in China.
“I … will discuss with my wife and family when I return,” he said in an email.
And Andy Dulin, a GOP Charlotte City Council member whose district overlaps with Myrick’s in southeast Charlotte, said he’ll make a decision on whether to run by week’s end.
Other Republicans mentioned: Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James, who said he will decide soon; and Dan Barry, mayor pro tem of Weddington, who has been running in the crowded 8th District race but actually lives in the 9th.
Former Republican Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory would have been a sure candidate for the seat if – after years of waiting for it to become vacant – he had not decided to try instead for the N.C. governor’s mansion.
Mecklenburg County commissioner Jennifer Roberts, who’s a Democrat, also is considering a run. So may Jeff Doctor, a Democrat who challenged Myrick in 2010.
But the 9th District has historically been a safe GOP seat – and one that rarely changes occupants.
With Myrick’s departure in 2013, the office will shift to another person for only the fifth time since Republican Charles Jonas went to Washington in 1953. Since then, the seat was held by Jim Martin, Alex McMillan and Myrick.
Its boundaries have changed over the years, and it shifts shape again under the reapportionment map approved last year by the N.C. legislature. The Charlotte-centered district is even more Republican, with Mecklenburg County comprising a larger slice. It no longer includes Gaston County. Instead it takes in southern Iredell County and northern Union. Still, seven out of 10 district residents live in Mecklenburg County.
About 40 percent of the voters are registered Republicans, with Democrats comprising 32 percent and independents, 28 percent.
It’s also a predominantly white district (83 percent).
‘Grateful for the privilege’
Myrick, who will turn 71 this year, made her announcement on Facebook just days before Monday’s start of filing.
“After thoughtful discussion with my family, I have decided not to run for another term in Congress,” Myrick wrote. “I’m grateful for the privilege of serving. … We will spend the rest of the year working on the issues that are important to all of you – and I hope to be a positive influence.”
Myrick gave no reason for her decision. She and her staff did not return phone calls Tuesday.
Many GOP stalwarts expected her to run for a 10th term.
“I was quite surprised by her decision,” said state Sen. Bob Rucho, a Matthews Republican. “I talked to her the other day and never got an inkling about it. … I applaud her for her great job and wish her the very best as we move forward.”
Myrick’s road to Washington began in Charlotte, where she served on the City Council before defeating Democrat Harvey Gantt in the 1987 mayoral race. She served two terms, then ran unsuccessfully for her party’s U.S. Senate nomination in 1992.
Two years later, Myrick was elected to Congress as part of a GOP tidal wave that ended the Democrats’ 40-year control of the House. She won with 66 percent of the vote, becoming only the second woman to be elected to a full congressional term in North Carolina.
Her platform that year called for term limits for members of Congress. But Myrick never got around to limiting her own terms, going on to easily win eight more times.
A staunch conservative, Myrick also managed to move up the leadership ladder in the House. By 2004, she was both a member of the powerful Rules Committee, which decides which bills go to the floor, and chair of the Republican Study Committee, whose members are often to the right of the House’s GOP leaders.
Over the years, she emerged as a fiscal conservative, but one who favored federal money for road projects in her district. As a breast cancer survivor, she became a champion for increased coverage of mammograms. And, especially in recent years, Myrick waged high-profile, often controversial, campaigns against illegal immigration and radical Islam, which she charged had infiltrated the U.S. government.
On Tuesday, Republicans praised her record; some Democrats criticized it.
“Sue Myrick has been an incredibly effective leader,” said N.C. Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes, a former congressman who served with Myrick. “Throughout her time in Congress, she earned the respect of the leadership by always being a strong voice for her district.”
But N.C. Democratic Party spokesman Walton Robinson said voters in her district will now “have the opportunity to elect a responsive, constituent-oriented representative who will take their concerns to Washington – not the other way around, as Sue Myrick has done for so many years.”
‘Not just NO, but HELL NO!’
Myrick was not the kind of House member to show up on national talk shows every Sunday.
But, in 2006, she did made national news – and seemed to speak for many around the country – when she sent a one-sentence letter to President George W. Bush, then had her office email a copy to reporters.
“In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab Emirates,” she wrote, “not just NO, but HELL NO!”
Myrick also demonstrated her toughness in a more personal way, by surviving breast cancer.
Diagnosed in 1999, she agonized over whether to make the news public.
“I have a very public job, so was concerned about what to tell the media about my surgery,” she wrote in a 2005 blog for the website Yahoo! Health. “My husband and I discussed it and decided that I had a ‘bully pulpit’ and should go public if it would help others. It was the best thing I did.”
She also served as a mentor for other GOP congressmen, including Cherryville’s Patrick McHenry, who was the youngest member of Congress when first elected to represent North Carolina’s 10th District in 2004.
“I have always been amazed by how hard Sue works,” McHenry said in a statement Tuesday. “Her leadership on health care and our national security will be sorely missed.”
Critics, foes welcome news
Myrick also had her share of foes, including Charlotte area Muslims and Hispanics who often criticized her outspokenness on issues relating to national security and immigration.
“We lost someone who worked tirelessly to fuel the flames of fear against the Muslim community and worked to make it hard for us to practice our faith openly,” said Jibril Hough, spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte, who welcomed the news that Myrick was retiring.
Local Muslims criticized her for writing the foreword to a book – “Muslim Mafia” – whose researcher called Islam a disease. And in 2003, during remarks about domestic security threats, Myrick upset U.S. Arabs and Muslims by saying: “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.”
She publicly faulted the U.S. intelligence community for failing to see a connection between al-Qaida and Samir Khan, a radical Charlotte blogger who left for Yemen to edit a magazine for the terrorist group and was later killed in a U.S. strike.
Last year, the congresswoman made headlines when she cancelled appearances at 9/11 memorial events because, she told the Observer, intelligence sources had alerted her that her name had turned up in a threatening Iranian news agency article.
Some criticized her, saying she was exaggerating the threat for political gain. But with the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, many members of Congress have been more concerned about their safety.
Appealed to GOP base
Some of the stands that upset Myrick’s critics delighted her Republican base.
She put getting tough on illegal immigration near the top of her agenda, for example.
In 2005, she managed to include her amendment to deport any illegal immigrant convicted of drunken driving in a bill that passed the House but died in the Senate.
She forged on, later reintroducing the “Scott Gardner Act” – named for a Mount Holly teacher killed in a 2005 wreck caused by an undocumented immigrant driving drunk – in the House.WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FRANCO ORDONEZ AND STAFF WRITER DAVID PERLMUTT CONTRIBUTED.
According to the Sikh Society of Michigan, the Sikh temple (known as a Gurdwara) in Sterling Heights has been under construction for several years, without any incidents or controversy.
That changed when someone vandalized the building sometime on Sunday night.
The vandals spray painted “don’t builed” [sic] on an outside wall. They also left images of a cross, a gun, and a misspelled version of the name “Mohammed.”
Muslims revere Mohammed as a prophet, but it has nothing to do with the Sikh religion. The word leads many to believe to believe the vandals thought they were targeting Muslims.
Dawud Walid, executive director for the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), calls the vandalism a hate crime.
“We joined the Sikh community in calling for local and federal law enforcement to use their full resources to investigate this recent hate crime,” Walid said.
The US Justice Department in Detroit says the incident is on their radar. They’ve met with members of the Sikh community about it.
But a DOJ spokeswoman says it’s yet how they’ll be involved in the investigation, or any potential prosecution. Anyone with information about the incident should contact Sterling Heights Police.
Walid also suggests the incident could stem from politicians’ “fanning the flames” of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in an election year.
“We hope that they will be a little more responsible,” Walid said. “They should understand that their statements and ads may push people over the edge, and they do have consequences.”
The US Sikh community has fallen victim to anti-Muslim sentiment before. A Sikh man was murdered in Arizona soon after the September 11th attacks. The killer thought he was Arab or Muslim.
IOWA – The Muslim community in Iowa is frustrated and angry over FBI’s sending informants into mosques to spy on worshippers, seething with a sense of betrayal that has undermined trust between American Muslims and security agencies.
“That was really surprising, very sad that somebody would come or the FBI or Homeland Security would send somebody here to pretend to be Muslim and try to find out what goes on here,” Dr. Hamed Baig, president of the Islamic Center of Des Moines, told CNN on Friday, February 3.
“I feel there is no need for that.”
In Des Moines, Iowa, a small yet diverse Muslim community is divided into four mosques from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, among other nations.
Frustration among members of the Muslim community began after 42 year-old Arvinder Singh, who has been attending their mosques over the past seven years, was revealed to be an FBI informant.
Charged with “selling or transferring precursor substances for an unlawful purpose” in March of 2002, Singh said he was approached by FBI officers who told him, “‘You look Middle Eastern, and we need your help for the war against terror.’”
Singh, currently in Hardin County Jail in Iowa, where he’s been awaiting deportation, said the FBI came to him with a simple tradeoff: We’ll help you get your citizenship if you help us get some terrorists.
Having no information about Islam, Indian-born Singh was surprised to be approached by FBI agents.
“I was surprised. I said, ‘Me? I have no idea about this’ And they said ‘We’ll train you. You’ll get used to it. We’ll make you go and do some work for us.’”
Later on, he assumed a Muslim identity, Rafik Alvi, and went into the mosques pretending to be interested in converting.
He says sometimes the FBI gave him pictures of persons of interest and he would confirm that they were at the mosque. On a few occasions, Singh says he taped his conversations with congregants.
“They wanted me to go investigate some people in the area,” Singh told CNN in a jailhouse interview.
“See what they’re doing, who they’re meeting. Who’s their family member, who’s attending them, what they are talking about. That kind of work.”
Anger
The mosque infiltration has angered Iowa Muslim community, saying that the FBI just took a step backwards in building trust with the Muslims in his community.
“To know that somebody made an intrusive entry into the masjid for purpose other than prayer, or other than socializing or taking care of anybody who is in need makes me very much nervous and embarrassed, too, that I belong to a community where we have a member who has come for some other purpose,” Anis Rehman, executive board treasurer of the Islamic Center of Des Moines and a college professor, told CNN.
“But later when we saw that he was not actually a member but a pretender then it made me more angry,” Rehman said.
Rehman says the idea of a FBI informant in their tiny mosque is not only offensive but baffling.
“I find that to send an impostor into our community which is so small where not only we know each other but (where) the law enforcement agents can perhaps pick each one of us by name and by family, I don’t think that the incident [on] 9/11 could warrant such action in a small community like ours.”
Since 9/11, Muslims, estimated between six to seven million, have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights, with a prevailing belief that America was stigmatizing their faith.
FBI tactic of sending informants into mosques have deteriorated relations with the US Muslim community over the past few years.
In 2009, Muslim groups threatened to suspend all contacts with the FBI over sending informants into mosques.
US Muslims are particularly wary of the FBI’s history of targeting members of their community.
Basim Bakri, another Iowa Muslim, noted that if Singh’s claims are true, the FBI has just destroyed any chances of building trust with the Muslims in his community.
“I think the FBI owe[s] us an apology because they did violate our civil rights,” Bakri said.
“It wasn’t right at all, it wasn’t right from the beginning and they have no right to do that.”
MONTREAL — A Muslim businessman in Canada became a terror suspect for telling his sales staff in a text message to “blow away” the competition at a New York City trade show, a religious association said Friday.
Moroccan-born Saad Allami, who works as a telecommunications company sales manager, was arrested three days after he sent the message in January 2011 and detained while police searched his home, said the Muslim Council of Montreal.
“The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff’s wife that her husband was a terrorist,” said court filings in a lawsuit filed by Allami, cited by local media. Allami was released after four hours of questioning.
Some of his colleagues reportedly claimed they were also held for hours at the Canada-US border on account of the accusations made against their boss.
“Mr Allami’s statements, when considered in the context of which they were given, were nothing to draw such alarm or suspicion,” said Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
“It is clear that his arrest was the result of racial profiling and a knee-jerk reaction to label him as a terror suspect simply due to his religious background.”
Allami is seeking Can$100,000 ($100,603) from Quebec’s provincial police, a police sergeant and the justice department for unlawful detention, unlawful arrest, loss of income and damage to his reputation.
The Quebec Superior Court is to hear the case on March 5.
Recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an article in the Daily Beast titled, Global War on Christians in the Muslim World. I wonder if she will be brave enough to take on the Jewish extremists below who have been targeting Muslims and Christians.
If they were Muslim you can rest assure that the attack would be considered part and parcel of Islamic teaching.
JERUSALEM — A Jerusalem monastery, built on the spot where tradition holds the tree from which Jesus’ cross was made, was defaced with graffiti bearing the hallmarks of militant Jewish settlers, police said on Tuesday.
“Death to Christians” was daubed in Hebrew on the outer walls of the Monastery of the Cross, an 11th-century fortress-like holy site situated in a valley overlooked by Israel’s parliament.
Army Radio reported that “Maccabees of Migron” was painted on the monastery, too, The Associated Press reported. Maccabees were ancient Jewish heroes, and Migron is an unauthorized settlement facing a court-ordered evacuation.
Such acts originally targeted West Bank mosques but have recently expanded to include a mosque inside Israel, Israeli military bases, and now, a Christian holy site.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the words “Price Tag” were also painted overnight by the vandals, who damaged two cars parked outside the monastery in the attack, according to Reuters.
The slogan, used by Jewish settlers in vandalism attacks on mosques and Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank, refers to the retribution they say they will exact for any attempt by the Israeli government to curb settlement in the territory.
It wasn’t too long ago that Robert Spencer went on a speaking tour in Australia. Did he inspire the Aussie “gentleman” below? What we do know is that this guy is a creep who hates Islam and Muslims and is willing to use violence to make his point, including intimidating elderly women. Of course, in the feverish minds of the Islamophobes this man was just practicing “free speech.”(H/T: Nasser AlK):
VIC Melbourne, 04.02.2012: The Bosnian mosque in Deer Park has been attacked, a man went on a rampage ripping the Qur’ans (around 50) and flushing them down the toilet.
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, who also holds the immigration portfolio, caused political uproar by claiming that not all civilisations are equal, with some more advanced than others.
“Contrary to what the left’s relativist ideology says, for us all civilisations are not of equal value,” Gueant on Saturday told a conference in the French parliament building, but closed to the media.
“Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not,” he argued in his speech at a meeting organised by a right-wing students group. “Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred,” he went on his speech, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. He stressed the need to “protect our civilisation.”
The interior minister’s comments provoked a torrent of criticism from the opposition and on the Internet, less than three months a head of a French presidential election. The left denounced his speech as an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to woo the far-right National Front voters ahead of the presidential election.
Gueant has repeatedly linked immigration with crime in France and last month said the delinquency rate among immigrants was “two to three times higher” than the national average. Last April, he declared that an increase in the number of Muslim faithful in France posed a “problem”.
Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who confessed to a bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011.
Anders Behring Breivik claims that he was “saving” Norway from leftists and Muslims, sort of like the “saving” that Breivick’s hero, Robert Spencer and his boss, David Horowitz do from time to time.
(Reuters) – Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway, said Monday his massacre was necessary to prevent his country’s cultural destruction.
“We in the Norwegian movement will not sit and see that we are made a minority in our own country,” the anti-Islam fanatic told a packed courtroom in only his second public comments since the attack in July.
“The attacks on the government headquarters were preventive attacks on people committing cultural destruction of Norwegian culture and Norwegian ethnicity,” he said and demanded to be released immediately.
The 32-year-old has admitted detonating a fertilizer bomb that killed eight people at a government building in Oslo in July and hours later committing a shooting spree at an island camp for the Labor Party youths, killing 69.
“I acknowledge the acts but I plead not guilty,” said Breivik, whose attacks were the worst outburst of violence in Norway since World War Two.
The custody hearing, required periodically to keep a suspect detained, was Breivik’s fifth and the second one open to the public as Norway prepares for his trial, set to begin on April 16.
He entered the courtroom with a faint smile, wearing a black suit with a silvery tie, and raised his arms to show off his cuffed hands.
In a manifesto posted online before the attacks, Breivik wrote that he was targeting “traitors” whose leftist views and softness on immigration had brought the country low.
“The ethnic Norwegians will be a minority in Oslo in the next 10 years. It is a fact. I represent Norwegian resistance,” he told the court.
(Writing by Walter Gibbs; reporting by Gwladys Fouche)
“You can see why the Mail is so keen on this story. It offers the opportunity to scaremonger about a (so far non-existent) “Muslim backlash” while at the same time publishing a picture of a woman in a bikini.”
A Belgian politician has risked causing uproar among Muslims after starting a ‘Women Against Islamization’ campaign featuring his 19-year-old daughter wearing a burka and a bikini.
Filip Dewinter, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party, uses a shot of his daughter An-Sofie Dewinter in the dark blue bikini for the political campaign.
The glamorous teenager dons a burka that covers her head and face, while the rest of the Muslim garment is draped over her back.
The provocative image is likely to inflame tensions among Islamic groups and nationalists in the racially-divided country.
The poster shows the words ‘Freedom or Islam?’ written on a red bar across Ms Dewinter’s breasts.
Further down the poster a black panel with the words ‘You choose!’ is seen covering the teenager’s crotch.
The extremist Vlaams Belang party claims that it wants to convince women to take a stand against Islam.
Ms Dewinter told the Belgian press she does not feel used by the party.
She said: ‘I’ve suggested (the poster) myself, I have learned to live with it but I have had everything up to death threats made at me.’
She said that she ‘ wanted to make this statement.’
She added: ‘What is the greatest contrast with a niqab? Nude.
‘The campaign fits in perfectly with how I feel about the whole issue . As women, we must choose: freedom or Islam.’
The teenager claimed that she had been threatened by Muslim groups
She added: ‘Death threats and criticism no longer scare me off.’
Her father, the party’s leader, said: ‘Women are always the first victims of Islam. We want to make clear that they have a choice.’
The potentially incendiary poster comes after The Islamic fundamentalist group Shariah4Belgium was slammed for its aggressive stance.
The group opened the country’s first Sharia court, a putting it on a collision course with the country’s nationalists.
SEATTLE (Reuters) – The U.S. Army has dismissed all charges against the last of five soldiers to face a court-martial in the slaying of unarmed Afghan civilians, officials from their home base near Tacoma, Washington, said on Friday.
Army Specialist Michael Wagnon, who was released from military detention and placed under home confinement in April, had been charged with premeditated murder in the death of a villager in Afghanistan during a tour of duty in February 2010.
“As of right now, he’s pretty much a free man,” said Lieutenant Colonel Gary Dangerfield, a spokesman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord. “He is still in the Army but a free man.”
The dismissal of the case against Wagnon, 31, brought to an abrupt end the Army’s prosecution of the most egregious atrocities that U.S. military personnel have been convicted of committing during a decade of war in Afghanistan.
Wagnon’s initial reaction to news of the dismissal was stunned disbelief, his defense attorney Colby Vokey told Reuters late on Friday. He then became “ecstatic” and “really relieved.”
Vokey, based in Dallas, called the dismissal “fantastic news.” He said the “Army did the right thing. We maintained all along his innocence and the government said it was the right thing to do.”
Five members of the infantry unit formerly known as the 5th Stryker Brigade were charged with killing Afghan civilians in cold blood in random attacks staged to look like legitimate combat engagements. Seven other GIs were charged with lesser offenses in a case that began as an investigation into rampant hashish abuse within the unit.
Pentagon officials have said that misconduct exposed by the case had damaged the image of the United States abroad.
Photographs entered as evidence showed the accused ringleader of the group, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, and other soldiers casually posing with bloodied Afghan corpses, drawing comparisons to the to the inflammatory Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004.
Gibbs was convicted by court-martial in November of murdering three unarmed civilians, drawing an automatic life prison sentence, but he will be eligible for parole in 8 1/2 years.
His chief accuser and onetime right-hand man, Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, was sentenced in March of last year to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to the same three murders. As part of his plea deal, Morlock had agreed to testify against the remaining witnesses, including Wagnon.
A third soldier charged with murder, Adam Winfield, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison. A fourth, Andrew Holmes, was sentenced to seven years after pleading guilty to a single count of murder.
Wagnon was the last to face court-martial.
Dangerfield would not say why the charges were dropped, and a statement from the base said only that the move was “in the interest of justice.”
The dismissal of charges comes less than two weeks after a U.S. Marine sergeant accused of leading a 2005 massacre of 24 civilians in the Iraqi city of Haditha pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty. As part of his plea deal, the Marine, Frank Wuterich he was spared jail time and instead faces a maximum penalty of demotion to the rank of private.
Wuterich initially was charged with murder in connection with the Haditha killings. Six of the seven other Marines originally accused in that case previously had their charges dismissed by military judges, while another was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
(Additional reporting and writing by Mary Slosson; Editing by Steve Gorman, Peter Bohan and Tim Gaynor)
Jessica Mokdad "loved Islam" according to her parents.
Shameless Pamela Geller is stooping to the lowest of the low. Using the name of Jessica Mokdad, a girl murdered by her “obsessed” and “monstrous” stepfather to line her pocket book and further the mass hysterical drive against Islam and Muslims.
This article while doing an O.K. job of reporting on the story gives Geller a free pass on her lunacy. What the hell is wrong with news outlets? Can’t they do a basic Google search? This woman, Geller, is a moonbat whose positions are consistently against human rights and basic freedoms, why is she not being called out for it below?
Geller also has a track record of inventing and attributing unrelated crimes to Islam and Muslims! You would think that FACT would make it into the story.
Listen Fox News Detroit: Just because someone declares themselves to be a defender of human rights does not make them one. Investigate their BACKGROUND!! Quit amplifying the voices of loons and bigots who have done nothing to help the cause of human rights and instead work only to add insult to injury by demeaning grieving families.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WJBK) — It’s been almost ten months since Jessica Mokdad’s murder. She was just 20 years old.
“It’s like still in disbelief,” said Mohammed Mokdad, her father.
Jessica’s murder made international headlines. She left Minnesota to escape an allegedly physically and mentally abusive stepfather, but in April of 2011, her stepfather, Rahim Alfatlawi, drove from Minnesota to her grandmother’s Warren home and shot her in the head.
Her family calls it an awful tragedy, but others are calling it an honor killing.
“We know that this is a practice under Islamic law. The honor killing is the final act. People know very little of the terror … that these girls live under,” said Pamela Geller.
She is the head of Stop the Islamization of America. Geller is hosting a conference on the anniversary of Jessica’s death in Dearborn. It’s called the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.
“We cannot sanction this gendercide. We cannot sanction the diminishment and dehumanization of women. We must speak up,” Geller said.
We asked Jessica’s stepmother, Cassandra Mokdad, whether her murder was an honor killing.
“Absolutely it was not,” she said.
She told us this disgusting act had nothing to do with Islam, a religion she said Jessica practiced proudly.
“It was nothing about religion or anything. It was just about a sick human being,” Mohammed Mokdad said.
“He wanted to have a relationship with Jessica as more than her stepfather. He wanted to have a more romantic relationship with her,” Cassandra Mokdad explained.
Even the Macomb County Prosecutor on the case said Alfatlawi murdered Jessica because he was obsessed with her, not the religion, and Jessica’s family wants her name taken off the conference.
“She’s using Jessica as her poster child for anti-Islam,” said Cassandra Mokdad.
“What gulls me is that there is this prohibition on discussing it and the ideology that inspires honor killings,” Geller explained.
She said this conference will happen and the name won’t be changed.
“We’re definitely going to have this conference and it will not be stopped. Their directing their barbs at me. I didn’t kill Jessica. I’m trying to save the next girl. They should be helping me save the next girl,” said Geller.
“Absolutely I’ll go. I won’t let her sit there and misuse Jessica’s name, and I will let her know exactly how I feel,” Cassandra Mokdad told us.
The conference will be held at the Hyatt in Dearborn at the end of April.
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.
The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.
The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. Its spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks with help from the CIA in a highly unusual partnership.
The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.”
The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited.
The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.
Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.
“The Palestinian community, although not Shi’a, should also be assessed due to presence of Hamas members and sympathizers and the group’s relationship with the Iranian government,” analysts wrote.
The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.
The document also renews debate over how the NYPD privately views Muslims. Kelly has faced calls for his resignation recently from some Muslim activists for participating in a video that says Muslims want to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States. The NYPD showed the video to nearly 1,500 officers during training.
Documents previously obtained by the AP show widespread NYPD infiltration of mosques. It’s not clear, however, whether the May 2006 report prompted police to infiltrate the mosques on the list. One former police official who has seen the report said that, generally, the recommendations were followed but he could not say for sure whether these mosques were infiltrated.
A current law enforcement official, also familiar with the report, said that since it was issued the NYPD learned that Hezbollah was more political than religious and concluded that it’s not effective to monitor Shiites.
Both insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.
Neither David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer, nor department spokesman Paul Browne responded to emails or phone calls from The Associated Press this week.
Iran is an overwhelmingly Shiite country, but Shiites are a small percentage of the U.S. Muslim population. By contrast, al-Qaida is a Sunni organization and many U.S. leaders consider Shiite clerics as allies in the fight against homegrown extremism. Shiites are often oppressed overseas and many have sought asylum in the West.
The document is dated just weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress that, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”
Even now, the U.S. remains particularly concerned with Iran, not only because of its nuclear research but also because intelligence officials don’t believe they know how Iranian sympathizers inside the United States would respond if the two countries went to war. By far, the largest group of Iranians in the U.S. lives in or around Los Angeles. Yet the NYPD, with a smaller Iranian population that police estimated at about 8,500 in New York City, shared the concerns about reactions to an open military conflict.
Asad Sadiq, president of the Bait-ul-Qaim mosque in the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, N.J., said the NYPD was being unfairly broad.
“If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association,” Sadiq, a dentist, said after seeing his mosque in the NYPD document. “Just because we are the same religion doesn’t mean we’re going to stand up and harm the United States. It’s really absurd.”
The AP showed the document to several veteran counterterrorism analysts. None said they had seen anything like it.
“It’s really problematic if you make a jump from a possible international conflict to saying therefore we need to monitor Shiite mosques writ large,” said Brian Fishman, the former research director at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center. “It doesn’t follow.”
For instance, the NYPD analysts focused much of the report on the Alavi Foundation, a New York nonprofit group that the federal government has since accused of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. Analysts then looked at a mosque where Alavi members prayed and that police say may have been linked to an effort to buy information about rocket technology for Iran.
There is no explanation, however, for how those suspicions warranted expanding surveillance to other Shiite mosques, including those far outside the department’s jurisdiction in Connecticut and New Jersey.
“Any time that you begin to isolate certain communities from a policing perspective because you think there’s risk, you have the potential that somebody overreaches,” said Robert Riegle, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst who oversaw efforts to work with state and local agencies.
At the Al-Mahdi Foundation mosque in Brooklyn, worshippers intoned their prayers Wednesday while touching their foreheads to disks of clay on the floor, a Shiite tradition.
“After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere,” imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. “If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world.”
At the Masjid Al-Rahman, a prayer hall in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, manager Abo Maher was surprised to see his mosque on the NYPD’s list of Shiite locations.
“This isn’t even Shia,” he said. “Their information is wrong.”
The police department’s Demographics Unit, the secretive squad of plainclothes officers used to monitor restaurants, social clubs and other gathering spots, found similar issues in Iranian neighborhoods, one former NYPD official recalled.
Muslims make up only a fraction of New York’s Iranian community so squad members returned from their rounds in Iranian neighborhoods and reported finding Jews and Christians, the former official said.
Sadiq, the New Jersey mosque president, said about 250 families — mostly Pakistanis and Indians and few Iraqis — attend his mosque. Every few years, he said, an FBI agent stops by, introduces himself and asks whether there’s been any radical rhetoric in his mosque and whether he knows anyone with connections to Iran. The most recent meeting was just Wednesday, he said, and the NYPD would be welcome if it came openly.
The intelligence unit operates in secrecy with little outside oversight. The City Council is not told about secret intelligence programs. And though the unit operates under the auspices of a federal anti-drug task force and receives federal money, it is not overseen by Congress. The Obama administration, including the Justice Department, has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether it endorses the NYPD’s tactics.
“They think that they can do whatever they want and get away with it,” Sadiq said.
The document also suggests a broader international intelligence mission than the department has previously acknowledged. The NYPD has officers stationed in 11 foreign cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Tel Aviv, where they work with local police and act as the NYPD’s eyes and ears overseas.
In their recommendations for the foreign liaison unit, analysts wrote that officers should: “Focus international intelligence collection on the Iranian threat, to include the activities of the IIS, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. throughout Europe and the Middle East.”
NYPD officers abroad are not supposed to be spies and do not answer to the U.S. director of national intelligence or the CIA station chiefs who coordinate America’s efforts to gather intelligence on Iran. In fact, the NYPD’s international officers aren’t even paid by the department. Rather, the program is paid for through a nonprofit foundation that raises money from corporate donors.
It has not previously been known that the NYPD would consider gathering overseas intelligence on Iranian intelligence services. The police department does not disclose details about the inner workings of the international program to the City Council, to Congress or to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Last week, rabid Islamophobe Diane West railed against the The Daily Beast for taking “a swipe” at her fellow anti-Muslim bigot, Dutch far right wing opportunist, Geert Wilders. The article that inspired her rant asked, “Can’t Someone Tell Geert Wilders to Stop His Anti-Muslim Diatribes Before Somebody Gets Hurt?”
Wilders is a master at capitalizing on real fears and conjuring false ones—and then dodging responsibility if people’s lives are ruined or lost. “I am responsible for my own actions and for nobody else’s actions,” he says. In a wide-ranging interview at the offices of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, Wilders complained to Newsweek that the “naive” Obama administration wasn’t doing nearly enough to combat what Wilders regards as the Islamic threat. Expanding on his claims that the Quran should be banned, just as Mein Kampf has been in some countries, he said the United States should be “getting rid of Islamic symbols—no more mosques—and closing down Islamic schools.” Read the rest here.
Wilders and his ilk have grown accustomed to spreading their hatred with impunity, there are welcome signs the climate may be shifting (h/t: eslaporte):
PVV leader Geert Wilders has demanded the German ambassador explain why he and the anti-islam party are mentioned in a 32-page leaflet warning of the dangers posed by far-right political groupings. The brochure, paid for by the German justice ministry, states that right-wing populist and radical parties could be a breeding ground for terrorism. Wilders is mentioned twice by name and one section includes his photograph. The folder also explains how neo-nazi strategists use social networks. Wilders used the microblogging service Twitter to urge the Dutch government to distance itself from this ‘scandalous’ statement and said questions will be asked in parliament. Some 10% of Germans are said to support populist right-wing groupings. Wilders’ anti-Islam party took around 15% of the vote at the June 2010 general election but support has fallen since then.
Last summer, a Dutch court acquitted Wilders of hate speech charges, this was hailed as a “victory for free speech“ among his hateful kindred on both sides of the Atlantic; it fed well into their “victimhood” narrative and mentality.
Wilders will no doubt continue to portray himself as a besieged champion of “free speech,” apparently oblivious to the irony of simultaneously lobbying to tax the wearing of the hijab, ban the niqab, ban the Qur’an and all things Islamic from the Western world.
Yesterday a mosque in the Glonnières district of Le Mans was found covered with graffiti reading “Islam out of Europe”, ”No Islam” and “France for the French”.
On Saturday a mosque in Miramas was also daubed with Islamophobic slogans along with the name of Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. It was the second time in four months that the mosque had experienced such an attack.
Last month we reported that fascist graffiti were painted on the wall of a mosque that is under construction in Montigny-en-Ostrevent, and two pig’s heads were left at the site where another mosque is being built in Nanterre.
Anti-Muslim Attacks Increased by 34% in France in 2011
These numbers are very conservative, however they are still quite alarming. If anyone has a better translation please forward it to us, this is my quick translation via. Google:
On Wednesday, the 1st of February, the National Observatory against Islamophobia said that Anti-Muslim acts and threats listed on French soil in 2011 increased 34% over the previous year.
According to Abdallah Zekri, president of the observatory attached to the French Muslim Council, these figures are from Statistics compiled by the Sub-Directorate of General Information (SDIG), reported the AFP.
“The actions and threats that have been the subject of formal complaints to the police and gendarmerie have increased from 116 in 2010 to 155 in 2011, an increase of 33.9%,” says Zekri. Only for actions, SDIG statistics for 2011, concerning in particular the violence and assault, fire and damage, the number increased from 22 to 38 a year to the next.
“I wish that President Sarkozy, to whom I sent a letter in December, make a statement. It denounces these unspeakable acts. In short, he seeks to allay the concerns of Muslims who are citizens just as Christians or Jews, “said Mr. Zekri.
Les actes et menaces anti-musulmans répertoriés sur le territoire français en 2011 ont augmenté de 34 % par rapport à l’année précédente, a annoncé mercredi 1er février l’Observatoire national contre l’islamophobie.
Selon Abdallah Zekri, président de cet observatoire rattaché au Conseil français du culte musulman, ces chiffres proviennent de statistiques de la sous-direction de l’information générale (SDIG), communiquées à l’AFP.
“Les actions et les menaces qui ont fait l’objet de plaintes déposées officiellement auprès des services de police et de gendarmerie sont passées de 116 en 2010 à 155 en 2011, soit une augmentation de 33,9 %”, précise M. Zekri. Pour les seules actions, les statistiques de la SDIG pour 2011, qui concernent notamment les violences et voies de faits, les incendies et les dégradations, leur nombre passe de 22 à 38 d’une année sur l’autre.
“J’aurais aimé que le président Sarkozy, à qui j’ai adressé une lettre en décembre, fasse une déclaration. Qu’il dénonce ces actes inqualifiables. Bref, qu’il cherche à apaiser les inquiétudes des musulmans, qui sont des citoyens au même titre que les chrétiens ou les juifs”, a déclaré M. Zekri.
GOP presidential hopeful and rabid Islamophobe Newt Gingrich is slamming Mitt Romney for vetoing a 2003 bill that would allocate an additional $600,000 of taxpayer money to provide poor Jewish nursing home residents with Kosher meals. Thundered Gingrich:
Romney as Governor eliminated kosher food for retired Jewish senior citizens…He has no understanding of the importance of religious liberty in this country.
I myself don’t have a problem with providing Kosher meals, and I would not have opposed the additional funding like Romney did. But, this does beg the question: what if this had been about Halal meals instead?
Had that been the case, the situation would have been completely reversed. In that scenario, had Mitt Romney supported a bill that allocated over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to Halal meals for poor Muslim nursing home residents, what do you think Newt Gingrich and the rest of the right-wing would be saying then? They would be ruthlessly attacking him for this.
We’d also hear a lot about how Muslims in America and the West in general demand “special rules” and “special treatment”–how they have a “feeling of entitlement.” We’d hear about how Muslims want “hand-outs” and “leech off” of the rest of us. We’d hear all the typical racist and bigoted charges that are often levied against non-white minorities.
Whenever a minority asks for cultural or religious accommodation, especially Muslims, they are accused of such things. What good, white, Judeo-Christian folk sometimes fail to realize is that the system is by default heavily bent in their favor, with “special accommodations” for them already built in.
This reminds me of a conversation I overheard between a Christian and Muslim colleague of mine. The Christian employee was complaining about how “it was unfair” that the Muslim colleague got to come in late for work on his religious holiday (Eid) and leave a bit early on that same day; she said: “It’s not fair: you guys get our Christmas off but we don’t get your holiday off.” I couldn’t believe my ears. She gets a whole two weeks off to go visit her family in another state, whereas he gets half a day off so that he can take his wife and kids out to eat at the local kabob joint. The Muslim employee wants “special treatment” (if you can call it that) because the system is already so slanted in favor of the dominant, majority group.
I’ve seen a similar occurrence with Friday prayers, with Muslim colleagues racing back and forth during lunch to make it in time. Meanwhile, Jews get Saturday off and Christians get Sunday off–by default. At my work, we often have to come in on Saturdays, but observant Jews can get it off by “special request.” If Muslims made that sort of request, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
This is a nation of immigrants, and as such, we must be ready to accommodate–within the bounds of reason–various races, religions, and customs. The only alternative, I suppose, is to adopt the nativist view of right-wingers: “they” must accommodate to “us.” This view, however, fails to realize that both groups need to bend a little to accommodate the other.
Speaking of Kosher and Halal, one recalls how the Queen of Islamophobia, Pamela Geller, who is herself Jewish, attacks Muslims for how cruel Halal slaughter is, even though it’s virtually the exact same process used by Jews for Kosher. Had a candidate supported a bill to give half a million dollars to provide Halal food, Geller would be screeching about how this was providing state support for evil Muslim butchery and animal cruelty. Common sense and rationality are lost with such absurdities.
On that note, I think it would behoove the reader to consider how dramatically different views are when we substitute “Jew” for “Muslim” or the other way around: for example, the standard “you can’t be racist against Muslims, because Muslim is not a race” doesn’t seem right when we say “you can’t be racist against Jews, because Jew is not a race.” It’s a worthwhile exercise to do any time you read a story about Muslims: just do the substitution and ask yourself if it sounds right. There’s a reason it doesn’t: all of these anti-Muslim smears were once used against Jews: it’s the same message, just used against a different minority group.
Islamophobes never want to play the substitution game, which is why they cry “tu quoque, tu quoque” whenever anyone uses it. They must at all costs prevent it from being used because it lays bare their bigotry.
In this particular case, it’s supporting “religious freedom” to use taxpayer money to provide Kosher meals to Jewish residents. But remember: it would be against freedom and free choice to use taxpayer money to provide Halal meals for Muslims. When it’s about Kosher, then it’s forcing your religious beliefs onto Jews to not provide Kosher meals, thereby “forcing” them to eat non-Kosher meals; when it’s about Halal, then it’s Muslimsforcing their beliefs onto us, by forcing us to provide them with special meals.
As George Orwell said: ”Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.”
The former House speaker regularly calls for treating Muslims differently — and his discriminatory remarks are mostly forgiven.
It’s interesting to observe what qualifies as beyond the pale in American politics. For bigoted newsletters written two decades ago, Ron Paul is deemed by many to be disqualified from the presidency. I don’t fault anyone for criticizing those newsletters. I’ve done so myself. They’re terrible. So is the way he’s handled the controversy. But isn’t it interesting that Paul has been more discredited by years-old, ghostwritten remarks than has Newt Gingrich for bigotry that he’s uttered himself, on camera, during the present campaign? It’s gone largely ignored both in the mainstream press and the movement-conservative organs that were most vocal condemning Paul.
That’s because Muslims are the target. And despite the fact that George W. Bush was admirably careful to avoid demonizing a whole religious faith for the actions of a small minority of its adherents — despite the fact that Barack Obama too has been beyond reproach in this respect — anti-Muslim bigotry in America is treated differently than every other kind, often by the very same people who allege without irony that there is a war in this country against Christians.
In the clip at the top of this post, Gingrich says, “Now, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I’m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I’d like them to respect our religion.” Of course, the U.S. government is compelled by the Constitution to afford protection to religion generally, and “our” religion includes Islam, a faith many Americans practice. That’s just the beginning of what Gingrich has said about this minority group. In this clip, he likens Muslim Americans seeking to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan to Nazis building next to the Holocaust Museum. He once suggested that the right of Muslims to build mosques should be infringed upon by the U.S. government until Christians are permitted to build churches in Saudi Arabia, a straightforward suggestion that we violate the Constitution in order to mimic authoritarians. He favors a federal law that would pre-empt sharia law — though not the religious law of any other faith — from being used in American courts, which would be the solution to a total non-problem.
And no surprise, for he regularly engages in the most absurd kind of fear-mongering. To cite one example:
I think that we have to really, from my perspective you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for Sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the U.S. Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam, I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.
If Gingrich believed all of this it would be damning. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it is more or less damning that his tone, and much of his substance, is in fact a calculated pander. Justin Elliott at Salon demonstrated as much when he delved into how Gingrich used to talk about these issues:
Gingrich’s recent rhetoric represents a little-noticed shift from an earlier period in his career when he had a strikingly warm relationship with the American Muslim community. As speaker of the House in the 1990s, for example, Gingrich played a key role in setting aside space on Capitol Hill for Muslim congressional staffers to pray each Friday; he was involved with a Republican Islamic group that promoted Shariah-compliant finance, which critics — including Gingrich — now deride as a freedom-destroying abomination; and he maintained close ties with another Muslim conservative group that even urged Gingrich to run for president in 2007.
The article goes on to note:
Gingrich’s warm relations with the Muslim community continued well into the mid-2000s. Around 2004, for example, he participated in a planning meeting of the Islamic Free Market Institute, according to an activist who also attended the meeting. “His tone was nothing like what you hear today,” recalls the activist. “He was very positive, very supportive. His whole attitude was that Muslims are part of the American fabric and that Muslim Americans should be Republicans.” By the standards of the Gingrich we know today, the Islamic Free Market Institute was essentially engaged in “stealth jihad.” The now defunct group, founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist in 1998 to woo Muslim Americans to the GOP, was involved in educating the public and policymakers about Islamic or Shariah-compliant finance. Its 2004 IRS filing reported the group spent tens of thousands of dollars to “educate the public about Islam[ic] finances, insurance, banking and investments.” To most people, there’s nothing nefarious about Islamic finance — there is a large international banking business centering on special financial instruments that are compliant with Islamic strictures against interest, and so on.
So in 2004 Gingrich attended a planning meeting of a group devoted to promoting Shariah-compliant finance. Fast forward to 2010 and here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute: “[I]t’s why I think teaching about Sharia financing is dangerous, because it is the first step towards the normalization of Sharia and I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”
If an American politician suggested, of Christians or Jews, that they should be required to take a special loyalty oath before assuming office; that the government should restrict where they’re permitted to build houses of worship; that laws should be passed singling out their religious law as odious; that they don’t count when Americans talk about “our” religion; that their main lobbying group should be aggressively investigated: if any American politician said any of those things, they’d be regarded as an anti-religious bigot engaged in a war on Christianity.
Whereas the accusation that there’s something wrong with Gingrich’s rhetoric is met on the right with righteous indignation, as if he is the put-upon victim of political correctness or the elite media.
In the 1980s, the Ron Paul newsletters played on white anxiety about urban crime and racism toward blacks. It was awful. And apparently America didn’t learn its lesson, for Gingrich 2012, like Cain 2012 before it, is playing on majority anxieties about terrorism and xenophobia toward Muslims. This is particularly dangerous in the civil-liberties climate produced by Bush and Obama, where American citizens can be deprived of their liberty and even their life without charges or due process, a protection that is especially valuable to feared minorities.
Construction crews should be putting the finishing touches on the Mubarak Blessed Mosque in Chantilly. Instead, they are repairing the work of vandals.
Sometime between Sunday evening and 6 a.m. Monday morning, the mosque was pelted with stones and masonry blocks. Nearly all the custom made windows and glass doors on the first floor were shattered. Damage has been estimated at $60,000.
Investigators found beer and liquor bottles in the woods behind the mosque, and they believe teenagers may be responsible.
“It is very sad,” said the mosque’s general secretary, Usman Ghumman. “But at the same time, our community is very resilient. We have asked our community members to fervently pray that we are able to overcome this hurdle.”
Mubarak Blessed Mosque has been under construction for a year, and was scheduled to open in just weeks.
Jerrold Foltz, pastor at the Wellspring United Church of Christ, said acts like this are an affront to area’s entire religious community. “Its an insult to the whole religious establishment,” Foltz said, “whether its a church or a mosque or a synagogue.”
Investigators say there is no evidence that it is a hate crime – nothing was taken and no graffiti was left behind. However, because of the extent of the damage, those responsible face felony charges.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of a bias motive in the incident.
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin has said "there should be no mosques" in the USA
MRFF deserves a lot of credit for exposing to West Point the fact that General Boykin should not be speaking at West Point’s National Prayer Breakfast.
Plans for a talk at West Point by a retired general known for his harshly anti-Muslim remarks were abruptly canceled on Monday after a growing list of liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations called on the Military Academy to rescind the invitation.
Lt. Gen William G. Boykin “has decided to withdraw speaking at West Point’s National Prayer Breakfast” on Feb. 8, said a statement issued Monday by the academy’s office of public affairs. “In fulfilling its commitment to the community, the United States Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.”
General Boykin, a longtime commander of Special Operations forces, first caused controversy after the Sept. 11 attacks when, as a senior Pentagon official, he described the fight against terrorism as a Christian battle against Satan. His remarks, made in numerous speeches to church groups, were publicly repudiated by President George W. Bush, who argued that America’s war was not with Islam but with violent fanatics.
Since his retirement in 2007 and a new career as a popular conservative Christian speaker, General Boykin has described Islam as “a totalitarian way of life” and said thatIslam should not be protected under the First Amendment.
Last week, after learning that General Boykin would be speaking at the prayer breakfast, a liberal veterans’ group,VoteVets.org, demanded that the invitation be revoked. In a letter to West Point’s superintendent, the group said General Boykin’s “incendiary rhetoric regarding Islam” was “incompatible with Army values” and would “put our troops in danger.”
Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, West Point’s director of public affairs, defended the invitation on Friday, saying that “cadets are purposefully exposed to different perspectives” and that the breakfast “will be pluralistic with Christians, Jewish and Muslim cadets participating.”
But by Monday, several other groups had condemned the invitation and concern was also reportedly being voiced by some faculty members and cadets. The Forum on the Military Chaplaincy (a liberal group of retired military chaplains), the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations made public appeals to the Pentagon to cancel General Boykin’s appearance.
A fourth-year cadet at West Point, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals for breaking military discipline, said in a telephone interview before the cancellation was announced that “people are definitely talking about it here.”
“They’re inviting someone who’s openly criticizing a religion that is practiced on campus,” he said. “I know Muslim cadets here, and they are great, outstanding citizens, and this ex-general is saying they shouldn’t enjoy the same rights.”
The cadet asked, “Are we supposed to take leadership qualities and experience from this guy, to follow in his footsteps?”
A similar controversy erupted last week, in the days before General Boykin spoke at the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast in Ocean City, Md. The general made no inflammatory statements about Islam, instead describing how prayer had helped him through dangerous military operations.
But Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, said the West Point invitation was a mistake. West Point, Mr. Montgomery said, would have given “a platform to someone who is publicly identified with offensive comments about Muslims and about the commander in chief.”
General Boykin is a leader of an evangelical group called Kingdom Warriors and a visiting professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests seeking comment.
The Danish People’s Party (DPP) wants to put a stop to immigration from Muslim countries, according to a new press release by the party. The party says Muslims don’t integrate and cause big problems with shariah zones, parallel societies and social control.
The announcement followed the release of marriage figures for immigrant groups. According to the new figures, just 20% of non-Western 2nd generation immigrants marry Danes. Among Pakistanis and Turks the figures are less than 10%.
“We must work towards bringing down the immigration from Muslim countries to zero. There can naturally be some exceptions, but there’s a need for political ambition to bring Muslim immigration close to zero,” says the party’s integration spokesperson Martin Henriksen.
“The 24-year old rule is now no longer enough. We have to deal with people who consciously decide to opt out of marrying Danes. It’s problematic. If we are to hope these families will be integrated in the future, we must introduce new and significant restrictions on immigration from Muslim countries,” says Henriksen.
The racist and fascist EDL want to march in Leicester this Saturday, 4th February, to spread their racist poison.
To counter their unwanted presence and to stop them intimidating the local communities the antiracists will also take to the streets on the same day.
This is the second time in less than two years that the EDL thugs want to stir up racism and divisions among the city’s diverse community. Last time when they showed up in October 2010, they caused much violence and disruption.
Despite the Stephen Lawrence verdict and the racist murder of Anuj Bidve in Manchester on Boxing day, once again they want to parade through the streets of Leicester. But Leicester has a proud history of challenging prejudice and promoting equality and people of the city have worked and campaigned together for many years to build a successful, multicultural city where different communities live peacefully side-by-side.
That’s why when the EDL showed up the last time the people of Leicester gathered in their thousands to show to the EDL that they are not wanted. Now again black, white and Asian people are set to show their unity against the EDL again at a ‘Love Leicester, Hate Racism‘ demonstration.
The demonstration is being organised by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) who have urged for a wider support. Thus the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ would be supporting this demonstration.
The ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ group was formed last year in response to some mis-guided Sikh youth supporting the EDL. They used to carry Sikh flag on the EDL marches and use Sikh insignia and emblems in their vile propaganda.
However, most of those Sikh youth have now left the EDL, largely due to the campaign lead by the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ but also after the EDL decided to make an alliance with British Freedom Party (BFP), a breakaway group from the BNP but with equally openly fascist policies.
Balwinder Singh Rana, spokesperson for the ‘Sikhs Against the EDL’ said, “We had always warned that the EDL are no different from the BNP. They are targeting the Muslims today but would turn against all of us tomorrow. I am glad that those Sikh youth who used to support them have learned the error of their ways, but our job is not done yet. We must support the people of Leicester to stand up to these racists & fascists so that they would think twice before they decide to turn up somewhere else”.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who is the biggest patron of Newt Gingrich's presidential bid, giving a reported $10m to a Gingrich-supporting Super Pac. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP
By donating $10m to the pro-Newt Gingrich Super Pac campaign, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, one of the richest men in the US, and his physician wife, Dr Miriam Adelson, have kept Gingrich in the Republican primary race, and given him the resources to win in South Carolina and, potentially, in Florida, without having to build a large donor base.
The power of corporate money in American politics is nothing new. But the rules set by the US supreme court in its Citizens United decision – that money is speech and corporations are people protected by the first amendment – have undone the limits set by Congress in the 1970s, allowing, in this case, one family to transform the Republican primary race.
Of course, like all private funding of politics, there is no way of knowing with certainty what the Adelsons expect to achieve with their money. And the mainstream US media has been coy about referring to the Adelsons’ political views. The New York Times story on the latest $5m donation to the Gingrich-supporting Super Pac merely described Sheldon Adelson as “a longtime Gingrich friend and a patron”.
This ignored the fact that the Adelsons use their wealth to fund rightwing groups in Israel and anti-Muslim campaigns within the US, causes that are also strongly supported by Gingrich. In Israel, Sheldon Adelson has been accused of using his newspaper Israel Hayom to promote support for his friend, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is also a political ally of Gingrich. In addition, Adelson is a financial backer of the One Jerusalem group, which opposes peace negotiations that would lead to parts of Jerusalem coming under Palestinian sovereignty. The couple’s Adelson Family Foundation donated $4.5m to the founding of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, headed by Likud party former minister Natan Sharansky (pdf).
Gingrich is “realistic” about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism,according to Adelson. He has endorsed the conspiracy theory that Muslim organisations are using a strategy of “stealth jihad” to infiltrate sharia law into US institutions. Speaking to the American Enterprise Institute in July 2010, Gingrich said: “I believe sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” He favours a federal law to ban sharia from US courts and has said he would require American Muslims to make a loyalty declaration before serving in his administration. With his wife Callista, he produced and narrated a 2010 film on the threat of radical Islam, entitled America at Risk: The War With No Name. Bernard Lewis, who coined the phrase “clash of civilisations”, appears in the film, saying: “This war will go on until the entire world either embraces Islam or submits to Islamic rule.”
While Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have also declared their strong support for Israel, only Gingrich has embraced a vision of civilizational conflict between the west and Islam – a convenient narrative for the right in Israel, which fears growing international support for the human rights of Palestinians, and would prefer Americans to think of Israel as a bastion of western values threatened by Islamic barbarism.
The number of Americans holding this view is declining. One index of this shifting mood was the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writing last December that the standing ovation Netanyahu received at Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”, implying that money rather than shared values underlies the special relationship.
Yet there remains a reluctance to fully discuss these issues for fear of fueling the old hate libels about Jewish money controlling world events. This is a real concern: antisemitism continues to be central to much far-right ideology in the US and Europe. Equally, though, we should not be discouraged from properly scrutinising the millions of dollars being spent to advance the career of a politician who promotes conspiracy theories about a Muslim takeover of America and is running for the presidential nomination while espousing a Greater Israel agenda.
These violent attacks have been occurring with some frequency, just a few days ago we reported on an EDL supporter who attacked a family with knives and threatened to kill them. Now we have another incident in which an EDL yob attacks a Muslim. Remember the EDL is Horowitz tool Robert Spencer’s favorite UK group, he once termed them, “freedom fighters.”
A racist thug who punched a taxi driver and dragged him along a street, has been jailed for 18 months.
Lee Preston, 22, targeted cabbie Mohammed Rashid, leaving him with two black eyes, a bruised face and grazes to his shoulders caused when he was dragged to the ground.
Mr John Hallisey, prosecuting, said the cabbie received a call at 9pm on April 16 to collect five men from Chaddesden. He noticed they were carrying cans of lager and told them these could not be drunk in his vehicle. But after a few minutes, the men started drinking.
“Mr Rashid told them to stop and the response was to start hurling abuse. The defendant was saying ‘we are EDL,’ referring to the English Defence League,” said Mr Hallisey.
Preston, of Walbrook Road, Derby, began to throw beer cans out of the taxi until Mr Rashid closed the windows – a move which angered the passengers. Mr Rashid stopped his cab and told the five to leave. One said: “Get out and we’ll sort you out.”
When they eventually left, they failed to close the rear doors but Mr Rashid waited until he thought they had walked away before getting out of the cab. But he was then grabbed and prevented from getting back into the vehicle before being attacked.
During this, he heard chants of “EDL” and one man said: “I’m going to kill you.” When a second taxi driver stopped to help, he was also assaulted and had his vehicle kicked.
Police were called and Preston was found hiding under a bush.
He admitted affray and racially aggravated assault causing actual bodily harm.
In a daring display of “investigative journalism,” Loonwatch was recently “outed” as a site, “pretty much exclusively concerned with exposing the perceived enemies of Islam…” This jealously guarded secret was previously known only to tech-savvy visitors clever enough to click the link to our About page:
Loonwatch.com is a blogzine run by a motley group of hate-allergic bloggers to monitor and expose the web’s plethora of anti-Muslim loons, wackos, and conspiracy theorists…..
Isn’t that a fancy way of saying pretty much the same thing?
Throughout the screed ”exposing” our “super secret mission,” there are numerous ludicrous and fact-less assertions, which have been refuted here and here. A garden variety bigot isn’t of much interest to us here, but amid the baseless accusations, fuzzy logic, and shameless self-promotion, there is a question that warrants a response:
Does Loonwatch really shun all criticism of Islam and immediately silence our critics by branding them as loons?
Similar accusations have been made repeatedly, against Loonwatch and other sites devoted to fighting Islamophobia. The short and simple answer is “no.” As American Muslim civil rights activist Ahmed Rehab has said:
One thing we must never allow is for the bad amongst us – terrorists, extremists, ideologues of exclusion and hate – to succeed in turning the rest of us against each other. We must condemn them, ostracize them, and disempower them. The way to do that is to strengthen our relations, and stand with one another. That is the only way to spell defeat for the agents of hate.
We must emerge from our comfort zones and stand together as one against all forms of violence, ignorance, and intolerance….
Islam should be subjected to its fair share of constructive criticism and we have said as much in a significant number of articles. In fact several of our writers have severely criticized the theological premises of certain violent and regressive trends within the worldwide Muslim community. The problem is that there’s nothing fair or constructive about the ocean of half truths and outright lies that are routinely spread about Islam and Muslims by a well-funded network of pseudo scholars, grassroots activists, media amplifiers, serial fabricators, and other assorted anti-Muslim crackpots.
Legitimate criticism is truthful, proportionate, and in accordance with fair standards.
Every life is sacred and precious, and reducing individuals to statistics is a grisly calculus. However, we must make the point that war consistently kills far more innocent civilians than terrorism. What justifies the myopic focus on the latter?
The most recent additions are here and here. We repeatedly expose this unfair tactic and insist that all religions be measured by the same set of standards.
Legitimate criticism is in accordance with fair standards.
Our mission is to expose the lies, exaggerations and double standards employed by anti-Muslim bigots, and our articles do exactly that. We advocate universal human rights, and refuse to give anyone a free pass.
We condemn all acts of terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians, no matter who is responsible.
No matter how many times we condemn terrorism, “critics” insist we haven’t condemned terrorism, and have even had the audacity to smear us a terrorist spin control network. It’s become almost laughable and reminiscent of a famous scene from the 1979 British comedy film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
Brian: …Will you please listen? I’m not the Messiah! Do you understand? Honestly!
Woman: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!
Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right, I am the Messiah!
Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah!
Will you please listen? We do condemn terrorism! Do you understand? Honestly! …
It’s time to resort to a more potent weapon: common sense. When some halfwit sets his underwear on fire in a failed terrorist attack, anyone with the slightest stake in the Muslim community instantly thinks, “Please, please…don’t let it be a Muslim!”
If it turns out the perpetrator is a Muslim, it is an unmitigated disaster for Muslims everywhere. Besides being morally repugnant, terrorism is self-defeating.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks paved the way for the US to bomb, invade, and occupy one Muslim country after another, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Syria and Iran may be next. The Islamophobia that germinated in the aftermath of the attacks has rooted itself in the public imagination and continues to deepen and expand, despite the loons’ absurd claims it doesn’t exist.
The blatantly obvious, self-evident truth is that terrorism hurts Muslims and damages the fight against bigotry.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that sets back the cause of fighting anti-Muslim bigotry more than a terrorist attack that is in any way associated with Muslims. The loons delight in reporting terrorist attacks because their interests are served, not ours. In fact, anti-Muslim hatemongers and outrage peddlers are so eager to publish news of “Islamic” terrorist attacks, they don’t even care if there are no Muslims involved, as we’ve reported here and here.
We condemn all acts of terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians, no matter who is responsible.
Our question to critics: Do you?
As Danios said in his recent article, We’re at War!” — And We Have Been Since 1776: 214 Years of American War-Making:
The objects of American aggression have certainly changed with time, but the primary motivating factor behind U.S. wars of aggression have always been the same: expansion of U.S. hegemony. The Muslim world is being bombed, invaded, and occupied by the United States not because of radical Islam or any inherent flaw in themselves. Rather, it is being so attacked because it is in the path of the American juggernaut, which is always in need of war.
The evidence that radical Islam is the justification, but not the catalyst, for US invasions is simply historical precedent. Decades before the War on Terror, the late civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against the war in Vietnam, and his words are no less relevant today:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; but they ask and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems…and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government…
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…
The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins…
Even as we commemorate Dr. King’s eloquent and timeless truths, it seems we’ve missed his essential message.
The US dominates the world through military power, maintaining over 700 bases in more than 130 countries, and is still bombing and invading nations with impunity. How is it that we view Muslims as the ones who are exceptionally violent and hellbent on taking over the world?
: the attribution of one’s own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects; especially : the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety.
The US has been variously bombing and starving Iraqis for more than two decades, which begs the question: What did the nation of Iraq ever do to the United States? The answer: nothing.
How is it possible to fixate on acts of terrorism while simultaneously ignoring the colossal crimes the US has visited on the once prosperous nation of Iraq?
: a psychological defense mechanism in which confrontation with a personal problem or with reality is avoided by denying the existence of the problem or reality.
Iran hasn’t attacked another country in over 200 years. Even as the US threatens to launch a war against this relatively peaceful nation, many Americans continue to view their country as peace-loving and standing firmly on the moral high ground.
What accounts for this resilient sense of self-righteousness?
: a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs.
How can our critics remain virtually silent on the Western violence and simultaneously assert, ”Loonwatch is protecting Jihadists and terrorists through lies of omission.”
: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.
Defense mechanisms and relentless propaganda are the “psychological cataracts” that embolden us to criticize others and remain blind to our own faults. Refusal to take a good look in the mirror is also a lie of omission.
We condemn all acts of terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians, no matter who is responsible.
Again, our question to critics: Do you?
Of course, the so-called “counter-jihadists” could reasonably argue that they too have a limited focus, and are, “pretty much exclusively concerned with exposing the truth about Islam…” That’s fine, as long as their criticism is truthful, proportionate, and in accordance with fair standards.
Read the following excerpts and decide if they constitute hate speech or merely tell the unvarnished truth about Islam:
The cultured peoples, both today and in the past, create and build, proving their worth as the creators and advancers of culture. Islam was and remains only the corrupter and destroyer of culture… Islam can never be great, can never create culture, for it is not a people, but rather only a corrupt mixture of inferior desert tribes with no national life or longing, with no proud and famous past.
And:
In this war for the very existence of the American people, we must daily remind ourselves that Muslims unleashed this war against us….
There is nothing cruder than the Muslim religious books: the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the Hadith…The whole is a collection of ghost hunting and mysticism, blind cursing and the crassest egotism, an unimaginable superiority complex, sick perversity, the overturning of all natural laws, lust for murder, terror, and horror.
The Crusades, with their enormous sacrifices in the blood of northern peoples, were the result of Muslim insanity.
And:
One feels horror at the unique depravity of the Muslims, at the crimes they have committed, at the devilish hate they have from the beginning directed against all those who did not want to bow to the yoke of Islam! This horror becomes terror when one reads the Qur’anic writings and reads such outbursts of Muslim rage as one finds in the Sunnah and Hadith…..
The term “kafir” expresses the deep antipathy Muslims feel toward infidels. Despite its inferiority, Islam was able to survive over the millennia because of its satanic hatred against infidels.
Muslim hatred today is as strong as it ever was. He who does not submit is their enemy. The Muslim hates the enemy with all his heart and with all the strength of his satanic soul….
Deep and boundless hatred is an essential characteristic of Islam.
Now there is war! The Muslims forced us into a struggle for life and death. The war has forced us to give up much we formerly thought was necessary. It has also forced us to give up the “politeness” that in reality is a weakness. A boxer in the ring must use his fists to defend himself against his opponent. A fencer can only win when he uses his sword. We as a people will survive this war only if we eliminate weakness and “politeness” and respond to the Muslims with an equal hatred. We must always keep in mind what the Muslim wants today, and what he plans to do with us. If we do not oppose the Muslims with the entire energy of our people, we are lost. But if we can use the full force of our soul that has been released by the new crusade, we need not fear the future. The devilish hatred of the Muslims plunged the world into war, need and misery. Our holy hate will bring us victory and save all of mankind.
Common themes include the cultural inferiority of “desert tribes,” crude scriptures, boundless hate for infidels, unique depravity, a superiority complex, sick perversity, and lust for murder, terror, and horror. Muslims pose an existential threat, and their collective insanity is even responsible for the Crusades.
This is pretty standard fare for hate sites like Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs, and Frontpage Magazine. Can you guess the source?
It’s a trick question because none of these excerpts came from contemporary hate sites. All are from articles published decades ago by Nazis. Every word in bold has been modified so the passages appear to refer to Muslims instead of Jews.
You can view the original versions here, here and here. We previously published an article comparing specific statements from pre-Nazi era Antisemitic propagandist Julius Streicher and Robert Spencer, here.
That brings us to the next part of the Loonwatch mission statement:
While we find the sheer stupidity and outrageousness of the loons to be a source of invaluable comedy, we also recognize the seriousness of the danger they represent as dedicated hatemongers…
Muslims have not (yet) been subjected to pogroms or rounded up en mass and herded into internment camps, and the point is to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have learned the lessons of history.
During the Nazi era, Antisemitic propaganda resonated with many “good Germans,” just as many “good Americans” once accepted slavery and thought of Native Americans as “savages.” Everyone outside the lunatic fringe recognizes the monstrous injustices of the past, but far fewer have the moral fortitude to recognize and speak out against the socially sanctioned injustices of the present day.
Islamophobia is the hate du jour, and hatemongers and hypocrites are enjoying a lavish feast.
But one North Carolina Republican believes that as a country we’ve grown soft since banning public hangings and is calling for them to reinstated as a deterrent to crime. If Rep. Larry Pittman had his way, “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers” would be first in line for the gallows:
Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, who was appointed to the District 82 House seat in October, expressed his views in an email sent Wednesday to every member of the General Assembly. [...]
“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”
As ThinkProgress reported, last year Republicans in South Carolina, Nebraska, and Iowa pushed legislation that would essentially legalize the murder of abortion providers. Such radical sentiments have been echoed by prominent conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who said during his 2004 campaign, “I favor the death penalty for abortionists.”
It was revealed in January 2011 that the NYPD was using an anti-Muslim documentary entitled “The Third Jihad” in its counter terror training courses. At the time “a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened ‘a couple of times’ for a few officers.”
A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.
During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.
We exposed the Third Jihad way back in 2009 when it was first released! We clearly laid out the facts: (1) Clarion Fund is an arm of Aish HaTorah, an Israeli advocacy and educational organization:
According to the Delaware Department of Corporations, Robert (Rabbi Raphael) Shore, Rabbi Henry Harris and Rebecca Kabat incorporated Clarion Fund. All three of whom are reported to serve as employees of Aish HaTorah International.
(2) Clarion Fund’s free mass distribution of the anti-Muslim movie, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War on the West (also directed by Shore) a few months prior to the 2008 presidential election was an attempt to sway the election in John McCain’s favor:
Unless you were sleeping in a cave during the 2008 Presidential election you’re probably aware that the mysterious Clarion Fund is the same organization that distributed 28 Million DVD’s of their controversial film Obsession, which compares Islam to Nazism, in newspapers in swing states across America.
The movie was widely discredited for its cast of radical and extreme pundits, some of whom (Daniel Pipes, Brigitte Gabriel, Walid Shoebat, Steven Emerson) we have featured on LoonWatch. As our articles showed, these Islamophobes have a history of bigoted and derogatory statements regarding Muslims and Islam.
The film itself was compared to Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 pro-Nazi film Triumph of the Will. Broward-Palm Beach New Times called it “misleading and dangerous.” Jeff VanDenBerg, director of Middle East Studies at Drury University, called the film “a blatant piece of anti-Muslim propaganda.”
During the campaign to distribute Obsession, news reports at the time quickly revealed that their main motivation was to shift the focus during the Presidential election from the Economy to the issue of National Security, the area in which John McCain led in polls.
Shore and his cohorts efforts failed as they over-reached in their attempt to paint the radical-stealth-Islamic boogeyman menace to America as similar to Nazism during WWII. They changed tactic with the Third Jihad and attempted to redirect the hate, though they only offered a thin vanilla (Zuhdi Jasser) covering for the bigotry that is clearly all over the film:
Third Jihad paints a picture of a nefarious plot by a cabal that includes all mainstream Muslim organizations to take over and dominate America. The movie, reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, centers around the purported discovery of a document describing a strategic secret plot by Muslims to undermine Democracy and replace it with Sharia’ laws.
The recent exposes in the mainstream media showing that thousands of NYPD officers have watched the anti-Muslim films, coupled with Ray Kelly himself being interviewed in the film has caused much embarrassment to the NYPD, which is already suffering from poor relations with the Muslim community. The NYPD and Ray Kelly have apologized, (Kelly now calls the movie “inflammatory”), but many are calling for Kelly to be fired.
In a press release Raphael Shore complained about his anti-Muslim film being dumped from the training of NYPD officers:
“We regret that the film has been taken out of the counterterrorism training program of the NYPD. The New York Times stories are proof positive that the Clarion Fund’s high-quality and impactful documentaries touch very sensitive nerves.
“Those that have blasted the film are attempting to stifle an important debate about the internal state of the Muslim community in America, and whether politicized Islam and indoctrination pose tangible security threats.
Yes, Raphael is concerned with the “internal state of the Muslim community in America”/sarcasm. He’s as concerned about it as Pamela Geller is no doubt. The truth is Raphael, your hate work on Islam is no longer going to get a free pass. People can see the nexus that aligns Right-Wing Islamophobes abroad and at home and they are tired of it.
The Third Jihad is essentially an updated and reconfigured version of Obsession or as some have called it“Obsession on steroids.” Instead of the overt comparisons of Islam with Nazism, or of a cosmic battle between good and evil, the object this time is to warn against a threat they term “Cultural Jihad” carried out from within by American Muslims.
In Third Jihad, just as in Obsession, there is the cliche disclaimer at the start of the film that the movie is not about the vast majority of Muslims who are peaceful, yet in Third Jihad just as in Obsession, the rest of the film quickly and completely trumps what becomes an empty disclaimer. Both films fail to make consistent distinctions between Islam and Radical Islamism, and at times conflate the two. As the IPS (Inter Press Service)notes:
Radical Muslims, by having children, spreading their faith, and ensuring their ability to practice Islam as they see fit, are working a ‘demographic jihad’ in which they see themselves emerging as a majority and making Islam the dominant religion of the U.S. – eventually to take over the nation altogether – contend Jasser and the films creators.
But that prospect seems unlikely in the U.S., where Muslim Americans are generally regarded as well-assimilated and not radicalised.
The film itself also contains inconsistencies in terms of differentiating between Islam and radical Islam.
For example, the graphic that the film used to demonstrate the spread of an Islamic state across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe used a tiled picture of a green crescent with a star between its points. The crescent and star are the symbol of Islam in general.
The documentary was produced by the Clarion Fund, a U.S.-based non-profit that was embroiled in controversy last year when it distributed its last movie, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” to nearly 30 million homes in the ‘swing states’ that normally decide U.S. presidential elections.
Its 501(c)(3) status as non-profit means the group is legally exempt from paying taxes and is prohibited from involvement in electoral politics.
IPS investigations also tied the production and distribution of “Obsession” to right-wing Israeli groups and U.S.-based neoconservatives.
The central focus of the film is the purported discovery of a document which claims Muslim organizations are seeking to “destroy” the West from within and replace Democracy with Islamic law worldwide. This ploy is similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which is a tract alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. Purportedly written by a secret group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion, the document underlies 24 protocols that are supposedly followed by the Jewish people.
The movie also suffers from a lack of credibility with most of the pundits it chooses to interview. For example one of the pundits is Tawfiq Hamid (!) who is labeled an ex-terrorist. Tawfiq’s story is not corroborated by any independent sources, he has also made blatant statements describing Muslims as terrorists and Islam as evil. On the Orla Barry Show he stated, “the majority of Muslim are all passive terrorists. They believe in this evil. They support it either by money or emotionally they are not against it.” He is also featured on radical Islamophobe Walid Shoebat’s website and has appeared with him on talk shows and other venues.
This hate movie is available online and its central protagonist is Zuhdi Jasser who is also the narrator of the film. Jasser is cast as an all American hero, clips of him having moments with his family are reminiscent of episodes out of Full House, complete with sentimental muzak equivalent to the quality one hears in elevators. Jasser is the lone American Muslim (all the others are either “scared” or “silent”) standing up against radicals. He is the “moderate” who is seeking to reform Islam while at the same time save America from the ignored threat of “homegrown radical Muslims.”
Is Jasser an unbiased chronicler of American Islam, and is he the right advocate to counter radical Muslims?
Considering his radical associations and partisan attachment to the far right wing of the Republican party, the answers are no.
As Richard Silversteinwrites, “To put it plain and simple, Jasser is a Muslim neocon.” He created a 501c3 designated organization AIFD (American Islamic forum for Democracy) whose agenda is a “barely concealed” form of radical Republicanism. 501c3 designated organizations are not allowed to meddle in partisan politics.
Jasser has himself publicly participated in the political process. In this endorsement of a far-right pro-Israel Colorado Republican legislative candidate, he strangely takes aim at the candidate’s Republican American Muslim opponent:
“A brief word about Mr. Sharf’s primary opponent. Mrs. Rima Barakat Sinclair has no apparent record, prior to this election of…any traditional conservative issues. Previously, her sole political agenda seems to have been anti-Israel activism. Her candidacy seems to be more a product of Islamist politics than of ideas central to conservative American principles and activism. Sadly, candidates out of this mold, who conflate the Israeli-Palestinian crisis with their Islamic identity actually harm more than they help the genuine pluralistic advancement of American Muslims. Most Muslims are actually quite diverse in their domestic and foreign policy politics and do not accept the collectivist agenda of political Islam (Islamism).”
It is certainly no accident that Sinclair’s opponent, Joshua Scharf, is a right-wing pro-Israel militant.
In this National Review interview, Jasser enthusiastically promotes a Republican agenda:
“Lopez: Do you like what you’re hearing out of any of the presidential candidates?
Jasser: (First a necessary caveat – the following is my personal opinion only and in no way that of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy).
Yes, I think most of the Republican presidential field is much more honest than the Democrats in articulating the real stakes in this war of ideas of the free world versus the Islamists. While most of the Republican candidates are in the right anti-Islamist arena, only a few have been able to articulate it clearly enough and with enough candor to get my attention. I am far from making up my mind on a candidate yet, but am encouraged by a lot of what I see from some of the candidates.
I am most heartened by what I am hearing from Rudy Guliani’s campaign, with Governor Mitt Romney very close behind in my mind. Mayor Guliani understands the toxicity of the Saudis and their Wahhabis…He is not afraid to articulate the conflict in ideas between Western freedom and Islamist theocracy…He names our enemies by name, and is not afraid to stand for principle and substance in foreign policy over diplomatic platitudes (i.e. against the Saudis, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood), and other Islamists.
Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign has also demonstrated a willingness to mince no words when discussing the ideologies we are facing. He identifies jihadists as our enemies and uses his important position of national and global leadership to clearly frame the debate as one between the ideology of Islamism (Caliphism, jihadism, and theocracy) versus freedom.
…John McCain’s articulation of the stakes in the Iraq war has always been very impressive, and I hope that other candidates can look to his clarity on the issue as an example of principle.”
His disclaimer is a laugh since the group’s website lists him as founder and president. Only one other individual is listed on the entire website as a staff member of the group. No board members are listed (though he refers to the existence of one). So Jasser IS AIF. If Jasser is a right-wing Republican, so is AIF. Which makes a 501c3 designation problematic.
Jasser is also a member of the Middle East Forum created and ran by neo-con Daniel Pipes as well as “the pro-Israel and neocon Committee on the Present Danger. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute. He writes for Family Security Matters, Middle East Quarterly, and other far-right websites.” If this doesn’t give you a hint about the agenda that drives Jasser and the purpose of this film nothing will.
Ana and Cenk do a better and more succinct job in eviscerating Third Jihad and the NYPD’s attempted cover-up:
A family barricaded themselves in their home as a neighbour armed with knives threatened to kill them, a court heard. Daniel Smith is said to have shouted racist abuse and English Defence League slogans as he smashed his way into the Thornhill Lees home.
Yesterday, victim Waaqas Ahmed said: “He was like a vicious animal against his prey, lunging. It’s a miracle I didn’t get hurt.”
Leeds Crown Court heard the attack on August 26, 2011, was the culmination of a long-running dispute between Smith’s girlfriend and their neighbours in Victoria Road.
Prosecutor Christopher Tehrani said Smith started a fight in the street with two of his neighbour’s brothers at around 7.30pm. When the fight was broken up, the brothers went into their sister’s house and locked the front door.
Soon after, Smith, 38, arrived armed with two knives and a screwdriver. Jurors saw mobile phone footage of him banging at the door and making threats.
Zubair Yasin said: “Everyone was on their phones calling the police. My little niece was screaming, my sister was crying. We could not imagine how this could be happening in our own home.”
Mr Tehrani said the family wedged an ironing board against the door, but Smith forced his way in. He threatened family members one-by-one with a knife.
Junaid Azad’s arm was cut when he tried to protect his sister. “It was pandemonium,” he said. Mr Azad said he defended himself and his family with a broom handle and exercise bar, and threw a milkshake at Smith.
Smith denies assault by beating and aggravated burglary.
We reported on the negative response Longview, Texas Muslims received from “some” of their neighbors who don’t want to see a mosque built in the town. It is only fair that we also highlight the voices who have no problem with the mosque and are in fact “disappointed” with the ignorant actions some of the anti-Mosque neighbors have taken.
A Longview resident said Thursday he is disappointed by the negative reaction from a portion of the Longview community toward a mosque being built on Amy Street.
“Quite frankly it was very disheartening to me to see that type of discussion taking place here in our community,” Vik Verma said during public comment at a Longview City Council meeting.
“I believe it’s strongly unwarranted. The Islamic community of Longview is merely wanting to have a house of worship just like any other faith in Longview, in Gregg County, in Texas and in the United States. I think this is a value that our community should embrace.”
Verma said freedom of religion is a right granted in the U.S. Constitution and that the community should embrace it. “I support the mosque. I’m glad it’s coming to Gregg County,” Verma said. “I think it’s good for diversity in our area, and I think it’s good for the community as a whole.”
The Dutch Cabinet moved a step closer Friday to banning the burqa, making good on an election promise that is largely symbolic but has broad public support.
Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen said the Cabinet agreed on plans to ban the head-to-toe Islamic gown along with other forms of face-covering clothing including ski masks. The legislation must still be approved by both houses of the Dutch Parliament, a process that could take months. “We are confident we have a majority,” Interior Minister Liesbeth Spies said.
Once seen as one of the world’s most tolerant nations, the Netherlands has turned increasingly conservative in recent years and is pushing immigrants more to fully assimilate into mainstream Dutch society. Anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders welcomed the decision in a tweet as “fantastic news.”
Like neighboring Belgium, the Dutch government cited security concerns as a reason for the ban and framed it as a move to safeguard public order and allow all people to “fully participate in society”. “People must be able to look one another in the eye,” Verhagen said.
The Dutch decision came despite criticism of the ban from independent advisory panel the Council of State, which reportedly suggested it could amount to an attack on freedom of religion. Verhagen denied ignoring the advice and said ministers took it into account when laying out the reasons underpinning the legislation. The government is confident that by citing public order concerns, the legislation will not breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
Leyla Cakir, head of Muslim women’s organization Al Nisa, said she was surprised and shocked by the decision. “You are taking away women’s right of self-determination, and it is all based on fear,” she said.
But in a statement announcing the decision, the government said it was helping women. “Having to wear a burqa or niqab in public goes against equality of men and women,” the government said. “With this legislation, the Cabinet is removing a barrier to these women participating in society.”
A ban on the veil was part of the deal the VVD and CDA made with Wilders in September 2010, in exchange for his party’s support for their coalition government. However, it would be unfair to accuse Maxime Verhagen of adopting this policy out of mere political expendency. He has a record of Islamophobia going back some years.
The suspended Gujarat cadre IPS officer, Sanjiv Bhatt, has strongly urged the head of the Special Investigation Team, R.K. Raghavan, to proceed with the prosecution of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as there was “substantial direct evidence as well as overwhelming circumstantial evidence” to establish his alleged complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002.
Mr. Bhatt, who shot off yet another letter to Mr. Raghavan on Tuesday (his fourth this month), said he was writing in response to reports that the SIT had sought legal opinion on whether or not to prosecute Mr. Modi for the post-Godhra violence. Drawing on his depositions before the SIT, Mr. Bhatt said he had personally met and alerted Mr. Modi to the deteriorating law and order situation on February 28, 2002, focusing especially on “the imminent carnage at Gulberg Society.”
He said he met Mr. Modi twice that day and “by the time of the second meeting… the carnage at Gulberg Society had begun in full view of the police personnel who were deployed there… The Chief Minister was accordingly briefed about the complete police inaction and complicity. The Chief Minister was also explicitly informed about the imminent threat to the lives of ex-MP Ehsan Jafri and his family members.”
Mr. Bhatt also drew the SIT’s attention to the “numerous Situation Reports and Alert Messages” sent “contemporaneously to the Office of the Chief Minister,” especially concerning the “developing violent situation and imminent carnage at Gulberg Society.”
He said Mr. Modi was also kept informed on telephone about the developments. A fax alert dated February 28, 2002 attached to the letter to Mr. Raghavan said: “As informed telephonically to the Hon’ble CM, ex-MP Ehsan Jafri and his family members residing at Gulmarg Society [Mr. Bhatt told The Hindu the alert had erroneously referred to Gulberg as Gulmarg because that is the first time he had heard of the housing society], Chamanpura, Meghaninagar have been summoned and are being attacked by a Hindu mob in the presence of policebundobust [deployment]. The lives of Ehsan Jafri and other family members are in imminent danger…” The alert was addressed to the Personal Secretary to the Chief Minister and the Personal Secretary to the Minister of State (Home) with copies to the Home Secretary and the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad.
Mr. Bhatt said that instead of reacting to the alerts, Mr. Modi instructed him (Mr. Bhatt) to dig out details of “past instances wherein Mr. Jafri had supposedly opened fire on Hindus during earlier communal riots in Ahmedabad.” Mr. Bhatt said that as he emerged from the meeting, he got the information that Mr. Modi was “independently getting real-time information updates on the developments that were taking place at Gulberg Society.”
Mr. Bhatt said the Chief Minister’s conduct made it “unambiguously and absolutely clear” that he was not interested in discharging his “constitutionally mandated legal obligation of directing the police force to act with all firmness in order to protect the life and property of helpless citizens.” Instead, he wanted to collect information that could be used to build a case that the Gulberg carnage was triggered by Mr. Jafri himself.
The police officer argued further that these “acts of commission and omission” by the Chief Minister amounted to “facilitation and abetment of the gruesome carnage at Gulberg Society” and he was liable to be charged for abetment under Sections 109, 112, 115, and 117 of the Indian Penal Code and for concealing design to commit an offence under Sections 118 and 119.
Later, Mr. Bhatt told The Hindu that he had repeatedly made two requests to the SIT: to allow his statement to be recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 of the Cr.PC. and to examine control room inspectors and other officers who were in a position to testify on the developments of February 27 and 28, 2002, and who could, by their statements, support or negate Mr. Bhatt’s claim that he attended a late night meeting held at Mr. Modi’s residence.
The police officer said: “My depositions to the SIT have been under Section 161 of the Cr.PC which does not even require my signature. However, a statement under 164 of the Cr.PC cuts both ways. It is legally binding, but if I have lied, it also allows my prosecution for perjury. Is that too much to ask?”
Thus the headline to an article in today’s Daily Mail. As is almost invariably the case when this newspaper reports on any issue involving Muslims, the headline is intentionally misleading.
If you read the article, you’ll see it is the rapist’s family background that is characterised as “strict Muslim” not the individual himself. In fact the judge in passing sentence made the point that the rapist carried out the attacks despite and in contradiction to his religious upbringing: “The fact that you have attacked these women not withstanding your background must represent your own wholly warped personality.”
But the headline suggests to the reader that it was the man’s strict adherence to his faith which produced the violent misogyny that led him to commit these crimes.
Islamophobes and anti-Muslim haters are all in a tizzy about some kind words that Liam Neeson had to say about Islam and the “beautiful mosques” he encountered in Turkey. The Sun magazine, a British tabloid ran the sensational headline, Liam Neeson: I May Become a Muslim.
Apparently this is the statement they are basing his consideration of Islam on:
“The Call to Prayer happens five times a day and for the first week it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing.
“There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.”
To me it sounds like Liam is being nice and appreciating the beauty that he most likely is able to find in various cultures and traditions. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think his words are just hollow sentiment, I think he probably was truly impressed and perhaps he is considering Islam, but of course those who take perpetual offense cannot concede that anyone, let alone a “celebrity,” could see anything beautiful within Islam or Muslim countries.
The ever hysterical Debbie Schlussel for instance thinks Neeson should change his name to Al-Moron. Failed comic book writer Bosch Fawstin is also offended, as are are a plethora of other Islamophobes.
Perhaps they will chalk it up to the secret-Muslamic-creeping-Shariah take over of Hollywood?:
HOLLYWOOD star Liam Neeson is considering giving up his Catholic belief and becoming a Muslim.
The actor, 59, admitted Islamic prayer “got into his spirit” while filming in Turkish city Istanbul.
He said: “The Call to Prayer happens five times a day and for the first week it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing.
“There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.”
Liam was raised in Northern Ireland as a devout Catholic and altar boy and was named after the local priest.
But the star — whose wife Natasha Richardson died aged 45 in a skiing accident in 2009 — has spoken about challenges to his faith.
He said: “I was reared a Catholic but I think every day we ask ourselves, not consciously, what are we doing on this planet? What’s it all about?
“I’m constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.”
Liam was criticised in 2010 after claiming Narnia lion Aslan — voiced by him in the movies — is not based on Christ as CS Lewis had claimed but in fact all spiritual leaders including Mohammed.
His latest film The Grey, about an oil drilling team who crash in freezing Alaska, is released in the UK on Friday.
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:
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.
Yes, they just oppose the small mosque-to-be because of “noise” and “traffic.” If that is the case ,then those issues would be legitimate concerns, but what they go on to do and say casts doubt on their stated intentions in opposing the mosque.
Hopefully this will be resolved properly (via. Islamophobia-Watch):
KYTX reports on resistance to the Islamic Centre of Longview’s plan to build the town’s first mosque, a relatively small structure which will be attended by no more than 40-50 people at a time. Needless to say, the objectors say they have nothing against Muslims, it’s just the noise and the traffic they’re worried about.
In response to the mosque proposal, some have erected “Jesus” signs outside their properties. However, this has nothing to do with hostility to Islam, but simply expresses their love of Christianity. As one mosque opponent explains: “The neighbourhood joined together and we put up the Jesus signs to support Jesus Christ in our church and our community.”
Didn’t they love Jesus before this mosque was going to be constructed? Do they realize Muslims believe in Jesus as well?
Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”
This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.
A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.
During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.
News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out terror plots.
But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.
“The department’s response was to deny it and to fight our request for information,” said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. “The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us.”
Tom Robbins, a former columnist with The Village Voice, first revealed that the police had screened the film. The Brennan Center then filed its request.
The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.
Commissioner Kelly is listed on the “Third Jihad” Web site as a “featured interviewee.” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that filmmakers had lifted the clip from an old interview. The commissioner, Mr. Browne said, has not asked the filmmakers to remove him from its Web site, or to clarify that he had not cooperated with them.
None of the documents turned over to the Brennan Center make clear which police officials approved the showing of this film during training. Department lawyers blacked out large swaths of these internal memorandums.
Repeated calls over the past several days to the Clarion Fund, which is based in New York, were not answered. The nonprofit group shares officials with Aish HaTorah, an Israeli organization that opposes any territorial concessions on the West Bank. The producer of “The Third Jihad,” Raphael Shore, also works with Aish HaTorah.
Clarion’s financing is a puzzle. Its federal income tax forms show contributions, grants and revenues typically hover around $1 million annually — except in 2008, when it booked contributions of $18.3 million. That same year, Clarion produced “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The Clarion Fund used its surge in contributions to pay to distribute tens of millions of copies of this DVD in swing electoral states across the country in September 2008.
“The Third Jihad” is quite similar, in style and content, to that earlier film. Narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona, “The Third Jihad” casts a broad shadow over American Muslims. Few Muslim leaders, it states, can be trusted.
“Americans are being told that many of the mainstream Muslim groups are also moderate,” Mr. Jasser states. “When in fact if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”
Footage of an interview with the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, is used in the movie.
The film posits that there were three jihads: One at the time of Muhammad, a second in the Middle Ages and a third that is under way covertly throughout the West today.
This is, the film claims, “the 1,400-year war.”
How the film came to be used in police training, and even for how long, was not clear. An undated memorandum from the department’s commanding officer for specialized training noted that an employee of the federal Department of Homeland Security handed the DVD to the New York police in January 2010. Since then, this officer said, the video was shown continuously “during the sign-in, medical and administrative orientation process.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it was never used in its curriculum, and might have come from a contractor.
As it turned out, it was police officers who blew the whistle after watching the film. Late in 2010, Mr. Robbins contacted an officer who spoke of his unease with the film; another officer, said Zead Ramadan, the New York president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, talked of seeing it during a training session the previous summer. “The officer was completely offended by it as a Muslim,” Mr. Ramadan said. “It defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for.”
When the news broke about the movie last year, Mr. Browne called it a “wacky film” that had been shown “only a couple of times when officers were filling out paperwork before the actual course work began.”
He made no more public comments. Privately, two days later, he asked the Police Academy to determine whether a terrorism awareness training program had used the video, according to the documents.
The academy’s commander reported back on March 23, 2011, that the film had been viewed by 68 lieutenants, 159 sergeants, 31 detectives and 1,231 patrol officers. The department never made those findings public.
And just one week later, the Brennan Center officially requested the same information, starting what turned out to be a nine-month legal battle to obtain it.
“It suggests a broader problem that they refuse to divulge this information much less to discuss it,” Ms. Patel of the Brennan Center said. “The training of the world’s largest city police force is an important question.”
Mr. Browne said he had been unaware of the higher viewership of the film until asked about it by The New York Times last week.
There is the question of the officers who viewed the movie during training. Mr. Browne said the Police Department had no plans to correct any false impressions the movie might have left behind.
“There’s no plan to contact officers who saw it,” he said, or to “add other programming as a result.”
In a recent article Eric Allen Bell Chooses to Retain “Ridiculous Prejudice”, I discussed an article this individual posted on Daily Kos claiming that the Loonwatch site was “in fact a terrorist spin control network.” I discussed his arguments and the reasons that I believe them to be Islamophobic. In about a week, he has posted a total of three such articles, and been joined in his rantings by Robert Spencer. You can see all of the updates with links at the bottom of my article about this saga.
In his second article Eric Allen Bell says:
But what about the rational and legitimate concerns that people, such as myself, voice about the theology of Islam and some of the ways it is practiced, in certain parts of the world, which violate human rights? Is the expression of such concerns something that should be dismissed and branded as yet more “Islamophobia”?
According to Loonwatch.com – a well known Islamophoiba [sic] watchdog site – there is no distinction. Loonwatch unconditionally attacks criticism of Islam but they refuse to criticize the many, many Islamic clerics and terrorists who are hurting people in the name of Islam. Should a person have something to say publicly questioning the funneling of monies from Islamic charities to Islamic terrorist networks, Loonwatch is there to call them a “Loon” for even raising the question. That’s quite a clever system – a form of radical Islamic McCarthyism it seems – with the first line of defense being a blogoshere of misinformed infidels who will blurt out the word “Islamophobe” at the slightest mention that within Islam there might be a problem brewing. What a clever design.
Should an article be written about forced marriages of Muslim child brides overseas or the stoning to death of a Muslim woman as punishment for being raped, or the many young boys who are brainwashed in Islamic madrasas only to become radicalized Islamic militants, or the Muslim men who were arrested in the UK for distributing fliers to Londoners saying that Homosexuals should be punished by hanging because their lifestyle is against Islam – any article written to express concern about these developments will likely lead the writer of such article to be branded a “Loon” by Looonwatch.com and have his name put out on the street.
Bell also said “But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad – even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them – even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a ‘Loon’ – thus the title of their blog, LoonWatch.com.”
And, his new friend Robert Spencer found this statement to be “entirely true observation”.
This particular claim is often made by Islamophobes, and it is becoming tiresome. Voicing legitimate concerns is not a problem, bigotry is a problem.
In this case, a claim was made first about Loonwatch whose sole purpose is narrowly focused on discussions of anti-Muslim bigotry. However, by Bell’s third article, and in the course of Spencer’s entire career, it is obvious that the claims are actually being made against the entire Muslim community and all of Islam.
However, even though Loonwatch is not in the business of themselves publishing anything other than information on Islamophobia, is it true that they would not tolerate criticism of Muslims?
Would writing or publishing articles raising any criticism of extremism or terrorism within the Muslim community lead to being labeled a “loon”? Would any criticism of extremist interpretations of Islam lead to being labeled a “loon”?
Here on The American Muslim, we have published thousands of articles, many of them discussing issues such as:
On TAM, we regularly call out those within the Muslim community that I identify as the “lunatic fringe”, discuss various interpretations of aspects of Sharia, condemn any interpretations that violate human rights. The list above is a very short list of the thousands of articles on such subjects that we have published, many of which I have written myself.
According to Bell any article written to express concern about these developments will likely lead the writer of such article to be branded a “Loon” by Looonwatch.com and have his name put out on the street.
And yet, what has been the result of my discussion of all of these concerns on TAM been? Loonwatch named me one of the “Anti-Loons of 2011”.
Muslims themselves discuss all of these issues and are more than happy to align with others who are concerned about a particular human or civil rights issue to work cooperatively to solve the problem. As one example among many, Muslims are working actively with representatives of other faith groups as part of an Interfaith Coalition against domestic violence. We are not interested in giving any credence to those who are not really concerned about a particular issue, but only in using it to further their bigoted Islamophobic agenda.
We have seen this sort of devious tactic too many times. Just one example was that two years after American Muslims had initiated a statement Apostasy and Freedom of Faith in Islam initially signed by 100 Islamic scholars and activists, a group called “Former Muslims United” produced their own pledgeand demanded that Muslims sign it. And, as I said at that time “This FMU pledge is simply another attempt to create propoganda (planting the idea that American Muslims have not taken a position against punishments for apostasy) and to attempt to make it seem as if only former Muslims can stand for what is right, and frankly to attempt to increase the visibility of the FMU at the expense of the Muslim community. This is shameful behavior (although typical of members of this group who go beyond denouncing Islamic radicalism to denouncing all of Islam) and is simply another example of attempting to marginalize the Muslim community and bolster the false claim that Muslims don’t speak up against injustices, extremism, etc.”
This particular claim that “truth tellers” are being accused of Islamophobia for no reason other than their legitimate concerns about real issues and that in fact there is not even such a thing as Islamophobia is nonsense. The further claim that the fact that there are fewer hate crimes against Muslims than against Jews also proves that Islamophobia doesn’t exist is more nonsense.
The reason that this is so obvious to so many is that rational people can tell the difference between legitimate concerns and bigoted stereotypes. The Islamophobia of these folks is very real.
More than six years after Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich led a squad of Marines into two Haditha, Iraq homes and massacred two dozen civilians, the American serviceman in charge has reached a plea deal.
For nine counts of manslaughter, Wuterich will get three months of confinement.
Wuterich is the last of eight men tied to the November 2005 killing that left 24 Iraqis dead, including women, children and the elderly. It was announced on Monday this week that he had reached a plea with prosecutors during his military tribunal and is now expected to be sentenced as early as Tuesday. According to the Associated Press, Wuterich will face a maximum of three months of confinement, the forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay and a rank demotion.
Of the other seven Marines charged with the now-notorious massacre, one was acquitted and six had their charges dismissed. Wuterich’s attorneys have been confident throughout the ordeal that he would see a similar outcome. “He’s going to be glad to have it over because he knows that he’ll be exonerated,” lawyer Neal Puckett told National Public Radio earlier this month.
On November 19, 2005, Wuterich led a squad of men into two separate homes in the town of Haditha and opened fire on everyone in sight. Prosecutors say that a roadside bomb exploded moments before the Marines stormed the home, and were brought into hysterics by seeing a fellow soldier die in the attack. In response, they went on a rampage and for 45 minutes raided the two homes and were never faced with gunfire. Wuterich later said he instructed his team to “shoot first and ask questions later.”
“My Marines responded to the threats they faced in the manner that we all had been trained,” he explained to CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2007. After the roadside bomb was detonated, Wuterich said that, “My responsibility as a squad leader is to make sure that none of the rest of my guys died. And at that point, we were still on the assault.”
Lt. Col. Joseph Kloppel, spokesman of the Camp Pendleton marine Corps base near San Diego, California, told the media on Monday that “By pleading guilty to this charge, Staff Sergeant Wuterich has accepted responsibility for his actions.”
At a Rick Santorum town hall meeting in Lady Lake, Florida moments ago, a woman stood up to declare that she doesn’t like to refer to “President Obama as president because, legally, he is not.” While the audience gasped and clapped at the comment, Santorum restrained himself, refusing to utter a critical word.
The lady continued, Obama “totally ignores” the Constitution, prompting a nod of approval from Santorum. Then she went even further with her conspiracy rant:
He is an avowed Muslim. [applause] And my question is: why isn’t something being done to get him out of our government? He has no legal right to be calling himself President.
In an exemplary show of cowardice, Santorum did not tell the woman that she had her facts wrong or even bother to distance himself from the previous comments. Instead, he did the opposite, giving sanction to her views. “I’m doing my best to get him out” of office, Santorum said, “and you’re right about — he uniformly ignores the Constitution.”
The tail continued to wag the dog as the lady pressed Santorum for tougher language about Obama’s unconstitutionality. Santorum meekly responded, “I agree with you in the sense that he is – he does things that are against the values and the founding principles of our country.” Watch it:
First, of course, Obama is not an “avowed Muslim.” He is a Christian.
And he certainly has every right to be calling himself President as he was soundly elected by the people and has sworn an oath (twice) to uphold his duty to serve and protect the United States.
For Santorum, who frequently touts the need for strong “leadership” in this country, today’s profile in weakness shows he’s unable to stand up to his own right-wing fringe.
Yerushalmi is beating a dead horse these days. Does he realize that this bill undermines our constitution? Or maybe the issue is that he has forgotten that the court in Oklahoma found the anti-Shariah bill discriminatory to foreign law.
RICHMOND – A leading American civil rights group has criticized a new proposed Virginia bill to ban courts from considering any religious codes in litigation, confirming that the bill was a new step towards effort to stigmatize Muslims and undermine their religious traditions.
“Bigotry needs to be repudiated, not legitimized through the introduction of a bill that has such hate-filled and un-American origins,” Gadier Abbas, staff attorney at the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a press release on Friday, January 20.
Titled Morris’ HB631, the new bill was introduced by Virginia General Assembly Delegate Rick L. Morris (R-House District 64) on January 11.
The anti-Shari`ah new proposed law would ban courts from applying religious traditions to proceedings, such as the execution of a will among Muslims.
Not only the religious Muslim code, the new bill would also prohibit the application of the Catholic equivalent, canon law, and other religious guidelines.
The suddenly controversial bill is scheduled to be heard by a Virginia legislature House subcommittee next Monday.
In Islam, Shari`ah governs all issues in Muslims’ lives from daily prayers to fasting and from, marriage and inheritance to financial disputes.
The Islamic rulings, however, do not apply on non-Muslims, even if in a dispute with non-Muslims.
In US courts, judges can refer to Shari`ah law in Muslim litigation involving cases about divorce and custody proceedings or in commercial litigation.
Defended
Sponsoring the bill, Morris said that he aimed at enforcing US laws only.
“It’s definitely not an anti-Muslim bill,” Morris told the Virginian-Pilot in a brief phone interview Friday.
He said his goal is to make it clear that Virginia judges can rely only on state and federal law in their rulings.
However, CAIR confirmed that the bill was drafted by anti-Islam activist David Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam, managed to gain the support of prominent Washington figures.
He is head of the anti-Islam hate group Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which on its now password-protected website offered a policy proposal that would make “adherence to Islam” punishable by 20 years in prison.
The proposed Virginia legislation is just one of more than 20 similar bills that have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide in the past year.
Over the past few years, lawmakers in at least two dozen states have introduced proposals last year forbidding local judges from considering Shari`ah when rendering verdicts on issues of divorces and marital disputes.
The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.
Earlier this January, a US federal court upheld an injection on a proposed ban on Islamic Shari`ah in the state of Oklahoma, saying the drive was unconstitutional and discriminates against religion.
An Alabama state senator plans to introduce a constitutional amendment that would ban state courts from looking to Islamic Shariah law in adjudicating cases, Hatewatch has learned.
Republican Senator Cam Ward pre-filed the “American and Alabama Laws for Alabama Courts Amendment” with the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 4.
The amendment’s language is clearly drawn from model legislation drafted by anti-Muslim lawyer David Yerushalmi, who equates Shariah with Islamic radicalism so totally that he advocates criminalizing virtually any personal practice that is compliant with Shariah. His “American Laws for American Courts” initiative enjoys support from Muslim-hating blogger Pam Geller, who plumbed new depths of foulness this week by expressing her “love” for the U.S. marines who were videotaped urinating on dead Taliban combatants.
Yerushalmi, who says the “War on Terror” should be a war against Islam “and all Muslim faithful,” has also proposed to outlaw Islam and deport Muslims and other “non-Western, non-Christian” people to protect the United States’ “national character.”
Ward, who could not be reached for comment, apparently shares Yerushalmi’s dislike of immigrants. The Alabama lawmaker is a member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), a national coalition that attributes to “illegal aliens” what it describes as “[i]ncreasingly documented incidences of homicide, identity theft, property theft, serious infectious diseases, drug running, gang violence, human trafficking, terrorism and growing cost to taxpayers.”
Since its founding in 2007, SLLI has taken a leading role in fostering xenophobic intolerance in statehouses across the nation. The group works hand-in-glove with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant hate group whose legal arm devised the draconian immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, portions of which have been enjoined by courts concerned about their constitutionality. Though Ward did not introduce Alabama’s immigration enforcement law, he has been a vocal supporter of the measure, which is widely viewed as the harshest of its kind.
Ward is not the first Alabama lawmaker to introduce an anti-Shariah measure. In 2011, Republican state Senator Gerald Allen sponsored SB 62, a virtual replica of Oklahoma’s notorious anti-Shariah “Save Our State” amendment, which was struck down on Tuesday by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Allen’s proposal, which singled out Shariah law as its principle target, was not taken up for consideration before last year’s legislative session ended.
Ward may stand a better chance of success. According to the Public Policy Alliance, which hired Yerushalmi to write the “American Laws for American Courts” model legislation, versions of the law have already been passed in Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona. Unlike Oklahoma’s amendment, none were immediately enjoined. The Public Policy Alliance describes its creation in explicitly anti-Muslim terms, claiming on its website, “we are preserving individual liberties and freedoms which become eroded by the encroachment of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, such as Shariah.” But the legislation itself does not contain any reference to Shariah law or Islam, thus avoiding the issue that immediately flagged Oklahoma’s legislation as unconstitutional.
Ward has not commented publicly about his proposal, so it is impossible to know what inspired him to think that Alabama needs to worry about Shariah law in the first place. The various state proposals banning Shariah, in effect, attack a problem that does not exist and will not under the U.S. Constitution.
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, less than 1% of Alabamans are Muslim. And of all the states in the union, Alabama has unique insight into what happens when theocrats get it into their minds to bring their religion into the courts.
In August 2001, Roy Moore – then-chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – hauled under cover of night a 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments into the building that houses the state’s appellate courts and law library. A coalition of civil rights organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (which publishes Hatewatch), sued, leading U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson to rule that the monument created “a religious sanctuary within the walls of a courthouse” and had to be removed. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision on July 1, 2003. When a defiant Moore refused to comply with the order, he was removed from office for ethics violations, and that was that for Alabama courts’ experiment with mingling secular and religious law.
The monument went too. It now resides at a church in Moore’s hometown of Gadsden, Ala.
Eric Allen Bell, the loon, has been dumped by Daily Kos for being a bigot. Good riddance.
What many have suspected seems to have happened, birds of a feather flock together.
If you sound like a bigot, write like a bigot, argue like a bigot, then you’re a bigot… he started sounding more and more like Robert Spencer and sure enough now they’re reposting each other for validation.
After three diaries of mounting Islamophobia Eric was finally dumped, what a shame I here you all cry.
Now I hardly feel the need to friend him on facebook but I might as well copy his whine here
Eric Allen Bell
Daily Kos has removed me as a writer. Apparently appealing to people’s humanity and asking if we can take a stand on human rights is not a value that DKOS holds as dear as compromise and commercialization. The liberal class in America IS NOT an effective voice of dissent. Either you are radical or you just don’t care. The middle ground is a waiting room for cowards.
Sorry Eric, you were not removed as a writer, but because you sounded just like Pamela Geller.
You mount a typical defense used by bigots everywhere, “I’m just telling the truth”.
You then proceed to lump every Muslim under a violent, bloodthirsty and bigoted banner, you even stooped to the “they are mere savages” argument.
You were not banned for speaking the truth.
You were banned because you are a bigot, sorry but it really is as simple as that.
Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum provoked an angry response from the Council on American-Islamic Relations Saturday for saying equality “doesn’t come from Islam“ but ”from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
“I get a kick out of folks who call for equality now, the people on the left, ‘Well, equality, we want equality.’ Where do you think this concept of equality comes from?” Santorum said during a South Carolina campaign stop Friday, ABC News reported. “It doesn’t come from Islam. It doesn’t come from the East and Eastern religions, where does it come from? It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that’s where it comes from.”
The former Pennsylvania senator, a Catholic, has spoken openly about faith on the campaign trail.
“So don’t claim his rights, don’t claim equality as that gift from God and then go around and say, ‘Well, we don’t have to pay attention to what God wants us to do. We don’t have to pay attention to God’s moral laws.’ If your rights come from God, then you have an obligation to live responsibly in conforming with God’s laws, and our founders said so, right?” Santorum asked.
In a statement, CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper called Santorum’s remarks “inaccurate and offensive,“ and said the organization was sending the candidate a copy of the Quran so he could ”educate himself.”
“The Quran, Islam’s revealed text, is the best refutation of Mr. Santorum’s inaccurate and offensive remarks, which are unbecoming of anyone who hopes to hold our nation’s highest office. Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God and share religious traditions that promote justice and equality,” Hooper said. “We suggest that Mr. Santorum educate himself about Islam and the American Muslim community by reading the Quran that we will send to his campaign headquarters next week.”
The FBI released hate crime statistics for the year of 2010, which showed that anti-Semitic crimes topped the list of religiously motivated hate crimes. Islamophobes have latched on to this fact to claim that “there is no Islamophobia.” For example, Robert Spencer of JihadWatch asked: ”What do you have to say about the fact that FBI statistics show that there is no ‘Islamophobia’?”
The American Muslim’s Sheila Musaji published a response to this argument, pointing out that it’s a non-sequitur: it does not follow that “there is no Islamophobia” just because there were more anti-Semitic hate crimes reported than anti-Muslim ones. This would be like arguing that “there is no anti-Semitism” because there were more anti-black hate crimes reported than anti-Semitic ones.
In fact, Musaji points out that there was a 50% increase in the number of reported anti-Muslim hate crimes. Any reasonable person would think this trend to be concerning and ask: what is causing this steep rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes?
There is another issue here: it’s a well-known fact that ethnic minorities are less likely to report hate crimes. One of the common reasons cited for this is that such minority groups tend to distrust police and authorities–which is certainly the case for Arabs and Muslims, who have every reason to feel this way.
Islamophobia penetrates law enforcement and government on all levels, starting from the police: the Washington Monthly had a very eyeopening article on the subject: How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam.
The FBI, the governmental institution responsible for monitoring hate crimes, is itself brimming with Islamophobia (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Many Muslims in America don’t trust the FBI, and wouldn’t report hate crimes to them, for fear of being accused of something themselves.
This is exactly what happened to a female Muslim student at the University of Bridgeport who reported to authorities that a man was sexually harassing her; not only was the man not investigated, but the female Muslim student herself ended up being investigated by the FBI after the accused molester called her a terrorist. That’s how vulnerable Muslims are in this country: accuse them of being a terrorist and the FBI will come knocking at their door.
The chain of anti-Muslim bigotry goes even higher to the Department of Homeland Security. The House Committee on Homeland Security is led by the fervently anti-Muslim Congressman Peter King. It is Muslims, not Jews or people of any other religion, who are subjected to such hearings. If King had suggested holding anti-Jewish hearings, the comparisons to Nazi Germany would be quickly invoked (rightfully so) and the Congressman’s career would come to a swift end (again, rightfully so). Yet, when this bigotry is leveled against Muslims, the reaction is far more mild.
This brings me to my second (and main) point: it is Muslims, not Jews or people of any other faith, who are the number one victims of institutionalized bigotry in America. This is something more pernicious than lone-wolf hate crimes, because the effects of it are more far-reaching.
It is Muslims, not people of any other religious faith, that were (and continue to be) detained by the hundreds–without trial or charge–and holed away in the hell-hole known as Guantanamo Bay detention camp. This, even though it was known by the government that “the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo were innocent.” Most Americans fail to realize the gravity of this injustice, and continue to believe–like mindless sheep–that the Gitmo prisoners are “the worst of the worst” and are evil Magneto-style villains. People of the future will be horrified that any sane person would think that this is necessary:
Who but the sickest and most deranged person could think this is OK?
Can you imagine the outcry had it been a Jewish person who had been imprisoned like so by our government? Even the idea is considered ludicrous.
Gitmo is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned in Bagram (“the Other Guantanamo”) and there are probably tens of thousands Muslims that have been detained by the United States, without trial or charge, around the world. They are subjected to typical American forms of torture: solitary confinement (considered by human rights experts to be one of the worst forms of torture) and sexual harassment (including sodomy, rape, and having their testicles electrocuted). Mentally deranged guards routinely used dogs to torture the inmates.
Yes, it is Muslims who are the victims of these horrific crimes.
These abuses are carried out because the institution that is supposed to protect American citizens (including American Muslims)–the U.S. Armed Forces–has instead been, in the words of the hawkish Jeffrey Goldberg, ”waging a three-decade war for domination of the Middle East.” Quite predictably, the U.S. Armed Forces as an institution is rife with Islamophobia.
It is Muslim civilians who are being incinerated by our bombs, missiles, and drones. Over the course of the last two decades, the United States has directly or indirectly caused the deaths of over a million Muslims. America is dropping bombs on multiple Muslim countries (the list just keeps getting longer and longer); Americans feel comfortable dropping bombs on countries they can’t even locate on a map. These are Islamophobic wars that kill way more people than hate crimes do.
[W]ho are the prime victims of America’s posture of Endless War? Overwhelmingly, the victims are racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals). And that is a major factor in why these abuses flourish: because those who dominate American political debates perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War…
To see how central a role this sort of selfish provincialism plays in shaping political priorities, just compare (a) the general indifference to Endless War and the massive civil liberties assaults… (ones largely confined to Muslims) to (b) the intense outrage and media orgy generated when a much milder form of invasiveness — TSA searches — affected Americans of all backgrounds. The success of Endless War and civil liberties attacks depends on ensuring that the prime victims, at least in the first instance, are marginalized and easily demonizable minorities.
It is Muslims who are the victims of such governmental abuses:
Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.
It is absolutely crass to argue that there is more anti-Semitism in America than Islamophobia. There would be nothing less acceptable in our country than anti-Jewish Congressional hearings. One could simply not imagine imprisoning hundreds of Jews–without trial or charge–in Guantanamo Bay. If the United States caused the death of over a million Jews, people would be calling this the next Holocaust. Such things are simply unthinkable, except when Muslims are the intended victims.
Certainly, lone-wolf hate crimes are worrisome, and Jews are one of the most targeted groups in this regard. This is a serious concern that needs to be addressed–as does the fact that there has been such a steep rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. But, we shouldn’t ignore institutionalized bigotry in America, which is even more worrisome. Muslims are the most vulnerable minority in this regard: they are the absolute lowest on the totem pole and get the dubious distinction of being the number one victims in this regard.
Lastly, it is very morbid the way the anti-Muslim cyber-world is pitting the Jewish community against the Muslim one. This is not a competition or game. Hate crimes are not points or goals. Jews, Muslims, and people of all faiths (or no faith at all) should unite together to fight bigotry and intolerance. After all, Jews are well aware of the tactics that were once primarily used against them but are now used against Muslims: it may be a different minority, but it’s the same message.
* * * * *
I encourage everyone to read Sheila Musaji’s take on the subject. It was her article that prompted me to weigh in on this issue.
For a long time the Islamophobia Industry has been pushing fake ex-Muslims and fake ex-terrorists. The insanity went as far as having the charlatan Walid Shoebat teaching security officials about the “dangers of Islam.”
Kamal Saleem is one such fake ex-terrorists whose been banking on the hate and fear of Islam. We have exposed him several times before,
A political organization by the name, “Constituting Michigan-Founding Principles” is hosting Saleem along with Rep. Dave Agema who has introduced something along the lines of an “anti-Sharia” bill which he is passing off as legislation against “foreign law.” How much do you think they are paying Saleem to speak?
There is no doubt that Rep. Dave Agema is trying to curry favor with the radical right, but he should be ashamed of himself for participating in an event alongside a well known liar and charlatan like Saleem.
ALLEGAN — Allegan County political organization Constituting Michigan-Founding Principles will host a self-proclaimed former terrorist on Thursday at the Allegan High School Events Center.
Kamal Saleem claims to have been a former Islamic radical and terrorist before converting to Christianity. He has since published a book detailing his experiences and makes regular tours speaking about his life and views.
”He had entered the U.S. and gotten in an accident, and received medical care,” said Carol Dannenberg, of Constituting Michigan-Founding Principles. “He thought, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to hurt these people.’ He was raised to believe that there was no hope, that killing was a good thing.”
”I met Saleem in my travels to Lansing,” said Bill Sage, one of the co-founders of Constituting Michigan. “He’s here to talk about keeping American law in American courts, to make sure that the Constitution is what we’re drawing from.”
Sage characterizes the organization’s main focus as education reform and a return to focusing on the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in schools. Sage will also be speaking at the event, as will state Rep. Dave Agema, according to organizers. Agema is one of the sponsors of House Bill 4769, which seeks “to restrict the application of foreign laws” in Michigan. Opponents have characterized the bill as discriminatory towards Islam.
Saleem himself is also the subject of controversy. Questions have been raised regarding the authenticity of his claims, as well as the goals of his speeches.
”I believe he’s a complete fraud, and his claims are bogus,” said Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR-Michigan, an American-Islamic relations council. “He says he’s been reformed by the Holy Ghost. If he were an actual former terrorist who snuck into the U.S., the FBI or immigration services would’ve detained and deported him by now.”
Walid claims that Saleem’s real name is Khodor Shami and that many details of his background do not add up.
”He’s profiting off the cottage industry of Islamophobia,” Walid said. “If he thinks that I’m lying, that I’m trying to falsely discredit him, he should sue me for defamation.”
Sage claims much of the controversy surrounding Saleem is the result of media bias.
”People don’t like his message, they don’t want him out there,” said Sage. “But if you listen to Kamal, you’ll understand.”
Walid encourages caution.
”Individuals should research his claims, and form their own opinions,” said Walid. “Don’t be taken in just because it sounds interesting.”
Contact Joe Stando at jstando@kalamazoogazette.com or 269-388-8553.
To date Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents ever.
Andrew Adler wrote that he thinks Benjamin Netanyahu should assassinate President Barack Obama because he is not pro-Israel enough. Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents out there and still you got the nutbags on the Right who want him dead.
Imagine if an American Muslim publisher had wrote this? He would be getting water-boarded in Guantanamo as we speak. Also, you could bet that the condemnations from Muslim leaders would barely be recognized, unlike in this case, where the outrage at Adler’s statements from within the Jewish community is highlighted very well.
NEW YORK – The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.
Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”
Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”
Adler apologized yesterday for the article, saying “I very much regret it; I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And in an interview with Gawker.com, Adler denied that he was advocating an assassination of Obama.
The op-ed in Atlanta Jewish Times.
The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta last night issued a harsh condemnation of Adler’s article, saying that his proposals are “shocking beyond belief.”
“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, also blasted Adler on Friday, saying “There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn’t even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage. Irresponsible rhetoric metastasizes into more dangerous rhetoric. The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler’s column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists — even in some segments of our community — that maliciously labels President Obama as an ‘enemy of the Jewish people.’ Mr. Adler’s lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he’s fit to run a newspaper.”
Anti-Muslim zealot Pam Geller announced this week the formation of a new international organization, Stop the Islamization of Nations (SION), for which she will serve as executive director. This “new global force” will merge the work of the two major anti-Muslim groups in the U.S. and Europe – Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), run by Geller and co-founded by another anti-Muslim fanatic, Robert Spencer, and Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), run by Anders Gravers out of Denmark. Spencer will serve as SION’s vice president.
This is not the first time these organizations have worked together. In the past, they have tried to hold events in Europe to protest what they see as a coming “Eurabia.”
Geller has a long track record of anti-Muslim activities. Most recently, Geller, whose blog Atlas Shrugs once suggested that President Obama is the “love child” of Malcolm X, celebrated a video that appears to show U.S. soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. “CAIR has whipped itself up into an Islamic frenzy because a video surfaced that appears to show US Marines [in] combat gear urinating on several dead jihadis,” Geller’s website said last week, referring to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group. “Would anyone have CAIRed if Marines urinated on dead Nazi soldiers during WWII? (Anyone besides CAIR and Nazis, that is)?”
Gravers’ organization, which inspired SIOA, was cited byNorwegian terrorist Anders Breivik in his manifesto as an organization that people should support and that should have far more members than it has. Breivik blamed the lack of support for SIOA on multiculturalism and political correctness. Spencer was a particular favorite of Breivik. His manifesto cited Spencer and his work dozens of times.
The new group intends to create a “common American/European coalition of free people” to “oppose the advance of Islamic law,” which it describes as in contradiction with “Western laws and principles.” It plans to publicize the names of politicians, activists and others “that promote the Islamization of Western policy and culture.”
SION’s board includes notable anti-Muslim activists, including Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychologist who has called Islam a “brainwashing machine,” and Hindu nationalist Babu Suseelan, who is published on Spencer’s hate site, Jihadwatch. Gravers will also serve on the board. SION plans soon to hold a worldwide summit to further its efforts.
Newt Gingrich’s statement that he would only support Muslim presidential candidates if they “would commit in public to give up Sharia” was met by harsh comments from both Muslim American organizations and academic experts on Islamic law. “Newt Gingrich’s vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat,” said Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Legislative Director Corey Sayolor.
But Gingrich’s anti-Muslim crusade found an ally with noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, leaped on Gingrich’s anti-Shariah comments yesterday in a column for National Review Online and on his radio show, Secure Freedom Radio. His column reads:
Newt is absolutely right in making such a distinction [between a "moderate person who worships Allah" or "a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us]. The danger we currently face from the so-called Muslim world arises not from the fact that people are Muslim, but from the extent to which they adhere to the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine of sharia.
With his successive warnings about sharia…Newt Gingrich has, in my judgement, rendered a real public service. We must know who are enemies are and we must defeat, not accommodate, those who in the name of Sharia are obliged to wage Jihad against us. And we must keep America Sharia free.
But Gaffney’s concerns about religious and personal freedoms rarely extend to Muslim Americans. Last year, he said:
A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.
Newt Gingrich makes no secret of his hostility toward Muslims but Frank Gaffney’s defacto endorsement — he also picked up an endorsement from anti-Muslim activist and Gaffney ally Pamela Geller — might not be helpful as Gingrich attempts to appeal to moderate voters and chip away at Mitt Romney’s momentum in the primaries. Gaffney is a noted member of the Islamophobic far-right and his organization, the Center for Security Policy, was highlighted as a major nexus for the anti-Sharia initiatives sweeping the country in the Center for American Progress’s report, Fear, Inc.
It is an understatement to say that violence against women is a serious issue today, as I wrote in a previous article titled, Rampant Sexual Harassment of Women…in the West, “women are mistreated across the globe, across cultures, races, and religions at unfortunately high and gross levels.” This was proven with empirical evidence and scholarly analysis from various studies.
In the intro of the article I reminded readers that Islamphobes,
love to trot out the talking point that Muslims (due to Islam of course) are unique in harassing and oppressing women. According to them, anytime a Muslim man harasses or otherwise assaults a woman it is considered a result of Islam or somehow encouraged by “Islamic behavior.”
This belief, however, is not limited to anti-Muslim bigots but has also crept into the popular imagination and perception of the mainstream.
It is within that context that we review another recent manifestation of this “anti-Muslim talking point” creeping into the mainstream. As many of those who watched the recent South Carolina GOP Presidential Primary debate are aware, Fox News’s Brett Baier asked Gov. Rick Perry about Turkey’s “Islamist oriented” government, and what our relationship should be towards them (Turkey is one of our oldest allies). He set up the question this way,
“Since the Islamist oriented party took over in Turkey the murder rate of women has increased 1400% there…”
My jaw dropped when I heard that, what an astronomical and frankly unbelievable number! The clear implication was that the “increase in violence” was related to the rule of the so-called “Islamist oriented” AKP party. Once again something “Islam” or “Islam” related was being cast as the source and cause of violence.
Imagine the effect this had on those watching the debate? It either reinforced or created the perception that Islam and Muslims are incredibly violent towards women, and that any “Islam” oriented political party will result in a degradation of women’s rights.
Brett Baier’s question was extremely misleading to say the least. It provided no context or evidence linking the AKP party to the “increase” in murders. To say that the AKP is “Islamist oriented” is misleading as well, a more appropriate analogy may have been to the “Christian Democratic” parties in Europe.
I have found conflicting origins on the source of the “1400% increase” statistic. On some news outlets we learn that the figures were released by Women’s Rights lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan,
The figures are based on data issued by lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan, Co-ordinator of the Istanbul Bar Association Centre for Women’s Rights.
According to the data of the Ministry of Justice, the number of women murders increased by factor 14 between 2002 and 2009. While 66 women were killed in 2002, this figure raised to 953 women murders in 2009. The development of the increase was documented as follows: 83 women murders in 2003; 128 in 2004; this figure more than doubled in 2005 with 317 women killings; again a sharp increase with 663 in 2006; a peak of 1011 women murders in 2007 and a small decrease in numbers in 2008 with 806 women murders.
Regardless of the source there seems to be agreement on the numbers. Tuskan in her report also added another startling fact regarding violence towards women,
The data revealed an additional startling dimension of the problem: 85 percent of about 2000 annually registered divorce applications in Istanbul are based on violence.
According to Tuskan the reason for this explosion in the number of divorce applications stemming from violence is, “based on the fact that women do not endure violence as they used to do in the past.”
Are violent incidents against women on the rise in Turkey? Or is it just that we are finally getting a clearer picture of something that has been happening at the heart of Turkish society for some time?
If one were to listen to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it has been his government that has started compiling these statistics, whereas before his administration statistics on the issue were not even “calculated,”
While numerous sources argued over the last week that violence against women increased by 1,400 percent in the past seven years, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said earlier this week that the issue was presented as if violence against women was on the rise. Highlighting that they would not ignore a single act of violence, Erdoğan said: “Before we started keeping track of this, statistics on the issue were not even calculated and no one was aware of these incidents. … I expect a responsible approach from both the opposition and the media over the matter and I say that, with solidarity and responsibility, we can decrease violence to the lowest level.”
I don’t see any reason to doubt Erdoğan’s assertion, however it would be vital to verify.
Either way, the statement from Erdoğan clearly contradicts Brett Baier’s misleading assertion that the so-called “Islamist-oriented” AKP which Erdoğan heads is the cause or root of the violence.
Erdoğan also went on to say,
“Violence against women is remorselessness, ruthlessness and, I say this without hesitation, contemptible”
Not really the evil, misogynist Islamic terrorist that Baier and Rick Perry thought ruled Turkey, aye?
Since the stats came out on the number of murders and incidences of violence directed against women there has been an intense debate on the subject in Turkey. It is no longer a taboo subject locked behind closed doors. There have also been massive grassroots campaigns and new legislation countering the violent trend,
In recent months, both print and visual media in Turkey have been running story after story about domestic violence: ex-husbands who shoot their ex-wives in front of their children, abusive husbands who come back to kill, boyfriends or fiancés who cannot forgive being dumped and seek revenge.
…
As disheartening as the situation is, there is also a growing reaction and a grassroots movement to stop it. Nowadays it is widely acknowledged that violence against women is not only confined to a few uneducated families in remote undeveloped regions. More importantly, until today, it was mainly assumed that such cases were a “family affair”. If a husband was beating his wife, this was their problem. Now this assumption is fully debunked. More and more public figures are coming out to say that domestic violence is everyone’s business and we should, as a society, interfere.
Family and social policies minister Fatma Sahin has announced that abusive husbands will be kept away from their homes with the help of electronic handcuffs. A group of men in the eastern province of Van have organised a significant march to protest at male violence. The group’s speaker proclaimed: “We are ashamed of men who attack women and do so in the name of manhood.”
University students are marching on the streets, women’s organisations are collecting signatures. Through blogs, websites, magazines, fanzines, panels and conferences activists are raising their voices, singers give concerts to honour women who have been victims of killings, writers and poets condemn the violence openly and contest it with their words. And yet, all this is not enough. Unless we change the way we raise our sons and discard our belief that they are superior to our daughters, unless we mothers stop treating our sons as the sultans in the house, nothing will be enough.
Lastly, it should be highlighted that Brett Baier’s misleading question is damaging most of all because it obfuscates the true issue of violence directed at women. It deflects from the root causes (cultural norms, cultural traditions, patriarchy) in exchange for the easy Orientalist scapegoat–Islam.
As Ilisha pointed out in her article on Honor Killing, by focusing on Islam, anti-Muslim Islamophobes are actually doing a disservice to those who are truly challenging violence towards women. Brett Baier’s question had the added effect of dehumanizing a whole nation, and I echo Ilisha’s call that Islamophobes, “give up their vicious campaign against Islam and join us in the struggle to end violence against women from all cultural and religious backgrounds.”
UPDATE I:
For further information on this topic I suggest reading The Journal of Turkish Weekly, which conducted an exclusive interview with Dilek Karal, a specialist at USAK Center for Social Studies regarding violence against women. According to Karal, there is no way to solidly identify whether murders against women have increased or decreased,
How should we read violence against women in Turkey? How accurate is it to say that violence has drastically increased in recent years?
D. Karal: There are a lot of factors which can trigger violence such as sociocultural factors, economic factors, and psychological factors in the environment where people grow up. We need to look at what conditions they become prominent under. The efforts shall target eliminating the roots of these factors. However this is not limited to the motto which is liberally used in Turkey—“education is a must”. Educated people also beat their spouses or commit different kinds of violence against them. Education is just one dimension. The issue should be tackled with integrated multi-agency policies. It is compulsory to operate family and child services efficiently, and formalize different environments where boys and girls grow up to not normalize the violence. All in all, violence as a phenomenon needs to leave our lives altogether.
For instance, Turkish Ministry of Justice 2010 data shows violence against women has increased 1400% during the last seven years. This is a very big number. According to some other data during the first seven months of 2010; 226 women were murdered while 478 women were raped and 722 women sexually abused. There are a lot of similar cases. Over 100,000 women suffered from sexual attacks. Although the numbers are as such, they cannot present us solid data regarding whether the violence has increased or decreased. This is because there are certain problems in evaluating statistical data in Turkey. The fact that they are being presented in a systematic fashion in recent years can be interpreted as the invisible tip of the iceberg slowly surfacing.
In other words, violence against women existed before as well but can now be better measured with in-depth research, which has made the issue more apparent. Without longitudinal studies it is very difficult to understand if the violence has increased or not. However, we need to underline that the existing circumstances in the context of this issue are already too tragic. According to Hacettepe University’s research, 39% of the women in this country (more than a third) are victims of physical violence and 15% are victims of sexual violence. 42% of women say that they have experienced a form of one or the other. The interesting part is the women who experienced violence did not make appeals to official units or to non-governmental organizations. More than half of them shared the situation with just close relatives. Only 8% of the women requested help from official units. This rate is very low. In a society where violence is skyrocketing, this low rate points to ignorance. Women either do not see themselves sufficient socioeconomically or they normalize violence in a sociocultural sense.
UPDATE II:
I also came across figures on murders of women since 2009 in the article, “This is a Civil War…” There is a large discrepancy between 2009 (1,126 murders) and 2010 (217 murders). If one were to be disingenuous regarding the issue, one could claim a massive decrease in murders!:
In The Washington Post yesterday, Law Professor Jonathan Turley has an Op-Ed in which he identifies ten major, ongoing assaults on core civil liberties in the U.S. Many of these abuses were accelerated during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, but all have been vigorously continued and/or expanded by President Obama. Turley points out that these powers have long been deemed (by the U.S.) as the hallmark of tyranny, and argues that their seizure by the U.S. Government has seriously called into question America’s status as a free nation: “They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian.” All ten of these powers are ones very familiar to readers here: Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.
I’ve written volumes on all of those powers over the last several years, but — especially today — I want to focus on one narrow but vital question: who are generally the victims of these civil liberties assaults? The answer is the same as the one for this related question: who are the prime victims of America’s posture of Endless War? Overwhelmingly, the victims are racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals). And that is a major factor in why these abuses flourish: because those who dominate American political debates perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War (all civil liberties abuses in fact endanger all citizens, as they inevitably spread beyond their original targets, but they generally become institutionalized precisely because those outside the originally targeted minority groups react with indifference).
To see how central a role this sort of selfish provincialism plays in shaping political priorities, just compare (a) the general indifference to Endless War and the massive civil liberties assaults described by Turley (ones largely confined to Muslims) to (b) the intense outrage and media orgy generated when a much milder form of invasiveness — TSA searches — affected Americans of all backgrounds. The success of Endless War and civil liberties attacks depends on ensuring that the prime victims, at least in the first instance, are marginalized and easily demonizable minorities.
The fundamental interconnectedness between war and civil liberties abuses on the one hand, and the targeting of minorities as part of those policies on the other, is, of course, nothing new. It was most eloquently emphasized in the largely forgotten, deliberately whitewashed 1967 speech about the Vietnam War by Martin Luther King, Jr. (who himself was targeted for years with abusive domestic surveillance by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover). Dr. King devoted that extraordinary speech generally to the way in which the war in Vietnam was savaging not only the people of that country but also America’s national character. He specifically sought to answer his critics who were objecting that his increasingly strident opposition to the Vietnam War was a distraction from his civil rights work; instead, he insisted, his war opposition and advocacy of civil rights are, in fact, causes that are inextricably linked:
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. . . .
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through [Lyndon Johnson's] poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such . . . .
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. . . .
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. . . .
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
King notably added another reason why he felt compelled to prioritize issues of war: “another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission.” As he put it: “ This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.” If only that award were similarly understood today. His essential point was that nothing good could possibly happen in America so long as it continued on its path of warfare and bombing and invading foreign countries, and it was therefore necessary to prioritize protests against the war on at least equal footing with every other issue.
Over the weekend, I recorded a BloggingheadsTV session with The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt in which several of these same themes were discussed; it was a good, civil, constructive discussion, and the video is below. Part of the debate over the last couple weeks among progressives regarding political priorities, the Obama presidency, the Ron Paul candidacy and the like has entailed a litany of accusations — smears — hurled at those of us who insist on the prioritization of issues of war and civil liberties abuses, and who vocally highlight the ways in which the Democratic Party generally and President Obama specifically have been so awful on these matters. Some Democraticloyalists have explicitly argued that contrasting Obama with Ron Paul on these issues is warped because issues of war and civil liberties are, at best, ancillary concerns, while others have gone so far as to claim that only racial and/or gender bias — white male “privilege” — would cause someone to use the Paul candidacy to highlight how odious Obama has been in these areas.
Leaving aside the fact that (as I detail in the discussion with Pollitt),numerouswomen and peopleofcolor have made the same points about the vital benefits of Paul’s candidacy — voices which these accusers tellingly ignore and silence — these accusations are pure projection. Those who were operating from such privilege would not seek to prioritize issues of war and civil liberties; that’s because it isn’t white progressives and their families who are directly harmed by these heinous policies. The opposite is true: it’s very easy, very tempting, for those driven by this type of “privilege” — for non-Muslims in particular– to decide that these issues are not urgent, that Endless War and civil liberties abuses by a President should not be disqualifying or can be tolerated, precisely because these non-Muslim progressive accusers are not acutely affected by them. The kind of “privilege” these accusers raise would cause one to de-prioritize and accept civil liberties abuses, drone slaughter, indefinite detention and the like (i.e, do what they themselves do), not demand that significant attention be paid to them when assessing political choices.
As I noted the other day, it isn’t white males being indefinitely detained, rendered, and having their houses and cars exploded with drones — the victims of those policies are people like Lakhdar Boumediene, or Gulet Mohamed, or Jose Padilla, or Awal Gul, or Sami al-Haj, or Binyam Mohamed, or Murat Kurnaz, or Afghan villagers, or Pakistani families, or Yemeni teenagers. In order to get the full depth of the oppression and injustice of these ongoing War on Terror policies, one has to do things like listen to this amazing — and tragically rare — interview conducted by Chris Hayes this weekend with Boumediene, as the former GITMO detainee explained in Arabic how his life was devastated by indefinite detention. It’s easy to convince yourself that these abuses are not an urgent priority if, like those above-linked accusers, your non-Muslim privilege (to use their accusatory terminology) enables you to be shielded from their harms.
This is the primary point made so brilliantly by Falguni Sheth, the Political Theory and Philosophy Professor, in arguing that white progressives throwing around these accusations are themselves the ones guilty of it by virtue of their willingness to subordinate these issues to partisan gain — in other words, no longer desiring that these abuses be vested with prime political priority now that it’s their Party and their President guilty of them:
But HERE FOLKS! I am a brown woman (in case my bio didn’t clue you into that), and I am downright livid at policies passed during the Obama administration (which a number of folks will attest that I anticipated before the 2008 election), which are even worse than expected. I am as livid with progressives who affect a casual? studied? indifference to the Administration’s repeated support for warrantless wiretapping (remember Obama’s vote during the 2008 election season when he took a break in campaigning to return to Washington to vote for the renewal of FISA; for his support of the Justice Department’s withholding of evidence (and even habeas corpus) from detainees on grounds of national security; his commitment to indefinite detention (NDAA was not the first time it’s arisen. We saw his support in the gesture to move Gitmo detainees to a federal prison in Illinois—with only a casual suggestion that they might receive civilian trials—only to watch it die quickly under even modest resistance. Guantanamo is still open with detainees languishing); the expansion of troops into Afghanistan in the first part of his term; the unceasing drone attacks in Pakistan, etc. . . .
Here’s my other question: Why does this have to turn into a “guilt by association” debate? Why can’t we discuss the questions that are being raised as serious and important questions, rather than referendums on voters’ or pundits’ moral character? I don’t have to like Ron Paul (and why do we need to LIKE our politicians?). I don’t have to have dinner with him. He doesn’t need to be a friend. He is raising the questions that every other liberal and progressive and feminist (yes, including you, Katha) should be raising and forcing the Democrats to address. As Greenwald has pointed out, these issues only become outrage-worthy when the Republicans are spearheading human rights violations, because it gives the libs and progs a lever by which to claim political superiority. The silence on the Democrats’ record of human rights violations is deafening. And they’re more than cherries on a blighted tree. They’re dead bodies on the blighted conscience of Americans.
As I said the other day, I don’t run around accusing progressives who have different political priorities than I do of being driven by racial and religious bias. I genuinely recognize that there are all sorts of benign and even noble reasons why one might have different political priorities or might even value partisan loyalty more than I do. But there is one thing I know for certain: to smear with this kind of innuendo those insisting on the prioritization of war and civil liberties issues or devoting oneself to these causes is indescribably irrational and reckless. One driven by racial or other forms of privilege would seek to de-prioritize or ignore these issues, not highlight them. Indeed, a primary reason why these fully bipartisan policies of Endless War and civil liberties assaults largely go unchallenged is precisely because their primary victims are anything but privileged. That’s exactly why these issues are not a distraction from the cause of equality; they are an embodiment of it.
* * * * *
On a related note, International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller reviewsthe debate raised here and elsewhere last week about the murder of Iranian scientists and argues that these acts, definitively and without question, are acts of Terrorism.
Here is the 55-minute discussion I had with Pollitt this weekend, one which, as I indicated, I thought was quite constructive and helpfully illuminated the key points:
UPDATE: The always smart Freddie De Boer has some poignant insights on all of this – on progressives, war and civil liberties — that are well worth reading.
Two stories coming out of Ohio related to Islamophobia. The first is still being investigated for a possible hate crime, and the second story shows that even within the prison system there is a double standard when it comes to Muslims.
A deliberately set fire at the Hilliard home of the son of a controversial Islamic scholar is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
The arson fire heavily damaged a house at 4907 Britton Farms Dr. once occupied by Salah Soltan, but now the home of his 24-year-old son, Mohamed, authorities said.
The younger Soltan and a friend escaped the fire without injury after it was reported to Norwich Township firefighters at 5:24 a.m. Monday.
Firefighters arrived to find flames coming from the rear of the $290,000 house, which sustained extensive damage, said Fire Chief Dave Long.
The house was painted with anti-Islamic slurs a couple of months ago, authorities said.
The elder Soltan, who now lives abroad, is a native of Egypt and formerly was a professor at Cairo University and president of Islamic American University in suburban Detroit.
Some conservative critics have accused Soltan of being sympathetic to terrorist causes. He has said while he supports Palestinian rights, he condemns terrorism as a violation of Islamic law.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations yesterday called on the FBI to assist in the investigation of the motive behind the fire.
The FBI is working with Hilliard police in investigating the circumstances of the fire, said Special Agent Harry Trombitas, spokesman for the Columbus field office.
Hilliard police called in state fire marshal investigators yesterday to assist in the probe and determined it was arson.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A Muslim death row inmate has settled a lawsuit that accused the Ohio prison system of denying him meals prepared according to Islamic law while providing kosher meals to Jewish prisoners.
Ohio had previously decided to remove all pork products from prison menus in response to the lawsuit, though inmates weren’t seeking a ban on pork.
Details of the settlement announced Wednesday afternoon weren’t released. Neither the inmate’s lawyer or the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction would comment.
The state argued as recently as last month that providing the meals, known as halal, could bankrupt the state’s food service system because thousands of inmates have declared themselves Muslim.
Attorneys for Abdul Awkal (ab-DUHL’ AW’-kuhl) and a second inmate argued that the state was exaggerating the cost.
This past week Eric Allen Bell posted an article on Daily Kos attacking the Loonwatch site
I was startled when I read the article, and sent an email “heads up” to Danios at Loonwatch in case he hadn’t seen the article yet. He replied that he had not seen it, and he was equally surprised at the content and at the venue in which the article was printed.
I had previously heard the name Eric Allen Bell only in relation to a documentary he had made One Mosque Too Many on the Murfreesboro Mosque. That documentary was well received in the American Muslim community, and in the interfaith community. Bell said himself about this documentary and why he made it
It was on this past 4th of July that I decided to make a documentary about the backlash against the building of a new Islamic Center here in Mufreesboro, TN. At that time I had no idea that a chilling wave of anti-Islamic hysteria was about to sweep over the country, strengthen the far right and send the civil rights movement several decades backwards all in the matter of just a few short weeks.
The documentary is titled “Not Welcome” and chronicles events in Murfreesboro concerning the backlash against the Mosque from the 4th of July to 9/11 of 2010. I have interviewed nearly everyone on all sides of this issue here. And along the way I have been threatened repeatedly but I have also made many new friends. I have learned a lot about how my own ridiculous prejudices about the South have distorted my point of view. I have been surprised repeatedly at how often the most unlikely of people can defy their stereotype with acts of kindness, courage and compassion. I have come to know many members of the Islamic community here, known them as friends, broken bread with them and watched as they faced persecution without striking back, without getting consumed with anger, watched as they prayed for those who oppose them, asked for God’s mercy on them and trusted that, in the end, whatever happens will be God’s will.
Because of that background, this current article of Bell’s was particularly puzzling. How could the person who said I have learned a lot about how my own ridiculous prejudices about the South have distorted my point of view. also be the person who showed ridiculous prejudice against the same American Muslim community he seemed to respect? I thought that perhaps there are two different individuals with the same name – one opposed to bigotry, and one encouraging it, and so I did a little research.
There is only one Eric Allen Bell. He has a website, and one of the sections of that site is Freedom From Religion. Scrolling through the posts in that section, it became obvious that this individual is not fond of religion. Bell’s posted comments are not just anti-Islam, but anti-all religion. One of his posts is titled “God” is part of the 1 percent, and seems to sum up Bell’s position:
Once upon a time a very, very angry man named “god” created the world, got pissed off at everybody and killed them all with a flood, except for his buddy Noah and his 2 live crew. Later God decided everyone is so lame that he chose his “chosen people” to give a plot of real estate to while telling everyone else to f*ck off, ordered some ethnic cleansings to clear out the area and so forth. Still finding nearly all people to be unbearable (and who can blame him, really?) this god person decided, out of the kindness of his heart, to send his only son to be brutally tortured and savagely murdered so that he won’t have to send us all into a lake of hell fire for all eternity, because he loves us.
About 600 years later, god met this slave owner named Mohammed who also hated most people and the two of them really hit it off. God told Mohammed to wipe out the Jews, the Christians, basically everyone who did not see the the world the way that he did, and together they decided to call this new way of thinking, “the religion of peace”. But now the religion of peace wants to wipe god’s chosen people off of their plot of real estate and the followers of god’s poor brutalized son – whom the chosen people killed (oops, epic fail there guys) see this as a good thing because it will bring about the end of the world, and god’s son will appear in the clouds while the rest of us can go to hell. What does this all mean? It means god must be stopped and his followers need to give us back our planet before they blow the whole damned thing up in one big rapturous apocalyptic orgasm of self fulfilling prophecy. In other words GOD IS PART OF THE 1 PERCENT. “He” must be stopped.
On his site he promotes films like “Islam, What the West Needs to Know” about which he says “I cannot say that I am in 100% agreement with everything said in this documentary. However, having read the Koran, visited a few mosques and produced a documentary on Islamophobia in the Bible Belt, it is my feeling that fundamentally what is being put forth here in “Islam – What the West Needs to Know” is correct.”
As Colm O’Broin has pointed out about this particular “documentary”
The documentary Islam: What the West needs to know, which features many of the most influential anti-jihad writers, makes this point clear. A short TV ad is shown of ordinary Muslim Americans describing their backgrounds and finishes with the statement that “Muslims are part of the fabric of this great country and are working to build a better America.” The contributors to the documentary warn ominously however that the Koran allows Muslims to deceive non-believers in the service of Islam.
This is possibly the most reprehensible claim made by the anti-Muslim writers. If you accepted what they say it would mean that you can’t trust your friends, relatives, neighbours or work colleagues if they happen to be Muslim. In fact, all Muslims are suspect according to this poisonous allegation.
Bell’s admiration for films like this, and for individuals like Robert Spencer of the hate group SIOA makes some sense after scrolling through Bell’s site. Although Spencer is a devout Catholic, and Bell would have no more respect for his religious beliefs than he would have for my religious beliefs, in Bell’s war against religion, it seems that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is his philosophy.
The newly coined term Islamophobia describes an irrational fear of Islam. But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad – even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them – even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a Loon.
What does Bell provide as way of evidence for the claim that Loonwatch opposes “any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad?” Does he provide quotes or statements from Loonwatch articles or writers? You know, facts?
The answer is a glaring and resounding, NO.
Instead, Eric relies on guesswork. According to him Loonwatch doesn’t speak out against “Islamic Terrorism,” that, to him, is enough to declare that it is “in fact a terrorist spin control network.”
A pretty bold and probably libelous claim when measured next to the absence of facts Bell provides.
When one takes a look at the mission statement of Loonwatch, it becomes clear that their focus is on challenging bigotry against Muslims,
Loonwatch.com is a blogzine run by a motley group of hate-allergic bloggers to monitor and expose the webs plethora of anti-Muslim loons, wackos, and conspiracy theorists.
What’s wrong with that? As many commenters pointed out to Bell there are “thousands” of sites tracking “terrorism” and “jihad.” In fact there is a whole “Terrorism Industry” that is in existence feeding off of the fear of “Islamic Terrorism,” to make sure that Americans have a new “green” menace to replace the old “red” menace. Prof. Charles Kurzman, who has actually done empirical evidence on this topic gives us some perspective on this exaggerated threat,
As it turns out, there just arent that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
Bell seems to have a schizophrenic personality, on the one hand he defends religious liberty (such as in the case of Murfreesboro Mosque) but on the other hand he agrees with many of the irrational attacks leveled at Islam and Muslims:
1.) He conflates Radical Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism with Islam. In the comment section he made clear that he believes “Islam IS Islamic Fundamentalism.”
4.) He cherry picks verses, quotes them out of context, and when it is pointed out that the same could be done with other scriptures he resorts to a popular argument amongst Islamophobes; stating that while it may be true that other scriptures hold violent passages they “are rarely carried out” in contrast to Islam. There is nothing further from the truth as the website, WhatIfTheyWere Muslim.com? details quite vividly. All the crimes that are considered uniquely “Islamic” are still committed by Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc.
Spencer, whom I don’t see eye to eye with either entirely, presents himself in a rather rational, sober and scholarly fashion and I might add that neither he nor the other “Loons” have bombs strapped to them – only words.
Now, should we likewise, per the logic of Mr. Bell, be afraid of the scary Christian Americans, and make broad sweeping generalities about Christianity? Or Jewish Americans? Or Israeli Jews?
This is just a slither of what I found wrong with Eric Allen Bell’s article. It was reliant on not only a highly dubious methodology of critique, sourced poorly, but also filled with Orientalist and prejudiced tropes that ironically were the same ones used by the anti-Mosque opponents Bell documented in Murfreesboro, TN.
In 2009, the Daily Kos published a positive review of our website. So imagine my surprise whenThe American Muslim emails me a link to a recently published article on Daily Kos which is nothing short of a hatchet job against LoonWatch. This article was authored by Eric Allen Bell and is entitled Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam. Bell had the temerity to accuse LoonWatch of being “a radical Islamic front, covering up for terrorism”; he writes: “Loonwatch.com is in fact a terrorist spin control network.”
We would hardly bat an eye at this loony stream-of-consciousness article–Islamophobes have been accusing us of this since our site launched–except that this screed was published on the Daily Kos. Why would a fellow progressive website take a swipe at us out of the blue?
This mystery solves itself when you look into who wrote the article. His name is Eric Allen Bell, and he professes a soft spot for Robert Spencer, a man who was ranked by FAIR as the #2 leading Islamophobe in the country (losing out the number 1 spot to his boss, David Horowitz). Spencer is the leader of the SIOA group, deemed by the SPLC to be a hate group. Spencer’s organization has links to Neo-Nazi and skinhead groups in Europe. Among other things, Robert Spencer joined a genocidal Facebook group and posted a genocidal video on his website. This is the man that Eric Allen Bell calls “rational, sober and scholarly.” Bell imagines some difference between Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller even though they are close friends and colleagues-in-crime:
That explains why Bell’s article looks like something out of a loony anti-Muslim blog likeBareNakedIslam, AtlasShrugs, or JihadWatch. Bell uses the exact same talking points against us. His main gripe seems to be why our site “ignores” the violent acts of terrorism committed by Islamic terrorists. The answer to that is painstakingly obvious: our website’s mission statement is to document and expose Islamophobia. To ask us why we don’t document Islamic terrorism would not be very different from asking us: why doesn’t your site talk about world hunger? Whereas this might be a worthy topic to bring attention to, it is simply not part of our mission statement. Surely, Bell understands that websites oftentimes specialize in one particular topic and simply do not have the resources to dedicate to every noble cause.
Bell’s accusation itself is steeped in his Islamophobia. Imagine, for instance, if some white guy accused the NAACP of being “a black supremacist group” because they only fought racism against blacks instead of documenting violence and crime committed by blacks. What would anyone call such a person but racist?
Eric Allen Bell tries to shield himself from accusations of bigotry by pointing out that he made some documentary about a mosque in Murfreesboro. Yet, this would be like someone being opposed to segregated schools for black people on the one hand but on the other hand becoming absolutely livid against anyone who dared to deny that blacks are more violent than white people. Readers can go to the racist website Stromfront to find plenty of people compiling lists of black violence and criminality just like Bell reproduced his list of Muslim violence and terrorism.
Bell argues that Muslims are more violent than people of other religions, which is in fact the exact same argument raised by–you guessed it–Robert Spencer. My response to this is two-fold:
1) The threat of Muslim terrorism has been extremely exaggerated (in order to justify our wars in the Muslim world). According to the FBI’s own database (available from 1980-2005), of the terrorist attacks in America less than 6% were committed by Muslims. Readers should also refer to my May 2010 article which noted that since 9/11, there have been zero U.S. civilians killed from Islamic terrorism. The situation is the same in Europe. For the past several years, Europol has released an annual terrorism report, which showed that Islamic terrorism accounts for less than 1% of terrorism in Europe and has resulted in zero deaths. In the half decade documented in these reports, the only injuries sustained from Islamic terrorism were to a security guard who “was slightly wounded.”
For the past several years, zero civilians in America and Europe have been killed by Islamic terrorism. Yet, we are indoctrinated into thinking that Islamic terrorism represents some existential threat: you should be scared out of your wits and be losing sleep over Islamic terrorism. This is war propaganda at its finest. The reality is that you have a far greater chance of dying from being struck by lightning (about 67 Americans die of lightning every year) than being killed by an Islamic extremist (a whopping average of zero).
When confronted by this reality check, Islamophobes are quick to shift gears and insist that they are talking about Islamic terrorism in the “rest of the world.” Yet, almost all of this Islamic terrorism takes place in countries that have been bombed, invaded, and occupied by the United States or its proxy Israel. (India is the notable exception, although it should be noted that India has sustained a brutal occupation of Kashmir for many decades.) Iraq currently leads the list. If you look at Iraq before we started dropping bombs on it, Islamic terrorism was virtually non-existent in that country. Is it Islam then that is to blame for this terrorism or our bombing, invasion, and occupation?
2) The type of terrorism that is included in such comparisons is what I call Amateur Terrorism (strapping a bomb on yourself to injure a security guard and kill yourself); it excludes the greater form of terrorism: Professional Terrorism (carpet-bombing an entire civilian population). This is the violence committed by nation-states. The United States and Israel are guilty of committing, in the words of the Nuremberg trial, “the supreme international crime”: waging wars of aggression. When this form of violence is factored in, then the argument that Muslims are more violent seems untenable. As Prof. Steven Walt noted, Americans have killed anywhere from 30 to 100 times as many Muslims as Muslims have killed Americans.
I find it difficult to lecture Muslims about how violent they are when my own government, with the backing of its people, have killed so many Muslims (and continue to do so on a daily basis).
In a way, our violence is worse than theirs, because ours is sanctioned by us: our duly elected members of government are the ones who launch these wars, with our blessing and support. It is our uniformed soldiers who kill those Muslims. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and such groups operate without governmental authority, without any sanction or permission from the Muslim population. In fact, the Muslim population is often the victim of such terrorist groups.
Since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years, or 91% of her existence. Meanwhile, the country in the Muslim world we vilify the most, Iran, has not initiated a war since 1795, over 200 years ago. (It was, however, attacked by its neighbor with the aid and encouragement of the United States.) Who is the more violent one again?
Here is a map of the Greater Middle East, showing countries that the U.S. has bombed or has bases in:
Meanwhile, the modern state of Iran has never attacked any of its neighbors or any other country in the region (or world). But, Eric Allen Bell wants us to say that Islam and Muslims are the violent ones?
These two points constitute my argument, and if Eric Allen Bell wants to produce something more than a screed that belongs on Pamela Geller’s AtlasShrugs, that’s what he needs to refute.
One should also recognize that I am making a radically different claim than the Islamophobes when I point to American aggression. There is nothing intrinsically different between the United States and the rest of the world that makes it more violent–or, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”–other than the fact that it has the power to do so. I truly believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely: those vested with great power almost invariably abuse it, and it is for this reason that they must be held to account the most.
Compared to the United States, the forces of Radical Islam have virtually no power. Since 9/11–more than a decade ago–the collective strength and resources of the “worldwide jihad” have been unable to kill a single civilian on American soil. That’s how powerful they are. In the grand scheme of things, Islamic terrorism is a nuisance of modern day existence, a threat akin to that of gang violence or drug cartels–it is not an existential military threat as it is made out to be.
There is no doubt that Radical Islam is repugnant to the senses and must be intellectually fought. But attacking all of Islam and Muslims in general–targeting their religion and labeling Islam as uniquely violent–is the most counter-productive way of doing so. More than that, it’s intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.
The girl was attacked by older white girls who kicked her, pushed her to the ground and drew on her face.
Surrey Police said it seemed the girl had been targeted on 11 January because she was wearing a headscarf.
Spelthorne councillor Colin Strong said the incident was being raised at a meeting with neighbourhood police as an issue that affected the community.
‘On busy road’
Detectives said they were treating the incident in Vicarage Road as a racially-aggravated assault.
Det Con Simon Egan said the girl had been targeted as she waited for a bus.
He said the suspects had kicked the victim in the leg, pulled her rucksack from her, pushed her to the floor, used make-up to draw on her face and racially abused her.
After the incident, the girl picked up her bag and ran away.
Det Con Egan said: “This was an appalling assault where a young victim has been targeted in a completely unprovoked attack.
“It would seem that suspects targeted the victim for no reason other than because she was wearing a headscarf.”
In an appeal for witnesses, he said the assault had taken place at the side of a busy road in daylight and urged any pedestrians or drivers who saw the attack to come forward.
The issue will be discussed at a neighbourhood policing meeting at the Sunbury Youth Centre, in Bryony Way, on Thursday evening.
Newt Gingrich who has been on a racist role, calling the president of the USA the “greatest food stamp” president, and implying that Blacks are more prone to “food stamps” than other groups is also displaying his bigotry towards Muslims and Islam again. He wants any future Muslim presidential candidate to be given a “sharia test.”
Newt Gingrich told a South Carolina town hall audience on Tuesday that he would be open to seeing a Muslim-American run for president, as long as the candidate denounced Sharia law and didn’t seek to impose his or her views on others.
At a town hall meeting in West Columbia, S.C., a man asked Gingrich if he would ever “support a Muslim-American running for president.”
“Would you endorse…a Muslim-American, [who] could possibly be running for president, given that we had a woman running for president in Hillary Clinton, and we had a Jewish-American, in Joe Lieberman, running for vice president?” he asked.
“A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat,” Gingrich replied. “A person who belonged to any kind of belief in Sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat.”
“I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia,” he said, referencing his support for the bill and drawing cheers from listeners at the event. “If they’re a modern person integrated into the modern world, and they’re prepared to recognize all religions, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if they’re the Saudis, who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow either a Jew or a Christian to worship in Saudi Arabia, that’s something different.”
He pointed to an acquaintance as an example of a “truly modern” Muslim.
“We have a friend in Arizona who serves in the U.S. Navy, who’s a medical doctor, who’s Muslim — but he’s a totally modern person, trying to find ways to bring Islam into modernity,” Gingrich said.
Former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said he wouldn’t be comfortableappointing a Muslim to a judgeship or cabinet position. He later apologized.
No item of female apparel summons more attention, animosity, debate or censure in Western society than the veil covering Muslim women. That’s saying something in a culture inured to the sight of sweatpants with “Juicy” on the backside, Abercrombie & Fitch’s padded “push-up” swimsuit tops for eight-year-old girls, and women teetering on skyscraper porno heels as hobbling as the “chopines” worn by 16th-century Venetian prostitutes.
Governments are racing to restrict the veil in its various declensions: hijab, chador, abaya, niqab, burka. France and Belgium banned face-and-body concealing burkas and niqabs last year; similar legislation is in the works in other European countries, echoing campaigns to rid cityscapes of minarets. Last June, Muslim women were singled out by FIFA, the world soccer body, which banned players from wearing Islamic headdresses on the grounds they could cause a “choking injury.” The Canadian federal government drew its first line in the sand last month when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced a ban on face veils during the swearing-in of the citizenship oath. Quebec’s Bill 94, which would deny essential public services to women in niqabs in the name of “public security, communication and identification,” is wending through the legislature.
So what’s really going on here? Why are women many see as subjugated the ones being censured? Part of what’s driving this is the visceral response a veiled face summons in the West: it’s a mystery and a threat. Unless you’re a surgeon, a goalie, a bride or a belly dancer, masking one’s face is anti-social, a prelude to robbing a bank or attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Faces confer identity, legally and socially. Covering them can signal Darth Vader menace. It’s dehumanizing.
A covered or veiled woman summons more complex associations, given that female emancipation in the West focused on bodily autonomy and was mirrored in fashion trends—beginning with Coco Chanel, who believed women should share the same liberties as men and replaced restrictive corsets and long skirts with jersey dresses, knits and pants. Instructing a woman to cover up to preserve sexual modesty and prevent lustful thoughts is viewed as archaic and misogynistic—harking back to the Victorians hiding curvy table legs or the kind of dystopian theocracy depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The “liberated” woman eschews modesty; any instructive to preserve it is code for oppression, as seen in global “SlutWalks” protesting “victim-blaming” after a Toronto police officer suggested women could avoid sexual assault if they stopped dressing “like sluts.”
Western women may be shackled by clothing and customs—six-inch stilettos, Brazilian waxing, cosmetic surgery, the imperative to be thin—but that’s seen to be their choice, their self-expression within a culture that often conflates female empowerment with female sexuality. A veiled Muslim woman is therefore even more freighted, thought to represent a second-class citizen deprived of identity and isolated from public life, a trapped victim of “gender apartheid,” as witnessed by the horrific acid attack on Afghani schoolgirls who abjured the offensive burka.
Yet we didn’t always see it that way. In the 1990s, the niqab, the veil that leaves only eyes exposed, was exotic, a marketing ploy: Loblaw put a photograph of a woman wearing one on the box for its “Memories of Marrakech” couscous. The “otherness” of a veiled Muslim could occasionally inflame bigotry, as seen in 1994 when female high school students in Montreal were expelled for wearing the hijab; the head scarf worn to preserve modesty was deemed an “ostentatious symbol.” But the burka was off the political radar, with the exception of feminist groups that protested the repression of women in fundamentalist Islamic nations, particularly Afghanistan, where Taliban rule in 1994 torched advances made by women.
Then came 9/11, and the burka was hijacked as a handy accessory for the emerging “war on terror.” The week after the twin towers fell, The Economist sent out a “free trial offer” mailer recycling a February 2000 cover of a woman in a niqab below the line: “Can Islam and Democracy Mix?” The image was sultry, destined to boost subscriptions, even if linking a veiled woman with all of Islam was below the magazine’s usual intellectual rigour. Not all Muslim women wear face-covering veils; many Muslims oppose the practice. The Quran, an enlightened text regarding gender equality, enforces no dress code; “hijab,” or cover, refers to the curtain that separates man and the world from God, not to clothing. Men and women are only called to “lower their gaze and guard their modesty.” Nor are Muslim nations in sync on veiling, which has come to represent an oppression-meter of sorts—from Afghanistan, where women faced a mandatory burka law punishable by death, to Tunisia and Turkey, where burkas are banned in schools and government buildings.
Turkish-born sociologist Necla Kelek dismisses the idea that the burka has anything to do with religion or religious freedoms, but rather represents an ideology whereby “women in public don’t have the right to be human.” France’s Fadéla Amara views the garment as a form of religious obscurantism, “a kind of tomb for women.” In her 2004 book, The Trouble with Islam, Irshad Manji rejects any notion of “spiritual submission” to the veil, calling adherence “closer to cultural capitulation”: “To cover my face because ‘that’s what I’m supposed to do’ is nothing short of brand victory for desert Arabs, whose style has become the most trusted symbol of how to package yourself as a Muslim woman.”
Yet as a symbol, the “desert Arab” packaging of women offered powerful visual shorthand for the indeterminate “war on terror.” It was harnessed to garner support for the invasion of Afghanistan, where the road to female freedom was measured in media reports in terms of women’s access to lipstick and beauty salons. Then the burka was tied to Islamic terrorism itself, linking the “war on terror” with a “war on Islam”: video footage that appeared to show one of the failed July 2005 London bombers wearing a niqab implanted fear that the garment posed a national security threat. That risk migrated to Muslim immigrants’ seeming unwillingness to conform to European and American mores. Even global cultural juggernaut Disney, whose 1992 Aladdin came under fire for promoting racist Arabic stereotypes, joined the hijab jihad last year, telling more than one Magic Kingdom employee that they were “not part of the Disney look.”
We can only await the Disneyfication of the burka, which has acquired near magical powers in its ability to turn right-wing politicians into situational feminists. French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the garment “a debasement” of women that rendered them “prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social contact, deprived of all identity,” ignoring the fact that his ban would closet these women in their homes. As British writer Myriam Francois-Cerrah, a Muslim, puts it: “[Governments] have a funny idea of liberation: criminalizing women in order to free them.”
Sheema Khan, author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman, likens the paranoia over female veiling to another trumped-up distraction: “These new WMDs (women in Muslim dress) seem to evoke the same fear as those other WMDs (weapons of mass destruction),” she writes. Khan, who wears the hijab, sees a cultural disconnect over the female body and its display: “Muslim women value their bodies, they simply don’t believe in flashing skin.”
In their covering and attempt to disappear from the public sphere, veiled women have acquired paradoxical power in a society that pays attention to women for what they’re not wearing: as the most visible of visible minorities, they’re a measure of multiculturalism’s limits. And as a graphic reminder of the world’s fastest-growing religion, they test how much religious observation and cultural defiance we’re willing to accommodate—and accept.
Jason Kenney described a covered face as “un-Canadian” when announcing the new citizenship ruling: “Allowing a group to hide their faces while they are becoming members of our community is counter to Canada’s commitment to openness, equality and social cohesion,” he said. The minister admitted he found it “frankly, bizarre” that women had been allowed to veil their faces. Some 81 per cent of Canadians agreed with the veto, according to a Forum Research poll, which raises questions as to whether we’ll see similar rulings in other public spaces; Muslim women’s right to veil their faces while giving testimony is currently being challenged.
Canadian political scientist and Middle East scholar Katherine Bullock predicted that Muslim women would become “the visible link between Western power politics and an anti-veil discourse in the West,” in her 2002 book, Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil. The University of Toronto professor, a convert to Islam since 1994, wears the hijab. She was prescient: Sarkozy’s targeting of the Muslim minority is viewed by many as a pander to voters on the extreme right.
Bullock challenges the common view that the veil is oppressive and degrading. While she acknowledges the horrific violation of women’s rights in Islamic states, she writes that these must be addressed by the courts, and that a woman’s right to wear the veil should be separate from other human rights issues. That argument is a hard sell in the West, where high-profile murders of Muslim girls and women are associated with their rejection of the veil in “honour killings,” the odious term that segregates extreme domestic violence: Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year-old Mississauga, Ont., girl who was murdered in 2007 by her father and brother for refusing to wear the veil, and the ongoing Shafia trial in Kingston, Ont., in which a husband, wife and son are accused of murdering three teenage girls and a first wife. At that trial an expert prosecution witness overtly raised the connection when speaking of Muslim mores: “A woman’s body is considered to be the repository of family honour,” he said.
That any woman would willingly wear an “ambulatory prison,” as Christine St-Pierre, Quebec’s minister for the status of women, has called the niqab, is a mystery in a culture focused on the exposed female body and the distorted “body image” resulting from artificial Photoshopped standards. Amid “Does this burka make me look fat?” jokes, female Western journalists took the garments out for test drives, reporting back that they were confining, isolating and even elicited hostility, which is predictable. Veiled Muslim women have become doubly dehumanized in the West—by the veil itself and incendiary responses to what it’s seen to represent—which makes them vulnerable to the kind of violent Islamophobic attacks seen in France.
Yet the defiance expressed by hijab and burka wearers confounds the stereotype that they are submissive and lack will. Disney’s hijab ban has been successfully challenged. Last September, Hind Ahmas and Najate Nait Ali made headlines when they were fined for disobeying the French burka ban.
Inscrutable and complex, the veil is a code that can’t readily be cracked. Many women are veiled against their will, it is true, yet many others choose it. The idea that the veil could represent an assertion of identity, defined by daily connection and devotion to God, is alien for many in a secular culture. Liberal ideas of equality and liberty, which distinguish want from need, trump other ways of looking at the topic, says Middle Eastern historian Christina Michelmore, a professor at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pa.: “A lot of women want to wear it because they have to,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2001.“It was a commandment, and I would obey,” Bullock writes. That’s a mindset alien in the West, Michelmore observes: “For many Americans, cultural restraints on individual behaviour automatically look like oppression. I think that’s a very American look at the world. For lots of cultures, communal standards aren’t seen as inhibiting individual freedoms.”
Women wear the veil as a rejection of Western values, Michelmore notes: “They see it as part of their identity, as separate from this globalized McDonald’s world.” Many of the veil’s most vocal proponents, ironically, are Western women who’ve converted to Islam, among them Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, German broadcaster Kristiane Backer, author of the 2009 book From MTV To Mecca, and Yvonne Ridley, of Islam Channel TV. Ridley extols the veil as offering freedom from Western sexism—the male gaze that renders a woman “invisible” after a certain age and undue judgment of women based on their appearance: “What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence?” she asks. Yet to frame the debate as an either-or duality between two cultures is to ignore the continuity that exists. There’s synchronicity in the burka being stigmatized at the same time female display in the West has geared into cartoonish, hyper-sexualization—the mainstreaming of the stripper aesthetic, the creepy Toddlers and Tiaras commodification of girls, and billboards like Estée Lauder’s: “Beautiful gives her daughter something to look forward to.” A new study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism reveals women are increasingly under-represented and overly sexualized in top movies: they’re far more likely to be seen in “sexy” clothing (25.8 per cent, compared to men at 4.7 per cent) and to be partially naked (23.6 per cent compared to 7.4 per cent). Yet the barbaric repression of women in fundamentalist Islamic nations—stoning for adultery, being denied the vote and access to education—renders complaints about continuing gender inequities in the West trivial by comparison, when, in fact, they are all extremes on a vast continuum.
Legislating what women wear under the guise of freedom is a worrisome portent, one Human Rights Watch calls a “lose-lose situation”: “[Burka bans] violate the rights of those who choose to wear the veil and do nothing to help those who are compelled to do so,” Judith Sunderland, a senior researcher with the group, said last April.
Art allows an exploration of the ambiguities that politics cannot. Canadian photographer Lana Slezic captured a fearful complexity in her famous portrait of Lt.-Col. Malali Kakar, Afghanistan’s most senior female police officer, who was murdered by the Taliban in 2008. Taken in profile, the image shows Kakar shrouded in a half burka, holding a handgun, her fingernails painted bright red. The image of the Afghan police officer working to emancipate Afghan women wearing a symbol of oppression upends the assumption that an unseen woman can’t yield power. Last week, Michelle Risinger, an NGO worker, blogged on GenderAcrossBorders.com about a successful uprising in Kabul by women disguised by their burkas; it forced her to redefine the garment “from a symbol of repression to a means of protection, and even the sustainment of women’s empowerment activities.”
Parisian guerrilla artist “Princess Hijab” explores the power of the veil in her work, using a black marker to “hijabize” and “niqabize” billboards to subvert consumer imagery and push cultural boundaries. “The niqab is very powerful, not just religiously,” the artist told Al Jazeera in 2010: “It has been used in fairy tales, it’s part of the collective memory, a symbol of religious observance, mourning and death.” The veil doesn’t belong to a single religious or ethnic group, she points out: “It’s an empowering piece of clothing but it also can be frightening.”
Exiled Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, known for her “Women of Allah” series, similarly creates haunting, powerful images of veiled women, some with guns, their bodies superimposed with Farsi poetry. “Western culture generally tends to mystify women behind a veil,” Neshat told hEyOkA magazine: “It seems ironic but true that the more a female body is covered, the more desirable it becomes. Therefore much of the credit goes to the phenomena behind Islamic culture that by controlling female sexuality, it ironically heightens the notions of temptation, desire and eroticism.”
That would explain the bizarre spectre of the increasing sexual fetishization of the burka in the West. In 2003, rapper Lil’ Kim appeared in a half-burka, naked below, on a magazine cover. In 2009, Mattel endorsed a “Burka Barbie.” The pneumatic plastic doll, once banned in Iran as a threat to “morality,” was outfitted in lime-green and Day-Glo orange “burkas” and auctioned off at Sotheby’s for Save the Children. A few months ago, Kim Kardashian, of sex tape infamy, pranced around in a burka in Dubai. Paparazzi swarmed. It was defiant, outrageous, more shocking than nudity. And anyone who sees it as cultural progress hasn’t been paying attention.
Two Extraordinary Men: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
The day when we are supposed to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy and struggle for civil rights, justice and freedom is marked today, January 16th, 2012. It goes without saying that everyone owes MLK Jr. a debt of gratitude. Reflecting on his life the past few days, I have re-read the “Auto-biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.” edited by Clayborne Carson, mostly using material from his collected letters, speeches and writings.
There are innumerable ways in which we can remember his legacy, but there is a specific context and relevance that I want to highlight, one that American Muslims and all despised minorities can relate to and understand.
It begins with first acknowledging that, as Svend White noted, Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t exactly the universally loved and admired individual that we honor today. In his time, MLK was reviled, considered by some in their hysterical conspiratorial craze “a Communist,” the FBI followed his every movement, and while he was alive he was considered a national security threat.
…contrary to the comforting revisionism that reigns, King was not universally acclaimed and supported after his advent in American national consciousness, even a decade after his legendary speech.
It’s relatively well-known that elements in the government—especially J. Edgar Hoover, who was convinced that he was a Communist plant—ignored the fact that by the end of his life he was a radical social critic who applied his vision to far more than race relations. As he began to apply his values holistically and across racial lines, he lost support among many erstwhile allies.
King’s bravery and vision did not end at “race relations,” his dream was larger, that is why he condemned the Vietnam war and joined striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
MLK day is an awkward day for Islamophobes. His life stands in sharp contradistinction to their hate-filled polemic and activism. While MLK waged jihad for civil rights and freedom, anti-Muslims lobby to restrict freedoms, while MLK pushed for non-violence and opposed aggressive wars, Islamophobes stand in support of such wars–or at least the by-product of slaughtering “towel-heads.”
The USA is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
If MLK said that today (and it is as true today as it was in his time), rest assured he would be called a leftist, terrorist sympathizer, or perhaps even a “secret Mooslim.”
MLK represented the highest qualities of his Christian faith, but this did not lead him to exclusivist narrow mindedness, instead it opened doors of knowledge and reflection upon unifying principles between the various world religions:
‘I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate — ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: ‘Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.’ If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”
For saying the above MLK would be considered a “dhimmi” by the radical anti-Muslim Islamophobes. That is why a commemoration of MLK is awesome, it exposes the futility of hate, the absurdness of it, while also reminding us that there is much work to be done to reach a dream that has not been understood or realized.
Washington, DC - I rarely learn anything meaningful from reading The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. In my opinion, his tight relationship with the Israeli government and its lobby here greatly influences his take on both foreign and domestic events. Although he occasionally deviates from the Israeli line, he not only appears very uncomfortable doing so, he tends to correct course fairly rapidly.
Nonetheless, in a Goldberg column about Iran this week, there was one paragraph that was dead-on and which he will have a hard time taking back (should he be so inclined).
Writing about a piece in the current edition of Foreign Affairs that endorses bombing Iran as a neat and cost-free way to address its nuclear programme, Goldberg explains why he thinks the author, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Matthew Kroenig, is wrong. Goldberg says he now believes:
…that advocates of an attack on Iran today would be exchanging a theoretical nightmare – an Iran with nukes – for an actual nightmare: A potentially out-of-control conventional war raging across the Middle East that could cost the lives of thousands Iranians, Israelis, Gulf Arabs and even American servicemen.
Think about that for a minute. Uber-hawk Jeffrey Goldberg is saying that the threat posed by Iran is a “theoretical nightmare” while a war ostensibly to neutralise that threat would present an “actual nightmare”.
No critic of US policy toward Iran could say it better or would say it differently. And why would we?
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has not yet made the decision to go nuclear. Speaking to CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta made the same point. Iran is not working on the bomb.
We do know, as Goldberg says, that a “potentially out-of-control conventional war raging across the Middle East” could “cost the lives of thousands of Iranians, Israelis, Gulf Arabs and even American servicemen”.
And that makes the decision against war a no-brainer. As Goldberg puts it:
Now that sanctions seem to be biting – in other words, now that Iran’s leaders understand the President’s seriousness on the issue – the Iranians just might be willing to pay more attention to proposals about an alternative course.
That alternative course would be an attempt “to try one more time to reach out to the Iranian leadership in order to avoid a military confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear programme”.
In short, dialogue.
The US, to this day, has never attempted a true dialogue with Tehran. Even under President Obama, all we have done is issue demands about its nuclear programme and offer to meet to discuss precisely how they comply with those demands.
That is not dialogue and it’s not negotiation; it’s an ultimatum.
The one attempt at dialogue (i.e., a discussion that involves give and take by both sides) was initiated by the Iranian government in 2003. That was when it proposed, according to the Washington Post, “a broad dialogue with the United States,” in which “everything was on the table – including full co-operation on nuclear programmes, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups”. In exchange, Iran wanted normalisation of relations with the United States.
As is well known, the United States did not respond. In fact, we chastised the Swiss intermediary who delivered the offer for having the temerity to do so.
It was us, not Iran, that spurned a process that would have led to improved relations.
Rather than diplomacy, we’ve pursued a policy of sanctions, which we escalate every time the war lobby demands them.
But sanctions will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapon capability, nor will “regime change”, considering that Iranians across the political spectrum support the Iranian nuclear programme. The only effect sanctions have is to please AIPAC, which has made confronting Iran central to its mission. AIPAC writes the sanctions bills, Congress passes them, the president signs them, and the Iranian people (not the regime) bear the brunt of the effects. (The politicians who endorse such measures, however, quite often are well rewarded.)
Goldberg deserves some credit for calling for dialogue. But his seriousness is undermined when he explains that the US offer must be our final one. Although real dialogue is a process, Goldberg’s suggestion is to try to talk just “one more time”. And then: war.
Nonetheless, Goldberg does not seem to be on the same page as the Israeli government or its neoconservative backers here, who reject any dialogue at all.
Any doubt on that score came today when an Iranian civilian nuclear scientist was assassinated in his car on a Tehran street. This was the fifth Iranian scientist killed in such an attack in the last two years.
The attack today certainly looks like an Israeli hit, especially when top Israelis themselves have warned that “unnatural” events were about to befall Iran. At this point, circumstantial evidence is all we can go on.
“For those hell-bent on getting the US engaged in a war that even Jeff Goldberg views as a ‘nightmare’ for both the US and Israel, this is a very good day indeed.”
That, and the answer to the ancient Latin question: Cui bono? Who benefits? (Check out Commentary, the neocon website that iscelebrating the murder.)
In theory, at least, the Netanyahu government benefits. A 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist is dead. The opportunities for dialogue or successful multilateral negotiations diminishes. And, if Iran responds in any way, US neocons (including Congress, which will recite its AIPAC talking points) will intensify calls for war.
On the other hand, actions like these against civilians in one country endanger civilians in others. Imagine how the United States or Israel would react if Iran or even Canada started bumping off nuclear scientists (or anyone else) in Washington.
Innocents in Israel, the US, Europe or elsewhere will pay a price for this criminal act of colossal stupidity. And from a security standpoint, such clear acts of aggression can only convince the mullahs that they need to develop a nuclear deterrent.
Here is Jeff Goldberg again in a column subsequent to the one I already cited:
If I were a member of the Iranian regime (and I’m not), I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation (not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West) and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible. Once I do that, I’m North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country.
In short, for those hell-bent on getting the US engaged in a war that even Jeff Goldberg views as a “nightmare” for both the US and Israel, this is a very good day indeed.
Congratulations. Or something like that.
MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network.
As tensions grow between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Israeli state, the scholar discusses Jewish identity and extremism.
When ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters recently clashed with Israeli government officials over gender segregation in public places, many of the demonstrators played on a link between Israel and Nazism by dressing up as Nazi concentration camp inmates.
Such clashes have become more frequent in recent years, as ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up 10 per cent of the country’s population, are said to be growing increasingly aggressive in their attempts to impose their conservative ways on others. So is the religious divide in Israel growing? And is there a link between the Holocaust and the existence of the state of Israel?
Earlier last year, before the recent demonstrations, Talk to Al Jazeera met Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who says that the foundation of the state of Israel and its link to the Holocaust is weak. In fact, he says, the Holocaust almost prevented the establishment of the state by destroying much of the population the Zionist movement had expected to move to Israel.
On the question of how to achieve peace with the Palestinians as Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stands firm on his demand that the Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state, Bauer says: “I think that is proof of his [Netanyahu's] internal insecurity. If you are secure in your Jewish identity you do not need Abu Mazen or Saeb Erekat to tell you that you are a Jew. Do they need me to fortify their belief that they are Palestinian?”
Bauer believes Palestinians and all other minorities living on Israeli soil should be given equal rights to Israelis, because a national state “should grant absolutely equal rights, not just formal rights, to the minorities that are within it”.
On this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Yehuda Bauer talks to Teymoor Nabili about being a historian in a region where there are as many versions of history as there are people telling them, Jewish identity and extremism and navigating between conservative Jews and Palestinians.
“There is a certain closeness in attitudes, in outlooks, in social psychology …. We are cousins. Cousins very often quarrel in a very unpleasant way, but I think that we could arrive at an arrangement where live and let live could become a viable option – it is not now, obviously, but it could become that. There is a danger of a violent Jewish radical, genocidal nationalism with a minority of Israeli Jews. There is such a minority, it’s very dangerous, I think we have to exert great pressure on these people to limit that, and finally to conquer it. This group of radical Jewish nationalists, genocidal radical Jewish nationalists, are a mirror image of radical Islam that wants to annihilate all the Jews in the world. But on both sides there is a danger. Here it is a minority, but that could change ….”
A black metal band nominated for Norway’s top music prize has rejected claims that lyrics on its latest album go too far in their criticism of Islam.
Taake’s nomination for the Spellemann Prize in the Best Metal Album category has sparked a strong reaction from listeners who find some of the band’s lyrics objectionable, newspaperAftenposten reports. In the song Orkan (“Hurricane”) on its latest album, Noregs Vaapen, the band sings: “To hell with Muhammad and the Mohammedans” and their “unforgivable customs”. It ends with the line: “Norway will soon awaken”.
Marte Thorsby, chairman of the prize committee’s board, denied any assertion that the jury must not have listened to the album properly before announcing the nomination. “We enjoy full freedom of expression in Norway and a Spellemann jury is not going to censor content in any way,” she told Aftenposten.
Søderlind said the lyrics were presumably written prior to last summer’s terror attacks in Norway, “and in the aftermath of July 22nd they’re completely over the edge”. “I’d imagine Taake aren’t particularly proud of these lyrics after Utøya,” he said, referring to the massacre of 69 young people at a summer camp by anti-Islam extremist Anders Behring Breivik.
In a written response to the newspaper, Taake front-man Ørjan Stedjeberg said his sole intention with the contentious lyrics was to criticize religion. “Our view, in the name of freedom of expression, is that it is shameful to adhere to Christianity or Islam. Incidentally, Christianity is mentioned in the same lyrics, but that doesn’t seem to have been given any emphasis,” he wrote. “Taake has never been a political band, and we do not encourage either violence or racism.”
Stedjeberg previously landed himself in hot water in 2007 when he appeared onstage with a swastika painted on his chest in Essen, Germany, where any use of the former Nazi symbol is strictly prohibited. In a statement released after the incident, Stedjeberg said: “Taake is not a political Nazi band, etc. We certainly didn’t expect the current threat reactions, as everyone should know by now that our whole concept is built upon provocation and anything evil- and death-related.”
The Spellemann Prize winners will be announced at a ceremony on January 14th.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Taake, after subsequent concerts on the band’s German tour were cancelled due to the Essen incident Stedjeberg posted a statement on the Taake website in which he wrote: “we truly apologize to all of our collaborators who might get problems because of the Essen swastika scandal (except for the Untermensch owner of that club; you can go suck a Muslim).”
Three cars were torched and a mosque wall was spray painted with the sentence “price tag Gal Arye Yosef” in the village of Dir Istiya near Ariel in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The sentence refers to the name of an illegal outpost that was evacuated in the last few days.
The head of the Dir Istiya local council, Nazmi Salaman, told Ynet that at 1:40 am residents noticed a car with three passengers and an Israeli license plate driving at high speed on the village’s main street towards the exit. “Immediately after that the residents noticed that three cars parked cars were on fire near the mosque and one of the fences that surround the mosque had the ‘price tag’ graffiti.”
Salaman added that at first the residents called the Palestinian DCO to report the incident, later Israeli police along with IDF troops arrived due to the fact that Dir Istiya is in Area C. “This is a continuation of attacks against Palestinians and mosques in the West Bank,” he said.
He noted that this was the second time that village property was vandalized. “The first time was in September when the Palestinian Authority launched their UN bid, and then settlers came and unsuccessfully tried to set the mosque on fire.”
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An amendment that would ban Oklahoma courts from considering international or Islamic law discriminates against religions and a Muslim community leader has the right to challenge its constitutionality, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.
The court in Denver upheld U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange‘s order blocking implementation of the amendment shortly after it was approved by 70 percent of Oklahoma voters in November 2010.
The amendment read, in part: “The courts shall not look to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.”
Backers argued that the amendment intended to ban all religious laws, that Islamic law was merely named as an example and that it wasn’t meant as a specific attack on Muslims. The court disagreed.
“That argument conflicts with the amendment’s plain language, which mentions Sharia law in two places,” the appeals court opinion said.
The court also noted that the backers of the amendment admitted they did not know of any instance when an Oklahoma court applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other countries.
Awad argued that the ban on Islamic law would likely affect every aspect of his life as well as the execution of his will after his death. The appeals court pointed out that Awad made a “strong showing” of potential harm.
“When the law that voters wish to enact is likely unconstitutional, their interests do not outweigh Mr. Awad’s in having his constitutional rights protected,” the court said.
DENVER – A giant electronic billboard that went up off 58th Avenue and Interstate 25 when the Broncos had an embarrassing record at the beginning of the season.
It begged Denver Broncos head coach John Fox to start Tim Tebow at quarterback instead of Kyle Orton.
Shortly after it went up, the Broncos reached 1-4 and then Tebow took over and led the team to the playoffs.
As the Broncos have evolved, so has the sign.
On Monday, the huge LED sign said, “Tebow’s trigger is right on target,” referring to John Elway’s request that Tebow throw the ball during Sunday night’s game.
Tebow threw for 316 yards and his 80-yard pass in overtime won the game for the Broncos over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The people behind the sign are not Christian or a conservative group plugging Tebow’s faith.
It’s three Muslim brothers who are just big fans of Tebow and the Broncos.
“It adds to the fun, at least for us,” Tariq Suleiman said.
“We wanted to be part of the excitement,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
After Sunday night’s thrilling overtime victory, the Suleiman brothers’ latest message asks doubters, “Now Do You Believe” in Tebow?
“For me personally, I never doubted him. I knew he could pull off a Steelers win,” Tariq said.
The Suleiman brothers have been creating new messages after each game, all from an office which has a window view of the sign.
Mohammad Suleiman is the youngest at 26, Ali, 28, is the middle brother, and Tariq, 30, comes up with most of the messages.
They all sell wholesale goods at their father’s store which is next to the billboard.
As most fans know, Tebow is a devout Christian who thanks the Lord during most interviews.
The Suleiman brothers are devout Muslims, also proud of their faith.
“We do like the fact that he practices what he preaches,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
“I am also a big believer in God as a Muslim, there are some differences but when Muslims and Christians get together, miracles can occur. We just had the Mile High miracle!” Tariq Suleiman said.
After Tebow threw for 316 yards last night, people quickly made the religious connection to John 3:16, which is Tebow’s favorite Bible verse.
Tebow also wore the verse on his eye black when he was quarterback in college at the University of Florida.
After the connection surfaced Monday morning, John 3:16 became the most searched Google term on Monday.
“I went to check the Quran, chapter 3, verse 16 to see what it said, and it talks about salvation and believing in God, very similar to what the Bible says,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
But the Suleimans say they didn’t start running the billboards for religious reasons, it was all about rallying for their favorite quarterback and team.
“It’s been great, obviously with the wins, and the way the fans have been coming in and reacting, they’ve been coming in and thanking us,” Mohammad Suleiman said.
“We love the Denver Broncos, we’ve always been fans, and this year has been just an amazing year,” Tariq Suleiman said.
9NEWS got a preview of the next sign the brothers will unveil. You can see it tonight on 9NEWS at 9 and 10 p.m.
When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew” by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the comment as a disgusting tribal dig.
However, ignoring these comments wouldn’t just be dangerous, it would be to allow a growing brand of hatred coursing through America’s veins – produced on the fringes – to continue infecting our public discourse (and public opinion) on matters both foreign and domestic.
It’s a hate-filled islamophobia that masquerades as patriotic, as anti-terrorism, as proudly American and Zionist (as though the two are synonymous). It’s a brand of hatred that the current GOP seeks, a hatred it feels it needs, a hatred it foments for perceived political gain at great cost to civil society. And, as much as it pains me as a progressive Jewish American to say, it’s a hatred right-wing American Jews are often solicited to be spokespeople for on venues like Fox News, with claims of anti-Semitism at the ready should they be critiqued by people such as, well, Jon Stewart.
So, wait – what happened to Jon Stewart, exactly? – you ask. Here is the context:
Jason Jones and The Daily Show crew produced this rather brilliant segment on how Broward County Republicans orchestrated a campaign to block membership of a Muslim Republican to the Broward Republican Party’s executive committee. This was done with the help of the Muslim-hating group ironically called Americans Against Hate (headed by Joe Kaufman, who is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for Congress).
This is not the first time that The Daily Show made fun of, ridiculed, and smeared proud Americans and passionate zionists. What’s he doing? And why? Does he know how much CAIR raised for their home office, Hamas, whose stated goal is to destroy the Jewish homeland, through the Holy Land Foundation? Stewart missed his calling. He would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany. Smug self-loathing Jew.
Yes, Geller is a nut. And yes, this particular display has been limited – so far – to her personal site. But Geller, just one of many fringe figures who inexplicably get airtime aplenty, knows what she’s doing. She knows the game: play the anti-Semitism card.
And not just any anti-Semitism card – the self-hating-Jew card. And she plays it against one of our country’s most important media critics and defenders of reason. Why? Because he represents exactly what she and her right-wing minions loathe: someone willing to call out islamophobia for what it is, even when promoted by American Jews.
While it would be easy to dismiss all this due to the messenger, does Jon Stewart shy away from railing against hatred and bigotry when it is perpetrated by the unhinged?
A Liberal Democrat candidate has refused to apologise for a series of shocking Islamophobic comments. Sick Dave Stone suggested a pork restaurant and a topless bar — named after Islam’s holiest city – should be build next to a mosque.
The would-be councillor, who is the party’s candidate for a by-election in Redcar and Cleveland on 19 January, said:
“Regarding the mosque being built near ground zero. I say let them build it. But then, across the street we should put a topless bar called “You Mecca Me Hot” … and next to that a pork rib restaurant … Then we’ll see who’s tolerant.”
A number of posts on his Facebook page were seemingly calculated to deliberately offend Muslims — including spreading outright smears. Stones claimed that the Royal British Legion were “not selling poppies in certain areas of the UK”, implying that objections from Muslims were behind the decision:
When contacted by Scrapbook, however, a spokesperson for The Royal British Legion said his claims about the poppies were “categorically not true”.
This brazen intolerance brings to mind Cllr Warren Swaine, a Liberal Democrat who was suspended from Reading Borough Council after Scrapbookexposed a race remark about Labour MP Chuka Umunna. That incident, and an attempted cover up, led to an internal party investigation at the behest of the party’s outraged black members.
Will the Lib Dem leadership be burying its head in the sand again this time?
Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church holds Christmas mass at the Abassiya Cathedral in Cairo. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA
The Islamophobes would like nothing more than strife and disunity between Muslims and Copts in Egypt. Much to their dismay however Pope Shenouda calls for unity in the country.
David Shariatmadari and Damien Pearse (The Guardian)
As Coptic Christians celebrated their first Christmas after the Egyptian revolution, their pope called for national unity amid fears that their community will suffer under Islamic majority rule.
Copts, who use of a 13-month calendar dating back to pharaonic times, celebrated Christmas Day on Saturday.
At the start of the festive celebrations in Egypt, prominent figures from across the political spectrum, including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and members of the ruling military council, attended Friday night mass at Cairo’s main Coptic cathedral.
The Coptic pope, Shenouda III, commended their presence and appealed for national unity for “the sake of Egypt”. He said:
For the first time in the history of the cathedral, it is packed with all types of Islamist leaders in Egypt. They all agree … on the stability of this country, and in loving it and working for it, and to work with the Copts as one hand for the sake of Egypt.
The call for unity follows an escalation in violence against the Christian minority, an estimated 10% of Egypt’s 85 million people, over the past year.
Many Christians blamed a series of street clashes, assaults on churches and other attacks on radical Islamists who have become increasingly bold after Mubarak’s downfall.
The Coptic church traces its origins to 50 years after the death of Christ, when Mark the Evangelist took the gospel to the pagan city of Alexandria.
British Copts, expatriate members of the Egyptian denomination, have also expressed their concerns over the events of the Arab spring.
“Because of the problems in the last 12 months, overall attendance every Sunday has increased significantly,” said Nabil Raphael, a GP who has lived in London for the past 35 years. He is a regular at St Mark’s church in Kensington. “Whenever there are problems in the mother church, people naturally get more interested and attend more regularly.”
Christmas services took place across Britain, with centres of worship in London, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, Newcastle and Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
As families gathered for the late-night church services marking Christmas Eve, there was a sense of nervousness, as well as joy. “Last year started horrifically for us,” said Egyptian-born Bishop Angaelos, who is based at the Coptic Centre, a manor house on the outskirts of Stevenage, Hertfordshire. “Just as we were going into new year celebrations we heard about the bombing.”
The 1 January 2011 attack outside al-Qiddissine church in Alexandria, the worst sectarian violence in Egypt for more than a decade, left 23 dead.
Attacks on the community continued after the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, prompting thousands of Copts to take to the streets in protest that no culprits had been brought to justice. The military violently quashed the most recent demonstration in October, leaving 27 dead and provoking further outrage.
“At the beginning [of the revolution] there was a great euphoria, a sense of hope for the future,” said Angaelos. “The problem is that because of the lack of law and order, you then had a lot of extremism. We saw in the past 10 months more attacks on Christians and churches than over the past two years before that.”
Amir Michaeel, 26, saw the revolution as a moment of hope for the country, which he left aged 12 when his father came to the UK to work. But he is concerned by the emergence of more organised Islamic parties.
Raphael is more categorical. “There is real concern about the likelihood of harsher treatment for the Copts if radical Islam is to rule Egypt.”
Bishop Angaelos said the community had no issue with a Muslim majority government as long as the rights of Copts were protected: “What we want is a government which represents everyone in the country, not just one sector over another.”
A Star of David and anti-Arab slurs were spray-painted at a mosque in Quebec
Harper condemns ‘heinous attacks’ on Gatineau mosque
Prime Minister Stephen Harper took time this week to condemn an attack by vandals at a mosque in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Ottawa.
“Our government strongly condemns these heinous attacks that have been terrorizing the whole community,” the Prime Minister said in a statement in French.
Bernie Farber, former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, wrote an Op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen about the importance of protecting those who face such despicable acts of racism as the vandalism of the Gatineau Mosque.
It’s difficult for those who have never experienced unbridled hatred to feel the pain that congregants of a Gatineau Mosque must be feeling today. Over the last two weeks hateful vandals have smashed windows, tried to torch cars in their parking lot and spray-painted anti-Islamic graffiti including of all things “Stars of David,” on the Mosque’s doors and windows.
Five hours west of Gatineau in the sleepy GTA bedroom community of Newmarket, Rita Brown and her partner Seun Oyinsan awoke Christmas morning to find that racist vandals had scratched an ugly epithet on the hood of their car. You see Rita and Seun are a mixedrace couple and it seems that there are at least a bigoted few in Newmarket who have yet to enter the 21st century.
Incredibly this was not the first such racist attack on this couple. In early September they were the victims of two other attacks. Swastikas and that despicable “N”-word were spray painted and scratched on the couple’s garage and van. The van also was defaced with acid and sharp nails embedded into small pieces of wood were placed under the tires. Ominously all this was followed by a warning that Rita and Seun were “not wanted in Newmarket” with a threat of violence.
In Newmarket there has been an outpouring of support. Local community newspapers have editorialized and condemned the actions. Neighbours and friends have rallied to the side of the beleaguered couple. In Gatineau condemnation came from the very top; Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke out strongly, as has mainstream Jewish leadership all too familiar with such faith-based attacks.
Sadly some used newspaper online comments to remind us that there still remain a small number of bigotry’s fellow travellers.
Regarding the Newmarket attack one poster wrote: “I will bet a loonie or toonie that they did it themselves, they over paid for their house, couldn’t sell it and are using ‘racism’ to gain sympathy. They know some braindead liberal with White Guilt will swoop in and save the day.”
Sadly similar comments were also found online pertaining to the Gatineau incident: “This appears to be an inside job by one of the congregation trying to put the blame on Jews by spray painting the Star of David on the door …”
Thankfully, here in Canada, like most of the western world, we have created anti-hate laws as a fence of protection from the very worst society has to offer. Laws prohibiting the vilest of racist expression make it a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in jail. Acts of violence and property destruction motivated by hatred can add months and even years to a sentence.
Recently there has been a debate raging here in Canada regarding the necessity of antihate laws. There are those who believe that any restriction on speech whatsoever is an infringement on our valued right to free-speech. In 1990 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld our anti-hate laws by a slim margin. While it found that such laws were a limitation on speech, given the serious need to ensure protection of vulnerable minorities such an infringement, it argued, was justified.
I agree. We are a democracy based on justice and law. We understand that human beings are far from perfect, hence we created laws to protect society. Anti-hate laws are a kind of insurance for the future. Such laws help define us as a tolerant society. To be sure we must find the correct balance between freedom of expression and the right to equality that we all share.
Rita Brown, her partner Seun Oyinsan and congregants of the Gatineau Mosque have the right, as do we all, to live in safety, free from hatred and vilification. We have the responsibility as a nation to protect identifiable groups as defined in law from the contemptible few who find hatred their oxygen of life.
As we enter a New Year let us join hands with Rita, Seun and the Islamic community of Gatineau and wish them strength for a better 2012. Let us also hope that those who committed these despicable crimes are apprehended and face the full force of Canada’s anti-hate laws.
Bernie Farber is the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress. He writes often on human and civil rights issues.
Geert Wilders and his PVV Party are upset that Queen Beatrix, queen of the Netherlands wore this “hijab-hat” while visiting a mosque in Abu Dhabi:
Queen Beatrix visits mosque in Abu Dabi
Wilders Seemingly forgot that he dressed like this while visiting a synagogue in the United States:
Wearing a Yarmulke (Yamaka) is okay but not the Hijab
Getting upset over celebrities and world leaders wearing Islamic or Muslim garb while visiting a mosque or Islamic holy place is a regular theme amongst Islamophobes, we have covered their angst about this before, Daniel Pipes’ Unhealthy Obsession with the Hijab.
Here is a Radio Netherlands post on the subject (via. Islamophobia-Watch):
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who is in Abu Dabi, wore a headscarf when she visited the Sheikh Zayed Mosque this morning out of respect for the customs, traditions and conventions of Islam, says Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal. The queen is on a two-day state visit to the United Arab Emirates.
“Not to have worn one during a visit to a mosque wasn’t an option. In that case, the invitation to visit to the mosque, one of the most important in the United Arab Emirates, would’ve had to have been refused,” explained Mr Rosenthal.
‘Oppression’
His comments come in response to criticism from the Freedom Party (PVV) about the clothing worn by Queen Beatrix and Crown Princess Máxima who, with her husband Prince Willem-Alexander, is part of the royal party visiting the UAE. The PVV had complained that, by wearing a headscarf, the queen was lending legitimacy to the oppression of women under Islam.
Mr Rosenthal pointed out that Queen Beatrix also adjusts the way she dresses when she visits synagogues and cathedrals.
‘Waste of time’ The democrat D66 party was quick to point out that PVV leader Geert Wilders himself wears a yarmulke when he visits the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Green Left MP Tofik Dibi not only slammed Mr Wilders’ comments about the queen’s dress but also the responses to them as a waste of time. (emphasis mine)
Western China is far from the happiest place in which to be Muslim right now. At the end of December, police killed seven people in Xinjiang, an area traditionally dominated by the Uighur Muslim ethnic group, using some very sketchy justifications. Days later, the government destroyed a mosque in Ningxia that was just set to reopen after refurbishment, prompting a fight in which at least two more people were killed. The details available on these events have been sparse and often in stark contradiction. It might seem as though we have wandered back in time to the Cultural Revolution, but we’re looking at a very twenty-first century brand of Islamophobia, infused with a legacy of ethnic tensions.
What happened in Xinjiang? The state claimed that police officers confronted a group of fifteen men who had kidnapped two people, and the kidnappers were Muslim extremists or terrorists off to “jihadist training” across the border. Government media sources and spokespeople refuse to specify the ethnic origins of the fifteen. One police officer was also killed.
Non-state media sources are reporting that this group was all Uighur, included children, and was attempting to escape Chinese repression. Other members of the group were taken into custody, and their fates are unknown. It’s far from the first time state information on violence involving Muslims has been questionable, as Edward Wong catalogues at the New York Times. There’s a lot that’s disturbing about this story, from implying that killing a group of people for supposedly kidnapping would somehow justify the killings, that they were killed in front of children, and that these people weren’t welcome in China, but weren’t allowed to leave, either.
As for Ningxia? Taoshan villagers raised USD $127 000 to renovate their mosque. After Friday prayers, the day before the opening ceremony, one hundred villagers faced one thousand soldiers and police officers. Three guesses how that went. The two confirmed dead are reported to have been elderly. This was so unexpected and unprecedented in this area that it sends a message of the state cracking down hard. That’s particularly so given that the soldiers and officers weren’t sent out until the mosque was completed, and all the more so following on immediately from the Uighur deaths.
A major difference between what happened here and what happened in Xinjiang is that the Taoshan Muslims, who say they’ve never experienced religious persecution before, are Hui. China’s biggest Muslim ethnicity, the Chinese-speaking Hui have been far better treated and tolerated by the state than any other Muslim group as they have been considered more properly Chinese – or at least they have been since the mid-twentieth century state classification of ethnic groups. (This is not at all to endorse the sentiment in the piece linked at the start of the last paragraph that Hui “are practically indistinguishable from the Han”. One wonders to whom they are practically indistinguishable.)
CNN Editor’s note:Dean Obeidallah is a comedian who has appeared on Comedy Central’s “Axis of Evil” special, ABC’s “The View,” CNN’s “What the Week” and HLN’s “The Joy Behar Show.” He is executive producer of the annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival and the Amman Stand Up Comedy Festival. Follow him on Twitter.
(CNN) – There are two Rick Santorums: The first one I might not agree with, but the second one truly scares me.
“Santorum One” pushes for less government regulation for corporations and shrinking the federal government. You may or may not agree with these positions, but they are both mainstream conservative fare.
Then there’s “Santorum Two.” This Santorum wants to impose conservative Christian law upon America. Am I being hyperbolic or overly dramatic with this statement? I wish I were, but I’m not.
Plainly put, Rick Santorum wants to convert our current legal system into one that requires our laws to be in agreement with religious law, not unlike what the Taliban want to do in Afghanistan.
Santorum is not hiding this. The only reason you may not be aware of it is because up until his recent surge in the polls, the media were ignoring him. However, “Santorum Two” was out there telling anyone who would listen.
He told a crowd at a November campaign stop in Iowa in no uncertain terms, “our civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God’s law.”
On Thanksgiving Day at an Iowa candidates’ forum, he reiterated: “We have civil laws, but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law.”
Yes, that means exactly what you think it does: Santorum believes that each and every one of our government’s laws must match God’s law, warning that “as long as there is a discordance between the two, there will be agitation.” I’m not exactly sure what “agitation” means in this context, but I think it’s a code word for something much worse than acid reflux.
And as an aside, when Santorum says “God,” he means “not any god (but) the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” So, if your god differs from Rick’s, your god’s views will be ignored, just like the father is on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”
Some of you might be asking: How far will “Santorum Two” take this? It’s not like he’s going to base public policy decisions on Bible passages, right?
Well, here’s what Santorum had to say just last week when asked about his opposition to gay marriage: “We have Judeo-Christian values that are based on biblical truth. … And those truths don’t change just because people’s attitudes may change.”
Santorum could not be more unambiguous: His policy decisions will be based on “biblical truths,” and as he noted, these “truths” will not change regardless of whether public opinion has evolved since the time the Bible was written thousands of years ago.
Imagine if either of the two Muslim members of Congress declared their support for a proposed American law based on verses from the Quran. The outcry would be deafening, especially from people like Santorum.
One of the great ironies is that Santorum has been a leader in sounding alarm bells that Muslims want to impose Islamic law — called Sharia law — upon non-Muslims in America. While Santorum fails to offer even a scintilla of credible evidence to support this claim, he continually warns about the “creeping” influence of Muslim law.
Santorum’s fundamental problem with Sharia law is that it’s “not just a religious code. It is also a governmental code. It happens to be both religious in nature and origin, but it is a civil code.”
Consequently, under the Sharia system, the civil laws of the land must comport with God’s law. Now, where did I hear about someone wanting to impose only laws that agree with God’s law in America?
So, what type of nation might the United States be under Rick Santorum’s Sharia law?
1. Rape victims would be forced to give birth to the rapist’s child. Santorum has stated that his religious beliefs dictate that life begins at conception, and as a result, rape victims would be sentenced to carrying the child of the rapist for nine months.
2. Gay marriages would be annulled. Santorum recently declaredthat not only does he oppose gay marriages, but he supports a federal constitutional amendment that would ban them, invalidating all previous gay marriages that have legally been sanctioned by states and thus callously destroying marriages and thrusting families into chaos.
3. Santorum would ban all federal funding for birth control and would not oppose any state that wanted to pass laws making birth control illegal.
4. No porn! I’m not kidding. Santorum signed “The Marriage Vow”pledge (PDF) authored by the Family Leader organization, under which he swears to oppose pornography. I think many would agree that alone should disqualify him from being president.
To me, “Santorum Two” truly poses an existential threat to the separation of church and state, one of the bedrock principles of our nation since its inception. Not only did Thomas Jefferson speak of the need to create “a wall of separation between church and state,” so did Santorum’s idol, Ronald Reagan, who succinctly stated, “church and state are, and must remain, separate.”
While there may be millions of Americans who in their heart agree with the views of “Santorum Two,” it is my hope they will reject any attempts to move America closer to a becoming the Afghanistan of the Western Hemisphere.
A 15-year-old boy was tortured and drowned by his sister and her boyfriend because they believed he was a witch, the Old Bailey has heard.
Kristy Bamu, from Paris, was found dead in Newham, east London, on Christmas Day in 2010.
The boy had 101 injuries and died from being beaten with a metal bar and drowning, the court heard.
His sister Magalie Bamu and her boyfriend, Eric Bikubi, both Congolese and aged 28, of Newham, deny murder.
Prosecutors told jurors of acts they described as “depraved”, “wicked” and “cruel”.
Kristy Bamu and his siblings were visiting London from Paris during the Christmas holidays
Mr Bikubi admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a plea not accepted by the prosecution.
‘Armoury of weapons’
Kristy and his siblings were visiting the couple for Christmas, but Mr Bikubi had accused the boy and two of his siblings of witchcraft, the court heard.
All three were beaten and other children were forced to join in the attacks. But it was Kristy who became the focus of Mr Bikubi’s attention, the prosecution said.
The teenager was said to be in such pain after days of being hit with an “armoury of weapons” including sticks, pliers, a metal bar, hammer and chisel that he begged to die.
Brian Altman QC, prosecuting, said: “Eventually Bikubi took him into the bathroom, put him in the bath and started to run the water.
“Kristy was just too badly injured and exhausted to resist or to keep his head above the water.
“It was only when he [Mr Bikubi] realised that Kristy was not moving that he stopped what he was doing and pulled him from the water.”
He added: “By then it was too late.”
The youngsters were forced to lie to their parents about what was happening when they phoned home, the jury heard.
Mr Altman said of Kristy’s father: “He had sent his children on holiday, not to a torture chamber.”
When police arrived they found Kristy and his siblings – brother Yves, 22, and and sister Kelly, 20, and other children.
Mr Altman said: “All were standing in the living room, hysterical, terrified and soaking wet.
‘Sorcerers’
“None of them spoke any English.”
Kelly Bamu said Mr Bikubi and Ms Bamu accused Kristy, herself and a third child of “being witches or sorcerers – practising witchcraft” which adversely influenced another child.
“Despite her own siblings’ denials that they were sorcerers, Magalie Bamu joined her boyfriend in repeating these fantastic claims and participating in the assaults,” Mr Altman said.
The three were beaten and refused food, drink and sleep and eventually, to stop the torture, they admitted being sorcerers, the jury was told.
Mr Altman said Mr Bikubi’s admission of manslaughter was rejected by the prosecution, which argues the couple carried out “the very deliberate murder” of Kristy.
‘Feral and evil’
Ms Bamu also denies two charges of causing actual bodily harm to her other siblings.
The defendants are originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The jury heard that witchcraft or sorcery – called kindoki – is practised in Congolese Christian churches.
Mr Altman said that taken out of the church’s control “it may take on a feral and indeed evil character, as we suggest it did here”.
The court heard that in 2008 Mr Bikubi had accused a family friend of being involved in witchcraft and had forced her to cut her hair short to purge herself.
Justin Elliot wrote a piece on Nezar Hamze’s attempt to join the Broward County Republicans not too long ago. The anti-Muslim response Hamze got from members of the Grand Old party received national attention at the time.
Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones was funny as usual and skewered Joe Kaufman in the video below. Kaufman was looking dolt-like as ever, unable to provide a definition of the word “against;” he also readily admitted that he used ‘guilt-by-association’ assumptions to label individuals such as Hamze ,and organizations such as CAIR, as “terrorists” or “terrorist supporters.”
Jason Jones heads to Florida to help a Muslim Republican gain the acceptance of the Brower County GOP. (05:21)
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The video certainly deserves to be in the annals of our Kaufman-o-meter series, so we will consider this Kaufman-o-meter #6!
Who is Joe Kaufman?:
Joe Kaufman, has been on the Anti-Muslim scene for quite a while now and is dubbed by the far Right-Wing FrontPageMag as, you guessed it…another one of their ”Investigative Journalists.” That he has been influenced by Meir Kahane and the Kahanist ideology is well documented, as is his love and angst for Kahane.
In the past he has been accused of contributing to the terrorist organization founded by Kahane known as JDL (Jewish Defense League) while others accuse Kaufman of at the very least holding views that parallel JDL positions.
Kaufman’s unsavory associations and views are quite real and they are only dangerous to America if you’re stupid enough to swallow his conspiracy theories but other than that he is simply a half-baked paranoid conspiracy theorist, some what along the lines of the “9/11 Truthers.”
In every nook and cranny there is a “Mooslim”…hiding and ready to get ya…so beware and be afraid. Be veryyyy afraid goes his story.
In this special LoonWatch series we will detail the exploits and punchlines that Krazy Kaufman throws out there and attempts to pass on as serious journalism, commentary and investigation.
One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.
A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome. The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:
“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim.Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”
Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future. (HT: @GregFrayser)
GOP presidential hopeful and former senator Rick Santorum found himself amid a flurry of new attention after placing a close second in the Iowa caucuses. One of the fiery right-wing politician’s views coming under increased scrutiny is his attitude toward Islam. Already in this campaign, Santorum endorsed profiling in airport security and, when pressed, said, “Obviously, Muslims would be someone you’d look at.”
Now, journalist Max Blumenthal unearthed a 2007 speech Santorum gave to a Washingtonconference at the invitation of David Horowitz. In the speech (audio can be found at anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller‘s site), Santorum outlined the “war” against “radical Islam”:
What must we do to win? We must educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate. …
The other thing we need to do is eradicate, and that’s the final thing. As I said, this is going to be a long war. There are going to be pluses and minuses, ups and downs. But we have to win this war to — fight this war to win this war.
Santorum insists that he’s “not suggesting that we have to go in there and blow them up.” But, later in the speech, he compares the “long war” to World War II, adding, “Americans don’t like war. They don’t like suffering and dying. No one does.”
Both in this speech and in other writings and remarks, Santorum often specifies that he’s speaking of “radical Islam.” But what does “radical Islam” mean to Santorum? In fact, the former senator often times conflates extremists with the entire Muslim faith at-large and, at other times, he states outright that radicals dominate Islam. In the 2007 D.C. speech, Santorum compared Muslim wars from hundreds of years ago to 9/11: “Does anybody know when the high-water mark of Islam was? September the 11th, 1683,” he said to gasps from the audience.
As to what “losing” the war with “radical Islam” looks like, Santorum discussed Europe. “Europe is on the way to losing,” he said. “The most popular male name in Belgium — Mohammad. It’s the fifth most popular name in France among boys.” The other data point he cited was larger birthrates among “Islamic Europeans” as opposed to “Westernized Europeans.” Nowhere did he indicate a growing “radical” threat in Europe.
In October 2007 at his alma mater Penn State, Santorum gave a speech and failed to break out the radical strain from the faith at-large: “Islam, unlike Christianity, is an all-encompassing ideology. It is not just something you do on Sunday. … We (as Americans) don’t get that.” The quote is particularly ironic from someone who, among other such statements, has said, “[O]ur civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God’s law.”
In a January 2007 speech, Santorum suggested Islam at-large was responsible for religious freedom issues and put the onus Muslims to deal with these issues to end the “war”:
Until we have the kind of discussion and dialogue with Islam — that democracy and freedom of religion, along with religious pluralism, are essential for the stability of the world and our ability to cohabit in this world. Unless Islam is willing to make that conscious decision, then we are going to be at war for a long time.
If Santorum’s discourse sounds like some of the Islamophobia network outlined in CAP’s Fear, Inc. report, that should be no surprise. Horowitz has repeatedly hosted Santorum for “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week” events and Geller and her associate Robert Spencer cite his work approvingly.
In a 2008 appearance at the Christians United For Israel confab, Santorum outflanked even Daniel Pipes. When Pipes mentioned that radicals only constituted about 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, Santorum, before wondering whether Muslims are capable of making moral decisions at all, challenged him:
It’s not a small number. OK? It’s not a fringe. It’s a sizable group of people that hold these views. [Pipes' notion of 'moderate' Islam] is the exception, I would argue, of what traditional Islam is doing.
No decent American — or anyone across the globe — should oppose “eradicat(ing)” extremist ideologies like militant, “radical Islam.” But Santorum’s history of statements raises questions about just exactly what and who he’s targeting for eradication.
WARNING: This article contains images with offensive language
A mosque in Gatineau, Que., that has been a target of vandalism was spray-painted with graffiti overnight.
Workers at the Outaouais Islamic Centre awoke Thursday to discover swear words and derogatory references to Arabs and Allah spray-painted in white.
The vandals painted messages on the front doors, across the building’s side and on two other entrances to the building.
The mosque had earlier been vandalized Monday morning when windows were damaged and someone attempted to set fire to two cars in the parking lot.
4th incident in 6 months
Gatineau police were investigating a number of incidents of vandalism at the mosque over the last few months. Police said it was the fourth incident in the last six months.
Mosque secretary general Amadou Thiam said the vandalism was a “provocation” and called on members of the mosque to remain calm.
Thiam urged police to do their utmost to find the perpetrators. The mosque has turned over security video footage to police.
Thiam also urged Gatineau city officials to show their support for the mosque.
Graffiti was spray-painted on the front door and two back doors of the mosque. (CBC)
Muslim, Jewish groups condemn attack
The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) condemned the vandalism Thursday and said authorities should investigate the incident as a hate crime.
“The repeated vandalism, within days of the previous attack, of this specific mosque is deeply troubling. Attacks on all our nation’s houses of worship must be condemned by all Canadians and should be investigated and prosecuted using all available law enforcement resources,” said Ihsaan Gardee, CAIR-CAN executive director.
Jewish Stars of David were also spray painted on the walls.
Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, also condemned the attacks.
“We unequivocally condemn all acts of vandalism committed against any place of worship,” Fogel said in a statement.
National Muslim and Jewish groups have condemned the vandalism. (CBC)
Mosque member says he isn’t taking attack personally
The mosque, located off Saint Joseph Boulevard just north of St. Jean-Bosco Park, draws about 500 people for Friday prayers and serves a community estimated at close to 5,000 people.
Mosque member Walid Ali said he didn’t think the incident was a hate crime.
“Maybe someone was drunk or something, I don’t think he deeply means it,” said Ali.
“I’ve been here more than three years and this has never happened,” he said.
By Rocco Parascandola, Matt Mcnulty, Kerry Burke AND Kevin Deutsch
(NYDailyNews)
THE UNHINGED Queens pyromaniac who unleashed a scary New Year’s Day firebombing spree had planned to take out “as many Muslims and Arabs as possible” by lobbing Molotov cocktails at worshipers inside a mosque, prosecutors said.
Ray Lazier Lengend, 40, allegedly told cops he had planned to inflict “as much damage as possible” by hurling all five of his firebombs from the balcony of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center onto the crowd below.
The hateful bomb-hurler, who is under psychiatric observation at Bellevue Hospital center, flat-out told detectives he did not like Muslims or Arabs, prosecutors said.
“This is a message to anyone who does this in the future,” said Imam Maan Al-Sahlani, leader of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center, where Lengend planned to inflict major casualties. “It’s a good message that justice will come for you, the police will come for you.”
The imam applauded prosecutors’ use of the hate crime statute and hoped it would deter further anti-Muslim crimes.
“Obviously there is something wrong with him,” Al-Sahlani said.
Lengend, an unemployed truck driver from Queens Village, will face a judge via video arraignment Thursday from his bed at Bellevue.
He faces 18 charges including arson as a hate crime and weapon possession for throwing Starbucks Frappuccino bottles filled with gasoline at four occupied Jamaica buildings — two of them places of worship.
Lengend’s brother-in-law, Bejai Rai, 73, said his Elmont, L.I., house was also firebombed because he evicted Lengend for not paying rent.
“He had a vendetta against us,” Rai told the Daily News. “He tried to kill my wife, my two sons and my sister. I’m glad they got him otherwise he’d be back to firebomb us again.”
Rai said his family could not sleep until Lengend was caught.
“This is the first night we’ve been able to rest since the bombing.”
Lengend carried out his spree in a silver Buick Regal, which had been stolen from a rental car business at Kennedy Airport.
He first drove to to a gas station off the Van Wyck Expressway at Hillside Ave. and bought five glass Frappuccino bottles, before heading to another gas station and filling them with fuel.
His first target was Hillside Deli on 179th St., where Lengend threw a flaming glass bottle that ignited upon hitting the floor.
He burned four other targets, including the mosque and a Hindu place of worship on 170th St., but did not inflict the massive damage he hoped for, prosecutors said.
Lengend confessed to three earlier attacks as well, sources said. He claimed ongoing beefs were his motive for all eight crimes.
The Newcastle mosque in Australia has been attacked several times. “Srebrenica,” a reference to the slaughter of thousands of Muslims during the genocide against Bosnian Muslims was spray painted on the mosque just a month ago.
Now, a few thugs forced worshippers into locking themselves in the mosque so as to avoid confrontation and violence with them. I don’t believe there is a correlation between Spencer’s recent visit to Australia and this attack on the mosque, however, such attacks are the Islamophobes’ wet dream.
Many Islamophobes love violence against Muslims. Violent rhetoric against Muslims is what sites like BareNakedIslam regularly indulge in, such sites are defended by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, whose own sites have approved of violence and intimidation directed at Muslims.
(Visit the original site for video of the attack):
AN attack on a Newcastle mosque, trapping seven worshippers inside, has been caught on security camera.The attack happened only minutes after a group of children had finished a scripture class and is the latest in a series of incidents that have left the city’s Muslim community feeling ‘‘vulnerable and scared’’.In the security footage, which has been provided to police, two tattooed men are seen to approach the Wallsend mosque about 9.30pm on Monday.One man, with a large tattoo of a cross on his neck, kicks through the fence gate and hurls an object at the mosque’s front door.
Then he runs and smashes a flying kick into the door.
More objects are thrown at the building and one of the men is seen to shout what appears to be abuse.
Newcastle Muslim Association vice-president Diana Rah said seven worshippers were inside the mosque at the time and managed to lock the main entrance on the side of the building.
The two men tried to kick through this entrance but were unsuccessful, she said.
Ms Rah said a group of children left the mosque after an evening scripture class only minutes before the men arrived.
Newcastle police Chief Inspector Dean Olsen said the attack was being investigated. He called for anyone with information to come forward.
Click below to see images taken from the CCTV footage.
Ms Rah said incidents against the mosque had increased in the past three months.
Garbage had been thrown across the mosque’s front lawn and the fence had been broken down on another occasion.
In April, an envelope containing photographs of three slaughtered pigs was left at the mosque’s doorstep. The pigs had been half-buried on land where a new mosque was to be built.
Last month the word ‘‘Srebrenica’’ was sprayed in graffiti across a neighbour’s car parked outside the mosque.
Srebrenica is the name of the town where 8000 Muslims were massacred in July 1995 during the Bosnian war.
The association had also received abusive emails and threats.
Ms Rah said that in the past 20 years there had been only a handful of isolated incidents directed at the Wallsend mosque.
But since the association had made plans to establish its mosque at Elermore Vale, the incidents had increased and were ‘‘starting to become a pattern’’.
Ms Rah said the Newcastle Muslim Association had ‘‘a lot of faith in the wider Newcastle community’’ and knew the majority were not responsible for the ‘‘unacceptable’’ acts.
The association had installed a high-tech security camera system.
In yet another disgusting post filled with typos, hate group leader Pamela Geller makes excuses for terrorism by saying that Muslims in Queens probably firebombed their own mosque.
Color me skeptical. We find time and time again, in the rare instances when a mosque has graffit [sic] or some prank, the perp is Muslim. More times than not.
Here’s the a [sic] sketch of the perp, looks like a CAIR member.
It’s amazing and sickening how much Geller’s smears of Muslims resemble antisemitic libels of Jews.
A stun gun apparently was used on a woman at a New Tampa Walmart on New Year’s Day, and police are investigating whether she was the victim of a hate crime.
The victim, a Muslim who was wearing a traditional ethnic dress known as a salwar, told investigators she was hit by a stun gun fired by another shopper shortly before 9 p.m. Sunday at the store at 19910 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.
A video of the incident does not show the victim being hit by the stun gun, said McElroy. But she did have marks “consistent” with being hit by a stun gun, McElroy said.
“She has two marks on her back,” McElroy said. “We have no reason to doubt what she is saying.”
The video shows the suspect and another woman following the victim through the store as if she were being targeted, McElroy said. The video does not show an exchange between the women, the stun gun incident or the victim being hit, but that may have occurred off-camera, said McElroy.
Before police can determine if the incident rises to the level of a hate crime, they must first find the suspect, described as a heavy-set white female, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall and between ages 30 and 49, said McElroy.
Investigators, she said, will have to determine if the offense “was based on prejudice against victim’s race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”
McElroy said the victim’s daughters raised the issue of whether she was being targeted because of her religion.
Another possibility, said McElroy, is that the victim may have been targeted because of the big purse she had in her shopping cart.
Efforts to reach the victim by phone were not immediately successful.
Hassan Shibly, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, said, “If indeed this was a hate crime it is a clear sign that anti-Muslim rhetoric is not cost free and may unfortunately lead to senseless attacks against law abiding American Muslims.”
Shibly said via email that regardless of the motive, he hopes the suspect is caught.
A couple things struck me while watching this video. The first was how unfunny it was. The second was how offensive it was. Let’s explore the latter:
The “Eurabia” threat
The video’s title, “Christmas in Eurabia,” refers to a conspiracy theory that white Christian Europe is being systematically overtaken by immigrant hordes of brown-skinned Muslims from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. An uninspired cross between “Europe” and “Arabia,” “Eurabia” is the anti-Arab/Islamophobic equivalent of saying “Jew York.”
To these “Eurabists,” the Islamification of Europe is being facilitated by multicultural permissiveness. The Eurabia ideology takes xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and nativism—all traits of classic white supremacism—but combines them with ultra-Zionism, as Israel represents the Western bulwark against the Muslim menace.
The English Defence League
The equivalent in the United States are the pundits, politicians, thinktanks, and officials who rail against the “creeping shar‘ia” threat. Participants in this American, European, and Israeli network of Islamophobic fear-mongering collectively refer to themselves as the “counter-jihad” movement.
The most infamous proponent of the Eurabia conspiracy theory is the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. Although many Eurabists publicly distance themselves from Breivik and dismiss him as a lone extremist, his 1500-page manifesto actually provides a good introduction to basic Eurabist ideology, and the citations clearly identify the most prominent voices in the “counter-jihad” movement. It is instructive to compare the message of Latma’s “Christmas in Eurabia” to the Breivik manifesto in one instance.
First they kill Santa Claus, then they rape your white daughters
As the “Christmas in Eurabia” video goes through its verses, the locale switches from London to Paris to Oslo. When it reaches Oslo, a Norwegian man (portrayed by Latma regular Noam Jacobson) instructs his daughter:
When they rape you, don’t object,
For that is politically incorrect.
The idea that Muslims are employing rape as systematic warfare against white (non-Muslim) women is popular among Eurabists. Breivik’s manifesto is littered with such references. Here is a sampling:
The incidence of rapes carried out by Muslim men in Norway against non-Muslim women is many times higher than rapes by non-Muslim men….
We have had several recent cases where native girls have been gang raped by immigrants in the heart of the EU capital….
Native Swedes are raped, stabbed, killed and chased out of their homes by Muslim gangs….
The massive wave of violence and especially rapes in Western cities now is a form of warfare against whites, and it’s about time it is recognised as such.
Are not the notorious “gang rapes” another example of collective violence to European women….
…Britons whose teenage daughters are being sexually abused and gang raped by various races who hate whites.
The Muslims therefore takes [sic] advantage of their Allah-given prerogative to rape, kill and steal from Europeans as they view this as the spoils of war.
Muslim drug traffickers/dealers all across Europe…mak[e] their subjects addicted to heroin… when “processing” non-Muslim girls for sexual/financial exploitation.
[Muslims] have…raped more than 500,000 European women…
…more than 1 million European women raped [by Muslims]…
Many European girls/women have been raped multiple times. Ratio is an average 200 rapes per 100,000 Muslims annually.
Moreover the connection between “Muslim-on-White rape” and political correctness, as depicted in the video, is expressed frequently in Breivik’s manifesto. The primary facilitator of mixed-race rape is multiculturalism:
Tellingly, when black gang members stab each other or gang rape a white teenage girl or when Muslim jihadists blow up buses and trains filled with innocent people the first concern of the guardians of multiculturalism will be to minimise the racial aspect of these events…
Make no mistake. These Muslims must be considered as wild animals. Do not blame the wild animals but rather the multiculturalist…traitors who allowed these
animals to enter our lands, and continue to facilitate them.
As a result of [multiculturalism]… more than 500 000 European women have been raped…
Fellow Islamophobe and Eurabist Pamela Geller explained that “Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes…”
In the “Christmas in Eurabia” video, mulitculturalism is depicted as permitting Muslims to commit violence against non-Muslims:
Someone burned my car, oh pity.
That’s what happens when you tease
Islam, the greatest creed of peace.
But it makes me feel so jolly,
Proves that multi-culti’s holy
And what is the only “Western” nation not incapacitated by multiculturalism? Israel. Again, from the manifesto:
The truth is that Israelis defend themselves so that their daughters do not have to suffer rape at the hands of Muslim Jihadists, the way the
authorities in Western European countries, and in Sweden in particular, allow to happen every single day.
To be clear, the fear of white women being raped by brown hordes is not based on personal concern for the women themselves, but on concern for the purity of Western heritage. To Eurabists, feminism is as responsible as mulitculturalism for the downfall of Western society:
As a Western man, I would be tempted to say that Western women have to some extent brought this upon themselves. They have been waging an ideological, psychological and economic war against European men for several generations now.
The “Muslim rape wave” myth
Why does the “Christmas in Eurabia” video jump from London to Paris and then to Oslo, where a Norwegian man tells his daughter to let Muslims rape her? Aside from the general tastelessness of the video, isn’t it especially inappropriate to focus on Norway, the site of the recent killings by Anders Breivik, whose crimes were motivated by a fear of creeping Eurabia and the raping of white women by hordes of Muslim immigrants?
A possible explanation lies in a pair of fabricated stories reported by the Israeli settler news site Arutz Sheva. Last June, Arutz Sheva “reporter” Gil Ronen wrote an article entitled “Police Report: All Assault Rapists in Oslo Follow Muhammad,”and he recently followed up on this story with another report, “Muslim ‘Rape Wave’ Reported in Oslo, Ministers Blame Israel.” The articles alleged that Norway was “suffering from an unprecedented wave of rapes that are largely being perpetrated by Muslim immigrants against local women,” based on statistics in an Oslo police report. Moreover, Norwegian “government ministers, most of them avowed anti-Semites, claimed that the report and its publication serve Israel and its policy of occupation,” with Norway’s justice minister declaring, “Israel must be glad to hear about it.”
However, the source for these stories was a single person living in Israel, a blogger named Yehuda Bello who was described by Ronen as “acclaimed,” “well-acquainted with Norwegian culture,” and as someone “who understands Norwegian and has Norwegian contacts.”
Then the story started falling apart. Arutz Sheva inexplicably removed references to the supposed anti-Semitic Norwegian ministers, while Boston University professor and Eurabist nut Richard Landes attempted to corroborate the story about the ministers, to no avail.
Meanwhile, writer Farha Khaled did what Gil Ronen and Arutz Sheva failed to do: she provided a link to the actual Norwegian police report and inquired with the Norwegian justice ministry about the statistics. The ministry’s response:
The Oslo Police District has given a report of rapes in Oslo in 2010. The report shows that for all types of rape, except assault rape, European perpetrators are in the majority, and they are mostly Norwegian. Assault rapes covers only five identified unique person. These have all a foreign origin. The number is however, so low that it does not provide a basis for drawing conclusions with regard to country of origin. Two of them were very young (under 18) and two had severe psychiatric diagnoses and cannot be regarded as representative of their ethnic culture. It is highlighted in the report that generalizations like “Oslo’s rapists are foreigners,” which have been seen in media, are wrong. The report gives no statistics regarding religion of rapists.
While Oslo has indeed been rocked with what has been termed a “rape wave,” authorities are still attempting to identify the culprits and causes, even suspecting the involvement of a serial rapist. Besides, if a “wave” of rapes signals a higher than statistically normal number of occurrences, one cannot necessarily refer to statistics preceding the wave to determine the identities of the current perpetrators.
Interestingly, Gil Ronen had cited another person as an authority on “Muslim rape waves”: the then-pseudonymous Eurabist blogger known as “Fjordman,” who was a primary inspiration for Anders Breivik. Much of Breivik’s manifesto was authored by Fjordman. In the June Arutz Sheva article, Ronen approvingly cited Fjordman’s warning about an earlier “immigrant [and Muslim] rape wave in Sweden,” from back in 2005.
Such reports of hordes of brown-skinned attackers may be familiar to people living in the US in the 1990s, when the media promulgated sensational reports of“wilding” and of African American and Latino “superpredators,” along with today’s recurrent media warnings of “immigrant crime waves.”
As we should be aware, the notion of brown men defiling white women is not a specifically Eurabist scare. It has long been the pinnacle of white supremacist and xenophobic fears, and has long been evoked to justify the oppression and expulsion of brown peoples.
In 1900, South Carolina Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, proclaimed this justification for the lynchings of African American men:
We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.
I am reminded of a white supremacist cartoon that I once had the misfortune to see. The cartoon, attacking miscegenation, depicted a black man hooking up with a white woman—with the act being orchestrated by a Jewish man. Both the black man and the Jewish man were drawn as hideous caricatures that highlighted stereotypical features. The Eurabist scare, whether portrayed through Breivik’s manifesto or Latma’s YouTube video, is an extension of the offensive cartoon, lacking only in the stereotypical Jew.
(Update: Ali Abunimah has more information about the Muslim rape wave myth on his blog.)
Is Latma a fringe group?
If we define fringe solely by the validity of one’s viewpoints, then Latma, which produced the “Christmas in Eurabia” video, would definitely be fringe. However, if we define fringe as lacking in popular representation and influence and thus negligible, Latma would not qualify.
Latma head director Shlomo Blass has worked on projects for the Likud party, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. Earlier this year, Blass collaborated with StandWithUs to produce a propaganda video for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The video, starring Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, was a copy of a settler video for the YESHA Council, with virtually the same storyboard and script, and which was also produced by Blass. The message in both videos were the same: the West Bank belongs to Israel.
Blass was recently commissioned to create another video for the Ministry, again starring Danny Ayalon, and this time purporting to address the issue of Palestinian refugees (of which Ayalon is not one).
Blass also produced the video “Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace”for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. This explained that in any future negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel would retain Jordan Valley, would control the West Bank airspace and roadways, and would reshape the West Bank borders to Israel’s liking.
More prominent than Blass is Latma’s chief editor, Caroline Glick, who also serves as the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post.
Both Glick and Blass starred in Latma’s infamous “We Con the World” video, which ridiculed the Mavi Marmara massacre and portrayed the Gaza flotilla as an Arab/Muslim/Turkish plot to deceive the world into hating Israel.
Caroline Glick, impersonating an Arab or a Muslim or a Turk—or perhaps a crazy Jewish woman from Chicago with a knife. Shlomo Blass can be seen behind her.
The video link to “We Con the World” was distributed to foreign media via the Israeli government press office. After the video was criticized internationally for its racist content, its tasteless response to the killings of nine people, and its contradiction of Israel’s self-portrayal as reluctant killers, the Israeli government claimed that the link was distributed in error. However, press officer director Danny Seaman still insisted that the video was “fantastic,” and Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev said, “I thought it was funny…It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do with it.”
In 2010, Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, based in Tel Aviv University, presented Latma with the NADAV Peoplehood Award, claiming that the “We Con the World” video “made many Jews feel proud in a time of conflict and tension for our people.”
Earlier this year, Israeli Channel One partially funded Latma to film a pilot for aweekly TV program in the style of Latma’s offensive YouTube videos.
Latma’s funder: The Center for Security Policy
Although Latma operates in Israel, it acts as an initiative of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a 501(c)(3) and DC-based think tank, where Caroline Glick serves as the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs. The CSP motto is, no joke, “Peace through Strength.”
Big Eagle is watching you.
The CSP made waves at the start of the Iraq War as part of the neocon network that was planning for US wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed the CSP National Security Advisory Council has at times included prominent Bush era neocons, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Dov Zakheim, as well as Dick Cheney.
CSP’s founder and president is neocon lunatic Frank Gaffney, who accused Saddam Hussein of orchestrating the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. More recently, Gaffney took up the “birther” cause and warned that Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”
Gaffney also railed against “Obama’s pandering to the radical homosexual agenda” and the “Obama/homosexual agenda” (in an article strangely placed under a section of the website titled “The Shariah Threat”).
The CSP helped organize the campaign against the Park51 Islamic Center and has been prominent in pushing the “shar‘ia law” scare in the US. Last year, the CSP published a report, Shariah: The Threat to America, co-authored by David Yerushalmi, who has been paid over $270,000 as CSP’s general counsel.
Yerushalmi, who also serves as the attorney for Pamela Geller and Gaffney, is an Orthodox Jew with a penchant for making the most blatantly offensive statements. In an essay entitled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion,” Yerushalmi attempted to justify addressing “blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City)” and explained that “there is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote,” since these founders had an “understanding of human nature and its affect on political society.”
The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society… the Jewish problem for conservatives is a…quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate… The conservative variety simply professes to uncover the many and varied ways Jews destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite, especially when the host is a Western nation-state… In response, one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.
And when Mel Gibson made his famous anti-Semitic remarks, Yerushalmi defended him by saying
That Gibson sees Jews in an unfavorable light is only irrational if one wishes to make the argument that secular liberal Jews are not in fact the leading proponents of all forms of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Christian movements, campaigns, and ideologies.
Such a congregation of Islamophobic, homophobic, racist whackjobs would be easily dismissed if the CSP and its affiliated network of Islamophobes did not have such immediate access to the media and to government officials, along with access to a multimillion dollar budget. It’s through CSP that Latma’s videos are realized.
The CSP website proudly features “Christmas in Eurabia” on its home page, and Caroline Glick needs an editor.
It is thus no surprise that Frank Gaffney, the CSP, and Caroline Glick are all cited and quoted as authorities in Breivik’s manifesto.
Is Caroline Glick a Nazi according to the Jerusalem Post?
On July 24, two days after the Anders Breivik killings, the Jerusalem Post issued an editorial warning that the massacre should not be allowed to be “manipulated” by the Left in such a way as to raise public concern that right-wing extremism was a “real danger facing contemporary Europe,” since the “real underlying problems faced not only by Norway, but by many Western European nations” was the “abject failure of multiculturalism.” That is, the real danger to Europe was the danger Anders Breivik warned about, and over which Breivik committed his killing spree.
An outcry against the editorial was inevitable, and so was the subsequent apology, which the Post issued on August 4, and which included the following statement:
It later emerged that Breivik, a Christian radical, had posted on the Internet an extremely anti-Muslim manifesto that supported far-right nationalism and Zionism.
He apparently feared that a “Muslim colonization” of Europe would destroy Norway.
This is certainly not the kind of support Israel needs. It is the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews. Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and around the world should be standing together against such hate crimes.
Yet the “Muslim colonization” of the West is exactly what the “Christmas in Eurabia” video is about and is the focal obsession of Eurabists and the so-called “counter-jihadist” movement that includes Caroline Glick and the Center for Security Policy.
Thus, if we are to take the Post’s apology at face value, we would have to accept that Glick’s sentiments, along with Latma’s, are “the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews.”
On August 8, Glick responded in the Jerusalem Post with a piece entitled“Norway’s Jewish Problem.” Regarding the Post’s apology editorial, Glick stated, “I was not consulted about this editorial ahead of time, and the editorial does not reflect my views,” implying that the earlier July 24 editorial did reflect and still reflected her views.
Glick refused to apologize, instead labeling her critics anti-Semites and attacking Norway for its pervasive “climate of hatred towards Israel and Jews.” She reminded her readers that Norway was invaded and occupied by the Nazis, and thus Norwegian officials may still be Nazi collaborators. She produced names of Norwegians she didn’t like, such as the humanitarian doctors Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert. Glick also claimed that “Judaism [is] the only religion that cannot be freely practiced in Norway.”
In a strange expression of moral superiority, she condemned Breivik’s actions, she said, even though Breivik’s victims “had obvious animosity towards Israel and sympathy for genocidal, Jew hating Hamas terrorists.” She concluded by stating that Norway owed her an apology but that no apology from Norway would be enough for her.
Apart from the fact that her long list of things to hate about Norway includes no mention of Norwegian black metal, the main thing that stands out in Glick’s opinion piece is this religious paradox: Glick is more concerned about Christmas being banned in a hypothetical Muslim Norway than she is concerned about Judaism already being banned in a non-Muslim Norway. This indicates either misplaced priorities or an inability to keep her fear mongering “facts” straight. That is, when she wants to criticize Norway, she warns that Jews are unsafe in Norway; when she wants to criticize Muslims, she warns that Christians are unsafe in Norway. Or else, she wants to protect the Jew-hating Norwegians from the Christian-hating Muslims.
Complicated? It’s simply a matter of who Caroline Glick hates most at the moment.
“Christmas in Jewrabia”
For an Israeli group that purports to satirize current events, Latma seems to have overlooked the irony of producing a video about a Muslim war on Christmas while their own government expresses hostility toward Christmas in the name of Jewish nationalism.
Take the case of Nazareth Illit, a suburb of the Nazareth that was the childhood home of Jesus. This year, when Palestinian Christians asked the mayor of Nazareth Illit to permit the placement of festive Christmas trees, similar to the enormous menorahs already on display in the town, the mayor refused. His reasoning:
The request of the Arabs to put Christmas trees in the squares in the Arab quarter of Nazareth Illit is provocative…Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen—not this year and not next year, so long as I am a mayor.
Never mind that the area of Nazareth was Palestinian Arab and largely Christian before Israel seized the land. In fact, during the imposition of the State of Israel in 1948, Nazareth was slated for ethnic cleansing, saved only when an Israeli officer refused to follow orders and instead decided to honor the agreement made with the town’s inhabitants during their capitulation. Nazareth Illit was constructed in the following decade in order to Judaize the area and offset the Palestinian majority.
In 1954, IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman explained that the purpose of Nazareth Illit was to “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.” Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael elaborated that Nazareth Illit would “swallow up” Nazareth proper through the “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and “the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.”
And let’s not forget the Israeli Ministry of Absorption’s own war on Christmas, when it recently produced a video warning Jewish Israeli expatriates in the US to return home, lest their children end up wishing a merry Christmas to the grandparents.
Israel, which side of the War on Christmas are you on?
Even Muslim camels are racially inferior
There’s one final thing to be said about the “Christmas in Eurabia” video. At one point, a camel can be seen walking through the Islamized streets of Norway. The connotation is that Muslim immigration will bring backwardness to European civilization, as represented by the orientalist trope of the Middle Eastern camel.
The irony here is that to diaspora Zionists in the west, the camel has positive connotations associated with the Jewish homeland, as evidenced in these pictures from this year’s “Celebrate Israel” parade in New York.
This can also be seen in Birthright trips, where the camel ride is a staple of the program to induce an emotional attachment to Israel:
How do we reconcile the contradictory connotations? Camels associated with Muslims/Arabs—as in the “Eurabia” video—are a symbol of oriental backwardness, to be contrasted with the technically advanced western Israeli civilization. It is an Israeli rejection of geographical realities, as Israel is seen to have more in common with Europe than with the Middle East.
However, camels associated with Israel—as seen through the idealized eyes of Zionists in the West—are a symbol of exotic wonder, rooting the Western diaspora Jew in a place that is magical and historically profound, symbolizing a deep yet constructed heritage. Here, the camel is part of Israel’s geography, as the camel, like the land, has been conquered by the Ashkenazi pioneers, and so too have the native Bedouins been conquered and thus now prepare the camel rides for the Birthright tourists as part of the contrived Bedouin experience.
Banner from a website promoting Birthright
“The Tribal Update”
When “Eurabia” becomes a reality, who knows what those nefarious Muslims will do? Once they outlaw Christmas, what will follow? Will they ban church bells?Demolish non-Muslim homes? Flatten complete villages? Evict non-Muslim residents for Muslim ones? Impose mass population transfers? Eliminate civil marriages? View non-Muslims in Europe as a “demographic threat”? Establishsegregated roads? Enact laws that favor Muslims? Require loyalty oaths to Europe as a “Muslim and democratic” continent? The possibilities that Latma can take their “Eurabia” scenario are endless, and they just need to look at home for inspiration.
But “Christmas in Eurabia” and “We Con the World” are only samples in the Latma YouTube video series known as “The Tribal Update.” Here are some others.
This video mocks the notion that Palestinians are indigenous to the land:
And in a skit entitled “Palestinian Eskimos,” the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people turns into a gratuitous joke at the expense of another oppressed indigenous population, the Inuit.
Another video depicts the UN as filled with incompetent Third Worlders such as an African ambassador who is so uneducated he can’t find Israel on the map.
And a slant-eyed ambassador eating rice.
Rahm Emanuel is depicted as a Jew-traitor.
Barack Obama is a Muslim anti-Semite.
If the Obama blackface is too subtle, here’s Noam Jacobson playing “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal,” in a skit that ridicules black African “Jews” making aliyah.
In case you don’t understand Latma’s sense of humor, you’re supposed to laugh as Kazabubu babbles in his stupid African gibberish: “Bu ta le bo bo bi de bbbbbbbbb”—thus demonstrating that he is of inferior stock to the real Jews such as Noam Jacobson and Caroline Glick.
Most of the videos are Israeli talking points expressed by critics of Israel (and semi-critics of Israel) in racist caricature. The humor relies on an elitist nationalist perspective that can be boiled down to this: The world hates Israel, but the world outside of Israel is just a bunch of ignorant Africans, rice-eating chinks, bloodthirsty Muslims, self-hating Jews, and white multiculturalists asking to be raped. Ha ha.
The sheer racism of Noam Jacobson is matched only by his cluelessness, as he fails to understand why his offensive “comedy” skits elicit such hatred—concluding that he is a victim of the world’s hatred against Israel and the Jews. The fact that people would hurl anti-Semitic slurs—unjustified yet unsurprising—against him after watching his racist videos somehow proves that he is doing the right thing. As Jacobson explained to a reporter, “When you see the talkbacks, you know what you’re fighting for.”
Such a remark, made without irony, and published in an article with the incredulous headline, “Fighting the New Blood Libel”—against the backdrop of blatantly racist videos such as “Kazabubu the Jewish Cannibal”—just goes to show what anyone who has sat through a video produced by Noam Jacobson and his Latma colleagues already understands: they have no sense of humor.
A Queens man confessed Tuesday to a firebombings spree on New Year’s Day — claiming a personal vendetta drove him to tossing the Molotov cocktails, police said.
The firebug — identified by sources as Raylazir Legend, 40 — told detectives that each of the five attacks in Queens and Elmont, L.I. — including an attempt to torch a Jamaica mosque — stemmed from ongoing beefs.
“The suspect made statements incriminating himself in each of the five firebombings, citing a personal grievance or dispute in each instance,” said Paul Browne, top spokesman for the NYPD.
Legend, an unemployed towtruck driver, was still waiting to be charged Tuesday, but a law enforcement official said he faces arson and hate-crime charges because of “broad anti-Muslim statements” he made during his confession.
Legend was cuffed about 8 a.m. Tuesday, after Detectives Richard Johnson and Charles LoPresti of the 103rd Precinct saw him get into a stolen car linked to the first attack: a Hillside Ave. bodega.
Legend was caught by workers at the bodega on Dec. 27 trying to steal a carton of milk and a Starbucks Frappuccino.
Robert Spencer and his fellow Islamophobes are fond of asking Muslims impossible questions, demanding that Muslims “admit” to something or another, and developing tests for Muslims to “prove” that they are “one of us”. Daniel Pipes had a test, David Horowitz had a petition he wanted Muslims to sign, Former Muslims United had a pledge against punishment for apostasy (created two years after an actual Muslim statement on this topic was issued) , the list goes on and on. None of these are serious attempts at understanding anything. They simply demand simple answers to complicated questions, or include some bigoted assumption within the question that no Muslim would agree with and demand a yes or no answer.
This is the infamous legal tactic exemplified by the question “Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!”
The most recent prove to me you’re not a radical Muslim test came out of a simple reqest for an interview with Robert Spencer by the Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah. Loonwatch lays out the background of this incident very well
Dean Obeidallah is working on an Islamophobia documentary and asked Robert Spencer if he could interview him. A simple request one would think? Spencer of course is chicken (as we have shown before), he doesn’t want to be exposed for the buffoon he is, and so he responded to Obeidallah with an inquisition-like (pun intended), 1,000+ worded questionnaire.
Isn’t this extremely odd? Spencer attempted to pass off his fear of this interview by claiming that Obeidallah was “running” from his questions. When Obeidallah called him out on not presenting the truth, Spencer begrudgingly published Obeidallah’s response:
Robert – I dont have the time to answer all ur questions in the midst of editing a film and all the other projects Im working on – in fact I didnt even finish reading all of them.
You dont know me but Im a rather direct person so so let me make this easy: If you are interested in being interviewed for our film, I can assure you that we will not quote u out of context or play any games with you- we will ask u straightforward questions – most of which Im sure u have been asked before.
If ur interested then lets please lock in a date when u will be in NYC and conduct the interview. If you’re not interested then lets not waste any more of each other’s time-I know we are both busy people.
Thanks, Dean
That’s pretty direct in my opinion. What is Spencer so scared of? Isn’t he the “champion of freedom,” defending the West against the Muslim hordes?
Here is an opportunity Spencer for you to put your cape on and be the champion of the “counter-Jihad” world!
Here is the 1,000 word plus questionnaire required by Spencer in order to consider being interviewed by Obeidallah, and I have taken the liberty of responding to the questions myself.
1. True or false: No comedy show, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings — all in the U.S. in the last couple of years
The only Americans who are concerned only about Muslims who have carried out or plotted terrorist actions are those who have fallen for Robert Spencer and other “greasy Islamophobe’s” big lie about the actual terrorism threat coming primarily from Muslims. All of us need to be concerned about all such actions, including those by non-Muslims such as — Ray H. Adams, Jim Adkisson, Alabama Free Militia, Chad Altman, Animal Liberation Front, Army of God, Samuel Arrington, Jonathan Avery, Sergio Baca, Daniel Barefoot, Philip Bay, John Patrick Bedell, Kody Brittingham, Seung-Hui Cho, Demetrius Van Crocker, Daniel Cowart, Samuel J. Crump, James Cummings, Matthew Derosia, Jeremy Donahoe, John Earl, Earth Liberation Front, Paul Ross Evans, David Anthony Fuselier, Matt Hale, Jeffrey Harbin, Kevin William Hardham, Lucas John Helder, Patricia Hughes, David Hull, Hutaree Christian militia, Idaho Mountain Boys Militia, Vadim Ignatov, Bruce Ivins, JDL, Jerry and Joe Kane, KKK, Joseph Konopka, William Krar, John F. Lechner, James Lee, Ryan Daniel Lewis, Thomas Hayward Lewis, Jared Lee Loughner, Davvie Love, Keith Luke, Dennies & Daniel Mahon, Alberto Martinez, David McMenemy, Jonathan Maynard, Justin Carl Moose, Donny Eugene Mower, Patriot Movement, Robert Pickett, Richard Andrew Poplawski, Project 7, Charles Carl Roberts, Daniel & Timothy Robinson, Dan Roberts, Scott Roeder, Daniel James Schertz, Paul Schlesselman, Kyle Shaw, Joseph Stack, Rossie L. Strickland, Roger Stockham, Texas Militia, Frederick Thomas, Bruce & Joshua Turnidge, omar Falu Vives, James von Brunn, Lonnie Vernon, Clayton Waagner, Jeffrey Weise, Byron Williams, Alexander Robert Youshock..
2. True or false: The fact that there are other Muslims not fighting jihad is just great, but it doesn’t mean that the jihad isn’t happening. This comedy show simply doesn’t address the problem of jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.
This is not a true or false question. The question contains more than one element, and requires a more complex answer than is possible with a simple true or false.
3. What do you make of the fact that Islamic supremacists from the Muslim Brotherhood invented the term “Islamophobia” in order to deflect attention away from jihad violence and Islamic supremacism, and intimidate opponents thereof?
Spencer believes that he knows who coined the term “Islamophobia”. There are certainly a number of different theories about when the term was first used. It really doesn’t matter who used the term first. The term itself has come to be used to describe a particular form of bigotry against Muslims and Islam, just as anti-Semitism has come to be used to describe a particular form of bigotry against Jews and Judaism. It’s primary use is to direct attention towards outright bigotry.
4. What do you have to say about the fact that FBI statistics show that there is no “Islamophobia”?
Actually, FBI statistics do not show that there is no “Islamophobia”. What the most recent “hate crime statistics” do show is that there have been fewer hate crimes committed against Muslims in the U.S. than there were against Jews. Whether this might also reflect a reticence to report such crimes on the part of members of some refugee communities particularly has been discussed. And, the same report documents the fact that the actual hate crimes against Muslims, while still lower than those against Jews, have increased by 50% over the last year. Hate crimes statistics are only one of many possible indicators of prejudice and bigotry.
Other possible indicators of Islamophobia including EEOC complaints about work related discrimination, and a trend towards an increase of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam rhetoric from public figures, Christian andJewish clergy, and even elected representatives would appear to show that this is a word describing a real phenomenon.
5. What do you have to say about the fact that many “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have been faked by Muslims, and that Jews are eight times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate attacks.
For every category of hate crime there have been people who have taken advantage of an opportunity to further their own agenda and claim a hate crime where none existed.
There are hundreds of such cases. Here are just a few:
— In Florida LB Williams, a 50-year-old black man, his wife of nearly seven years Donna Williams, who is white, and their bi-racial daughter found a cross burning in their driveway. This was reported and investigated as a hate crime, but it turned out that Mr. Williams faked the whole thing in an attempt to stave off a divorce.
— In Anderson, California, a black high school student staged a fake hate crime because she was angry with her father for not picking her up on time.
— A Jewish student at George Washington University faked an anti-Semitic hate crime
The issue is not that there are some despicable individuals who will lie about hate crimes, but that there are far too many legitimate hate crimes against minorities.
6. True or false? Since the Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” one easy way to do that would be to guilt-trip non-Muslims into being ashamed of resisting jihad activity and Islamic supremacism, for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia.”
Another impossible true or false question. To think that every American Muslim is somehow privy to internal Muslim Brotherhood plots, or has ever even met a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for that matter is nonsense. The Muslim Brotherhood document that Spencer refers to has had a lot of questions raised about its authenticity.
7. True or false: Negin Farsad, with her “eye-catching mini dresses,” etc., has more to worry about from observant Muslims than she does from “Islamophobes.”
Negin Farsad is a competent Muslim woman who can speak for herself. Ask her the question. My guess (as a Muslim woman myself) would be that she would say that Muslim women have as much to worry about from Muslims holding extremist interpretations of Islam, as from Islamophobes. Being an extremist and being observant are not the same thing.
8. What do you think of this: When you call Geller (and by implication, me) a “Muslim hater,” I believe that you are ascribing people’s legitimate concerns about jihad and Islamic supremacism to “hate,” and that the only effect of this will be to make people who have those legitimate concerns to be even more suspicious of Muslims, which will only lead to more of what you call “Islamophobia.”
Geller is called a “Muslim hater” because of the hateful things she herself is documentedas saying. — ”Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?” — I would like to feel all warm and fuzzy and embrace the moderate Muslim/ meme but they show no evidence of their existence – not in any real number anyway. The only voices of reason in the Muslim world are lapsed Muslims or apostates. — We can pretend or we can strategize on how to defeat our mortal enemy. — Muslims have no right to invoke Moses and Abraham. — Muslims have no right to invoke Moses and Abraham. — There are no moderates. There are no extremists. Only Muslims. — Islam is not a race. This is an ideology. This is an extreme ideology, the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.
And, here are a few of your own quotes, Mr. Spencer — Islam itself is an incomplete, misleading, and often downright false revelation which, in many ways, directly contradicts what God has revealed through the prophets of the Old Testament and through his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh… For several reasons… Islam constitutes a threat to the world at large. — no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an, since—as we have been pointing out here for over three years now—there are so many elements of traditional and mainstream Islam that are at variance with our system of government, our Constitution, and our entire way of life. — there is no reliable way to distinguish a “moderate” Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a “radical” Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn’t acting upon them at the moment. — The misbegotten term “Islamo-fascism” is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state. — there has been no widespread, sustained, or sincere Muslim outcry against the jihad terrorist enterprise in general. — there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.
Geller and Spencer’s hateful rhetoric could fill a book. Refusing to acknowledge this sort of speech as hatred will only make Muslims not only suspicious of those who engaged in such speech, but proves to us that Islamophobia really does exist.
9. Is there a plan behind your demonizing and smearing of all anti-jihadists? Do you want to create “Islamophobia” in order to claim privileged victim status for Muslims and exempt them from reasonable law enforcement scrutiny?
Actually, no we would like to shine a bright spotlight on Islamophobia and it’s purveyors so that decent people can see it for what it is and reject it as bigotry pure and simple, so that we can stop wasting time responding to bigotry against all Muslims and use that time to work together to fight against actual Muslim and non-Muslim extremists.
10. What kind of work have you done to raise awareness about the escalating persecution of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim societies, which is far worse in Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere than Muslims have it here? Why not?
Dean Obeidallah is an American Muslim comedian. He is not responsible for solving all of the problems of the world, even those directly involving Muslims anymore than every Christian is responsible for solving all of the problems of the world directly involving Christians. Spencer, you are Catholic, what have you done to raise awareness about the pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church, or about the genocide of Muslims by Christians in Bosnia, or about brutality and slaughter by the Christian Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, or about numerous other crimes involving Christians? It’s ludicrous to believe that every individual member of any religious group is personally responsible for every injustice committed anywhere in the world by anyone who shares the same religion.
11. On what basis do you imply that those who are defending freedom against jihad are “exhibiting behavior which is less than consistent with the values of this nation”? What have you done to resist the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated agenda of “sabotaging” this nation “from within”?
You are not defending freedom against jihad, you are consistently demonizing Muslims. And, it is not only Muslims who are openly stating that this is bigotry. There is a reason that the ADL (A Jewish anti-defamation group) has said that Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer’s Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) is a “group that promote an extreme anti-Muslim agenda”. There is a reason that The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated SIOA as a hate group, and that they are featured in the SPLC reports Jihad Against Islam and The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle. There is a reason that Geller and Spencer are featured prominently in the Center for American Progress “Fear Inc.” report on the Islamophobia network in America. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the People for the American Way Right Wing Playbook on Anti-Muslim Extremism. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the NYCLU report Religious Freedom Under Attack: The Rise of Anti-Mosque Activities in New York State. There is a reason that Geller is featured in the Political Research Associates reportManufacturing the Muslim menace: Private firms, public servants, and the threat to rights and security. There is a reason that the SIOA’s trademark patent was denied by the U.S. government due to its anti-Muslim nature. There is a reason that they are featured in our TAM Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry. There is a reason that Gellerand Spencer are featured in just about every legitimate report on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred.
12. Aside from the murder of a Sikh by an idiot shortly after 9/11, what evidence do you have of any backlash against Muslims to which you refer so off-handedly in the WaPo? Where are Muslims suffering violence, discrimination, harassment of any kind? Even you expected far worse than you got when you went to the South — and the level of harassment you did get was no worse than what I get in my email every day. So why the overblown claims about it?
You need to do a little research yourself, and might start with the following collections of resources:
13. And yes, what do you think about these recommendations?
Do Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah really want to eradicate “Islamophobia”? As long as Islamic jihad and supremacism continue, a comedy tour will never do the trick. But here is an easy way. They can call on Muslims in the U.S. to do these things:
1. Focus their indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.
2. Renounce definitively, sincerely, honestly, and in deeds, not just in comforting words, not just “terrorism,” but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Sharia even by peaceful means. In line with this, clarify what is meant by their condemnations of the killing of innocent people by stating unequivocally that American and Israeli civilians are innocent people, teaching accordingly in mosques and Islamic schools, and behaving in accord with these new teachings.
3. Teach, again sincerely and honestly, in transparent and verifiable ways in mosques and Islamic schools, the imperative of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis, and act accordingly.
4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach sincerely against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.
5. Actively and honestly work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities
1 and 2. Please see the thousands of fatwas, statements, articles, etc. by Muslims denouncing extremists committing violent acts in the name of Islam in our TAM collection Muslim Voices Against Extremism and Terrorism. Type “lunatic fringe” into the search engine of TAM for numerous articles denouncing particular extremists and extremist groups. See my article American Muslims must defend the Constitution of the United States in which I said America is a secular and democratic nation with a clearly marked wall between church and state (thank God!). One of the reasons America has been a beacon to the world is the freedom that all Americans have to practice any (or no) religion. As an American Muslim I don’t believe that America can be defined as anything but a secular democracy (secular meaning neutral towards religion, not devoid of religion or hostile to religion) in which all religions are free to worship. I don’t want to see Shariah, or Biblical law, or any other religious law replace the Constitution, and I don’t want to see any kind of a theocracy in place based on any religion. I agree with Rabbi Arthur Waskow that “When those who claim their path alone bespeaks God’s Will control the State to enforce their will as God’s, it is God Who suffers.” All civilians are innocent including Americans, Israelis, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
3. There are numerous existing studies, polls, and statements about radicalization in the Muslim community and how the community is working to counter attempts by extremists to radicalize individuals here. The efforts within the Muslim community are numerous. MPAC alone has many ongoing efforts including the NATIONAL GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGN TO FIGHT TERRORISM and BUILDING BRIDGES TO STRENGTHEN AMERICA: BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE COUNTERTERRORISM ENTERPRISE BETWEEN MUSLIM AMERICANS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT. Also type “radicalization” into the TAM search engine for numerous articles, etc.
4. Why would American Muslims be responsible for building comprehensive programs in other countries. We are Americans.
5. Muslims have already done this. And, in fact, many of the actual arrests made of individuals plotting some terrorist act were made because of tips from American Muslims.
To sum up, yes you are an Islamophobe. The fact that you and your partner Pamela Geller have shown time and time again that you have a tenuous grasp of the concept of “truth telling”, and haveattempted to conceal evidence when you’ve been caught in lies and distortions is shameful. The fact that you have also shown time and time again that you have no qualms about exploiting a tragedy to further your own agenda is shameful. The Belgian shooting tragedy, and the Hollywood shooting tragedy are just two of the most recent examples.
The fact that you are a middle aged man whose primary means of earning a living comes from being paid to churn out anti-Muslim propoganda is shameful.
A little comedy, preferably satirical about Islamophobes and their tactics wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Update Robert Spencer and David Horowitz jointly published another version of these 5 questions on Front Page Magazine.
The book banners never sleep. I’ve received a note that the Valley View School Board in Jonesboro will meet at 5:30 p.m. today while others watch football games to consider two complaints from school district residents about the teaching of “The Kite Runner” to honors English classes. As you might know, “good Christians” do not countenance literature that presents Muslim people in anything but an unflattering light.
We reported on this controversy earlier. The ACLU is keeping watch. Some School Board members had taken a “middle ground.” Let the book be read, but not aloud.
UPDATE: A Jonesboro correspondent reports that the board met to hear the complaints, but took no action, thus leaving the curriculum including the book in place. The public was invited to speak but only supporters of the book spoke. A round of applause followed the board’s decision to take no action, I was told.
A note before the meeting from ASU professor Norm Stafford and ACLU Board member about tonight’s meeting. There’s still time to join the throng on the side of free expression:
I am writing to urge you to attend a special meeting of the Valley View School Board tonight, Monday, January 2nd at 5:30 pm, at the office of the superintendent on the Valley View campus.The Board will decide on the complaints of two patrons opposing the teaching of Khaled Hosseneini’s The Kite Runner to senior English classes. The book has won numerous awards and is a novel recounting the redemption of a man, who as a young boy witnessed his male friend being sexually assaulted and out of fear did nothing. The novel provides insight into modern Afghanistan and the effects of war on the area and its people as well as into the brutal Taliban.
Although the central goal of those complaining is to eliminate this single text from the curriculum, they have support of strong religious forces in the area and want a homogenized curriculum. In a story in the Jonesboro Sun , one of those complaining said that students’ belief that America is one country under God would be undermined by reading the novel.
The teacher, whose abilities I know and respect, has taught the novel in the past, and now her job is at stake.
The announcement for this called meeting appeared on page 7 of the Sun on December 31st. It appears that the Valley View Board and those opposing the teaching of the novel want the issue addressed with as little publicity as possible.
Those opposing the teaching of the novel will be out in force. Those wishing to prevent this censorship need to be present as well. Please let others know of this meeting and its time and place.
According to the Greek press, Greek Orthodox Bishop Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus appealed to the Council of State to withdraw a Greek bill that would allow the building of a mosque in the capital city, Athens.
Known for his far-right views, Seraphim described the bill as an anti-Christian move and a disrespect to Christian martyrs, although it is billed as democratic move.
In the previous years, there were talks of building a mosque in Athens. However, no steps were taken as the previous governments’ ministers were mainly right-wingers.
This year a bill which asked for an old building in the Votanikos region of Athens to be converted into a place of worship for Muslims passed through the Greek parliament.
All the facts on this are not clear yet, but it is being reported as a bias crime in many reports. If this holds true then it will be another manifestation of the all too real threat to Muslim communities from radical hatemongers.
A wave of arson attacks spread across eastern Queens on Sunday night, and the police said the firebombings were being investigated as bias crimes — with Muslims as the targets.
No one was hurt in the four attacks, in which homemade firebombs were apparently used. In three of the four attacks, the police said, Molotov cocktails were made with Starbucks bottles.
The first attack occurred just before 8 p.m. at a bodega at 179-40 Hillside Avenue.
Ten minutes later, another crude firebomb was thrown, this time at a private home at 146-62 107th Avenue, and the house caught fire.
Half an hour after that, an Islamic center at 89-89 Van Wyck Expressway was the target. The last attack occurred at a house at 88-20 170th Street, the police said.
The Islamic center, the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation, houses one of the most prominent Shiite mosques in New York. According to its Web site it offers funeral services, counseling and free SAT classes. It lists branches in several cities, including Montreal and Islamabad, Pakistan. Calls to the foundation were not returned Sunday night.
The firebomb, made with a glass Starbucks bottle, was thrown at the door of the center, possibly from a van as it drove it by, the police said. The door was blackened, but the building did not catch fire.
A similar weapon was found at the bodega, the site of the first attack, according to the police. The bomb might have been thrown from inside the store, because the counter sustained some damage, the police said.
It was the second attack, on 107th Avenue, police and fire officials said, that caused the most damage.
Shortly after 8 p.m., someone called 911, saying that a Molotov cocktail had been thrown at their home. The house caught fire, and it took more than 60 firefighters about 40 minutes to bring it under control.
In the fourth attack, two bottles were thrown at the house on 170th Street. A spokesman for the Fire Department said that the person who called 911 said they saw a vehicle drive by as the bottles were hurled toward their home. But the flames quickly fizzled.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for federal civil rights charges to be filed against a man seeking to “save his country” by allegedly stabbing a faculty member of the University of Illinois College of Law who he thought was Middle Eastern.
The non-Muslim victim of Sri Lankan origin was stabbed December 7 on the second floor of the Illinois Terminal Building in Champaign, Ill. The victim was singled out due to his perceived ethnicity and the attacker allegedly committed the offense to, in his words, save his country. The victim underwent surgery for a stab wound to his neck.
His alleged attacker, 23-year-old Joshua Scaggs, was charged with attempted murder and a hate crime.
We thank local law enforcement authorities for their swift and professional actions in this case and urge the US Department of Justice to consider what federal civil rights charges could be filed in the case, said a CAIR spokesman.
Adding, Our society must begin to address the rising level of anti-Muslim sentiment that can lead to such disturbing incidents.
CAIR contacted the FBI and local police to seek the investigation of a possible bias motive for the stabbing of a Sikh man at Fresno Yosemite International Airport in California.
When a Muslim does something good Islamophobes treat it as an aberration or an action done despite Islam. Remember according to the Islamophobes “the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.”
A man foaming at the mouth lunged for the airliner’s cabin door, attempting to open it as flight attendants struggled to hold him at bay.
Most of the post-Thanksgiving travelers cruising at some 30,000 feet toward Kansas City that day were unaware of the potential disaster looming at the front of the plane.
But when a crew member came on the intercom asking if anyone had medical training, passenger Jabir Hazziez Jr. heard the sense of concern in her voice.
What happened next came as no surprise to those who know and work with Hazziez, a Kansas City firefighter, reserve Jackson County deputy and member of the U.S. Naval Reserve.
As Hazziez walked toward the front of the plane, he saw a man pacing and holding his head in his hands. The man appeared to be in an “altered mental state” and clearly appeared agitated.
“He was trying to get to the door of the plane,” Hazziez recalled recently. “I grabbed ahold of him and tried to calm him down.”
But the man only became more combative and knocked Hazziez into the cockpit door.
Using his law enforcement training, Hazziez put the man in a neck restraint and took him to the floor. The man continued kicking and trying to reach the door with his feet. Another passenger grabbed the man’s legs.
Together they held him for about 15 or 20 minutes until the plane, which had taken off in Atlanta, made an emergency landing in Memphis and authorities came on board to deal with the man. Later, Hazziez learned the man had been suffering from an adverse reaction to a vaccine.
“I’m glad it was a medical situation and not a criminal incident,” Hazziez said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
When the flight resumed, Hazziez was showered with thanks from his fellow passengers and received a standing ovation before leaving the plane after that Nov. 30 flight.
Although Hazziez’s religious faith didn’t matter to those grateful passengers, it has become an important aspect of his story.
He is a Muslim.
And like others of his faith, he is sensitive to the negative perceptions and prejudices of some in the post-Sept. 11 world. But he says what he did that day was in keeping with the teachings of Islam.
“We are supposed to help those in need and protect and help those who can’t help themselves,” he said.
The Midland Islamic Council issued a statement praising Hazziez for enhancing the image of American Muslims and helping to “affirm the many valuable and useful contributions they make to our nation.”
The accolades have continued, including a resolution from the Kansas City Council and Mayor Sly James honoring Hazziez for his “heroic actions.”
Hazziez said he has been humbled by the attention and praise.
“I have a hard time calling myself a hero,” he said. “I just reacted to the situation.”
Aasim Baheyadeen, who has known Hazziez for 35 years, smiled when he heard what he had done.
“Yeah, that sounded like him,” Baheyadeen said. “He’s a person who is held in great esteem.”
Kansas City Fire Chief Smokey Dyer, too, said he was not surprised.
A 10-year department veteran, Hazziez is a hazardous-materials specialist trained to handle some of the most dangerous and technically challenging incidents. It is the kind of job that requires quick thinking and keeping a level head, Dyer said.
“He is an outstanding firefighter,” Dyer said. “It was very characteristic of the performance we see on a weekly and monthly basis.”
Jackson County Sheriff Mike Sharp described Hazziez as a good deputy and a good guy.
“He stepped up to the plate and took control of the situation,” Sharp said.
A spokesman for AirTran Airways said Hazziez’s actions were much appreciated.
“His background unquestionably translated into resolving the situation safely,” said spokesman Brad Hawkins.
Of course, no one is more proud of Hazziez than members of his family.
“We have joked for years calling Jabir ‘Mr. Safety,’ ” said his youngest sister, Rabiyyah Hazziez. “I suppose now he needs a new name: Captain America.”
Dean Obeidallah is working on an Islamophobia documentary and asked Robert Spencer if he could interview him. A simple request one would think? Spencer of course is chicken (as we have shown before), he doesn’t want to be exposed for the buffoon he is, and so he responded to Obeidallah with an inquisition-like (pun intended), 1,000+ worded questionnaire.
Isn’t this extremely odd? Spencer attempted to pass off his fear of this interview by claiming that Obeidallah was “running” from his questions. When Obeidallah called him out on not presenting the truth, Spencer begrudgingly published Obeidallah’s response:
Robert – I dont have the time to answer all ur questions in the midst of editing a film and all the other projects Im working on – in fact I didnt even finish reading all of them.
You dont know me but Im a rather direct person so so let me make this easy: If you are interested in being interviewed for our film, I can assure you that we will not quote u out of context or play any games with you- we will ask u straightforward questions – most of which Im sure u have been asked before.
If ur interested then lets please lock in a date when u will be in NYC and conduct the interview. If you’re not interested then lets not waste any more of each other’s time-I know we are both busy people.
Thanks
Dean
That’s pretty direct in my opinion. What is Spencer so scared of? Isn’t he the “champion of freedom,” defending the West against the Muslim hordes?
Here is an opportunity Spencer for you to put your cape on and be the champion of the “counter-Jihad” world!
* Spencer’s questionnaire/commentary:
1. True or false: No comedy show, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings — all in the U.S. in the last couple of years.
2. True or false: The fact that there are other Muslims not fighting jihad is just great, but it doesn’t mean that the jihad isn’t happening. This comedy show simply doesn’t address the problem of jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.
3. What do you make of the fact that Islamic supremacists from the Muslim Brotherhood invented the term “Islamophobia” in order to deflect attention away from jihad violence and Islamic supremacism, and intimidate opponents thereof?
4. What do you have to say about the fact that FBI statistics show that there is no “Islamophobia”?
5. What do you have to say about the fact that many “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have been faked by Muslims, and that Jews are eight times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate attacks.
6. True or false? Since the Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” one easy way to do that would be to guilt-trip non-Muslims into being ashamed of resisting jihad activity and Islamic supremacism, for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia.”
7. True or false: Negin Farsad, with her “eye-catching mini dresses,” etc., has more to worry about from observant Muslims than she does from “Islamophobes.”
8. What do you think of this: When you call Geller (and by implication, me) a “Muslim hater,” I believe that you are ascribing people’s legitimate concerns about jihad and Islamic supremacism to “hate,” and that the only effect of this will be to make people who have those legitimate concerns to be even more suspicious of Muslims, which will only lead to more of what you call “Islamophobia.”
9. Is there a plan behind your demonizing and smearing of all anti-jihadists? Do you want to create “Islamophobia” in order to claim privileged victim status for Muslims and exempt them from reasonable law enforcement scrutiny?
10. What kind of work have you done to raise awareness about the escalating persecution of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim societies, which is far worse in Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere than Muslims have it here? Why not?
11. On what basis do you imply that those who are defending freedom against jihad are “exhibiting behavior which is less than consistent with the values of this nation”? What have you done to resist the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated agenda of “sabotaging” this nation “from within”?
12. Aside from the murder of a Sikh by an idiot shortly after 9/11, what evidence do you have of any backlash against Muslims to which you refer so off-handedly in the WaPo? Where are Muslims suffering violence, discrimination, harassment of any kind? Even you expected far worse than you got when you went to the South — and the level of harassment you did get was no worse than what I get in my email every day. So why the overblown claims about it?
13. And yes, what do you think about these recommendations?
Do Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah really want to eradicate “Islamophobia”? As long as Islamic jihad and supremacism continue, a comedy tour will never do the trick. But here is an easy way. They can call on Muslims in the U.S. to do these things:
1. Focus their indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.
2. Renounce definitively, sincerely, honestly, and in deeds, not just in comforting words, not just “terrorism,” but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Sharia even by peaceful means. In line with this, clarify what is meant by their condemnations of the killing of innocent people by stating unequivocally that American and Israeli civilians are innocent people, teaching accordingly in mosques and Islamic schools, and behaving in accord with these new teachings.
3. Teach, again sincerely and honestly, in transparent and verifiable ways in mosques and Islamic schools, the imperative of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis, and act accordingly.
4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach sincerely against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.
5. Actively and honestly work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.
Between 2005 and 2010 mosques in the Netherlands were defaced 117 times, according to research by social researcher Ineke van der Valk. The acts of vandalism were motivated by a hatred of Islam, the researcher is quoted as saying on VPRO radio programme Argos.
In 43 cases, the mosques were daubed with offensive symbols or slogans. In 37 instances, the mosques sustained material damage. In 99 of the incidents the police failed to find any of the culprits. In the United States there were 42 similar incidents during the same period. Most of the vandalised mosques in the Netherlands are located outside the major cities.
There are some 450 mosques in The Netherlands, which has a population of more than 16.5 million. Some five percent of the population is believed to be Muslim, some 44 percent Christian and over 41 percent agnostic. As a percentage of the population, the Netherlands has Europe’s second-largest Muslim community, inferior only to France, which has a Muslim community of more than nine percent.
(cl)
We don’t not support censorship unlike the hypocrites in the Islamophobesphere who for instance advocate bans on the Qur’an. However, when you cross the line into open calls for genocide and violence against another group of people you have entered very murky water. WordPress for instance has guidelines against such things and that is the reason the genocidal hate site BareNakedIslam was pulled down, they violated WordPress’ guidelines. Now they are crying victim and martyrdom for Free Speech, something they want to strip away from Muslims. Expect Robert Spencer to come to their aid once again.
A hate site hosted on WordPress.com has been pulled down by the popular blog host, reported CAIR yesterday.
The vicious blog had hitherto featured a number of violent threats against mosques and Muslim American citizens, including the words “I want (Muslim) blood on my hands!”
WordPress took notice that the Islamophobic site violated a number of its stipulated terms of service, including blogs that “contain threats or incite violence towards indiviudals or entities” and took appropriate action.
Last year, a similar blog was taken down by WordPress that shamelessly advocated burning mosques, calling in fake bomb threats implicating Muslims, desecrating Muslim cemeteries, and recommending “the proper way to shoot a Muslim.”
The Sun newspaper has come over a bit modest. Following a Channel 4 documentary about media reporting of Muslims, the paper accepts some of its stories were “distorted”. But they’re not doing themselves justice. They weren’t distorted – they were entirely made up. For example, a story about a Muslim bus driver who ordered his passengers off the bus so he could pray was pure fabrication.
But if reporters are allowed to make up what they like, that one should be disciplined for displaying a shocking lack of imagination. He could have continued, “The driver has now won a case at the Court of Human Rights that his bus route should be altered so it only goes east. This means the 37A from Sutton Coldfield will no longer stop at Selly Oak library, but go the wrong way up a one-way street and carry on to Mecca. Local depot manager Stan Tubworth said, ‘I suggested he only take it as far as Athens but he threatened a Jihad, and a holy war is just the sort of thing that could put a service like the Selly Oak Clipper out of business’.”
Then there was a story about “Muslim thugs” in Windsor who attacked a house used by soldiers, except it was another invention. But with this tale the reporter still claims it’s true, despite a complete absence of evidence, because, “The police are too politically correct to admit it.” This must be the solution to all unsolved crimes. With Jack the Ripper it’s obvious – he was facing the East End of London, his victims were infidels and he’d have access to a burqua which would give him vital camouflage in the smog. But do the pro-Muslim police even bother to investigate? Of course not, because it’s just “Allah Allah Allah” down at the stations these days.
Maybe Muslim newspapers should retaliate by publishing their own made-up stories. So it will be reported that “Barmy PC teachers in Leicester have banned children from playing Noughts and Crosses, claiming the cross reminds Church of England kiddies of the suffering undertaken by Lord Jesus. A spokesman for the Board of Education said, ‘We have to be sensitive. Which is why we’ve replaced the game with ‘Noughts and Hexagons’. We did look into calling it ‘Noughts and Crowns of Thorns’ but decided Hexagons was more appropriate.”
Or, “Doctors have been told that patients are no longer to be referred to as ‘stable’, as this is offensive to followers of Jesus, who was said to have been born in one. So medical staff have been informed they must use an alternative word, or if they can’t think of one just let the patient die.”
The most common justification for ridiculing Islam is that the religion is “backward”, particularly towards women, as a fundamental part of its beliefs. The Sun’s old political editor suggests this as a defence of his newspaper’s stance, saying that under Islam, “women are treated as chattels”. And it’s true that religious scriptures can command this, such as the insistence that, “a man may sell his daughter as a slave, but she will not be freed at the end of six years as men are.” Except that comes from the Bible – Exodus, Chapter 21, verse 7.
The Bible is packed with justifications for slavery, including killing your slaves. So presumably the Sun, along with others who regard Islam as a threat to our civilisation, will soon be campaigning against “Sunday Schools of Hate” where children as young as seven are taught to read this grisly book. And next Easter they’ll report how, “I saw a small child smile with glee as he opened a Cadbury’s egg filled with chocolate buttons. But behind his grin I couldn’t help but wonder whether he wanted to turn me into a pillar of salt, then maybe sprinkle me on his menacing confectionary treat.”
In his defence of making stuff up, the Sun’s ex-political editor spoke about the amount of domestic violence suffered by Muslim women. But there’s just as much chance of suffering domestic violence if you’re not a Muslim, as one of the 10 million such incidents a year that take place in Britain. Presumably the anti-Islam lobby would say, “Ah yes, but those other ones involve secular wife-beating, which is not founded on archaic religious customs, but rational reasoning such as not letting him watch the snooker.”
And finally the Sun’s man defends the line of his paper by saying that, after all, these Muslims “are trying to bomb our country”. So it’s their civic duty to make stuff up – the same as keeping a look-out for spies during the Second World War.
So we should all do our bit, and every day send in something, until the press is full of stories like “Muslims in Darlington have been raising money for semtex by organising panda fights.” Or “In Bradford all nurseries have been ordered to convert their dolls’ houses into miniature mosques so that Muslim teddies have somewhere to pray.”
A group of prominent Muslim figures in New York City have said they will boycott an annual meeting on Friday with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in order to protest against police surveillance of their communities.
In particular, the group says it is outraged at details that emerged earlier this year of a concerted effort by the New York police department to monitor activities of Muslims in New York. A series of reports by the Associated Press detailed the activities of a unit within the NYPD, called the Demographics Unit, that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, including eavesdropping in businesses and infiltrating mosques.
“According to the investigation, the police department monitored and collected information on New Yorkers at about 250 mosques, schools, and businesses throughout the city, simply because of their religion and not because they exhibited suspicious behavior,” the letter said.
It added: “Mayor Bloomberg, the extent of these civil rights violations is astonishing, yet instead of calling for accountability and the rule of law, you have thus far defended the NYPD’s misconduct. We, on the other hand, believe that such measures threaten the rights of all Americans, and deepen mistrust between our communities and law enforcement.”
The letter was signed by 15 prominent Muslim New Yorkers, including Khaled Lamada, head of the Muslim American Society, Omar Mohammedi, president of the Association of Muslim American Lawyers, Aisha al-Adawiya, founder of Women in Islam, and Iman Al Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, who president of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York.
Another signatory, Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab-American Association of New York, told the Guardian that the AP reports had confirmed her worst fears. “This confirmed what we already knew. It gave validity to our concerns that we are being spied upon just because of our religion. That undermines the security of all New Yorkers,” Sarsour said.
Sarsour added that lawsuits against the NYPD were being considered in the wake of the AP investigation, and called for an independent inquiry into the activities of the department when it came to monitoring Muslim communities.
So far, that call has fallen on deaf ears. Senior police figures have denied that they targeted Muslim communities in general, claiming they only followed leads. Bloomberg has also strongly and consistently backed the city’s police department and its tactics.
An investigation by the CIA had looked at its role in helping the NYPD and recently concluded no wrongdoing had taken place.
But Sarsour remained unsatisfied.
“How can someone from the CIA be the one to investigate the CIA? We are asking for an independent investigation,” she said, saying it should be carried out by the Department of Justice or a Congressional committee.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office downplayed the impact of the letter and the boycott, saying that other Muslim leaders were still planning on attending the breakfast gathering. “We have a couple dozen Muslim community leaders who have RSVP-ed that they will be at the breakfast, which is about the same as previous years,” said Stu Loeser.
NYPD officials also weighed into the spat, saying that the AP story had exaggerated its activities. “The NYPD lawfully follows leads in terrorist-related investigations and does not engage in the kind of wholesale spying on communities that was false alleged,” said Paul Browne, an NYPD deputy commissioner.
But the revelations about the Demographics Unit are not the only controversy surrounding NYPD actions around Muslim Americans and terrorism. An NYPD operation last month arrested a suspected “lone wolf” terrorist in the shape of New Yorker Jose Pimentel. NYPD officials hailed the arrest, which occurred after a lengthy undercover operation that saw an NYPD informant supply Pimental with bomb-making equipment, as a major triumph.
However, it later emerged that the FBI had passed on co-operating on the case, because it believed the target was not a viable threat. That has led to accusations that the NYPD “entrapped” Pimental.
That time where we recount and reflect upon the events and happenings of the past year is upon us. A review of 2011 is due in short order, but before we post that piece we will consider the anti-Loons of the year. This time around it would only be fair to allow loonwatchers to vote for the Anti-Loon of the Year. As we can’t create a poll, we present those we found deserving of such a consideration.
It goes without saying that we feature and cite many of Glenn Greenwald’s articles. His research is almost always exhaustive and thorough. The facts he uncovers are intertwined with phenomenal analysis that very often exposes the hypocrisy of the US government, attacks on the rule of law, double standards in media and much more.
A perennial Anti-Loon, Stephen Colbert has joined his creative prowess with biting political satire that is only challenged by his arch-nemesis Jon Stewart. Colbert lent his enormous talents quite a few times in brutally exposing the stupidity of Islamophobia.
We freakin’ love Jon Stewart! We have his image on the side of our website linking to his page on Comedy Central. He is an inspiration, and what he has done to combat Islamophobia in this country is, in my opinion, equal to the efforts of a Glenn Greenwald.
Wajahat Ali has made an extraordinary contribution towards, on the one hand, “humanizing Muslims” and “Islam” through the arts, and on the other hand factually taking apart the funding of the Islamophobia apparatus in this country. His contribution to the Center for American Progress report entitled Fear, Inc. was one of the biggest stories of the year. For this, co-authors Matt Duss and Eli Clifton deserve an honorable mention as well.
Sheila Musaji has for a long time been taking anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia to task through her website The American Muslim. She has been a premiere defender of justice, equality and freedom, and for her strong stance she draws the ire and scorn of the hatemongers. Keep up the indispensable and valuable work Sheila!
Sherrif Lee Baca has been a consistent defender of religious freedom and pluralism. He is someone who actually interacts with Muslims and has taken the effort to understand Islam. In his amazing testimony in front of Congress during the Peter King McCarthyesque hearings he displayed his intricate knowledge of not only Islam but the smears leveled at Muslim leaders and organizations. He provided curt, substantial, factual and logical replies to leading anti-Muslim questions that too often are not rebutted in the mainstream.
Ahmed Rehab is a consistent and seemingly tireless voice for rationality and harmony in our society today. He is one of a handful of Muslims who manages to receive airtime to annihilate any and all Islamophobes he encounters in debate; various Fox News interviews attest to that reality. His participation in the Arab Spring highlights the diversity of his activism. Recently, his article on the “Radical Right” threat to America garnered much attention and is a necessary corrective to the exaggerated focus on conspiracies of “Islamization” and “terrorism.” A point we have been making on this site for quite some time now.
Reza Aslan is one of our favorite scholars. When he is not demolishing Islamophobes in debate he is traveling the country speaking at various venues about Islam, the Muslim world and its interactions with the West. He is also a powerful voice for peace and his exclusive interview with Loonwatch was one of the highlights of the year for us:
Sarah Posner is one of the foremost writers on religion in America today. Her articles are carried widely across the country in many different venues. Her skill at in-depth analysis of religious trends makes her an important voice when she turns her attention to anti-Muslim and Islamophobic bigotry.
Haroon Mughal is a great writer, with tremendous insight and piercing analysis. He went into the lion’s den when he attended a radical Christian gathering in Detroit that was aimed at having Jesus “invade” the dreams of Muslims and turn them into Christians.
Richard Silverstein is an ally and a friend of Loonwatch. His work detailing the hate amongst extremist Zionists in Israel and their American counterparts has been significant and vital. He is a promoter of peace and is continuing the Jihad of Tikun Olam, “repairing the world.”
Cenk Uygur is another perennial favorite of ours on Loonwatch. His show, the Young Turks provides us with much material in exposing the fallacies of right-wing loons:
Russel Simmons has been out in front fighting bigotry against all people especially Muslims. He was a prominent voice supporting Park51 and recently bought all the Ad space for the All American Muslim reality show.
The Peter King hearings while bringing forth the ugly populism that lies at the heart of much of our politics also highlighted some courageous and forthright politicians who were willing to take a stand against demagoguery and hatred.
Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony at the Peter King hearings was heart wrenching. Ellison did a good job over the past year of humanizing Muslims and being a progressive voice for justice and equality in the nation.
This by far has not been an exhaustive list. Please add any names you think are important to see here and we will update the piece. Below are some more individuals deserving of anti-Loon consideration (*not in any particular order):
*Update: Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch, Muhammed Malik, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Chris Christie, Charles Johnson of LGF, Faiz Shakir, Mikey Weinstein, William Coley, Tariq Jahan.
It is no surprise that extremist right-wing anti-Muslim polemicist Robert Spencer is on the prowl, targeting peacemakers and interfaith leaders. In a recent blogpost Spencer targets Roman Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of Washington D.C., Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and ISNA president Imam Mohamed Magid.
He begrudges the fact that Cardinal McCarrick “respects Imam Mohamed Magid”:
Spencer rehashes his favorite method of attack; smear and libel. He claims the Imam has ties to the “Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas,”
The Imam Mohamed Magid is with the ADAMS Center. From a February 2008 report: “Another D.C.-area mosque, the ADAMS Center, was founded and financed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has been one of the top distributors of Wahhabist anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma.”
What does Spencer cite to prove his claims about the Imam? The ubiquitously termed “February 2008 report.” By not naming the report or its authors Spencer hopes the reader will lazily trust that it is a credible source. The fact is the so-called “report” is nothing except more Islamophobic yarn spun by the anti-Islam industry.
The report was put together by the Mapping Sharia Project led by David Yerushalmi, David Gaubatz and Frank Gaffney under the auspicious of SANE (Society of American National Existence). You may remember David Gaubatz as the co-author of Muslim Mafia which asserted that Muslim spy interns had infiltrated the government; Newsweek labeled this one of the top ten wackiest conspiracy theories of 2009. SANE is well known as a racist organization, and the Mapping Sharia Project has been discredited for its indulgence in conspiracy myths and shoddy methodology.
Amongst the main myths forwarded in the “report” is the false claim that 3 out of 4 mosques in the United States “preach anti-Western Jihadist hate,” including the ADAMS Center. The truth it turns out is that this report has never been made public, the link that Spencer provides is to a World Net Daily article from 2008 claiming to report the findings of an “undercover survey.”
Spencer’s other attempt at tying Imam Magid to the “Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas” is to claim that ISNA has “admitted” ties to both organizations. To do so he doesn’t rely on statements by ISNA or its members (i.e. Facts), but again returns to the anti-Islam echo chamber to gather “information.” Spencer cites pseudo-journalist turned “terror expert” Steven Emerson. Steven Emerson’s terror expertise led him in the past to respond to the Oklahoma City Bombing by claiming it showed “a Middle Eastern trait. It goes without saying that ISNA has never claimed to endorse, support or be in any way associated with either the “Muslim Brotherhood” or “Hamas.”
Spencer seeks to give Cardinal McCarrick the “Lowe’s treatment,” trying to intimidate him into repudiating Imam Magid through falsities covered by a thinly disguised undercurrent of bigotry. It must be said that such defamation of real peacemakers and freedom fighters is projection on the part of Spencer and his allies.
The real threat and subversion in this country is being carried out by Spencer and his allies in the radical right-wing. They are the ones attacking freedom of religion by lobbying for so-called anti-Sharia’ legislation whose real intent is to ban Islam, protesting the construction of Mosques and furthering the idea that all Muslim leaders and organizations are “fifth columns.”
Robert "police blotter" Spencer Inventing "Islamic" Crimes
Inventing “Islamic” crimes has been one part of the hatemongers consistent methodology of smearing Islam and Muslims.
For instance, in the past month Spencer and Geller falsely accused Islam and Muslims as the perpetrators of invented Jihad attacks at least twice to our count:
The so-called “counter-jihad” bloggers are covering themselves in glory again, slobbering and ranting and trying to take advantage of a terrible crime to advance their un-American agenda.
Same bigotry, different day.
This time they’ve seized on a story about a man in Texas who killed six members of his own family on Christmas morning while dressed in a Santa suit, then committed suicide. The man’s wife had left him, his home had been foreclosed upon, his business was failing, and he had filed for bankruptcy; with anyone else, these things would be considered strong motives for committing this massacre.
But because the man’s name was Aziz Yazdanpanah, and he was apparently unhappy about who his daughter was dating, these bloggers have decided it had to be an “Islamic honor killing.” And now they’re letting their bigotry run free again.
Hate group leaders Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are out in front, as always.
The mainstream media has reported this as the “Santa killer.” No mention that it was an Islamic honor killing until this Dallas Morning News story. Our daughters and granddaughters are going to be the ones who will suffer because of for this obfuscation and excusal of barbarism.
This has been going on for years. When Amina and Sarah Said were brutally murdered by their father, also in Texas, on New Year’s Day 2008 for the same reason — having non-Muslim boyfriends — I thought, this is it. This is going to break the dam wide open. America would not, could not possibly, ignore this horror caused by and sanctioned by Islamic beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes.
And yet America continues to ignore this horror. And more and more people are victimized every day.
Spencer: Islamic honor killing in Texas: ‘Santa’ who murdered family on Christmas morning was Muslim who didn’t like his daughter dating a non-Muslim – Jihad Watch
Again and again we have seen honor killings in which fathers kill daughters who are dating non-Muslims or have supposedly besmirched the family honor by some sexual indiscretion. Lt. Todd Dearing says that motive isn’t important — which is generally only the case when Islam is involved.
To recap: Yazdanpanah killed his family members while they were all celebrating Christmas and then committed suicide. He was wearing a Santa suit. His life was falling apart in just about every possible way.
But to these vile bigots, it had to be an “honor killing” — for no other reason than the man’s nominal Muslim faith. It’s almost unbelievably disgusting.
And the posts by these bloggers are just the tip of the iceberg; their followers have no restraint whatsoever. Some of the comments posted at “counter-jihad” blogs about this tragedy:
Satan and muzzies are two of a kind…..
[…]
savages
[…]
We can’t offend muslims with Christmas but a muslim can kill his whole family on Christmas day and the media won’t even go near the fact they were all muslims.
We only find out on the crazy right-wing internet.
Once again we have the media filtering out information they don’t think we need to know.
[…]
2 miles from my house, a stinkin’ Muslim is committing honor killings. Islam, the Koran, and all true followers need to burn.
[…]
Islam. Satan’s church.
[…]
We live in the same neck of the woods. My Granny lived there for a year, was a nice complex, but over the last few years has had more and more muzzies moving into it. The entire metroplex has had a huge upspike in moozlim population. But still the Media and the masses are lulled to sleep with the peaceful moozlim rhetoric.
[…]
These men who are Muslim and believe in this should never have children or be castrated.
[…]
Americans may wish to consider how safe it is to have Muslims in their neighborhoods, but that would make us bigots wouldn’t it.
Islam is a deathcult
[…]
Here’s an example of the double bladed sword of ” PC “. This piece of camel crap doesn’t deserve to be buried in the ground!!!! They should kill a pig and bury it with him!!!!
[…]
I AM surprised that this being a raghead, he didn’t rape his daughters first.
[…]
As sad as this event is it nonetheless points out the truth that a muslime can not be anything but a brutal, murdering, control freaking, inbred son of a muslime sex slave who-e.
No matter their public persona their heart and mind is convuluted and warped to commit atrocities.
[…]
Go figure, a sheethead dressed as santa kills everyone, and then himself.
[…]
Perhaps Mr. Yazdanpanah was suffering from the terrible disease known as “SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME” though I doubt an autopsy will be be of any help. If he was a faithful muslim the demons probably summoned him to butcher his family for rebelling against Allah.
[…]
What a waste of life. Islam = hate and murder. Islam offers NOTHING to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Absolutely nothing.
[…]
The satanic cult of death REQUIRES BLOOD SACRIFICE for any number of offenses: being non-muslim, apostasy, misbehavior, disobedience, insulting the pedophile prophet of death, drawing the pedophile prophet of death, dating, etc.
These are only pious demon worshipers practicing their demonic cult, fully protected, by an army of feds and prosecutors all of whom report to comrade holder, as a *religion*.
There are thousands of similar comments about this story, all over the right wing blogs. These people aren’t even trying to pretend they’re not hateful bigots any more — they’ve embraced their sickness.
Right-wing movements previously associated with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi ideologies are increasingly opting for a surprising tactic to garner legitimacy within mainstream politics: Forging alliances with extremist Jewish organisations under the banner of fighting “Islamisation”.
“Far-right parties are professing a new found love of Israel as a way of escaping their past anti-Semitism and racism, and to justify their prejudice towards European Muslims as not being racist,” Toby Archer, a researcher who studies far-right parties and the “counter-jihad blogosphere”, explained to Al Jazeera. “Parties like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the National Front in France are all coming out from a neo-fascist past.”
These parties have stopped using anti-Semitic rhetoric, Archer said, which had prevented them from attracting support. It is important to distinguish between the traditional far-right, who are historically anti-Semitic, and the populist new-right, who have emerged in the last two decades and partake in an anti-Muslim discourse, he said.
The English Defence League (EDL) closely linked to the BNP, a right-wing anti-Islamic extremist group based in the UK. The EDL has gained notoriety for its aggression against British Muslims and its links with neo-Nazi groups. Last year, it moved to garner support within the Jewish community by officially opening a Jewish Division open to “represent the Jews who are fighting against Islamisation,” according to a statement.
Tommy Robinson, a spokesperson for the EDL, said one of the group’s fundamental beliefs was that as a “shining star of democracy”, Israel has the right to defend itself.
“Far-right parties are professing a new found love of Israel as a way of escaping their past anti-Semitism and racism, and to justify their prejudice towards European Muslims as not being racist.”
- Toby Archer, researcher
Yet a number of recent demonstrations held by the EDL have continued to be marked by anti-Semitic rhetoric, critics say. In a 2010 demonstration held in Cardiff, EDL members burnt anti-Nazi flags.
BNP leader Nick Griffin has referred to the Holocaust as “the Holohoax” and was convicted in 1998 for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. He has voiced his support for the EDL and its members. Griffin believes that the EDL is helping politicise young people in the UK. “At least they’re trying to do something,” he said of the EDL. “It’s crude and a bit rough… but we shouldn’t condemn them for being a bit rough and ready…”
Invitation accepted
Signs of lingering anti-Semitism within the UK’s far-right have not stopped the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a group the US Federal Bureau of Investigation considers a “violent extremist organisation”, from eagerly accepting a partnership with the EDL.
In January 2011, JDL Canada organised a rally in support of the EDL. Meir Weinstein, national director of the JDL in Canada, defended its stance, saying the EDL is “taking issue with radical Islam” and supports Israel. Shortly after the rally, mainstream Jewish organisations in Canada publicly distanced themselves from the EDL.
James Clark, an activist with Stop the War Coalition in Canada, has faced the JDL at several rallies. He believes that Jewish groups are shifting towards far-right nationalists, rather than the other way around.
“The JDL has tried to move their politics to the right,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are quite a fringe organisation, but made a bit more respectable by more mainstream Zionist organisations that give them a platform; organisations who support them, but don’t feel safe saying the same thing in public.”
He added that the JDL is obsessed with Muslims and the Muslim community, and prays on the irrational fear that Canada might soon be run by Sharia Law.
The JDL also purports to have significant influence over the Canadian government, who Clark describes as “far and above the US government as Israel’s best friend”.
According to Weinstein, the JDL was able to sway the government from banning George Galloway, a pro-Palestinian British MP, from entering the country in 2009 due to his outspoken sympathies for Hamas.
For Daniel Freeman-Maloy, a Canadian activist and research student at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University, the JDL is the product of a larger issue.
“[As Jews] we want to exist, and take measures to ensure we do exist… we will ally ourselves with anyone who will fight alongside us against that evil.” - Meir Weinstein, national director of JDL in Canada
“It is important to highlight that this is not an isolated group”, he told Al Jazeera. “It is a symptom of unapologetic ethno-religious chauvinism that has been left to develop unchecked.”
Weinstein, however, sees it as a fight for survival.
“[As Jews] we want to exist, and take measures to ensure we do exist,” he said. “We take that seriously, and we will ally ourselves with anyone who will fight alongside us against that evil.”
Shaky theological convergence
While the US has been credited with having the most visible pro-Israeli rhetoric, JDL supporters in the US seem to be somewhat different than those in Canada and Europe.
In the past, the US JDL chapter has been linked to a string of bombings against Arab-American targets. It is suspected of carrying out the assassination of Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the planned attack on Arab-American Congressman Darrell Issa.
Max Blumenthal, a journalist following right-wing movements, believes that the US JDL chapters no longer represent as extreme a viewpoint as they once did, but have now gone mainstream.
At a rally in November 2011, Texas Governor and Christian right representative Rick Perry was seen hugging Dov Hikind, a former leader of the JDL.
For Blumenthal, the alliance between the US right-wing and Jewish extremists is forged on a theological convergence.
“Christians who are sympathetic to the JDL mentality are Christian-Zionists”, he explained. “They are waiting for ‘the Rapture’, and part of the fulfillment is the gathering of all Jews into Biblical Israel, which means the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
Ironically, part of the Rapture mythology is that all non-Christians will perish on that day, including Jews.
The fight for Israel
In Europe, the JDL appears to be expanding. They have recently opened a UK branch (French, German, Swedish, Danish and Austrian chapters are already in existence) and an all-encompassing European umbrella organisation. The JDL Europe’s membership is reported to be around 3,000, with more than 5,000 supporters.
Steven Weigang, founder and chief executive officer of the JDL Europe and the German branch, said the group is “necessary to prevent another holocaust. The anti-Semitism is growing in Europe and we can’t just stand on the side-lines.”
He reaffirmed that JDL Europe shares the views of JDL Canada and its relationship with the EDL, without addressing the EDL’s links to the BNP.
Right-wing groups are gravitating towards the JDL, rather than the other way around, but more in terms of policy towards Israel rather than sharing the same ideology, Weigang said.
“I think the Right in Europe is moving towards sharing our politics”, he said. “The Europeans feel that what is [happening] in Israel [is] on the agenda… I am not sure if they share the same visions as we do. They maybe say it, but they don’t mean it.”
“It is necessary to prevent another holocaust. The anti-Semitism is growing in Europe and we can’t just stand on the side-lines.”
- Steve Weigang, founder and CEO of JDL Europe
In France, the JDL has always maintained an active role: It is known for accosting pro-Palestinian rallies, vandalising property, and lobbying the government whenever it perceives pro-Palestinian gestures. In September, the French chapter of the JDL called on its members with military experience to go “defend” the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Samuel Ghiles Meilhac, a historian who specialises in the French Jewish community, told Al Jazeera that there has been a distinct shift in the community from its previous alignment with the left towards the right.
While representatives of mainstream Jewish organisations are not associated with right-wing parties like the National Front at the moment, Meilhac thinks this could change. In recent years, the National Front has been pandering to Jewish voters by focusing on a “common enemy: the Islamisation of Europe”.
“Most people who are part of the Jewish mainstream in France remember the 1970s and 1980s when the National Front were making jokes about what happened in World War II,” Meilhac said. “But the question is: If the extreme right doesn’t make references to the Jews now, will there still be people in the Jewish mainstream powerful enough to reject them?”
Muslim bashing has become an official part of the Republican playbook. As the New York Times reports on Dec. 21, Newt Gingrich, the erstwhile frontrunner, has declared:
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”
Presumably judges in a Gingrich administration who recognize Sharia law will not only be dragged to Capitol Hill by the police, but impeached. “No judge will remain in office that tried to use sharia law,” Gingrich has stated.
Gingrich is not alone. Mitt Romney declared in 2007 that it was “not likely” that he would have a Muslim in his cabinet, and this year echoed Gingrich: “Of course, we’re not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts.”
Rick Santorum, largely ignored but now getting his 15 minutes from Iowa voters, declared Sharia incompatible with democracy, “A democracy could not exist because Muhammad already made the perfect law. The Koran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic [sic].”
Echoing Gingrich’s own apocalyptic warnings, he calls Sharia “an existential threat” to the United States.
Michele Bachmann declared in response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden: “This is the beginning of the end of Sharia compliant terrorism.”
Rick Perry has been attacked for signing a bill prohibiting the mislabeling of non-halal meat as halal. One commentator suggested Perry was ‘putting the Texas state government in the position of enforcing Islamic dietary laws, a part of sharia.”
The candidates have picked up on a strand of know-nothingism also at work in the states. Nearly two dozen states have introduced laws in the past two years to ban the use of Sharia in court cases. Seventy percent of Oklahoma voters approved a no Sharia initiative, and a state senator in Tennessee tried to make following Sharia a felony punishable by 15 years in jail.
Is there really an issue here? Our laws are secular. Religious groups often compete to have their notions of morality enacted into law. Indeed, religious Catholics, Jews and Muslims often agree on such hot button issues as abortion or gay marriage. Moreover, Sharia law, like other religious laws, is not monolithic. There are numerous schools of Islamic law and, although there are common threads, the laws in Muslim countries differ greatly and there is great scope for judges to exercise their conscience and their discretion. The specter of stonings and amputations is a caricature of Islamic law. In any event, American Muslims are not agitating for veilings or beheadings (although the U.S. alone, among modern democracies, shares approval for the death penalty).
To the extent that Muslim organizations support laws that accord with their beliefs and act within the democratic process, their actions are no different than the actions of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops or the American Jewish Committee. And the threat of some takeover of Sharia by stealth or against the democratic will is absurd. Muslims constitute less than 5 percent of the population. To the extent that Muslims are trying to have certain aspects of private or religious life governed by traditional laws, they are also well within the American mainstream. American Jews often bring disputes, voluntarily, to the Beth Din — the Jewish courts that enforce traditional Jewish law and the decrees of such courts are enforced like any other voluntary agreement to delegate decision-making to an arbitrary forum. Beth Dins also issue decrees on such issues as divorce, certifying kosher establishments, burial, conversion and the like. Such decisions are not binding in secular courts, but give voluntary guidance to religious people who accept the authority of those courts. Religious courts granting religious divorces or making rulings on aspects of religious practice do not impinge on the rights of the majority or anyone other than those who voluntarily seek their authority.
In addition, religious groups have sought the protection of state laws to protect their religious rights. Jews have successfully argued for kosher slaughter laws virtually identical to the Halal law in Texas. New York and New Jersey have full time divisions of kosher enforcement, staffed by rabbis, that inspect establishments that offer kosher food for sale. Is that the state imposing religious law? Of course not. It is part of the reasonable accommodation that is made to treat religious practice with respect and to allow people to live religious lives within the context of a secular republic. To the extent that Muslims wish to have their practices accorded a certain amount of protection and respect or allow religious courts to provide guidance or voluntary resolution of disputes, this fits well within the tradition of religious minorities incorporating traditional institutions into American life without compromising on the secular legal tradition.
Stoking the irrational fear of being overtaken by alien religious doctrine is nothing new in American life. A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard, opposed the nomination of Louis Brandeis, the first Jew ever to sit on the Supreme Court, arguing:
“For the first time in our history a man has been nominated to the Supreme Court with a view to attracting to the President a group of voters on racial grounds. Converting the United States into a Government by foreign groups is to me the most fatal thing that can happen to our Government . . . “
Attacks on Al Smith suggested he would take orders from the Pope when he ran for president in 1928, a charge that was echoed by Norman Vincent Peale when John Kennedy ran for President in 1960.
The fear of Muslim domination is nothing more than a tool for demagoguery. Fear of the other mobilizes votes. But the Muslim world follows our elections closely. We cannot call for tolerance in Islamic societies while candidates for the highest office stoke the flames of intolerance. We cannot hope for an Arab Spring while at the same time arguing for an anti-Islamic winter.
To be sure, there are “mortal threats” to the United States. Sharia is not one of them. By alienating American Muslims and the Muslim world by denigrating their law and culture only aggravates the real threats that we face.
Former “Saturday Night Live” actress Victoria Jackson, working on confidential information she as a web talk show host has special clearance to obtain, has claimed that the United States is being overtaken by radical Muslims bent on bringing the nation under Sharia law.
“I just went to a briefing in Washington DC, across the street from the Capitol, at the Longworth building at 8:30 am two days ago and it changed my life,” Jackson said last week on her web show, “Politichicks.” “For six hours, I saw pictures and names and dates and facts and Islamic law books and Korans, Surahs for six hours and they proved to me… that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our highest positions in government and this is serious.”
Jackson also detailed the meeting in an earlier blog post this December. In that post, she details testimony given by John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who worked on the case against former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. Guandolo resigned from the FBI in 2008 after he was caught trying to score a $75,000 donation for an anti-terrorism group from a wealthy Jefferson case witness with whom he was having an affair. Guandolo now gives speeches on the existential threat of Islam, claiming that Muslim groups are using political correctness and political insurgency to stop FBI and police officers from stopping their spread of Sharia law.
The actress-turned-pundit also reported testimony from Maj. Stephen Coughlin, who in 2008 was effectively fired from his post at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because, many conservatives believe, he was a staunch anti-Islamic extremist advocate. Wired reports that his contract was not renewed after a staffer for Gordon England, then the deputy secretary of defense, raised questions about his work. Last January, Coughlin gave a maligned speech during an FBI presentation on Muslim extremism.
Claiming that it was strongly hinted that President Obama was a Muslim — his policies all favor Muslims and are against Israel, she claims to have been told — Jackson says in the video that the ultimatum pushed by terrorist groups in America is “You have to convert or be killed.”
While she says that the meeting forever changed her, Jackson has already long claimed that Muslims — led by secret Muslim and terrorist sympathizer President Obama — are quietly taking over the United States government. She also has famously taken umbrage with gays and “Glee,”including a highly publicized string of attacks last March.
“This new al-Qaida magazine for women has beauty tips and suicide-bomber tips! Gimme a break!” she wrote in a blog post for World Net Daily. “That is as ridiculous as two men kissing on the mouth! And I don’t care what is politically correct. Everyone knows that two men on a wedding cake is a comedy skit, not an ‘alternate lifestyle’! There I said it! Ridiculous!”
“Michelle [sic] Bachmann and Rick Santorum are the only GOP candidates so far to acknowledge the above facts and warn against the present threat of Islamic Law replacing our Constitution,” Jackson concluded in her blog post on the ex-FBI briefing. In a Fox News appearance early in December, she called Bachmann “my girl” and said, “Very few people in America are informed and educated as I am.”
Deep seated racism and anti-Muslim sentiment based on the Islamophobia Industry’s conspiracy theories coupled with a neo-fascist ideology can lead to deadly results.
by Gabriele Marranci (Islam, Muslims and an Anthropologist)
On the 13th of December, in my birthplace Florence, an Italian gunman killed two street vendors from Senegal, wounded another three, and committed suicide when the police reached him. The killing was racially-motivated and Gianluca Casseri, 50, was a writer for and member of CasaPound, a neo-fascist group. The Senegalese street vendors he killed (Samb Modou, 40yrs old, and Diop Mor, 54yrs old) lived in Italy for a considerable time and leave behind their wives and children in Senegal. The life of migrants in Italy, in particular for Muslims such as the Senegalese, is known. The xenophobic Lega Nord has built its political reputation on the exploitation of Italians’ frustration with a badly managed migration policy and an increase of refugees. Furthermore, Italians often know very little about Islam and Muslim culture, despite the centuries of, for the most part peaceful, cultural and scientific exchanges. The ‘Mamma li Turchi’ attitude, facilitated by local newspapers and Italian neo-fascist websites, has reached its epitome. The former Berlusconi government and its rhetoric has also played a part in cultivating such atmosphere. The difficulties that Muslims in Italy face to build a proper mosque often seem insurmountable.
This killing in Italy did not catch me by surprise. During my visits in Italy I became aware of how a certain anti-Muslim rhetoric, which Fallaci powerfully expressed, has found not only sympathizers and fervent believers, but also the attention of a general public for which anti-Muslim attitudes posses a cathartic function within a country condemned to a populist political and economic decline. Among the millions screaming in forums, in newspapers and on blogs against the immigrants, Muslims and the now fully implemented (it appears) Shari’a in Italy, there will always be some who dream of being a ‘hero’.
Such people, in the name of the Italic supreme race, or in the name of Jesus, or both (as is often the case), will fantasize about taking matters into their own hands and spilling the hated blood of the ‘Saladin’ in order to bring Europe back to Christendom. Some will depart from fantasy and take a step further and plan actions. On the 13th of December, Gianluca Casseri succeeded in what was planned as a ‘suicide’ terrorist action.
Although many are the differences between Breivik and the more mysterious Casseri, many are also the similarities. The isolated lonely life, the love of fantasy literature (Casseri published some books), the Celtic imaginary tradition (so dear to the Lega Nord), and the reference to heroic resistance to Islam through more or less mythological heroes. In the case of Casseri, this ‘hero’ was the cruel Dracula whom historically in 1461 killed every Turk and Muslim he could find in southern Walachi.
Analyzing some of the messages left by members of radical far-right forums, we encounter again the Nazi imagination which is full of a mix of pagan symbolism and empty Christian rhetoric and the need of an enemy other, in this case the Muslim rather than the Jew. The similarity, in those forums, of the rhetoric praising Breivik and Casseri is impressive. Both them have been mythologized in a similar way to how suicide bombers or jihadi fighters are. Perhaps most striking is the evident hate of the ‘different’ and an impressive lack of empathy. Empathy is indeed the key to understanding these incompressible acts of hatred.
Racism, or attitudes of hatred towards the so called ‘out-group’, which often is the main cause of radicalism, as I have suggested in my last book, is better explained through processes of identity and emotions. Recent psychological, neurological and even endocrinological behavioral studies (to which anthropologists have paid too little, if any, attention) have shown what I call a ‘natural‘ bias that we have for the ‘other‘, in particular when phenotypical traits are involved (such as skin colour for instance).
Just to mention some of these studies, Matteo Forgiarini et.al (2011) have investigated ‘the existence of a racial bias in the emotional reaction to other people’s pain and its link with implicit racist biases.’ The study confirmed, while testing Caucasian people, ‘a reduced reaction to the pain of African individuals was also correlated with the observers’ individual implicit race bias’. Alessio Avenanti et all (2010) studied the empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-races as far as pain was concerned, and again this study found that although ‘human beings react empathically to the pain of stranger individuals [...] racial bias and stereotypes may change this reactivity into a group-specific lack of sensorimotor resonance’.
More recent studies, interestingly, have even challenged that the famous Oxytocin is a bit more sinister than the ‘hug hormone’ we knew, and found, as Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al’s study (2011) has shown, that it may have a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence. Yet this seems not enough to explain the actions of Gianluca Casseri. Indeed, there is another element that we have to consider: dehumanization. Now, for a long time social science, and in particular anthropology, has discussed the dehumanization of certain groups as merely a cultural process.
Yet the reality again becomes more dramatic when we combine what we know from interviews with what neuroscience, through fMRI studies, can tell us. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske (2006) have shown that dehumanization is not just an attitude, but rather something that is clearly identifiable within brain functions – such as the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition, as well as exaggerated amygdala and insula reactions (consistent with disgust) and the disgust ratings they elicit.
I could provide other evidence of the fact that all of us, as human beings, have these ‘natural’ biases, yet the difference is that the majority of us is able to control them, to see them as stereotypes which we have been educated to reject or at least challenge. Yet the above ‘natural’ characteristics, as they can be controlled, they can also be reinforced and transformed into a cognitive lens through which to make sense of the world. Paranoia is surely the result and it is clear that both Casseri and Breivik were and are paranoid, but not crazy. Indeed, they are the result of certain rhetoric, ideology and culture – what in other words is becoming, to use Dan Sperber’s epidemiological model, a robust replication system.
Casseri needed his victims’ blood to become the mythical hero of those Italians (but also Europeans, Americans and Australians) whom have decided to live in the darkness of their ignorance and believe that they are fighting a civilizational war; a belief marked by an explosive mix of mythology, religion and fantasy. Casseri is at the same time the extreme product of such robust replication system and another ‘infectious’ agent. Like in the case of terrorism perpetrated by Muslim fanatics, Cessari’s fantasy can only be the nightmare of the too often silent moderate majority; the only force that can stop the system from replicating beyond return.
A police officer was wounded as clashes erupted between ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israel police on Monday in two separate neighborhoods in Beit Shemesh.
Two residents were also arrested in the clashes.
Approximately 300 ultra-Orthodox Jews began chasing police officers, hurled rocks at them, and burned trashcans after police were called to remove a sign on a main street that orders the separation of men and women in the neighborhood. The sign has been removed and re-instated several times over the past two days.
Confrontations also occurred in another of the city’s neighborhood after a Channel 10 news crew attempted to film a news piece in the neighborhood. The crew was surrounded by ultra-Orthodox residents who began harassing the crew, who immediately called for police reinforcement.
Officers arrived on the scene, and clashed with residents who laid on the ground in order to protect those which the police sought to apprehend for questioning.
On Sunday, a Channel 2 news team was attacked and beaten by 200 ultra-Orthodox men at the same location on the street where the sign that was removed had been hanging.
After the assault on the Channel 2 news team earlier Sunday, one resident living nearby said that the sign in question has existed for six years already. He added that it does not order women not pass in the street, but to abstain from gathering on the sidewalk.
Lowe’s is taking a lot of heat this week for pulling their ads that air during the show, now their CEO has stepped up to respond to all of the controversy.
Lisa Abdelsalam said she feels “like she swallowed poison” in the days since the threat of parental protests caused the Muslim mother and author to cancel a talk with students at A.M. Kulp Elementary School in Hatfield.
“I have a such a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Abdelsalam, 48, who lives in Colmar with her husband and children, all of whom were or are North Penn students.
Born in Lansdale, the 1981 North Penn High School graduate converted to Islam at 19, when she married her husband, who is from Egypt.
As she has many times at many North Penn schools, she was scheduled to meet with several Kulp classes over four days earlier this month to discuss how she wrote and published her book, “A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” based on her son Yoseph’s experiences at York Avenue Elementary in the 1990s.
“A Song for Me, A Muslim Holiday Story,” has illustrations based on pictures of the York Avenue school and details a Muslim boy’s efforts to fit into the holiday spirit at Christmastime.
A few days before her appearance at Kulp was to take place, Principal Erik Huebner called her.
The principal, according to Abdelsalam, told her a few parents had complained about the program and threatened to bring in an outside group to protest if the classes went forward.
“They did not want a Muslim or a Muslim book read in their classrooms,” she was told. Huebner could not be reached for comment.
Abdelsalam, a longtime volunteer at Kulp where she previously served as president of the Home and School Association, and a current member of the district’s diversity committee, was taken aback. “I was serving pizza with these people last year,” she said.
Huebner was supportive, said the author, and said she was welcome to come regardless of the protests. However, both she and the principal decided it was best to cancel, for the sake of the young students.
“I didn’t feel it would be right; it wasn’t one day, it was four days over two weeks,” she explained. “It’s not a battle that should be fought in an elementary school parking lot.”
Christine Liberaski, a spokeswoman for the North Penn School District, said she hopes the program can be rescheduled in the spring.
“I can’t speak to why some people objected,” said Liberaski, who noted that Abdelsalam previously received praise for her book and her presentation on publishing.
The idea for the book came when a music teacher approached Abdelsalam years ago when Yoseph, now 21, was in elementary school. She was asked if she could find a Muslim holiday song for the school’s annual concert. Finding none, she wrote one herself and also wrote the story. She now has two CDs of music she sells online with her book.
“It’s about inclusivity and the child being happy he’s in a school where everyone is accepted,” said Abdelsalam. “I don’t go and talk about religion.”
Editor-writer for right-wing Arutz Sheva Site, Gil Ronen
Original guest piece submitted by Farha Khaled
Norway Ministry of Justice confirms that a 2010 Oslo police report on rapes which Gil Ronen and other Islamophobes claim has statistics showing the rapists were all Muslims are untrue.
Earlier this month, Arutz Sheva, an Israeli website popular with Kahanists, an outlawed movement that is gaining prominence with the rise of the extreme right in Israel published ‘Norwegian Minister Links Norwegian Rape Wave To Israel’ by Gil Ronen. The story purported to shed light upon a conspiracy involving a Norwegian minister who ordered the truth about an Oslo police report detailing rape statistics to be hushed up, otherwise Israel may use the report against Norway because the rapists were Muslims. Ronen offered no evidence for his claims except to cite an Israeli blogger who writes a Hebrew blog, one Yehuda Bello whom he claims understands Norwegian and has contacts in Norway. Ronen wrote:
Bello reports that from January to late October, 48 rapes were confirmed to have been carried out in Oslo alone, 45 of them by Muslims. 48 rapes were confirmed to have been carried out in Oslo alone, 45 of them by Muslims.
Ronen contradicts this statement in another paragraph where he writes that the politically correct culture prevents them from being reported as ‘Muslim’ crimes. When journalists expressed scepticism at the reports blaming the Norwegian minister, all citing Ronen, the headline at Arutz Sheva was edited to read ‘Muslim ‘Rape Wave’ Reported in Oslo‘. The original claims about the ministerial cover up, can still be seen quoted by propagandists of Islamophobia including Robert Spencer of the David Horowitz organisation FrontPage Mag. The only source Ronen links to as proof, is an earlier piece he wrote in June 2011 with the headline ‘Police Report: All Assault Rapists in Oslo Follow Muhammad‘, where he claims:
Norway’s police issues report with amazing statistic: all assault rapes in Oslo in 2010 were perpetrated by Muslims
Meanwhile, anti Muslim bloggers like Pat Condell jumped onto the bandwagon as did hatemongers Pamela Geller and Debbie Schlussel , the latter has suggested that 9/11 could have been prevented had the feds paid more attention to Rabbi Kahane instead of making Kahanism illegal. Not surprisingly, none of these bigots linked to ‘Voldtekt i den globale byen’ the Oslo 2010 rape statistics report which they were misrepresenting. It is worth mentioning here that Geller and Schlussel along with Caroline Glick have received flak for attempting to tie the Breivik attacks to Norway’s anti Israel stance. The gist of Ronen’s earlier piece is that Norway’s bored rich population have their priorities wrong. But never fear because a neo nazi like Fjordmann (Anders Brievik idol), and by now discredited Yehuda Bello, are here to educate the Norwegians, whom he describes:
They are also traditionally anti-Semitic, he believes. As a result their politicians and press are focused on Israel’s actions in Shechem (Nablus) and Hevron and choose to ignore Muslim misdeeds – be they in Iran, Syria, or in Norway itself.
What he writes next appears to be projection:
Despite this, he reports, the Muslim rape campaign has become so terrible that even Norwegians have begun to recognize the reality around them, and in recent months there have been protests where the slogan was “Muslims out!”.
If Ronen believes that expelling Norway’s Muslims will make the Zionist expansionist project more acceptable to Norwegians then it’s a misguided assumption. The anti-Israeli occupation sentiment in Norway existed before the Muslim immigrants arrived in any significant numbers.
Shortly after Arutz Sheva published the Oslo rapes report in early December, I wrote to The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police asking them to verify Gil Ronen’s claims. I received the following reply from Elisabeth Lund a Senior Adviser to the Ministry:
Statistics regarding assault rapists:
The Oslo Police District has given a report of rapes in Oslo in 2010. The report shows that for all types of rape, except assault rape, European perpetrators are in the majority, and they are mostly Norwegian. Assault rapes covers only five identified unique person. These have all a foreign origin. The number is however, so low that it does not provide a basis for drawing conclusions with regard to country of origin. Two of them were very young (under 18) and two had severe psychiatric diagnoses and cannot be regarded as representative of their ethnic culture. It is highlighted in the report that generalizations like “Oslo’s rapists are foreigners”, which have been seen in media, are wrong. The report gives no statistics regarding religion of rapists.”
Yours Sincerely,
Grethe Kleivan
Deputy Director General
Gil Ronen’s claims can therefore be dismissed for what they are: the usual fanatical anti-Muslim fear-mongering so common amongst his ilk. Those who parroted Ronen’s claims should be ashamed of themselves and at the very least correct their mistake, but don’t expect “Facts” to get in the way of their hate propaganda.
WASHINGTON — Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”
Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials. The anti-Shariah theorists say that just as communism posed an ideological and moral threat to America separate from the menace of Soviet missiles, so today radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a “stealth jihad” that is no less dangerous than the violent jihad of Al Qaeda.
“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Mr. Gingrich said in the speech. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.”
Echoing some Republicans in Congress, Mr. Gingrich blasted the Obama administration’s policy of declining to label terrorism carried out in the name of militant Islam as “Islamic” or “jihadist.” Administration officials say such labels can imply religious justification for a distortion of doctrine that most Muslims abhor, thus smearing an entire faith.
But to Mr. Gingrich, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, the administration’s language smacks of the willful blindness of an earlier era. “The left’s refusal to tell the truth about the Islamist threat is a natural parallel to the 70-year pattern of left-wing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union,” Mr. Gingrich said.
Shariah (literally, “the path to the watering place”) is a central concept in Islam. It is God’s law, as derived from the Koran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and has far wider application than secular law. It is popularly associated with its most extreme application in societies like Afghanistan under the Taliban, including chopping off a hand as punishment for thievery.
But it has always been subject to interpretation by religious authorities, so its application has varied over time and geography, said Bernard G. Weiss, professor emeritus at the University of Utah and an authority on Islamic law.
“In the hands of terrorists, Shariah can be developed into a highly threatening, militant notion,” Professor Weiss said. “In the hands of a contemporary Muslim thinker writing in the journal Religion and Law, Shariah becomes an essentially pacifist notion.”
The Arab Spring has set off a lively political and scholarly debate over the growing power of Islamists in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. But those are all overwhelmingly Muslim countries. The idea that Shariah poses a danger in the United States, where the census pegs Muslims as less than 1 percent of the population, strikes many scholars as quixotic.
Even within that 1 percent, most American Muslims have no enthusiasm for replacing federal and state law with Shariah, as some conservatives fear, let alone adopting such ancient prescriptions as stoning for adulterers, said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, who spent a year traveling the United States and interviewing Muslims for his 2010 book “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”
The notion of a threat from Shariah to the United States “takes your breath away, it’s so absurd,” Dr. Ahmed said. He sees political demagoguery in the anti-Shariah campaign, which fueled rallies against mosques in the last two years from Manhattan to Tennessee.
All of the Republican presidential candidates have been asked about the supposed threat from Shariah. Representative Michele Bachmann told the conservative Family Research Council in a November speech that Shariah “must be resisted across the United States,” endorsing moves by several states to prohibit judges from considering Shariah.
Mitt Romney said in a June debate: “We’re not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts. That’s never going to happen.” He immediately added, “People of all faiths are welcome in this country.”
For Mr. Gingrich, concern about Shariah has been a far more prominent theme. He and his wife, Callista, produced and narrated a 2010 film on the threat from radical Islam, “America at Risk,” that discusses the danger of both terrorism and Shariah against a lurid background of terrorist bombings, bloody victims, wailing sirens and chanting Muslim crowds. (Mrs. Gingrich does say, at one point, “This is not a battle with the majority of Muslims, who are peaceful.”)
One Muslim activist who is shown in the film calling for “separation of mosque and state,” Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, said he appreciated Mr. Gingrich’s support in an ideological contest with large Muslim advocacy groups in the United States that he believes have an Islamist slant.
But Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said non-Muslims like Mr. Gingrich were not the most effective advocates for what he believes is really a debate within Islam.
“Unfortunately, as long as a non-Muslim opens the discussion, whether it’s Gingrich or someone else, it’s going to hit a brick wall in the Muslim community,” Dr. Jasser said.
Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim and an adviser to law enforcement agencies in Texas and to the Department of Homeland Security, is a conservative Republican who said he once idolized Mr. Gingrich. He said he no longer did.
He said the anti-Shariah campaign in the United States was “propaganda for jihadists,” offering fuel for the idea of a titanic clash of faiths. Those who truly want to protect American values should talk to Muslims, he said, not demonize them.
“There are plenty of American Muslim patriots who will defend American freedoms,” Mr. Elibiary said. “But you can’t be anti-Islam and find those allies.”
The Daily Mail reports: ”A courageous housewife stabbed a machete-wielding burglar when he threatened to cut off her son’s finger, a court was told yesterday. Gillian Wilson, 55, was praised by a judge after she rushed at violent burglar Nigel Greenwood, 29, and plunged a knife into his arm, causing him and his accomplices to flee.”
What a sharp contrast this report presents to the Mail‘s coverage of Inayat Bunglawala’s resistance to a violent intruder at his own home in 2009 (see here and here), for which the paper was subsequently obliged to issue an apology and pay damages.
Yaqub Bham’s visit to a residence in Tomball on Wednesday was supposed to be routine for the 61-year-old ADT salesman, who had come to inspect a client’s property before installing a home security system.
Instead, the homeowner, David L. Nienberg, allegedly tried to stab Bham with a fork, bit off part of his ear, and beat him so badly that he broke 10 ribs.
Nienberg, 42, of Tomball, is charged with aggravated assault. If convicted, he could serve from two to 20 years in prison.
Bham’s distraught family members want the incident investigated as a possible hate crime against Bham, a Muslim native of Pakistan who became an American citizen in 2007.They say an agitated Nienberg became violent after asking Bham about the origin of his name and where he was from.
Harris County sheriff’s deputies who responded to a 911 call from Nienberg’s family about 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday did not mention the questions about Bham’s name and origins in their report, said Deputy Thomas Gilliland, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.
Gilliland said Nienberg apparently became angry while reviewing the contract for a security system in his four-bedroom home on Everhart Pointe Drive. When Bham offered to make another contract, or change it, “the defendant took the backpack that Mr. Bham had and wouldn’t give him the backpack, which contained the keys to his vehicle,” Gilliland said.
The two men’s verbal disagreement then became physical, the deputy said.
Nienberg lunged at Bham with a fork, Gilliland said he was told. Relatives took the implement away, but Nienberg allegedly managed to get Bham in a choke hold, beat him, and bite him while muttering about military operations.
When deputies arrived, Nienberg refused to let go of Bham until they “secured the perimeter” and “secured women personnel,” Gilliland said.
It took three deputies to pull Nienberg off Bham, he said. They deployed Tasers on Nienberg twice, and even then, the furious man continued to kick and spit after they wrestled him into a patrol car, said Gilliland.
Victim hospitalized
Bham, who was recovering Friday in a local hospital, immigrated to Houston in 1997 and is the married father of three adult children. He and his family proudly became U.S. citizens four years ago, said his daughter, Shazdeh Bham, 23.
“When we moved to the States, it was for educational opportunities and just a better living, a better life,” she said.
Every once in a while, the Bham family hears negative comments like, “Go back to your country where you belong,” Shazdeh Bham said, “but it’s never bothered us. It never made us think twice about anything.”
The attack on her father was different, though, and frightening.
“I’m just really angry, and I’m extremely confused because I still don’t understand why this happened, and what triggered this … and why this person caused this much harm and this much hurt to my father,” she said. “Now I just want to see justice. I want to see this person punished for what he did.”
Shazdeh Bham said her father is a hardworking citizen who would never say anything negative about anyone.
“He is a patient and positive person,” she added. “He is very easy to work with. His family is his entire life, which is his only priority.”
Nienberg’s questions about Bham’s name and background suggest that the attack might have been motivated by racial or religious bias, said Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group on Friday joined Bham’s family in calling on local law enforcement and the FBI to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
“It’s because of what precipitated the attack that makes us think it has all the elements of a hate crime: ‘What does your name mean? Where are you from?’ And then boom, he jumped on him,” Carroll said.
“The level of hate speech and rhetoric that we hear on a fairly regular basis in society – the baseless accusations that Muslims are trying to take over America, or they’re trying to bring Sharia law, or they’re trying to subvert the government – this baseless rhetoric keeps the environment heated for something like this to happen, for the possibility of violence,” he said. “When you say that stuff over and over and over, it begins to play on your psychology toward a certain group of people.”
Motives a mystery
Nienberg has no prior criminal history in Harris County.
After hearing about his use of military terms, deputies asked Nienberg’s relatives if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, Gilliland said. They were told that Nienberg is a veteran but that he had never served in any type of conflict, nor had he ever been deployed overseas.
Neither Bham nor Nienberg’s family members offered a clue as to what went wrong, Gilliland said.
He said deputies are looking into whether Nienberg was under the influence of narcotics or alcohol or had suffered a mental break, “because it was just incoherent, the things that he was saying.”
It will be up to prosecutors to decide whether to upgrade the charges to a hate crime, Gilliland said.
As it is, Nienberg is charged with a second-degree felony.
He is being held in a Harris County Jail on $30,000 bail.
The phenomenon that is Tim Tebow has extended outside the realms of the gridiron and into pop culture. Does he have God on his side? Would America love him if he was just as conservative and just as vocal, yet a member of the Islamic faith?
A version of this question was posed by Fox News recently. It was wrapped under the banner of their yearly “war on Christmas” with the subheading of a “war on Christians.” They argued that the voices calling for him to pipe down about his faith were anathema to a war on the Christian faith and that this is a growing and disturbing trend. They argued that the founding fathers initially came here for religious freedom and those freedoms were under attack.
To that last point I agree. Religious freedoms are under attack. Lots of freedoms are under attack. As a Muslim in this country there are countless examples of religious freedoms being questioned by the majority the least of which is this current fracas where the Lowe’s hardware store has pulled its money from ads on the “All-American Muslim” reality TV show. A show, from all accounts, that is neither universally reflective of American Muslims, but also, to right wing (nut) groups, does not expose Muslims for the real threat that they are.
So, it is in this cultural moment that we come to see Tebow Time every weekend. He plays terrible for three quarters and then, when all hope is lost, when the game is down to the wire, and the amazing defense of the Broncos (that love to watch him play instead of sitting when the offense is playing) puts him in a position to drive the team down the field, score to win or tie to go to overtime. They have done it consistently all season. The undefeated Green Bay Packers are now a side story to all that is the Denver Broncos led by Tim Tebow, probably the first home-schooled quarterback in American history. At the end of every game, Tebow, the child of Baptist missionaries, says the following: “First I would like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
I talked about this recently on Public Radio’s “The Takeaway.” It’s not like he is the first athlete to be vocal about his faith. In reality, football is a very faith-filled sport. The Lord’s Prayer is recited in almost every locker room in the country (save one town in Michigan that says the opening chapter of the Quran). As a Muslim, I know the Lord’s Prayer by heart because I played football for 13 years.
No, faith and football are not a new combination. What is new is Tebow.
What makes him irresistible is this collision of a series of factors: the media-saturated world we are in makes it so that we know far too much about athletes and public figures than ever before. Tebow is unique because he is both an underdog and a winner. He is both humble and non-judgmental — a dynamite combination for any human being. FInally, his fellow teammates love him, he does not drink, smoke or do drugs, he is celibate, unmarried, and he has a winning smile and personality.
People of faith should be cheering this model Christian on. Anyone of any passion should be exalting his independent thinking and supporting his right to speak freely about what he holds dear.
But what if he were Muslim? Americans look to people who are successful and they want to be like them. So, in some ways, young people want to be like him. If he were Muslim, would young people want to be Muslim? Would that scare people?
If he was Muslim would it be, as Fox News suggests, that everyone would be more careful when attacking him because the world is more sympathetic to Islam and on a march against Christianity?
Perhaps guilt that exists within Christians that were raised Christian but aren’t “practicing” Christianity in a particular way. They are uncomfortable about their faith. They see him out there with his public proclamations and it makes them feel like bad Christians. Would a “Muslim” Tebow, with all the qualities of humility and grace that Tebow exhibits, then make reactionary, and self-absorbed, Muslims feel like they were bad Muslims?
Tebow makes people that are faithful feel two ways. Some want him to be private about his faith and simply live by example. Others are like “Yes! That’s awesome!”
In general, some of the best people of any faith are too concerned about their own development and that challenges of living in this intensely secular culture to be worried about telling others what they should or should not be or do. That’s Tim Tebow. He’s concerned about his own development. That’s what everyone admires him for. He does not really care about what you think and you feel like he wants you to be as ecstatic about what you believe as he is. But would it be the same if he were a Muslim?
Finally, the big question: Is God on Tebow’s side? Obviously we will never know the answer. I will say this: If the Broncos continue at the pace they are going, make it to the playoffs, have a miraculous run all the way to the Superbowl, and if their defense is good enough to keep the game under 10 points and you give Tim Tebow the ball at the end of the game, then you might see Tebow as the Superbowl champion. Would we think he had God on his side this whole year?
And what if he did all that and the first thing he said in the interview was: “First, I would like to thank Allah and send blessings upon Prophet Muhammad.”
Attackers sprayed a West Bank mosque with anti-Islamic and pro-settler graffiti on Monday, a Palestinian official said, in an assault that bore the hallmarks of another raid by Jewish extremists.
The mayor of Bani Naim south of Hebron said that slogans in Hebrew sprayed on walls surrounding the village’s Sahaba mosque included “curses against the Prophet Mohammed” as well as “price tag” and “Yitzhar youth,” a reference to a hardline settlement and nearby outpost in the northern West Bank.
Mayor Radwan Manasra said that the mosque was on the village’s southern edge, facing the settlement of Pnei Haver, about 3.5 kilometres (two miles) away.
It was the seventh suspected attack in as many days by ultra-nationalist Jews fighting government plans to dismantle wildcat settlement outposts by vandalising mainly Palestinian property, although they have recently struck at Israeli army bases and the homes and offices of leftwing Israelis.
It was the third mosque attack since Wednesday, one of which coincided with the demolition by troops of the Mitzpe Yitzhar outpost.
The FFA’s previous letter-writing campaigns have been targeted at shows with both gratuitous and non-traditional sexuality, like Behind Girls Gone Wild and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
All-American Muslim is the first show that FFA has targeted on the grounds that it obscured “the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values”. But it’s not the first time Florida has made national headlines for sentiments hostile towards Muslims.
Last spring, pastor Terry Jones caused worldwide outrage when he burned a Koran at his church in Gainesville, Florida. In September, Nezar Hamze, head of the Florida Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was the first person refused admission to the Broward County Republican party executive committee.
And Congressman Allen West, who represents constituents in South Florida, was recorded by the liberal website ThinkProgress last August saying “Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD, and we need to have individuals that stand up and say that.”
‘Fear mongering’
The boycott by the FFA comes as distrust of Muslims is on the rise across the US. Statistics released by the FBI in November show that anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by about 50% in 2010.
All-American Muslim was targeted by a small Florida organisation
After a long quiet period, says Mark Potok, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, crimes against Muslims started up again in 2010 with the May fire bombing of a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida.
The big spike in hate crimes across the US, he says, coincided with the summer controversy over plans to build an Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero in New York City.
“There’s been a dramatic increase thanks to this completely ginned up controversy about the imposition of Sharia law,” says Mr Potok. “What we’re seeing is fearmongering on an absolutely massive scale.”
He is careful to point out that while speech against Muslims is not a hate crime, “words have consequences”.
That being said, his office has not observed a noticeable rise in anti-Islamic group activity in Florida.
Sense of urgency
However, the debate over Muslim ideology has become a political fulcrum in Florida, especially for Tea Party candidates. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Matthew Hendley, a reporter for the New Times, a weekly paper in Palm Beach and Broward county.
“Florida really is a hotbed for this kind of thing,” says Tim Murphy, a reporter for Mother Jones magazine who has covered the issue.
He notes several factors that make Florida unique: a history of well-organised political activism, large populations of both pro-Israeli Jewish residents and pro-Palestinian Muslim residents, and a few high-profile arrests of Muslims suspected of terrorist activity.
As reported in the Miami Herald, the FBI also investigated ties between the 9/11 hijackers and a Saudi family living in Sarasota, Florida.
To those concerned about Islamic extremism, says Mr Murphy, these arrests “give them a sense of urgency – ‘we need to act now.’”
In South Florida, political figures concerned with Muslim extremism and what they perceive as the spread of Sharia law are well-represented.
Joyce Kaufman, a south Florida radio host, frequently speaks out against Islam encroaching into classrooms and American culture, and her remarks are examples of the kind of extreme rhetoric now being heard.
At an event hosted by the anti-Islamic activist Pamela Geller, Ms Kaufman said that “almost every act of political murder” has been done in the name of Allah.
When a Tampa imam was arrested on suspicion of aiding the Pakistani Taliban, religious leaders held a protest, demanding the mosque be shut down.
Former Florida Representative Adam Hasner, who is now running for the US Senate, has been vocal in the fight against Sharia law and the threat of radical Islam. When he was speaker of the house in Florida, he invited the controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders to speak at a summit. During his speech, Mr Wilders said while there may be moderate Muslims, “there is no such thing as a moderate Islam”.
A new approach
To that end, those who fight “radical Islam” often see any expression of Islam as a threat, say Muslim activists.
“I’ve been in South Florida my whole life. It’s been on a steady rise for the last few years,” says Mr Hamze, the man who was excluded from the Broward County Republican party. “Since ’07 or ’08, there has been an increase in activity,” he says. “Now there are churches involved with this, politicians involved, radio stations involved.”
Though his views as a Muslim hew closely to Republican views on social issues, his affiliations with CAIR – which opponents say is an organisation with extremist ties – factored into his exclusion.
Florida Congressman Allen West has sparred with members of CAIR over the values of Islam
While Florida Republicans actively courted Muslim voters in 2000, the party has now found success rallying voters against the dangers of militant Islam.
But they maintain that fight against Muslim extremism is not the same thing as a fight against Muslims. Rick Wilson, an advisor for Mr Hasner, says that CAIR and other groups “shout down any critique of extremism as a critique of Islam”.
“Opposing Islamic radicalism and opposing Sharia Islam, these are things, as Adam has frequently said, that speak to our national security in the first and our national character in the second,” says Mr Walker.
All-American Muslims
A fear of Muslim extremism in the US is not solely a Florida phenomenon, after all. While the Florida Family Association initially pushed Lowe’s to drop their All-American Family advertising, the campaign has found support across the country.
And Florida is not defined by groups like FFA.
Hasan Shibly, the director of the Tampa chapter of CAIR, recently moved from New York to Florida. He says that he’s never known Islamaphobia to be so rampant, but believes that for the most part, those attitudes belong to a vocal but small minority.
“I really don’t think this rhetoric is reflective of Floridians as a whole.”
Hundreds of Arabs across Israel took to the streets Saturday to rally against attacks on mosques and the so-called ‘mosque bill,’ which aims to prohibit mosques from sounding public calls for prayer.
The protesters carried signs reading: “We won’t agree to silence the Muezzin”, “A democratic state doesn’t attack freedom of religion” and “Transfer state.” Demonstrators also chanted against the torching of mosques in Jerusalem and in the West Bank.
Dozens of demonstrators gathered in the Arab-Israeli towns of Umm al-Fahm and Shfaram, with more protestors joining in various other communities, including Baka al-Garbiyeh, Tira, Taiba, Sakhnin, Tarshiha, Nazareth, Rahat, Jaffa, Kabul and Jisr az-Zarqa.
One protester from Rahat, Jumah Zabarka, told Ynet: “The State of Israel didn’t prosecute those responsible for the ‘Price Tag’ operations. Torching mosques is an act of chutspa because it hurts the Arab residents in Israel and the Arab population across the world.”
He added that the reaction to the mosque torching was insignificant compared to the reactions after the settler attack on Colonel Ran Kahane at the Ephraim Brigade’s base in the West Bank. “The entire country spoke up and the prime minister harshly condemned the dangers. But if somebody hurts us – they’d rather not discuss it,” he said.
While discussing the ‘mosque bill’ Zabarka explained this is a very sensitive issue. “They want to humiliate us at any price. We’re sending out a message to the State that we’re not going to allow for a ‘second Nakba.’”
Knesset Member Jamal Zahalka (Balad) spoke blatantly about the issue at hand: “The torching of the mosques and the ‘mosque bill’ are part of a war declared against the Arab and Muslim population by the racists and settlers. The sound of the Muezzin, the church bells and the blowing of the shofar have always existed.”
As has been highlighted on Loonwatch, the radical anti-muslim vanguard, and specifically Pamela Geller, has been mouthing the idea of an unmistakable joinder between the ideology of National Socialism, coined by Adolf Hitler, and Islam. She has campaigned the notion that Hitler himself was spiritized by Islam and that the Muslim faith was used as an inspirational take-off point for the Nazi extermination program. According to her, the genocidal insanity of Hitler was strategically interlaced with the genocide of the Armenians. And as that may be true, Hitler also said that he was genuinely inspired by and admired the extermination of the Native Americans.
Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies in English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for Native Americans in the wild west; to his inner circle he often praised the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the “red savages” who could not be tamed by captivity.[1]
Genocide at the hands of early Christian Americans supposedly stained the mind of Hitler. He had found a palpable source of inspiration for his extirpational plans. As far as Christianity is concerned though, Hitler did not accredit himself any particular Christian denomination. On the contrary, he found himself outside the fold of Christianity.
When Germany officially came under Nazi rule, the church found itself in a desperate need to redefine itself. In 1939, Protestant theologians, clergymen and other influencial characters within the Christian movement, as well as regular old congregants, joined forces to auspicate the grand opening of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. The advanced objectives were both political and theological in nature. Prof. Susannah Heschel, in her critically acclaimed work, The Aryan Jesus, says that:
Seeking to create a dejudaized church for Germany that was in the process of ridding Europe of all Jews, it developed new biblical interpretations and liturgical materials. In the six years of its existence, as the Nazi regime carried out its genocide of the Jews, the Institute redefined Christianity as a Germanic religion whose founder, Jesus, was no Jew but rather had fought valiantly to destroy Judaism, falling as victim to that struggle. Germans were now called upon to be the victors in Jesus’s own struggle against the Jews, who were said to be seeking Germany’s destruction.[2]
The institute gained a lot of success in winning support for its radical agenda from a broad spectrum of ecclesiastical representatives and scholars, who shared or came to share, a volition to weed out the very Judaic vertebra of Christian history and origins. The church under Nazi rule was however not homogeneous. Some adherents of Christian faith felt that the Tanakh should be pooh-poohed or completely expunged from the scripture since the Old Testament was regarded as a Jewish book. Others proposed that the opponents had failed at realizing that the Old Testament in all actuality was anti-Jewish in essence; that the prophets were at constant war with Israel’s sinful ways. By unreading the Bible’s Jewish core text, they suggested that it should be preserved as proof that the Jews were a violent enemy.
However serious the intrafaith quarrel seemed, none of them were in opposition to the Nazi regime. They were all outspokenly anti-Semitic and the rivalry was only preferably based on theological issues: on the one side for example, there were Christians who accepted baptism as a way to dejudaize the Jewish community, and the counterpart of the inter-religious fued – a majority assemblage – who did not regard the Jews as spiritually equal and therefore, always, unfit for Christian faith. As a rule, rather than as an exception, this was the status of Germanic Christendom. There were no real schismatic ”bail-outs”. Alternative views and large-scale opposition to the rabid racism of the church were almost unherad of. Gailus, in his Protestantimus und Nationalsozialismus, accentuates this and asseverates the low percentage of withdrawals from the church.
Without any doubt, one main reason for the Nazi regime’s success, was due to anti-Semitism. Other areas were left underachieved. Hitler and his minions did not reach their desiderated goals, neither militarily nor politically. The Nazi regime did nonetheless exploit the church’s prevailing anti-Semitic interpretations of the New Testament. The anti-Semitic resonance found its way through the church. Susannah Heschel explains why:
…its success can be credited in large measure to the unrelenting anti-Jewish Christian theological discourse that linked Nazi propaganda with the traditions and moral authority of the churches. That link was proclaimed with enthusiasm by Nazi Christians: ‘In the Nazi treatment of the Jews and its ideological stance, Luthers intentions, after centuries, are being fulfilled’[3]
As she also notes, Uriel Tal clearly demonstrates that anti-Semitism within Christianity was not a new phenomenon. He argues that it was utterly owing to Christian anti-Judaism for its success. He writes:
…it was not the economic crises that brought about this new political, racial anti-religious antisemitism, but completely the reverse, it was precisely the anti-Christian and antireligious ideology of racial antisemitism which hampered the first antisemitic parties in their efforts to utilize the economic crisis for their political development. . . [because] what still attracted the masses was the classical, traditional Christian anti-Judaism, however adapted it may have become to the new economic conditions.[4]
As a matter of fact, it can be stated that whatever the seriousness of the inter-religious dialogues, they ultimately came together, putting their frictions aside, due to their shared anti-Semitic attitudes. The church’s willingness to steward the neo-pagan Nazi rulers and conversely their adopted and appropriated Nazi rhetoric, combined with their volition to recognize Nazi symbolism, is what finally made Christendom a tolerable contestant from a Nazi standpoint. Hitler knew that he had to appeal to a Christian audience and thus his phraseology was painstakingly calculated. He delicately drew on Christian spirituality and was quoted saying that:
St. Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a super-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men…[causing] the death of the Roman empire. [5]
Christianity could not be rejected. The Nazi ideologists felt that a sudden forfeiture of Christianity would in fact offend the moral of Germans. Since the anti-Semitism of Germanic Christianity was utilized as a tool of propaganda, it became the basis for the Nazi party to lean on when appealing to the masses. Nazi ideologists exploited Christianity by colonizing and usurping its theology and its anti-Semitism, for self-fulfilling purposes. The Nazi party integrated key elements of Christian theology with its own ideology. In that way they figured they could boost the quantity of supporters, but they also argued that they needed to bolster their message with a cohesive resonance of Christian tradition, inasmuch as the teachings of the faith had been shaping European culture and thought for thousands of years.
As for liability, the church maintained their guiltlessness. In the aftermath, those people who participated in propagating an anti-Jewish message by disseminating the Christian outlook, justified it by waving the “non-complicity-card” in the actual mass murders. And here it gets really interesting. Firstly, the church propagated anti-Semitism during a time when Jews were being dissociated from the rest of the population. Secondly, they were being rounded up and killed. That is tantamount to giving the executors the go ahead. By suggesting genocide, or by agitating its exigency, they were compliant in murdering them off from a far. Heschel goes on fitting them with the term ‘desk murderers’, implying that they were culpable in promoting genocide from behind their pulpits.
Paralleling the German church to a contemporary context: this is exactly what Geller and Spencer are doing. The German Christians hid their Nazi anti-Semitism beneath the cloak of religion. Geller and Spencer are doing the same thing when they are hiding their true agendas behind a cloak of “civil rights activism.”
They can disassociate themselves from instigating hate all they want. But the fact of the matter is that they are propagating an ideology of hate. Consider for a moment if Geller went back in time with her desktop computer. She would sit there with a warm cup of tea and a cozy felt wrapped around her legs, indulging in and spreading hate and rationale for the dissociation of the Jewish people. Switch from “Islam and Muslims” to “Judaism and Jews” and she would be part of the the German hate-machinery of intellectuals who metaphrased the Nazi ideology into Christian theology: giving Nazism a religious significance by transforming the message into a seizable spiritual discourse. Like whitewashed tombs on the outside, but putrefactively dead inside. That is the true nature of charismatic hate demagogues.
The church and the Nazi movement envisaged their task as an act of self-defence. The Jews were regarded as violent enemies of the state: their agenda could not allow them to ever assimilate into society and they would never submit fully to German law.
…Institute statements regarding Jews and Judaism were mirrors, in Christianized language, of the official propaganda issued by the Reich during the course of the Holocaust: Jews were the aggressive enemies of Germans and Germany was fighting a defensive war against them. Even as the Nazis carried out the extermination of the European Jews, their propaganda argued that it was the Jews who were plotting to murder the Germans. [6]
The rationalization and the language of the Nazis are comparatively similar to that of the vanguard of Internet Islamophobia. With statements such as “the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim” (meaning that a muslim has to kill or maim, or by the use of creeping Jihad, overthrow the ruling apparatus and it’s majority population) they suggest that the West is in dire need to protect itself. It is, so they claim, an act of self-defence. A minority population in Europe and the United States, supposedly in a state of violent or passive aggressive opposition to the West: a Clash of Civilizations.
Furthermore, in terms of the machination of genocide, several high officials within the church actually furthered the notion of terminating Jewish life. A few months after the Nuremburg Laws were enacted, a group of representatives from German churches gathered in Dresden to discuss the merging of the church body. During this meeting, at that time the head of the Thuringian Ministry of Education, and later in 1939, approximately 3 years after the meeting in Dresden, the figurehead of the Institute, stated the following:
…In Christian life, the heart has to be disposed toward the Jew, and that’s how it has to be. As a Christian, I can, I must, and I ought always to have or to find a bridge to the Jew in my heart. But as a Christian, I also have to follow the laws of the nation [Volk], which are often presented in a very cruel way, so that again I am brought into the harshest of conflicts with ‘Thou shalt not kill the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ. [7]
Siegfried Leffler not only spoke of killing the Jews as early as in 1936, a few years prior to it actually being done, but the people attending the meeting did not at any time voice any discontent to what was being said. It was as if it had already become a customary discourse within German Christian congregations. The discussion continued as if the murder of Jews in the name of Christ was an acceptable iniquity. In other words, the murder of Jews was considered an option in dealing with the elimination of Jewish influence on German life and church.
Apologetics within the contemporary church downplay the role of the Christian movement, as it is an awkward moment in history, reminiscent of past atrocities committed in the name of Christ. But the documented history of the church’s influence on Nazi Germany and its crucial effect on public opinion, is so articulate that any attempt at brushing it off as an isolated event, or by claiming that the Protestant Christian movement were actually motivated by sectarian currents, in and by itself becomes inofficious. A stillborn attempt at trying to explain away history. The German Christian movement was a faction within the Protestant church, following in the footsteps of its founder, Martin Luther. They always connected their ideology and approach to the ‘Jewish question’ to him and expressly voiced that their agenda was an attempt to pick up where Luther had left off.
This makes Geller and her co-agitators brutally incoherent. They take something, that may very well be true, out of its context: by picking and choosing events in history, that strengthen their pre-determined panorama of hate. In point of fact, by drawing her conclusions, she is trying desperately to downplay or fully hide, the Christian interspersion on Nazi thought.
Hitler may have observed the game-plan of the Young Turks. This does not mean that Hitler was anymore influenced by Islam than he was by Christianity. As was mentioned at the top, Hitler did draw from the Christian American holocaust of Native Americans, and he did reference Christian spirituality in his speeches. Does that mean that he was Christian or that he was motivated by Christian theology? No, it doesn’t. It means that Hitler was looking for a way to streamline his operational murder and slave camps.
He was not ideologically influenced by any of the examples he was drawing on, he was just trying to find a way to advance his efforts. But that is obviously something that eludes Geller’s ratiocination. It does however show that religion, when hijacked, can get ugly. The German Christian movement is surpassingly good at proving this point.
[1] Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography, John Toland. p.202
[2] The Aryan Jesus, p.6
[3] Ibid, p.7
[4] Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Antisemitism, p.177
[5] The Aryan Jesus, p.8
[6] The Aryan Jesus, p.14
[7] ThHStA A 1400, 239, February 24-25, 1936. Attending the meeting: Paul Althaus, Martin Doerne, Erich Fascher, Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Dedo Müller, pastors and senior ministers; Leffler, Leutheuser, Hugo Hahn, The Aryan Jesus, p10.
*Disclaimer: We are by no means endorsing the idea that Christianity is an anti-Semitic religion. We are only exploring the Islamophobic claim that Hitler was inspired by Islam, as well as the relationship between the Third Reich and the German Christian Church.
Benjamin Taghiov is the nom de plum of a Swedish author, specializing in the fields of Political Science and Oriental studies. A long time admirer of Loonwatch, he plans on contributing more articles in the future.
Christopher Hitchens finally succumbed to cancer, dead at the age of 62. He is being lavishly praised throughout the media, some are even (ridiculously) comparing him to his hero George Orwell.
I was about to render an obituary for Hitchens, when I read one from Glenn Greenwald, who pretty much summed up my thoughts on his passing. I would just like to add that we didn’t do many articles on Hitchens because (1) there just wasn’t that much noteworthy coming from him, and (2) it was pretty well established that Hitchens was a neo-Con with blood on his hands.
The pieces we did do on Hitchens focused on some glaring factual mistakes he made, such as the one in his article praising (toppled) dictator Ben Ali, in which he claimed Rachid Ghannoushi had penned a fatwa calling for the death of a liberal Tunisian professor. We also took him to task for his shallow attempts at reconciling his whole-hog support of George W. Bush’s pre-emptive and destructive war on Iraq, he argued, “If Saddam were still in power, this year’s Arab uprisings could not have happened.” Have you ever heard more BS, and they are comparing him to Orwell. Sick.
Anyway, Greenwald eviscerates the chorus of praise making the rounds in the media. Unsurprisingly, amongst the Islamophobes he is considered ‘one of them,’ (via. JihadWatchUnverisity grad. SheikYerMami) and is likewise being universally praised.
Greenwald first criticizes the elite protocol that is reserved for the deaths of public figures, and also exposes many of the repulsive actions Hitchens took in his life, actions that had significant impact on the world.
All of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.
But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.
Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”
Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:
As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.
I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:
Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.
Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”
Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda:
I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.
In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with “Just you wait!” and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets–with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he’d always said so. It’s amazing that he’d dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won’t care.
Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the U.S. can be a “superpower for democracy,” and that Toms Jefferson [sic] and Paine would approve. He’s also slammed the “slut” Dixie Chicks as “fucking fat slags” for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn’t like it that Kerry ”exploits” his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).
Sweet Jesus. What next? I’m afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He’s becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.
One of the last political essays he wrote in his life, for Slate, celebrated the virtues of Endless War.
* * * * *
Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.
Nor should anyone be deterred by the manipulative, somewhat tyrannical use of sympathy: designed to render any post-death criticisms gauche and forbidden. Those hailing Hitchens’ greatness are engaged in a very public, affirmative, politically consequential effort to depict him as someone worthy of homage. That’s fine: Hitchens, like most people, did have admirable traits, impressive accomplishments, genuine talents and a periodic willingness to expose himself to danger to report on issues about which he was writing. But demanding in the name of politeness or civility that none of that be balanced or refuted by other facts is to demand a monopoly on how a consequential figure is remembered, to demand a license to propagandize — exactly what was done when the awful, power-worshipping TV host, Tim Russert, died, and we were all supposed to pretend that we had lost some Great Journalist, a pretense that had the distorting effect of equating Russert’s attributes of mindless subservience to the powerful with Good Journalism (ironically, Hitchens was the last person who would honor the etiquette rules being invoked on his behalf: he savaged (perfectly appropriately) Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, among others, upon their death, even as millions mourned them).
There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do. As Aaron Bady put it to me by email yesterday:
I go back to something Judith Butler’s been saying for years; some lives are grievable and some are not. And in that context, publicly mourning someone like Hitchens in the way we are supposed to do — holding him up as someone who was “one of us,” even if we disagree with him — is also a way of quietly reinforcing the “we” that never seems to extend to the un-grievable Arab casualties of Hitch’s favorite wars. It’s also a “we” that has everything to do with being clever and literate and British (and nothing to do with a human universalism that stretches across the usual “us” and “them” categories). And when it is impolitic to mention that he was politically atrocious (in exactly the way of Kissinger, if not to the extent), we enshrine the same standard of human value as when the deaths of Iraqi children from cluster bombs are rendered politically meaningless by our lack of attention.
That’s precisely true. The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role, in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.
If Muslims were committing this disgusting practice you can be sure that the hatemongers would be up in arms declaring Islam a “vile and intolerant” religion. They would also claim that this is the “pure Islam, etc.”
The Anti-Defamation league (ADL) called on the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to publicly denounce “the repulsive decades-old practice by ultra-Orthodox Jews of spitting at Christian clergymen they encounter in the street.”
“This repulsive practice is a hateful act of persecution against another faith group and a desecration of God’s name according to Jewish law,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “This display of hate and bigotry has no place in Israel and is inimical to Jewish values of treating all people with respect and kindness.”
The ADL sent Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger a letter, urging them to meet with Haredi leaders to put a stop to this practice and to cooperate to educate their community about respect for other faiths and coexistence.
Robert Spencer and his biggest fan: Anders Behring Breivik
Jeff Sparrow, one of the authors of the book On Utoya puts to rest the feeble attempts by Geller and Spencer to separate themselves from Anders Breivik.
On the Drum last week, Chris Berg attacked the book On Utoya (to which I’m a contributor) for suggesting a link between Islamophobic rhetoric and Anders Breivik’s anti-Muslim rampage.
“There is,” Berg said, “an enormous moral leap between believing multiculturalism is a bad policy and systematically slaughtering 77 members of the Norwegian Labour Party, some as young as 14 years old. To suggest they are on the same continuum is to obscure how anybody could make that leap.”
I wonder if Berg actually read the book.
On Utoya’s not about people who believe “multiculturalism is a bad policy”. Rather, it discusses rightwing commentators who, like Breivik, see multiculturalism as a cover for what they generally call “Islamicisation”.
As it happens, one of the more extreme and repellent of these Islamophobic pundits was just in Australia.
A few weeks ago, the Q Society hosted an Australian tour by the American writer Robert Spencer.
Spencer runs a website called Jihad Watch, in which he publicises whatever slurs about Muslims that Google sends his way. Recently, he launched an “Action Alert” over a nefarious plot to force halal birds upon innocent Americans. Butterball turkeys represent, you see, the latest gobbling incarnation of the “stealth jihad” by which Islam enslaves the West and its people. He also helped initiate an ad-boycott against a reality TV-show All American Muslim: the Florida Family Association, with whom Spencer has allied himself, claims the show about average Muslim families is actually “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values”.
Spencer works closely with the blogger Pamela (‘Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s Son’) Geller, another big name in the so-called “counter jihadi” milieu. Together, they run the group Stop the Islamization of America, an outfit described by the Anti-Defamation League as “consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American’ values.”
Both featured repeatedly in Breivik’s manifesto.
“About Islam,” he wrote, “I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer.”
As you would expect, in the aftermath of the Oslo massacre, Geller and Spencer hastily condemned their Norwegian admirer (though Geller couldn’t resist pointing out that the teenagers he murdered were “future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate”, nor posting a picture with a caption about how the camp attendees had “faces which are more MIddle [sic] Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian”).
For his part, Spencer noted that Breivik had explicitly criticized the non-violent orientation of Jihad Watch, a criticism that meant, he said, any connection between his work and Breivik’s actions was ludicrous.
It’s true that Spencer and Breivik disagree about how to fight Islamicisation.
But they don’t disagree that its happening. Spencer’s Melbourne talk concluded like this:
“This is an unconventional war. We are in a war, we are in a clash of civilisations. The thing I want to leave with you in closing is that we are the soldiers. The soldiers are not in uniform. There are no armies on the field. The armies on the field are there, they’re doing noble work but that’s only one small part. The main struggle is right here. And we are it. This is a battle for the soul of Australia, for the soul of Europe, for the soul of America, for the soul of the west. And it’s outcome is not at all decided, as dire as it may look, because we have not yet begun to fight. It is up to us.”
Breivik, too, thinks a war with Islam is already underway.
His disagreement with Spencer and Geller, then, isn’t about the diagnosis. It’s just about the nature of the cure.
That’s the real jump – from accepting rhetoric about war, to taking up the gun to fight it.
Naturally, the vast majority of those who attended Spencer’s lectures won’t embrace violence (and nor did he urge them to).
In that sense, the debate about Breivik’s sanity is moot. By definition, if you commit mass murder, you’re not normal, simply because normal people aren’t mass murderers.
On the same tautological level, Berg’s correct to say no-one’s responsible for Breivik’s actions except Breivik. He’s the one who pulled the trigger – not Spencer, not Geller, and not anyone else.
Yet Berg refuses to acknowledge what Breivik himself was perfectly clear about – ideas and actions are related.
Spend some time on the big anti-Islam websites, and you’ll read over and over and over again that Muslims are violent, dangerous and determined to destroy everything the West holds dear. On Spencer’s page, for instance, commenters refer to Muslims as “subhuman barbarians”, “parasites”, “savages”, “people infected with the musloid faith”, “vermin” and so on.
thirty-five comments by JihadWatch readers, and not a single one who opposed the idea of ethnic cleansing of Germany (or the entire non-Muslim world) and the nuking of Mecca on ethical grounds (with the notable exception of Ronald who thought that it would mean losing the oil reserves and another user who thought there are more creative ways to deliver “pure insult and humiliation” upon Muslims). Not a single commentator on the thread opposed either of these two ideas on moral grounds.
Geller’s blog is the same: almost every post descends into overt eliminationism.
Oh, of course, Spencer says he’s not responsible for his readers and their desires for racial murder. He doesn’t, his blog says, necessarily endorse their comments. But where, we might ask, do they get these ideas? Why do advocates of mass slaughter feel so comfortable around him?
“We should declare war on iran, syria, egypt and saudi arabia, as well as libya and the sudan and somalia, and we should kill people by the scores. no science. no precision bombing. no shock and awe designed to ‘impress’ and send ‘signals’, but old fashioned war with wholesale slaughter including indiscriminate death of innocents and babes. down to the last muslim, if necessary.”
“Old fashioned war with wholesale slaughter including indiscriminate death of innocents”: that’s pretty much what Breivik provided a few years later.
Like Breivik, Jay’s enthusiasm for murder extends beyond Muslims to a Left that he says facilitates “stealth jihad”. That’s why, on his own blog, he urges readers to
buy guns. buy ammo. be jealous of your liberties. and, understand, you are going to have to kill folks, your uncles, your sons and daughters, to preserve those liberties.
Yes, there’s a difference between Spencer denouncing liberals as traitors and Jay declaring they should be exterminated, just as there’s a gap between Jay preaching mass murder and Breivik actually carrying it out.
But it shouldn’t be difficult to understand how the constant shared rhetoric about existential war breaks down Berg’s “enormous moral leap” and makes it far more likely that a keyboard warrior will creep out from behind his PC, believing, as he lifts his rifle, that he’s saving Christian civilization, that he’s finally doing what all his friends just talk about.
Chris Berg says that Breivik was a “shocking outlier”, indicative of nothing.
It’s a ludicrous argument.
With their epic struggle against the Mooslamic turkeys, Geller and Spencer might seem like fringe nutters. But they’re not. They’re both widely published (two of Spencer’s books have been New York Times best-sellers); they appear regularly on the circuit of right-wing radio and Fox News.
Transformational issues facing this nation and the world at large—the world at war, creeping Sharia, the perversion of the rights of free men—hang in the balance during the Obama administration as never before. The stakes could not be higher. On foreign policy, Europe has lain down. The political elites have capitulated to Islamists and to multiculturalists. Europe is committing slow cultural and demographic suicide. It seems unclear that they could hold up their end even if America did the heavy lifting.
That book appeared with a glowing foreword by former ambassador to the UN John Bolton – a man who Newt Gingrich has recently announced will be Secretary of State under a Gingrich presidency. Indeed, Gingrich himself seems on-side in this lunatic crusade. The frontrunner for the Republican nomination recently announced that “sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world as we know it”.
Meanwhile, in Europe, far-right groups, many with histories stretching back to the fascist era, are re-orienting to exploit anti-Muslim sentiment – and, as a result, they’re growing.
Mattias Gardell, a Swedish expert on the far right, provides the following list of what he calls “redesigned brown [ie fascist] parties”:
Fremskrittspartiet, (Progress Party, Norway), Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats), Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party), Sannfinländarna (True Finns), Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom, Netherlands), Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), Front National (Belgium), Front National (France), Mouvement pour la France, British National Party, Lega Nord (Northern League, Italy), Futuro e Libertá (Italy), Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party), Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Germany), Pro Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany), Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (Alliance for the Future of Austria) and Laikós Orthódoxos Synagermós (People’s Orthodox Rally, Greece).
Gardell notes:
Some of these have been remarkably successful. Dansk Folkeparti gained nearly 14 per cent of the votes in Denmark’s 2007 election; Fremskrittspartiet – of which Breivik was once a member – received 23 per cent of the vote in Norway’s 2009 election; and Partij voor de Vrijheid – whose leader Geert Wilders seeks to ban the Koran – became the third largest party in parliament, with 17 per cent in the 2010 election. In Sweden, Sverigedemokraterna – whose ideologue Kent Ekeroth believes that Sweden and Europe are cast in an apocalyptic war with Islam and Muslims, and who co-funds the anti-Muslim network out of which Breivik emerged – became the first brown party in the country’s history to enter parliament, with close to 6 per cent in the 2010 election. In Finland, True Finns – whose ideologue Jussi Halla-aho says that Europeans have but two options when confronted with Muslim immigration: war or surrender – gained 19 per cent in the 2011 election, just 1 per cent away from becoming the largest party.
In one instance in Norway, where the massacre also took place, vandals desecrated a mosque in August, 2010, with spray-paint writings saying “oink” and “Allah is a [picture of a pig]“. In another 2010 Mosque attack, this time in the Netherlands, a dead sheep was found hanging in the place where a mosque was to be built. In a similar incident in Normandy, France, inscriptions reading “Islam get out of Europe”, “No to Islam and to burkas”, along with swastikas, were discovered on 15 July, 2010, which the report suggests might be encouraged by a law banning women from wearing the full-face Islamic veils in public, since the timing of the events coincide.
A few months ago, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned: “A dangerous trend is emerging, a new politics of polarization. Some play on people’s fears. They accuse immigrants of violating European values. Europe’s darkest chapters have been written in language such as this. Today the primary targets are immigrants of the Muslim faith.”
Most of the rebadged far-right organisations have retained their old-school anti-Semitism even as they choose, for strategic reasons, to campaign against Islam (and, often, support Israel). Indeed, the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism generally reappear in the new discourse of anti-Islam bigotry. Gardell explains how:
anti-Muslim conspiracy theory comes complete with its own version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Evoking a Manichean vision of a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, it tell us that for 1300 years the Western world has been locked in an apocalyptic conflict with ‘Islam’, which is depicted as an animated being with a sinister agency, which tirelessly seeks the eradication of Christian Europe, the last outpost of freedom.
The journalist Colm Ó Broin has produced a neat demonstration of the relationship between the old hate and the new hate, with a close comparison of Spencer’s writing on Muslims next to the propaganda of Julius Streicher, the editor of the notorious anti-Semitic magazine from the Nazi era, Der Stuermer.
Here are the first nine of his parallels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Muslims/Jews are uniquely violent.
“(Islam) is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” Robert Spencer.
“o 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.
It’s pretty remarkable stuff. But then we come to the tenth point, and it’s the real kicker.
The final parallel is a shared insistence that such criticism has no relationship to violence.
“There is nothing in anything that I have ever written that could be reasonably construed as an incitement to violence against anyone,” says Robert Spencer.
In a strict sense, that’s probably true. Spencer himself, unlike his associates, knows to watch his mouth. In Orwell’s terms, he’s the kind of person always somewhere else when the trigger gets pulled.
Then again, so was Streicher.
For that was his defence at Nuremberg – he’d never personally incited violence.
“The contents,” Streicher argued, “of Der Stuermer as such were not [an incitement to violence]. 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.”
Streicher didn’t burn houses down himself. Nor, he claimed, did he encourage others to do so.
But if you publish article after article claiming that a particular minority group is a deadly menace, a violent, existential threat to the nation and its citizens, can you really claim surprise if others take you seriously?
Which brings us back to Berg and the IPA.
If someone toured Australia peddling Streicher-style slurs against Judaism, the Jewish community would be rightly outraged, precisely because of the relationship between talk about war against a minority and actual physical violence against them.
Would Australian conservative thank tanks argue they had nothing to worry about? Would they tell them that rhetoric about “war against Jews” was merely a suggestion that multiculturalism was a bad policy? Would he reassure them that past examples of deadly violence were the result of an apolitical lunacy for which no-one other than the direct perpetrators were responsible?
If not, wherein lies the difference. During his Australian sojourn, Robert Spencer was invited onto ABC Queensland to discuss his theories. Would a peddler of hatred against any other minority have been treated that way?
That’s the thesis of On Utoya: that bigotry against Muslims has been consistently downplayed in the mainstream, thus creating an environment in which violence becomes more likely.
Unfortunately, the argument seems more relevant than ever.
Jeff Sparrowis the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. He Tweets @Jeff_Sparrow.
Vandals set fire to another mosque in the West Bank on Thursday and defaced it with Hebrew graffiti.
The governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghanam, said arsonists doused the mosque in the village of Burqa with gasoline, then set it afire. The Hebrew words for “war” and “Mitzpe Yitzhar” were painted in red on a wall, and the Israeli military said carpets and chairs were burned.
Mitzpe Yitzhar is an unauthorized Jewish settlement outpost in the West Bank where Israeli security forces demolished two structures early Thursday.
In recent years, settlers have attacked Palestinian and Israeli military targets in retaliation for Israeli government operations they see as overly sympathetic to Palestinians. The increasing frequency of the attacks, the sparse number of arrests and paucity of indictments have generated allegations that the Israeli government isn’t acting forcefully enough against extremists after two years of violence.
On Wednesday, following an assault on an Israeli military base, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved measures to clamp down on extremists, including giving soldiers the authority to make arrests and to ban extremists from contentious areas.
A must see documentary on AlJazeera English, dealing with the contemporary influence of Far Right Christianity on American politics. It gets really interesting from the 18:00 mark.
Washington D.C.’s Mall is the home of many of the city’s finest museums, housing works of the masters at the National Museum of Art, historic aircraft at the Air and Space Museum and America’s Native heritage at the American Indian Museum.
But one man saw that something was missing: Amir Muhammad couldn’t find a museum that showed Islam’s history in America. So he started digging. His results – including photos, artifacts, and displays – have become America’s Islamic Heritage Museum and Cultural Center in Southeast Washington, DC.
Beginnings
A native of Connecticut, Amir Muhammad was raised Baptist. His first experience with Islam was in 1973, under the former Nation of Islam leader Elijah P. Muhammad. He also studied the writings of the late Malcolm X.
But it was some genealogical research that transformed his faith: he found Muslim names in his family tree. He began to search libraries and town records. He talked to his mother, who gave him vital family information. He began to visit Georgia, where his mother was from trying to get any information he could find.
His search became more focused when he moved from Richmond, Virginia to Washington, DC.
“I felt that if I was living in the DC area, with the National Archives here, if I ever moved, I would feel bad that I didn’t take advantage of it,” said Muhammad.
Through his research, Muhammad came across several Muslim names especially amongst the Gullah people in the lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia. He found stories of Muslim slave managers who helped defend the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the War of 1812. He found several tombstones with Muslim names, sometimes having to go deep into the woods – and into areas where he did not feel welcome – to find them.
Digging in Earnest
He also found tombstones with the one-finger bas relief, a Muslim symbol meant to signify the oneness of God. He explored the ruins of Gullah slave quarters – called “Tabby Ruins” – and found modern people who carry on the Gullah traditions – like weaving intricate baskets from sea grass.
Muhammad came across Muslim Africans who fought in the Civil War, including Muhammad Ali Ibn Said, who spoke seven languages, fought for the Union in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment and later became a teacher. He found Muslims like Hadji Ali, an Ottoman of Jordanian parents known as “Hi Jolly” who was one of the first camel drivers ever hired by the U.S. Army for its experimental Camel Corps.
Amir Muhammad’s search continued through census records, where he found Muslim names in several documents. His search also led him to sports heroes like Muhammad Ali. He found Muslim educators, scholars, judges, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and members of the U.S. military – some of whom were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amir says American Muslims need to know their history to feel part of the country.
“Another thing we talk about is the forgotten roots, because it’s something that’s forgotten,” he said. “People don’t understand that it’s the roots and the core of America,” said Muhammad.
Traveling show
His research was first displayed in 1996 as a traveling exhibit by a non-profit organization called the “Collections and Stories of American Muslims,” or CSAM.
Muhammad and his wife Habeebah – a PhD and Registrar at the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture – took the exhibit to several countries. In Qatar, it was featured in the State Department’s cultural exchange program.
The exhibit also traveled to Nigeria, and made stops in Abuja, Abeokuta, and Kano, where Muhammad personally led tours through the exhibit for visiting dignitaries.
Permanent Home
This year, the Exhibit found a home at the former Clara Muhammad School on Martin Luther King Avenue in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood. A former carriage and paint shop the building was upgraded to a school and then revamped to accommodate the museum.
The development and cost of the current space was more than $40,000. The cost for keeping the museum open for the first year is expected to be around $150,000. The facility also hosted four iftars this year – including one sponsored by the Ambassador of the Embassy of Qatar.
Amir Muhammad’s eyes light up when he talks about his work. He calls finding Muslims in American history “like a blessing from God.” But he added that his hope is to one day to join other museums in a prominent place on the Washington Mall.
Gingrich reasserts his commitment to the Sharia Hysteria and now suggests “a federal law that says ‘no court, anywhere in the United States, under any circumstances, is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.”
Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael GersonexaminesNewt Gingrich’s history of anti-Muslim fear-bating and concludes that “those views demonstrate a disturbing tendency: the passionate embrace of shallow ideas.” But Gerson fails to acknowledge that Gingrich’s “shallow ideas” are more than just rhetoric. Gingrich has a plan to put them into action.
It’s time we had a national debate on this. And one of the things I’m going to suggest today is a federal law that says ‘no court, anywhere in the United States, under any circumstances, is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.’ Period.
Watch it:
And Gingrich’s 2010 documentary, “America At Risk: The War With No Name,” portrays a disturbing vision of the world in which the U.S. and its western allies are at war with Islam. “This war will go on until either the entire world either embraces Islam or submits to Islamic rule,” says historian Bernard Lewis, while appearing in the film.
Further exemplifying his anti-Muslim sentiments, In an interview last week, Gingrich explained that the Palestinians are an “invented people,” a statement effectively denying the right of Palestinians to a state. Such a position would end U.S. support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rejects the policy positions of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations.
Gerson’s effort to flag Gingrich’s anti-Sharia rhetoric as “simplistic” is a welcome pushback against the growing Islamophobia in the far-right. (We addressed this problem in our recent report “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America.”) But Gerson fails to acknowledge the potential domestic and foreign policy implications of Gingrich’s anti-Muslim statements.
Jerusalem Mayor denounces arsonists’ attack on burial site of noted Muslim figure, saying zero tolerance should be shown to violence of any kind, and that coexistence in the city must be kept.
Arsonists set fire to a deserted mosque in central Jerusalem during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday. There was no structural damage reported and the damage mainly consisted of the blackening of walls and graffiti reading “Price Tag,” and anti-Islamic phrases.
The Nebi Akasha mosque, apparently built under the Ayyubid dynasty in the 12th century with additions made under the Mamluk dynasty in the 13th century. It is believed that the mosque was founded on the burial site of combatants in Saladin’s army, though an ancient tradition designates the site as the place where Akasha, a friend of the Prophet Muhammad, was buried.
The mosque is uniquely located in central Jerusalem in the midst of a Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. It was abandoned in the Israeli War of Independence. Its was recently renovated and turned into a municipal storage facility.
Graffiti spray painted on the historical site included inscriptions such as “Muhammad is Dead,” “Muhammad is a Pig,” and “Price Tag.”
The Jerusalem municipality closed off the entrance to the mosque, and the police and Shin Bet began an investigation.
On tonight’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a look at the controversy surrounding TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, and the Tampa-based group that hates it. Because the Muslims depicted in the show aren’t shown to be terrorists bent on destroying America, the Florida Family Association can’t abide it. Like most zealots, all they want is their stereotypes reinforced. Is it too much to ask for Bravo to whip up a season of the The Real Martyrs of Jalalabad? Sheesh.
There is no denying the uptick in right-wing terrorism in Europe, Anders Breivik being the most glaring example of this violence. The ties between fanatical right-wingers in Europe and in the United States is well known, Robert Spencer being a prominent figure in such circles. Of course, right-wing Islamophobes are in denial about the resurgent xenophobia and anti-Muslim hysteria they have helped foster and which is now having deadly consequences.
Now, Robert “Police Blotter” Spencer is at it again, resorting to his well worn modus operandi of trying to link any possible crime “allegedly” committed by a Muslim to Islam.
He does this of course to dehumanize Muslims, inflate and exaggerate the stealth-Muslamic-Islamization threat and also to deflect from any negative news regarding the so-called “counter jihad” movement.
Spencer quickly jumped on a Telegraph report about an attack in Liege, Belgium, in which four people were killed and dozens injured. According to the Telegraph report, the attacker was identified as Nordine Amrani citing (without a link) something called the “Karachi Post,” saying the attack was linked to an “honor killing.”
To say the least, this whet Spencer’s enormous anti-Muslim Islamophobic appetite. Spencer went on to write,
…the Telegraph notes a link to an honor killing case that could indicate that this was yet another act of violence by Misunderstanders of the Religion of Peace.
Spencer’s own fans took issue with his jumping the gun, cautioning him not to make a fool out of himself:
Be careful before attributing this to Islamic terror. We don’t know for sure yet.If it transpires that it has nothing to do with Islam, it makes Jihad watch look bad.
Spencer responded by blaming others, as well as saying that “GnaeusNaevius” criticism sounds “like something out of the looniest Islamic supremacist foes of this site.”
Gnaeus goes on to have another exchange with Spencer,
Thanks for your reply. Your point is well taken, but I would rather you had held back until we had CONCRETE evidence of the motivations of this attack. Otherwise, it does make you a bit too keen to pin things like this on Muslims. It’s happened before.
Actually, I am not keen to “pin things like this on Muslims,” and whatever you think has “happened before,” in reality I have always done what I have done here: report available evidence.
If the Telegraph reports on the honor killing link, and the Flanders News gives the attacker’s name (the Telegraph has it as well now) why is it all right for them to report these things but wrong for me to do so?
I think Gnaeus’s advice is wise. Reproducing other peoples’ speculation harms JW’s credibility if they turn out to be baseless. No-one is questioning JW’s right to quote the Karachi Post, only the wisdom in doing so.
So what ended up happening? It blew up in Spencer’s face. He would have done well to listen to his brethren, but such is the condition of the fuzzy guru of Islamophobes; he cannot countenance any criticism or even advice.
Pakistani Twitter account Karachi Post claims the attack was linked to a sentence in an honor killing case. (Officials later said the case was in no way linked to the attack, and the Karachi Post admitted they used the attacks as efforts “highlighting the evil of honor killing.”)”
So the so-called Karachi Post is a twitter dude, and yet his statement supersedes statements by Belgian officials. Use of disingenuous links to bolster a non-credible claim? You don’t say…
A convicted gun fanatic threw hand grenades and opened fire on a square bustling with Christmas shoppers in the centre of the Belgian city of Liège, killing at least six people, including himself, and wounding dozens, some critically.
Hours after failing to show up for police questions about his preoccupation with guns, the 33-year-old unleashed a lunchtime attack on Place Saint Lambert, which was hosting a Christmas market that attracts 1.5 million visitors a year.
Police said there were no indications that the dead assailant, a local man, had been involved with terrorism. Nor was there evidence of any ideological motivation for the murders.
The gunman was named as Nordine Amrani, a 33-year-old Liègeois who was known to be a “gun freak”, according to the police. He was given a jail term of almost five years after police officers raided his metal workshop three years ago and found a dozen firearms, including an AK-47 machine-gun, and 9,500 gun parts. He was also found guilty of drug dealing after cultivating 2,800 marijuana plants.
He has a North African sounding name so naturally he’s being framed as a jihadist by the Islamophobes. But this looks like the actions of a man who was desperate not to go back to jail, and would rather take his own life and as many others as possible than be incarcerated again. There don’t appear to be any political or religious motivation behind his actions. He’s obviously well known to the police, and they are satisfied that there are no links to a terrorist network. But, he’s from an Arabic background and possibly a Muslim one, and that’s all the right wingers need to know.
Put this down as example number 1,000,342,784,678 in the annals of #EpicRobertSpencerFail.
Over 90% of Senegalese are Muslims, is it shocking that this fanatical right-winger from Florence targeted them? Don’t expect the likes of Robert Spencer to speak about some one such as Casseri who likely shares in his ideology, he’s too busy trying to link crimes committed by random Muslims to Islam.
Police said the gunman, Gianluca Casseri, 50, was known to have sympathies with Italy’s extreme Right.
He first opened fire on a group of Senegalese street traders at a market in Piazza Dalmazia, on the northern outskirts of the Tuscan city, killing two, seriously wounding a third and causing panic among shoppers and pedestrians.
He then jumped into a white car and drove off. Witnesses said the owner of a newspaper stall tried to block him but the gunman told him that unless he got out of the way he would be the next victim.
Casseri appeared a short time later at San Lorenzo market, in the centre of Florence, where he opened fire again with a .357 Magnum hand gun, wounding two more Senegalese hawkers.
He then turned the gun on himself, shooting himself in the chest.
“I heard the shots but I thought they were fireworks. Then I turned around and I saw three men on the ground surrounded by blood,” a vendor at the scene of the first shooting told the Italian news agency Ansa.
Senegalese traders were quoted as saying that they had worked in the city for years, had never had any trouble, and could not understand the motive for the attacks.
Florence and other large Italian cities host a shifting population of African street vendors who sell traditional handicrafts and fake designer handbags to tourists.
After the shootings, a group of West African traders staged a peaceful demonstration at the scene of the first shooting, shouting “Shame, shame”, before marching on the city centre.
Imagine if a major American advertiser were to pull its ads off of Jersey Shore because they received objections that the show while portraying a group of Italian-Americans, made the glaring error of excluding Mafiosi.
Imagine if the absence of characters “whacking knee caps” and “making offers you cannot refuse” was deemed as an “omission” and therefore pro-Italian propaganda, and as a result too controversial to sponsor.
Pathetic? Incredulous?
Well imagine no more.
Such is the pitiful state that Islamophobia has reached in this country, and it’s very real.
All-American Muslim is an American reality show like any other. It portrays the trials and travails of five Michigan families with typical reality show themes like marriage, birth, business, faith, food and of course drama queens.
There is one problem however, at least for the Florida Family Association: the characters in the show are American Muslims.
The Florida Family Association got its members to send in dozens of emails to the show’s advertisers based on a pre-written template that stated in part:
“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to the liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”
So basically, their objection is that the show is portraying “ordinary Muslims” as – you may need to sit down for this – “ordinary Muslims”! Of course this runs the risk that unsuspecting Americans may come to view their ordinary Muslim neighbors as ordinary. According to this Florida group of nuts, this would be a travesty that American corporations must not contribute to.
We are more or less used to the unfortunate fact that there are anti-Muslim loons lurking about out there. There’s the burn-a-Quran-day pastor from Florida, there’s the group from Florida that tried to ban a Muslim professor from the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission because he was Muslim, and there’s that guy who tried to organize against Muslim family day at a Six Flags Texas theme park in Texas. Yes, yes, he was from Florida.
But what is real cause for alarm is the creeping influence of Islamophobia into mainstream American politics and culture. From the Peter King radicalization hearings that use taxpayer funds to put mainstream American Muslims and their institutions on mock trial, to the frequent anti-Muslim rantings of the Congressman from Florida, Allen “Islam is not really a religion” West all the way to presidential hopeful Newt “Palestinians don’t really exist” Gingrich. And now, we have the weak-kneed primetime corporate sponsors.
That a group of extremists from Florida would exercise their first amendment right to carry out bigoted campaigns is unfortunate but not all that shocking. That 65 out of 67 advertisers (according to the Florida Family Association’s website of which only Lowe’s is independently confirmed) would capitulate to their nonsensical complaints that “ordinary Muslims are being portrayed as ordinary” is an alarming new milestone in the mainstreaming of bigotry in this country. For that reason, it ought to catch the attention of Americans who, for far too long, have stayed on the sidelines of the Islamophobia horror picture show.
Lowe’s admitted that they cut their ads short as a result of the emails they were receiving and after reviewing some websites and blogs out there (in the “bigotosphere”). Lowe’s is not just a tool in the hands of the far right, it’s the entire hardware store.
What Lowe’s is essentially saying by choosing to pull its sponsorship is that NOT portraying American Muslims as terrorists is just, well, too controversial for its brand:
“We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance. We strongly support and respect the right of our customers, the community at large, and our employees to have different views. If we have made anyone question that commitment, we apologize.”
Lowe’s is putting forth a very dangerous argument: that the far right bigots and the mainstream Muslim voices with their pro-tolerance allies of all faiths are equal opposites; that those who wish to humanize a faith community that comprises 25% of humanity and those who wish to demonize them are equal opposites; that the forces of bigotry and the forces of anti-bigotry are equal opposites. The pervasive assumption that there is a moral equivalency between the two sparring sides is a major factor in the rise of Islamophobia in the US. But Lowe’s goes further than to claim moral equivalency. It actually takes sides, the wrong side: the side of the bigots.
The running complaint used to be that Muslims are always portrayed as terrorists. But now, the message being sent is that “not portraying American Muslims as terrorists” is sufficient for complaint and controversy. It’s moving the goal posts to a dangerous new “lowe”.
There are three lessons to be extracted from this episode:
First, it is a confirmation of what we have been stating all along: Islamophobia is not merely a reaction to terrorism or radical ideologies (which would have been a welcome exercise), but, in fact, it is a form of bigotry that targets an entire faith community: the religion of Islam itself and its mainstream practitioners.
Second, Islamophobia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s sort of like “we hate you because you are terrorists, but when you’re not terrorists, we want you to be terrorists so we can hate you.” In the case of American Muslim leaders and organizations, the line is “we hate you because you are terror-linked, but when you’re not, we need you to be terror-linked so we can hate you.”
Third, Islamophobia is but a smokescreen, a projection of sorts. We are often told that Muslims are trying to Islamize America and institute Islamic Shariah law (“Sharrorize” America as Imam Suhaib Webb puts it). We are told that the less than 1% of American Muslims is but a fifth column who is here to take over and subjugate the remaining 99% plus. Setting aside the obvious ludicrousness of the claim for a second, ask yourself when was the last time American Muslims organized to pull advertisements off the air from shows that do not conform with their faith values (and trust me there are many)? Our organizing campaigns are themed around anti-bigotry and social justice, not the imposition of our faith.
To the contrary, it is the Christian right, the same folks who comprise many of the leading anti-Muslim alarmists, groups like the Florida Family Association (and trust me there are many) that are time and again organizing to force their way of thinking on other Americans. A quick visit to their website shows that this is not the first time they have successfully harassed advertisers for advertising on shows that do not conform to their ideology. They’ve targeted gays, sexually liberal shows, and others they disagree with.
It is not a coincidence that the organized Islamophobia networks in this country often include the same people who are trying to force-feed the Bible into government, schools, and public life.
And so comes the most important realization:
The organized American Muslim community’s agenda is in fact a social justice agenda. Any objective scrutiny of our organizations, campaigns, projects, and discourse reveals that this is widely and consistently the case.
On the other hand, as I already mentioned, you will find that it is it is none other than the far right that is out to force their narrowly conceived socio-religious ideology and way of life on Americans.
They conveniently promulgate the whole Islamist supremacist takeover fantasy and the Shariah scare as a divergence, a distraction, a smokescreen.
Projection is the name of the game.
They often use soft namesakes like “family” and “freedom” to give the impression of docility, and they inundate their websites and blogs with American flags and eagles to give the impression that they are the tried and true patriotic Americans who are best poised to speak for the majority.
They are not the majority, but they are not less than 1% either. They are in the millions, have access to billions of dollars, and have sufficiently organized at both the grassroots level and onas well as the internet in recent years to start to flex some muscle. (It is often stated that if fascism were to ever come to America, it would be wrapped in the US flag and bearing a cross.)
There is a ray of light. More Americans are beginning to wake up to the Islamophobia disease and the attempts at divergence from the real threat to our freedoms and democracy.
A year ago, the scorching Park51 controversy, while contrived and sensationalized at the end of the day, failed to impress the media or the public. In the case of the Lowe’s controversy, Americans are joining hands in speaking out against bigotry. Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish groups, as well as notable individuals, including 2010 Spirit of Anne Frank awardee Anya Cordell, California State Senator Ted Lieu, music mogul Russell Simmons, actress Mia Farrow, and several other celebrities, have come out strongly to say “enough is enough.”
For Lowe’s and other companies that gave in to bigotry, the choice is simple: own up to your error and do the right thing – or risk being chalked up on the wrong side of history (not to mention the wrong side of an impending boycott).
The recent case of an assault on a white woman by Somalis in Britain is being fully exploited by loons on both sides of the Atlantic. Islamophobia Watch investigated and exposed the distorted coverage, though as usual, the truth cannot wash away the residue such sensationalism invariably creates.
Over the past week we have seen a wave of right-wing hysteria over the case of Rhea Page, a white woman from Leicester who was assaulted by four women of Somali heritage – or a “Muslim gang”, as they are invariably described.
The version of events that has gained currency on the racist right is that the women subjected Page to a “savage beating” while screaming “kill the white slag” but escaped a prison sentence because the judge accepted the defence’s argument in mitigation that the accused were Muslims who weren’t used to drinking alcohol. The case has been presented as an example of double standards in the British legal system, which supposedly discriminates against the white majority population and in favour of Muslims and other minorities.
Daily Express columnist Leo McKinstry produced a characteristically frothing-at-the-mouth comment piece on the case. Being a bit of a traditionalist, McKinstry couldn’t help adding a large dollop of good old-fashioned racism to his article (“Too many Somalians have become a burden on the British taxpayer, thanks to their welfare dependency…. Somalian gangs, most of them peddling drugs, have helped to create a climate of fear in parts of our cities through their enthusiasm for violence and contempt for the law”). But the main thrust of his argument was viciously Islamophobic:
The dogma of political correctness is dangerously weakening Britain’s traditional concept of justice. Our ruling elite are so deluded by the ideology of cultural diversity that they have lost the ability to protect the innocent and punish the guilty.
That is the only conclusion to be drawn from the outrageous leniency shown by a court this week towards a gang of Somalian Muslim women who savagely beat up a white woman in Leicster city centre. In a brutal, unprovoked assault, the thugs knocked Rhea Page to the ground, then repeatedly kicked in the head while calling her a “white bitch” and “white slag”….
Incredibly, despite the ferocity of the attack, the judge gave the girls only suspended sentences, even though he could have jailed them for up to five years. His bizarre decision came after the defence told him that the Muslim assailants had been drinking and were “not used to being drunk” because of their religion.
As a cause for mitigation, this is absurd. Why on earth should Muslims be treated any differently to other offenders, simply on the grounds of their faith? … The disgraceful message of this episode is that Muslims can get drunk and maim almost with impunity because the state is so craven about their creed….
The reluctance to imprison Ms Page’s attackers is so indicative of the supine, guilt-ridden mindset of our modern ruling class, where cowardice is dressed up as cultural sensitivity and self-loathing masquerades as tolerance. This mentality, which is tearing apart the moral bonds of our civilisation, can be seen all around us. This mentality, which is tearing apart the moral bonds of our civilisation, can be seen all around us….
Tremendous double standards are at work over race crime. Racial killings of whites are frequently downplayed or forgotten…. The British establishment is guilty of nothing less than reverse racism. Their members, from judges to politicians, think they are enlightened and compassionate. But in truth they are filled with prejudice. For often they refuse to expect the same standards of civilised behaviour from certain minorities that they demand of the indigenous population.
Forces further to the right have of course seized on the case. The British National Party reported it under the headline “‘Enough is enough’ – Rising anger over court bias as Muslim racists swagger free from Leicester court” and boasted that they were recruiting members off the back of the controversy. Paul Weston, the leader of the English Defence League’s new political ally the British Freedom Party, posted an article (“One rule for them, one rule for us”) on Ned May’s Gates of Vienna blog, one of the “counterjihadist” websites that provided the inspiration for Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. The EDL itself organised a protest in Leicester yesterday and has announced that it will be holding a national demonstration there in February to oppose “anti-white racism and the 2 tier justice system”.
This entire furore derives from a report published in the Daily Mail last week, under the headline “Muslim gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling ‘kill the white slag’ FREED” (subsequently amended to “Girl gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling ‘kill the white slag’ freed after judge hears ‘they weren’t used to drinking because they’re Muslims’”). In the print edition the article was headlined “Somali girls thugs go free after judge is told ‘they were not used to being drunk’”, but the Mail evidently thought it necessary to beef up the shock-horror anti-Muslim message for the benefit its online readership.
The Mail‘s account provided the basis for further coverage in the Sun, the Telegraph and the Metro. The Sun added an editorial comment, headed “Return Left”:
How Britain cheered when judges doled out proper jail sentences to the looters who briefly ran amok in our cities. Four months on, the Left has regrouped to concoct its perverse excuses for evil. And courts have resumed their liberal agenda too. So while in the summer yobs were handed two years apiece, yesterday a girl gang who screamed racist abuse while kicking a care worker’s head in got six months. Suspended. The poor dears were Muslims and not used to drinking, you see.
Since then the Sun has kept the issue on the boil by running an interview with Rhea Page (“I daren’t go out since race attack”), which in turn provided the Mail with an opportunity to run the story a second time (“Muslim girl gang ‘sentence sends wrong message about street violence’”). Not to be outdone, the Express, apparently feeling that McKinstry’s extended rant was an inadequate response to the scandal, published another op ed by Nick Ferrari (“Whatever happened to the idea of everyone being equal in the eyes of the law? Are we really suggesting that Muslims can be seen to be beyond the law by virtue of being unused to drink? … If this wasn’t a race crime, what the hell is?”)
Where did the Mail get the information for the report that provoked such a frenzy? As is often the case, the paper lifted the basic facts from a local newspaper and then distorted them in order to support its own anti-Muslim agenda. (For another recent example, see the Mail‘s concocted story of “church leaders” expressing “fury” over a branch of McDonald’s opening on Christmas Day.) In this instance the Mail‘s piece was essentially a rewrite of a report published in the Leicester Mercury back on 24 November, combined with quotes from an interview with Rhea Page, who of course held her assailants entirely responsible for the violent confrontation and claimed that she and her partner Lewis Moore were blameless.
If you examine the Leicester Mercury report you can see how it has been manipulated by the Mail. It was the lawyer for just one of the defendants, Ambaro Maxamed, who raised the issue of their faith. He said: “Although Miss Page’s partner used violence, it doesn’t justify their behaviour. They’re Somalian Muslims and alcohol or drugs isn’t something they’re used to.” But there is no suggestion in the Mercury report that the religious affiliation of the accused had anything to do with the judge’s decision not to jail them:
Sentencing, Judge Robert Brown said: “This was ugly and reflects very badly on all four of you. Those who knock someone to the floor and kick them in the head can expect to go inside, but I’m going to suspend the sentence.” He said he accepted the women may have felt they were the victims of unreasonable force from the victim’s partner.
A researcher from Full Fact contacted the Judicial Office, who referred her to the Mercury report as accurately reflecting the facts of the case and pointed out that “the role of the victim’s boyfriend was the one which impacted on the judgement”. This was no doubt reinforced by the fact that the main object of Lewis Moore’s violence was Ifrah Nur, who it appears had initially intervened to try and stop the fight, only to be punched in the face by Moore.
The Mail was clearly aware of this hole in its story. Hence the weasel-worded sentence that opened its report: “A gang of Muslim women who attacked a passer-by in a city centre walked free from court after a judge heard they were ‘not used to being drunk’ because of their religion” (emphasis added). Chronologically speaking, this is of course strictly true. The Mail‘s objective, however, was to mislead its readers into concluding that the judge decided against jailing the women because they were Muslims.
The actual cause of the violent clash is itself obscure. The Mail quoted Page as saying:”I honestly think they attacked me just because I am white. I can’t think of any other reason.” She added: “We were just minding our own business but they kept shouting ‘white bitch’ and ‘white slag’ at me. When I turned around one of them grabbed my hair then threw me on the ground.” Page repeated this accusation in her Sun interview: “they all came from behind me shouting, ‘White bitch’ and ‘White slag’. I had done absolutely nothing to them, I hadn’t even looked at them.”
But the Mercury report states that the assault on Page followed a verbal altercation: “after words were exchanged, Ambaro Maxamed had grabbed Miss Page’s hair, causing her to fall on the ground” (emphasis added). Which obviously conflicts with Page’s account. The Mail has posted CCTV footage of the incident on its website, but this has been edited so that the events leading up to the attack have been omitted. Even on the basis of this truncated version, however, it looks as though Page was involved in a verbal exchange with two of the four women before they attacked her. Exactly what was said, and why it provoked a violent reaction, the Mail obviously had no interest in establishing. They preferred to whip up the anger and indignation of their readers with a tale of Muslim thugs attacking a random stranger solely because she was white.
The claim that the attack was racially motivated is also dubious. The Mercury reports that only one of the defendants was accused of using such language: “During the hearing, James Bide-Thomas, prosecuting, said Ambaro Maxamed, who started the violence, had called Miss Page a ‘white bitch’ during the incident.” But Page’s account has all four of the women calling her a “white bitch” and “white slag” before attacking her. If that was indeed the case, it is difficult to understand why the Crown Prosecution Service failed to charge the accused with a racially aggravated offence. The Islamophobic right of course have a ready explanation for that. It wasn’t because the police and CPS were unconvinced that the assault was racially motivated or felt there was insufficient evidence to prove this (just as they refused to accept the allegation by Ifrah Nur that Page’s partner Lewis Moore had himself been racially abusive towards her). It was because the state systematically discriminates against white citizens in favour of ethno-religious minorities. And that, we are told, was also why the defendants were not sent to prison.
Indeed, as we have seen, the central claim of the racist right in relation to this case is that the sentencing of the four women was part of a general pattern, with the legal system systematically giving preferential treatment to non-white minority communities and Muslims in particular. To quote Leo McKinstry’s diatribe: “We can be pretty sure that if a Somalian Muslim girl had been kicked to the ground by a group of white brutes, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Police would have taken a tougher approach.” This is the so-called “two-tier system” that the EDL endlessly bangs on about.
This myth was demolished in a recent Guardian report, based on an analysis of over a million court records, which found that:
black offenders were 44% more likely than white offenders to be sentenced to prison for driving offences, 38% more likely to be imprisoned for public disorder or possession of a weapon and 27% more likely for drugs possession. Asian offenders were 41% more likely to be sent to prison for drugs offences than their white counterparts and 19% more likely to go to jail for shoplifting.
One expert, who is working with the Magistrates’ Association on disparities in sentencing, told the Guardian that the “disproportionality appears to be getting worse”.
As for McKinstry’s views on the judicial system’s supposed bias in favour of Muslims and minorities, ENGAGE has posted an effective response:
His statement that had the race of the attacker and victim been reversed, the sentencing would have been harsher is highly dubious. Take, for example, the disproportionate effects of stop and search on ethnic minorities, or the harsh judgements handed down to young Muslims for public order offences committed during demonstrations against the Israeli offensive on Gaza in December 2009 – January 2010. Or to use examples more directly related to the question of inversing ethnic identities and comparing the judges’ decisions – take the case of the four men who were given suspended sentences for their drunken attack on a mosque in Scunthorpe last month, or the community service sentence given to a young white teenager who committed a religiously aggravated attack on a Muslim police officer. Did any of these cases merit a column from McKinstry on the justice system and its upholding equality under the law? The answer is, of course, no.
None of this justifies the violence to which Rhea Page was subjected, of course. It is even possible that Page was indeed attacked at random, purely because she was white, though that strikes me as unlikely. It might be argued that the assailants should have received heavier sentences. Or you could argue that Lewis Moore should have been charged with assault too, for that matter. But in order to make a judgement on these issues it would be neccessary to have much more reliable information about the case than we currently do. It is a shameful reflection on the state of journalism in the UK that the Mail, and the rest of the press that unquestioningly followed its lead, have shown not the slightest interest in uncovering that information and presenting us with an accurate account of the events.
In its analysis of the inaccurate press coverage of the case, Full Fact has suggested that “this handling of the story reflects inexperience in reporting legal issues on the part of the journalists concerned”. That is far too charitable. In reality, what we have here is the conscious manipulation and distortion of the facts by the Mail in order to produce a misleading story that has been uncritically repeated by other right-wing newspapers, with the aim of inciting their readers against Muslims.
This sort of irresponsible journalism has real consequences. Former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt, who has explained to the Leveson inquiry how that paper takes its line directly from the Mail, put it very well: ”The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke’s head caved-in down an alley in Bradford.” Already we are seeing increasingly violent expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry in the UK – only last week an EDL member and his friend were convicted of trying to blow up a mosque in Stoke. Nor is it accidental that Anders Breivik was influenced by the Mail – numerous anti-Muslim reports from the paper are cited in his manifesto and he even reproduced an article by Melanie Philips in its entirety. If the Islamophobic propaganda put out by the Mail and the rest of the right-wing press continues at its present pitch the emergence of a British Breivik cannot be ruled out.
Postscript: This analysis has concentrated on the right-wing response to the case in the UK. However, it has also been taken up by US right, with predictably ignorant and bigoted coverage from the likes of Jihad Watch, Bare Naked Islam, Pamela Geller and FrontPage Magazine.
As most of you know already, Lowes pulled its advertisement from TLC’s All-American Muslim after being pressured to do so by Islamophobes. It seems that many other companies have also succumbed to this anti-Muslim bigotry, threatening the very existence of the show.
Enter music legend and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who tweeted:
Just purchased remaining spots for #allamericanmuslim for next week. The show is now sold out! keep your money @lowes and we will keep ours.
Simmons bought the remaining ad space for next week’s episode of the show. The Huffington Post reports:
After Lowes created some open ad time, Russell Simmons filled it in a high profile way.
The music legend and entrepreneur tweeted on Monday that he bought all the remaining ad space on “All-American Muslim,” the TLC reality show that has been at the center of a recent media buy controversy.
“Just purchased remaining spots for #allamericanmuslim for next week,” he wrote. “The show is now sold out! keep your money @lowes and we will keep ours.”
Corporations such as Lowe’s have pulled their ads from the show, under pressure from conservative protests led by the Florida Family Association. Simmons has called for a boycott of Lowe’s, pushing a petition via Twitter.
Simmons later said that corporations want their longterm ad space, making it difficult for him to purchase all that he wanted. In the space, he’ll push his Visa Rush Card.
This isn’t the first time Simmons has put his substantial wealth towards public activist causes; in November, he offered to pay for the cleanup of Zuccotti Park, in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
It also isn’t the first time that Russell Simmons has stood up against Islamophobia. In fact, he stood in solidarity with Muslims during the whole “Ground Zero Mosque” nonsense. At that time, Simmons had courageously said:
America is using the mosque and Ground Zero as a mask for its own Islamoph[ob]ia
Mr. Simmons, LoonWatch is the most well-known anti-Islamophobia website on the internet, and we commend you!
President Barack Obama said today the U.S. has requested that Iran return the highly sensitive stealth drone that crash landed there two weeks ago, but an Iranian general already said that’s not going to happen.
“We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said at a news conference.
So, let me get this straight: the U.S. has been using surveillance from stealth drones to bomb and assassinate targets inside Iran, one of these drones goes down while flying inside Iran’s sovereign territory, and now the U.S. is asking for it back? This reminds me of childhood story an Indian friend of mine told me: his mother used to ask for her shoe back whenever she used to throw it at him.
A shocked Iranian military official replied:
No one returns the symbol of aggression to the party that sought secret and vital intelligence related to the national security of a country.
What do you think the United States would do if an Iranian drone was downed in U.S. territory? We all know the answer: bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages. Or, at minimum we would use drones to drop a few bombs on their heads.
Some Americans wonder why there are so many Muslim suicide bombers. Well, they don’t have drones, which are the American equivalent of suicide bombers. Drones have the added benefit that they can be operated without fear of any personal harm.
Drones are now America’s favorite Muslim killer, used against at least six different Muslim countries (Iran could be considered the seventh Muslim country to have this honor).
But, always remember: they (Iranians, Muslims, etc.) are so violent, and we are so peaceful.
Update:
JihadWatch’s Marisol just posted an article complaining about the fact that “Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space.” (h/t Believing Atheist) Marisol huffs: “So, does anyone still say ‘friend and ally?’”
The “threat” comes after U.S. drones violated Pakistan’s sovereignty for the millionth time and committed what under international law is considered an act of war: they bombed and killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Some “friend and ally” America is.
This is not the first time American drones have killed Pakistanis. In fact, they have been doing so for many years, killing hundreds of civilians–including children.
If Mexico routinely sent killer drones across the border to snuff out American lives, what do you think the American reaction would be?
But in the Orwellian world of JihadWatch, it is the party that defends its sovereignty that is at fault (because it is Muslim) whereas the party violating sovereignty is justified in doing so (since it is fighting Muslims). Unfortunately, this bizarro world is not limited to the loony land of JihadWatch but rather exists in mainstream political discourse and is a part of conventional wisdom.
On Friday, there was a tragic incident in Hollywood, California. A man began shooting people randomly near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and injured two men, one critically, before he was finally shot and killed by police.
Pamela Geller had an article online right away titled HOLLYWOOD JIHAD: SHOOTOUT, GUNMAN CALMLY TARGETED DRIVERS AND PEOPLE WHILE SHOUTING ALLAHU AKBAR! She said in her lede “What is most disturbing about this story, apart from the obvious horror, is that not one news account reported what one witness said the shooter was screaming: “allahu akbar.” Not one news account. The media is the enemy.”
The initial local news video about the incident did include one witness saying that the shooter shouted “Allahu Akbar!” but at this point no other witness has confirmed that. Whether or not that one witness was accurate about what he thought he heard, no one yet knows, and none of the cell phone videos of the incident as it happened at this point confirm this allegatioin. Other witnesses said that they heard the shooter shout “Is this the end?” and “kill me” and “I’m gonna die” during the rampage. Witnesses also identified the shooter variously as “white” and as “hispanic”.
Of course, as soon as Geller posted her story, the Islamophobic echo chamber reposted her story with their own sensational headlines. Geller’s partner Robert Spencer posted his own article referring to Geller. Sheikh Yermami called it “Hollywood Jihad”, Bare Naked Islam called it “Sudden Jihad Syndrome”. Debbie Schlussel called it a “terrorist attack”. Free Republic re-posted, Creeping Sharia re-posted. Even the Grant County Tea Party site re-posted Geller’s article. Gateway Pundit said“Once again the media hid the truth from the American public.” The Muslims are Terrorists site posted the headlineMuslim goes on shooting spree in Hollywood! Shouts allah akbar, media omits that detail to protect jihadists! with the lede “Thankfully one less muslim is wandering the streets tonight!”
More often than not, Geller is the first to churn out some anti-Muslim meme, and then her willing accomplices echo her message and pass it on. It takes on a life of its own. Geller is one of the key players and in our Who’s Who of Islamophobes and it is almost impossible to keep up with her rantings and update our backgrounder on her as fast as she can churn out her hateful messages.
On Saturday the identity of the shooter was released by the authorities. According to KTLA News“The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office has identified the man police shot and killed Friday after he opened fire on unsuspecting cars in the middle of a busy Hollywood intersection. The 26-year-old man was Tyler Brehm. Few details about the man are available but a Facebook page belonging to a man bearing the same name reveals that man ended a relationship four days ago. It has not yet been confirmed that the Tyler Brehm depicted on the Facebook page is the same Tyler Brehm involved in Friday’s shooting, but the Facebook page indicated its owner lives in Hollywood and was originally from Carlisle, Penn. The Baltimore Sun reports that Brehm’s ex-girlfriend, Alicia Alligood, told KTLA 5 she and Brehm dated for four years before breaking up this month. The end of their relationship may have acted as a trigger that led to Friday’s fatal events, she said in a phone interview with KTLA 5’s David Begnaud. … She said Brehm was “really stressed out lately.” He met a woman he thought was a pharmaceutical saleswoman, who had given him some kind of pills, Alliegood said. He began taking the pills, which was alarming because he never took drugs before. One of Brehm’s neighbors described him as unstable.
The actual story as far as what anyone knows to date is that a young man named Tyler Brehm went on a shooting spree. Witness reports are varied. The police are investigating. Little is known about the shooter beyond his name, the fact that he is from Pennsylvania, is unemployed, and recently broke up with his girlfriend. He may have been emotionally distressed. He may have been taking drugs. The Hollywood Reporter has the most recent information and an interview with one of the victims..
Outside of law enforcement, only Pamela Geller and her echo chamber “know” more than this. Publishing such baseless speculation is irresponsible, and only proves that the only motivation is pure hatred.
This sort of behavior on the part of Geller and her cohorts in the Islamophobia echo chamber is not new, and we even have a collection of some of Geller’s previous false claims here and of the attempts by Geller and friends to cover up evidence of their false claims here. Here is just one example of this pattern of jumping to false conclusions
In July of 2011, Pamela Geller published a post titled Vehicular Jihad in Arizona which was Geller’s take on a simple story about a terrible car accident in Arizona in which the driver of a vehicle crashed into 3 parked vehicles in a parking lot and was killed. The man was a physician named Ajaz Rahaman. As soon as the man’s name was released, Geller posted her article. This was before there were any autopsy findings released, before police investigations were completed – before anyone knew what happened. The name of this man sounded as if he might be a Muslim. However the name Walid Shoebat might also be identified as a Muslim name. That’s all the proof Geller needed to call this “vehicular jihad”. I published an article giving the facts titled “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Discover Muslim Vehicular Jihad Plot” and within a day Geller pulled the original article from her site but that the article still exists on google cache. Why did they try to cover this up. Because the doctor simply had a heart attack and died at the wheel which is why the car crashed.
This gleeful rush on the part of the Islamophobes to connect any violence to Muslims is also a pattern, as happened with the Virginia Tech shootings. Pamela Geller, the Queen of the Islamophobes promoted the non-existent Muslim connection in the Virginia Tech massacre, in an article Ismail Ax and the Prophet Moe with the lede “Release the damn transcripts. Enough with the cover up. Don’t the dead and America, a country at war, deserve to know was is really happening? As I wrote here previously, we know Ismail Ax was written in red (color of blood) on his arm, we know he signed his suicide note Ismail Ax and sent an overnight package to NBC from A Ishmail, he made sure he had no other ID on his person after he martyred himself so you can be sure he wanted to be remembered as Ismail Ax. This is in and of itself very telling. Shaving his head and from what I can see in his pictures and martyr video- his body (that’s what they do – remember the 9/11 hijackers?) , must have added to law enforcement’s suspicions, which is why it so damning that they would say so early on that horrible day that “it was not tied to terrorism.” And, she comments The tie-in is carefully explained at Prophet of Doom here. It’s lengthy – read it. I’ve excerpted here. “Every aspect of Cho’s rage, every nuance of his twisted and inverted morality, was lifted from the pages of Islam.” Geller never did post an apology or a correction.
The only effect that all of this propaganda has is to stir up the readers of these sites into a frenzy of anti-Muslim hatred. And, it works.
Here are a few of the readers comments on this Hollywood shooting incident from Gateway Pundit -The “sudden” jihad syndrome began months or years ago with the satanic infestation of this man’s soul by islam. – Unless you want US cities to look like Kandahar…the Muslim cancer in the US must be dealt with swiftely and forcefully. Allowing these morons to bring their terror onto our soil should not be tolerated. Here are a few comments from Geller’s site - Muslims don’t need a motive..they are born as murderous scum! - This is just the beginning. This will most likely be the false prophet of Rev 13. Watch out, it will be coming to your town sooner than you think. Resist now or forever hold your peace. Here are a few comments from Creeping Sharia - Now we are seeing these MUSLIM THUGS going after any AMERICAN here in the U S A yelling ALLAHU AKBAR so why not retaliate with ALLAUH AKBAR with there MOSQUES OF HATE and NEUTRALIZE THEM AND THERE IMAM’S!!!! Lock AND LOAD. – Who do we have to blame for the growth, and infiltration of these terrorist? I would prefer to classify them as Muslim dirt bags. .The filth and actions connected with this group are beyond human comprehension. God help us to destroy the filth that is invading our country.Lord expose the plan behind the intent and people involved in the overall desire to introduce this religion. What would America have to gain by acceptance of these people? We must determine who, why. and what. – Joke what God has a name like Allah. You insult God with that handle.Your god has made a pact with the devil to destroy those he fears the most.Christians and Jews are the friends of GOD . Your so called Allah is a prophet that is dead and burning in hell with the rest of his Muslim buddies.Thank God that many Muslims are being visited by the Son of God Jesus in dreams and visions, and are bending their knees, and being set free. Protect them Lord, and allow them protection from the crazies.
And, here is an email that I received from one of these folks who takes this sort of hateful anti-Muslim propaganda as “real journalism”: We dont want your kind here..we dont need your radical opinions..we want you out of our beautiful country and back to your camels and women beating and hostile islamic bullshit..you arent part of the human race as far as we’re concerned..you belong on another planet where you can blow shit up…LEAVE!!!! I hope and pray that all you radical assholes are buried in hell…you are not welcome or wanted in U.S. soil, unless its 6 feet under..go back and wash your fucking camels and beat your women..die motherfuckers, die!!!!
This is the effect the sort of hate spewed by the Islamophobia echo chamber has on the “minds” of their readers. I have by the way saved this email along with lots of others provoked by previous Islamophobic rants.
And, no matter what the actual facts turn out to be, it won’t make any difference for most of these folks who so desperately need someone to look down on. After all, they and only they know the “truth”. I would hope to see some of these folks stop for a moment and really think about what sort of effect their words have on others, and perhaps reconsider or even feel some shame. But, I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.
The loons are having a field day spreading a ridiculous rumor about anIslamic cleric who supposedly issued a fatwa warning women not to get near bananas and cucumbers because long, slender fruits and vegetables might inspire “sexy thoughts.” Supposedly he also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.
Obama say, “Respect it!” Jay Leno’s wife Mavis say, “The Qur’an is more liberal with women than the Bible.” Geller say, “One banana split, please, and a side of cukes, with extra whipped creme, thankyouverymuch.”
Hell knows, whenever I am feeling lonely or blue, I head down to D’Agostinos and I perk right up again.
Seriously, this is a war on women, about women and ultimately to control women. Women are the ultimate booty, the spoils of war, chattel.
Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim investigated and concluded the rumor was unsubstantiated and a result of “shoddy reporting”:
by Sheila Musaji
There was supposedly a fatwa written which would deserve ridicule if it exists. The original article about this was posted on Bikyamasr, an Egyptian news site, and the article was written by an individual named Manar Ammar. Manar Ammar is identified as a Senior Reporter and Women’s Editor for Bikyamasr.com.
The article quotes an UNNAMED Islamic Cleric residing in Europe who “has banned women from touching bananas, cucumbers and other elongated fruit and vegetable due to their sexual resemblance” The Bikyamasr article refers to the source as “The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news”.
I tried searching for el-Senousa news, but got nowhere. There is no site for any such entity. I can find nothing about them searching the net except for hundreds of articles reposting the article from Bikyamasr which mentions el-Senousa as its source.
Muna Khan at al Arabiya reports the same problems I had in finding the actual source of this story, and says “According to the Canadian news site Straight.com, it’s been difficult to find the El-Senousa site on which Bikya Masr based its article on. A simple search of the website takes you to a list of articles on the story being quoted but not to the main site itself.” She points out that there have been enough of what I call “stupid fatwas” to make anything easy to believe, but, it is an irresponsible rush to judgement to just assume something is true and publish it without any fact checking.
I found the article from Straight here, and it says “That’s some pretty good flame-bait, but is it legit? According to the article in bikyamasr.com, the story originally appeared on something called “el-Senousa news”, but good luck finding it. In fact, a Google search for “el-Senousa news” only points back—many times over—to the article in bikyamasr.com. Between that and the somewhat intangible location and identity of the “unnamed sheikh” in the article, the tale of the vegetable-fearing Mullah is starting to look a little short on authenticity. What’s more likely is that the independent news service bikyamasr.com is reacting to the troubling emergence of the hard-line Salafi Al-Nou party in Egypt’s (reportedly fraud-ridden) election—a story that, sadly, isn’t so cockamamie.
This article was immediately picked up and posted with appropriate anti-Muslim comments by just about every site in the Islamophobic echo chamber.
Robert Spencer posted the “story” from Bikyamasr on Jihad Watch and included in his lede “It’s all about controlling women, like so many aspects of Islamic law. Sharia Alert from Eurabia”.
The always ladylike Pamela Geller posted this on Atlas Shrugs under the heading No cucumbers or bananas for you, slut! and included in the lede “Obama say, “Respect it!” Jay Leno’s wife Mavis say, “The Qur’an is more liberal with women than the Bible.” Geller say, “One banana split, please, and a side of cukes, with extra whipped creme, thankyouverymuch.”
Weazel Zippers simply posted the article with no lede, but the comments their readers posted in response are truly hateful. For example: — ALL of Islam is a plague, a disease of the mind and soul. — Folks there is going to be a war—-I mean a real war where winner takes all and these animals will gladly die for their cause so we better get ready to do the same…..and I don’t ever again want to hear the term moderate muslim….my reply to that is show me one—just one.
You get the idea about the response to this article, and that response is not to a particular unknown shaikh, but to all Muslims. Perhaps the author of the article and the Egyptian site that posted it are unaware that there is a problem with Islamophobia out there.
Why would anyone post an article about an unnamed person residing somewhere in one of the 47 countries of Europe who had supposedly issued a stupid fatwa without any corroborating evidence that this was even true. What is the point of raising this issue in such a thoughtless way? This is not a satirical article making fun of the stupidity involved in such a fatwa. This is not an article that provides concrete facts about the author of the fatwa, or that provides any counter arguments. There are no facts here that others could use to counter the fatwa, or to make a judgement about the author.
Whatever the reason that Bikyamasr had for posting this bit of unsubstantiated nonsense, the only effect it has had was to give the Islamophobes yet another item to use for years to come to bash Muslims. This article was not just irresponsible, it was as stupid as the supposed fatwa would be if it in fact exists.
I would like to see either a clarification of the article with actual information about the supposed fatwa and its supposed author (that can be verified), or an apology for engaging in reckless speculation and passing on of rumors.
It’s not as if we don’t have enough actual members of the Muslim lunatic fringe that need to be countered, that we need to make them up.
UPDATE 12/10/2011
I received an email from the Founder and Editor of Bikyamasr:
Thank you for your email. I am Joseph Mayton, the Editor and Founder of Bikyamasr.com. I would like to bring your attention to the corrected version of the article, which now has the appropriate name of the publication where the information first appeared in Arabic, with a link.
We take full responsibility for this error and have stated so on the article. It is unfortunate that it has been taken out of context, but we feel that by talking about the anger it initially sparked was properly done. At the end, these places are going to take any little bit of information for their own purposes. It is sad.
I hope you will understand that we do our utmost to source anything from a third party, as any other news website would.
If you have any other questions, or would like to interview me, or our staff, please let us know.
Thank you very much for the email, Joseph
The article now lists the source of this “fatwa” as el-Sawsana news and the link takes you to a site that is only in Arabic. I don’t speak Arabic, so am unable to make out what the original article of this “news” item might have been.
I received a second email from Joseph Mayton asking me to check out a follow up article that they have now posted Cucumber sheikh “far from the truth,” says Egypt Islamic leader. This new article quotes Sheikh Gaber Taye’ Youssef, identified as “An Islamic scholar and chairman at Egypt’s Religious Endowments Ministry said this sheikh could not be more “far from the truth.” … He expressed serious doubts that the sheikh sourced is even qualified for his position. “Nonesense and wrong, such talk is empty of any logic or sense and has no roots or relations with Islam or its belief system,” said Youssef when Bikyamasr.com interviewed him over the phone early on Saturday.
Sheikh Youssef’s opinion is exactly what any mainstream Muslim already knew.
The following is a guest post for Sami H. Elmansoury.
As one proud American, I have frankly reached my pinnacle in the near-tacit acceptance of the rising tide of fear-mongering by un-American groups that are once again washing in the most heinous types of bigotry across our great nation. My now aging American grandfather proudly came to the United States in the late 1960s at the heels of war to seek liberty and freedom — things that he deeply cherishes until today. But his occupational purpose in being brought here was to help ensure that the United States beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race, by rocketing Neil Armstrong to the moon, as a brilliant engineer with NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. He was a patriot then, and he is a patriot now. And his love for country throughout the years has consistently fueled my own.
So as I learned of the success this past week of these fear-mongering groups in coercing our American companies [like Lowes] into taking bigoted stands [by withdrawing advertising from TLC's "All-American Muslim], I helped to create this petition in order to say “enough is enough” and to bring back some sanity to our national conversation. And what a remarkable day yesterday became. In just hours, we collected nearly 3,000 signatures — which will continue into next week — from Americans of ALL walks of life.
We have gained the stellar support of Congresspersons and Air Force personnel; we have had unsolicited outreach from conscientious leaders and citizens across our country, we have further isolated the bigots, and we have seen media presence from well-known activists such as Russell Simmons, who has pledged that his support and that of other influential figures will only increase in the coming days. We have even seen an apology - albeit one that lacked any reversal of the bigotry – from the Lowe’s corporate office.
As the petition states, “It is these same critics who have often touted the question: ‘Where are the mainstream Muslims?’” So when a television station seeks to portrays just that, one would think that these critics would have celebrated the effort, rather than have condemned it. Yet their reactions left no more proof necessary of their actual, bigoted, money-driven, and self-interested intentions as the most dangerous thing for many who oppose this show out of personal bigotry or out of egregious self-interest is to see a far-reaching portrayal of the reality and truth of average American Muslims: That they are human, are prone to normalcy, cherish liberty, and are working for the best interests of their respective communities. And that “danger” is the reasonable human being’s victory.
So if there was ever a moment to say “enough” to those who continuously question how “American” you, I, or your neighbor are – I believe that this can be it. Now is the time to throw un-American, hate-mongering bigotry back into the hole from which it disturbingly emerges every few decades. We are all in this together as Americans — whether we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist – whomever we are, and whatever belief system we espouse. And, while we must strive to protect the homeland, together, we are one country. Personally, I will continue to work throughout my life to see that we remain that way.
This petition and the surrounding activism are only the beginning of an end, God willing, to this continuing absurdity. The next step will be upon our leaders, upon our politicians, upon our media, and upon all of us who continue to seek peaceful coexistence and American unity, to take back the microphone — and to put the bigots on notice.
For the outpouring of support seen yesterday, and for every day that I have lived on this Earth, I say God bless the only homeland that I have known — and God protect its freedoms and its values, for both our children, and for theirs.
To learn more about the petition protesting the advertising boycott against “All-American Muslim,” click here. To sign the petition, click here. [link fixed]
Sami H. Elmansoury serves Immigrant Rights Task Force for the Office of the Borough President of Manhattan and as an invited member of the Generation Change initiative for the United States Department of State.
The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t a top tourist destination for most Americans.
Iran is portrayed in the Western media as a country run by fanatical, bloodthirsty Mullahs, ruling in concert with the often outrageous President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As for the Iranian people, angry mobs are often shown in the streets, burning American flags and shouting “Death to America!”
No wonder it is easy to convince Americans that Iranians are consumed by hatred and eager to reduce American cities to rubble. Yet Americans brave enough to visit Iran quickly discover Iranians are a friendly, gracious people. They love Americans, and they are not bashful about sharing their affection. Tourists from California said they were amazed by their experience:
“We were besieged, mobbed almost, by whole classrooms of up to 50 or 60 individuals who would come up to us and smother us with hugs and kisses,” reports Caroleen Williams, of Coronado. “‘Are you Americans?’ they asked. ‘We love Americans.’ Women walking down the sidewalks in full black burqas would wave to us and tap their hearts.”
In fact, Williams says they were repeatedly urged to take home a message: “Tell all Americans we love them.”
The experience is not unusual. An American Rabbi who visited Iran described a similar experience in his blog. He concluded that Iran is misunderstood by Americans, and especially by American Jews, many of whom are convinced the Iranians harbor a special hatred for them:
The most essential thing I’ve learned is in some ways the most basic: Iran is a beautiful country with a venerable history and wonderful, gracious people. It is also a powerfully complicated country, marked by a myriad of cultural/political/religious/historical layers. I am now more convinced than ever that we in the West harbor egregiously stereotypical assumptions about this country – and that we harbor them at our mutual peril. ~ Rabbi Shalom Rav
A journalist from the Christian Science Monitor confirmed that the affection Iranians have for Americans is not confined to secular liberals:
After speaking with numerous Iranians from all walks of life – lower and upper class, religious and secular, Westernized and traditional, government- affiliated and civilian – I became convinced that this vilified member of the ‘Axis of Evil‘ is actually one of the most welcoming places for Americans to travel in the Middle East. Indeed, all Iranians with whom I spoke shared a positive opinion of Ameri-cans.
Iranian admiration for America is not a new phenomenon. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks more than a decade ago, Iranians held spontaneous candlelight vigils, mourning, praying for the victims, and expressing solidarity with the American people.
The New York Times reported that an opinion poll showed 74% of Iranians want to renew relations and start a dialogue with the US. Iranian authorities were so incensed by the results, they arrested the pollster. The regime has always capitalized on legitimate grievances against Western foreign policy to rally Iranians against America, but many Iranians are no longer listening.
Refusing anti-Americanism is one way to swipe at the hated regime. Iran has an overwhelmingly young, vibrant population fed up with the oppressive theocracy that began more than three decades ago when the late Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies established the system of Vilayat-i-Faqih, “Rule of the Jurist”.
In some ways Iranians are more American than Americans themselves, because Iranians truly cherish liberty and have struggled for over 100 years to be free. ~ Iranians love America – But – Americans Hate Iran
Paradoxically, the US is largely responsible for setting back Iranian democracy and self-rule by decades. In 1953, the US and Britain overthrew Iran’s democracy, imposed the tyrannical Shah of Iran as the new leader, and divided up the country’s oil wealth among themselves. The operation was not a secret, and is chronicled in mainstream sources here, here, and here.
American Protester
In 1979, the Iranian people deposed the Shah. Later that same year, rumors circulated that the US was poised to retake the Iranian government, and the infamous Iranian Hostage Crisis ensued.
In the wake of the crisis, the late Ayatollah Khomeini dubbed America the Great Satan, a term that has been co-opted ever since by Islamophobes determined to portray Iranian leaders as hateful and irrational. The Iranian Hostage Crisis enraged Americans, and spawned Iranophobia, a special strain of fear and hatred that has never entirely faded from public memory.
Apparently emboldened by the dispute, Saddam Hussein subsequently waged war on Iran. The US supported and armed Saddam Hussein, who was an ally at the time. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed during the Iran-Iraq War.
In the years since, US policy has remained aggressive and hypocritical in the eyes of many Iranians, and for good reason. Sanctions hurt the people of Iran and do little to weaken the regime, and frequent saber rattling by the US and Israel is unsettling:
When Iranians burn the American flag in street demonstrations – they are NOT showing hatred toward Americans; they are in fact pointing out the the U.S. government has and is continuing to try to destroy Iran and Iranians.
Who is the U.S. government fooling? Maybe Americans – but not Iranians. We know the truth and understand fully the harm that is being imposed on Iran – every single day.
As much as Iranians despise their current regime and adore Americans on a personal level, they are united in the opposition to foreign intervention.If the US attacks Iran, Iranians will rally around the flag. As the aforementioned article in the New York Times states:
Left to its own devices, the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad. The ayatollahs’ best hope is that hard-liners in Washington will continue their inept diplomacy, creating a wave of Iranian nationalism that bolsters the regime — as happened to a lesser degree after President Bush put Iran in the axis of evil.
Like the people of Iran, most Americans support diplomacy and are opposed to war. While it’s true that most Americans don’t reciprocate the love Iranians feel for them, it is largely because they glimpse into Iranian society exclusively through the corporate media.
Hardliners on both sides fan the flames of hatred and mutual distrust because it serves their nefarious agendas. The interests of the people lie in recognizing each others’ common humanity.
Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich has stirred controversy by calling the Palestinians an “invented” people who could have chosen to live elsewhere.
The former House of Representatives speaker, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race, made the remarks in an interview with the US Jewish Channel broadcaster released on Friday.
Asked whether he considers himself a Zionist, he answered: “I believe that the Jewish people have the right to a state … Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire” until the early 20th century,
“I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab
community.
“And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it’s tragic.”
Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.
Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the
then-British ruled territory of Palestine which Arabs rejected.
More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their lands by Zionist armed groups in 1948, in an episode Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or “catastrophe”.
‘Irrational hostility’
Gingrich’s comments drew a swift rebuke from a spokesman for the American Task Force on Palestine, Hussein Ibish, who said: “There was no Israel and no such thing as an “Israeli people” before 1948.
“So the idea that Palestinians are ‘an invented people’ while Israelis somehow are not is historically indefensible and inaccurate.
“Such statements seem to merely reflect deep historical ignorance and an irrational hostility towards Palestinian identity and nationalism.”
Sabri Saidam, adviser to the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera, “This is a manifestation of extreme racism and this is a reflection of where America stands sad, when Palestinians don’t get their rights…this is sad and America should respond with a firm reaction to such comments that, if let go, more of which will come our way,”
“Let me ask Newt Gingrich if he would ever entertain the thought of addressing Indian Americans by saying that they never existed, that they were the invention of a separate nation, would that be tolerated?”
“Let’s also reverse the statement; let’s put ourselves in “the shoe of Jews who are listening now. Would they ever accept such statements being made about them?”
Saidam said, “I think it’s time that America rejects such statements and closes the door to such horrendous and unacceptable statements.”
Gingrich also sharply criticised US President Barack Obama’s approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying that it was ”so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit.”
He said Obama’s effort to treat the Palestinians the same as the Israelis is actually “favouring the terrorists”.
“If I’m even-handed between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day, that’s not even-handed, that’s favouring the terrorists,” he said.
He also said the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, share an “enormous desire to destroy Israel”.
The Palestinian Authority, which rules the occupied West Bank, formally recognises Israel’s right to exist.
President Mahmoud Abbas has long forsworn violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the UN.
Gingrich, along with other Republican candidates, are seeking to attract Jewish in the US support by vowing to bolster Washington’s ties with Israel if elected.
He declared his world view was “pretty close” to that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and vowed to take “a much more tougher-minded, and much more honest approach to the Middle East” if elected.
There are other instances of such stupidity, (just check out our archives) but one has reared its ugly head anew and this one can’t be so easily laughed off. Far right Christians and anti-Muslim bigots hate a new show on TLC called All American Muslim. According to them it humanizes Muslims, and we can’t have that! Robert Spencer for instance wanted to see a “terrorist Muslim family” included.
Supporters’ emails to advertisers make a difference.Florida Family Association sent out a third email alert on December 6th which reported The Learning Channel’s new program called All-American Muslim. All-American Muslim is propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values. The email alert encouraged supporters to send emails to the companies (including Lowes) that advertised during the December 4th and 5th episodes.
Lowes sent the following email to Florida Family Association stating that All-American Muslim “does not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines.” If you have not sent your email to All-American Muslim advertisers click here.
—– Original Message —–
From: Andrew
To:davidcaton@floridafamily.org
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 12:57 PM
Subject: RE: Lowe’s Home Centers, Inc. advertised during All-American Muslim
Hello David,
Thank you for contacting Lowe’s. We work hard to listen to our customers and respond to their concerns. Lowe’s has strict guidelines that govern the placement of our advertising. Our company advertises primarily in national, network prime-time television programs and on a variety of cable outlets. Lowe’s constantly reviews advertising buys to make certain they are consistent with its policy guidelines.
While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program.
Our goal is to provide the best service, products and shopping environment in the home improvement industry. We appreciate your feedback and will share your comments with our advertising department as they evaluate future advertising opportunities.
If I can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to call 1-866-900-4650, or email execustservice@lowes.com. You may also contact us by mailing your correspondence to Lowe’s Companies, Mail Code CON8, 1605 Curtis Bridge Rd., Wilkesboro, North Carolina 28697.
Here is a list of companies that they claim to have succeeded in convincing to cancel their advertising based on this bigoted, hateful, anti-Muslim reasoning:
3M (Command, Scotchbrand tape),
Airborne Vitamin,
Amway,
Anheuser Busch Inbev (Select55),
Art Instruction Schools,
Bamboozles,
Bank of America (Cash Rewards),
Bare Escentuals,
Brother International (Ptouch),
Campbell’s Soup,
Capital One,
Church & Dwight (Oxi Clean, Arm & Hammer),
City Furniture,
Conagra (Hunt’s Diced Tomatoes),
Corinthian Colleges (Everst411),
Cotton, Inc.,
Cumberland Packing (Sweet’N Low),
Dell computers,
Diamond Foods (Kettlebrand Chips),
Estee Lauder (Clinique),
ET Browe (Palmer’s Cocoa butter),
Gap,
General Motors (Chevy Runs Deep),
Good Year,
Green Mountain Coffee,
Guthy Renker (Proactiv),
Hershey kisses,
Home Depot,
Honda North America,
HTC Phones,
Ikea,
JC Penney,
JP Morgan Chase (Chase Sapphire),
Kayak.com, Kellogg (Special K),
Koa Brands (John Frieda),
Leapfrog Enterprise (Leapster Explorer),
Lowe’s
Mars (Dove Chocolate),
McDonald’s,
Nationwide Insurance,
News Corp (We bought a zoo movie),
Nintendo (Mariokartz.com),
Novartis (Theraflu),
Old Navy,
Pernod Ricard (Kahlua),
Petsmart,
Pier One,
Pfizer (Centrum vitamin),
Procter & Gamble (Align Probiotic, Crest, Febreze, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Pur, Tide),
Progressive Insurance,
Prudential Financial,
Radio Shack,
Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse,
SC Johnson (Drano, Glade, Scrubbing Bubbles),
Sears ,
Signet (Kay Jewelers),
Sonic Drive-ins,
Subaru, T
HQ (uDraw),
T-Mobil,
Toyota (Camry),
Volkswagen,
Vtech (Mobi Go, V Reader),
Wal-Mart
Whirlpool (Maytag)
Did this program not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines because it showed a Muslim policeman who self-identifies as an American? Was it because Muslims and Arabs were not portrayed as evil villains who are not “real Americans” and have no right to act as if they are normal human beings with families, mortgages, jobs, etc. From here it looks like the MuslimPhobes are winning the undermine anything Islamic and Muslim as evil PR war.
In another seeming blow to the propaganda pushed by right-wing Islamophobes that all terrorism resides within Islam and is committed by Muslims, news of a letter bomb sent to the chief executive of Deutsche Bank (hat tip:JD):
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – An Italian anarchist group has claimed responsibility for a letter bomb sent to Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, and may have sent two more packages, investigators said on Thursday.
The suspicious envelope, intercepted on Wednesday evening, has raised fears that a wave of protests against the failures and excesses of bankers could turn more violent, and prompted police across Europe to warn banks to be extra vigilant.
Ackermann, 63, a Swiss who is the first non-German to headGermany’s biggest bank, is one of the few senior managers in the country always surrounded by bodyguards.
A hidden, rolled-up letter written in Italian from the Federazione Anarchica Informale (the Informal Anarchist Group, or FAI) spoke of “three explosions against bankers, banks, fleas and bloodsuckers,” the German investigators said.
“So it must be deduced from this that two more letter bombs may have been sent,” the Criminal Investigations Office for the state of Hesse and Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement.
Earlier they said initial tests had shown the letter bomb sent to Ackermann was operational.
The FAI previously claimed responsibility for a parcel bomb that injured two people in the offices of the Swiss nuclear lobby group in March, as well as for parcel bombs sent to the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome last year.
The group also claimed to be behind a letter bomb sent to theEuropean Central Bank, also based in Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt, in 2003.
A United States official told Reuters FBI agents in Germany were in touch with German authorities about the investigation, but that the FBI was not aware of any specific or related threat to New York.
Security has been stepped up at Deutsche Bank offices around the world, banking sources said. One insider said the number of threats against Ackermann had increased in recent months and his security would be tightened, though there were no plans to cancel public appearances.
SECURITY CHECKS
One banking source said that since 2006 every item of mail sent to members of Deutsche Bank’s executive committee was put through a security check.
“We are deeply affected by the violent assault on our CEO Josef Ackermann,” a spokesman for Deutsche Bank said. Employees heading to work, however, said they did not feel threatened.
“There are always people who think a solution would be to make someone pay, but as an employee, I do not feel threatened,” Stefan Popp told Reuters Television.
European leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday to try to agree on a way out of a sovereign debt crisis that has triggered a wave of government austerity measures and caused Germans to fret they may have to foot the bill.
Some experts said the euro zone debt crisis could have prompted the attempted attack.
A letter bomb sent to Chancellor Angela Merkel last year originated in Greece and is thought to have been linked to an anarchist group reacting to the extreme austerity measures.
Earlier, Frankfurt’s offshoot of the Occupy protest movement, which is critical of banks and has been staging protests in New York, Washington, London and many other cities, denied any connection with the attempted attack.
“We condemn any action that is linked to violence,” said Frank Stegmaier, an activist in the Occupy Frankfurt group, which has been camping outside the ECB since mid-October.
“Occupy has other ways of protesting,” he added.
“SYMBOLIC TARGET”
Before the FAI claim of responsibility, security experts had speculated about the possible involvement of the anti-capitalist movement in Germany which has been gaining momentum, as seen by a number of arson attacks on the Berlin rail network earlier this year.
“I don’t think a sustained campaign against business or even banking leaders is likely in Germany. Ackermann is a highly symbolic target, who has personal security wherever he goes,” said David Lea, a senior analyst for Europe at Control Risks.
Ackermann is the highest-paid chief executive of a German blue-chip company, earning 9 million euros ($12 million) in 2010. He is chairman of the Institute of International Finance, the bank lobbying group negotiating a private-sector contribution toward a multi-billion euro bailout of Greece.
Due to retire as chief executive in May after more than 10 years at the head of Deutsche, he is credited with transforming the bank into a “global champion,” and has become associated with Wall Street-style bonuses and a shareholder-driven management style.
A previous Deutsche Bank head, Alfred Herrhausen, was murdered in 1989 by leftist Red Army Faction guerrillas who blew up his car.
(Additional reporting by Sabine Wollrab, Edward Taylor, Philipp Halstrick, Reuters TV and Harry Papachristou in Athens, William Maclean in London; Writing by Madeline Chambers and Gareth Jones in Berlin, Editing by Rosalind Russell)
The revolutions in the Arab world are continuing, revolutions don’t succeed over night and the eventual shape Tunisia and Egypt will take is still to be seen. Yet the talking points on the anti-Muslim right have solidified, aside from mocking and being amongst the earliest naysayers of the revolutions they have since taken to calling it an “Arab winter,” and an extremist Islamist takeover akin to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, etc.
One nation in the region, Israel has been amongst the foremost in propagating the idea that these revolutions are the beginning of some sort of diabolical sweeping fundamentalism.
In that vein, we see the vice-president of Israel, Silvan Shalom calling on Tunisian Jews to make “aliyah” (immigrate) to Israel. Most Tunisian Jews it seems are responding by telling the VP to go to hell (hat tip: Atheist Arab):
Some members of Tunisia’s small Jewish community have responded after Israeli Vice-Prime Minister Silvan Shalom made another call on the Tunisian Jewish community to immigrate to Israel, this time in a Jerusalem ceremony in honor of Tunisian victims of the holocaust on December 7th.
According to the Tunisian news site “Business News” the Gabes, Tunisia born Israeli Vice-Prime Minister said, “I call on the Jews living in Tunisia to come and live in Israel as soon as possible.” But getting the nearly 1,800 strong Tunisian Jewish community to “make aliyah” or immigrate to Israel may not be an easy task for Shalom for now.
The owner of La Goulette’s Kosher restaurant, Mame Lilly, and former Constituent Assembly candidate Jacob Lellouche insisted that to him, Shalom’s comments were shallow. “Silvan can say whatever he wants. I am Tunisian, this is my country. I will stay here. Silvan can not tell me where to live.”
He added that the only fear he had of the Islamists currently in Tunisia’s government was that they would not succeed in improving Tunisia’s situation. “I fear for Islamists that god will turn against them,” he joked with a tint of sarcasm.
Avraham Chiche, is the director of the Jewish Old Age home in La Goulette. His family immigrated to Tunisia over 500 years ago from Spain during the Spanish inquisition. Chiche feels that Shalom’s comments have been political and he has no plans to leave Tunisia.
Silvan Shalom
“Silvan Shalom needs to mind his own business and let us choose to live where we want to live, instead of making publicity statements for Israel,” said Chiche.
“We fear the small number of Salafists in Tunisia, but not Ennahda, the leadership of Ennahda came to us both before and after the election and assured us that our community will remain a vital part of Tunisian society while they are in government,” Chiche added.
Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist Ennahda party currently holding a plurality of seats in Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly, the elected body charged with drafting the country’s new constitution echoed Chiche’s sentiment in an extensive radio interview in Arabic on a local station, Shems FM, the afternoon of December 8th. “Jews and Muslims have been living and working together peacefully here for thousands of years, why should we ask them to leave?” he stated when asked his thoughts on Shalom’s comments.
“I invited the President of the Jewish Community, Mr. Roger Bismuth to meet with me at the Ennahda Party headquarters shorty after the election and we had a very good conversation,” Ghannouchi added.
When asked specifically what he thought about the future prospects of Tunisian-Israeli relations, Ghannounchi made his usual condemnations of the Israeli government, but said domestic policy was his main concern. “Isreal is an occupying state, I condemn Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinians but right now we have a constitution to draft and the country I am concerned most about is Tunisia,” Ghannouchi said.
Others contacted in the Jewish community refrained from comment.
A Djerba based silversmith who asked not to be named, said that it was best for him not to respond to Shalom’s comments. Like many other Tunisians he is hoping that Tunisia’s democratic transition succeeds.
“It is best I not respond to Shalom because whatever I say can be misunderstood or distorted by people both here and in Israel. I obviously have not taken these calls seriously, they have been made by Shalom before. I prefer to be vigilant, and patient with this new government to see if the democratic transition will be successful instead of listening to the provocations of Shalom.”
One of the men accused of setting fire to a Stoke-on-Trent mosque was a member of the British National Party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL).
Simon Beech was a serving soldier with the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment, based at Weeton Barracks near Preston, Lancashire, when he is alleged to have set fire to the City Central Mosque in Regent Road, Hanley, in the early hours of December 3 last year.
He is accused of entering the mosque, which was still under construction, with his co-accused Garreth Foster. The Crown Prosecution Service allege the pair were responsible for starting a blaze on the ground floor and feeding a gas pipe upstairs, from a neighbouring property.
Beech, of Hilton Road, Hartshill, and Foster, aged 28, of Hartshill Road, Stoke, deny arson.
Yesterday at their trial at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court the jury heard Beech, aged 23, subscribed to Facebook and the EDL.
Peter McMaster, an intelligence researcher with Staffordshire Police, said on November 10, less than a month before the arson, Beech posted comments including “Let’s start bashing skulls, dirty, rotten rodents, they breed like rats here, they need to die like rats” and “I say we need to start taking things into our own hands because they are running the place”.
The next day he posted “Get as many heads as we can, go and smash some skull and take over Shelton”.
And Beech said he “liked” a comment someone else posted – “Nuke all mosques”. He also posted comments including “Time we took things into our hands,” and “I say we put a stop to it before it’s too late.”
Also on November 11, Beech said: “The time has come we burn their place, burn the lot of them.”
We’ve taken on the issue of Honour Killings in the past and exposed the hypocrisy and double standards of the anti-Muslim brigades who seem to think it is a “Muslim only” problem. The piece below eviscerate a recent smear by the likes of Robert Spencer and his echo chamber in the Islamophobe-sphere that was making the rounds, claiming that there was an “alarming rise of ‘Muslim honour attacks in the UK.”
Media coverage of the police figures for so-called “honour” crimes in the UK, revealed by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation in association with the Guardian, was generally fairly balanced, avoiding the Islamophobic stereotyping of the Muslim community that you might have anticipated. Even the Daily Star managed to report the issue without blaming Muslims.
The exception was the Daily Mail, which headlined its report “Alarming rise of Muslim ‘honour attacks’ in the UK”. This irresponsible accusation against British Muslims was predictably endorsed by Robert Spencer atJihad Watch (“The Daily Mail headline goes straight for the elephant in the room: this is largely a phenomenon within Muslim communities in Britain”), while his friend Pamela Geller of course agreed (“As Muslim immigration increases, so does sharia, misogyny and gendercide”).
The ignorance and bigotry underpinning such views hardly need underlining. As a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told the Mail: “Honour-based violence cuts across all cultures, nationalities and faith groups – it is a worldwide problem.” Honour attacks are a problem in Hindu-majority India, for example, but are not evident in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. Even contributors to a discussion thread on the Mail‘s own website were able to make the obvious point that honour-based violence is a cultural rather than a religious phenomenon.
It was notable that the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation itself made no claim that Muslims were mainly or disproportionately responsible for honour crimes in the UK. This was by no means because IKWRO suffers from over-sensitivity towards Muslims and their faith. It is a hardline secularist organisation that lines up with the Islamophobic right on a number of issues – supporting the French ban on the veil, for example, andbacking the anti-sharia bill tabled by Geert Wilders’ ally Baroness Cox. But IKWRO is sufficiently familiar with the situation on the ground to know it makes no sense to depict honour attacks as a specifically Muslim problem.
There are no official figures for honour crimes in the UK broken down according to the faith of the victims and perpetrators. However, IKWRO director Diana Nammi has been quoted as saying that honour-based murders in the UK occur mostly in the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities, with Muslims responsible for around two-thirds of these crimes. Based on the last available census, the total Muslim-Hindu-Sikh population of the UK is 2,485,000, of whom 1,591,000 are Muslims – 64% of the total. Which would indicate that Muslims are no more likely to carry out such murders than Hindus or Sikhs are.
You might think that all of this was pretty obvious, and that nobody with half a brain or a shred of intellectual honesty would buy the Islamophobic myth that Muslim communities are inspired by their faith to commit acts of violence against young women. You should try reading a piece posted by Robin Shepherd on his website The Commentator. Entitled “BBC reveals huge scale of honour attacks in Britain, fails to mention the word ‘Islam’”, this poisonous article is worth quoting at length, in order to convey how deeply unpleasant it is:
The families giving the orders, as well as the victims, are in all, or almost all, cases Muslim. Surprised? No, of course you’re not. Honour attacks ranging in brutality from beatings to murder are commonplace in many parts of the Muslim world.
Since Britain, like many other European countries, has imported sizeable Muslim communities, which are to a significant degree unassimilated, the cultural practices of the old country have survived the transition to the new….
Enter the BBC, which reported on the matter in a lengthy, 700-plus word article and failed to mention the words “Muslim”, “Islamic” or “Islam” even once.
As I write this I am flicking back to the story itself so I can double check using the Find function. Could I be mistaken?
This is how societies go down: when matters of the profoundest significance to their character, and potentially their very existence, have been rendered undiscussable by the people that set the terms of public debate.
Clearly the people who wrote and edited that story should be dismissed.
They won’t be of course because the mind-numbing, multiculturalist narrative that demanded censorship of the salient evidence is effectively institutionalised as the dominant narrative across the BBC as well as the wider liberal establishment.
So be it. Go ahead and have a conversation about deep-seated problems inside the fastest growing demographic group in Europe without mentioning what that group is. The quality of your discussion will be moronic. But you reap what you sow.
Shepherd goes on to berate Sky News and the Daily Telegraph, not generally known as warm supporters of the UK’s Muslim community, for following the BBC in its “politically correct” suppression of the supposed link between Islam and honour crimes.
This is the kind of foam-flecked rant you might expect to read on some extreme “counterjihadist” blog of the sort that inspired Anders Breivik. But Shepherd is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, which is advertised as a sponsor of The Commentator site. Nor is Shepherd the only raving anti-Muslim bigot to hold a prominent position in the HJS. Douglas Murray(“Why is it that time and again the liberal West is crumpling before the violence, intimidation and thuggery of Islam? … All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”) is anAssociate Director of the organisation.
Yet the Henry Jackson Society serves as the secretariat for two All-Party Parliamentary Groups – on Homeland Security andTransatlantic & International Security. The former’s objective is to “provide parliamentarians with up-to-date information and analysis on homeland security and national resilience issues”, while the latter provides the same service in connection with “international security issues, global defence concerns, international incidents and the efforts being made to comment and react to them in Britain and abroad”.
Do MPs and peers really think it appropriate that an organisation like the HJS should hold the position of secretariat to officially recognised parliamentary groups which seek to influence government policy on domestic and international security issues? Andrew Gilligan, Paul Goodman and the Jewish Chronicle waged a vicious campaign to remove ENGAGE as the secretariat to the APPG on Islamophobia, falsely accusing them of political extremism and antisemitism. But Gilligan, Goodman and the JChave nothing to say about the parliamentary role of an organisation headed by real extremist bigots like Robin Shepherd and Douglas Murray.
The Hindustan Times reports that a Sikh individual was stabbed in an unprovoked attack at Fresno Yosemite International Airport in California. A hate crime is suspected. It is very common for anti-Muslim bigots to confuse Sikhs, who wear conspicuous turbans, for Muslims–a confusion that is symbolically representative of the profound ignorance that underlies Islamophobia.
A Sikh man waiting for a plane at Fresno Yosemite International Airport has been stabbed in a seemingly unprovoked attack, police said. The victim was treated at the airport and boarded his flight bound for India. Fresno police said Mitchell Dufur, 26, stabbed the Sikh man in his 50s in the upper torso Sunday evening in the security area. No words were exchanged before the attack. The man was standing with his translator when the attack occurred.
Dufur was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and possession of a knife in an airport.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Monday urged the FBI and police to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
“Sikh men who wear beards and turbans as part of their faith are often targeted by bigots who mistake them for Muslims,” said Sacramento CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra.
Gina Swankie in the Sacramento FBI office said her office was having “a dialogue with the group,” but would not confirm whether they had opened an investigation.
Police Lt Don Gross said investigators have not determined whether it was a hate crime because Dufur has refused to talk to police about his motive.
Two elderly men were earlier gunned down in Sacramento on March 4 while walking through a neighbourhood in Elk Grove.
Update I:
Ahmed Rehab tweeted about a second stabbing, another possible hate crime. Rehab tweeted:
An Indian American Law professor at #UIUC (unconfirmed) stabbed at train station by a man yelling “This is MY country”
The story is still unfolding, but is being reported here:
A faculty member from the College of Law was stabbed Wednesday on the second floor of the Illinois Terminal Building at 5:44 a.m. Wednesday.
According to the report, officers found Joshua Scaggs, 23, and the 41-year-old victim, a professor at the University.
The suspect was lying on the floor face-down near a utility knife, and the victim was sitting in a chair bleeding profusely.
“One of our faculty members was involved in that incident,” said John Colombo, assistant dean at the College of Law. “I can’t confirm (the name) to anyone outside of the College of Law community.”
Police took Scaggs into custody. A witness said Scaggs and the victim were seated in the waiting area when Scaggs suddenly jumped up and shouted that this was his country. He then attacked the victim, who is a non-white male.
Scaggs grabbed the victim around the neck and appeared to be choking him. He then forced the victim to the floor. The witness then pulled the suspect off of the male.
Scaggs was issued a $500,000 bond Thursday, according to the Champaign County Clerk’s office.
The 41-year-old victim, of Champaign, was transported to the Carle Hospital emergency room. Scaggs was later arrested on charges of attempted murder and a hate crime and transported to the Champaign County Satellite Jail.
Can you imagine if two Christian or Jewish-Americans were stabbed by Muslims in separate incidents? What do you think the reaction of the media would have been?
The New Zeland press has been covering the political philosophy of Richard Prosser, one of the eight New Zealand First candidates elected to parliament in the recent elections.
In addition to bringing back military service and arming taxi drivers (“His views sound like those of a redneck to me”, the director of the Taxi Federation responds) Prosser proposes a ban on the “burqa”.
His message to veiled Muslim women is: ”This is my culture and my country, not yours. Get some respect and conform.”
Rep. Peter King, an avowed supporter of the Irish terrorist organization, the IRA during the 80′s and 90′s held his fourth hearing targeting American Muslims along with Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has had thirteen such hearings. King is known for his animus toward Muslims, in the recent past he has said that , “there are too many mosques in the US,” that “80-85% of mosques are controlled by extremists,” and that “85 percent of American Muslim community leaders are an enemy living amongst us.”
These hearings are not only divisive in that they single out a particular group, they have been lambasted for not covering the spectrum of threats faced by this country (especially by the Right-wing), while at the same time inflating and exaggerating “homegrown terrorism” and “radicalization” from Muslims. The utilitarian argument has been employed to highlight that not only are these hearings uninterested in a real problem or a real solution, they are wasting valuable time and tax-payer money. Recently, we published a piece highlighting the findings of Prof. Risa A. Brooks’s study, empirically and definitively proving that “homegrown terrorism is not a serious threat;” a conclusion echoed by others such as Charles Kurzman and Duke University.
So continued the charade this morning; Washington D.C. political theater at its finest or rather ugliest. The populist fear-mongering focused its eye on the “Muslim American threat” within, and to, our military.
We heard about Nidal Hasan and other attacks, but we didn’t hear about the main reason that these lone-wolfs are created: our foreign policy of bombing, invading and occupying Muslim majority nations. The Congress’ time would be better spent if they debated the ramifications of foreign policy rather than broadly generalizing a whole category of people as a possible “fifth column.”
One quite revealing episode was when Rep. Lungren asked the assistant secretary of Defense for the Department of Homeland Defense, “Is having ‘soldier of Allah’ on your card a behavioral indicator that would alert military leaders that there is a threat from a soldier?”
I wonder if Rep. Lungren would likewise ask if having “soldier of Jesus, or soldier of Yahweh, or soldier of Ram” on one’s card is a behavioral indicator worthy to raise red alerts? Certainly the unstable nature of Nidal Hasan, his rambling presentations were more of an indicator than “soldier of Allah?” This however gives one insight into the double standards and maligning of Islam/Muslims inherent in the thought process of individuals such as Rep. Lungren.
In what seemed the most common sense portion of the hearings, Rep. Laura Richardson (definitely one of the anti-loons of the year), asked “Is there a threat to military communities limited to Islamic extremists, yes or no?”
All three of those giving testimony answered “no” to the question. Lt. Col Sawyer answered that they have also seen a “proliferation of other movements outside the Islamic faith,” and then he mentioned how members have been targeted by “Christian movements and Identity movements.”
Rep. Richardson followed by saying that it has been mentioned that skinheads and White extremists were a threat in the 90′s, and asked if the panelists would consider them to no longer be a threat? All answered “no.”
She then went on to state that the reason she is asking those questions is because the topic today is “Homegrown terrorism: the threat to military communities inside the United States, it doesn’t say Islamic anywhere in here.” A crucial point considering that the actual hearing wasn’t as broad as the language would imply, and instead was solely focused on the “radical Islamic homegrown threat.”
For some much needed perspective on today’s hearings watch this “elbow from the sky” from Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks:
Anonymous vandals hurled a burning tire at the entrance of a mosque in Brukin, a village south-east of Qalqilyah. They also spray painted the walls and smashed the windshields of two nearby vehicles. The police have launched an investigation into the suspected hate crime.
The IDF said in response: “The IDF and Defense Ministry are working to locate those responsible and take incidents in which property is damaged very seriously, especially in the case of holy sites.” (Yoav Zitun and Omri Efraim)
So the IDF is “working to locate those responsible?” Well, maybe they should look at their own ranks, as three Israeli soldiers were recently arrested for partaking in “price tag” attacks.
The former IRA Terrorist supporter, Peter King is holding his fourth hearing on “Muslim-American Radicalization,” this time focusing on the “military.” Expect it to be an Islamophobiapalooza.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is hoping his panel’s hearing on the radicalization of Muslim-Americans within the U.S. military will reveal how the armed services can better protect itself against homegrown attacks.
Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) is holding a joint hearing on Wednesday, along with Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), as the next stage in his series of efforts to address the radicalization of American Muslims. Pointing to the 2009 shootings at the Fort Hood military base in Texas and at a military recruiting station in Arkansas, which killed a total of 14 people and wounded more than two dozen, King said the issue of radicalization within military communities is one that is grossly under the radar.
“There is an attempt by Islamists to join the military and infiltrate the military, and it’s more of a threat than the average American is aware of right now,” said King in an interview with The Hill on Monday.
Lieberman said his committee has held 13 hearings over the past five years on the issue of violent Islamic extremism and, based on what he has learned, the military is an increasingly large target for attacks.
“Clearly, the threat of homegrown terrorism has increased dramatically, and clearly, members of the armed services are a high-value target,” Lieberman said in a statement.
The issue was brought to the front burner for King after it was raised by Paul Stockton, the assistant secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs. King said he feels the Obama administration is just as concerned with the issue as he is, and hopes to develop a working partnership to address some of the inadequacies that will come up at Wednesday’s hearing.
“I think more can be done,” he said. “But this is not going to be any attempt to bash the administration, necessarily. From my perspective it’s going to be a productive hearing and it’s not going to turn into a partisan fight.”
King gave several examples of issues that need more attention, such as whether the military needs to provide more security for recruiting centers and bases in the U.S. or whether local and state law enforcement should play a larger role in coordinating security with the military.
He said he also hopes to address the minutiae of radicalization on military bases. He used an example of how he has heard of at least one instance in which a copy of the radical Islamic magazine Inspire — which has been used as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups — was found in a barracks and allowed to remain. But Confederate flags are rightfully banned, he said.
“I’m using that as an example about whether or not we need to be more aggressive in facing up to the reality. It’s Islamic terrorism. It’s not just a nondescript, anonymous type of terrorism.”
King has held three hearings so far this year on the issue of radicalization of Muslim-Americans within the U.S. The first one drew the most scrutiny, as nearly 100 members of Congress asked him to cancel it or widen the breadth of the radicalized groups he was probing. King lauded the hearing as a success, saying that it brought attention to a taboo subject that is a serious and growing security concern.
The other two hearings focused on the terrorist group al-Shabbab’s influence within the U.S., and the radicalization of Muslim-Americans within U.S. prisons.
Carlos Bledsoe is serving life in prison for waging a shooting spree in 2009 at an Arkansas military recruiting center that killed Army Pvt. William Long.
Bledsoe’s father — who testified before King at a previous hearing, saying that his son was influenced by radicalized Muslim ideals — is planning to be at Wednesday’s hearing, where the slain soldier’s father, Daris Long, is slated to testify. King said each knows the other will be at the hearing and that Bledsoe is attending to show his support for Long.
Also expected to testify are Jim Stuteville, an Army senior adviser for counterintelligence operations and liaison to the FBI, and Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point military academy.
King is planning to unveil a committee report on the issue at Wednesday’s hearing and another joint report with the Senate panel afterward.
He said his next hearing will likely be next year and focus on the use of certain mosques by al Qaeda and Iran in their efforts to radicalize people within the U.S.
Open Doors USA, a Christian organization which evangelizes non-believers around the world, has drafted a Relgious Freedom Pledge, which it is asking the presidential candidates to sign.
[R]eligious liberty in full is the birthright of every American, as recognized by the First Amendment. It entails the right to believe, worship, and practice in accord with one’s faith, subject only to the limits imposed by the U.S. constitution and the Bill of Rights. The right of religious freedom must be applied equally to all religious communities in America, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. At the same time, religious freedom does not mandate belief, but protects the right not to believe.
So why won’t the pledge promoters talk about Islamophobia — by the very candidates it is trying to get to sign the pledge?
The only candidate so far to sign the pledge is Rick Santorum, who just last week advocatedfor profiling of Muslims. Santorum has also maintained that “Christendom” is at civilizational war with “jihadis,” who include, in his mind, moderates like Imam Feisal Rauf. When I asked an Open Doors spokesperson, Jerry Dykstra, about Santorum’s endorsement of Muslim profiling, he told me that “we’re happy to discuss the pledge, but not to comment on individual candidates’ stance on issues. We’re not experts in each candidates stance or statements on every issue. We do want candidates to pledge to upholding religious freedom for people of all faiths which of course includes Muslims.” But when I asked Dykstra if I could interview an Open Doors representative about the pledge in light of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. generally, he declined.
Taking a look at Open Doors website, I see that it promotes a “Muslim World Ministry” for which it raises money so “You can send light to dark places in the Muslim World.” You’re free to be Muslim, but it would be better to be Christian.
What’s more, though, is how Christian candidates who’ve done much to promote a lack of religious freedom for other religions (e.g., Michele Bachmann’s worry that sharia will “usurp the Constitution” or Newt Gingrich’s calls to ban sharia law because it is “a comprehensive political, economic and religious movement that seeks to impose sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society”) or who have done little to tamp it down (e.g., Rick Perry’s lamenon-efforts to call out his supporters’ anti-Mormonism, or Mitt Romney’s apparent willingness to overlook his endorser Jay Sekulow’s anti-Muslim crusades) are “considering” signing the pledge, with no questions raised by Open Doors.
It seems that Open Doors is more concerned about what it perceives to be anti-Christian sentiment. According to the pledge, religious freedom includes the right to employ religious arguments “contending for or against laws and policies, such as laws designed to protect the unborn and traditional marriage, or to relieve poverty and increase economic opportunity for the disadvantaged.” (Right Wing Watch points out how pledge co-author and Georgetown University professor Thomas Farr has argued that Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in the Proposition 8 case would lead to religious persecution because it deemed “that religious and moral arguments against gay marriage are, in effect, irrational and therefore unconstitutional.”) The pledge also promotes “the right of individuals and of religious communities not to be forced to participate in, or to forfeit their employment because of refusal to participate in, activities that deeply offend their religious conscience.” (That is the same argument made by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and some evangelicalsagainst providing insurance that covers cost-free birth control.)
Religious persecution is a serious issue, and it’s true that Christians experience actual religious persecution in many places in the world. But being deprived of the ability to force one’s religious beliefs on all one’s fellow citizens in a secular democracy does not constitute persecution, and marginalizing Muslims in the name of “protecting” the Constitution isn’t “freedom.” But Open Doors doesn’t want to talk about it.
Oldest synagogue in East Bay reaches out to Stockton mosque
STOCKTON – Worshippers at the Masjid al Emaan mosque congregate in a nondescript office park on Pershing Avenue in north Stockton. The mosque has been around for only a few years, and its small membership has diminished in the aftermath of an unsolved arson fire seven months ago.
Temple Sinai in Oakland is the oldest synagogue in the East Bay, dating back more than 130 years, with nearly 1,000 member families. In terms of its history and size, it would seem to be much farther from Masjid al Emaan than a mere 75-minute drive.
And yet, when members of Temple Sinai learned of the fire that damaged Masjid al Emaan, they were moved. Recently, the temple donated $100 to Masjid al Emaan. Mosque officials say it is the only contribution they have received from outside the Muslim community.
“That’s wonderful,” said Basel Karabala, the mosque’s vice president and treasurer. “It’s a beautiful gesture. Unfortunately, people don’t know the history behind that. You had Jews and Muslims and Christians living side by side for thousands of years. The flare-ups have only been in the last 60 or 70 years. Before that, for eons, we had been living in peace.”
The temple’s rabbi, Andrew Straus, also noted the relationship between Jews and Muslims. Straus said that in making the contribution, his congregation was saying, “Yes, there have been strains and challenges, but like us, you were created in God’s image, and when one suffers tragedy, one forgets the strains in a relationship and says, ‘You are our brothers.’ ”
Masjid al Emaan’s 60 members worship in office space in the same office park that housed their previous facility, which was destroyed by the fire. Mosque officials are looking for a more permanent rental site with the long-range goal of purchasing a facility.
They do not plan to apply the temple’s donation to rent and also said there are no plans to put the $100 into a fund to be applied later toward purchase of a facility because Muslim religious law forbids investing money for interest. Instead, the mosque plans to make a donation of its own.
“Maybe we can use that money and feed the poor, maybe in the Bay Area or in Stockton,” Karabala said.
Straus said, “I was not aware of that. That’s a decision for them to make. We’re saying, ‘Losing a building in a fire, with the emotional and physical harm that causes, we want to help you.’
“We wanted to reach out to the Muslim community and say, ‘We are brothers in faith. We’ve been there. We remember and we want to reach out to you.’ ”
Contact reporter Roger Phillips at (209) 546-8299 orrphillips@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/phillipsblog.
Terrorism is a threat to the safety and security of any and every country. And naturally, if the terrorist threat arises from within a country’s own people, it is even more concerning. Combating this threat must be a top priority for law enforcement. But, what is extremely important is that law enforcement have its eyes wide open as to the reality and all sources of such a threat.
In recent times, there has been an abundant focus on the threat of Muslim homegrown terrorism. Judging by the recent plots that have been in the news – underwear bomber, Times Square bomber, Ft. Hood – this would seem to be prudent. The question remains, however, do the facts support such a contention, namely, that Muslim homegrown terror is a serious threat to the safety and security of the United States.
Not exactly.
This is according to a study by Marquette University Assistant Professor Risa A. Brooks: “Muslim ‘Homegrown’ Terrorism in the United States: How Serious Is The Threat?” After analyzing the data, Professor Brooks concludes:
My conclusion should be generally reassuring to Americans: Muslim homegrown terrorism does not at present appear to constitute a serious threat to their welfare. Nor is there a significant analytical or evidentiary basis for anticipating that it will become one in the near future. It does not appear that Muslim Americans are increasingly motivated or capable of engaging in terrorist attacks against their fellow citizens and residents.
There is not enough space to go over the entire study here, but I will highlight some salient points:
Studies of Muslim communities provide little evidence of changes or trends that suggest they are becoming any less resilient against the threat of militancy in their midst.
For example, one major effort funded by the Department of Justice, in which researchers resided for periods of two to three months in four midsized Muslim American communities, found that several features of these communities rendered them intrinsically resistant to militancy, including, in particular, the strength of their communal organizations and social networks. In addition, there were efforts expressly geared toward preventing and exposing any signs of militancy, including both outreach programs and a variety of internal monitoring, or self-policing, practices.
Despite the concerns expressed by many analysts and public officials, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Americans face a growing threat of deadly attacks plotted by Muslims in the United States.
Seen in light of the threats posed by other segments of the population, the one posed by Muslim Americans appears neither especially novel, nor severe.
And the Professor puts the Muslim threat in persepctive:
Another study found that from September 2001 through September 2010, there were eighty domestic plots involving primarily right-wing terrorists (source: Beutel, “Data on Post-9/11 Terrorism in the United States.” See also Strom et al., “Building on Clues,” p. 7.)
The article concludes by saying:
This article demonstrates that the threat posed by Muslim homegrown terrorism is not particularly serious, and it does not appear to be growing, especially in its most lethal incarnation—deadly attacks within the United States. Indeed, many analysts and public officials risk overstating the threat posed by Muslim American terrorism. Mischaracterizing that threat, in turn, is potentially costly and counterproductive for the security of the United States and the welfare of its citizens, for several reasons.
First, misjudging the homegrown threat could lead the country to overinvest or poorly spend on counterterrorism initiatives…Second, overstating or poorly characterizing the challenges posed by Muslim American terrorism risks undermining societal resilience in the face of terrorism…Finally, mischaracterizing and inflating the Muslim homegrown American threat could prove self-defeating to the country’s efforts to defend against it. Especially worrisome is the potential that, in an atmosphere in which the threat of homegrown terrorism appears serious and worsening, law enforcement will employ counterproductive methods that threaten the trust between its officials and Muslim communities—trust that underpins the demonstrated capacity and willingness of American Muslim communities to self-police and root out militants in their midst.
What the professor is saying is this: always focusing on the “Muslim terrorist monster,” which – as the evidence shows – is not as serious a threat as is being stated, actually does a disservice to the security of our country. This is a point that Loonwatch and a plethora of others have been making for quite some time now. Starting with our piece, “All Terrorists are Muslims except…” up until our present discussion of Charles Kurzman’s work, as well as frequent updates on the blown-out-of-all-proportion “Muslim terror” threat, we have highlighted the farcical nature of the national narrative regarding Muslims and terror.
The fact remains that as long as the “terror expert” and “Islamophobia” industries are intertwined and profiting off of the new fear, we will continue to see resources spent in that direction. We may see hundreds of books, reports, studies (such as the one by Prof. Risa A. Brooks), exposes, detailed research, and surveys empirically squashing the “anti-terror” propaganda machine, but until Americans get hip to the fact that they are being taken for a ride, the con-artists will continue to reap the benefits.
However, with that said, work by Charles Kurzman, Spencer Ackerman, Risa Brooks and others are important contributions to the new, yet increasing literature shedding light on the moribund nature of the exaggerated threats of “Islamic extremism” and “homegrown terrorism.”
A Muslim woman was spat at and abused by a gang of six teenagers in Telford who pulled off her religious headdress in a racially motivated attack.
The gang, who were all male, surrounded the 52-year-old woman and started aggressively pushing and shoving her as she walked along a footpath by the skate park near William Reynolds Infant School in Woodside on Tuesday. Chris Ammonds, spokesman for Telford police, said the woman was abused between 6pm and 6.20pm.
“After circling the victim the youths then started to racially abuse her. At least one of the youths spat at the victim too.
“The youths then pulled the victim’s hijab – a traditional Muslim headdress – off her head and taunted her with it but she quickly managed to grab it back off them and flee.
“The victim has been left very shaken by this incident and also suffered a long scratch to her right cheek as a result of the assault.
“The youths that surrounded the victim are all described as being white, aged between 15 and 17 and as wearing tracksuits and hooded tops or caps.
“Officers are very keen to identify the youths that assaulted this woman.”
Anyone with information should call Telford police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.
Members of a role-play team after their act at a local community event in London, on June 26, 2011. The play explored many problems that young Muslims face (right) and how they can live a better life by following the examples of ancient Islamic leaders (left).
To view all the images click on the link right below:
“Osama! Osama!”— yelled a pair of complete strangers, as photographer Bharat Choudhary walked to his apartment from the University of Missouri campus in 2009, where the photographer was pursuing a Master’s degree in photojournalism. Islamophobia is a personal issue for Choudhary, who is an Indian Hindu.
“I had a big beard at that time,” adds Choudhary, who used the incident as inspiration for his current project, which documents Muslim life in the United States and England. Titled The Silence of Others, the series captures similar situations and their effects on the project’s participants, as well as the lives of young Muslims and the communities to which they belong.
Choudhary traces the origins of the idea back to his time as a student in India, where he worked with CARE India in Ahmadabad in 2004. The organization provided rehabilitation to victims of ethnically charged violence, who lost limbs or were paralyzed in the 2002 riots in the Indian state of Gujarat. The images he saw there formed an experience that Choudhary says “will always be there with me.”
He began working on the project in the Midwest, where he documented stories in small towns across Missouri and Illinois, as well as larger cities like Chicago. Choudhary is continuing the second phase of the project in England, broadening the geographic reach of the body of work and expanding it as a platform to help Muslims and non-Muslims understand each other.
Though the growing body of work represents a variety of life stories—a Missouri couple’s efforts to establish the state’s first Mosque, a Caucasian woman’s conversion to Islam and the development of Muslim communities in Chicago, London and elsewhere—Choudhary says he has found similar themes of alienation and ostracism of his “Others” on both sides of the Atlantic. But it’s precisely the challenge of breaking through their silence that captivates Choudhary and pushes him to continue the project.
“It’s finding the right kind of people who would be willing to talk and be photographed—that is one thing that keeps me awake all night,” Choudhary says. “It’s been quite an interesting journey so far.”
The FBI is using its extensive community outreach to Muslims and other groups to secretly gather intelligence in violation of federal law, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged Thursday.
Citing internal bureau documents, the ACLU said agents in California are attending meetings at mosques and other events and illegally recording information about the attendees’ political and religious affiliations. FBI officials denied the allegations. They said that records kept from outreach sessions are not used for investigations.
The documents reveal new details of the FBI’s efforts to build a more trusting relationship with Muslims and other communities — a major priority since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Federal officials have said that the effort is aimed at protecting Muslims’ civil rights and smoothing lingering resentment over the law-enforcement crackdown after the attacks, along with helping the government fight terrorism.
Some of the papers describe agents speaking at career days, briefing community members on FBI programs and helping them work with police to fight drug abuse. But the files also depict agents recording Social Security numbers and other identifying information after they meet people at the events and, in at least one instance, noting their political views. It appears that the agents are conducting follow-up investigations in some instances, but heavy redactions in the documents make it impossible to determine how far any examination might have gone.
In one case, an agent wrote that he checked California motor vehicle records on someone the agent encountered at a Ramadan dinner at a San Francisco Islamic association. An attendee is described as “very progressive.” Another is called “very Western in appearance and outlook.”
At another Ramadan dinner in San Francisco, an agent recorded the names of Muslim groups listed on pamphlets distributed at the event — and appeared to note that several people associated with one of the groups were under investigation.
The FBI turned the heavily redacted documents over to the ACLU as part of a lawsuit filed by the civil rights group and two other organizations to uncover what the groups consider to be inappropriate or illegal FBI tactics in the fight against terrorism.
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said some of the actions depicted in the documents violate the Privacy Act, a law that bars federal agencies from maintaining information about activities protected by the First Amendment, such as freedom of speech and association. FBI officials said the law allows agencies to keep information that is considered relevant and necessary to their mission, in certain circumstances.
A dangerous ‘guise’
“It’s one thing for the FBI to say to a community group, ‘We’re going to come and meet you to establish ties,’ ” Shamsi said. “But it’s a very dangerous way to proceed to collect intelligence under the guise of community outreach.”
FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan said the bureau’s meetings with community leaders are not designed to gather intelligence but rather “to enhance public trust in the FBI in order to enlist the cooperation of the public to fight criminal activity.” He said that the practice provides “information to the public in support of crime prevention efforts, and opens lines of communication to help make the FBI more responsive to community concerns.”
Kortan said FBI policy requires that an “appropriate separation be maintained between outreach and operational activities” and that although “facts surrounding an outreach meeting or event may be documented,” that is only for internal purposes to ensure “that personnel time and resources are being used effectively and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, policies and program requirements.”
Some Muslim groups reacted to the documents with anger. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the FBI’s actions will have a “chilling effect” on Muslims’ constitutionally protected activities.
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, said the papers “confirm the worst fears of Muslim community members.”
The FBI, under intense pressure to prevent another attack on U.S. soil, has sought to strike a balance between civil liberties and law enforcement in the decade since the Sept. 11 strikes. Civil liberties groups have long accused agents of overreacting, but FBI and Justice Department officials say they have helped safeguard the nation from another attack.
The documents released Thursday show agents in a variety of settings in Muslim and other communities. In one 2009 memo, an agent in Sacramento appears to be monitoring the Saudi Student Association at California State University through the outreach effort.
The agent writes of meeting with someone at the student union building and records that person’s birth date, Social Security number, telephone number and address — all in the same sentence. The person is described as giving the agent detailed information about the association.
Yet some of the documents are more mundane, including a 2009 memo detailing FBI contacts with Assyrian organizations in San Jose, which notes how the Assyrian language is “very similar to ancient Aramaic.”
Another memo describes a 2007 meeting hosted by the FBI in San Jose for 27 Muslim organizations that featured FBI presentations, a question-and-answer session and lunch catered by a local kabob restaurant. The writer provides a detailed “demographics” breakdown of participants, including what percentage are Sunni Muslim versus Shiite, and lists all the organizations in attendance.
One group listed was the Oakland-based Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California. Sara Mostafavi, a board member, said she found that troubling.
Just before Thanksgiving, a 32-year-old industrial designer was leaving a Lucky store in San Jose with some turkey broth and salt when he was assaulted by a group of men who broke his jaw and called him a “terrorist.”
This week, the man, who asked this his name not be used for fear of retaliation, underwent jaw surgery, and he is still in need of dental care for the six teeth that were knocked out about 9 p.m. Nov. 21 in the parking lot of the Lucky at 3270 S. White Road near Aborn Road.
“I believe they hit me with the tequila bottle,” he said. “Then they spit on me and called me a terrorist.”
None of the suspects, possibly three or four men, who were all wearing dark, hooded sweatshirts during the attack, have been arrested.
San Jose police confirmed the assault, but aren’t saying much more.
The victim’s family, originally from Calcutta, India, moved to Silicon Valley more than 30 years ago. They are Hindu, and the victim has no criminal record in Santa Clara County, according to a review of court records. He said he graduated from San Jose State with a degree in industrial design.
In 2010, FBI statistics show there were 24 hate crimes reported in San Jose, compared with about 140 hate crimes reported in Los Angeles, a city about four times the size.
A detective this week met the victim, police confirmed. The detective is trying to track down witnesses and find out whether the grocery store’s security camera documented.
La Dépêche reports that racist graffiti and Nazi symbols were daubed in red paint on the walls of the Louis-Nicolas-Vauquelin secondary school in Toulouse last weekend. The slogans “Arabs out of France”, “Arabs sod off” and “Islam get out” were accompanied by swastikas and other Nazi signs such as 88 (i.e. Heil Hitler).
The White House quietly ordered a widespread review of government counterterrorism training materials last month, following Danger Room’s reports that officials at the FBI, military and Justice Department taught their colleaguesthat “mainstream” Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the Death Star.
According to a Pentagon memorandum acquired by Danger Room, the White House’s National Security Staff in October requested “Departments and Agencies” to “provide their screening process for CVE trainers and speakers.” (.pdf) CVE refers to “Countering Violent Extremism,” the euphemism du jour for the war on terrorism. The memorandum says that “recent media attention” led to the review, and contains a single attachment to demonstrate that attention: “Spencer Ackerman’s Wired.com article.”
The ongoing review will examine whether counterterrorism training material throughout the government is accurate and relevant, and will make sure the briefings given to federal field offices and local cops meet the same standards as FBI headquarters or the Pentagon.
Jose Mayorga, a retired two-star general who now serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, oversaw the Pentagon’s contribution to the White House review. In the memo, dated Oct. 16, Mayorga asked aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to collect counterterrorism training materials at the “service academies and major academic centers (e.g., Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and National Defense Intelligence College)” by Oct. 31, a deadline that Pentagon spokesman Robert Ditchey says has “been extended” so the department can be “comprehensive and deliberate.”
The purpose of the review, Mayorga writes, is to “determine the criteria used to establish professional qualifications for teachers and lecturers providing instruction on countering violent Islamic extremism; with particular focus on Military Information Support Operations, Information Operations, and Military Intelligence curriculum.” Mayorga adds that information on “cultural awareness” for troops preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan is also subject to the White House review.
But at least one member of Congress is worried that all of these reviews will undermine counterterrorism efforts in the name of political correctness.
In a forthcoming letter to Holder and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) writes that “political nature of these reviews might inadvertently weaken our law enforcement and military counter-terrorism training programs by censoring certain language that is used to objectively identify the asymmetrical threats that are present in today’s world.”
“We don’t necessarily disagree with some action being taken,” Myrick’s military affairs aide, Clark Fonda, tells Danger Room. “But we’re concerned that this could inadvertently cause a political reaction within [the Justice Department] and [the Defense Department] that could lead to the censoring of words such as ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ in federal law enforcement and military counter-terrorism training documents.”
Myrick’s letter to Holder and Panetta cites the recommendations of a Senate inquiry into the Fort Hood shooting that also warns against euphemistic treatment of violent Islamic extremism. Yet the leader of that inquiry, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), told Danger Room that the FBI’s anti-Islamic training materials represented a “lie” that “all Muslims support terrorism.”
These messages are complicated, if not contradicted, by the anti-Islam training that counterterrorism agents and officials at the FBI, Justice Department and Defense Department have received. “Boneheaded is a generous way to describe this training,” says counterterrorism analyst Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice. “I’d lean more towards hateful, paranoid and completely counterproductive.”
This time Spencer is going to bat for the loony-even-by-Geller-standards, BareNakedIslam (BNI) website, which was briefly shut down by WordPress for violating its terms and conditions.
A few days ago, Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim reported on the unanimous cacophony of sadistic joy displayed by the owners and commenters on BNI regarding repeated arson attacks on mosques in France,
An anti-Muslim site called Bare Naked Islam has posted an article celebrating this. The article is titled “WOO HOO! Yet ANOTHER anti-Muslim attack on a French mosque”. Just in case they take it down, CAIR has saved the page here. The headline of the article states Apparently, Hell hath no fury like a Frenchman scorned. It’s the third attack on a mosque just this month. Will the Muslims ever get a clue that they are not welcome in France?
Most of the comments below the Bare Naked Islam article are hateful. Some examples:
The following six comments are from the same individual, Keith Mahone:
Musaji notes:
This last comment by Keith Mahone is the most extreme, and a particular concern since he says in his long rambling rant that he regularly drives past a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, and that the sight of that mosque causes him distress.
I waded through a few articles on the site and the comments, and found that this sort of rabid hatred of Muslims and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, but also actually murdering them is common.
Read Sheila Musaji’s complete piece, it details even more examples of the rabid and visceral genocide-calling on BNI.
Spencer has linked to BNI for years now and the two have a mutual admiration for one another. Spencer does not take issue with BNI’s anti-Muslim genocidal rants nor does he condemn them, rather he resorts to conspiracy theory and forwards the argument that BNI is a victim of “Islamic supremacist” warfare.
Instead of apologizing for associating with BNI he rushes full hog into their corner, lauding them as an “anti-Jihad website.” He gives the meager caveat that “he doesn’t agree with everything they write,” and that “he doesn’t condone threats” but then he puts on the apologist cap, saying they were just a few “unhinged comments.”
No, Spencer, they aren’t a few comments, they are a sample of the consistent violent anti-Muslim rhetoric pervasive in the Islamophobesphere, including your own blog (one example out of many):
Spencer oddly attempts to deflect by posting screen shots by commenters “Mosizzle” and “RefutingActs” from Spencerwatch.com which he interpreted as threats; however even some of Spencer’s own followers considered this a ludicrous stretch.
It is really a pathetic attempt at “deflection,” especially when anyone with half a brain knows that what is written on a daily basis on JihadWatch and BareNakedIslam cannot compare to our meticulous care in deleting hateful or bigoted remarks, and even allowing some vile Islamophobes such as “halal pork” to post.
At the end of the day, Spencer is so far down the rabbit hole he probably doesn’t understand what he is doing. More likely however is that this is how he truly feels, he wishes to see the end of Islam and Muslims and he is willing to realize that goal by any means.
A Minneapolis man who lost his job with the Transportation Security Administration for an off-duty assault of an elderly Somali man has been sentenced to six months in prison for the hate crime.
George Thompson, 64, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Minneapolis under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Thompson’s case was the first prosecuted under the act.
Signed into law in October 2009, the act was named after Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming teen who died after being kidnapped and beaten in 1998, and James Byrd, Jr., a black man who was dragged to death in Texas that same year.
“Physical violence motivated by racial or religious hatred exacerbates fear and tears at the fabric of our society,” B. Todd Jones, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said in a statement issued after Thompson’s sentencing. “Here in Minnesota, we have vibrant and diverse communities and should be celebrating that fact, not assaulting people because of it.”
Thompson also was charged in state court about three months after the May 4, 2010, assault in another bias-inspired attack on the same street as the earlier incident, but that allegation was dropped once the federal case was filed.
According to the criminal complaint in the dismissed case:
Thompson approached a man and asked him whether he was Somali. The man said he was, prompting Thompson to chase and threaten to kill him. The man found refuge with police officers who were nearby.
Thompson then went into a neighborhood bar, where he was arrested. He was drunk and had two loaded firearms with him and a permit to carry them.
Both incidents cost Thompson his job with the Transportation Security Administration. He worked for eight years with the federal agency that provides security to the nation’s airports.
According to court documents in the federal case:
Thompson was leaving a bar in his Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and “punched or shoved” an 82-year-old Somali man without provocation. The man nearly fell.
“You Muslims, go back to your country,” witnesses reported Thompson as saying, along with, “You Somali, go back to your country.”
The defense acknowledged that Thompson was embarrassed and sorry for the assault, but also noted that the defendant was frustrated by trouble that Somali youth had been causing in his neighborhood.
The defense pointed out that Thompson and others were subjected to threats, assaults, robberies and indecent exposure from Somali youth.
(CNN) – The man accused of killing 77 people in a terrorist rampage that shook Norway last summer is insane and cannot be sentenced to prison or preventive detention, but can be confined to a mental hospital for the rest of his life, police said Tuesday.
Anders Behring Breivik suffers “grandiose delusions” and “believes he is chosen to decide who is to live and who is to die,” Prosecutor Svein Holden announced.
Police said psychiatrists had determined that the 32-year-old man was psychotic at the time of the attacks and during 13 interviews experts conducted with him afterward. The doctors also found him to be paranoid and schizophrenic, police said.
The experts reached their conclusions after 36 hours of interviews with Breivik, police said.
The extension of Breivik’s confinement under a compulsory mental health care order will be reviewed by a court every three years, police said. The court will consider whether he still represents a danger to society.
Breivik had not been told of the psychiatrists’ findings, police said. His lawyers were expected to relay the news.
The decision underscores the difference between the justice system in the United States and that in Norway, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
“In the United States, it is extremely difficult to establish successfully an insanity defense,” he told CNN in a telephone interview. “You can be paranoid, yet still able to control your behavior and be legally responsible.”
In cases like the mass killing in Norway, “there tends to be a tremendous amount of pressure from the public and maybe politicians as well to lock someone away for as long as possible, and bring justice to the victims,” Fox said.
Breivik is accused of killing eight people in Oslo and 69 who were among 700 mostly young people attending a Labour Party youth camp on nearby Utoya Island.
He has pleaded not guilty but admits carrying out the attacks, the judge handling his case has said.
Breivik is described by authorities as a right-wing Christian extremist. A 1,500-page manifesto attributed to Breivik posted on the Internet is critical of Muslim immigration and European liberalism, including the Labour Party.
The manifesto predicts that a “European civil war” will lead to the execution of “cultural Marxists” and the banishment of Muslims.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said in the aftermath of the attacks that his country had been fundamentally changed, but vowed that Norway would remain “an open society.”
Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang said Norwegians would respond to the violence with equally powerful weapons: “We’re going to punish him with democracy and love,” he told CNN shortly after the killings.
Still, memories of the slaughter on the island, where many of the campers survived by hiding behind rocks, remained acute on Tuesday.
“I will always have mixed feelings when I go back, of course,” Labour Party member Eskil Pedersen told a reporter. “I think about the 22nd of July and the dreadful things that happened that day, but I have been here every year and every summer since 2000. A lot of my time as a youth has been here on this island. I have very many good memories as well.”
He said a memorial will be built there. “Our aim is to reclaim Utoya, take it back as an island, have activities, have a summer camp here,” he said.
Relatives of some of the victims expressed disappointment at the decision on Breivik, a journalist from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. told CNN. “They have looked forward to seeing him getting a sentence for the rest of his life for the acts he has committed,” correspondent Tomm Kristiansen said.
Public reaction is mixed, said journalist Olav Mellingsaeter. Most people are surprised, not angered, by the findings, he said.
“We must trust that the psychiatrists have done a thorough job,” a 30-year-old student told the reporter.
A 36-year-old woman said, “As long as he does not escape, I do not care where he’s kept.”
At his trial in April, Breivik will have the opportunity to present evidence, police said.
He has been in custody since his arrest on Utoya Island on the day of the killings, which marked the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II.
In today’s Muslim threat news: Some New York cabbies are Muslims! And they pray, to their Muslim god! And when they do, they illegally double-part their taxicabs on the street, because Muslims “obey religious laws over parking rules.”
That salacious headline comes via DNAInfo, a normally reliable local New York news site. Apparently, a mosque on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is popular with cab drivers. During prayers, they “double- and triple-park outside the house of prayer, forcing northbound traffic…to veer into the oncoming traffic lane.” The mosque’s neighbors—including Donald Trump, who owns four nearby towers—don’t like that, so naturally they complain to the police about it: “311 records show at least nine complaints this year about illegal parking at that intersection.”
Nine complaints! In just one year? It’s a full-blown scandal.
If you live in New York, anywhere, you spend an average of 15 minutes per day mad about some asshole double-parking somewhere. The fact that some Muslim cab drivers double-park to pray doesn’t mean they “flout the rules of the road in order to observe the rules of their religion.” It means they flout the rules of the road because, like everyone else who drives an automobile in Manhattan, they are asshole drivers.
A former journalist at the Daily Star told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that he received threats and may have had his phone hacked after he quit the paper in protest at what he claimed was its anti-Muslim propaganda.
Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson Inquiry that he received threatening phone calls, text messages and emails after he leaked his outspoken resignation letter to the Guardian newspaper.
Mr Peppiatt said the messages included, “We’re doing a kiss and tell on you”, “You’re a marked man until the day you die”, and “RD will get ya” – a reference, he suggested, to Express Newspapers owner Richard Desmond.
“It worried me enough to get my girlfriend to move out for a couple of days because I didn’t know at the time where it was coming from and the frequency, all through the night, got me thinking for her safety it’s best that she lets this cool off,” he told the inquiry.
The journalist said he was also emailed details of a voicemail left on his phone by a friend cancelling an arrangement to see Arsenal play Barcelona after the message was apparently deleted.
“I see no way that the information could have been known unless my voicemail had been accessed,” he said in a witness statement.
Mr Peppiatt, who worked as a full-time freelance journalist for the Daily Star for two years, claimed that editorial decisions at the paper were “dictated more from the accounts and advertising departments than the newsroom floor”.
Giving an example, he told the inquiry: “I did a feature about M&S skinny pants and it was because they were trying to get an advertising contract with M&S.
“There was no journalistic merit in this – it involved me posing for pictures in my pants.”
He also said public relations had a “huge influence” on journalism.
“In two years I went on four free holidays from PR companies in order to give their stories an extra push,” he said.
“I was not alone in this, and certainly the higher up the chain you were, the greater the incentives that may be offered.”
Mr Peppiatt claimed that the Daily Star shaped stories to fit its “ideological perspective” and that quotes and details of articles were regularly made up.
He read out a series of misleading headlines run by the paper, including “TV King Cowell Is ‘Dead”‘, “Chile Mine To Open As Theme Park”, “Angelina Jolie To Play Susan Boyle In Film” and “Bubbles To Give Evidence At Jacko Trial”.
The reporter said he did not think newspaper regulator the Press Complaints Commission – from which Mr Desmond withdrew in January – was “held in esteem” at the Daily Star.
Mr Peppiatt said the Daily Star “did not really use” private detectives, adding: “I don’t think that was some sort of ethical decision as much as a financial one.
“Their budget is significantly smaller than some of their rivals, and often they are quite happy just to follow up other people’s news rather than be too bothered about actually getting genuine exclusives themselves.”
If Pat Robertson’s CBN News wants to be treated as a credible news source, it probably should stop elevating the story of Kamal Saleem.
Saleem, who was also prominently featured in The Call: Detroit – where he urged other Muslims to convert to Christianity – and told rally attendees that he is the descended of the “Grand Wazir of Islam.” However, the title is not found anywhere in Islam. While preparing for The Call:Detroit, Saleem said that President Obama planned “to break down Article 6” of the Constitution in order to enforce “Islamic law,” warning “if he breaks this, the Sharia law will be supreme in America.”
An investigation by CNN found that Saleem is one of a handful of “fundamentalist Christians posing as ex-terrorists,” and a Middle East studies professor at the conservative Calvin College said his story “is not verifiable and without it he’s no different from other fundamentalist preachers.” Howard even wrote a review of Saleem’s book, which he called “obsessively, sadistically violent,” highlighting Saleem’s many contradictions in his backstory and his blatant and bizarre misrepresentations of Islam, saying, “Suffice it to say that if the subject were Jews, this book could not have been published.” Howard even points out that Focus on the Family, a former employer of Saleem, even had doubts about Saleem’s conversion story.
Haroon Moghul of Religion Dispatches also points out inconsistencies in his story of working for rival Palestinian secular and Islamist groups simultaneously and his claim that as a Muslim he was “allergic to Jesus,” even though Muslims consider Jesus the Messiah.
Why would CBN News bolster such a clear fabricator?
CNN notes that “Saleem, whose real name is Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network for sixteen years.”
On Friday, CBN’s The 700 Club featured a story on Saleem where he discussed how he tried “to wage Cultural Jihad” in the Bible Belt:
Kamal was seven when his parents sent him to Muslim training camps to learn to use weapons and engage and kill the enemy. The boys were also taught another, more subtle form of warfare…
“We were training for what’s called, ‘Culture Jihad,’ which is shifting cultures. Culture Jihad is unlike the sword, unlike the rifle. It is the Jihad that will come into your world.”
By his 20s, Kamal was chosen to wage Cultural Jihad on America.
“In Islam, liberty, freedom, monarchy, all these are idols and must be brought down. So the liberty that you have in United States of America is anti-Islam, so America must be changed. So I moved to the ‘Bible Belt’ specifically. The Bible Belt was the strongest of the strongest. That’s where the stout Christians are, and I want to take on the best of the best, because I considered myself as the sword of Islam. I thought, ‘I’m anointed. I’m unique. I’m selected. I’m coming to a country and a culture to change it. I have the power of Allah with me.’”
Nadine Naber’s piece below was from a talk she gave at the University of Michigan on Feb 7, 2011, preceding the overthrow of Mubarak. However, her words and comments about the interplay between imperial feminism, orientalist tropes and Islamophobia provide much needed perspective to our discussion on the Feminist Mosaic.
“. . . I’m making this video to give you one simply message: We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honor and want to live with dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights…The entire government is corrupt—a corrupt president and a corrupt security force…If you stay home, you deserve what will happen to you…and you’ll be guilty, before your nation and your people…Go down to the street, send SMS’s, post it post it on the ‘net. Make people aware…you know your own social circle, your building, your family, your friends, tell them to come with us. Bring 5 people, or 10 people; if each of us manages to bring 5 or 10 people to Tahrir Square…talk to people and tell them, this is enough! It will make a difference, a big difference…never say there’s no hope…so long you come down with us, there will be hope…don’t think you can be safe any more! None of us are! Come down with us and demand your rights my rights, you family’ rights. I am going down on January 25th and I will say ‘no’ to corruption, ‘no’ to this regime.”
These are the words of Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26 year old woman whose Jan. 18 vlog is said to have helped mobilize the million that turned up in Cairo and the thousands in other cities on Jan 25. Asmaa’s vlog, like the stories of many Egyptian women of this revolution offer up a challenge to two key questions framing U.S. discourse on the Jan. 25 Egyptian revolution:
1) Where are the women?
2) and…”but what if Islamic extremists take over?”
Often ignored in U.S. discussions on Egypt is how protests led by labor unions—many women-based labor unions in the manufacturing cities of Egypt—have catalyzed the Egyptian revolution (Paul Amar, 02-05-11). The women now holding down Tahrir Square as we speak—are of all ages and social groups and their struggle cannot be explained through Orientalist tropes that reduce Arab women to passive victims of culture or religion or Islam. They are active participants in a grassroots people-based struggle against poverty and state corruption, rigged elections, repression, torture, and police brutality. They are leading marches; attending the wounded, and participating in identity checks of state supported thugs. They have helped create human shields to protect Egyptian Antiquities Museum, the Arab League Headquarters, and one another. They have helped organize neighborhood watch groups and committees nationwide in order to protect private and public property. They are fighting against dictatorship among millions of people-not guided by any one sect or political party—united under one slogan: we want and end to this regime. Master Mimz—protest rapper in the UK best represents my point in the lyrics to her song: Back Down Mubarak…where she states:
“First give me a job—then lets talk about my hijab”
For anyone wondering about the oppression of Arab women, the women of this revolution have indeed suffered—Professor Noha Radwan was attacked and beaten half to death by Mubarak thugs who ripped her shirt open and had stitches in her head. Several women—and men are now martyrs (they are now over 300). Amira, killed by a police officer; Liza Mohamed Hasan, hit by a police car; Sally Zahran, hit by a Mubarak thug in the back of the head with a bat, went home to sleep and never woke up.
Since the demonstrations pushed the police out of the center of Cairo, several women have made statements such as this: “It’s the first time that I have never been harassed in Cairo”—Egyptian police are notorious for sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
Some Egyptian women are also on the frontlines of the war over ideas—fighting the Egyptian state TV and exposing the contradictions between U.S. discourses on democracy and U.S. practices. As Mubarak’s regime pays thugs to run over peaceful demonstrators, stab them and kill them, many women have expressed outraged over Obama and Clinton’s advice that: “both sides need to refrain from violence.”
Aida Seif Al Dawla is a leading human rights activist with Nadeem Center for psychological rehabilitation of victims of violence and torture. By extention, her work, like the work of many Egyptian feminists and human rights activists fighting against state violence, involves confronting U.S. imperial relations with the Mubarak regime. Today, the people of the revolution are outraged over the U.S.’ unanswered loyalty to Mubarak as well as Obama’s backing of vice president Omar Suleiman and the lack of discussion about Suleiman’s role in Egyptian torture and his important role in the US rendition-to-torture program. U.S. leaders have called Suleiman a distinguished and respected man. They use these words to describe the coordinator of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, an extrajudicial procedure in which suspected terrorists are transferred illegally to countries like Egypt that are known to use torture during interrogation. Consider, for instance, the case of the Pakistani man Habib—in which the CIA passed Habib to Omar Suleiman in Egypt. Habib was then repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. After Suleiman’s men extracted Habib’s confession, he was transferred back to US custody, where his testimony became the basis of his eventual imprisonment at Guantanamo.U.S. policy helps sustain the structures of torture and violence in Egypt. As Egyptian American media pundit Mona Tehawy puts it: U.S.’ “stability” comes at the expense of freedom and dignity of the people of my or any country.”
Of course a democratic Egypt would benefit women. The government recently passed a law restricting the work of civil society organizations, many of them led by women. The current regime is responsible for widespread human rights violations, including intense forms of harassment and violence against women, which many organizations such as Nazra for Feminist Studies, the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, and the Egyptian Association for Community Participation Enhancement, have well-documented.
So rather than asking, “where are the women,” we might ask:
Why does much of U.S. public discourse frame the revolution through Islamophobic logic and why has the corporate media focused mostly on images of Egyptian men?
Islamophobia fuels popular U.S. discourses on Egypt and drives the question: what if Islamic fundamentalists take over Egypt? And it this very discourse that legitimizes the U.S. administration’s complicity in Mubarak’s violent efforts to quell the revolution. This explains why my public expressions of hope for the success of the revolution and for democratization in Egypt are often been met with a sense of grave concern: “but what if Islamic fundamentalists take over?” These questions must be understood in terms of an imperial psyche, a state of consciousness that is driven by panic over Islamic fundamentalism and that works as a blocking operation, or a rationale against supporting the Egyptian revolution. These questions must be located in the historical trajectory of the post-Cold War era in which particular strands of U.S. liberal feminism and U.S. imperialism have worked in tandem. Both rely upon a humanitarian logic that justifies military intervention, occupation, and bloodshed as strategies for promoting “democracy and women’s rights.” This humanitarian logic disavows U.S.-state violence against people of the Arab and Muslim regions rendering it acceptable and even, liberatory, particularly for women. Islamophobic panic over the future of Egypt similarly de-centers the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime’s past and present repression. It denies historical conditions such as the demographic realities in Egypt, the complex, multidimensional place of the Muslim Brotherhood in the revolution, and the predominance of secular visions for the future of Egypt. Islamophobia thus legitimizes complicity with dictatorship and U.S. empire, producing this message for the Egyptian people: “Its best that you continue to live under tyranny.” Gender fuels Islamophobia, requiring “the Arab woman” to be nothing more than an abject being, an invisible sister, wife, or mother of “the real revolutionaries.” Islamophobia legitimizes itself through the disappearance of Egyptian women as active agents in the revolution.
I do not intend to be overly celebratory. We have learned from history that following the revolution, women are often pushed back to the sidelines, away from center stage.
We might also then ask, if Egypt enters a democratization period, will the voices of the women of Tahrir remain center stage? And what are the possibilities for a democratization of rights in Egypt– all civic rights—in which women’s participation, the rights of women, family law, and the right to organize, protest, and express freedom of speech remain central? And what are the possibilities for international solidarity with Egyptian women and Egyptian people—amidst a war of ideas that often obstructs the possibility to see Arab or Muslim women and as human– and as rightful agents of their own discourses, governments, and destinies? It has become increasingly clear that this revolution is much greater than a conflict between Egyptian state and non-state actors. Egyptian women’s rights, like the rights of all Egyptians are entangled in the global, imperial relation between the U.S., Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and other repressive regimes of the region and beyond. Only when we can take these local and imperial forces seriously can we begin to understand the oppression millions of Egyptian people are determined to end. The people of Tahrir and all the demonstrators of Egypt have spoken and said, we will not betray the blood of our martyrs–we will not give up until Mubarak steps down. It remains to be seen what the transitional period will look like but one thing is clear: it must be led by the people of Egypt. And as the Egyptian movement for freedom and democracy continues, will U.S. social movements—whether feminist, anti-war, or beyond—forget the imperial past and the blood of the Egyptian martyrs or commit to holding the U.S. and Israel accountable for complicity with dictatorship and thirty-plus years of repression in Egypt?
A WA Liberal MP has claimed Australians are unknowingly being converted to Islam by eating Halal meat. In a speech to Parliament yesterday, backbencher Luke Simpkins said most Australians did not know that most of the meat they ate came from animals killed in accordance with Muslim law.
“By having Australians unwittingly eating Halal food we are all one step down the path towards the conversion, and that is a step we should only make with full knowledge and one that should not be imposed upon us without us knowing,” Mr Simpkins told Parliament. “What is happening is wrong. Too often the minorities in this country are looked after without regard to the majority.”
Mr Simpkins said he had carried out an unofficial survey in his northern-suburbs electorate of Cowan and had discovered that most meat at major chains such as Coles or Woolworths had been killed under Halal conditions, but had not been labelled as such.
He tabled a petition demanding that all Halal meat be clearly identified, complaining people could not buy meat for their “Aussie barbecue” without the influence of the “minority religion”.
Mr Simpkins said that Mohammed the prophet of Islam had talked of how the religion could be expanded around the world by getting people to eat Halal meat. “He reportedly said, ‘The non-believers will become Muslims when, amongst other things, they eat the meat that we have slaughtered’. This is one of the key aspects to converting non-believers to Islam,” Mr Simpkins said.
The petition tabled by Mr Simpkins had been organised by the Barnabas Fund, an organisation that supports Christians living in Muslim countries.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said Opposition Leader Tony Abbott should pull Mr Simpkins into line. “All members of Parliament should be looking to promote understanding and harmony between religions. Mr Simpkins has done the complete opposite,” he said.
A Muslim woman from Mississauga, Ont., who had her niqab pulled from her face at a local mall, says her young children no longer feel secure with only her nearby.
Inas Kadri, whose assault at Sheridan Centre in Mississauga was caught on a security camera, spoke to CBC News on Tuesday as she awaits the sentencing of the woman who attacked her.
Kadri was shopping with her three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter when she was approached by two women. One of the women began swearing at her, about her religion and her veil, telling her, “Leave our country. Go back to your country,” Kadri said.
The woman can be seen in the video grabbing Kadri’s veil and pulling her off-camera. The attacker walked away while Kadri ran for help.
“Being attacked for no reason — for no reason — that’s something difficult,” she said.
Kadri’s victim impact statement reads, in part, that, “My kids don’t feel secure with me alone, and always prefer to have someone bigger in size than me to feel safe.”
The accused, Rosemarie Creswell, pleaded guilty after the video was played in court.
When CBC News spoke to Creswell on the phone, she admitted to pulling off the veil but insisted it was all just a misunderstanding, before hanging up mid-interview.
Kadri believes the attack was motivated by hate, which could bring a stiffer sentence.
York University law professor Faisal Kutty, who is Muslim, will watch for the judge’s sentencing Friday with interest.
“As Canadians in a multicultural, liberal, democratic society, I think we need to send a clear message and I hope the judge does so,” he said.
Kadri said she won’t stop wearing her face veil no matter what anyone else says or does.
“Not my father, not my husband, not no one at all,” she said. ” It’s me, and it’s my choice.”
Recently, the MiddleEastForum’sfailed academic with a history of Islamophobia,Daniel Pipes sent out a fund raising email, full of misrepresentations and lies regarding a Center for American Progress report that described his anti-Muslim activities.
Pipes begins his solicitation:
The Center for American Progress, in a much-ballyhooed study, deemed me one of the five most influential thinkers shaping the public discussion of Islam.
The study Mr Pipes is talking about is “Fear Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” and the actual words used to describe Mr Pipes in the report are “Islamophobia misinformation expert” and not “influential thinker” as he is claiming.
It was the first in-depth report into how a small cadre of bigots are fomenting and funding Islamophobia for political gain though LoonWatch has been debunking and exposing their nefarious associations for over two years now. The report states (page 6):
Five experts generate the false facts and materials used by political leaders, grassroots groups, and the media:
“These experts travel the country and work with or testify before state legislatures calling for a ban on the nonexisting threat of Sharia law in America and proclaiming that the vast majority of mosques in our country harbor Islamist terrorists or sympathizers.
Indeed, the email Pipes sent out to solicit donations would qualify as an exhibit of this misinformation. He writes:
Meanwhile, Islamist violence in America is on the rise; for example, the number of jihad-related terror indictments in U.S. courts doubled in 2010 and is on pace to reach a new high in 2011.
Jihad related attacks in 2010 were down from the previous year. He made no mention of the significant numbers of American Muslims tipping off authorities about potential threats, nor of the growing debate questioning the motives of the myth makers fueling this propaganda.
Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%.
Muslims need to be more aggressive in confronting mistruths about Islam that appear in discourse, whether they come from radical Muslims or anti-Islamic demagogues. The public is uneducated about Islam. This vacuum is being filled by the clash-of-civilization cheerleaders. Muslims need to tell a different story.
In the Fall of 2011, Risa Brooks, Political Science Professor at Marquette University, wrote an analysis; “Muslim ‘Homegrown’ Terrorism in the United States: How Serious Is the Threat?” It details how the exaggerated fear of Islamic terrorism in the USA diverts costly resources from more pressing threats and questions why the Department of Homeland Security downplays the rising number of right wing terrorist threats and which are often not even labeled as such even when they qualify. She concludes:
“the political dynamics noted above contribute to an unbalanced presentation of domestic terrorist threats in the country, the well-intentioned desire by public offcials and politicians to prepare people for local attacks even at the risk of overstating their probability, and perhaps more cynically, those individuals’ bureaucratic and political incentives to magnify the threat. Regardless of the source of alarmism, all Americans benefit from questioning assumptions about the Muslim homegrown threat.“
The Jews’ Golden Age in America began in 1950, when social restrictions were eased in universities, banks, businesses, clubs, etc. This period may now be ending with the growth of the American Muslim population.
Elsewhere too, Pipes has written of his fear of the growing influence of American Muslims:
It is also the right of CAIR, AMC, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council to devote their resources to promoting the idea of Muslim victimization. But the reality is, stubbornly, otherwise: far from being victimized, the Muslim-American community is robust and advancing steadily.
In his paranoid mind, any kind of success enjoyed by American Muslims must necessarily translate as being detrimental to American Jews. This myopic thinking would explain his uncalled for attacks on Rep. Ellison and his fixation with Muslims in every walk of life from politics to business, from the academia to beauty pageants. Both in America and around the world, Pipes and his Islamophobic allies manage to find a conspiracy behind anything that portrays Muslims in a positive light.
Simultaneously, trawling the news for any crime committed by a Muslim to exploit as the true face of Islam even if the culprit was a non practicing Muslim or a non-Muslim! He claims to be protecting American rights in the Middle East and trumpets how Campus Watch (accused of intimidating academia) and The Legal Project combat ‘lawful’ jihadism and protects free speech citing Geert Wilders as a beneficiary. Would Wilders have been a recipient if he didn’t lent support to the far right Likud agenda that neo conservatives support? Top Dutch officials have mocked Wilders for claiming Islam is a trojan horse in the Netherlands when he himself is loyal to a foreign nation. Sheila Musaji has a compilation of anti Palestinian and Islamophobic memes that Pipes has attempted to legitimise through his organisations.
Returning to the email Pipes sent out, he goes on to solicit:
As debate over Middle Eastern and Islamic issues intensifies ahead of the 2012 elections, I urge you to support our efforts by making a donation
This shouldn’t come as any surprise. Pipes had already tried to inject anti Muslim hysteria masquerading as ‘debate’, both during and after the 2008 election. Some highlights include; Equating Keith Ellison to Hitler; Propagating the falsehood of Obama being a Muslim for which he was mocked at in Islam, Israel and Insurgents a televised Q and A session; Suspecting beauty pageants of ‘affirmative action’ for their odd frequency of having Muslim winners. Although Pipes claims that he only fights ‘Islamism’, in all likelihood to keep up a pretense of scholarly repute, Eli Clifton outed him as a fully fledged Islamophobe.
Having failed to influence the 2008 election in the way he had hoped, Pipes switched tactics proceeding to advise Obama that he could save his presidency by bombing Iran. Then when Egyptians were waiting for Mubarak to step down, he saw Iran as the puppeteer lurking in the background.
Evidently, Pipes intends to get just as down and dirty in the 2012 elections as he puffs:
The Forum, a think tank I founded in 1994 to promote American interests in the Middle East and protect America from Islamist threats, is very active these days.
By now there is plenty of evidence that points to a legitimate threat being hyped by Pipes under cover of American patriotism to promote Likud politics for which an Islamist bogeyman is necessary. All this, whilst accusing American Muslims of colluding with the left to strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood. Clearly a bad case of projection. One could conclude that Pipes is as extreme as they get, but the peace advocate and blogger Richard Silverstein notes at his website Tikun Olam, popularly known as ‘The Wiki Leaks of Israel’ that ‘Among Anti-Muslim Warriors Pipes is a Dove‘. Particularly so when compared to proponents of Religious Zionism and right wing extremists.
Robert Steinback at the SPLC offers a mirror into the minds of these anti Muslim warriors with his intelligence report ‘Jihad Against Islam‘ which he ends with :
It is particularly perplexing trying to discern the ultimate goal of this corps of activists. If their aim is to isolate and destroy the violence-prone fanatical Muslim fringe, then it doesn’t make sense to undermine moderate Muslims and argue that only confirmed terrorists are interpreting the Koran correctly. But both tactics make perfect sense if the aim is to build a widespread, irrational fear and hostility against Islam in general — encouraging, rather than helping defuse, an eventual global confrontation between East and West.
It may indeed be a cynical obfuscation employed by Pipes and his allies to further their own politics and biases, but at the very least he can bank on receiving money to continue his crusade–if his followers are daft enough to donate.
Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, a key ally for the ruling Liberal-Christian Democrat coalition, said on Saturday he opposed a planned visit by Turkish President Abdullah Gul because Turkey is an “Islamist regime”.
Wilders, whose party is the third-largest in the Dutch parliament and opposes closer ties between Europe and Turkey, backs the Dutch minority government in return for tougher immigration and integration rules.
Gul has been invited to visit the Netherlands next year, when the two countries will celebrate 400 years of relations.
Wilders said in a commentary in the Dutch daily De Volkskrant that Gul should stay in Ankara.
“There is nothing to celebrate. The Islamist regime of Gul and his party member and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is not a true friend of the West and therefore neither of the Netherlands,” Wilders said.
“Everywhere Erdogan comes, he calls on Turkish immigrants to not adapt. Turkey does not want to become European but wants to islamise Europe,” Wilders said.
While Erdogan heads a political party with roots in political Islam, Turkey is a constitutionally secular democracy.
A Dutch parliamentary committee cancelled a visit to Turkey in 2009 after Turkish government officials refused to meet Wilders, who has compared Islam to Nazism but was acquitted of hate speech in June.
In 2009, a Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted by Dutch public broadcaster NOS as calling Wilders a racist who was not welcome in Turkey.
Wilders said in his article that Islam was “fundamentally intolerant” of Judaism, Christianity and humanism.
Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal said that Gul’s visit was in line with the long relationship between the nations and the celebrations would focus on mutual economic interests.
Officials at the Turkish embassy in The Hague were not immediately available for comment.
If you didn’t know by now, Hamas and Hezbollah hablan mucho Español. If you also didn’t know by now, GOP candidates like Rick Perry are retrying to combine the fear of immigrants and Mooslims taking over the country. Apparently, it is a tried and true method to win the GOP candidacy.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry warned viewers of CNN’s Republican debate on Tuesday that Hamas and Hezbollah were working out of Mexico. Perry’s answer came in response to a question about securing the southern border.
“We’re seeing countries start to come in and infiltrate. We know that Hamas and Hezbollah are working in Mexico as well as Iran with their ploy to come into the United States,” Perry said.
He continued: We know that Hugo Chavez… and the Iranian government has one of the largest — I think their largest embassy in the world is in Venezuela. So the idea that we need to have border security with the United States and Mexico is paramount to the entire western hemisphere.”
One of the most devout Christians in the GOP field endorsed singling out Muslims for extra screening by the Transportation Security Administration while the only African-American candidate called for racial profiling by another name.
“Obviously, Muslims would be someone you look at, absolutely,” said former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. “The radical Muslims are the people committing these crimes, by and large, with younger males” also deserving of more scrutiny at airport checkpoints.
Herman Cain said he was in favor of “targeted identification,” another way of saying some people look more suspicious than others. “If you take a look at the people who have tried to kill us it would be easy to identify what that profile looks like.” But when moderator Wolf Blitzer suggested that focusing on one sort of person would be like sngling out Christians or Jews, Cain rejected the premise as “simplifying.”
Rep. Ron Paul, as is wont in these debates, differed from his rivals. After Santorum noted that Muslims would be “your best candidates” for extra screening, the Texas congressman said, “What if they look like Timothy McVeigh?” referring to the white Christian ex-soldier convicted in 1995′s Oklahoma City bombing.
Sud Ouest reports that when a member of staff arrived at the mosque in Villeneuve-sur-Lot in south west France on Saturday morning they found that the slogan “Islam out of Europe” had been daubed on the walls in black paint along with swastikas and “88″ (Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”). A wooden pallet had been set on fire against the front door but had only caused minor damage. Police also discovered a bottle thought to contain a fire accelerant.
A report by Ajib (via Islam in Europe) points out that the graffiti and arson at Villeneuve-sur-Lot is the latest in a series of criminal attacks on French mosques. Earlier this month the mosque in Montbéliard was the target of an arson attack that caused serious damage. A few days before, on the day of Eid al-Adha, Muslims in Saint-Armand-les-Eaux in the département du Nord were shocked to discover racist graffiti on the door of their mosque.
In a statement condemning the attack in Villeneuve-sur-Lot the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman reiterates its call for a parliamentary inquiry into the rise of anti-Muslim hatred in France.
In case it wasn’t obvious already, Herman Cain’s brief outreach to the Muslim community to atone for his unending list of inflammatory statements is definitely over.
Visiting a Jesus-themed amusement park in Orlando, Cain gave a moving speech to visitors after the daily reenactment of the crucifixion about his experience battling colon cancer. But per Yahoo’s Chris Moody, things got awkward once the topic turned to his choice of physician:
He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”
“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign-not that I had anything against foreign doctors-but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.’”
“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”
The crowd laughs uneasily.
This isn’t a new story: Cain told it repeatedly this Spring, playing it up for Christian audiences especially. But since that time Cain made a brief - apparently abortive - attempt to apologize to Muslim leaders for his bigoted statements and refocus his campaign on the economy. Looks like that stretch is over.
* * * * *
Here’s video (go to 5:00 to hear the part about “Dr. Abdallah”):
Recently we sat down with Muslim scholar and best selling author Reza Aslan for an in-depth interview on a wide range of issues. This is the first in what will hopefully be a longstanding series of interviews that are planned with high profile scholars and movers and shakers in pop culture.
We covered Reza’s days as a break dancer, conversion to Christianity and return to Islam, his thoughts on Islamophobia, Robert Spencer, the Arab Spring, reformation of Islam and the current saber-rattling with Iran.
It was a fascinating and hilarious interview and I think you will find we covered new ground, such as the breaking news that Reza is willing to finally reciprocate Robert Spencer’s man crush!
Loonwatch (LW): I heard you used to break dance?
Reza Aslan (RA): Yes, (laughter) I used to be a break dancer. My name used to be El Penguin, because I was so bow legged.
LW: Did you ever graduate to doing head spins and flares?
RA: I could do a really poor head spin but it was definitely not my forte with my footwork. I was in a (laugh) break dance troupe called Etron, which was Norte spelled backwards because we were on the north side of Fresno.
LW: Do you still break once in a while?
RA: Hell no. If I tried to break dance today I would definitely break something. Oh, I could still pop-lock with the best of them but break dancing, no.
LW: We heard in the course of one of your interviews that you converted to Evangelical Christianity at one point in your life?
RA: Yes. (laughter) My entire life is just one big practice of taqiyyah. Like everything I do as a human being.
Actually, it was part of this group called Young Life, pretty famous nation-wide group. They go into High Schools and Junior High Schools and they evangelize. I went to this summer camp where you hear the Gospel message, and yeah when I was 15 years old, a sophomore, and so it was before my sophomore year of HS. Yeah, I found Jesus, he was awesome.
LW: How was that, what was that experience like when you were an Evangelical?
RA: It’s magical! The thing about Evangelical Christianity and why I think it is so appealing, particularly to young people is that I mean it is just such a brilliant and profoundly moving story. There is a reason why it is called the greatest story ever told, right? That God had this physical son, like His little baby boy you know that came down to earth and because you yourself are such an awful human being, because of all the terrible things you do, God decided to have His son tortured and murdered in order to save you from yourself and that if you don’t accept that story, not only are you spitting in God’s face but oh yeah you are also going to burn in hell for all eternity.
It’s an amazing story, that’s why it is so appealing. Now the important thing to understand is that is what it precisely is, a story. I am not by any means discounting it or criticizing it. All religion is story, all mythology is story but that is a particularly good one, and it’s a story, I think particularly for young people looking for easy answers to complicated questions, that they can flock to, and the last 2000 years are testimony to that.
LW: That is quite profound. I was wondering, going from that to becoming an Islamic scholar and someone who regularly speaks on Islam, how did you return to Islam? Was it a going back to your roots?
RA: Well, after High School, like most people who are introduced to Evangelical Christianity when they’re kids then go to college, you realize, “oh wow, a lot of the stuff that I was told by my youth leaders and my pastors was kind of nonsense actually” and so you begin to question those issues, question those ideas.
I went to a Catholic College, a Jesuit Catholic College and began studying the Bible and particularly the New Testament from a scholarly perspective and the more I kept studying the more I realized almost everything I was told about the Bible and about the New Testament and frankly about the Gospel story was false. More importantly the truth behind the Gospel story, the truth behind who Jesus was and what Jesus really said was far more interesting, far more profound and frankly far more appealing than the false notions of it that I was fed as a kid. So throughout my early years in college I decided to get a degree in Biblical Studies. I became fluent in Greek and became a young scholar about the origins of Christianity and the historical Jesus and then when I graduated I was heading off to Harvard to get a Masters degree in that topic when one of my undergraduate professors, one of my mentors, Katherine Bell sat me down and basically said, “Why aren’t you studying Islam?” and I said “what do you mean?”
She basically said something at the time that really changed my life, which was by the time I get my PhD in Bibilical Studies no one is going to care about Biblical Studies anymore, everyone is going to want to have scholars and experts on Islam. You know, this was in 1995 when she said this, she obviously was quite prescient in what she was talking about. She gave me a couple of books and obviously my family was nominally Muslim, well not really, culturally Muslim, just as most Christians are culturally Christian and I had grown up surrounded by Muslim culture, so I was somewhat familiar with it, but of course like most people of a particular religion I really knew nothing about the religion that I “called my own.”
I spent the summer before I went off to Harvard just reading some books about Islam, reading the Quran really for the first time as an adult and the more I started reading about it, the history, the theology, the Quranic studies, the more I was just kind of excited about it. I always talk about how I had an emotional conversion to Christianity but a rational conversion to Islam. Reading about the way Islam talks about the divine and the relationship between human beings and God and conceptions of the universe and ideas of the transcendent, these made a hell of a lot more sense to me cosmologically speaking than some old man in the sky impregnated a virgin and His son came out and died for us.
It’s just that the symbols of Islam suddenly broke through and made sense to me in a way that traditional Protestant Christianity never really did, and then when I entered Harvard the first day of class I had to get all new classes and change my advisers and tell everyone, “by the way I am not here to do what I told everyone I was going to do, instead I am going to study Islam.”
LW: Wow, fascinating, you don’t hear today, discussion about Islam and rationality often…
RA: There is no more rational religion than Islam. Islam is founded upon reason and rationality, very much like Judaism. You have to understand that Islam and Judaism are legalistic religions, Christianity is a creedal religion. Christianity is all about belief, right? In fact, if you are a Catholic that creedal formulation is a complex formula, “I believe in God the Father maker of heaven and earth, I believe in Jesus His only begotten son, I believe in the Holy Spirit, I believe in the Holy Apostolic Church, etc. etc.”
In Judaism and Islam there is no creedal statement as such. In Islam the creedal statement is as simplistic as it possibly can get. “There is no god but God, Muhammad is God’s messenger,” that’s the sum in total of creed when it comes to Islam, as a result both Islam and Judaism developed as highly legalistic religions. In legalistic religions the people who usually control the interpretation are scholars. In a creedal religion the people who control interpretation are preachers, priests and pastors, you see what I mean?
The Pope used an age old Papal arg. going back to the Crusades, whilst setting up Islam as the "irrational" other
In other words, and by no means am I saying priests aren’t intelligent, of course they are, and often times they go through enormous amounts of religious training, but their job is to shepherd a flock, not to deal with the very high rational concepts of legal theory that is born from a religion founded on orthopraxy, correct practice instead of orthodoxy, correct belief.
It’s just another wide spread misperception in the United States about Islam, that Islam is a religion that cannot reconcile reason and faith.
The only real global religion which has dealt with that problem really is Christianity. I mean if you are talking about Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine and all the way to Paul Tillick and Reinhold Niebuhr, these are the great Christian theologians that for thousands of years have been struggling to reconcile faith and reason. That hasn’t really been that strong of an argument in Judaism and Islam, the argument has been about the different “rational answers” that are possible to the various questions, theological questions that Islam and Judaism bring up, but the question is not should reason even play a role.
LW: It seemed the Pope didn’t help that case with the Regensburg Address. What was he after with that? When Pope Benedict made that speech, he used Islam as a counter example to Christian rationality.
RA: Yeah, that’s the thing. Of course the Pope was advancing an old Papal argument against Islam that goes back to the Crusades, but again what the Pope is talking about is it took Christianity 1600-1700 years to reconcile reason and faith and so therefore Islam needs to do the same, without recognizing that during those 1700 years in which reason and faith were divorced in Christianity, they were married very well in both Islam and Judaism.
LW: This might be a good time to segway to the Anti-Muslim Catholic polemicist Robert Spencer, one of the premiere Islamophobes today. He is funded by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which in turn is funded by right-wing foundations, you’ve probably read about this in the Fear Inc. report already. We’ve been tracking him and what he says about you…
RA: Oh yeah he is in love with me.
LW: (laugh)He calls you all sorts of names, calling you a “metrosexual,” “boy Reza Aslan,” “Bright Young Muslim Thing,” “little boy Reza,” “pathetic little Islamic Supremacist Reza,” “pseudo-Moderate,” etc. What is behind all this name calling, he seems to have a crush on you?
RA: I do think he has a crush on me. As a lot of people know, this guy is someone who poses as some sort of pseudo-scholar because he has a one year Masters degree from a school in North Carolina and because of that a lot of people let him get away with the asinine things that he says. I think I was probably the first person to utterly embarrass and shame him on national television and since that time he has taken all the internal feelings of inadequacies that I am sure he has, poured it all out on me and I am perfectly happy with that. The fact of the matter is that if Robert Spencer thinks you are wrong then you got to be right.
I am pleased as punch, every word that Robert Spencer writes about me puts a gigantic smile on my face. You know he used to actually email me his columns as though I actually care, you know, to read the drivel that he writes. We reply to him just making fun of him.
In fact, I’m going to say right now, and you can publish this, I’m kind of in love with Robert Spencer.
(laughs)
There’s something about that giant beer gut and the furry face, there’s this kind of walrus quality to him, that, I don’t know how to say this, that just turns me on, and I think I am pretty sure, that he feels the same about me.
LW: He definitely has a man crush on you.
RA: He definitely has a man crush on me and I guess what I am trying to say is that for the first time I am ready to publicly admit those feelings are reciprocated.
LW: (laughs)This is breaking news.
RA: And I know Robert Spencer reads Loonwatch and I just want him to know: “Robert, I think we may have something here. Robert I think there is a possibility for the two of us to have a future together, this could really be a beautiful love story.” And, if he is willing to finally admit to his true feelings for me, I am in the position now where I can reciprocate those feelings.
LW: Amazing, maybe he will finally admit what he has been feeling all this time.
RA: I think he is ready to admit it. But only if his mom lets him…and by his mom I mean Pamela Geller…
(laughs)
Robert Spencer next to Pamela Geller, "where's the leash?"
LW: Who in this relationship, between him and Geller, who holds more sway?
RA: Are you kidding me! I’m surprised that in pictures of the two of them that she is not holding a leash.
RA: Of course Pamela Geller is known most for her rationality.
(laughs)
It’s not a surprise to hear those comments. No look…
LW: How does she get away with it?
RA: What do you mean!? This is how the world works, the more insane you are the more attention you get, exhibit A: Herman Cain…this is how it works, but in all honesty I do just want to say I make fun of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer because they are clowns and you are supposed to laugh at clowns.
This idea that these are people who deserve engagement (laughs)…Spencer’s fans email me all the time and say “you’re afraid to debate Robert Spencer.” No, I don’t debate Robert Spencer for the same reason I don’t debate a four year old child because this is not about a conversation. You cannot have a rational conversation with a clown and the fact of the matter is that the reason Robert Spencer is constantly begging people like myself to debate him is because he knows that appearing on the same platform legitimizes his view.
You are not going to have a debate about the African American experience in the United States with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (laughs), that person does not belong in that debate. To have him there by definition legitimates his position.
So Spencer, Geller, Emerson, these guys belong in the gutter where they are. That’s where they are, that’s where they belong. They get a lot of attention because Fox News keeps inviting them and good for them. Fox News has become the go to Islamophobic network for these kinds of guys, and that’s great, and they are going to keep preaching to the same choir that watches Fox. Good for them but the notion that these guys somehow belong in the mainstream, that they belong on a dais debating socio-religious matters with an actual scholar is absurd.
LW: As you know we have been trying to debate Spencer, and as you say he tries to get you guys so he can legitimate his views. However, he has been avoiding our entreaties to debate, why do you think that is.
RA: I’ll tell you why because you’ll make fun of him. You know, I call this the Colbert Principle. People always ask me how do I respond to these anti-Muslim clowns like Geller and Spencer and my answer is I don’t respond to them, I make fun of them. It’s the Colbert Principle, if you respond to the inanities that come out of Robert Spencer’s mouth by definition you are saying that it’s worth a response and it’s not, what it is, is worth making fun of, and in this case I would really like to thank Geller and Spencer for being so easy to make fun of. It’s really effortless.
Robert Spencer and Julius Streicher's eerily similar rhetoric
LW: Recently we posted a piece comparing quotes Spencer has made about Islam and Muslims to those by a precursor to the Nazi era, Julius Streicher’s quotes about Jews and Judaism. It’s interesting because if you just change “Jew” to “Muslim” or “Judaism” to “Islam” they are identical. Yet Spencer in one of his posting calls you the modern day “Fritz Kuhn,” the leader of the American Nazi party. Would you consider this unintended projection on his part?
RA: One thing we shouldn’t forget about these guys is that they have been accused by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish organizations of being anti-Semitic. It’s not only that they hate Muslims, they like to pretend that they are supporters of Israel, etc. but the statements they have made about Jewish politicians, look at what they have said about Elena Kagan.
Alyssa Rosenberg, the Atlantic writer who just wrote a piece on All American Muslim was called a dhimmi Jew by Pamela Geller, I mean these guys are anti-Semites. Again that’s not me, that’s the Southern Poverty Law Center calling them anti-Semites, that’s the anti-Defamation League calling them anti-Semites. I think their words speak for themselves.
LW: I don’t want to spend too much time on Spencer but one thing I did want to bring up is Spencer’s frequent attempts to link you to the “Mullahs” of Iran. He casts aspersions on really what seems to be a great organization that you are a board member of named, NIAC, National Iranian American Council.
RA: It’s a council actually that is trying to keep Iran and the United States from engaging in a global war, so of course they are obviously agents of the Iranian Republic. You know, come on, don’t we all know this.
Yes, I am also ready to admit that my parents brought me here at 7 years old as a sleeper agent and I am going to be activated any moment now, my code word is Chelo Kebob, if I hear Chelo Kebob then I am immediately activated and then my training as an agent for the Islamic Republic kicks in, so be careful.
LW: (laughs) He links to this group called the Pro-democracy Movement of Iran, I don’t know if you have ever heard of this group, PDMI, we went to their website and it’s a ridiculous website. It has articles on there supporting the Mujahideen-e Khalq.
RA: Exactly, which is all you need to know. These “pro democracy sites” are run by neo-conservatives, by people with a very clear agenda, the same agenda that they had for Iraq, so the very fact that they support a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of a number of American citizens as well as Iranian citizens, Iranian non-combatants. An organization that has repeatedly been cited for torturing its own members, for brainwashing its own members, for taking children and turning them into armed militants, but the idea that these pro-democracy movements in the United States are supporting the MEK is really the only thing you need to know about these organizations.
LW: All of this exposes a deep hypocrisy when they are badgering Muslim organizations on the flimsiest of guilt by association smears. Regularly calling Muslim Advocates, CAIR, ISNA “Hamas-linked,” this is their favorite trope.
RA: But again this is what I’ve been trying to say, this is just an indication of why these groups do not deserve a response because when they say NIAC is a Hezbollah supporting group, you can’t respond to idiocy, you can’t respond to those kinds of moronic statements, because again that sort of bigotry does not reside in the mind, that bigotry resides somewhere more visceral. It’s much more, it’s something that exists in the gut, in the chest and that kind of feeling can not be deflected by logic, by reason. It’s immune to reason.
This car dealer supposedly is a revolutionary guard sleeper terrorist
LW: Staying on the topic of Iran, there has been a lot of discussion about Iran in the media. Of course not too long ago we had the case of the alleged car dealer mastermind terrorist. One day it was news and the next day it wasn’t, you said about it, “It’s sloppy. It’s uncharacteristic,” … “It really does not serve Iran’s interest in any legitimate way.”
Do you think all this activity regarding Iran is just a preliminary way to pave the way for war with Iran, much in the same way as was done with Iraq?
RA: No. We are not going to war with Iran. Nobody is going to war with Iran, neither the United States or Israel. I can tell you for a fact that Israel is not going to war with Iran because Israel keeps talking about it. If anybody who has studied Israeli politics at all can tell you anything is if Israel talks about bombing Iran then that means it has no intentions of doing it. When the Israelis want you dead you just die, OK.
No one sends an invitation first, no one issues a press release and this is exactly what is going on and I love it, it’s like the media is a monkey that sees something shiny in the corner. There was this great piece that I circulated not too long ago in which it was just a collection of headlines from major newspapers and magazines: the Atlantic, Harpers, New York Times, Los Angeles Times.
A collection of headlines describing imminent war, the imminent bombing of Iranian nuclear sites by Israel and or the United States, the collection was from the last fifteen years, so again, all we have to remember is the cover of Atlantic last year, Jeffrey Goldberg’s article that Israel is six months from bombing Iran. This is every few months, people start to raise this specter that Israel is going to bomb Iran. Israel, America these aren’t stupid countries. They know better than you and I the repercussions of such a conflict. I can show you half a dozen quotes from Ehud Barak himself, the defense minister of Israel stating in no uncertain terms the idiocy of such a campaign. So the idea that he has all of a sudden changed his mind and is planning to bomb Iran is ridiculous, I think this is just what Israel does every few months to ratchet up the pressure on the United States to be more aggressive and robust in trying to counter Iran’s nuclear program.
LW: Well that really puts it in perspective. So you think it is only saber rattling and positioning within the region.
RA: That’s all it is and that’s all it’s ever been for the last 20 years.
LW: Interesting. OK, to pick your theological brain for a second, Joel Rosenberg wrote this article for Fox News about why Iran’s leaders believe the end of days has come, and this is a regular idea thrown out there by Islamophobes; that we have to fear a dangerous off shoot of Shia’ Eschatology. Is there any truth to this idea?
RA: No. It’s as true as George Bush thinking that Jesus made him president so to bring about the Messiah’s return, people were saying that as well. It doesn’t mean that George Bush didn’t believe that Jesus made him president, it’s not that George Bush didn’t believe the Messiah would return some day, but the notion that, that belief predicated his foreign policy is nuts and the same thing with Iran.
The Shi'a Mahdi, or Messiah
It’s just part of this fear-mongering that has been going on for a very long time and again predicated on this idea that Iran is this irrational actor, that if they manage to get a nuclear weapon, the first thing they would do is commit suicide with it. Of course, don’t you know it! That’s all they want, so that all 75 million Iranians could be nuked off the face of the earth as soon as possible.
Again, the stupidity of that statement speaks for itself. Iran is an oppressive, autocratic, blood-thirsty government that tortures and murders its own citizens, that supports terror organizations around the world because it feels as though it benefits from doing so, but it is not stupid. What your readers should understand more than anything else about the Iranian government is that they care more about their own survival than they care about anything else. So again, these kinds of statements are not the kind made by foreign policy experts, these are not statements by experts in the region, these are statements by the amateurs who read an article one day about the fact that the Shia believe in a Messiah and then continued to regurgitate the same nonsense over and over again and in any case it doesn’t matter because these people have no effect whatsoever on what our government does.
It’s not as though the state department is sitting around wondering what Frank Gaffney thinks about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
LW: One of the topics that you hit upon in your work in No God but God and in speeches and lectures is that Islam is in a reformation period. Seeing the events in the Arab Spring, and the changes sweeping the region how do you see that idea of reform playing a part in these protests, if any?
RA: The reformation of Islam is not something that is new or unique, it has been going on for over one hundred years, and again you have to remember reformation is an actual, technical term. It doesn’t mean reform, what it means is the inevitable conflict that arises in all religious institutions over who has the right to define faith, is it the individuals, or is it the institution itself.
That conflict is ever present, it exists in all religious traditions, but in times of societal stress, in times of social ruptures that conflict jumps to the surface as it did with Temple Judaism in first century Palestine that ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Temple and the construction of Rabbinic Judaism. As it did in the fifteenth and sixteenth century in Europe, in which the conflicts over the Pope’s authority to define Christianity ultimately fractured Christianity into competing sects and schisms based on sola scriptura; that individuals should define what scripture means for themselves, not have the Pope tell them what it means, and it’s been going on in Islam since really the end of the 19th century as a result of the colonial experience in the Middle East and the rapid rise of literacy and education.
So this idea that the Islamic reformation being something new or unique is really borne out of a misunderstanding of what that even means, and so the relationship to what is happening with the so called Arab Spring and the phenomenon that I am talking about and writing about is very clear.
These are kids, these are young people who because of their education, because of their literacy, because of their access to new ideas, new sources of information are no longer interested in the answers given to them about religion and society, whether its by religious institutions, the clerics, the Mullahs or even political organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the National Islamic Front.
Protesters getting hosed by Egyptian Police
Nor are they interested in their governmental institutions at all. What you saw on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria is not an Islamic Awakening by any means, these people are not calling for Islam, on the contrary the traditional Islamic authorities have been totally left behind by these protests, they didn’t have anything to do in starting them, they didn’t have anything do in perpetuating them and they have nothing to do with defining them so this generation of young people is the inevitable result of a century long process whereby individuals in the Muslim world have begun to decide for themselves without the mediation of any institutional authority, whether religious or governmental, what it means to be Muslim in the modern world, what the answers to Islam are as a result of the rapid changes that are taking place in their society. I’ve been saying it’s going to happen for over a decade and so those people who were saying the Arab Spring came as a surprise or it wasn’t going to happen weren’t paying attention.
LW: You wrote in Tablet and Pen “The United States has displaced the old colonial powers to become, for better or worse, a dominant and unavoidable presence in the lives of the people of the Middle East. The consequences of American involvement in the region will be felt for many years to come.” How do you think America and our government in particular has reacted to this, do they know what they are doing over there?
RA: No, of course not. The American public? Of course not. I think the American public recognizes that we have had a fairly destructive presence and influence in the Middle East and in the pursuit of our national security and economic interests we’ve made a lot of enemies in that region. So i think most young people know that now, it’s kind of part of the national narrative, whether those young people know how embroiled we still are in the region, and how we still are making disastrous choices not just for the peace and stability of the Middle East, but when it comes to our own safety and security I think for the most part young people are more interested in Snookie’s panties than they are in what is going on in Yemen or Syria.
(laughs)
LW: You debated one of the New Atheists, Sam Harris. Is Sam Harris a smart guy? What were your thoughts about him?
RA: There is no doubt Sam Harris is a smart guy, he has a PhD in neuro-science. You can be a smart guy and be ignorant about particular topics and issues. The problem with Sam Harris is that he tends to write about the things he is ignorant about, (laughs) I think Sam Harris should stick to writing about neuro-science, I think his last book was great. When Sam Harris writes about neuro-science, in other words his expertise, I think it’s great, I love reading his work. When he talks about religion, a topic he knows nothing about, that he’s never studied as an academic discipline, that he’s done no field research in whatsoever, and in which he frankly is unqualified to opine about, that’s the problem. I don’t write about nero-Science because I’m not a neuro-scientist.
LW: On a random note you compared Osama Bin Laden to Freddie Mercury, (laughs) can you expand on that?
RA: Yes, I did, the point I was making was that what made Bin Laden attractive to young people was his personal charisma not his intellectualism or writings on Islam. Again Bin Laden was an engineer. He cannot talk intelligently about Islamic Law, or Philosophy and for the most part he doesn’t do that, what he has, and everyone knows this, even his biggest enemies know this about him, he had this intense magnetic appeal, this charisma that drew people to him.
People like Peter Bergen and Fawaz Gerges, who have met Bin Laden, who have spoken to his followers, who have spoken to people who were on their way to commit suicide on his behalf but were caught, what they find is the same thing, that Sheikh Bin Laden is this mystical being. People talk about dreams in which Sheikh Bin Laden comes to them and tells them to pick up a gun and join the fight, it’s that intense mystical quality that has transformed Bin Laden even after his death into a pop culture phenomenon like Freddie Mercury or the other person I compared him to was Che Guevara. Like Freddi Mercury or Che Guevara who have entered the pop culture zeitgeist in a way that goes beyond their particular talents or their particular ideas.
LW: There is a quote In your book No God but God, you wrote that in 2005…
RA: That’s when it was published…
LW: I found this quote in which you write: “Simply put, Islam in the United States has become otherized. It has become a receptacle into which can be tossed all the angst and apprehension people feel about the faltering economy, about the new and unfamiliar political order, about the shifting cultural, racial, and religious landscapes that have fundamentally altered the world. Across Europe and North America, whatever is fearful, whatever is foreign, whatever is alien and unsafe is being tagged with the label ‘Islam.’”
RA: That is from the new introduction from the updated version that just was released in 2011…
LW: This is of course still the case today. Are you encouraged that Muslims are breaking through this concept of being “otherized” or their religion being “otherized”?
RA: This is not the first time in America’s history that a religious minority has been otherized and told they are the internal enemy, that they are not American. Every single word that is being said about Muslims today by these radical anti-Muslim zealots was said by anti-Semites in the 1920′s and 30′s about Judaism, by anti-Catholic activists in the 19th century by the Know Nothings and preachers like Lyman Beecher. This is not a new thing, this is what we do in this country, we so often define ourselves, what it means to be American which is of course a malleable and slippery identity by defining ourselves in opposition to somebody else whether: Catholics, Jews, Japanese or Germans and now it is just Muslims.
There should be no question in anyone’s mind, anyone who has bothered to study for even a few minutes should know that in a generation from now we are going to look on the anti-Muslim zealots of today, these clowns like Pamlea Geller, Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney and Steven Emerson with the same exact shame, disdain, mockery and derision that we look back at the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholicism of our past. That’s guaranteed.
These guys have always been there, they have always been around, they have always been on the fringes and on the margins and you know in a generation from now when Muslims become as much a part of the American religious fabric, as much as Jews and Catholics have become, I am sure these guys will show up again and start picking on some other religious or cultural minority. This is an issue that they have themselves. They have a psychic problem, bigotry is a psychic problem and it’s part of the human condition, and you know lets not kid ourselves, it’s always going to be around, it’s just that it’s target is going to change.
LW: I think this is good place to wrap up, we have a lot to unpack here. Thank you for your time!
Project co-sponsored by they Muslims Against Hunger Project, Rutgers University Shalom-Salaam, and the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
On Sunday morning, the kitchen of the Muslim Foundation Inc. Mosque in Somerset was filled with good smells and friendly conversation as a group of volunteers prepared 350 meals for homeless folks in New York and New Jersey.
The event was part of a larger “Weekend of Twinning,” held from Nov. 18 – 20.
The purpose of the weekend is to facilitate events between Muslim and Jewish people to promote greater understanding and community between the two, according to Walter Ruby of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
According to a release from Muslims Against Hunger, more than 125 events are being held around the world as part of the Weekend of Twinning.
“Each Jew and each Muslim is obligated to help those most in need,” Ruby said.
Adult and student volunteers, as well as a group from Rutgers University prepared tandoori chicken, rice pilaf, salad, vegetables and fruit. A kosher and vegetarian option of chickpea salad was also prepared, as well as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Zamir Hassan, founder of the Muslims Against Hunger Project said about 100 meals would be taken to a shelter in Basking Ridge, while another 150 would be taken to Manhattan, where they would be handed out to homeless on the street.
Ruby said the group planned to visit 53rd St. and Lexington Ave. in New York, a spot where many homeless people congregate.
An Orthodox Jewish outreach group called “Masbiah” would be meeting them in New York to assist in handing out the meals, he said.
Additionally, the volunteers held an interfaith luncheon and prayer service following the morning preparation.
Marshal Anjum, 26, of Shalom-Salaam, a Muslim and Jewish student organization at Rutgers University said the group is working to build bridges between the Jewish and Muslim communities.
“We thought community service was a great way to go about it,” she said.
… Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim, either in your cabinet or as a federal judge?
Cain: “No, I would not. And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there is this attempted to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government. … The question that was asked that ‘raised some questions’ and, as my grandfather said, ‘I does not care, I feel the way I feel.’ …
“I immediately said, without thinking, ‘No, I would not be comfortable.’ I did not say that I would not have [Muslims] in my cabinet. If you look at my career, I have hired good people regardless of race, religion, sex gender, orientation and this kind of thing.”
BECK: So wait a minute. Are you saying that Muslims have to prove their, that there has to be some loyalty proof?
CAIN: Yes, to the Constitution of the United States of America.
BECK: Would you do that to a Catholic or would you do that to a Mormon?
CAIN: Nope, I wouldn’t. Because there is a greater dangerous part of the Muslim faith than there is in these other religions. I know that there are some Muslims who talk about, “but we are a peaceful religion.” And I’m sure that there are some peace-loving Muslims.
On Wednesday, Cain met with four Muslim leaders in Sterling, Va. He said in a statement later he was “truly sorry” for comments that may have “betrayed” his commitment to the Constitution and the religious freedom it guarantees.
He also acknowledged that Muslims, “like all Americans,” have the right to practice freely their faith and that most Muslim Americans are peaceful and patriotic.
CAIN: Call me crazy. … Some people would infuse Sharia Law in our courts system if we allow it. I honestly believe that. So even if he calls me crazy, I am going to make sure that they don’t infuse it little by little by little. … American laws in American courts, period.
AMANPOUR: American laws are in American courts. So the people of this country should be safe for the moment.
Now Cain gives us another quote for November:
I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views
I wonder who it was who told you. Maybe, Zuhdi Jasser, who was a star witness in the Peter King Trials?
Herman Cain said that he believes a majority of American Muslims share extremist views in an interview published on Monday.
In an interview that included a few eyebrow-raising comments, Cain’s exchange about American Muslims may get the most attention.
“I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” Cain said in an interview with GQ.
Asked if he thought this individual — whom Cain would only identify as “a very prominent voice in the Muslim community” — was right, Cain said that although he found it hard to believe, ultimately he trusted his adviser.
“Yes, because of the respect that I have for this individual. Because when he told me this, he said he wouldn’t want to be quoted or identified as having said that,” Cain said.
In March, Cain made waves when he said that if he were elected, he would not feel “comfortable” in appointing Muslims to his Cabinet.
The interview — which included questions from GQ‘s food critic — also touched on some of the culinary themes that have permeated the Republican nominating contest. Cain famously described himself as not the flavor of the week or month after his rise to the top of the polls, joking that instead he was Häagen-Dazs’s black walnut, a flavor that “tastes good all the time.”
The GQ writers challenged Cain to assign flavors to his competitors and Cain obliged, labeling Mitt Romney plain vanilla and Texas Gov. Rick Perry rocky road. He was then asked what flavor Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) would be:
“Michele Bachmann … I’m not going to say it. I’m not going to say it,” Cain said.
But pressed by his interviewers, Cain relented, saying that Bachmann would be “tutti-frutti.”
“I know I’m going to get in trouble,” Cain said.
The interview was conducted at Capitol Hill pizzeria Seventh Hill, and Cain — the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza — was asked what he could tell about a man from the toppings he ordered.
“The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is,” Cain responded. Pressed, he laughingly elaborated that “the more manly man is not afraid of abundance” and that a pizza piled high with vegetables was “a sissy pizza.”
The GQ comments were the latest in a string of questionable jokes and comments that might have derailed other candidates. Cain acknowledged as much, asking the GQ writers, “That probably wasn’t politically correct, was it?” at the conclusion of the interview.
At last week’s Republican presidential debate, Cain referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as “Princess Nancy,” but walked back the name almost immediately after the debate.
So far, Cain’s candid remarks and allegations of sexual harassment that have surfaced in recent weeks have done little to ding his popularity. A pair of polls released Monday from NBC and Battleground both show Cain still leading the Republican field.
It turns out, when Herman Cain said the majority of Muslim Americans hold extremist views, he didn’t mean “Americans” as in Americans. Not at all. What he really meant, his campaign spokesman has clarified, was Muslims from some other country.
Cain just shut up!
Update II: We just can’t keep up with Herman Cain’s fails; check out the latest:
This story reminds us here at “What If” of the Malaysian Fatwa against yoga and the Islamophobes who rallied against it. Robert Spencer’s writers proclaimed:
“Why should we look for other alternatives to exercise and search for peace? Yoga could cause (Muslims) to stray from their faith because its movements are according to the style and traditions of Hinduism.”
Will Spencer and his cronies repeat the same thing in a Christian context?
In his blog, Pastor Mark Driscoll from the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, says that “yoga is a religious philosophy that is in direct opposition to Christianity”. Because of this, he believes that “yoga cannot be simply received by any Christian in good conscious”.
Say what?
Not that this is the first time we’ve heard such rubbish about the conflicts between yoga and religion, but for the last time, can someone please tell these people that yoga is not a religion?
But even if we did tell him this (and other people have), the good Pastor refuses to believe it. In fact, he says yoga is downright demonic and he compares it to being as bad as adultery–which is nothing but a huge stretch (pun intended):
There is nothing wrong with stretching, exercising, or regulating one’s stress through breathing. But when the tenets of yoga are included, it’s by definition a worship act to spirit beings other than the God of the Bible. By way of analogy, there is nothing inherently wrong with intimacy, sex, and pleasure. But when the tenets of adultery are included, it’s a sinfully idolatrous worship act. A faithful Christian can no more say they are practicing yoga for Jesus than they can say they are committing adultery for Jesus.
Pastor Mark goes on to say that we just don’t understand what yoga really is. To which I say, do you, Pastor? Have you ever tried it? Have you experienced the true goodness that can come to your mind, body and spirit when you start flowing in some of the awesome poses and vinyasas? Doubtful, because he believes that we simply cannot get down on our mats while “ignoring the religious aspects of the practice of yoga”.
Yes, some people choose to incorporate spirituality into their practice, which is completely fine. To each yogi, her own. But since when does spirituality equal religion? Can’t we just open our hearts and our minds to the possibility that we can express gratitude and thanks and creativity and acceptance without a particular religious belief being a part of that? I, for one, have never had a yoga teacher quote from the Bible or any other religious readings during class, but even if I did, I’m pretty sure I’d be OK with that.
Yet Pastor Mark still rejects the idea that we can grow spiritually without church. In fact, he says the only real way to do so is through Christianity.
Sigh.
I say we all get down on our mats today and send some hearty “OMs” to the good Pastor.
On Wednesday night, comedian and right-wing pundit Dennis Miller appeared on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor to talk about various political issues. At one point, Miller explained that on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, he was sitting next to a Muslim man. He told O’Reilly that he fantasized about assaulting the man if he stood up:
MILLER: Billy, I just flew five hours from L.A. to New York next to Islamic kid who was in his 30s. I couldn’t even watch the movie. I just fantasized [about] hitting him in the head with an elbow if he went up.
“You’re doing the Juan Williams thing!” O’Reilly responded to Miller, apparently laughing off his remarks. Miller’s comments come at a time when Islamophobia continues to be pervasive on the far-right. Last week, Tennessee state Rep. Rick Womick (R-Murfreesboro) told ThinkProgress that he thinks Muslims should be banned from the military, earning a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League.
A Midlands mosque was vandalised on the morning of Armistice Day in what is suspected to be a hate crime
The Masjid-E-Umar in Darlaston, West Midlands was vandalised on the morning of Remembrance Day in what is suspected to be a hate crime in retaliation against the fifty Muslim individuals who took part in burning poppies on Remembrance Day 2010.
The attack occurred between the hours of 7:30am and 11:00am. The suspects were said to have jumped over the locked gates and spray-painted a graffiti image of a poppy on the mosque door with the text ‘‘Burn this one’’ to signal the mosque as a supporter of the poppy burning incident.
In 2010, to commemorate Remembrance Day, fifty individuals under a now banned extremist group, Muslim Against Crusades, took part in burning poppies near the Royal Albert Hall in London causing disruption. CCTV was in operation outside the mosque but no footage of the perpetrators had been captured.
Police arrived on the scene shortly after 12pm and patrolled the area for the remainder of the day. The graffiti was removed but the mosque door was damaged.
This isn’t the first time that the Darlaston mosque has been attacked. Two years ago, an attacker spray-painted racist words on the mosque but was caught on CCTV and received community service. And following the London 7/7 bombings, a brick was thrown at the mosque leaving permanent damage to the building.
A Darlaston community member said that the racists who attacked the mosque were ignorant as they ‘‘are over 2 million Muslims in the UK, how can they blame the actions of fifty people to be the beliefs of 2 million?’’ Another community member expressed her thoughts on the attackers, “they have no understanding or respect for any religion,” she said. “This is a place of worship. We live in a multicultural society. We have to respect each other. That’s what it means to be British.”
Other Attacks on Mosques
Similar attacks on mosques throughout the UK have been occurring, some even more violent than the one at Masjid-E-Umar. In July 2011, a Luton mosque was attacked in the early hours of the morning. The attackers broke the mosque windows and sprayed graffiti on the walls.
At the Redbridge Islamic Centre, an incident was reported where attackers shouted racial abuse and threw bricks at the building while worshippers were inside, injuring one man.
Following from the deadly hit-and-run of three Muslim men in Birmingham, in the wake of the 2011 riots, several mosques in Birmingham received a number of threats.
I’m the one they’re after. I’m “the enemy,” the believer in the “false idol,” “the darkness” Jesus needs to cast out of America, the reason they’re spending all night in Detroit’s Ford Field, sending prayers over Michigan mosques “like sending special forces into Afghanistan.” And there are thousands of them, come because Pastor Lou Engle asked them to.
Founder of TheCall, Engle warns that an Islamic movement is rising in Dearborn, Michigan—“Ground Zero” for America’s spiritual future (and site of a new TLC reality show, All-American Muslim). When I heard the goals for TheCall Detroit—healing America in a time of crisis, accomplishing racial reconciliation, and (here’s where I come in) bringing Jesus to Muslim hearts—I figured a Muslim in the crowd could be a nice twist.
So I was there with them for hours into the late night and hearing their ex-Muslim speaker ridiculously early in the morning, the undercover Muslim surrounded by tens of thousands beside me, praying for Jesus to invade my heart. My plan was to report from the inside, to talk to the attendees as one among devoted thousands (though probably not revealing my religious background, unless I had to and knew where the exits were).
I’d observe firsthand what goes on at a gathering like this. I’d try to understand how such Christians understand Islam. Lou Engle’s world is alien from my New England roots and New York life. I’d attended churches before, but nothing like this. We need to know where this fear and hate come from, what its intentions are, and who it appeals to.
But as the day approached, Engle’s connections to a network of right-wing activists and political Christians came into focus. From the involvement of US Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin (who has helpfully compared Islam to a diabolical religion), to a Michigan Call coordinator named Rick Warzywak (who believes that Christians should “go back and occupy or take back the land” of American Muslims), to a particularly weird twist on the theme of racial reconciliation (involving sending Detroit’s African-American Muslims, or ex-Muslims, to the Middle East), it was clear that this might be an uncomfortable assignment.
So I shaved my beard down to a goatee. Just in case.
But that anxiety only confirmed the importance of what I was doing. I needed to see this for myself. Americans, and American Muslims especially, need to know how certain interpretations of professedly apolitical Christianity become allied to a far-right agenda of foreign wars and domestic austerity, glorifying the rich while demonizing the poor.
Political Christianity’s treatment of Islam is one of the few points, and perhaps the only point, at which right-wing, political Christianity’s radical agenda is revealed, for its attitude to Islam speaks both to the narrowness of its domestic vision (America for certain Americans) and the aggressiveness of its foreign vision (going abroad to find monstrous Muslims to convert). Don’t let the language of love fool you.
A Pep Rally for Jesus
I was sure I’d be one of very few non-white folks in attendance, yet when the gates opened on Friday afternoon, I was struck by the diversity—and the juvenile vibe. I took my seat close to the stage, surrounded by people of every color, finding it hard to focus because of the pounding Christian rock music shaking the stadium. Folks were on their feet, dancing and swaying. Rather than stick out, I blended in perfectly.
People have tried to compare Islamophobia to old-school racism. And I’ve repeatedly disagreed. We have a tendency to accuse arguments rooted in religion and tradition of reaching back to the past; the truth, however, is much more complicated. As much as religion shapes the world, it is shaped by the world. Even when we invoke the past, we must accommodate the language and conclusions of today. Just fifty years ago, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann would not have been viable candidates. Hell, they wouldn’t have been candidates at all. And so too with TheCall.
The rally formally opened with a Native American band (actually, since they were Canadian, a First Nations band). Everybody seemed into it, on their feet and swaying to the beat. Judging by those first hours, this was worship at the altar of a multicultural Jesus, advertising its many ethnicities, stressing the need for racial reconciliation and forgiveness, encouraging populations pushed apart by suspicion to come together in Jesus’ name. I found it encouraging and I found it worrying.
The diversity was nice. Different languages were spoken on the stage, many different ethnicities were represented. But that diversity could be used to excuse a more subversive intolerance, all the harder to detect for the polyglot multiplicity. It’s not so different from how, since the 1960s, consumer culture has appropriated the language of diversity, and even its attitude, without dealing with its underlying and democratic point. And so we have elite institutions that are ever more racially diverse, who increasingly deploy people of different colors and backgrounds in their advertising and hierarchies, even while social mobility goes into steep decline and the middle class is eviscerated.
I’m sure Engle believes in a Christian movement that transcends race, to reach around the world. Just as I’m sure he’d be greatly pleased by my conversion to his Christianity. But this misses the deeper point, the truly political and partisan nature of TheCall; I saw this as far more than a spiritual exercise in part, I think, because I was forced to process what was happening around me as an outsider. Because, after all, religions are not interchangeable, like different color cars of the same make and model.
Raised in Sunni Muslim tradition, I always experienced worship as the effort to establish an immediate, intimate, and contemplative connection with God; in Sunni mysticism, observing the law is a necessary condition of spirituality. I say this not to establish distance, or to enforce division, but to draw our attention to how religion can be either a source of strength or a source of harm. To make a long point short, Islam is a religion of moral law; when the institutions that produce its legal scholars (who are, ideally, also spiritual authorities) are subverted, undercut, or simply insufficiently rigorous, the resulting interpretations of law become irrelevant—or dangerous.
Keeping that in mind, I found TheCall was immediately shocking.
A friend called a few hours in, concerned that I might be kidnapped (I’m sure he was joking—I hope), and asked what I made of the whole thing. And the first thing that came to mind was: “It’s like a pep rally for Jesus.”
So that Jesus Might Invade Their Dreams
Even when there were speakers, they were bookended by passionate music, deeply emotional calls to prayer, folks spontaneously joining hands and forming prayer circles, turning not to established rituals but whatever the moment led them to. A man behind me started speaking in tongues, and within a few hours, people were fainting and falling to the ground. I had never experienced anything like it.
But with all the transport out of and away from yourself, there was little time to digest what the speakers were saying, little time to think through the implications of their exhortations. In fairness, that didn’t seem to be a problem right away. As I said, the first few hours seemed to be a public relations dream come true; I heard little overtly anti-Muslim sentiment (and no mention of homosexuality).
A look at the program confirmed why. The section titled “Dearborn Awakening” was dumped in dead time, 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. Since Dearborn is home to many Arabs and Muslims, as well as one of the largest mosques in America (a Twelver Shi’a mosque, incidentally), I knew this must be the part of TheCall that would confront Islam. Likely the organizers wanted to shift the more controversial stuff to when nobody would be paying attention; according to Rachel Maddow, this might also have been in the hope that, with Michigan Muslims asleep, Jesus might invade their dreams.
Engle underestimated this Muslim’s desire to see through the subterfuge.
I left Ford Field after five hours, frankly exhausted by the emotional commitment requested by TheCall. A friend took me to an Arab restaurant, where all the waitresses wore hijab. That, and seeing Arabic signs and advertisements everywhere, only fifteen minutes from Ford Field, was pleasingly jarring (and strategically reassuring: In case things turned ugly, I knew where to run, and had a reasonable sense of how fast).
I explained to one of the friendly, all-American, veiled waitresses what I was doing in Dearborn. She seemed skeptical. So I shared TheCall’s promotional literature, and she was stunned. This poor girl hadn’t realized she was part of any “Islamic movement in America” (in America, but not “American”). That night, I spoke to other Muslims about TheCall. They were either deeply concerned or just shrugged it off. As of Friday night, I would’ve been with the second group.
At midnight, I was back in my hotel, stuffed full of shish tawouk, Arab pastries, and chai. I took a two-hour nap, and then went back for more.
Like the Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood used to have a popular slogan: “Islam is the solution” (Islam huwa al-hall). “Jesus is the answer” is the same kind of sloganeering. I’m not just saying that because I know it would drive Engle nuts. It is an overly and therefore problematically easy answer to some very knotty problems. And hearing Engle insist on this point brought me back to the very format of TheCall, which rushes through speakers, condenses their points, and squishes them between loud music and unreflectively emotional appeals. There’s little time to ponder what it means for America if only Jesus can solve our problems.
In an introduction found in the event program, Engle wrote:
Revolution is in the air. But the revolution that is needed is not a revolution of snarling protesters or angry mobs; it’s a Jesus revolution, a revolution of forgiveness, racial reconciliation, compassion.
It’s one thing if he genuinely disavowed politics, but time and time again his supposedly apolitical efforts have an undeniable political goal. In fact TheCall is deeply and suspiciously political, and—at least here he is honest—revolutionary. It seeks to heal America by making a different America in its place, one whose moral conversation displaces its political discourse, one whose reference point is Jesus. Rick Perry’s prayer rally The Response was modeled on Engle’s interpretation of the solemn assembly described in Joel 2, which in turn shaped TheCall. Engle himself has traveled to Sacramento, Washington, and Kampala to praise efforts to restrict the rights of LGBT people and has led elected Republicans in a prayer session that predicted God would punish America for passing health care reform.
But most relevant here was the vacuity of the content: The solution to America’s great crisis was prayer, from start to end, and apparently little else. Any religiosity that encourages worship without broader social engagement—non-Christians were barely acknowledged over the course of an event designed to heal America’s profound crisis—while allying with those who seek to do away with much of our government is anything but apolitical. It just doesn’t have the courage to admit it.
Engle argues that America is in crisis. So do a lot of folks. But then he argues that the only way out is through Jesus. Undoubtedly every political and social crisis has a moral dimension, though to admit that means little. What matters more is to think this logic through: How will we solve political and social crises if we read them through religious lenses? While a universalized, transnational Christianity has its appeal, it doesn’t leave much room for other Americans—or America as a political project. The more I listened to Engle diagnosing America’s problems, the more I thought of old-school Islamists.
Moozlums Allergic To Jesus
Of course, I had come to hear what TheCall would say about Muslims. Engle’s disavowal of any political agenda is, on this point, either evidence of duplicity or naiveté. We are at war in numerous Muslim-majority countries, facing an America in fiscal crisis, fighting a magnificently costly war on terrorism with no defined end, and watching a movement to ban Shari’ah law to save the Constitution while our civil liberties are increasingly challenged. There is no way that any conversation about Islam in America cannot have political implications. Long story short, I’m glad I was wide awake and raptly attentive at 3 a.m.
“Dearborn Awakening” began with a preacher who could not pronounce “Muslim.” He seemed to think it was “Mooz-lum.” I wanted to raise my hand to correct him, but everyone else had his or her hands raised (for different reasons). In the singing, one of the chorus lines was “Gather the remnants/among the Muslims”—a reference to the remnant of Christians remaining during the Tribulation who will evangelize the non-Christians so they will be saved before Jesus’ return. Another speaker clued us in on Jesus’ attitude to the Muslims: “You love them, and there’s nothing they can do about that.” Leave it to TheCall to make love sound alarming, even terrifying.
But the best was yet to come, and his name was Kamal.
Kamal was the reason we were here (and awake). I didn’t know who Kamal was, and would only later learn his identity, although while he was speaking, I suspected he was a fraud. (I’m not the only one who finds Kamal Saleem dubious). Kamal introduced himself as an ex-terrorist, which usually makes me wonder, considering how others have made lucrative careers profiting from ignorance, paranoia, and naïveté. (Imagine how much money I could make as a “former Muslim” on the incestuous right-wing circuit. I’m imagining it right now, and am mildly depressed.)
I’m not saying Kamal Saleem is definitely a fraud; it may simply be that he was raised by one of the dumbest Muslim families in the world.
Kamal claimed that he was raised in “jihad” in Lebanon, and kindly shared the implications with an audience that knew no better. For example, he said, when a Muslim’s blood is first shed in the path of God, he becomes a Messiah. (Unfortunately for Kamal, there is only one Messiah in Islam, and it’s Jesus—who, to take the previous speaker’s logic to its conclusion, loves us even if Lou Engle doesn’t want him to.) Kamal then told us that Islam teaches that there is only one way to go to heaven, and that is war. In fact, he shared many “facts,” the full effect of which was to convince the audience that Islam is purely demonic. Indeed, numerous references were made to “the darkness,” “the enemy,” and “false idols,” oblique enough to avoid outright outrage, but obvious enough to anyone more than half awake.
Stressing his Muslim credentials, Kamal said that one of his uncles was “the holiest of holies,” the Muslim Pope. There is no Muslim Pope, though to be fair, Kamal’s uncle might just have been lying to the poor boy. Kamal then told us that he was recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood and the PLO (a secular organization) and went on his first mission into Israel—we’re assuming that this was a military operation—at the age of seven. At the age of eight, he went on his second mission. Years later, when he first met Christians in America, Kamal was repulsed. His initial reaction was: “I’m allergic to Jesus.” (The audience loved this part.) Unfortunately for the supposed former Muslim, nobody taught Kamal that a Muslim who does not honor Jesus is by the consensus of every school in Islam not a Muslim.
Kamal then turned his sharp mind to theology, and distinguished the Muslim concept of God from the Christian, arguing that what Muslims believe in is a false idol. Christians, on the other hand, believe in the true God of love. Nobody told Kamal that one of Islam’s ninety-nine names of God is al-Wadud, the Loving, and that many other names express compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. Pretty much everything Kamal praised about the “Christian” God, short of the Trinity, could easily square with Islam’s understanding of the Divine: God is loving, forgiving, merciful, and personally concerned with us. Kamal closed with his conversion story, and a reminder that since converting, Saudi Arabia, the PLO, and the Muslim Brotherhood had all put a price on his head.
All the friendly diversity from Friday night, the warm and smiley openness, had vanished. Love and freedom were convenient catchphrases justifying the identification of nearly one-quarter of humanity with the demonic. It’s one thing to say that you’d like Muslims to convert to Christianity. Fair enough. Many Muslims want Christians to convert to Islam. It’s another thing to so brazenly misrepresent Islam. Conflicts in the past could be safely broached, but when it came to today’s war on terror, the disingenuousness and ill-spiritedness of choosing a former Muslim with the worst possible perspective on Islam revealed Engle’s agenda and its overlap with fearmongering Islamophobes.
After Kamal, there was mostly prayer and music, and prayerful music, until 6 a.m., at which time the first prayer of the day came in (I prayed at the hotel, just to be safe). Afterwards I took a long nap and came back to TheCall by late morning. But by then much had changed. Ford Field, which at best was half full, was empty and dulled. And it was hard to talk to people. Folks were friendly, but rarely chatty—though to do them justice, most of them were fasting, and probably hadn’t slept the night. The conversations I had with participants and performers were generally rushed. I didn’t want to be too obvious by raising the topic of Islam, and so it never came up.
Meanness of Spirit
Even back at the hotel, I didn’t get much traction. Most folks focused on the intensity of the experience, although my coming all the way from New York intrigued some. While taking a shower on Sunday morning, I heard a man in the room next door passionately scream Jesus’ name, but on reflection, that might have been something else entirely. There wasn’t much else to do, and I wanted the other side of the story. Saturday afternoon, I headed for Dearborn’s giant mosque, the Islamic Center of America, where I spent an hour asking the folks I met what they thought about TheCall. One activist noted that he hadn’t made any initiative to reach out to Engle; as an African American, he noted, he wouldn’t reach out to David Duke. For him, Engle was another piece of the Islamophobia puzzle.
After praying at sundown—the first time, incidentally, I’ve prayed in a Twelver Shi’a mosque (this trip was full of new religious experiences)—I visited a mosque in Rochester Hills, this one mostly South Asian and Sunni, where I was also able to get some local Muslims’ reactions to TheCall. There was of course concern, and some surprise. Many had heard, but many had not. More of the Muslims were more interested in hearing what it was like to be there. I’d live-tweeted TheCall and issued far too many Facebook updates, so some looked for clarification or explanation of certain points. I went back to the hotel by midnight and fell asleep fast, and didn’t begin to reflect on the whole experience until Sunday morning.
I was naturally disheartened, considering that the participants probably thought Kamal Saleem represented Islam. But on the drive to the airport that disappointment lifted. America is in crisis, as Engle warned, but its solution can be intimated in the popular energy that has animated engagement from Wisconsin to Wall Street to Tahrir—on the way to the airport, I drove past Occupy Detroit.
Our imaginations are once more open, as we consider the incompatibilities of unchecked capital and genuine democracy. In this time of reconstructing the way our world works, a polarizing and exclusive religious vision is not particularly relevant. America is also inescapably and increasingly diverse, and its domestic and foreign policy requires finding a method of engagement with difference that is reasonable and respectful.
But there is a more inescapable truth about Engle’s “Dearborn Awakening.” He chose a speaker who lied, obfuscated, and confused. Should any of the participants want to learn more about Islam, if even to bring Jesus to Muslims, they have already heard the worst of the worst. And they’ll quickly find out that Islam is very different from what they were told it is. All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud.
As much as TheCall prayed for “Jesus to cover Dearborn in light, and cast out the darkness,” Kamal Saleem was the one speaking in the dead of night. Engle should pay more attention to his own moralizing etiology of America’s crisis. Democracy, like a free-market economy, operates on trust, and when that trust is lost, it is very hard to recover. The relationship of the faithful with their leaders is much the same. Those many thousands who were clearly lied to on Saturday morning will find out. Perhaps not immediately. But eventually. And then they’ll begin to wonder what else was a lie.
Before I begin, I must disclose my general disdain for reality television. I think this phenomenon is part of a generalized “dumbing down” of America. I’ll even go so far as to say that I lose a bit of respect for those who watch Jersey Shore, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, etc.
But, when I heard about TLC’s All-American Muslim, I was naturally intrigued. It was a clear violation of the rule that Muslims can only be portrayed in American media as terrorist villains or, occasionally, as the token Muslim helping “the good guys” against the Evil Muslim Terrorists. The idea of depicting what real Muslims are like–instead of the caricature in the media–is something I support.
Indeed, there is probably nothing more important in the battle against Islamophobia than humanizing Muslims and making them relatable, which this television show just might do (or at least help in doing so). Katie Couric argued that a “Muslim Cosby Show” would be a great idea: just as it helped many white Americans see that black Americans weren’t all that different from them, so too could a show about American Muslim families help other Americans realize that they aren’t all that different from each other.
JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer and other Islamophobes absolutely hate that idea. That’s why Spencer grumbled that “[t]he point of the show is to depict Muslims as ordinary folks just like you and me who are subjected to unjust suspicion.”
How DARE the show depict Muslims as ordinary folks! Doesn’t TLC know that Muslims are not ordinary at all, that they eat infidel babies for breakfast, shoot jihad laser beams from their eyes, and fart 100% pure radioactive Sharia?
Spencer bellowed:
TLC’s much-ballyhooed All-American Muslim reality show makes its agenda clear in its opening sequences: shots of a hijabbed girl roller-skating, Muslims dancing at a wedding, an American flag waving proudly in the breeze, and newspaper clippings proclaiming “4 in 10 Americans ‘suspicious’ of Muslims,” “Outrage at Ground Zero ‘Mosque,’” and “Muslims Brace for Backlash.” The point of the show is to depict Muslims as ordinary folks just like you and me who are subjected to unjust suspicion.
And so we meet one zaftig girl who loves to have fun and go to clubs, and who is in the process of getting married. Another young woman, provocatively dressed by Muslim standards, is trying to open up a club of her own. A young hijab-wearing wife shares the joy of her pregnancy with her loving husband. They’re balancing the demands of faith and family with life’s daily pressures, just like most Americans. So why—the show implies—are non-Muslim Americans so mean to them?
Yet it is noteworthy that both the woman who is getting married and the one who is trying to open a club acknowledge that they are not all that religious. And that is the problem at the heart of All-American Muslim. The Muslims it depicts are for the most part undoubtedly harmless, completely uninterested in jihad and Islamic supremacism…
But Americans aren’t suspicious of Muslims who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football. Americans are suspicious of Muslims who are trying to blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law.
Robert Spencer is upset that All-American Muslim didn’t portray a family of terrorist Muslims–perhaps they could have named them the Al-Kablams. Here is where Spencer lives in his Islamophobe fantasy: he imagines that American Muslim families are “jihadis” and Islamic supremacists who want to “blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law.”
If Jersey Shore were really about Italian-Americans (as some incorrectly thought it was), do you think it would be justified to demand that the show include a mafioso family in it? Does a reality show about Catholic families in America need to include a family led by a child-molesting priest? Would a reality television show about Mexican-American families be “misleading” if it didn’t include at least one family of illegals? Would a show about Russian or Chinese-Americans be incomplete if it didn’t include at least one family of radical communists? Is a show about black Americans incomplete if it doesn’t include a family of ex-cons?
What utter nonsense.
This would be like arguing that the Cosby Show was misleading white America, since it showed “harmless blacks,” and not the ones “who are trying to rob, rape, and kill whites,” which was a prevailing stereotype of the time. The entire purpose of the Cosby Show–and now All-American Muslim–is to counter stereotypes. So why on earth would All-American Muslim include a terrorist family? Why does anyone take Robert Spencer’s nonsense seriously?
The fact that All-American Muslim chose to include characters who were not very religious had Robert Spencer in quite the tizzy. Interesting, some American Muslim viewers were also taken aback by this. However, AltMuslim.com’s Tuqa Nusairat gave an appropriate response to this criticism, saying:
Let’s stop assuming that Muslims do not drink, have tattoos, or own clubs. If you were somehow shocked by the scenes on this episode, it simply indicates your lack of intermingling with a representative sample of American Muslims.
Only a very small percentage of American Muslims are observant. (The exact percentage is hotly debated, but there is no question that they are in the minority.) And only a fraction of those who are religious wear the headscarf (hijab). Therefore, one could even say that the observant Muslim population is over-represented in All-American Muslim.
This is another reason, among the many, that Islamophobic fear-mongers are wildly off the mark when they portray the American Muslim population as a threat to American democracy. If only a fraction of Muslim women even wear the headscarf in America, what percentage of American Muslims do you think want to overthrow American democracy to replace it with Taliban-style Sharia? (Answer: 0.000000001%)
This is not to buy into Robert Spencer’s false dichotomy between Good, Nominal Muslims on the one hand, and Bad, Observant Muslims on the other. Spencer writes:
[T]here are people who are very knowledgeable about its doctrines and serious about putting them into practice, and others who don’t know and don’t care about what their religion teaches but still identify themselves as members of it, and every gradation in between. It would never happen for obvious reasons, but All-American Muslim would be much more interesting if it tracked one of its secular, attractive nominal Muslims as he decided to get more serious about his faith, and ended up participating in jihad activity or Islamic supremacist efforts to demonize and marginalize those who resist that activity.
He assumes that religious observance would necessitate participation in terrorism and Islamic supremacism. In fact, as I noted above, many of the actors are observant: they reconcile their faith with modernity–and set themselves to being productive citizens; there is no contradiction for them, and millions of others, between being religious and being a good citizen. In fact, they see the two things going hand-in-hand. And Robert Spencer et al. absolutely hate that.
* * * * *
Elsewhere in the same diatribe, Robert Spencer says:
All-American Muslim addresses nothing of that supremacist ideology, although at times it makes an appearance despite the producers’ best efforts. The woman who is getting married is marrying a Roman Catholic, who converts to Islam in order to marry her. Her father insists on the conversion as a condition of the wedding, and at one point we are told in passing that while a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim woman, a Muslim woman is not free to marry a non-Muslim man.
There are two issues here: (1) an alleged double standard between Muslim men and women with regard to marrying non-Muslims, and (2) a supposed supremacist attitude that demands that Muslims can only marry fellow Muslims.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t discussed in the first episode of the show (perhaps it will be in future episodes), there exists an alternative opinion with regard to Muslim women marrying non-Muslims, a view grounded in the Quran no less. This dissenting, reformist opinion is expressed by the Islamic intellectual Khaled Abou El Fadl, who allows Muslim men and women to marry non-Muslims.
The traditional opinion uses verse 2:221 of the Quran to completely prohibit Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims (see, for instance, this ultra-conservative Islamic website):
And do not give your women in marriage to idolaters until they believe: a believing slave is certainly better than an idolater, even though he may please you. Such people call you to the Fire, while God calls you to the Garden and forgiveness by His leave.
Yet, the first half of the verse, addressed to the men, is conveniently left out (in bold):
Do not marry idolatresses until they believe: a believing slave woman is certainly better than an idolatress, even though she may please you. And do not give your women in marriage to idolaters until they believe: a believing slave is certainly better than an idolater, even though he may please you. Such people call you to the Fire, while God calls you to the Garden and forgiveness by His leave.
It’s the exact same restriction upon Muslim men. The Quran says in another verse (5:5):
Today all good things have been made lawful for you. The food of the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) is lawful for you as your food is lawful for them. So are chaste, believing, women as well as chaste women of the people who were given the Scripture before you (Jews and Christians), as long as you have given them their bride-gifts and married them, not taking them as lovers or secret mistresses.
Clearly, the first verse (2:221) prohibits marriage to idolaters only, not to all non-Muslims. In fact, throughout the Quran, the “People of the Book” (which includes Jews and Christians) are referred to separately from “idolaters,” an indication that these two groups are not simply interchangeable.
The other verse used to support the traditional view is 60:10, which says that “[believing women] are not lawful wives for [the disbelievers], nor are the disbelievers their lawful husbands.” However, this verse was revealed regarding the women who fled persecution in Mecca (which at that time was ruled by idolaters) to find refuge in the city of Medina; these women were called The Emigrants. They had previously been married to idolaters, not People of the Book.
More importantly, we see once again that the other half of the verse, addressed to the men, is conveniently omitted by proponents of the traditional view:
…[Believing women] are not lawful wives for [the disbelievers], nor are the disbelievers their lawful husbands…and do not yourselves hold on to marriage ties with disbelieving women…
The reformist view thus rejects the double standard, and argues that the verses used to prove that Muslim women aren’t allowed to marry non-Muslims have the exact same prohibition for Muslim men; therefore, the only logical way to reconcile this is to say that the Quran prohibits Muslims–men and women alike–from marrying idolaters, but does not prohibit marriage to all non-Muslims. The prohibition certainly does not include Jews and Christians (such as Jeff). Based on this understanding, Muslims are allowed to marry Muslims or non-Muslims, so long as they are chaste.
There are much wider implications to this discussion, including the way different ideological groups within the Islamic community…
1) …choose to emphasize or de-emphasize traditional views.
2) …choose to emphasize or de-emphasize ijma.
3) …view the religious texts: do they view the Quran with “fresh eyes” or do they only read the Quran “through” ancient commentaries? Also, is it really true that the stricter, more conservative views are “more authentic” and are more closely grounded in Quranic evidence?
4) …view non-Muslims: are they all idolaters? Or can non-Muslims enter Paradise?
5) …view women and patriarchy.
These and other issues I plan on discussing in greater detail in the future. They are very important to comprehend if one truly wants to understand the American Muslim community and Islam in general. This understanding and depth of knowledge is needed to tackle Islamophobia as well, and it is critical in order to counter the myths spread by Robert Spencer and co.
* * * * *
Robert Spencer then says:
Left unanswered in the show is the question of what might have happened if the couple had decided to get married in the Roman Catholic Church, or to leave Islam at some later date. No doubt this non-observant woman’s Muslim relatives would have been less solicitous in that event.
So too are many devout Catholic parents “less solicitous” when their children wish to marry outside the faith. In fact, the Catholic Church blocks all marriages to non-Christians, calling it a “disparity of cult.” One must seek a special exemption from a bishop to conduct such a marriage; the bishop’s job is to try to get the non-Christian partner to agree that the children will be raised Catholic. Is this then a reflection of the supremacist attitude of Catholicism?
How would Robert Spencer himself react if his son or daughter wanted to marry a Muslim? We all know how “solicitous” he’d be feeling.
Certainly, many Protestant Christian groups, especially Evangelicals, insist on only dating and marrying fellow believers. Many outright forbid marriage outside the faith, citing the Biblical verse 2 Corinthians 6:14:
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?
Two of the three major branches of Judaism (Orthodox and Conservative) similarly forbid Jews from marrying non-Jews.
But, remember, when Muslims say that they should only marry fellow believers, that’s a proof of inherent Islamic supremacism!
The lady–in this case, Robert Spencer–doth protest too much, methinks.
Also, it should be pointed out that there is no indication that Shadia is fearful for her life should she choose to marry a non-Muslim. A reasonable assumption is that her father would be upset with her, stop speaking to her for some time, and/or not attend the wedding. Only in Spencer’s mind would it be reasonable to assume that he is going to “honor kill” her. Considering that the total number of Muslim honor killings in the United States can be counted on the hand, why should the show depict that as representative of the millions of American Muslim families?
In fact, Shadia’s father already knows that his daughter is dating Jeff; she even kisses Jeff in front of him. Shadia’s father also knows that she has tattoos and drinks alcohol, among other “un-Islamic” things. He hasn’t killed her yet. In fact, he is loving towards her.
Even though the father’s demand–that Jeff convert to Islam if he wants to marry Shadia–is completely unreasonable, it should be noted that really the father is asking for Jeff to make a token, fake conversion–one that he probably knows is not considered valid in Islam. Contrary to what was depicted on the show, conversion to Islam does not require just saying a simple sentence and presto! Rather, Islam stresses that conversion starts in the heart; without conviction, the conversion meant nothing.
Similarly, Robert Spencer whines elsewhere:
There are many women in the show who are wearing hijabs and many who are not, but we are not allowed to see what might happen if one of the hijab-wearing women decides to take it off. Such conflicts would not serve The Learning Channel’s agenda.
Here again he assumes that the women on the show are forced to wear hijab by their families. This shows Spencer’s unfamiliarity with American Muslim community. One can bet that there are other women in the same family who don’t don the hijab–and nothing happens to them. In fact, it has been a phenomenon that younger American Muslim women don the hijab of their own accord, often against their parent’s wishes. In any case, there is no reason at all to assume that anything at all would happen to them if they chose to take it off. Such considerations would not serve JihadWatch’s agenda.
* * * * *
Robert Spencer concludes with a sentence that makes clear his views endorsing collective guilt and punishment:
[A]ll that All-American Muslim gives us is a denunciation of “Islamophobia” featuring Muslims who could never have conceivably inspired any suspicion of Islam in the first place.
Spencer seems to be of the opinion that Radical Muslims are the ones to blame, not Islamophobia, for the suspicion the Muslims in All-American Muslim must deal with. Can you imagine how quickly a person would be dubbed a racist if they were to say something outlandish like “black criminals, not white racists, are responsible for racism against the black community”?
Insert any race or religion for “Muslims” and Spencer’s bigotry becomes clear. His beef with All-American Muslim is an argument steeped in Islamophobia, which the show may help to counteract–and that’s why it is only natural that people like Robert Spencer would steadfastly oppose it. The Islamophobes can’t stomach Americans viewing American Muslims as “ordinary folks just like you and me.” And that’s reason enough to support the show, at least in my book.
* * * * *
Addendum I:
Aman Ali, co-creator of 30 Mosques in 30 Days, offered some legitimate criticism of All-American Muslim. The show failed to show the ethnic diversity within the American Muslim community: all the Muslims in the show are Arab-Americans. This reinforces the myth that all Muslims are Arabs, and all Arabs are Muslims. In fact, “[o]nly about 12 percent of Muslims worldwide are Arabs”, and in the United States only 1 in 4 Muslims is of Arab ethnicity.
All-American Muslim didn’t bother to include any characters from the Asian and black communities, even though these two groups make up a greater percentage of the American Muslim population. Writes Ali:
Brilliant! What better way to show the mainstream public an insight into how multicultural and intellectually diverse Islam’s followers are… with a show focusing on just Arabs (20 percent of the world’s Muslim population) who follow the Shia sect of Islam (about 10 percent of the world’s Muslim population).
The show, which premiered over the weekend, presents itself as a glimpse into the American Muslim community but ignores an overwhelming majority of the cultures that comprise it. South Asians like my parents, who came from India, make up one of the largest group of Muslim immigrants in the United States.
That doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the show makes no reference to African-American Muslims, another huge American Muslim group. Many of the black slaves that built the foundation of this country with blood, sweat and tears were Muslim.
And Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Dave Chappelle and Lupe Fiasco are all American Muslims, too. Hell, Detroit is right next to Dearborn. All the producers had to do was turn around and they’d find one of the most active African-American Muslim communities in the country.
AltMuslim.com’s Tuqa Nusairat countered by saying:
The “reality” is that “Jersey Shore” doesn’t represent Italians in NJ, “Sister Wives” doesn’t represent all Mormons, “Kate Plus Eight” doesn’t represent all families of multiples, so why would would we expect this show to represent all American Muslims?
The problem with Nusairat’s retort is that Italians did and do criticize Jersey Shore for not being representative of their community. They were certainly justified in doing so, even though the show was not called All-American Italians. Similarly, Mormons did and do criticize Sister Wives, because they feel that it is not representative of their faith community. (And I’ll be honest: I’ve never heard of Kate Plus Eight so no comment there.)
Jersey Shore was a poor choice for Nusairat to have relied on to make her argument. However, I agree with her article overall and share her optimistic opinion with regard to the show, which is a refreshing change from the same-old Muslim as Terrorist role that Robert Spencer insists upon. Since people today don’t like reading, the best way to counter Islamophobia and reach the average Joe is not through the long and intricate articles I write, but through the boob tube. All-American Muslim is a step in the right direction.
We did a piece on the despicable anti-Muslim bigotry spewed by Professor Maurice Moshe Eisenstein a few days ago. Sadly, it seems we did not capture the full breadth of his hate-mongering. While we were able to expose his linking and liking Pamela Geller’s genocidal anti-Muslim website Atlas Shrugs, we failed to show some more of the direct and insidious comments he has posted in the past, both on his blog and on his personal Facebook page.
In this screen shot, Eisenstein calls Muslims barbarians, and says there is no future in Arab countries run by Muslims:
Here Eisenstein curses Prophet Muhammad, and says Muslims look upon the Earth as flat:
Here Eisenstein reveals what he thinks about those Muslims at Purdue who are part of the MSA:
This is radical extremism. Period. Imagine if Eisenstein’s last name was Abdul, and replace Muslim with Jewish in the above comments, how long would such a professor last at the said institution? This is a serious breach of the integrity Purdue University by a faculty member and should not be condoned, as it has thus far by the university administration.
There is more to the hate filled banter of Eisenstein, just visit his ironically named blog, Speaking Truth to Power.
Here he sounds more like Halal Pork with all the talk of “snakes”:
Spring and Arabs, i.e. Muslims, is like talking about friendly cobra snakes. There is no such thing.
…
Egypt is under the greatest influence of Islam as a terrorist religion than it has ever been, with no countervailing force.
…
Arabs are only friends of Arabs. (If you doubt that ask any Hindu.) There is no option in the Arab world of supporting so called human rights. The only place that it came close was in Turkey (I know it is not Arab; but, it is Muslim.)
If one thinks that this is relegated to Facebook, think again, he is spewing the same stuff in the CLASSROOM. He states below that Arabs and Muslims haven’t contributed anything to society in 2,000 years, is that what they want professors teaching at the university?:
According to one YouTube commenter this wasn’t recorded by students but was shamelessly put online by Eisenstein himself:
nasserorion Its not recored, he shares all the lectures on his online courses
Anti-Muslim comments made by a PUC professor on his public Facebook page and during his class lectures have led to campus-wide outrage and student protests.
Energetic chants such as “No more Eisenstein, Eisenstein must go!” and “They say get back, we say fight back!” echoed throughout the courtyard between the Gyte and SUL buildings on Nov. 9 and 10. Students held signs and handed out transcripts of Eisenstein’s Facebook comments while expressing their opinions as others came and went between classes. Approximately 50 to 70 students took part in the protest.
PUC students Wala Issa, Jessica Tabor and alumni Chris Ramirez started the protests by organizing with other students in response to the anti-Muslim comments and alleged religious harassment from Eisenstein. During the exchange of comments on Facebook, Eisenstein called Issa a “Jew hater” after she posted a separate link in defense of Muslims and the Islamic religion. Issa said her intentions were to show that anyone can take an article and misinterpret it.
“He believes that we are targeting him as an orthodox Jew, [but] this has nothing to do with that. We are just offended about things that he said, which were calling Muslims terrorists and saying that the prophet Muhammad was an idiot,” said Issa.
Aside from the comments made on Facebook, Issa has previously filed two personal complaints to PUC officials against Eisenstein. The first complaint was filed on Aug. 31, to History and Political Science Department Head Richard Rupp, Dean of Liberal Arts and Social Science Ronald Corthell and Linda Knox, associate director of Affirmative Action at PUC. The second was filed with Corthell on Sept. 21.
…
The first incident involving Issa and Eisenstein occurred on Aug. 30, the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. Issa said Eisenstein made comments during a classroom lecture where he allegedly stated “Muslims are corrupting the world and the only thing Muslims are good for is their food.”
Representatives of PUC’s Social Justice Club and the Muslim Student Association both said they plan to file separate complaints in the days to come.
Alshammari said he and the MSA joined the protests after they saw the comments made by Eisenstein on Facebook and said he believes Eisenstein should be fired over his remarks. He said that students came to the protest and told him Eisenstein has not only insulted Muslims, but Hispanics, blacks and other minorities as well.
Sociology Professor Alan Spector attended the protest on Nov. 10 and gave his opinion of Eisenstein’s comments.
“Professors have a right to their own opinion, but the question is whether or not it creates a situation in the classroom where students feel like they’re not going to be judged fairly or graded fairly,” Spector said.
Tabor, who described Eisenstein’s comments as “hateful,” said, “The university has policies on student academic honesty, yet it appears that faculty members are not held to the same standards. Clearly, Eisenstein believes his university protected “bully pulpit” gives him the freedom to promote his bigotry.”
Loonwatchers should continue to support the students with letters, emails and phone calls to the university. This sort of hate filled bigotry and racism is damaging not only to the school but most importantly to the students who deserve a real education.
In this computer screen shot a Pink Panther figure stands next to a portrait showing murdered Turkish businessman Enver S. in a DVD reportedly produced by neo-Nazis Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boenhardt to document a series of murders they committed over several years on November 15, 2011 in Germany.
An interesting title. You never hear such language when Muslim nations take unequivocal stands against violence in their countries. What’s the last time you saw, “Shocked Saudi Arabia Vows to Fight Terrorists.”
The larger story is how little attention this has received outside of Germany. If these were Muslims you could bet that it would be world-wide news, threat levels and suspicions of terrorists sleeper cells would be dominating coverage.
The money quote from this piece:
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany lamented what it described as a chronically neglected chain of violence against Muslims in the last 20 years.
“Obviously right-wing terrorism was rife and went unchallenged because the authorities looked too much in the direction of religiously motivated criminals,” Council chairman Aiman Mazyek told the Osnabruecker Zeitung.
LEIPZIG/BERLIN – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives urged her on Tuesday to step up the fight against right-wing extremists following the chance discovery that a group of neo-Nazis had been murdering immigrants for years.
Merkel has described as a national disgrace the existence of a cell, called the National Socialist Underground, whose members are now suspected of killing between 2000 and 2007 at least nine immigrants, eight Turks and a Greek, and a police woman.
The cell only came to light by chance, raising fears the security services have underplayed the threat from the extreme right and may have been distracted by its use of unreliable informants from the right-wing scene.
Police are reopening all unsolved cases with a possible racist motive since 1998.
The case has topped the national news since the weekend and politicians from all parties have expressed shock, which has also fuelled calls for a renewed effort to ban the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).
“You cannot help being left with the dreadful impression that the danger of right-wing extremist violence wasn’t taken seriously enough,” Thomas Oppermann, a member of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.
Germany’s Nazi past makes right-wing militancy a particularly sensitive subject, yet experts have long warned of extremism among disenchanted young people in eastern regions of the country where unemployment is high and job prospects poor.
At least 3 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany. Many came to fill West Germany’s labour gap after World War Two and helped deliver its “economic miracle”. About 81 million people live in Germany.
“BRUTAL THREAT”
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) voted unanimously at a congress in Leipzig on Tuesday to push for tough action against what the party called “a serious, brutal threat to our democratic life”.
The CDU urged the government to “intensify the fight against right-wing extremism” and to “find out whether the recent events provide grounds for a prohibition of the NPD”.
Conservative parliamentary leader Volker Kauder said he was in favour of exploring whether it would be possible to “root out this Brown weed” — referring to the brown shirts once worn by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Stormtroopers — by banning the NPD.
A previous attempt to ban the NPD in 2003 collapsed because informants were used as witnesses. Many politicians are wary of trying again, not least because of the fear of pushing NPD supporters underground.
Lorenz Caffier, the CDU’s leader in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one of the depressed former East German areas plagued by right-wing extremism and where the NPD enjoys support, told the congress “German society has to stand up to the extreme-right NPD with all our might, it is our democratic duty”.
With seats in two regional assemblies, the NPD received 1.06 million euros in taxpayers’ money last year.
The NPD is more radical than populist, anti-immigration parties in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Sweden.
Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution describes the NPD as racist, anti-Semitic and revisionist and says its statements prove its inspiration comes from the Nazis. The party says the German constitution is a “diktat” imposed by victorious Western powers after World War Two.
Last weekend the NPD appointed Holger Apfel as their leader. He has tried to portray himself as the moderate face of the NPD and distanced himself from the newly-found terror cell, as well as condemning political terrorism and violence.
MISINFORMED
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency monitors far-right extremists but has in the last few years made little of the threat of violence from right-wing groups.
One of the main charges levelled at the agency is that in its efforts to infiltrate right wing groups, it used unreliable informants. Critics even say money paid to the informants went to fund criminal activities.
Top-selling Bild newspaper reported that a security agent had been very close to the scene of crime in six of the cases.
“There is much to indicate that the intelligence services did not fulfil their task of protecting society. They failed,” veteran Greens lawmaker Hans-Christian Stroebele said.
“Not only did they let huge risks develop but probably 10 or more people have been murdered. Post-war Germany has not known this kind of drama until now,” he told N-TV television.
Families of some of the victims have said they thought all along the murderers were right-wing radicals.
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany lamented what it described as a chronically neglected chain of violence against Muslims in the last 20 years.
“Obviously right-wing terrorism was rife and went unchallenged because the authorities looked too much in the direction of religiously motivated criminals,” Council chairman Aiman Mazyek told the Osnabruecker Zeitung.
Police discovered the neo-Nazi group, known to the Thuringia regional intelligence service in the 1990s but then forgotten, earlier this month when two of its members apparently committed suicide in a caravan in Eisenach in eastern Germany.
Weapons involved in the murders were later found at a burned out house nearby in Zwickau that had been used both by them and by a woman called Beate Zschaepe, who has given herself up. A male suspected accomplice was arrested on Sunday.
Other evidence uncovered included graphic DVDs prepared for sending to media and Islamic cultural organisations. They show a Pink Panther cartoon figure pointing out the scenes of the killings. Police say this indicates the group had inside knowledge of the attacks.
The parents of a 17-year-old Indiana high school student say the constant bullying their son suffered due to his Middle Eastern ethnicity culminated in a beating that injured his brain, and are suing the school district for failing to intervene as his physical and verbal abuse escalated.
“The principal [Robert McDermott] turned a blind eye to the repeated bullying and harassment of this student,” the Haddad family’s attorney Kenneth Allen said in a press conference Monday. “The principal was notified on several occasions of the situation, but did nothing. Inaction by those in charge in the face of injustice cannot be tolerated.”
In January, the teen’s parents say a group of boys showed up at the family’s home in St. John, Ind. and tried to lure Haddad outside to beat him up, prompting his parents to inform the school of their concerns, which they say only escalated the problem, NBC reports. Hind Haddad said her son quit the football and baseball teams in part due to harassment, but the bullying only intensified.
The district’s Superintendent Larry Veracco is named in the lawsuit, along with School Board President George Baranowski, Principal Robert McDermott, and Assistant Principal Sean Beasley Jr., according to the Sun-Times. Several students are also named in the assault.
The Haddad family is seeking monetary compensation for their son’s injuries and have accused the school of violating his civil rights and failing to intervene, the Northwest Indiana Times reports. They filed a temporary restraining order Monday to prevent the video surveillance of the beating and prior complaints they had filed from being tampered with or altered. The students accused are junior and senior football and baseball players, Allen told the Times.
The Haddad family say their son’s injuries were severe, but the school failed to provide him medical treatment or call the police. Allen told the Times that none of the students involved in the beating were disciplined, but that David Haddad was suspended for 10 days for throwing one defensive punch while trying to get off the floor.
Haddad’s mother Hind says she’s afraid to send her son back to school.
“This is a parent’s nightmare, when they call you to tell you your son has been beaten up,” Hind Haddad told the Times. “It’s unbelievable.”
Richard Dawkins, well known biologist and pop-atheist-guru (add goofball) recently brought up the question of whether or not atheists should support Christian missions in Africa. (hat tip: Rob)
He believes the answer is “still no,” (he doesn’t say why) but since Islam according to him is an “unmitigated evil” and atheism is not going to be making any inroads into Africa anytime soon it is a question worth “raising.”
July of 2011: Here’s the comment he left on a thread that discussed sexism. It isn’t cute, reasoned critique of religion anymore, just plain vile:
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
Dawkins is at again. This time he cannot understand why young, white British women are converting to Islam, so the urge to comment on the article published in The Independent, “Women & Islam: The rise and rise of the convert”, was hard to resist:
“Whenever I read an article like this, I end up shaking my head in bafflement. Why would anyone want to CONVERT to Islam? I can see why, having been born into it, you might be reluctant to leave, perhaps when you reflect on the penalty for doing to. But for a woman (especially a woman) voluntarily to JOIN such a revolting and misogynistic institution when she doesn’t have to always suggests to me massive stupidity.”
In Dawkins’ asinine mind, he wonders why would anyone, especially women, join this “revolting and misogynistic institution.” Due to his lack of in depth research regarding women and Islam, it suggest to me massive stupidity on his end. Due to this orientalist outlook on Islam and it’s treatment of women as only being inclusive to the religion, you are moving up in ranks for your anti-Islamic rhetoric.
ThinkProgress filed this report from the “Preserving Freedom Conference” in Nashville, TN.
State representative Rick Womick (R-TN) has made no secret of his anti-Muslim views. A New York Times article from July described Womick on the statehouse floor, warning his constuents that Islamic law was the most urgent threat to their way of life. But in an interview on the sidelines of the “Preserving Freedom Conference” at the Cornerstone Church in Madison, TN, Womick went to new extremes to paint Muslim Americans as dangerous and seditious.
In the interview, which took place on Veterans Day, Womick told ThinkProgress that “I don’t trust one Muslim in our military” and “if they truly are a devout Muslims, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.” When asked if Muslims should be forced out of the military, Womick responded “Absolutely, yeah.” Read the exchange:
FANG: What about the thousands of Muslims that are still in the military that are veterans, that are translators, that are active personnel. Is there some sort of policy solution that you’re advocating? […]
WOMICK: Personally, I don’t trust one Muslim in our military because they’re commanded to lie to us through the term called Taqiyya. And if they truly are a devout Muslim, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.
Do they really have to use a dead pig, four pig heads and 120 liters of pig’s blood to make a statement? Are there any other mediums to get your message across? Maybe having a meeting and discussing things over like fashionable citizens? Just a suggestion you know. Instead of the abuse and misuse of dead animals.
A dead pig and four pig heads have been found buried on the site of a future mosque in an anonymous anti-Islam attack, police say.
The attackers sent anonymous letters to the media in the region near the mosque site in the town of Grenchen in canton Solothurn.
In the letter they said they had also poured 120 litres of pig’s blood on the ground, saying it was a test of Muslim faith whether the mosque would be built on the land afterwards.
The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland said it “condemned the profanation of the site of a future mosque”, adding: “With this act, a line has been cross and Islamophobia has attained a new level.”
Grenchen mayor Boris Banga described the attack as “horrible and abominable”.
Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller have had a lot to say about the Occupy movement, except when a group they wholeheartedly support were planning to attack peaceful protesters.
Anti-Muslim demagogues Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have expressed their unqualified support for the fascist English Defence League on many occasions, despite the EDL’s frequently violent demonstrations and the presence of many outright neo-Nazis among their ranks.
This is the kind of thuggish, violent bigotry Geller and Spencer are working to bring to America.
Police arrested 179 members of the English Defence League after reports of repeated threats to attack Occupy protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Armistice Day.
Scotland Yard said they believed a breach of the peace was about to take place after they got intelligence that the EDL were planning the Armistice Day attack. The law states officers can arrest if they believe the breach of the peace to be “imminent.” …
The English Defence League had issued statements and made threats on Facebook to burn down protesters tents if they were still outside St Paul’s on Remembrance Sunday, according to Phillips.
Some members of the EDL had also attempted to enter the encampment, most recently on Thursday night.
A statement by the EDL on Thursday was read to the Occupy LSX general assembly on Friday morning to make people aware that there was a threat being made. “They called us all sorts of names in the statement and said we should leave “their” church and stop violating their religion,” said Phillips.
VHP international general secretary Pravin Togadia on Monday called for a new Indian Constitution that allows for “anyone who converts Hindus to be beheaded”.
The fiery speech, seconded by right-wing leaders, came towards the conclusion of the three-day Akhil Bhartiya Dharmaprasar Karyakarta Sammelan-2011, held a few yards away from the controversial Pirana dargah on the city’s outskirts, where he stayed during the event.
Workers of the VHP from across the country had gathered here, many of them staying in the dargah premises for the three-day conference, causing a lot of anxiety for the police, Monday being Eid-ul-Azha.
Asaram Bapu’s son Narayan Sai, who also came for the concluding ceremony on Monday, said, “I would suggest that we Hindus should include Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains because their line of thinking is no different from Hindus, except for a few small habits.”
Meanwhile, the Saiyed families residing in Pirana village offered namaaz at Imamshah Bawa Dargah on the occasion of Eid-ul-Azha amid tight police security.
Around 120 families belonging to the Saiyed community reside in Pirana village and consider themselves as descendents of Imamshah Bawa. There is a controversy surrounding the Imamshah Bawa Dargah, whose trust is run by seven members of Satpanthi group, who were originally Kutchhi Patels and converted to this sect, and three members from the Saiyed community.
Days late to the artificial war on Christmas trees, Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce is accusing President Obama of displaying “contempt for Christianity” by levying a tax on Christians that she says is rooted in Muslim tradition.
On November 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a plan initiated by tree farmers during the Bush administration to levy a fee on large tree farmers. The assessment was intended to fund a marketing campaign promoting fresh Christmas trees. Media conservatives quickly launched a false attack on the Obama administration, which subsequently announced that the industry-backed fee would be put on hold.
Bruce dismissed the undisputed fact that the fee was sought by tree growers, modeled on similar USDA initiatives including the “Got Milk?” and “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” campaigns. Pointing to the innocuous fact that the Obama administration has issued decrees honoring the Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, Bruce instead argued that the “checkoff” fee — sought under a 1996 farm act — is further evidence that Obama is “pandering to Muslims” while showing “contempt for Christianity”:
Oh sure, the Fed is saying it was a marketing fee for the Christmas tree “industry,” to supposedly improve the image of the apparently much hated and dreaded tree. The fact is it was a tax meant to fund a board appointed by a federal agency targeting one religion and one religion only — Christianity.
There is a precedent for this — in the Muslim world it’s called the “Jizya” — a tax levied on non-Muslim citizens in the Islamic world, allowing them to practice their religion while being “protected” by the Muslim state.
In our case, it seems more like an atheistic federal government looking for tribute by those pesky Christians who dare to think there is a higher authority than the permanent political class.
Bruce’s vitriolic screed is being promoted at Fox Nation as evidence of Obama’s “War on Christianity.”
Professor Maurice Moshe Eisenstein is a tenured associate professor of Political Science at Purdue University Calumet. He is under fire from student protesters for past and present remarks targeting various groups but particularly Muslims.
Nearly two dozen students demonstrated Wednesday outside Purdue University Calumet in protest of a political science professor who they say made racially prejudiced remarks verbally and on his Facebook page, particularly targeting Muslim students.
The student who organized the protests is one Christopher Ramirez. Ramirez believes that prof. Eisenstein purposefully posted inflammatory remarks aimed at Muslims on his Facebook page on the Muslim festival of Eid-Al Adha:
Christopher Ramirez, who organized the protest, pointed to associate professor of political science Maurice Eisenstein’s Facebook page, where he posted a picture and comment Sunday about 100 black Christians who were killed by radical Muslims. Ramirez said the picture and comment were posted on the first day of Eid, a traditional Muslim holiday.
Eisentstein for his part believes he is the victim of a conspiracy by Jew-haters:
They say I teach religion in class. I believe the person who started this is a faculty member, and I believe that many of these are her students. I am the only one who comes in every day with a kippah (a cap) on. I don’t know the answers to your questions. I made myself available. No one spoke to me. They are saying all of these bad things about me, but they wouldn’t talk to me.”
Maurice Eisenstein, who believes he is being targeted because he is an Orthodox Jew.
Actually, it would seem professor that the students are quite right to take umbrage at your Facebook postings. Viewing it today, we captured this screen shot of what we assume is the offending post that has riled up the student protesters:
It is quite condescending for a political science professor to coach his view of the sectarian violence in Nigeria in such black and white terms as “decide if you are with the radical or civilized people,” clearly he is generalizing about Islam and Muslims, and casting them in the “radical” and hence “uncivilized” camp. Students who saw this posting and read it in the context of the professor’s past statements can be excused for thinking he meant to tar all Muslims.
Yet, what we found even more egregious and definitely inexcusable is the link the professor posted just a few scrolls down on his Facebook page. It is a link to the hate site run by the fanatical queen bee of Islamophobia, Pamela Geller’s AtlasShrugs:
This is inexcusable. Pamela Geller is not only a radical anti-Muslim but a racist to boot, if you don’t believe us (there’s ample evidence to believe us), then maybe you will take the word of the ADL and the SPLC. Such a link cannot be a mere faux pas, it’s akin to linking to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website, and the administration at Purdue University Calumet should take a stronger stand than it has:
“Purdue Calumet by its nature as a public university welcomes and encourages the exchange of thoughtful and diverse views and opinions. Likewise, the university does not condone expressions that are considered offensive, intolerant or disrespectful.
“That stated, certain, recent unpleasant comments exchanged between Associate Professor of Political Science Maurice Eisenstein and others have been communicated on the Professor’s personal Facebook page. In no way do these comments reflect the university’s position and commitment to tolerance and respect with regard to the right of free expression by all individuals.
“Nonetheless, though Professor Eisenstein is a tenured faculty member, tenure has no bearing on the nature of free expression, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, that Purdue Calumet faculty members choose to exercise on their personal Facebook page. Neither are there Purdue Calumet policies and regulations that extend to personal Facebook pages.”
Such mealy mouthed pronouncements from the administration do nothing to help. Loonwatchers should let them know that they should review the professor’s treatment of his students, not only due to the protests but also the troubling links the professor maintains. Ask them if they would be okay with a professor linking to neo-Nazi websites? And then inform them of the disgusting, bigoted, racist, genocidal comments Geller has made, as well as her associations.
A challenger to Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) had his web ad, which featured graphic images of murdered non-Muslims and the House member swearing to the Koran, pulled from YouTube for violating the site’s terms of service last week, Hopkins Patch reports.
“Congressman Ellison swore an oath to uphold the Constitution,” says Ellison’s Democratic challenger Gary Boisclair, “on a Koran.” He continues, “The Koran says Christians and Jews are infidels. The Koran says Christians are blasphemers who should have their hands and feet cut off and that they should be crucified and killed.” He asks, “Do you really want someone representing you who swears an oath on a Koran, a book that undermines the Constitution and says you should be killed?”
(You can watch the ad here, via the Minnesota Independent.)
Boisclair, who works for the anti-abortion group Society for Truth and Justice, told Patch that one of the “sub-goals” of his candidacy is to allow the airing of graphic anti-abortion ads.
Ellison was indeed sworn in using a Koran — a copy owned by Thomas Jefferson.
“I’d like to thank YouTube for removing the ad because it violated the company’s ‘policy on shocking and disgusting content,’” said Ellison in a statement. “The people of Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District elected me to uphold our Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion for every American.”
One of Ellison’s opponents in 2010 — and possibly 2012 — independent Lynne Torgerson, attacked Ellison for his Muslim faith. She wrote that Islam advocated “criminal behavior,” adding “we simply went too far with Keith Ellison. Keith Ellison simply is not a proper person to have in our federal government.”
Ellison’s constituents in Minneapolis and its environs, however, have consistently voted for him. He has been re-elected twice, winning by over forty points each time.
If you are a Muslim or have an Arabic sounding name and have been elected to public office or appointed to advise a government official, then be prepared to have your name smeared by the far right-wing.
For example, Rep. Keith Ellison’s victory as the first Muslim elected to Congress is routinely used by the right-wing as evidence of the “Muslim Brotherhood” agenda to subvert and “Islamicize America.” Who can forget the widely-lampooned exchange between Rep. Ellison and Glenn Beck asking the congressman to “prove that he is not working with the enemy?”
Even if you are not yourself a Muslim, but are the son of a Muslim, you are not immune. The President of the United States is a practicing Christian, but one born to a Muslim father. That was enough for the far-right hacks to dish the same Islamophobic whack job on Barack Obama, i.e: accusing him of being a terrorist-sympathizer and a secret Muslim hell bent on destroying the United States through “stealth Jihad.”
Such conspiracy theories have now reared their ugly head in Illinois. A blogger by the name of Warner Todd Huston takes issue with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s appointment of Safaa Zarzour to the Illinois Muslim American Advisory Council.
After mocking the formation of the council, Huston goes on to write:
Among those appointed by the Governor to this board is ISNA Secretary-General Safaa Zarzour, a man who has been linked to organizations that fund Islamist terrorism.
Zarzour is known as a supporter and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group well known for pushing extremist Islamism and for funding terror throughout the world…Why has our governor appointed a terror supporter to a state board of advisors?
What evidence does Huston provide to support the quite serious claim that Zarzour is a “known supporter and member of the Muslim Brotherhood” or that he is a “terrorist supporter?” Zero. Not a quote, not a video, nothing but innuendo and poorly connected guilt by association smears.
Such lies and indulgences in conspiracy theory are especially egregious when one considers who Safaa Zarzour really is and what he stands for. He is the perfect example of a civically engaged citizen: an elected official, a prominent interfaith leader, an educator and an advocate for civil rights.
Safaa Zarzour at a Northwestern University panel with Cardinal Francis George and Michael Kotzin, VP of the Jewish Federation
There isn’t exactly a ton of Muslim elected officials in Illinois, but Safaa Zarzour happens to be one: he was elected as a trustee of the Bridgeview Public Library several times, each time with an emphatic victory margin. In fact, he is twice elected, having also been chosen by voters as the Commissioner of the Bridgeview Park District where he currently serves.
Throughout his career, Zarzour has made a reputable name for himself as a civic leader in Chicago, a national interfaith leader, and a trailblazing educator having served as a High School principal for many years.
Mr. Zarzour’s civic and educational work has been featured in many media including 60 Minutes, PBS Front Line, Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and many others. Mr. Zarzour has received several honors and awards for his public service.
It goes to show the extreme cluelessness of the far-right hate bloggers that they see fit to question the credentials of such an established name, one who is the recipient of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations’ 2009 Outstanding Service Award, handed to him by Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley at a prominent ceremony.
But Warner Todd Huston’s shoddy attempt to fear-monger about a Muslim adviser to Gov. Quinn comes as less of a surprise when one considers Huston’s own, very real and problematic associations and beliefs.
Anti-Muslim Right-Wing Blogger Warner Todd Huston
Huston is part of the nefarious Islamophobic network of bloggers that includes the likes of the far right loon Pamela Geller. Geller is the co-founder of SIOA, an organization labeled by the SPLC as an anti-Muslim hate group. One of its co-founders, John Jay has openly called for the annihilation of Muslims. Geller’s work was also cited by the anti-Muslim/anti-Left Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik as inspiration in his terrorist manifesto. A simple glance at Geller’s beliefs and activism reveals a radicalism that has earned her the appellation of The Looniest Blogger Ever.
Huston’s blog, Publius Forum has been featured on various far-right vitriolic hate sites with extreme and radical leanings, such as: Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CandaFreePress.com, RightPundits.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, Human Events Magazine, American Daily Review, etc.
Huston’s bias against the enfranchisement of qualified American Muslims like Safaa Zarzour are even less of a surprise when you consider that he has called for the “criminalization of Islam” (Wikiquote). In an article titled, “Making Islam Illegal—Is it the only Choice,” Huston goes on to answer his own question by writing,
The best course of action is to make public displays of Islam and certain of its practices illegal in Western nations.
He goes on to compare Islam to the KKK and calls for the USA to put Islam “down” by not affording it the status of being a religion, a regular meme amongst Islamophobes and their fascist counterparts in Europe such as Geert Wilders.
What is evident is that Safaa Zarzour and Warner Todd Huston are polar opposites. While Zarzour works in the interfaith world, contributes to society, stands up for civil rights and is the epitome of moderation, Warner Todd Huston represents those anti-Freedom voices who seek to sow discord amongst different faiths and undermine one of our most cherished freedoms: the freedom of religion. The notion that an extremist hatemonger would call for the marginalization of an award-winning and established community builder is testimony to the self-delusional farcical worldview of Islamophobes and of how little respect they have for the intelligence of the public and elected officials alike whom they hope to scare into compliance.
If anything Governor Quinn should be lauded as a role model of American integrity and inclusiveness and emulated from coast to coast. It is only by standing up for what’s right, that the cowardly forces of hate, divisiveness, and fear-mongering can be duly undermined.
We refrained from commenting on the controversy surrounding the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for several reasons. First, before the firebombing it was quite clear that the piece and the accompanying front cover cartoon of Prophet Muhammad saying “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing” while distasteful and stupid to many, was protected and legitimate under free speech.
The cartoon itself however did have elements of Islamophobia, just take a look at it:
You have the cartoonish hook-nosed-goofy-smirking-Ayrab-Mooslim with some weird looking turban on his head.
Charlie Hebdo knew what it was doing, they wished to provoke, they created a buzz and got world-wide media attention for their magazine which had little following outside of France.
A proper response by those offended or upset would have been to peacefully protest, or to satirize the Charlie Hebdo publication, or to do as most have done and simply ignore it.
Alas, some idiot firebombed the Charlie Hebdo offices. Who did it, we don’t know yet, but in the media the presumption is it’s a Muslim. According to reports,
A police official cited a witness saying that someone was seen throwing two firebombs at the building.
Muslims under the spotlight again because of some lone-wolf’s actions have universally condemned the firebombing.
No one has claimed responsibility but let’s assume this “someone” is a pissed off French Muslim for now, that would make it 1 guy out of 5 million French Muslims responding to the magazine with violence. Not really the expected conflagration of riots, embassy burnings, deadly protests, etc. that the Islamophobesphere hoped for.
Let’s be real, the Islamophobes want another Danish Cartoon controversy so they can gloat and further their ideology of excluding Muslims from Western society. That’s what they wished for after Geert Wilders released the movie Fitna, and they failed. It’s what they wished for during the tempest-in-a-teapot South Park controversy, and they failed.
It is also important to once again note the double standards involved. It isn’t as if Islam or Muslims have a monopoly over violence against perceived offenses to sacred subjects. The website What If They Were Muslim makes that much clear! It wasn’t hard to find this story, from France itself about Christians destroying a piece of artwork they found offensive:
April 20, 2011
ANDRES Serrano’s Piss Christ has been destroyed by Christians who broke into a French gallery and slashed the photograph after weeks of protests.
The New York photographer’s controversial work shows a small crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine.
It outraged the US religious right in 1987, when it was first shown. It was vandalised in Melbourne in 1997, and neo-Nazis ransacked a Swedish show by the artist in 2007.
Why wasn’t the above, as serious a story as the firebombing of Charlie Hebdo, treated the same way in the media? Why do we not hear about the incompatibility of Christianity and modernity? Why do we not hear cries for limiting the practice of Christianity in the West? Why do we not hear pundits and intellectuals pontificating about the unique inability of Christianity to take satire and ridicule? Because Christianity is not the “other.”
Lastly, the untold context in which this French saga must be viewed is the souring relations between the French establishment and their Muslim minority. Islam has been “otherized” in France and across Europe, just as it has in the States, but in France it is taken to the next level.
Paris – A mosque in eastern France was damaged after unknown attackers set fire to the building using a burning rubbish bin early Thursday, France 3 television reported.
The head of the mosque in Montbeliard, located about 170 kilometres south of Strasbourg, near the German border, discovered the fire when he arrived to open the building for morning prayers, the report said.
One wall was badly damaged. The attack on the mosque is the second in a month, according to France 3.
A group calling itself Les Echappees Belles (The Lucky Escapes) claimed responsibility for the incident in tracts left near the mosque. The group – believed to be a group of women loosely influenced by right-wing extremists, according to France 3 – had claimed responsibility for setting fire to the mosque’s van in October.
All this of course in no way justifies the bombing of Charlie Hebdo. However, it provides much needed perspective on the politics of provocation as well as to the deep double standards not only inherent in the biased Islamophobesphere but also in the uncritical media.
Paris – A mosque in eastern France was damaged after unknown attackers set fire to the building using a burning rubbish bin early Thursday, France 3 television reported.
The head of the mosque in Montbeliard, located about 170 kilometres south of Strasbourg, near the German border, discovered the fire when he arrived to open the building for morning prayers, the report said.
One wall was badly damaged. The attack on the mosque is the second in a month, according to France 3.
A group calling itself Les Echappees Belles (The Lucky Escapes) claimed responsibility for the incident in tracts left near the mosque. The group – believed to be a group of women loosely influenced by right-wing extremists, according to France 3 – had claimed responsibility for setting fire to the mosque’s van in October.
Police were investigating the incident.
Muslim groups say the number of attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions is on the increase.
The Collective Against Islamophobia in France recorded 188 Islamophobic acts in 2010, mostly against institutions such as mosques.
Carla Lewis had never been in a mosque before and she wasn’t sure what to expect.
“Because I’m a Christian, and you hear all this propaganda that if you’re not Muslim, you’re their enemy,” she said.
Still, she entered, a little confused for a moment about where to go and how to behave until someone showed up to assist her.
“Are you here for the clinic? Let me show you the way,” someone offered.
Lewis, a 47-year-old truck driver, said her private health insurance lapsed in April after she took a leave of absence to care for her ill child. She needed a physical exam before returning to work, so a flier in the library piqued her interest.
It was advertising a free medical clinic at the Islamic Center of Tucson.
“I came and found it was not what I thought,” Lewis said. “People were very friendly and professional and welcoming.”
When organizers first conceived of the clinic, they hoped to reach people who, like Lewis, never had direct experience with Tucson’s Islamic community.
The clinic was the brainchild of Yahya Nomaan, 20, a pre-med student at the University of Arizona and the son of a pediatrician.
With hostile rhetoric about Islam growing to a crescendo in recent years over the building of mosques in communities from New York to California, Nomaan saw the need to highlight the contributions of Muslim Americans.
“You go to any hospital, you have a Doctor Khan, you have a Doctor Hassan,” he said. “Clearly medicine is our forte.”
So Nomaan and his father, Dr. Mohammed Nomaan, decided to start a free monthly medical clinic. The Islamic Center of Tucson offered its space, and local doctors from the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America volunteered to staff it.
During a recent clinic, the younger Nomaan and other volunteers circled the brightly lighted waiting area, taking vital signs and making small talk with patients.
Maryam Tanbal – an earnest 17-year-old with a disarming smile – greeted patients and gave them the requisite paperwork.
She said sometimes people seem a little hesitant when they first arrive because they’re unsure how to behave in a mosque. They wonder if they need to take their shoes off, for example.
She assures them that while shoes should not be worn in the rooms where prayers are held, the clinic is located in a separate area, and patients should keep their shoes on.
October marked the sixth clinic at the Islamic Center, and the younger Nomaan said the operation goes smoother each time. In the past, tiny glitches have arisen – one of the rooms in the mosque was locked, or a blood pressure cuff broke.
“Today was the first clinic with no hiccups,” Nomaan said. “We have God to praise for that.”
If you go
• Clinic location: Islamic Center of Tucson, 901 E. First St.
• When: Last Saturday of every month, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Contact: 329-1428
• Cost: Free
• Appointments: Recommended but not required
Anissa Tanweer is a University of Arizona student who is an apprentice at the Star. Contact her at starapprentice@azstarnet.com or 573-4117.
The cemetery dates from the 12th century and is the resting place of several Sufi saints (AFP, Ahmad Gharabli)
The “Price Tag” vandals attack again.
Early in October they vandalized a mosque by setting it on fire. And also, last year around the same time, Safed, a small town in Israel had grafiti that the “Price Tag” vandals are known for:
In a city park next to a college building on a recent afternoon, “Death to Arabs” was scrawled on a gatepost. The park is a hangout for the Arab students, who were scattered on benches during a break between classes.
Let us imagine if these “Price Tag” vandals were Muslims. They would be considered a terrorist group threatening the state of Israel’s existence. Spencer and Geller would make claims that they are here in America terrorizing our citizens daily.
This time around, the vandals thought to ante up their game and vandalize a Muslim cemetery instead.
JERUSALEM — Racist slogans were sprayed over gravestones in an old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, site of a dispute between Palestinians and supporters of a museum being built alongside, police said on Thursday.
An AFP photographer, who arrived at the cemetery in the city centre, said he saw graffiti on 15 tombs reading “price tag” and “death to the Arabs.”
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that “the slogans were painted several weeks ago” and had not yet been erased by municipal authorities.
Hardline Jewish settlers have adopted what they call a “price tag” policy — a euphemism for revenge attacks against Palestinians and their property following Israeli government measures against settlements.
In recent months, the scope of such attacks has broadened, with vandals targeting Israeli army vehicles, mosques and cemeteries inside Israel and Israeli anti-settlement activists.
On Wednesday, police said they had arrested a suspect in a graffiti attack and bomb hoax at the Jerusalem offices of Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now on Sunday, in which a wall was daubed with the words “price tag”.
In the Jerusalem cemetery dispute, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, is building what is termed a “Museum of Tolerance” alongside the disused graveyard.
The project has sparked controversy because it is being built on land belonging to the Ma’man Allah cemetery, commonly called Mamilla, which dates from the 12th century and is the resting place of several Sufi saints.
Descendants of those interred in the west Jerusalem cemetery say it also houses the remains of soldiers and officials of legendary Muslim ruler Saladin.
Texas is on a roll these days. It wasn’t too long ago that the right-wing nut in Texas Crockett Keller, who is certified to teach people to obtain and use a concealed gun, said the following in an ad:
If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame; I am Crockett Keller, thank you and God bless America.
The Texas Dept. of Public Safety will not revoke or suspend the license of a handgun instructor…
Now Texas creates this racist poster. Will Texas come down hard on the people who created the poster or in the end will they pretend like nothing happened?
New York, NY: IAAB’s 2011 Student Summit, held this past weekend in Washington, DC, included representatives from 42 universities nationwide and in Europe. Given the news on Friday afternoon of the “Let’s Play Cowboys and IRANIANS!” poster in a restaurant in Katy, Texas, the workshop on Media Representation focused on this issue. Summit participants discussed the history of such racist representations of communities of color in the United States. Students issued the following statement to condemn the poster’s display:
Iranian Alliances Across Borders’ (IAAB) 2011 Student Summit addressed the current state of the Iranian American diaspora community. Over 70 Iranian American student leaders from 42 universities around the nation and abroad expressed outrage over the bigoted content of the 1979 poster titled “Let’s play cowboys and IRANIANS!” displayed in John Nonmacher’s restaurant in Katy, Texas. This image displays a group of gun wielding cowboys under an American Flag, proudly encircling a lynched Iranian man. In Nonmacher’s words, this poster is purely a historical artifact; however, the image recalls a time of high xenophobic animosity towards Iranian immigrants within the United States.
The IAAB Summit participants condemn both the violent image portrayed in the poster and its bigotry towards Iranians, as well as indigenous groups. Fundamental American values of tolerance, diversity, and respect for all human beings are not in accordance with the offensive nature displayed by the poster. We believe that the ideas represented in this incident are detrimental to civil society, especially at a time when democratic dialogue is critical to mitigating political tensions. We stand in solidarity with communities of color that have and continue to experience this kind of demonization. We firmly believe that the propagation of such hostile ideas should not exist within any society.
Signed by students from the following 42 universities:
Bentley University, Boston College, Boston University, Bucknell University, College of William and Mary, Columbia University, Duke University, Emory University, Fairfield University, Fordham University- Lincoln Center, George Mason University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, INSEAD, New York University, Northern Virginia Community College, Oxford University, San Jose State University, Stanford University, Syracuse University, The Commonwealth Medical College, The George Washington University, The New School, Tufts University, University of Baltimore, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Central Florida, University of Connecticut, University of Illinois Springfield, University of Iowa, University of Maryland – College Park, University of Maryland – Baltimore County, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley College, Westminster College, Yale University
About Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) – IAAB is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization with a young, dedicated staff spread across the United States, Europe and Iran. The mission of the organization is to address issues of the Iranian diaspora community while raising awareness of the Iranian community, promoting leadership, and connecting Iranians across borders. For more information about IAAB, please visit www.iranianalliances.org.
The FBI wasn’t just wrong in teaching its agents that average Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress Tuesday. That bigoted Bureau training undermined the government’s efforts to stop the next terror attack.
The FBI briefings, given to Bureau counterterrorism agents at its academy in Quantico, were not only “flat-out wrong,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee. They “really have a negative impact on our ability to communicate effectively” with American Muslims on counterterrorism, civil rights and other issues.
An array of elected and appointed government leaders have denounced the FBI training, since it was first revealed by Danger Room in September. Holder’s comments were the most strident — and highest-level — official condemnation yet. And it reinforces a key point that critics of the Islamophobic briefings have made all along: that tarring “mainstream” Muslims as “radical” and “violent” only helps the real terrorists evade their government pursuers.
That kind of training, Holder insisted, was “inconsistent with what we have been trying to do here at the Department. Those views do not reflect those views of the Justice Department [and] the FBI.”
Without using his name, Holder also rebuked FBI counterterrorism analyst William Gawthrop, who conducted the training at Quantico and in New York. Gawthrop, as Danger Room has extensively reported, likened Islam to the Death Star and said al-Qaida was “irrelevant” compared to the threat of Islam itself. Holder told the panel: “We have distanced ourselves from that person and those statements.”
The statements, maybe. But not the person.
Nearly two months after Danger Room began its FBI expose, Gawthrop is still employed at the Bureau. He’s been put on a leash, prevented from teaching at Quantico or delivering freelance lectures — though the FBI says it won’t comment on what he teaches to veterans in his side gig at the online American Military University.
But Holder went further in his rebuke of the FBI training materials than did Bureau Director Robert Mueller. Last month, Mueller told a House panel that the instructions were “very unusual.” Holder, by contrast, said flatly that he hesitated to distinguish U.S. Muslims from non-Muslims. American Muslims are “American citizens who have the same desires as we have,” he said.
Holder’s argument echoes that of Texas Muslim leader Mohamed Elibiary, who received a September commendation from Mueller himself to recognize his partnership with the FBI on counterterrorism. The anti-Islam training “makes my job — and the FBI field offices’ jobs — much harder,” Elibiary told Danger Room recently.
A very hearty thank you to all the loonwatchers who voted for Danios as Best Writer in the 2011 Brass Crescent Awards. This marks the second year in a row that Loonwatch has won a Brass Crescent Award, last year it was for best non-Muslim Blog and this year for best writer:
We couldn’t do this without you guys! Thank you for all your tips, feedback, and input.
Anti-gay sentiment in Africa is creating a new kind of refugee (Credit: Reuters/James Akena)
Can you imagine if they were fleeing because of the insidious and all encompassing horror of Sharia’? It would be international news and the Islamophobes would be all over it, their silence on the matter is quite telling. (Hat tip: Daniel Bartholomew)
As Uganda revives anti-gay legislation, gays seek haven in other countries
I first met Fred at a prayer service for gay men in an industrial part of Nairobi where even on a Sunday morning, the noise was deafening. The service was part biblical study and part support group. The other men who were worshipping with Fred in the dingy and cavernous room that day were Kenyans, but he was not.
Fred, a lanky Ugandan, became a refugee in December 2009 after he was brutally assaulted by a mob in Kampala for being gay.
Fred, who asked that his last name not be used, bought a one-way ticket to Nairobi days after the assault with the intention of never returning. “It’s OK to kill me,” he said. “People would be happy to see me dead, even some of my family.” I asked what he meant by OK, and he explained that no one would ever have to pay a price for his murder.
Within the last decade, rancorous anti-gay rhetoric has infiltrated public discourse in many African countries. Just last week, the Ugandan parliament revived a proposal to legalize capital punishment for people who engage in homosexual acts. This is new for Africa. In the past, homosexuality was rarely brought up privately let alone in the public sphere. The new acrimonious tone against homosexuality espoused by politicians and religious leaders has percolated across all strata of African society including the media. It has also given rise to increasing homophobic and transphobic violence, which for a growing number of gay Africans has meant that life in their own countries has become untenable.
Fred’s journey from Uganda to Kenya followed the same logic as that of other Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) African refugees I spoke to. They move to urban centers in neighboring countries not necessarily because these places are any less hostile to homosexuals but for the anonymity that comes with being a newcomer in a densely populated area.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, went on record last May saying that anti-gay hate crimes are increasing around the world and now account for a high percentage of all reported hate crimes.
Homophobia is not necessarily a new attitude for most African societies. Being gay is a crime in 38 of the 54 countries in Africa. Many of these laws have been on the books since colonial times. But it’s a stretch to think, as some have claimed, that homophobia is simply a vestige of colonial times.
However, some pundits believe that the shift to a more sinister form of homophobia in many African countries over the last decade has its root in conservative religious indoctrination. Some reports suggest that U.S. evangelical groups have had a hand in creating the venomous anti-gay attitudes and violence that have swept over the continent and pushed gay Africans out of their countries.
“It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we saw Africans with the help of American conservative religious groups using this issue (homosexuality) as an organizing tool,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who has studied the U.S. evangelical influence on African societies.
Fred, who looks a decade or so younger than his 48 years, said that for most of his life he had guarded his sexuality with the utmost care for fear of social retribution and becoming estranged from loved ones. He lived his life relatively undisturbed until 2009 when the “Kill the Gays” bill, which sought to legalize capital punishment for homosexuality, was first introduced. Fred says it was during this time that he started to fear for his life.
His neighbors began to suspect he was gay and threatened to turn him in to authorities or to kill him themselves. On the night of his near fatal assault, he says, a large group of people from his neighborhood stood outside his bedroom quietly waiting to get the final proof they needed to confirm their suspicions. When they had heard enough, they broke his window and attacked him and his partner.
“People don’t leave their countries on a lark seeking more gay bars,” says Cary Alan Johnson, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. He adds that in places like Uganda it is because of an overwhelming sense of fear for their lives.
Kaoma says Uganda is unique only in that it has gotten more international attention. Other African countries continue to take steps to criminalize homosexuality. This, he says, will increase the flow of LGBT refugees if the international community doesn’t put pressure on these governments.
Also, because some gay African advocates have chosen to become more visible in their fight for equality, anti-gay factions have become more vehement. Some gay rights advocates have been driven into hiding.
Larry, a leading Kenyan gay rights advocate who now lives in Texas after being granted political asylum, was forced to relocate to Uganda in 2007 after he appeared on Kenyan national television as an openly gay man. “I left for Uganda because I needed to go undercover since there were multiple threats to my life.” He says he chose Uganda because of its proximity to Kenya and because he had friends there.
Neil Grungas, executive director of Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, a San Francisco-based organization assisting LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, says that while there is no way of knowing exactly how many LGBT African refugees there are, it is a growing problem. “We know that it’s an enormous issue in Africa because the continent has the most concentrated persecution against gay people,” he said in a phone interview.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. State Department do not track refugees who are displaced because of their sexual orientation. But even if those numbers existed, Duncan Breen, senior associate at Human Rights First, a D.C.- and New York City-based human rights organization, says the numbers would be grossly inaccurate given how many of these refugees might be afraid to reveal their sexuality.
But those working on refugee issues believe that the flow of LGBT refugees is on the rise. They point to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees issuing guidelines for working with LGBT refugees and providing sensitivity trainings to its field staff. Also this past summer, the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services funded the very first LGBT resource center, at Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, a Chicago-based organization that provides services to immigrants and refugees. Under the grant, the group is to come up with best practices for resettling LGBT refugees in the U.S.
Still, advocates and some U.S. politicians say the U.S. government should do more to expedite the resettlement process for refugees fleeing antigay persecution. In a February 2010 letter addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) urge Clinton to take decisive steps to protect LGBT refugees, who are targets of violence in the countries they have escaped from as well as the ones they’ve escaped to.
Danny Dyson, one of the first African refugees to be resettled in the United States because of the anti-gay persecution he faced in Uganda, went back and forth between Uganda and Kenya before his arrival in San Francisco. “It was a nightmare in Kenya,” he said. “At first I didn’t have any help, and I had to leave the refugee camp I went to because other refugees started harassing me for being gay.” Dyson finally found help with a U.S. nongovernmental refugee assistance group, which asked that it not be named because they feared recriminations for their work with LGBT refugees.
Dyson and Fred met in Kenya as refugees. Fred awaits a decision from the U.S. government on his application for resettlement. Having heard about Danny’s successful resettlement in America, he asked me, “Is it true there are lots of us there and I don’t have to hide?”
Naomi Abraham is a multimedia journalist in New York City. She reported from Kenya and Uganda as part of a project sponsored by the International Center for Journalists. The Ford Foundation provided funding for this story. More Naomi Abraham
The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.
Research by the British thinktank Demos for the first time examines attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.
The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.
“We’re at a crossroads in European history,” said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. “In five years’ time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency.”
The report comes just over three months after Anders Breivik, a supporter of hard right groups, shot dead 69 people at youth camp near Oslo. While he was disowned by the parties, police examination of his contacts highlighted the Europe-wide online discussion of anti-immigrant and nationalist ideas.
Data in the study was mainly collected in July and August, before the worsening of the eurozone crisis. The report highlights the prevalence of anti-immigrant feeling, especially suspicion of Muslims. “As antisemitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century,” said Thomas Klau from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who will speak at Monday’s conference.
Parties touting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas have spread beyond established strongholds in France, Italy and Austria to the traditionally liberal Netherlands and Scandinavia, and now have significant parliamentary blocs in eight countries. Other nations have seen the rise of nationalist street movements like the English Defence League (EDL). But, experts say, polling booths and demos are only part of the picture: online, a new generation is following these organisations and swapping ideas, particularly through Facebook. For most parties the numbers online are significantly bigger than their formal membership.
The phenomenon is sometimes difficult to pin down given the guises under which such groups operate. At one end are parties like France’s National Front, a significant force in the country’s politics for 25 years and seen as a realistic challenger in next year’s presidential election. At the other are semi-organised street movements like the EDL, which struggles to muster more than a few hundred supporters for occasional demonstrations, or France’s Muslim-baiting Bloc Indentitaire, best known for serving a pork-based “identity soup” to homeless people.
Others still take an almost pick-and-mix approach to ideology; a number of the Scandinavian parties which have flourished in recent years combine decidedly left-leaning views on welfare with vehement opposition to all forms of multiculturalism.
Youth, Demos found, was a common factor. Facebook’s own advertising tool let Demos crunch data from almost 450,000 supporters of the 14 organisations. Almost two-thirds were aged under 30, against half of Facebook users overall. Threequarters were male, and more likely than average to be unemployed.
The separate anonymous surveys showed a repeated focus on immigration, specifically a perceived threat from Muslim populations. This rose with younger supporters, contrary to most previous surveys which found greater opposition to immigration among older people. An open-ended question about what first drew respondents to the parties saw Islam and immigration listed far more often than economic worries. Answers were sometimes crude – “The foreigners are slowly suffocating our lovely country. They have all these children and raise them so badly,” went one from a supporter of the Danish People’s Party. Others argued that Islam is simply antithetical to a liberal democracy, a view espoused most vocally by Geert Wilders, the Dutch leader of the Party for Freedom, which only six years after it was founded is the third-biggest force in the country’s parliament.
This is a “key point” for the new populist-nationalists, said Matthew Goodwin from Nottingham University, an expert on the far right. “As an appeal to voters, it marks a very significant departure from the old, toxic far-right like the BNP. What some parties are trying to do is frame opposition to immigration in a way that is acceptable to large numbers of people. Voters now are turned off by crude, blatant racism – we know that from a series of surveys and polls.
“[These groups are] saying to voters: it’s not racist to oppose these groups if you’re doing it from the point of view of defending your domestic traditions. This is the reason why people like Geert Wilders have not only attracted a lot of support but have generated allies in the mainstream political establishment and the media.”
While the poll shows economics playing a minimal role, analysts believe the eurozone crisis is likely to boost recruitment to anti-EU populist parties which are keen to play up national divisions. “Why do the Austrians, as well as the Germans or the Dutch, constantly have to pay for the bottomless pit of the southern European countries?” asked Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freedom Party of Austria, once led by the late Jörg Haider. Such parties have well over doubled their MPs around western Europe in a decade. “What we have seen over the past five years is the emergence of parties in countries which were traditionally seen as immune to the trend – the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, the resurgence of support for the radical right in the Netherlands, and our own experience with the EDL,” said Goodwin.
The phenomenon was now far beyond a mere protest vote, he said, with many supporters expressing worries about national identity thus far largely ignored by mainstream parties.
Gavan Titley, an expert on the politics of racism in Europe and co-author of the recent book The Crises of Multiculturalism, said these mainstream politicians had another responsibility for the rise of the new groups, by too readily adopting casual Islamophobia.
“The language and attitudes of many mainstream parties across Europe during the ‘war on terror’, especially in its early years, laid the groundwork for much of the language and justifications that these groups are now using around the whole idea of defending liberal values – from gender to freedom of speech,” he said.
“Racist strategies constantly adapt to political conditions, and seek new sets of values, language and arguments to make claims to political legitimacy. Over the past decade, Muslim populations around Europe, whatever their backgrounds, have been represented as the enemy within or at least as legitimately under suspicion. It is this very mainstream political repertoire that newer movements have appropriated.”
Jamie Bartlett of Demos, the principal author of the report, said it was vital to track the spread of such attitudes among the new generation of online activists far more numerous than formal membership of such parties. “There are hundreds of thousands of them across Europe. They are disillusioned with mainstream politics and European political institutions and worried about the erosion of their cultural and national identity, and are turning to populist movements, who they feel speak to these concerns.
“These activists are largely out of sight of mainstream politicians, but they are motivated, active, and growing in size. Politicians across the continent need to sit up, listen and respond.”
Voting trends
As a political party, having tens of thousands of online supporters is one thing but translating these into actual votes can be quite another. However, the Demos survey found that 67% of the Facebook fans of the nationalist-populist groups which put up candidates – some are street movements only – said they had voted for them at the most recent election.
Further analysis found that female supporters were more likely to turn support into a vote, as were those who were employed.
The Tea Party opens a long-planned convention tonight in Daytona Beach, expecting 1,200 delegates, dozens of speakers — but almost no big-name politicians.
None of the leading Republican presidential candidates and only two of the five U.S. Senate candidates agreed to speak at the three-day Florida Tea Party Convention at the Volusia County Ocean Center.
And top Republican officeholders who have previously courted Tea Party support — Gov. Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and U.S. Rep. Allen West of Plantation — also sent their regrets.
Organizers said they still expect two presidential candidates: U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. But neither campaign would confirm they’re coming, and their campaign schedules don’t list the convention.
Sid VanLandingham, the convention’s communications director, blamed the busy campaign season, saying a regional event has a tough time competing for attention.
“The [politicians'] schedulers, they’re making last-minute decisions, hopping from place to place, and it’s changing constantly,” he said.
In fact, all of the politicians who responded to Sentinel inquiries cited scheduling conflicts, though the convention dates were set months ago. And their absence leaves many observers puzzled, considering how popular tea-party events have been among most Republican candidates.
Liberals say the depiction of tea partyers as “extremists” — especially on issues such as immigration — is prompting candidates to keep their distance.
“A lot of politicians are worried about being painted by that association, especially as we get into the real meat of the election cycle,” said Mark Ferrulo, executive director of the liberal, Tallahassee-based Progress Florida.
The convention has attracted more than 30 political and social conservatives — many from out of state — as speakers. Among them: John Michael Chambers, founder of the Save America Foundation; Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition; and Mathew Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel.
VanLandingham, whose home group is the South Lake 912 Tea Party of Clermont, said the big-name politicians might have been a draw, but they are not the point.
“It’s a grass-roots gathering of people from around the state to share what works, what doesn’t work, and to share projects,” he said, citing workshops on how to organize for the 2012 elections.
The only statewide candidates expected to come are Mike McCalister of Plant City and Craig Miller of Winter Park, both underdog candidates for U.S. Senate.
Those who expressly said they are not coming include GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman, and GOP Senate candidates Adam Hasner, George LeMieux and U.S. Rep. Connie Mack.
A whirlwind of controversy in the past two weeks could have played a role, after the convention invited anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller to speak and an American Muslim civil-rights group, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, protested.
“They [CAIR] put pressure, I think, on some of the state officials, and I think some of the state officials, in their judgments, they declined to go,” VanLandingham said. “Their [the officials'] reasons were ‘prior commitments.’ ”
Geller writes an anti-Islam blog called Atlas Shrugs and leads an organization called “Stop Islamization of America.” Last year, she received wide attention — and stoked bitter anger from American Muslim groups — with her harshly worded opposition to a proposed Muslim community center a few blocks from ground zero in New York City.
Last month, CAIR sent letters to Florida politicians urging them not to attend the convention if Geller was on the schedule. And when Rubio and Scott indicated they would not come, CAIR issued a news release thanking them.
Geller said CAIR tries to get her appearances canceled or boycotted wherever she goes. But she said she is certain her appearance in Daytona had nothing to do with all the declined invitations.
“The politicians decided not to participate before this controversy began,” she said in an email.
But CAIR is not so sure.
“In other states, elected officials have pulled out and do not want to be on the same stage as her,” said CAIR media-relations director Ahmed Rehab.
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)
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.
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.
In “Islamophobia,” Vanguard correspondent Adam Yamaguchi examines the rising tide of Islamophobia on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten years after 9/11, the fear of future attacks paired with the growing number of Muslims across Europe and America has given birth to an aggressive new network of anti-Muslim alarmists.
Watch the premiere of Vanguard’s “Islamophobia” on Monday, November 7, at 9/8c.
“Vanguard” is Current TV’s no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show’s correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world’s most important stories.
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday the Obama administration is striking all references to Islam from Justice Department training manuals, exaggerating a directive from federal officials to evaluate procedures for religious and cultural sensitivity.
Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, equated the effort to strike offensive references to Islam from material to removing suspicion of Islamic terrorism from department policy.
A conservative popular with tea party activists and evangelical conservatives, she later linked President Barack Obama with “4,400 American lives” lost in Iraq. However, the death toll in the 8-year-old war that began under President George W. Bush had already reached 4,229 when Obama was inaugurated in 2009. It now stands at no fewer than 4,481.
As she campaigned in Iowa, now the focus of her effort to win the Republican nomination, Bachmann accused the administration of making changes in training manuals under pressure from pro-Islam groups with terrorist links.
“And now Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she told about 75 Republican activists in an eastern Iowa hotel conference room.
The FBI has not removed Islam from training material, said an FBI official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity.
The FBI has been conducting a comprehensive review of its training materials after it was revealed that what officials termed an inaccurate description of Islam, one that linked the religion to terrorism, was being used in some of the bureau’s training programs. Last month, FBI officials said the agency was undertaking the review in light of an analyst’s criticism of Islam during a lecture last spring.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole said last week he had asked that all aspects of the department be broadly re-evaluated for “sensitivity for all peoples of faith” in its training efforts.
“Examples include the efforts of our law enforcement components to ensure that their interactions with the community – whether in responding to an attack on a mosque or arresting a suspect in a counter-terrorism investigation – convey a sense of basic respect to the rule of law and the rights of all who have made this nation their home,” Cole said.
In her remarks Friday, Bachmann broadly painted the effort as trying to remove the link between Islam and anti-American terrorism sponsored by radical Islamic extremists.
“And so now the White House has scrubbed all Islamic terms from the national counterterrorism strategy. The White House has removed all Islamic terms from the Pentagon’s report on the Fort Hood shooting. And now, Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she said.
The White House declined to respond to Bachmann’s criticism.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Bachmann said Obama’s foreign policies were worse than his economic ones and linked Obama to the war’s overall death toll as well as its cost.
“Under Barack Obama’s watch, we’ve expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives,” she said.
Bachmann is on the first leg of a three-day campaign trip to the leadoff caucus state.
___
Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.
Fox News is now actively concealing a link between an Alabama-based blogger repeatedly featured on the network as an expert and allegations of a domestic terrorist plot.
This morning on America’s Newsroom, Fox News ran an extensive report on yesterday’s arrest of four Georgia men accused of plotting an attack on federal employees and U.S. citizens using explosives, guns, and the biological toxin ricin. At the end of the segment, correspondent Jonathan Serrie pointed out that one of the defendants “allegedly cited the online novel Absolved, which discusses small groups of citizens attacking U.S. officials,” with the defendant allegedly “saying that the attacks would be based on events in that novel.”
Charging documents indeed state that accused plotter Frederick Thomas repeatedly cited as an inspiration the novel Absolved, in which underground militia fighters declare war on the federal government over gun control laws and same-sex marriage, leading to a second American revolution. But Fox’s report neglected to mention the allegedly inspirational novel’s author, who is no stranger to Fox viewers.
Indeed, the author, Mike Vanderboegh, has been mainstreamed by the network, which has repeatedly featured him as an expert on the ATF’s failed Operation Fast and Furious. Fox has identified Vanderboegh as an “online journalist” and an “authority on the Fast and Furious investigation,” and has consistently failed to acknowledge his extremist views, actions, and affiliations.
Watch:
Vanderboegh, a former member of the militia and Minuteman movements and now a leader of the “anti-government extremist group” the Three Percenters, which claims to represent the three percent of gun owners who “who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act” but will instead, “if forced by any would-be oppressor, … kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution.”
The complaint against Thomas details a similar scenario:
THOMAS described a scenario in which he felt would be the “line in the sand” that would result in the activation of militias. THOMAS believed that soon, during a protest action, a protestor would be shot. It is his opinion the militias would act and respond by openly attacking the police. He then openly discussed having complied what he called the “Bucket List” which is a list of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and members of the media he feels needed to be “taken out” to make the country right again.”
Vanderboegh has stated that “another civil war in this country is the last thing I want,”writing in the introduction to Absolved that the novel is “a cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF,” who “need to know how powerful” the “armed citizenry” “could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.”
Fox News has repeatedly presented Vanderboegh as a credible source. Their failure to mention his authorship of a novel that allegedly inspired a terrorist plot is telling.
UPDATE: In a subsequent report, Fox’s Serrie said that Absolved was written by “the former leader of an Alabama militia,” and briefly flashed an image of the book’s cover that showed Vanderboegh’s name. Serrie did not note Vanderboegh’s connection to Fox News.
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.”
Anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer is expected to speak at the Franciscan University on Tuesday, November 8th at 7 pm. Admission is free and there will be a question and answer session. If any loonwatchers live in the area or can make the drive it would be great.
Franciscan University will be a hostile environment, so it will be like walking into the lion’s den. The universities supporters believe they are in a kulturkampf with the Obama administration, and Spencer has already spoken to an approving crowd in the past where he delivered a triumphalist message in militaristic tones.
Ultimately it is only Jesus Christ that can fight against this [Islam]~Robert Spencer
STEUBENVILLE, OH—Robert Spencer, the internationally known founder of Jihad Watch, will speak at Franciscan University of Steubenville on Tuesday, November 8, at 7:00 p.m. on the topic ”Islam’s View of Christianity: Why It Matters.” The talk, which will take place in the Tony and Nina Gentile Gallery of the J.C. Williams Center, is free and open to the public.
Spencer will speak on the peculiar understanding of Christianity contained in the founding texts of Islam, how that view has shaped Islamic/Christian interactions down to the present day, and what we as Catholics and Christians can do in the face of this resurgent religion.
Spencer has studied Islamic theology, law, and history for over three decades. He currently serves as the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community.
He is the author of 10 books, including Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, a refutation of moral equivalence and call for all the beneficiaries and heirs of Judeo-Christian Western civilization, whatever their own religious or philosophical perspective may be, to defend it from the global jihad. He is coauthor, with Daniel Ali, of Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics, and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims.
His articles on Islam and other topics have appeared in a wide array of newspapers and Web sites.
Spencer has appeared on the BBC, ABC News, CNN, FoxNews, PBS, and many other media outlets as well as on numerous radio programs including Vatican Radio.
Following his talk, Spencer will answer questions from the audience. For more on Spencer at Franciscan University, watch a clip from his remarks at this summer’s Defending the Faith Conference.
If any loonwatchers go and record Spencer and or would like to submit a piece about their experience we will run the article with all due credit. Let us know if anyone is interested. Feel free to comment below or email us at:info@loonwatch.com.
(Reuters) – The owner of a large southwest Alabama car dealership derided as “Taliban Toyota” by a competitor has been awarded $7.5 million in damages after a jury trial for his slander claim.
Iranian-born Shawn Esfahani, owner of Eastern Shore Toyota in Daphne, Alabama, sought $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Bob Tyler Toyota, claiming employees at that Pensacola, Florida-based dealership falsely portrayed him as an Islamist militant to customers.
“The feeling I received in the courtroom for the truth to come out was worth a lot more than any money anybody can give me,” Esfahani told Reuters on Tuesday.
Esfahani’s lawsuit said that Bob Tyler sales manager Fred Kenner told at least one couple considering buying from Eastern Shore Toyota in 2009 that Esfahani was of Middle Eastern descent and was “helping fund the insurgents there and is also laundering money for them.”
Esfahani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, fled his native Iran in 1980 following the Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed Shah and swept Shi’ite Muslim clergy to power, his lawsuit said. He opened his car dealership in 2007.
The Taliban, by contrast, are hardline Islamists in the central Asian nations of Afghanistan and Pakistan who follow an austere interpretation of Islamic law.
A Bob Tyler salesman was accused of telling the same couple that Esfahani was from Iraq and calling him a “terrorist” who put soldiers including the salesman’s brother in harm’s way.
“(Esfahani) is funneling money back to his family and other terrorists. I have a brother over there and what you’re doing is helping kill my brother,” the salesman told the couple when he called them on the Eastern Shore sales floor, according to the suit.
The jury deliberated for three hours before awarding Esfahani $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages on Monday evening.
Bob Tyler’s attorney Jeffrey Ingram could not be reached for comment on Tuesday, and Tyler and Kenner both declined to comment on the verdict through a dealership spokesman.
Esfahani said the dollar amount awarded by the jury was irrelevant unless the case sets a precedent by which other business owners can seek recourse against tactics he considers “un-American.”
“This case didn’t take aim at just Mr. Tyler,” he said. “It was intended to address any other business that resorts to those kinds of actions to win at their game unfairly.”
Gaffney and McCarthy, who both are mentioned in CAP’s report as part of the influential “Islamophobia network,” make a series of unfounded allegations against CAP and the report.
McCarthy, the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has made no secret of his dislike for Muslims and progressives. His eagerness to create a grand-conspiracy between the two was on full display during the interview.
But Gaffney and McCarthy take a turn into uncharted, and wildly unsubstantiated, territory when they float the theory that the CAP report was, as Frank Gaffney declares, a product of “a red-green axis between George Soros’ friends and beneficiaries on the radical left like the Center for American Progress and the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood most notably.”
Listen here (Gaffney’s theory of a “red-green axis” starts at 3:45):
Gaffney, and his allies like Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, have been desperate to paint Fear, Inc. and CAP as a radical institution aligned with violent Islamists. But their attempts to make their fantasies a reality has resulted in some bizarre attempts at guilt-by-association.
Gaffney, McCarthy, and most critics of the report — Islamophobe Pamela Geller said the authors should “choke on their own vomit” — are eager to discredit CAP and the report’s authors using factually baseless attack and wildly speculative conspiracy theories. McCarthy responded to Gaffney’s “red-green axis” theory that, “the evidence [that radical Islamists and the Center for American Progress] cooperate is so strong, that the real question that the interesting quesiton is ‘why this happened’ not ‘whether it happened.’
Conveniently, neither McCarthy nor Gaffney provide any actual evidence of this bizarre theory. But the report does show plenty of evidence of their hostility toward American Muslims. In 2009, Gaffney announced there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims but may actually be one himself” and, after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) banned Gaffney for making baseless accusations against board members, he declared that the Muslim Brotherhood had “infiltrated” CPAC.
While Gaffney might be finding fewer friendly audiences for his anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, he and his friends still have a home on AM radio, every weeknight.
Loonwatchers action is required! For some reason “Kamal Saleem” has been invited by Mayor Don Reimal of Independence, MO to speak at his Prayer Breakfast.
An Interfaith group from Independence has called the Mayor out on his selection of Saleem:
Independence, MO —An open letter to Independence Mayor Don Reimal.
The purpose of this letter is to address the selection of Kamal Saleem as the guest speaker for this year’s Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.
It is the opinion of the Interfaith Progressives of Independence that Mr. Saleem is a poor choice for this community event. Mr. Saleem’s message is one of division and fear. He paints Islam as a religion bent on world domination and violence. We don’t understand how this message is appropriate for our community.
On his own website (Kamalsaleem.com), one can find him stating things such as this: “there are people coming here (USA) who want to convert the stars on the American flag into crescents.” (www.kamalsaleem.com)
Mayor Reimal, we find such sentiments to be inappropriate for the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. It is important that civic events be welcoming to all people in Independence.
The Interfaith Progressives of Independence believe it is important that all our Muslim, Jewish, atheist and other citizenry are treated with respect. In our opinion, the choice of Mr. Saleem is disrespectful to our non-fundamentalist Christian residents.
Rev. Brian Morse
Mark Matzeder
Michele Yancey Bigler
Terry Flowers
Paul Neidlinger
Michele Spillman
Interfaith Progressives of Independence
Lets show solidarity with the Interfaith organization and contact the Mayor to let him know that Kamal Saleem is a very poor selection for the Prayer Breakfast.
Despite several pleas to Mayor Don Reimal’s office to reconsider the choice for the Independence Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast keynote speaker in two weeks, the selection committee’s unanimous choice for a presenter remains in place.
…
A chaplain in the Missouri National Guard also emailed Reimal and said he would no longer attend the breakfast because of the speaker choice. That person, Reimal said, represents the only cancellation – to his knowledge – based solely on the selection of a speaker.
“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal. Murder,” Thomas said during the meeting, court records show.
Imagine if these militia men were Muslims, Spencer and Geller would be on Fox News telling the world how dangerous Islam is. Yet there is no mention of their religious affiliation. The article refers to these men with the use of two main adjectives: militia and Georgia. It would seem “Christian” the ostensible faith of the arrested is an an unnecessary adjective that creates a bias towards a religion.
And so imagine once again if these militia men were Muslims, Islam would be the main adjective in the story.
(Reuters) – Federal authorities on Tuesday arrested four Georgia men accused of plotting to buy explosives and produce a deadly biological toxin to attack fellow U.S. citizens and government officials.
The Justice Department said the men were members of a fringe domestic militia group and had planned to manufacture ricin for use in their attacks.
The men attended meetings starting in March where they discussed carrying out crimes, including murder, in order to undermine federal and state government, prosecutors said. The targets included local police, federal government buildings and employees of agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service.
The meetings were monitored by FBI agents with the assistance of a confidential informant, according to prosecutors. Two of the men also met with an undercover agent to discuss buying explosives and weapons parts, prosecutors said.
The men are Frederick Thomas, 73; Dan Roberts, 67; Ray H. Adams, 65; and Samuel J. Crump, 68. Thomas is from Cleveland, Georgia, and the other three men are from Toccoa.
At a meeting at Thomas’ house in March, Thomas said he had enough weapons to arm everyone at the table and that he had compiled a “Bucket List” of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and media members he felt needed to be “taken out” to “make the country right again,” according to court documents.
“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal. Murder,” Thomas said during the meeting, court records show.
During a meeting in September, Crump said he wanted to make 10 pounds of ricin and disperse it in various U.S. cities, according to prosecutors. Authorities said he described one scenario in which the toxin would be blown from a car traveling on Atlanta highways.
Last month, Adams allegedly gave Crump a sample of the beans used to produce ricin, prosecutors said.
Ricin can cause death from exposure to as little as a pinhead amount. Most victims die between 36 hours and 72 hours after exposure, and there is no known antidote.
The most famous case of ricin poisoning was in 1978 when dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was killed when an assassin in London jabbed him with an umbrella that injected a tiny ricin-filled pellet.
“These defendants, who are alleged to be part of a fringe militia group, are charged with planning attacks against their own fellow citizens and government,” Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.
“While many are focused on the threat posed by international violent extremists, this case demonstrates that we must also remain vigilant in protecting our country from citizens within our own borders who threaten our safety and security,” she said.
(Additional reorting by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by Greg McCune)
WICHITA - A Muslim mosque in west Wichita that was heavily damaged by fire early Monday had received anti-Islam letters in recent months.
Somebody also had begun turning on its outside water faucet overnight to hike its water bill, its leader said.
Abdelkarim Jibril, president of the Islamic Association of Mid Kansas at 3406 W. Taft, said the letters put down Islam, called the prophet Muhammad a pig, and enclosed drawings that mocked him.
The mosque received about eight of the letters starting four to six months ago, but they had stopped about a month ago, he said.
Jibril said the mosque hadn’t turned the letters over to authorities before the fire.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined the fire investigation Monday.
The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
Investigators are aware of the letters.
“We don’t know if any of the letters have any relationship to the fire at this point. It’s something we’re looking into though,” said Wichita fire Lt. Troy Thissen.
“We’re not ruling out anything,” Wichita fire Capt. Stuart Bevis said.
The blaze was reported at 12:45 a.m. at the association, southeast of Maple and West streets.
The fire spread quickly and gutted the attic, Bevis said. Damage was set at about $130,000.
“It’s a fairly good-sized structure,” he said. “We had fire get up in the attic space early on.”
Firefighters had to assume a defensive posture soon after arrival because of the danger posed by being inside the structure with upper levels on fire, Bevis said.
The fire may well have totaled the mosque, he said, because of the extensive damage to the attic and roof support structure.
“We’re going to be taking a lot of steps” to review evidence because the fire involves a religious meeting place, Bevis said.
Jibril, who has been president of the association for most of its 32-year history, said he was called to the scene about 4 a.m.
“It’s devastating to see something like that, or see somebody even try to do something like that, “ he said.
Jibril said the anti-Islam letters appeared to have been sent by the same person because they contained the same types of pictures and same handwriting. Among the messages: “I don’t need to know anything else about you but 9/11”, Jibril said.
Enclosed pictures included drawings of prophet Muhammed with a beard, Jibril said.
“We don’t allow pictures of the prophet,” he said.
Most of the letters were mailed from somewhere in Texas with the mosque’s return address on the envelopes, Jibril said.
Some letters were sent to cities in the east, such as Boston, with the mosque’s return address on them.
Mosque leaders were talking about turning them over to the FBI and had decided to do that, but didn’t do it before the fire.
Jibril said the letters would still have been in the office at the mosque at the time of the fire.
The mosque’s outside faucet began being turned on during the night at about the time the letters stopped a month ago, Jibril said.
That action raised the association’s monthly water bill, normally about $30, to $500, Jibril said.
Jibril said the mosque will be rebuilt.
“We need a place on the west side for the people that live and work on the west side,” he said.
Hussam Madi, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Wichita, who also delivered sermons at the mosque, said the fire was “ very, very sad” for the people who prayed there.
The mosque was the first to open in Wichita.
Muslims bought the building, formerly a Mennonite community center, in 1979. Muslims had held prayer services in homes or other churches until then.
About 30 or 40 people attended Friday services at the mosque, which also held Sunday school classes, classes in Arabic, holiday prayers and other gatherings, Jibril said.
Although there are two mosques on the east side of Wichita, the mosque on the west side served members of the Muslim community who live on both sides of the city, Madi said.
Muslims from the east side who flew out of town on Fridays often would stop there to pray before they left town, he said.
The fire already has caught the attention of one national organization.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American/Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., said he will be monitoring the investigation to see whether it is deemed to be a hate crime. “This is the kind of thing that happens all too often,” he said, “but it’s hard to predict.”
In the past year, arsonists have targeted mosques, or mosque construction sites, in Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Michigan, he said.
In May of last year, a bomb exploded at a Florida mosque.
Update: Geller withdrew from the “Shariah Conference,” (read below) and she also just withdrew from the Tea Party Convention in Florida. She is claiming victim status.
MURFREESBORO — Former congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik said Monday she has found a place to hold a freedom conference after getting turned down by 20 hotels.
Cornerstone Church in the Madison community on Nashville’s northeast side agreed to hold the event, “The Constitution or Sharia Conference.” The event will be held at 10 a.m. Nov. 11.
“There was no room in the inn for freedom, but pastor Maury Davis of Cornerstone Church opened his doors for free speech,” said Zelenik, who lost the 2010 Republican primary to U.S. Rep. Diane Black of Gallatin.
However, headliner Pamela Geller, who runs the Atlas Shrugs anti-Islam blog, has bowed out because the event is no longer at a secular venue.
“While I have nothing against speaking in a church per se, I refuse to have my message driven from the public square,” she wrote in an email.
Geller and Zelenik referred to Hutton Hotel’s decision last week to cancel booking for the event in Nashville, citing safety concerns.
“It was a poor decision by Hutton Hotel when they changed their story three times from what they initially told me,” Zelenik said. “Our goal is to expose and disclose the differences between Constitutional and Shariah law. Our conference recognizes the freedoms of all Americans, including Muslim women, because they have equal protection under our Constitutional law. I reject Islamic Shariah for any woman.”
Zelenik also criticized Islamic Center of Murfreesboro member Saleh Sbenaty, who described the conference as “hate speech.”
“Hate speech for what?” she said. “Does he hate our Constitution or does he hate Shariah law? I wonder how he would feel in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Iran with constitutional law competing with Shariah? Anyone who would try to bring in constitutional law in these countries would be imprisoned and/or put to death.”
Sbenaty, who works as a 19-year professor at MTSU in the Engineering Technology Department, said he referred to the gathering as a hate group because he’s concerned with the reputations of the speakers Zelenik has invited.
“I’d like to ask her does she want to associate herself with those who inspired Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 93 people in Norway?” Sbenaty asked. “In his manifesto of more than 1,5,00 pages, he was inspired by the people she invited to this conference. He mentioned Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Why would we need these people who are coming here to town to preach hate?”
Events such as these can hurt tourism, Sbenaty added.
“Why would you want to bring in people who would damage the reputation of Nashville and Murfreesboro?” he asked. “It’s ironic that she is damaging our community in the name of freedom.”
Sbenaty said there’s always a small sect in any religious group that’s dangerous and can commit tragic acts in the name of their religion.
“Extremists can interpret any religion they way they want,” said Sbenaty, noting that he grew up in Damascus, Syria, with Christian and Jewish friends before becoming a U.S. citizen after moving to Tennessee in 1982. “This is my country. This is where I want to live. This is a country that is founded on freedom, and it’s founded on equality. It’s not founded on bigotry.”
The Rev. Maury Davis of Cornerstone said he agreed to host the conference because he wants to learn more about Shariah law and its impact on American culture. Earlier this year, the church hosted a speech by Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who is highly critical of Islam.
He said speakers will not be allowed to promote hatred toward Muslims.
“I am not going to have any hate speech,” Davis said. “And I define hate speech as inciting people to hurt people or mistreat people.”
Tickets to the conference are $20 and can be purchased at shariafreeusa.com.
The Canadian case in which Mohammad Shafia killed three of his daughters and his first wife are being sensationalized in the Islamophobesphere as a clear cut instance proving Islam sanctions “Honor Killing.” There are all sorts of wily and convoluted attempts at stretching Quranic verse and Prophetic tradition to mean something they clearly don’t, as Ilisha makes clear in her most recent article.
The video below clearly demonstrates however that there are some Christians who are willing to use corporal punishment to put their children “back in place,” and they do this based on the Bible (hat tip: Omar Q.):
Needless to say such literalism can have deadly consequences, but should we now blame all of Christianity for these zealots? Should we say that their interpretation is the correct one, the one most in fidelity with scripture?
The Shafia murder trial currently underway in Ontario, Canada is a public relations bonanza for anti-Muslim bigots who have made so-called “Islamic honor killings” a major theme in their campaign to vilify Muslims. Three of Mohammad Shafia’s daughters and his first wife were found dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal two years ago in what prosecutors say was a quadruple murder staged to look like an accident.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, who was 18 at the time of the incident, have each been charged with four counts of first-degree murder. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Shafia is a wealthy Montreal businessman originally from Afghanistan, who was apparently living in a polygamous arrangement with his first (infertile) wife, his second wife, and their seven children. After leaving Afghanistan in 1992, the family had lived in Dubai, Pakistan and Australia before settling in Quebec, Canada.
Two summers ago on a return trip from a Niagara Falls vacation, the family checked into a Kingston hotel for the night. Early the next morning, police found the family’s wrecked sedan in the nearby Kingston Mill locks.
Inside were the bodies of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, and Mohammad’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. Autopsies indicated all four victims had drowned.
At first, the couple told police their eldest daughter had taken the sedan for a joyride without their permission, resulting in a tragic accident. Inconsistencies in their story left police suspicious, and evidence found at the scene contradicted their account.
Investigators said the sedan would have had to travel past a locked gate, over a concrete curb and a rocky outcrop, and then make two U-turns to wind up in the locks of the canal. Damage found on both vehicles indicates that Mohammad Shafia’s SUV pushed the sedan into the shallow canal at an isolated, unlit location.
Police seized a laptop from the family’s Montreal home they said was owned by Shafia but used by his son Hamed. In the weeks leading up to the alleged murder, forensic experts found incriminating phrases had been entered in the Google search engine, including “Where to commit a murder,” “Can a prisoner have control over their real estate,” and ”Montreal jail.”
Shafia’s chilling statements captured on police wiretaps suggest he orchestrated the death of his daughters because they consorted with boys and dishonored his family with their defiant behavior:
“They committed treason on themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion…they betrayed everything.”
An apparently remorseless Shafia told his second wife that when he views the cell phone photos of Zainab and Sahar posing with their boyfriends or in suggestive clothing, he is consoled, saying:
“I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they come to life, I would do it again.”
The trial has received intense media coverage in Canada, but in the US, coverage has been mostly confined to anti-Muslim hatemongers and outrage peddlers. Frontpage Magazine, a site run by anti-Muslim loon David Horowitz, prompted some hate-filled comments from readers responding to an article about the Shafia trial:
“IslamoFascist Pigs will continue to carry out the tenets of Islam because they are 7th Century barbarians in the 21st Century. It’s unfortunate that Canada doesn’t have a death penalty.”
“…The West is drinking poison, we need to puke it out and close the door and seal every crack to keep this evil out.”
An article on The Blaze, a right wing website founded by former Fox News host Glenn Beck, provoked over 200 colorful comments, including:
“These towelheads think they are above the law. I don’t know what its going to take to wake up our country and it’s leaders.”
“ISLAM THE MUSLIM BARBARIC SATAN CULT! These are Dictator Barack Hussein Obamas chosen people! The SHARIA-LAW IS ALREADY STARTING IN OUR AMERICA!”
“Gee…if Muslims keep this up there won’t be a ‘problem’ with them. I say we need to keep hands off and let this run its course.”
“Nuke Mecca, Nuke Medina. Peace through Strength, Strength through Superior Firepower.”
Pamela Geller’s website Atlas Shrugs is also covering the story, and her readers appear to be equally hateful, paranoid, and in some cases, unaware that Afghans are not Arabs:
“Muslim DOGS is what they are… Arab DOGS!”
“Just another moderate Muslim. And that is not tongue-in-cheek. DEPORT ALL OF THEM.”
“The pathetic politically-correct wussies in the canadian parliament have totally rolled-over and caved to these islamo-crazies. Sharia will be the law of the land in canada within the next three years. It’s time to beef up our northern border.”
Notice that these comments are not confined to outrage over this specific crime, but are a wholesale denunciation of all Muslims and the Islamic religion, as well as calls for violence, deportation, and even genocide. Comments consistently expressed a visceral hatred of Muslims, belief in a sinister left-Islamist alliance, and paranoid conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over and imposing Sharia (Islamic Law) in the Western world.
Geller has a section on her website entitled, “Honor Killings: Islam Misogyny,” where she frequently repeats the lie that honor killings are sanctioned by Islamic Law. She describes honor killing in America as, “a grotesque manifestation of [S]haria law abrogating American law,” and warns that “creeping [S]haria” will bring a myriad of barbaric practices to the US if “Islamic supremacists” are not stopped.
The fact is that honor killings are not religiously or legally sanctioned by Islam. Rafia Zakaria is a lawyer, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, and the Director for Amnesty International USA. Zakaria is also a Muslim feminist and a regular contributor to Ms.blog Magazine, which covers contemporary women’s issues. On the subject of honor killing, she has said:
“That is one of the black and white statements I can make. There is absolutely nothing, either in the Qur’an or in the Hadith, or even in any secondary source that says that honor killing is something that Muslims should do or can do or that is lawful.”
Honor killing is an ancient practice that can be linked to the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, circa 1700 BC. Barbara Kay, a harsh critic of Islam who previously sparked controversy with her column, “The Rise of Quebecistan,” says the first honor killing in Judeo-Christian civilization is recorded in the Bible in Genesis 34. She relates the story here.
Some Muslims, a minority mistakenly believe that “honor killing” is permitted in Islam, and Mohammad Shafia’s statements in the wake of his daughters’ deaths suggest he shares this misconception, conflating culture and faith. For this reason, it is important to spread the news that Islam does NOT condone these killings, yet anti-Muslim bigots who claim they care about Muslim women are doing the opposite.
In a pathetic attempt to prove Islam sanctions honor killings, the loons have dredged up ”Reliance of the Traveller,” a classical manual for the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence written over 600 years ago. A convoluted interpretation of select passages has gone viral, and is now routinely cited on the pages of hate sites and in comments on numerous articles related to honor killing.
Geller quotes a section of The Traveller on her website that says certain crimes, including the killing of one’s offspring, are not subject to retaliation, implying Muslim parents have a free pass to murder their children under Islamic Law, which is a bold faced LIE. Retaliation is a form of reciprocal justice, lex talionis, commonly known as “an eye for an eye.”
A crime that is not subject to retaliation can still be punished by other means. Restrictions on reciprocal justice in the Qur’an were meant to reduce blood feuds and the cycle of vengeance. The concept of retaliation is also found in Jewish and Christian scriptures, and like honor killing, traces back to the ancient Code of Hammurabi.
Even if The Traveller sanctioned honor killing (which it doesn’t), it would be the interpretation of one Islamic cleric who lived centuries ago, and not a formal part of Islamic Law. Sharia is drawn primarily from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and neither sanctions honor killing.
Of course Geller is only parroting a common anti-Muslim talking point pushed by her teacher in all things Islamic, Robert Spencer. Spencer, since the launch of JihadWatch has tried his utmost to find an Islamic text that he could contort and link to “honor killings.”
His one method has been to cite the well known story of Khidr in the 18th chapter of the Qur’an as such a justification for “honor killing” in Islam:
Khidr killed the young man because he would grieve his pious parents with his “rebellion and ingratitude” (v. 80), and Allah will give them a better son (v. 81).
…[further down states]…
Another point emerges in Islamic tradition: don’t kill children, unless you know they’re going to grow up to be unbelievers. “The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) used not to kill the children, so thou shouldst not kill them unless you could know what Khidr had known about the child he killed, or you could distinguish between a child who would grow up to he a believer (and a child who would grow up to be a non-believer), so that you killed the (prospective) non-believer and left the (prospective) believer aside.” The assumption thus enunciated may help explain the persistence of the phenomenon of honor-killing in Islamic countries and even among Muslims in the West.
Robert Spencer shamelessly tries to mislead the reader into thinking there is some textual justification for honor killing. Seeking Ilm, a traditional conservative Muslim website takes Spencer to task for this and sheds light on the above falsities, debunking Spencer’s mythical explanation:
Such an explanation is not at all mentioned by the scholars of old or of late. None understood this story to mean that it is permitted to kill children if they will be an unbeliever.
It goes on to discuss the tradition mentioned by Spencer: first the speaker is a disciple of the Prophet Muhammad known as Ibn Abbas; second, the wording of the tradition cited by Spencer is from a shaadh (peculiar) narration of the said tradition and is therefore “weaker” and not “accepted”; third, it is narrated differently in the Sahih of Imam Muslim (one of the most authoritative books of tradition) with only these words,
“Verily the Messenger of God (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) did not kill children, so do not kill children, unless you know what Al-Khidr knew when he killed the child.”
The Seeking Ilm folks go on to write,
The fact is it is impossible to know what Al-Khidr knew. Imam An-Nawawi (1234-1278 CE), recognized as one of the most brilliant Muslim jurists and judges to have lived, explained these words in his commentary upon the Sahih of Imam Muslim:
“It means: Verily it is not permitted to kill them (i.e. children), nor is it permitted for you to make a connection to the story of Al-Khidr utilizing it to kill children. For verily, Al-Khidr did not kill except by the command of God, the exalted, as this was specifically allotted to him just as was mentioned in the end of the story [of khidr], “And I did it not of my own accord.” So [Ibn ‘Abbas is saying] if you came to know of such from a child then he is to be killed. And it is known such cannot be known [by a person] and so it is not permitted to kill him.” ((Sharh Sahih Muslim: Translated by Seekingilm team ))
What is also important to mention is that Imam Nawawi himself, the great Dr. in Hadith and commentator of the Sahih, places this hadith beneath the chapter title, “Women Participants in Jihad are to be Given Reward but not Part of the Spoils, and the Prohibition of Killing Children of the People of War.” This fact stresses our point that the Muslims did not extract the meaning claimed by Robert Spencer. If Robert Spencer and crew did not get all of what we just stated, let us sum it up for the idiots out there: one of the most prominent scholars for all Muslims is clearly stating that killing children is not permitted based upon this verse, as knowledge of the child’s future is not certain save by revelation from God, as was received by Al-Khidr. Even Moses, according to the story, did not know of the plight of the child, so how is it that a layman is to know of such? Furthermore, Imam An-Nawawi known as the second Imam Ash-Shafi’i, is stating that it is totally forbidden to kill children. The fact is Spencer’s null attempt at utilizing this statement for his own fear-mongering and islamophobic agenda only shows anyone with any knowledge of Islamic law how horridly ignorant Robert Spencer is of Islam.
Horridly ignorant is right!
In any case, it seems highly unlikely that the Canadian court will consult a centuries-old manual on Islamic jurisprudence to determine sentencing in the Shafia case.
Loons, who are clearly unhinged from reality, insist liberal “wussies” are caving in to “Islamo-crazies” and will allow Muslims to invoke Sharia to get away with murder in Western courtrooms. Apparently they see no contradiction between their belief that Islamic Law is soft on crime and simultaneously, exceptionally harsh and barbaric.
Outside of the loons’ fevered imaginations, Sharia is not a factor in the Shafia trial. The accused will be subject to the Law of Canada, and if convicted, all three face life in prison.
It is time there was a museum exhibit dedicated to the victims of jihad. Where is the Met’s showcase of the lives and cultures and histories of the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations, and enslavements? Where is the grandiose suite of new galleries dedicated to highlighting Islam’s systematic dehumanization of women: honor killings, clitorectomies, and so much more?
Wow, wow, Pamela, wait there a second. “270 million victims” of Islam? Are you sure? What might be the source for this? She gives no link.
Thankfully, Gus found what might be the primary source for this statistic:
Tears of Jihad
These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.
Africa
Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman’s Presbyterian Board of Missions, David Livingstone, p. 62, 1888] Those who were left behind were the very young, the weak, the sick and the old. These soon died since the main providers had been killed or enslaved. So, for 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.
120 million Africans
Christians
The number of Christians martyred by Islam is 9 million [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-10] . A rough estimate by Raphael Moore in History of Asia Minor is that another 50 million died in wars by jihad. So counting the million African Christians killed in the 20th century we have:
60 million Christians
Hindus
Koenard Elst in Negationism in India gives an estimate of 80 million Hindus killed in the total jihad against India. [Koenard Elst, Negationism in India, Voice of India, New Delhi, 2002, pg. 34.] The country of India today is only half the size of ancient India, due to jihad. The mountains near India are called the Hindu Kush, meaning the ‘funeral pyre of the Hindus.’
80 million Hindus
Buddhists
Buddhists do not keep up with the history of war. Keep in mind that in jihad only Christians and Jews were allowed to survive as dhimmis (servants to Islam); everyone else had to convert or die. Jihad killed the Buddhists in Turkey, Afghanistan, along the Silk Route, and in India. The total is roughly 10 million. [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-1.]
10 million Buddhists
Jews
Oddly enough there were not enough Jews killed in jihad to significantly affect the totals of the Great Annihilation. The jihad in Arabia was 100 percent effective, but the numbers were in the thousands, not millions. After that, the Jews submitted and became the dhimmis (servants and second class citizens) of Islam and did not have geographic political power.
This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.
This was written by Bill French aka “Bill Warner” of “Center for the Study of Political Islam” (cf. this FrontPageMag interview).
Let’s go over it step by step.
1. Africans. The number of 120 million victims is, of course, taken from thin air. Even assuming the number of 25 million slaves to be correct, and assuming that “Islam” was responsible for them, one cannot simply multpily the number by a single dodgy statistical point to get some sort of a total number of “dead”.
Notice that the whole transatlantic slave trade is attributed to Islam! Apparently, Christians had nothing to do with it. This way we will soon hear that Confederacy was an Islamic separatist state.
However, when we assume the scope of the Arab slave trade (which existed before Islam) to be between 10-18 million people, to claim that Islam as such is responsible for the associated victims is the same as claiming that Christianity is to blame for the victims of slavery and racism perpetrated by Christians (among many other things).
2. Christians. The first source cited is not quite scholarly. It’s a mish-mash of statistical data, and when it comes to “martyrdom” particularly, there is no careful, scholarly discussion of each particular number as well as its sources, which leaves the question of the reliability of each particular statistic open. Here’s the table 4-10. It is so exhaustive, yet it has only 9 million alleged Christian victims of Muslims (I did not bother to verify by recounting, but table 4-5 does have 9 million alleged victims of Muslims). However then the “Tears of Jihad” article claims that there were 50 million more of them. How did the authors of that table somehow miss these additional millions? If they were so incompetent, why cite their statistics in the first place?
But where is the 50 million figure from? The source is given as “History of Asia Minor” by Raphael Moore. Quick Google search brings up this source, which is an article by Raphael Moore entitled “In Memory Of The 50 Million Victims Of The Orthodox Christian Holocaust”. Its first sub-section is called “History Of Asia Minor: 1894-1923”, which is apparently at the root of confusion for Geller’s source: the name of the sub-section was confused with the name of the complete work. Such brilliant scholarship.
The number “50 million” does appear in the article, but only as a total number of Christians martyred in XXth century!
Between the tolls exacted from prisons, concentration camps, forced marches and exiles, warfare, famine, and brutal military occupation, it is reasonable to conclude that up to 50 million Orthodox Christians have perished in the first eight decades of the twentieth century.
Geller’s source simply took this number and ascribed it to “Jihad”.
(As a side note, this source is also far from scholarly and the number is not calculated properly, but that is already irrelevant for the purposes of the present critique.)
3. Hindus. It is claimed that the number is estimated by Elst (who is known for right-wing anti-Muslim bias). However, when we take a look at his book we see this:
As a contribution to research on the quantity of the Islamic crimes against humanity, we may mention Prof. K.S.Lal’s estimates about the population figures in medieval India (Growth of Muslim Population in India). According to his calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate). More research is needed before we can settle for a quantitatively accurate evaluation of Muslim rule in India, but at least we know for sure that the term crime against humanity is not exaggerated.
So it’s not Elst’s estimate, but Lal’s estimate. And moreover, it is not an estimate of 80 million murders. It’s an estimate of a population decrease in five centuries, the causes of which may be many, including natural population decrease, conversions, etc.
The problem, however, is that Lal’s estimates are simply fantasies. One cannot take seriously any such estimates based on extremely fragmentary demographic data for the year 1000. Simon Digby writes in his review of Lal’s book, after addressing some of Lal’s assumptions (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 38, no. 1, 1975, p. 177):
Regarding the population of India before A.D. 1000 Lal quotes the guesses of Colin Clark – 70 millions – and Jyotindra Mohan Datta – 200 to 300 millions. He himself prefers 200 millions and he believes that, mainly as a result of the Muslim invasions and presence, the population of India fell from 200 millions in A.D. 1000 to 125 millions in A.D. 1500, to rise under more amiable Mughal rule to 175 millions in 1700.
[…]
The author is known for his detailed studies of the Khalji dynasty and of the fifteenth century Delhi sultanate. He is well versed in the sources of medieval North Indian history. In the present study he has assembled almost all the conceivably relevant data and for this reason it will remain of value as a compendium of references. Yet the unknown variables are so great and the quality of the data yielded by our sources so poor that almost any detailed general estimates of population based upon them must appear wilful, if not fantastic. At the time when this review was being written, E. J. Hobsbawm (in New Society, 11 July 1974, 76) called the attention of historians of premodern Europe, who dabble in social statistics based on sources of comparable quality to those of Lal, to an axiom of computer operators ‘GIGO’: this stands for ‘Garbage in – Garbage out’!
A reasonable person can agree with this conclusion. Thus, the figure of “80,000,000” Hindus murdered by Muslims is based on nothing but weak speculations.
Interestingly, elsewhere Elst writes:
Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.
4. Buddhists. The only source given for the alleged Buddhist victims of Muslims is the same book with Christian statistics, not any scholarly historical source about, you know, Buddhists. But when we look at the table 4-1, we only see the number of 10,000,000 Buddhists cited (without sources, I might add; and it contains 80,000,000 alleged Muslim martyrs as well, 10 million more than alleged Christian martyrs, estimated to be 70 million!). There is no indication in the table that these Buddhists were slaughtered by Muslims.
———
As an atheist, I have no problem with talking about the responsibility of religions for many evils of this world. However I must state that the much bandied about number of “270 million” victims of Islam is total bunk based on nothing.
American Vision is a hard-line Christian Reconstruction organization whose current leader, Gary DeMar, has said that democracy should be replaced by a theocratic government run by Christians who will impose Old Testament prohibitions and the occasional executions of “sodomites” to drive gay people back into the closet. It’s no surprise, then, that American Vision has involved itself over the years with anti-gay and anti-abortion causes.
Lately, however, it has branched out and seems to be testing its message in the antigovernment and conspiracy-laden “Patriot” waters. Literally.
The group is co-sponsoring a January 2012 “Patriot Cruise” that will, according to a promotional webpage, transform participants’ abilities to defend their faith and the country’s foundations, and help them learn how to convert others who oppose “the truth by which we stand.”
During the weeklong cruise aboard Royal Caribbean’s 1,020-foot Mariner of the Seas, participants will “explore what Americans really believe” in the learning environment of a “masters [sic] level teaching classroom and the energy of a Town Hall meeting.” Other sponsors include the Patriot Depot (which sells anti-Obama T-shirts and other “supplies for the conservative revolution”) and a Gary DeMar side project, Vision2America, which is working to “restore America to a Christian republic.”
“No conference on land,” American Vision claims, “will equip you for opposing the godless apologists of the liberal machine.”
So far, in addition to DeMar, there are four “On Board Leaders” (other speakers to be announced). The others are Alan Keyes, former presidential candidate and birther who works with the Declaration Alliance (which supported the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps); speaker and author Bill Federer of American Minute, who has appeared on conspiracy-monger Alex Jones’ show; and Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson, once known for her six seasons on Saturday Night Live but currently known for her anti-gay, anti-Muslim and anti-liberal slams; and birther Gary Kreep, a former national board member for Young Americans for Freedom. Kreep also lists himself as unpaid general counsel to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. The MCDC closed down in March 2010, though its website remains.
Can’t make the cruise and need a Patriot fix? The American Vision store carries the Patriot-friendly tract Gateway to Liberty: The Constitutional Power of the Tenth Amendment, as well as a 2011 Firearms Guide and another guide called Disaster Prep 101. You can also pick up some copies of the young adult novels The Drums of War, a series about the Revolutionary War.
American Vision is also tailoring its Christian Reconstructionist rhetoric to more Patriot and Tea Party-sounding calls to “restore America.” Its website currently posts a “County Rights” project, a series of articles by research director Joel McDurmon (soon to be available in video and book) that tell readers how to “restore freedom” by taking control of local (i.e. county) governments and establishing the kind of community that reflects their values.
In one article, titled “State’s Rights: How to Get Freedom Back,” McDurmon gives a shout-out (but is quick to claim it’s not an endorsement) to the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC), a driving force behind so-called “nullification” movements to undo or weaken federal laws that proponents don’t like. Though he claims not to endorse the TAC, he nevertheless lists 12 issues that the TAC is working on, including “Sheriffs First” laws against “unwarranted federal policing activities” and freedom from federal gun regulations. He calls the list “impressive” and proceeds to explain how nullification might be a strategy to undo Roe v. Wade at the state level.
A Radio New Zealand host’s reference to a “suicide bomber Barbie” doll for the Muslim market has been labelled hateful and divisive.
The comment was made by host Paul Brennan while standing in on Jim Mora’s regular afternoon show last Thursday. Brennan had been discussing niche Barbie doll products for adult collectors when panelist John Bishop said there was “a huge market in the Muslim world” and asked why there couldn’t be “a terrorist Barbie”. Brennan then suggested a “suicide bomber Barbie” that came with a little belt.
Radio New Zealand has cautioned the presenters about inappropriate remarks after receiving 13 formal complaints over the exchange.
One complainant, Gisborne councillor Manu Caddie, said he was surprised to hear such stereotypes on the national broadcaster and had to check he wasn’t listening to talkback radio. “I thought it was pretty hateful kind of comments and not particularly helpful or the kind of thing we want to be promoting in New Zealand,” he said. “I think we’ve done well to create a fairly tolerant, multicultural society and those kind of comments aren’t going to help promote that kind of openness and diversity.”
Mr Caddie said people were free to air their opinions but he expected higher standards from Radio New Zealand.
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.
Saudi Arabia convicts individuals for practicing sorcery and when they do Spencer and Geller blog about how it is proof of Islam’s backwardness and repression. Where is their outcry over this? (hat tip: DE)
Rabbinical court penalizes a woman for witchcraft. And no, it’s not Monty Python
The rabbinical court of Haifa ruled against a woman whose husband claimed she practiced witchcraft in their home. The court acquitted the woman of refusing to cook for her husband, as the latter committed adultery, which the court found constituted mitigating circumstances in the woman’s dereliction of culinary duties. (Hebrew)
The woman denied being a witch, but she failed a polygraph test – which is not accepted as evidence in regular Israeli courts. Presumably the duck test was unavailable. The court, composed of rabbis Yitzhak Shmuel Gamzo, Michael Bleicher, and Meir Kahan, admitted they found no legal precedent for reducing the woman’s ktuba – the money her husband pledges her in case of divorce – presumably since the Halachaic punishment for witchcraft is death. They nevertheless relied on the dubious book of Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, which is not generally considered to be law book (much more of a moral tale) to deprive her of some 90,000 NIS. Impressive.
And no, this isn’t mythical medieval England. This is Israel, 2011. And the court is funded by the government.
The SPLC’s Hatewatch Blog used research from a feature of ours written by Farha Khaled, they arrived at the research via. Islamophobia Today’s repost of the piece.
Three months after Anders Behring Breivik unleashed a horror upon Norway in the name of anti-Muslim rage, killing 77 people in an attack intended to draw attention to the threat of Islam, the blogger-muse he regarded as Europe’s “most talented right wing essay[ist]” has re-emerged from a self-imposed hiatus.
On Monday, the American website Gates of Vienna, under the boastful headline, “Fjordman Lives On,” touted a Norwegian newspaper’s publication of the blogger’s latest work, which attacks the media in Europe for its alleged complicity in allowing Islam to spread unchecked. In a brief introduction, Fjordman wrote that Breivik’s terrorism will not dissuade him from attacking Islam.
“After the terrorist attacks of July 22nd I was exhausted,” he wrote. “I seriously contemplated giving up my career as a writer. However, after the situation has calmed down a bit and I could think things through, I have decided to continue with undiminished force. Right from the beginning I have been saying that terrorists, whether they come in the shape of Islamic Jihadists or Anders Behring Breivik, should not be allowed to decide what a free society can or cannot discuss, and I meant that.”
Inspired in part by Fjordman, Breivik predicted the onset of a war that would kill or injure more than a million people as he and his small group of warriors seized “political and military control of Western European countries and implement[ed] a cultural conservative political agenda.” In preparation for this conflict, the manuscript laid out plans for the formation of a Christian army, known as the Knights Templar, to wage “guerrilla warfare against the Multiculturalist Alliance through a constant campaign of shock attacks.”
Fjordman wasn’t the only one to influence Breivik. Also cited in Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto were Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the group Stop Islamization of America. In the aftermath of the massacre, Spencer, who Breivik quoted extensively, denied any responsibility for the murders. “If I was indeed an inspiration for his work, I feel the way the Beatles must have felt when they learned that Charles Manson had committed murder after being inspired by messages he thought he heard in their song lyrics.”
The venue for Fjordman’s rebirth is just as interesting as his return. The website is popular among white supremacists and occasionally published Fjordman before Breivik’s massacre. The site claims to be the portal for “a new phase in a very old war,” and draws its name from the Ottoman Empire’s sack of cities across 16th century Europe.
The site is run by a couple living in Virginia, Edward May and his wife, who edits the blog under the pseudonym “Dymphna,” according to Islamophobia Today, which tracks anti-Muslim rhetoric and crime. And one thing is clear about the way Fjordman was treated on the website when he reared his head—he was not regarded as a pariah but rather as a celebrity.
“Just as we did several weeks ago,” Gates of Vienna boasted, “we aim to overcome the stifling censorship imposed by the Norwegian media by spreading this essay as widely as possible.”
“If you are an Islamophobe, and even Tea Party Politicians don’t want to hang out with you, you are in trouble.”
We live in the age of organized Islamophobia. Anti-Muslims coalesced after 9/11 and created, in effect, an industry that sought to influence public officials, government bodies and the masses across the United States and Europe. While the forces involved may come from different backgrounds in terms of ideology, faith and political persuasion they are united in their efforts to demonize Islam and Muslims.
Anti-Muslim Islamophobes have created a structure of Islamophobia that cuts across many levels. They hope that in people’s minds Islam will become the new Nazism and Communism combined or worse, because at least the former two enemies of humanity were “Western” and had some “rationality,” whereas Islam is the incomprehensible beast from the East.
Reza Aslan explains it well:
Simply put, Islam in the United States has become otherized. It has become a receptacle into which can be tossed all the angst and apprehension people feel about the faltering economy, about the new and unfamiliar political order, about the shifting cultural, racial, and religious landscapes that have fundamentally altered the world. Across Europe and North America, whatever is fearful, whatever is foreign, whatever is alien and unsafe is being tagged with the label ‘Islam.’ (No god but God)
Islamophobes work assiduously to push their agenda. They have boosted the profiles of (fake)ex-Muslims, (fake)scholars, and created a network of think tanks, foundations, “terror experts,” bloggers that have produced hate groups such as ACT! for America and SIOA amongst others.
Their activism is strong and they won’t stop anytime soon because that is what they get paid to do!
For some time American Muslims must have felt alone in fighting the scourge of bigotry and hatred that was aimed at them, however efforts such as ours here show that decent people from all walks of life can come together to fight the menace of fear-mongering and prejudice.
It is through the efforts of loonwatchers that we have agitated the SPLC and even the ADL to take firm stands against the Islamophobia movement. Loonwatchers were also instrumental in first booting Geller from the Hyatt Place in Sugarland, Texas and then evicting her crew from the Hutton Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee where they planned a “Sharia Conference” that was really more of a love-in for the vanguard of Islamophobia.
Now, according to several reports, another victory, both Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Rick Scott, Republicans from Florida say they will not participate in a Tea Party Convention where they would have shared the stage with Pamela Geller and another Islamophobe:
Rubio and Scott are listed as “confirmed speakers” at the convention, but representatives of their respective offices told CAIR-FL that the event is not on the senator’s nor the governor’s official schedule.
Before we published our article asking loonwatchers to contact both Rubio and Scott the two were still confirmed speakers at the Tea Party Convention. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Rubio and Scott may end up showing up for the convention, they are after all Republicans, but if this stands it is another strong rebuke to Geller, Spencer and the rest of the anti-Muslim Islamophobia movement.
Daniel Tutt writes that Islamophobes have noted that there is push back against them, and they are none too happy about it, this is why it is an opportune moment to point out that we have to continue to hound the Islamophobes. An elected official should never share the same podium as a Pamela Geller, the FBI should never allow its employees to be instructed or lectured by a Robert Spencer, universities should never invite a Nonie Darwish to their campus to deliver speeches on “Islam,” or “Sharia.”
We shouldn’t rest on our laurels! Loonwatchers should capitalize on the momentum and actively campaign, using fliers, letters, phone calls, organizing protests and rallies where ever and when ever Islamophobes attempt to gain legitimacy. We will do our part by exposing them for the frauds they are and giving you the ammunition to shed light on their hatred.
Fear Inc. did a great job in tracking the network that funds Islamophobia. David Horowitz is one recipient of Islamophobic largess. He spends the money by paying Robert Spencer of JihadWatch and Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish amongst other activities.
Horowitz is very interested in college campuses, he was the originator of “IslamoFascism Week,” an Islamophobic event that catered to all the usual hatemongers. Now it seems he is putting advertisements in college newspapers. The results of the ad campaign seem to have backfired as they have brought Muslims and non-Muslims closer together instead of driving them apart.
Friendship can be forged under the most unlikely circumstances. Therefore, we formally thank the David Horowitz Freedom Center for providing us with this opportunity to find common ground against a common problem.
On Oct. 13 , the David Horowitz Freedom Center published an ad in the Daily Bruin titled “Not All Fears Are Phobias,” wrongly identifying Islam as a perpetrator of terrorism worldwide. By submitting the ad to our campus newspaper, the DHFC sought to bring its politics of division and fear to our campus community. Instead, it became a rallying point between two populations with viewpoints that often conflict. J Street U at UCLA and the Muslim Student Association have joined in solidarity to demonstrate to campus that we must rise above messages that intend to tear us apart.
No, really. This wouldn’t have happened if you had not published this. David Horowitz, you are truly a peacemaker.
The ad presents one step in a campaign to isolate the American Muslim community, all but labeling the entire community a security threat. The David Horowitz Freedom Center attempts to legitimize a policy of exclusion and suspicion of American Muslims and galvanize a susceptible population against them.
The Horowitz ad has made students on campus feel uncomfortable, upset and unsafe. While Muslim students feel it attacks their personal identity, others see the ad as unrepresentative of their values. This ad creates an environment where a specific community feels unsure of whether it can express its identity without fear of backlash or condemnation. The university has an obligation to protect its students in this capacity, especially when UCLA is among the most diverse campuses in the United States.
The campus Muslim community expressed widespread dismay and unease over the message embedded in the ad. They were outraged at being implicated in the actions of extremists, a tiny percentage of the overall population. Many members of the MSA felt unsafe and wary of a campus that might have endorsed a blanket criminalization of a religion rather than attributing blame to the individuals who committed the crimes.
If the David Horowitz Freedom Center really wanted to combat extremism, it would be urging us to communicate and learn from our classmates instead of preaching a dogma of intolerance. In actuality, placing the ad encourages the spread of extremism, divides our community and leads to demonization of student populations.
How can an organization that is against anti-Semitism condone Islamophobia? We feel that anyone against the former yet allowing the latter is applying a double standard to our neighboring communities. From J Street U’s standpoint, the Jewish values that we have been brought up on will not allow us to condone the oppression of any society, for our community is not exclusive to this experience. Our religious and ethnic memory is stained with millennia of oppression, and we pity those who have not learned from it. Our community suffered greatly, and we will do whatever we can to make sure others do not have to.
The solidarity shown by non-Muslim students for fellow Muslim students has helped to mitigate the dismay experienced by the MSA and wider Muslim community. Several members of the Muslim community stated that they felt reassured by the display of shared sympathy and very much appreciated the verbal expressions of support. The MSA and J Street U at UCLA decided to take this opportunity to collaborate and show the campus that personal friendships and logical arguments always trump fear.
It’s not only about the Jewish and Muslim communities. No community on or off campus should be demonized or disrespected. Instead of fostering fear and rejection, it’s our duty to try to understand each other’s cultures or viewpoints. The great thing about UCLA is the diversity of its student community. It takes special courage to approach the “other,” but it is always worth the risk.
J Street U and the Muslim Student Association at UCLA envision a campus where we’re not afraid to share our experiences, our cultures and our identities. Everyone does not need to agree, but everyone should be allowed to present their own viewpoints. The kind of ad that propagates fear of the “other,” but doesn’t allow that “other” community to speak for itself, is not what we need on campus. We don’t want a campus where people are scared of each other and where students are discouraged from interacting with people whom they disagree with or see as different. With this collaboration, we have taken our first step toward realizing this vision. We invite the campus community to join us.
This message is a joint response from J Street U at UCLA and the Muslim Student Association, written in collaboration between Fowzia Sharmeen, Jared Schwalb and Gabriel Levine, a UCLA alumna, fourth-year student and third-year student, respectively.
U.S. Rep. Allen West has already tried to end federal funding for National Public Radio. But if he needed another reason to hate NPR, yesterday’s “All Things Considered” segment should do the the trick.
The story explored West’s view of Islam as a “totalitarian, theocratic, political ideology,” and his ongoing rhetorical battle with Nezar Hamze, the executive director of the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. No news there — the West/Hamze controversy has already been well-documented on the Pulp. But NPR took the story one step further, suggesting that Broward Republicans were more anti-Muslim than their GOP comrades in other states.
Yet committee chairman Richard DeNapoli told NPR: ”I really don’t think this had anything to do with religion. It’s just that this was a widely known circumstance where he had made statements against Allen West, and the members reacted to that.”
Strike one. Broward Republicans will defend West to the end, even if it makes them look like bigots on national radio. But wait, there’s more!
“CAIR officials say they have good relations with other Republicans, but that in South Florida at least, the Republican Party and their Tea Party supporters have made Muslims feel unwelcome,” NPR reporter Greg Allen said.
Ouch. This means South Florida — a predominantly Democratic area– is allegedly more prejudiced against Muslims than other Republican strongholds.
Congratulations, Broward. You are the new Strom Thurmond.
An evangelical group known a The Call, headed by Lou Engle, is planning a prayer rally at Ford Field in Detroit in Nov. 11 with the goal of converting Muslims before they turn Michigan into an Islamic state.
In a Youtube video, Engle and another pastor, Rick Joyner, say that the event will use prayer to send dreams of Jesus to the Muslims and convert them:
Joyner: One of the things Detroit has become known for in our nation is the largest Muslim community in our nation, and Dearborn, it’s growing. Many havesaid there actually is an attempt to make Michigan our first Muslim state…. You cannot understand our modern world today without understanding Islam, and the Lord called them hypocrites who did not know the Signs of the Times. We need to know and understand this issue, we have to. And Islam is in our face, everywhere we return. And here, in America, this is the one place where it is most in our face, right now…
Engle: At 11-11-11 the Lord just clearly showed to us, you got to pray all night long because it’s when the Muslims sleep and all over the world right now Muslims in the night are having dreams of Jesus, we believe that God wants to invade with His love Dearborn with dreams of Jesus. We’re gathering together to say God, pour out your grace and revelations of Jesus all over Dearborn and the Muslim communities of North and South America.
Joyner and Engle were also two of the primary movers behind Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s prayer rally in Houston in early August.
Brigitte Gabriel of ACT! for America (formerly American Congress for Truth) today sent members a video message urging them to become “Patriot Partners” by making monthly donations to her anti-Muslim group. She said that the funding will go towards efforts to pass laws banning the supposed use of Sharia law in courts, such as the one struck down by a federal judge in Oklahoma. Gabriel called her rivals “unhinged” and “fronts” of the Muslim Brotherhood who intend to “smear” and use “legal assaults” against anti-Sharia legislation.
Of course, Gabriel’s legislative fix is still in need of a problem, as there is simply no evidence that Sharia law or Sharia courts are permeating the American justice system. But don’t let that stop you from giving Gabriel your money!
The Looniest Blogger Ever will be at a Tea Party Convention in Florida next week. It might not be possible to persuade the Tea Party to refuse a bigot such as Geller the spotlight, considering they don’t want Muslims anywhere near them, but senators and other officials shouldn’t come close to her even if it were with a ten foot pole.
Next week’s Florida Tea Party convention is slated to feature some big names in Florida politics, as well as the opportunity for state tea party members to discuss some of their favorite topics — including Agenda 21 and Islam.
According to the current convention agenda, speakers will include Gov. Rick Scott, former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, anti-Islam blogger Pam Geller and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
Attorney General Pat Bondi was mulling over an appearance, but her name does not appear on the updated convention agenda. In September, Scott’s office told the Independent his appearance had not been confirmed.
The convention will also feature G. Edward Griffin, an anti-Federal Reserve, anti-United Nations and anti-communist conspiracy theorist who describes himself as a “life member” of the John Birch Society — a historically infamous anti-communist group.
Anti-Islam blogger Pam Geller is also on the agenda for next week. Geller is best known for her blog Atlas Shrugs, described by The New York Times as a “site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.” According to the Times, Geller “has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by ‘Islamic supremacists’; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.”
Geller is well known in certain Florida political circles, because she — along with a small group of advocates in Florida, including a U.S. Senate candidate — fought to keep Rifqa Bary in Florida during the very public legal dispute involving her parents.
(via. The Florida Independent)
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Gov. Rick Scott should take a similar stand to that of their fellow Republican, Chris Christie who said, “I am tired of the crazies.”
At the very least loonwatchers in Florida and everywhere should contact Rubio and Scott’s office and ask them to take a stand against Geller.
Here is a short sampling of the batsh** loony things Geller has either said or promoted. It should be more than enough to convince any rational individual, especially a public official to denounce her:
Geller is not only a birther but has posted a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming Malcolm X is Barack Obama’s father.
Just look at the difference between Clergy Beyond Borders and hatemongers such as SIOA’s Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. One group (guess who) promotes pluralism, respect for our Constitution and freedom while the other one sows divisiveness, hate and thrives off of fear.
An unusual vehicle is stuck in traffic on the highway from Nashville to Murfreesboro, T.N. It may look like an everyday passenger van but a glance inside tells a different story. Two imams, two rabbis and one evangelical pastor sit cheek-by-jowl with boxes of interfaith material blocking the back windows. With the rain pelting against the windows, the pastor and one of the rabbis pull up Facebook, excitedly checking how many friends they have in common. The conversation swings from good-natured teasing to philosophical discussions and disheartening stories of humiliation suffered in a post-9/11 world. This drive is just one of many this group will have taken together by the end of their 15-day Religious Leaders for Reconciliation ride through cities in the American South and Midwest. Their goal is to bring a message of unity and of interfaith understanding to a country they feel is forgetting what that means.
“A rabbi next to an imam, next to an evangelical minister: it sounds strange,” explains Imam Yahya Hendi, founder of Clergy Beyond Borders, the organization sponsoring the ride, and the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University. “But this is the America dream. This is what America makes possible. This could be a joke in Saudi Arabia or maybe in Pakistan. This could never be a joke in the United States of America. This is a dream we need to protect. This is the reality we need to nurture.”
Deep recessions in the United States in the past have resulted in high levels of intolerance of immigrants and other minority groups. “History suggests that the quality of our democracy — more fundamentally, the moral character of American society — would be at risk if we experienced a many-year downturn,” Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman predicted in “Meltdown, a Case Study,” in The Atlantic in 2005.
For the clergy in the van, Friedman’s 2005 predictions are today’s realities. The stresses of the last decade have thrown American racism and prejudice into stark relief. An atmosphere of suspicion and misunderstanding has taken root, poisoning the religious and cultural plurality that many Americans point to with great pride. The motto of the trip is “One Ark, One Humanity,” drawing from the premise that followers of the three Abrahamic faiths share the same ancestor, Noah. In other words, to ignore that bond is to ignore one’s own faith. By talking about each of the religious traditions and better understanding them, the clergy hope to break down barriers between the practitioners of each of the faiths. Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, a ride participant said, “I don’t actually think as a Jew, that I know everything there is to know about God and about religious truth. I love my tradition, I read the text of my tradition, but it’s been my experience with Christians and Muslims that what I’ve learned [from them] enriches me, makes me a better Jew and makes me see things in my own tradition that I didn’t see before.”
The destination today is Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, T.N., the ninth city on the tour. While much of the media and political attention last year was focused on whether to build Park 51, the proposed Muslim cultural center in downtown New York, Murfreesboro was struggling with its own divisive debates over the building of a new mosque. No sooner had the land been secured, some members of the community opposed it. Bringing the matter to court over zoning laws, the case attracted the attention of national conservative groups. Soon, it was no longer about the legality of building the mosque but rather a referendum on American Muslims and on Islam itself. The Los Angeles Times reported that conservative activists were brought into Murfreesboro to say in court that “American Muslims — including those in Murfreesboro — want to impose Shari’a, or Islamic law, on the United States, and that the proposed mosque, gymnasium and swimming pool were part of a ‘stealth jihad.’” Meanwhile, the county’s planning commission argued that Islam was not a religion and therefore not eligible to own land for religious purposes.
The Judge ultimately ruled in favor of the Muslim community but just before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the local Islamic Center received a bomb threat. Thus far, no contractor is willing to take on the project of building the mosque.
In the van, this recent history is well known. There was some anxiety as the group rolled closer to the destination. The event, co-sponsored by the MTSU Muslim Student Association, the Wesley Foundation and the Jewish Student Union, would be open to the public. One of the clergy remarked that earlier in the day while in Nashville, he was told that he would be going to ‘Ground Zero.’ His students at Duke University told him that they looked forward to seeing him if he got back, not when.
The program at MTSU was billed as an interfaith event but Islam and Muslims were firmly at the center of the discussion. Could this panel of clergy bring some words of reconciliation or encouragement to this town torn apart by anger and suspicion? Imam Hendi, with great verve and enthusiasm, tried to impress upon his audience the seriousness with which he takes the American ideals of religious plurality and freedom. “Many years ago,” he thundered to the crowd, “I wanted to live free and I knew only in America can I live free. Only in the pluralistic, diverse America, can I be myself and I want America to continue to be pluralistic, to continue to be diverse. That is why I will continue to live in the United State of America. Not because I want it to be a Muslim America. No! If America wants to become Muslim, let me know so that I can move elsewhere.”
Laughter and applause greeted his words, but skepticism lingered. In this traditionally Christian majority community, some wanted to know if by advocating for religious pluralism, these clergy were really advocating for an amalgamation of the three religions. Absolutely not, was the immediate reply. “I am an exclusivist,” expanded Reverend Steve Martin. “How do I square that then with interfaith dialogue? Calling myself a Christian or claiming a certain faith experience doesn’t mean that I have it all figured out. Although I believe the truth of the faith that I claim is definitive, there’s a lot that I can learn about that faith by interacting with, by loving and caring, and deeply deeply respecting brothers and sisters of other pathways and other faiths. ”
Other questioners spoke more to the political discourse of recent years, demonstrating the influence conservative talking points have had within the community. “Do you believe that Christians should be able to build as many churches as they wish and Jewish people should be allowed to live in Saudi Arabia and build as many synagogues as they wish?” asked one audience member suspiciously. “How do you plan to even begin on the oppression of your [Muslim] women?” asked another.
These provocative questions resulted only in calm answers. I’m so glad you asked that question, responded Imam Hendi. “I stand by you for a Christian to be able to openly and publically worship in churches in Saudi Arabia.” Imam Abdullah Antepli, his colleague on the panel, jumped in, adding that not allowing minorities to pray in Saudi Arabia has no grounding in Islamic practice and is in fact a violation of Islam.
Turning the onus back onto the questioner concerned about Muslim women’s rights, Imam Hendi added some provocation of his own. “I feel so angry when I see women oppressed in some Muslim countries. That happens not because of Islam, but rather despite Islam. Look at the history of the past 20 years in Muslim countries. Turkey had a female president, [as has] Bangladesh and Indonesia. Pakistan had a female prime minister. The American debate, unfortunately, is still if we can have a female president.”
For many others, the themes of unity and of opening oneself up to ones’ neighbors resonated deeply and without rancor. They made it clear that the debate over the mosque not only affected the Muslim community, but the whole community. It was their image and reputations on the line. Laura, a Murfreesboro resident, summed up many of her neighbors’ feelings during the question and answer session. The portrayal of her town in the media over the past year was not a fair representation of her and of the people of Murfreesboro, she said. “There are many of us who support the mosque,” she added. “A number of us have made some efforts in community organizing in order to come together.”
As people lingered in the lobby following the program, the mood was positive. The message the clergy had been trying to impart all evening seemed to have fallen on receptive ears. “I think it was one of the best debates we’ve had, and I’ve been to several of them,” said Jennifer Roberts, another Murfreesboro resident. “In the last year, [this] is all I want to talk about. I started a diversity group where I work and we’re trying to get people just to learn. You don’t have to become. You don’t have to switch. If you know, it’s not as scary.”
Having been awake since 5 AM and arriving back at their hotel in Nashville 18 hours later, it had been a long day for the group. Early the next morning, they would pack up the van again and leave for their next stop: Louisville, K.Y. The schedule was punishing, but they had a mission. “A lot of voices in the name of religion have been dividing us,” said Imam Antepli, who had gotten up at 3:30 AM to join the ride. “We are struggling to turn our differences into richness. It is the core mission of the clergy to make religion a strong force of peace and reconciliation.”
'We're a culture, not a costume': This campaign to counter racist Halloween fancy dress was created by a student group at the Ohio University called Students Teaching Against Racism
When did a suicide bomber become traditional garb for Muslims?
Halloween is a time for parties, dressing up and having fun with a bit of harmless – but scary – make-believe.
But a group of college students are taking a stand against some costumes which, they say, can cause hurt and humiliation to people from minority ethnic groups.
Students Teaching Against Racism in Society, an Ohio University student group, have created a poster campaign to highlight the racial stereotyping all too common in Halloween party dress.
The campaign, headlined ‘We’re a culture, not a costume’, shows images of people of different ethnic groups holding up images partygoers whose costumes they say lampoon their cultures.
Above each image, the posters read: ‘This is not who I am, and this is not okay.’
They have provoked an online row over whether the costumes are actually racist, or whether they are just in good fun.
One blogger who wrote about the posters two days ago had to disable comments on her website after she got 3,000 views and comments from ‘rude, racist people.’
On the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind blog, Melissa Sipin wrote of the campaign: ‘These posters act as a public service announcement for colored [sic] communities.
‘It’s about respect, human dignity, and the acceptance of other cultures (these posters simply ask people to think before they choose their Halloween costume).’
She added: ‘What these costumes have in common is that they make caricatures out of cultures, and that is simply not okay.’
‘This is not who I am, and this is not okay’: The posters highlight the crass racial and cultural stereotypes that emerge in Halloween fancy dress each year
One poster shows a young Arab-American man holding up an image of a Halloween reveller wearing Arabic dress and a suicide bombers vest.
Another shows a Native American man holding a picture of two women with paint on their faces and feathers in their hair holding a sign reading, ‘Me wantum piece [sic]… not war.’
A third poster shows an Asian American woman holding up a picture of a woman dressed as a Japanese geisha girl, with silk kimono and heavy white foundation.
Row: Online comments have urged the students behind the campaign to ‘get a sense of humour’
On the Huffington Post, where the story has also been reported, website comments were split over whether the costumes could be judged offensive.
Many could see nothing wrong with dressing according to racial stereotypes: A user going by the screen name Masterkcb1 wrote on the site: ‘People need to get a sense of humour, and quit taking everything so seriously.
‘If I can’t dress like a bandito then nobody can dress like a ghost because I don’t have a tan and I find it offensive.’
In a blog post cheering the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, neoconservative activist Rachel Decter Abrams descended into a twisted call for genocide, calling for Israel to throw released Palestinian prisoners whom she described as “child sacrificing savages” and “unmanned animals” — along with “their offspring” — “into the sea, to float there, food for sharks.”
Abrams is the half-sister of Commentary editor John Podhoretz, the wife of Iran-Contra felon and former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, and the daughter of Midge Decter and step daughter of neocon founding father Norman Podhoretz. She is also a board member of the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel, which recently produced baseless ads claiming the Occupy Wall Street movement is anti-Semitic.
The Washington Post’s neoconservative “Right Turn” blogger Jennifer Rubin is one of Abrams’ closest allies in the media. As soon as Abrams tweeted out a link to her exterminationist blog post, Rubin — whose Twitter account is “JRubinBlogger” — retweeted it to her followers, clearly approving of its content. Indeed, Rubin is not known for retweeting material she does not endorse. Hours later, Rubin deleted the tweet from her account, hoping that no one would notice it — and tacitly admitting she had crossed a bright red line.
Unfortunately for Rubin, I grabbed a screenshot of her tweet promoting Abrams’ call for mass murder. Here it is:
In July 2010, the veteran CNN correspondent Octavia Nasr was fired for writing on Twitter that she was “sad” to hear of the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a figure instrumental in the foundation of Hezbollah whom she said she “respect[ed] a lot.” Despite apologizing and explaining that she merely admired Fadlallah’s strong stance against honor killings and support for women’s rights, CNN heeded calls from pro-Israel groups for her termination.
An Ottawa-based diplomat from the Palestinian Authority, Linda Sobeh Ali, was reassigned by the Canadian government last week after she retweeted a link to a Youtube video that included a call for a war “against the soul of Zionism.” Pro-Israel groups in Canada were responsible for bringing the retweet to the government’s attention, and for pressuring it to act.
In the case of Nasr, CNN took full responsibility for what she wrote and promoted on her personal Twitter account. The news organization saw her tweet as a reflection on its reputation and credibility, and took action. The Washington Post has done nothing, however, about Rubin’s approving promotion of her friend’s call for genocide.
Does the Washington Post have a policy on the promotion of mass murder by its staffers? It is up to Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton to explain if Rubin’s act was permissible according to his paper’s ethical guidelines, and if so, why.
“You boys were so much fun on the 8th grade trip! Thanks for not bombing anything while we were there!” read the yearbook inscription penned by the middle school teacher.
The eighth grade yearbook was littered with similar remarks by classmates linking Omar to a “bomb.”
“To my bomb man!” read one note. “Come wire my bomb,” read another.
“What is this?” asked Omar’s mother incredulously. He had handed the yearbook over to her moments earlier when he arrived home that afternoon.
Omar answered quietly, “I know, Mom, I know.” He stared down at the kitchen floor. His eyes could not meet his mother’s but he began to tell her what had happened just one month earlier.
In May 2009, Omar joined his classmates on a school trip to Washington, D.C. As they toured the Washington Monument, visited area museums and passed by the White House, the kids repeatedly told Omar they hoped he wouldn’t “bomb” any of the sites. A teacher chaperoned the children, heard the comments and responded by doing… well, nothing, except leave a denigrating remark in Omar’s yearbook a month later.
It was clear to Omar’s mother that her American born and raised son was harassed because of his Muslim faith and Arab ancestry.
Unfortunately, this was not the first bias-based bullying incident involving Omar that school year. Only several months earlier a peer was intimidating Omar, calling him a “terrorist,” during an elective trade course. Omar finally told his mother about the bullying when his report card indicated that he was failing that same class, while acing the others where he was not subjected to such humiliating treatment.
Omar’s mother had addressed the bullying with the school Vice-Principal immediately afterwards.
But, when she spoke to her son’s school Principal regarding the D.C. trip and subsequent offensive yearbook comments (by a school teacher), the Principal was shocked to learn that Omar had been a prior victim of bullying earlier in the academic year. He had no knowledge of that incident in his school.
While the Principal assured her that he would take proper action against the offending teacher, nothing actually happened. The teacher denied hearing the bomb-related comments during the field trip to D.C. and excused her yearbook note as a “joke.”
Omar’s incensed mother took her case to the school Superintendent who in turn suggested scheduling a cultural sensitivity training about Arabs and Muslims for faculty.
That never came to pass, however.
In a written complaint Omar’s mother filed with a state government agency (with jurisdiction over such bias-based bullying incidents as the one involving her son) she observed:
“[O]ne day, there will be a child who is pushed beyond their limits, as we have seen in tragic events throughout the country, like Columbine and suicides of children being picked on for no other reason than being “different.”
What will we do then?
Must we wait for tragedy to create a safer and more open society for our community?”
By now Omar was a freshman in the public high school where the bullying continued, unabated.
In school, Omar was frequently referred to as “faggot.”
Omar never told his parents.
The verbal harassment culminated into physical “touching.”
A male student rubbed Omar’s shoulder while calling him “faggot.”
Still, Omar said and did nothing seeming paralyzed by his fear and shame.
Then, during a fire drill at school a group of boys yelled out to Omar, “Call off your tribe so we can go back into school!”
That was it.
Omar told his parents what was happening. He explained to his mother that he tried to keep the bullying a secret because he did not want to “hurt or upset” them.
Omar’s mother complained to the Principal, Superintendent and state agency… again.
This time, the high school held a cultural sensitivity training focusing on American Arabs and Muslims and geared towards faculty members, only.
Some mistakenly believe that bullying is a rite of passage which children must endure. It is worth noting the American Medical Association, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identify school bullying as a “public health problem.”
In fact, bullying has been recognized as a form of child abuse when perpetrated by other children. Studies have shown that victims of bullying may suffer school phobia, increased truancy and reduced concentration and classroom achievement. Bullying victims may also suffer sleep disturbances, bedwetting, abdominal pain, high levels of anxiety and depression, loneliness, low self-esteem and heightened fear for personal safety.
While anti-bullying legislation plays a critical role in protecting bullying victims, proper implementation and enforcement of those laws is key. Case in point: over 45 states have such legislation in effect (including Omar’s home state) yet bullying — and bias-based bullying — persists in epidemic proportions.
And, what happens when a disappointing report card or offensive inscriptions in a child’s yearbook does not tip off a parent that his or her child is a target of such bullying conduct? Many children refrain from sharing such details with family members sometimes out of a sense of shame and embarrassment but often because they are attempting to shield parents from being hurt or upset, as we saw in Omar’s case above.
Preventative measures geared at faculty, students and administrators are necessary to stop bullying from occurring in the first instance. Indeed, evidence suggests that bullying behavior can be significantly reduced through prevention curricula.
According to a new report published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) titled, “Global Battleground or School Playground: The Bullying of America’s Muslim Children,” bias-based bullying against American Muslim children (or those perceived to be Muslim) is on the rise and such school bullying is largely attributed to cultural and religious misunderstanding.
The report finds that a primary factor underlying the persistent harassment, ridicule and discrimination against American Muslim children is the American mainstream’s general misperception of Islam and Muslims.
The ISPU paper calls for intensive and pervasive efforts to educate American society about Islam and Muslims. It suggests that such cultural information should be provided to libraries, knowledge bases, teachers and school administrators.
Such facts and figures about Muslims and Islam — compiled with the assistance of diverse community groups and advocates — should also be featured in educational materials and resources, school curricula, popular Internet sites, television and films.
Not surprisingly the report identifies the media as a problem source for stereotyped images of Muslims as terrorists and the outside group in the “us” versus “them” dichotomy.
Perhaps it is time for “Hollywood” to consider positive associations for the Muslims it portrays on the big screen and in our family rooms. American Muslims are doctors, lawyers, engineers, make-up artists, photographers, engineers, information technology specialists, law enforcement agents, teachers, professors, bankers, community advocates, humanitarians, etc. — isn’t it time we portray them that way?
Children’s programming can also play a critical role in addressing this issue.
Note the influence of Sesame Street, for instance: a 1996 survey found that 95 percent of all American preschoolers had watched Sesame Street by the time they were three. More recently, in 2008, an estimated 77 million Americans had watched the program as kids.
In my view, Sesame Street should feature more American Muslim, Arab American and South Asian celebrities, children and characters in its regular programing.
The children’s show has made great strides in promoting diversity and multiculturalism and recently introduced its first South Asian character to the regular cast. To further promote increased diversity, it could throw a party with authentic Middle Eastern food and music for its American viewing audience, for example.
Musicians could play the tabla — an Arabic percussion instrument which produces a great beat — while guests enjoy pita chips and hummus. Mangos, a popular fruit in the Arab and Muslim world, could also make an appearance where celebrating children learn how to count all the mangos.
And, during ‘The Word on the Street’ segment, Murray could imaginably interview a young Sikh man with a turban or a young American Muslim girl or woman who wears a hijab or headscarf. This may help address the growing phenomenon of “hijabophobia.”
Further, The Daily Show‘s Asif Mandvi, who happens to be an Indian-American Muslim in addition to being funny, could make a cameo appearance to help define and explain a new word (e.g. the word jocular) to the young viewing audience. I am willing to offer my consulting services free of charge to help realize progress in this way.
The answer does not lie with Sesame Street alone, however. Countless other children’s programming could help as well and impact continued positive change. For instance, in addition to Dora, Diego and Ni Hao, Kai-lan, perhaps Nickelodeon could consider adding similar programming with Arab, Muslim and South Asian heroes and heroines.
You may be wondering about Omar and his family. His mother organized and conducted cultural competency training on American Muslims and Arab Americans for her son’s school district. It was well-received.
As for Omar — with the help of his family he has a great new attitude towards bullying which prompts him to stick up for other children targeted in the way he was.
Please note that names have been changed to protect the child’s identity according to his parent’s wishes.
It looks like the Islamophobes have been rejected once again. Queen bee Islamophobe Pamela Geller and her sidekick Robert Spencer have been given the boot by the Hutton Hotel in Nashville. I guess they didn’t want to open up their venue to the SIOA “nuke the Muslim” club and other fanatics who were gathering for a “Sharia Conference.”
Steve Eckley, senior vice president of hotels for Amerimar Enterprises said:
he wasn’t fully aware of the topic or the people involved when he booked the event in Nashville, and now he fears that resulting protests could turn violent. As well, the hotel’s other clients that day expressed concerns.
This marks the second time in two weeks that Geller and co. have been kicked out of a hotel. The first time was in Sugarland, Texas at the Hyatt, and though the Hyatt made some lame excuse as to why they kicked them out, it is pretty clear they didn’t want to get embroiled in the fiasco that goes along with being associated with hatemongers.
Geller is in hysterics and is urging her followers to deluge Hutton Hotel with angry calls and threats of boycott for being “dhimmis” and “sharia compliant.” At this rate, her and her followers will have to boycott all major hotels across the USA for refusing to serve her hate ideology and conspiracy theories.
Contact the Hutton Hotel and let them know that you appreciate the cancellation because right now they are most likely under siege by bigots and they may cave in if no one shows them support:
Hutton Hotel 1808 West End Ave Nashville, TN 37203
Here is the email of the current manager of the Hotel, Steven Andre sandre@huttonhotel.com
Here is Geller’s rant:
The Hutton Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee is now sharia-compliant.
Steve Eckley, Senior Vice-President of Hutton Hotel, has caved to Islamic supremacist demands and cancelled our entire Preserving Freedom Conference scheduled for November 11th in Nashville. Eckley notified us that they will not honor our contract. Steve said that if we showed up we would not be let in. He said he has been getting threatening letters and calls. We are currently awaiting the written notification of the cancellation.
Steve Eckley’s phone number is 720 318 4238. He said he would not let us in the hotel if we showed up. He was so ugly and hostile, it was shocking.
I was a scheduled keynote speaker, along with Robert Spencer, Wafa Sultan, Mark Durie, William Murray, Father Keith Roderick, and a host of voices for freedom.
This is the second time in no less than a week that a major hotel has capitulated to intimidation and demands to enforce the blasphemy laws under the sharia here in America. Opposing the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth is now forbidden in the war of ideas.
Just last week the Hyatt Place in Sugarland canceled a tea party event where I was scheduled to speak. They have since apologized, but that is hardly enough. Free speech, the cornerstone of our constitutional republic, is in serious jeopardy. Under the Shariah, criticism of Islam is blasphemy (punishable by death in Muslim countries living under the Shariah). This is the death of free speech in the continuing Islamization of America. This is yet another shattering demonstration of why I wrote my book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.
The silencing of free speech is key to the islamization of America.
Americans must boycott these cowardly enterprises and raise their voices in protest.
Hutton Hotel 1808 West End Ave Nashville, TN 37203
Here is the email of the current manager of the Hotel, Steven Andre sandre@huttonhotel.com (hat tip Rob)
Nashville is a gateway city for refugee resettlement — whole Muslim communities are resettled in “gateway” cities like Lewiston, Maine; Shelbyville, Tennessee; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Clarkston, Georgia; and Jamestown, North Dakota. Nashville has one of the country’s highest Muslim populations.
I strongly urge all Atlas readers contact the Hutton Hotel and voice your concern with the abridgment of our cherished and hard-fought freedoms. This continuing restriction of free speech is a key front in the war on the truth. Your future, your children’s future and that of our country is at stake. I cannot impress this upon you enough.
Get this out to your lists, your friends, and all the freedom lovers that you know.
The battle to stop a mosque being built in a Gold Coast hinterland estate is turning nasty, with a pig’s head posted on a fence and signs publicising the Islamic project vandalised. The Sunday Mail believes police were called after a pig’s head splattered with red paint was hung on a fence at the site.
The incident has sparked fears of a protracted hate campaign against the Muslim community. The words “terrorists” and “Go back to Afghanistan” were scribbled across planning signs outside the property in Alkira Way at Worongary. A resident, who asked not to be named, told the Sunday Mail: “This place will become a war zone. There are old people living here who are scared.”
Police at Mudgeeraba were called to remove the pig’s head and have spoken to residents about the unrest in their quiet rural suburb. “We’re aware of an incident at that address. We are continuing to investigate,” a police spokesman said.
If this were Muslims you could be sure that there would be a boycott of this bus line, as well as cries about Creeping Sharia’ and the threat of Islamization.
On the morning of October 12, Melissa Franchy boarded the B110 bus in Brooklyn and sat down near the front. For a few minutes she was left in silence, although the other passengers gave her a noticeably wide berth. But as the bus began to fill up, the men told her that she had to get up. Move to the back, they insisted.
They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.
“If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’” he told Franchy, who rode the bus at the invitation of a New York World reporter. She then moved to the back where the other women were sitting. The driver did not intervene in the incident.
The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.
The arrangement that the B110 operates under can only be described as unorthodox. It operates as a franchise, in which a private company, Private Transportation Corporation, pays the city for the right to provide a public service. Passengers pay their $2.50 fare not by MetroCard, but in dollar bills and coins. The city’s Franchise and Concession Review Committee defines a franchise on its website as “the right to occupy or to use the City’s inalienable property, such as streets or parks, for a public service, e.g., transportation.”
The agreement goes back to at least 1973, and last year the franchise paid the city $22,814 to operate the route, according to the New York City Department of Transportation. According to the news site Vos Iz Neias?, which serves the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City and elsewhere, the bus company has a board of consulting rabbis, which decreed that male passengers should ride in the front of the bus and female passengers in the back.
City, state and federal law all proscribe discrimination based on gender in public accommodations. “Discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations in New York City is against the law,” said Betsy Herzog, a spokeswoman for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which investigates and prosecutes alleged violations of anti-discrimination law.
The Department of Transportation, which issues the franchise, confirms that it understands the B110 to be subject to anti-discrimination laws. “This is a private company, but it is a public service,” said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the DOT. “The company has to comply with all applicable laws.”
Following the New York World’s inquiry, Solomonow said DOT would contact Private Transportation Corporation. “We are reaching out to the company about this alleged incident to ask for its response, with the expectation that it will take steps to prevent the occurrence of incidents of this nature,” he said.
Melissa Franchy/Special to the New York World
Herzog said the Human Rights Commission would not investigate the B110 unless someone filed a complaint. But its website states that “anyone who provides goods and services to the general public is considered a public accommodation” and that it illegal for public accommodations to “set different terms for obtaining those goods or services” to different groups.
Ross Sandler, a professor at New York Law School and editor of the CityLaw newsletter, said that anti-discrimination laws apply to bus franchises, but that religious groups are sometimes granted exceptions. “Do all these laws apply? Yes, they apply to buses that are franchises,” Sandler said. “The question is whether there is an exception for this particular bus line.”
The Transportation Department said that the B110 had not been granted any exceptions to anti-discrimination laws.
Calls to the offices of Private Transportation Corporation also went unreturned. We tried calling the home of Jacob Marmurstein, the company’s president, but were told he was unavailable.
The New York World will be keeping a close eye on the practices aboard the B110 bus and the city’s response – and we will let you know when we hear more.
Islamophobic blogs like Gates of Vienna, popular with white supremacists have Israeli American fans who have adopted a hard line pro Israel agenda. It also appears that ‘Fjordman‘ is back at Gates of Vienna. He was cited recently as a tipster alongside Caroline Glick, the senior editor at The Jerusalem Post.
A closer scrutiny of Gates of Vienna the white supremacist blog which published ‘Fjordman‘ until he went into hiding after the Norway massacre shows it is run by a couple living in Virginia, USA, one Baron Bodissey whose real name is Edward May popularly known as ‘Ned May‘ and his wife who edits the blog under the pseudonym ‘Dymphna.’ It claims to focus on the ‘Great Jihad’ in Europe, regularly publishing essays promoting white supremacism, calls for a Muslim Holocaust and is filled with vile anti Islam bigotry, lies and polemics dressed up as ‘counter jihadism’. Anders Brievik has posted comments there. In the past too, discussions of exterminating the ‘Muslim’ problem caused waves as in ‘Thinking the Unthinkable‘ in which options to rid the world of Muslims were discussed.
Gates of Vienna has a pro Israel focus which Ned and Dymphna go to great pains to emphasise. A cynic may suspect there are ulterior motives at play here. The connection between Zionism and organized Islamophobia is clear and comes as no surprise now. Fear Inc. a six month study by the Centre for American Progress, details how an Islamophobia industry is being funded and peddled by a small minority of conservatives. What is popularly known as ‘Islamism’ has its Zionist counterpart, as explored in a recent LoonWatch series ‘Why Religious Zionism, Not Judaism, Is The Problem‘.
Indeed Dymphna regularly does the rounds at right wing Zionist websites posting comments moaning about their poverty. One such blog is the rabidly anti Palestinian and Islam hating blog ‘Sultan Knish‘ run by Daniel Greenfield an Israeli sabra living in New York, who is a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Centre the same organisation that sponsors Jihad Watch. Daniel is obsessed with a pathological hatred for Muslims and a delusion that the US military exists to carry out his fantasy of a war on Islam. Daniel’s postings regularly dehumanise Muslims, and are filled with anti Islam screeds which he fabricates on whim, not unlike Ned May. He also has a Torah Parsha blog and this video shows him in a debate about New Media. In a common theme amongst neo cons, Daniel complains there is a plot to destroy the US military by Obama. In one blog post ‘Winning the War on Terror‘ he suggests genocide:
‘We would have to be willing to kill millions, directly or indirectly, while maintaining an alliance that would defy Russia, China and the First World nations that would accuse us of genocide. The real name for this war might well turn out to be World War III. It would take a Churchill or a Roosevelt to launch something like that, and while the world would be radically different afterward, it might well turn out to be radioactively different too.’
Whilst Daniel’s crowd propagate that Muslims are out to destroy the USA, the truth is these very neo conservatives bankrupted the US economy by leading it into trillion dollar wars on fake premises and fabricated evidence. As Julian Borger reported in The Guardian, the evidence for the Iraq war was fabricated by the now defunct ‘The Office of Special Plans‘ affiliated with hard line Likudniks.
When the worlds media was questioning the role Robert Spencer and his crowd played in influencing the massacre, Daniel Greenfield, rushed to defend his buddies with ‘Brievexploitation‘ a pathetic attempt to divert blame. A cursory glance at the comments underneath this post, dated 8/06/2011 shows Dymphna reminding Daniel how her ilk suffer for being philo-semitic:
‘The fledgling right wing of European politics, the only part of it that was NOT anti-Semitic, has been ripped from the body politic in Europe and thrown on the ash heap.’
After reminding him and his readers of the huge sacrifices made, she goes on to subtly beg:
‘Perhaps you could suggest to Mr. Horowitz that as part of discovering ABB’s networks, he could have that analysis done? Certainly if I had the money I’d get it asap.’
Far right Islamophobic activists have forged alliances of convenience with radical Zionists and regard Israel as an ally, not least because they see Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as a role model for how Muslims should be treated. Hard line Zionists see it as an opportunity to lessen the growing Muslim presence and influence in the USA and Europe which they see as detrimental to a greater Israel. Stooges like Geert Wilders are funded in the hope they can halt Muslim immigration and influence. Marginalised as they are, some European nationalist groups are willing to shed their traditional Jew hatred in an attempt to find allies, but as often happens in marriages of convenience, it doesn’t take much for cracks to appear. Pamela Geller’s association with the EDL caused waves when Roberta Moore claimed they had Jew hating members and were not sufficiently pro Israel. In Europe, German newspaper Der Spiegel probed this alliance in ‘The Likud Connection‘ showing how some marginalized right wing populists are going the Geert Wilders way. This bizarre coupling has split the far right movement in Europe which has traditionally been anti-semitic.
Meanwhile, Ned May, an EDL activist, serves as director of International Free Press Society an American and Denmark based group whose members claim to fight threats to free speech from ‘forces within Islam’. IFPS’s board members include the familiar names Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and affiliates like Aish Ha Torah. Incidentally, one of the listed advisers for IFPS is Rachel Ehrenfeld an “expert on terrorism” and author of ‘Funding Evil’ in which she made allegations of terror funding against the now deceased Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz for which he sued.
Ned often mixes in a pro Israel and pro Jewish stance liberally peppering his polemics with quotes from the Talmud and expresses a desire (like Dymphna) to be in the pay of Mossad. In this he has help from fellow bloggers like his friend, a Jerusalem based Israeli American lawyer, one Carl Mordechai Sherer, who runs Israel Matzav as ‘Carl in Jerusalem‘. Charles Johnson banned Carl from Little Green Footballs where he was a heavy commenter for posting a link to Gates of Vienna with a curt ‘I will have nothing to do with people who promote fascist creeps‘. Stung by LGF’s criticism, a blog war followed, in which Ned May tries to salvage some dignity for his cesspool.
A particularly revealing blog post is where Carl can be seen giving Ned advice on the legality of declaring Jewish rights to Israel as an indigenous people, stating he fully supported a ‘greater Israel’ though the world won’t allow it. Ned in turn laments a common nazi theme which he modifies to this convoluted logic:
‘Regardless of the merits of the case, I agree with Carl that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will never be applied to Jews — or to white Europeans, for that matter.
“Indigenous Peoples” are “brown” peoples, especially Muslims, American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and black Africans. Anything using the term that is passed by the UN will only be allowed to apply to those peoples, and never to Jews or Caucasians.’
Ned May must be unaware of the millions of Caucasian Muslims including Russians, American Muslims, British and other European converts. Carl, who did not see fit to tell his friend that most Israeli’s are non Caucasian Sefardi Jews was however, quick to hypocritically cry ‘nazi’ at white supremacist Occupy Wall St protesters.
‘For those who have never been to Gates of Vienna, go check it out. It’s some of the highest level intellectual material you will ever read on the Internet.’
How high is that ‘intellectual level’ ? Let us quote Ned verbatim where he explains the purpose of Gates of Vienna is to spread lies at a grassroots level, in short; telling a lie often enough makes one believe it. Not just to lie but to oversell it. In a blog titled ‘Overselling the Meme‘ he states:
‘This must be accomplished at a level well below that of the celebrities and famous pundits, because action on that battlefield invites a massive and well-funded counterattack by CAIR, ISNA, the OIC, etc.’
Using hyperbole and flowery nonsense, he spells out his mission in life:
‘As a propagandist, my task is to spread the meme and not to sweat the nuances. Nuances can be argued about and nailed down by scholars in the centuries after Islam — as a culture, a political ideology, and a religion — is totally destroyed. We don’t have the luxury for such finicky scholasticism right now.’
Perhaps the best known Israeli tipster for Gates of Vienna is The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick an Israeli American known for her right wing views, and who serves as editor for the Israeli political satire website Latma TV. Caroline was cited approvingly in Breivik’s manifesto. It appears that Fjordman is once more back at Gates of Vienna, for on 13th October 2011, the credits included :
‘Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, heroyalwhyness, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.’
‘But this is lower than I’ve ever seen someone go who carries a management title at a journalism organization. I’m ashamed to say that Glick and I are both Columbia alums. Even if she hates people of another race or religion and is allowed by her editors to poke fun at them in a tasteless and blatantly racist way, she should be fired for making fun of the dead.’
This incident was not the first time Caroline Glick had received flak for her radical opinions. In the aftermath of the Norway massacre, the Jerusalem Post published editorials that had tried to link the tragedy to Europe’s immigration policies. Norwegians took offence at sentiments expressed by Glick amongst others and voiced their objections to Israeli diplomats as to how the tragedy was being exploited. Some weeks later, the Jerusalem Post’s Editor in Chief published ‘Apology to Norway‘ an editorial in which he expressed remorse:
‘As Senior Contributing Editor Caroline B. Glick suggested in her column last Friday, the fact that Breivik’s warped mind cited a group of conservative thinkers including herself as having influenced his thinking in no way reflects on them.
“As a rule, liberal democracies reject the resort to violence as a means of winning an argument. This is why, for liberal democracies, terrorism in all forms is absolutely unacceptable,” she wrote. “Whether or not one agrees with the ideological self-justifications of a terrorist, as a member of a liberal democratic society, one is expected to abhor his act of terrorism. Because by resorting to violence to achieve his aims, the terrorist is acting in a manner that fundamentally undermines the liberal democratic order.”
It later emerged that Breivik, a Christian radical, had posted on the Internet an extremely anti-Muslim manifesto that supported far-right nationalism and Zionism.’
He then moves on to vocalise the Jerusalem Post’s stance:
‘This is certainly not the kind of support Israel needs. It is the type of Islamophobia that is all too reminiscent of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Jews. Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and around the world should be standing together against such hate crimes.’
Caroline has also given explicit permission for Gates of Vienna to publish a Norwegian version of Norway’s Problem which Ned did after writing:
‘Under normal circumstances, Gates of Vienna does not publish in any languages other than English (in its American, British, Canadian, and Australian variants). However, we are making an exception for the following opinion piece by Caroline Glick.’
Setting the tone for this unique honour, Ned continues:
‘The result was the column below. Several Scandinavians requested that we publish a Norwegian translation, and with Ms. Glick’s permission it was kindly translated by Cecilie.’
Indeed! We have here one of Israel’s most ‘most important’ women and the Senior Contributing Editor of the Jerusalem Post giving permission to publish a translated version of her article at a hate site (that credits and links back to her) espousing views deemed repugnant by her editor-in-chief. One can recall the hue and cry when Octavia Nasr tweeted about a Hezbollah sheikh’s death that led to CNN firing her!
Gates of Vienna may be bottom feeders in the world of Islamophobia, but clearly their unsettling involvement with prominent hatemongers is more than just a cause for concern.
Violent ethnic riots swept Bulgaria weeks before this Sunday’s presidential elections, following the killing of a teenager by a man with links to a local Roma crime boss. Originally aimed at highlighting the alleged corruption of “Tsar” Kiril Rashkov, these demonstrations soon spread across the country, before ugly scenes developed. Rioters turned on ethnic minorities and Muslims and attacked mosques in both Sofia, the capital, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city.
A few months earlier, politicians and the public had gathered to show their support for a unified Bulgaria following violent demonstrations outside Sofia’s historic Banya Bashi mosque. But what began as a “peaceful protest” against the volume of loudspeakers that broadcast the call to prayer, ended with supporters of Ataka, the ultra-nationalist party, setting fire to prayer mats and pelting worshippers with stones.
Some observers equated this attack with the creep of Islamophobia being seen in parts of western Europe. Yet it came as a shock to many in a country that prides itself on its history of religious tolerance.
“[That] was something nobody expected,” said Mustafa Alish Hadji, the grand mufti and leader of Muslims in Bulgaria, following the protests. “It is worrying for Muslims and Christians because it [creates] tension that didn’t exist before.”
Ethnic distinctions have become a favoured topic to exploit in the country’s post-communist political landscape, particularly since Ataka won 9.36 per cent of the vote in the 2009 parliamentary elections, establishing an informal coalition with the governing centre-right party.
But, while Ataka’s hardline rhetoric has served it well, the mosque protests did not get the expected results – ethnic sectarianism is accepted in Bulgaria, religious sectarianism is not. The public laid flowers at the mosque and opposition politicians denounced the attacks as a publicity stunt in the preamble to this Sunday’s municipal and presidential elections, in which Volen Siderov, the Ataka leader, is running for president using the campaign slogan, “I am your weapon, use it”.
Ataka was condemned in a declaration by Parliament to be “dangerous to the government” with an attitude “completely foreign to the Bulgarian people and their religious and ethnic tolerance”.
Irrespective of ethnicity, Bulgarian Muslims face prosecution because they are considered “Turkish” and associated with the rule of the Ottoman empire.
While myths of the terrible Turk are ubiquitous in Bulgarian culture – painted on churches and reenacted in village celebrations – so, too, is a strong sense of religious acceptance.
“This hatred is new to us,” said Hadji. “It’s the first time we have seen such nationalism and seen such hatred towards others. Most Muslims are rural. The problem is not in rural areas, it is in towns and in cities. Nationalism has more power [there] than in the villages,” he said. “In the city, people don’t know each other so well. In the village, Muslims and Christians live and pray together. Nationalism has no way to separate them.”
Nowhere is this religious tolerance better exemplified than in the villages of the Rhodope mountains, where minarets rise above thick clusters of pine trees and Muslims and Christians live side by side.
On the same day that blood stained the steps of the Banya Banshi mosque in Sofia, a three-day wedding was underway in the village of Musfata Alish Hadji. The celebration shared by Christians and Muslims exemplifies Bulgaria’s comfortable blend of Slavic and Eastern traditions. Women with red sequins glued bindi-style to the centre of their brow began the festivities by ring dancing to a pop song. Their performance was followed by belly dancing and exclamations in Greek and Arabic. Around tables spread with banitsa pastry and halva sweets, wedding guests spoke of their shock at the Sofia attacks.
Ramadan, a lorry driver in his thirties who had previously worked in Spain, said Bulgaria was among the most tolerant places in Europe for Muslims.
“The racism in Spain is horrible,” he said. “In the south, they treat us Muslims like s***, they swear at us. This doesn’t happen here. We are respected.”
When NATO backed rebels entered Tripoli in late August, it spelled the end of the Gadaffi regime. His reported death today marks the symbolic end of the Gadaffi era. There is no shadow of a doubt that Gadaffi was a dictator, that much is clear from numerous human rights and amnesty reports.
Now marks a new beginning for Libya.
Unlike the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan uprising was tainted by Nato’s involvement; it was not a victory purely by the people, of the people and for the people. It is hoped that the forces of self-determination and true democracy will prevail over those trends that are either open to, or already have been co-opted by foreign interests.
Needless to say, the Islamophobes are already instigating the doomsday scenario. Robert Spencer says in a blog post titled, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Gaddafi has been captured”:
It is likely that the new America-backed regime will compete with the Gaddafi regime in its hatred for America and the West, and become noted for being even more anti-American than he was.
It goes without saying that one should take Spencer’s words with a heavy grain of salt, after all such pessimism on his part is born not out of a true analysis of Libya as it is today but out of a deep seated hatred for Islam and Muslims. For Spencer Muslims can only ever live under dictatorship and oppression.
Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the body of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi following his death in Sirte.
Al Jazeera has acquired exclusive footage of the body of Muammar Gaddafi after he was killed in his hometown, Sirte.
Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of Libya’s National Transitional Council, confirmed that the ousted leader had been killed on October 20, 2011 near Sirte.
“We announce to the world that Muammar Gaddafi has been killed at the hands of the revolutionaries,” Ghoga told a news conference in Benghazi.
The news came shortly after the NTC captured Sirte after weeks of fighting.
Rachel Abrams is a founding board member of a pro-Israeli PAC called the Emergency Committee for Israel. She recently posted this genocidal Arab-bashing Muslim-hating rant on her blog (h/t Glenn Greenwald):
Then round up [Gilad Shalit's] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.
As Greenwald so presciently notes, Rachel Abrams is not “some fringe Arab-hating figure but from the heart and soul of the American neocon movement.”
Abram’s world view, one which depicts the Judeo-Christian America and Israel as the harbingers of freedom, liberty, and democracy–and the Violent Dark-Skinned Ay-rab jihad-loving Moozlum Terrorist world as the incarnation of all that is Evil–cannot exist in a vacuum. The only reason so many people hold such views is because of how carefully and closely the mainstream media and the national discourse is controlled.
This is the reason that my controversial series–about the inequities of “the Judeo-Christian tradition”–is so important. There is no other way to truly kill this paradigm except to expose how truly hypocritical such a view is.
In a recent article for National Review Online, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer criticized the Center for American Progress’s report “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Following a familiar formula, the authors play the victim, accusing CAP of peddling “conspiracy theories” about anti-Muslim activists like themselves.
Even a cursory glance at our report, however, shows we have done no such thing. Quite the contrary, the dissemination of hateful anti-Muslim ideas by Horowitz, Spencer, and others is done right out in the open. CAP’s contribution was to document these efforts, to draw together the various strands in order to properly view them as part of a coherent whole — an organized campaign to spread misinformation about the religious faith of millions of Americans.
The authors first take issue with our use of the term “Islamophobia,” claiming “the purpose of the suffix — phobia — is to identify any concern about troubling Islamic institutions and actions as irrational, or worse as a dangerous bigotry that should itself be feared.” This is false. As my co-authors and I note in our report, we don’t use the term “Islamophobia” lightly. We define it as an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.
We think that any fair-minded reader of Horowitz and Spencer’s work, which our report extensively documents, would conclude that it qualifies.
Engaging in exactly the sort of careless slander that our report examines, the authors then deride similar reports from what they refer to as “[Muslim] Brotherhood fronts like CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations], and jihadist apologists like the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Interestingly, they spare the Anti-Defamation League, which released a backgrounder earlier this year declaring that Spencer’s group, Stop Islamization of America, “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam.”
Spencer’s group, the Anti-Defamation League wrote, “seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American’ values.” Should the Anti-Defamation League also be lumped with the “jihadist apologists”?
Rather than addressing such charges, however, the authors spend the majority of their response listing reasons why Islamic extremist terrorism represents a genuine threat to American security. But they are rebutting an argument we have not made. As evidenced by the considerable amount of work CAP has produced on the subject, we take the issue of national security extremely seriously — far more seriously than Horowitz and Spencer’s selective, inflammatory, and unscholarly rendering of the Islamic peril suggests that they themselves do.
It is enormously revealing that Horowitz and Spencer do not address the actual argument made in “Fear, Inc.,” which is that they, along with a small cadre of self-appointed experts and activists, promote the idea that religiously inspired terrorism represents true Islam. (“Traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful,” wrote Spencer in 2006. “It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”) They also promote the idea that Sharia law is incompatible with a modern society (“There is no form of Sharia that does not contain . . . [the] death penalty for apostasy,” wrote Spencer, obviously ignorant of the manner in which Islam is practiced by millions of Sharia-adherent Muslims in the United States).
The unmistakable implication of these claims is that all observant Muslims should be viewed with suspicion simply by virtue of being observant Muslims. That’s obviously Islamophobic. (It also flies in the face of the evidence. Earlier this year, the largest study of Muslim Americans ever done, the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey, found that “involvement with the mosque, and increased religiosity increases civic engagement and support for American democratic values.”)
It is worth noting here the irony of Horowitz and Spencer’s accusing CAP of promulgating a conspiracy theory, because, as the Anti-Defamation League’s backgrounder also notes, a conspiracy is precisely what those authors themselves allege in regard to American Muslims’ supposed efforts to infiltrate the American legal system with Islamic Sharia law. (For an examination and rebuttal of those claims, see CAP’s previous issue brief, “Understanding Sharia Law.”)
And finally, a word about the venue in which Horowitz and Spencer’s piece was published, National Review. While we don’t share many of this magazine’s positions, we recognize it as an institution of American conservatism and a key player in the American political debate. Its imprimatur matters, which is why we’re concerned that that imprimatur should be granted to characters like Horowitz and Spencer.
Back in the 1950’s, the stridently anti-Communist John Birch Society made very similar claims about the threat of Communism that Islamophobes now make about the threat of Islam. At one point, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, wrote that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
National Review’s founder and editor, William F. Buckley Jr., responded to Welch’s allegation with condemnation. “How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points . . . so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked. “That dilemma weighs on conservatives across America.” Buckley’s condemnation helped marginalize the John Birch Society from the mainstream conservative movement for decades.
In Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine on Feb. 3, 2011, Spencer wrote, “[Muslim] Brotherhood operatives are in the American government and working closely with it, thanks to Barack Obama.” On Sept. 12, 2011, Spencer criticized President Obama’s choice of a Bibleverse read at the 9/11 commemorations as evidence of the president’s “remarkable, unqualified and obvious affinity for Islam.” The list of similar allegations from Spencer is not short.
This new dilemma should weigh on conservatives across America. David Horowitz, Robert Spencer, and the rest of the Islamophobes we name in our report are the modern version of the John Birch Society. Judging Robert Welch’s allegations of President Eisenhower’s supposed Communist sympathies to be beyond the pale, William F. Buckley denounced them in the pages of National Review. It’s unfortunate that, rather than do the same in response to Welch’s heirs, today’s National Review gives them a platform.
— Matt Duss is a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress and the director of the Center’s Middle East Progress project. He is a co-author of “Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.”
THE 99 is an animated series featuring superheroes inspired by Islamic culture and society. The series was scheduled to launch in the US last week on the The Hub children’s television network, but producers have since announced the broadcast will be postponed indefinitely. Vicious anti-Muslim bigots everywhere are gleeful, boasting that their small but boisterous outcry may have prompted the delay.
The New York Post published a scathing article by outrage peddler Andrea Peyser criticizing the series and calling on anti-Muslim bigots to protest loudly so they can “cancel THE 99 before it starts.” Peyser says the series will indoctrinate impressionable young children with Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes “masquerading as the good guys.”
For Peyser the Hateful, Muslims are always super villains, so characters who represent the 99 virtues of God in the Qur’an will naturally use their powers to wage the ultimate jihad. She conjures up fearsome images of Jabbar the Powerful dishing out a mean stoning, and Darr the Afflicter venting his rage on hapless dhimmis.
The looniest blogger ever, Pamela Geller, told CNN that THE 99 is unacceptable because Islam must be portrayed as misogynistic, violent, and oppressive to non-Muslims, and that there must be an emphasis placed on Islam’s bloody, violent history. She said anything else is just “dawah proselytizing.”
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, the Kuwaiti-born, U.S.-educated psychologist who created THE 99, said he never expected to face his fiercest opposition to the series in the US, a country that prides itself on diversity and tolerance. The whole point of THE 99 was to bridge the gap between Islam and the West by promoting universal values and encouraging tolerance, cooperation, and mutual understanding. Al-Mutawa said he wants to provide positive role models to all children:
“I told the writers of the animation that only when Jewish kids think that THE 99 characters are Jewish, and Christian kids think they’re Christian, and Muslim kids think they are Muslim, and Hindu kids think they’re Hindu, that I will consider my vision as having been fully executed.”
Geller is not appeased, and continues to describe the series as an onslaught of cultural jihad aimed at radicalizing American children. She says the true superheroes are “counter-jihadists” like Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, all of whom are in fact rabid anti-Muslim loons. She has also launched a crude online parody called THE 19, which features Spencerman and Gellerwoman as superheroes presumably fighting Muslim evildoers.
Last month, Geller and her fellow hate mongers must have been thrilled with the release of a comic series that suits their agenda perfectly. Frank Miller is a legend in the comic world for writing and drawing film noir-style comic book stories, includingBatman: The Dark Night Returns. Influential in Hollywood, he directed the film version of The Spirit and co-directed Sin City. Miller also produced the 2006 American fantasy action film 300, which some critics described as psychological warfare against Iran.
Miller released a post-9/11 propaganda comic series to correspond with the ten year anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York City, and said he hoped it would ”really piss people off.” He was braced for a fatwa and seemed to look forward to a backlash that never came. Despite the underwhelming response from Muslims, Wired Magazine said:
“Holy Terror is a screed against Islam, completely uninterested in any nuance or empathy.” Miller has produced, “one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time. “
Outrage over the 9/11 attacks inspired Miller’s dark comic series steeped in insatiable rage and vengeance, but the same events also inspired Al-Mutawa, who said he wanted to take Islam back from the extremists who had hijacked it. He conceived of the idea for his series during a London cab ride with his sister in 2003.
Al-Mutawa envisioned THE 99 as a world-class comic book on a par with American classics, so he assembled a team of veteran writers and artists with experience creating comic icons like Spider-man, Power Rangers, and X-Men. In 2006, he launched his new series to audiences in the Middle East.
THE 99 quickly became the most popular comic book in the region, selling over a million copies per year, and prompting Forbes Magazine to declare the series as one of the 20 trends sweeping the globe. An English language version launched in the US in 2007 without opposition. Industry giant DC Comics gave the series a promotional boost in 2010 by producing a six-part limited edition crossover that paired THE 99 with classic American superheroes including Batman, Superman, and the Justice League of America.
In 2009, Al-Mutawa decided to turn his successful comic book into an animated series. His company, Teshkeel Media Group, partnered with a Dutch company to co-produce and distribute the new series. The cartoon version of THE 99 has also been a smashing success, and it is expected to reach viewers in over 50 countries by the end of next year.
THE 99 was initially banned in Saudi Arabia when critics expressed concern that Al-Mutawa was violating Islamic Law with characters that personified God. Al-Mutawa eventually won approval for the series after he convinced religious authorities that the characters are not manifestations of God, but merely extol the 99 virtues mentioned in the Qur’an.
Saudi Arabia has since signed on for merchandise deals and even plans to build its own Disney-style theme park based on the series. The 99 Village opened in 2009 in Kuwait, and several more theme parks are planned throughout the region. Today no Arab country bans THE 99, which is also broadcast in a growing number of Muslim countries outside the Arab world, including Turkey and Indonesia.
Not everyone is happy about the widespread acceptance THE 99 has received in the Muslim world. Phyllis Chesler, another rabid anti-Muslim bigot and friend of Pamela Geller, has criticized Muslims for what she describes as “disturbing double standards.” She says they are turning a blind eye to Al-Mutawa while he creates 99 images of God, but they terrorize Westerners with fatwas and violence for lesser offenses.
She said Muslims (apparently all of them) have also terrorized American cartoonist Molly Norris for her Everybody Draw Muhammad Day hate fest, and Dutch cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for his infamous drawing of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-studded turban.
It is difficult to see the connection between these provocative events and the introduction of THE 99, but Chesler seems to think they should all inspire a backlash of equal proportions if the Muslims are to apply consistent standards. This is tortured logic, but in any case, shouldn’t it be a good thing that THE 99 didn’t cause a violent backlash?
Chesler and her loony friends certainly didn’t write any articles praising Muslims for their subdued reaction to Frank Miller’s provocative, hateful comic series. For them, Muslims always deserve only criticism, no matter what they do.
Batina the Hidden
Chesler also expressed concern over what sinister “Muslim values” the series might foist on non-Muslim children. She asks, “Will children learn about democracy, modernity, tolerance, Enlightenment, women’s and gay rights from these ‘Islamic’ figures?”
Spider-man doesn’t typically lecture children on democracy, modernity, and Enlightenment. Those seem like heavy topics for a cartoon series written for children.
As for gay rights, how many gay and lesbian characters can you name from the Justice League or any other mainstream comic series? If Chesler is really an advocate for gay rights, she needs to expand her focus to the entire industry.
THE 99 does promote gender equality, which Al-Mutawa has elaborated on during numerous interviews. Islamphobes like Chesler and Geller will simply not let facts stand in the way of their propaganda efforts, and continue to spread the lie that the female characters in the series are oppressed and forced to wear Islamic clothing.
“Because [THE 99] is mainstreaming the institutionalized oppression of women under Sharia, as exemplified by the burqa-wearing superhero. One would think that the male superheroes would have superpowers strong enough to be able to control themselves without the women having to don cloth coffins.”
Batina the Hidden seems to be the loons’ favorite obsession. The character is from Yemen, and her clothing accurately reflects what some women wear in that country. Al-Mutawa said the burqa is not Islamic, but it is a cultural tradition that is important to some people, adding:
“I believe that forcing someone to wear the burqa is despicable. But I believe that if somebody wants to choose to do it, that’s their right…And so, out of respect for people who choose to wear the burka, I have one character out of 99—one percent—that wears a burqa. “
Although nearly every one of their articles tries to generate hysteria about Batina, the Hidden, Islamophobes have yet to explain how merely seeing a cartoon character wearing a burqa will traumatize American children. Marvel already has two characters who are Muslim women. The character Dust is from Afghanistan, and she wears a black ensemble that covers her from head-to-toe, showing only her eyes.
Dust has been around since 2002, though it seems few of our hyper-vigilant hate bloggers have detected her “stealth jihad.” Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Aonso said,
“I don’t view a Muslim superhero as avant garde. Muslims comprise 23 percent of the world’s population, and we like our comics to reflect the world and its diversity.”
Despite all the controversy, Dr. Al-Mutawa remains optimistic. He has faced many hurdles in the last eight years, and his frustrations have been chronicled in the PBS documentary Wham! Bam! Islam! ”One way or the other,” he says, “‘The 99′ will get on air in the U.S.”
The Sugar Land Tea Party is going to have to move its hate fest from the Hyatt Place Houston to a community center. It looks like the word spread about how loony and bigoted Pamela Geller is and the Hyatt administration took notice.
Kate Shellnutt, the author of the article below alerted us to this fact with her tweet:
a visit by one of the biggest names in islamophobia has caused drama for the tea party in sugar land http://t.co/CZLjGdM4
Shellnutt’s article gives Pamela Geller too much credit by calling Geller a critic of “radical Islam.” Geller is not a critic of “radical Islam.” She is a far right-wing nut job who hates Islam and Muslims, thinks the USA is under imminent threat of Islamic takeover, thinks Obama is a “Mooslim” anti-Semite and radical Jihadist who is working in league with the Iranians to bring about Islamic rule. And those are some of her more tame ideas!
The Sugar Land Tea Party was forced to move an event featuring a prominent critic of radical Islam after Hyatt Place learned of opponents’ plans to protest it.
The hotel, where activist Pamela Geller was going to address the crowd and sign copies of her new book Stop the Islamization of America, cancelled their meeting space, forcing the Tea Party to reserve a nearby community center.
“In light of the business disruptions affiliated with this event, it has been moved to an alternate location,” said a Hyatt Place manager, who declined to give further details on the decision.
Geller is known for her views on Islam, including strong opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque (which she is said to have nicknamed), dismissal of liberal politicians for “giving in” to American Muslims and continued belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
On her right-wing blog Atlas Shrugs, Geller urged readers to boycott the hotel for cancelling the event, calling it a setback to free speech and “a stunning surrender to Islamic supremacism.”
The Sugar Land Democrats Club announced their protest on Sunday and still plans to hold a peaceful demonstration at the event’s new location, the Sugar Land Community Center.
“Let’s send a message to the fear mongers and haters in Sugar Land and Fort Bend County that the likes of Ms. Pamela Geller and her bigoted ideology are not welcome here in the 4th most racially diverse county in the USA,” residents Deron Patterson and Q Imam said in a press release.
The community center can be rented out for public or private events, like tonight’s book signing, said Doug Adolph, Sugar Land city spokesman.
All attendees and protestors must follow the law, but the community center does not place any further restrictions on First Amendment rights, he said.
Like Geller, two-thirds of Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement say that Islam is at odds with the American way of life, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The survey also showed Tea Party members are nearly twice as likely as the general public to believe that American Muslims want to establish sharia law. They are less comfortable with mosques in their communities, Muslims praying in airports and Muslim women wearing niqab.
The Sugar Land Tea Party event isn’t the first time Geller has come to the Houston area. The local chapter of Act! For America hosted Geller and fellow anti-Jihadist Robert Spencer in June, when they showed their film, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks.
“We believe presentations such as this also provide an opportunity for citizens to learn more about how Islamic Law (Sharia) contradicts the U.S. Constitution– an excellent example of which we are seeing played out right before us at this event, in that Shariah Law prohibits Freedom of Speech if the speech can be considered to be ‘offensive’ to Muslims,” said Susan Watts, of Act! For America Houston, by email.
Fear, Inc. – a recent report by the Center for American Progress—labels Geller one of the main players in the country’s Islamophobia network and says her blog incites Muslim fear-mongering among the right-wing blogosphere, including some politically conservative Christians.
“She writes about Muslims in the most reductive and offensive way imaginable,” said Matt Duss, an analyst on national security policy at the center. Geller, he said, has been able to strike an emotional chord with her readers and followers by orchestrating controversy and fear over Islam, as she did with the Ground Zero mosque incident.
Geller and Spencer’s organization – Stop Islamization of America—was founded in 2010 to fight radical Islam and terrorism, but their opponents insist the organization’s scope extends far beyond that.
The Anti-Defamation League wrote Sugar Land city officials and religious leaders ahead of the upcoming event, warning them of Geller’s vilification of Islam. The ADL said her group “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” and the Southern Poverty Law Association has labeled it a hate group.
Geller’s supporters, who continue to see radical Islam as a dangerous, real and urgent threat, disagree with these characterizations.
“We see value in presentations like (hers) as one of the tools available in learning more about the creep of Sharia Law and it’s customs, as well as an opportunity to understand the impact of Cultural (or Stealth) Jihad which is usually aided by a complicit media paralyzed by Political Correctness,” Watts said.
MEK-Terror Linked/Terrorist inspirerRobert Spencer is already calling Hyatt officials “dhimmis” and blaming CAIR and the “world wide Muslim conspiracy” for this cancellation. He is also asking his shock troops of Spencerites to flood the Hyatt with calls and emails about how they don’t appreciate the hate event being canceled:
Wherever they succeed in intimidating a group or venue into dropping a talk by a freedom fighter, we have to bring just as much pressure to bear for the cause of justice, and let that group or venue know that we do not appreciate their failure to stand up for Constitutional principles when challenged. So please contact the Hyatt Place in Houston and tell them that since they canceled the Geller event, you will be staying elsewhere:
Hyatt Place Houston/Sugar Land 16730 Creek Bend Drive Sugar Land, TX 77478, USA Phone: +1 281 491 0300 Fax: +1 281 491 0325 Farley Kern Vice President, Corporate Communications Tel: +1 312 780 5506 farley.kern@hyatt.com
The stakes are very high. If we don’t resist this Islamic supremacist thuggery, the Islamic supremacists will succeed in stamping out all discussion of the truth about Islam and jihad, thereby rendering us mute and defenseless before its advance. That’s why we have to resist now, at every step, before it’s too late. Contact the Hyatt. But don’t just complain: host a counter-jihadist in your area. Stand for freedom.
Spencer believes in Freedom just as much as Kim Jong Il does, that much is clear when you visit Robert Spencer Watch. I think loonwatchers should contact Hyatt Place Houston and let them know how much you appreciate the fact that they won’t allow their venue to be used as a place of hate.
Tom Trento believes the Muslim Brotherhood is behind “Occupy Orlando.” Just watch him in the video below stretching and trying to grasp at anything to come up with his absurd conspiracy theory.
Trento and his friends seem like stalkers. It’s also quite funny how he passes off the “Rifqa Bary” case as a victory when in fact none of the objectives that he and his friends, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer wished to achieve were actualized. The whole Rifqa Bary episode was a colossal and humiliating defeat for the Islamophobes.
In a video clip and blog post published today, a right-wing activist with ties to GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner alleges that Occupy Orlando, a Central Florida group that has sprung up in solidarity with the New York-based Occupy Wall Street movement, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Occupy Orlando held its first event this past weekend, beginning its “occupation” at Senator Beth Johnson Park, outside of the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, at 8 a.m. Saturday.
In a recent post on the website for The United West, an anti-”Shariah Islam” organization, the group’s director, Tom Trento claims that his team found what they consider evidence that the Occupy Wall Street-inspired group in Orlando is part of a “move by a Muslim activist to take over control of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ in the ‘spirit of the Arab Spring.’”
For those with eyes to see, ears to hear and a wee bit of cranial activity, the jury is in, the facts are known and the words “Arab Spring,” are synonyms for “Muslim Brotherhood.” Though there is strong evidence for the Ikhwan’s involvement initiating the various revolutions in Egypt and the northern Maghreb, it is indisputable that the Brothers are exploiting the incoherent chaos in these countries and taking a leadership role either overtly or through compliant proxies to move toward a shariah-compliant state. In the spirit of Rahm Emanuel, the Muslim Brotherhood will never let a good crisis go to waste.
…
As The United West video teams circulated (overtly and covertly) through hundreds of protestors at “Occupy Orlando, “ I was informed that a Muslim activist lawyer with whom we had confrontations in the past, was at this demonstration. Though it has been two years, we could never forget the easily-agitated, Mr. Shayan Elahi. Yes, Orlando, this is the same Muslim who lost a race in 2010 to become a Judge.
…
After Elahi’s second try at “intimidating” us (yes, it was comical) it became obvious to us that he was not just an observer at this event but a participant…and then it all came together. Shaya Elahi is the leader (of the leaderless) Occupy Orlando! It turns out that he is the “official” legal counsel for this movement and indeed one of the key people, if not the main person calling the shots!
Once we watched Shayan Elahi in action, running around, signing up speakers, providing direction, telling people what to do, we started to connect the dots to the stated Face Book Mission Statement of “Occupy Orlando,” which reads, “…we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”
In his post, Trento asks United West supporters if they think Elahi “is looking for a place to mark up his first win by coopting a incoherent movement primarily made up of ‘hippies and anarchists’ so that he can build a political base for his Islamic goals?”
Groups that have sprung up in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street have, for the most part, been leaderless — much like the original movement. Occupy Orlando’s Facebook page describes itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”
A recent press release from Occupy Orlando states that there were “approximately 200 speakers and more than 1,500 participants spanning across many political and generational spectrums gathered to share dialogues ranging from pro-life to dismantling the federal reserve” at the event.
As Trento mentioned, he and Elahi have had run-ins in the past. Elahi was an attorney for Rifqa Bary’s parents after she separated herself from her Muslim parents in Ohio as a minor when she converted to Christianity. Trento, along with other anti-Islam activists in Florida, fought in the legal battle to keep Bary in the state and away from her parents.
During an interview in Trento’s video, Elahi pulls aside one of the frustrated protesters Trento is talking to and tells her, “He is one of the biggest bigots in town.” Elahi also turns to Trento and calls him a “racist bigot.”
GOP Senate hopeful Adam Hasner has called Trento a “good friend” and was among the group of Florida activists that tried to keep Bary in Florida. He and Trento founded the Florida Security Council together in 2008; that group eventually expanded to become The United West.
“In our society, government is supposed to be public and you’re supposed to have a private life,” Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, said. “We’ve flipped that on its head.”
Hello to you, and to whoever might be spying on us tonight.
This is how some Muslim New Yorkers have grown accustomed to opening meetings, on campus and at mosques from Steinway Street in Queens to Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Their assumption is that someone is always listening for hints of frustration and anger and disloyalty.
“In our society, government is supposed to be public and you’re supposed to have a private life,” Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, said. “We’ve flipped that on its head.”
They found that undercover officers, known as rakers, infiltrated hundreds of mosques; that a secret demographic unit compiled extensive dossiers on where Muslim New Yorkers eat, work, type on computers and transfer money to relatives; and that even imams who worked closely and courageously with the police have found themselves spied on and listed as “suspects.”
The Police Department’s reach extends to India, Pakistan and the Middle East, and less exotically to New Jersey, where undercover police cells have taken roost. And the department works with the F.B.I. and, more controversially, the C.I.A. in a way that sounds less fraternal than like a blood marriage.
Recently, the C.I.A. sent what The A.P. described as “one of its most senior clandestine officers” to work at One Police Plaza. It is highly unusual and troubling for the C.I.A. to work so closely with a police department.
So how should we parse these deeply unsettling findings? We live in an age of moral murk. It is to diminish none of the power of The A.P.’s work to acknowledge that some revelations fall into moral shadow rather than a Manichean play of pitch darkness and light.
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly vibrates with certitude. He watched those towers transformed into calamitous clouds of dust. He learned of profound federal intelligence failures and bristles with a determination not to go there again.
“We’re paid to think the unthinkable,” Mr. Kelly told the City Council at a hearing 11 days ago. “We want to know how individuals traveling here communicate and conceal themselves. We go where the leads take us.”
I get that. The word “if” dominated our lives for many months after 9/11. Shortly afterward, my wife and I decided not to send our son to a fine public middle school in Lower Manhattan, for fear of having him too far removed from our Brooklyn home if. …
And I have felt a bubbling up of impatience with some religious leaders. The Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn was briefly home to the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, who helped plot the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and since then other radicals are reported to have passed through. Does anyone there tend the door?
Councilman Brad Lander is one of those wrestling thoughtfully with such questions. But as he put pointed questions to Mr. Kelly at the hearing, the answers were illuminating in not terribly comforting ways.
It sounds, Mr. Lander said, as if you’re engaged in religious and ethnic profiling.
The commissioner shrugged. “I wouldn’t believe everything that I read,” he replied.
This fell well short of candor, which is unfortunate at a time when the police brass ask us to give them something like blind trust in their intentions. Afterward, an A.P. reporter asked, point-blank, Can you point to specific factual inaccuracies in our reporting?
And the commissioner replied: No.
This pattern recurs. Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, has a tendency to emphatically deny what has certifiably happened, whether the spying on and locking up of demonstrators for days at the Republican National Convention, or these recent revelations.
Credibility is like sand flowing through an hourglass. It runs out.
Professor Bayoumi rides subways and elevators and understands terrible possibilities. “I understand there need to be investigations,” he said. “But to base it on religious beliefs and what someone says at a meeting, rather than on actual leads …”
He paused, frustrated. “It weakens the bonds in a community and corrodes trust. Is that useful?”
It looks like the myth that Geller was pushing some months ago about Muslim hordes incinerating Nigerian Christians is resurfacing once again, this time on Facebook.
A blog by the name of Waffles at Noon covers the re-emergence of the photo:
A horrifying photo has surfaced on Facebook, one that claims the dead, charred bodies in the photo are Christians burnt alive by Muslims in Nigera. A common caption reads reads:
Christians burnt alive by Sunni Muslims in NIGERIA…(Posted by Jillian Becker in Africa, Arab States, Christianity, Christians burnt alive by Sunni Muslims, Islam, Muslims, jihad)…..PLEASE SHARE IT OR JUST UPLOAD YOUR OWN…BUT SOMEHOW SPREAD IT IF YOU’RE EVEN 1% CHRISTIAN — It is still not over yet! —
Waffles goes on to cite our piece from April that points out the fact that the picture is a fake.
Below is our post exposing the absurd falsity of attempting to pass the Congo gas tanker explosion as an example of Nigerian sectarianism.
Pamela is claiming in a blog titled, Nigeria: Muslim Hordes Mass Slaughter Christians that a gruesome picture is evidence of Muslim violence against Christians in Nigeria (be warned the picture is gruesome):
A terrible and horrifying picture indeed.
Pamela brags that she wrote about it “first” back on April 19, and then wonders “why” is America fighting in Libya to restore a “universal Caliphate?”
Huh??
It turns out however that the above picture is not evidence of some “Muslim rampage” in Nigeria! The charred bodies are a tragic result of a tanker explosion in the CONGO!! A whole other country the last time I checked! Here is the evidence from Afrik.com(I give you the Google translation since it was originally in French):
The explosion, on July 3, a tanker in the town of Sange, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has resulted in 235 deaths.
You will also see an interesting picture of Muslim UN soldiers, possibly from Pakistan helping to respond to the tragedy.
Here is a report from Reuters with some more pictures:
(Reuters) – At least 230 people were killed when a fuel tanker overturned and exploded in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, unleashing a fire ball that tore through homes and cinemas packed with people watching World Cup soccer.
Officials said on Saturday the explosion late on Friday also injured 196 people, adding that the death toll could rise.
They described scenes of devastation in the town of Sange, where houses were burned and bodies littered the streets. Some people died while trying to steal fuel leaking from the tanker, but most were killed at home or watching World Cup soccer in cinemas.
Many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition.
United Nations helicopters began airlifting injured people to hospital, while Congo’s army, which lost a number of men in the blast, has sent soldiers in to help with the rescue.
“Our latest numbers are 230 dead and 196 injured,” Madnodje Mounoubai, a spokesman for the U.N. mission, said. Congo’s government also gave the same number of dead.
Marcellin Cisambo, governor of South Kivu province, where the incident took place, said the blast occurred when the fuel truck overturned, leaked fuel and then later exploded.
It was not immediately clear what caused the initial accident or later blast, but local people said the truck, which was part of a convoy, stopped when the road seemed to crumble, toppling the vehicle and spilling fuel. Fire then erupted.
“It’s a terrible scene. There are lots of dead bodies on the streets. The population is in terrible shock — no one is crying or speaking,” Jean-Claude Kibala, South Kivu’s vice governor, said from Sange, which is between the towns of Bukavu and Uvira.
“We are trying to see how we can coordinate with (the U.N.) to manage the situation and how to take the wounded to hospital,” he added.
TANKER ACCIDENTS
Roads in the area are notoriously bad after years of war and neglect in the vast central African nation.
“Some people were killed trying to steal the fuel, but most of the deaths were of people who were indoors watching the (World Cup) match,” Cisambo said.
There have been numerous similar accidents across Africa, where crowds gather around fuel tankers involved in crashes, only for the tanker to explode.
Millions of football fans across Africa were watching Ghana, the continent’s last team in the World Cup, play Uruguay in the quarterfinals of the tournament on Friday evening.
For many, who have no electricity at home, makeshift cinema halls are the only option for watching the football.
“My children were watching the football match in the cinema and then they ran out to see the petrol,” said Kiza Ruvinira, who lost three children and his sister-in-law in the blast.
“I went out to see what happened and I found my three children’s bodies myself. I don’t know how to go on.”
Mubaya Mumasura also lost three family members: “I don’t know what to do with myself I am so sad. I want the government to assist all the victims and help us.”
Congo’s weak government has difficulty providing even the most basic services, so U.N. peacekeepers began airlifting some of the wounded to nearby hospitals and aid workers were called in to help with medical treatment.
“The national Red Cross is working on collecting the bodies and taking them to the morgue, but the priority is obviously to take the wounded to the hospital,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) coordinator Inah Kaloga told Reuters.”
Kaloga said aid workers were trying to identify bodies before they were buried, but many were completely charred.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Captain Olivier Hamuli,” spokesman for Congo’s military operation in South Kivu, adding that 13 soldiers had been injured and another 10 were missing.
The Kenyan driver of the truck is being held by the police.
Alain Ilunga, deputy CEO of Congo’s storage and distribution company, which is already investigating the incident, said the truck was carrying 49,000 liters of petrol at the time.
After a long and hard debate, I finally decided to attend Kamal Saleem’s Sept. 25 talk at the Midland Center for the Arts. My purpose of attending the talk was to take notes and ask questions during a Q&A session. Because there was no Q&A, I decided to raise my concerns here.
He started his talk with a few sentences of peace and right after that started to describe the importance of Sept. 11 for Muslims, linking it to the Battle of Vienna and revenge, which was news for me — a born Muslim. That was the beginning of his, what I believe, hate speech.
His next claim was “God of the Quran does not love his people”; whereas, at least 11 of 99 attributes (names) of Allah have a meaning of love, compassion, mercy, or peace including Al-Wadood, The Loving. His love is mentioned in the Quran many times including: “And He is oft-forgiving, the Loving (85:14)”. Saleem claimed that Allah wants Muslims to die for Him and says this is the primary reason for the terrorism/ suicide bombing in the world, ignoring the underlying geopolitical reasons and terrorism by non-Muslims, including Christians (remember the Crusades). According to a 2008 Pew poll, only 5 percent of Pakistanis justified suicide bombing, even though Pakistan is the country most affected by the menace. As a Muslim, I was taught that suicide is prohibited in any circumstance, no exception. The Quran specifically says: “O you who have believed, do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly but only [in lawful] business by mutual consent. And do not kill yourselves. Indeed, Allah is to you ever Merciful (4:29)”. The concept of suicide bombing was alien to Muslims; for example, in Pakistan, the first suicide attack occurred only in the mid- ’90s and none were recorded in Afghanistan until 2002. However, the history of suicide bombing goes back to 1 AD (see, “Dying to Win” by Robert Pape). The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (LTTE), a Marxist organization, invented the suicide vests and killed many, including Rajiv Gandhi, then Indian Prime Minister.
Saleem also kept calling Muslims as Moslems, which was weird. As a former believer of the religion he should know the correct pronunciation.
According to Kamal, most of the terrorism and killings in history have been perpetrated by Muslims, which is a fallacy. Ironically, even ignoring earlier historical events such as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide of native North and South Americans and of other native people, most of the killings in the last 100 years have been carried out by non-Muslims (e.g., WWI, WWII, USSR [Stalin], China [Mao], Congo [Leopold II of Belgium], British India [1947]; Cambodia [Pol Pot], North Korea [Kim Il Sung], Ethiopia [Menghistu], Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka [LTTE], Gulf, Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, to name a few). A detailed, but not exhaustive, list can be found at http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html. The FBI database indicates that attacks by Islamic extremists on U.S. soil comprised only 6 percent during 1980-2005.
He also spent significant time on the concept of Taqiyya and linked it to stealth jihad by saying Muslims are allowed to lie by their religion. Growing up as a Muslim, I only heard this term in reference to Shia religion; however, I never encountered a situation confirming this even with my Shia friends with whom I grew up. The term Taqiyya is a false concept not belonging to the authentic teachings of Islam — I did not find a single entry in Hadith (Sahih Bukhari, the most authentic compilation) or the Quran which can relate to this concept. (I even searched with words: lie, lying, Taqiyya, etc. at http://www.searchtruth.com/). One of the Hadith that I found during my search was “The signs of a hypocrite are three: Whenever he speaks he tells a lie; whenever he is entrusted he proves dishonest; whenever he promises he breaks his promise (Book #51, Hadith #12).”
During the Google search, however, I saw “Lying is not permitted except in three cases: (1) a man’s speaking to his wife to make her happy; (2) lying at times of war; (3) and lying in order to reconcile between people. Even though I could not find any Hadith to back this up, if we consider this to be true, it is not different from the teachings of Judaism (e.g., Talmud, Baba Kamma 113a) or Christianity (e.g., 1 Samuel 16 incident), for detail see http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/08/silencing-spencer-taqiyya-and-kitman-are-part-of-judeo-christian-belief/.
Jihad was described as a Holy War (the term itself has come from the Crusades) by Kamal and was explained as the 6th pillar of Islam, obligatory for every Muslim. Jihad is never considered as one of the pillars of Islam by Sunni Muslims, and fighting is only permitted in self defense after exhausting every other option.
And even then, Muslims must follow strict rules of combat including prohibitions against harming civilians and against destroying crops, trees, and livestock. The notion that Islam spread through the sword was emphasized by the speaker — one question I had for him was how did it spread to Indonesia, Malaysia and many other parts of the world where no Muslim soldier ever put his feet? Compulsion in religion is in fact forbidden in the Quran: “Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth has been made clear from error (2:256)” and “And neither I am going to worship that which you have worshipped, nor will you worship the One whom I worship. For you is your faith, and for me, my faith (109:4-6).”
Unfortunately he was not open to Q&A. Contrary to Saleem’s assertion that all the verses of love and peace in the Quran came when Muslims were weak (prior to their immigration to Madina) and were abrogated thereafter (after the establishment of Islamic state in Madina), the former verse was revealed in Madina (two years after the immigration) prohibiting Muslims to forcefully converting anyone to Islam, including their own children.
Of course his talk could not be complete without bringing up the fear of Sharia in the U.S. Scholars agree that Muslims living in non-Muslim countries have to comply with laws and regulations of the country where they have been living — this is what I was taught and therefore, I don’t see an issue of Sharia laws taking over our Constitution.
Kamal also kept quoting verses from the Quran (e.g., 5:51, 5:80) out of context and generalizing from them; whereas, those verses were revealed on specific occasions mentioning specific groups of people. He mentioned that slavery is not prohibited in the Quran (it isn’t in the Bible either), which is true; however, he forgot to mention how many times the Quran mentions the importance of freeing slaves; only one of many verses in the Quran should suffice as an answer: “…Righteous are those who believe in God, the last day, the angels, the scripture, and the prophets; and they give the money, cheerfully, to the relatives, the orphans, the needy, the traveling alien, the beggars, and to free the slaves; and they observe the prayers (Salat) and give the obligatory charity (Zakat); and they keep their word whenever they make a promise; and they steadfastly persevere in the face of persecution, hardship, and war. These are the truthful; these are the righteous. (2:177).”
Even the POWs were treated with respect by Muslims and subsequently released (e.g., see POWs of the battle of Badr) — a thing never practiced at that time; POWs were either killed or enslaved. This verse also answers his assertion that when Muslims sign a peace treaty it is only valid for 10 years and it has to be broken within that period
I believe he wanted to mention the peace treaty of Hudaybiyya, which was signed between the Muslims of Madina and the polytheists of Mecca for a stipulated period of 10 years but which was broken by the Meccans two years later. He misquoted many other verses which are popular with Islamophobes. Explanations of a few can be read at the following site as I cannot go in detail of all here: http://www.load-islam.com/.
Another topic was the presumed ambitions of Muslims to dominate the world and convert everyone to Islam which can easily be rejected as Muslims ruled India for over 500 years and remained a minority. Similarly, large populations of Christians live in Lebanon (40 percent), Palestine pre-1948 (30 percent) and Egypt (10 percent), to name a few countries. Jews and Christians (always called people of the books in the Quran and never nonbelievers or infidels) and Muslims lived together in peace for millennium; even when Jews were persecuted in Europe, they were safe in Muslim countries. The issues that we currently see are the result of geopolitics (colonization, occupation [Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq], denying freedom by supporting dictators and preventing the liberation [Kashmir, Chechnya]), not religion. More information can be gleaned at: http://www.al-bab.com/arab/background/jews.htm.
Saleem mentioned killing of Jews of Bani Quraiza in Madina after the Battle of Trenches without giving any details. They were guilty of treason by helping Meccans in the battle when they had an agreement to support Muslims and their fate was determined using Jewish laws (Deuteronomy 20:10-18) by one of their former leaders upon their agreeing to his adjudication (read Martin Lings’ book, “Muhammad: his life based on the earliest sources.” This is the common punishment of treason even today (Section 110 of Article III states, “…such person or persons shall be adjudged guilty of treason against the United States, and shall suffer death …” and this is exactly what happen to Anwar Al-Awlaki recently).
His portrayal of the status of women in Islam was also completely wrong. In order to understand the issue of the treatment of women in Muslim countries, we should separate the religion and the culture. The maltreatment of women by Muslims can always be traced to the cultural practices and never to the teachings of the religion itself. The Quran clearly states that men and women are equal in creation and in the afterlife, but not identical. Both of them are created from a single soul. One person does not come before the other, one is not superior to the other, and one is not the derivative of the other. A woman is not created for the purpose of serving a man. Rather, they are both created for the mutual benefit of each other (Quran 4:1, 30:21).
And before I end, I would like to write summary of my research on Kamal Saleem. He was born in 1957 and according to his claim, he was recruited by the PLO in Beirut, Lebanon when he was 7 years old, that would be 1964 or 1965. This cannot be true as the PLO was founded on May 28, 1964 in the West Bank and had its first armed wing in Southern Lebanon in 1969 and was not deployed to Beirut until the mid 1970s. His claim that he was a member of both the PLO (a socialist organization with Christians as members [e.g., Hanan Ashravi, George Habash]) and the Muslim Brotherhood (an arch rival of the PLO) and that he met Yasir Arafat, Moammar Gadhafi, Hafiz Al-Asad and Saddam Husain is ridiculous.
To further this, I include excerpts from one of the posts I found online which is supposedly from one of his nephews, Mohammad Itani. The real name of Kamal Saleem is Khodor Al Shami. He was a Sufi with Sheikh Rajab who never believed in militancy and the Brotherhood was not in existence in Lebanon during his time there. His Dad, Kamal Shami, was a blacksmith in downtown Beirut. Many of his close friends were Christians and he could not ask his son to kill Christians, as Kamal Saleem claims, while being friends with them. Additionally, Kamal Saleem’s older brother, Mahmound Shami, married a Christian, Madlin Khoury; this gives the lie to his claim that his mother and father taught him to hate and kill non-Muslims. He used to work with his brother and never handled a gun. Before his coming to the U.S., he worked in the Persian Gulf where he was introduced a man who helped him come to the U.S. As to his time in Afghanistan, he was actually living in the U.S. and had regular phone contact with his family. It is all about fame and fortune.
This sounds right, since just before ending his talk he started selling his and similar books, videos and CDs including interpretations of the Quran for Christians (Snake oil salesmanship!). I hope the audience will choose to go to the original sources and not fall into his trap and see the world through his eyes.
The Sugar Land Tea Party will host activist, author and blogger Pamela Geller on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at the Hyatt Place.
Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of the blog Atlas Shrugs. She is the executive director of Stop the Islamization of America, as well as the Freedom Defense Initiative, and is a regular columnist for American Thinker, Human Events and other publications.
Geller is the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and the newly released Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She has been a guest on numerous news programs, including “Sean Hannity.”
The event will start with a meet and greet at 6:30 p.m., with Geller’s presentation to follow from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. After the event, she will sign copies of Stop the Islamization of America.
The Hyatt Place located at 16730 Creek Bend Drive in Sugar Land.
We have received some backlash regarding Danios‘ series on “Jewish Law,” (Halakha)–not merely from the usual crowd of Islamophobes, but from some fans who think the articles are inflammatory.
The main criticisms regarding the articles have been that we #1: supposedly use the “same method as the Islamophobes” and thus are “stooping to their level;” #2: that we are “bashing” Judaism; #3: this is not good for interfaith dialogue; and #4: the individuals we are citing as sources are “self-hating Jews” or “illegitimate.”
I disagree with this criticism for the following reasons:
The method of the Islamophobes is to: selectively quote/misquote, lie, essentialize, hate, foment bigotry, and push forward zany conspiracies in a process of dehumanization and otherization. We do none of the above. We haven’t since the start of the site and we never will.
Danios’ disclaimer, Why Religious Zionism, Not Judaism, Is the Problem, more than sufficiently articulates the clear distinction we are making. Judaism itself is not the problem. Even the texts and scriptural sources are not necessarily the problem. Rather, it is extremist minds reading and interpreting the texts that are the problem.
We are meeting the challenge put forth by Islamophobes, encapsulated by Robert Spencer, who claim Islam has a special and unique providence over religiously inspired and sanctioned violence against innocents; Spencer writes in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades):
When modern-day Jews and Christians read their Bibles, they simply don’t interpret the passages cited as exhorting them to violent action against unbelievers. This is due to the influence of centuries of interpretive traditions that have moved away from literalism regarding these passages. But in Islam, there is no comparable interpretive tradition. The jihad passages in the Qur’an are anything but a dead letter.
These articles are a follow up to the previous series covering violence in the Bible. That series received far less criticism than this present one, most likely because it was seen to take Christianity to task more than Judaism. The added sensitivity to the Jewish community is understandable, considering the long history of violence, oppression, and hate Jews have had to face over the centuries.
We maintain such a sensitivity to Jewish history and struggle and do not intend this series to be employed as a blunt instrument that is used to bash one’s religious opponents over the head; in fact it can’t be!
Instead, the point is to instill a sense of religious humilityin all of us. Or, put in another more colloquial way, “don’t act like your s*** don’t stink.”
As Danios wrote:
I will be applying the same standards our opponents apply to the Islamic tradition to the Jewish one, to show that Judaism is equally vulnerable to such criticisms. It is hoped that this exercise will encourage people of Judeo-Christian background to be more hesitant in vilifying and targeting Islam. This is purely an exercise in thought, a what if scenario (what if we applied the same standards to your religion as you do onto others?) designed to be the antidote to religious and cultural arrogance.
By clarifying that this constitutes an “exercise in thought” one should know that I am not saying Judaism is XYZ because of ABC, but rather simply that if you insist on arguing that Islam is XYZ due to ABC then–based on your own logic–Judaism and Christianity are also XYZ because they too have ABC. This is a what if? and an if-then argument.
These articles on Jewish law are just a more in-depth variation of the longstanding series, “What if they were Muslim?”. When one is confronted with the fact that one’s own belief system is equally prone and open to bellicose interpretations and that those interpretations do exist and have real world implications, it will give one pause. It will make one re-examine his or her own triumphalist attitude and should redirect his or her efforts positively. At least, this is the goal.
Previously you may have put people of _____ religion down, but now upon reflection you realize, “I can’t because I stand condemned by the same logic.”
Our biggest regret here is that some really good-hearted folk might be offended, as Danios wrote:
Naturally, “bystanders” will be caught in the crossfire. Good-hearted, fellow Jews may be offended by such an article series that takes such a critical look at Jewish law. This is why I explained my absolute reluctance to go down this path in my opening disclaimer. But, the constant barrage of Islamophobic polemics, encouraged by Israeli activists, convinces me that this is something unavoidable. Thus it is so, that with a grudging heart, I proceed forth.
Some may be taken aback by the extensiveness of these pieces, but when tackling such an issue it is important to be both thorough and comprehensive. Would our readers expect anything less of LoonWatch and Danios, known for their in-depth rebuttals?
In regards to interfaith dialogue it must be pointed out that what passes as “interfaith” at times is a superficial cliched kumbaya-hand-holding that covers up or ignores serious challenges. At some point, if we are true to ourselves the hard questions about bigotry, hate, and violence that proliferate through the various religions of the world must come up.
This is the difficult part of “interfaith dialogue” that has yet to be seriously grappled with: how do we deal with belligerent interpretations, how do we manage them, reconcile them while remaining in fidelity and authenticity with tradition; how do such interpretations stack up to ethics; is a complete reconstruction of religious thought necessary, etc.
All of this said, I would like to add that most readers and commenters understand the import and logic behind our articles. Best-selling author Lesley Hazleton, one of our favorite Anti-Loons and a prolific writer on theology, tweeted:
Congrats to Danios @Loonwatchers: great thinking on hot-button topics of #Zionism, #Islamism, #antisemitism bit.ly/mTeecA
Gefilte, another one of our Jewish writers proffered this view when we solicited him for a comment about the series:
I periodically contribute to loonwatch. Like many Jews, it bothers me that extremists in the name of my religion have declared war not on terrorism but on mainstream Muslims. Loonwatch asked me if I was disturbed by the series on how Jewish law has been expropriated by Zionists to justify killing, torture, and collective punishment. I have to say, it’s a complicated question. In general, I don’t like anybody taking potshots at anyone else’s religion. After all, that’s primarily what loonwatch does every day.
But, to answer your question, I have to issue my own disclaimer. I don’t claim to speak for most Jews on this. None of us do, and I think that’s the most distressing thing about Zionism and the state of Israel, which pretends to speak in our name. You know the old joke: ask two Jews a question, get three (or more) opinions. We do tend to have an independent streak.
Religiously I’ll freely admit to being a “cafeteria Jew.” I don’t believe that anybody’s scripture (mine, yours, or the other guy’s) came directly from G-d, but I do believe they were inspired by that piece of our humanity that constantly seeks G-d. For me, the supernatural aspects of ancient religions should be updated. And I also find that rational thought augments faith. Even though evolution can be understood as a scientific principle, how amazing it is! Spinoza and Einstein had similar views too.
It’s not necessary to believe that Moses literally received the Torah on Sinai, or that Jesus was miraculously conceived by G-d, or that Allah whispered the exact words in the Qu’ran to Mohammad. It seems to me that G-d speaks to everyone, and sometimes particularly sensitive men and women hear his resonances better than others. We’ve called such people prophets.
Since the 19th century scholars have demonstrated that the Torah was pieced together from two different versions of an orally-transmitted Jewish law, liberally laced with history, stories, and legal claims by both Southern and Northern Kingdoms to the land of Israel. In with all this were moral stories. The “cafeteria Jew” in me gravitates to the moral lessons and the rich literature in the book. But, to be honest, the genocide, murder, duplicity, and some of the kinky sex in there seems more an artifact of human hands and less of divine inspiration.
It seems to me that Danios has merely pointed out that the Torah, like the Qu’ran, contains some passages that (were it a movie) should have some advanced R if not X rating. The Torah, like the Qu’ran and the New Testament, was written long before Amnesty International, the UN, or the Red Cross were founded, or multiculturalism was ever conceived. What did anyone do with those *other* people back then? Genocide, mass expulsions and slavery is the answer. No wonder the Tea Party loves the Old Testament so much. Some of them even want to bring back stoning. As Danios points out, zealots can find anything they want in the Torah, just as zealots can find anything they want in the Qu’ran.
So, to *finally* answer your question, am I offended? No, not really. These are essentially the same observations I’ve made over the years, and they merely raise the same questions that Hebrew school teachers occasionally have to scramble to answer. So, if the purpose is didactic, as opposed to hateful, what’s there to object to? Islamophobes make similar deconstructions of Islam, usually with less fidelity to its texts, but there the intent is to show how evil Muslims are. Or that their religion is inherently evil too. In your case, I think you make a clear and repeated distinction between our religion and the ding-dongs who have expropriated it.
I appreciate the disclaimer you’ve attached to each installment: “Why Religious Zionism, not Judaism, is the Problem.”
Gefilte goes on to suggest we mention that we are doing this series to show “how easy it is for fundamentalists to hijack ANY religion.” A fair point I’d say!
I’m not going to discuss the criticism regarding sources cited such as Norman Finkelstein, something that has been covered well enough by Danios. While this series may seem polarizing to some, it was necessary and consistent with what we are doing. “Keeping an eye on the Islamophobes” also means dissecting their arguments and ideas to reveal them for the frauds they are.
I wish every story we did was one about mutual understanding between faiths, good deeds done in unison, selflessness across religious divides, togetherness and harmony, but alas even though those are our favorite stories they are not the only reality.
******************
Lastly, upon revisiting the articles we will add an asterisk to every title next to the words “Jewish Law*” so as to make clearer that we are not essentializing Jewish Law or saying that it is defined solely by those who have expropriated it to justify violence toward the innocent.
(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)
The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it. But since the U.S. Government rolled out its Most Serious Officials with Very Serious Faces to make these accusations, many people (therefore) do believe it; after all, U.S. government accusations = Truth. All Serious people know that. And in the ensuing reaction one finds virtually every dynamic typically shaping discussions of Terrorism and U.S. foreign policy.
To begin with, this episode continues the FBI’s record-setting undefeated streak of heroically saving us from the plots they enable. From all appearances, this is, at best, yet another spectacular “plot” hatched by some hapless loser with delusions of grandeur but without any means to put it into action except with the able assistance of the FBI, which yet again provided it through its own (paid, criminal) sources posing as Terrorist enablers. The Terrorist Mastermind at the center of the plot is a failed used car salesman in Texas with a history of pedestrian money problems. Dive under your bed. “For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents,” explained U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and “no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere and no one was actually ever in any danger.’”
But no matter. The U.S. Government and its mindless followers in the pundit and think-tank “expert” class have seized on this ludicrous plot with astonishing speed to all but turn it into a hysterical declaration of war against Evil, Hitlerian Iran. “The US attorney-general Eric Holder said Iran would be ‘held to account’ over what he described as a flagrant abuse of international law,” and “the US says military action remains on the table,” though “it is at present seeking instead to work through diplomatic and financial means to further isolate Iran.” Hillary Clinton thundered that this “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.” The CIA’s spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, quoted an anonymous White House official as saying the plot “appeared to have been authorized by senior levels of the Quds Force.” Meanwhile, the State Department has issued a Travel Alert which warns American citizens that this plot “may indicate a more aggressive focus by the Iranian Government on terrorist activity against diplomats from certain countries, to include possible attacks in the United States.”
In case that’s not enough to frighten you — and, really, how could it not be? — some Very Serious Experts are very, very afraid and want you to know how Serious this all is. Within moments of Holder’s news conference, National Security Expert Robert Chesney – without a molecule of critical thought in his brain — announced that this “remarkable development” was “very scary.” Very, very scary. Chesney then printed large blocks of the DOJ’s Press Release to prove it. Self-proclaimed “counter-terrorism expert” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross tapped into his vast expertise to explain: ”Holder weighing in on the plot’s connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it.” Progressive think-tank expert and Atlantic writer Steve Clemons decreed that if the DOJ’s accusations are true, then ”the US has reached a point where it must take action” and “this is time for a significant strategic response to the Iran challenge in the Middle East and globally,” which “could involve military.”
The ironies here are so self-evident it’s hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, and Brookings “scholars,” is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination? Does anyone, for instance, have any interest in finding out who is responsible for the spate of serial murders aimed at Iran’s nuclear scientists? Wouldn’t people professing to be so outraged by the idea of entering another country to engage in assassination be eager to get to the bottom of that?
Then there’s the War on Terror irony: our Hated Enemy here (Iran) is a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Meanwhile, our close ally, the victim on whose behalf we are so outraged (Saudi Arabia), is not only one of the most tyrannical and aggressive regimes on the planet, but produced 15 of the 19 hijackers and had extensive and still-unknown involvement in that attack. If the U.S. is so deeply offended by the involvement of a foreign government in an attack on U.S. soil, it would be looking first to its close friend Saudi Arabia, where “elements of the government” were likely involved in an actual plot rather than a joke of a plot.
To make sure you understand just how dastardly and evil the Iranian plotters here are, the DOJ in its complaint highlighted that the used-car-salesman-Terrorist-Mastermind said that he preferred that nobody else be killed when the Saudi Ambassador was assassinated, but if it were absolutely necessary, he could accept some unintended deaths! Here’s how the NYT summarizes that:
The complaint quotes Mr. Arbabsiar as making conflicting statements about the possibility of bystander deaths; at one point he is said to say that killing the ambassador alone would be preferable, but on another occasion he said it would be “no big deal” if many others at the restaurant — possibly including United States senators — died in any bombing.
What kind of monster thinks that way, we are supposed to ponder. Behold the warped mind of the Terrorist! He’s actually willing to accept that others die besides his intended targeted! Is that not the mentality that drives U.S. behavior in multiple countries around the world every day? The U.S. flattened an entire civilian apartment building in Baghdad with a 2,000-pound bomb when it thought Saddam Hussein was there (he wasn’t — oops — but lots of innocent people were). NATO repeatedly bombed structures in Tripoli where it thought (mistakenly) Moammar Gadaffi was located, in the process almost certainly killing large numbers of unintended targets. The U.S. just killed one of its own citizens that it insists (not very credibly) it did not intend to kill in order to eradicate the life of Anwar Awlaki, and killed dozens of innocent people when it previously tried to kill Awlaki with cluster bombs.
The U.S. is the living, breathing symbol of this “collateral damage” rationale. It’s what drives all the multi-nation American wars and occupations and drone campaigns and assassinations that continuously pile up the corpses of innocent people. But we’re all going to gather in righteous disgust at the idea that this monstrous International Terrorist would be willing to incur some unintended civilian deaths in order to assassinate an official of the peaceful, freedom-loving Saudi regime. Really, for brazen irony, how can this be beat?
Tom Kean, former chairman of the 9/11 Commission said the alleged plot “surprises me.” Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Kean said the plot is “pretty close to an act of war. You don’t go in somebody’s capital to blow somebody up.”
Meanwhile, President Obama decried this plot as “a flagrant violation of US and international law.” But maybe some Persian Marty Lederman in Tehran wrote a secret legal memo concluding that this was all in accordance with domestic and international law, which — as we know — is conclusive and provides a full shield of immunity.
So facially absurd are the claims here — why would Iran possibly wake up one day and decide that it wanted to engage in a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil when it could much more easily kill Saudi officials elsewhere? and if Iran and its Quds Force are really behind this inept, hapless, laughable plot, then nothing negates the claim that Iran is some Grave Threat like this does — that there is more skepticism expressed even in establishment media accounts than one normally finds about such things. Even the NYT noted — with great understatement — that the allegations “provoked puzzlement from specialists on Iran, who said it seemed unlikely that the government would back a brazen murder and bombing plan on American soil.” The Post noted that “the very rashness of the alleged assassination plot raised doubts about whether Iran’s normally cautious ruling clerics supported or even know about it.” The Atlantic‘s Max Fisher has more on why this would be so out of character for Iran.
But while some attention has been devoted to asking what motive Iran would have for doing this, little attention has been paid to asking what motive the U.S. would have for exaggerating or concocting the connection of Iran’s government to this plot. Aside from the benefits the FBI and DOJ receive when breaking up a “very scary” plot — the bigger, the better — it has been one of Obama’s highest foreign policy priorities to isolate Iran and sanction it further: as a means of placating Israel and punishing Iran for thwarting America’s natural right to rule that region (so monstrous is Iran that, as the U.S. has repeatedly complained, they actually continue to “interfere” in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan!). As Ignatius explains, the U.S. Government instantly converted this plot into a vehicle for furthering those policy ambitions:
With its alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Iran has handed the United States an opportunity to undermine Tehran at a moment when U.S. officials believe the Iranian regime is especially vulnerable. . . . “We see this as a chance to go out to capitals around the world and talk to allies and partners about what the Iranians tried to do,” the [White House] official said. “We’re not going to tolerate targeting a diplomat in Washington. We’re going to try to use this to isolate them to the maximum extent possible.”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden announced today that the U.S. is “working to unite the world” behind a response to Iran’s “outrageous” actions and that ”nothing has been taken off the table.” So Iran’s supposed involvement in this plot is the ideal weapon for the U.S. to advance its long-standing goals with regard to that country. Maybe that warrants some serious skepticism about whether the U.S. Government’s claims are true? But we all know that only Bad Muslim countries exploit foreign policy exaggerations or fabrications for political gain, and not the United States of America (especially not with Barack Obama, rather than a Republican, in the White House).
What’s most significant is that not even 24 hours have elapsed since these allegations were unveiled. No evidence has been presented of Iran’s involvement. And yet there is no shortage of people — especially in the media — breathlessly talking about all of this as though it’s all clearly true. If the Obama administration decided tomorrow that military action against Iran were warranted in response, is there any doubt that large majorities of Americans — and large majorities of Democrats — would support that? As I said when discussing the Awlaki killing, the truly “scary” aspect of all of this is that the U.S. Government need only point and utter the word “Terrorist” and hordes of citizens will rise up and demand not evidence, but blood.
UPDATE: Perpetual war-cheerleader Ken Pollack of Brookings says that, if true, this plot “shows that Tehran is meaner and nastier than ever before” and “would represent a major escalation of Iranian terrorist operations against the United States.” Also, he announces, this “should remind us that Iran also is not a normal country by any stretch of the imagination.” That — self-anointed arbiter of who is and is not a “normal country” — from a person as responsible as any pundit or think-tank expert for the attack on Iraq that killed at least 100,000 human beings, denouncing as Terrorists and abnormal a country that has invaded nobody.
UPDATE II: On NPR this morning, Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations — and Ken Pollack’s co-author on Iran — said this when asked if he has any doubts about the accuracy of U.S. government statements: “The only unusual aspect of this is actually having a terrorist operation on American territory. I don’t know what the evidence about this is, but I’m not in a position to doubt it.” That perfectly summarizes the political, media and “expert” class’ attitude toward U.S. Government claims: they’re keeping everything secret about their accusations, so there’s no reason to doubt what they’re claiming. The National Security Priesthood that uncritically amplified every U.S. Government claim and fanned the flames of war against Iraq is alive, well, and more mindless and dutiful than ever.
UPDATE III: The Christian Science Monitor details the many reasons why “Iran specialists who have followed the Islamic Republic for years say that many details in the alleged plot just don’t add up.”
UPDATE IV: On Good Morning America this morning, Joe Biden warned that “the Iranians are going to have to be held accountable” and “nothing has been taken off the table,” and then promised: “And when you see the case presented you will find there is compelling evidence for the assertion being made.” Except — after 24 hours of media hysteria — there’s this Reuters article, which — under the headline “Officials concede gaps in U.S. knowledge of Iran plot” — reports:
Iran’s supreme leader and the shadowy Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of an alleged plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, but hard evidence of that is scant, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
The United States does not have solid information about “exactly how high it goes,” one official said. . . .The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their confidence that at least some Iranian leaders were aware of the alleged plot was based largely on analyses and their understanding of how the Quds Force operates.
I wouldn’t exactly call that — what was the phrase Biden used? — “compelling evidence for the assertions being made.” In fact, it reminds me of the language anonymous government officials began using to describe their “knowledge” of Anwar Awlaki’s alleged operational role in plots against the U.S. once they killed him: “patchy”; “partial”; “suspicion.” But what we learned with Awlaki is likely what we’ll see here: many people reflexively believe government accusations even when unaccompanied by evidence, and that belief is not diluted even when government officials began acknowledging (albeit anonymously) that they do not possess and never did possess any conclusive evidence to support their accusations.
Editor’s note: Flynt Leverett teaches international affairs at Penn State and is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Hillary Mann Leverett teaches U.S. foreign policy at American University and is CEO of a political risk consultancy. Together, they write The Race for Iran. They both held senior positions on Middle East policy at the State Department and National Security Council.
(CNN) — Calls by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Hillary Clinton to “unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians,” in response to an alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Washington, reflect a hubristic misapprehension of reality.
The Obama Administration mistakenly believes it can exploit the accusations for strategic advantage. In fact, they are likely to play to Iran’s advantage, not America’s.
The U.S. foreign policy community profoundly misunderstands the Islamic Republic’s national security strategy. The Islamic Republic seeks to defend itself not primarily by conventional military power, in which it is deficient, but by forging ties to proxy allies around the region-actors with the ability to affect on-the-ground outcomes in key regional settings who are inclined to cooperate with Tehran.
In some cases, these actors are discrete political movements, often with paramilitary capabilities, for example, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia political parties-cum-militias in Iraq.
In other situations, Tehran sees public opinion as its chief ally. By contrasting some regimes’ cooperation with the United States and Israel with its own posture of “resistance” to American and Israeli ambitions to regional hegemony, Tehran cultivates “soft power” across the Middle East.
Iran conceives its strategy, especially in a period of relative decline in America’s standing, as one that constrains unfriendly regimes in the short term and undermines them in the longer term. Over the last decade, it has helped the Islamic Republic reap significant political and strategic gains in important theaters across the Middle East-Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories.
With the advent of the Arab awakening at the end of last year, Iranian decision-makers are confident that some Arab states’ shift toward governments more reflective of their peoples’ attitudes and concerns-and, hence, more inclined to pursue more independent foreign policies vis-à-vis the United States and Israel-will work to Iran’s advantage.
Iranian policymakers correctly calculated that virtually any successor to Saddam Hussein ‘s regime in Iraq would be a net positive for Iranian interests. Now, they calculate that a successor to the Mubarak regime in Egypt is bound to be less enthusiastic about strategic cooperation with the United States and Israel and more receptive to Iran’s message of resistance.
Iran’s strategy toward Saudi Arabia runs very much along these lines. Tehran’s approach is to highlight Saudi collusion with Washington and (at least indirectly) with Israel on important regional issues, thereby attracting support from ordinary Saudis-not just Saudi Shia but also Sunnis who dislike their government’s pro-American stance.
In the short term, Iran seeks to constrain the Saudi government from cooperating in military strikes or other coercive actions against it by making this an unpopular prospect for much of the Saudi population.
In the longer term, Iran is working to transform the regional balance of power from one in which the United States, the Saudis, and other American allies dominate to one in which American, Israeli, and Saudi influence is marginalized by the diplomatic realignment of Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Turkey, post-Saddam Iraq, and now Egypt.
The Saudi leadership tries to push back by portraying Iran as an “alien”, Shia/Persian element in its environment. At times, this helps the Kingdom hold the line against the Islamic Republic’s soft power offensive. But the long-term trend is toward rising Iranian influence. In this context, the notion of an Iranian government plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States simply has no logic.
History also suggests we treat the Obama Administration’s claims of Iranian government complicity with deep skepticism.
For eight years, during 1980-1988, the fledgling Islamic Republic had to defend itself against a war of aggression launched by Saddam Hussein — a war of aggression financed primarily by Saudi Arabia. Nearly 300,000 Iranians were killed in that war. But, during the entire conflict, the Iranian government never targeted a single Saudi anywhere in the world.
This is not because the Islamic Republic loves the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is because Iran’s national security strategy ultimately depends on appealing to the Saudi public not to support attacks against Iran, by harnessing popular anger over Israeli actions and U.S. overreach in the war on terror.
Killing a Saudi Ambassador would have exactly the opposite effect. Whatever Mansour Ababsiar and his cousin may have talked about, it is wholly implausible that the Iranian leadership decided that this was a smart thing to do.
The Obama Administration’s calls for more concerted action against Iran will ultimately backfire-because they will be seen in most of the Muslim world (outside Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab monarchies closely linked to Saudi Arabia) as the United States yet again leveling dubious life-and-death charges as the pretext to contain or even eliminate another Muslim power.
President Obama, his advisers, and all Americans need to ask themselves if this is really the time to bring the United States even closer to another Middle East war fought in blind defiance of the region’s strategic realities.
A Spanish schoolgirl has been expelled from school during an exam after refusing to remove her Islamic headdress or hijab, school officials said.
“They told me to remove it… they humiliated me in front of my peers,” she told El Mundo newspaper.
The 14-year-old girl, who lives in Madrid, decided to wear hijab this summer.
Her parents became outraged by the expulsion and described it an “abuse,” reporting the case to judiciary officials.
This comes while there are no clear guidelines prohibiting the wearing of headscarves in state schools in Spain.
Muslims currently account for just over one million of Spain’s 46-million population.
Muslims in Spain have been witnessing a growing trend of Islamophobia as e hostility towards the expressions of Islamic symbols and practices grows in the European state.
The discriminatory policies on the rise in Spain clearly breach the country’s Law of Religious Freedom, as well as the International Human Rights law.
Original post: Spanish girl thrown out of exam for wearing headscarf
There is a troubling track record on the Right-Wing of nominating hatemongerers, bigots and now potential associates to war crimes to key positions in their cabinets. Is it willful ignorance, stupidity, or purposeful?
We reported last on Walid Phares when Rep. Peter King announced he was going to call Phares to testify at his “Muslim American radicalization hearings.” King eventually walked back that announcement due to pressure. For God sake, Walid Phares joined an organization whose slogan was, “Kill a Palestinian and you Shall Enter Paradise.”
After a prominent Baptist minister proclaimed last week that Mormonism is a non-Christian “cult” that would ideally disqualify adherents from the White House, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney enjoyed a full-throated defense from people all over the political spectrum who considered the pastor’s remarks an ugly example of religious bigotry. But Romney, a practicing Mormon, may soon find himself facing allegations of intolerance from another religious minority: American Muslims.
The Daily Beast has learned that the nation’s leading Muslim advocacy group sent a letter to the Romney campaign late Tuesday calling for the ouster of the candidate’s recently appointed foreign-policy adviser, Walid Phares. In the letter, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) refers to Phares as “an associate to war crimes” and a “conspiracy theorist,” citing ties to a violent anti-Muslim militia. Scholars and leaders throughout the Islamic community are adding pressure on Romney to drop the adviser immediately. (The Romney campaign and Phares did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
The controversy comes at an awkward time for the campaign. Hours before CAIR’s letter was sent, Romney called on primary rival Perry to “repudiate” the anti-Mormon remarks made by the Rev. Robert Jeffress, who has endorsed the Texas governor, and touted the importance of tolerant discourse. “I just don’t believe that kind of divisiveness based on religion has a place in this country,” Romney said at a New Hampshire press conference.
Yet Phares is a divisive figure in the minds of some leading U.S. Muslims. To admirers, Phares is a well-regarded scholar who has testified before the Defense and State departments, and has worked as a terrorism expert for professional news outlets such as NBC and, most recently, Fox News.
But to critics, Phares has long been a lightning rod for charges of Islamophobia and outright aggression toward Muslims. According to CAIR, Phares, who was born in Lebanon, worked as an official in the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia that reportedly took part in “the 1982 massacre of civilian men, women, and children at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.” In 1984, another Lebanese militia with which Phares was allegedly associated rounded up a group of men for questioning and then slaughtered them with guns and grenades, according to a news report. (There is no indication that Phares was directly involved in the violence; his roles in the organizations are reported to have been administrative.)
When he emigrated to the United States in the 1990s, Phares positioned himself as an expert on Islam and Middle East relations, allying himself with conservative think tanks and appearing frequently on television. Throughout his career as a pundit, he has warned that some Muslims are plotting a secret takeover of American institutions with the end goal of imposing Sharia.
This history of inflammatory rhetoric has drawn scorn from many corners of the American Muslim community, and CAIR’s concerns were echoed by a chorus of Islamic scholars reached by The Daily Beast.
“[Phares] is hostile to Muslims and Romney has adopted an expert who is going to alienate him from a good section of the voting public,” said Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke professor of Islamic studies.
“Frankly, it is a pathetic reflection on Governor Romney to have surrounded himself with such a person for advice on the Middle East and Islam,” said Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. “It would be akin to turning to [former KKK member] David Duke to get advice on race relations.”
Correy Saylor, legislative director for CAIR, is willing to give Romney the benefit of the doubt and assume he was largely unaware of Phares’s past. Saylor credits Romney with showing an increased sensitivity to Islam over the years.
During his 2008 presidential candidacy, Romney reportedly told supporters in a private meeting that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. But he later walked back that comment, and in this election cycle he has occasionally found himself defending Islam against his opponents’ intolerance. Saylor cited an early primary debate during which Herman Cain hypothesized that appointing a Muslim to his cabinet could open the door to the implementation of Sharia in the U.S. Romney dismissed the paranoid theory, insisting that “people of all faiths are welcome in this country.”
“He’s getting better,” Saylor concluded. “But this appointment is a step in the wrong direction.”
Ibtihaj Muhammad is the first practicing Muslim to represent the U.S. in women's fencing. She's ranked second in the U.S. and 11th in the world. Ibtihaj stands out because she wears her hijab headscarf that is worn by Muslim women.
Ibtihaj Muhammad jogs lightly across the second floor gym at the Manhattan Fencing Center in New York. She’s warming up, eager to get some work in.
Ready! Fence!
Fencers are already on the strip, a narrow fighting lane, and they’re going at it, the air filled with little razor-like hisses and whispers. Many are Olympic hopefuls, like her, preparing for the World Championships Saturday in Italy. The competition is another chance for Muhammad to earn qualifying points in her quest to make the 2012 London Olympics in July.
“I don’t think I ever wanted anything so much,” said Muhammad, 25, of Maplewood. “I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to make this Olympics.”
When it’s her turn to spar, she slips the fencing mask over her hijab, the headscarf Muslim women wear. In a room full of fencers, it’s the one thing that makes her stand out. If she makes the Olympics, she’ll stand out even more. Fencing officials believe Muhammad is likely to be the first American Muslim woman wearing a hijab to compete at the games. The United States Olympic Committee doesn’t track athletes by religion, but the demographic is something Muhammad thinks about, knowing what an accomplishment it would be since few Muslim women compete in sports.
“I didn’t have female Muslim role models to look up to in the athletic world,” she said. “It’s really important for people to know my story. I think it’s something I have to do, because I want Muslim female youth to believe they can do something like this.”
Muhammad is ranked number two in the United States and 13th in the world in women’s sabre, a fencing style in which strikes are made above the waist with any part of the weapon. Locally, she represents the Peter Westbrook Foundation in New York City, training at the Fencers Club on West 28th Street, where she is coached by Akhnaten Spencer-El, a 2000 Olympic fencer. Under him, she’s a tactical, cerebral fighter who caught the fencing world off guard in 2009.
She won the U.S. national title that year, cracking the top 16 world rankings. Last year, she won a bronze medal at the Pan American Championships and a coveted spot on the U.S. women’s national team.
“She’s still young in the game and she’s only going to get better,” Spencer-El said.
Back to the strip. She goes against a member of the U.S. men’s national team, then her teammate, Dagmara Wozniak of Avenel. You can hear the constant ping of saber blades colliding. Everyone has cat-like footwork that is lickety-split quick, calculating and aggressive. They duel back and forth trying to outsmart each other, snapping their weapons at the wrist to score. The long electrical wires attached to the edge of their fencing jackets register hits. All of them look like puppets dancing on a string, lunging toward each other and their their shot at gold.
Ibtihaj Muhammad, left, and Damara Wozniak, of Avenel, face off during practice match in New York.
Getting to Italy isn’t easy. Each country is allowed two spots for women’s sabre and Muhammad and her teammates are the top four fencers in the U.S. The best of them is two-time Olympian Mariel Zagunis of Oregon, and she’s number one in the world.
Muhammad is unfazed. She trains daily, except for Sunday, running in the morning before conditioning at a women’s gym. In the evening, she’s in New York City fencing for four hours.
“I just keep going,” she said. “I don’t want to get to a competition and lose a bout, because I didn’t work out that extra hour.”
You can see she’s super-competitive, hating to lose, constantly critiquing herself. She’s all business for this once in lifetime shot, but Muhammad does pause for what’s important.
The third of five siblings in an athletic family, Muhammad finds strength in her faith. In August, she stayed focused through Ramadan, the annual Islamic month of fasting during the day. But Muhammad wants no sympathy, saying her sacrifices are not unlike anybody else’s. She kept hyrdrated, waking up every 90 minutes at night to eat and drink. If she makes the team, Muhammad will be used to the regimen since Ramadan next year falls during the Olympic competition.
It doesn’t matter at this point. Muhammad has come a long way in a career that started when she was a high school freshman. She stumbled on the sport driving past Columbia High School with her mother, who could see the team practicing through the large cafeteria windows. Inayah Muhammad didn’t know what they were doing but thought her daughter should try it because the uniform would cover her body and that was suitable to Islam’s tenet of modesty for women.
“I had know idea it (fencing) would take us this far,’’ said her mom, a Newark schoolteacher. “She’s so in love with the sport. I don’t think she really understands how good she is.’’
Muhummad was an epee fencer with Columbia until her former coach, Frank Mustilli, saw she was a better fit for sabre’s combative vein. At practice one day, Mustilli said his mild mannered athlete got upset after she got hit hard and lashed out.
“She showed me a little bit of fire. She screamed and attacked,’’ said Mustilli, head of the New Jersey Fencing Alliance.
At Columbia, Muhammad also played softball and volleyball but was captain of two state championship fencing teams before going to Duke University. She became a three-time NCAA All-American, earning dual degrees in International Relations and African-American studies with a minor in Arabic.
Ibtihaj Muhammad is seen during a September practice in New York.
After graduation in 2007, her father, Shamsiddin Muhammad, said his daughter’s passion for fencing did not wane. The family supports her financially and she chipped in what she could last year as a substitute teacher at Shabazz High School in Newark and fencing coach at Columbia.
“I know this is her dream and inspiration,’’ said her dad, a retired Newark cop. “We believe that what is written is going to happen.’’
That belief helps her deal with distractions on this journey. At times she’s wondered if her race or religion played a role in a judge scoring unfairly. When traveling, she has been treated as a foreigner who can’t speak English, and worse, she feels the stares that say terrorist.
In Belgium this year, security officials told her to leave the airport unless she removed her hijab. Muhammad would not. Her mother interceded and there was a compromise to have her head patted down. Muhammad said it’s frustrating making others comfortable, but she’s not going to let “closeted views” derail her purpose.
“If God wants me to succeed, no one can take it from me,’’ she said. “That’s the way I approach it and I think that’s what keeps me sane and grounded in this sport.’’
The article below is from 2009, but it goes well with Danios’ series on how “Jewish Law” can be interpreted by some in a bellicose and genocidal manner. Can one imagine if the below were said by a mainstream Muslim scholar? All hell would break loose. (hat tip: DE)
Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.
But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.
“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature.
Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.”
“I don’t believe in Western morality,” he wrote. “Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”
Friedman’s use of phrasing that might seem more familiar coming from an Islamic extremist has generated a swift backlash. The editor of Moment, Nadine Epstein, said that since the piece was printed in the current issue they “have received many letters and e-mails in response to Rabbi Friedman’s comments — and almost none of them have been positive.”
Friedman quickly went into damage control. He released a statement to the Forward, through a Chabad spokesman, saying that his answer in Moment was “misleading” and that he does believe that “any neighbor of the Jewish people should be treated, as the Torah commands us, with respect and compassion.”
But Friedman’s words have generated a debate about whether there is a darker side to the cheery face that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement shows to the world in its friendly outreach to unaffiliated Jews. Mordecai Specktor, editor of the Jewish community newspaper in Friedman’s hometown, St. Paul. Minn., said: “The public face of Lubavitch is educational programs and promoting Yiddishkeit. But I do often hear this hard line that Friedman expresses here.”
“He sets things out in pretty stark terms, but I think this is what Lubavitchers believe, more or less,” said Specktor, who is also the publisher of the American Jewish World. “They are not about loving the Arabs or a two-state solution or any of that stuff. They are fundamentalists. They are our fundamentalists.” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a regular critic of Arab extremists, said that in the Jewish community, “We are not immune to having these views. There are people in our community who have these bigoted, racist views.”
But, Foxman warned, Friedman’s views are not reflective of the Chabad rabbis he knows. “I am not shocked that there would be a rabbi who would have these views,” Foxman said, “but I am shocked that Moment would give up all editorial discretion and good sense to publish this as representative of Chabad.”
A few days after anger about the comment surfaced, Chabad headquarters released a statement saying that, “we vehemently disagree with any sentiment suggesting that Judaism allows for the wanton destruction of civilian life, even when at war.”
The statement added: “In keeping with Jewish law, it is the unequivocal position of Chabad-Lubavitch that all human life is G-d given, precious, and must be treated with respect, dignity and compassion.”
In Moment, Friedman’s comment is listed as the Chabad response to the question “How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” after a number of answers from rabbis representing other Jewish streams, most of which state a conciliatory attitude toward Arabs.
Epstein said that Friedman was “brave” for stating his views so clearly.
“The American Jewish community doesn’t have the chance to hear opinions like this,” Epstein said, “not because they are rare, but because we don’t often ask Chabad and other similar groups what they think.”
The Chabad movement is generally known for its hawkish policies toward the Palestinians; the Chabad Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, rejected peace accords with the Palestinians. Rabbi Moshe Feller, the top Chabad rabbi in Minnesota, said that the rebbe taught that it is not a mitvah to kill, but that Jews do have an obligation to act in self-defense.
“Jews as a whole, they try to save the lives of others,” Feller told the Forward, “but if it’s to save our lives, then we have to do what we have to do. It’s a last resort.”
Friedman is not a fringe rabbi within the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. He was the English translator for the Chabad Rebbe, and at the rebbe’s urging, he founded Beis Chana, a network of camps and schools for Jewish women. Friedman is also a popular speaker and writer on issues of love and relationships. His first book, “Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore?” was promoted with a quote from Bob Dylan, who Friedman brought to meet the rebbe.
On his blog and Facebook page, Friedman’s emphasis is on his sympathetic, caring side. It was this reputation that made the comment in Moment so surprising to Steve Hunegs, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council: Minnesota and the Dakotas.
“Rabbi Friedman is a best-selling author who addresses some of the most sensitive issues of the time,” Hunegs said. “I intend to call him and talk to him about this.”
But Shmarya Rosenberg, a blogger and critic of Chabad who lives a few blocks from Friedman in Minnesota, says that the comment in Moment is not an aberration from his experiences with Friedman and many other Chabad rabbis.
“What he’s saying is the standard normal view of a Chabadnik,” Rosenberg said. “They just don’t say it in public.”
For his part, Friedman was quick to modify the statement that he wrote in Moment. He told the Forward that the line about killing women and children should have been in quotes; he said it is a line from the Torah, though he declined to specify from which part. Friedman also said that he was not advocating for Israel to actually kill women and children. Instead, he said, he believed that Israel should publicly say that it is willing to do these things in order to scare Palestinians and prevent war.
“If we took this policy, no one would be killed — because there would be no war,” Friedman said. “The same is true of the United States.”
Friedman did acknowledge, however, that in self-defense, the behavior he talked about would be permissible.
“If your children are threatened, you do whatever it takes — and you don’t have to apologize,” he said.
Friedman argued that he is different from Arab terrorists who have used similar language about killing Jewish civilians.
“When they say it, it’s genocide, not self-defense,” Friedman said. “With them, it’s a religious belief — they need to rid the area of us. We’re not saying that.”
Feller, the Chabad leader in Minnesota, said that the way Friedman had chosen to express himself was “radical.”
“I love him,” Feller said. “I brought him out here — he’s magnificent. He’s brought thousands back to Torah mitzvah. But he shoots from the hip sometimes.”
On ABC’s This Week, host Christiane Amanpour confronted Herman Cain about a comment he made to ThinkProgress. “There’s this creeping attempt…to gradually ease Sharia Law and the Muslim faith into our government,” Cain told us in March.
After showing Cain his quote, Amanpour asked him to respond to Chris Christie, who has said, “This Sharia law business is crap, it’s just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” Cain responded:
CAIN: Call me crazy. … Some people would infuse Sharia Law in our courts system if we allow it. I honestly believe that. So even if he calls me crazy, I am going to make sure that they don’t infuse it little by little by little. … American laws in American courts, period.
AMANPOUR: American laws are in American courts. So the people of this country should be safe for the moment.
In July, Cain met with a small group of Muslims and said he was “truly sorry for any commentsthat may have betrayed my commitment to the U.S. Constitution and the freedom of religion guaranteed by it.” It’s therefore disappointing that Cain is still clinging to his anti-Sharia rhetoric.
The “creeping Sharia” threat, as CAP explained in our report “Fear, Inc.,” is the product of a hate campaign organized by a small number of Islamophobic actors who are trying to cast suspicion on the presence of all Muslims in America. In fact, Cain’s language of “American laws in American courts” is lifted directly from a right-wing lawyer named David Yerushalmi, who has been leading an effort to pass anti-Sharia measures in roughly two dozen states.
As the ACLU has explained in a thorough legal analysis, the “creeping Sharia” rhetoric is a mythical menace and a fabricated threat:
There is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts. On the contrary, the court cases cited by anti-Muslim groups as purportedly illustrative of this problem actually show the opposite: Courts treat lawsuits that are brought by Muslims or that address the Islamic faith in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths or that involve no religion at all. These cases also show that sufficient protections already exist in our legal system to ensure that courts do not become impermissibly entangled with religion or improperly consider, defer to, or apply religious law where it would violate basic principles of U.S. or state public policy.
A Center for American Progress report on Sharia explained, “It’s important to understand that adopting” the creeping Sharia rhetoric “would direct limited resources away from actual threats to the United States and bolster an anti-Muslim narrative that Islamist extremist groups find useful in recruiting.”
Recall, in 2010, Oklahoma passed a “Save our State” ballot initiative that banned Sharia in its state courts. That amendment was halted from taking effect by a federal district court. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange argued: “It would be incomprehensible if…Oklahoma could condemn the religion of its Muslim citizens, yet one of those citizens could not defend himself in court against his government’s preferment of other religious views.” The 10th Circuit court is now hearing the case.
Timoth Sylvia, pastor of HOPE United Church of Christ in Naperville, first noticed the signs saying “Vote No to Mosque on 248″ early this week.
The signs relate to the possible annexation into Naperville of a 14-acre property on 248th Avenue just south of 95th Street. The land is currently owned by the United Church of Christ’s national organization. However, the Islamic Center of Naperville is working to purchase the land and get it annexed into the city. The site includes a four-bedroom house which United Church of Christ used for offices before moving to its new location at 1701 Quincy Ave. in Naperville this summer. The rest of the property is farmland.
The annexation was discussed on Wednesday night at the Naperville Planning and Zoning Commission meeting. The meeting may have been the spark for those who put the signs up in the area.
Sylvia said he got word Monday that signs had been put up on the property. He said one sign put in the front yard of the property said “No Ragheads on 248″. “It was just disheartening,” he said. There were also signs saying a basic “Vote No to Mosque on 248″ on utility poles up and down 248th Avenue, he said, and also along stretches of Route 59 in Naperville.
Robert Spencer, director of the hate site Jihad Watch, has been steamed by the arguments of certain individuals and groups who have protested against the killing of Anwar Awlaki, such as the ACLU, Rep. Ron Paul, and writer Glenn Greenwald.
Perhaps the ACLU, CAIR, Greenwald and Paul would have been satisfied if we had airlifted an elite corps of defense attorneys into Yemen, along with a couple of cops to read al-Awlaki his Miranda rights and give him a chance to lawyer up. Along with them, CNN could have sent all the equipment necessary to set up a satellite feed, so that al-Awlaki could have been given an international platform to spread his message of anti-Americanism, hatred and Islamic jihad.
Then everyone would have been satisfied that the rights of this stalwart American citizen had been respected, and al-Awlaki himself could have had time to ensure that his efforts to murder innocent Americans in the name of Islam would go on unimpeded if he were convicted and imprisoned for a long stretch.
What all these statements fail to take into account is that we are at war, and that this war is different from all wars that have gone before it. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen, yes. He was also a traitor.He was waging war against his native country. He was an enemy combatant. If an American citizen had gone to Germany and joined the Wehrmacht in 1942, and was killed in battle against American forces, would anyone have been raising “constitutional issues” over the killing?
Al-Awlaki was on the battlefield of this war when he was sitting at his computer exchanging e-mails with the Fort Hood jihad mass murderer, Nidal Hasan, or working out the details of the plot to blow up American cargo planes last year. Thus American forces were perfectly justified, legally and morally, to take him out in such a setting, without sending him a lawyer or reading him his rights or spending a few million dollars to give him a global forum to air his views.
As the nature of warfare has changed, so must also our response to it. Al-Awlaki was not a cat burglar assassinated by rogue cops. His killing is not a violation of anyone’s civil rights. That this question has even been raised is indicative of just how thick the fog of ignorance still remains about the nature of the conflict we’re in, who it is exactly that we’re fighting, and what precisely we should do about it.
The short answers: This is an Islamic jihad. Al-Awlaki was a jihadist, dedicated to killing Americans. He got what was coming to him.
Well then, it’s very simple, you see. President Obama, or anyone in government, can say so-and-so is a terrorist and voila! That person should be deemed an existential threat to the United States and be killed without any due process of law.
First, Spencer says that Awlaki was a traitor. He may very well have been a traitor, but we have constitutional provisions that handle this issue in Article III, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. But if it were up to Spencer then the President or someone else in government could simply declare someone a traitor and have that person’s life taken away.
I find this logic by Spencer very illustrating not because of how mainstream this type of warped thinking is in the U.S. amongst the political punditry, but because of the hypocrisy he shows when it’s a Muslim country that does the same thing.
Recently Iran declared one of its citizens, Yusef Nadarkhani, an apostate and, as Spencer’s hate site reports it, has now dropped that charge and replaced it with a charge of treason. The same charge Spencer throws at Awlaki. Iran declares one of its citizens to be a traitor without any evidence and Spencer is there to protest against this. But the United States declares one its citizens to be a terrorist without a shred of proof offered and Spencer is smiling at the prospect at the death of the accused.
Don’t expect Spencer to catch the contradiction there.
Second, Spencer said that Awlaki was waging war. How does he know that? Because the U.S. government says so.
But didn’t the Iranian government say that Yusef Nadarkhani was a traitor? Why not believe them, too? I’m sure they have secret evidence as well.
In all seriousness, the situation with Nadarkhani should make Spencer pause and think about the implications of what he is saying about Awlaki and how it can affect civil rights in America. Instead of lusting for blood, if Spencer cared at all about civil rights he would be concerned about the abuse or potential abuse that Obama’s decision to kill Awlaki could have in the future.
But evidence doesn’t matter to Spencer – except when it’s an evil Muslim country that is attempting to punish its citizens without due process. Spencer just eats up whatever proof the U.S. government gives him – even when that proof is admittedly weak.
The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.
But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.
And:
Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.
The proof the U.S. is offering is not even of the “full proof” variety. It’s “patchy” and they’re admittedly not even “positive” it was Awlaki who was allegedly giving instructions to another person to commit a terrorist operation.
But for Spencer, and other fake patriots like him, whatever accusations the government hurls at someone are holy, while any attempts to examine the accusations of the government are met by hostile resistance from such fake patriots. Spencer and the fake patriots care little about the Constitution, but are more concerned with killing people who haven’t been proven guilty of any crime.
Look at Spencer jumping out of his seat to show this “proof” to his readers that Awlaki was a criminal:
Here is more evidence that al-Awlaki was an enemy combatant — a commander in a new kind of war.
And then Spencer offers this damning evidence:
The Homeland Security/FBI bulletin, obtained by Fox News, specifically says Awlaki, an influential new-generation figure in Al Qeada, showed the suspected Christmas Day bomber how to detonate the bomb he is accused of hiding in his underwear….
See! Homeland Security said that Awlaki taught the underwear bomber how to detonate the bomb he hid in his underwear! Never mind that this “evidence” offered by Homeland Security and Spencer is simply an accusation. Also never mind that the accused underwear bomber himself, who is not even a U.S. citizen, is getting his day in court, while Awlaki – who was a U.S. citizen and had no opportunity to defend himself against the accusations made against him – had a missile fired at him from a drone that ultimately killed him.
This is how constitutional freedoms die. They die at the hands of fools who wrap themselves in the flag, while they simultaneously smash the essence of the country they claim to be fighting for because they are cowards.
My favorite Spencer, Spencer Ackerman once again has the scoop. It turns out that “FBI Intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones teaching their colleagues that the U.S. is at war with the Islamic religion,” Justice Department officials and the military were in on the game as well.
They are using the trope pushed by Islamophobes that there is a “civilizational jihad” between Islam and the West. We note Tarek Masoud’s comments at a House hearing regarding this Islamophobic talking point in our article, Sue Myrick’s Muslim Brotherhood Hearing.
A slide from a 2010 PowerPoint prepared by Justice Department intelligence analyst John Marsh
FBI intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones teaching their colleagues that the U.S. is at war with the Islamic religion. Justice Department officials — and even teachers at the Army’s top intellectual center — are delivering similar messages.
Danger Room has acquired a 2010 PowerPoint presentation compiled by an intelligence analyst working for the U.S. Attorney in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Reminiscent of FBI training materials exposed by Danger Room in September, the PowerPoint warns of a “Civilizational Jihad” stretching back from the dawn of Islam and waged today in the U.S. by “civilians, juries, lawyers, media, academia and charities” who threaten “our values.” The goal of that war: “Replacement of American Judeo-Christian and Western liberal social, political and religious foundations by Islam.”
When Danger Room questioned the Justice Department about the briefing, it issued a statement pledging to join the FBI in scrubbing its counterterrorism training for signs of material that equate average Muslims with terrorists.
“To ensure that Justice Department standards are upheld,” the statement reads, “the Department has today instructed all components and U.S. Attorney’s Offices to review all training materials and presentations provided by Justice Department personnel to ensure that any material presented is consistent with the Department’s standards, goals and instructions.”
But the Justice Department is hardly alone in hosting bigoted and counterproductive counterterrorism training. Even if federal prosecutors and FBI agents no longer go through such instruction, Danger Room has learned that anti-Islam training material has spread into the military. Some of the Islamophobic presenters hired by the FBI also lecture at premiere schools for military intelligence; at an online university favored by students seeking jobs in U.S. intelligence agencies and with affiliated contractors; and even at the Army’s intellectual center, Fort Leavenworth.
In other words, what the FBI once told Danger Room was an isolated incident — occurring one time in one lecture session — has spread throughout numerous government agencies over the years.
And in addition to being dubious as a matter of civil rights, experts say that the training places U.S. counterterrorism efforts at risk. “Boneheaded is a generous way to describe this training,” says counterterrorism analyst Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice. “I’d lean more towards hateful, paranoid and completely counterproductive.”
Another slide from a 2010 PowerPoint prepared by Justice Department intelligence analyst John Marsh
The presentation in question is the work of John Marsh, a self-described “intelligence specialist” working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Titled “21st Century Terrorism: History, Perspective, Development” and dated May 19, 2010, it was apparently delivered to a Defense Department hazardous-materials conference.
Marsh’s presentation, which claims to be “one analyst’s view” and not that of the U.S. government, paints a harsh view of Islam. “Internal Islamic Failures/Collapse,” it advises, “Did NOT Start on 9/11,” but instead date back “~1400 years” — that is, to the birth of Islam itself and the death of the Prophet Muhammad. (Other slides take a meandering tour through world history, and specifically the very pre-Islamic Roman Empire.) “2 Inescapable facts” about contemporary terrorists, Marsh presented, are “1. All Say they are Muslims. 2. All believe they are acting as followers of the true Islam.” Oddly, Marsh doesn’t mention the 2009 shooting spree at the U.S. Holocaust Museum or the 2010 attack on an Austin, Texas IRS office; both strikes were clearly acts of terror, but neither perpetrator was Muslim.
Still, Marsh provides “disclaimers” that Muslims “can separate politics [from] religion.” He acknowledges distinctions between Shiites and Sunnis, and between average “Muslims” and hardcore “Islamists.” Some slides list “positive contributions” from Muslims, particularly in the fields of medicine, art and architecture. “Many Muslims do desire peace,” Marsh allows.
But several of Marsh’s other slides blur those distinctions. They describe Islam as operating along a “broad Muslim belief spectrum,” spanning from average “Muslim” to “Jihadi supporters/terrorists.” (The “Two ‘Faces’ of Islam,” in Marsh’s telling.) The briefing contends, “No Major Muslim group has ever renounced the doctrines of jihad of the sword.” Underscoring his point, a picture of the burning Twin Towers is paired with two minarets. Over them reads a quote: “The West never remembers and the East never forgets.”
Those aren’t the only quotes Marsh uncritically presents. A famous line borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s influential book The Clash of Civilizations — also the title of one of Marsh’s briefing slides — reads, “Islam is CONVINCED of the superiority of its CULTURE; and OBSESSED with the inferiority of its POWER.” Marsh also presents a quote from the son of the founder of Hamas, a convert to Christianity: “What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God.” And bookending his presentation is a quote from Princeton’s Bernard Lewis that seems to anticipate the objections to Marsh’s own briefing: “Self censorship and political correctness will destroy our ability to discuss issues critical to our survival.”
If that sounds reminiscent of William Gawthrop, the FBI intelligence analyst who compared Islam to the Death Star, it may not be an accident. One of Marsh’s slides cites a briefing of Gawthrop’s, titled “The Sources and Patterns of Terrorism in Islamic Law,” which presents straight-line arrows leading from “Islam” to “Hostile Islamic Groups,” “Hostile or Facilitating Islamic Nations” and ultimately an “Insurgency Environment.” The countries Gawthrop lists as afflicted by Islamic insurgencies include Iraq — but also the Netherlands, England, France and even the United States.
“Ironically, this briefing could have been delivered by Osama bin Laden himself,” says Brachman. “The fact that it’s getting airtime is a disaster for our government and the American Muslim community alike.”
Marsh refused to speak to Danger Room about his presentation. Both he and his boss, U.S. Attorney Peter J. Smith, referred Danger Room to the Justice Department for comment. The Justice Department promptly disavowed Marsh’s briefing — and pledged to join the FBI in reforming its counterterrorism curriculum.
“The presentation in question does not reflect the views of the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania or the FBI. The presentation represented ‘one analyst’s view,’ as stated in the slides, and the opinions expressed were only those of the presenter,” reads a statement prepared for Danger Room.
Nevertheless, the Department statement continues:
To ensure that Justice Department standards are upheld, the Department has today instructed all components and U.S. Attorney’s Offices to review all training materials and presentations provided by Justice Department personnel to ensure that any material presented is consistent with the Department’s standards, goals and instructions. This is particularly important with regard to training related to terrorism, countering violent extremism and other training that may relate to ongoing community outreach efforts.
Marsh, it turns out, does a fair amount of speaking on the perceived Islamic threat. In March 2011, he spoke to a Harrisburg community college’s homeland security conference on the subject of “Stealth Jihad: A Long-Term Threat to America?” (.pdf) Back in 2008, Marsh was invited to speak at the annual convention of the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s R&D agency. The subject of his panel? (.pdf) “Hotbeds of Radicalization in Contemporary American Society.”
But the Justice Department is hardly the only government agency playing host to briefings that take a skeptical view of Islam. At least 10 times since 2007, Stephen Coughlin, a former consultant on Islamic law for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has lectured at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Army’s intellectual nerve center.
Coughlin has given presentations before conservative audiences that claimed Muslim nations have a “ten year plan” to make criticism of Islam illegal under international law. He has criticized ex-President George W. Bush’s assurances that the U.S. is not at war with Islam for having a “chilling effect” on intelligence analysis. Now a visiting fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, Coughlin gave a January talk to the FBI’s D.C. field office allegedly claiming Islamic law was incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.
“I brief the FBI, brief the Department of Defense,” Coughlin told Danger Room during a short telephone conversation.
Danger Room has confirmed that Coughlin regularly lectures before a class at the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The course is known as FA30, an “Information Operations” course, which instructs mid-career Army officers how to get the military’s message out.
When Danger Room initially called the course’s supervisor, an Army civilian named John Warner, to ask about Coughlin’s lectures, Warner abruptly ended the conversation, saying, “There’s really not a need for you guys to know this.”
Coughlin would not discuss the content of his briefings: “There’s a degree of confidentiality. If they want to talk, that’s their decision.” Before ending the conversation, he added, “I think you’re doing a hit and run and it’s pretty sleazy.”
Later, Army Col. Mike Dominique, who is in charge of training Army information operations officers at the Combined Arms Center, decided he did want to talk about Coughlin’s briefings. Dominique elaborates that his own “focus is the extremist groups” — the ones that the majors who take the FA30 course have to confront. And that is why Coughlin will continue to be invited to lecture at Leavenworth. “What Mr. Coughlin brings is a certain level of expertise on these extremist groups. He brings a perspective to the audience,” Dominique says.
But Coughlin also discussed Islam itself in the Leavenworth class. “Does he draw parallels between religion and the extremist groups? That can be seen. He uses that as an example,” Dominique says. “His only area of expertise is Islamic law. I can tell you this — and I’d like to really focus on this — my teaching point is not on the Islamic religion. That’s something we are very careful about. Who are the folks we have to deal with? We have IO [Information Operations] officers and American soldiers who are of the Muslim faith. We don’t focus on the religion aspect, but on the extremist aspect.”
A spokesman for the Combined Arms Center, Army Lt. Col. Steve Leonard, acknowledges that “in other venues, [Coughlin] may have created a negative message.” But Leonard says that even when Coughlin discusses Islam at Fort Leavenworth, he does not cross a line into anti-Islam sentiment.
“He helps the students develop a mental model of extremist groups and the process they use to influence moderate Muslims,” Leonard tells Danger Room. “He explains how extremists use the Quran and Sharia law to build a jihadist narrative that creates significant influence within a moderate population.”
In 2007, as Stephen Coughlin began lecturing on Islam at Fort Leavenworth, William Gawthrop began delivering a similar message at the premiere school for U.S. military intelligence. The class was catalogued as NFI 533, “Intelligence and Homeland Security.” It took place at the National Defense Intelligence College, the professional education institution run by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
According to a 2007 email Gawthrop sent to colleagues, obtained by Danger Room, Gawthrop saw his pedagogic activities as part of a self-initiated effort to build a “knowledge bank” of analysts “whose interests include Islamic Law and its impacts on Homeland Security.” The “informal” group would study Islamic Law’s influence on such issues as “immigration, birth rates and demographics,” “aggressive civil suits,” “Sharia Economics,” “Academia, Information Operations, and Parallel Structures.”
A spokeswoman for the DIA, Susan Strednansky, confirms to Danger Room that Gawthrop taught the 2007 course. The previous fall, he also taught a course called “Intelligence and National Security Policy Structure and Process.” Strednansky did not explain why Gawthrop’s lecturing ended.
That was not the only venue Gawthrop had to instruct U.S. intelligence analysts.
Gawthrop remains on the faculty of American Military University, an online higher-learning institution that caters primarily to military veterans and students interested in entering the security field. Gawthrop teaches classes on intelligence.
AMU is an 20-year old university — first a correspondence school, later exclusively online — that offers a variety of bachelor’s and master’s programs to its 97,000 students. About two-thirds of its students are active-duty troops or reservists. And it’s attractive to them because AMU accepts academic course credits that troops can earn in on-base education centers, so they don’t have to start their education from scratch when they finish their service. Most military and intelligence contractors require a college degree for their highest-paying jobs — and accordingly, many of AMU’s alumni are in “public safety or first-responder careers,” says AMU spokesman Brian Muys.
Gawthrop has taught at AMU since August 2007, to a “variety” of courses, each averaging about 14 students per class. “As a matter of university policy, his personal views expressed in any public forums — like those of all our other faculty — do not necessarily represent those of AMU itself,” says Muys. “Similarly, his appearance at public forums outside of our classroom environment does not otherwise imply any AMU endorsement of, or involvement in, such events.”
But American Military University recommended Gawthrop as a lecturer on Islam to the New York chapter of Infragard, a partnership organization between the FBI and the private sector, according to chapter president Joseph Concannon. On June 8, 2011, Gawthrop lectured to the group, instructing that al-Qaida was “irrelevant” compared to the threat of Islam itself. (Muys said he was unable to comment on the matter.)
The FBI explains that several of its employees have second jobs. It refused to comment on Gawthrop specifically. And as it has since the beginning of Danger Room’s expose, the FBI refused to make him available for an interview or explain why it continues to employ him.
The FBI’s parent agency, the Department of Justice, may not be taking any action to fire Gawthrop or Marsh. But in announcing its new vetting for anti-Islamophobic material in its training session, it emphasized that it views American Muslims as partners, rather than targets of the mass suspicion portrayed in the briefings.
“The Justice Department is fundamentally committed to upholding the civil rights of all Americans and is responsible for bringing to justice those who violate civil liberties,” the statement issued to Danger Room reads. “The Department’s commitment to protecting the rights of the Muslim and Arab-American communities has never been stronger, and its outreach to these communities continues daily around the country. Members of the Muslim community are indispensable partners in a shared effort to combat national security threats.”
The FBI and the Justice Department both are now reviewing their counterterrorism training for anti-Islam messages. Will the U.S. military follow suit?
Images: Justice Department intelligence analyst John Marsh’s 2010 briefing on “21st Century Terrorism.” Photo: Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Reuters has an article marking the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street which draws parallels with the threat from the far right today.
The article closes with a quote from EDL leader Stephen Lennon: “There will be an anti-Islamist political party forming this year. Britain’s primed for it.”
This confirms the Gates of Vienna report of discussions at the London “counterjihad” conference in September.
Hatred is a current ‘cool’ fad—but a terribly dangerous one.
Four days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, three innocent men, (Sikh, Muslim and Egyptian Christian) were murdered. The killer of the Sikh victim vowed to “kill the ragheads,” shooting the first person he saw wearing a turban.
A Hindu man was murdered October 4, 2001, and we just marked the 10th anniversary of the day an extraordinary young Muslim, Rais Bhuiyan, was blinded in one eye and left for dead.
Even now, most articles mentioning Muslims continue to elicit strings of comments, many of which genocidally proclaim, “Kill them all.” The anti-Muslim cloud permeates our atmosphere; coloring perceptions, inciting bullying, assaults and policies.
Bhuiyan worked arduously, though unsuccessfully, to prevent the execution of his would-be killer, Mark Stroman, a swaggering self-avowed “red-neck patriot.” At his trial, Stroman raised his middle finger at the two grieving widows, whose husbands he had slain.
But Bhuiyan’s compassion, transformed the murderer. “At that time here in America everybody was saying ‘let’s get them’—we didn’t know who to get, we were just stereotyping,” Stroman told a reporter. “I stereotyped all Muslims as terrorists and that was wrong.” Moments before being executed, Stroman said. “Hate is going on in this world, and it has to stop. Hate causes a lifetime of pain.”
I wish Stroman were alive to preach his epiphany to those who are writing, yelling, garnering votes and cashing in on the ongoing smear campaign against all Muslims. Like Stroman, their commentary targets without care for the true nature of those they would harm, or inspire others to harm. Their victims are considered guilty by virtue of being born Muslim.
Last month, I was the only Jewish speaker at a predominantly Muslim conference (United for Change). Every speaker condemned 9/11 and all attacks on innocents. Each acknowledged atrocities by some who have falsely usurped Islam and distanced themselves from those criminals. This is something that Christians and Jews do not seem to need to do when members of their faith commit crimes.
At the closing, we read the Charter for Compassion . The other woman on the podium was wearing a headscarf. Some clerics were wearing long robes and the dome-shaped turbans routinely caricatured in anti-Muslim cartoons. The image was made for Islamophobes, who rail against all things Muslim.
Yet the woman looked like Mother Theresa or Mary, and the clerics were dressed no more strangely than the Pope.
A young woman at the conference told me that if one were devout, it would seem as if there was an air-conditioner under one’s scarf on hot days. I think the same magic device must be under Sikhs’ turbans, the anachronistic black coats and fur-trimmed hats of orthodox Jewish men and orthodox Jewish women’s wigs and the Pope’s mitre. Maybe the Dalai Lama has a magic heater under his saffron cotton for cold climates, and clothing challenges, including looking “different,” are something around which this unlikely group could form an alliance.
We have to be allies for one another. I received the Spirit of Anne Frank Award; for my programs and work as an ally, post 9/11–my story is at “Where the Anti-Muslim Path Leads” and (My) Life, Etc. (Post 9/11). I credit the non-Jewish friends who hid and supported Anne’s family for inspiring me to espouse the necessity of crossing gulfs on behalf of people of other religions, ethnicities, etc. I know Rais and the families of the hate-crime victims would be my ally if the tables were turned.
If those who are invested in smearing Muslims took a break from yelling and judiciously listened, I believe they would no longer be knee-jerk anti-Muslim. Islamophobes, however, deny Islamophobia while they foment it. And they seem untroubled by violence, unless it is perpetrated by Muslims.
Those whom the perpetrator of the Norway massacre credited for inspiring his vicious attacks dismissed any influence, casting aspersions instead on the victims, smearing them as Muslims and “multi-culturalists”. (A site that tracks anti-Muslim attacks, daily, is www.IslamophobiaToday.com ).
As with Holocaust deniers, evidence does not deter those who smear all Muslims. But just because many people scream something does not make it true. Similar smear campaigns by intellectuals, social and political leaders targeted Native Americans, African Americans, Jews and Japanese Americans. These cases wrought untold destruction, until they were revealed as false and horrifying in the extreme. In the wake of racism, murder and genocide, profound lessons have often been realized, but too late to reverse the irreversible.
Though I continue to hold hope, logic seems lost to Islamophobes. Since Muslims are roughly 1/5 of the world’s population, they would be wrecking massive havoc, worldwide, if their nefarious goal was domination and destruction of all non-Muslims. It clearly isn’t.
At the conference, I heard absolutely no evidence of hatred directed at anyone. Yet, Muslims are chronically impugned as haters, and, therefore, worthy of hate, according to Islamophobes.
The Charter for Compassion reminds us what makes the most sense in this crazy world: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. I cannot top the Golden Rule, but I would also ask this question:
If hate is the problem–as it was on 9/11–how can hate be the solution?
Anya Cordell is recipient of the Spirit of Anne Frank Award, for her work against the designation of any group as “Other.” She is the author of RACE: An OPEN & SHUT Case, and presents programs against “appearance-ism” (appearance-based judging of ourselves and others), xenophobia, stereotyping, teasing, bullying, racism and all forms of bias. Following 9/11 Anya reached out to strangers and founded The Campaign for Collateral Compassion to raise awareness of the backlash against Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others. See http://www.Appearance-ism.com
Islamophobia is “more widespread in Western Europe than any social prejudice since the anti-Semitism of the 1930s”, says a leading expert on the Far Right in Europe.
According to Professor Cas Mudde, a Dutch academic at DePauw University and the younger brother of prominent right-wing activist Tim Mudde, Islamophobic views have largely replaced racist ones on the Far Right. But anti-Muslim rhetoric is not just limited to the extreme fringe, says Professor Mudde; Mainstream European commentators and politicians also frequently denounce Muslim practices.
“The problem is that the vast majority of Muslims in Europe are born and raised there. By excluding them discursively, but also increasingly in government policies, such as putting limitations on building mosques, which you don’t have on churches and synagogues, or by banning the burqa, you marginalise and exclude a large part of the population which is growing.”
Mudde argues that Islamophobic ideas have become acceptable because a near majority of European citizens now consider Muslims to be alien to Western culture:
“Democratic societies are based on loyalty and solidarity. If Muslims are excluded and isolated, why should they feel solidarity with other populations? It’s important because there are increasingly cities in Europe with Muslim majorities.”
In addition, the demonization of the Islamic faith in popular culture has also led to a rise in Islamophobic hate crimes. Strong evidence of this came in a 2009 study of anti-Muslim prejudice by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency.They questioned 23,500 people from ethnic minority groups in all 27 EU Member States about their experience of prejudice.
The report found an extremely high level of intolerance: One in three Muslim respondents had been discriminated against in the previous 12 months, and 11 percent had experienced a racist, or anti-Islamic, crime.
Despite the high figures, most discrimination against Muslims goes unrecorded. Some 79 percent of Muslim respondents in the study had not reported their experiences; with 59 percent believing that “nothing would happen, or change by reporting it”, while 38 percent said that “it happens all the time”, and “cannot be stopped”.
Dr Robert Lambert, the co-director of the UK’s European Muslim Research Centre, has researched hate crimes against Muslims in the Tower Hamlets area of London.
“I was a policeman in the area in the 1980s and 1990s, when the large Bangladeshi community was terrorised by Far Right groups like the National Front and Combat 18. It was a largely poor, new immigrant community and very intimidated. Violence and racism became regular and routine,” he said. “Then, eventually the threat receded because the local community stood up against it robustly.”
However, Lambert’s recent interviews with Muslims in Tower Hamlets now indicate that hate crimes have returned.
“Some of the victims from the 80s and 90s thought it was all over, but they say they are victims a second time over. First, it was their ethnic identity and now they are targeted for their Muslim identity.”
The website Islamophobia Watch also lists thousands of acts of violence and prejudice, many of them carried out by members of the English Defence League (EDL) – an anti-Muslim street protest group formed in 2009. Last week, for example, EDL thugs in east London were jailed for smashing their way into a mosque in Redbridge and attacking the imam. The attack took place near Dagenham, where the EDL has staged anti-Muslim demonstrations outside another proposed mosque.
The EDL has also been trying to spread its malign influence overseas. An investigation by the left-leaning British newspaper The Observer established that the movement’s leaders have regular contact with anti-jihad groups in the Tea Party organisation, and invited Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a Tea Party activist, to speak about Sharia law and funding, in London.
The EDL has also elicited support from the notorious Pamela Geller, who was influential in the protests against plans to build an Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero. Geller, darling of the Tea Party’s growing anti-Islamic wing, advocates an alliance with the EDL.
She said on her blog: “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west.”
A mosque in northern Israel has been set on fire by suspected Jewish extremists in the latest of a series of incidents known as “price tag” attacks.
The interior of the mosque in the Upper Galilee was destroyed along with many holy books. It’s thought the arsonists arrived in the early hours of Monday morning.
Graffiti including the slogan “price tag” was spray-painted on walls.
ANWAR AL-AWLAKI, the Yemeni-American cleric who was killed Friday in a C.I.A.drone attack in Yemen, appears to be the first United States citizen that our government has publicly targeted for assassination.
The accusations against him were very serious, but as a citizen, he deserved a fair trial and the chance to face his accusers in a court of law. Whether he deserved any punishment for his speech was a decision that a jury should have made, not the executive branch of our government. The killing of this American citizen is not only unconstitutional, but hypocritical and counterproductive.
The assassination is unconstitutional because the Fifth Amendment specifies that no person may “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” A group of policy makers unilaterally deciding that a particular citizen needs to be targeted is, by no stretch of the imagination, due process.
The assassination is hypocritical because America routinely criticizes (and justifiably so) such extrajudicial assassinations when they occur at the hands of another government. We most certainly don’t approve the regimes of Syria or Iran eliminating those whom they deem to be traitors. In fact, Al Qaeda’s own justifications for murder stem from the notion that its members are qualified to be the judge, jury and executioner of those whom they view as enemies. America’s moral authority is undermined if we criticize in others what we do ourselves. It only reinforces the stereotype that the United States has very little concern for its own principles. Even Nazi war criminals got their day in court, at Nuremburg.
It is ironic to note that those who have actually attempted terrorist attacks on American soil and been caught were read their Miranda rights and went to trial, even though some were not United States citizens. Yet Mr. Awlaki, who has never been accused of himself directly attempting an attack, was not given this chance.
Lastly, the assassination is counterproductive because it feeds into the martyr mythology that makes Al Qaeda’s narrative so different from that of most other terrorist groups.
If our policy makers studied history, they would realize that Sayyid Qutb, a founder of radical Islam, while popular in his life, only achieved his legendary status after the Nasser regime in Egypt had him executed, in 1966. Instantly, his books became (and remain) best sellers. Killing people doesn’t make their ideas go away.
Mr. Awlaki was born in New Mexico in 1971 while his father was pursuing graduate studies. Though his parents returned to Yemen when he was seven, he later returned to the United States to pursue degrees in engineering and education. Eventually, he became an imam, or leader, of a mosque in California and later in Virginia. During these years, it is alleged that he met multiple times with at least three of the 9/11 hijackers. But for many American Muslims, he was only known for one thing: the telling of stories from the Koran. He lectured about the lives of the prophets of God, drawing from traditional Islamic sources (and sometimes even Biblical ones).
His captivating lecture style and copious quotations from classical sources made him extremely popular, especially among American Muslim youth. During these pre-9/11 years, these lectures, still available online, became some of the hottest-selling items at some Islamic conferences across America. At this stage, he was not publicly associated with any radical views. However, after 9/11, he adopted a more adversarial and anti-American tone, eventually moving back to Yemen. He was jailed for two years (and rumored to have been tortured).
It was only after his release that he publicly began supporting Al Qaeda and issuing messages calling for attacks upon the United States. It was alleged that he came into contact with or inspired a number of people to attempt terrorist activities: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused in the 2009 killings in Fort Hood, Tex.; Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, accused of trying to set off a bomb hidden in his underwear on a 2009 flight to Detroit; and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a car in Times Square last year.
Mr. Awlaki’s ideas were dangerous. His message that one cannot be a good Muslim and an American at the same time was insulting to nearly all American Muslims. His views about the permissibility of killing Americans indiscriminately were completely at odds with those of mainstream Muslim clerics around the world. He needed to be refuted. And that is why many people, myself included, were extremely vocal in doing just that.
Mr. Awlaki needed to be challenged, not assassinated. By killing him, America has once again blurred the lines between its own tactics and the tactics of its enemies. In silencing Mr. Awlaki’s voice, not only did America fail to live up to its ideals, but it gave Mr. Awlaki’s dangerous message a life and power of its own. And these two facts make the job of refuting that message now even more difficult.
When one thinks of Buddhism, images of violence and intimidation do not generally come to mind. However in Sri Lanka a group of Bhuddist monks led a crowd in the destruction of a Muslim shrine.
A Sri Lankan news website showed photographs of a crowd including monks apparently reducing a small structure to a pile of rubble.
The mob waved Buddhist flags and – in one picture – burnt a green Muslim flag. There have been no other reports of what happened.
Ten years ago the Taliban destroyed the famous Bamiyan statue, the world was rightly grieved and upset at their reckless actions. Islamophobes and others exploited the situation and imputed the Taliban’s destruction to Islam, can we now say Buddhism is responsible for the destruction of the Muslim shrine?
A group of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka led a crowd that demolished a Muslim shrine last week, the BBC has learned.
This incident took place on Saturday in Anuradhapura, an ancient Buddhist city and Unesco world heritage site.
The monk who led the group told the BBC he did it because the shrine was on land that was given to Sinhalese Buddhists 2,000 years ago.
But a prominent Muslim in the area said he was very sad and the sentiment was shared by many Sinhalese too.
A Sri Lankan news website showed photographs of a crowd including monks apparently reducing a small structure to a pile of rubble.
The mob waved Buddhist flags and – in one picture – burnt a green Muslim flag. There have been no other reports of what happened.
‘Police presence’
But the BBC has spoken to the monk, Amatha Dhamma Thero, who admits masterminding the demolition of the Muslim shrine.
He said he arranged a gathering of 100 or so monks, including some from other Asian countries, to take action because – he alleged – local Muslims were trying to convert the shrine into a mosque despite new constructions being illegal on this site with its many Buddhist temples.
He said local government officials arrived and said they would remove the shrine within three days, but the crowd said “we cannot wait” and proceeded to tear down the structure.
Some witnesses say that the police were present during the incident and did not do anything to stop the destruction of the shrine. Amatha Dhamma Thero says that the police were there to prevent communal clashes.
But the police deny they were present at all.
“This is a fabricated story. No media in Sri Lanka has reported this and we don’t have any police report. If this happened there would have been a complaint. We have not received any complaint,” outgoing police spokesman Prishantha Jayakody told BBC Sinhala.
One councillor told the BBC that mosque officials were afraid to complain about an attack that occurred while senior police officers were present.
The demolition has been denounced by a local senior Muslim and a local Sinhalese politician.
‘Government should act’
The Muslim, Abdul Razack, denied that a mosque was planned and said the demolished shrine was about 300 years old and had attracted visitors of other faiths too.
He said local Muslims and Buddhists alike were concerned at what happened but Muslims had avoided the site on Saturday, fearing sectarian disharmony.
The politician, Aruna Dissanayake, said the government should act against those who had attacked the shrine.
A minority was trying to create sectarian problems in a place where most Muslims and Sinhalese Buddhists co-existed well, he added.
Most of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese are Buddhist, and Muslims are regarded as a separate ethnic group.
In a recent newspaper column, a veteran Muslim journalist said there was a growing fear among his community that some people were running a campaign to incite the Sinhalese against them, including through Sinhalese websites and print media.
Nonie Darwish, a staple of the Right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobia network has been invited to speak by the George Mason Law School. She is scheduled to speak at the law school on October 5. [5 p.m., Room 121]. Her address, titled “The West’s Clash with Radicalism,” is sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Jewish Law Students Association. We urge all loonwatchers to contact the school and ask that she be disinvited.
Recently Nonie Darwish let loose her radical and violent rhetoric at an SIOA rally. (Bear in mind that SIOA has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the SPLC and was denied a trademark patent by the US government.)
Islam is a poison to a society. It’s divisive. It’s hateful. Look what Islam is doing on our college campuses. It’s full of anti-Semitism. It’s going to turn us against one another. It’s going to produce chaos in society. Because Islam should be feared, and should be fought, and should be conquered, and defeated, and annihilated, and it’s going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, Islam is going to be brought down. . .Because Islam is based on lies and it’s not based on the truth. I have no doubt whatsoever that Islam is going to be destroyed.
We have also dealt with Nonie Darwish’s radicalism in past articles. One of the most recent articles dealt with the fact that she was called as a witness in a New York State Senate hearing on “preparedness since 9/11″:
Like most in the anti-Muslim business, Nonie has a greatly exaggerated personal sob-story backed up by book deals and speaking engagements in all the typical “hating on Muslim” venues. She sells herself as a “human rights activist,” as do so many other virulent Muslim-bashers, though she doesn’t seem to care too much about the human rights of Muslims. This time, however, she will be using the pseudonym “Nahid Hyde,” perhaps as a not-so-clever way of avoiding government inquiry into her association with other bigots and white supremacists. Yet, even a cursory view of her ridiculous book titles should cause any serious security official to question her credibility as a fair and impartial witness.
In her estimation, Islam is a backward and authoritarian ideology that is attempting to impose on the world the norms of seventh-century Bedouin life. For Darwish, Islam is a sinister force that must be resisted and contained.
It must be difficult to pack so many stereotypes into 272 pages, but Ms. Darwish has done it, making such bold generalizations and demonstrably false claims as:
Sharia is incompatible with any state that has as a foundational principle the equality of the sexes before the law.
Egypt’s religious tradition is anchored in a moderate, tolerant view of Islam. We believe that Islamic law guarantees freedom of conscience and expression (within the bounds of common decency) and equal rights for women. And as head of Egypt’s agency of Islamic jurisprudence, I can assure you that the religious establishment is committed to the belief that government must be based on popular sovereignty.
But disclosing some enlightening and nuanced facts about contemporary Islam or the multivalent, non-monolithic view and relationship Muslims have with Islamic Law would ruin her book sales and speaking tours, wouldn’t it?
Like other Islamophobes, she is careful to make a distinction between Islam and Muslims, so as not to appear like the plain bigot she is:
Darwish is careful to distinguish between people and ideas: “The purpose of this book is not to spread hatred of a people but to tell the truth about the wickedness of Islamic Sharia law.”
Such distinctions are disingenuous, pro-forma statements that only fool the naïve into thinking she isn’t a professional hate-monger. (Right, just like how Pam Geller loves those Moozlims so much she wants to drop nuclear bombs on them, out of love, of course.)
Contrary to her assertion, Ms. Darwish regularly engages in dehumanizing rhetoric about all Muslims, not just extremists. She even told the New York Times:
A mosque is not just a place for worship. It’s a place where war is started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur. It’s a place where ammunition was stored.
That was one of her tamer statements dressed up before a liberal audience. Such sweeping outright lies have been instrumental in the spread of anti-Muslim, anti-Sharia, and anti-Mosque hysteria in our country, materializing in over 800 documented cases of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination. When confronted about her lies, she will likely attempt to dismiss her critics as agents of the Mad Mullah Conspiracy, rather than owning up to the falsity of her claims.
It is sad that Darwish is still getting a pass on her bigotry and lies and finding mainstream audiences willing to listen to her spout her desire to see the demise and destruction of Islam. For more on Darwish read the article, Nonie Darwish Caught in a Pool of Lies.
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s close ally, John Jay (a founding member of SIOA) is calling for the mass murder of all Muslims–again. We reported on him previously in our piece, SIOA Co-Founder: Kill Your Liberal Relatives and All Muslims.
Anders Breivik redux anyone? And yes, he is a US citizen.
If John Jay inspires someone to kill a bunch of Muslims will we need drones to hunt him down?
One of the groups founded by anti-Muslim demagogues Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer is called the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an “umbrella” group that provides cover for their other activities and funding for their anti-Muslim advertisements.
1.)take out the talking head media, and burn the new york times, the los angeles times and the washington post to the ground. draw and quarter the media, and shoot their remains from canons in the four directions of the prevailing winds.
rinse, lather, repeat as needed.
2.)take out all the incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress, and every self avowed socialist and communist in congress. give them all proper muslim burials at sea, just like osama bin laden.
eliminate pensions for congressional service. rinse, lather, repeat as needed.
3.)eliminate the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara. boil bill ayers, bernie dorhn and angela davis in canola oil, and feed their remains to the fishes.
“send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice”— John Jaythey are all physical cowards. they should fall into line pretty quickly. repeat every ten years as a prophylactic, on general principle.
and,
4.)now that the “arab spring” has brought enlightenment to the middle east, send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice.
burn all the mosques. period.
just sayin’.
john jay @ 09.26.2011
p.s. burn the editors and contributors to “the daily kos” at the stake. i’ll think of something suitable for hilary clinton. bill, he has to room with jimmy carter in a clapped out pickup & camper on the edge of a southern peanut field, somewhere in arkansas: that’s about as close to a living hell as i can imagine for him.
and, throw all the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits, from which there is no escape. sorry, jeb. but, i think that you were a skull & bones internationalist, too, weren’t you?
A stunning level of hatred and incitement, even for these crazed bigots. Let’s hope the authorities are keeping as close an eye on this lunatic as they are on radical Muslims.
Since Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s debate debacle last week, commentators and conservatives alike have been questioning his readiness and looking for another presidential alternative to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Now, Colorado’s Tom Tancredo is piling on.
In a column for the Daily Caller, Tancredo, who ran twice for his party’s presidential nomination in an effort to inject the illegal immigration issue into the larger debate, is slamming Perry for his soft policies on illegal immigration in Texas – and what Tancredo calls his “Muslim blind spot.”
“What is not yet as widely known about Perry is that he extends his taxpayer-funded compassion not only to illegal aliens but also to Muslim groups seeking to whitewash the violent history of that religion,” Tancredo writes. ”Perry endorsed and facilitated the adoption in Texas public schools of a pro-Muslim curriculum unit developed by Muslim clerics in Pakistan.”
Tancredo cites a study by The Center for Immigration Studies, which shows that 81% of the 279,000 jobs created in Texas in the past four years went to non-citizens, a high number of them illegal aliens, to discredit Perry’s central presidential argument – that he’s overseen a “Texas miracle” of job growth while the national economy continues to decline.
And in 2008, as Tancredo points out, Perry helped expand the Muslim Histories and Culture Project, a teacher-training program spearheaded by Texas Ismailis that introduces Islamic history and culture curricula into Texas schools.
While many of the GOP’s 2012 contenders have sought to distance themselves with Islam, Perry, Tancredo points out, refused to endorse a proposal in the Texas legislature to outlaw Sharia law in the state.
“What is it with Republican elites like Perry?” Tancredo writes. “Do they think Republican primary voters are stupid? Does Perry think he can talk tough in defending the Texas death penalty and then waffle on border security and taxpayer support for illegal alien children? Why does he think he can claim to be the ‘tea party candidate’ while endorsing a whitewash of Islamic extremism in Texas schools?”
Thanks to the vigilance of the American Library Association (ALA), the list of books banned or challenged in 2010-2011 isn’t as long as it could be, but it’s long enough to keep a person out of books for at least a year. Every year during Banned Book Week the ALA works to keep books considered controversial, obscene or profane on library shelves and in schools.
In the past year, books in danger of censorship include Suzanne Collins’ popular “Hunger Games” series, which was adapted into a screenplay and will arrive in theaters sometime in 2012 to torment parents and others who think it numbs kids to violence. A Virginia school system also tried to ban “The Diary of Anne Frank,” when it received a complaint that the book “sexual material and homosexual themes.”
The ALA asks that from Sept. 24 – Oct. 1, lovers of literature read a banned book. Below, some titles from the 2010-2011 list to get you started:
“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Anne Frank
“Water for Elephants,” Sarah Gruen
“Brave New World,” Alduous Huxley
“The Koran”
“The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger
“Push,” Sapphire
“Slaughter-house 5,” Kurt Vonnegut
“Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Joseph Lelveld
The hollow words of Netanyahu are even more pronounced when we realize his government is in fact funding extremist radical Yeshivas (Jewish religious colleges) in West Bank settlements.
Can you imagine if this were a Muslim country? We wouldn’t hear the end of “state funded terrorism.” (hat tip: T.H. and MrIslamAnswersBack)
Israel’s domestic intelligence agency is urging the government to stop funding a religious college in a Jewish West Bank settlement after warning that its senior rabbis are encouraging students to attack Palestinians.
The intelligence agency, Shin Bet, pressed a month ago for an immediate block on the annual £226,000 grant for the religious college, or yeshiva, in the notoriously extreme settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus. The Education Ministry has reportedly yet to take a decision despite two meetings with Shin Bet.
Residents of the nearby Palestinian village of Asira El Qbilya say the masked, club-wielding teenage settlers who invaded it last week came from Yitzhar.
The Israeli military disclosed last month that it had issued restraining orders on 12 settlers from the Yitzhar area for “violent and clandestine activity” targeting Palestinians in the West Bank, including endangering lives by “igniting… mosques, vehicles and buildings”.
The head of the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva complex in the settlement, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, has been filmed accompanying students who threw stones at a Palestinian village. Rabbi Shapira is the author of The King’s Torah, a book which suggests that Jewish law on occasion permits the killing of non-Jews.
There was heightened tension in parts of the West Bank last week as Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, submitted his application for UN recognition. A Palestinian was shot dead in Qusra, also near Nablus, by Israeli troops after confronting villagers who gathered in response to a settler invasion. A Jewish settler and his one-year-old son were killed in a car crash near Hebron, which the police say was probably caused by Palestinians throwing stones.
Meanwhile, the US joined Palestinian leaders in condemning Israeli government approval yesterday for the construction of 1,100 new homes in the Jerusalem area settlement of Gilo. It came only days after the international quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN urged the parties to “refrain from provocative actions” that might jeopardise future negotiations.
A US State Department official said Washington saw the “continued expansion of settlements” as “corrosive not only to peace efforts and a two-state solution, but to Israel’s future itself”.
Two men, aged 25 and 26, were charged in Västerås on Friday for attempted murder in connection with attacks on two men of south Asian origin at the end of July.
According to the prosecutor the case concerns a hate crime with the men targeting their victims due to their foreign origin.
Four days after the attacks in Oslo and Utøya which left 77 dead, a man sleeping on a bench in the town of Västerås was attacked. He was seriously injured and was relieved of his mobile phone.
Two days later another man, this time of Sri Lankan origin, was stabbed and seriously injured while completing his paper round.
According to the police report on the case, the accused, who deny the charges, expressed hatred of immigrants in the attack with one screaming “Go home” to the bleeding victim and then pausing to draw a swastika on the man’s bag.
According to the Dagens Nyheter daily the police report details that one of the defendants sent the follow text message to the other shortly after Behring Brevik’s terror attack on July 22nd:
“A Norwegian ‘Nazi’ has killed like, around 84! From the left who, like, cheered on Islam. HAHAHA!! WHITE POWER!”
The men were arrested shortly after the second attack.
A police inspection of computers seized in the defendants homes has revealed pictures of the men raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute in front of the Swedish flag.
Furthermore the men’s internet history showed that they spent time immediately prior to the attack in the early hours of July 28th visiting a racist YouTube channel.
My previous article describes how anti-Muslim bigots use young Muslim murder victims as props in their campaign of hate. Sensational headlines, haunting photographs, and lurid tales of cold blooded murder are indispensable tools in their campaign to vilify Islam. This campaign is bolstered by a set of core themes that are reinforced through tireless repetition.
Islamophobes portray honor killings as a special kind of evil that is unique to Islam, and greatly exaggerate the prevalence of these crimes. Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Frontpage Magazine rarely miss an opportunity use the phrase “Islamic honor killing,” which has joined “creeping sharia” and “stealth jihad” in an endless parade of misleading slogans and catchphrases. All of these themes converge in paranoid conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over and imposing barbarism in the Western world.
Most of their arguments depend on casual acceptance and do not stand up to scrutiny. With the help of some grade school math, relevant facts, and a healthy dose of global context, it is fairly easy to set the record straight.
The term “honor killing” was not coined by Islamophobes, even though it serves their agenda well. Many human rights organizations track honor killings as a subcategory of homicides or femicides (killing of women). For our purposes, that’s a good thing because it allows us to refute the idea of widespread honor killings using statistics from credible sources.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates there are 5,000 murders classified as honor killings each year worldwide, and they are not all perpetrated by Muslims. To put that into perspective, consider that the World Health Organization says there are over half a million annual homicides in the world. Using basic math, we can conclude that honor killings make up less than 1% of all murders.
If 1% of the world’s Muslims perpetrated an honor crime each year, we could project at least 1 million incidents. The number is far lower, and leaves 99.99% of the Muslim population innocent of this crime. Why should all Muslims be indicted for the actions of a negligible minority?
Chesler quotes the same estimate of 5,000 annual honor killings worldwide, but she says the true number is “much greater.” “Definitive or reliable worldwide estimates of honor killing incidence do not exist,” she concedes, yet she is somehow certain the the number is much greater.
She cites a study of the media throughout her article, which found, “there were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe.” Taking her study at face value, do you think 33 honor killings constitutes an epidemic? Stinging insects kill more than 40 people each year in the US, which is more than the number of honor killings Chesler reported over the course of her study for all of North America. Chesler says, “to combat the epidemic [emphasis mine] of honor killings requires understanding what makes these murders unique.”
In the US, an estimated 1200 women are killed by their spouse or partner each year. Chesler herself states that, “In the non-immigrant West, serious domestic violence exists which includes incest, child abuse, marital rape, marital battering, marital stalking, and marital post-battering femicide.” Yet for some reason, she feels it is more important to focus on the unique nature of honor killings than to address the broader issue of violence in her own country.
To her credit, Chesler does not blame honor killings on Sharia, nor does she say these crimes are religiously sanctioned in Islam. Instead she resorts to blaming them on Islamic culture. The Director of Human Rights Watch says that honor killings cut across cultures and religions, and that dowry deaths and crimes of passion have a similar dynamic.
Dowry killings actually outnumber honor killings, and they are on the rise. Women with insufficient dowries are murdered or driven to suicide in what are often disguised as kitchen accidents. For this reason they are sometimes called “bride burnings.” In 2008, there were over 8,000 dowry deaths reported in India alone.
Murders for crossing caste boundaries are also similar to honor killings in that they are a cultural inheritance, victims are usually killed by their own family members, and the crimes are often endorsed or encouraged by village-based caste councils. The caste system is outlawed, but it remains entrenched in parts of India and Nepal, neither of which has a Muslim majority.
Honor killings also share features with other forms of femicide outside of the Middle East and South Asia. Just a 10-15 minute drive from El Paso, Texas, USA, there is a border town in Mexico called Ciudad Juarez. Over the last two decades hundreds of women have been kidnaped, brutally raped, tortured, and murdered in Juarez, and the perpetrators remain free. Femicides in Mexico have nearly doubled from 1,085 in 2007 to 1,926 in 2009.
There were nearly 700 murders of women in neighboring Guatemala in 2010, and 1,110 reported cases of femicide in Honduras between 2008 and 2010. Of the cases in Honduras, only a 211 made it to court, and a mere 4.2% resulted in a conviction.
High rates of homicide and femicide also plague many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rape is used as a weapon of war in a systematic pattern of destruction that has claimed an estimated 2 million victims. The conflict in the Congo has resulted in more deaths than the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur (Sudan) combined.
The United Nations says, “The brutality and scale of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo almost defies imagination.” Over five million people have died in the last 10 years in what 60 Minutes described as a “War Against Women.”
Imagine the photos Geller could harvest for “Islam’s Gruesome Gallery,” featured on her website Atlas Shrugs, if only this were an Islamic country. Since the overwhelming majority of the people in the Congo are Christians, these crimes don’t receive the spotlight on anti-Muslim hate sites.
How can anyone genuinely interested in the rights of women ignore the situation in the Congo? Even if Islamophobes could substantiate their claims that honor killings are exceptionally barbaric and unique to Islam, that would not be a justification focusing on them exclusively.
True human rights activists don’t discriminate among murder victims. All major human rights organizations address honor killings in context, and they do not promote these crimes as a way to spread fear and hatred toward Islam. Islam also takes a universal approach, likening the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33).
In her book proposal for Stop the Islamization of America, Geller described herself as, “One of America’s foremost activists for human rights and freedom.” If she were sincere, she would give up her vicious campaign against Islam and join us in the struggle to end violence against women from all cultural and religious backgrounds.
Nezar Hamze is both a Muslim American who is the executive directorof the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a self-identified Republican. As a way to further his activism in the Republican Party, Hamze campaigned for a position on his local Republican party’s executive committee in Broward County, Florida.
During a “raucous meeting” of the party on Monday night, Hamze’s bid for committee membership was rejected by a vote of 11-158, as he was attacked with offensive questions about his faith and even compared to a terrorist by Islamophobic attendees.
Before the vote even took place, the local party changed its rules to require that each new applicant to the executive committee answer questions for five minutes, a rule change Hamze jokingly told a reporter could be called the “Hamze rule.” And as audience members stepped up to interrogate Hamze, he was told that his organization CAIR was identified as a terrorist organization and asked if he supported terrorism. Following the lead of GOP audiences who have booed gays and condemned the uninsured, one attendee yelled out “terrorist!” as Hamze was trying to speak:
At times, when he addressed the packed room at the Sheraton Suites in Fort Lauderdale, a few members shouted out among the crowd of about 300.
“Terrorist!” said one man.
After the vote, Hamze said he wished he had received a letter of denial rather than face such a barrage of hostile questions. One Republican member remarked that Hamze had effectively been “singled out“:
“Wow,” [Hamze] said afterward. “If I had realized it would be like that, I wish they had just sent me a letter saying I was denied.” One Broward Republican member, blogger Javier Manjarres, objected to the process. “They singled him out,” Manjarres said. “It was a set up.”
Before seeking a spot on his local party’s committee, Hamze told the Florida Independent that the main reason he was making his bid was to bring “Muslims to the mainstream political process.” Yet it appears that the Broward County Republican Party seems to believe that Hamze has to be either a Muslim or a Republican, but not both.
Gates of Vienna the notorious white supremacist blog which published Fjordman and inspired Anders Brievik, recently published a three part essay which calls for the Holocaust of Muslims.
This is the same far right cesspool-of-bigotry-website notorious for publishing Pedar Jensen who vented his Islamophobia for many years under the pen name of Fjordman, and who has now gone into hiding after being interviewed by Norwegian police over the Anders Breivik massacre. Gates of Vienna is run by a couple in the USA, one Baron Bodissey whose real name is thought to be ‘Ned May’ and a woman calling herself Dymphna.
This is not first time Gates of Vienna has published screeds supposedly written by other anonymous contributors calling for the genocide of Muslims. A few years back a similar lovingly written piece inciting for the genocide of Muslims was published as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs noted in Gates of Vienna Toys with Genocide:
‘If violence does erupt in European countries between natives and Muslims, I consider it highly likely that people who had never done anything more violent than beat eggs will prove incapable of managing the psychological transition to controlled violence and start killing anything that looks remotely Muslim. Our unspoken conviction that we, in 21st-century Europe, ‘
On 20th September 2011, Dymphna Of Gates of Vienna posted a three part series by one Zenster with the introduction:
This is the first of a three part essay dealing with Islamic terrorism and what can be expected regarding Islam’s ultimate fate.
Moving on to Part 1, titled ‘When Will It End?’ the essay begins by setting the tone with:
‘Short answer ― It will end when the tipping point is reached. This tipping point can be defined as follows:
When living with Muslims becomes more trouble than living without Muslims.‘
A long rambling justification about the costs of policing airlines from terrorists, and how that money could be better spent on fighting aids and other social ills follows, in an obvious attempt to find some sort of moral justification as to why there is no other way. It ends with the ominous warning ‘The tipping point is approaching swiftly’
Part two of the essay has the presumptuous title Why it will End? and answers the question by stating ‘Islam has “unhappy ending” written all over it’ before going on to elaborate with hyperbole and lies including one manufactured on Gates of Vienna by Fjordman:
‘Throughout Europe, Muslims are disproportionately represented in rape, violent crime and imprisonment statistics. The expense of this criminality reaches into extra billions of Euros per year and does not cover property damage, victim rehabilitation and other ancillary expenses. Nor does this speak to the same criminal practices and consequences resulting from ostensibly legal immigration into Europe by tens of millions of Muslims over the past few decades.’
The rapes statistics in Scandinavia that Fjordman published at Gates of Vienna which were then repeated on the Islamophobic blogosphere were proven to be lies. Zenster continues his mental masturbation:
The reputation of Muslims as predatory criminals and intensely parasitic occupiers all combines into a damning indictment of Islam. Its presence on earth only promises increased conflict, more atrocities, new genocides and unwarranted diversions of wealth that could better serve far more deserving causes. Finally, Islam is assembling too many enemies too fast to where they cannot be expected to keep pursuing their own petty quarrels instead of addressing the overarching threat of jihad. The complete and total inability of Islam to coexist with any legitimate faith or other culture presages a day when its numerous victims will band together in pursuit of an ultimate victory.
That is why it will end.
In the concluding Part three, How it will End? Zenster sums it up briefly: ‘The Muslim holocaust.‘ He then continues exhibiting more megalomania and what clearly appears to be a projection of his own fantasies:
‘Suffused with delusions of adequacy, Muslims think nothing of constantly antagonizing Western powers who long ago perfected industrialized warfare to an extent that Islam can only dream of, despite its supremacist fantasies.’
This could explain why the far right white supremacists see Israel as an ally. They see Israel as doing their dirty work for them, and as if on cue Zenster trots out the Samson option:
‘Neither is this the end of it. Iran’s reckless pursuit of genocide against the Jews could precipitate the Muslim holocaust all by itself. Little known to most people is Israel’s Samson Option. If true, the Jewish state has quietly informed its Arab neighbours that a single WMD strike against Israel will result in the entire MME (Muslim Middle East) being incinerated in nuclear plasma. Hundreds of fusion warheads along with newly acquired Dolphin class submarines and cruise missiles back this up.’
Contradictions galore! Elsewhere in this three part essay the author talks of the plot to establish the world Caliphate, but here he says he is convinced it won’t come about. Freudian slip? :
‘Now, consider how America rolled up Iraq’s sidewalks in two weeks. This is the “reality gap” confronting Islam and its delusory vision of world domination. No such thing will ever happen.’
More ramblings, perhaps to justify his own dreams of nuclear warfare
‘It is more than safe to say that an industrially and militarily unlettered Islam is not going to take over the world using such a feeble tool as terrorism. As was also noted in Part II, Islam is assembling too many enemies too fast and that pace far outstrips any ability of theirs to perfect the mass production of intricate nuclear weapons nor muster fighting forces of even marginal proficiency. Chronic overreach is a hallmark of Islam and its habit of poking at the Western nuclear dragon with its terrorist pointed wooden stick bodes especially unwell for Muslims everywhere.’
The essay is full of dire warnings, rants about liberals who are complicit in Islamising the planet, of the political establishment for being too weak, but more gravely, it even condemns the ‘counter jihad’ movement for not calling for a ‘solution’ and for being too soft.
When you hear of so called ‘counter jihadis’ accused of being ‘soft’ and the whole of western civilization embroiled in a plot whose aim it is to – err- destroy themselves – it is safe to assume you are reading from someone not quite right in the head, to put it politely. Someone who doesn’t deserve a second thought and should ordinarily be dismissed as a raving loon. Except that it was at this very website, where a writer with the same Islamophobic rhetoric inspired a loner to kill tens of children on a holiday island!
Farha Khaled is a columnist for the Saudi based Arab News.
Congressman Mike Quigley addressed a crowd at the American Islamic College and apologized for the “rising Islamophobia” in the United States. Many in the Right-Wing took exception to this with Quigley being castigated as a dhimmi-leftist pandering to “the Mooslims” about a fictional “rise in Islamophobia.”
Bill O’Reilly even thought it fit to do a segment on his show about it, having anti-loon Ahmed Rehab on. At the end of the segment O’Reilly admitted that Rehab’s stats on the “rise of Islamophobia” bolster his argument.
Mike Quigley knows about cheap shots on ice. Now he’s an expert on being blindsided on the Internet and cable TV.
Mr. Quigley, a Democratic Chicago congressman, had a relatively light Saturday recently. He played ice hockey in the morning, did a beach cleanup with the Sierra Club and hit four block parties in the 32nd, 43rd and 44th Wards. Along the way he surfaced at a conference held by the American Islamic College. It was a quick in-and-out, with remarks to perhaps 100 attendees about the strengths of American pluralism, the sort he makes to many groups. They included:
“Forms of discrimination come in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think that it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face.”
He then bicycled to the first block party. The Islamic College audience was apparently grateful but didn’t find his appearance especially notable as they returned to the business of their meeting.
Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found the address nice and patriotic. “What we’d expect of a congressman,” he said.
Neither he, Mr. Quigley nor anybody else there was prepared for the response initiated in the conservative blogosphere, then intensified on radio and TV.
The congressman was attacked harshly, with at least one death threat on a Fox News site that by week’s end was still not taken down despite requests.
Andrew Breitbart, a conservative activist, blogged that Mr. Quigley made a “surprise appearance” before “the primarily Muslim audience. He rambled on about the typical racism and discrimination that the liberal left is so convinced America is rampantly infected with.”
The appearance was not a surprise, even if not on the formal program. But the nefarious implication was repeated on blogs and the Fox News Channel. Video links included the lines above but not related comments about the legacies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others.
Social media posts and hundreds of nasty calls, e-mails and faxes poured in to his offices, which deleted profane and violent posts and passed direct threats to law enforcement.
But the conservative echo chamber was in high dudgeon. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, decided that Mr. Quigley’s remarks were a story and thus conferred high-profile legitimacy to the bloggers’ vituperation on Tuesday. Mr. Quigley could not appear, but Mr. Rehab did, initially nonplused that the remarks were deemed newsworthy.
With “Questionable Apology” emblazoned on the screen, Mr. O’Reilly repeated the same two sentences Mr. Quigley had uttered and declared: “Wow! What discrimination?” Statistics don’t support claims of bias against Muslim Americans, he said.
Much data and polling contradicts him. As an unabashed Mr. Rehab told him, “You’d have to be living under a rock” to miss the overarching reality.
Mr. Rehab cited federal figures on rising workplace complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination and polls showing both that 39 percent of Americans would require Muslims to carry special identification and that one-third don’t think Muslims should be allowed to run for president.
“O.K., those stats bolster your argument,” Mr. O’Reilly conceded. “But in economic realms, Muslim Americans are doing well, pretty well,” he said. “We don’t want anybody to be anti-Muslim. Thank you for coming on here,” Mr. O’Reilly concluded brusquely, with Mr. Rehab having clearly failed to fulfill a role of self-righteous liberal piñata.
But Fox wasn’t done.
On Wednesday, its morning “Fox and Friends” show saw Mr. Quigley, 52, called a “silly old fool” by Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and advocate of aggressive military actions. He belittled Muslims with a series of mock apologies like “We should apologize for preventing them from beating their daughters to death for flirting.”
Eboo Patel, an Indian-born Muslim and former Rhodes Scholar who runs the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Corps, found the response offensive. But he noted a Gallup poll finding that American Muslims remain very optimistic despite facing discrimination.
He mentioned that his nephew in Houston was hassled when, for religious reasons, he wouldn’t eat school pizza with pork.
Well, at least we occasionally try to curb school bullies. We clearly don’t when it comes to the bullies who can drive our public dialogue.
Ul Haque said many good relationships began Sunday despite “friction” he heard about in connection with the event. He referred to aspersions cast against the meeting by the leader of a local ACT! for America chapter.
Dorrie O’Brien of Grand Prairie, a Tarrant County Republican Party precinct chairwoman, said the idea of Christians and Muslims making friends or having fun together is “repulsive and impossible.”
O’Brien doubted that 1,000 Muslims would show up at the Keller church, because they’ve been told not to mix with Christians or Jews.
KELLER — A neighbor can be a Muslim “and still be my friend,” said Pastor Bob Roberts Jr. of NorthWood Church.
Roberts was surprised by the number of friends who showed up Sunday for the church’s Building Bridges with Fellow Texans event.
“We had a goal of 1,000 Christians and 1,000 Muslims,” he said. “We ended up with 1,500 Muslims and 1,000 Christians.”
Folks were standing against the walls of the 2,000-seat sanctuary, and monitors were set up in the foyer, where at least 400 others stood, said Paul Schneider, a NorthWood spokesman.
Roberts said NorthWood had considered having the event on the previous Sunday, Sept. 11, but the Muslims helping organize the gathering asked to put it off for a week.
“The more we thought about it the more sense it made,” Roberts said.
The 10th anniversary of 9-11 inspired NorthWood members to invite Muslims — and Christians from other churches — to their sanctuary. But making the Muslims feel uncomfortable would have defeated the purpose, Roberts said.
While 9-11 was mentioned during Sunday’s gathering, it was certainly not the focus. Pastors and imams talked more about what Muslims and Christians have in common than their differences. Jokes were told — one imam commented that the Dallas Cowboys needed divine intervention — and congregants stood in unison to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and Texas Pledge of Allegiance.
“A young lady in a hijab sang the Star-Spangled Banner,” Roberts said. “A combined choir of Muslim and Christian kids sang You Are my Sunshine.”
Breaking down barriers
Building Bridges created a favorable environment for interaction between members of the faiths, Roberts said.
“We didn’t just sit around and preach sermons,” he said. “We talked together, laughed together, ate together and built relationships.”
Such events are important “to break down the barriers between our faiths,” said Imam Zia ul Haque of the Islamic Center of Irving. “It’s important to teach people what we believe in and how we see ourselves.”
Muslims see themselves as contributing citizens of this country, ul Haque said. Several Muslims proved that as they were leaving the building after the event ended.
NorthWood members at a table near one door were signing up volunteers for Building Community, a service project in early October where 1,500 to 2,000 people are needed for major renovations at houses, schools, a park and a clinic in Haltom City and Keller.
Roberts said church leaders were surprised when Muslims wanted to sign up, and the project leaders asked him what to do.
“I said, ‘Sign them up,’” he said.
NorthWood members signed cards to declare what activities they intend to take part in with Muslims, whether hosting multifaith dinners or volunteering for service projects, Schneider said.
Ul Haque said many good relationships began Sunday despite “friction” he heard about in connection with the event. He referred to aspersions cast against the meeting by the leader of a local ACT! for America chapter.
Dorrie O’Brien of Grand Prairie, a Tarrant County Republican Party precinct chairwoman, said the idea of Christians and Muslims making friends or having fun together is “repulsive and impossible.”
O’Brien doubted that 1,000 Muslims would show up at the Keller church, because they’ve been told not to mix with Christians or Jews.
Obviously, she was wrong.
“I think there will be challenges whenever you try to build relationships,” ul Haque said. “But we shouldn’t be dissuaded just because of friction.”
Roberts agreed.
“What concerns me right now is that most Muslims have a view that evangelical Christianity doesn’t respect them or value them,” he said.
‘Love all people’
Ul Haque hopes Christians will help Muslims adjust to American society and be tolerant meanwhile.
“We don’t have to agree about our beliefs,” he said. “There are differences in our understanding about God. We can agree to disagree and respect each other despite our differences.”
Roberts said that it’s important for society to accept religious freedom and that he has a problem with people who can’t tolerate those differences.
“It used to be that faith was tribal and geographical,” he said. “Now all religions are all places like never before, and they continue to multiply in nontraditional places. In America we have the chance to build a new model for what it looks like for people of faith to get along.”
Roberts reminded Christians what the Bible says about loving your neighbor as yourself.
“I think to follow Jesus is to love all people,” he said. “To isolate a people, reject them or denigrate them, there’s nowhere in the scripture where Jesus approved of that or practiced it. If anything he pushed back really hard.”
The popularity of the Gospel grew worldwide because “it’s an inclusive message for the world and was meant to be shared with every person,” Roberts said. “I wonder sometimes what book people are reading who call themselves Christians and yet demonize other people.”
One of the most moving moments of the event was toward the end, when Roberts, speaking for Christians at NorthWood and other churches from Dallas and Saginaw, told the Muslims, “We love you.”
After a standing ovation, a Muslim in the audience, Reyad Ghosheh of Allen, stood and replied to Roberts, “We love you too.”
Last year, when Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren announced his intention to speak at the University of California at Irvine, some members of the school’s Muslim Students Union plotted to inform Oren of their feelings about some of Israel’s policies. They used their voices to do so. This is illegal!
Today 10 members of the so-called “Irvine 11″ (charges against one of the original eleven students were dropped) were convicted on misdemeanor charges of disrupting a meeting and conspiracy to disrupt a meeting in a Santa Ana, Calif., court. Here’s what they did, which is a crime:
In February 2010, as Oren began to speak about the U.S.-Israeli relationship at a campus speech, the students rose one-by-one to object to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. One shouted, “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!” As the offender was removed from the audience, a designated compatriot shouted, “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide!” And so on. According to an attorney for one of the students, the longest of the interruptions lasted roughly 8 seconds, and the total amount of time taken up by their outbursts—combined—was roughly one minute.
That’s one minute too long when you’re talking about Muslim students interrupting the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. to inform him that some people think his country’s policies are unjust, which is illegal, so don’t do it.
Should all Catholics be judged by this fringe group who are challenging modern science? What if they were Muslim? There would be ceaseless discussion about how Islam is incompatible with science and modernity. (hat tip: Ahmed)
Scientists have got it wrong – Earth really is the centre of the universe, according to a group of staunch Catholics who refuse to believe otherwise.
“A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church’s original teachings as proof that Earth is the centre of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church’s clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago,” The Chicago Tribune has reported.
“The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among those who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of early church doctrine.
“By challenging modern science, proponents of a geocentric universe are challenging the very church they seek to serve and protect.
“Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church’s influence.”
Robert Sungenis, the leader of a movement urging scientists to reconsider their opinion, said believing in heliocentrism was dangerous.
“False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions – thus the state of the world today,” Mr Sungenis told The Tribune.
“Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”
Astrophysicists at Catholic university Notre Dame in the United States said there was good reason why the concept of geocentrism was extinct.
“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich told The Tribune.
“There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s.”
Professor Garnavich said geocentrism “violates what he believes should be a strict separation of church and science”, according to The Tribune.
“One answers why, the other answers how, and never the twain should meet.”
But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.
The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.
“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”
The FBI declined to respond directly to such questions from Danger Room. But what’s clear is that the anti-Islam sentiment in the FBI’s training and orientation isn’t the marginal problem that the Bureau portrayed in its previous public statements and press releases. It’s not a historical problem, it’s ongoing. And it will require substantial effort to root out. Not even a July warning from the office of a powerful senator was able to spur the Bureau to purge itself of its anti-Islam material.
One example is found in the mandatory orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs. Those task forces are a nationwide partnership between the FBI, intelligence analysts and state and local police. As of late last week, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the program, new members or those needing a belated orientation saw this description of Sunnism — the largest branch of Islam — as part of their online training course:
Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.
That paragraph is contained in orientation material, known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force Orientation v2 course, distributed online through a secure intranet for every member of the JTTFs. That’s approximately 4,400 officials, according to FBI figures, all charged with stopping terrorism. The orientation course is mandatory for every member of the task force.
The passage is especially odd because most of the orientation consists of practical, mundane information, such as the proper forms to fill out during an inquiry or FBI standards for investigations, according to the source. It consists of five sections, one of which is about Islam, Muslims and Arab culture. The supervisor of each JTTF has to certify that all his or her personnel have completed the online orientation course, and then must pass that certification up to FBI Headquarters’ Counterterrorism Division.
The FBI would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the JTTF orientation material.
The excerpt from the JTTF orientation material was provided to Danger Room by a concerned law enforcement official, who says the material contains 20 paragraphs about Islam in a similar vein. Several Bureau and law enforcement officials who spoke to Danger Room on condition of anonymity believe that such instructions are detrimental to uncovering and thwarting terrorist plots, and that the FBI continues to be less than forthright with the press and the public about the extent of its teaching that Islam is at the root of the menace of terrorism. Evidence for this continuing belief can be found in Quantico, Virginia, at the FBI’s elite training academy.
Within the sprawling campus of that academy, Quantico maintains a library befitting the FBI’s status as America’s most important law enforcement agency. It stacks thousands of books, from heavy tomes containing the U.S. criminal code to forensics reference material that could be out of CSI, across three unclassified floors. The library is open to all FBI agents, plus intelligence officials and police from across the country, for a single purpose: to provide background material for cases, guidance material for intelligence analysis and other tools meant directly to aid law enforcement. In other words, it’s not your public library.
There’s a section on religion — in which Islam, perhaps understandably, predominates. A law enforcement source provided Danger Room with a photographic catalog, compiled in late August, of approximately 100 books on Islam out of around 150 stacked at Quantico. Many of them are innocuous or contain unquestioned scholarship, ranging from authors like Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.
But, significantly, the library also contains books by anti-Islam authors that portray the religion as devoted to murder and world domination.
And there is also Onward Muslim Soldiers by Robert Spencer. Spencer is one of the U.S.’ leading opponents of Islam. Along with the blogger Pamela Geller, Spencer leads a group called Stop Islamicization of America, which “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Spencer’s work was cited 64 times in the political manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo terrorist who killed 69 people earlier this year.
The FBI’s dalliance with Robert Spencer is not limited to the stacks of Quantico. In July 2010, Spencer presented what he described as “two two-hour seminars on the belief-system of Islamic jihadists” to the JTTF in Tidewater, Virginia. He presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office. When a coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter protesting the FBI’s embrace of Spencer, the Special Agent in Charge of the Norfolk FBI, Alex J. Turner, replied, “Seeking broad knowledge on a wide range of topics is essential in understanding today’s terrorist environment, and helps us to defeat ignorance and strengthen relationships with the diverse communities we serve.”
Spencer was only one of an array of self-anointed experts delivering similar messages about Islam to Bureau audiences.
On January 11, the FBI’s Washington, D.C. Field Office held a seminar on Islamic extremism. In the conference room of its Judiciary Square offices, about 60 of the Field Office’s agents and intelligence analysts spent the morning hearing two presentations — one from terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka, a fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and another from a self-identified expert on Islamic law, Stephen Coughlin, a former consultant to the military’s Joint Staff. The takeaway of Coughlin’s presentation, according to an attendee: Islam is out to take over the world and there is no such thing as a loyal American Muslim.
Coughlin was described to Danger Room as presenting a far more extreme take on Islam than Gorka, who spoke separately on the subject of “Core Texts of Salafi Jihad.” But Coughlin allegedly told the agents that Muslims believe Islamic law to be all-encompassing, preventing an either/or choice to U.S. Muslims: either reject the U.S. Constitution or fall into apostasy. Sharia law, Coughlin instructed in the tone of a neutral reporter, was a threat to the agents in the room. He explored an obscure Islamic concept known as “abrogation,” the supposition that some Koranic verses supersede others, to argue that the Koran’s non-violent passages are overtaken in Muslim eyes by commands to wage war against “non-believers.”
It’s a line Coughlin has long pushed. During a presentation at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010 — in which he shared a stage with Spencer and Geller — Coughlin asserted that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the geopolitical organization of Muslim nations, has a “ten-year plan” to make “defamation of Islam a crime” worldwide. One of his briefing slides read, “The SILENCE in the mainstream media on this DIRECT ASSAULT is DEAFENING! — not just on speech — but on thought itself!!” Coughlin’s 2007 master’s thesis at the National Defense Intelligence College claimed that President George W. Bush’s reassurance that the U.S. was not at war with Islam had a “a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine by effectively placing a policy bar on the unconstrained analysis of Islamic doctrine as a basis for this threat.” (.pdf) In 2008, his Joint Staff contract wasn’t renewed after a staffer for Gordon England, then the deputy secretary of defense, raised concerns about his work. (Through a spokesman, England declined to comment.)
Coughlin did not respond to requests for comment.
The presentation to the Washington Field Office wasn’t mandated by FBI Headquarters. It was set up on the initiative of a well-intentioned agent. But not everyone was comfortable with the presentation. Some walked out in boredom or disgust, according to the source. Others made fun of it.
But some voiced worries that the presentation sent an implicit message to agents that they should be targeting Muslims in the name of stopping terrorism. And in the past few years, the FBI has accelerated its monitoring of mosques, community centers, businesses and other organizations run by Muslims. Several observers suspect that the persistence of training materials that casts Islam in a threatening light helps explain the increased surveillance. Others — including many counterterrorism professionals within the FBI who say they are disgusted by the bigoted material they’ve received — fear that the presentations will drive a wedge between the Bureau and the U.S. Muslim communities whose assistance it needs to prevent terrorism.
“Inappropriately enlarging the characterization of the threat to include all of Islam,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former official with the National Counterterrorism Center, “may inadvertently increase al Qaida’s ideological resonance and could facilitate recruitment of would-be terrorists.”
Books in a library and presentations in a field office will only reach the agents who visit the library or work in the field office. A Joint Terrorism Task Force orientation will only reach JTTF members. But every FBI agent can access the bureau’s intranet. And until Danger Room’s expose, that network hosted material purporting to demonstrate “the inherently violent nature of Islam.”
Two law enforcement sources with access to the intranet — sections of which are classified — described to Danger Room its page on “Islamic Law.” FBI intranet users type in “Islamic Law” or “Islam” into a Google-like search function. Up pops what’s called a Subject Matter Expert page, or SME, pronounced “Smee.” Usually, an agent seeking a SME will be searching for material directly relevant to an ongoing investigation or a timely intelligence product. But the SME for “Islamic Law” recently featured uploaded documents stretching all the way back to the 19th century, with titles like “The Personal Law of The Mahommedans.”
One such document is a text from 1915, titled “Mohammed Or Christ: An Account Of The Rapid Spread of Islam In All Parts of The Globe, The Methods Employed to Obtain Proselytes, Its Immense Press, Its Strongholds, & Suggested Means to be Adopted to Counteract the Evil.” That explicitly religious and archaic tome instructs that its purpose is “to set forth the appeal of that [Muslim] world for the Gospel. It is a decisive hour!”
Another is a Regent University master’s thesis called “Devoutly Violent or Nominally Peaceful? The Justification for Violence in Islam.” It asks: “[S]eeing as the foremost goal of Islam (which literally means ’submission’) is to subject the entire world to Shari’a law and Allah’s guidance, can a devout Muslim who witnesses to a Christian (who rejects his invitation to Islam) really not become violent? … In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the inherently violent nature of Islam.”
In the image above, formerly available on the FBI’s “Islamic Law” SME, a thermometer represents a correlation between the Muslim population of a country and its “violence level.” As Muslims accumulate in a given place, they incline toward “grievance fabrication,” then “chronic terror attacks,” and even “state-run ethnic cleansing.” The final stage is “peace” — in an all-Muslim state.
Two law enforcement sources told Danger Room that after our coverage of the FBI’s training materials ran, the “Islamic Law” SME and similar FBI intranet sites were scrubbed of such material. Danger Room was able to acquire some of these documents before they were removed.
Asked to reconcile that statement with the 2006 assessment, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen replied, “The assessment you cite includes a series of indicators of radicalization. These indicators do not conflict with our statement that strong religious beliefs should never be confused with violent extremism.”
The FBI is now in damage-control mode. On Thursday afternoon, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for its offensive training materials and admit that they were more extensive than it previously acknowledged. The FBI did not make any commitments on which outside experts or organizations it would consult for an updated training curriculum. But according to one participant, the FBI representative on the call said that many people within the Bureau disapproved of the anti-Islamic rhetoric. The FBI’s Allen declined to comment.
“We are glad that this very serious issue has finally received the attention of FBI leadership,” says Farhana Khera, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates, “but an internal review is insufficient at this stage. In the last year, the FBI has either defended its use of bigoted trainers or emphatically assured the public that the various trainings were one-time, isolated incidents. Each time those assurances were later revealed to be false.”
Muslim Advocates sent a letter to the Justice Department Inspector General last week seeking an investigation. It has yet to receive a reply. However, the chairs of the Senate’s homeland security and intelligence committees have separately told Danger Room they will subject the FBI’s counterterrorism training to scrutiny.
For months, in fact, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), has raised concerns that law enforcement at all levels lacks “meaningful standards” for counterterrorism training. In the course of his ongoing inquiry on the subject, Lieberman’s staff became aware of a particularly problematic individual: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop.
In April, Gawthrop presented a three-day briefing at the FBI’s Quantico training facility to counterterrorism agents in which he equated “mainstream” Islam with terrorism. In earlier interviews, he mused about triggering a “deteriorating cascade effect” upon Islam, convincing Muslims to abandon their religion by attacking “soft spots” in the Islamic faith. And he has lectured widely about the “threat” of Islam, ostensibly as a private citizen.
Lieberman staffers were appalled by the “inappropriate materials being used by Mr. Gawthrop and notified the FBI in mid-July of their concerns,” says Leslie Phillips, Communications Director of the Homeland Security Committee.
The FBI wouldn’t directly comment on the committee’s warning, instead reiterating the Bureau’s new commitment to a wide-ranging review — one that will stretch from Quantico to the FBI’s many field offices to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, its Washington headquarters.
“The senator hopes the FBI will take appropriate action to prohibit these and any other inaccurate training materials from being used in the future,” Phillips adds.
In the meantime, Gawthrop is, as of this writing, still an FBI counterterrorism analyst. And the message he helped inculcate in the Bureau lingers.
Even Ivy League Universities such as Princeton are not immune from radical anti-Muslims. A Christian man by the name of Adam Pyle interrupted a Muslim Student “welcome back dinner,” telling them that “Muslims are going to hell.”
One can only imagine the hysteria this would have caused in the anti-Muslim blogosphere if a Muslim had barged into a Christian, Jewish or any other faith’s “welcome back dinner.”
This is also noteworthy in the backdrop of the terrorist attacks in Norway. Anders Behring Breivik claimed to be a member of the Knight Templars as well. While we should not extrapolate excessively from this one incident we should keep in mind that there is a rise in the appropriation of Christian Crusader theology, symbols and rhetoric amongst the anti-Muslim movement.
One need only look at Robert Spencer’s extolling of the Crusades and reiteration of its call, “God Wills it,” and to the fascination in anti-Muslim groups of Crusader symbols, vividly brought to the fore in our piece, SIOA is an Anti-Muslim Hate Group.
A local man claiming to be part of the Knights Templar was arrested on Saturday night after allegedly interrupting a Muslim Student Association welcome back dinner and telling students that “Muslims are going to hell,” according to multiple witnesses and police reports.
While the incident reflects a nationwide spike in bias crimes in the wake of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, MSA members say they are treating it as an isolated event and do not plan to scale back any of their events in response.
The man, Adam Pyle, 26, of Princeton Township, had apparently been present for part of the actual dinner at Campus Club, said Sohaib Sultan, the University’s Muslim life coordinator. Toward the conclusion of the dinner, Pyle left the dining area and allegedly started going through the backpack of Jihad Al-Jabban ’14, the MSA public relations chair.
When Al-Jabban walked over, Pyle explained that he was a Christian but still a member of the “ummah,” the global Muslim community, according to Al-Jabban. Pyle then proceeded to bow and ask MSA members if they were members of the ummah, said MSA vice president Areej Hassan ’13. He also allegedly asked a member, “Why do you hate Jews?” Hassan is a staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.
“I immediately became a little bit nervous about what his intentions were,” Sultan said. “I realized this could be a potentially violent situation.”
Sultan then ushered the 60 to 70 students attending the dinner into a closed room away from Pyle, and an attendee called Public Safety. In the meantime, Pyle allegedly said, “Muslims are going to hell” and “Death to Muslims,” and began walking toward the students, according to Sultan.
“I stood right in front of him and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to let [you] go inside,’ ” Sultan recalled. During the night, Pyle also allegedly made references to the anti-Christ, University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua said in an email.
At 8:57 p.m., Public Safety officers arrested Pyle and charged him with bias intimidation, criminal attempt, disorderly conduct, harassment and defiant trespass, Mbugua said. Pyle will face the criminal charges on Monday in the Borough Municipal Court. Public Safety ordered Pyle to stay away from campus for the next 90 days, and the department intends to ban him permanently.
A message left seeking comment at Pyle’s home phone number was not returned. Pyle is not affiliated with the University.
“You just never know the type of individual [who] might come in and do something,” Sultan said. “The Muslim community in America has seen a real rise in Islamophobia over this past year in particular, and so it shakes us up. We really did feel threatened.”
It is unclear how Pyle learned of the welcome back dinner, since the event was only advertised via email and with limited on-campus advertising, MSA board members said.
“I don’t even think it was premeditated,” said Sheeba Arif ’14, the MSA events chair. “I feel like he just stumbled in on it actually.”
It is also unknown how Pyle gained access to Campus Club, access to which was limited by prox at the time, Mbugua said.
Sultan said the incident has shaken up some Muslim students, and he is concerned that new students may get the wrong impression about the University.
“To the freshmen and first-year graduate students, please don’t worry. This was an isolated incident and you will find this campus as warm and welcoming to Muslims as anywhere in this country,” Sultan said in an email to the MSA listserv.
Sultan has invited officers from Public Safety to speak with students at Friday prayers this week to thank the officers and to discuss revising any safety protocols. Students praised the responding officers, who also offered to escort the members back to their dorm rooms after the event.
Sultan added, however, that he doesn’t anticipate any increased security as a result of the incident.
“We really do hope and anticipate that this was a completely isolated incident,” he said. “We want to continue being the open community that we’ve become at Princeton.”
Other religious organizations on campus, including the Office of Religious Life, have lent their support and have offered to hold discussions and vigils in response to the incident. MSA board members said they may discuss the issue broadly at the next Religious Life Council meeting, but they want to move forward.
“It’s an isolated incident,” Arif said. “We don’t want to make a bigger deal than it is.”
While advocacy groups noticed a rise in bias crimes around the 9/11 anniversary, Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that colleges and universities are often immune.
“Colleges and universities have typically not been a major factor in our annual reporting on bias-related incidents, just because they tend to be more open, more tolerant and more knowledgeable about Islam and Muslims,” he said.
Indeed, Sultan said he couldn’t recall any similar incident occurring on campus, except for the occasional controversial speaker or offensive email. Mbugua also said this is the first incident of its nature to happen on campus.
“I think it’s still on the minds of students, but I think we recognize this was completely an isolated incident,” Sultan said. “Princeton University has been a wonderful and very welcoming home for Muslim students and faculty for many years.”
A schoolboy from Sydney’s north was brutally bashed and verbally abused by more than 20 students for being Muslim, the boy has claimed. Hamid Mamozai, 15, was allegedly hit up to a dozen times by two fellow students at Asquith Boys’ High School on Wednesday as several more cheered and hurled racial abuse from the sidelines.
“[They were saying] hit him more, hit him more, he deserves it, you terrorists, go back to where you came from, go blow something up,” Hamid told Channel 10. He said he was kneed in the face four of five times and hit up to 15 times in the face. Hamid was taken to hospital unconscious and with internal bleeding but suffered no serious injuries.
Najia, Hamid’s sister, said he had been subjected to racial abuse at the school for up to two years and was “emotionally and mentally sick” because of it. “The boy is scared … he doesn’t get out of the house,” she said.
His mother, Hosna, who fled war-torn Afghanistan 20 years ago, said she had repeatedly complained to the school to no effect. “I just want to know why this is happening, why the principal doesn’t care that students are being bullied, why don’t they stop it? I want other parents to know why this is happening,” she said.
Asquith Boys’ High declined to comment last night. In response to inquiries from the Herald, a spokesman for the Department of Education said one student had been suspended for 20 days and the police had been informed. Teachers provided immediate assistance to Hamid and called his family and an ambulance when the incident occurred, the spokesman said. Hamid and his family have been offered counselling and the school has arranged to meet with Mrs Mamozai this morning.
“Racism is not tolerated by Asquith Boys’ High School, which disciplines students engaged in such behaviour and supports students subjected to it,” the spokesman said. “Disciplinary action has been taken against students who have previously used racist language to the injured student. Due to the police investigation, it is inappropriate to comment further on the incident at this stage.”
President Barack Obama has released his detailed, long-form birth certificate that shows he was born in Hawaii. And the president has said he is a Christian.
But a Winthrop Poll released today shows that large numbers of S.C. Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party don’t believe him.
Nearly 73 percent said the word “honest” does not describe the president well. Almost 30 percent of self-identified S.C. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say Obama is a Muslim, and 36 percent say the president “probably” or “definitely” was born in another country.
For a few years of his childhood, Obama lived in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Obama, however, has insisted he is a Christian, just as he has maintained that he was born in Hawaii.
With some Republicans arguing Obama was not born in the U.S. – and thus is ineligible to serve as the nation’s chief executive – the president released his long-form birth certificate that showed that he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961.
A birth notice in a Hawaii newspaper also indicates that the president was born where and when he says he was.
But the release of that long-form birth certificate has only partially mollified those who questioned the details of the president’s birth.
A Winthrop poll from April, before the president released the detailed birth certificate, found 43 percent of S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners said the president was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country. About 45 percent said he was “definitely” or “probably” born in the United States. Now, that percentage has crept up to 53 percent.
Whether or not they think Obama was born in the United States, S.C. Republicans and Republican leaners still don’t have much use for the president, the poll shows.
More than three-quarters of those polled say the word “intelligent” describes the president “very well” or “well.” But about 75 percent say the same thing about the word “socialist.”
Muslim artist Kenny Irwin has been featured on our site in the past when he unveiled he “Ultra Christmas Decorations” on Conan O’Brien’s show. This time he microwaves an anti-Muslim 9/11 coloring book and turns it into the “anti-bigotry slug.” (hat tip:pigeonyolk)
Artist microwaves “The We Shall Never Forget 9:11 The Kids’ Book of Freedom” coloring book by Publisher Wayne Bell.
In response to Wayne Bell’s islamophobic coloring book geared at impressionable young children called “The We Shall Never Forget 9:11 The Kids’ Book of Freedom” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nJlk_Em7xY , nationally & internationally acclaimed artist Kenny Irwin & founder of the famous dOvetastic Microwave Theater series has produced Episode #602 in which the coloring book gets microwaved inside a powerful hand built giant microwaving robot called the MALIK 11000 Five Ton Microwaving Robot standing twenty feet tall. The resulting art is transformed into the “AntiBigotSLUG” available on Ebay.
The artist makes a anti-hate statement explaining the hateful content issues at hand in the video & the real facts that the villains that caused the 2001 attacks were not representives of islam. That muslims condemn the attacks whom also lost loved ones & were also first responders. Muslims have been plagued for years by false stereotyping, bigotry & hate as a result of the attacks that occurred in 2001. The artist feels the book is inflammatory showing a narrow perspective of the 2001 attacks, that is hateful against muslims & has included educational links with the video that will hopefully educate people more about muslims & the faith of islam.
Needless to say, none of the government officials responsible for this abuse of a U.S. citizen on American soil has been held accountable in any way. That’s because President Obama decreed that Bush officials shall not be criminally investigated for War on Terror crimes, while his Justice Department vigorously defended John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and other responsible functionaries in civil suits brought by Padilla seeking damages for what was done to him.
As usual, the Obama DOJ cited national security imperatives and sweeping theories of presidential power to demand that Executive Branch officials be fully shielded from judicial scrutiny (i.e., shielded from the rule of law) for their illegal acts (the Obama DOJ: ”Here, where Padilla’s damage claims directly relate, inter alia, to the President’s war powers, including whether and when a person captured in this country during an armed conflict can be held in military detention under the laws of war, it would be particularly inappropriate for this Court to unnecessarily reach the merits of the constitutional claims” (emphasis added)). With one rare exception,federal courts, as usual, meekly complied. Thus, a full-scale shield of immunity has been constructed around the high-level government officials who put Padilla in a hermetically sealed cage with no charges and then abused and tortured him for years.
The treatment Padilla has received in the justice system is, needless to say, the polar opposite of that enjoyed by these political elites. Literally days before it was required to justify to the U.S. Supreme Court how it could imprison an American citizen for years without charges or access to a lawyer, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla — on charges unrelated to, and far less serious than, the accusation that he was A Dirty Bomber — and thensuccessfully convinced the Supreme Court to refuse to decide the legality of Padilla’s imprisonment on the grounds of “mootness” (he’s no longer being held without charges so there’s nothing to decide).
At Padilla’s trial, the judge excluded all evidence of the abuse to which he was subjected and even admitted statements he made while in custody before he was Mirandized. Unsurprisingly, Padilla was convicted on charges of “supporting Islamic terrorism overseas” – but not any actual Terrorist plots (“The government’s chief evidence was an application form that government prosecutors said Mr. Padilla, 36, filled out to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000″) – and then sentenced to 17 years in prison, all above and beyond the five years he was imprisoned with no due process.
Not content with what was done to Padilla, the Bush DOJ – and then the Obama DOJ – contested the sentence on appeal, insisting that it was too lenient; Padilla also appealed, arguing that the trial court made numerous errors in excluding his evidence while allowing the Government’s. Yesterday, a federal appeals panel of the 11th Circuit issued a ruling, by a 2-1 vote, rejecting each and every one of Padilla’s arguments. It then took the very unusual step of vacating the 17-year-sentence imposed by the trial court as too lenient and, in effect, ordered the trial judge to impose a substantially harsher prison term:
Padilla’s sentence is substantively unreasonable because it does not adequately reflect his criminal history, does not adequately account for his risk of recidivism, was based partly on an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors . . . .
As the dissenting judge explained, this decision is extraordinary because trial judges — not judges sitting afterward on appeal — are the ones who hear all the evidence and thus have very wide discretion to determine the appropriate sentence. But more so, in this case, a sentence less than the full maximum was warranted because “the trial judge correctly concluded that a sentence reduction is available to offenders who have been subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions of pre-trial confinement.” About that point, the dissenting judge documented:
Padilla presented substantial, detailed, and compelling evidence about the inhumane, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and mentally painful conditions in which he had already been detained for a period of almost four years. For example, he presented evidence at sentencing of being kept in extreme isolation at he military brig in South Carolina where he was subjected to cruel interrogations, prolonged physical and mental pain, extreme environmental stresses, noise and temperature variations, and deprivation of sensory stimuli and sleep.
In sentencing Padilla, the trial judge accepted the facts of his confinement that had been presented both during the trial and at sentencing, which also included evidence about the impact on one’s mental health of prolonged isolation and solitary confinement, all of which were properly taken into account in deciding how much more confinement should be imposed. None of these factual findings, nor the trial judge’s consideration of them in fashioning Padilla’s sentence, are challenged on appeal by the government or the majority.
Thus: American officials who are responsible for this “inhumane” and “cruel” abuse of detainees act with full impunity, as usual. Those who are its victims are not merely denied all redress (though they are), and do not merely have the courthouse doors slammed in their faces in the name of secrecy, national security and presidential power (though they do), but they are also mercilessly punished to the fullest extent possible.
It should be said that part of what happened here is just the typical politicization of the judiciary, as the two-judge majority was comprised of a hard-core right-wing Reagan/Bush 41 appointee from Alabama (Joel Dubina), while the other was one of Bush 43′s most controversial appointees, the former Alabama Attorney General who was filibustered by the Democrats and allowed onto the bench only by virtue of the “Gang of 14″ compromise (William Pryor). Meanwhile, the dissenting judge was born in Mexico to Syrian parents and, after moving to Miami at the age of 6, became the first female judge (as well as the first Hispanic and Arab American judge) on the Florida Supreme Court (rising to Chief Justice), and was a Clinton appointee to the federal appeals court (Rosemary Barkett); Barkett, incidentally, dissented from an 11th Circuit ruling denying a habeas petition to Troy Davis, the African-American death row inmate scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia this week despitemountains of evidence showing his innocence. So this episode highlights one of the few genuine differences that remain between the two parties that can truly impact people’s lives: their judicial appointments.
But the overriding theme is what we have seen time and again, that which — as it turns out — is the subject of my book to be released next month: America is plagued by a two-tiered justice system in which political and financial elites enjoy virtually absolute immunity for even the most egregious of crimes, while ordinary Americans (and especially fully stigmatized ones like Padilla) are subject with few defenses to the world’s largest and one of its most merciless systems of punishment. Thus do Jose Padilla’s lawless jailers and torturers walk free and prosper, while no punishment is sufficiently harsh for him.
Padilla was never even charged with, let alone convicted of, having anything to do with a “dirty bomb.” “Dirty Bomber” was the villain nickname given to him by Bush officials and mindlessy repeated by its media to justify the treatment to which he was subjected. The U.S. Government gave up long ago using this accusation to demonize him (NYT on his conviction: ”The dirty bomb accusations were not mentioned during Mr. Padilla’s three-month trial here“), but their lying “watchdog media” servants continue unabated. Who would possibly object to a longer prison term for A Dirty Bomber who tried to detonate radioactive weapons in American cities? The fact that not even the Government charged with him that is no deterrent to its media continuing to claim he did.
A teenager shouted racial abuse as he kicked and stamped on a 71-year-old grandfather’s head for 10 minutes. And he later sent a sickening text boasting about his horrifying actions.
At Kilmarnock Sheriff Court on Monday, the 16-year-old – who cannot be named for legal reasons – pleaded guilty to carrying out the vicious attack outside the Ayrshire Central Mosque in July.
His victim, who had already suffered a stroke, sustained severe facial injuries in the unprovoked attack which took place in the early hours of the morning.
Nancy Beresford, prosecuting, said that the former Crosshouse shopkeeper had gone to the mosque, in Hill Street, Kilmarnock, to prepare for Friday prayers at around 1.40am. As he approached the door, clad in white robes, he noticed a male and two females, along with young children, standing in the street, with another group of females nearby.
The 16-year-old then came towards him shouting abuse, including “Paki bastard”. He punched the pensioner in the chest, causing him to fall to the ground. The teenager continued the assault, while still shouting abuse.
Interviewed, he denied the assault and racial abuse. The 16-year-old told police that he couldn’t understand “why somebody was praying at that time in the morning”.
The Ayrshire Central Mosque was opened earlier this year after the conversion of a former pub – a development that was fiercely opposed by the Scottish Defence League. Back in 2009, when the EDL was planning to extend its Islamophobic campaign north of the border, Osama Saeed reported:
“Mosques in Glasgow and Kilmarnock have been identified by the far right Scottish Defence League and their English counterpart as possible scenes of protest. In Glasgow, we understand that they have discussed George Square, Pollokshields and the Sheriff Court as possible locations. The latter seems like a strange place to hold a demonstration till it is understood that it is across the street from Glasgow Central Mosque. Also discussed has been a pub in Kilmarnock, the Hillhead Tavern, which is the subject of interest from a Muslim group to buy and convert into a mosque.”
The SDL eventually settled on Glasgow for their first demonstrationbut went on to organise a protest in Kilmarnock in June last year. Although it was billed as a demonstration in defence of “free speech”, the SDL’s main target was clearly the conversion of the former Hillhead Tavern.
The FBI says that Gawthrop gave his last presentation to Bureau counterterrorism classes in April 2011, but the newly disclosed videos would suggest that Gawthrop has continued his career as a terrorism “expert” at FBI sponsored events for at least another two months.
In video acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, FBI counterterrorism trainer William Gawthrop, who in previously leaked documents was shown to have lectured that the Muslim prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader,” tells his audience that “[After 9/11] we wasted a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon, the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevent… if you have an Islamic motivation for actions.”
Ackerman had previously called attention to Gawthrop’s presentation materials for his lectures at the FBI’s training facilities in Quantico, Virginia, in which the counterterrorism “expert” suggested that Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, hadn’t moderated its “militancy considerations” since approximately 622 B.C.
Gawthrop, much like many of the experts discussed in the Center for American Progress’s new report Fear, Inc., believes that Islam is, at its roots, a violent ideology at war with the West.
In the newly released video, Gawthrop tells his audience at the New York Metro Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan — an FBI sponsored public-private partnership — that even overthrowing Islamic states, like Iran, who threaten the U.S. and its allies, is insufficient since “there are still internal forces that will seek to exert Islamic rule again.”
Watch it:
Gawrthrop, as he advocates in his PowerPoint presentations, pushes for a direct confrontation with Muslims that challenges the underpinnings of their religion and Koranic teaching. Referring to a slide with the words “Holy Texts” and “Clerics,” Gawthrop says:
If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there. That’s a critical vulnerability.
Ackerman and Shachtman report that a different video, which they were unable to recover before it was deleted, showed Gawthrop criticizing outreach programs to Muslims communities:
If we were going back to the 1940s, this would be like the Army and Navy asking Japanese-Americans to participate in the intelligence and operations paths trying to understand the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. That didn’t happen,
The FBI says that Gawthrop gave his last presentation to Bureau counterterrorism classes in April 2011, but the newly disclosed videos would suggest that Gawthrop has continued his career as a terrorism “expert” at FBI sponsored events for at least another two months.
About 30 Muslim graves have been desecrated in Carcassone, south-west France. A legal inquiry has been launched to find the perpetrators and punish them.
The caretaker of the military cemetery of Saint-Michel de la ville discovered racist and Nazi slogans daubed on the gravestones when he closed up on Saturday.
The graves belonged to Muslims killed fighting for France during World War I and were immediately repainted and restored.
The graffiti were “really racist” and “particularly disgusting”, according to Carcassonne prosecutor Antoine Leroy, who has opened an inquiry into the incident.
Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks analyze the debate between Michael Moore and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck makes almost absolutely no sense:
Loonwatchers, please welcome Ilisha our newest contributor. She will be focusing on issues of women and Islam.
This month Pamella Geller published a book entitled, “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance,” which she describes as a “how to” guide for fighting various Islamic menaces, including “creeping sharia” and “stealth jihad.” She also describes how Muslims, who make up less than 2% of the American population, are “Islamic Supremacists” plotting to take over every aspect of American life.
Geller has also announced plans for a future book tentatively entitled, “Sex, Murder, and Islam: Honor Killing in America. ” She says the book will be about the “ongoing proliferation” of honor killings among immigrants to the West from Muslim countries. Honor killings have recently become the centerpiece of Geller’s campaign against Islam, and feature prominently on her website, Atlas Shrugs.
Honor killings are not Islamic, and they are not condoned in the Qur’an. This is a matter of fact. Honor killing is a form of murder where the victim is denied a fair trial, which is contrary to Islamic law. Islam opposes acts of murder and vigilantism, and likens the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33). Honor killing is a cultural inheritance which predates Islam by centuries, and Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nationshave all said that honor killings cut across cultural and religious lines.
Nevertheless, “Islamic” honor killings are a public relations bonanza for Islamophobes, especially when they take place in a Western country. They are used to reinforce the notion that Islam is inherently violent and irrational, and to suggest that Muslim families view a young woman’s adoption of Western culture as a capital offense. Isolated incidents are amplified through intense media coverage, stoking fears that Muslims are importing barbaric customs into Western countries through immigration.
Anti-Muslim hate sites including Jihadwatch, Atlas Shrugs, and Frontpage Magazine have been weeping crocodile tears for Aqsa Parvez since she was killed by her father and brother in December of 2007 in an apparent honor killing. Both men received life sentences for their crime in June of 2010, but that hasn’t stopped Pamela Geller from continuing to exploit the incident to advance her agenda. She recently managed to raise $5,000 in donations she used to fund a controversial memorial plaque for Aqsa Parvez in Israel.
Parvez is the ideal poster child for their campaign to vilify Islam because she was the teenage daughter of Muslim immigrants living in Ontario, Canada. For similar reasons, Robert Spencer is exploiting the tragic death of two sisters, Sarah Yaser Said, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, who were shot and killed by their father, an immigrant from Egypt, in January of 2008 in Texas.
Geller and Spencer show little interest in similar crimes when they are committed by non-Muslims. A few months before Aqsa Parvez was killed, a gruesome video surfaced of a 17-year old Du’a Khalil Aswad in Mosul, Iraq being stoned to death by a mob while she cried out for help. The video garnered immediate attention when it was presumed to be an “Islamic” crime, but quickly dropped out of the spotlight when it turned out the victim was a Kurdish girl from the Yazidi religion who was killed for having an Arab Muslim boyfriend.
In 2008, a man in Chicago killed his pregnant daughter, her 3-year old child, and her husband by burning down their home because she had married a man from a lower caste. This horrific crime was ignored by the usual hate brigade because the perpetrator was a non-Muslim immigrant from India. Robert Spencer mentioned the case on Jihadwatch only briefly, and that was to complain that media attention should be going to the murder of the Said sisters instead.
Geller’s Atlas Shrugs features a memorial page entitled, “Honor Killing: Islam’s Gruesome Gallery.” It is indeed gruesome and serves her agenda of inspiring outrage against Islam and Muslims. Unlike the Memini (“Remembrance”) memorial for victims of honor killings from all religious backgrounds, Geller’s Gruesome Gallery is devoted exclusively to highlighting honor killings associated with Muslims.
Geller and Spencer have also been relentless in trying to get police in Tampa, Florida to reopen the case of Fatima Abdullah, insisting she was the victim of an honor killing and subsequent cover up. The 48-year old woman died when she fell and hit her head on a coffee table at her brother’s home. Her brother was not home at the time of the incident.
This is the sharia in America. The idea that a woman would die after she ‘threw herself to the floor’ or hit her head repeatedly on the coffee table is institutionalized gender apartheid, the sharia. The idea defies logic, belies reality.
As a self-proclaimed scholar on Islam, Spencer should know that Islamic law (“the sharia”) does not sanction honor killing. The coroner’s autopsy report concluded the “Manner of Death” was “Accident (Decedent fell and struck head on table).” The detailed medical report does not mention any evidence of foul play.
Jihadwatch later published a page with the headline, “Tampa Police crime scene tech now admits ‘fear of Muslim reprisal’ in honor killing classified as accidental death,” which was reposted to numerous anti-Muslim hate sites. This implies police lied when they ruled the case an accident, but a closer look at the details shows this headline is misleading.
A crime scene technician from the Tampa police department called the Florida Family Association (FFA) nearly a year after the initial investigation and asked that her name be removed from their website, which has been stirring up controversy over the case, in concert with Geller and Spencer. The technician did not want her name posted on a controversial public website, though it is unclear from the reports whether she feared reprisal from angry Muslims, or from “activists” aligned with the FFA.
Although Tampa police have stood by results of their initial investigation, Geller and an assortment of other loony Islamophobes continue to exert pressure on authorities to reopen the case. They have linked the case to their conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over the country, apparently starting with the Tampa Police Department. Geller has dubbed the city “Tampastan,” and claims Florida police are engaged in a cover up because, “…murdering Muslim women in America is preferable to offending Muslims or insulting Islam.”
It is tempting to dismiss Geller and Spencer for their outlandish statements and crude publicity stunts, but they have enjoyed surprising success, especially in using the mainstream media as a conduit for spreading their hateful ideas. If they were targeting any other minority group, they would probably be consigned to the lunatic fringe.
The complete failure of our law enforcement agencies to protect us from real threats of terrorism was confirmed on September 11, 2001, when – in spite of plentifulwarnings, including from fieldoffices of the Federal Bureau of Idiocy Investigation – nineteen hijackers armed only with box cutters commandeered three airliners and drove them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
No one paid the price for this – except, of course, the victims of the attacks. No high-ranking US government official, including the head of the FBI, was fired or even called on the carpet.
Instead, our law enforcement agencies were given a free pass – and a blank check. Billions were poured into “anti-terrorist” programs, as a terrified and prostrate Congress authorized unprecedented intrusions into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Surveillance State, already growing at a rapid pace, grew to gargantuan proportions, employing tens of thousands of professional snoops and sneaks to spy on the legal, constitutionally protected activities of American citizens.
The first, but far from only, targets of this massive escalation of spying were Americans of the Muslim faith – and, while the neocon media salivated at the prospect, mosques, religious leaders, and ordinary people were put in the government’s sights. The wholesale targeting of Muslims has become so egregious that agents inside the FBI rebelled, and leaked documents to Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman which reveal the craziness that has not abated since 9/11.
The documents are dozens of pages out of “training” manuals which posit that Islam, per se, is inherently and inescapably violent and subversive. As Ackerman reports:
“The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’
“At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’ under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.’”
This is craziness, and it’s not the craziness of the Bush era, either – Ackerman reports that the last “training session” that utilized these nut-job materials was in March of this year. Yes, folks, it’s all about hope and change – from bad to worse.
Go here and feast your eyes on the actual materials used to “train” FBI agents involved in “counterterrorism” operations in the US: Mohammed, according to the FBI, was a “cult leader,” and torture is part of the Muslim religion, mandated by the Prophet – a weird accusation coming from the US government, which infamously institutionalized torture techniques borrowed from the Communists and the Nazis. Much space is given over to characterizing the prophet Mohammed as psychopath who “heard voices,” “contemplated suicide,” and plotted heinous murders. In short, he’s a medieval version of David Koresh – another FBI target – whose followers presumably deserve the same fate.
The theme of this material is simple: Islam is not a religion but a military-political formation whose goal is world conquest, whose methods are utterly ruthless, and whose followers are mad dogs who can only be shot down with relentless ferocity.
As Ackerman points out, al-Qaeda couldn’t agree more.
The lunacy doesn’t end there, however: a document entitled “Militancy Considerations” has a graph that charts the violent tendencies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to this work of graphical genius, Judaism underwent a very brief period of orienting toward violence that began to be ameliorated starting in 1400 B.C. – a factoid the Palestinians will be thrilled to hear about. Christianity, in contrast, started out pretty violently – which should be news to fans of the Sermon the Mount – and only started to approximate the relative peacefulness of Judaism around the year 1900, where the two lines on the graph representing the two religions meet and merge.
Islam, however, is an entirely different story: here the line goes up very briefly, charting the course of what the FBI describes as the “Meccan period,” but then goes sideways – toward increasing violence – in a straight line, after entering what is termed the “Medina period.”
We have heard all this before, of course – in the ravings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and David Horowitz. Indeed, the author of at least one of the FBI “presentations,” one William Gawthrop, was interviewed by WorldNutDaily – birther headquarters – in which he attributed radical Islamist terrorism to the prophet Mohammed’s “mindset.” In the interview, Gawthrop is described as someone “who until recent months headed a key counterintelligence and counterterrorism program set up at the Pentagon after 9/11.” Islam isn’t really a religion, according to Gawthrop, but a “military doctrine.” The Koran is not only a sacred text but also a manual for world conquest:
“’Today the United States and an increasing number of other governments are beleaguered by an expanding array of states, groups and individuals whose goals, actions and norms are animated by Islamic values,’ Gawthrop said. ‘This places the defenders in the unenviable position of having to fight, at the strategic level, against an idea.’
“How do you attack an idea? By hitting ‘soft spots’ in the Islamic faith that, once exploited, ‘may induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target,’ Gawthrop says.”
“’Critical vulnerabilities of the Quran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,’ Gawthrop said. ‘Similar vulnerabilities may be found in Muhammad’s character.’”
This reads like a rationale for the worst sort of hate-mongering of the kind one sees on far-right-wing blogs, and the obscene excesses of wackos like Pamela Geller, who ascribe every sort of moral and sexual perversion to the most revered figure of one of the world’s three great Abrahamic faiths. The idea is not to win over Muslims, at home and abroad, to the anti-terrorist cause, but to insult and provoke them to higher levels of violence.
Somewhere close to the lowest rung of Hell, Osama bin Laden is smiling.
Gawthrop criticizes the Pentagon for lacking his own “strategic” understanding of Islam, and predicts that:
“As the jihad spreads … the government eventually will have to get involved in a such a controversial national education campaign, politically incorrect as it may be. ‘If the United States, moderate Muslim governments and the non-Muslim world seek to engage ideological adversaries on their own ground,’ he said, ‘they will have to develop, use and maintain the full range of capabilities in the ideological component of national power, and address Islam’s strategic themes directly.’”
In other words: hire him to direct a national – nay, international – hate campaign directed at Islam, per se, and the memory and image of the Prophet Mohammed.
The anti-Muslim business is one of the few that is booming in Obama’s America, along with the arms manufacturers and the hedge funds. “Homeland Security” is a growth industry, with the prospect of huge amounts of government money flowing into the coffers of frauds like Hawthrop. This is welfare for nut-balls.
See here, here, here, and here for reports on the growing infiltration of Washington’s “counter-terrorism” efforts by Anders Breivik look-alikes. As Dana Priest pointed out in her comprehensive series on the gargantuan “anti-terrorist” bureaucracy that has mushroomed since 9/11:
“In their desire to learn more about terrorism, many departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and others in the intelligence community.”
This is the inevitable result of any government program designed to “study” a religio-ideological phenomenon – an entire industry grows up in the lush atmosphere of plentiful and lucrative government contracts, flowering into the likes of Hawthrop and other crackpots who pose as “experts.” It happened during the cold war, with neoconservative “experts” arising to push their extremist policies – and the same thing is happening today in our endless “war on terrorism.”
These snake oil salesmen gain surface credibility on account of their background in government and the military, or due to their association with a whole sub-universe of fringe “thinktanks,” such as Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP). Gaffney’s CSP is a key node in the nut-job network, and one indication of their credibility level is the fact that Gaffney has endorsed the laughable “intelligence” expertise of Walid Shoebat, who claims Obama is a Muslim. Gaffney and Shoebat once appeared on a panel together discussing the question of whether – or when – Obama became a Muslim. Gaffney, for his part, along with David Horowitz, is convinced that the Republican party – and the US government – have been infiltrated by Islamists due to the efforts of Grover Norquist! Shoebat is also a favorite of the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA), which publishes Hawthrop’s drivel in their journal: he appeared, with Robert Spencer and William Boykin — the “crusader” General — at a “Ft. Hood Memorial” hate-fest. The wacko circle-jerk of cross-endorsements and interlocking organizations serves to buttress the “credentials” of these “experts.”
That they have infiltrated law enforcement at the local, state, and federal level, is horrifying – and unsurprising. They’re just going where the federal dollars flow, springing up like weeds in a sparsely-grown patch of ground. Tax dollars spread generously around breed these phonies like flies after a summer rain: it’s a built-in feature of our bureaucratic approach to “fighting terrorism.”
What’s scary is that the FBI is supposed to be protecting us from “terrorism” – but who will protect us from our protectors? These lazy dolts have nothing better to do than sneak around “investigating” Americans who have broken no law, accusing even this web site – and this columnist – of being “a threat to National Security” and in all probability an “agent of a foreign power.”
The foreign power is in Washington, D.C., where parasites like Hawthrop & Co. feed at the public trough. It’s more than past time to clean the Augean stables of our “counterterrorism” bureaucracy and start defending the nation in a credible way.
The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.
“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”
The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.
Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.
They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” When Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.”
But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took place on March 21.
The Islam briefings are elective, not mandatory. “A disclaimer accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government,” FBI spokesman Christopher Allen tells Danger Room.
“The training materials in question were delivered as Stage Two training to counterterrorism-designated agents,” Allen adds. “This training was largely derived from a variety of open source publications and includes the opinion of the analyst that developed the lesson block.”
Not all counterterrorism veterans consider the briefings so benign. “Teaching counterterrorism operatives about obscure aspects of Islam,” says Robert McFadden, who recently retired as one of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service’s al-Qaida-hunters, “without context, without objectivity, and without covering other non-religious drivers of dangerous behavior is no way to stop actual terrorists.”
Still, at Quantico, the alleged connection between Islam and violence isn’t just stipulated. It’s literally graphed.
An FBI presentation titled “Militancy Considerations” measures the relationship between piety and violence among the texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. As time goes on, the followers of the Torah and the Bible move from “violent” to “non-violent.” Not so for devotees of the Koran, whose “moderating process has not happened.” The line representing violent behavior from devout Muslims flatlines and continues outward, from 610 A.D. to 2010. In other words, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.
Training at Quantico isn’t designed for intellectual bull sessions or abstract theory, according to FBI veterans. The FBI conducts its training so that both seasoned agents and new recruits can sharpen their investigative skills.
In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even “Islamist extremism.” Islam.
What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include “immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.
On Tuesday, the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), warned that law enforcement lacks “meaningful standards” to prevent anti-Islam material from seeping into counterterrorism training. Some FBI veterans suspect the increased pressure on American Muslims has a lot to do with the kind of training that Quantico offers.
“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.” (Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works for the ACLU.)
The chief of the Training Division, Assistant FBI Director Thomas Browne, came into his current job in January. His official biography lists no terrorism expertise beyond serving as a coordinator for a bureau “Domestic Terrorism Program” in Tennessee sometime in the last decade.
It is unclear what vetting process the FBI used to approve these briefings; if any Muslim scholars contributed to them; and what criteria Quantico uses to determine Islamic expertise. “The development of effective training is a constantly evolving process,” says FBI spokesman Allen. “Sometimes the training is adapted for long-term use. This particular training segment was delivered a single time and not used since.”
Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.
At the time, Gawthrop’s major suggestion for waging the war on terrorism was to attack what he called “soft spots” in Islamic faith that might “induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target.” That is, to discredit Islam itself and cause Muslims to abandon their religion. “Critical vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,” he said. Alas, he lamented, he faced the bureaucratic obstacle of official Washington’s “political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the religion of Islam,” according to the website.
Back then, however, Gawthrop didn’t work for the FBI. He had recently stepped down from a position with the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity. That agency came under withering criticism during the Bush administration for keeping a database about threats to military bases that included reports on peaceful antiwar protesters and dovish Church groups. It is unclear how Gawthrop came to work for the FBI.
Through an intermediary, Gawthrop told Danger Room that he was unavailable for comment before our deadline.
The FBI didn’t always conflate terrorism with Islam. “I never saw that,” says Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s most distinguished counterterrorism agents and author of the new memoir The Black Banners, who retired from the bureau in 2005. “Sometimes, toward the end of my time, I started noticing it with different entities outside the FBI. You started feeling like they had a problem with Islam-as-Islam, because of the media. But that was a few people, and was usually hidden behind closed doors.”
Soufan, a Muslim, has interrogated members of al-Qaida and contributed to rolling up one of its cells in Yemen after 9/11. But by the logic of the FBI’s training materials, Soufan’s religious practices make him a potential terrorist.
McFadden, the former NCIS counterterrorist, has a lot of respect for his FBI colleagues, who he believes are ill-served by these Islam briefings. “These are earnest special agents and police officers who want to know how do their job better,” McFadden says.
Too often, McFadden says, counterterrorism training becomes simultaneously over-broad and ignorant. “Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization of things like, for instance, the Hawala system,” McFadden explains. “It’s a system that most of the developing world and expatriates from it use to move money around, including terrorists. But you can’t say the whole hawala system is about terrorism, just like you can’t say that Islam as a whole has anything to do with bad behavior.”
McFadden, a Catholic, believes that obsessing over obscure Koranic verses is as useful a guide to terrorist behavior as “diving into the rite of exorcism” is to understanding Catholicism.
On April 6, barely two weeks after the “Islamic Motivations for ‘Suicide’ Bombers” briefing at Quantico, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the bureau’s budget before a congressional committee. Among his major points: the FBI needs cooperation from American Muslims to stop the next terrorist attack.
“Since September 11th, every one of our 56 field offices and the leadership of those offices have had outreach to the Muslim community,” Mueller said. “We need the support of that community … our business is basically relationships.” That is exactly the opposite message sent in the training rooms of Quantico, where the next generation of FBI counterterrorism is shaped.
Terrorist inspirer Robert Spencer’s proclivity to engage in anti-Muslim Islamophobic conspiracy theories is well known. Recently, he dallied once again in the nutty conspiracy that Barack Obama is a ‘radical undercover Mooslim’ hell bent on destroying America.
Obama reads Psalm 46, including verse 8: “Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has wrought desolations in the earth.”
The only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being wreaking desolations on the earth are…Islamic jihadists.
Robert Spencer, just like his comrade Pamela Geller believes Obama is a Muslim. They have repeated this claim numerous times, both implicitly and directly, though Spencer has reverted again to not saying it clearly.
Spencer, unlike his friend Geller knows that such a belief is bats*** loony so he attempts to couch his language in euphemism and hints.
It is interesting to note Spencer’s false claim that the “only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being are Islamic jihadists.” Spencer isn’t that stupid, just a week ago he was on Pat Robertson’s700 Club, the same loon pastor who “in the wake of 9/11, had a now (in-)famous exchange with the late Jerry Falwell in which the two religious leaders suggested that the United States ‘deserved’ the attacks for its tolerance of secularism, gays, abortion, feminists and pagans.”
Maybe Spencer thinks that Robertson is an Islamic Jihadist?
However, when have facts ever stopped Spencer in the past? So, with single-minded drive to prove Obama’s radical Islamic Jihadism he continues:
So why did Barack Obama pick this psalm out of 150 psalms, and out of innumerable appropriate Biblical passages, to read at the 9/11 ceremonies? 9/11, after all, was a day when there were indeed wrought desolations on the earth. Did Obama really mean to say that God did it, that it was an act of divine judgment, rather than a monstrous and unmitigated evil?
Or is this just another one of those funny coincidences, of which there are so very, very many when it comes to Barack Obama and his remarkable, unqualified and obvious affinity for Islam?
Robert Spencer long ago went off the rails when he solidified his alliance with Pamela Geller and the fascist anti-Muslim Right-wing network. Ever since then it has been downhill for the anti-Muslim polemicist. No longer does he care to present the facade of impartiality, scholarliness or truth. He has been savaged for it in the mainstream media, it only remains for the national security complex, which still allows him to instruct its employees to catch up to this soon to be bygone “counter-jihad” blogger.
Wallowing in his own self-righteousness, Spencer declares the President of the United States Barack Obama, a professed Christian, the commander-in-chief of forces occupying two Muslim nations and bombing the hell out of several more of being an “Islamist Jihadist.”
Is that called “chutzpah” or just plain right-wing anti-Muslim loonacy?
On the same day the country gathered together to recognize the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched two F-16 jets to tail a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver after the crew reported “suspicious activity on board.” That “activity”? The existence of three dark-skinned passengers. Two Indian men and one self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” from Ohio — all unknown to each other — made the mistake of boarding a plane on Sept. 11, 2011.
After the crew reported that two people had spent “an extraordinarily long time” in the bathroom, the jets escorted the plane to its destination in Detroit, Michigan. Then, according to reports and the “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife” Shoshana Hebshi, a SWAT team of about 10 police boarded the plane with machine guns and three dogs, approached Hebshi and the men’s aisle, handcuffed them, and escorted them off the plane:
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
My last tweet: Majorly armed cops coming aboard
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
After interrogating and strip-searching the three passengers, the FBI determined hours later that “there was no real threat,” excusing the wildly disproportionate response by stating, “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.” When Hebshi asked her interrogator what sparked the concern, he replied “that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity.” Hebshi noted that the “activity” was two Indian men “going to the bathroom in succession.”
Hebshi’s situation is an all-too-common example from one of 9/11′s salient legacies: racial and ethnic profiling. Multipleminorities — Muslim or not — have been banned from flights or subjected to humiliating searches solely because of their appearance. Indeed, U.S. officials even spurred diplomatic tension with India last year for detaining its U.N. envoy and demanding to physically check his turban.
Living through this era of Islamophobia, Hebshi wondered whether the mere fact that three minorities “who didn’t know each other” but were dark-skinned will always be “suspicion enough.”
A Bronx Imam received a partially burnt Koran, delivered in an envelope to his mosque the day before Sept. 11th.
The Imam found the Koran in a brown envelope, which showed up at his mosque on East 198th Street at around noon Saturday. There were also papers inside the envelope covered with cartoon like drawing depicting hatred towards Muslims.
The Imam also found white powder inside the envelope. Tests determined the powder was actually pieces of the burnt Koran.
The incident is being investigated by the hate NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.
Loonwatchers in Michigan and elsewhere should not stand for this fakery. They should take action and lodge complaints with their senators and congressional representatives. No longer should those who are clearly out to make a buck while trafficking in hate and lies be given a free pass.
The appearance of a man who claims to be a reformed terrorist at a rally against illegal immigration at the Capitol building in Lansing is raising questions both about the accuracy of his story and the propriety of his invitation to speak.
Kamal Saleem of Berkley spoke at the rally and testified before the House Commerce Committee supporting legislation introduced by Rep. Dave Agema (R-Grandville) that would require contractors for the state and temporary agencies to use E-Verify, a federal system to verify a person’s immigration status.
E-Verify is a federal program that has been found to return false denials, resulting in people losing jobs. The legislation was tabled by the Commerce Committee for a second time.
“I came to the United States of America not to love you all. I came to be — exactly — to destroy this country as a terrorist. We crossed the Canadian border. We brought weapon caches right through cities, through Windsor,” Saleem told attendees. “This is what is all happening by allowing illegals in here to come through our borders and become a part of our country. They can become legal terrorists in your hometown to kill your children, and your grandchildren and your future as we know it.”
Saleem claims that he was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as well as the Muslim Brotherhood when he came to the U.S. in 1979 “for the first time.” He said the E-Verify system was important to prevent future terror attacks on American soil.
“This (E-Verify) will not allow people like me to come to this country to destroy it and would allow the American people to legally work and have their freedom in this country,” he said.
For Calvin College history professor Douglas Howard, there is much to doubt about the claim to have been a former terrorist. Howard researched Saleem’s background in 2007 when the Calvin College Republican Club invited him to present at the conservative Christian college. Howard said that as an expert in Middle East history, his department tasked him with reviewing Saleem’s credentials and advising the department on whether or not it should co-sponsor the event.
“I concluded this person is a fraud,” Howard says.
Howard tried to get the appearance canceled but it was too late in the process.
In a 2010 Books and Culture: A Christian Review article about Saleem’s book “The Blood of the Lambs,” Howard explains how he first came to question Saleem’s story.
A look at his website told me immediately that he was not who he said he was. The signature of his deception was his statement that “in my family was the Grand Wazir of Islam.” The term is ridiculous, a spurious title meant to mislead the innocent with an aura of authority.
In the conclusion of that article — in which he calls Saleem a fraud and deconstructs errors in his book — Howard writes of Saleem’s book:
“It is insulting to be told that we have to look down the barrel of a gun to see life’s inner meaning, or that only a killer can really understand Islam. Authentic experience comes when we see a man or a woman before we see a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew; when we hear a human voice before we hear ‘a thick Middle Eastern accent’; when the person next to us on the plane is a young man—with a father and a mother waiting for him—before he is a Nigerian or an American. Anything else leads down the road toward extremism. Although Kamal Saleem has forsaken much, he has evidently not yet forsaken that.”
Howard says that while he was doing research on Saleem, he called a former employer. He did not name the employer during the interview with Michigan Messenger, however, he identifies the employer as Focus on the Family in Books and Culture review.
“He claimed to have been a former football player, a placekicker for Barry Switzer (former coach of the University of Oklahoma football program) and claimed that he won a game in the last three seconds with a field goal,” Howard recalled Focus on the Family staff telling him. The problem? No such game existed and while Saleem makes a big deal about hiding his real name, Focus on the Family staff referred to him by his given name — allowing Howard to check Oklahoma rosters.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported in 2008 on Saleem’s history:
Kamal Saleem, whose real name is Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network for sixteen years, and was hired by Focus on the Family in 2003. In 2006, he launched Koome Ministries, whose mission is to “expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world… America must wake-up and set a continued Christian agenda of Liberty and Truth as a standard to follow throughout the free world.”
Focus on the Family staff expressed discomfort with Saleem, Howard said, particularly with his claims of Christian conversion. Saleem alleges that he was in a near fatal car wreck, but Christians cared for him, taking him into their home and provided for him while he healed. That he says lead to his conversion. In an interview with Pat Robertson 700 Club TV show, Saleem says he called out for Allah to answer him, and when he didn’t he decided to kill himself for questioning his faith. At that moment, Saleem claims, the Christian God came to him. Robertson is transfixed by this tale.
Saleem has never identified what city or state this near fatal accident occurred in, nor has he ever identified the Christian doctor who allegedly gave him refuge and helped him pay his bills while he was recovering.
The history professor says that Saleem’s claim on Tuesday to have smuggled weapons into the U.S. is new. “It sounds like he is upping the ante,” Howard said.
The story Saleem tells is bewitching, Howard admits.
“It preys on people’s lack of information and their worries and their fears and their wanting to find a way to justify their own attitudes toward Islam and Middle East policy,” Howard says. “There’s a market out there that wants Kamal Saleem’s story to be true.”
And Saleem is not alone in this new, post 9-11 market. He has appeared with another well known former terrorist, Walid Shoebat. Shoebat was recently the subject of an investigation by CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show. That investigation raised questions about the veracity of Shoebat’s claims to being a former terrorist.
Boyd, the DOJ National Security spokesman, declined to discuss the concerns about Saleem’s accuracy.
“Further, we have no comment on whether Mr. Saleem’s other statements are accurate or not,” he said.
Maria Elena Garcia Upson, spokesperson for the Citizenship and Immigration Services, would not comment on Saleem’s case specifically, citing privacy rules. But she did comment in general about alleged ex-terrorists receiving American citizenship.
“Well obviously it would be a concern in general, but we are not the enforcement arm, you will have to talk to Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Upson said.
An ICE spokesperson did not return inquires by press time.
Others are arguing that if Saleem’s story is true, that raises even more questions both about his citizenship and his appearance at the rally.
“If Representative Agema recruited as a speaker an admitted terrorist who says he brought weapons into the United States my first question is why this guy isn’t in custody or in jail? And why was Mr. Saleem allowed to become a United States citizen?” asks David Holtz, executive director of Progress Michigan. “In trying to make a point about illegal immigration, Dave Agema instead makes you question his judgment and sanity. Perhaps the FBI should be invited to future Agema events since he may decide he needs more terrorists to deliver his talking points.”
State Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Detroit) went even further.
“I am unforgiving for any terrorist,” Talib said in exclusive interview with Michigan Messenger. “He should be deported for that. And you can quote me on that.”
Agema defends Saleem.
“What happened with Kamal is totally different,” Agema says of the reformed terrorist. Agema says following his conversion to Christianity, Saleem helped the federal government track down terror cells in the U.S., a claim that could not be verified.
“As a general rule, the Justice Department does not publicly comment on whether or not someone has provided assistance to the U.S. government in counter-terrorism operations,” said Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, when asked what role, if any, Saleem had played in uncovering terror plots in the U.S.
Howard also called Agema out over Saleem’s appearance and testimony.
“It is really unfortunate that Rep. Agema has decided to align himself with this kind of cynical opportunism,” he said. “That is unbelievable that he could testify before a House committee.”
“There is no smiley face, no whitewash on what happened here ten years ago today. What happened, was murder!” As she peppered her speech with soundbites, Pamela Geller was occasionally forced to pause for chants of “U-S-A!” from the smattering of supporters who had turned out for her Freedom Rally yesterday in Lower Manhattan. It was doubtful that there were any “smiley faces” at the official commemoration at the 9/11 Memorial that morning, but if you spoke with attendees of the Freedom Rally, one might have gotten the impression that Presidents Obama and Bush presided over a mass burning of Bibles and bald eagles.
“This country has become communist,” Sheepshead Bay resident Patricia Randolph told us. “A good way to fight for freedom is to know your history, to know that Muslims build victory mosques in places that they have conquered.” She was referring of course to Park51 a cultural center and mosque that may be built blocks from the World Trade Center site. “And have you heard about that mosque they’re building in Sheepshead Bay near a school? Those women that walk around my neighborhood with black nails? They’re Taliban wives.” Her friend Elizabeth of Midwood added, “The Muslims rape little girls, we have to make it safe for the kids.”
By some accounts, Anthony Mijares is a bit player in the story of Murfreesboro, Tenn., a small city 40 minutes south of Nashville. In Murfreesboro, a growing Muslim community’s plan to build a new mosque has unleashed a public furor, produced threats and counterthreats, and revealed just how far fear of another terrorist attack has spread across the United States.
Since the mosque won local government building approval in May 2010, Murfreesboro’s 250 Muslim families have taken an undesirable spot at center stage. Unidentified individuals vandalized a sign that had marked the future worship space site for months and in a separate incident, someone set ablaze a piece of construction equipment. On Labor Day an anonymous caller threatened the group again. A bomb, the caller said, will explode over the September 11 weekend inside the office space where Murfreesboro’s Muslims currently worship. Local law enforcement, the FBI and ATF are investigating the incidents and will not comment on their status.
But Mijares, a retiree and Roman Catholic, is also the lone voice behind a letter-writing campaign to discourage companies from displaying or advertising in a local paper that he believes is helping to fuel the local controversy. For more than a year, the paper has featured stories about the planned mosque, Islam and the alleged threat they pose to Murfreesboro. And this summer, that publication launched its own campaign against Mijares, publishing his home address in an ad that called for readers to “combat” his efforts.
“Yes, I consider that a threat,” said Mijares, 54. “What else could it be when every local right-wing nut, some militia member in Idaho or some Aryan (Neo-Nazi) in West Virginia can read the words ‘combat’ printed next to my address online? The Rutherford Reader knows what it’s doing. That wasn’t a mistake.”
What is happening to Mijares may be the final proof that the crisis in Murfreesboro has been created by nothing more than irrational fear and hate, not legitimate concerns about safety, said Reavis Mitchell, a historian at Fisk University in Nashville who specializes in 20th Century American history.
“There is a long line of people who have been branded an outsider, a troublemaker of some kind, because they won’t tolerate injustice silently,” said Mitchell.
Historically, community crises like the one in Murfreesboro have been resolved, or at least calmed, after the name-calling, threats, acts of intimidation or actual violence begin national attention turns to the troubled town or ringleader, Mitchell said. During the McCarthy anti-Communist campaign and The Civil Rights Movement, that’s the point at which change occurred, he said.
CNN, Time Magazine and international publications have covered the mosque controversy in Murfreesboro. But Mijares and his campaign have remained largely unknown.
In April 2010, just a few weeks before the new mosque won local government approval, Mijares picked up a copy of The Rutherford Reader, a free weekly newspaper, at a Murfreesboro Kroger. Mijares had scannedThe Rutherford Reader before, but that day Mejares was appalled. In stories, editorials and hard-to-describe items where opinions and facts were commingled, the paper called for a halt on “Muslim immigration” and described Islam as “dehumanizing” and “defiling.”
Mijares decided to contact Kroger. Within weeks, the grocery chain directed its distributor to stop making room for The Rutherford Reader on its free publication racks.
Mijares insists that he isn’t a fan of censorship, arguing that The Rutherford Reader can print what it wants and distribute it anyway that it can. But businesses that keep The Rutherford Reader afloat by supplying advertising revenue and access to consumers should think about this carefully, Mijares said, or they risk offending their own customers.
Over the next year, Mijares sent similar letters to the owners of local stores, restaurants and the local Chamber of Commerce. When seven stores, restaurants and chamber locations decided to stop displaying The Rutherford Reader on their free publication racks, Mijares expanded his efforts to advertisers.
“This is hate speech, pure and simple,” Mijares said. “I thought advertisers should know that The Rutherford Reader has taken a turn.”
Pete Doughtie – The Rutherford Reader‘s editor, publisher and owner — did not respond to multiple requests for comment left at his office and home. But this week, Doughtie’s column posed a revealing challenge.
Muslims are not in America to assimilate. They are here to change our system … Our preachers should go beyond telling us more than ‘we must love our enemies.’ That is simply passing the buck. They should be getting every Christian ready and armed with the Word of God and an understanding of the Quran and Hadith, to defeat those who are out to destroy Christianity, and our American way of life.
(Hadith is a collection of sayings and ideas attributed to the prophet Muhammed.)
Since the mosque project was approved, Doughtie -a self-described white Christian American – has described Islam in his column as a “political ideology,” rather than a religion. He has told readers that Islam compels violence and attempts to implement sharia, a code of Islamic laws. He has described Mijares as a Muslim. And he has described as “terrorists” Mijares and other locals who have objected to The Rutherford Reader‘s content and the vandalism and arson at the mosque.
“Pete Doughtie is a bully and a bigot,” said Mijares. “I may be a 5’4″ Italian-American guy with a big nose and olive skin who gets looks around town. And I know that he cannot fathom that there are non-Muslims who do not agree with his ideas. But I am, in fact, not a Muslim. I am not a terrorist. And I am not afraid of Pete Doughtie.”
Mijares is a retired international cargo expeditor who spent September 11 directing cargo traffic at the panic-stricken Los Angeles Airport, so he does not scare easily, he said. He moved to Tennessee to care for his ailing mother in 2005.
The Rutherford Reader is a right-of-center publication that represents the community’s concerns, said Kevin Fisher, an unpaid Rutherford Reader columnist. Fisher, who is African American, is a corrections officer and also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that aims to stop construction of the new mosque.
“I take civil rights seriously and I wouldn’t participate in anything that tramples on people’s rights. I wouldn’t write anything that intentionally offends anyone,” said Fisher. “If I have, I am sincerely sorry. But I know Mr. Doughtie and I’ve always thought he was a really nice guy.”
Fisher objects to the lack of detail included in the public meeting notice where the mosque project was approved. The notice — which included the same information as other planning commission announcements -– allowed the mosque to escape comment from people who oppose it, Fisher said. But that is not his only concern.
“We don’t know enough about the motivations here. It’s only been 10 years since 9/11,” said Fisher, who has sought and lost two bids for public office since 2008. “In the blink of an eye, foreign students went from students to terrorists. And I think that this is why our whole thinking as a nation changed. We have to judge the issue of terror and the potential for Islamic radicalization a little differently. We certainly have to look at that potential in our own community.”
Fisher would not comment on the ads featuring Mijares’ complete home address. But, Fisher said, Mijares invited the attention when he began his campaign.
When Mijares says that the ads may be dangerous, he is right, said Eric Allen Bell, a documentary filmmaker. In 2010, Bell moved to Murfreesboro planning to take a break. Instead, he wound up making a documentary about the mosque controversy. A full-length version of that film, “Not Welcome,” will be released next year, Bell said.
While Bell was making the film, he wrote a series of editorials that criticized the mosques’ opponents, including The Rutherford Reader. The weekly’s subsequent issue included Bell’s picture beneath a headline that read, “The Rutherford Reader’s Free Speech is Being Threatened.”
Bell began to receive death threats via email, he said. Bell hired a private security to accompany him to certain public events. Then one particularly scary threat arrived over Facebook. When Bell approached local law enforcement, he was reminded that an official complaint would become a matter of public record and would include his home address. A police officer warned him that this might put him in greater danger, Bell said.
“I was advised by people who know that community that you probably need to take this seriously and leave town,” said Bell, who returned to California in November 2010.
It is not a coincidence that when the small but vocal group of Murfreesboro residents who oppose the mosque describe their concerns, the sorts of claims made in The Rutherford Reader often come up, said Saleh M. Sbenaty, a board member of Murfreesboro’s mosque and a professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
“There are people and publications in this city that specialize in making false accusations,” said Sbenaty, who moved to the United States from Syria, 30 years ago around the same time that Muslims in Murfreesboro formed the city’s mosque. “They insist that all Muslims are dangerous. And unfortunately, there are a small number of nut jobs who will take that seriously.”
Late Wednesday, the mosque’s board voted to suspend usual weekend activities at the mosque because of the bomb threat. On Saturdays, the mosque typically holds religious education classes for children. On Sundays, there are sports or community events for kids.
“It is quite unfortunate that our children are bullied in school and now are the subject of a new threat,” said Sbenaty, a father of two.
Threats, or what some people consider threats, are becoming common in Murfreesboro.
Back in May, Mijares noticed a Rutherford Reader ad for a Nissan dealership. Mijares contacted the dealer. And since the Japanese car company’s North American headquarters are located in nearby Franklin, Tenn., he also called Nissan’s community relations staff.
“After he (Mijares) made us aware of the publication where this ad was placed,” said Paula Angelo, Nissan’s director of corporate communications, “it was clear immediately that its content does not align with Nissan’s core values.”
Mijares contacted corporate headquarters on May 24. The dealership makes independent decisions about advertising, but there was a conversation between the business and corporate officials, Angelo said. On June 8, Angleo contacted Mijares to advise him that the dealership had purchasedRutherford Reader ad space in May and June but that additional ads would not be placed, he said.
On July 18, The Rutherford Reader began running its series of full-page anti-Mijares ads.
“Murfreesboro, to borrow a phrase, is the ground zero of Muslim bashing in America right now,” said Faiz Shakir, vice president of the Center for American Progress and one of the researchers behind“Fear, Inc.,” a six-month study released in August by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank that examined the rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment.
The study found that small groups of individuals have funneled the same pieces of questionable research to activists, commentators and politicians, who have then stirred or led groups such as the one that opposes the Murfreesboro mosque, Shakir said. In August, one of those individuals, Frank Gaffney, testified in the Murfreesboro case hoping to help stop the mosque. Fisher first met Gaffney in the courtroom, he said.
Inside Murfreesboro, some people suspect that The Rutherford Reader‘s interest in covering the alleged threats posed by Islam may be driven by profit. In Tennessee, local governments are required to list public notices -– advisories about government meetings and other activities -– in general interest publications. These ads generate revenue for newspapers.
“I think it may be Mr. Doughtie’s goal to write just enough about this local controversy to drive up his circulation and meet the definition of a general interest publication,” said Ernest G. Burgess, Rutherford County mayor. Murfreesboro is the largest city in Rutherford County and Burgess is the county’s chief executive officer.
In late August, the ads with Mijares’ home address disappeared. Mijares received a few nasty letters and emails. But, Mijares says, he won’t stop his letter-writing campaign.
“I’ve never been terribly social. In fact, some people may call me a misanthrope,” said Mijares. “I don’t mind if some people don’t like me. I just don’t appreciate anyone threatening my family.”
If the ads continue, Mijares said he will post Doughtie’s home address online with a description of Doughtie’s activities and ideas in Arabic.
10 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Let this day be one of remembrance for the victims, their families and loved ones. Let it not be a day used as political football to divide, fear-monger and justify war and aggression.
Imagine if this incident involved Muslims. We would not hear the end of it from these Islamophobes about how Sharia is taking over. (hat tip: Alfred J from Kenya)
Anders Breivik’s manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called “the Vienna school of thought”, which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against “the Islamisation of America”.
But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward “Ned” May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.
All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:
“The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy.”
Spencer’s jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik’s manifesto; May’s Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.
Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him “a profound and subtle thinker”. Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer’s works, especially if they believed that Islam was “a religion of peace”. Last week, Spencer’s blog re-ran a piece from Geller’s Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is “a front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
As well as the “counter-jihad” websites such as Spencer’s and May’s, analysis of Breivik’s web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People’s party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.
One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal’s masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.
To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik’s crime. Peder “Fjordman” Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.
It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that “Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying“, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the “counter-jihad” belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. “It’s a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you’ve never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you’re on the right side: you’re another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades.”
This clearly mirrors Breivik’s self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.
Lansing — Terry Jones, the controversial Florida pastor, returned to Michigan on a rainy Wednesday night for a 30-minute speech on the steps of the Capitol where he railed about radical Islam.
The pastor’s speech was greeted by more police, media and protesters than supporters or curious onlookers.
About a dozen protesters started chanting “Say No to Hate” during Jones’ speech before police quieted them down.
“Terry Jones is not welcome here,” said protester David Mitchell, 30, of Lansing, who held a banner with others saying: “They shall not pass.”
Jones, wearing jeans and a Harley Davidson black bomber jacket, decried Islam as a not a peaceful religion and oppressive to women. The Islamic law, Sharia, should not be tolerated, he said.
“Islam is a religion that hates freedom of speech,” Jones said.
He was in Lansing to support a new organization, Operation Freedom’s Tree, founded by James Terpening. The political group denounces Islam as evil.
Jones supporter Eugene Connors, 40, of Lansing agrees. One sign he held said: “Stop Burning Christians.”
“People don’t realize the threat Islam poses to everyone,” he said.
Afterward, Jones said he doesn’t have a problem with Muslims, just the radical element and Sharia. Jones lamented the low turnout, including the no-show of state Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, who authored legislation to ban foreign law.
“He chickened out,” Jones said.
Asked if he has plans to burn the Quran again, Jones said no.
Jones, who caused a hubbub for burning the Quran in March, also caused a stir with a visit to Dearborn during the Arab International Festival this summer.
The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.
Greece’s parliament on Wednesday approved the construction of a new mosque in Athens to satisfy a long-standing demand by thousands of Muslim residents, a government source said.
The project to build the Greek capital’s first official Muslim place of worship in decades was supported by 198 deputies from the centre, right and left (out of 300) against the objections of 16 nationalist MPs.
The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction, another long-running concern in Greece. It calls for the renovation of an existing state building – a disused military base – in the run-down Athens industrial district of Elaionas.
Thousands of Muslims from Arab nations, Africa and the Indian subcontinent live and work in Athens without official prayer sites or a cemetery, despite years of promises by successive Greek governments.
Muslim faithful have crafted mosques out of rented flats and disused warehouses which are regularly targeted in racist attacks.
Anger towards migrants and attacks have escalated on the streets of Athens in recent months as the debt-hit country battles a growing recession that has brought thousands of job layoffs.
A staunchly Orthodox state with bitter memories of nearly four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule, Greece currently offers sanctioned Muslim religious sites only near its northeastern border with Turkey where a Muslim minority of Turkish origin lives.
All traces of Islam were eradicated in Athens in the early 19th century when Christianity was restored, and bureaucratic wrangling and opposition from local church leaders and mayors have since stalled plans for a mosque and cemetery.
Just when you thought Joe Kaufman couldn’t make more of a fool of himself he proves you wrong! Previously, Kaufman eulogized a dead terrorist and racist by the name of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and we thought “well he can’t top that!” Then he called for nuking Muslim countries, and we thought “OK, that’s it, no way he can surpass such lunacy.” Then it so happened we learned he’s been paying homeless people to join his pathetic anti-Muslim rallies to bolster their numbers, and we’re like “golly jee, he keeps setting the bar so low.”
Recently, Kaufman was at a rally to express love for anti-Muslim politician Allen West and condemn CAIR South Florida. I kid you not, Kaufman’s exact words at the rally were “I love Allen West.” But that’s not the real ludicrous bit.
The ridiculous portion is Kaufman’s response to a reporter who asked him about his infamous call to “nuke the Mooslims”:
Reporter: “Do you support the nuclear bombing of Iran?”
Joe Kaufman: “No…um, well, I would never say whether I would support that or not.”
Why is this so ridiculous? Well, Kaufman has had 10 years to reflect and ponder on how he would answer this inevitable question, and the above is the best he could do. Rather then coming right out and saying he “wouldn’t,” as most conscientious people would, he hesitated and dodged. By dodging however, he not-so-subtly implied he is open to supporting such horrific action. That’s wily Kaufman for you I guess.
Who is he?:
Joe Kaufman, has been on the Anti-Muslim scene for quite a while now and is dubbed by the far Right-Wing FrontPageMag as, you guessed it…another one of their ”Investigative Journalists.” That he has been influenced by Meir Kahane and the Kahanist ideology is well documented, as is his love and angst for Kahane.
In the past he has been accused of contributing to the terrorist organization founded by Kahane known as JDL (Jewish Defense League) while others accuse Kaufman of at the very least holding views that parallel JDL positions.
Kaufman’s unsavory associations and views are quite real and they are only dangerous to America if you’re stupid enough to swallow his conspiracy theories but other than that he is simply a half-baked paranoid conspiracy theorist, some what along the lines of the “9/11 Truthers.”
In every nook and cranny there is a “Mooslim”…hiding and ready to get ya…so beware and be afraid. Be veryyyy afraid goes his story.
In this special LoonWatch series we will detail the exploits and punchlines that Krazy Kaufman throws out there and attempts to pass as serious journalism, commentary and investigation.
Settler crying after his illegal outpost was demolished. Later they went and set a mosque on fire.
Can anyone imagine if Muslims had done this to a so-called “disused” Synagogue, Church, etc.? You can be sure there would be a big brouhaha over how Islam is evil and is trying to destroy the “infidel.”
Earlier in the day, Israeli settlers in the West Bank tried to set a fire inside a disused mosque to protest the Israeli military’s destruction of three settler houses at an illegal outpost.
The police and witnesses said the settlers threw burning tires into the mosque and spray-painted the names of two settlement outposts on the walls, including that of Migron, where the army destroyed three buildings constructed on private Palestinian land. The Israeli Supreme Court determined that the entire outpost was built on such private land, but the three chosen for destruction had been built after that decision was handed down. (Via the NewYorkTimes)
With Representative Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and Texas Governor Rick Perry’s triumphal entrance into the GOP presidential primary, there’s been a sudden spike of attention drawn to the extremist religious beliefs both candidates have been associated with – up to and including their belief in Christian dominionism. (In the Texas Observer, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast, for example.) The responses of denial from both the religious right itself and from the centrist Beltway press have been so incongruous as to be laughable – if only the subject matter weren’t so deadly serious. Those responses need to be answered, but more importantly, we need to have the serious discussion they want to prevent.
For example, in an August 18 post, originally entitled, “Beware False Prophets who Fear Evangelicals”, Washington Post religion blogger Lisa Miller cited the three stories I just mentioned, and admitted, “The stories raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees”, then immediately reversed direction: “But their echo-chamber effect reignites old anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians. Some on the left seem suspicious that a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world.” Of course, she cited no examples to bolster this narrative-flipping claim. More importantly, she wrote not one more word about the real concerns she had just admitted.
Dominionism is not a myth
“What In Heaven’s Name Is A Dominionist?” Pat Robertson asked on his 700 Club TV show, one of several religious right figures to recently pretend there was nothing to the notion. Funny he should ask. In a 1984 speech in Dallas, Texas, he said:
“What do all of us do? We get ready to take dominion! We get ready to take dominion! It is all going to be ours – I’m talking about all of it. Everything that you would say is a good part of the secular world. Every means of communication, the news, the television, the radio, the cinema, the arts, the government, the finance – it’s going to be ours! God’s going to give it to His people. We should prepare to reign and rule with Jesus Christ.”
Furthermore, C Peter Wagner, the intellectual godfather of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), actually wrote a book called Dominion! in 2008. Chapter Three was entitled “Dominion Theology”. When pressed, Peter likes to pretend that his ideas are just garden-variety Christianity, based on Genesis 1:26, in which, before the fall, God gives Adam and Eve dominion over the natural world - a far cry from dominion over other people, who did not even exist at the time, as evangelical critics of this dominionist argument have repeatedly pointed out.
Dominionism is not new
Dominionist ideas have circulated throughout the religious right for decades prior to Robertson’s 1984 speech. A primary source was the small but influential sect known as Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R J Rushdoony in the 1960s, which advocates replacing American law with Old Testament codes. Centrists like Miller make the mistake of thinking that the small size of Rushdoony’s core of true believers is the full extent of his influence. But this is utterly mistaken. As Michelle Goldberg wrote in Daily Beast, “Rushdoony pioneered the Christian homeschooling movement, as well as the revisionist history, ubiquitous on the religious right, that paints the US as a Christian nation founded on biblical principles. He consistently defended Southern slavery and contrasted it with the greater evils of socialism.”
A second source traces back to the roots of the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s, long rejected by orthodox evangelicals because they contradicted scripture and denied primary agency to God – which is why they insist that Christians must actively establish church dominance over all of society, because God can’t do it alone.
The Latter Rain was denounced by the Assemblies of God – the largest American Pentecostal church – in 1949, not solely for dominionist ideology, but for a variety of related beliefs and practices. When similar teachings and practices re-emerged in the guise of the New Apostolic Reformation 50 years later, the Assemblies of God denounced them again in 2000.
This time, however, many Assemblies of God congregations have increasingly accepted the NAR influence. Sarah Palin’s long-time church in Wasilla is one such congregation. The most clear-cut example of NAR dominionism is the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate”, which holds that dominionist Christians should control the whole world by infiltrating and dominating the “Seven Mountains” of culture: (1) Business; (2) Government; (3) Media; (4) Arts and Entertainment; (5) Education; (6) Family; and (7) Religion.
Dominionism is not a left-wing fantasy
A number of authors made charges similar to or derived from Joe Carter, web editor of First Things, who wrote: “The term ["dominionism"] was coined in the 1980s by [sociologist Sara] Diamond and is never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation.”
However, at the same time Diamond was working on her dissertation – published as the book Spiritual Warfare in 1989 – evangelical writer/researcher Albert James Dager was taking similarly critical aim, though from a different direction. In 1986 and ’87, he published a multi-issue essay “Kingdom Theology” in the publication Media Spotlight. In that text he also used the terms “Kingdom Now” or “Dominion” Theology. In 1990, Dager, too, published a book, Vengeance Is Ours: The Church in Dominion.
While his main focus was doctrinal error and non-Christian practices and influences, Dager’s work traced dominionism back to the 1940s and even earlier. Many more have followed in his footsteps since then. If you Google the words “dominionism” and “heresy”, you’ll get more than half a million hits. It should be obvious to anyone that conventional conservative Christians have big problems with dominionism – if only the United States’ establishment media could figure out how to use Google.
Dominionism is not an imprecise catch-all term
Despite lingering definitional differences that are common with relatively new terminology, those who study dominionism and related phenomenon in a political framework have an increasingly common and precise terminology that most writers and researchers share. Researcher Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates provided a very useful guide, “The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy”, which addresses issues of terminology from several different perspectives – for example, between “generic dominionism” and specific dominion theologies.
Berlet also draws a distinction between “hard” and “soft” dominionists. “Soft Dominionists are Christian nationalists,” he writes. “They believe that Biblically-defined immorality and sin breed chaos and anarchy. They fear that America’s greatness as God’s chosen land has been undermined by liberal secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals … Their vision has elements of theocracy, but they stop short of calling for supplanting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Hard Dominionists add something more to the mix: “They want the United States to be a Christian theocracy. For them the Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely addendums to Old Testament Biblical law.”
Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionists clearly fall into the hard dominionist camp. But the NAR seems to straddle the soft/hard division. On the one hand, they clearly do claim that conservative Christians are ordained to run the world, not just US society. Thus, the Seven Mountains Mandate. On the other hand, Wagner and others have argued that the Seven Mountains is compatible with democracy. The state of Hawaii shows how: Early in the 2010 election cycle, both the Republican and the Democratic frontrunners for governor were associated with the NAR. That changed when long-time Congressman Neil Abercrombie joined the race on the Democratic side, and eventually won the race handily. But for a while, the NAR came tantalisingly close to realising their dream, at least in one state – not just to win power, but to occupy all the possible paths to power.
What’s more, in a recent article at Talk2Action, Rachel Tabachnick draws attention to another hedge on Wagner’s part, quoting from Dominion! In a section entitled “Majority Rules”: “If a majority feels that heterosexual marriage is the best choice for a happy and prosperous society, those in the minority should agree to conform – not because they live in a theocracy, but because they live in a democracy. The most basic principle of democracy is that the majority, not the minority, rules and sets the ultimate norms for society.”
This, of course, is utterly false in a liberal democracy, such as the United States. Liberal democracies combine majority rule as a general governing principle with a framework of rights protecting individuals in political minorities from persecution, political repression, and the like. The fact that Wagner so utterly misunderstands the foundations of American democracy shows just how dangerous such “soft” dominionism can be. This same lesson can be drawn from Uganda as well, where several different strains of dominionist theology have combined to bring that nation to the verge of passing a law that will make homosexuality punishable by death. Such is the nature of illiberal dominionist “democracy”.
Europe’s bloody theocratic wars
This brings us, finally, to the serious discussions that dominionists and their enablers, like Miller, are trying to prevent. The first of those is about the very nature of American democracy. For nearly 200 years, Europe was torn apart by a series of religious wars and their bloody aftermath – the major reason that the United States was founded as a secular republic. We’re potentially on the verge of forgetting all that history and suffering through it again, just as we’re now suffering through forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression. Those centuries of war began with the German Peasants’ War of 1524-26, in which more than 100,000 died; continued through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War on the European continent; and lasted until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). This was the bloody European history of religious intolerance and strife that many, if not most, American colonialists were fleeing from when they came to the New World.
It was also this bloody history that gave rise to the development of classical liberalism, affirming the individual right to religious liberty and replacing the top-down theocratic justification of the state with Locke’s concept of the bottom-up social contract, based on the consent of the governed. The ideas that Locke perfected took generations to develop. Religious tolerance, for example, began as simply a matter of pragmatism: unless people stopped killing each other for differing religious beliefs, war in Europe would never end.
But gradually, the idea took hold that tolerance was a positive good, and key to this new perspective was the recognition that torturing someone to change their beliefs could not produce the desired result of a genuine heartfelt conversion. Thus, the moral rejection of torture – another feature of classical liberalism – had its roots in the evolution of the idea of religious liberty. The idea of utterly forgetting the prolonged bloody history that the United States was born out of is no laughing matter.
The same could be said of the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with laws based on the Bible. Of course most Americans were Christians at the time, but the leading intellects were decidedly less so, much more influenced by Enlightenment thought. There were many, such as Jefferson, who were better described as Deists, who believed that God had created a rational universe, but did not intervene supernaturally thereafter. They deliberately used terms like “the Creator” and “Nature’s God” to affirm their distinctive, non-Christian view.
Moreover, God was not mentioned at all in the Constitution, and religion was only mentioned to exclude its influence, stating that no religious test should be required for office. Finally, US law was based on British common law, not the Bible. The Supreme Court itself is a common law court, following common law precedents and practices. And British common law traces back to Roman law, which first came to England centuries before Rome adopted the Christian religion.
Of course the intolerant religious right wants us to forget this. How else could they ever gain power, except through massive forgetting of who and what the United States really is? Not to mention who and what they are: the most fundamental enemies of the United States, who would, if they could, return us to the centuries of blood before the US was born, the nightmare out of which the United States awakened.
Theocratic thinking threatens the US today
There are very immediate consequences that flow from the theocratic mindset. You’ll note, for example, that the “Seven Mountains” of culture do not include science. That’s not because dominionists intend to leave science alone, but rather because they see no need to dominate what they can simply cut off, ignore and deny. If science tells them that homosexuality is an inborn trait, why fight that in the realm of science when politics, the media, religion and education offer much, much better places to fight? After all, who says that education has to be based on facts? The same holds true for evolution and global warming as well, not to mention the workings of the economy.
One rightwing denier of dominionist influence, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, even framed his attack as “An unholy war on the Tea Party, while another denier complained that instead of describing the Tea Party as a movement united around concern about big government, many journalists seem to be trying to redefine the colour red by overlaying religious intent and purpose on the movement.
Yet the dominionist connection to the Tea Party goes far beyond just the two candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Ron Paul, whose extreme anti-government positions helped to fuel the emergence of the Tea Party, has much deeper dominionist connections than either of the two new darlings. During his first term in Congress, one of his aides was Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law, and a leading Reconstructionist in his own right, who has written extensively on so-called “Biblical Capitalism”, an ideology profoundly at odds with traditional Biblical-based teachings on economic justice.
While libertarians once traced their descent from John Locke, and more recently from the deeply anti-Christian Ayn Rand, Reconstructionism represents an increasingly important foundation for their views. A recently released sociology study, “Cultures of the Tea Party”, found that Tea Party supporters are characterised by four dispositions: “authoritarianism, ontological insecurity, libertarianism, and nativism”. Since traditional libertarianism was purportedly the opposite of authoritarianism, this highlights how radically libertarianism has changed – a conclusion that’s echoed by the 2011 Pew Reaserch Political Typology Poll, which found that religious and economic conservatives had completely merged into one single group since 2006 and all previous polling.
What this means in the long run is far from clear. But it strongly suggests a solidfying outlook with deep Reconstructionist sympathies that actually looks at government failure to deal with major issues, such as restoring the economy, as a positive good. If faith in American institutions collapses entirely, then who wouldn’t give Biblical law a shot? The more loudly such people proclaim themselves patriots, the more loudly they cheer for US collapse. It’s not just Obama they want to fail. It’s the very idea of America.
Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newsletter.
We reported a few weeks ago about a letter sent by Nezar Hamze of CAIR South Florida, a constituent of Allen West’s district, expressing his concern at West’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and associations with extremists and hatemongers. West responded to Hamze’s letter with a one word reply, “NUTS!”:
In attempting to explain what the Miami New Times called possibly the “dumbest thing ever written on congressional stationery,” some have latched on to the likelihood that he is “channeling a famous line by an American general fighting the Nazis during World War II. During a battle with German troops in Western Europe, Gen. Anthony McAuliffe was told that the Germans wanted his men to surrender. He replied, ‘Us surrender? Aw, nuts!’”
Instead of condemning the radical company that he has been keeping, Rep. Allen West decided to tell Hamze to ‘go to hell.’ West implies Islam is akin to Nazism and that Muslims are modern day Nazis. This aligns well with the Islamophobic belief that Islam is not a religion but rather a totalitarian political ideology that seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire world. To say this dehumanizes Muslims would be an understatement.
West and his supporters, perhaps smarting from the blow of this latest PR disaster decided to hold a town hall on “terrorism” as well as a rally against Nezar Hamze and CAIR:
Instead of helping their cause, Allen West and his supporters undermined it even more by exposing their radicalism and stubbornly clinging on to their conspiracies of infiltration and subversion by “Mooslims.”
For instance Peter Lebowitz leader of something called (Senior?)Citizens for National Security stated at the rally, “They(muslims) are not in large numbers at this point but they have infiltrated our schools, our colleges, our government, our treasury department. They are not coming to the gate, they are inside the gate!” He also said that “if we don’t wake this country up, your grandchildren and my grandchildren will not know America,” “we are being attacked and they are everywhere.” Sounds kind of like Anders Breivik doesn’t he?
Rev.O’Neal Dozier spoke plainly without any of the sugar-coating some Islamophobes are accustomed to:
He’s not in the video, but Rev. O’Neal Dozier was also named in the CAIR letter as an anti-Islam extremist tied to Congressman Allen West. His words were unambiguous.”“I believe Islam, period, is a danger to this country,” said Dozier, a former George W. Bush advisor who leads a large church in Pompano Beach where Allen West has spoken. “The only true Muslim is an extremist … true Muslims are terrorists.”
Interestingly, Joe Kaufman was questioned about his call for nuking Muslim countries after 9/11 and far from repudiating the comment he struck an ambiguous tone:
Reporter: “Do you support the nuclear bombing of Iran?”
Joe Kaufman: “No…um, well, I would never say whether I would support that or not.”
All of these individuals are intimately linked with Allen West. They are his base of support, and they are not confined to southern Florida or Allen West’s district. It remains to be seen if Allen West’s star will continue to shine on the Right-Wing or whether such antics will relegate him to being a one term Congressman.
The Obama administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday in a speech blasting the president’s new counterterrorism strategy.
Lieberman said that Obama’s strategy, which was released in June, “was ultimately a big disappointment,” and while it successfully identified the core of the domestic radicalization problem, it did not establish a clear plan of attack to deal with the growing issue.
The four-term senator and one-time presidential candidate said one of the key problems with the Obama administration’s strategy was that it continues to call terrorism that aims to harm the U.S., “violent extremism” instead of “violent Islamist extremism.”
“The administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism,” Lieberman said, speaking at a National Press Club event hosted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
“To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is Al Qaeda and its allies. Now that’s better but it is still too narrow and focuses us on groups as opposed to what I would call an ideology, which is what we’re really fighting.”
Lieberman, who as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has held numerous hearings on the issue of Islamic extremism, said that Obama needs to stop being afraid of offending the overwhelmingly large portion of law-abiding and well-intentioned Muslims with his rhetoric.
“I assume the refusal of the administration to speak honestly about the enemy is based on its desire not to do anything that might feed into al Qaeda’s propaganda that we’re engaged in a cold war against Islam,” he said. “But that is so self-evidently a lie that we can and have refuted it and I think we’ve done so effectively.”
The issue of singling out Muslims in the U.S.’s war against terrorists came to a head earlier this year when Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) held the first in his series of hearings on American-Muslim radicalization.
Nearly 100 Democratic lawmakers wrote to King, who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and asked him to expand the scope of the hearing to include other radical extremists groups, such as white supremacists, environmental extremists, and animal-rights activists. King declined to expand the hearing’s scope and heralded it as a success for drawing attention to an issue that lawmakers and government officials avoid too often.
Lieberman referenced these sentiments on Thursday, saying that though they are extremist groups, they do not constitute the threat the U.S. currently faces.
“We’re not in a global war with those [groups],” he said. “We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists.”
The U.S.’s successful war against terrorists depends on the administration’s ability to correctly identify who its enemy is, Lieberman said.
“To win this struggle, it’s vital that we understand that we’re not just fighting an organization al Qaeda,” he said. “We are up against a broader ideology, if you will, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam, that has fueled this war.
“Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated but when the broader sets of ideas that are associated with it are rejected and discarded. A reluctance therefore to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder I think to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas,” Lieberman said.
Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).
What is the “material support” he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit – “a number of terrorist logos.” That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.” The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.
Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders. One can dislike this legal fact. One can wish it were different. But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision inBrandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.
In doing so, the Brandenberg Court struck down as unconstitutional an Ohio statute (under which the KKK leader was prosecuted) that made it a crime to “advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.” Such advocacy — please read the part in bold — cannot be a crime because it is protected by the First Amendment. The crux of the Court’s holding: ”the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force“ (emphasis added; for more on the First Amendment law protecting this right to advocate violence, see my discussion here).
To put this less abstractly, and as I’ve noted before, a person has — and should and must have — the absolute free speech right to advocate ideas such as this:
For decades, the U.S. Government has been engaging in violence and otherwise interfering in the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children have died as a result. There is no end in sight to this American assault on the Muslim world and those of its client states. Therefore, it is not only the right, but the duty, of Muslims to engage in violence against Americans as a means of self-defense and to deter further violence against Muslims. That is the only available means for fighting back against the world’s greatest military superpower. The only alternative is continuing passive submission to this onslaught of violence aimed at Muslims.
One may find that idea objectionable or even repellent, but does anyone believe that someone should be prosecuted for writing that paragraph? Anyone who would favor prosecution for that doesn’t understand or believe in the Constitution, as those ideas are pure political speech protected by the First Amendment, every bit as much as: the climate crisis now justifies violent attacks on polluting corporations; or capitalism is so destructive that the use of force in service of a Communist Revolution is compelled; or “if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken” (Brandenberg); or such is the tyranny of the Crown that taking up arms against it is not merely a right but the duty of all American patriots (The American Revolution). The Jerusalem Post justfired one of its columnists, a Jewish leftist who wrote that Palestinian violence against Israel is ”justified” because they have the “right to resist” the occupation; is he guilty of a crime of materially supporting Terrorism? Should Ward Churchill, widely accused of having justified the 9/11 attack (or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who did the same) have been indicted?
Judging from the description of Ahmad’s video in the FBI Affidavit (Ahmad’s YouTube account has been removed), the video in question does not go nearly as far as the clearly protected views referenced in the prior paragraph, as it does not explicitly advocate violence at all; indeed, it appears not to advocate that anyone do anything. Rather, the FBI believes it is evocative of such advocacy (“designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT”), which makes this prosecution even more troubling. Apparently, if you string together video and photographs (or words) in a certain way as to make the DOJ think that you’re implicitly trying to “develop support” for a Terrorist group — based on the political ideas you’re expressing — you risk decades of imprisonment. Is it possible to render the ostensible right of “free speech” more illusory than this?
This case is not an aberration; as indicated, prosecuting Muslims for pure political speech is an increasing weapon of the DOJ. In July, former Obama OLC official Marty Lederman analyzed the indictment of a 22-year-old former Penn State student for — in the FBI’s words – “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the [October, 2010] shootings” at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Museum and ”a number of postings encouraging attacks within the United States.” He also posted links to a bomb-making manual.
Regarding the part of the indictment based on “encouraging violent attacks,” Lederman — who, remember, was an Obama DOJ lawyer until very recently — wrote: it “does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection under the Brandenburg line of cases.” As for linking to bomb-making materials, Lederman wrote: ”the First Amendment generally protects the publication of publicly available information, even where there is a chance or a likelihood that one or more readers may put such information to dangerous, unlawful use.” Lederman’s discussion of the law and its applicability to that prosecution contains some caveats (and also raises some other barriers to these kinds of prosecutions), but he is clear that the aspect of the indictment based on the alleged advocacy and encouragement of violence in the name of jihad “would appear to be very vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge.” That’s government-lawyer-ese for: this prosecution is attempting to criminalize free political speech.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this trend is the fact that a Pakistani man in New York was prosecuted and then sentenced to almost six years in prison for doing nothing more than including a Hezbollah news channel in the package of cable channels he offered for sale to consumers in Brooklyn. On some perverse level, though, all of these individuals are lucky that they are being merely prosecuted rather than targeted with due-process-free assassination. As I documented last month, that is what is being done to U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki due — overwhelmingly if not exclusively — to the U.S. Government’s fear of his purely political views.
If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was designed to prevent the government from imprisoning people — or killing them — because of the political ideas they promote. Yet that is clearly what the Obama administration is doing with increasing frequency and aggression.
There is one last point that bears emphasis here. Numerous prominent politicians from both political parties — Michael Mukasey, Howard Dean, Wes Clark, Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell, Fran Townsend, Rudy Giuliani, and many others — have not only been enthusiasticaly promoting andadvocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization (MEK of Iran), but they have been receiving substantial amounts of cash from that Terrorist group as they do so. There is only one list of “designated Terrorist organizations” under the law, and MEK is every bit as much on that list as LeT or Al Qaeda are. Yet you will never, ever see those individuals being indicted by the Obama DOJ for their far more extensive — and paid – involvement with MEK than, for instance, Ahmad has with LeT. That’s because: (1) the criminal law does not apply to politically powerful elites, only to ordinary citizens and residents (indeed, many of those MEK-shilling politicians cheer on broad and harsh application of the “material support” statute when applied to others), and (2) MEK is now devoted to fighting against a government disliked by the U.S. (Iran), so they’ve become (like Saddam Hussein when fighting Iran and bin Laden when fighting the Soviet Union) the Good Terrorists whom the U.S. likes and supports.
Nonetheless, MEK remains on the list of the designated Terrorist groups, and lending them material support — which certainly includes paid shilling for them — is every bit as criminal (at least) as the behavior in the above-discussed indictments. As usual, though, “Terrorism” means nothing other than what the U.S. Government wants it to mean at any given moment. The evisceration of the rule of law evidenced by this disparate treatment is as odious as the First Amendment assault itself.
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.
Eliyahu Stern, an assistant professor of religious studies and history at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism.”
We here at Loon Watch have documented many of the perverse and reprehensible statements of those in the Islamophobic blogosphere. However, sometimes these loons take their disgusting behavior and rhetoric to another level. It is safe to say that these loons have a burning hatred in their hearts for Muslims and the religion of Islam, despite their hollow claims to the contrary (Pamela Geller claiming that she “loves Muslims” or Robert Spencer being pushed to say that Islam molds its followers to be moral and upright individuals).
Previously, Geller and Spencer attempted to exploit the Rifqa Bary incident to their advantage. However, their ridiculous claims that the girl’s life was in danger were dispelled by law enforcement who told all sane individuals that the parents were cooperating and posed no threat to young Rifqa. Despite the police’s claims to the contrary, the loons continued to use Rifqa’s situation to promote their hate fest against Islam and Muslims.
So it is nauseating to read that bigots like Geller and Spencer have decided to “honor” a Muslim girl named Aqsa Parvez who was murdered in 2008 by her father for not practicing her faith the way her father wanted. Geller used the opportunity to exploit the murder of this young Muslim girl for her anti-Muslim agenda by creating a “memorial” in Aqsa’s honor. In reality, it is nothing but a monument symbolizing “everything that is wrong with Islam” in the mind of Pamela Geller. She is weaponizing a young girl’s grave site.
Geller raised money, asking her anti-Muslim fans to support the erection of a headstone at the site of Aqsa Parvez’s grave in Canada. “All was going according to plan,” says Geller, until Aqsa’s family refused to use such a headstone from her. What is amazing is that Geller didn’t seem to anticipate this, and instead raised $5,000 from her supporters anyways. One wonders why she is so incredulous: does it take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Muslim family wouldn’t want to erect an anti-Muslim headstone on their daughter’s grave site? A headstone funded by people who absolutely hate their religion?
Says Geller further: “The family (yes, the family that murdered her) had refused to ‘sign off’ on the headstone.” The family didn’t kill Aqsa Parvez. Her father and brother did. They are both serving life sentences for her murder. I seriously doubt they had any legal say in what is placed on Aqsa’s grave. It was likely the mother who decided against using such a headstone. One could hardly expect her to do otherwise, considering she is Muslim herself.
It is even doubtful that Aqsa Parvez herself would support the headstone. It is quite possible, even probable, that Aqsa would renounce her self-proclaimed benefactor Pamela Geller. Based on what we know, Aqsa was most likely still a Muslim, and never renounced her religion altogether. Why would she want to associate herself with people who vilify her own religion and all its adherents? Like many young Muslims, she might simply have been rebelling against a strict interpretation of Islam–a firebrand, conservative form of it. Why is it a given that she rejected the entire religion of Islam, as Geller et al. would imagine?
After being rebuffed by the family, Geller shopped around for a place to erect a memorial and finally decided upon Israel. Writes Geller:
I approached the JNF and worked to plant the Aqsa Parvez Grove in American Independence Park in Jerusalem, Israel, where the plaque before the grove will read: “In Loving Memory of Aqsa Parvez and All Victims of Honor Killings Worldwide.
The irony of the location perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of the whole thing. The JNF, the Jewish National Fund, is a quasi-governmental organization in Israel that does not sell land to non-Jews, certainly not to Muslims. Indeed, the JNF has been at the forefront of stripping Muslims of any land rights in the state of Israel. Quite literally then, the “memorial” for Aqsa Parvez is built on land that she herself could never own. She could not own her own “memorial.”
But of course that was the point. The choice of Israel was intended to be especially inflammatory. With very good reason, no country earns the ire of Muslims more than Israel, which illegally occupies and oppresses its Muslim population. Choosing Israel as the site for this “memorial” is meant to give the Muslim world the middle finger. It would be like the KKK selecting apartheid-era South Africa as the site to erect a “memorial” to honor victims of black-on-black violence during the 1960′s. Nobody would take the KKK’s “memorial” seriously, and everyone would know that they don’t give two damns about the black victims. The point would be to vilify black people, not honor them. Likewise, the “memorial” for Muslim victims is not meant to honor them but vilify Muslims.
The idea of career anti-Muslim bigots creating a “memorial” for Muslim victims is truly a laughable notion and people should see through the thin fog of bigotry on display. This faux memorial is a sadistic propaganda attempt by Geller and Spencer to exploit the death of a young girl for their agenda to link a disgusting crime to Islam and Muslims.
A judge ordered a Wichita pastor to stay away from the Islamic Society of Wichita, as part of a sentence for loitering and disrupting business.
Sedgwick County District Judge Phil Journey this morning sentenced Mark Holick to serve 12 months unsupervised probation, pay $300 in fines and stay at least 1,000 feet from the Islamic Center, where he was arrested in August 2010.
Holick, pastor of Spirit One Christian Ministry, and more than a dozen followers had gone to the Islamic Center as members there were trying to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Holick said they were there to hand out Bibles. Police said he was causing a disturbance and blocking access to the center.
Police had said they asked Holick to move to a public sidewalk. In one instance, cited by Journey, Holick marched in place in response to police orders to move.
“The only reason you were the one arrested is because you were the only one who disobeyed the police orders,” Journey told Holick.
The case reached district court on an appeal from a conviction in Wichita Municipal Court. Holick asked for a a jury trial. Jurors found Holick guilty early last month on two counts of loitering and disrupting a local business.
Journey’s sentence followed the recommendations of Assistant City Attorney Michael Hoelscher.
During the hearing, Holick gave a 15-minute speech, quoting Bible verses and accusing the city of violating his First Amendment rights.
“Wichita is confused,” Holick said. “I am not your enemy. Islam is. The Lord said there will be no other gods before me.”
Journey told Holick that the First Amendment guaranteed his rights to express his religious beliefs but allowed laws to regulate how he practices his faith.
“I want you to think about this,” Journey said. “What if the shoe had been on the other foot and someone from the Islamic Center had come to your place and tried to convert your members and had blocked your driveway?”
Spirit One has been a street and online ministry since a month after his arrest, Holick said, when he sold his building in south Wichita to another church. First Freewill Baptist now resides at 1515 E. Harry.
The judge reminded Holick that the Constitution provides protection for people of all faiths, not just Holick’s.
“I hope you will reflect on the choices you made,” Journey said. “There’s nothing wrong the proselytizing or holding your beliefs. It’s the manner of how you carry them out that’s the problem.”
Holick could face a six-month jail term if he doesn’t follow the conditions of his probation.
That Eric Bolling is a terrible host is not a new revelation. Recently he had Islamophobe Steven Emerson on his show to discuss the CAP report on the Islamophobia Network (video below). Bolling once again reveals himself to be a shill for Right-Wing anti-Muslim hacks:
“I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”
What irks me more than Bolling however is Emerson professing he is merely a “messenger.” Messengers generally don’t claim to be scholars or experts. By saying he is merely a “messenger” Emerson hopes to secure the victim card and divert attention away from any responsibility for his Islamophobic statements and actions.
It is no coincidence his Islamophobe contemporaries, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, acted the same exact way during the Norway Massacre.
Last week, the Center for American Progress published a report detailing the network of anti-Muslim “experts” who relentlessly promote Islamophobia in America, as well as the sources of their funding. One of those featured in the report, Steve Emerson, appeared on the August 30 edition of Fox Business’Follow the Money to misrepresent the report and attack CAP in an attempt to discredit the report’s claims.
Emerson said on Fox that he felt “somewhat complimented because they’re attributing to me and four other people the ability to control the minds of 300 million Americans for 15 years.” In fact, the report features a dozen “main players who conjure up and spread misinformation about American Muslims and Islam,” as well as seven major financial contributors and an echo chamber that includes the religious right, the media, politicians, and grassroots organizations.
Emerson went on to suggest that some level of Islamophobia is justified because “65 to 70 percent of all international terrorist attacks are carried out by radical Muslims, so there’s a fear based on that.” He accused CAP of quoting “terrorist organizations” and “a front group for Hamas” in its report, dismissing CAP as a “$38 million-a-year organization that looks like the Democratic Party in exile.”
Emerson also falsely suggested that the report somehow denies that Islam is used as a justification for terrorist acts:
What’s interesting here is that when it comes to looking at Islamic terrorist attacks, what they deny and what they claim is racist is the assertion that Islamic terrorism is motivated by Islamic extremist clerics, mosques, statements –
Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.
During his Fox appearance, Emerson also offered this bizarre comparison: “This reminds me of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or, you know, it reminds me of someone who attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center because they attacked the Ku Klux Klan. Right? I’m the messenger.”
Emerson later said:
They believe that the only reason there exists suspicion against Islam — popular suspicion, and it’s not a majority, it’s a minority — is because of people like me who are orchestrating it like, you know, the Wizard of Oz. The bottom line is it comes from so many rampant sources — if you go on YouTube, on the Internet. Most of the Islamic organizations in the United States, they’re run by the Muslim Brotherhood or they were created by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that believes in imposing Islam and the sharia around the world. We’re coming out with a documentary –
Host Eric Bolling echoed Emerson: “I find it hard to believe that a group of four or five people are — who are responsible for what is perceived Islamophobia. I think it has a lot more to do with 3,000 people dying at the World Trade Center 10 years ago.”
A New York amusement park was temporarily shut down Tuesday after a large-scale altercation erupted between Muslim patrons and park rangers over a disagreement on headgear rules.
Muslim women in a tour group at Rye Playland in Westchester County were reportedly denied access to several rides because they were wearing hijabs – their traditional headscarves, MyFoxNY reports.
“Our headgear policy is designed to protect the safety of patrons and safety is our first concern,” said Deputy Parks Commissioner Peter Tartaglia. “This policy was repeatedly articulated to the tour operator, but unfortunately the message did not reach some of the members of his group.”
The altercation began when park officials offered refunds and members of the Muslim group got in a scuffle, Tartaglia told The Journal News. Two park rangers were injured when they jumped in to break it up, he said, and were taken to local hospitals.
Dozens of police vehicles from nine agencies then rushed to the park, where officers arrested 15 people – mostly for disorderly conduct, authorities said. The disturbance involved around 30 to 40 people.
All other visitors were not allowed into the park between 4 and 6 p.m. ET, with exit ramps from I-95 closed as well.
The tour group – the Muslim American Society of New York – was at the park to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr, an Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, MyFoxNY reports.
“Everybody got mad, everybody got upset,” Amr Khater, a Brooklyn resident, told The Journal News. “It’s our holiday. Why would you do this to us?” Khater said park rangers notified him of the headgear rules upon arrival.
The Journal News reports: “Lola Ali, 16, of Astoria said she witnessed a group of girls and women wearing hijabs go to park security to confront them about the headgear issue. She said the women were upset and yelling. She said the security officers started pushing them away and the girls stood their ground, at which point the security officers grabbed them, pushed them to the ground and handcuffed them. Men within the park saw this and tried to intervene, Ali said, and the situation went downhill from there. ‘They were beating down the girls, then they started beating down the guys,’ she said of the security officers.”
Believing that the upcoming 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 is best memorialized in crayon, Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. is publishing a new coloring book entitled “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom.” In offering kids the option of coloring the Twin Towers burning, mourning survivors, or the Navy SEALs shooting Osama Bin Laden, publisher Wayne Bell insists that “the doodles represent patriotism,” a “simplistic, honest tool” to “help educate children on events on 9/11.” But many Muslims describe it as, in a word, “disgusting.”
Pointing out that Muslims are already dealing with an environment of increasing Islamophobia, Michigan Council on American Islamic Relations representative Dawud Walid noted that “nearly all of the mentions of Muslims in the book are accompanied by the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist.’” Indeed, the page depicting a Navy SEAL aiming at bin Laden cowering behind is veiled wife reads “Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.” Bell’s response? “The truth is the truth“:
“Little kids who pick up this book can have their perceptions colored by those images … it instills bias in young minds,” said Walid. He says that some of the narrative and photos aren’t even correct, noting that Bin Laden wasn’t hiding behind a wife when he was shot.
Bell stood by the book as an “honest depiction”.
“The truth is the truth,” Bell said, adding, “It’s unfortunate that they were all Muslim and that’s the part people want to erase … I don’t know what else you can call them.”
Noting that one page depicts a woman mourning with a cross chain dangling from her neck, Walid says “Muslims mothers lost sons too.” He also noted that he’s not an advocate of showing children violent images — a sentiment that many military families share. Shariah Gibbs, a military spouse in Germany, said “This should not be a coloring book.” Another said, “I would not buy a coloring book [about 9/11]…To me, coloring books should be fun….this is not!”
It is important to note that Bell has published other coloring books on topics “from dinosaurs and zoo animals to African-American leaders, President Obama, superheroes of the Bible and even the Tea Party.” He even said that, if asked to print a book reflecting positive images of Muslim Americans, “I’d print it tomorrow.” To which Walid said, “Well, I’m asking him to do it right now.”
Last week, the Center for American Progress released a 130-page report detailing who’s behind the rise of Islamophobia in the United States. “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America” shows how a small handful of groups, including ACT! for America and Stop Islamization of America, have been the driving force behind the the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.
A ThinkProgress investigation found that a top employee at ACT! for America, Chris Slick, was a key staffer in South Carolina for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and continues to be a “rabid Romney volunteer” this year. Slick, who currently works as ACT!’s director of online operations, served as a South Carolina field manager for Romney’s 2008 presidential bid. During Slick’s tenure on Romney’s staff, the former Massachusetts governor declared that he would not appoint a Muslim in his cabinet if he were elected president. (GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain made a similar pledge this cycle, to much criticism.) After Romney’s bid failed, Slick moved on to spread Islamophobia at ACT! for America, though he maintains contact with Romney’s 2012 presidential bid as a volunteer.
At ACT!, Slick has worked to distribute model anti-Sharia legislation to state lawmakers around the country. In South Carolina, for instance, state Sen. Mike Fair (R) told ThinkProgress he had coordinated with Slick as he introduced legislation to ban Sharia in the Palmetto State. After working behind the scenes with Fair to bring up the anti-Sharia legislation, Slick then lobbied ACT! supporters to inundate state Sen. Larry Martin (R) with phone calls in an attempt to persuade Martin to lift his hold on the bill.
Slick’s Islamophobia isn’t just confined to pushing anti-Sharia legislation. His Twitter feed includes frequent anti-Muslim and anti-Arab missives. On April 25, Slick wrote, “Press 3 for Arabic. Yep, we are in trouble now folks…”. The week before, Slick accused Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) of having “ties to terrorism” for once representing the Arab television network Al Jazeera. Back in February, Slick retweeted a post from Logan’s Warning asking “Why would any woman be supportive of Islam?” And earlier that month, Slick wrote, “Dear Egyptian protesters [sic] aka the Muslim Brotherhood, please do not damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild them again. Signed, The Jews.”
Slick also sent out an ominous tweet on May 10: “I need a Wikipedia expert. Need to hire one to clean some stuff up. Do you or someone you know work well with Wiki? Let me know ASAP.” It’s unclear precisely whose or what Wikipedia page he wanted to alter.
To learn more about how the Islamophobia network operates, check out this video ThinkProgress produced:
Five teens were arrested and charged after a shot was fired outside of an Orleans County mosque Monday night as worshipers were leaving nightly Ramadan services.
YNN spoke with members of the World Sufi Foundation Mosque in Waterport as well as law enforcement officials to learn more about what happened.
“I’m just grateful that things weren’t worse last night, which they easily could’ve been,” said David Bell of the World Sufi Foundation Mosque.
Members of the mosque in Waterport said they have been harassed since they were first founded in 1974. They said they have experienced everything from people speeding by and shouting vulgar language to having their fence torn out and burned down.
Still, they said nothing compares to what happened Monday after nightly prayer services.
“As we were standing here, the one car came back and instead of speeding by that car swerved directly into our group of people. It clipped me,” Bell said. “I fell to the ground and what’s even more difficult is what happened after. There was a group of people and a shot was fired before the car sped away.”
“This is actually the first time that someone’s actually been physically injured and that’s a concern for us. Imagine coming out after a service, particularly a holy service, coming out and seeing someone flipped by a car obviously we’re going to feel threatened by it, we’re going to feel insecure about it and we’re gonna wonder where is our protection and where are our rights,” said Bilal Huzair of the World Sufi Foundation Mosque.
Huzair said members of the mosque immediately called 911 to report the incident.
He said another member, who was late to prayer service, spotted the black SUV and white truck parked down the road at the Lake Alice Public Boat Launch. He said the member recognized the vehicles as the ones that were allegedly involved in a separate harassing incident just a few days earlier.
Huzair said once David Bell was taken to the hospital for treatment, he and other members of the mosque drove to the boat launch and used their cars to surround the two vehicles full of teens until police arrived.
Huzair claims it took more than 40 minutes for police to arrive and that police only came after the teens called 911 to say they were being harassed.
“I think there’s some miscommunication as to what agencies can respond and where they respond. There was more than one law enforcement agency involved in this. We did have local Albion police and state police assisting the sheriff’s office on both incidents,” said Orleans County Sheriff Scott Hess.
“Whether or not it was properly responded to initially is something we’ll be looking at, but I can tell you on behalf of this county, this is something that we’re taking extremely serious and will be properly addressed to be sure there will be no further escalation of what’s already occurred and the harassment that they’ve been subject to,” said Joseph Cardone, Orleans County district attorney.
Investigators charged Mark Vendetti, 17; Tim Weader, 17; Dylan Phillips, 18; Jeff Donahue, 18; and Anthony Ogden, 18, with misdemeanor disruption of religious services.
Vendetti is also charged with felony criminal possession of a weapon for allegedly shooting a 16-gauge shotgun in front of the mosque where people were leaving. He was arraigned and sent to the Orleans County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bail.
Authorities said all five teens are buddies from Holley.
No charges have been filed related to Bell’s injury, though the district attorney said more charges are possible. Four of the teens are scheduled to appear in Carlton Town Court on September 6.
“I’m hopeful that something can begin to change,” Bell added.
Later in the day on Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for appropriate hate crime charges to be brought against the five Orleans County teenagers.
“New York Muslims must be free to practice their faith without fear of harassment or intimidation,” said Faiza N. Ali, community affairs director of CAIR’s New York chapter.
People who live near the mosque are reacting to the arrests. Opinion seems to be mixed on whether the incidents are related to religion.
“Just kids being renegade kids, you know there’s renegade kids out there. So anyway nobody got shot I guess. Kid probably went by and blew a shot out of the window,” said Phil Coville of Albion.
“You don’t do pranks with loaded weapons. It’s unfortunate. Kids, I don’t know how old they are, but they have a way of wrecking their own youth with rash acts And i hope somebody will put the brakes on these guys,” said Patricia Smith of Ontario.
“They were wrong because you don’t go interrupt somebody’s thing and go shoot off a gun, that’s not right, that’s not right. They should think first with their actions, not try to hurt somebody,” said Deborah Rebar of Albion.
People that YNN spoke with said they know very little about the mosque itself.
YNN contacted Carlton Town Supervisor Gayle Ashbery, who declined comment for our report.
Loonwatchers, first of all I want to thank you for your patience while we experienced a malicious attack by hackers who wished to destroy Loonwatch’s reputation. It is not a surprise that there are many out there who want to destroy our work.
Unable to counter our facts, arguments and use of satire they instead chose to go the dirty route. This is not the first time. Almost a year ago to the date, our site was also attacked: Some Want Loonwatch to be Silenced.
Commenters in the Islamophobesphere were gloating that Loonwatch was under attack, commenting on how there are “bugs” here and “LOL-ing” at the fact that the site was attacked.
These weren’t ordinary hackers, our technical team tells us that they were quite sophisticated, this is why it took some time to redress the issue.
I want to assure our fans and loonwatchers everywhere that not only has the issue been tackled but we have upped our defenses to protect the site and ensure that there won’t ever be a repeat of what occurred a few days ago.
However, since we live in an unpredictable world where you are never 100% safe from attack I want readers to know a few things: In case of attack in the future, please visit our Facebook and Twitter pages for updates on what is going on with the site. We also have a mirror site: Loonwatch Digest, which you can visit in the meantime while we secure the main site. And of course you can visit Spencerwatch.com and WhatIfTheyWereMuslim.com.
Once again I want to thank you all for your patience, apologize for any inconvenience and reassure you that what happened a few days ago will not happen again.
A very interesting report on the funding of the anti-Muslim movement. It is unfortunate that despite a few citations there is scant mention of our taking the haters on day in and day out for over two years.
Following a six-month long investigative research project, the Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. The authors — Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and myself — worked to expose the Islamophobia network in depth, name the major players, connect the dots, and trace the genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda.
The report, titled “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” lifts the veil behind the hate, follows the money, and identifies the names of foundations who have given money, how much they have given, and who they have given to:
The money has flowed into the hands of five key “experts” and “scholars” who comprise the central nervous system of anti-Muslim propaganda:
FRANK GAFFNEY, Center for Security Policy – “A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.” [Source]
DAVID YERUSHALMI, Society of Americans for National Existence: “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…the Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.” [Source]
DANIEL PIPES, Middle East Forum: “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” [Source]
ROBERT SPENCER, Jihad Watch: “Of course, as I have pointed out many times, traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” [Source]
STEVEN EMERSON, Investigative Project on Terrorism: “One of the world’s great religions — which has more than 1.4 billion adherents — somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.” [Source]
These five “scholars” are assisted in their outreach efforts by Brigitte Gabriel (founder, ACT! for America), Pamela Geller (co-founder, Stop Islamization of America), and David Horowitz (supporter of Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch). As the report details, information is then disseminated through conservative organizations like the Eagle Forum, the religious right, Fox News, and politicians such as Allen West and Newt Gingrich.
Over the past few years, the Islamophobia network (the funders, scholars, grassroots activists, media amplifiers, and political validators) have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that “radical Islam” has infiltrated all aspects of American society — including the conservative movement.
To explain how the Islamophobia network operates, we’ve produced this video to show just one example of how they have mainstreamed the baseless and unfounded fear that Sharia may soon replace American laws:
*We published this piece earlier but took it down for technical reasons.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A 24-year-old man has been arrested on hate crime charges for the November firebombing of a mosque in Corvallis, Ore., where the suspect in a Portland, Ore., bomb plot once worshipped, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.
The suspect in the Corvallis firebombing was identified as Cody Crawford, who lived a block from the mosque. Shortly after the firebombing, authorities searched his home.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sought an investigation Wednesday into the Obama administration’s cooperation with award-winning filmmakers working on a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said too much information already has leaked out about the Navy SEALs raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan in May, and Pentagon officials have cautioned against discussing details of the mission.
King asked the inspectors general of the CIA and Defense Department to determine what consultations occurred in the Obama administration about providing Hollywood with access to covert military operators and clandestine CIA officers.
The picture will be directed by Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter will be Mark Boal, 2009 Academy Award winners for “The Hurt Locker.”
The White House ridiculed King’s request, saying the moviemakers will not receive any sensitive information.
Press secretary Jay Carney told reporters, “When people, including you in this room, are working on articles, books, documentaries or movies that involve the president, ask to speak to administration officials, we do our best to accommodate them to make sure that facts are correct. That is hardly a novel approach to the media.
“We do not discuss classified information. And I would hope that as we face the continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.”
He said information provided about the raid was focused on President Barack Obama’s role and it’s the same information given to anybody writing about the topic.
King said his staff has spoken to CIA officials who were upset about any cooperation with the movie-makers. Among the things he asked the inspectors general to investigate were:
_Any consultations within the administration on the advisability of providing Hollywood executives with access to covert military operators and clandestine CIA officers to discuss the raid.
_Whether a copy of the film would be submitted to the military and CIA for pre-publication review to determine whether special operations tactics, techniques and procedures, or intelligence sources and methods, would be revealed.
_Whether filmmakers attended a meeting with special operations personnel and CIA officers, and whether any such attendance was balanced against the duty to maintain cover for these operatives.
The movie may be released by Sony Pictures Entertainment next fall, shortly before the November 2012 elections.
Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters, “This film project is only in the script development phase, and DoD is providing assistance with script research, which is something we commonly do for established filmmakers.
“Until there is a script to review, and a request for equipment or other DoD support, there is no formal agreement for DoD support.”
Bigelow and Boal said in a statement, “Our upcoming film project about the decade-long pursuit of bin Laden has been in the works for many years and integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, as well as the cooperative strategies and implementation by the Department of Defense and the CIA.
“Indeed, the dangerous work of finding the world’s most wanted man was carried out by individuals in the military and intelligence communities who put their lives at risk for the greater good without regard for political affiliation. This was an American triumph, both heroic and non-partisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”
Two Chechens Movsar Jamaev and Rustam Daudov first met on Wednesday July 19, this year on the island Utøya. They quickly became good friends, and were going to dinner, when the first shots were fired on Friday, July 22 – says on its pages the well-known Norwegian newspaper “Dagbladet”.
With the prior permission of their parents, they told the reporters of this newspaper about the terrible hours spent on the island of Utoya.
“We heard the first shots and saw a group of teenagers standing near an armed man who was shooting them at a point-blank. Three of them were shot in front of us”, – said the young Chechens. “From there the two young men ran towards the woods, pulling a group of terrified Norwegian youth, who did not know how to save themselves.” 16-year-old Norwegian said he was so frightened that he could not move. “Therefore, Movsar took my arm and dragged me into the forest” – he said. From there Movsar called his father, who gave him instructions, how to behave in a similar situation.
“I have witnessed how people were shot earlier in my country by the Russian occupiers, when I was a kid. After talking with my father, I was able to pull myself together. My dad told me that I must possess myself and that I should think not only about themselves, but also about the other children on the island. He told me that I should tried to save as many as possible. “Attack on the offender should be done properly” said dad”- says Movsar.
“The murderer, dressed in the form of a police officer, shouted to us to come to him. At first I thought to do it, until I realized that he was going to kill us. Soon, he began to shoot the children who came to him, believing that he is a policeman. He did calmly and cooldbloodedly kill defenseless children.”- said Movsar. According to his friend, Rustam, they were armed with stones, decided to stop the offender. Rustam states, that both of them with stones in their hands began to move towards Anders Breivik.
“We were maybe a meter away from him and were going to throw stones at him, but he shot one of our friends. Then we threw stones at him and ran to save our lives and the lives of other children who were still alive – said Rustam. Movsar has no doubt that he got the murderer with a stone. He says that after this killer howled and shouted at him “f***ing nigger”.
After that, the young men decided to seek and rescue the remaining children. They found a cave in the rock, where they hid terrified children (a total of 23 people), among whom was even an eight-year boy. Movsar says that he carried him on his shoulders for nearly an hour.
Then they stood on duty at the cave entrance hoping to protect children. From there, they saw several young people drowning in the water. “I could not let them drown, and swam to help them. Three times I did it, but I was totelly exhausted due to the cold water. I did not have the strength to save the boy, who was only ten feet from me. He drowned “. – Movsar said.
Anders Behring Breivik, the butcher of Norway, believed the “Muslim colonization” of Europe – aided and abetted by multiculturalist fellow travelers and colluding weak-kneed politicians – was poised to destroy pristine Norway unless he acted. Breivik’s European Declaration of Independence lists a series of demands, above all that “immigration in whatever form should be immediately and completely halted and that our authorities take a long break from mass immigration in general until such a time when law and order has been reestablished in our major cities.”
The irrational fear of immigration does not align with the facts. Immigration has remained remarkably stable over the past 50 years – with approximately 3% to 3.2% of the world’s population as international migrants.
Norway, which sent to America some 522,000 immigrants over a century ago, is paradigmatic of the status quo. Over the course of 150 years, it has experienced a minor net migration gain. Today, it has approximately 550,000 immigrants – half of them originating in Europe, with Poles and Swedes leading the way. Norway has a small Muslim population (roughly a quarter of its immigrants).
Immigration’s stability is remarkable. While the potential for immigration continues to grow in our increasingly mobile and global world, the reality of international immigration remains quite stable – with more than 96% of all human beings living in the countries where they were born.
Adam Barnett co-wrote One Law for All’s Enemies Not Allies: The Far:Right report. Here he responds to Robert Spencer’s statement on the report.
Following the publication of ‘Enemies Not Allies: The Far-Right’, our new report which investigates his and similar organisations, Stop Islamization of America director Robert Spencer has invited One Law for All to ‘substantiate [our] charges, or withdraw them and issue a public apology.’ One could simply recommend that Mr. Spencer read our report. Indeed, in his ‘rebuttal’, he writes as if he has answered all of these charges before. It’s therefore strange that he felt the need to reply to them at ‘11:53pm’ on a Sunday night, and to attempt to smear his critics as ‘racist anti-Semites’ and ‘supporters of Jihad’. One could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Spencer hoped to prevent people from reading the report for themselves.
In any event, I’m happy to list our main charges against his group and refer interested readers to the relevant citations in our report:
- Stop Islamisation of Europe is the ‘expansion’ of a Danish anti-Muslim party, Stop Islamiseringen af Danmark (SIAD), which was itself the result of a split within a xenophobic lobby group. (p.36-37) It calls for a boycott of all ‘Islamic countries’, for the Qur’an to be banned, for the mass deportation of immigrants from Europe, and protests against the building of Mosques. (p.37, 44-46) SIOE’s leadership consider all Muslims to be congenital liars who have a ‘culture of deceit’, and never tire of announcing that they ‘do not believe in moderate Muslims’. (p.40-41, and here)
- SIOE’s leaders have collaborated with and defended Julius Borgesen, former spokesperson for the right-wing extremist group Danske Front, which has ‘co-operated’ with Blood & Honour and Combat 18. Borgessen has reportedly participated in a march to celebrate Rudolf Hess, and was imprisoned in 2007 for calling for an arson attack against a Danish minister. SIOE insist that Borgesen is ‘in no way Nazi [or a racist], but is fighting for the democracy and freedom of Denmark’. (p.38-39) Further, there is evidence to suggest that other Danish neo-Nazis, as well as members of the BNP and the National Front, have attended SIOE and SIAD events. (p.38, 47)
- Stop Islamization of America is the U.S. branch of the SIOE umbrella group, and was entrusted by its leadership to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in January 2010. Geller and Spencer have praised SIOE, endorsed its political programme, published its statements and expressed admiration for its leaders. (p.48-49)
- SIOA’s leaders have surpassed SIOE’s defence of war criminal Radovan Karadzic, (which included offering justifications for his actions), by defending Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, denying Serbian atrocities including the Srebrenica genocide, publishing the work of professional apologists for the Milosevic project, and in Spencer’s case working on an institutional level with such people to oppose an independent Kosovo. Ms. Geller has gone so far as to say that Bosnian Muslims killed themselves in order to ‘manipulate media coverage’, and refers to the 1995 genocide as a ‘propaganda lie’ which was ‘manufactured [by] the international community’ as part of ‘the ongoing blood libel against the Christian Serbs’. (p.42-43, 53-54 and here)
This is presumably what Mr. Spencer means when he writes of SIOA’s ‘opposition to the jihad in the Balkans and skepticism (sic) about some of the charges made of Serbian war crimes.’
- SIOA’s leadership has supported, defended and praised the English Defence League, (without equivocation until recently), and has promoted their events, published their statements and attacked their critics. (p.55-59) Co-director Pamela Geller’s web log has featured conspiratorial articles regarding the President of America’s religion, his family, his sexual history, and the circumstances of his birth, and has likened his ‘stealth jihad on the White House’ to ‘an SS officer getting elected president during WW II’. (p.52-53) In 2010, Robert Spencer defended his and Geller’s ‘colleague’ Joseph John Jay, who had recommended the ‘wholesale slaughter’ of Muslim civilians, including children, on the grounds that he had been ‘misinterpreted’. Spencer maintains this still, and Ms. Geller has recommended Jay’s writings as recently as July 2011. (p.51-51)
I could go on, but I ought to address Mr. Spencer’s direct challenge regarding a quote of his which we included. Here is the quote, published on his Jihad Watch site in 2005: ‘there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.’
Writing today, Spencer claims ‘what [he] meant was there is no institutional distinction, so jihadis move freely in Muslim circles among those who oppose them and claim to do so’. However, when asked by a commenter on the original article in 2005 ‘how distinctions can be made’, Spencer replied: ‘That’s simple. Let American Muslims renounce all attachment to violent Jihad and Sharia, refuse all aid from Sharia states (chiefly Saudi Arabia), and cooperate fully with anti-terror efforts aimed at rooting jihadists out of American mosques.’ (p.52) Having thus identified all Muslims as suspects who are guilty until proven innocent, Spencer does not specify how to treat Muslims who do not ‘cooperate fully’, or who fail to make the prescribed disassociations. But based on his record and the company he keeps, I’m glad we’ll never have to find out what it might entail.
I think this meets Mr. Spencer’s challenge, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring all of this to people’s attention. I’m not sure how one squares the above with the claim that SIOA ‘stand[s] for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for all people’. Perhaps Mr. Spencer will enlighten us.
This is a guest post the centrist (Lucy Lips’ boyfriend)
For someone who spends the majority of his time blogging, Robert Spencer is remarkably thin skinned. Ever since One Law for All published its report about how the far-Right has hijacked the anti-Islamist debate, Spencer has been howling with his characteristic sense of righteous indignation and victimhood. Dissent and disagreement is not allowed in Spencer’s world. Detractors are immediately branded ‘Marxists’, ‘anti-Semities’, ‘Dhimmis’, ‘stooges’ or practitioners of Spencer’s favourite slur ‘Taqiyyah’.
Spencer might claim not to hate all Muslims, but his work belies that vacuous claim. Jihad Watch essentalises Muslims on a daily basis, as if they were a monolithic whole acting in unison for the pursuit of an unspoken grand agenda. Every action performed by a Muslim, no matter what their actual motivation, is immediately ascribed to Islam. It is as if no Muslim ever acts without reference to their Islamic identity.
Consider this wild theory posted on Spencer’s website. An article posted by ‘The Anti-Jihadist’ claims that allegations of rape made against Dominique Strauss-Kahn are actually part of a ‘stealth jihad’. What matters, long before any real facts have been established in that case, is that Strauss-Kahn’s accuser is a Guinean Muslim immigrant.
It also so happens that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is Jewish. Coincidence?…Why would a Muslim, and a ‘pious, devout’ one at that, be so adept and experienced at lying? Surely Islam has nothing to do with this woman’s pathological lying, and nothing to do with her criminal attempts to extort money from a powerful, rich Jew. Of course.
Perhaps Strauss-Kahn’s accuser was trying to extort a rich and powerful man. The facts are far from settled. But if she were, why is Spencer not content to think of her as simply a crook? Rather, what is singled out and stressed is that she is Muslim. Indeed, the article is quite explicit in arguing that Muslims are inspired to become ‘pathological liars’ by Islam.
That is the modus operandi of Jihad Watch. Elsewhere on his site, Spencer posts a picture of an unknown Muslim woman wearing a headscarf while working for the TSA (Transportation Security Administration). After offering an insincere caveat, “I am sure the TSA employee pictured here is as loyal and patriotic as the day is long”, Spencer gets to the nub of the matter. He objects to seeing a Muslim TSA worker because:
we are forced tacitly to acknowledge either that that belief-system [Islam] had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — even though the attackers themselves invoked it and only it as their motivation — and that therefore we must do nothing to oppose its spread in the West, or that even if that belief-system did motivate the 9/11 jihad attacks, it is continuing to advance in the West and we can do nothing about it.
The two goals may coalesce: in other words, Islamic jihadists who wished to infiltrate the TSA may decide that a hijabbed TSA worker would be preferable to one in secular dress, as a gesture of Islamic supremacist assertiveness as well as the placement of an agent who could weaken security at the right moment.
So any Muslim woman wearing the hijab is making ‘a gesture of Islamic supremacist assertiveness’? Remember that Spencer claims not to hate all Muslims or be immediately suspicious of them, yet he ascribes such conspiratorial motives to women who simply cover their hair.
Back to Spencer’s bizarre logic:
A hijabbed TSA worker is the personification of a dare: Islamic supremacists are daring the TSA to question her about her belief-system, thereby acknowledging that that belief-system has something to do with terror and violence.
Again, the hijab is linked to a ‘supremacist’ plot, this time as part of an ‘Islamist dare’. Spencer’s claims not to hold all Muslims in disdain and under suspicion is palpably false as demonstrated by articles like that, and literally hundreds of others on his website.
Spencer and supporters of his essentialist view automatically ascribe the beliefs of Islamist political parties, terrorist organisations, and the most regressive, literalist interpretations of Islam to all Muslims. Suspicion and distrust naturally follow, creating the climate in which the delusions that consumed Anders Breivik are formed.
Spencer has howled wildly that Breivik has nothing to do with him. Yet, it is not that simple. Spencer may not advocate actual violence but that is his only difference with Breivik – one of style rather than substance. They share a general diagnosis of ‘the problem’: the supposed ‘colonisation’ of Western societies by Muslims and the hysterical claim that there will be a ‘Muslim takeover’.
This is no different to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut Tahrir which condemned 9/11 and 7/7. They might oppose those attacks, but do so over issues of style only. They share al-Qaeda’s overall diagnosis and worldview: that Islam is under attack by a belligerent West and that the only solution is the revival of puritanical Islamic societies.
In any event, Spencer’s claims about being opposed to violence require serious examination. When the Egyptian revolution began one might have expected Spencer to support a group of people fighting for their freedom. Instead, an article on Jihad Watch by ‘Roland Shirk’ could only imagine the worst.
What Muslims want, around the world, is to impose political Islam…For us to be prattling on about the virtues of self-government in this context is suicidal, like Russian aristocrats hosting Bolsheviks in their salons.
So much for all the pieties about not hating Muslims and always suspecting the worst about them. Shirk then offered a very unique solution to avoid the ‘suicidal’ situation he saw arising in Egypt, arguing:
If I could have Mubarak’s ear, I would whisper just two words of wisdom: Tiananmen Square.
That sentence was later removed, presumably after its inexpediency was realised, but you can see a screenshot of the original below.
This is a very serious charge which Spencer must answer. Yes, the offending line has been removed but who uploaded the original article – Spencer or someone else? If not Spencer, then who? And, perhaps most damning of all, why has Roland Shirk continued to post articles on Jihad Watch since calling for the massacre of countless Egyptians as they demonstrated against one of the Middle East’s most brutal regimes?
Rather than descending into wild name calling, it would be good for Spencer to engage with the issues at hand if he is sincere.
Spencer has howled wildly that Breivik has nothing to do with him. Yet, it is not that simple. Spencer may not advocate actual violence but that is his only difference with Breivik – one of style rather than substance. They share a general diagnosis of ‘the problem’: the supposed ‘colonisation’ of Western societies by Muslims and the hysterical claim that there will be a ‘Muslim takeover’.
This is indeed the case. Here’s Spencer, speaking in 2007:
There will be civil war in Europe. The European citizenry, for the most part, are not ready to accept Islamic law and there will be armed conflicts.
It is difficult to imagine any other future scenario for Western Europe than its becoming Islamicised or having a civil war.
Fjordman, a Norwegian writer whose work has been featured on Jihad Watch (see, for example, here, here, and here) claims, in an article recommended by Spencer:
The West is becoming so overwhelmed by immigration that this may trigger civil wars in several Western nations in the near future.
If the Leftists and the Globalists have their way then our civilization will die, plain and simple. That’s why this ongoing struggle is likely to get ugly, because no compromise is possible. Since similar ideological struggles are taking place throughout the Western world, this situation could trigger a pan-Western Civil War.
The Fjordman quote above is taken from a ‘Brussels Journal’ article. Spencer is a supporter of the Brussels Journal (see approving quotes here and here, for example), despite it featuring articles such as this one, which speaks of ‘the sustained persecution that BNP members are subject to in the archPod state of ex-Great ex-Britain’, and goes on to advocate racial separatism:
Integration is not possible except by hoisting the white flag, as white Body Snatchers do. But separation ought to be possible, and is likely to occur in the future.
[...]
Saving Western Civilization must entail as well separation from Muslims and from Third World Latinos, which these groups already practice toward whites. How to separate without cruel and unjust policies is an issue beyond the scope of this discussion, as it requires a fully-informed consideration of the specific circumstances in each Western country separately.
What is clear is that the fault for the disaster of bringing to the West tens of millions of unassimilable Muslims, tens of millions of subliterate Mestizo laborers, millions of chaos-generating Africans, lies not with such Muslims, Mestizos and Africans but with the crazed Body Snatcher elite that has brought them – by naïve intention and by purposeful inattention, both. The separation therefore, cannot be guided by animus toward such immigrants, who have done what comes naturally, but toward those who have brought them to the West.
In a 2010 article published by Jihad Watch, Fjordman writes:
Wherever possible, non-Muslims should seek to physically separate themselves from Muslims.
Spencer, both via his own writings and the writings of others that he promotes on Jihad Watch, clearly supports a paranoid worldview in which it is only a matter of time before Europe is torn apart by wars brought about by its Muslim minority. He is happy to promote authors and journals that advocate various forms of confessional and even ethnic separatism.
The Centrist argues:
Spencer might claim not to hate all Muslims, but his work belies that vacuous claim. Jihad Watch essentalises Muslims on a daily basis, as if they were a monolithic whole acting in unison for the pursuit of an unspoken grand agenda. Every action performed by a Muslim, no matter what their actual motivation, is immediately ascribed to Islam. It is as if no Muslim ever acts without reference to their Islamic identity.
Again, this is indeed the case, and another good example of this is found in Spencer’s claims about various car accidents being part of a low-level jihadist plot.
As I noted in a post in April this year, Spencer has collected stories of Muslims involved in hit-and-run incidents and built a bizarre narrative around them.
He suggests that a man who had drunk six cans of Budweisser before crashing into six people during a police chase may have drunk the beer ‘to steel himself’ before committing a supposed act of ‘jihad’.
In another case, this time involving a man who reportedly is ‘mentally ill, suffers from depression and hasn’t being taking his medication’, Spencer nonetheless concludes that on the basis of the man’s name – Ismail Yassin Mohamed – the case may ‘possibly’ be an example of ‘Sudden Jihad Syndrome’.
Spencer can launch foaming-at-the-mouth attacks as much as he likes, but the fact of the matter is that he long ago crossed the line that separates legitimate criticism of Islam and opposition to Islamism from anti-Muslim bigotry and fearmongering.
“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’sJihadWatch, Pamela Geller’sAtlasShrugs, 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.
WASHINGTON D.C., Ramadan 8/August 8 (IINA)-Amidst talks of Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims in the United States, a challenge to the idea that Muslims are new members of American society can be found in a recently formed Islamic Heritage Museum.
“So many times people, Americans and non-Americans, Muslims and non-Muslims, have misperceptions of Muslims saying they came from the Nation of Islam or that they came through the immigrations in the 60s and the 70s. Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its conceptions.”
The Museum, located in Washington DC, began as a traveling exhibit called “Collections and Stories of American Muslims” which went on display in mosques and university campuses. As demand for the American Muslim historical narrative increased, co-founder and curator Amir Muhammad decided on making it a permanent feature in the nation’s capital.
“We felt there was a need being here in Washington, D.C. to have a place that the public could come to, learn about Islam, and learn about Muslims and learn about the history of Muslims in America.”
Stories begin with African Muslims like Estevanico, a servant to the Spanish explorers in the early 1500s- to Muslims living amongst Native American tribes in the eighteenth century. Many attendees were surprised to hear of these early Muslim adventures and discussed their experience at the museum.
Muhammad discussed the importance of the museum in light of rising Islamophobia.
The museum also traces modern day Muslim experiences, including civic and military participation.
As the discourse on Islamophobia increases, American Muslims continue to carry out projects like this museum in hopes of solidifying their place in American history and society.
A legislator in Michigan has decided to jump on the anti-Sharia bandwagon and has proposed legislation to protect us from Sharia law. Tennessee has proposed such a law, and Oklahoma has passed one (although it was later struck down by a court and presumably will be tied up in the courts for a while). While this appears to be a trend, it is confounding.
First, here is Rep. Dave Agema, quoted in theDetroit News: “Our law is our law. I don’t like foreign entities telling us what to do.” His bill, he says, will prevent anyone “who tries to shove any foreign law down our throats.”
So, Agema is proposing a state law to keep “foreign entities” from “telling us what to do.” I presume he is being colloquial; who cares if they try and “tell us” what to do? We don’t have to listen, do we? Presumably, he is suggesting that there is some way that they can force us into doing something we don’t want to, unless there is a law preventing it. So he has proposed his bill, which will presumably protect us from this ominous threat.
Too bad he hasn’t read our Constitution. I’m not talking about the Constitution of the State of Michigan; I’m talking about the big kahuna: The Constitution of the United States. Article VI reads in part:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. [Emphasis added.]
Forgive my italicizing; the drafters of the Constitution didn’t feel the need to italicize the important parts of the document because they thought later generations would read it carefully for themselves.
So, what Dave Agema has missed — and the others who are trying to pass these stupid laws — is that when it comes to the law, the Constitution already trumps whatever a “foreign entity tell[s] us” to do. (See italicized portions above.)
Don’t get me wrong; I know that some people have heard of Sharia law being applied by parties willingly to their own disputes. That is, both sides to a dispute have decided to use Sharia law as a guide for settling their dispute. While you might not want it applied to your dispute, who cares how other people settle their disputes?
You may not know this, but across America everyday litigants choose to step outside the court system and let arbitrators decide their disputes for them. In these arbitrations, different rules are often applied. Rules of evidence are modified, juries are not used and appeals are barred. To a lawyer, those three things alone are enough to cause nightmares. Yet it is perfectly legal because the parties have agreed to resolve their dispute in that manner.
There have also been the oddball resolutions where parties have agreed to settle their disputes with a coin toss. Frankly, if I had to choose between Sharia law and a coin toss, I’d go with Sharia law. Does that mean we should outlaw the coin toss? Quick! Mr. Agema — I have another law I need you to work on!
The strange thing is that the law would be legally meaningless if passed. The Constitution is already the supreme law of the land; another legislative statement affirming the Constitution’s supremacy would not change or add anything. What is upsetting is that everyone knows these laws are simply being passed as anti-Muslim statements. After all, they serve no legitimate purpose.
GOP presidential hopefuls have been falling all over themselves to please anti-Muslim elements within the party, each trying to outdo the other in this regard. From Herman Cain of “Muslims must take a special loyalty oath” fame to Michele Bachmann who signed an “anti-Sharia pledge,” it’s a close call who’s truly in the lead.
To gain his street cred on Anti-Muslim Street, Texas Governor Rick Perry started “palling around” with anti-Muslim influentials. All was going as planned, until Salon’s Justin Elliott entered the scene. For those of you who haven’t been following Elliott’s excellent work, he’s become a very quiet yet forceful and consistent voice against anti-Muslim hatred.
Elliott decided to throw a wrench into the Perry presidential machine after he dug up an interesting tidbit about the governor: Perry has had very cordial relations with the Aga Khan, an influential Muslim spiritual leader. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t be blamed for not knowing who the Aga Khan is. To make a long story short, the Aga Khan refers to Karim al-Husseini, who is the 49th Imam (leader) of the Shia Ismaili sect of Islam.
Lest you begin to imagine a bearded mullah or angry ayatollah, be advised: the Aga Khan would fit in more with Donald Trump than Ayatollah Khomeini. I’ve reproduced his picture above: notice the expensive suit and tie; the guy is as GQ Muslim as you can get. The Aga Khan is a billionaire, lives in Europe, and jet-sets around the world. He married a British fashion model, and in spite of the Islamic prohibition on gambling, owns some of the finest thoroughbred race horses in the world.
If you’ve been disabused of the notion that the Aga Khan is some Islamic fundamentalist, be rest assured too that he’s quite a pacifist as well. The Evangelical Academy of Tutzing in Germany awarded him the Tolerance Prize, just one of the many awards he’s been given. The Aga Khan heads notable humanitarian efforts throughout the world.
From a theological perspective, you should know that the Shia Ismailis (the sect to which the Aga Khan belongs to) are considered by many elements within the Islamic orthodoxy to be heterodox (even “heretical” by some). They are to Islam what Mormons are to Christianity. They don’t pray five times a day, they don’t fast during Ramadan, etc. Far from calling to jihad and the imposition of “dhimmitude,” the Shia Ismailis are usually on the receiving end of religious discrimination and sometimes even persecution. So if there were Muslims who “counter-jihadists” could tolerate these would be it!
But Justin Elliott predicted that the Islamophobes wouldn’t care: any Muslim is unacceptable. You know how there was a saying that the only good Indian is a dead Indian (or, alternatively, the only good nigger is a dead nigger)? Well, Islamophobes adhere to the following axiom: the only moderate”Muslim” is an ex-Muslim. So to them, the Aga Khan is not acceptable: the Aga Khan hasn’t publicly repudiated and renounced Islam. He certainly hasn’t written a book about what’s wrong with Islam, so he must be a stealth-jihadist!
Less than a week ago, Elliott posted an article entitled “Rick Perry: the pro-Sharia Candidate.” It was certainly tongue-in-cheek, almost spoofing right-wing nut jobs. Bellowed Elliott:
Rick Perry has made a name for himself in the last few weeks by palling around with some radical evangelical Christian figures who are openly hostile to Islam, and have even, in one notable case, called for a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S. Perry also raised eyebrows in his decidedly unecumenical exhortation for all Americans to pray to Jesus Christ.
But it turns out that the Texas governor has had surprisingly warm, constructive relations with at least one group of Muslims over the years.
Perry is a friend of the Aga Khan, the religious leader of the Ismailis, a sect of Shia Islam…
Elliott also dug up the fact that Perry cooperated with the Aga Khan in a couple educational projects. In high school world history, for example, students learn about various world cultures, including Islamic civilizations. Perry and the Aga Khan worked together improving the standard of teaching in this regard, and Perry himself said: “I have supported this program from the very beginning, because we must bridge the gap of understanding between East and West if we ever hope to experience a future of peace and prosperity.”
Here’s where Justin Elliott decided to rattle the cage (to make a political point but also for sh**s and giggles) and poke the anti-Muslim beast in the Republican circus tent. Elliott quipped:
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that right-wing bomb-throwers will use this as a line of attack against Perry.
Elliott predicted that his article would create a political maelstrom for Perry. And he was right. As if on cue, the mindless drones and brainless sharia-zapping zombies of the Islamophobic cyber-world marched in lockstep, honing their taqiyya-radars on Rick Perry and setting their jihad-phazers to kill mode.
Just a few short days after his piece, Elliott published a follow-up article, documenting the hyper-exaggerated response from the anti-Muslim right-wing. Humorously, one prominent “anti-Sharia” figure quoted in Elliott’s article defiantly said (emphasis added):
This story tells us more about Salon, Politico and other left-of-center media outlets than about Perry. Rather than engage on the substantive issues as regards to Islamism and the extent of the threat of groups with political motivations and histories of terrorist links, Elliott and Smith refuse to take their opponents seriously, thinking they’re ‘poking the cage’ of a Republican base too unsophisticated to know the difference between the Ismaili sect and, say, the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s humorous is that in fact Elliott’s “poking the cage” worked “like clockwork.” Elliott effectively became a puppet-master, adequately demonstrating to us how easy it is to stir up a fake anti-Muslim controversy. Just yell any variation of Muslim, Sharia, and stealth jihad loud enough, link them to your opponent, and voila!, the anti-Muslim cyber-world will inject into the issue a life of its own, amplifying it a hundred-fold.
Justin Elliott has successfully made fools out of the right-wing anti-Muslim nutters, who took the bait. I want to laugh, but perhaps I’m too scared to. This is a well-oiled machine, an echo chamber of anti-Muslim madness, a Frankenstein that even the creators cannot contain.
It looks like my story last week about Rick Perry’s cordial relations with a group of Muslims has, as expected, generated alarm within the anti-Shariah wing of the Republican Party.
My piece explored Perry’s long-standing friendship with the Aga Khan, the wealthy, globe-trotting leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect, which has a small but significant population in Texas. Perry and the Aga Khan have launched two joint projects, including a program to educate Texas schoolchildren about Islamic culture and history. I noted that this relationship set Perry apart from those members of the GOP field who consistently demonize Islam, and that some anti-Shariah/anti-Muslim activists might be skeptical of his ties to the Aga Khan.
Like clockwork, two anti-Shariah figures have now penned columns attacking Perry on exactly these grounds. But one anti-Shariah group, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, has dissented and says it has no problem with Perry’s relationship with the Ismailis. The group’s spokesman, Dave Reaboi, emailed Commentary’s Alana Goodman:
Politico’s Ben Smith amplified a Salon report about Perry’s relationship with Aga Khan of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam. As Salon’s in-house apologist for Islamism and crusader against conservatives, Justin Elliott clearly believed such a story, breathlessly told, would cause a great deal of friction between the Texas governor and the GOP base—who are rightfully concerned about the anti-Constitutional aspects of Shariah law in our own country, and are watching as Shariah is the rallying-cry of jihadists around the globe. That said, Perry’s relationship to Khan and the Ismaili’s, I predict, will not cause much of a stir. The Islamailis are a persecuted Shia minority in Saudia Arabia; indeed, Perry’s meeting with Khan could not have won him many friends there. Rather than reaching out– as both presidents Bush and Obama mistakenly did—to problematic organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s expressly political agenda, Perry’s choice to engage with a more ‘progressive’ group is a good sign.
And:
This story tells us more about Salon, Politico and other left-of-center media outlets than about Perry. Rather than engage on the substantive issues as regards to Islamism and the extent of the threat of groups with political motivations and histories of terrorist links, Elliott and Smith refuse to take their opponents seriously, thinking they’re ‘poking the cage’ of a Republican base too unsophisticated to know the difference between the Ismaili sect and, say, the Muslim Brotherhood.
As it turns out, Reaboi’s predictions — that Perry’s associations “will not cause much of a stir” and that anti-Shariah activists are too sophisticated to demonize the Ismailis — have already been proven wrong.
The blogger and activist Pamela Geller wrote a column for the American Thinker today declaring that “Rick Perry must not be President. Have we not had enough of this systemic sedition?”
But Perry has been sucked into the propaganda vortex, and is now wielding his enormous power to influence changes in the schoolrooms and in the curricula to reflect a sharia compliant version of Islam. He is a friend of the Aga Khan, the multimillionaire head of the Ismailis, a Shi’ite sect of Islam that today proclaims its nonviolence but in ages past was the sect that gave rise to the Assassins.
Commentary’s Goodman suggests that, compared to Gaffney’s think tank, Geller is a fringe figure in the anti-Shariah movement. In fact, Geller is one of the primary ideological and organizational leaders of the movement: she devotes numerous posts to the issue on her influential blog; she regularly gives speeches on Shariah and discusses it on TV; and she founded a group, Stop Islamization of America, that names stopping Shariah as one of its primary goals.
And it gets better: Both Geller and Gaffney are apparently on the eight-member steering committee of a coalition called the “Sharia Awareness Action Network.”
Another sponsor of that coalition is WorldNetDaily, which yesterday published an attack on Perry by Joel Richardson, author of “The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth About the Real Nature of the Beast” (WND Books). He argues that Perry has been fooled by the Aga Khan, who is part of the relentless Islamic quest to conquer “the West”:
It should also be mentioned that one of the doctrines espoused by Ismaili Muslims is the doctrine of Taqiyya. In simple terms, the doctrine of Taqiyya allows Muslims to purposefully hide or lie about their true religious beliefs to “unbelievers” or even Muslims of different sects. Of course, it is doubtful that the children of Texas will learn anything of Taqiyya in their Perry-sponsored education concerning Islam.
Of course, while lying in the name of religion may seem like a foreign concept to most, it is the principle of “the ends justify the means” that underscores many aspects of the Islamic approach to win the West.
One can only hope that such is not the principle driving Gov. Perry’s campaign for the presidency.
None of this is particularly surprising. As I noted in my original piece, the Muslim education program previously generated a bit of controversy in a state board of education campaign in Texas. (“I think Islamic curriculum is about the furthest thing that we need to be introducing into Texas classrooms,” said the Republican candidate in that race.)
To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with the Aga Khan-Perry partnership, and the effort to educate Texas schoolchildren about Muslim culture and history is to all appearances a positive and constructive thing. I think Perry’s relationship with the Ismailis in Texas makes for an interesting and relevant contrast to the Santorums and Cains of the GOP field.
But here’s the bottom line: My prediction that anti-Shariah activists would be troubled by Perry’s associations was borne out in the space of just a few days.
I’m writing a much longer piece on Orientalism and its ramifications on our society today, but I found this article in TIME magazine from 1979 very interesting. It is essentially a long review of Edward Said’s historic work “Orientalism,” less than a year after its initial publication.
One piece of information that struck out was the fact that between 1800 and 1950 some 60,000 works on “Islam and the Orient” were published:
As writing about Islam and the Orient burgeoned—60,000 books between 1800 and 1950—European powers occupied large swatches of “Islamic” territory, arguing that since Orientals knew nothing about democracy and were essentially passive, it was the “civilizing mission” of the Occident, expressed in the strict programs of despotic modernization, to finally transform the Orient into a nice replica of the West.
Post 9/11, with the Iraq and Afghan invasions and the rise of Islamophobia to endemic levels I think its a safe bet that there have been thousands of publications about ‘Islam and Muslims in the Orient and the Occident.’
In an angry, provocative new book called Orientalism (Pantheon; $15), Edward Said, 43, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, argues that the West has tended to define Islam in terms of the alien categories imposed on it by Orientalist scholars. Professor Said is a member of the Palestine National Council, a broadly based, informal parliament of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He summarized the thesis of Orientalism in this article for TIME.
One of the strangest, least examined and most persistent of human habits is the absolute division made between East and West, Orient and Occident. Almost entirely “Western” in origin, this imaginative geography that splits the world into two unequal, fundamentally opposite spheres has brought forth more myths, more detailed ignorance and more ambitions than any other perception of difference. For centuries Europeans and Americans have spellbound themselves with Oriental mysticism, Oriental passivity, Oriental mentalities. Translated into policy, displayed as knowledge, presented as entertainment in travelers’ reports, novels, paintings, music or films, this “Orientalism” has existed virtually unchanged as a kind of daydream that could often justify Western colonial adventures or military conquest. On the “Marvels of the East” (as the Orient was known in the Middle Ages) a fantastic edifice was constructed, invested heavily with Western fear, desire, dreams of power and, of course, a very partial knowledge. And placed in this structure has been “Islam,” a great religion and a culture certainly, but also an Occidental myth, part of what Disraeli once called “the great Asiatic mystery.”
As represented for Europe by Muhammad and his followers, Islam appeared out of Arabia in the 7th century and rapidly spread in all directions. For almost a millennium Christian Europe felt itself challenged (as indeed it was) by this last monotheistic religion, which claimed to complete its two predecessors. Perplexingly grand and “Oriental,” incorporating elements of Judeo-Christianity, Islam never fully submitted to the West’s power. Its various states and empires always provided the West with formidable political and cultural contestants—and with opportunities to affirm a “superior” Occidental identity. Thus, for the West, to understand Islam has meant trying to convert its variety into a monolithic undeveloping essence, its originality into a debased copy of Christian culture, its people into fearsome caricatures.
Early Christian polemicists against Islam used the Prophet’s human person as their butt, accusing him of whoring, sedition, charlatanry. As writing about Islam and the Orient burgeoned—60,000 books between 1800 and 1950—European powers occupied large swatches of “Islamic” territory, arguing that since Orientals knew nothing about democracy and were essentially passive, it was the “civilizing mission” of the Occident, expressed in the strict programs of despotic modernization, to finally transform the Orient into a nice replica of the West. Even Marx seems to have believed this. Read more
Kirchick is not the first, and probably will not be the last to express such a sentiment. To buttress his point Kirchick cites the familiar Pew Poll research and celebrations on Palestinian streets after the 9/11 attacks as evidence that there is a large wellspring for terrorism, while claiming that, excepting some mad bloggers, Breivik was universally condemned in the West.
It goes without saying that Kirchick’s analysis is simplistic for more than one reason. Firstly, Breivik’s terrorism did not emerge out of nowhere, there is an anti-Muslim movement from which his thoughts were gleaned. Secondly, there are many in the anti-Muslim movement who share Breivik’s ideas about the “Muslim threat.” Thirdly, while many in the anti-Muslim movement are not willing to kill to reach their ends they do share in a radical and anti-Democratic path to “solve” the “Muslim problem.” Fourth, there is a significant group of individuals who do support aggressive and violent action to “save the West from Muslims” (see: SIOA is a Hate Group).
Fifth, the Islamist terror threat is overblown, (see: “All Terrorists are…”). Sixth, Kirchick conflates anti-Americanism and opposition to American foreign policy with those who express a willingness to join “Islamist terror.” Seventh, he is unaware or ignores the fact there is a disproportionately large amount of support and acceptance for the killing of civilians amongst non-Muslims in the West, but lets keep it brief.
Support for Breivik’s Brand of Terror vs. Islamist Terror vs. Professional State Terrorism
Breivik’s brand of terror may not elicit as much support as ‘Islamist terror,’ but that is not to say there isn’t a pool of acceptance for the murder of civilians in the West. In fact, what would Kirchick’s response be to the fact that many more non-Muslims condone and justify the murder of civilians than Muslims?
58% of Catholics and Protestants believe the targeted military killing of civilians is sometimes justified (would that be considered “Christianist” support?), while 52% of Jews and 64% of Mormons believe it is sometimes justified. That dwarfs Muslims, 21% of whom say it is sometimes justified, while 78% say it is never justified.
What would Kirchick make of the evidence that Americans and Israelis are more likely to justify the murder of civilians than Muslims in almost every country?
It would seem that Professional Terrorism of the statecraft kind dwarfs the meager in comparison threat of “Islamist terror.”
Perhaps Kirchick wrote this piece before the publication of the Gallup Poll survey and was therefore the victim of horrible timing?
Homework for James Kirchick
Kirchick would do well to read a new book from Charles Kurzman, “The Missing Martyrs.”
“The Missing Martyrs” is an accessible scholarly work that addresses the overlooked and often ignored question of: if as we are told, there is a lot of support for terrorism amongst Muslims, why out of 1.5 billion Muslims are there so few Muslim terrorists? Why does fear of the bogeyman of “terrorism” continue to haunt us when the threat from so-called “jihadists” is just not that great?
Aaron Ross in his book review for MotherJones writes,
As it turns out, there just aren’t that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
While Arabs and Muslims continue to repudiate Al Qaeda and its allies by toppling dictators and pushing forward towards Democracy, it is high time that US journalists, analysts and think tanks stop beating the dead horse of “Islamist terror” and catch up to the changes shaking the world.
Terrorism is not confined to non-state actors alone, if this is accepted than the narrative of greater support for terrorism amongst Muslims must not only be revised but should properly be dumped in the garbage bin of history.
Some people have wondered why I focus so much on America’s many wars: isn’t this site about Islamophobia, not U.S. foreign policy? Although it is true that LoonWatch is primarily a site documenting and refuting Islamophobia, I strongly believe that there exists an intimate link between Islamophobia and America’s Endless Wars.
For one, America’s foreign policy is itself Islamophobic. Our wars are launched thanks to Islamophobia within the most jingoist elements of American society, the neoconservatives, the Zionists (both Jewish and Christian), etc. It finds an audience within the general public, which has a very poor opinion of Islam. Our wars can only be sustained by ratcheting up fear-mongering and Islamophobia. Our wars conveniently serve to complete the loop by feeding Islamophobia itself, as Muslims are Other-ized as the enemy.
Islamophobia operates under the assumption that it is Islam itself that makes Them Hate Our Freedoms. They hate us (and some of them attack us) because we are the Infidels. The reality, of course, is that they hate us not for our freedoms or the fact that we are infidels, but the fact that we bomb them, invade them, and occupy them. As the article below shows, we also make them foot the bill for their own destruction:
When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. “Reparations payments” are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s “free Iraq.” In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to “liberate” the Iraqi people.
In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop ofmassive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.
Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to “pay back” the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.
The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people [of] Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of “liberation” speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.
Having completed the book I was about to sit down and do a review, however I stumbled upon this one from MotherJones which reflects to some degree my thoughts on the book:
Immediately after last month’s terror attacks in Norway, Islamic extremism shot to the top of almost every list of suspected culprits. Among the soothsayers of creeping Shariah, there was never any doubt who was responsible. Others’ more rational, if hasty, assessments of Norway’s threat matrix pointed to the same (wrong) conclusion. For all their differences, both lines of reasoning shared a common assumption: that the sheer volume of Muslim terrorists out there made their involvement likely. Or as Stephen Colbert skewered the media’s rush to judgment: “If you’re pulling a news report completely out of your ass, it is safer to go with Muslim. That’s not prejudice. That’s probability.”
Charles Kurzman begs to differ. In his new book, The Missing Martyrs, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill sociology professor rejects that Muslims are especially prone to violent extremism. “If there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom,” he asks, “why don’t we see terrorist attacks everywhere, every day?”
In theory, we should. After all, there’s any number of ways a terrorist committed to murdering civilians could attack (and our gun lobby certainly isn’t making weapons harder to get a hold of). But we don’t. No Islamist terrorist attack besides 9/11 has killed more than 400 people; only a dozen have killed more than 200.
As it turns out, there just aren’t that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
Even so, it sure seems there are a lot of Muslims committed to the West’s destruction. What else to make of the celebrations in Middle Eastern streets after 9/11? Or Pew Research Center opinion polls of multiple predominantly Muslim nations showing significant support for suicide bombings? But Kurzman warns against conflating anti-Americanism with actual willingness to engage in terrorism. In reality, he says, the young man sporting the bin Laden T-shirt in Islamabad is probably more like the American teenager in Berkeley with the Che poster on his dorm room wall than a future Al Qaeda jihadist.
Yet even if only 1 in 100,000 Muslims is a terrorist, that still leaves something like 15,000 terrorists from a global population of around 1.5 billion Muslims. Surely that’s enough to inflict serious damage? It could be—and Kurzman concedes that Islamist terrorism should be taken seriously—but in practice, several factors conspire against Al Qaeda and its allies’ aspirations of regularly striking Western targets with spectacular attacks.
For one thing, Islamist terrorists are bitterly divided between globalist groups like Al Qaeda and localists like the Taliban and Hamas. The Taliban, for instance, opposed (and still opposes) Al Qaeda’s international ambitions, so much so, Kurzman claims, that its foreign minister sent an envoy to warn American and UN officials in the summer of 2001 about a possible, albeit unspecified, attack. Meanwhile, rifts within the Muslim world about issues like democracy, liberalism, and the role of women have crippled support for global jihadists. Insistent that all streams of Islamic thought conform to their rigid doctrines (and willing to murder fellow Muslims to make the point), Al Qaeda and its affiliates have alienated millions of potential supporters, rendering themselves far easier targets for unsympathetic Middle Eastern regimes to go after.
After pressing his case with almost prosecutorial precision for the first two-thirds of the book, Kurzman’s analysis veers off the rails as he detours into an alternately banal and pedantic discussion of everything from America’s need to balance liberty with security to the lexicological origins of sociology. In a case of epically bad timing, he devotes the better part of six pages to praising recently discredited philanthropist Greg Mortenson as “a role [model] for American foreign policy.” Kurzman is unfortunate more than anything else here, but after arguing that American foreign policy doesn’t really affect Muslims’ views of the US, his sudden fawning over Mortenson’s in-vogue “hearts and minds” counterterrrorism strategy is somewhat befuddling.
Still, Kurzman’s hard-headed empirical approach to an issue so often locked in emotion-fueled back and forth makes The Missing Martyrs (or at least most of it) a must-read. Early on, he states his aim: “to reduce the panic by examining evidence about Islamist terrorism—the actual scale of it and the reasons it is not more widespread.” It’s an important goal—perhaps more so now than at any point in recent memory—and Kurzman has made a valuable contribution.
Aaron Ross is an editorial intern at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter and email tips and insights to aross [at] motherjones [dot] com.
The Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land (Lehava) has decided to start “defending the daughters of Israel” on the country’s beaches.
According to the organization, many Arab men are posing as Jews, courting and harassing the beautiful women. In response, a “coast guard” aimed at fighting the alleged phenomenon has been set up.
In recent weeks, Lehava members have been handing out dozens of leaflets to Jewish women on the beaches of Bat Yam, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Caesarea and Eilat, asking them to maintain their Jewishness and not to give in to the non-Jewish men’s appeals.
The organization decided to do something after receiving complaints from many women who claimed to be harassed by non-Jewish men on the beach.
“Last year we discovered that there are many gentiles arriving at the beaches, but not in search of the sun or water,” said Benzi Gopstein, one of Lehava’s leaders.
“Due to the multiple complaints,” he explained, “we decided to promote a campaign at the start of the bathing season this year in order to prevent situations in which girls discover that the ‘Yossi’ they are dating is actually ‘Yusuf’, prevent sexual harassment and assimilation.
“The volunteers handing out the leaflets are all seculars, as the religious public only visits segregated beaches, which don’t have the Arab problem. We’ve also started distributing a clip on Facebook and YouTube and we hope the girls will open their eyes.”
‘There are enough Jewish men around’
Gopstein noted that the “coast guard” is also called “The committee for defending girls on beaches across Israel“, and that its members are volunteers living in the beach area.
He said that the patrol members use convincing methods only. “We turn to the girls with a plea: ‘There are enough good Jewish men you can go out with.’”
He stressed that “the letter of the rabbis’ wives (calling on Jewish girls not to date Arabs) was intended for the religious public. Now we are turning to the secular public and saying that you don’t have to be a religious girl in order to marry a Jew, you don’t have to be religious in order to want your son to remain Jewish, and its part of the people of Israel’s duty to remain Jewish.
“At the moment we are operating in several cities, but I believe that following the clips we’ll reach other places too.”
It wasn’t long ago that Robert Spencer, a leader in the anti-Muslim movement, was arguing that “the only good Muslim was a bad Muslim.” Now he has suddenly “reversed” his position on Islam during a recent interview with Fox News’ Alan Colmes. Colmes did a pretty good job challenging Spencer on the holes in his anti-Muslim ideology: his double standards vis-à-vis Islam and Christianity, his downplaying the peaceful teachings of the Quran, his support for Pam Geller’s extremist and “meaningless” rhetoric, etc. Spencer spent most of his time on defense, often interrupting Colmes just when he was making a solid point.
Colmes could have done a better job refuting the point Spencer tried to make with the case of would-be terrorist Faisal Shazad. Spencer claimed that Shazad wholly and independently justified his actions by Islam when, in fact, he justified his deeds citing American foreign policy. This is what he really said:
“I want to plead guilty 100 times because unless the United States pulls out of Afghanistan and Iraq, until they stop drone strikes in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen and stop attacking Muslim lands, we will attack the United States and be out to get them.”
Shahzad cited the numerous civilian deaths as primary justification for perpetrating retaliatory terrorism, along with vague platitudes about the Quran, justice, and the afterlife; very little to do with normative Islamic teachings and mostly to do with drone strikes and civilian “collateral damage,” as Danios pointed out. Tellingly, Shahzad plainly violated mainstream Islamic teachings about fulfilling pledges and being a good neighbor. The judge rightly told him, “I do hope you spend time in prison thinking about whether the Koran gives you the right to kill innocent people.”
If this is the example Spencer wants to cite, then that’s a debate that I am happy to have. As in this case, Spencer’s own examples often turn out to be proofs against him. The raw data is simply on the side of those people, Muslim and non-Muslim, who wish to live together in a peaceful democratic society. Perhaps Colmes can be forgiven for not pressing him on this point (after all, he does work for Fox News). But it was this exchange at the end of the interview that was truly magical:
Robert Spencer Finally Admits Islam Makes Muslims Good People:
Colmes: Robert, excuse me, is there anything positive about Islam you could say?
Spencer: Islam makes a lot of people be very moral and upright and live fine lives.
Colmes: That’s good right? And wouldn’t that be true of most Muslims?
Spencer: I would certainly say so, yeah, I never have denied it.
At some point, Spencer must have had a “change of heart” and decided all his years of attacking Muslims as a whole, the Prophet, and the Quran wasn’t really fair. More likely, however, is that when pressed in public on his anti-Muslim ideology, Spencer retreats to the “political correctness” he regularly derides in liberals, lest the viewers think he is nothing but a hard-nosed bigot. Because I remember specifically when Spencer denied the fact that most American Muslims are normal, ethical people:
“I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.”
And again, who can tell the difference between peaceful Muslims and terrorists? Spencer observes:
“I have maintained from the beginning of this site and before that that there is no reliable way to distinguish a “moderate” Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a “radical” Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn’t acting upon them at the moment. And the cluelessness and multiculturalism of Western officialdom, which make officials shy away from even asking pointed questions, only compound this problem.”
Spencer had written on numerous occasions and maintained from the beginning that there is no practical difference between the average American Muslim on the street and an indoctrinated, foreign, psychotic jihadist. Did he really forget he said all that? Because Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway shooter, didn’t forget when he justified killing liberal race traitors, echoing Spencer’s talking points about multiculturalism and Islam:
“Tell me one country where Muslims have lived peacefully with non-Muslims without the Jihad
…How many thousands of new Europeans must die, how many one hundred thousand European women should be raped, millions robbed and tractor discarded before you understand that multiculturalism + Islam does not work?”
And again the killer repeats Spencer’s belief in the alleged absence of moderate Muslims:
“And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called “moderate Muslims”. There is moderate Nazis, too, that does not support fumigation of rooms and Jews. But they’re still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservatives Nazis strike (if it ever happens). If we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the fumigation of rooms and Jews?…. For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and Marxists are conservative, most are moderate. But does it matter? A moderate Nazi might, after having experienced fraud, choose to be conservative. A moderate Muslim can, after being refused to enter a club, be conservative, etc.”
Is Spencer willing to acknowledge the plethora of errors in his long track record of extremist hate speech, or are his comments to Colmes yet another implementation of Islamic taqiyya on his part? Taking a lesson out of the jihadist playbook, are you Robert? Judging by your latest round of hateful vitriolic spew, in which you railed against the “propaganda line” that “Islam is a religion of peace,” it seems like you are.
A 64-year-old man pleaded guilty Wednesday to violating the civil rights of an 83-year-old Somali man he assaulted in Minneapolis last year while yelling that his victim was a Muslim and should go back to Africa.
George Thompson of Minneapolis appeared before U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson in federal court in St. Paul.
Court papers said that Thompson, a former employee of the Transportation Security Administration, attacked his victim on May 4, 2010, because of the man’s “actual and perceived religion and national origin.”
The incident occurred near 5th Street and Cedar Avenue S. The victim was identified in court papers only by his initials.
The Hennepin County attorney’s office deferred to federal authorities because Thompson could receive a longer sentence under federal law, said Chuck Laszewski, a county attorney’s office spokesman.
Thompson was charged under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Protection Act, passed in 2009. Shepard was tortured and murdered in Wyoming by two men who believed he was gay; Byrd, a black man, was dragged to his death behind a truck by three men in Texas.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis said Thompson could receive up to 10 years in prison.
On July 26, 2010, Thompson was arrested a second time by Minneapolis police, also near 5th and Cedar, in a similar incident.
A Somali man told police he was getting into a car when he was approached by Thompson and asked if he was a Somali. When the man said he was, Thompson told him he was going to kill him and began to chase and threaten him.
Thompson then went into the Nomad World Pub, where he was taken into custody. The complaint said Thompson was intoxicated and had two loaded firearms with him and a permit to carry them. Thompson was charged in that case with second-degree assault and making terroristic threats.
Laszewski said the Hennepin County attorney’s office will move to dismiss the charges in the July 2010 case once it gets official notice of the status of Thompson’s federal case.
Riots have been rocking Britain for days now. Interestingly the EDL and their cohorts were quick to blame Muslims and Islam as the culprits. Many Islamophobes were eager for a repeat of 2005 when riots rocked France and they latched onto the fact that many of the youths involved were of North African descent.
Can you imagine if Muslims were heavily involved in these riots, or if there was a Muslim face to these riots? You can be sure that Islamophobes would be blaming Islam. Instead we have a sad case in which some Muslim youths who were actually protecting their neighborhood were killed after leaving the Mosque, in what witnesses are saying was a targeted killing. Will the Islamophobes suck up their pride, put away their hate and commend these youth for sacrificing their lives while protecting their neighborhood? (hat tip:Link182 &JD)
Police in Birmingham have launched a murder inquiry after three British Asian men were killed by a car in an incident that has raised fresh tensions after nights of looting.
A tearful and resentful crowd gathered outside the City hospital following the incident early on Wednesday morning, with police protecting the building against any incursion as feelings ran high.
A man has been arrested and a car impounded following the crash near a mosque in the Dudley Road area of England’s second city. Neighbours said the men had just left the mosque and were among large numbers of local people determined not to allow the fluid series of grab-and-run attacks in the city centre to spread to their area.
Unconfirmed reports suggested that two of the men were brothers Shazad Ali and Abdul Mussavir , 32 and 30, who ran a carwash which was reckoned to be among possible targets for looters. The BBC has interviewed the father of another victim, Haroon Jahan, 21, who worked as a mechanic in a local garage.
Emergency ambulances found around 80 people already trying to help the victims when they arrived at the scene, which is close to a petrol station on Dudley Road. Throughout Tuesday, large numbers of British Asians had gathered outside shops and other businesses in Handsworth, Lozells and other inner-city areas, sometimes in tense face-offs with small groups of mostly African-Caribbean youths.
Community leaders are working to calm intense anger in the largely British Asian area around the scene of the tragedy, where groups of local people are out on the streets openly warning of inter-communal violence.
The local Labour MP, Shabana Mahmood, joined a tense meeting at Dudley Road mosque, which was being protected by young men in the early hours when the car rammed into a group including the three victims.
The Bishop of Aston, the Right Rev Anthony Watson, was also there and warned of concern about possible reprisals and events “potentially having an ugly race dimension”. Efforts are being focused on calming younger people who accuse the police of taking too little action to protect locally owned businesses from the looters.
One man who declined to give his name said that he had seen the incident and described it as “deliberate – no way was it an accident. The driver went on to the pavement and rammed them. He knew what he was doing.” He said that he had given evidence to the police.
Feelings have been inflamed by an alleged 20-minute delay before an ambulance arrived, with other locals saying that police riot vans had got in the way. Frantic efforts by locals to resuscitate the men failed and two died at the scene. The third died shortly afterwards at City hospital. Forensic experts are examining the scene and the impounded car and an appeal has made for witnesses.
Confrontation with the British Asian community or inter-communal violence would take the disturbances on to a new level and police have worked rapidly on the murder inquiry. It comes on top of 19 court appearances due on Wednesday after 43 arrests on Tuesday, and a further 37 on Tuesday night as violence dogged pockets of Birmingham and neighbouring West Bromwich and Wolverhampton.
Police do not yet know if there is any link to the troubles beyond the fact that unusually large numbers of people were on the streets in Winson Green and neighbouring suburbs. A spokesman for the West Midlands force said: “The incident took place close to the Jet filling station on Dudley Road in Winson Green at approximately 1.15am. Three ambulances, two rapid response vehicles and an incident support officer were sent to the scene.
“When crews arrived, they found around 80 people at the scene with resuscitation ongoing on three men. Crews used their advanced life support skills while police officers provided support.”
Violence in Birmingham on Tuesday night was on a much-reduced scale compared with Monday, but its spread to West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, in contrast to the relative calm in London, attracted growing attention. Police are growing increasingly used to troublemakers’ use of Twitter and other swift links to spot unprotected areas and zero in on them.
There is a frequent attempt by Islam bashers to say that Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Qur’an was due to the dispute with Barbary Pirates in 1780. This excellent article written by Sebastian R. Prange puts that idea to rest,
Sifting through the records of the Virginia Gazette, through which Jefferson ordered many of his books, the scholar Frank Dewey discovered that Jefferson bought this copy of the Qur’an around 1765, when he was still a student of law at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. This quickly refutes the notion that Jefferson’s interest in Islam came in response to the Barbary threat to shipping. Instead, it situates his interest in the Qur’an in the context of his legal studies—a conclusion that is consistent with his shelving of it in the section on jurisprudence.
We also learn that Jefferson knew of Islam and the Qur’an from a work “closer to hand” titled, Of the Law of Nature and Nations by Samuel Von Pufendorf,
The standard work on comparative law during his time was Of the Law of Nature and Nations, written by the German scholar Samuel von Pufendorf and first published in 1672. As Dewey shows, Jefferson studied Pufendorf’s treatise intensively and, in his own legal writings, cited it more frequently than any other text. Pufendorf’s book contains numerous references to Islam and to the Qur’an. Although many of these were disparaging—typical for European works of the period—on other occasions Pufendorf cited Qur’anic legal precedents approvingly, including the Qur’an’s emphasis on promoting moral behavior, its proscription of games of chance and its admonition to make peace between warring countries. As Kevin Hayes, another eminent Jefferson scholar, writes: “Wanting to broaden his legal studies as much as possible, Jefferson found the Qur’an well worth his attention.”
What is most interesting is the idea that the Qur’an may have reinforced Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom,
But did reading the Qur’an influence Thomas Jefferson? That question is difficult to answer, because the few scattered references he made to it in his writings do not reveal his views. Though it may have sparked in him a desire to learn the Arabic language (during the 1770′s Jefferson purchased a number of Arabic grammars), it is far more significant that it may have reinforced his commitment to religious freedom. Two examples support this idea.
In 1777, the year after he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was tasked with excising colonial legacies from Virginia’s legal code. As part of this undertaking, he drafted a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, which was enacted in 1786. In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted his strong desire that the bill not only should extend to Christians of all denominations but should also include “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Muslim], the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
This all-encompassing attitude to religious pluralism was by no means universally shared by Jefferson’s contemporaries. As the historian Robert Allison documents, many American writers and statesmen in the late 18th century made reference to Islam for less salutary aims. Armed with tendentious translations and often grossly distorted accounts, they portrayed Islam as embodying the very dangers of tyranny and despotism that the young republic had just overcome. Allison argues that many American politicians who used “the Muslim world as a reference point for their own society were not concerned with historical truth or with an accurate description of Islam, but rather with this description’s political convenience.”
These attitudes again came into conflict with Jefferson’s vision in 1788, when the states voted to ratify the United States Constitution. One of the matters at issue was the provision—now Article vi, Section 3—that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Some Anti-Federalists singled out and opposed this ban on religious discrimination by painting a hypothetical scenario in which a Muslim could become president. On the other side of the argument, despite their frequent opposition to Jefferson on other matters, the Federalists praised and drew on Jefferson’s vision of religious tolerance in supporting uncircumscribed rights both to faith and to elected office for all citizens. As the historian Denise Spellberg shows in her examination of this dispute among delegates in North Carolina, in the course of these constitutional debates “Muslims became symbolically embroiled in the definition of what it meant to be American citizens.”
It is intriguing to think that Jefferson’s study of the Qur’an may have inoculated him—to a degree that today we can only surmise— against such popular prejudices about Islam, and it may have informed his conviction that Muslims, no less and no more than any other religious group, were entitled to all the legal rights his new nation could offer. And although Jefferson was an early and vocal proponent of going to war against the Barbary states over their attacks on us shipping, he never framed his arguments for doing so in religious terms, sticking firmly to a position of political principle. Far from reading the Qur’an to better understand the mindset of his adversaries, it is likely that his earlier knowledge of it confirmed his analysis that the roots of the Barbary conflict were economic, not religious.
It is amazing that today many in the Tea Party and the anti-Muslim Movement who claim the mantle of patriotism are in stark opposition to founding fathers such as Jefferson. What would those who seek to curtail religious freedom for Muslims have to say about this?
They have more in common with the anti-Federalists who wished to use Muslims as a symbol to further their own political ends.
by Sebastian R. Prange, photography provided by Aasil Ahmad (Saudi Aramco World)
acing the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. stands the Jefferson Building, the main building of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, with holdings of more than 140 million books and other printed items. The stately building, with its neoclassical exterior, copper-plated dome and marble halls, is named after Thomas Jefferson, one of the “founding fathers” of the United States, principal author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and, from 1801 to 1809, the third president of the young republic. But the name also recognizes Jefferson’s role as a founder of the Library itself. As president, he enshrined the institution in law and, in 1814, after a fire set by British troops during the Anglo-American War destroyed the Library’s 3000-volume collection, he offered all or part of his own wide-ranging book collection as a replacement for the losses, commenting that “there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
Among the nearly 6500 books Jefferson sold to the Library was a two-volume English translation of the Qur’an, the book Muslims recite, study and revere as the revealed word of God. The presence of this Qur’an, first in Jefferson’s private library and later in the Library of Congress, prompts the questions why Jefferson purchased this book, what use he made of it, and why he included it in his young nation’s repository of knowledge.
These questions are all the more pertinent in light of assertions by some present- day commentators that Jefferson purchased his Qur’an in the 1780′s in response to conflict between the us and the “Barbary states” of North Africa—today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. That was a conflict Jefferson followed closely— indeed, in 1786, he helped negotiate a treaty with Morocco, the United States’ first treaty with a foreign power. Then, it was relations with Algeria that were the most nettlesome, as its ruler demanded the payment of tribute in return for ending semiofficial piracy of American merchant shipping. Jefferson staunchly opposed tribute payment. In this context, such popular accounts claim, Jefferson was studying the Qur’an to better understand these adversaries, in keeping with the adage “know thy enemy.” However, when we look more closely at the place of this copy of the Qur’an in Jefferson’s library—and in his thinking— and when we examine the context of this particular translation, we see a different story.
rom his youth, Thomas Jefferson read and collected a great number of books, and a wide variety of them: The collection he eventually sold to the Library of Congress comprised 6487 volumes, ranging in subject from classical philosophy to cooking. Like many collectors of the time, Jefferson not only cataloged his books but also marked them. It is his singular way of marking his books that makes it possible to establish that, among the millions of volumes in today’s Library of Congress, this one specific Qur’an did indeed belong to him.
The initials “T.J.” were Thomas Jefferson’s device for marking his books: On this page, the “T.” is the printer’s mark to help the binder keep each 16-page “gathering” in sequence, and the “J.” was added personally by Jefferson.
In the 18th century, the production of books was still an essentially manual process. By means of a hand press, large sheets of paper were printed on both sides with multiple pages before being folded. They were folded once to produce four pages for the folio size, twice to produce eight pages for the quarto or four times to produce the 16-page octavo. These folded sheets, known as “gatherings,” were then sewn together along their inner edges before being attached to the binding. To ensure that the bookbinders would stitch the gatherings together in the correct sequence, each was marked with a different letter of the alphabet on what, after folding, would become that gathering’s first page.
Thus, in an octavo volume like Jefferson’s Qur’an, there is a small printed letter in the bottom right-hand corner of every 16th page. It was Jefferson’s habit to take advantage of these preexisting marks to discreetly inscribe each of his books. On each book’s 10th gathering, in front of the printer’s mark J he wrote a letter T, and on the 20th gathering, to the printed T he added a J, thereby in each case producing his initials. This subtle yet unmistakable signature appears clearly on the two leather-bound volumes in the Library of Congress.
Jefferson’s system of cataloging his library sheds light on the place the Qur’an held in his thinking. Jefferson’s 44-category classification scheme was much informed by the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whose professional trajectory from lawyer to statesman to philosopher roughly prefigures Jefferson’s own career. According to Bacon, the human mind comprises three faculties: memory, reason and imagination. This trinity is reflected in Jefferson’s library, which he organized into history, philosophy and fine arts. Each of these contained subcategories: philosophy, for instance, was divided into moral and mathematical; continuing along the former branch leads to the subdivision of ethics and jurisprudence, which itself was further segmented into the categories of religious, municipal and “oeconomical.”
Jefferson’s system for organizing his library has often been described as a “blueprint of his own mind.” Jefferson kept his Qur’an in the section on religion, located between a book on the myths and gods of antiquity and a copy of the Old Testament. It is illuminating to note that Jefferson did not class religious works with books on history or ethics—as might perhaps be expected—but that he regarded their proper place to be within jurisprudence.
Jefferson organized his own library, and he shelved religious books, including his English version of the Qur’an, with other works under “Jurisprudence,” which fell under “Moral Philosophy.”
The story of Jefferson’s purchase of the Qur’an helps to explain this classification. Sifting through the records of the Virginia Gazette, through which Jefferson ordered many of his books, the scholar Frank Dewey discovered that Jefferson bought this copy of the Qur’an around 1765, when he was still a student of law at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. This quickly refutes the notion that Jefferson’s interest in Islam came in response to the Barbary threat to shipping. Instead, it situates his interest in the Qur’an in the context of his legal studies—a conclusion that is consistent with his shelving of it in the section on jurisprudence.
Jefferson’s legal interest in the Qur’an was not without precedent. There is of course the entire Islamic juridical tradition of religious law (Shari’ah) based on Qur’anic exegesis, but Jefferson had an example at hand that was closer to his own tradition: The standard work on comparative law during his time was Of the Law of Nature and Nations, written by the German scholar Samuel von Pufendorf and first published in 1672. As Dewey shows, Jefferson studied Pufendorf’s treatise intensively and, in his own legal writings, cited it more frequently than any other text. Pufendorf’s book contains numerous references to Islam and to the Qur’an. Although many of these were disparaging—typical for European works of the period—on other occasions Pufendorf cited Qur’anic legal precedents approvingly, including the Qur’an’s emphasis on promoting moral behavior, its proscription of games of chance and its admonition to make peace between warring countries. As Kevin Hayes, another eminent Jefferson scholar, writes: “Wanting to broaden his legal studies as much as possible, Jefferson found the Qur’an well worth his attention.”
” We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their
civil capacities.”
— From the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom, ratified 1786;
drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777
In his reading of the Qur’an as a law book, Jefferson was aided by a relatively new English translation that was not only technically superior to earlier attempts, but also produced with a sensitivity that was not unlike Jefferson’s own emerging attitudes. Entitled The Koran; commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, it was prepared by the Englishman George Sale and published in 1734 in London. A second edition was printed in 1764, and it was this edition that Jefferson bought. Like Jefferson, Sale was a lawyer, although his heart lay in oriental scholarship. In the preface to his translation, he lamented that the work “was carried on at leisure time only, and amidst the necessary avocations of a troublesome profession.” This preface also informed the reader of Sale’s motives: “If the religious and civil Institutions of foreign nations are worth our knowledge, those of Mohammed, the lawgiver of the Arabians, and founder of an empire which in less than a century spread itself over a greater part of the world than the Romans were ever masters of, must needs be so.” Like Pufendorf, Sale stressed Muhammad’s role as a “lawgiver” and the Qur’an as an example of a distinct legal tradition.
This is not to say that Sale’s translation is free of the kind of prejudices against Muslims that characterize most European works on Islam of this period. However, Sale did not stoop to the kinds of affronts that tend to fill the pages of earlier such attempts at translation. To the contrary, Sale felt himself obliged to treat “with common decency, and even to approve such particulars as seemed to me to deserve approbation.” In keeping with this commitment, Sale described the Prophet of Islam as “richly furnished with personal endowments, beautiful in person, of a subtle wit, agreeable behaviour, shewing liberality to the poor, courtesy to every one, fortitude against his enemies, and, above all, a high reverence for the name of God.” This portrayal is markedly different from those of earlier translators, whose primary motive was to assert the superiority of Christianity.
In addition to the relative liberality of Sale’s approach, he also surpassed earlier writers in the quality of his translation. Previous English versions of the Qur’an were not based on the original Arabic, but rather on Latin or French versions, a process that layered fresh mistakes upon the errors of their sources. Sale, by contrast, worked from the Arabic text. It was not true, as Voltaire claimed in his famous Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764, that le savant Sale had acquired his Arabic skills by having lived for 25 years among Arabs; rather, Sale had learnt the language through his involvement in preparing an Arabic translation of the New Testament to be used by Syrian Christians, a project that was underwritten by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in London. Studying alongside Arab scholars who had come to London to assist in this work, he acquired within a few years such good command of the language that he was able to serve as a proofreader of the Arabic text.
It is thus not so surprising that Sale turned from translating the holy text of Christians into Arabic to rendering the holy text of Muslims into his native English. Noting the absence of a reliable English translation, he aimed to provide a “more genuine idea of the original.” Lest his readers be unduly daunted, he justified his choice of fidelity to the original by stating that “we must not expect to read a version of so extraordinary a book with the same ease and pleasure as a modern composition.” Indeed, even though Sale’s English may appear overwrought today, there is no denying that he strove to convey some of the beauty and poetry of the original Arabic.
An inscription inside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. quotes Jefferson’s 1777 statute on religious pluralism that inspired the constitutional right that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.”
Sale’s aspiration to provide an accurate rendition of the Qur’an was matched by his desire also to provide his readers with a more honest introduction to Islam. This “Preliminary Discourse,” as he entitled it, runs to more than 200 pages in the edition Jefferson purchased. Fairly presented and conscientiously documented, it contains a section on Islamic civil law that repeatedly points out parallels to Jewish legal precepts in regard to marriage, divorce, inheritance, lawful retaliation and the rules of warfare. In this substantial discussion, Sale displays the same quality of dispassionate interest in comparative law that later moved Jefferson.
ut did reading the Qur’an influence Thomas Jefferson? That question is difficult to answer, because the few scattered references he made to it in his writings do not reveal his views. Though it may have sparked in him a desire to learn the Arabic language (during the 1770′s Jefferson purchased a number of Arabic grammars), it is far more significant that it may have reinforced his commitment to religious freedom. Two examples support this idea.
In 1777, the year after he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was tasked with excising colonial legacies from Virginia’s legal code. As part of this undertaking, he drafted a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, which was enacted in 1786. In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted his strong desire that the bill not only should extend to Christians of all denominations but should also include “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Muslim], the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
This all-encompassing attitude to religious pluralism was by no means universally shared by Jefferson’s contemporaries. As the historian Robert Allison documents, many American writers and statesmen in the late 18th century made reference to Islam for less salutary aims. Armed with tendentious translations and often grossly distorted accounts, they portrayed Islam as embodying the very dangers of tyranny and despotism that the young republic had just overcome. Allison argues that many American politicians who used “the Muslim world as a reference point for their own society were not concerned with historical truth or with an accurate description of Islam, but rather with this description’s political convenience.”
“The style of the Korân is generally beautiful and fluent, especially where it imitates the prophetic manner, and scripture phrases. It is concise, and often obscure, adorned with bold figures after the eastern taste, enlivened with florid and sententious expressions, and in many places, especially where the majesty and attributes of God are described, sublime and magnificent; of which the reader cannot but observe several instances, though he must not imagine the translation comes up to the original, notwithstanding my endeavours to do it justice.”
— from “A Preliminary Discourse”
by George Sale
These attitudes again came into conflict with Jefferson’s vision in 1788, when the states voted to ratify the United States Constitution. One of the matters at issue was the provision—now Article vi, Section 3—that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Some Anti-Federalists singled out and opposed this ban on religious discrimination by painting a hypothetical scenario in which a Muslim could become president. On the other side of the argument, despite their frequent opposition to Jefferson on other matters, the Federalists praised and drew on Jefferson’s vision of religious tolerance in supporting uncircumscribed rights both to faith and to elected office for all citizens. As the historian Denise Spellberg shows in her examination of this dispute among delegates in North Carolina, in the course of these constitutional debates “Muslims became symbolically embroiled in the definition of what it meant to be American citizens.”
It is intriguing to think that Jefferson’s study of the Qur’an may have inoculated him—to a degree that today we can only surmise— ainst such popular prejudices about Islam, and it may have informed his conviction that Muslims, no less and no more than any other religious group, were entitled to all the legal rights his new nation could offer. And although Jefferson was an early and vocal proponent of going to war against the Barbary states over their attacks on us shipping, he never framed his arguments for doing so in religious terms, sticking firmly to a position of political principle. Far from reading the Qur’an to better understand the mindset of his adversaries, it is likely that his earlier knowledge of it confirmed his analysis that the roots of the Barbary conflict were economic, not religious.
Sale’s Koran remained the best available English version of the Qur’an for another 150 years. Today, along with the original copy of Jefferson’s Qur’an, the Library of Congress holds nearly one million printed items relating to Islam—a vast collection of knowledge for every new generation of lawmakers and citizens, with its roots in the law student’s leather-bound volumes.
In the current era of Islamophobia, anythingremotely “Muslim-ish” touches off paranoid delusions of impending jihad, particularly when it involves American emblems — like Whole Foods. Last week, the suburban staple decided to tout “Saffron Road,” a new line of Halal-certified frozen food, to coincide with the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. Halal foods are items permitted under Islamic dietary guidelines. In a post on the company’s website entitled “What’s this halal about,” Whole Foods offered a chance to win free samples because “whether you eat halal because of your religious dietary guidelines or you simply prefer to choose food that’s made with high-quality, responsibly farmed ingredients, then Saffron Road has some tasty offerings for you.”
It seems that a “very small” contingent of consumers and right-wing bloggers simply preferred to throw an apoplectic fit. Thus, in apparent genuflection to this bloc, Whole Foods sent an email to all its U.S. stores specifically telling the franchises not to promote Ramadan this year. The Houston Press obtained a copy of the email:
“It is probably best that we don’t specifically call out or ‘promote’ Ramadan,” reads a portion of that email. “We should not highlight Ramadan in signage in our stores as that could be considered ‘Celebrating or promoting’ Ramadan.”
This reversal marks “a significant departure from years past, when Whole Foods has promoted its halal items during Ramadan with small signs that displayed a crescent moon, the symbol of Islam.” What’s more, the move is hardly likely to placate the small number of fringe bloggers who are already boycotting the chain for “pimping and promoting–’Canaan Fair Trade’ and ‘Palestinian Fair Trade’ Olive Oil.” But given the conservativecredentials of Whole Foods owner John Mackey, perhaps its surprising the company even considered recognizing Islam in the first place.
Whole Foods responded that the company has not stopped the campaign. It states it is still highlighting halal but also maintained it is still “not specifically [promoting] #Ramadan after some negative comments.” In any event, as Gawker notes, the whole episode does serve as a kind of flow chart for future faux-controversies: “Are you a racist xenophobe who dislikes anything at all for any arbitrary reason? Simply complain loudly on your blog, and Whole Foods will obsequiously cater to your every last prejudice.”
*Updated*
Despite a wave of false rumors that it was backing out of its Ramadan campaign, Whole Foods has directly stated via Twitter that they are indeed standing behind their efforts.
“We are still carrying and promoting halal products for those that are celebrating Ramadan this month. We never sent a communication from our headquarters requesting stores take down signs or remove parts from this promotion. We have 12 different operating regions and unfortunately, one region reacted by sending out directions to promote halal and not specifically Ramadan after some negative online comments.”
LILBURN, Ga. — Opponents of a mosque being planned by a Muslim congregation in the metro Atlanta suburb of Lilburn are planning a protest.
WSB Radio reports (http://bit.ly/qUW7Jd) that opponents are planning to protest Monday night outside the Lilburn City Council meeting.
The congregation plans to submit a third request to the city for rezoning of four acres at the corner of U.S. Highway 29 and Hood Road so they can build a 20,000 square foot mosque and a 200 space parking lot.
Twice in the past, the city has denied requests to change the zoning.
The city council is scheduled to hear the congregation’s most recent proposal later this month.
Unfortunately there aren’t many other GOP leaders willing to take the stand that Chris Christie did.
Gov. Christie’s stand is a sigh of relief in an age of Islamophobiapalooza, especially from a high profile GOP official. Sadly, Gov.Christie’s righteous stand for Sohail Mohammad is an exception in today’s politics.
This incident also further highlights the shoddy work of Islamophobe Steven Emerson, who is caught once again being full of BS.
Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday slammed the anti-Muslim “crazies” who have raised objections to his nomination of a Muslim lawyer to become a state Superior Court judge.
“Ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammad,” Christie said in response to a reporter’s question at a Thursday press conference. “Sohail Mohammad is an extraordinary American who is an outstanding lawyer and played an integral role in the post-September 11th period in building bridges between the Muslim American community in this state and law enforcement.”
Critics have used the very track record Christie cited to depict Mohammad, an Indian-American, as a radical unfit for the bench. Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism in January derided Mohammad as a “longtime mouthpiece for radical Islamists”. Emerson traced Mohammad’s career back to his work as an immigration lawyer on behalf of Arab men who were detained after 9/11.
Christie pointed out that many people were wrongly arrested during that time, and that none of Mohammad’s post-9/11 clients were charged with crimes of terrorism. Christie added that Mohammad set up “dozens of meetings” between government and law enforcement officials and members of the Muslim-American community to build lines of trust.
A reporter asked Christie a question about Shariah law, which only fired up the governor’s frustration. “Shariah law has nothing to do with this at all. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. The guy is an American citizen … and has never been accused of doing anything but honorably and zealously acquitting the oath he took when he became a lawyer…. This Shariah law business is crap. It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background…. I’m happy that he’s willing to serve after all this baloney.”
This weekend, Gov. Rick Perry will host a mass Christian prayer rally in his home state of Texas. The principal sponsor of the rally, the American Family Association, has a truly vile record on immigration issues. The Association’s principal spokesperson on policy issues, Bryan Fischer, says that Muslims should be barred from becoming naturalized citizens because, he says, Islam requires Muslims to kill Christian Americans.
Fischer has hosted a number of Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty, on his powerful “policy” radio broadcast that is heard nationally. His tarring of all Muslims as destructive of America has not dissuaded Perry and others from seeking Fischer’s favor. For instance, this rant by Fischer was deemed beyond the pale by Republican leaders:
We allow unrestricted Muslim immigration into the United States. We are welcoming to our shores, welcoming to our borders, men who are determined to destroy us. They’ve said it themselves, it’s in their own writings, it’s in their own words; they’re out to eliminate and destroy western civilization. It’s just absolute folly to invite that kind of toxic cancer into our culture, but that’s what we’re doing every single day.
Fischer has said that Muslim immigrants are not protected by the First Amendment. Fisher says there should be “no more mosques, period” because “each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.”
Fischer says that Muslim’s should be ineligible to enter the U.S. and that those who are already here should be deported:
[T]he most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. This will protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values. Muslims, by custom and religion, are simply unwilling to integrate into cultures with Western values and it is folly to pretend otherwise. In fact, they remain dedicated to subjecting all of America to sharia law and are working ceaselessly until that day of Islamic imposition comes.
The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals. Why force them to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?
In other words, simple Judeo-Christian compassion dictates a restriction and repatriation policy with regard to Muslim immigration into the U.S.
Fischer was a harsh critic of evangelicals who endorsed immigration reform as a way of showing compassion to the undocumented. Ladst year he wrote this in The Hill:
But upholding the law is not mistreatment. We do no wrong to the shoplifter by holding him accountable for his behavior. In fact, enforcing the law is the way government shows compassion for victims of crime. Compassion is misdirected if it is targeted toward lawbreakers rather than victims.
Where is the compassion for the residents of Arizona who are forced to cope with drug smuggling, drug-related violence, human trafficking, home invasions, kidnappings and $2.7 billion in annual costs imposed on them by illegals for education, welfare, law enforcement and healthcare?
There’s no way around the fact that my evangelical friends want to reward aliens who break the law.
We should instead deal with the 12 to 20 million illegals currently in the country through attrition, by making access to any taxpayer-funded resource — whether education, welfare or healthcare — contingent upon proof of legal residency.
Once illegals realize they will be sent home the moment they come to the attention of any government agency or any branch of law enforcement, they will immediately stop being a drain on taxpayer resources and will be the most law-abiding residents we have.
Rigorous use of the E-Verify system will dry up the job market for illegals, once again creating incentives for them to self-deport.
Enforcing our immigration policy need not break up families. The president sent spouses and children along when he deported the Russian spies, and we can do the same with every illegal alien. We do not want to separate husbands from wives, or children from parents, so our policy should be to repatriate entire families together to preserve family integrity.
If a member of a family has the legal right to remain in the U.S., he of course should be allowed to exercise that right. But then the family itself would be responsible for dissolving the family unit, not the United States.
NEW YORK (PIX11)— Former presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, is cashing in on the upcoming, 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by marketing an educational “cartoon” about the events that sent the United States back to war.
“You can go to Learn Our History.com,” Huckabee told viewers this week on Pat Robertson‘s “700 Club” cable show. The one-timeArkansas governor is producing a series of DVD’s, and he told the TV audience, “The first one’s $9.95, and then it goes to $11.95.”
“Someone to profit off the worst day in American history is unheard of,” fumed retired, FDNY fire chief, Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son, Jim Jr., on 9/11.
“Three thousand Americans were murdered, and it’s for his personal gain. I think it’s blood money,” Riches told PIX 11.
A preview of Huckabee’s cartoon for the “Time Cycle Academy” shows a plane heading toward the Twin Towers on a clear day, with someone shouting below “No!” before the jet crashes into the first tower. The cartoon also shows a “Wanted” poster for Al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden — long before he was fatally shot by U.S. Navy Seals this past May — portraying an animated Bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, as he proclaims, “The time for jihad is upon us, death to the Americans!”
When PIX 11 traveled to the Tribute Center right next to Ground Zero on Wednesday, a Utah tourist, Heather Robertson, said this about Huckabee’s history lesson: “I don’t know if I like it in cartoon form.” Robertson continued, “I think it diminishes what took place on 9/11.”
A laborer named Frankie, who was working in a hard-hat re-building World Trade Center Tower 4, said this about Huckabee’s efforts, “Then do it for free. He’s about making money. He ain’t about teaching anybody anything. If he’s doing not-for-profit, then that’s a different story. But I’m sure he’s making money on it.”
David Yi, a Korean immigrant who lives in New Jersey, did not think the cartoon was such a bad idea for kids. “We have to teach them freedom to protect ourselves,” he told PIX 11.
Huckabee’s representatives have not been responding to requests for comment.
Jim Riches had plenty more to say, however. “I think for politicians trying to teach our kids, we’re in trouble. Leave it to the teachers, the educators.”
Riches also noted the recently-passed Zadroga Law to help sick, 9/11 “First Responders” leaves certain people out. “The people who have cancer aren’t even going to be covered,” Riches told PIX 11. “And I think that would be another good place to put the money, instead of putting it in his pocket.”
ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, CO.
Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain met with Muslim leaders outside Washington, DC in a laudable attempt to make amends for the Islamophobic positions that had come to characterize his candidacy. Cain had previously declared he will not appoint Muslims in his administration — he later backtracked and said he would only require a special loyalty oath from Muslim appointees — and argued that Americans have the right to ban mosques.
However, not everyone was pleased with the former pizza executive’s recent move.
Last weekend, ThinkProgress spoke with Frank Gaffney, a conservative conspiracy theorist who nevertheless enjoys outsized influence on the right. The Center for Security Policy president had a unique take on the matter: Herman Cain had actually been meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to Gaffney, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, where Cain met with Muslim leaders last Wednesday, is “a prominent Muslim Brotherhood apparatus in Washington DC.” The Center’s Imam, Mohamed Magid, is actually, says Gaffney, “the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States”:
KEYES: Where would you say Herman Cain’s at now?
GAFFNEY: I only saw one press report of it, and it sounded as if some of what you just described was said by people, Muslim Brotherhood people frankly, with whom he was meeting rather than the candidate himself. [...]
KEYES: Those were Muslim Brotherhood people that he was meeting with?
GAFFNEY: Oh yeah. The ADAMS Center is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood apparatus in Washington DC. It’s one of the most aggressive proponents of its agenda in the city. [...] Specifically, meeting with Mohamed Magid who is the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States, who happens also to be the Imam at the ADAMS Center. It’s one of those things, it’s a very problematic departure from what I think had been a generally sensible… I don’t agree everything he has said and some of the positions he has taken, but I think generally speaking he’s been forthright in raising a concern that I think is warranted. And if in fact he’s now changed his position in ways that are being reported, that’s even more troubling than if he was spending time with Muslim Brothers.
Watch it:
Such a charge would be shocking, were it not made by a man who says the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the federal government and CIA chief David Petraeus is submissive to Sharia law.
Despite Gaffney’s outlandish beliefs, he remains an extraordinarily influential figure on the right. Members of Congress regularly appear on his radio show, Secure Freedom Radio. He is anadvisor and close friend to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And along with a small group of like-minded conservatives, Gaffney has turned Islamophobia into an industry.
With his latest accusation against Herman Cain, Gaffney is well on his way to becoming the 2011 version of Rudy Giuliani. Gaffney’s every utterance now boils down to “a noun, a verb, and ‘Muslim Brotherhood.’”
“Ramadan,” said President Obama at a White House iftar dinner in 2010, “is a reminder that Islam has always been a part of America. The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.”
The dinner to which the president referred took place on December 9, 1805, and Jefferson’s guest was Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, an envoy from the bey (chieftain) of Tunis who spent six months in Washington. The context of Mellimelli’s visit to the United States was a tense dispute over piracy on American merchant vessels by the Barbary states and the capture of Tunisian vessels trying to run an American blockade of Tripoli.
Mellimelli arrived during Ramadan, and Jefferson, when he invited the envoy to the president’s house, changed the meal time from the usual hour of 3:30 p.m. to “precisely at sunset” in deference to the man’s religious obligation.
Jefferson’s knowledge of Islam likely came from his legal studies of natural law. In 1765, Jefferson purchased a two-volume English translation of the Quran for his personal library, a collection that became, in 1815, the basis of the modern Library of Congress.
Can we all agree that the worst thing about “Fox & Friends” is how clumsy and obvious they are with their political agenda? (Ok, the second-worst thing, after Steve Doocy’s face. And voice. And the things he says.) Good propaganda is supposed to be sort of covert and insidious, right? Anyway, a couple months ago Fox attacked Obama for not issuing a “proclamation” for Easter, even though the president celebrates Easter every year with a massive party. If you wondered why they did this, the punchline came this morning, when Fox trashed Obama for issuing a proclamation… for Ramadan, the Shariah Easter!
It begins with what in a regular morning show would be “news” — the president recognized Ramadan — and then everyone sort of freezes and Gretchen awkwardly just brings up today’s designated attack line, attributing it to “some people.” “Some people are saying,” she says, more than once, to describe what she is saying. What “some people” are saying is that Barack Obama did not release a “proclamation” for Easter. Why didn’t he tell everyone when Easter was? (No president has released in Easter proclamation in at least 20 years.)
As MediaMatters explains, Barack Obama did not actually issue a proclamation for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. He did release a statement. There is a difference. (Proclamations have actual legal weight behind them!)
But none of that matters. The story is, Barack Obama hates Easter and loves Ramadan. I wonder what they’re suggesting, about the president? That he… doesn’t like chocolate?
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene
This past April, right-wing war hawk John Bolton suggested during an interview on Fox News that the United States should cut Social Security and Medicare to finance the defense budget.
During debate over the debt deal today on the Senate floor, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) appeared to endorse this call. Lieberman explained that he is working with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on a Social Security spending reduction plan and that “we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense…to protect us…with Islamist extremists”:
LIEBERMAN: I want to indicate today to my colleagues that Senator Coburn and I are working again on a bipartisan proposal to secure Social Security over the long term, we hope to have that done in time. To also forward to the special committee for their consideration. So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.
A very well written piece from Ali Abunimah. The connection between Zionism and the rise in Islamophobia was explored by LW when we wrote an exclusive piece exposing the funding apparatus of Islamophobia, The Connection between Zionism and Organized Islamophobia–The Facts.
In the piece we elaborated on how Aubrey Chernick, a premiere funder of Islamophobes has also donated to, amongst other groups, the ADL which is quite literally taken apart in the article below.
Ali Abunimah writes,
The continued lurch towards extremism in Israel, and among many of its supporters, underscores the truth that anyone who wants to dissociate from ultranationalism, racism and Islamophobia, also has to repudiate Israel’s state ideology, Zionism.
It may not be true that Zionism needs to be absolutely repudiated for one to “dissociate from ultra-nationalism, racism and Islamophobia,” however criticism of Zionism should not be conflated with anti-Semitism or seen as a desire to destroy Israel.
In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League, likened the hateful ideology that inspired Anders Behring Breivik to massacre 77 innocent people in Norway to the “deadly” anti-Semitism that infected Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is a parallel that I, and many others who have been observing with alarm the rise of anti-Muslim incitement in the US and Europe, have made frequently.
Does this mean that Foxman – head of one of the most hardline and influential pro-Israel lobby groups – has found common ground with the Palestine solidarity movement?
That would be a good thing if it helped to fight the growing scourge of racist incitement. But by criticising the ideology that inspired Breivik, and pointing the finger at a few of its purveyors, Foxman appears to be trying to obscure the key role that he and some other pro-Israel advocates have played in mainstreaming the poisonous Islamophobic rhetoric that has now – Foxman himself argues – led to bloodshed in Norway.
Pointing the finger
Foxman describes, in his Washington Post article, “a relatively new, specifically anti-Islamic ideology” which Breivik used to justify his attack. “Growing numbers of people in Europe and the United States subscribe to this belief system”, Foxman writes, “In some instances it borders on hysteria. Adherents of this ideological Islamophobia view Islam as an existential threat to the world, especially to the ‘West.’”
“Moreover”, Foxman explains, “they believe that leaders and governments in the Western world are consciously or unconsciously collaborating to allow Islam to ‘infiltrate’ and eventually conquer democratic societies.”
Just such irrational beliefs underpin the hysteria about “Creeping Sharia” – the utterly baseless claim that Muslims are engaged in a secret conspiracy to impose Islamic law on the United States. So prevalent has this delusional belief become, that legislative efforts have been mounted in about two dozen American states, and have been passed by three, to outlaw Sharia law.
Foxman points the finger – as others have rightly done – at extreme Islamophobic agitators such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, co-founders of “Stop Islamisation of America” – whose hate-filled writings Breivik cited in his manifesto.
So far, Foxman has it right. But then he drops a clue about what really frightens him:
“One bizarre twist to Breivik’s warped worldview was his pro-Zionism – his strongly expressed support for the state of Israel. It is a reminder that we must always be wary of those whose love for the Jewish people is born out of hatred of Muslims or Arabs.”
Who does Foxman think he is kidding? There is nothing “bizarre” about this at all. Indeed Foxman himself has done much to bestow credibility on extremists who have helped popularise the Islamophobic views he now condemns. And he did it all to shore up support for Israel.
After Norway, Foxman may fear that the Islamophobic genie he helped unleash is out of control, and is a dangerous liability for him and for Israel.
Zionists embrace Islamophobia after 9/11
Many American Zionists embraced Islamophobic demagoguery after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Their logic was encapsulated in then-Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious assessment that the attacks – which killed almost 3,000 people – would be beneficial for Israel.
Asked what the 9/11 atrocities would mean for US-Israeli relations, Netanyahu told The New York Times, “It’s very good”, before quickly adding, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy” and would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror”.
In order for Israel and the United States to have the same enemy, the enemy could not just be the Palestinians, who never threatened the United States in any way. It had to be something bigger and even more menacing – and Islam fit the bill. The hyped-up narrative of an all-encompassing Islamic threat allowed Israel to be presented as the bastion of “western” and “Judeo-Christian” civilisation facing down encroaching Muslim barbarity. No audience was more receptive than politically influential, white, right-wing Christian evangelical pastors and their flocks.
Sermons of hate
“Since the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, on September the 11th, American politicians have tripped over themselves to state that the vast majority of Muslims living in the United States are just ordinary people who love America and are loyal to America. Is that true? Is that really true?”
That is the question Pastor John Hagee, leader of an evangelical megachurch and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), posed to his followers whom, he said, were becoming more concerned as “mosques appear across the nation”.
In a series of sermons soon after the 9/11 attacks which he titled “Allah and America,” Hagee began a relentless campaign of inciting his followers to fear and hate Muslims and Islam (videos of Hagee’s sermons can be found on YouTube.
Hagee has emerged over the past decade as one of the most prominent Christian Zionist supporters of Israel. His sermons are broadcast on dozens of TV channels and he influences millions of Americans.
As his “Allah and America” sermons progressed, Hagee’s answers became clear: “In the Qur’an, those who do not submit to Islam should be killed. That means death to Christians and death to Jews. Now I ask you, is that tolerant? Is that peaceful? Is that a sister faith to Christianity?”
After reading and distorting “selected verses from the Qur’an, which is the Islamic bible, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to increase our understanding of the basis of their faith,” Hagee claimed, “the Qur’an insists that no matter how mighty a nation is, it must be fought until it embraces Islam.”
And, apparently knowing that his congregation may hate and fear only taxes as much as Muslims, Hagee told them that the Qur’an’s message to Muslims is “when you get into the government, tax Christians and Jews into poverty until they submit willingly to Islam. Sounds like the IRS [Internal Revenue Service], but not faith.”
Then he offered this warning: “Politicians who are telling America that Islam and Christianity are sister faiths are lying to the people of this country. There is no relationship of any kind between Islam and Christianity. None whatever.”
At every step, Hagee exhorted the faithful that Islam and Muslims were not only a danger to the United States, but specifically to Israel – a country to which they should offer unconditional support.
This sounds a lot like the ideology of generalised fear and loathing of Muslims that Foxman condemned in the Washington Post.
Islamophobic fearmongering, demonisation and dehumanisation, from the likes of Hagee, and bellowed continuously on cable channels and radio stations across America, enabled the US government to legitimise invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and expand wars from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia. These took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, under the guise of a “war on terror” – all the while as presidents hosted White House iftars.
What makes Breivik’s attack so shocking and new is that he turned the Islamophobic rhetoric against the white citizens of the Euro-American “homeland”, those whom the officially-sanctioned military slaughter of Muslims abroad was ostensibly meant to protect.
Foxman welcomes Hagee in from the fringes
While Hagee offered his zealous support to Israel (he founded CUFI in 2006), not all of Israel’s supporters returned the love. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, warned in 2007 that the pro-Israel Jewish community’s embrace of far-right ideologues would drive away young, socially-liberal Jews from supporting Israel. He feared it could endanger the bipartisan support Israel always enjoyed in the United States by identifying it with what Yoffie saw as extremist elements.
Yoffie focused his criticism on Hagee, “who is contemptuous of Muslims, dismissive of gays, possesses a truimphalist theology and opposes a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He worried about the warm reception Hagee was receiving at conferences of Jewish Federations all over America.
One influential figure who didn’t share Yoffie’s fears about Hagee was Foxman, who told a reporter from the Religion News Service in March 2008, “I don’t have to agree with anybody 100 per cent in order to welcome their support, as long as their support is not conditioned on my agreeing with them on everything or accepting them 100 per cent.”
When it came to light during the 2008 US presidential campaign that Hagee had said in a 1999 sermon that Hitler had been sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain repudiated Hagee’s endorsement. But Foxman was quick to offer Hagee absolution, issuing a statement accepting the pastor’s “apology”.
Enabling Islamophobia
Foxman’s embrace of Hagee does not even mark the lowest point of his dalliance with Islamophobic extremists. Recall last summer – in the run up to the US midterm elections – the hate campaign targeting a proposal for an Islamic community centre planned for lower Manhattan in New York City.
Dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque” by its critics, it became a cause celebre for the Republican Party – and some gutless Democrats – who claimed that building the institution close to the former site of the World Trade Centre would be an insult to the memory of victims.
The hate campaign was notable for unprecedented anti-Muslim rhetoric that exceeded anything heard in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks. While New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg earned plaudits for defending the right of American Muslims to build the Islamic centre where they wanted, Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League caused consternation when they backed the bigots and came out against the project.
And who was it who helped take a little-noticed plan for a community centre and turn it into “a national political spectacle?” None other than Pam Geller and Robert Spencer – as the Washington Post reported at the time- the same Islamophobic extremists whom Foxman now blames for fueling the kind of hatred that inspired Breivik to kill.
Rescuing Zionism from Islamophobia
Foxman’s claim that Breivik’s support for Israel is “bizarre” is a brazen attempt to deflect attention from the alliance that Foxman and leading Israeli politicians have made with the most racist Islamophobes – ones Foxman accurately likens to anti-Semites.
To be clear, Israel and Zionism have always been racist toward Palestinians and other non-Jews, otherwise how else could they justify the expulsion and exclusion of millions of Palestinians solely on the grounds that they are not Jews? It is the virulent, specifically anti-Muslim trend that has been particularly pronounced since 2001.
But the rot has already gone too far. As a recent article in Der Spiegel underscores, Europe’s far-right anti-Muslim demagogues have found many allies and admirers in Israel, particularly within the upper echelons of the ruling Likud and Yisrael Beitenu parties.
And the feeling is mutual: European ultra-nationalists, such as Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders, have put support for Israel’s right-wing government at the centre of their politics.
Islamophobia welcome in Israel
While the world was united in horror at Breivik’s massacre, several commentators in Israel’s mainstream media were much more understanding of his motives, if not for his actions. An oped on Ynet, the website of Israel’s mass circulation Yediot Aharonot, stated that “the youth movement of the ruling Labour Party” – of which many of the youths murdered on Utoya island were members – “is an organisation of anti-Israeli hate mongers”.
An editorial in The Jerusalem Post offered sympathy for Breivik’s anti-Muslim ideology and called on Norway to act on the concerns expressed in his manifesto, while an op-ed published by the same papersaid that the youth camp Breivik attacked had been engaged in “a pro-terrorist program”.
Meanwhile, an article in the American Jewish newspaper The Forward noted that on many mainstream internet forums, Israelis expressed satisfaction with Breivik’s massacre and thought that Norway got what it deserved.
Clear warning signs
Foxman cannot claim he didn’t see any of this coming. Back in 2003, I interviewed him for an article about the inclusion of Yisrael Beitenu and other parties in Israel’s governing coalition, parties that openly advocated the expulsion of Palestinians. Foxman’s attitude was as indulgent toward those racists and would-be ethnic cleansers as he was to Hagee’s hate-mongering a few years later, and it is those same Israeli parties that have forged the closest ties with European and American anti-Muslim extremists.
The continued lurch towards extremism in Israel, and among many of its supporters, underscores the truth that anyone who wants to dissociate from ultranationalism, racism and Islamophobia, also has to repudiate Israel’s state ideology, Zionism. Universal rights and equality for all human beings are concepts that are anathema to both.
With his panicked and belated jump onto the anti-Islamophobia bandwagon, Foxman hopes we won’t notice, and that organisations like his can continue defending Israel’s racism free from the stain of the deadly anti-Muslim extremism they have done so much to promote.
Ali Abunimah is author of “One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse”, and is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is planning to screen a controversial film on Capitol Hill about attempts to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Manhattan.
The film, “Sacrificed Survivors: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mosque,” was produced by the conservative Christian Action Network (CAN) and has begun to garner criticism from such groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The 45-minute film is largely focused around a series of interviews conducted with survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and members of their family. The interviews, according to CAN’s website, delve into the feelings they experienced last summer when a group proposed building an Islamic center blocks away from where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
Efforts to build the Islamic center, which was set to include a swimming pool and a mosque among other amenities, were the focus of nearly every news agency last summer and brought a slew of politically charged arguments from members of Congress.
CAN attempted to get permission to show the film in New York City parks over the week leading up to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but it was denied out of concern for the content.
According to CAN’s website, West plans to host the event during the week Congress returns from recess, on Sept. 8 in the Rayburn House Office Building.
This will not be the first time a controversial film about Muslims has been shown on Capitol Hill. In 2009, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) hosted the controversial Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders and showed his movie, “Fitna,” which many Muslims have designated anti-Islamic. Following an anti-screening campaign by the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association, no members of Congress reportedly showed up to watch the film.
West came under fire last year for commenting during a conference that terrorists were fulfilling mandates laid out by the Quran.
A spokeswoman for West did not immediately return a request for comment.
A coalition ally of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has provoked outrage after he praised the rantings of Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
Mario Borghezio, an MEP with the anti-immigration Northern League party, who have campaigned against Muslims and the building of mosques, said Breivik had some ‘excellent’ ideas.
Speaking on an Italian radio show he said he agreed with the maniac’s ‘opposition to Islam and his explicit accusation that Europe has surrendered before putting up a fight against its Islamisation.’
Though Borghezio added that he did not however agree with the use of extreme violence, or Breivik’s anti-Papal views, his comments immediately unleashed a storm of fury with his own party apologising to still grieving Norway.
Northern League chief Roberto Calderoli said: ‘His comments are terrible and completely unqualified and we can only apologise to the families of the victims for the delirium of what he said.’
The Northern League is a key ally of Berlusconi’s ruling right-wing coalition and, although the prime minister did not comment personally, members of his party also rounded on Mr Borghezio.
Carlo Giovanardi, an MP for the Christian Democratic Party, said: ‘Is it too much to ask for our Northern League friends to throw Borghezio out of their party?
‘We have vain hopes he will resign for what he said but that is unlikely to happen.’
Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini also stepped into the row over Borghezio’s comments and said: ‘He should offer Norway his personal apologies.
‘We as a government cannot intervene directly with an MEP – but we have made it very clear that the best course of action would be for him to make a personal apology.
‘His own party has disassociated themselves from him and that is a very important sign – he must feel the duty to say himself that he is sorry for what he said.
‘Any message of racism, xenophobia and exclusion or which leads to an incitement of violence or an emulation of violence must be condemned.’
When Ibtihaj Muhammad fastens her headscarf, or hijab, around her chin, one of its purposes is to deflect unwanted attention.
But when she wears a hijab in a sporting arena, it often has the opposite effect.
The New Jersey native is currently ranked 11th in the world in women’s sabre, a discipline of fencing. Only one American ranks higher: Mariel Zagunis, the two-time Olympic and world champion.
Both women will compete this weekend at a World Cup fencing event at the New York Athletic Club to earn points toward qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee do not track athletes’ religion, but if Muhammad makes the Olympic team, she would likely be the first practicing Muslim woman to represent the U.S. at the Games.
When she competes, photographers often zoom in on the name Muhammad on the back of her fencing jacket. Her mother, Denise, recently saw such a photo and said, “I realized: my God, she’s representing all of us.
In June 2007, “counter-jihad” blogger Pamela Geller posted the following Email from Norway, from a reader who sounds a lot like the Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik.
This is what the post looks like today:
I am running an email I received from an Atlas reader in Norway. It is devastating in its matter-of-factness.
Well, yes, the situation is worsening. Stepping up from 29 000 immigrants every year, in 2007 we will be getting a total of 35 000 immigrants from somalia, iran, iraq and afghanistan. The nations capital is already 50% muslim, and they ALL go there after entering Norway. Adding the 1.2 births per woman per year from muslim women, there will be 300 000+ muslims out of the then 480 000 inhabitants of that city.
Orders from Libya and Iran say that Oslo will be known as Medina at the latest in 2010, although I consider this a PR-stunt nevertheless it is their plan.
From Israel the hordes clawing at the walls of Jerusalem proclaim cheerfully that next year there will be no more Israel, and I know Israel shrugs this off as do I, and will mount a strike during the summer against all of its enemies in the middle east. This will make the muslims worldwide go into a frenzy, attacking everyone around them.
Before, I thought about emigrating to Britain, Israel, USA, South Africa, etc. for taxes and politics, but instead (although I believe we are the very last generation on earth before the return of God) I will stay and fight for the right to this country and indeed the entire peninsula, for the God-fearing people, just in case this isn’t the end of the world after all. Doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan.
It’s far from impossible to achieve, after all my people has done it every time before, in feats that match the ancient greek, hebrew and british “legends”.
Oslo and the southeast may fall easily, but there are other lines than “state”-borders drawn across this country since long before there was even a single muslim in the world, and we have held them this long, against everyone else too. We are entering a new golden age for my people, and those of a handful other countrys, but only through struggle.
Never fear, Pamela. God is with you too in this coming time.
But Pamela Geller’s guilty conscience is showing again, because as a matter of fact, she edited her post very recently to take out the most incriminating line. The Internet Archive has a copy of the original:
As you can see, the line Geller edited out is:
We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.
Google’s cache also has a copy of Geller’s page, captured on June 30, 2011 — and the line about “stockpiling weapons” was still there at that time.
Obviously, Pamela Geller is going through her archives and scrubbing any violent rhetoric related to Norway, and equally obviously, she’s doing it to cover her tracks.
Please, nutty people, leave my e-mail inbox alone! I’ve been flooded with mail from defenders of Pamela Geller, the shrieking bigot who thinks all Muslims are evil, that Muslims live under her bed, that Muslims short-sheeted her bed at summer camp, and so on. Here is one such letter:
Pamela Geller is right, you want to see America and Israel destroyed. Why do you love Muslims so much? Are you a secret Muslim?
You got me! I am a secret Muslim. Well, not a secret one anymore. I’m actually known in Occupied Palestine as Abu Tsuris. I was a summer intern with Hamas (in the press office) and I’m hoping to get my M.A. in Shari’a from al-Azhar University, where I also play for the lacrosse team.
It is amazing to me how Geller’s followers think of Islam the way they believe Islam thinks of Christianity and Judaism. For the record: I’m a proud Jew, not observant enough, but trying, and I also admire many aspects of Islam. I don’t believe this to be a contradiction. I love Islamic art and architecture and poetry, and I appreciate the manner in which Islam provides meaning and solace to its followers. I appreciate Islam’s firm stand against idolatry, and I also find comfort in Islam’s stunning diversity. Included in this diversity, of course, are streams of Islam I find disagreeable, and one or two I find repugnant. But Islam, like Judaism, and like Christianity, is a universe. It is not a monolith, as Pamela Geller and her ilk would have you believe. Some of the best people I know are Muslim, and some of the worst are Muslim. The same holds true for Judaism. Pamela Geller is a terrible bigot because she believes that Islam is an intrinsically evil system, and that everyone who adheres to this system is intrinsically evil..
A book by one of Norwegian terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite anti-Muslim authors.
All this is revealed in a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit(.pdf), which trains new Bureau recruits. Among the 62 slides in the presentation, designed to teach techniques for “successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E. [Middle East],” is an instruction that the “Arabic mind” is “swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts.”
The briefing presents much information that has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with constitutionally-protected religious practice and social behavior, such as estimating the number of mosques in America and listing the states with the largest Muslim populations.
Other slides paint Islam in a less malicious light, and one urges “respectful liaison” as a “proactive approach” to engaging Muslims. But even those exhibit what one American Muslim civil rights leader calls “the understanding of a third grader, and even then, a badly misinformed third grader.”
One slide asks, “Is Iran an Arab country?” (It’s not.) Another is just a picture of worry beads.
“Based on this presentation, it is easy to see why so many in law enforcement and the FBI view American Muslims with ignorance and suspicion,” says Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal aid group. “The presentation appears to treat all Muslims with one broad brush and makes no distinction between lawful religious practice and beliefs and unlawful activities.”
A grainy copy of the PowerPoint was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California chapter and the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, and provided to Danger Room. The two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year inquiring about government surveillance of American Muslim communities.
“In order for FBI training to be effective it has to present useful, factual and unbiased information. This material fails on all three criteria,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who now works for the ACLU. “Factually flawed and biased law enforcement training programs only expand the risk that innocent Muslim and Arab Americans will be unfairly targeted for investigation and prosecution, and stigmatized in their communities.” [Full disclosure: My fiancee works for the ACLU.]
In response to queries from Danger Room, the FBI issued the following statement about the PowerPoint: “The FBI new agent population at Quantico is exposed to a diverse curriculum in many specific areas, including Islam and Muslim culture. The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced. It was a small part of a larger segment of training that also included material produced by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point.”
It is unclear when the FBI stopped using the PowerPoint.
Among the most provocative aspects of the presentation is its recommended reading list. One book offered is The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, by Robert Spencer. Spencer is one of the ringleaders of the protest against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the co-founder of Stop the Islamicization of America, which “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda,” in the view of the Anti-Defamation League. A manifesto written by the Norwegian terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik cited Spencer 64 times.
Another book cited is The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai. The volume was briefly infamous in 2004, after Seymour Hersh reported its influence among certain Iraq war hawks in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. According to Hersh, the takeaway of Patai’s book is that “Arabs only understand force” and are susceptible to “shame and humiliation.”
“It’s like asking law enforcement to learn ‘the facts’ about the African American experience by reading a book by the grand wizard of the KKK,” says Khera. “It is deplorable and offensive that the nation’s top law enforcement agency would promote such hateful so-called ‘experts’ on Islam.”
An FBI spokesman said Spencer’s book is no longer on the reading list but was not sure about the others. “We encourage our agents to seek out a variety of viewpoints. That does not mean we endorse or adopt the view of any particular author,” the bureau’s statement continues. “Broad knowledge is essential for us to better understand and respond to the threats we face. Knowledge also helps us defeat ignorance and strengthen relationships with the diverse communities that we serve.”
In recent years, law enforcement agencies around the country have proven receptive to anti-Muslim crusaders. The Washington Monthly recently reported on the “growing profession” of terrorism consultants who get paid to make “sweeping generalizations about Muslims” to rapt audiences of cops. Adam Serwer at the American Prospect reports that another Breivik favorite, Walid Shoebat, also gets government cash to tell police things like “Islam is the devil.”
At a Capitol Hill event on Monday, a Florida-based researcher named Peter Leitner claimed that up to 6,000 Muslims in America are a “fifth column.” According to Leitner’s official biography, he founded a group called the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center; Higgins claims to have provided counterterrorism instruction to “FBI Counterterrorism Special Agents,” various police departments countrywide and even Blackwater.
“These characterizations of Islam and of Arab and Muslim people are not just disheartening — they are frightening,” says Veena Dubal, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. “Degrading and inaccurate characterizations of Islam and of the ‘Arab mind’ don’t help individual agents fight terrorism. Rather, they imbue law enforcement with an extremely biased view of a diverse community.”
The Fox rapid-response team makes a plea to distinguish violence in the name of a religion from the practitioners and tenets of that religion as long as it’s Christianity.
When a tragedy like the one in Norway occurs, it’s human nature to try and explain the unexplainable. This almost always turns into a search for someone to blame. This frequently leads to attempts to guess what media figures the killers in question may have followed, putting those figures on the defensive. That defense is much harder when the terrorist himself cites your work explicitly. Such is the position that Robert Spencer, director of the blog Jihad Watch, now finds himself. Today, he appeared on Alan Colmes’ radio show to defend his site and his work.
Unsurprisingly, they found very little common ground.
This weekend, it was discovered that Spencer’s anti-Jihad (some, not Spencer, would say “anti-Muslim”) writing was cited 64 times in the manifesto of the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Because of this, he quickly received a large amount of unwanted attention, being mentioned on NBC Nightly News and featured heavily in a New York Times article entitled “Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.” Spencer has decried this “blame game” as a “leftist fantasy.”
In this writer’s opinion, Breivik was crazy and you can’t blame any one person for crazy being, well, crazy. I may find much of Spencer’s writings reprehensible and he may have contributed to an anti-Muslim culture that Breivik dwelled in, but he’s no more guilty for this crime than a heavy metal band is for Columbine.
That being said, Colmes got some good points in when he pointed out the difference between the way people like Spencer categorize Breivik to the way they do Islamic terrorists. Why are the latter endemic of a massive Islamic cultural problem whereas Spencer is so quick to describe Breivik as alone gunman. Hypocrisy is just as dangerous as irrational blaming.
It’s a fascinating (and heated) conversation. Watch the clip from Fox News below:
By now you probably have read all the details concerning the terrorist attack in Oslo, Norway. This attack has shined a spotlight on the demonization of Muslims at the hands of anti-Muslim bloggers we have profiled on this site. For example, the NY Times published a devastating expose of the shooter’s ideological ties to Robert Spencer. The evidence is so damning that Spencer is in a panicked state of damage control. So his friends at Frontpage Magazine have jumped to defend his Islamophobic enterprise, an apologia worthy of a detailed response from Loonwatch.
The article begins with some whining about how poor Spencer is the victim of the lamestream media:
No tragedy goes long without exploitation, and the atrocities in Norway are no exception to that rule.
Spencer spends his days exploiting bad news about Muslims, but when the news reflects poorly on him and he is criticized, it suddenly becomes exploitation?
Is silencing researchers who have put years of effort into exposing networks of radicals the right response to a terrorist attack? No reasonable person would think so. But that is exactly what media outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic are trying to do.
Who is silencing Robert Spencer? Has his website been shut down? Is he prevented from publishing more books? Rest assured that Spencer’s first amendment rights are intact. The problem here is that Frontpage is cynically playing victim; they cannot distinguish between being fairly criticized and actually being denied rights.
Now let’s turn to the voluminous citations from Spencer found in the Shooter’s manifesto:
The “64 times” cited by the Times and its imitators reflects lazy research since the majority of those quotes actually come from a single document, where Spencer is quoted side by side with Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice.
See, Spencer was only cited 64 times making the argument (unlike Blair and Rice) that terrorism is an essential aspect of mainstream Islam.
Quite often, Robert Spencer is quoted providing historical background on Islam and quotes from the Koran and the Hadith. So, it’s actually Fjordman quoting Spencer quoting the Koran. If the media insists that Fjordman is an extremist and Spencer is an extremist — then isn’t the Koran also extremist? And if the Koran isn’t extremist, then how could quoting it be extremist?
Actually, it’s Fjordman quoting Spencer quoting the Quran (out of context) and explaining that good Muslims are terrorist killers. Why shouldn’t he defend Western civilization from Muslims?
The New York Times would have you believe that secondhand quotes like these from Spencer turned Breivik into a raging madman… The complete absence of quotes in which Robert Spencer calls for anyone to commit acts of terrorism reveals just how empty the media’s case against him is.
See, Spencer is just arguing that good Muslims are terrorists, that Islam is pure evil, and that Muslim immigration, aided by liberals, is destroying Western civilization. He supposedly never* actually calls for outright violence, but he has no problem with people who post violent comments on his website.
If we follow Spencer’s logic, it can be easy to conclude that violence is needed to stem the Hottentot Mongol tide of immigration. This argument ignores the fact that demonization leads to violence:
“When you push the demonization of populations, you often end up with violence,” said Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But the shooter didn’t kill Muslims, so Islamophobia cannot be involved, right?
And even this is irrelevant because Breivik did not carry out violence against Muslims… If Breivik was motivated by Islamophobia, then why did he not attempt to kill Muslims? Why did he not open fire inside a mosque?
Opposition to Islam was the killer’s stated motivation. He targeted other white Scandinavians because he considered them race traitors. He wrote all of this down, too, so we don’t even have to make guesses about it! He blamed liberals for enabling jihad by supporting “multiculturalism.”
Just because he didn’t directly attack Muslims does not mean Islamophobia had nothing to do with this attack. In fact, it had everything to do with the attack. But there is one last straw for Spencerites to grasp at:
Not only did Breivik not target Muslims, but he considered collaborating with Muslim terrorists… “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties,” Breivik wrote. “We both share one common goal.”
Interesting, Breivik and the Islamophobic ideology he shares with Spencer do indeed share one common goal with jihadists. They both want a homogenous society that doesn’t tolerate the Other. They both want to incite religious/nationalist war. They both want to increase Islamophobia; Spencer because it is his source of income, and jihadists because it is good recruiting propaganda. So, it is not a surprise to us that extremists share common goals but for vastly different reasons. We’ve known for some time that Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists reinforce one another.
In sum, Spencer and Frontpage want free reign to demonize Muslims and peddle baseless sharia conspiracy theories, but they cry foul when they get criticized in public. They suddenly demand the nuance that they have so far happily denied to Muslims as a whole.
*Admin Note: Spencer has subtly and overtly endorsed violence or a violent posture against Muslim citizens and their “liberal enablers” in the West. Just in January, in a piece titled “Digging Graves for the Next World War,” Roland Shirk a contributor at JW wrote,
The strings that knit together peaceful coexistence among communities are straining under the pressure of millions of resident aliens who should never have been admitted, who can only be tolerated when they are as sure as we that compared to us they are helpless. Islam is a religion of fear and force, and its adherents can only be at your feet or at your throat. We had better decide which posture we prefer. The time is short.
Those words are essentially the theme of Breivik’s manifesto, and Spencer approved it. This is on top of the knowledge that Spencer joined a Facebook group that sought as its objective a Reconquista of Anatolia, a holocaust of Turks and a forced conversion of any and all remaining Muslims. Spencer never denied joining the group, only claiming that he was the victim of a “trick.”
American anti-Islam bloggers aren’t to blame for the Norway Massacre. But their response to the attacks is nonetheless revealing, in that they are now demanding the kind of nuanced analysis of the Norway shootings that they’ve always failed to offer when implicating jihadism or all Muslims for terror attacks.
As the news of terrorist attacks in Oslo broke on Friday, the conservative media were quick to place the blame on al Qaeda even though the details weren’t fully known. Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote that the attacks were “a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.”
At first, it wasn’t unreasonable to reach that conclusion. Given the way the attacks unfolded — multiple targets being hit within a short time period — it was reasonable to assume that Islamic extremists were responsible, rather than anti-Muslim extremist Anders Behring Breivik.
When the truth became known, Rubin, like many others on the right, tried to downplay the right-wing anti-Muslim ideology driving the alleged shooter. She was suddenly far more generic in how she describedBreivik’s motive, referring to it as “undiluted evil.”
What’s notable about the response by conservatives to the attack is that their primary worry was that the anti-Islam cause might be tarnished. Bruce Bawer, writing in the Wall Street Journal, was beside himself that “this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.” He then casts Breivik’s concerns, if not his actions, as defensible, describing “the way he moves from a legitimate concern about genuine problems to an unspeakably evil `solution.’”
It would be hard to imagine a conservative showing such empathy for Hamas, concluding that while terrorism is evil, they are nevertheless acting out of legitimate concerns about Palestinian suffering. What’s pathetic is not so much their reasoning, but the knowledge that their arguments would be the same in substance, if more enthusiastic, had Muslim extremists been responsible.
The most telling reaction was from the anti-Muslim bloggers Breivik cited by name in his manifesto.
Pamela Geller, who along with Professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer has been active in opposing the construction of mosques in the U.S., wrote: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.” Spencer, for his part,wrote: “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.”
Most of Geller and Spencer’s blogging consists of attempts to tar all Muslims with the responsibility for terrorism. At CPAC last year, Geller and Spencer drew a large crowd for their documentary referring to the proposed community center near Ground Zero as “the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.” Yet they’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing — assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association. What’s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it’s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.
These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited — by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it’s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should — terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.
Robert Spencer and his biggest fan: Anders Behring Breivik
Anders Behring Breivik is by all accounts an intelligent individual, wealthy and from a privileged background. He believes Europe is under assault, that it is being colonized by the hordes of the evil “green” menace known as ‘Islam’ and that Europe’s leaders are responsible for the onslaught. He believes this despite the fact that there are no Muslim Armies occupying ANY European nation, there are no Muslim Armies that have set up bases in ANY European nation.
How did he come to the irrational conclusion that his very way of life was under imminent threat?
His inspiration can be gleaned from the words of his manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. In his own words he was inspired by Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Ibn Warraq, Serge Trifkovic, the so-called “Vienna School” and a plethora of other Islamophobes and anti-Muslims.
LoonWatch since its inception has been warning about the ever increasing radicalization of the anti-Muslim Movement, its trans-atlantic nature, as well as the eventuality of violence. We documented numerous instances of “inciting violence,” both in the speech of the leading Islamophobes as well as in the conduct and speech of their followers.
One only needs to look at our piece on Pamela Geller, “The Looniest Blogger Ever,” in which Geller engages in all of the well worn conspiracies that we are used to and which Breivik shared, as well as her pronouncements of genocide against Muslims and the “political elites” who enable them.
Robert Spencer’s influence on Breivik’s ideas about Islam, Muslims and the West seems to be greater than anyone else. He cites Spencer numerous times (64) in his manifesto, always glowingly, for instance he writes on p. 754,
About Islam I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer. Bat Ye’or’s books are groundbreaking and important, though admittedly not always easy to read. The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom should be considered required reading for all those interested in Islam. It is the best and most complete book available on the subject in English, and possibly in any language. Ibn Warraq’s books are excellent, starting with his Defending the West . Understanding Muhammad by the Iranian ex-Muslim Ali Sina is also worth reading, as is Defeating Jihad by Serge Trifkovic.
Like Spencer, Breivik believes in waging a Crusade against Muslims. Spencer declared in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), “God Wills it!,” that was the battle cry of the Crusaders. There is more in Danios’ series rebutting The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).
We have been trying to prevent the grisly terrorist attacks that rocked Norway by making people aware of the serious threat from radicals who in the guise of freedom and under the mantle of liberty wish to impose their truly destructive, exclusivist ideology upon the masses.
However, our protestations were generally unheeded. It resulted in the Beslan of Norway and now we have a manifesto from a killer inspired by the extremists who we have been exposing for years. Anders Behring Breivik is the polo sweater wearing anti-Muslim Right-wing nationalist Crusader icon of Islamophobes worldwide, he is their Che Guevara and he will inspire more copycats in his wake.
Spencer is working hard to disassociate himself from one of his fans
The anti-Muslim loons of the world are in a major bind right now. Their intolerant anti-Muslim attitude and constant fear-mongering is responsible for the horrible terrorist attack that occurred in Norway at the hands of self-professed Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller supporter Anders Behring Breivik. Recent reports suggest that Breivik was inspired by the writings of anti-Muslim bigots like Spencer and Geller, as well as others in the anti-Muslim circle such as Bat Ye’or and Fjordman.
Spencer himself has come out and attempted to dismiss the connection between Breivik’s violence and his own anti-Muslim bigotry, saying “no one has explained or can explain how this guy’s supposed anti-jihad views have anything to do with his murdering children.” A fair question in light of the tragic violence that Breivik was responsible for. Did the anti-Muslim hatred inspire the violence in Oslo?
Spencer lays out his version of the logic this way, saying:
1. Freedom fighters preach free speech, freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all people, against Sharia and Islamic supremacism that denies those rights, advocating only legal means of protest and dissent.
2. Some nutcase who allegedly expressed allegiance with the freedom fighters kills people, none of whom are preaching Sharia or Islamic supremacism.
3. Media assumes that #1 caused #2 and blames freedom fighters.
The obvious problem with Spencer’s logic is that it does not include his and other anti-Muslim loons’ consistent denunciations of “leftists” as jihad-enablers. This is a key tenant of the so-called anti-jihadist movement. They hate the left, or more specifically, anyone who treats Muslims with a smidgen of fairness and tolerance. Spencer and Geller consistently and constantly portray the left as those who would sell out the West to the scary Mooslems. Spencer’s hate site Jihad Watch is filled with posts denouncing the “Leftist/Jihadist alliance,” warning his readers of how the left will happily allow the Mooslem hordes to overthrow the West and “dhimmify” its population.
Breivik adopted this view of the left. Paul Woodward notes that Breivik argued “that cultural conservatives should not identify their main opponents as Jihadists, but instead should focus their attention on those he regards as the ‘facilitators’ of Jihadists, namely, the proponents of multiculturalism.” It was these liberals and “multi-culturalists” that were the target of his rampage.
Therefore, a more logical set-up would be as follows:
1. Anti-Muslim bigots vilify Muslims as a threat to Western culture and civilization, and argue that the left is most responsible for allowing Muslims to undermine Western civilization. In fact, the left is more the enemy than the anti-jihadists themselves!
2. A right-wing self-proclaimed anti-jihadist chooses the capital of a famously liberal, leftist, and socialist country as the target for his attack.
3. Media is perfectly justified in establishing a link between #1 and #2.
When you preach bigotry and fear on a daily basis, don’t be surprised when one of your followers takes the next logical step. But Robert Spencer has a reason to feign surprise and indignation over what his hatred has incited, as the link between his hate-writing and this act of terrorism becomes clear: Richard Silverstein notes that the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik cited Robert Spencer 46 times in his manifesto. He was clearly quite the fan. This certainly seems to be right-wing anti-Muslim terrorism inspired by the king of Islamophobia himself, Robert Spencer.
The man suspected of a gun and bomb attack in Norway has called his deeds atrocious yet necessary, his defence lawyer said.
“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” defence lawyer Geir Lippestad told TV2 news on Saturday.
Lippestad said his client had said he was willing to explain himself in a court hearing on Monday. The court will decide at the hearing whether to keep the suspect in detention pending trial.
Earlier on Saturday, officials in Norway had charged a 32-year-old Norwegian man with killing at least 92 people in a gun and bomb attack described as the worst act of violence in the country since World War II.
Police confirmed to Al Jazeera on Saturday that the suspect had been named as Anders Behring Breivik.
Breivik, who confessed to firing weapons during questioning on Saturday, belonged to right-wing political groups. But officials said they are not jumping to conclusions about his motives.
Reports suggest he belonged to an anti-immigration party, wrote blogs attacking multi-culturalism and was a member of a neo-Nazi online forum.
But Norwegian authorities said Breivik, detained by police after 85 people were gunned down at a youth camp and another 7 killed in an Oslo bomb attack on Friday, was previously unknown to them and his internet activity traced so far included no calls to violence.
‘Beyond comprehension’
Breivik bought six tonnes of fertiliser before the massacre, a supplier said on Saturday, as police investigated witness accounts of a second shooter in the attack on Utoya.
If convicted on terrorism charges, Breivik would face a maximum of 21 years in jail, police said
If convicted on terrorism charges, he would face a maximum of 21 years in jail, police have said.
Norway’s royal family and prime minister led the nation in mourning, visiting grieving relatives of the scores of youth gunned down at an island retreat, as the shell-shocked Nordic nation was gripped by reports that the gunman may not have acted alone.
The shooting spree began just hours after a massive explosion that ripped through an Oslo high-rise building housing the prime minister’s office.
“This is beyond comprehension. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for those who have been killed, for their mothers and fathers, family and friends,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Saturday.
Though the prime minister cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the gunman’s motives, both attacks were in areas connected to the left-leaning Labour Party, which leads a coalition government.
The youth camp, about 35km northwest of Oslo, is organised by the party’s youth wing, and the prime minister had been scheduled to speak there on Saturday.
‘Christian fundamentalist’ views
The blond-haired Behring Breivik described himself on his Facebook page as “conservative”, “Christian”, and interested in hunting and computer games like World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2, reports say.
On his Twitter account, he posted only one message, dated July 17, in English based on a quote from British philosopher John Stuart Mill: “One person with a belief is equal to a force of 100,000 who have only interests”.
The suspect was reportedly also a member of a Swedish neo-Nazi internet forum, a group monitoring far-right activity said on Saturday.
Nordisk, a 22,000-member web forum founded in 2007, describes itself as a portal on the theme of “the Nordic identity, culture and traditions.”
In comments from 2009-2010 to other people’s articles on another website, Document, which calls itself critical of Islam, Breivik criticised European policies of trying to accommodate the cultures of different ethnic groups.
“When did multi-culturalism cease to be an ideology designed to deconstruct European culture, traditions, identity and nation-states?” said one his entries, posted on February 2, 2010.
Breivik wrote he was a backer of the “Vienna School of Thought”, which was against multi-culturalism and the spread of Islam.
He also wrote he admired Geert Wilders, the populist anti-Islam Dutch politician, for following that school. Wilders said in a statement on Saturday: “I despise everything he stands for and everything he did”.
Nina Hjerpset-Ostlie, a contributing journalist to the right-wing website, said she had met Breivik at a meeting in late 2009.
“The only thing we noticed about him is that he seemed like anyone else and that he had some very high-flying, unrealistic, ideas about marketing of our website,” she said.
Police searched an apartment in an Oslo suburb on Friday, which neighbours said belonged to Breivik’s mother.
“It is the mother who lives there. She is a very polite lady, pleasant and very friendly,” said Hemet Noaman, 27, an accounting consultant who lives in the same building in a wealthy part of town. “He often came to visit his mother but did not live here.”
Oslo Deputy Police Chief Roger Andresen would not speculate on the motives for what was believed to be the deadliest attack by a lone gunman anywhere in modern times.
“He has never been under surveillance and he has never been arrested,” Andresen told a news conference on Saturday.
Populist party member
Breivik, who attended a middle class high school called Handelsgym in central Oslo, had also been a member of the Progress Party, the second-largest in parliament, the party’s head of communications Fredrik Farber said.
He was a member from 2004 to 2006 and in its youth party from 1997 to 2007.
The Progress Party – conservative but within the political mainstream – wants far tighter restrictions on immigration, whereas the centre-left government backs multi-culturalism. The party leads some public opinion polls.
A politician who met Breivik in 2002-2003, when he was apparently interested in local Oslo politics, said he did not attract attention.
“I got the impression that he was a modest person … he was well dressed, it seemed like he was well educated,” Joeran Kallmyr, 33, an Oslo municipality politician representing the Progress Party, told the Reuters news agency.
Progress leader Siv Jensen stressed he had left the party.
Breivik was also a freemason, said a spokesman for the organisation.
Details on the culprit behind yesterday’s massacre in Norway, which saw car bombings in Oslo and a mass shooting attack on the island of Utoya that caused the deaths of at least 91 people, have begun to emerge. While it is still too early for a complete portrait of the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, there are enough details to begin to piece together what’s behind the attack.
And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called “moderate Muslims”.
There is moderate Nazis, too, that does not support fumigation of rooms and Jews. But they’re still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservatives Nazis strike (if it ever happens). If we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the fumigation of rooms and Jews?
Now it unfortunately already cut himself with Marxists who have already infiltrated-culture, media and educational organizations. These individuals will be tolerated and will even work asprofessors and lecturers at colleges / universities and are thus able to spread their propaganda.
For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies…(page 2-3)
What is globalization and modernity to do with mass Muslim immigration?
And you may not have heard and Japan and South Korea? These are successful and modern regimes even if they rejected multiculturalism in the 70′s. Are Japanese and South Koreans goblins?
Can you name ONE country where multiculturalism is successful where Islam is involved? The only historical example is the society without a welfare state with only non-Muslim minorities (U.S.)…(page 7)
We have selected the Vienna School of Thought as the ideological basis. This implies opposition to multiculturalism and Islamization (on cultural grounds). All ideological arguments based on anti-racism. This has proven to be very successful which explains why the modern cultural conservative movement / parties that use the Vienna School of Thought is so successful: the Progress Party,Geert Wilders, document and many others…(page 13)
I consider the future consolidation of the cultural conservative forces on all seven fronts as the most important in Norway and in all Western European countries. It is essential that we work to ensure that all these 7 fronts using the Vienna school of thought, or at least parts of the grunlag for 20-70 year-struggle that lies in front of us.
The book is called, by the way 2083 and is in English, 1100 pages).
To sums up the Vienna school of thought:
-Cultural Conservatism (anti-multiculturalism)
-Against Islamization
-Anti-racist
-Anti-authoritarian (resistance to all authoritarian ideologies of hate)
-Pro-Israel/forsvarer of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries
- Defender of the cultural aspects of Christianity
- To reveal the Eurabia project and the Frankfurt School (ny-marxisme/kulturmarxisme/multikulturalisme)
- Is not an economic policy and can collect everything from socialists to capitalists…(page 20)
Daniel Pipes: Leftism and Islam. Muslims, the warriors Marxists Have Been praying for.
The following summarizes the agenda of many kulturmarxister with Islam, it explains also why those on death and life protecting them. It explains so well why we, the cultural conservatives,are against Islamization and the implementation of these agendas… (page 27)
We must therefore make sure to influence other cultural conservatives to come to our anti-rasistiske/pro-homser/pro-Israel line. When they reach this line, one can take it to the next level…(page 41)
Anti-Muslim activists and right-wing Zionists share a political narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a “clash of civilizations,” one in which Judeo-Christian culture is under attack by Islam. Israel, in this narrative, is the West’s bulwark against the threat that Islam is posing to Europe and the United States. The nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism was clearly on display during last summer’s“Ground Zero mosque” hysteria, which culminated in a rally where Geller and Wilders addressed a crowd that included members of the EDL waving Israeli flags.
This comment by Breivik is one example of the twisted way in which Islamophobia and a militant pro-Israel ideology fit together:
Cultural conservatives disagree when they believe the conflict is based on Islamic imperialism,that Islam is a political ideology and not a race.
Cultural conservatives believe Israel has a right to protect themselves against the Jihad.
Kulturmarxistene refuses to recognize the fact that Islam’s political doctrine is relevant and essential. They can never admit to or support this because they believe that this is primarily about a race war – that Israel hates Arabs (breed).
As long as you can not agree on the fundamental perceptions of reality are too naive to expect that one to come to any conclusion.Before one at all can begin to discuss this conflict must first agree on the fundamental truths of Islam’s political doctrine.
Most people here have great insight in key Muslim concepts that al-taqiiya (political deceit), naskh (Quranic abrogation) and Jihad. The problem is that kulturmarxister refuses to recognizet hese concepts.They can not recognize these key Muslim concepts. For if they do so erodes the primary argument that Israel is a “racist state” and that this is a race war (Israelis vs. Arabs) and not defense against Jihad (Kafr vs. Ummah)
Breivik’s admiration for the likes of Daniel Pipes is also telling, and should serve as a warning that, while it would be extremely unfair and wrong to link Pipes in any way to the massacre in Norway, Breivik’s views are not so far off from some establishment neoconservative voices in the U.S. For instance, both Pipes and Breivik share a concern with Muslim demographics in Europe. In 1990, Pipes wrotein the National Review that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”
Pipes was appointed by the Bush administration to the U.S. Institute of Peace, andsits on the same board than none other than the Obama administration’s point man on the Middle East, Dennis Ross.
Pipes’ and Breivik’s concern about Muslim and Arab demographics also recall the remarks of Harvard Fellow Martin Kramer, who infamously told the Herzliya Conference in Israel last year that the West should “stop providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status…Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim, undermine the Hamas regime, but they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth and there is some evidence that they have.”
Why Breivik, and his accomplices if he had any, would attack young Norwegians remains unclear. But it probably had something to do with Breivik’s belief that European governments, and the Norwegian government, were run by “Marxists” allied with Islamist extremists who were bent on destroying Europe through “multiculturalism.”
Of course, support for Israel and its current right-wing policies do not automatically translate into support for extremist right-wing violence. But Palestinians, and the larger Arab and Muslim world, know far too well the consequences of Islamophobia and far right-wing Zionism. Now, it seems that Norwegians do too. While much remains to be learned about the attacks in Norway, it has exposed the dangerous nexus of Islamophobia, neoconservatism and right-wing Zionism, and what could happen when the wrong person subscribes to those toxic beliefs.
We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs about how these crazed radical anti-Muslim Islamophobes are inciting violence through their hate-mongering. Anders Behring Breivak, arrested as a suspect in the attack has written glowingly of Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, SIOE, and the EDL. Charles Johnson of LGF reports that he had a link with Fjordman who was a guest writer on Geller’s blog.
Stunned office staff and civil servants working in the vicinity of the bombed building said two explosions could be heard in close succession. The sound of the blasts echoed across the city just before 3:30 p.m. local time. Giant clouds of light-colored smoke continued to rise hundreds of feet into the air over the city…
Photos and television footage showed windows blown out in the 17-story office building across the street from the oil ministry, and the street and plaza areas on each side were strewn with glass and debris.
The first person on the scene “described it as ‘worse than a war zone,’” says Joe Sivilli, who’s talking to Mother Jones‘ Tim McDonnell from on the ground in Oslo. Sivilli, who speaks Norwegian fluently, works at a home-brewed beer shop about 2 kilometers away from the site of the bombing. He says he felt a “rumble, like a small earthquake,” when the bomb went off, but assumed it was just “construction or something like that.” He’ll be monitoring the Norwegian-language media for us as this story develops.
Wasn’t there another attack? A gunman dressed as a policeman reportedly opened fire this afternoon at a Labour party youth camp on the island of Utoya, about 15 miles outside of Oslo, killing at least 80 people (police officials previously reported at least 10 casualties, but had expect that number to rise). Police have a suspect in custody. Prime Minister Stoltenberg was due to visit the camp tomorrow morning, according to NRK, Norway’s national public television broadcaster. (Stoltenberg has attended gatherings at the camp almost every year in recent memory.) On Friday evening, police found undetonated explosives on the island.
Close to 700 teenagers had gathered on Utoya, and initial reports suggested that some tried to flee by swimming. CBS News reports that Kurt Lier, Oslo’s assistant chief of police, “had little information about what had happened on the island, but said if people are leaving island swimming, it is a ‘long swim.’” Hans-Inge Langø, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), says the “timing and targets [of the attacks are] too similar for this not to be connected.” The AP reports that Norwegian police say the two events were definitely connected.
The Pamela Connection:
UPDATE 1, Saturday, July 23, 12:16 a.m. EDT: Blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballsis reporting that the Oslo bombing/shooting suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, posted often on a Norwegian anti-immigration site and recommended a post by the prominent anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, who spearheaded the US drive against the planned “Ground Zero mosque.” (We’ve previously covered her activities here, here, here, here, and here.) LGF also asserts a link between Breivik and one of Geller’s guest bloggers, Fjordman.
Geller responded on her own website: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions…this is war. And the left is vicious, amoral and depraved. They mean to win, and that is the only way they know how.”
UPDATE 2, Saturday, July 23, 11:06 a.m. EDT: Oddmy Estenstad, an employee of agricultural retailer Felleskjøpet, tells CNN that Utoya shooting suspect Anders Behring Breivik bought six tons of fertilizer from the company in May:
She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.
“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”
UPDATE 3, Saturday, July 23, 11:09 a.m. EDT: According to the UK’s Daily Mirror, Anders Behring Breivik has been “preliminarily charged with acts of terrorism.” Norwegian police say the 32-year-old Breivik appears to be an extreme right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, due to postings on his website. NRK reports that the suspect is a member of an Oslo gun club, and “was exempted from military service, and thus…has no special education [from the Norwegian] Armed Forces.”
UPDATE 4, Saturday, July 23, 11:19 a.m. EDT: Norwegian media report on eyewitness accounts of the Utoya massacre. The Los Angeles Times also has the story:
Media reports say the gunman apparently used a handgun and a machine gun, and that police arrived at the island possibly 90 minutes after the shooting started. At midmorning Saturday, police were still searching the island for more bodies. One wounded survivor, Adrian Pracon, described the gunman as “calm and controlled,” shooting people who tried to escape the island by swimming to the mainland…Pracon described his attempt to escape. “We started running down to the water and people had already undressed and started swimming.”
Pracon said he began swimming, but “after 150 meters … I realized I wouldn’t make it so I went back and saw him standing 10 meters from me shooting at the people who tried to swim over.”
From our Loonwatch Readers:
Dane Bargeld:
He has written a number of comments on norwegian website document.no:
He seems to be more intelligent than the average loon. His comments are reflective rather than emotional. He doesn’t seem crazier than the average loon. His last comment is from october 2010 though.
He’s expresses support for:
- The Vienna school of thought
- Political movements like Tea Party, PVV (Wilders), EDL and (norwegian) Progress Party
- Israel
- Christianity (he’s a protestant but dislikes modern day protestancism and suggest that christians should unite in the roman-catholic church)
- Countries like Japan and South Korea (for rejecting multiculturalism)
He dislikes:
- Islam
- Totalitarian ideologies
- Cultural marxism
- Multiculturalism
David:
According to Norwegian reports, the organization this CHRISTIAN TERRORIST belonged to tried to establish links with the English Defense League — another Lieblingsorganization von Frau Geller.
Myrpou:
The swedish site realisten.se claim that Anders Behring Breivik claimed to be THE Fjordman over a year ago, so they initially reported when they got his name that Fjordman was the terrorist. However Robert Spencer claims it isn’t Fjordman and an article on Gates of Vienna claims the same, however the former was a bit suspicious to me, they didn’t allow any comments on that particlar article and made it clear that “the discussion was over”. If they’re certain that this guy isn’t fjordman wouldn’t they be more willing to prove it?
Eslaporte:
Breivik has had many posts on the site Document.no, an Islam-critical site that publishes news and commentary…Anders Breivik Behring has also commented on the Swedish news articles, where he makes it clear that he believes the media have failed by not being “NOK” Islam-critical…
As far as the Dutch connection, we still don’t know the total details about the 2009 Queen’s Day Apeldoorn attack – which there were accusations that the ethnic Dutchman, Karst Tates, was a radical right nutjob. The Dutch police appeared to whitewash the report and there appear to be a sloppy investigation of Tates’ past year up to his terrorist attack on the Dutch Royals.
Last April, we had a shoppingmall shooting where the shooter was an unabashed PVV voter and hated foreigners also. Are we going to see the are whitewash by Dutch police?
How Islam Created the Modern World:
He was active in the kind of Huy buoy-like forums in the Netherlands as we know. He was active in SOORTS called Huy buoy-eight forums that even in Kenner Netherlands.
There is another link with the Netherlands. Ice is another link system nand Netherlands. Breivik is also a follower of Pamela Geller, an angry white woman who became famous thanks to the action against the otnmoetingscentrum five blocks from where the WTC once stood. Breivik is a follower of Pamela Geller, an Angry glossy women who shoveled name thanks to the Acti called otnmoetingscentrum Five block from where formerly called World Trade Center stood. Geller invited Geert Wilders and the two support each other. Geller invited Geert Wilders supports a two Elka. Breivnik how close to her is unclear (probably a follower, and no more).
How Hecht Breivnik ice with her was not clear (probably a Volga, a Not anymore). It seems that he wanted to act against the Muslims politically dangerous enough to play offered. It seems that HE is a DAAD Wild Couples against the dangerous politics against Muslims Few games offered.
Apparently, the norwegian far right Anders has also praised Geert Wilders PVV party as being the only true party.
‘Suspicious attack and shootings have sympathy for PVV’
Anders Breivik Behring, the man suspected of the bombing and the shooting on the island, according to Fox News Utoya sympathy for Geert Wilders. On a Swedish news site he would have said that the Freedom Party is the only “true” conservative party. The media were not critical enough towards Islam.
Wilders said in a statement on Saturday:
“I despise everything he stands for and everything he did.”
Look at the hypocricy, it’s stunning. What a reptilian farce, I mean can’t these muslim haters at least be loyal to one another? Anders at least is honest, but Geert Wilders is a smarmy liar, when he says he despises everything Anders stands for.
How can he say that, when he shares his goals and supports the PVV, is pro Zionist, supports the Israeli far right, anti Muslim,
Breivik wrote he was a backer of the “Vienna School of Thought,” which was against multiculturalism and the spread of Islam.
He also wrote he admired Geert Wilders, the populist anti-Islam Dutch politician, for following that school.
Wilders said in a statement on Saturday:
“I despise everything he stands for and everything he did.”
Norwegian:
The suspect is not, by all accounts, the blogger known as Fjordman. He is one of his followers in his preachings of class war. Fjordman is widely believed to be one of the two brothers Anfindsens, since part of OJ ANfindsens book about the necessity of the survival of the white race seems written by his brother and bears close resemblance to Fjordmans style of writing.
JD:
Ok so when this story first broke out Yahoo was reporting it as a muslim terrorist see link below ( picture is fuzzy because it a screen shot of whole page click on it to zoom in and you can read it)
Grobpilot: Kill all muslims even the babies because they will eventually grow up and start killing you.
Bob: They rounded up japanese americans during ww2 and put them in basicly concentration camps in the desert
maybe thats what need done with the muslims till they are shipped out
Hakepeszip:When will civilized countries finally learn not to allow in Islamist in especially not if they are from any
of their garbage countrys
Another Article Few Hours Later ( keep in mind this is mid day we still dont know who what where when why )
People blamed by journalist Louise Nordstum and Matt Lee at AP were..
Al-Quida
Helpers of Global Jihad
Libya
People Pissed off at Mohammed Cartoons.
This lead to more wonderful comments which are at bottom of the pic you can read them
Uncle Remus: Welcome to the rest of the world norway see how far the muslim cancer has spread.
Thaddeus : Lets Hope if it is a white christian patriot then he took out plenty of left wong traitors
and some muzzie immigrants Europe must cleanse itself of third world immigrants
and left wingers Me and my mates are ready herer in England blah blah blah(+5 thumb up)
Norwegian national broadcaster NRK identified him as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik and said police searched his Oslo apartment overnight. NRK and other Norwegian media posted pictures of the blond, blue-eyed Norwegian.
“He is clear on the point that he wants to explain himself,” Roger Andresen told reporters Saturday.
National police chief Sveinung Sponheim told NRK that the suspected gunman’s Internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views, but whether that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen.”
Andersen said the suspect posted on websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies. He did not describe the websites in any more details.
George Carty:
Here’s an extra interesting piece of info: the island camp had hosted a pro-Palestinian rally the day before. I wonder if the gunman got his dates mixed up?
Salam:
He has written a 1400 page islamophobic book where he described in detail how the bombing/massacre would go down. I take back what I said about his ideology not being extreme. This is fucking insane. He used this as a publicity stunt to spread his propaganda. Oh wow.
A quote from the book:
“7a. Apprehension
If you for some reason survive the operation you will be apprehended and arrested. This is the point where most heroic Knights would call it a day. However, this is not the case for a Justiciar Knight. Your arrest will mark the initiation of the propaganda phase.
7b. Your trial offers you a stage to the world”
When I thought this couldn’t get more surrealistic..
Damian:
This video calling for European Christians to take up arms against the Islam and the multicultural left seems to have been posted by Anders Breivik (here anglicised as “Andrew Berwick”) yesterday before he put his plans into action (please note: Youtube have removed original by Andrew Berwick, so this is a repost, which may also be moved):
The video shows him holding a gun a the end. From the text of the video, it seems he is hoping to start a new Crusade, a civil war that will finally rid Europe of Islam once and for all.
His thinking on these issues is clearly influenced by Robert Spencer of “Jihad Watch”, who also calls for a new “Crusade” against Islam in his books. Much of what Breivik says in online comments comes straight out of Spencer’s thinking on these issues: e.g. that the leftists/multiculturalists are the greatest threat to Western civilisation, because they are facilitating the “Islamisation” of Europe:
In these comments Breivik cites Spencer’s “Jihad Watch”, as well as Pamela Geller’s anti-Islam/anti-leftist hate-site “Atlas Shrugs”, as sites that all Europeans should read.
The fundraising race on the Republican side in anticipation for 2012 has claimed several victims in the past few weeks, in, as Jon Stewart joked, “what will definitely be called the most important election of our lifetime,” but few have adequately depicted the swift elimination of each with the violence it deserves. Stewart made up for that tonight, sending off candidates with mini wildlife films after mercilessly tearing them apart for their mistakes.
Rick Santorum got the most traditional way out– a wildebeest eaten by a giant alligator for acquiring so few funds. Then came “old silverback Newt Gingrich,” who Stewart noted was “actually in a lot less debt” than America is, hitting the one million mark in deficit while the nation is still $45,000 in debt per person.
Then Stewart turned to Tim Pawlenty, whose campaign to be taken seriously while being thoroughly boring brought out some of the best in Stewart. “Ooh, Tim Pawlenty,” he mocked, “taking a bold stance against charisma! Saying it’s got no place in politics!” Jokingly mimicking Pawlenty asking whether politics was a “popularity contest,” he answered himself: “oh wait, it is.” Pawlenty’s animal alter ego didn’t even get killed by another animal– it was a mammal chopping down a tree, getting pummeled by the very tree he just cut down. “If a Pawlenty campaign falls in the woods,” Stewart asked, “does it make a sound?”
Then there is Herman Cain, who, Stewart ceded, was not doing bad at all in the money race– but then there is his understanding of the First Amendment. Stewart tore into his statements on last week’s Fox News Sunday, where Cain declared that the First Amendment gave communities the right to ban mosques. “There are some pronoun issues here,” Stewart quipped about Cain describing the struggle as “our First Amendment” protecting against “their mosque.” “the First Amendment protects their mosque from us,” Stewart corrected, similarly going through his claim that Islam is different from other religions in that it has an element of law in it. Cain, perhaps most pathetically, didn’t even get to die in animal form– he is just a domestic cat, head stuck in a tissue box.
Walid Shoebat is well known as a fraud. CNN recently exposed him in a two part series for masquerading as a “terror expert.” The truth is that Shoebat is just one of many so called “terror expert professionals” who are banking big time on your dime when in fact they are impostors, no better then two-bit snake-oil salesmen.
Now there is a website documenting the fraud Shoebat is perpetrating: www.walid-shoebat.com.(hat tip: Rick) Please follow the site, favorite it and share with your networks.
What is going on in Arizona? The word “Haboobs” is being criticized because it is Arabic? Ridiculous, I thought the objection might be that to some ears the word is close to a certain slang term referring to women’s breasts? That would be reason to keep the term, it would be great fodder for comedians or regular citizens playing off the term!
PHOENIX — The massive dust storms that swept through central Arizona this month have stirred up not just clouds of sand but a debate over what to call them.
The blinding waves of brown particles, the most recent of which hit Phoenix on Monday, are caused by thunderstorms that emit gusts of wind, roiling the desert landscape. Use of the term “haboob,” which is what such storms have long been called in the Middle East, has rubbed some Arizona residents the wrong way.
“I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob,” Don Yonts, a resident of Gilbert, Ariz., wrote to The Arizona Republic after a particularly fierce, mile-high dust storm swept through the state on July 5. “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?”
Diane Robinson of Wickenburg, Ariz., agreed, saying the state’s dust storms are unique and ought to be labeled as such.
“Excuse me, Mr. Weatherman!” she said in a letter to the editor. “Who gave you the right to use the word ‘haboob’ in describing our recent dust storm? While you may think there are similarities, don’t forget that in these parts our dust is mixed with the whoop of the Indian’s dance, the progression of the cattle herd and warning of the rattlesnake as it lifts its head to strike.”
Dust storms are a regular summer phenomenon in Arizona, and the news media typically label them as nothing more than that. But the National Weather Service, in describing this month’s particularly thick storm, used the term haboob, which was widely picked up by the news media.
“Meteorologists in the Southwest have used the term for decades,” said Randy Cerveny, a climatologist at Arizona State University. “The media usually avoid it because they don’t think anyone will understand it.”
Not everyone was put out by the use of the term. David Wilson of Goodyear, Ariz., said those who wanted to avoid Arabic terms should steer clear of algebra, zero, pajamas and khaki, as well. “Let’s not become so ‘xenophobic’ that we forget to remember that we are citizens of the world, nor fail to recognize the contributions of all cultures to the richness of our language,” he wrote.
Although use of the term often brings smirks, Mr. Cerveny said the walls of dust could have serious consequences, toppling power lines and causing huge traffic accidents. Although ultradry conditions in the desert are considered one cause for the intensity of this year’s storms, Mr. Cerveny pointed to another possible factor: the housing bust that left developments half-finished and unmaintained, creating more desert dust to be stirred up.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Instead of calming fears, the death of Osama bin Ladenactually led more Americans to feel threatened by Muslims living in the United States, according to a new nationwide survey.
In the weeks following the U.S. military campaign that killed bin Laden, the head of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, American attitudes toward Muslim Americans took a significant negative shift, results showed.
Americans found Muslims living in the United States more threatening after bin Laden’s death, positive perceptions of Muslims plummeted, and those surveyed were less likely to oppose restrictions on Muslim Americans’ civil liberties.
For example, in the weeks before bin Laden’s death, nearly half of respondents described Muslim Americans as “trustworthy” and “peaceful.” But only one-third of Americans agreed with these positive terms after the killing.
Most of the changes in attitude happened among political liberals and moderates, whose views shifted to become more like those of conservatives, the survey found.
The shift in views can be explained by the fact that bin Laden’s death reminded some Americans of why they may fear Muslims in the first place, saidErik Nisbet, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, and one of the leaders of the survey project.
“The death of bin Laden was a focusing event. There was a lot of news coverage and a lot of discussion about Islam and Muslims and Muslim Americans,” Nisbet said.
“The frenzy of media coverage reminded people of terrorism and the Sept. 11 attacks and it primed them to think about Islam in terms of terrorism.”
In fact, while prior to bin Laden’s death only 16 percent of respondents believed a terrorist attack in the United States was likely in the next few months, 40 percent believed an attack was likely after the killing.
“That is going to have a negative effect on attitudes,” Nisbet said.
The researchers’ ability to find out how American attitudes changed after bin Laden’s death was accidental, Nisbet said. Nisbet and Ohio State colleagueMichelle Ortiz, also an assistant professor of communication, had commissioned the Survey Research Institute of Cornell University and the University of New HampshireSurvey Center to jointly conduct a national telephone poll of Americans beginning in early April. The survey focused on perceptions and attitudes about Muslim Americans.
Interviews started on April 7, 2011, and 500 interviews were conducted prior to May 1, when bin Laden was killed. The remaining 341 interviews were conducted following the death.
Many of the survey responses changed significantly after the killing, Nisbet said.
After bin Laden’s death, 34 percent of Americans surveyed agreed that Muslims living in the United States “increased the likelihood of a terrorist attack.” That was up from 27 percent prior to the killing. The percentage of respondents agreeing the Muslims in the United States are supportive of the country dropped from 62 percent to 52 percent.
Americans were less likely to oppose restrictions on Muslim American civil liberties after the killing, Nisbet said. For example, public opposition to profiling individuals as potential terrorists based solely on being Muslim dropped from 71 percent to 63 percent. Likewise, opposition to requiring Muslims living in the United to register their whereabouts with the government dropped from two-thirds of respondents to about one-half.
Changes in attitudes were not related just to preventing a possible terrorist attack, but also included attitudes about religious tolerance of Muslims. For example, nearly one in three respondents surveyed after bin Laden’s death agreed that “Muslims are mostly responsible for creating the religious tension that exists in the United States today.” That was up from about one in five respondents before the killing. Correspondingly, opposition to a nationwide ban on mosque construction in the United States fell to 57 percent from 65 percent.
The negative feelings even carried over to personal relationships. The percentage of respondents who said they were unwilling to have a Muslim as a close friend doubled after the death, going from 9 percent to 20 percent.
“That’s important because research has shown that the best way to reduce prejudice and improve intergroup relations is through personal contact,” Nisbet said. “That won’t happen if people avoid contact with Muslim Americans.”
Many of the changes in attitudes after Bin Laden’s death were almost entirely due to political liberals and moderates changing their opinions about the threat posed by Muslims in the United States, the survey found.
The percentage of liberal respondents who agreed that Muslims in the United States “make America a more dangerous place to live” tripled after bin Laden’s death, going from 8 to 24 percent. The percentage of moderates believing this increased from 10 percent to 29 percent.
In contrast, the percentage of conservatives who believed this were essentially unchanged – 30 percent before bin Laden’s death and 26 percent following.
“Liberals and moderates essentially converged toward conservatives in their attitudes about Muslim Americans,” Nisbet said.
Nisbet said it is unclear whether these changes in attitudes would last long-term or not. But research suggests these negative feelings can be dangerous even if they are short-lived.
“Every time these anti-Muslim feelings are activated by media coverage, it makes them that much easier to get reactivated in the future,” Nisbet said. “These feelings and attitudes become more constant the more you experience them.”
The telephone survey involved adults in the continental United States, including cell-phone only homes, and was designed to be representative of the U.S. population. All percentages reported here were adjusted to control for differences in the characteristics of survey respondents interviewed before and after bin Laden’s death. The researchers controlled for age, gender, race, education, political ideology, whether the respondents were evangelical Christians, and their knowledge about Islam.
That means any differences in attitudes between respondents polled before and after the death are not the results of any difference on these personal attributes.
In addition to Nisbet and Ortiz, the survey was conducted by Yasamin Miller, director of the Survey Research Institute at Cornell and Andrew Smith, associate professor and director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
Contact: Erik Nisbet, (614) 247-1693begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (614) 247-1693 end_of_the_skype_highlighting; Nisbet.5@osu.edu Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (614) 292-8457 end_of_the_skype_highlighting; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
Cable channel TLC is hoping to do for Muslims what it did for polygamists and Sarah Palin — put a new spin on controversial subjects that people often make judgments about without knowing the whole story.
The reality show “All-American Muslim” will follow the lives of five Muslim American families, some of whom are related, who reside in Dearborn, Mich., a suburb of Detroit that has a large Muslim population. The show will debut in late November.
The people participating in “All-American Muslim” seem to range from very religious to more casual, and all struggle to find a balance between their American home and their Muslim background. One cast member is a football coach and another is in law enforcement. There are even splits in the level of devotion in some families. One family features two sisters — one of whom wears a traditional head scarf and another who has tattoos and piercings and married an Irish Catholic.
“We wanted to show there was diversity even within the Muslim community,” said TLC General Manager Amy Winter. “These are families that might have beliefs that are different than yours, but we are all living similar daily lives and hopefully we will bring that to light.”
GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain has revealed himself to be, for various reasons, the biggest bigot and buffoon in the race. He kicked up a firestorm with his recent comments on Fox News Sunday in support of the “right” to ban American mosques. Apparently, Cain thinks that freedom of religion means freedom to ban religions:
CAIN: They could say that. Chris, lets go back to the fundamental issue that the people are basically saying they’re objecting to. They’re objecting to the fact Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Sharia law. That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes. The people in the community know best, and I happen to side with the people in Murfreesboro.
WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to ban a mosque?
CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.
Discriminating against Muslims is not discrimination because they’re Muslims! Kind of like the argument we hear from racists that discrimination against black people is not discrimination because black people are more likely to be criminals.
Many religious leaders took Cain to task for his comments, but not everyone. In fact, more than enough far right wingers are gleefully embracing his call to deny American Muslims their fundamental American rights.
Permits, in my judgment, should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.
Did you get that? Each Islamic mosque is “dedicated” not to the pillars of Islam (faith, prayer, charity, and fasting) but to the “overthrow of the American government.” As if all the Muslims of every denomination (Sunni, Shi’ite, Sufi, liberal, conservative, etc.) are acting with one will, one goal, like the Borg (resistance is futile, you will be assimilated). He must have read that somewhere in the Protocols of the Elders of Mecca.
Anyway, it is this last point that has Bryan Fischer super excited: he is no longer alone in his Bigotry now that a big shot GOP candidate has legitimated his effort to ban all mosques. On what grounds can they so brazenly defy the First Amendment? The bogus talking point about Islam being a political ideology, not a religion:
In point of fact, in Islam the church IS the state. And since Islam allows no room for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience and equal rights for women, it’s view of culture is so bizarrely un-American as to be dangerous and destructive to civilized society in all its forms.
This is quite ironic coming from a man whose goal in life is to impose his backward religious opinions on an unwilling society. Don’t mind our homegrown Christian fundamentalists who reject separation of church and state. They don’t count.
•Large majorities cite the equal importance of democracy and Islam to the quality of life and progress of the Muslim world. They see no contradiction between democratic values and religious principles.
•Political freedoms are among the things they admire most about the West.
•Substantial majorities in nearly all nations say that if drafting a new constitution, they would guarantee freedom of speech.
•Most want neither theocracy nor secular democracy but a third model in which religious principles and democratic values coexist. They want their own democratic model that draws on Islamic law as a source.
•Significant majorities say religious leaders should play no direct role in drafting a constitution, writing legislation, determining foreign policy, or deciding how women dress in public.
Egyptians… express little interest in recreating their country in the image of Iran, as has been the fear among some Western commentators. Less than 1% say the Islamic Republic should be Egypt’s political model, and most Egyptians think religious leaders should provide advice to government authorities, as opposed to having full authority for determining the nation’s laws. The majority of residents in the Arab world’s most populous nation desire a democracy informed by religious values, not a theocracy.
•Majorities in most countries believe that women should have the same legal rights as men: They should have the right to vote, to hold any job outside the home that they qualify for, and to hold leadership positions at the cabinet and national council levels
•Majorities of men in virtually every country (including 62 percent in Saudi Arabia, 73 percent in Iran, and 81 percent in Indonesia) agree that women should be able to work at any job they qualify for.
•In Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote, 58 percent of men say women should be able to vote.
•While Muslim women favor gender parity, they do not endorse wholesale adoption of Western values.
So, while scientific polling of the Muslim world (not to mention American Muslims) reveals broad support for democratic principles, a rejection of theocracy, and support for women’s rights, that won’t stop the far right from parroting the thoroughly debunked but politically potent talking point that Islam is somehow uniquely anti-democratic, oppressive to women, and dangerous.
Bryan Fischer is the face of the grassroots prejudice to which Herman Cain is appealing and which will not likely be criticized by the rest of the GOP candidates. American right-wing politics has sunk to a new low. No longer is shredding the First Amendment considered fringe, crazy talk.
Fischer is not a lone anti-freedom bigot anymore. The GOP is right there with him.
LA MIRADA – The vandalism of a La Mirada mosque is not being investigated as a hate crime, Sheriff’s Department officials said Tuesday.
Someone threw a rock through the mosque’s newly installed rear doors between 2 and 6 p.m. Monday, according to Rezaur Rahman, the president of Muslim Community Services Inc.
“This is not being classified as a hate crime right now because there is nothing to substantiate it as one,” said Lt. Pat Valdez of the sheriff’s La Mirada Station. “(But) we are very concerned about it and have already notified our department’s Terrorism Early Warning Group.”
The congregation finished prayer at 2 p.m. Monday and Rahman did not return until before the evening’s prayer session.
“Everything was fine before I left the mosque yesterday afternoon, and when I returned later that evening, I noticed shattered glass on the floor near our newly installed doors,” Rahman said.
“I found a rock lying among the shattered glass and was very surprised that it could have broken through our very strong, double-layered doors,” he said.
Deputies from the sheriff’s Norwalk Station responded to the scene, 14225 Imperial Highway, 10 minutes after Rahman reported the incident.
Authorities took pictures and secured the rock as evidence.
The report has been filed as a vandalism incident and additional patrols have been placed in the mosque’s area to ensure its safety until the investigation is completed, officials said.
The mosque opened on Feb. 16 after an eight-month renovation that began in July 2010.
“This is something that motivates me to create a peace rally,” Rahman said.
Rahman said he contacted Rabbi Mark Goldfarb of Temple Beth Ohr and the Rev. Bill Miller of United Methodist Church, relaying the news regarding the incident and his interest in organizing a community peace rally.
“We’re all concerned with the situation and the Whittier Area Interfaith
Council is determined to make it clear that this is not acceptable in our community,” Miller said.
“It is an outrage and when one of us is hurt, we’re all hurt and it’s our job to stand together when things like this happen,” he said.
The congregation reconvened at 9:30 p.m. Monday for prayer which lasted until 5 a.m. Tuesday.
“At first we were afraid to publicize this, but we think it’s better if we do because we need to do our part to let everyone know that we’re here and we want peace,” Rahman said.
“It’s deeply troubling to hear about the incident at the La Mirada mosque. Unfortunately mosque vandalism around the nation is not uncommon, however, we should remember those incidents are not widespread and the American Muslim community continues to live in peace and harmony with their American neighbors and citizens,” Munira Syeda, a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Tuesday.
“It is also important to remember that as Americans, we need to continue to increase bridge-building and the understanding of our various minorities and those who may not know that much about the Islamic and Muslim faith. Mosques are American houses of worship and the Muslim faith is a positive part of our country. We ask mosque members to remain vigilant and report vandalism incidents to their local authorities right away,” Syeda said.
A similar incident took place on March 19, one month after the mosque opened.
“Luckily no one was here when the incident took place because someone could have been hurt,” Rahman said.
Southern Baptist leader Richard Land chided presidential candidate Herman Cain for disregarding the constitutional rights of U.S. Muslims during a Monday C-SPAN interview.
He reminded Cain that as a Christian and an African American, he should have a special interest in the enforcement of the constitution in all communities.
Last week, Cain told reporters that the plan to build the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in Rutherford County, Tenn., is “an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion.” He sided with community members who have protested the center saying the center is “another way to gradually sneak Sharia law into our laws.”
Cain, an associate pastor at Antioch Baptist Church North and a GOP presidential hopeful, argued last week that the ICM is not an “innocent mosque” and warned of the threat of Sharia (Islamic law) to American laws. He asserted in a Sunday Fox News interview that the Murfreesboro community has the right to ban the center’s construction.
Land said he agrees that allowing Sharia law in the courts is unconstitutional, as it also violates the rights of women. He agreed that it should not be enforced in America’s legal system or government, but reminded the public that that the First Amendment allows for religious freedom.
“I think the First Amendment is one of those amendments that is too important and protects rights that are too central to our guaranteed rights in this country to be left with a local option,” he asserted.
Like Christians, Muslims have the right to have places of worship near where they live, Land said. Additionally, Muslims and Christians have the shared right to abide by the rules of their faith as long as that faith is not imposed on the government, he argued.
Muslim women in America have a right to choose to be veiled and abide by Sharia in their marriages. Land said that he would fight to the death to protect Christians’ right to abide by biblical precepts in their marriages. Similarly he contended, “I defend to the death of their (Muslims’) right” to marry according to their customs.
The Southern Baptist also asserted that Cain, who boasts that he is the descendent of slaves, should defend Muslims’ rights under the Constitution so that they are upheld in every community, city and state.
“Mr. Cain of all people, as an African American, should understand that our civil rights have to be guaranteed on a federal level,” he said. “I don’t think he would want to leave the civil rights of an African American to the local voters in Philadelphia and Mississippi where they buried three civil rights workers – one black, two white – under a dam after they had killed them.”
In a press release released on Tuesday, King said:
“At this hearing, the third in a series, we will examine Somalia-based terrorist organization al-Shabaab’s ongoing recruitment, radicalization, and training of young Muslim-Americans and al-Shabaab’s linking up with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).“In Minnesota, Ohio, and other states, dozens of young Muslim males have been recruited, radicalized, and then taken from their communities for overseas terrorist training by al-Shabaab. In a number of cases, the men – including both Somali-Americans and other converts — have ended up carrying out suicide bombings or have otherwise been killed, often without their families even knowing where their sons have gone. There has not been sufficient cooperation from mosque leaders. In at least one instance, a Minnesota imam told the desperate family of a missing young man not to cooperate with the FBI.
“There are growing concerns that al-Shabaab in Somalia is linking up with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen to better train these radicalized young men in order to attack Americans around the world, or potentially shift their focus to attacking our homeland.
“This coordinated and ongoing recruitment and radicalization of young Muslim men in the U.S. is a serious and growing threat to our homeland security and simply cannot be ignored.”
It is time to stop giving Herman Cain’s unapologetic bigotry a free pass. The man and his poison need to be seen clearly and taken seriously.
Imagine the reaction if a major-party presidential candidate — one who, like Cain, shows actual support in the polls — said he “wouldn’t be comfortable” appointing a Jew to a Cabinet position. Imagine the outrage if this same candidate loudly supported a community’s efforts to block Mormons from building a house of worship.
But Cain’s prejudice isn’t against Mormons or Jews, it’s against Muslims. Open religious prejudice is usually enough to disqualify a candidate for national office — but not, apparently, when the religion in question is Islam.
On Sunday, Cain took the position that any community in the nation has the right to prohibit Muslims from building a mosque. The sound you hear is the collective hum of the Founding Fathers whirring like turbines in their graves.
Freedom of religion is, of course, guaranteed by the Constitution. There’s no asterisk or footnote exempting Muslims from this protection. Cain says he knows this. Obviously, he doesn’t care.
Cain’s remarks came as “Fox News Sunday”host Chris Wallace was grilling him about his obsession with the attempt by some citizens of Murfreesboro, Tenn., to halt construction of a mosque. Wallace noted that the mosque has operated at a nearby site for more than 20 years, and asked, sensibly, what the big deal is.
Cain launched into an elaborate conspiratorial fantasy about how the proposed place of worship is “not just a mosque for religious purposes” and how there are “other things going on.”
This imagined nefarious activity, it turns out, is a campaign to subject the nation and the world to Islamic religious law. Anti-mosque activists in Murfreesboro are “objecting to the fact that Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, sharia law,” Cain said. “That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”
Let’s return to the real world for a moment and see how bogus this argument is. Presumably, Cain would include Roman Catholicism among the “traditional religions” that deserve constitutional protection. It happens that our legal system recognizes divorce, but the Catholic Church does not. This, by Cain’s logic, must constitute an attempt to impose “Vatican law” on an unsuspecting nation.
Similarly, Jewish congregations that observe kosher dietary laws must be part of a sinister plot to deprive America of its God-given bacon.
Wallace was admirably persistent in pressing Cain to either own up to his prejudice or take it back. “But couldn’t any community then say we don’t want a mosque in our community?” Wallace asked.
“They could say that,” Cain replied.
“So you’re saying any community, if they want to ban a mosque. . .,” Wallace began.
“Yes, they have the right to do that,” Cain said.
For the record, they don’t. For the record, there is no attempt to impose sharia law; Cain is taking arms against a threat that exists only in his own imagination. It makes as much sense to worry that the Amish will force us all to commute by horse and buggy.
This demonization of Muslims is not without precedent. In the early years of the 20th century, throughout the South, white racists used a similar “threat” — the notion of black men as sexual predators who threatened white women — to justify an elaborate legal framework of segregation and repression that endured for decades.
As Wallace pointed out, Cain is an African American who is old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation. “As someone who, I’m sure, faced prejudice growing up in the ’50s and the ’60s, how do you respond to those who say you are doing the same thing?”
Cain’s response was predictable: “I tell them that’s absolutely not true, because it is absolutely, totally different. . . . We had some laws that were restricting people because of their color and because of their color only.”
Wallace asked, “But aren’t you willing to restrict people because of their religion?”
Said Cain: “I’m willing to take a harder look at people that might be terrorists.”
Generations of bigots made the same argument about black people. They’re irredeemably different. Many of them may be all right, but some are a threat. Therefore, it’s necessary to keep all of them under scrutiny and control.
Bull Connor and Lester Maddox would be proud.
Eugene Robinson will be online to chat with readers at 1 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
The man at the center of this story is 59-year-old Jordanian-American Omar al-Omari. He looks very much like the college professor that he is — tweed jacket, button-down shirt, thick round glasses, drinking coffee. We met at a coffee shop near downtown Columbus, Ohio, where he laid out a series of events that ended with him being accused of having links to terrorism.
“Actually, I was out of town, out of state, attending a conference and on my way back to Columbus,” Omari said, “and I received a call from one of the attendees of this conference in which I was told my name was used repeatedly during the training. Apparently I was labeled as a suspect. They personalized the attacks. There was a promise to dig into my background, and basically, as an Arab-Muslim American, they thought I’m a suspect.”
Omari was singled out at a three-day seminar for local police and law enforcement in the Columbus area last April. The class was part of a larger nationwide initiative to help local law enforcement not just understand terrorism, but perhaps find ways to stop it. The Obama administration has set aside millions of dollars to fund these training programs, and, not surprisingly, that money has helped create an industry in which self-styled terrorism experts contract themselves out to local police departments as terrorism tutors.
There is no certification process to vet the experts. They simply present their resumes and, often through word of mouth, they get hired. The trainers tend to be former government officials. Sometimes they have had key roles in the federal government fighting terrorism. Just as often, they have not. There’sgrowing evidence that many of these training sessions are providing officers at the grass roots with a biased view of Muslims in America. Thatis what appears to have happened to Omari.
The training at the Columbus Division of Police took place over three days in mid-April 2010. The course was titled “Understanding the True Nature of the Threat to America.” Broad outlines of the curriculum are posted on the trainers’ website. The course includes a discussion about the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States; Islamic law as it relates to jihad; and the trainers say they will provide “specific examples of Muslim Brotherhood/Islamic Movement activity in the locale in which the presentation is given.” It was in that context that Omari became a target.
One of the trainers in Ohio that day was a man named John Guandolo. He’s a former FBI agent and former Marine. According to people in the training class that day and Guandolo himself, a photograph of Omari with members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a local Muslim advocacy group, was put up on the screen. According to the people who were there, Guandolo and the other visiting trainers didn’t say outright that Omari was a terrorist, but they suggested that he had links to bad people — people who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and even al-Qaida.
“I stand by what I said that day about Omari,” Guandolo told me, though he declined to say so on tape. “The facts are on my side.”
Now, to understand why the accusations against Omari were so surprising, it is important to know that at the time he ran a key Muslim outreach program for the state of Ohio. What he was doing for the state’s Department of Public Safety was considered so effective, counterterrorism officials in Washington sent him overseas to talk about it.
Omari is from Jordan. He has been living in the U.S. for 30 years, and he’s an American citizen. Even so, for people in the counterterrorism class in Columbus that day, it seemed entirely possible that he could be a terrorist. And that reaction in the room surprised a lot of people — most notably Deputy Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Columbus Division of Police. Blackwell is now in charge of the division’s homeland security unit.
“I was shocked,” he said. “I was shocked that a person at Omar’s level inthe state of Ohio in the Department of Public Safety would have his picture displayed by an anti-terrorism group. His reputation was impugned incredibly by the speakers.”
Blackwell and other officials suspended the class to make sense of what happened. “We had a meeting and we discussed what we were witnessing right before our very eyes, what was transpiring in the lecture hall,” Blackwell said. What was so strange about Omari being singled out was that nearly everyone in the room knew him, or at least had heard of him. He was one of Ohio’s most high-visibility Muslims. Many of the visiting officers and Columbus officers had actually worked with Omari on outreach in the Muslim community.
“I knew him really well,” Blackwell said. “And I thought he was a great professional, so that was part of the reason why I was so surprised when his picture popped up in the presentation.”
But for some reason, maybe because former government officials said Omari couldn’t be trusted, Blackwell watched as some people in the room were ready to believe the worst.
“There were a large amount of people there that felt the class was in fact appropriate — that the finger-pointing and the name-calling and the nexuses that were developed and discussed were appropriate to discuss,” he said. “And then you had a huge percentage that were equally and diametrically opposed to that way of teaching and the substance of the anti-terrorism class.”
And the lesson Blackwell took from their reaction?
“That as Americans we are all over the board on our feelings about the terrorism issue,” he said. “And as a law enforcement professional, even law enforcement is divided in how they view people.”
The next day, some people came to Omari’s defense. The head of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force and one of the FBI’s top agents in Ohio both arrived at the academy and assured the class that Omari wasn’t a terrorism suspect. Everyone says that at that point the room erupted in shouts. Half the officers sided with Omari. The other half trusted the trainer, Guandolo. Blackwell said they assumed he must be privy to intelligence on Omari that he wasn’t revealing.
Guandolo suggested when I interviewed him on the phone that there were things he knew about Omari that the FBI didn’t. “We know we have our facts right, because we have to,” Guandolo said. (Nearly a dozen sources contacted by NPR in the intelligence community, the FBI and at the Department of Homeland Security said Omari has no links to terrorists or terrorism. They said the accusations against him are unfounded.)
Bill Braniff, who is in charge of the training program at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, sees what happened in Ohio as part of a larger problem.
“I think this is something that happens across the nation fairly consistently,” he said. “No one is tracking this with numbers, but anecdotally we are hearing about it all the time. The Muslim-American community is being preyed upon from two different directions. One, the jihadist recruitment and radicalization that is actively preying on their sons and daughters; and two, the elevated levels of Islamophobia — Islamophobia at worst and distrust and alienation at best.”
That distrust had real consequences in Columbus. Omari lost his job with the state of Ohio, though not because of claims that he had ties to terrorism. After that training session, officials began digging into Omari’s past, and they eventually found something: They discovered that his employment application was incomplete. He hadn’t listed all of the schools where he had worked before taking the job with the state of Ohio. Omari says he just listed places where he had taught relevant courses — courses that touched on Middle Eastern studies. But he was fired anyway — some six months after the training session.
Federal officials familiar with the case say Omari was singled out because he distinguished between extremist Muslims and mainstream Muslims in his outreach and training programs. Guandolo, the trainer, had a different view. When he talked to me about Muslim groups in the U.S., he spoke in terms of whether or not Muslims were patriotic.
Omari, for his part, still can’t believe he got fired. “I lost a lot of things over this,” he said. “I lost respect, dignity, reputation — everything really was connected with that, and definitely, you know, how could you defend yourself?”
Chief Blackwell says even more than a year after the episode, he’s still upset. “That was not a good day, in my opinion, for the Columbus Division of Police or law enforcement in general,” he said.
Omari filed suit last week against the Ohio Department of Public Safety and several individuals for wrongful dismissal. He said he’d love to get his job back. And the trainers who came to the Columbus police department? One of them is scheduled to hold another training session in August at the CIA.
On September 21, 2001, a 41-year old white supremacist from Dallas walked into a gas station and opened fire on people he believed to be Arabs. Enraged by the 9/11 attacks, the shooter, Mark Anthony Stroman, killed an Indian man who was Hindu and a Pakistani man who was Muslim. Rais Bhuiyan, a 37-year old Muslim Air Force pilot from Bangladesh, was Stroman’s third victim. Shot in the face at close range with a double-barrel gun, Bhuiyan survived the attack, suffering now from partial blindness. After admitting to the attacks, Stroman is scheduled to be executed tomorrow in Texas.
Bhuiyan, the lone survivor of Stroman’s attack, is now trying to save his life. After the attack, Bhuiyan told the New York Times that he spent his time “simply struggling to survive in this country.” But pulling on his profound capacity for forgiveness, he has spent the last several months petitioning Texas to spare Stroman’s life. When asked why, Bhuiyan said his Islamic faith taught him not to seek vengeance and that what Stroman “did was out of ignorance” about Islam:
Q Mr. Stroman has admitted trying to kill you. Why are you trying to save his life?
A I was raised very well by my parents and teachers. They raised me with good morals and strong faith. They taught me to put yourself in others’ shoes. Even if they hurt you, don’t take revenge. Forgive them. Move on.It will bring something good to you and them. My Islamic faith teaches me this too. He said he did this as an act of war and a lot of Americans wanted to do it but he had the courage to do it — to shoot Muslims. After it happened I was just simply struggling to survive in this country. I decided that forgiveness was not enough.That what he did was out of ignorance. I decided I had to do something to save this person’s life. That killing someone in Dallas is not an answer for what happened on Sept. 11.
Q If you had the chance to meet Mr. Stroman, what would you say to him?
A I requested a meeting with Mr. Stroman. I’m eagerly awaiting to see him in person and exchange ideas. I would talk about love and compassion. We all make mistakes. He’s another human being, like me. Hate the sin, not the sinner. It’s very important that I meet him to tell him I feel for him and I strongly believe he should get a second chance. That I never hated the U.S. He could educate a lot of people.
In response to Bhuiyan’s efforts, Stroman had this to say:
Q What do you think of Rais Bhuiyan’s efforts to keep you from being executed?
A “Yes, Mr Rais Bhuiyan, what an inspiring soul…for him to come forward after what ive done speaks Volume’s…and has really Touched My heart and the heart of Many others World Wide…Especially since for the last 10 years all we have heard about is How Evil the Islamic faith Can be…its proof that all are Not bad nor Evil.”
Stroman’s realization stands in stark contrast — and as a strong rebuke — of the nation’s continuing descent into an Islamophobic age. Americans are living through a time when theexistence of Islam in the U.S. is seen as an insidious infiltration of homegrown terror and the sight of anything or anyoneIslamic sparks visceral paranoia and outrage. Instead of fighting this reactionary tide, conservative politicians are exploiting the right-wing hatred as a way to raise their profile. Be it through congressionalhearings or campaignplatforms, the marginalization of Americans because of their faith threatens our core values and cultivates the very attitudes that stoke those like Stroman to violence.
Bhuiyan’s “deep Islamic Beliefs Have gave him the strength to Forgive the Un-forgiveable…that is truly Inspiring to me, and should be an Example for us all. The Hate, has to stop, we are all in this world together,” said Stroman. “Its almost been 10 years since The world stopped Turning, and we as a nation will never be able to forget what we felt that day, I surely wont, but I can tell you what im feeling Today, and that’s very grateful for Rais Bhuiyan’s Efforts to save my life after I tried to end His.”
The surreal world of anti-Muslim Islamophobia knows no bounds. Islamophobes and the political class that panders to them have been caught with their pants down–figuratively for once. Since 9/11, these traffickers in hate have profited from the development of an industry of “terror expert professionals,” consisting of so-called: “ex-terrorists,” “ex-Muslims,” “scholars,” “think tank gurus,” pontificating on the incompatibility of Islam and Democracy, the danger of a growing Muslim populace in the West, the need to be suspicious of Muslims, Muslims’ susceptibility to terrorism, etc.
This narrative belies reality, Muslims who commit terrorism are an extreme minority, in fact what is most glaring in the face of this propaganda is what Charles Kurzman terms, The Missing Martyrs (book review to come soon). For all the hackneyed anti-Muslim diatribe and hypotheses of an omnipresent and ever dangerous “Islamic terrorism,” what is remarkable is the absence of “would-be martyrs,” let alone a threat level that is blown out of all proportion. The Arab Spring has, more than anything else, dealt a stinging, if not lethal blow to the harbingers of doom.
What is most irksome is that the real radicals, the ones who draw us into endless war, increase hostilities amongst communities, and hob nob with anti-freedom organizations are the same individuals projecting their worldview onto Muslims.
Where else (with the exception of perhaps a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel) could we witness a House Homeland Security Sub-committee Hearing being chaired by a Congressman who once was the most outspoken advocate of a terrorist organization. Rep. Peter King’s involvement with the IRA while they were targeting and murdering civilians is well known, and the hypocrisy and double standard of him chairing hearings on “American Muslim radicalization” is painfully evident.
This however is not the only, or even the most glaring example we can turn to of Congressmen or former high ranking government officials supporting or advocating on behalf of a terrorist organization.
Congressmen (including Democrats) and former government officials have met with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization that was designated a terrorist group in 1997 when the list was first compiled, and is STILL ON THE LIST–for now.
MEK has a very aggressive and organized lobby effort in Washington D.C. According to one House staffer, the MEK is “the most mobilized grassroots advocacy effort in the country — AIPAC included.” Their mission is to be delisted as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), push the USA to foment war with Iran, i.e. “regime change,” and have themselves installed into power. Sound familiar?
They attempt to pass themselves off as the sole legitimate opposition to the Iranian regime, going so far as to claim that they are the Green Movement or the government in exile. Now there is a quiet push to have them delisted from the FTO list:
Members of Congress led by Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) have introduced a resolutioncalling on the Secretary of State and the President to throw the support of the United States behind an exiled Iranian terrorist group seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime and install themselves in power. Calling the exiled organization “Iran’s main opposition,” Filner is urging the State Department to end the blacklisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — a group listed by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The resolution currently has 83 cosponsors and is gaining significant ground.
Such a move would have disastrous repercussions for the USA, and would inevitably lead to blowback considering what the MEK is about:
[F]or the record, here are the facts about the MEK (you can find this and more at www.mekterror.com):
The State Department reports the MEK is a terrorist group that has murdered innocent Americans and maintains “the will and capacity” to commit terrorist attacks within the U.S. and beyond. [1]
The MEK claims to have renounced terrorism in 2001, but a 2004 FBI report states “the MEK is currently actively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism.” [2]
The leaders of the Green Movement, Iran’s true popular opposition movement, have denounced the MEK and warned that the Iranian government seeks to discredit Iran’s opposition by associating it with the MEK:
“The Iranian Government is trying to connect those who truly love their country (the Greens) with the MEK to revive this hypocritical dead organization.” – Mehdi Karroubi, Green Movement leader. [6]
“The MEK can’t be part of the Green Movement. This bankrupt political group is now making some laughable claims, but the Green Movement and the MEK have a wall between them and all of us, including myself, Mr. Mousavi, Mr. Khatami, and Mr. Karroubi.” – Zahra Rahnavard, Women’s rights activist and wife of Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi[7]
Iraqi National Congress Redux?
The MEK claims it is “the main opposition in Iran,” yet similar to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress that helped bring the United States into war with Iraq, the MEK is an exiled organization that has no popular support within Iran. [8]
RAND reports that the MEK are “skilled manipulators of public opinion.” The MEK has a global support network with active lobbying and propaganda efforts in major Western capitals. [9]
Members of Congress have been deceived and misinformed into supporting this terrorist organization:
In 2002, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen led efforts for the U.S. to support the group, prompting then-Chairman and the Ranking Member of the House International Affairs Committee, Henry Hyde and Tom Lantos, to send a Dear Colleague warning against supporting the MEK. They cautioned that many Members had been “embarrassed when confronted with accurate information about the MEK.” [10]
In the current Congress, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) have each introduced resolutions calling for MEK to be removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list.
A Capacity and Will to Commit Terrorist Acts in the U.S. & Beyond
The Bush administration determined in 2007 that “MEK leadership and members across the world maintain the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.” [11]
The Canadian and Australian governments have also designated the MEK as a terrorist organization. The Canadian government just reaffirmed its designation in December.[12][13]
An EU court removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations, but only due to procedural reasons. According to a spokesperson for the Council of the European Union, the EU court “did not enter into the question of defining or not the PMOI [MEK] as a terrorist organization.” [14]
Saddam Hussein’s Terrorist Militia
The MEK received all of its military assistance and most of its financial support from Saddam Hussein, including funds illegally siphoned from the UN Oil-for-Food Program, until 2003. [15]
The MEK helped execute Saddam’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds. Maryam Rajavi, the MEK’s permanent leader, instructed her followers to “take the Kurds under your tanks.” [16]
A Cult That Abuses Its Own Members
Human Rights Watch reports that MEK commits extensive human rights abuses against its own members at Camp Ashraf, including “torture that in two cases led to death.”[17]
A RAND report commissioned by DOD found that the MEK is a cult that utilizes practices such as mandatory divorce, celibacy, authoritarian control, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse, confiscation of assets, emotional isolation, and the imprisonment of dissident members. [18]
RAND concluded that up to 70% of the MEK members at their Camp Ashraf headquarters were likely recruited through deception and are kept there against their will. [19]
The FBI reports that the MEK’s “NLA [National Liberation Army] fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MEK’s Support Network. […] These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if the children did not cooperate with the MEK. ”[20]
A History of Anti-Americanism
One of the founding ideologies of the MEK is anti-Americanism—the MEK is responsible for murdering American businessmen, military personnel, and even a senior American diplomat. [21]
The MEK strongly supported the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, vigorously opposed their eventual release, and chastised the government for not executing the hostages. [22]
The MEK was Not “Added” to the FTO List as a Goodwill Gesture to Iran
The MEK is opposed by the Iranian people due to its history of terrorist attacks against civilians in Iran and its close alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
The greatest beneficiaries of delisting MEK would be Ahmadinejad and Iranian hardliners who seek to link the U.S. and the Green Movement to MEK.
U.S. support for MEK would be used as a propaganda tool by hardliners to delegitimize and destroy Iran’s true democracy movement.
American credibility among the Iranian people would be ruined if the U.S. supported this group.
This should all gives us pause. Do the elected and former government officials who support delisting the MEK know the troubling anti-American, terrorist history of the MEK? If they do, then how in good conscious can they actively push to delist them?
The scenario that keeps coming to mind is cover for war or a possible Israeli attack against Iran. A possibility that seems ever more likely as MJ Rosenburg wrote recently:
A longtime CIA officer who spent 21 years in the Middle East is predicting that Israel will bomb Iran in the fall, dragging the United States into another major war and endangering US military and civilian personnel (and other interests) throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Earlier this week, Robert Baer appeared on the provocative KPFK Los Angeles show Background Briefing, hosted by Ian Masters. It was there that he predicted that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is likely to ignite a war with Iran in the very near future.
Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Robert Spencer’s link to the MEK. Spencer frequently spews insults at Reza Aslan for being a board member of the NIAC. In his “expert” opinion true Iranian Freedom organizations oppose the NIAC, and view them as tools of the Mullahs.
A contemptuous claim if it wasn’t so laughable, considering that the NIAC has frequently spoken out against the Iranian regime and has thrown its weight completely behind the Green Movement.
Spencer comes to this conclusion based on the opinion of his friends in a group called the PDMI or Pro-Democracy Movement of Iran. No one really knows how many people are in the PDMI, all they have is a blogspot website which Spencer links. The website is quite strange, it has an image of former Iranian dictator Reza Shah, and also articles supporting the MEK. Is it another MEK front group? One recent article from July 15 is titled “Iran, Mujahedin-e Khalq, and the US State Department,” by Hamid Yazdanpanah, who writes:
[W]hat has consistently been a go-to practice in appeasing Tehran? The harassment and terrorist listing of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK)…the terrorist designation of the MEK arose purely out of appeasement of the Iranian regime…The terrorist designation of the MEK has not only failed to appease the Iranian regime, it has resulted in severe harm and restriction for an organization devoted to the liberation of the Iranian people. The State Department has a moral and legal obligation to undo this grave error and delist the MEK.
It looks as if on top of all the conspiracies, hatred, and anti-Freedom ideas that Spencer pushes he is also linked to the terrorist MEK. Human Events, another website Spencer writes for contains articles supporting the MEK, such as this one by James Zumwalt. Can we now begin every piece on Spencer with, “The MEK linked Robert Spencer…”?
Sadly, this chimera world in which the Islamophobes and their allies turn everything upside down or sweep it under the rug hoping no one will find the truth is real. We are confronted with an organized mechanism of propaganda seeking to profit from endless war, occupation, hatred, hypocrisy and double standards. We are in an age in which the Supreme Court has upheld a “criminal prohibition on advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization,” and yet our Congressmen, and their lobbyist friends can get away with doing exactly that when it suits their purposes!
*Update: There are more Islamophobes involved in the cynical nexus of bringing legitimacy to the MEK. One such longtime advocate has been neo-Conservative Daniel Pipes, who rather seems like a mild Islamophobe these days. For his support of the MEK see, Daniel Pipes: My Writings on the Mujahedeen-e Khalq. (hat tip: NassirH)
Ultra-Orthodox protestors clashing with police on Jerusalem’s Neviim Street on Saturday. By Nir Hasson Photo by: Olivier Fitoussi
There were 800 ultra-Orthodox protesters attempting to block traffic on Shabbat due to religious motivation, but if Muslims did something of this caliber, everyone would mention that Islam demands all Muslims to act like this.
Police arrived on horseback to disperse the crowd on the central Neviim Street, using a water-spraying vehicle to push the ultra-Orthodox protesters back toward the curb and allow traffic to resume. Protesters yelled out “Shabbos” and “Nazis” and threw objects as police remained in the vicinity to keep the peace.
Earlier this week, Jerusalem District Commander Niso Shaham requested that secular activists refrain from protesting ultra-Orthodox attempts to close off the road, explaining that this would only fuel tensions. The commander pledged to take the necessary measures to ensure traffic would flow as usual on the central Jerusalem road.
Saturday’s events come just days after ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim residents set fire to trash cans and hurled rocks at police officers to protest the shutting down of an illegal slaughterhouse. Six policemen were wounded in the fray.
Neviim Street, a central Jerusalem road, is one of the most important avenues of transportation in the capital, particularly since the closure of Yaffo Road to traffic in recent years. Neviim also serves as a border between ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and the cultural and shopping center of the city.
Secular residents claim that the police are turning a blind eye to ultra-Orthodox efforts to block traffic on the street every Saturday, with hundreds of religious men often resorting to violence in a bid to prevent cars from desecrating Shabbat.
Although police have successfully prevented the total closure of Neviim Street in the past, secular drivers have complained of ultra-Orthodox zealots kicking, hitting, and throwing bottles on their cars when they attempt to drive through the street.
In the boiling caldron of American outrage, here’s one to throw in the pot.
In this faded industrial town on the Erie Canal, the old United Methodist church downtown is being turned into a mosque, the old roof topped with minarets, the crescent moon and star of Islam on new white stucco replacing the familiar red-brick facade. Like the immigrants and refugees making up an ever-increasing share of the local population and the 42 languages spoken in the local schools, it is one more sign of how much the familiar world here is fading into the past.
Somehow, though, people here have not been given the current script. Instead, while mosques and Islamic community centers have been contested from near ground zero and Staten Island to Murfreesboro, Tenn., Temecula, Calif., and Sheboygan, Wis., Utica is a place where the dog hasn’t barked.
Instead, the mosque has been welcomed by, among others, former church members grateful that the old building will be saved. Some 200 people showed up this month for a tour by the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica.
Utica is hardly some post-racial nirvana, and it probably helps that the Muslim community is largely Bosnian, not Arab. But if we had today’s stories told by Frank Capra rather than by talk radio, there are more than a few that could be told in this town, which is being revived by immigrants and is embracing difference not in the didactic style of do-gooder moralizing but as a continuation of what Utica has always been.
“Where would we be today if no one welcomed the Italians, like my father, the Irish, the Polish, who became the backbone of this community,” said Mayor David R. Roefaro, who owns a funeral home. “When I ran for office, my slogan was ‘We’re in this together,’ because I believe it.”
Like most of upstate New York, Utica has seen better days. The population, more than 100,000 for much of the past century, is now around 60,000. Most of the old textile and manufacturing jobs are gone. That said, a flood of immigrants and resettled refugees, Bosnians, Burmese, Somalis, Vietnamese, Iraqis and many others, who now make up about a quarter of the population, have almost stopped the population decline. The Bosnians, in particular, have refurbished much of the housing, and Utica feels like a place with a pulse and maybe even a future.
“I’ve been here for eight years, and to watch the transformation, new stores, new restaurants, has been amazing,” said Peter D. Vogelaar, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees. He said an estimated 600 houses had been purchased by refugees, helping to prop up the housing market. “Utica is a model for a small community in terms of integrating and acculturating emerging populations.”
So while some other communities grapple with English-only movements, Utica’s City Hall does its best to provide information in all the languages its residents speak while they learn English. The city and the Muslim community together came up with a plan to save the old church building, its basement underwater, which would have cost the city $1 million to demolish.
Would the mosque construction have been as placid if it began now or if the congregation came from somewhere else or looked Middle Eastern rather than European? Maybe not. But the imam, Ahmedin Mehmedovic, said he took pains to be sensitive to the community, making sure to save and return all the religious artifacts to the church members, and he wasn’t surprised his congregation was treated well in return.
“I think the main point is to respect each other,” he said. “So if you respect me as a Muslim and as a good man, I’ll respect you, too. I’ll try to do what’s best for you. You’ll try to do what’s best for me. In Utica, there is a big harmony between different religions and different congregations.”
Not all is harmony. The Republican candidate for Congress, Richard Hanna, expressed support last week for the project in Lower Manhattan, only to have the Democratic incumbent, Michael Arcuri, come out against it. On Monday, Mr. Hanna changed course, calling the project “an affront to the victims of 9/11.”
Still, it’s not a fight people seem to want at home. Maybe if you came here to experience freedom, religious and otherwise, you appreciate it more than the guardians of morality insistent on leaving no hot button untouched, no election-year skirmish in the culture wars worth walking away from.
On an Israeli Russian-language site IzRus we can see this news item from 12.07.2011:
Russian nationalists met in Israel with a right-wing Zionists
One of the leaders of Russia’s National Democratic Alliance, who visited Israel together with his colleagues at the invitation of religious-right-wing Zionists, came to the conclusion that the two political forces have a lot in common …
Since last week, in Israel there is a group of moderate [ethnic] Russian nationalists from Russia, arrived here at the invitation of the religious-right bloc “Ihud ha-Leumi” (“National Unity”). The leaders of an interregional public association of the National Democratic Alliance (established in March 2010) made several trips to the Holy Land, visited the Knesset, and the memorial complex “Yad Vashem”. Following the visit, co-chairman of the movement Ilya Lazarenko came to the conclusion that the Russian nationalists and right-wing Zionists have much in common. “We are very much in common, and first of all – rejection of violent Islamism, which is a threat to civilization – he said to the portal IzRus. – We also have some ideological overlap associated with the objectives of nation-building and its operation.”
Russian political leaders in recent years emphasize the multi-ethnic country and its citizens need to instill ethnic and religious tolerance. However, Lazarenko is convinced that in Russia today it is not only appropriate but also very important to talk about national component. “The national problem in Russia – this is primarily a[n ethnic] Russian problem, all the rest follow. The problem is that [ethnic] Russians don’t have their own national state, their homeland. Just as Jews didn’t have it for a long time,” – said Lazarenko.
The Russian version of the Israeli 7th channel - Arutz Sheva – that caters to the religious right-wing segment of the population provides further details of the visit.
Yesterday in Knesset leaders of the Russian National Democratic Alliance (NDA) met with the representative of the bloc “National Unity” MK Aryeh Eldad, head of the parliamentary lobby against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
Member of the “Union of Professors for strong Israel” Dr. Michael Pavlov
accompanied the group and translated during the meeting.
The meeting took place in a warm, friendly atmosphere, – said Dr. Pavlov. Aryeh Eldad was interested in the political platform of NDA and the opinion of the alliance about Israel and to certain Israeli politicians. In response to Ilya Lazarenko said he had been impressed by the visit to the Deputy Minister of Negev and Galilee Ayoob Kara. Mr. Lazarenko also warmly praised the bloc “National Unity”, believing members of this unit to be the real patriots of Israel.
[...]
Ilya Lazarenko said he hoped for further cooperation with the patriotic forces of Israel. MK Aryeh Eldad assessed the meeting as productive.
On the photo in the article are NDA’s Ilya Lazarenko (right) and Alexey Shiropayev(left).
For one week representatives of Russian public movement “National Democratic Alliance” (NDA) were in Israel.
Guests from Russia visited the memorial complex “Yad Vashem”, toured the West Bank, walking on Hebron and Jerusalem, and had a conversation at the “Round Table” in Netanya, with the extra-parliamentary and informal social and political organizations and movements, including “The Jewish Memorial “and the” Altalena – New Zionist revisionists.”
Guests from Russia, accompanied by Shlomo Lensky, editor of “7th channel” [Arutz Sheva] Tuvia Lerner and Dr. Michael Pavlov. Conversation with the deputy minister Ayoob Kara was also recorded by television reporters from “Israel Plus” channel (the same day, two representatives of the NDA were guests at the “Open Studio” show with David Cohn).
Says Dr. Michael Pavlov: “About a month ago I was contacted by my friend, asking for help in organizing the visit to Israel of the movement of Russian National-Democrats. I was a little confused, because, in my understanding a Russian nationalist is a drunken member of Pamyat society, brandishing an ax, shouting “Beat the Jews – save Russia.” However, looking at information about the movement of the national democrats, I was pleasantly surprised. It turns out that for a long time the movement takes the Israel-friendly stand, and was one of the few Russian organizations that fully supported Israel during “Operation Cast Lead.”
Yesterday there was a meeting of the co-chairmen of the NDA Alexey Shropayev and Ilya Lazarenko and the movement’s press secretary Alexander Galitskij and representatives of the St. Petersburg branch of the movement with the Deputy Minister development of Negev and Galilee Ayoob Kara. During the meeting, Mr Kara told about the blood relationship of the Druze – and specifically of his family – with the people and the State of Israel, as well as his vision of the Israeli national policy and current global threats. Russian leaders of the National Democratic Alliance Alexey Shiropayev and Ilya Lazarenko told about similar aspects of political life in Russia and have found many points of mutual understanding.
The Deputy Minister told guests that he had only recently returned from a trip to Europe, where he had met with representatives of right-wing national parties [Vlaams Belang/Dewinter - S.R.]. “Some accuse me of having links with the ultra-Right movements and leaders. But I say – Israel must find allies to fight the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism. Left-wing leaders can not understand what I explain to them for many years: we have no partner for negotiations among the Arab countries – they do not want the existence of a Jewish state at all. This is proved by our retreat from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Israel returned to the boundaries defined by the UN, “Hezbollah” and Hamas failed to cease hostilities against Israel. Every day I read the Arabic-speaking press and see all the duplicity: while in English the Islamists broadcast their love of peace, then in Arabic – they call for Islamic expansion and the destruction of Israel.”
[...]
Russian National Democrats were satisfied with the visit to Israel. “In Russia, most of the media lie about the Jewish occupation and discrimination against the Arab population. We visited Hebron, and have not seen any signs of occupation. On the contrary – most people in the Russian provinces would envy those conditions which are at the Arab residents of Hebron. We have seen in Israel the only effective model of national state in the world, preserving the democratic structures, and we believe that Russia has a lot to learn from Israel in this field “- the movement’s leader Alexey Shiropayev said.
Shlomo Lensky (deputy adviser to Michael Ben-Ari on ‘Russian’ Affairs) who accompanied the NDA group to the Knesset (as well as on a trip to Hebron, and to the “round table” in Netanya) noted that both for the Russian nationalists and for the Israeli right it was very important to break down stereotypes. “It is believed that if you’re a Russian nationalist – automatically you’re an anti-Semite and a fascist, etc., etc., and if you’re an Israeli right-wing you are always an extremist, a fanatic, a schismatic, and both – marginal. Meeting with Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara was an indication that it is the people who value and care about their country’s national interest who will find common language, who have a space for dialogue and may cooperate in the fight against common enemies, without being burdened with an inferiority complex and a variety of prejudices, “- said Shlomo Lensky.
Ayoob Kara has expressed willingness and even the desire to visit Russia as an official guest of the NDA, and said he would prefer St. Petersburg – a city about which he had heard many things, but, unlike other cities in Russia, and he hadn’t visited. “I am pleased to become a mediator between Russia’s NDA and similar national parties in Europe” – said Ayoob Kara.
OK, so who are Ilya Lazarenko and Alexey Shiropayev?
Ilya Lazarenko is best known as the founder of the so-called “Society of Nav“, a defunct pseudo-occult organization. Another name – “Church of the Great White Race”. It is described as a “racist ariosophic Gnostic-neo-Pagan organization which calls for the “rebirth of the Russian people as a part of the Aryan nations of the white race”. The organization “copies several elements of the KKK symbolics – gowns, pointy hats – but are very hostile to Abrahamic religions”. Lazarenko called this society “the Russian KKK”. See this link for some photos of their symbols, including the swastika.
In an old interview with Moscow News (quoted here) Lazarenko explained why the organization was founded on April 20:
April 20th was pointed out by the prevailing astrological situation. This is pure coincidence. Although we have nothing against Hitler. He was a good man, loved animals, children and his people.
Lazarenko claims: “We’re not fascists”, but then adds:
If we come to power, we will immediately introduce martial law, arrest the current government, restore the death penalty, will make Moscow a restricted area. We will revive the slogan “Beat the kikes, save Russia!” Modern rotten society is unable to resist. Like a goat on a string, it will follow the leader.
Lazarenko has a blog at LiveJournal, “ariognostic”. Here are a couple of his comments:
No trolling, actually.
That the NSDAP regime was Judeophobic is a fact.
That 6 million of specially killed Jews during the Holocaust are a myth – it is also a fact.
The method of “proving” the “6 million” is pure hysterics, nothing more. This myth doesn’t hang together.
2007-02-02 10:17 pm UTC
It would be more reasonable for Jews to admit that 80% of the “Holocaust” consist of inventions of the Allied war propaganda. The war propaganda was never “objective”. [...]
Being in sound mind, it is difficult to believe that “death camps” were effectively killing Jews up until the 70s, to get to the 6 million victims.
Nowadays even an attempt to get to the bottom of this causes hysterics.
[...]
There is no evidence of intended, massive extermination of any groups by national criteria in NS Germany.
Now Shiropayev. You can look at the Wiki article about him through Google Translate, or at this note. He was writing essays in defense of swastika back when he was still a Christian. He is well-known for his radical poetry. Some samples are here (use Google translate). Two examples of raw translation:
The sacred springOver Moscow – stormy expanse.
People and greenery come to life.
The day is such – the birthday of Adolf.
It means – the joy is in the sky.
Celestial strings rattle,
Continuing as flows of rain.
With undiluted bass of Perun
The Führer’s name responds.
Führer is with us – neither black bones
Nor the poor product of Hollywood.
He is the air in discharges of energy,
Which is clear as the Buddha.
He is a breath of spring tillage,
Washed clean by the triumphant sky.
He is the zenith with the Kolovrat of Salvation
And the jubilant roar of Messerschmitt.
Collapsed on Moscow as a flood
And as a pagan baptism Spree -
From the volatile mountains of airy Europe,
From the peaks of cloudy Hyperborea.
Zeus strikes the golden aegis,
Without giving cheap warranties.
This Spartan name – Hitler -
Comes to life under the sun, as an antique.
Führer with us! In the glow of a halo,
Shuddering roofs and grounds,
The sun-faced messenger of Olympus,
Who awakened the mystery of the Race.
Führer is alive! Wheel of Helios
Like a tsunami will crumple paranoia.
No, not the flocks of geese from Laos -
It is the souls of heroes are returning.
What is left is the shifting pile
From banners, legions and steel -
The Doric world of thunder and sun
Will rise from the hot ashes.
(C) Alexey Shiropaev, 2001
From another poem:
Greetings, our stern happiness,
The steel of space, the steep sky!
Catacomb symbols of swastikas
Hallow the concrete.
Singing “Horst Wessel”
I go out on the trail.
I hanged a Communist
On a high oak.[...]
How easy and pleasant it is
To pass through the woods,
While falling apart into the spots
Of the SS camouflage.
In his 2002 book “Prison of the Nation” [pdf] Shiropayev blames the Ukrainian famine of 1933 on the “Jewish Kremlin”. He writes:
But what can one say about nobility and aristocracy, if even in XIXth century the Jews, this, using Menshikov’s words, “Asiatic, extremely dangerous, extremely criminal people” have introduced their blood in the the Russian Imperial family?[...]As we see, the St. Petersburg emperors have inherited from the Moscow tsars the tradition of interracial sodomy. But the asiatic element was the new one. Instead of Tatar princes – Jewish bankers.
And further:
So, during the pre-October decades an organic “changing of the guard” in the elite layer of the Russia-Eurasia took place. “Steppe” element replaced by “desert” element, which was – because of many religio-historical features – far more anti-Aryan. Moreover, in contrast to the “nomads”, the “desert children” had developed an ideology of Talmudic racism, which proclaims religio-racial superiority of the Jews over “goyim” and, accordingly, the right of the “people of God” to rule and even the massively physically exterminate the “heathens”. Add to this the Jewish control over a significant part of international financial capital and the world’s masonic structures. All this did not promise the white population of Russia anything good. Tatarism must have seemed like “flowers”. This is what happened. Compared to Trotsky, Batu-Khan was an Asiatic liberal.[...]
Jews entered the Project to pursue their own goal – the power over the world, and that means primarily the Aryan world.
[...]
It was’t difficult for Jews to push Russia into war with Germany.
[...]
The organizers and main implementers of the the Tsar’s murder were, of course, the Jews.
[...]
By killing the Romanovs the Jews were exterminating the living memory about mother Europe, about Rus.
[...]
After the murder of White tsars, a genocide of the white population began on a monstrous scale. The second after oprichnina, but incomparably more powerful and fanatical Asiatic terror apparatus was created – the Cheka, in which acronym is hidden the Hebrew word meaning “slaughterhouse for cattle”, i.e. for all non-Jews-goyim according to the Talmud race theory.
These are the people who were invited by Ichud Ha-Leumi to Israel, whom Lensky and Lerner of Arutz Sheva promised to promote while they were visiting. What’s worse, judging by this interview an Arutz Sheva reporter took from Shiropayev after the latter visited Yad Vashem, AS people knew about his background – he is asked about his views about Hitler, about his poems (he, of course, dismisses it as mere poetry, says he grew out of it, and dishes out a boilerplate speech about the dangers of Islamism).
More ironically, these people are complete political non-entities in Russia – they have no influence, so this visit cannot be excused even as “Realpolitik”. In fact, it serves as a legitimization of these people in Russia.
Police at Kilmarnock are continuing enquiries and appealing for information after an elderly man was seriously assaulted in the early hours of Friday 15 July 2011.
The 71-year-old Asian man was discovered with serious facial injuries around 0130 hrs on Friday 15 July 2011 outside the Community Mosque in Hill Street, Kilmarnock. It is believed that he was attacked prior to opening the Mosque for a prayer session and was discovered by two fellow members of the Mosque who informed the emergency services.
The injured man was taken by ambulance to Crosshouse Hospital where he is currently being treated for his injuries. Hospital staff describe his condition as stable.
Chief Inspector Wilson Brown at Kilmarnock Police Office said: ”This is a despicable act of violence carried out on a defenceless man. At this time there would appear to be no motive for this attack however we can’t rule out the possibility of it being racially motivated.
“It is believed that the man was attacked prior to him opening the Mosque and it is not known how long he may have been lying on the ground injured before two fellow members discovered him.
“At the time that the injured man was discovered by his fellow members of the Mosque, another two young men approached them to assist. Unfortunately these two men left prior to police arrival and I’d like to ask them to contact police immediately as it is vital that we speak to them.
“I also urge anyone who has any information which could assist us in tracking down the person or persons responsible for this sickening attack to contact police.
Anyone with information should contact Kilmarnock Police Office on 01563 50500 or alternatively CRIMESTOPPERS on 0800 555 111 where anonymity can be maintained.
The Hill Street mosque was opened earlier this year after the conversion of what had formerly been the Hillhead Tavern. The conversion was denounced by the Scottish Defence League who held a demonstration in Kilmarnock in June last year.
Herman Cain said Sunday that Americans should be able to ban Muslims from building mosques in their communities.
“Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” Cain said in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community, and the people of that community do not like it. They disagree with it.”
Last week, the Republican presidential candidate expressed criticism of a planned mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, telling reporters at a campaign event that “This is just another way to try to gradually sneak Sharia law into our laws, and I absolutely object to that.”
“This isn’t an innocent mosque,” Cain said.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Wallace pressed him about those comments.
“Let’s go back to the fundamental issue,” Cain said. “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws — Sharia laws. That’s the difference between any one of our traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”
“So, you’re saying that any community, if they want to ban a mosque…” Wallace began.
On Sunday, Cain defended his position, telling Wallace that it’s not discrimination.
“Aren’t you willing to restrict people because of their religion?” Wallace asked.
“I’m willing to take a harder look at people who might be terrorists, that’s what I’m saying,” Cain replied. “Look, I know that there’s a peaceful group of Muslims in this country. God bless them and they’re free to worship. If you look at my career I have never discriminated against anybody, because of their religion, sex or origin or anything like that.”
“I’m simply saying I owe it to the American people to be cautious because terrorists are trying to kill us,” Cain said, “so yes I’m going to err on the side of caution rather than on the side of carelessness.”
NIAGARA FALLS — The arrest of a Niagara Falls woman accused of using ethnic slurs and assaulting a woman of Pakistani origin is “a troubling symptom” of increased anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, the spokesman of a national civil rights group said Friday.
“How do you prevent something like this if [you're a] law enforcement officer?” asked Ibrahim Hooper, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C.
“It’s almost impossible,” Hooper said. “I think it’s more of a job for religious and political leaders, who need to speak out against this anti-Muslim sentiment in our society, so that those who carry out these attacks don’t see tacit approval of their actions in the silence of public officials.”
Police described the incident as uncommon in a city that regularly welcomes international tourists of many ethnic origins, and a local Muslim leader said relations between Muslims and others generally are better in the Buffalo Niagara region than in many other parts of the country.
But police say good will went out the window at about 8:20 p.m. Thursday when Antoinette S. Ivey, 32, of Ninth Street, and another woman in a van hurled ethnic and racial slurs at a 26-year-old woman of Pakistani origin walking along Portage Road on the way to meet her husband.
The victim was wearing a purple head scarf, or hijab, a common garment among Muslim women.
According to the victim and other witnesses, the two women continued yelling at the victim after she met her husband in the parking lot of the Dollar Tree store on Portage, and when the victim asked why they were swearing at her, the two women got out of the van and assaulted her.
Before her husband could intervene, the victim was slapped in the face, knocked to the ground, punched and kicked repeatedly, police said. Her hair also was pulled, and she suffered bruises, pain and swelling on her head and body.
There is “no indication” that the victims and assailants knew each other, Police Superintendent John R. Chella said.
The victim was taken by ambulance to Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, where she was treated and released, police said.
While police searched Friday for her companion, Ivey was held in the Niagara County Jail in lieu of $750 bail. She was charged with third-degree assault as a hate crime.
The crime normally is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in a county jail, but as a hate crime, it becomes a felony punishable by up to four years in state prison, Assistant Niagara County District Attorney Peter M. Wydysh said.
Chella said this might have been the first instance this year of a hate crime, which his department is required to report quarterly to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
The Falls, he said, is a safe place for residents and visitors.
“Our numbers don’t indicate a serious problem,” he said. “We take each individual case seriously, but we don’t have an epidemic that we’re doing anything proactively to prevent it. I can’t recall any one [incident] this year.”
Police responded quickly and appropriately, said Hooper, whose group has called on the FBI to investigate the matter along with two other recent incidents in New York City.
Relations between Muslim-Americans and others in Western New York are “much better” than some other parts of the country, said Dr. Khalid J. Qazi, president of the local chapter of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
“We’ve been visible in the community for a number of years, and hopefully that has made a difference in how we are perceived and Muslims in general [are perceived],” Qazi said. “We want to make sure we contribute to the growth of the country like everybody else.”
News Niagara Reporter Thomas J. Prohaska contributed to this report.
If such an initiative were started by a group in a pre-dominantly Muslim nation, as it has in places such as Jordan and Malaysia, the Islamophobesphere would go buck wild with cries that it is proof of the backwardness of those societies, or a result of evil SHARIA!! At the very least the complexity of the issue both theologically and societally would be reduced or all together discarded.
Even in the United States there are now efforts to introduce legislation to legalize polygamy in Utah. What if they were Muslim?
Practice promoted as solution for the abundance of single women, Arab demographic threat and the predicament of seeking extramarital relations.
A new organization is trying to reinstate polygamy into mainstream Orthodox Judaism, despite it being against the contemporary norm of Jewish law, and prohibited by the state.
The idea is the brainchild of Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem (The Complete Jewish Household).
It is being promoted as the Jewish solution for the abundance of single women, the Arab demographic threat and the male predicament of seeking extramarital relations.
A small advertisement over the weekend in the broadly circulated Shabbat Beshabato, a hand-out distributed in synagogues nationwide dealing with the weekly Torah portion and contemporary issues, quoted a paragraph from senior Sephardi adjudicator Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Yabi’a Omer treatise, in which he wrote that it is a mistake for non-Ashkenazim to follow Rabbeinu Gershom’s “stringency,” according to which it is prohibited for a man to marry more than one wife. Approximately 1,000 years ago, Rabbeinu Gershom of Mainz, Germany, issued resonating reforms on a variety of subjects pertaining to Jewish life, and those who transgressed them were liable to be socially excommunicated. Perhaps the most well-known of these prohibitions is to not to be married to more than one woman at a time, despite the fact that this was common in biblical times.
The man behind the ad, Rabbi Yehezkel Sopher, saw no legal problem in his initiative.
“This is not about secular people who abide by the rules of the state, rather religious people. Whoever wants to take another wife – the Torah does not object to it,” Sopher told The Jerusalem Post. “We work according to the Shulhan Aruch, there are rules here.”
As for Rabbeinu Gershom’s excommunication ban, even for those who would as Ashkenazim have followed it – “that has been over for hundreds of years by now,” as its end date was the end of the fifth millennium according to the Jewish year count, i.e. some 700 years ago, he said.
As for the fact that the rabbinate is against bigamy and polygamy, Sopher, who identified himself as a resident of the Central region, explained that “the rabbis at the Chief Rabbinate receive their salaries from the state,” so publicly they have to object to polygamy. “But if you ask them behind closed doors, they will say it’s allowed.”
Sopher himself is married to only one woman, “but there is already consent to a second.”
Asked why they made this issue public now, and in a mainstream national-religious publication, he said that “we really wanted it to resonate.
We’ve been working on it for two years now, through our publications.
But we want it to get out to the larger public.
“This is a cry out to all God-fearing Jews. Instead of Arabs marrying Jewish women, Jews should,” he said.
“This is also a solution for women who never married, for widows, divorcees.”
The whole notion of monogamy is not an essentially Jewish one, Sopher stressed. “This [polygamy] is very acceptable in our religion, it’s religious coercion from the establishment under the influence of Catholicism that prevents about 15 percent of women in their fertile age from marrying,” he said.
“It’s cruel. And the Jewish nation is harmed by it. We think national fertility could rise by at least 10%. This is national discrimination, where the state turns a blind eye to Beduin, who freely take more wives. If Jews do, they are thrown into prison. And if a law is implemented in a discriminatory manner, it doesn’t have to be heeded,” he said.
In the ad, Sopher noted his group had a rabbinical court working with it on the issue. The head of that court is Rabbi Dov Stein of Jerusalem, who also serves as secretary for the nascent Sanhedrin project.
Stein said Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem’s initiative is not counter to the laws of the state.
“You can legally marry a second woman, the same way the secular public figured out how to marry in Cyprus and then have it approved here. Rabbis have found ways to enable such frameworks – otherwise we’d be inciting to a crime here,” he told the Post. “There are loopholes in the law we can find, Ashkenazim as well.”
The source of this move is not men, rather women, said Stein.
“This is an appeal of women to change the law, they are voicing their protest, they are not enabled to establish a family, have a future.
They are miserable.”
Stein said on Sunday afternoon that nearly 100 people had already telephoned to express interest in such an endeavor, following the weekend ad.
“There are women who agree, but can’t act on it. But even if a woman doesn’t agree, her husband is not her property, and by law he is not prohibited from having an affair with another woman.”
Senior members of the Chief Rabbinate slammed Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem and said it was a perversion of Judaism, motivated solely by “carnal lust.”
This is a distortion and madness,” said Rabbi Ya’acov Bezalel Harrar, the head of Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar’s office.
As for Yosef’s adjudication quoted in the ad, “this was taken out of context.
The validity of Rabbeinu Gershom’s excommunication ban might have expired, but that doesn’t mean that polygamy is permitted,” Harrar said.
“No rabbi would permit such a thing,” he said. “This is despicable villainy,” Harrar continued. “I am even less bothered by homosexual relations than such an instance in which a man takes two wives. In a homosexual scenario there are two people who decide to live their life that way. Here a person is putting two women into a conflict.
“Besides carnal lust” of the men involved, “there is nothing here,” he said of the claim that this was being proposed in the name of women who otherwise wouldn’t be able to marry or bear children. Harrar also doubted the fact that this could be seen as a trend. But “if it is a trend, it deserves all possible condemnation,” he said.
Kiryat Ono Chief Rabbi Ratzon Arusi, head of the Chief Rabbinical Council’s Marriage Committee, said that “it is true that in the Torah a man is allowed to marry more than one woman. But it is wrong to think that besides Rabbeinu Gershom’s ban the phenomenon was widespread.”
Arusi noted as proof the fact that Yemenite Jews, who never accepted the ban, rarely took more than more wife, and even when they did it was only in extreme cases such as infertility.
But in modern Israel, a rabbinic court would not allow a Yemenite man to take another woman, even when his barren wife insisted that she wanted him to, he said.
“Don’t think rabbinic courts aren’t very careful about not letting one bring troubles into his home,” Arusi said. A rare case in which a second wife would be allowed would be if the first one were in a coma, and it would be impossible to divorce her according to Jewish law. “And even then, the rabbis would ensure that all the comatose woman’s rights were ensured, should she awake from her coma,” he said.
Arusi was concerned that such a phenomenon would increase the rates of unregulated marriages and divorces in Israel, which could lead to severe pedigree problems.
“Woe to all those who take the law into their own hands, and create facts on the ground, and seek ways around the rabbinate with private weddings, without getting permission from the rabbinate and the leading rabbis.
They are not solving problems, rather creating them. By registering marriage in Israel, we can monitor things and ensure there are no mamzerim [people forbidden to marry according to Halacha] marrying. Can we have that supervision with unregulated weddings? And how can one be sure that the divorce carried out for such a person who wed off the books would be entirely by Jewish law? This is narrowmindedness that should not be allowed,” Arusi said.
“There is an internal halachic debate on this, but these people should not deceive the public into thinking that without Rabbeinu Gershom’s ban any Jew can go and marry as many women as he wants,” he said.
Arusi said his committee would examine the issue in its next meeting.
Freedom of worship is one of our most invaluable rights. It means that I have the complete freedom and the human right to worship God the way I see fit or to not worship, provided that I uphold the standards of civil law. Thomas Jefferson so eloquently wrote:
That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
This human right is the cornerstone of our democracy. It keeps the political conversation rational, among other things, and prevents our nation from degenerating further into partisan religious delinquency. So, naturally, I am dismayed when I see this most basic and cherished freedom become a casualty in our national discourse on Islam and Muslims.
Observe Asra Nomani, whom we’ve criticized before for supporting racial profiling, in her latest draconian suggestion; if mosques do not bow to the demands of her ideology, they should be denied tax exempt status (i.e. forced to shutdown from crippling taxes). How did she arrive at such a conclusion?
Our goal was to walk through the front double doors designated for “brothers” and pray in the forbidden space of the opulent musallah, or main hall, of the mosque.
She paints herself as a freedom fighter, a successor to Martin Luther King Jr. But the question is: why do Muslim men and women pray in separate spaces? Is it sexism?
Until a point in time when we live in a “genderless” society (maybe something Asra advocates?), men and women are generally considered distinguished entities and traditional religions tend to take this into account. In the case of the majority of Muslims, men and women pray in separate places for the five congregational prayers because the Quran says:
Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them… And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof… (24:30-31)
Pious Muslims are not supposed to gawk with lust at members of the other sex. This applies in daily life and even more so in the ritual prayer in which concentration and focus should be directed towards God and not the opposite sex. Separating men and women in the Muslim prayer is therefore considered a matter of modesty; not that women are inferior or have less rights. Thus, separate prayer halls in themselves are not an indication that women are being mistreated or denied access to the mosque.
But perhaps the issue is that women have a less nice area to pray in or are being denied access to the mosque altogether. On this issue Nomani has a point, and she produces some statistics and studies, although mired by her sweeping generalizations:
In a 2005 publication, “Women Friendly Mosques and Community Centers,” written by two American-Muslim groups — the Islamic Social Services Associations and Women In Islam — the authors confirmed that “many mosques relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children,” some mosques “actually prevent women from entering,”…
It is true that some mosques have less than adequate facilities to accommodate female worshippers, but is it always a case of sexism? If you haven’t noticed, opening or expanding a mosque is not the easiest thing to do in America right now. There are other factors involved other than an alleged omnipresent sexism dominating the Muslim community. Some of these mosques do not have the funding to give women a bigger space; and perhaps, it may be the conservative culture of a particular mosque for women to normally pray at home with their children, usually coming to the mosque only on special occasions, and thus a bigger space is unnecessary.
Nomani could draw from Islamic tradition to support her legitimate goal of helping women increase their presence and participation in the mosque. She could, for example, mention how numerous authentic traditions record that the Prophet Muhammad gave women universal support to go to the mosque:
Do not prevent the maid-servants of Allah from going to the mosque.
[Sahih Muslim, Book 004, Number 0886]
She could engage in a respectful dialogue with notable Imams, scholars and activists, work for grassroots change in her local community, and help establish the model mosque she seeks with their help or of her own volition. Unfortunately, Nomani thinks strong-arm bully tactics and shouting matches in the mosque are the way to go.
First, she travels to different communities to whom she does not belong and demands to violate their sacred spaces. Then, she makes a ruckus in the media to bring pressure on Muslim communities from society at large. That hasn’t worked, so now she wants the government to step in and tell Muslims how they should organize their prayer halls:
I understand the difficulties in having the state intervene in worship issues. I believe in a separation of church and state, but I’ve come to the difficult decision that women must use the legal system to restore rights in places of worship, particularly when intimidation is used to enforce unfair rules.
That is an almost comically irrational paragraph, and yet it ran in a column published in none other than USA Today. Nomani says that she “understand[s] the difficulties in having the state intervene in worship issues,” but shows no such understanding at all. Then, she writes that she “believe[s] in a separation of church and state,” but then she calls upon the coercive power of the state to force doctrinal change in places of worship. She cannot have it both ways…
I am not worried that IRS agents are about to descend on the nation’s churches, mosques, and synagogues to force a new government-endorsed theology on our places of worship. I am very concerned, however, that this kind of argument, left unaddressed, implies a power that the government does not and should not possess.
Undoubtedly what Nomani is asking for is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution’s, First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” She would open the floodgates of government intervention into the most private area of our lives, our places of worship, our sacred spaces, and threaten to raise our taxes if we didn’t worship in a manner consistent with her ideology (a curious double-violation of Tea Party ideology but nonetheless will probably receive a free pass from many on the Right because of the fact that Muslims are Nomani’s target).
She warns us that in mosques “intimidation is used to enforce unfair rules” but she has no problem using the long arm of the law to intimidate Muslims and force them to construct their prayer halls in line with Nomani’s ideology or else be crushed by burdening taxes. So, Asra, how are you not also using intimidation “to enforce unfair rules?” Can anyone else see the double standard?
Don’t get me wrong. Freedom and women’s rights are very vital issues for Muslims to tackle, but not so much for Nomani. She seems far more interested in getting her uninformed and sensational views published than in helping the Muslim community from within.
How else can we understand her aggressive assault on our most basic American freedom?
Herman Cain, it’s probably safe to say, has already peaked. For reasons that remain unclear, hewowed Republicans in the primary season’s first debate but was quickly forgotten when Michele Bachmann wowed Republicans in the second debate. His national polling average of 10.2 percent in late June has gradually dropped over the past couple of weeks to 6.5 percent, according to Real Clear Politics. His numbers have steadily declined in polling of the Iowa caucus as well, and some of his staff in Iowa and New Hampshirerecently abandoned ship. But Herman Cain does still have one card up his sleeve: More than any other candidate, he’s willing to say heinous, bigoted things about Muslims.
Cain has said he wouldn’t appoint a Muslim to any position within his administration because of fears that Muslims are trying to “gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.” He later softened his position slightly, allowing for the potential hiring of Muslims that pass some kind of loyalty test that only Muslims have to take. And now Cain is speaking out against the never-ending controversy over a proposed Islamic center and mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee:
“It is an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion,” he said. “And I don’t agree with what’s happening, because this isn’t an innocent mosque.” ….
“It is another example of why I believe in American laws and American courts,” Cain said. “This is just another way to try to gradually sneak Shariah law into our laws, and I absolutely object to that.”
You read that correctly: Letting Muslims practice their religion is an infringement on our freedom of religion. Let that argument sink in for a second. Or don’t. It’s actually uncomfortably farcical.
New York civil rights lawyer David Perecman comments on allegations of an possible attack on a burka-wearing woman in Harlem. New York City police are investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
Aissatou Diallo claims that two women, one back and one white, attacked her as she was walking in Harlem. She said she was called a “f–king terrorist” and punched after she asked one of the women to stop taking pictures of her. The pair allegedly then ran off only to return and throw Diallo to the floor, pull off her burka and curse at her.
Both women who allegedly attacked Diallo have been arrested on assault charges. NYPD hate crime detectives are investigating whether the crime was a bias attack.
In New York, civil rights violation lawyers understand that being charged with a hate crime can increase the severity of an assault or battery charge.
“Being charged for a hate crime can make a rotten situation even worse for someone arrested in New York,” civil rights violation lawyer Perecman said.
New York civil rights violation lawyer Perecman is the founder of The Perecman Firm, one of New York’s civil rights violation law firms.
We have been covering the story about “The King’s Torah” for quite some time now, it is quite popular amongst the religious right in Israel. Can you imagine if texts such as this were found in an Islamic book called the “The Caliph’s Sharia’”?,
I. A gentile must not kill his friend, and if he has killed, he must die.
II. The prohibition “thou shalt not commit murder” refers to a Jew who kills another Jew.
III. A Jew who kills a gentile is not required to die.
Replace “gentile” with “kafir” and Jew with “Muslim,” and imagine the reaction from the Islamophobesphere.
Last year, I reported on a convention of top Israeli rabbis who gathered to defend the publication of Torat Hamelech, a book that relied on rabbinical sources to justify the killing of gentiles, including infants “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.” The most prominent rabbinical endorsers, Kiryat Arba’s chief rabbi Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, had dismissed police summons at the time, insisting that man’s law could not touch the halakha. A year later, in late June, the Israeli police finally arrested Lior for his role in endorsing and promoting the book.
Riots broke out almost immediately in the wake of the arrest, with mobs of religious Zionists burning tires and attempting to storm the Israeli Supreme Court compound. Fearing more riots and with sales of Torat Hamelech surging, the police handled Rabbi Yosef with kid gloves, requesting he come in for questioning but not arresting him. In the end, the state neglected to remove Lior, Yosef, or any other state-employed rabbi from his position for endorsing Torat Hamelech.
Why is Torat Hamelech so explosive? Yuval Dror, an Israeli journalist and academic, excerpted some of the book’s most incendiary passages. What appeared was Jewish exclusivism in its most extreme form, with non-Jews deemed permissible to kill, or Rodef, for the most inconsequential of wartime acts, including providing moral support to gentile armies. The book is a virtual manual for Jewish extremist terror designed to justify the mass slaughter of civilians. And in that respect, it is not entirely different from the Israeli military’s Dahiya Doctrine, or Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin’sconcept of “asymmetrical warfare.” The key difference seems to be the crude, almost childlike logic the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, marshals to justify the killing of non-Jewish civilians.
Here are passages from Torat Hamelech, as excerpted by Dror and translated by Dena Bugel-Shunra:
II. Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder
Maimonides wrote in the Halachas of Murder, Chapter A, Halacha A:
He who kills one soul of Israel violates a prohibition, as it is said “thou shalt not commit murder, and if he committed murder maliciously, in front of witnesses, his death shall be by the sword…
It is therefore made explicit that the “thou shalt not commit murder” prohibition refers only to a Jew who kills a Jew, and not to a Jew who kills a gentile, even if that gentile is one of the righteous among the nations… we have derived that from the verse “thou shalt not commit murder”, one cannot learn that there is a prohibition on killing a gentile.
(Page 17-18)
VIII. Conclusion
I. A gentile must not kill his friend, and if he has killed, he must die.
II. The prohibition “thou shalt not commit murder” refers to a Jew who kills another Jew.
III. A Jew who kills a gentile is not required to die.
IV. The prohibition on a Jew killing a gentile derives from the fact that a gentile is not allowed to kill a gentile.
(Page 27)
I. A gentile is killed for one death, and with one judge
A gentile who violates one of the seven rules [of Noah] must be killed, and he is killed based on the word of one witness and with one judge and with no warning.
II. A witness becomes a judge
For the Sons of Noah [gentiles] the witness can himself be a judge. This mean: if one person saw the other committing a crime – he can judge him and kill him for this, as he is the witness and he is the judge… Moses [moshe rabbenu] saw the Egyptian hitting a man of Israel, and killed him for that. So there Moses is the witness and is the judge, and this does not delay the carrying out of the law upon the Egyptian.
(Pp. 49-50)
What transpires from these matters is that when you judge a gentile for crimes that he has committed – you must also consider the question of whether he has repented, and if he has – he must not be killed… moreover: it is better that the gentile repent than that we kill him. If we come upon a gentile who does not abide by the Seven Laws [of Noah], and the importance of abiding by them can be explain to him, so he will repent – we would prefer to choose that path, and not judge an kill him.
(page 70)
It is explained in Yerushalmi [codex] that when a [child of] Israel [a Jew] is in danger of his life, as people tell him ‘kill this particular gentile or you will be killed’ – is permitted to kill the gentile to save himself… and the [interpreters of the law] Rashi and Maimonides say that the law of requiring to die rather than commit the crime is only valid in case of a Jew against another Jew, not in the case of a Jew against a stranger living among them… It is clear from these statements that when the choice is between losing the life of a stranger living among them and losing the life of a child of Israel [a Jew] – the simple decision is to permit [the killing].
(Pp. 157-158)
When the question is of a life of a gentile weighed against the life of a child of Israel [Jew], the initial proposal returns, which is that a Jew can violate law in order to save himself, as what is at stake is the soul [life] of a Jew – which supersedes the entire Torah [code of law] - in contrast with the life of a stranger living among us, which does not permit any Torah prohibition to be superseded.
(page 162)
To save the life of a gentile, one does not violate the Sabbath rules, and it is clear from this that his life is not like the value of the life of a child of Israel, so it may be used for the purpose of saving the life of a child of Israel.
(page 167)
An enemy soldier in the corps of intelligence, logistics, and so forth aids the army that fights against us. A soldier in the enemy’s medical corps is also considered a “rodef” [villain who is actively chasing a Jew], as without the medical corps the army will be weaker., and the medical corps also encourages and strengthens the fighters, and helps them kill us.
A civilian who supports fighters is also consider Rodef, and may be killed… anyone who helps the army of the evil people in any way, strengthens the murderers and is considered to be Rodef.
(page 184)
III. Support and encouragement
A civilian who encourages the war - gives the king and the soldiers the strength to continue with it. Therefore, every citizen in the kingdom that is against us, who encourages the warriors or expresses satisfaction about their actions, is considered Rodef and his killing is permissible. Also considered Rodef is any person who weakens our kingdom by speech and so forth.
(p. 185)
We are permitted to save ourselves from the Rodef people. It is not important who we start with, as long as we kill the Rodef people, and save ourselves from the danger they pose. And see for yourself: if you say that the fact that there are many of them brings up the question of whom to start with, and that that question is supposed to delay us from saving for ourselves - why it stands to reason: the existence of any one of them postpones the salivation, and this is the reason to treat each and every one as a complete Rodef, and to kill him, so he will not cause this ‘life-threatening’ question…
Whoever is in a situation where it is clear that he will chase and danger us in the future - it is not necessary to give it fine consideration as to whether at this moment, exactly, he is actively helping the chasing [harassment?] of us.
(Pp. 186-187)
X. People who were forced to partner with the enemy
We have dealt, so far, with gentiles whose evil means that there is a reason to kill them. We will now turn to discuss those who are not interested in war and object to it with all force…
We will start with a soldier, who is party to fighting against us, but is doing so only because he has been forced by threats to take part in the war.
If he was threatened with loss of money and such things - he is completely evil. There is no permission to take part in chasing and killing due to fear of loss of money, and if he does so -he is a Rodef in every definition thereof.
And if he was threatened that if he would not participate in the war, he would be killed - according to the MAHARAL [rabbi]… just as he is permitted to kill others - so, too, can others (even gentiles)kill him, so we will not die. And for this reason, according to the MAHARAL, it is simply evident that such a soldier may be killed.
And according to the Parashat Drachim [rabbi? Or possibly book of law?] - he must not participate in the murdering even if he must give his life due to this. And if he does so [participates] - he is evil and may be killed, like any other Rodef.
We will remind, again, that this discusses all types of participation in the war: a fighter, a support soldier, civilian assistance, or various types of encouragement and support.
(P. 196)
XVI. Infants
When discussing the killing of babies and children - why on the one hand, we see them as complete innocents, as they have no knowledge, and therefore are not to be sentenced for having violated the Seven Laws, and they are not to be ascribed evil intent. But on the other side, there is great fear of their actions when they grow up… in any event, we learn that there is an opinion that it is right to hurt infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation the damage will be directed specifically at them.
If the king is permitted to kill his own men for the purpose of war - that same opinion also holds with regard to people who belong to the evil kingdom. In a war of righteous people against evil people, we assume that the evil will eventually hurt us all, if we let it raise its head, and the people of the evil kingdom will also suffer from it.
We are, in fact, arguing to any person from the evil kingdom: if you belong to the evil king - you are liable to be killed for helping murderers; and if you do not help him - you should help us, and it is permissible to kill you as we kill our own people (as we are all in trouble together, and in such a situation it is permissible to kill the few in order to save the many.)
This theory also permits intentional hurting of babies and of innocent people, if this is necessary for the war against the evil people. For example: If hurting the children of an evil king will put great pressure on him that would prevent him from acting in an evil manner - they can be hurt (even without the theory that it is evident that they will be evil when they grow up.)
(P. 215)
VII. Revenge
One of the needs which exists, in the hurting of [Evil people?] is the revenge. In order to beat [win the war against] the evil people, we must act with them in a manner of revenge, as tit versus tat…
In other words, revenge is a necessary need in order to turn the evil-doing into something that does not pay off, and make righteousness grow stronger; and as great as the evil is - so is the greatness of the action needed against it.
(Pp. 216-217)
Sometimes, one does evil deeds that are meant to create a correct balance of fear, and a situation in which evil actions do not pay off… and in accordance with this calculus, the infants are not killed for their evil, but due to the fact that there is a general need of everyone to take revenge on the evil people, and the infants are the ones whose killing will satisfy this need; and they can also be viewed as the ones who are set aside from among a faction, as reality has chosen them to be the ones whose killing will save all of them [the others from that faction?] and prevent evildoing later on. (And it does indeed turn out that to this consideration, the consideration that we brought forth at the end of the prior chapter also definitely is added - which is, that they are in any event suspected of being evil when they grow up.)
Last night CNN had a “special investigation” on the fraud that is known as Walid Shoebat. It took them years to realize that he was a fraud, even after they had him on as a “terrorist expert” in the past. We wrote about Shoebat two years ago in a piece titled, Three Stooges Coming to a Campus Near You, and Walid Shoebat:”Kill them and their Children”.
CNN provided some disturbing video of Shoebat defrauding security personnel and first responders and wasting tax payer money with his lies. Hopefully it won’t be long until Robert Spencer and the rest who get paid to hate-monger to the DHS are exposed by mainstream media.
Watch Part 2 of Drew Griffin’s special investigative report about Walid Shoebat Thursday on AC360° beginning at 10pm E.T.
From Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston, CNN Special Investigations Unit
Rapid City, South Dakota (CNN) — Walid Shoebat had a blunt message for the roughly 300 South Dakota police officers and sheriff’s deputies who gathered to hear him warn about the dangers of Islamic radicalism.
Terrorism and Islam are inseparable, he tells them. All U.S. mosques should be under scrutiny.
“All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them,” he says.
It’s a message Shoebat is selling based on his own background as a Palestinian-American convert to conservative Christianity. Born in the West Bank, the son of an American mother, he says he was a Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist in his youth who helped firebomb an Israeli bank in Bethlehem and spent time in an Israeli jail.
That billing helps him land speaking engagements like a May event in Rapid City — a forum put on by the state Office of Homeland Security, which paid Shoebat $5,000 for the appearance. He’s a darling on the church and university lecture circuit, with his speeches, books and video sales bringing in $500,000-plus in 2009, according to tax records.
“Being an ex-terrorist myself is to understand the mindset of a terrorist,” Shoebat told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
But CNN reporters in the United States, Israel and the Palestinianterritories found no evidence that would support that biography. Neither Shoebat nor his business partner provided any proof of Shoebat’s involvement in terrorism, despite repeated requests.
Back in his hometown of Beit Sahour, outside Bethlehem, relatives say they can’t understand how Shoebat could turn so roundly on his family and his faith.
“I have never heard anything about Walid being a mujahedeen or a terrorist,” said Daood Shoebat, who says he is Walid Shoebat’s fourth cousin. “He claims this for his own personal reasons.”
CNN’s Jerusalem bureau went to great lengths trying to verify Shoebat’s story. The Tel Aviv headquarters of Bank Leumi had no record of a firebombing at its now-demolished Bethlehem branch. Israeli police had no record of the bombing, and the prison where Shoebat says he was held “for a few weeks” for inciting anti-Israel demonstrations says it has no record of him being incarcerated there either.
Shoebat says he was never charged because he was a U.S. citizen.
“I was born by an American mother,” he said. “The other conspirators in the act ended up in jail. I ended up released.”
He said his own family has vouched for his prison time. But relatives CNN spoke to described him as a “regular kid” who left home at 18, eventually becoming a computer programmer in the United States.
Shoebat, now in his 50s, says he converted to Christianity in 1993 and began spreading the word about the dangers of Islam. He has been interviewed as a terrorism expert on several television programs, including a handful of appearances on CNN and its sister network, HLN, in 2006 and 2007.
Since al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, expertise on terrorism has been in high demand. The federal Department of Homeland Security has spent nearly $40 million on counterterrorism training since 2006. The department doesn’t keep track of how much goes to speakers, nor does it advise officials on the speakers hired by states and municipalities.
Shoebat spoke at a 2010 conference in South Dakota and was so well-received that he was invited back for the May event in Rapid City, according to state officials. He warned the police and first responders gathered in the hotel conference rooms that the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah had operatives working in Mexico and that drug cartels were raising money with Islamic groups. He also asserted that federal agents could have prevented the 9/11 attacks by looking for a chafed spot, called “zabibah,” that sometimes forms on the foreheads of devout Muslims.
“You need ex-terrorists who can tell you what life is like and what thinking is like of potential terrorists,” Shoebat said. “But had we looked at the zabibah only, we would have deflected a suicide action of killing 3,000 Americans.”
But Shoebat also told the group there were 17 hijackers when there were 19. And perhaps more surprising from a man who bills himself as a terror expert, Shoebat said the Transportation Security Administration could have stopped them. The TSA wasn’t created until after the 9-11 attacks.
Jim Carpenter, South Dakota’s homeland security director, said Shoebat brought “a point of view that certainly is not mainstream.”
“He brings in commentary about living and being raised as a Muslim and converting over to Christianity — gives them a different aspect of breaking the mold, so to speak,” Carpenter said. But he said Shoebat’s appearance was “a small portion” of the two-and-a-half-day conference.
“It’s not like we’re talking about setting up training and a discipline we would follow, that this is the only way and that’s the particular point of view of a Muslim or somebody of the Islamic faith. That’s not the case,” Carpenter said. “That’s his point of view.”
Carpenter said there is “no fear of threat” from Islamic terrorism in South Dakota, where the last census reports showed the state’s Muslim community made up less than one-half of 1 percent of the population. According to Rapid City’s local newspaper, about two dozen Muslims live in the city.
During Shoebat’s presentation, he criticized Muslim organizations and told audience members to be leery of Muslim doctors, engineers, students and mosques.
“Now, we aren’t saying every single mosque is potential terrorist headquarters. But if you look at certain reports by the Hudson report, 80 percent of mosques they found pamphlets and education on jihad. So they’re in the mosque, the mosque in accordance to the Muslim brotherhood is the command post and center.”
The conservative Hudson Institute said it never issued such a report and has no idea why its name was invoked.
Shoebat warned that making special accommodations for Muslim beliefs was a step toward establishing Islamic religious law. And he recounted how he wore a T-shirt that read “Profile me” on a trip to the airport and approached the screeners at the security checkpoint.
“I got tapped down, I got checked, I got all these different things,” he said. “I say it’s wonderful.”
Shoebat and business partner Keith Davies run several foundations and three websites that are all linked. Shoebat said the major group, the Forum for Middle East Understanding, includes his own Walid Shoebat Foundation.
In tax records filed by Davies, the Forum for Middle East Understanding reported 2009 earnings from speaking engagements, videos and book sales of more than $560,000. The documents are thin on specifics, and so is Shoebat.
“Basically, we are in information, and we do speaking and we do also helping Christians that are being persecuted in countries like Pakistan, and we help Christians that are suffering all throughout the Middle East,” he said. Asked how they do that, he said, “None of your business” — adding that disclosing details could endanger people he was trying to help in Islamic countries that have laws against blasphemy.
Shoebat’s name doesn’t appear on any of the paperwork. As for his own salary, he said he makes “probably what a gas station makes or a garage makes.”
“Everybody thinks I’m just raking in the dough, which is absolutely incorrect,” he said. He referred details to Davies, who offered to provide a copy of the group’s tax returns — but didn’t. When asked who served on the foundation’s board of advisers, Davies gave “Anderson Cooper 360″ the name of a former pilot, who didn’t return phone calls. But he could not name the high-ranking military officers he said were on the board.
Federal officials say they don’t know exactly how much money has gone to speakers like Shoebat. But in April, the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee raised concerns about “vitriolic diatribes” being delivered by “self-appointed counterterrorism experts” at similar seminars.
Sen. Susan Collins, the committee’s Republican chairwoman, and Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman asked the department to account for how much federal grant money went to state and local counterterrorism programs and what standards guided those grants. The request followed reports by the liberal Political Research Associates and the Washington Monthly that raised similar questions.
The Homeland Security Department told CNN that it has standards — and if training programs don’t meet them, “corrective action will be taken.”
“We have not and will not tolerate training programs — or any DHS-supported program — that rely on racial or ethnic profiling,” the agency said in a written statement.
NEW YORK—A young Brooklyn boy who vanished while walking home from a day camp in one of the safest parts of the city was killed and dismembered by a stranger who he had turned to for help after getting lost, police said Wednesday.
An intense search for the missing 8-year-old, Leiby Kletzky, ended early Wednesday morning with the gruesome discovery of pieces of his dismembered body inside the home of a man who had been seen with the child around the time he disappeared, police said.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the 35-year-old suspect, Levi Aron, made statements implicating himself in the boy’s death.
Investigators tracked Aron with the help of surveillance video that showed him being approached by the lost boy.
When detectives arrived at the man’s home, they asked him where the boy was and he nodded toward the kitchen, Kelly said.
Detectives saw blood on the freezer door and they opened it to discover bloody knives, a cutting board and feet inside, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Additional body parts were found inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a trash bin in another Brooklyn neighborhood.
Police and volunteers had been looking since late Monday afternoon for Leiby, who disappeared while on his way to meet his mother in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park.
The break in the case came when investigators focused on a grainy surveillance video that showed the boy, wearing his backpack, walking down the street, while a man walked nearby.
Detectives noticed the man on the video going into a nearby dentist’s office, Browne said. The dentist, located later in New Jersey, said he remembered someone coming by to pay a bill for a patient, and police were able to identify Aron using records from the office. When they went to his home, they made the gruesome discovery.
Police said Aron lives alone in the apartment, in a building shared with his parents. He once had a summons for urinating in public but otherwise did not have a criminal record, Kelly said.
Outside the family’s apartment building Wednesday morning, men and women from the community clustered in separate groups. Many of the mothers gathered there said the streets are safe enough for a child Leiby’s age to walk home alone.
“This is a no-crime area,” said State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose district includes the area. He said the boy was the only son of the Kletzky family. The couple has four daughters, and the husband works as a driver for a private car service.
“Everybody is absolutely horrified,” he said. “Everyone is in total shock, beyond belief, beyond comprehension to suddenly disappear and then the details and the fact someone in the extended community it’s awful,” he said.
He said the parents did not know Aron, who lived about a mile away from the boy.
At about 6:45 a.m., an NYPD crime unit carted away the trash bin where some of the body parts had been found and put it in a truck, and police officers walked in a line looking for evidence under cars and on sidewalks.
The medical examiner’s office will determine a cause of death and positive identification.
Leiby was one of the neighborhood’s many Hasidic Jews, an ultra-Orthodox people who live in tight-knit, somewhat insular communities and abide by strict religious rules that require men to wear dark clothing that includes a long coat and a fedora-type hat. Men often have long beards and ear locks.
Most of the 165,000 members in the New York City the area live in neighborhoods in Brooklyn and are part of three different sects. Hasidism traces its roots to 18th-century Eastern Europe.
A $100,000 reward had been offered, Hikind said the outpouring of support has been tremendous with people from all over the state volunteering their time to scour the neighborhood and hand out flyers.
Adel Erps, who lives two blocks from the family, said she was very upset because the state of the body means it will be more difficult to do a proper burial. Like other neighborhood residents congregating near the boy’s home Wednesday, she expressed shock that the suspect was Jewish.
“He’s a sick person obviously, but it hurts so much more,” she said.
One of the many signs of the rightward creep of Western European politics is the recent unison of voices denouncing multiculturalism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel led off last October by claiming that multiculturalism “has failed and failed utterly.” She was echoed in February by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron. All three were late to the game, though: for years, the Dutch far right has been bashing supposedly multicultural policies.
Despite the shared rhetoric, it is difficult to discern a common target for these criticisms. Cameron aimed at an overly tolerant attitude toward extremist Islam, Merkel at the slow pace of Turkish integration, and Sarkozy at Muslims who pray in the street.
But while it is hard to know what exactly the politicians of Europe mean when they talk about multiculturalism, one thing we do know is that the issues they raise—real or imagined—have complex historical roots that have little to do with ideologies of cultural difference. Blaming multiculturalism may be politically useful because of its populist appeal, but it is also politically dangerous because it attacks “an enemy within”: Islam and Muslims. Moreover, it misreads history. An intellectual corrective may help to diminish its malign impact.
Political criticisms of multiculturalism confuse three objects. One is the changing cultural and religious landscape of Europe. Postwar France and Britain encouraged immigration of willing workers from former colonies; Germany drew on its longstanding ties with Turkey for the same purpose; somewhat later, new African and Asian immigrants, many of them Muslims, traveled throughout Western Europe to seek jobs or political refuge. As a result, one sees mosques where there once were only churches and hears Arabic and Turkish where once there were only dialects of German, Dutch, or Italian. The first object then is the social fact of cultural and religious diversity, of multicultural and multi-religious everyday life: the emergence in Western Europe of the kind of social diversity that has long been a matter of pride in the United States.
The second object—suggested by Cameron’s phrase “state multiculturalism”—concerns the policies each of these countries have used to handle new residents. By the 1970s, Western European governments realized that the new workers and their families were there to stay, so the host countries tried out a number of strategies to integrate the immigrants into the host society. Policymakers all realized that they would need to find what later came to be called “reasonable accommodations” with the needs of the new communities: for mosques and schools, job training, instruction in the host-country language. These were pragmatic efforts; they did not aim at assimilation, nor did they aim to preserve spatial or cultural separation. Some of these policies eventually were termed “multicultural” because they involved recognizing ethnic community structures or allowing the use of Arabic or Turkish in schools. But these measures were all designed to encourage integration: to bring new groups in while acknowledging the obvious facts of linguistic, social, cultural, and religious difference.
The third object that multiculturalism’s critics confuse is a set of normative theories of multiculturalism, each of which attempts to mark out a way to take account of cultural and religious diversity from a particular philosophical point of view. Although ideas of multiculturalism do shape public debates in Britain (as they do in North America), they do so much less in continental Europe, and even in Britain it would be difficult to find direct policy effects of these normative theories.
Politicians err when they claim that normative ideas of multiculturalism shape the social fact of cultural and religious diversity: such diversity would be present with or without a theory to cope with it. Nor are state policies shaped by those ideas, which tend to be recent in origin. Quite to the contrary, each European country has followed well-traveled pathways for dealing with diversity. Methods designed to accommodate sub-national religious blocs are now being adapted and applied to Muslim immigrants. Far from newfangled, misguided policies of multiculturalism, these distinct strategies represent the continuation of long-standing, nation-specific ways of recognizing and managing diversity.
• • •
Consider the case of Germany. Merkel’s claims were perhaps the least weighty, but her words point to a growing conviction among some Germans that Muslim immigrants are inassimilable. Merkel’s attack was as vague as it was opportunistic. She regretted that the German “tendency had been to say, ‘let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other’” and concluded that this attitude had not produced results, as if she had thereby identified policies that could be changed. Her real meaning was made clear by the presence of Horst Seehofer next to her on the podium. Seehofer, the Bavarian state premier and Merkel’s coalition partner, has called for curtailing immigration.
One poll showed a third of Germans believed the country was ‘overrun by foreigners.’
Merkel’s speech followed a series of anti-Muslim public statements by high-placed German officials. In June 2010 then-Bundesbank member Thilo Sarrazin published a book in which he accused Muslim immigrants of lowering the intelligence of German society. Although he was censured for his views and dismissed from his central bank position, the book proved popular, and polls suggested that Germans were sympathetic with the thrust of his arguments. One poll showed a third of Germans believed the country was “overrun by foreigners.” A few months earlier, in March, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble waded in to say that Germany had been mistaken to let in so many Turkish workers in the 1960s because they had not integrated into society.
At least the finance minister pointed to a real German policy, one that encouraged low-paid laborers to relocate to the country and rebuild it. But Merkel’s notion that the German government had promoted a multikulti society (as distinct from celebrating colorful Kreuzberg or a Turkish star on the German soccer team) ignores the brunt of German immigration policy, which, until 2000, denied citizenship to those workers, their children, and their grandchildren. In other words, the government and many, perhaps most, Germans had not hoped, as Merkel claimed, that everyone would live side by side. Rather, the hope was that “they” would just pack up and leave.
In this sense Germany has largely followed its longer-term policies for dealing with diversity: German federal and state governments have historically denied that immigration could be of value and maintained a policy of limiting citizenship only to those who could demonstrate German descent. But Germany may also follow the public-corporation model it has arranged with Christian and Jewish groups. A proposed Islamic public corporation would have the legal status to obtain government funding for mosques and would serve as a legitimate overseer of materials selected for Islamic religious education. This promising policy goal, not yet achieved, would recognize and support Islam in accordance with long-standing German principles governing religious diversity, not on grounds of multiculturalism.
• • •
In contrast to Germany, Britain has promoted multiculturalism as an explicit policy, but not in those domains where Cameron denounced it. In his February 2011 speech, Cameron blamed multiculturalism for creating spatial divisions and fomenting terrorism. “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism,” he claimed, “we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.” Left apart, some have submitted to extremism, he argued, and some of those extremists have in turn carried bombs in the name of Islam. His solution was three-fold: ensure that any organization asking for public money subscribes to doctrines of universal rights and encourages integration, keep extremists from reaching students and prisoners, and ensure that everyone learns English.
As a diagnosis of problems of homegrown terrorism, the speech fell short. The British bombers principally responsible for the 2005 attacks in London knew English and English people well. Mohammad Sidique Khan, believed to be the leader of the bombing plot, was recalled as a “highly Westernized” man who grew up in Leeds and attended university there. Shehzad Tanweer, another of the bombers, had a similar background. According to the official report on the bombings, both men had developed jihadist convictions in Pakistan.
If these and other homegrown terrorists have problems feeling at home in Britain, it is because they do not remain in their “separate cultures” but instead become isolated individuals without a social or cultural base. In otherwise-distinct analyses of European jihadists, French political scientist Olivier Roy and American counterterrorism expert Marc Sageman each paint a picture of young men who suffer from a lack of ties with others in their communities. Roy calls them “deterritorialized”; Sageman describes a “bunch of guys” who find themselves without opportunities at home, who are considered foreigners despite being born in Europe, and who end up traveling abroad to seek out extremists. Hardly walled off in enclaves in Bradford (or Hamburg), they are free-floating, perfect speakers of English (or German) who feel themselves rejected by the people and institutions around them.
It’s not just Muslims who cut themselves off. A large percentage of British children attend schools that admit only Catholics and Anglicans.
Cameron used his speech to argue for his “Big Society”—policies of state divestment from welfare predicated on the belief that if people have to work together to survive they will gain a stronger sense of being British. But whatever the merits of this approach to British social ills, it has little to offer individuals who already consider themselves discarded by those around them.
So Cameron got it wrong when it comes to homegrown terrorism. What did he have in mind when he spoke of “state multiculturalism”? Multicultural policies in Britain today mainly concern how state schools handle their diverse clientele: teaching cultural and religious studies curricula, offering halal meals to Muslim pupils. Behind these specific policies is the notion, generally accepted in Britain, that the cultural and religious traditions of each pupil should be positively recognized. These politics find one salient expression in a commissioned white paper by the political theorist Bhikhu Parekh, whose 2000 book, Rethinking Multiculturalism, asks: in a multicultural society, how should the state balance legitimate claims to diversity with the need to “foster a strong sense of unity and common belonging among its citizens”? This is precisely Cameron’s concern, but Parekh voices it as a justification for educational multiculturalism. Parekh argues that recognizing the traditions held by religious and ethnic communities through multicultural school curricula provides a psychologically sound basis on which to construct an inclusive national identity. (His view comes close to claims made by another political theorist, Will Kymlicka, who argues that maintaining cultural heritage is of psychosocial importance in the development of a liberal citizen.)
There is controversy in Britain about schooling and the isolation of cultural minorities, but spatial segregation of immigrant communities was a product of South Asian settlement patterns in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s, not state multiculturalism. When men (and, later, families) moved from Pakistan and Bangladesh to Britain, they brought whole lineages and villages along with them, reproducing their old linguistic and religious networks in urban British neighborhoods. The result was a chasm separating Asian and white communities, and in some cities this absence of interaction and understanding spiraled into hatred and unrest. In the spring and summer of 2001, riots pitted Asians against whites in the northern cities of Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford. Today, these cities remain highly segregated. Their schools reflect, and exacerbate, the problem. Pupils remain sorted into largely white and largely Pakistani or Bangladeshi schools. As one head teacher at a 92 percent Pakistani primary school said in a report released on the tenth anniversary of the riots, “Some of our children could live their lives without meeting someone from another culture until they go to high school or even the workplace.”
The combination of religion and schooling contributes to this segregation, but not in the way that Cameron’s speech suggests: it’s not just Muslims who’ve cut themselves off from the rest of society. Across Britain a large percentage of children go to schools that only admit students who regularly attend a Catholic or an Anglican church. In sharply segregated Oldham, 40 percent of secondary schools are of this type, and they draw from a largely white population. This religious divide is increasing, due to the addition to the school scene of state-supported “faith academies,” mainly Church of England and Catholic schools. Whereas in the United States government support for religiously exclusive schools would be judged as excessive entanglement of the state with religion, British ideas of public life start from the premise that religious communities are legitimate and socially important sources of citizen education, and thus deserving of state aid.
Thus, if state multiculturalism exists in 2011, it would be found in broadly accepted principles about the role of state support in promoting diverse kinds of schools. These policies can have segregating effects, but they are also current Tory policies. Cameron and his Party don’t like to bring them up in other contexts, though; they are not in the business of attacking Christian schools.
On the whole, then, it seems that accommodation of immigrants in Britain has taken the usual course for that nation. The methods applied to distinct religious groups that predate Islam on the Isles have been extended to the newest arrivals.
British ideas of public life start from the premise that religious communities are legitimate sources of citizen education.
Cameron’s policy proposals were on a wholly different topic: he paid special attention to reducing the degree of toleration afforded Islamic groups with extreme views. Here one might join with the prime minister in finding that certain Islamic groups ought to have their public activities curtailed. The most frequently cited example is the Hizb ut-Tahrir, who reject participation in British politics and urge British Muslims to prepare themselves for the coming of the Islamic state, to be created somewhere in the world in the not-too distant future. This, however, does not concern the validity of recognizing cultural diversity but rather the degree to which the state ought to allow extreme or intolerant public speech, the same issue that arose thanks to the Danish cartoons controversy and that regularly figures in laws against Holocaust denial.
• • •
Although French President Nicolas Sarkozy attacked le multiculturalisme, more often French politicians use the term “communalism” (communautarisme). This refers not to the North American philosophy of communitarianism, although that takes its lumps sometimes as well, but to everyday practices and attitudes that reject “living together” in favor of “living side by side.” Usually Britain is the negative example, though of late the French have been blaming themselves for this supposed deficiency as well.
But communalism is no more precise an object of denunciation than is multiculturalism. InLe Monde on March 16 of this year, the new Interior Minister, Claude Guéant, said that high unemployment among those who come to France from outside the European Union proves “the failure of communalisms” because those immigrants tend to clump together by culture and doing so keeps them from getting jobs. He acknowledged that people chose where to live, that the state did not put them there, but argued, “We have gone too long in letting people group together in communities.” Guéant suggests that what has been going on is a state multiculturalism of inaction without specifying how the state could break up existing communities.
A few pages later in the same issue, a columnist analyzed the American “Galleon affair,” a case of financial fraud involving financiers from India, as an instance of communalism because these men, who held degrees from Harvard and Wharton and worked at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, had common national origins. Now, these immigrants did get jobs, great ones. Apparently communalism of one sort is the key to success, albeit illicit success, while communalism of another sort explains high unemployment rates. A cynic might add that if working in small incestuous groups defines communalism, then France, with its unusually small set of industrialists serving on interlocking boards of major companies, its exclusive school system, and marriage practices designed to preserve the elite, is among the most communalist of nations.
In any case France has never undertaken state multiculturalism. Although some officials have decried the politics of the “right to a difference” that marked several years at the beginning of François Mitterrand’s presidency in the 1980s, those politics could hardly be called “multicultural.” Some instruction in “languages of origin” was provided, but this was intended to facilitate the eventual “return” of immigrants and their children. Other sources of aid provided tutoring and training, and current policies direct additional money to school districts with large numbers of pupils “in difficulty.” At the same time, the French state has provided free language classes to immigrants, assistance to groups seeking to build mosques, and practical accommodations to allow the preparation of halal meat in abattoirs. State support for and control of religious groups is, despite the rhetoric of strict state-religion separation, a long-term feature of French policy. More than a century after France’s 1905 law of church-state separation, the state pays for the upkeep of older religious buildings, gives tax breaks to religious groups, and hires teachers for private religious schools (most of them Catholic).
• • •
Blaming multiculturalism for social ills is a Dutch national sport. Yet, as the University of Amsterdam sociologist Jan Willem Duyvendak has written, the Netherlands has never pursued state multiculturalism or the preservation of minority cultures. Instead it has pursued two sets of policies, one aimed at maintaining the long-standing commitment to the political peace, the other at achieving the integration of minorities.
The long-standing Dutch preference for compromise is embodied in the polder model—a reference to working together to build dykes, a bit like Tocqueville’s American “barn-raising.” Historically this meant that people were loath to criticize unassimilated immigrants. Dutch cultural practices thereby favored the unofficial continuation of a multicultural social reality, where people were free to continue to speak their own languages, worship in their own ways, and so forth. This kind of “live and let live” social habit was the Dutch solution to religious conflicts during a period of relatively intense religious belief and practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It gave rise to a quasi-official model of “pillars”: religious networks and institutions within which each Dutch man or woman was presumed to remain.
For the Dutch right, attacking Islam is a psychologically useful way of reworking their own heritage.
This social conception of keeping the religious and political peace by separating people according to religion subtended policies of creating and financing religious schools. Although the pillar structure had come apart before major Muslim immigration was underway in the 1970s and ’80s, a psychological residue persisted, dictating that each religious group should ignore the particularities of the other. Far from accepting or recognizing the other’s validity, this attitude promoted bare tolerance, civic acceptance of the right to the existence of Catholics, Protestants, and for that matter, gays and pot-smokers. Condemnation was constrained to the home or the pulpit. So while Dutch policies and norms favored a diverse society, they took no part of what is today thought of as multiculturalism, with its efforts to reach beyond toleration toward appreciation.
At the same time, governments developed a series of policies aimed at promoting the advancement of minorities through provision of schoolteachers who spoke their languages (principally Arabic and Turkish), construction of local councils that would advise the government on how best to foster integration, and special funding to provide additional tutoring and support at schools heavily attended by the children of immigrants. By the end of the twentieth century these policies had been changed to focus more on skills training and teaching in Dutch, but the goal of state policy continued to be, as it had always been, that of promoting integration. In the Netherlands, as in France, financial aid was targeted to schools with many poor students, who happened to descend from recent immigrants.
The attack on these policies and attitudes has focused on values attributed to Muslims or to Islamic doctrine. In 1991 parliamentary opposition leader Frits Bolkestein criticized the government for failing to defend Western values of free speech and equality against Islamic views. He used the case of Islam to launch a broader attack against the political elite and their way of papering over differences (the polder model) rather than standing up for Enlightenment values against the Islam of the Ayatollahs. A rising class of populist politicians seconded this critique, among them the right-wing and openly gay Pim Fortuyn—killed in 2002 by an activist concerned about scapegoating Muslims—and the anti-Islam campaigners Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders. Their attacks on Islam were also political appeals against the elites in order to curry favor with the forgotten working classes. Polder politics, elite domination, and Islam were the common enemy, and the refusal of the leading classes to denounce non-Dutch and anti-Enlightenment Islamic values was the major evidence that things had gone wrong. As in France this admonition has been heard on the left and the right, from Social Democrats as well as from Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom. It reflects a cultural nationalism that can appeal to the old-style populism of the right or to the universalism of the left.
In life and in death, Fortuyn focused the attack on multiculturalism even more narrowly as an attack on Islamic intolerance of sexual diversity, and in particular, of gay lifestyles. Fortuyn personified a secularist, sexually open, and “tolerant” Dutch identity, against which Islam and Muslims could easily be targeted as the pre-Enlightenment other. In no other country has the issue of tolerating gays become so central and so salient a part of the critique of Islam. This line of attack was powerful because it also was a critique of older Dutch ways of doing politics and thinking about sexuality. Throughout most of the twentieth century, most Dutch people held religious views about homosexuality and women’s rights that were not too different from those now ascribed to Muslims by their opponents. Attacking Islam was thus also a psychologically useful way of reworking one’s own heritage.
Ironically, the current focus on Islam per se—Wilders compared the Qur’an to Mein Kampfand seeks to have it banned in the Netherlands—has distracted the far right from policies about minority achievement and language learning. The focus now is on the acceptability in the Enlightenment West of the pre-Enlightenment Muslim. And yet the right continues to attack Dutch multiculturalism because it remains rhetorically useful to link the cultural critique of religion to a populist critique of past elites.
• • •
Blaming multiculturalism, then, is useful because it is both vague and misdirected. It would be much harder for Cameron to acknowledge that British racism, immigration trajectories, foreign policy, and faith-based schools have made major contributions toward minority isolation than it is to say: we got it wrong, now let’s get it right, let’s all be British. Islam provides a soft target for aspiring cultural nationalists. It is easier for Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen of the right-wing French National Front to decry Muslims praying in the street than it is to make room for adequate mosques. And across Europe, it is easier to point to the irresponsible statement of a foreign imam and say that Islam is the problem than to figure out how Muslims, like practicing Catholics and Jews before them, might best construct the cultural and religious institutions they need to be at ease in their new (and not so new) countries.
One can, and should, refute these misdiagnoses and at the same time give due credit to policies promoting integration within each of these societies. Speaking the language of the country and gaining job skills are the keys to becoming a productive citizen. France made free French courses part of its “integration contract” in 2003; with its 2005 Immigration Act, Germany began providing free German lessons to people granted work visas. When most Islamic religious officials are recent immigrants, it makes good sense to offer them instruction in the language, law, and politics of their new country of residence. These are policies of integration rather than assimilation; they are perfectly consistent with the promotion of equal respect for all religions and cultures.
Blaming multiculturalism ties the package together: it discredits a foreign element—Islam—and it identifies the fifth column that let it in, those past proponents of multiculturalism. That it misreads history is beside the point. It makes for effective, albeit irresponsible, populist politics.
Two years after participating in a Taglit-Birthright tour, Harald Fuller-Bennett was denied entry into Israel. The Shin Bet claimed he had links to terrorists and suspected him of no longer being Jewish.
With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.
But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.
Fuller-Bennett is now 30 years old. On his Taglit-Birthright tour in January 2008, he said, “I gained a lot of sympathy for Israelis and for the multitude of challenges they face (and the many mistakes the government is currently making in facing them ). We had a number of engaging Israeli military members on our bus. I am still Facebook friends with some of them. My conversations with them taught me much about the complexity of modern Israel, and the difficulty of being born into a state with a siege mentality.”
Fuller-Bennett joined a group within the Taglit program called “Peace, Pluralism and Social Justice.” He is not certain that this subgroup of Taglit is still active, but the fact of its existence shows the organizers recognized that there are young Jews whose interest in Israel has not eliminated their capacity for criticism. “We had questions about Israel but wanted to see for ourselves,” Fuller-Bennett said.
But it was not his participation in Taglit’s “most lefty, peacenik” group, as Fuller-Bennett defines it, that made the Shin Bet decide this employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was dangerous.
‘Suspicious conduct’
That happened on May 2, 2010, when he and his girlfriend (now his fiancee ) landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport for a week-long visit to Israel. This would have been his third visit to the country. But to their astonishment, after his passport was stamped for entry, he was taken aside, interrogated and put on a plane back to the United States. The fresh stamp was crossed out with two diagonal lines and the additional stamp: “Denied Entry.”
“About a week after I was denied entry, Noam Chomsky and a Spanish clown were denied,” he recalled.
The Shin Bet investigator asked him where they intended to go. “To Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and perhaps Bethlehem,” where a friend of his girlfriend lives, he answered. Afterward the state would claim, in response to the suit filed by Shatz and Cohen, that Fuller-Bennett had been “briefed to conceal his intention to enter Judea and Samaria,” and that “his conduct during the questioning at Ben-Gurion Airport aroused the questioners’ suspicion.”
Indeed, as Fuller-Bennet wrote me by email from his home in the U.S., “I was quite nervous during the investigation, especially when the investigator became accusatory and suspicious because of my travel to Syria and Sudan. I had never been interrogated in such a manner before, and I am a naturally easygoing person not accustomed to, nor expecting, such treatment. I’m sure I acted oddly as a result.”
When he realized he was being denied entry, he wrote, “I felt like shit. I felt like an idiot for being naive and not getting a ‘clean’ passport, and for being nervous during my interrogation despite the fact that I had absolutely zero intention of doing anything remotely activist-like in Israel other than possibly going to Bethlehem (which I hear many foreign Christians do every year ).”
A few months after he was sent back to the U.S., he contacted attorneys Shatz and Cohen. In October 2010, they asked the Interior Ministry to explain the deportation and inform them whether a denial of entry order had been issued, and if so, for how long, so that they could request its cancelation.
Having received no reply, the lawyers wrote again in January 2011, this time warning they would go to court if they did not receive an answer. The answer was: “Your client’s entry into Israel was denied by the security authorities because he is suspected of links to hostile terrorist elements.”
The petition to the Jerusalem District Court, in its capacity as a court of administrative affairs, was filed in March 2011. The state’s response, filed on June 29, 2011 by Deputy Jerusalem District Attorney Moran Braun, asked the court to reject the petition. To defend the Shin Bet’s decision to deny Fuller-Bennett entry, Braun wrote: “Information was received about anti-Israel protest activity in which the plaintiff took part; moreover, the possibility arose that the plaintiff had converted to Islam.”
But at the hearing on June 3, Braun said the claim that Fuller-Bennett had ties to terrorists was “mistaken.” And while there had been concern that he might have converted to Islam, “Today we have presented our position and we are not insisting on this.” In short, he added, the ban on Fuller-Bennett entering Israel had been canceled.
The lawyers therefore agreed to withdraw the petition. Judge Noam ordered the state to pay Fuller-Bennett’s court costs, because the Interior Ministry rescinded its entry ban only after the petition. And Fuller-Bennett would like to make it clear he is in fact an atheist.
Here’s the comment he left on a thread that discussed sexism:
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
And here’s a brief roundup of what people are saying about it.
Several comments, including Watson’s own, hit on exactly what the fight’s about. Dawkins has every right to dismiss Watson’s story and to argue that she was not in a high risk situation. But his attempt to prove how insignificant Watson’s story was by comparing it with the much worse scenario of a Muslim woman’s daily life hurts his argument. The fact that something worse is going on somewhere else does not diminish whatever may be happening here. Also, as Watson points out, Dawkins is admired widely for work criticizing creationism and denouncing the use of religion as an excuse for repressing women in particular. To defend only some women from misogyny and not all, she and others argue, is hypocrtical. (sic)
Again, he implies that “Muslim women” and “American women” are mutually exclusive groups; again, he implies that American women do not “suffer physically from misogyny,” nor are their lives “substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny.”
High-profile and influential men, like Dawkins, who use their status to minimize sexism in the West, deny the lived experiences of women, and advance the stupid thinking that all Western women are both white and privileged, poison a well already rank with gender bias. Men like Dawkins who sneer at Western misogyny make Western women’s lives more difficult, including women like Watson who are atheists. So, why should Watson and other women continue to hand Dawkins their money and support, and prop up his influence, when he thinks they’re all a bunch of whiny bitches who should be satisfied getting sexually harassed because somewhere (in those bad, brown, Muslim countries) a woman has it worse?
Lots of people have said lots of things about this, rightfully calling out Dawkins’ male privilege and pointing out that the “there are bigger problems” argument is derailing and silencing.
But very few of these posts have touched on Dawkins’ use of Muslim women specifically. And that’s where we come in.
Richard Dawkins is an atheist, and as an atheist, he believes that organized religion is harmful for women. There are plenty of religious and non-religious thinkers who can level-headedly make the case that organized religions use rooted patriarchal norms to oppress women and often works against their own ideals, but Dawkins is not one of those people. Dawkins uses the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman and gives little regard to how his politicized views are received by Muslim women.
So no one should be surprised at his comment above.
But that’s doesn’t make it okay. Dawkins’ comment trades in stereotypes about Muslim women “over there.” Does female genital mutilation happen? Yes. Are women not allowed to drive cars in Saudi Arabia? Yes. Is stoning a thing? Yes. But is Dawkins’ use of these acceptable? No.
It’s unacceptable for Dawkins to make sweeping statements like this because he attaches loaded terms like “female genital mutilation” and “stoning” to a huge, worldwide term like “Muslim women,” and attaches these things to Islam itself, ignoring outside cultural, economic, and social influences. Making blanket statements about FGM and stoning and driving attaches these to all of us, and contributes to the Oppressed Muslim Women stereotype. And you know what that stereotype has done to help us? Nothing.
It’s also just as silencing to female Muslim activists “over there” who are dealing with these issues, and other important ones, such as campaigning for the right to vote, pass their citizenship to their children, or keep custody of their children after divorce. Dawkins is injecting Muslim women “over there” into an issue that concerns us as well (sexual harassment and sexism in belief systems), but uses us to derail this issue.
And what is Dawkins doing to actually help the Muslim women he claims are “mutilated with a razor blade[s],” and “not allowed to drive a car,” and “stoned to death”?
NOT A DAMN THING.
So kindly shut the f**k up, Richard Dawkins, and stop using us as foot soldiers in your crusade against organized religion. We’ll be fine without you.
Robert Spencer cites crackpot mythistorian on Hajj
Robert Spencer is failing to convince America that Islam itself is a threat to national security. Americans are waking up to the fact that the universal values that bring Americans and Muslims together are far more numerous than our differences. But Spencer has spent the last several years trying to “prove” that Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, was a war-monger, a fanatic, a woman-hater, a pervert, (insert evil cliché here), etc. For example, one of his top books is, “Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.” All of his arguments are predicated on the fact that Muhammad existed in order to found Islam. Jihadist terror didn’t come from nowhere, right?
Well, these arguments just won’t cut it anymore. People can only be fooled for so long by a handful of cherry-picked verses and facts. Perhaps Islam does have something in common with Judaism and Christianity, Spencer’s readers might think. These are dangerous thoughts in Spencer’s profession. So he has moved on to a new strategy: Muhammad didn’t exist. Islam is, in fact, an extension of Hinduism. How did he reach such a conclusion and for what purpose?
Spencer receives an e-mail from the mysterious “Arnaud” allegedly an “Islamic scholar who writes from Switzerland” with a strange theory about how Hajj (pilgrimage) and Salat (ritual prayer) are actually Hindu in origin. He posts the article, the purpose of which is to “debunk” the two pillars of Islam:
Islam is like a special table that needs 5 legs (so-called “5 pillars”). Displace two of them and the table would fall, wouldn’t it?
At some point Spencer must have realized that it was simply the junk history of “mythistorian” and “crack pot” Purushottam Nagesh Oak. The article is riddled with so many factual errors that Spencer takes the post down. He must have thought that anything with a negative angle on Islam deserves the benefit of the doubt. Post first; ask questions later.
Yet Spencer depends upon his audience perceiving him as an authoritative “Islamic scholar.” He has to maintain some pro forma standards of objectivity. Damage control is needed. So he rewrites the article, taking out the most egregious misinformation (just enough to appear somewhat scholarly), crediting an unnamed “European researcher” (not Arnaud), and publishes it on Pam Geller’s site as a part of his new-found effort to prove that Muhammad never existed.
What does this little sidetrack into mythistory have to do with Jihad and “Islamic” terrorism, the focus of Spencer’s work? Nothing at all, which plainly demonstrates what we’ve been saying all along. Spencer is an intolerant fundamentalist, a religious polemicist, NOT an expert on security or terrorism. He cares about sustaining his career on the back of Islamophobic prejudice, even if that means drawing upon every crackpot theory he receives from fellow internet goons. No need for his allegations and theories to be logical or internally consistent, so long as the target is Islam. The ends justify the means.
Honestly, this is quite bizarre coming from Spencer, a man who has sold himself for so long as the “politically-incorrect” Islamic scholar willing to speak hard truths about the “intolerant” Muhammad, the prophetic figure allegedly at the heart of Jihadist terrorism. Now it seems he’s willing to completely change his tactics and develop other theories to attack Islam. Whatever Spencer ultimately believes about the nature of Islam, it must be profoundly negative and foreign. He sees no “universal moral values” in Islam that Muslims can share with other religions (see Politically Incorrect, Ch. 6).
Yesterday, Muhammad was a fire-breathing infidel-slayer. Today, he is a Hindu myth gone wrong. Tomorrow, I imagine he’ll be something else, perhaps the first Nazi. Wait, that’s been done. Oh well. If the old stuff doesn’t work anymore, you’ll think of something new, right Bob?
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Three bones make Kada Hotic feel like a winner. It may not sound like much after nearly two decades of anguish, but to her they mean everything.
Two pelvic bones and a fragment of the lower jaw are what remain of Hotic’s son Samir, who was killed by Serb forces in the killing fields of Srebrenica. They were dug up this year and identified – and now he will have a proper funeral along with 612 other newly identified massacre victims.
“They said I should not be looking for more,” she said of the remains. “In a way I am happy, if this can be called happiness. But the alternative is not finding anything and that would have been worse.”
There’s something else that makes Hotic happy.
She came face to face last month with the man she blames for Samir’s death: former Serb general Ratko Mladic, who was captured in May and is standing trial in The Hague, Netherlands on charges of masterminding Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.
Last month, her eyes met Mladic’s through the glass barrier that divided the courtroom from the audience chamber. She pointed at him, then at herself, slowly dragged a finger across her throat – and waved it Mladic.
“You killed my only son,” she said the gestures meant. “Now you will pay for it.”
Srebrenica – with its majority Muslim population – was a U.N.-protected area, besieged by Serb forces throughout the 1992-95 war for Serb domination in Bosnia.
But U.N. troops there offered no resistance when the Serbs overran the town on July 11, 1995. There, Serbs proceeded to round up Srebrenica’s Muslims and killed more than 8,000 men and boys – the climax to the 1992-95 Bosnian war that claimed 100,000 lives. An international court later labeled the killings a genocide.
Hotic lost 29-year-old Samir, her husband Sead, two brothers, and many men in her wider family.
The killers plowed the bodies into hastily dug mass graves, which they later reopened to move the bodies to other sites in an attempt to hide the crime. They worked with bulldozers that ripped bodies apart.
Forensic experts have been painstakingly assembling complete skeletons and checking each bone against the DNA from survivors’ blood samples.
Most of the time, however, families don’t get anything near a full set of bones. They just bury body parts so they have a grave to visit at the Potocari memorial center near Srebrenica, built across the former U.N. base where Bosnian Muslims had sought shelter.
Hotic sat there paralyzed with fear 16 years ago, listening to the general issuing orders as U.N. peacekeepers stood idly by.
“He told them ‘my Serb brothers, you have green light, use this opportunity, one like this will not be offered to you again,” she remembers. Then she watched soldiers separating men from women – and taking the men away, it turned out, for execution.
The memorial was built in 2003 at the site where she last saw her son and husband. That year, Hotic buried her husband, whose remains had already been found.
Through the years, Hotic has found special ways to keeping her son alive. Samir was a smoker and blew rings “you could push a stick through.”
After Srebrenica, she took up smoking and practicing smoke rings.
“If I would manage to make one, I imagined it was his.”
Since 2003, she has been going to Potocari every year for the mass funerals, in which almost 4,000 victims have been laid to rest. As of Monday, one of the gravestones will read Samir Hotic.
And with closure near, she has quit smoking.
“The waiting was not in vain,” she said. “I may be a victim, I lost my loved ones but I am the winner.”
All across the world of Islam, we find responsible thinkers, analysts and creative writers engaged in deep introspection on how their societies became vulnerable to religious extremism and how this issue became a casus belli for the West.
Some of the affluent Arab states invest considerable sums of money in the promotion of inter-faith harmony and understanding. Many intellectuals from the West respond positively and help place issues in a constructive perspective.
Unfortunately, the dominant trend in the West continues to be the exploitation of terrorism to demonise Islam. This becomes particularly noticeable when writers of repute give up all pretence to objectivity and weigh in on the side of low order propagandists against the Muslim world.
Christopher Hitchens is a famous British writer who migrated to the United States some 20 years ago. In due course he abandoned his leftist past and became an ardent neo-conservative.
He also claimed a Jewish lineage on facts that his own brother considers rather exaggerated. In internal debates on both sides of the Atlantic, he fiercely supported the invasion of Iraq. In the latest issue of Vanity Fair he returns to Pakistan, a country that arouses visceral hatred in him and lambasts it in a language that does not fight shy of using four-lettered words.
The occasion is the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. The very opening of his polemic, however, shows that he wants to use the incident to attack the Pakistani society from every conceivable angle. So blatant and biased is the denunciation of Pakistan that the best refutation so far has come from Christine Fair, a regional specialist who teaches at Georgetown University.
Hitchens employs his old trick of seizing on some isolated feature of a Muslim society and dresses it up as its dominant trait. The opening gambit comes from the well-known fact that Islam has not been entirely successful in uprooting some old tribal customs, usually in remote areas. Pakistan still faces the evil phenomenon of honour-killing that raises its head in some communities from time to time.
In the opening paragraph of a very poorly researched article that Vanity Fair thought it fit to publish, Hitchens first finds that much of Pakistan has been Talibanised and then goes on to make the extraordinary observation that Pakistan ‘is a society where rape is not a crime’. “It is”, he declares ” a punishment” to which women can be sentenced by tribal and kangaroo courts.
He then quickly moves on to savage President Asif Ali Zardari as the man who “cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto” ; a man ‘lacking in pride’ and indeed ‘lacking in manliness’. As he ridicules the very concept of sovereignty of Pakistan, very few Pakistani readers would doubt that the writer is a typical American Zionist-neoconservative who cannot bear the thought of a Muslim state equipped with nuclear weapons in violation of the ‘law’ that only Israel in this region has the right to possess them.
Hitchens’ ludicrous claim that much of Pakistan has been Talibanised is a reminder that most polemics against Islam and Muslim societies rely on such sweeping generalisations.
Qutb’s impact
In October 2006, Hitchens’ closest friend, the distinguished British novelist, Martin Amis, published a long essay on extreme Islamism in London’s Sunday Observer. He based his lengthy thesis on the premises that liberal Islam has already been defeated and supplanted by violent Islamism.
For evidence he relied heavily on a critique of the impact of Sayyid Qutb. In his native Egypt as, indeed, in most Muslim countries his philosophy and political activism continue to generate controversy. This dialectical debate about his work is an essential part of intra-Islamic disputations. Amis completely ignored this fact and presented him as the triumphant influence on Muslims.
As a critique of Qutb’s ideas the essay was a non-starter. Having made a most perfunctory reference to this aspect of Qutb, he went on to ridicule him almost entirely in terms of his presumed frustrations in dealing with liberated western women during his travels and study in Europe and North America. The idea was to locate the true provenance of Qutb’s struggle against western imperialism in his discomfort in dealing with western women.
Some time back, a thoughtful article by Michael Vlahos in the American Conservative discussed in detail how the ‘great Muslim War’ replaced the story of globalisation and how American insistence on ‘you are either with us or against us’ is now promoting counter-movements all over the globe. Hitchens and Amis wilfully ignore the context — centuries of western colonialism and the revived quest for western hegemony at the turn of the century — because their basic purpose is to support war as an instrument of restoring dominance.
By trying to show all Muslims as potential Al Qaida followers they sell their militarism to the anti-war majorities in the West. It is unfortunate to see the broad humanism of distinguished writers who should claim a universal audience being made available to the neo-imperialists of our times.
The writer is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan. Till recently, he worked as the Chairman of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.
Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller
It has been a while since we addressed the blog wars, the phenomenon in which anti-Muslim hate bloggers such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Debbie Schlussel etc. fight with fellow travelers in bigotry or individuals who have reformed themselves of their hate-mongering.
In the past we saw eruptions of in-fighting when Charles Johnson of LGF denounced Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller for allying with neo-Fascist Euro supremacist politicians such as Geert Wilders (the website Gates of Vienna vs. the World vs. LGF covered the events). Then there was the tussle between Debbie Schlussel and Pamela Geller/Robert Spencer, (Spencer at one time called Schlussel a “freedom fighter, for her part Schlussel refers to Geller as “Scamela”), and not too long ago Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer flung accusations of plagiarism and insults at one another.
Now it seems we have further cracks in the radical anti-Muslim right. Pamela Geller, who has been supporting and defending the EDL for quite some time, calling them “Defenders of Western Civilization” finally made some critical remarks about them due to their open anti-Semitism:
[I]t has become increasingly clear that the EDL has morphed and diverged from its original course. They now have clearly been infiltrated by the worst kind of influences, something that had successfully staved off for years, and they’re no longer staving it off. Roberta Moore, the leader of the Jewish Division, has broken with the EDL…the EDL has done a Charles Johnson…Now that the person whom I most trusted in the EDL, Roberta Moore, has resigned, as she was increasingly uncomfortable with the neo-fascists that had infiltrated the administration of the group, I too am withdrawing my support from the EDL.
Can we just say, “I told you so?!”
Of course, Roberta Moore is also a strident bigot, she was exposed by our European correspondent Remora for comparing Islam to “nazism,” calling Islam a “cult,” and saying Muslims come to the West and live off of “government support.”
It took Pamela Geller ages to realize the hateful character of the EDL, it was only when the gross, malignant and open anti-Semitism of the group became undeniable that she distanced herself from them. She was and is unwilling to condemn their and Roberta Moore’s anti-Muslim bigotry because she shares in the same hatred.
For her condemnation Geller was rebuked by Gates of Vienna, an anti-Muslim site that was (formerly?) an ally of hers. They expressed shock and “astonishment” that Geller would condemn the EDL, and wrote an open letter addressing Geller and asking her to “reconsider your deplorable words and withdraw them.” Numerous anti-Muslim hate sites signed the letter.
How long until Geller and co. suffer further setbacks in their fight against “the Mooslims?” Maybe Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller will be trading shots at each other in the near future.
Using the religion card when it is irrelevant to the topic is unprofessional and bigoted, but that doesn’t phase Fox News Channel television personality Brian Kilmeade. He thought it was important to bring up the issue of the burqa and somehow connect it with Keith Ellison.
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.
CAIRO – Well-qualified, ambitious and skilled Germen Muslims are complaining of growing discrimination against them in the job market, especially veiled women, who are taking the full brunt for their dress.
“Society is not open enough to let us work,” Erika Theissen, managing director of the Muslim Women’s Center for Encounters and Further Education (BFmF) in Cologne, told Deutsche Welle on Sunday, July 10.
Converting to Islam in the 1980s, she dons a carefully matched pastel blue headscarf to the rest of her outfit.
Noticing the changing work atmosphere in Germany, accompanied by exclusion of many Muslim women from work, Theissen established her BFmF center which employs over 50 Muslim women, some of them highly qualified.
In Dusseldorf, the North Rhine-Westphalian capital, she currently organizes a conference gathering about 80 people including scientists, politicians, activists and Muslim social workers to discuss discrimination against Muslim women in the workplace.
“People think the Muslim community doesn’t want Muslim women to work. But most Muslim women are not discriminated against by the Muslim community, but by society,” she added.
Theissen is not the only Muslim to face job market discrimination.
Collecting about 30 rejection letters, Ismahen Dabbach is a best example on the growing job discrimination in Germany.
“My name is Ismahen Dabbach, I am 26 years old, I was born in Germany and I am a trained office clerk. I am very flexible, independent and open to everything that carries me further forward in life,” the ambitious young woman used to say during job interviews. Yet, rejection was also the expected reply.
Dabbach, whose parents are Tunisians, feels that since she decided to wear hijab four months ago, her search for a job has become extremely difficult.
“They put you on a waiting list, then they invite you and tell you that they will call you, but after three days you get a rejection letter,” Dabbach asks.
“So you start asking yourself: did I make a mistake or is it the company’s fault?”
Germany has between 3.8 and 4.3 million Muslims, making up some 5 percent of the total 82 million population, according to government-commissioned studies.
Stereotyping
Social analysts agree that German Muslim, especially veiled women, have hardly any chance of getting a job.
Such a trend, according to Mario Peucker, a social scientist at the University of Melbourne, is apparent in medium-sized German companies which show clear anti-Muslim tendencies.
“Even if they don’t have personal resentments, they may think that their customers or their staff might have a negative image of Muslims and this becomes their reason for not employing Muslim men or women,” he says.
Germans have grown hostile to the Muslim presence recently, with a heated debate on the Muslim immigration into the country.
A recent poll by the Munster University found that Germans view Muslims more negatively than their European neighbors.
Germany’s daily Der Spiegel had warned last August that the country is becoming intolerant towards its Muslim minority.
According to a 2010 nationwide poll by the research institute Infratest-dimap, more than one third of the respondents would prefer “a Germany without Islam.”
Denouncing the growing prejudice, which a 2006 anti-discrimination law could not end, Peucker called for offering employers anonymous applications so they would not see a name or photo on the applicant’s resume.
But Erika Theissen thinks it’s not enough.
“I think the government must be a role model for those people who have the possibility to give jobs and then I hope, other people will think: ok, I can take a woman with a headscarf, it will not cause a big problem for my business,” she said.
Living the current tragedy, Dabbach only dreams of a normal eight-hour job in her home country Germany.
“I want to have a normal eight-hour-job, from eight to five, five days a week, where I can wear my headscarf, like an ordinary citizen,” she says.
To turn the dream into a reality, she started searching the internet for jobs offered by Muslim companies. She got a job outside Germany after only three days of search.
For this job, Dabbach, who lives in the western German town of Gütersloh, would move outside Germany.
“What should I do now?” Dabbach asked helplessly.
“I am at home in Germany, my family and friends are here. Should I just leave them? I am really torn.”
Europe’s rights court on Friday rejected two cases brought by Muslims against Switzerland’s constitutional ban on the construction of new minarets.
The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights said it would not consider the cases because the plaintiffs “cannot claim to be ‘victims’ of a violation” of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the court enforces.
One of the cases was brought by a former spokesman for the mosque of Geneva and the other by a number of Swiss Muslim associations.
Switzerland held a referendum in November 2009 in which citizens voted to ban the construction of new minarets, a move that drew criticism worldwide. The vote inserted a new line in the Swiss constitution stipulating that “the construction of minarets is forbidden”.
The plaintiffs had said the ban violated their religious rights, but judges in Strasbourg said they had not proven the ban “had any concrete effect” on the plaintiffs.
As the plaintiffs could not prove they planned to imminently erect a mosque with a minaret, they could not show they were subject to any discrimination, the judges said. ”The simple fact that this could be the case in the near or far future is not, in the eyes of the court, sufficient” to warrant the examination of the cases, the judges said.
The Strasbourg court is due to consider three more cases on the minaret ban.
Surprise, surprise, ACT for America or as they are better known ACT for Hate’s largest chapter is in Nashville. Bob Smietana does a good job reporting on them in the article below.
ACT! for America sums up its mission in four words: “They must be stopped.”
The “they” in question are Muslims, who ACT! for America’s leaders insist are involved in a stealthy jihad to destroy the United States from the inside out, replacing the Constitution with the Islamic legal code known as Shariah.
The Virginia Beach, Va.-based national nonprofit claims 150,000 members and spreads its message through books, websites, radio ads, cable television and the work of local chapters.
It has become a potent political force in Nashville, home to the largest ACT chapter in the nation. Local members have opposed new mosques and lobbied for laws limiting Islamic influence — including a new state anti-terrorism law that originally referenced Shariah law.
Their message appeals to Bible Belt Christians, who fear that Islam and secularization threaten their way of life, and Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel, who see Muslims as the enemy of that nation. Members point to the 2009 case of Carlos Bledsoe, a Muslim convert and former Tennessee State University student who confessed to murdering an Army recruiter in Little Rock.
Critics say ACT distorts the nature of Islam and labels law-abiding Muslims as terrorists. Local Muslims say they will stand up for their rights to religious freedom.
“We are not afraid of this ACT group,” said Rashed Fakhruddin, a member of the Islamic Center of Nashville. “But we are concerned about the climate of fear they are trying to create.”
ACT has nine chapters in Tennessee: Middle Tennessee — based in Nashville — Cleveland, Hermitage, Jackson, Lebanon, Knoxville, Memphis, Morristown and Niota. Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a Boston-based anti-Islam group, said he’s not surprised that ACT has caught on in Middle Tennessee.
“The extent to which ACT has been successful in Nashville reflects its strong leadership nationally and locally and the frustration of many citizens with the failure of Nashville’s civic leadership and the media to deal with this threat,” he wrote in an email.
Anti-Islam groups fight for new laws
Daniel Bregman, a Nashville eye surgeon, leads the Middle Tennessee chapter. Bregman’s wife, Joanne, an attorney, has been one of the group’s chief lobbyists at the state Capitol.
Bregman turned down several requests for an interview. He appeared in a promotional video produced by the charity’s national office for its recent annual conference, held in Washington, D.C. The video states that Nashville has the largest chapter in the country, although the group won’t reveal its membership numbers.
“There are a couple reasons why a large chapter is good,” he said on the video. “The larger you are, the more power you have.”
The video includes images of the couple, as well as images of the outside of the Islamic Center of Nashville. Bregman repeats the claim that Muslims in the U.S. want to impose Shariah law in the place of the U.S. Constitution and are threatening non-Muslims.
“The imposition of Shariah law, which is the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists in this country, is that I become a second-class citizen,” he said. “If I don’t get killed first.”
ACT members see themselves as warriors in a clash between Western civilization and Islam. That belief is reinforced at local chapter meetings, which feature speakers from other national anti-Islam groups.
They include Frank Gaffney of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy and a star witness for opponents of the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. He has argued on ACT! for America’s cable show that Muslims should be arrested and tried as traitors if they follow any part of Shariah law.
He spoke at a March 15 ACT meeting held at New Hope Community Church in Brentwood, and a recording of his speech recently was posted online.
“Frankly, I feel I am in the presence of a lot of heroes,” he told audience members. “Folks like you are, in the end, what’s going to make a difference between victory and defeat in what I think of as the war for the free world.”
That message appeals to ACT supporters such as J. Lee Douglas, a Brentwood dentist.
Douglas said he usually takes a live-and-let-live approach when it comes to religion. But he doesn’t believe Islam shows the same respect to other faiths.
“I think with Islam, there is an effort to not just leave people alone,” he said. “There is a compulsion to force people to join that faith.”
Defenders called apologists, ignorant
Douglas was one of 100 or so people in attendance at a workshop Tuesday night — also at New Hope Community Church — sponsored by the local chapter of ACT! for America.
The session was titled “Persuading the Near Enemy.” According to the workshop leader, Bill French, a near enemy is anyone who thinks Islam has good points.
“The near enemy is the apologist for Islam, who, I have found, doesn’t know anything about Islam,” French told the group.
French is a former Tennessee State University physics professor who writes under the pseudonym Bill Warner and runs the Center for the Study of Political Islam. He has no formal training in Islamic studies and doesn’t speak Arabic.
He recently was listed as a member of “The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle” by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Reportmagazine, along with Gaffney, ACT founder Brigitte Gabriel and David Yerushalmi, a Phoenix attorney who drafted Tennessee’s anti-Shariah bill.
That law passed after all references to Shariah and Islam were removed. The final version made giving assistance to a terrorist group a class A felony.
Shariah law’s meaning debated
French’s books, with titles such as Shariah Law for Non Muslims, and talks are based on counting verses in the Quran and other Islamic texts. He says that more verses in those texts are about politics and violence than religion.
Therefore, he argues, Islam isn’t only religion. Instead, he sees it as a political system bent on world domination, disguised with a thin veneer of religion. Real Muslims who follow the true Islam want to spread their religion by force.
“Jihad is what made Islam great,” he said.
Page Brooks, assistant professor of theology and Islamic studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, said ACT! For America confuses radical Islam with the more moderate mainstream version of the faith.
Brooks, who is a chaplain in the Army National Guard, spent 2010 in Iraq. He said the Muslims he met there were thankful that American troops were opposing terrorists, who used Islam to justify violence.
“Even the average Iraqi knew the difference between the radical jihadists and the average Muslim walking around the street,” he said. “We have to be careful about who we label as a radical Muslim.”
Brooks also took issue with how ACT! for America and its supporters describe the Islamic legal code known as Shariah. That code guides religious practice — such as how to pray or what to eat — as well as family law, business practices and rules for ethical warfare.
“A lot of it has to do with religious compliance and personal holiness,” Brooks said.
Ron Leonard, ACT chapter leader in Hermitage, said his group is only worried about terrorists.
“I want to make that real clear,” said Leonard, who retired from the Army National Guard in 2004. “It is not Muslims. It is the extremist elements that we are dealing with. Muslims are good people. There are people that take their extremist views to the point of killing people. And ACT is in a position to stop this from going on.”
War, religious right are at group’s roots
ACT! for America is the brainchild of Hanah Kahwagi Tudor, a Lebanese Christian who fled her homeland during that country’s civil war, which raged from 1975 to 1990.
Tudor, who goes by the pseudonym Brigitte Gabriel, first moved to Israel, where she worked for a television network owned by Pat Robertson.
She married a co-worker named Charles Tudor, a former cameraman for Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Praise the Lordtelevision show. The couple eventually settled in Virginia Beach.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she began speaking out about terrorism. She wrote two books — They Must Be Stopped andBecause They Hate — which became best-sellers.
In books and speeches, Tudor says that Islamic terrorists took over her home country, and she wants to stop them before they take over America.
Tudor declined to be interviewed. On Friday, the ACT! for America website announced she’d visit Nashville on a November date to be announced.
ACT and Tudor’s other nonprofit, the education group American Congress for Truth, took in a combined $1,612,908 in 2009, according to their latest federal tax returns, known as Form 990s. The groups asked for an extension for filing their 2010 tax returns.
Tudor was paid $178,441 in salary by the two charities.
The nonprofit uses constant email updates, conference calls with Tudor and other electronic means to keep in close contact with local leaders.
Email updates sent to supporters also regularly include a request for donations.
Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, attended ACT’s recent national convention and wrote about her experience for religiondispatches.com.
Ingersoll, who is critical of ACT, said the event was well organized and professional and focused on an “us versus them” approach to Islam and to liberals, who are seen as supporting Muslims.
“It’s framed as this real fear of outsiders,” she said. “It’s tied to all of the tea party rhetoric about the real America.”
Middle Tennessee Muslims organize
ACT’s growing influence has led local Muslims and interfaith groups to become more organized.
Hillsboro Presbyterian Church recently hosted an interfaith Scripture study with local Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders. About 50 people attended.
Fakhruddin, of the Islamic Center of Nashville, helped organize opposition to the anti-Shariah bill, working with the American Civil Liberties Union as well as people of other faiths.
“It made us a stronger group,” he said. “We will not tolerate any acts of injustice. Not just to Muslims, but to all Americans.”
Local Muslims haven’t been politically active until recently, Fakhruddin said. Now they are more aware of how to get involved in the political process and have now gotten to know their state legislators. They also are committed to defending the U.S. Constitution.
“People know us a little better than they did in the past,” he said. “People will see what we stand for and who we really are now. We are Americans. We are not some other group. We stand up for America.”
(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.
Aside from the fact that real democracies don’t persecute their minorities, Jews are reminded in many pieces of scripture to never forget when we were “strangers in a strange land” (see the book of Exodus). Maybe this is one reason why Muslim-bashing ticks me off so much. As a group, we should know what it’s like — if not us personally, then our parents.
Nowadays, though, we have discovered that, after centuries of being despised by zealots and Christian-tinged nationalists, we have suddenly been mailed gold membership cards to a newly-constituted “Judeo-Christian” country club [others need not apply]. We’ve arrived, we tell ourselves. They love us. Things have changed.
Well, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the folks who hated Jews last year have simply moved on to new enemies. They haven’t stopped their hating, and I don’t trust their unctuous expressions of new-found love. The religious right responsible for so much of the bigotry toward Muslims (and previously Jews and African Americans) still can’t decide whether they want to kiss us, convert us, wear tallit and sing in Hebrew, or keep blaming us for Golgotha. By the time they realize we really aren’t converting any time soon, I suspect they won’t love us quite so much. And then it will be time for us to die in their End Times scenario. All this is to say – we’re really still the enemy. But ever since the Holocaust it’s just been, well, a bit awkward to say things like that in polite company. But give it time. They haven’t really changed.
Yet Jews are not their only enemies. Blacks, gays, tree-huggers, socialists, progressives, unionists, Hispanics, immigrants, flag-burners, pacifists, anti-globalists, anti-imperialists, secularists, atheists – the list is pretty long – everyone’s a target. And it has always seemed so obvious to me that much of their hostility to Muslims is that Islam is simply their number one religious competitor.
But none of this is new.
A few years ago, while doing some genealogical research, I came across a 1909 immigration document which recorded a family member’s recent arrival in America on a ship from Antwerp. I always found it odd that the shipping company had recorded all this information (but more on this in a second):
19y; male; single; can read/write;
Citizen of: Russia, Race: Hebrew;
Last Residence: Russia, [town] Destination: NY, NY; Has ticket;
Passage paid by brother;
In possession of: $25; Has been in US before in NY;
Never in prison or supported by charity;
Not a polygamist or an anarchist;
Place of Birth: Russia, [town]
In that year, 1909, many Jews were sympathetic to movements advocating anti-authoritarian forms of government based on justice, not nationalistic slogans. After all, nationalism had never been kind to Jews in Europe. For reasons of both fact and perception, most Jews were presumed to be anarchists in 1909.
And a cautious nation couldn’t be too careful about letting such troublemakers into a society whose ideal was British and German Protestantism. Organizations such as the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League were alarmed that so many of these new Jewish immigrants were “undesirable” that they helped legislate large fines on steamship companies which failed to screen them out (thus the detailed steamship records above). The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill was hardly subtle: restrictions were harshest on eastern and southern Europeans (Jews and Italians). The Dillingham Commission further restricted such immigration and totally eliminated Asians. The American nativists of the time believed these foreigners were inherently “lesser breeds” and incompatible with a superior Christian, European society – something echoed frequently by Tea Party types in the U.S. today and by Islamophobes like Geert Wilders. The League’s charter:
We should see to it that the breeding of the human race in this country receives the attention which it so surely deserves. We should see to it that we are protected, not merely from the burden of supporting alien dependants, delinquents, and defectives, but from what George William Curtis called “that watering of the nation’s lifeblood,” which results from their breeding after admission.
Sound familiar?
First they came for the Jews, then the Muslims. Who’s next?
Washington, DC – Although negative stories of Islamophobia in the United States abound in news media, most Americans respect religious diversity. That’s why on Sunday, June 26, thousands of people across America joined together at dozens of churches and other houses of worship across the country. Congregants united to do far more than read Christian scriptures; from Alabama to Alaska, from California to New York, worshippers also heard the words of Jewish and Muslim sacred texts as rabbis and imams joined pastors in leading an event called Faith Shared.
A joint project of Human Rights First and the Interfaith Alliance, Faith Shared brought Americans together to counter the anti-Muslim bigotry and negative stereotypes that have erupted throughout the country in the past few years and led to misconceptions, distrust and, in some cases, even violence.
If I were living in a Muslim-majority country, I might think the United States is filled with people burning the Quran, demonizing Islamic beliefs and tarring all Muslims as supporters of radicalism and terrorism. To the casual observer, the anti-Islam fervor of late would seem to bear that out, but the truth is far more complicated.
It is true that in recent years the United States has seen a disturbing trend of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and rhetoric, as well as a general lack of understanding about Islam. We’ve seen Quran burnings, individuals attacked only because they are Muslim, a pipe bomb explosion at an Islamic community center in Florida and a surge in reported cases of discrimination against Muslims in workplaces and schools throughout the country.
But those incidents – all of which have grabbed headlines – don’t represent the views of so many Americans who respect religious freedom and the diversity of faiths that freedom brings. In fact, a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that Muslims are an important part of the American religious community, with strong agreement across political and religious lines. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report showing that much of the hatred directed toward Muslims has been stirred up by a small but influential group of activists and media.
Discussions about the role of Islam and Muslims in American life have all too often degenerated into stereotypes and hatred. If not challenged, these can undermine respect for the religious freedom of all Americans and weaken our resilience as a nation.
And the concerns go beyond our country. What happens in the United States with respect to the treatment of Muslims, rightly or wrongly, has a huge impact overseas on the perception of the country in general, and on U.S. efforts to promote human rights abroad.
It’s imperative for the international community to support efforts to create responsive governments – those that give equal rights to members of all minorities, protect religious freedoms and allow for the freedoms of expression and assembly. The United States can and should play a key role in supporting those efforts.
For that reason, it’s vital to recognize that what happens in the United States – how Americans protect human rights and religious freedoms and how they deal with security issues in relation to the Muslim community – influences how the international community perceives the American people’s commitment to promoting democracy. A message of respect among religious groups in the United States, one that says anti-Muslim fervor is only a small part of the American story, will strengthen that commitment in the eyes of many.
As we continue in this effort, my colleagues and I are not naive about the challenges that can divide America along religious lines. Muslims are not alone among Americans in terms of bearing the brunt of stereotypes and hatred. Indeed, with the Faith Shared services, we sent and will continue to send a clear message: Despite the challenges, the way forward must begin with respect.
We cannot solve these problems in a day but on June 26, Americans across the country showed that we respect religious differences and reject the demonization of any religion. Americans are a nation not of the few who burn Qurans and incite hatred, but of the many who fully embrace religious freedom, tolerance and pluralism.
* Tad Stahnke is the Director of Policy and Programs at Human Rights First. This originally published by the Common Ground News Service, or CGNews.
Pamela Geller and her cronies are waging a personal war, and once again her line of target is the silent evil enemy: common sense.
Not content with spreading venom in the USA, Pam is now screaming that Europe has bowed to the shackles and chains of imperialist “Islamic supremacists,” after French and European authorities “cancelled” a Stop the Islamisation of America (SIOA) and Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) “freedom” rally, that aimed to protest outside the European Parliament, over “the Islamic takeover of Europe.”
As ridiculous as Pam’s event sounds I for one wouldn’t mind seeing Pam Geller and her friends make a fool of themselves, so was her rally really “cancelled?”
Yes, the European authorities seem to have annulled the Pam and co. rally, but is it in the context of “pro-Jihadism submission to Islamic Supremacism,” as the hate-mongers are claiming?
Let’s dissect the truth behind this “cancellation”:
Pam Geller’s Fascist Message and the Implications for Violence
Geller writes,
Democracy collapses in Europe: EU cancels SIOA/SIOE free speech rally — Freedom from jihad flotilla to launch on 9/11
STRASBOURG, FRANCE, June 28: In a capitulation to Islamic supremacists and violent radical Leftists, French and European Union authorities have canceled a free speech rally planned by a coalition of American and European human rights organizations in Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament. The human rights organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) were planning to hold their first-ever transatlantic summit in Strasbourg, France, on July 2.
The SIOA/SIOE summit was dedicated to the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law – all principles denied by Islamic law.
The evidently responsible and comprehensible actions of the European and French authorities, who were prompted to cancel the potentially violent event, is now being used by Geller as proof of European and French authorities’ “support for Islamic terror and anti-Semitism.”
The authorities may have cancelled the event due to many factors. Firstly, an event justifying racism, fascism and bigotry towards a minority, Muslims in this case, is one big red flag! While some Americans may reflexively take exception to the cancellation of the rally on the grounds that it compromises “free speech,” here in Europe we take our practised laws of equality and freedom very seriously. Authorities have to balance “freedoms” and “rights” with the competing issues of “security,” “community harmony,” and defense against “hate speech” that incites violence, and so decisions to cancel rallies are taken very seriously.
Secondly, a main factor in the cancellation of the event seems to be the crowds that would flock and gather for the rally: neo-nazis, thugs, violent fringe groups, racists, and xenophobes masquerading as self-proclaimed ‘human rights’ activists. This event would have been a grave security threat to the people of Strasbourg, an event purely designed to deliberately provoke the liberals, Muslims and opposition groups and hence would be a breach of French and European law.
The Gellerists attempts in Europe give us pause, after all, Europe is home to one of the most inhuman crimes in history, the Holocaust, which was the result of propaganda, scapegoating and persecution. The rational expertise of the authorities recognised these signs, and sanctioned it in the appropriate manner. In this case, they have cancelled a palpable hate rally that had the potential to turn violent.
Human Rights and Muslim Takeover in the Bizzare-o World of Pamela Geller
The atypical, and apocryphal view of Geller’s interpretation on the meaning and definition of ‘human rights’ is comical. She calls for an international deployment to “defend the rights of man,” when she herself is partaking in an epic act of human oppression:
“The SIOA/SIOE Freedom From Jihad aid flotilla,” Geller explained, “is intended to be a direct response to the capitulation of French, European, and American authorities to Leftist and Islamic supremacist forces of oppression and injustice. It is set to launch after our national Rally for Freedom at Ground Zero on the tenth anniversary of the Islamic jihad attacks that murdered three thousand Americans.”
The “Freedom from Jihad aid flotilla,” is obviously a mock-term employed by Geller to demean the Gaza Freedom Flotillas, which she derisively describes as “Jihad flotillas.” Geller dare not admit that Gaza has been and is in need of desperate aid due to the inhumane and oppressive blockade instituted by the Apartheid state of Israel because, well…you know, Israel is sugar and spice and everything nice!!
Let us analyze the facts here. It is estimated that 857 million people are citizens in Europe, and 58 million Muslims in Europe, 14 million of these numbers directly living under the European Union, including those who have converted to the religion of Islam. Where is the indication that Islam is in a takeover of Europe, when the numbers of non-Muslims to Muslims ratio is incomparable and far greater. This is a tool of hysteria and sensationalism on the part of Pam Geller, to insert misinformation to promote a repugnant agenda.
Another important point to note here is that Geller, on the mention of the tragedy of 9/11, conveniently makes no mention of the numerous Muslim victims that died on 9/11, who also were equally victims of such a heinous crime. The lack of acknowledgement of those Muslim deaths, only reiterates her pure uncompromising hatred of Muslims.
The SIOA Freedom From Jihad Flotilla will call upon the international community to act in defense of these basic human rights:
The freedom of speech – as opposed to Islamic prohibitions of “blasphemy” and “slander,” which are used effectively to quash honest discussion of jihad and Islamic supremacism;The freedom of conscience – as opposed to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy;The equality of rights of all people before the law – as opposed to Sharia’s institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims. The Flotilla will call upon all free people of all races and creeds to stand with us to defend our freedoms against the radically intolerant ideology codified in Islamic law.
Geller wants to galvanize the globe to fight 12th century medieval law books that are not applied in the Muslim world, and are particularly irrelevant in light of the Arab Spring. Geller has a condensed and inept understanding of the term “Human Rights,” one which is limited in scope, and only applies to her circle of hate and dogmatism. According to her human rights apply to everyone –except Muslims. That is not human rights, it’s the selected persecution of a minority group, which in-turn presents this whole so called ‘freedom from jihad’ flotilla as nothing more than an opportunity to channel Islamophobic extremism from the right of the spectrum. There are no two ways about this issue.
Geller and co. have a very idiosyncratic strategy to illuminate the principles of ‘violence’ and ‘hatred’ in Islam. In order to combat and deplete the notion of Islamist extremism and hatred, the Gellerists have adopted the very same model of intolerance and prejudice, in order to stamp out the very elements they oppose. What a paradoxical stance, where two wrongs never will make a right. In what parallel universe would such an absurd theory make any sense? Only in the world of Pamela Geller.
The story below from AlterNet is a must read, I don’t know why it is not being covered more. This is a clear and bold example of a high ranking politician meddling in religion and thereby comprising the separation between Church and State. If that wasn’t bad enough he happens to be propping up one of the most extremist, dominionist organizations and movements in the country, the AFA.
AFA is the same group whose rising star is the repugnant Bryan Fischer. Fischer has made radically hateful comments about Muslims and Gays. In light of the fact that the Islamophobesphere and twitterati are up in arms about the Imam who made homophobic statements, where is the outrage over Gov. Rick Perry? This is an issue that effects us ten times more than some Imam making bigoted remarks.
Interestingly enough I have just found out that Bruce Bawer, (a friend of Robert Spencer’s, who thinks the West is “appeasing Islam”) is now blogging on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Just today, under a blog titled “Islamophobia,” Bawer writes somewhat misleadingly that if you object to an Imam who preaches intolerance of gays you will be labeled an “Islamophobe.” How ridiculous is that?
I tweeted back, “Bigotry does not make bigotry OK. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Homophobia does not justify #Islamophobia and vice versa.”
No response yet. However, I noticed that neither Andrew Sullivan or any of his fellow bloggers at the Daily Dish have commented on Gov.Rick Perry’s endorsement of AFA or full frontal assault on the separation of Religion and State.
Gov. Rick Perry’s call for a day-long event of prayer and fasting Aug. 6 at a sports stadium in Houston is a dramatic escalation of government meddling in religion.
American politicians love to invoke religion, and a generic form of an alleged “one-size-fits-all” piety is so common that scholars have even give it a fancy name: ceremonial deism.
Ceremonial deism is what explains “In God We Trust” on our money, “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance and the tendency of presidents and governors to attend interfaith prayer services whenever there’s a natural disaster.
Despite its short-comings – ceremonial deism doesn’t offer much to non-believers, for example, and many devoutly religious people find it sterile and bland – the practice at least recognizes that religious beliefs come in many forms. Thus, God is appealed to but not Jesus. Prayers are “non-sectarian.”
What’s planned for Texas in August is not ceremonial deism. It’s something else entirely. And it’s a big problem.
Gov. Rick Perry’s call for a day-long event of prayer and fasting Aug. 6 at a sports stadium in Houston is a dramatic escalation of government meddling in religion. Called “The Response,” the event is being coordinated by the American Family Association (AFA), an extreme Religious Right group, as well as other far-right religious groups and figures with controversial theological and political ideas. The rally is exclusively Christian in nature; in fact, it reflects a certain type of Christianity – the fringes of fundamentalism.
What brought this about? Perry’s theological allies claim that America is being punished by God for its wicked ways. They see a national day of repentance as the solution.
On The Response’s website, Perry writes, “Right now, America is in crisis: we have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters. As a nation, we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy.”
Of course, this could be just a sheer political ploy. Perry has been openly flirting with a presidential run, and this event could be little more than an effort to curry favor with the Religious Right in advance of that.
Regardless, word is spreading quickly among the religio-political right. Potential attendees to The Response are told to bring a Bible and encouraged to fast – although there will be a few food vendors on site for those who can’t or won’t. The groups behind this effort tend to come from the fringes of Christianity that are obsessed with things like prophecy, direct messages from God, faith healing and so on. These charismatic Christians emphasize a highly charged form of worship that stresses emotional outbursts and a theology of judgment. They seem to be convinced that God has it in for America, mainly because we permit legal abortion, tolerate gays and have a secular government.
Many churches in America preach this theology, and Americans are free to attend these houses of worship and hear it whenever they like. But government endorsement of this sectarian message goes too far – and that’s why more and more people are speaking out over Perry’s prayer confab.
Mainline Christian, non-Christian and secularist groups have protested the Perry event – and rightly so. Perry and his supporters don’t try to downplay the proselytizing nature of the event; in fact, they brag about it. They say non-Christians are welcome to attend to hear a message about redemption through Christ.
Perry defended the event, tellingThe New York Times, “It is Christian-centered, yes, but I have invited and welcome people of all faiths to attend.” He also brushed off charges that the AFA is extreme, calling it “a group that promotes faith and strong families, and this event is about bringing Americans together in prayer.”
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.
Russell Blackford recently wrote a piece on Islamophobia that was reproduced by Richard Dawkins, in which he said,
“attacks on Islam..made opportunistically..cannot be dismissed out of hand as worthless.”
We responded on Twitter by saying that most attacks can be dismissed as worthless. Exhibit A: Conspiracy Theories.
Now here is a perfect example, from one Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, who thinks the recent E.coli outbreak in Germany is linked to Muslim immigrants’ importation of “fecal jihad.” After this, I don’t know who could compete for “the craziest conspiracy theory of the year award.” (hat tip: Sphinx and Jake)
The writer and “Islam expert” Dr. Udo Ulfkotte has made a nice career for himself in Germany by spreading hate and fear against Muslims. In a recent interview he fantasized about all the “living space” (Lebensraum) ethnic Germans could have if only they could conduct forced deportation of all the Turkish and Arab people living in Germany. No matter that nearly all of Dr. Ulfkotte’s hateful diatribes are based on lies: he is a much sought-after guest for TV talk shows and discussion panels.
But even Dr. Ulfkotte may have outdone himself with his mostrecent piece on the right-wing Truther site of Kopp Verlag(with thanks to Politblogger). Germany is facing a health crisis due to vegetables tainted with E.coli. Naturally, Udo Ulfkotte seizes the opportunity for yet another attack on immigrants from Turkey:
Im »Erdbeerland« in Pottenstein und auf mindestens zehn weiteren Erdbeerplantagen erfand man den Hosenzwang, weil Türkinnen, die dort saisonal gearbeitet hatten, bei der Arbeit auf die Erdbeeren uriniert und zwischen den Pflanzen auch noch andere »größere Geschäfte« verrichtet hatten. … Bestimmte Migranten haben eben völlig andere Vorstellungen von Hygiene und der Einhaltung von Hygiene-Richtlinien als wir Europäer.
(In the “strawberry region” in Pottenstein (Austria) and on at least ten other strawberry farms workers are required to wear pants because Turkish women who were working there seasonally were urinating on the strawberries and even defecating among the plants….Certain migrants have a completely different concepts of hygiene than we Europeans.)
Dr. Ulfkotte goes on to describe a “fecal Jihad” being waged by Muslims against Europeans.
Thus far, there is zero evidence that the E.coli outbreak has any connection with strawberries, much less strawberries from Austria. Authorities believe rather that cucumbers from Spain may be to blame. But don’t look for a retraction or an apology from Dr. Udo Ulfkotte. He has never once retracted any of the numerous lies he’s published at Kopp Verlag or elsewhere.
Again, Ulfkotte is free to publish whatever he wishes, even if it’s mostly lies. What concerns me is that he is viewed by the German media as an “expert” and frequently appears on German television. They are lending to this fraud credibility he in no way deserves.
So what happens when the world’s oldest Islamic university and seminary declares support for a constitutional, democratic state? Deafening silence from the Islamophobesphere, why of course. It proves the lie to the claim that somehow Islam and Muslims are impervious to Democracy, Rule of Law, Equal Rights and universal suffrage.
In a statement titled “Al-Azhar Document” and read on national television, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayeb, the country’s highest religious authority, outlined his institution’s vision on key political, social and economic issues that have been subject to raging debates across the country for months.
The product of a consensual agreement reached between Al-Azhar officials and numerous prominent intellectuals and religious figures following extensive discussions over the last few weeks, the Document contains 11 main articles and is meant to serve as a foundation for a new social arrangement in post-Mubarak Egypt.
The statement opens with a definitive and unequivocal position on the contentious debate taking place in society between liberal forces and religious currents on the nature of the relationship between religion and the state in a new Egypt.
In a clear rejection of the argument put forward by many Islamic Salafists, the Grand Imam laid out his support for a ‘democratic and constitutional’ state.
“Islam has never, throughout its history, experienced such a thing as a religious or a theocratic state,” El-Tayeb said. He added that theocratic states have always been autocratic and humanity suffered a great deal because of them.
The document stressed its support for universal democratic rights such as free and democratic elections where the citizens as a whole constitute the sole and legitimate source of legislation.
The Grand Imam said that striving towards social justice needs to be a basic component in any future economic arrangement in Egypt. He stressed that affordable and decent education and health care services must become a right for all citizens.
The document was explicit in its support for freedom of expression in the arts and literary fields within the accepted boundaries of Islamic philosophy and moral guidelines. It highlighted the need for expanded scientific and popular campaigns to combat illiteracy and advance economic progress.
“We need a serious commitment to universal human rights, the rights of women and children,” El-Tayeb said.
In a clear reference to the status of religious minorities especially Copts, the Grand Imam stated that citizenship must be the sole criterion by which both rights and responsibilities are administered in society.
The document emphasised the right of all citizens to practice any of the three main religions in complete freedom. Along those lines, the Grand Imam admonished all those “who use religion to incite sectarian strife or those who accuse others of religious apostasy simply based on political disagreements.”
The document asked all Muslims to refer to Al-Azhar’s religious opinions as the highest and final word in all disputed theological matters.
In foreign affairs, the document stressed that Egypt must regain its once prominent status in the Arab, Muslim and African spheres, maintain its sovereign and independent decision making process and continue its support for the Palestinian people.
Finally, the Grand Imam demanded that the Institution of Al-Azhar be independent of the state. Along those lines, the document pointed out that the Supreme Clerical Committee of Al-Azhar not the government – as has been the practice for decades – chooses the position of Grand Imam.
I wanted to find out what the kerfluffle over “creeping Shariah” was all about. After all, this is a Republican worry in thirteen states which have introduced anti-shariah laws. And apparently it’s more serious than even a global economic Depression.
So I went to a blog by the promising name of “Creeping Shariah” and its matching Twitter feed for some hard answers.
The website promised to easily locate the numerous recent cases of jihad being waged on our very shores. In Massachusetts alone there were forty incidents of jihad, as those sly Mahometans managed to finesse a Muslim holiday in Cambridge, plotted to build a cemetery in Belchertown, and the Muslim Brotherhood had apparently consulted with Whitey Bulger to get governor Duval Patrick to build a mega-mosque in Bah-stahn.
Those armed-and-dangerous ladies from Code Pink were raising money for Hamas, CAIR was at it again, trying to help out some headscarf-toting Muslim terrorists at a Boston pharmacy school, Yale University was cozying up to faculty jihadis by not re-inviting an Islamophobe to come back for a conference, and some crazy Mooslim women troublemakers in Kansas City wanted to wear Islamic-style bathing gear in a pool. The fate of our pools, our children, and our very nation were at stake. And all this trouble from a bunch of Muslim women, no less.
Beside the fact that New Haven and Kansas City are not exactly in Massachusetts, most of the other “incidents” reported were endlessly-recycled hate blurbs from people like Pamela Geller and Rick Santorum — which, I will grant you — do constitute a sort of domestic terror. But most of the postings were over a year old. Maybe getting all that “news” onto his website was just too overwhelming for him. HTML can be so wordy.
But now I was really curious. Incidents of creeping shariah and jihad were obviously so numerous, so dangerous, and so troubling that perhaps a Twitter feed could provide better real-time coverage of the onslaught. And surely the feed would corroborate a pattern of Islamification of our beloved heterosexual, fetus-friendly, pro-capitalist, White-loving, brown-skin-hating, Ayn Randophilic, Judeo-Christian-based culture! I went online looking for more answers.
And answers I found. More attacks on Keith Ellison, indignation at a Toronto school which tried to accommodate a Muslim student who wanted to pray quietly in a corner of its library, and the unmitigated gall of the town of Farmington, Michigan, to sell an unused school to an Islamic cultural association. Truly disturbing stuff, indeed!
Elsewhere in the tweets were some on a Republican congressman (Wolf, R-VA) going after CAIR via the IRS, Judicial Watch going after CAIR, and disappointment that CAIR could sue a former intern who stole tens of thousands of documents for his Islamophobe father, Paul David Gaubatz.
There was also a speech by Geert Wilders at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, part of his “Warning to America” event, which concluded with the words:
You and I, Americans and Europeans, we belong to a common Western culture. We share the ideas and ideals of our common Judeo-Christian heritage. In order to pass this heritage on to our children and grandchildren, we must stand together, side by side, in our struggle against Islamic barbarism. That, my friends, is why I am here. I am here to forge an alliance. Our international freedom alliance. We must stand together for the Judeo-Christian West. We will not allow islam to overrun Israel and Europe, the cradle of the judeo-Christian civilization.
Wow. Now I get it. Only Leni Riefenstahl was missing from the picture. Or was that Hermann Goering?
I mean, thank goodness I’m a Jew! It wasn’t that long ago that Nordic types like Wilders were saying the same thing about my people. Now with the cool kids expanded to “European Judeo-Christians” and not just Christians anymore, I could join a select club and kick around Muslims if I wanted to — rather than just being a Yid whose faith and culture was once characterized by Nazis exactly as Wilders paints Islam at churches and synagogues today.
I’d get with his program, but all I’d have to do is stop trying to be a mensch. That and the stench Wilder’s words would leave in my mouth.
Wild Celebrations as Rabbi Dov Lior is Released from Prison
Where do we even begin with this one? We did a story on the Rabbi’s who penned and supported the work, “The King’s Teachings,” in which all manner of immoral actions are allowed in the name of security. At the time and since, nearly the entire religious establishment of Israel has supported the Rabbis, even if some have not given their explicit endorsement.
Do we have to ask, what if they were Muslim?
(Hat tip: Tony)
There is more at Haaretz as well about the reaction from parliamentarians who are outraged at the arrest of Lior.
JERUSALEM — The arrest of a prominent Israeli settler rabbi who endorsed a book sanctioning the killing of non-Jews under some conditions is sharpening the battle lines between some Jewish religious sages and the Israeli government.
After Rabbi Dov Lior, spiritual leader of the radical Kiryat Arba settlement in the West Bank, was detained and brought in for police questioning, hundreds of his followers, most of them teenagers, went on a rampage. Other rabbis fulminated against the idea that a rabbi could be arrested at all.
On the other side, secular Israelis complained that some rabbis in Israel think they are above the law.
Lior, a longtime symbol of religious and nationalist extremism, was brought in for questioning Monday after his car was stopped on a West Bank road. Lior, who was freed after a brief interrogation, accused officers of “Bolshevik” tactics.
Joining critics of his own government’s action, the Minister of Religious Affairs, Yaakov Margi, raged that the rabbi, who is in his late 70s, was “abducted on his way to Jerusalem like the lowest criminal.”
Lior was brought in Monday after ignoring a series of official police orders to report for interrogation.
His arrest angered supporters as a mark of disrespect for a venerated scholar.
Hundreds of disciples tried to block the road to the entrance to the city, snarling traffic at afternoon rush hour. Others tried to attack the Supreme Court. Hundreds besieged the home of a government official they thought was responsible for the arrest warrant.
The warrant had been pending for months in connection with a preface Lior wrote in support of a book, “The King’s Teachings.” The book quotes some religious sages as permitting, under certain conditions, the killing of non-Jews, including babies, “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.”
Police wanted to question Lior over the possibility that his endorsement of the book was incitement to murder.
Backers accused authorities of assaulting Lior’s freedom of speech and complained that inflammatory statements by leftists against nationalist Israelis did not draw similar sanctions.
Critics of Lior and his camp saw a sign that some rabbis and their followers believe that secular law does not apply to them.
“Those who favor freedom of expression will of course find it difficult to accept as self evident the arrest of a person, any persona, for things that he said or wrote,” read an editorial in Wednesday’s Haaretz newspaper.
“But from the moment that the police decided to summon Rabbi Dov Lior to an investigation, he should have reported, even if he is firmly opposed to doing so, and taken advantage of every legitimate way of protesting against the claims against him,” Haaretz wrote, calling for Lior’s dismissal from his official, state-paid positions.
The Jerusalem Post wrote it was not clear that Lior committed a crime.
“He has, however, placed his rabbinic reputation behind a morally repugnant book” with “far-reaching and horrid implications, particularly in wartime settings,” the newspaper said.
Lior told reporters afterward that he ignored the police orders to report for questioning because he considered them illegitimate.
Although respected in the religious nationalist community, Lior’s teachings and commentaries have made him a polarizing figure in Israel for decades.
Following a shooting attack on a Jerusalem seminary in 2008, he ruled that Jewish law forbids employing and renting homes to Palestinians. He also praised Baruch Goldstein, the American immigrant doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians at a religious shrine in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994.
Some rabbis have repudiated “The King’s Teachings,” which doesn’t explicitly mention Arabs or Palestinians.
On Wednesday, the Israel Hayom newspaper reported that a sequel to “The King’s Teachings” was in the works. Its author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, said he has sold more than 2,000 additional copies of “The King’s Teachings” since Lior’s arrest.
Shapira was arrested briefly for questioning about the book last year. No one has been charged.
A bill which would ban halal and kosher slaughter methods has passed through the Dutch parliament, despite opposition from Muslim and Jewish groups who say a ban would impinge on their religious freedoms.
The bill, which was passed overwhelmingly by parliamentarians on Wednesday, still has to pass through the Dutch senate, which is unlikely before the summer recess.
The Dutch cabinet said on Monday that the law may be unenforceable in its current form due to the ambiguity of a last-minute amendment that says religious slaughter licenses can be granted if they can “prove” that it does not cause animals more pain than stunning.
If the Netherlands outlaws procedures that make meat kosher for Jews or halal for Muslims, it would be the second country after New Zealand to do so in recent years. Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland also ban religious slaughter.
Henk Blekers, the Dutch deputy secretary of economic affairs and agriculture, said that the cabinet would “look at how it fits with freedom of religion”, citing the European Convention on Human Rights.
Both halal and kosher slaughter rules prescribe that animals’ throats must be cut swiftly with a razor-sharp knife while they are still conscious, so that they bleed to death quickly.
‘Animal rights over religious rights’
But the Party for Animals, the main proponents of the proposed law, argue that sparing animals needless pain and distress outweighs religious groups’ rights to follow their respective slaughter practices.
“They (livestock) stay conscious for up to 5 minutes. They lose a lot of blood and they can choke on their own blood and the cut should be one time, but research shows that with kosher slaughter (they are cut) on average 3.5 times, and with halal 5.5 times,” Karen Soeters of the Party for Animals told Al Jazeera.
But defenders of the practices said that religious slaughter methods could be humane.
“With halal, the animal can’t be stressed. It can’t see other animals being killed,” Abdulhakim Chouaati of the Dutch Halal Feed and Food Authority told Al Jazeera.
“It’s our religion we’re practicing, and expressing religion in our modern industrial society is not a thing which is appealing to the public,” Ronnie Eisenmann, a Jewish community leader in the Netherlands told Al Jazeera.
In an open letter pleading with parliament not to pass the law, a a committee of rabbis said the impact on the Jewish community would be “deep and large”.
“Older Jews are frightened and wonder what the next law will be that limits their religious life. The youth are openly asking whether they still have a future that they can or want to build in the Netherlands,” the letter continued.
Only Christian political parties opposed the ban, arguing that it undermined the country’s tradition of religious tolerance.
A solid majority of Dutch voters say they support the ban, and parliament voted for it by a margin of 116 for to 30 against.
The support for the ban comes from an odd pairing of the political left, which sees religious slaughter as inhumane, and from the anti-immigration right, which says it is foreign and barbaric.
Behold the erroneous misinformation factory at Front Page Mag, the online place where Islamophobes go to find spurious arguments that make them feel better about being intolerant of Muslims. Today’s gem comes from Raymond Ibrahim, a skilled harvester of Islamophobic cash cows, a particularly spite-filled individual with an obsession for essentializing Islam as a religion of war, slavery, and sexual misconduct.
Where before have I heard similar claims about a similar religion? Oh yeah. Every anti-Semitic website on the internet. The strong parallel between the claims, rhetoric, and methodologies of Anti-Semites and Islamophobes have been discussedmany timesbefore, so there is no need to repeat those arguments here.
Today, I will comment on Mr. Ibrahim’s unprincipled “research” which has as an a priori(beforehand) conclusion that Muslims are never victims, only perpetrators. What perturbed me is that Front Page praises Mr. Ibrahim as a “widely recognized authority on Islam” who can translate “important Arabic news that never reaches the West.”
You see, according to David Horowitz, anti-Muslim ideological commitment makes someone a “widely recognized authority” on Islam; not rigorous academic training, as those foolish liberals believe, with their pesky “facts,” their elitist “research methodologies,” and their vexatious love of “balance.”
To the matter at hand. You may have heard the recent story about two Egyptian Christian girls who were allegedly abducted by Muslims. Raymond pens an anti-Muslim hit piece entitled “Egypt: Christian Girls Kidnapped and ‘Sold’.” Ready for some bombshell evidence of Islam’s collective depravity? Won’t find it here. Raymond is upset that the Egyptian Newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm, didn’t report on this story with an acceptable level of anti-Muslim bias:
At the end of the Al-Masry Al-Youm report, we get a trailing sentence alluding to “claims” that two Christian girls “were abducted by Muslims and forced to convert to Islam” as the reason why Copts were demonstrating and clashing with the police in the first place.
This is the “claim” that Mr. Ibrahim wants to advance, the claim of the Christian protestors, i.e. the girls were kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and this sort of thing happens all the time because of the tenets of Islam. (Sigh). It should go without saying that mainstream Islam explicitly teaches against forced conversions. Several Quranic verses can be produced to support this:
Had your Lord willed, all the people on earth would have believed. So can you [Prophet] compel people to believe? (10:99)
If your Lord had pleased, He would have made all people a single community, but they continue to have their differences… (11:118)
If you find rejection by the disbelievers so hard to bear, then seek a tunnel into the ground or a ladder into the sky, if you can, and bring them a sign: God could bring them all to guidance if it were His will, so do not join the ignorant. (6:35)
The messenger’s only duty is to give clear warning. (29:18)
We know best what the disbelievers say. You [Prophet] are not there to force them, so remind, with this Quran, those who fear My warning. (50:45)
There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error, so whoever rejects false gods and believes in God has grasped the firmest hand-hold, one that will never break. God is all hearing and all knowing. (2:256)
Say, ‘Obey God; obey the Messenger. If you turn away, [know that] he is responsible for the duty placed upon him, and you are responsible for the duty placed upon you. If you obey him, you will be rightly guided, but the Messenger’s duty is only to deliver the message clearly.’ (24:54)
Note that the last two verses were revealed in Medina, just in case anyone wants to bring up the tired, old canard that everything wise and peaceful in the Quran was abrogated. In fact, Al-Azhar University’s Commission for Embracing Islam may “spend several days making sure that the person wants to convert to Islam voluntarily and as a result of their own desire.”
Therefore, if it is true that the girls were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, this would be an obvious breach of normative, mainstream Islamic teachings, not to mention Egyptian civil law. This would make it a case of criminal behavior, not normal religion. Whoever forces someone to be a Muslim is not behaving like a Muslim. Period.
However, as we shall see, we have strong reason to doubt these girls were kidnapped in the first place.
What are Mr. Ibrahim’s sources for claiming the two girls were in fact kidnapped and forced into Islam? A dubious Arabic website entitled “Free Christian Nation.” No possibility of bias there (sarcasm intended). Mr. Ibrahim boasts about his expert Arabic translation skills:
One must again turn to Arabic sources for the telling details. I have put together the following narrative and quotes based on these two Arabic reports:
The two girls, Christine Azat (aged 16) and Nancy Magdi (aged 14) were on their way to church Sunday, June 12, when they were seized. Their abductors demanded $200,000 Egyptian pounds for their release. The people of the region quickly put their savings together and came up with the ransom money; but when they tried to give it to the kidnappers, they rejected it, saying they had already “sold” the girls off to another group which requires $12 million Egyptian pounds to return them.
Two unsourced reports in Arabic? From which news agency? There are no authors or publishers listed on the reports. If you can read Arabic, seriously, check it out. So your ability to translate from some random anonymous Arabic websites is why you are a “widely recognized authority on Islam”?
But what our “widely recognized authority on Islam” failed to mention is that other mainstream newspapers (even in English, accessible to non-scholars, no translation necessary) have published reports contrary to his central claim. Mr. Ibrahim tells us about his scholarly research methods:
I tried to find this story in English-language media and, as expected, found nothing…
Oh really? I did a two-second Google search and found some. For example, Al-Ahram reported that:
During recent weeks, the two girls, who are cousins, have uploaded videos on YouTube announcing their conversion to Islam and that they were not kidnapped by anyone. This came in response to the father of one of the girls reporting theirdisappearance.
According to this report, the girls willfully converted to Islam, so Mr. Ibrahim tries to explain this away:
Some have tried to pass the usual rumor that the girls “willingly” ran off and converted to Islam, but even Egyptian officials reject this, saying that Al Azhar, which is the institution that formally recognizes conversions to Islam, has not acknowledged the conversion of underage minors.
This “rumor” happens to be based upon the Youtube testimony of the girls themselves, which would make it more than a rumor. The fact that Al-Azhar University did not announce their conversions is not proof that the girls didn’t willfully convert because, as Al-Ahram reports, Al-Azhar “does not accredit conversion to Islam from anyone younger than 18.” Minor details!
The point here is not whether the girls converted or not. I won’t get into “he said, she said” arguments about a pending legal case. The point is that Raymond, as usual, obviously didn’t research and balance his reporting, which means the only reason he brought it up at all is because it is useful ideological propaganda. His readers don’t read Arabic. They won’t double check his work. These blatant mistakes will get swept under rug, again as usual, to be replaced by the next propaganda item, the next blog post, the next hit piece. The erroneous misinformation factory marches on.
Does Raymond really want to help the Christian community in Egypt? Coptic Christians, whom Raymond pretends to defend, have rejected these kind of tactics and propaganda that divide Egypt along religious lines. Bishop Markos of Shubra al-Kheima told Al-Masry Al-Youm that:
Copts fall under the protection of the Egyptian state, and Muslims and Christians in Egypt fall under the protection of God, who mentioned Egypt and its people in the Quran and the Bible.
So don’t be fooled into thinking Raymond cares about these girls or even Egyptian Christians. He’s just using them and their story to whip up anti-Muslim populism, to use as a religio-political wedge issue in the campaign against Obama and liberals.
Undoubtedly, the guys at Front Page would not campaign for the human rights of these two girls if they had really converted to Islam. If their conversion to Islam was genuine, would Mr. Ibrahim and Horowitz support their religious freedom?
I ask these questions because, contrary to the 24-hour hate-on-Islam-a-thon at Front Page, Egyptian Christians who convert to Islam have also faced persecution. This certainly wouldn’t be the first case. As Al-Ahram reported:
This is not the first story of Muslim converts that has been a source of public debate and concern. Camilia Shehata, who disappeared from her house in July 2010, wasalleged to have converted to Islam only to be held in church after conversion to prevent her from practicing her new religion.
Of course, stories about Muslims being denied religious freedom by Christians don’t quite fit into the Islam-is-all-evil-all-the-time-RSS-feed at Front Page Mag.
MSNBC’s The Ed Show on MSNBC turned its focus on Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District race as candidate Lynne Torgerson spoke with Rev. Al Sharpton about incumbent Rep. Keith Ellison last night. The contentious back and forth centered on Torgerson’s claim that Ellison, a Muslim, doesn’t hold the U.S. Constitution “supreme” over Shariah law. Her beef: Ellison said the U.S. Constitution is the “bedrock” of American law, but didn’t say it was “supreme.”
On The Ed Show, Sharpton asked Torgerson, “What evidence do you have that he’s not committed to the Constitution?”
Torgerson replied, stating that she’s “not anti-Muslim in any way, shape or form,” before going on to say, “Mr. Congressman Ellison has been long been associated with the most extremist groups around. He has close ties to CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic relations, which was a named co-conspirator to funding terrorism in the Holy Land Foundation trial—”
Sharpton interrupted her to again ask her whether she has evidence to back her claim that the congressman doesn’t hold the Constitution “supreme” or whether she’s “fearmongering and demagoguing to get votes.”
She says Ellison “refused” to answer the question, but Sharpton noted that in a clip played on the show and credited to Torgerson’s campaign Ellison answers it.
“I believe that the United States Constitution, which has been amended well over 25 times, is the bedrock of American law,” Ellison said in the clip. “This whole movement to ban Shariah — bills like this have been introduced in 22 states — in my view is a very thinly disguised effort at religious persecution of people that are Muslim.”
To that, Torgerson said, “Actually, what he said is the U.S. Constitution is the bedrock of American law. That does not answer the question of what should be supreme currently… Mr. Ellison actually evaded the question.”
Ellison’s office sent a statement to The Ed Show underscoring his stance and taking Torgerson to task for her “extreme” and “intolerant” rhetoric:
I took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion for all Americans. Religious acceptance is a deeply rooted American value, and regardless of political persuasion, it’s a value we must protect.
It’s too bad that someone can obtain so much attention based on their intolerant rhetoric, especially when unemployment is above 9 percent. On the other hand, the nation will be able to see how extreme the rhetoric has become. I call on all Americans to reject religious intolerance and embrace our constitution which upholds the promise of liberty and justice for all people.
One other question Sharpton asked: Since Ellison got 68 percent of the vote in 2010, compared to Torgerson’s nearly 4 percent, “Is 68 percent of your district radical Islamic sympathizers?”
“No sir, I wouldn’t say so,” she said. Asked why so many people voted for Ellison, she answered, “I don’t believe people yet know what his associations and his actual agenda is.”
Are any of you shocked that an EDL member did this? Wow, I can’t believe that a group of thugs who hate Muslims and regularly throw their hands up in Seig Heils would attack a mosque! Of course both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer continue to defend them. (via. Europeans Against Islamophobia)
A 25-year-old English Defence League member has pleaded guilty to daubing hate graffiti on land being considered as a site for a mosque.
Christopher Payne of Hucknall admitted spraying the graffiti but denied putting a pig’s head on the site in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire.
He appeared at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court and will be sentenced on 21 July.
Police went to the property on 23 June where the slogan “No Mosque Here” was found spray painted on the ground.
Pig’s head
Payne pleaded guilty to causing racially or religiously aggravated alarm, dissent or distress and causing racially aggravated criminal damage.
Three other men aged 19, 21 and 31, have been arrested and questioned about the incident.
Payne, of Beardsmore Close, Hucknall, who is an events planner for the English Defence League, told the court that he sprayed the slogan but did not put the pig’s head on the grassland.
He was granted bail with a curfew but ordered to stay out of West Bridgford and not to go within 200m of a mosque.
He has also been told not to have any public association with the English Defence League.
A member of the public reported finding the graffiti near Collington Way in West Bridgford on Thursday.
A Hasidic man, Simchon Shwartz shouted racist epithets and violently assaulted his neighbor, calling them “F—ing Arabs,” “F—ing Terrorists.”
“F—ing Arabs! F—ing terrorists!” Schwartz screamed when he grabbed his neighbor, Selda Turan, 27. He shoved the woman against her car and poured beer on her head, a police source said.
This disgusting assault will most likely not be covered much by the media, we will hear deafening silence from Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, or silly equivocation along the lines of, “but…no..he was drunk,” etc.
Imagine for a second if a Muslim had done this? We all know that this would be immortalized as a terrorist attack and Islam would be blamed for the attack. (hat tip:Peak of Elephants)
A boozy Brooklyn man was hit with hate crime charges Sunday for pouring beer on a newlywed neighbor, calling her an “Arab terrorist” and pummeling her husband, police sources said.
Following the seemingly unprovoked attack Saturday night in Mill Basin, Simchon Schwartz, 46, hid in a local synagogue and tried to fight off cops when they came to arrest him, sources said.
The Hasid even kicked out a window of a police cruiser as he sat inside, whining that “the cuffs are too tight,” a source said.
“F—ing Arabs! F—ing terrorists!” Schwartz screamed when he grabbed his neighbor, Selda Turan, 27. He shoved the woman against her car and poured beer on her head, a police source said.
Turan’s husband of 13 months, Mustafa Turan, rushed out of their house to protect his wife, but Schwartz punched him in the face, the source said.
Neighbors said the Turans moved into the heavily Jewish neighborhood about a month ago. They said the victims were from Turkey; it wasn’t clear if they were Muslim.
Schwartz was arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court on charges of felony assault and felony criminal mischief, both as hate crimes. He was also charged with resisting arrest, obstructing cops, menacing and harassment. He could get up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
“They arrested the wrong person,” Schwartz’s attorney, Lance Lazzaro, said Monday night.
He said his client was attacked by Mustafa Turan, 32, after Selda Turan complained about Schwartz’s children being noisy. He said Mustafa Turan called Schwartz a “dirty Jew” and hit him.
Cops said they found no physical evidence supporting Schwartz’s counterclaim, while Mustafa Turan needed three stitches to close a gash on his nose. The ordeal erupted at 7 p.m. Saturday when Schwartz began harassing Selda Turan on their E. 70th St. block, a criminal complaint charges. Schwartz opened a can of beer and poured it on Selda Turan, grabbed her by the the arm, pushed her into the side of her car and called her an “Arab terrorist,” the complaint said.
Selda Turan was left with scratches and bruises. Schwartz was released without bail.
A judge rejected a prosecution request to hold Schwartz on $60,000 bail, but granted the Turans an order of protection barring him from contacting them.
The Turkish couple live in a townhouse that shares a common wall with Schwartz’s home.
Cops said that following the fisticuffs, Schwartz scratched the Turans’ car with a key.
Once Schwartz, a car dealer, bolted from the scene, the Turans called 911. Schwartz’s son led cops to a Chabad House on nearby E. 69th St., where they found the suspect. Cops smelled alcohol on his breath, a source said.
Schwartz struggled with cops as they dragged him out of the synagogue in handcuffs. They drove him to his house, where his neighbors identified him as the culprit. As Schwartz threw a tantrum in the police car, his wife made a veiled threat to the victims, sources said.
“This is a majority Jewish neighborhood. We’re going to get you back,” Esther Schwartz told the Turans, the sources said.
While Schwartz was in jail over the weekend, his wife circulated a petition demanding the Turans’ landlord evict them, neighbors said. About 20 neighbors signed it, but the Turans’ landlords, Rusden and Saadet Dolan, refused.
“That’s their opinion,” Rusden Dolan told the Daily News.
ACT! for America, or as they are better known ACT! for Hate, held a meeting recently headlined by Rep. Allen West. Allen West of course is an anti-Muslim Islamophobe extraordinaire, we’ve covered his rise to prominence within the hardcore radical anti-Muslim right-wing quite extensively.
The main themes of his speech revolved around the usual wacky fear-mongering and hatred about how suspicious Muslims are, how they want to take over the world, how we need to be real “Americans” and fight them instead of “surrendering.”
At the end of the day it is plain nutty stuff, but here is the cause for concern: Allen West is a Congressman, he has a cult-like following among Conservatives, and there will be a few who will take his call for action and translate that into violence against Muslims.
You can find the video of his speech on YouTube, I am not linking to it since it directs to a hate channel. Interestingly, the video was shot by Austrian anti-Muslim politician Elizabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolff who was recorded a few years ago saying, “Muslims rape children.” Wolff seems to be a favorite amongst right-wing anti-Muslim nut-jobs, she appears frequently at their rallies and conferences.
Here are some of the choice cuts from Allen West’s diatribe against Muslims and Islam:
“I like Irish Spring, but I don’t much care for Arab Spring”
“If you’re going to act for America first you have to be like America…the America in which there was an understanding and a seeking of a merciful god…a Judeo-Christian God”
“We are not out of the woods yet, it’s something totally different, it’s called lawfare, a new line of attack. We have long seen such victories in Europe and its backdoors (inaudible), over thirty years Europe has traveled down that path, appeasement, obfuscation and cultural abdication in pursuit of short sighted political and economic gain and benefits, she observes that ‘today, Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization with post-Enlightenment secular elements to a simple nation of dhimmitude Eurabia, a secular Muslim transitional society with its judeo-christian mores rapidly declining
“where is the outrage from millions of peaceful Muslims and Muslim nations when their religion is supposedly hijacked?”
“the Quran is longer than the Bible”
“In order to act for America, you have to act like Americans”
“you have to ask yourself, is our liberty important enough to fight for?”
“Is Western civilization worth saving?”
“We stand at the brink of a new dark age”
“Find out if Muslim Student Associations are terrorizing students on university campuses”
“Help our European brothers and sisters, there are a number of organizations fighting back in this clash of civilizations”
“War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest thing”
“Act like Americans, not the poor timid soul who would surrender the greatest nation the world has ever known.”
West’s statements are increasingly becoming radical which is in line with the general trend in the Islamophobesphere. As they find that their words, actions and exhortations are not gaining traction with mainstream society their speech gets increasingly hostile and inflammatory. The Islamophobes long ago dropped rational discourse and have increasingly latched onto emotional and irresponsible rhetoric. It is only a matter of time before we see a crazy guy acting on the fears and anxiety stoked by the likes of West throwing a bomb into a mosque while people pray.
This article is not about the validity of the Dutch law regarding hate speech, but about the consistency of the rule of law as well as its implications for Dutch society.
The acquittal of Dutch politician Geert Wilders on 22 June 2011 on charges of “inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims” is a political victory for Wilders, a legal travesty, and a missed opportunity for Dutch democracy. Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) are known around the world for their Islamophobic propaganda. A random selection of his Islamophobia includes statements such as “Islam is a fascist ideology”; “Mohammed was a paedophile”; and “Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible”. He has also warned of a “tsunami” of Muslim immigrants and compared the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
A glance at the declarations of Wilders and his party leaves no reasonable doubt that Islamophobia is at the core of his program. Wilders may have changed his opinion on various issues, most notably non-Muslim immigrants and the welfare state, but on one point he has never wavered: his struggle against the alleged “Islamisication” of the Netherlands, Europe, and even the world. For example, at a speech on 12 May 2011 at the Cornerstone Church in Tennessee, he said:
“My friends, I am sorry. I am here today with an unpleasant message. I am here with a warning. I am here with a battle-cry: ‘Wake up, Christians of Tennessee. Islam is at your gate.’ Do not make the mistake which Europe made. Do not allow Islam to gain a foothold here.”
While I am not a lawyer, I cannot see how the Amsterdam court can come to theconclusion that Wilders did not - according to Dutch law and precedence – “incite hatred and discrimination” against Muslims. The emphasis is important: for the Netherlands has – since the case of the Centrumpartij (Centre Party / CP) of Hans Janmaat (1934-2002) in the early 1980s – long experience of charging political parties and politicians under anti-discrimination legislation.
Since that time, several parties and politicians whose public statements have been far less consistent and far-reaching than those of Wilders have been convicted of incitement to racial hatred. For example, Janmaat was given a suspended sentence of two months’ imprisonment and a fine of 7,500 guilders (c 3,400 euro) in 1997 for declaring at a demonstration that “as soon as we have the opportunity and power, we will abolish the multicultural society” – a statement that Wilders regularly makes. In fact, a Dutch court even found that the slogan “Full is Full” – used in the 1990s by the CP, and its successor the Centrumdemocraten (Centre Democrats / CD) – constituted incitement to racial hatred. Today, that statement would be almost uncontroversial.
The contrast between Janmaat’s conviction and Wilders’s acquittal reflects an important development in Dutch politics and society. While Wilders’s Islamophobic comments are objectively harsher than Janmaat’s xenophobic equivalents of the 1990s, they are also much more accepted in contemporary Dutch society. This is not necessarily to say that the Dutch population has become more xenophobic over the past generation. What has happened, rather, is that the taboo on expressing xenophobia in public has been broken, particularly regarding Islam and Muslims (see “The intolerance of the tolerant”, 20 October 2010). It was, incidentally, the earlier flamboyant populist Pim Fortuyn (1948-2002) rather than Janmaat or Wilders who was the agent of that change.
In consequence, politicians such as Wilders can gain much more electoral support than Janmaat ever could, which gives them real political power. And there is no doubt that Wilders’s political power has played a major role in the court’s decision. After all, it is much easier to convict the leader of a marginal and ostracized party like the CD than a figure like Wilders, the leader of the third-largest party in the parliament and a “support-party” of the current government (see “ The Geert Wilders enigma“, 23 June 2010).
A political failure
But a political victory is not automatically a democratic victory. In fact, I would argue that the acquittal of Geert Wilders is both a defeat of and a lost opportunity for Dutch democracy. Don’t misunderstand: I am a long-term opponent of the Netherlands’ anti-discrimination laws, I support absolute freedom of speech; and I believe that a democratic state should not limit or regulate speech, particularly in politics.
That said, a liberal democracy cannot function without the rule of law; and an essential aspect of this is equality before the law. Clearly, however, this is not the case in the Netherlands, where for decades people have been treated differently with regard to anti-discrimination laws (for example, in the 1990s the powerful conservative politicianFrits Bolkestein was not even indicted, far less convicted, for statements very similar to those of Janmaat).
To be fair, in acquitting Wilders the Amsterdam court has undoubtedly taken the changed public discourse on immigrants into account. But this does not get to the heart of the problem, which is not judicial but political. The Amsterdam court found itself trapped by history; it was asked to enforce a law inherited from the past for which there no longer exists majority political and public support. Its acquittal has taken the lint out of the powder-keg of anti-discrimination legislation. It is now up to the politicians – not judges – to bring social values and laws back into harmony.
If Wilders had been convicted, a political crisis was inevitable: how then, after all, could the Dutch government rely on the support of a party of a convicted “anti-democratic” politician? A combination of the ensuing public outcry and sheer political necessity would have forced parliament to amend the legislation by bringing it more into accord with the public view. Now, Wilders might continue at times to raise the issue, even if mainly to portray himself as a near-martyr in order to generate political support; but the political elite will resume ignoring the topic while trying to regulate who is indicted or not (and, in the few cases that this fails, to try and influence who is convicted or not).
This outcome continues a policy of legal insecurity that undermines the rule of law in the Netherlands. It is therefore high time that Dutch politicians update the anti-discrimination laws in accordance with their own and contemporary Dutch society’s preferences.
“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.”
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.
As worshipers entered Washington National Cathedral for Sunday morning’s service, some crossed themselves and some took photographs, some wore ties while others wore shorts and a few even wore yarmulkes.
In the center aisle, in place of the baptismal fountain, candle-lit stands bore three books: a Bible, a Torah and a Koran. When a visitor asked a nearby usher what to do, the usher replied: “This is a totally different service than what we usually do. There’s no wrong answer.”
Instead of Communion, the service featured readings from each of the three Abrahamic faiths, part of a project to promote religious tolerance through similar interfaith services at about 70 churches nationwide. The effort aimed to counteract negative stereotypes and hostile rhetoric targeting American Muslims in the past year, notably the controversy about plans for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York and the burning of a Koran by the Rev. Terry Jones in March in Florida.
“What we have done together in this great cathedral this morning, along with others in similar services in houses of worship across our nation, can alter the image and substance of our nation, as well as our religion,” said the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, one of the organizations that sponsored the project. “Today’s beautifully written liturgy, informed by Islam, Judaism and Christianity, declares unambiguously . . . we are not scripture burners, rather, scripture readers.”
A local rabbi and imam joined Gaddy and the cathedral’s Episcopal clergy on the dais to share their messages of mutual understanding and respect.
“For nearly a decade now, since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we Americans have known without a doubt that any hope for a peaceful world will require profound engagement among the world’s religions,” cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III said.
The service began with a traditional call to prayer in the three religions’ terminology — a Hebrew “Bar’chu,” an Arabic “Azan” and a Latin “Spiritus Domini” — all sung in ethereal tones that swirled through the cathedral’s soaring nave.
Then Rabbi Amy M. Schwartzman of Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church read a passage from Deuteronomy about showing kindness to strangers. Imam Mohamed Magid, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, chanted a passage from the Koran about the value of diversity.
“God could have made all of us look the same and go to the same temple or same church,” Magid explained. “But God willed that humans are diverse.”
Gaddy said he hoped the readings would underscore the commonalities among the three traditions, especially their shared message of tolerance and compassion.
“No one verse or one passage in any book of scripture should be allowed to hijack or hold hostage the central truth, the overarching as well as pervasive moral mandate, which emerges from the full sweep of truth in those books of scripture,” he said. “Cherry picking isolated texts . . . allows mean-spirited people to turn the scripture of our religions into weapons.”
Almost 1,000 people attended the service, an average turnout for a summer Sunday. Among them were people actively involved in interfaith dialogue groups, as well as those who were surprised to find the Jewish and Muslim elements of the service.
Ken Bagley, who with his family was visiting the District from Connecticut, just happened upon Sunday’s service.
“It was a neat opportunity to hear all three perspectives in one service and to see how alike they are. You too often hear about how different,” Bagley said.
Alex Huddell, a 21-year-old student at American University, said she had never heard the Koran chanted, except “maybe in movies.”
“It was interesting and beautiful to listen, even if you didn’t understand, to the different rhythms and styles,” Huddell said. “I’m Christian, but I feel a lot of embarrassment about the way Christians sometimes marginalize other religions. So it’s nice to hear there are some leaders in the faith community who are trying to promote the same message of acceptance.”
Pete Carlson, a member of the cathedral’s congregation, said he was inspired by the service and hopes to attend more interfaith events.
“It was even more moving than the normal service here on Sunday,” Carlson said. “It felt like we were a part of something much bigger and much older.”
Lloyd, the cathedral’s dean, said a Muslim reading also will be part of the cathedral’s memorial service for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
This pastor is giving Christians a bad name. He thinks all terrorists are Muslims, wants a background check on all Muslims who are trying to set up a mosque in the small town of Carnegie.
The Rev. Keith Tucci preaches from a pulpit more than an hour from Carnegie, but he’s concerned about a different religious community’s plans to relocate there.
Tucci, pastor of the Living Hope Church in Latrobe, said he has “serious concerns” about members of a Muslim mosque who want to move to a former Presbyterian church in the heart of Carnegie’s business district. Tucci said he and members of his congregation will travel to Carnegie on Monday to pass out “informational packets” about the Muslim faith.
“I have questions: Who are these people? Are they American citizens? Has anyone done a background check on them?” said Tucci, whose church is part of a national network of Bible-based churches with headquarters in Reserve, La., according to its website. “I’m not saying all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. We need more information about these people before they are allowed to move in and ruin a community.”
Carnegie Councilman Rick D’Loss, president of the borough’s synagogue, Congregation Ahavath Achim, said some residents asked questions about the plan for the building but generally expressed support.
“In a town of 8,000 people, of course you’ll have some dissenting opinions, but Carnegie is a very inclusive place,” D’Loss said. “Muslims have rights just like anyone else, and they can pray as they choose. It’s a shame that we have to keep telling people that. I find it funny that a group is going to drive all the way from Westmoreland to tell us we shouldn’t allow the Muslims to be in our community.
“If we say no Muslims, then we have to say no Jews, too. Then what?”
The borough council on June 14 approved the Attawheed Islamic Center’s request to convert the 19,000-square-foot stone and brick building along East Main Street into a place for prayer and religious education. No residents expressed opposition at a public hearing about the mosque or during the council meeting that followed. The Muslim group rents space on Banksville Road.
Even with council approval, it’s unclear when the group would move into the building, which needs extensive repairs, including a roof. Al-Walid Mohsen, vice president and manager of the Attawheed Islamic Center, did not return calls for comment.
Police Chief Jeff Harbin, who is the part-time borough manager, said the Living Hope Church group has a right to come to Carnegie and pass out information and talk about concerns, as long as they do so peacefully.
“I grew up in Carnegie, and we tend to welcome everyone,” Harbin said. “We believe in the right of people to express their opinions, and we respect the First Amendment. People are free to disagree.”
Can I just say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Imagine if this had been a Muslim leaders son and he said something similar? Now Bibi is crying for context and understanding, sad.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli prime minister’s 19-year-old son posted disparaging comments about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page, an Israeli paper reported Friday
Earlier this year, Yair Netanyahu posted that Muslims “celebrate hate and death,” the Haaretz daily reported. After Palestinian assailants entered a West Bank settlement and stabbed five members of an Israeli family to death, he wrote that “terror has a religion and it is Islam.”
Yair Netanyahu, the eldest of the prime minister’s two sons, is currently a soldier in the Israeli military’s media liaison unit.
A lawyer for the Netanyahu family, David Shimron, said the comments were those of a “teenager” and were “taken out of context in an attempt to defame the prime minister and his family,” Shimron said in a statement provided to The Associated Press.
According to the Haaretz report, the prime minister’s son also ran a Facebook group that called for a boycott of Arab businesses and products, and used obscenities to describe Arabs. He was 17 at the time. The group had a total of 23 members, the paper reported.
In another comment, he wrote that there had never been a Palestinian state and that he hoped “there would never be one.”
Haaretz said the comments in question were removed within two hours of the paper’s request for a response from the prime minister’s representatives.
The younger Netanyahu’s Facebook page also included comments on the Israeli version of the TV show Big Brother and a “like” directed at Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, alongside photos of himself with world leaders like Bill Clinton and Silvio Berlusconi.
A military spokesman said commanders had spoken to Netanyahu “to clarify to the soldier the military commands, outlining his mistakes, as would be done with any soldier in a similar situation.”
Some of the comments predated his military service, the military said.
Shimron, the Netanyahu family’s attorney, slammed Haaretz for reporting the comments.
“Bringing them up now is ridiculous and shows the cynical use of the words of a teenager, said in anger, when he could not imagine that someone would someday make use of them,” the lawyer wrote.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife believe in moderation and tolerance, and they respect all people without regard for their religion, origin or nationality and that is how they raise their children,” the statement said.
The families of Israeli leaders have typically been kept out of the spotlight, but Netanyahu’s family has sometimes drawn media attention in ways that have been a liability for the Israeli leader.
Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s third wife, has been criticized for allegedly mistreating her household staff and for meddling in state affairs. She has denied the accusations.
When a so-called enlightened “Westerner” wants to intervene to help the poor brown people, what do you get? A hodgepodge of neo-Orientalist titillation, fantasy and the worsening of conditions for the oppressed.
Tom MacMaster should of thought this through a little better. On a side note, in the past we also got comments from one Amina Arraf on this piece and this one.
In a queer turn of events it has been exposed that Amina Arraf, known to most as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” is no more than a contrived Orientalist avatar of one 40-year-old white man from Georgia, Tom MacMaster. The first words that came to mind upon hearing the news, were “ILAAN KOS…” but we’re trying to refrain from wasting our indignation on curses (albeit justified) and re-orient the conversation into a productive analysis of what MacMaster’s hoax means for the position of Arabs in western media.
The Violence of Representation:
More than just speaking for Syrian activists, or Syrian women, or Syrian lesbians, as so many righteous liberal Westerners “interested” in the Middle East so often do, Tom MacMaster, in his own words, “created a voice,” and in doing so redefined what representation means for Arabs in western media – we call it ventriloquism. In creating the “dummy,” Anima, through the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, MacMaster became the mouthpiece for an entire class of Syrian people while denying Syrians (activists/women/lesbians/all of the above) the right to a voice in an already one-sided global media.
In this violent act of representation in which language and meaning was appropriated, MacMaster detracted from the stories of REAL Syrians who risk their lives daily in opposition to the dictatorship of the Assad regime. Not only did the attention received by MacMasters fake blog rob Syrians of their own voice, it put them in danger in a very real way.
MacMaster, in all of his privileged splendor as a straight American white man, appropriated and “outed” his avatar Amina as a lesbian activist, and in doing so put numerous queer Syrians at risk. Writing from a cozy home in Georgia/Edinburgh/Turkey bares no risk, allowing for plenty of slack when it comes to accuracy and accountability. Yet the victims will ultimately not be the MacMasters of the world, the phony bleeding heart liberals, but the people on the ground that Amina fails to represent.
Daniel Nassar, a moniker for a Syrian Lesbian activist, blogged a furious response to the hoax, explaining that MacMaster, “took away my voice… and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog…you single-handledly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause.” LGBT folk, like Nassar, who have been doing the ground work to better the conditions in which they live now have to combat the overreaching imaginations of gung-ho white men in the West as much as they do the unjust laws and social stigma of their own regimes.
In creating Gay Girl in Damascus and appropriating the identity of a gay Syrian woman, MacMaster violently drowned out the voices of so many Syrians undergoing REAL persecution, and detention for their dissent (and identities) against the brutal regime. As much as MacMaster relishes his role play an Arab lesbian, he fails to realize that the politics arising from that identity are earned through a lifetime of hardship and inescapable pleasures and punishment, not enthusiasm for the romanticism of a region.
Neo-Orientalist Media Titillation
Regardless of whatever lazy apology MacMaster nervously reaches for, Amina was never intended to be a fictional character for the betterment of women or LGBT people in the Middle East. She is a western fantasy intended to arouse and titillate the western sensibilities to feel, not act. This is the ultimate neo-orientalism as it not only re-imagines an existing geographic location, but invents an entire human landscape.
Because the avatar in question is a gay woman, the international media was quick to eat it up, already confirming their notions and desires for how LGBT people and women live their lives in the Middle East. In fact Amina’s story tells us more about the West than it does Syria. The cyber ghost was so easily welcomed by the media and concerned readers because she is symbolic of all the tropes which Westerners use to position themselves as superior interpreters of Middle East society and culture.
One shouldn’t need the sensationalized fictional narrative of a lesbian Syrian woman to affirm the rights of Syrian demonstrators who are being brutally repressed by their governments. But if the goal is to arouse emotion and entertain, then MacMaster has succeeded in proving that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.
Reaffirming this point is the Washington Post article onMacMaster in which the authors claim that, “the hoax raised new questions about the reliance on blogs, Tweets, Facebook postings and other Internet communications as they increasingly become a standard way to report on global events.”
For Arabs grasping on to the short end of the media stick, MacMaster’s mess is not a nuanced analysis of the importance of fact checking. To the contrary, this is a particular issue that speaks to the agency of Arab voices slowly being drowned out in a world of lazy journalism, and false reaches for objectivity.
The Violent Aftermath
Ultimately MacMaster has aided the Assad regime and other dictatorial bodies of government by confirming what the Arab dictators have been saying all along: that the uprisings are simply a conceived Western ploy. With the creation of the “Amina dummy,” MacMaster has managed to turn anti-revolutionary regime propaganda into truth by providing evidence that certain narratives of the revolution are fabrications of the West. Because this revolution is being fought on a battle field of (mis)information and truth, every single contribution is a decisive battle in which the outcome of an entire people is at stake – something MacMaster should be held accountable for jeopardizing.
The Arab revolutions are not events for the Western gaze to speculate and draw inspiration – they are real lived and often-times bloody moments that shape, destroy and rebuild the lives of living, breathing people.
Equally infuriating is the insincere “apology” MacMaster posts on his blog in which he ironicly echoes the rhetoric of the Assad regime and explains that his fabrication of a person and misdirection of a people was for the greater good. So if we are to take MacMaster’s “apology” sincerely then we are inadvertently embracing his philosophy – the belief that your voice doesn’t matter if you’re a (queer/female/activist) Arab because some white man in American can always write your story better.
Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui are New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.
A total of 166 out of 1,466 cases launched in connection with discrimination and racism-related offenses involve faith, according to the 2010 report prepared by Belgium’s Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR).
Eighty-four percent of these cases are connected to Islam while only 2 percent concern Christianity and Judaism. The high number of cases of discrimination against Muslims is likely to bring more debates on Islamophobia back to the agenda. Eighty percent of the complaints filed with the CEOOR involve racism.
About two-thirds of the cases involving Islam stem from Islamophobia, the report says. These incidents of Islamophobia are mostly characterized by propaganda being disseminated through email and pressure in the workplace. The workplace-related cases of discrimination include exclusion and verbal provocation of Muslims. The report notes these instances are a result of workplace administrations believing that “religion has no place in the workplace.” The tension arising from Islamophobic attitudes in the workplace is mostly eliminated “by transferring the Muslim employee involved to another department or laying her/him off.”
Furthermore, 50 percent of cases of discrimination involving faith are linked to media organizations that publish or air unfair accusations or generalizations about members of a specific religion. Twenty-five percent of these cases concern recruitment or promotion while 8 percent involve services provided. The cases of discrimination in the latter category are mostly visible in real estate purchases or rentals. Some real estate agents and home owners are not inclined to rent out their properties to people who they believe are of a different faith.
Additionally, the number of cases of discrimination reported to the CEOOR in 2010 increased by 25 percent compared to the previous year. A list of companies allegedly reluctant to employ foreign employees was recently posted on the Internet.
The apparent recent surge in popular anti-Muslim sentimentin the United States has been driven by a surprisingly small and, for the most part, closely knit cadre of activists. Their influence extends far beyond their limited numbers, in part because of an amenable legion of right-wing media personalities — and lately, politicians like U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who held controversial hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims this March —who are eager to promote them as impartial experts or grassroots leaders. Yet a close look at their rhetoric reveals how doggedly this group works to provoke and guide populist anger over what is seen as the threat posed by the 0.6% of Americans who are Muslim — an agenda that goes beyond reasonable concern about terrorism into the realm of demonization.
Of the 10 people profiled below, all but Bill French, Terry Jones and Debbie Schlussel regularly interact with others on the list. Most were selected for profiling primarily because of their association with activist organizations. People who only run websites or do commentary were omitted, with two exceptions: Schlussel, because she has influence as a frequent television talk-show guest, and John Joseph Jay, because he is on the board of Pamela Geller’s Stop Islamization of America group. Three other activists, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney, have interacted with many of the core group as well and also have offended many Muslims, but they are somewhat more moderate in their views of Muslims than those who are profiled below.
BILL FRENCH
ORGANIZATION Heads the for-profit Center for the Study of Political Islam in Nashville.
CREDENTIALS Former Tennessee State University physics professor; author of Sharia Law for Non-Muslims (2010; under the pen name Bill Warner).
SUMMARY French has no formal training or background in law, Islam or Shariah law — which in any case is not an established legal code, as the book title implies, but a fluid concept subject to a wide range of interpretations and applications. He garnered attention recently by leading the opposition to a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “The two driving forces of our civilization are the Golden Rule and critical thought. … There is no Golden Rule in Islam. … There is not really even a Ten Commandments.”
—Quoted in The [Blount County, Tenn.] Daily Times, March 4, 2011
“This offends Allah. You offend Allah.”
— Quoted in The Tennesseean, Oct. 24, 2010, speaking to opponents of the Murfreesboro mosque while pointing to an American flag
BRIGITTE GABRIEL ORGANIZATIONS Founder and head of ACT! for America and American Council for Truth.
CREDENTIALS Author of Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (2006) and They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It (2008). Co-producer and co-host of weekly ACT! for America television show.
SUMMARY Gabriel views Islam in absolute terms as a monolithic threat to the United States, Israel and the West. She is prone to sweeping generalizations and exaggerations as she describes a grand, sophisticated Muslim conspiracy bent on world domination. Of the people profiled here, she alone has focused on building a grassroots organization, claiming 155,000 members and 500 chapters around the country. Questions persist about the accuracy of her autobiographical account of being a victim of Muslim militancy in Lebanon.
IN HER OWN WORDS “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America. They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department.”
— Quoted in The New York Times, March 7, 2011
“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arabic world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arab and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no soul! They are dead set on killing and destruction.”
— From a speech delivered to the Rev. John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel Convention, July 2007
“Tens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government. They are here — today. Many have been here for years. Waiting. Preparing.”
— ACT! for America website, undated
P. DAVID GAUBATZ ORGANIZATION Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE).
CREDENTIALS Co-author of Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America (2009). As director of operations for SANE’s Mapping Shariah project (see David Yerushalmi, below), a privately operated effort to infiltrate American mosques in an attempt to expose radical elements, Gaubatz was paid $148,898, according to Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim website.
SUMMARY A civilian agent who worked in the Middle East for the U.S. Air Forces Office of Special Investigations, Gaubatz made it a personal project — and the theme of his book — to prove the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is linked to international terrorism. In October 2009, four members of Congress led by Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) held an embarrassing press conference claiming the book revealed a Muslim plot to infiltrate government. Their hardest “evidence” was a document showing that CAIR had encouraged young Muslims to become Capitol interns — much like many other Washington, D.C., interest groups.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “As an ideology [Islam] is a terminal disease that once spread is hard to destroy. Once the ideology (cancer) takes hold it is like trying to remove millions of cancerous cells in one’s body. Not impossible to remove, but very, very unlikely.”
— Essay on the Northeast Intelligence Network website, June 10, 2008
“[T]he political ideology of winning over the West and the world for an Islamic Caliphate is NOT specific to some extremist group of Muslims. This is mainstream Islam and Shari’a. … The goal remains the same: all of the non-Islamic world, and indeed all of the Islamic world, must submit to Shari’a. A Muslim who refuses to do so will be killed. … A non-Muslim, assuming he is not a pagan (typically a Christian or Jew) might be given the opportunity to live in a subservient status in an Islamic society and pay a special head tax to prove his submission. But this option is left to the Caliph or ruler at the time.”
— Essay carried by the Assyrian International News Agency, Feb. 13, 2008
PAMELA GELLER ORGANIZATIONS Executive director and co-founder (with Robert Spencer; see below) of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA)
and the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an umbrella group encompassing SIOA. Both are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Runs the Atlas Shrugs blog.
CREDENTIALS Self-styled expert on Islam with no formal training in the field. Co-produced with Spencer the film “The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks,” which was first screened at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference. Co-author with Spencer of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (2010).
SUMMARY Geller has seized the role of the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and influential figurehead. Her strengths are panache and vivid rhetorical flourishes — not to mention stunts like posing for an anti-Muslim video in a bikini — but she also can be coarse in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam. Geller does not pretend to be learned in Islamic studies, leaving the argumentative heavy lifting to SIOA partner Spencer. She is prone to publicizing preposterous claims, such as President Obama being the “love child” of Malcolm X, and once suggested that recent U.S. Supreme Court appointee Elena Kagen, who is Jewish, supports Nazi ideology. Geller has mingled with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists and defended Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. She is a self-avowed Zionist who is sharply critical of Jewish liberals.
IN HER OWN WORDS “Islam is not a race. This is an ideology. This is an extreme ideology, the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.”
— On Fox Business’ “Follow the Money,” March 10, 2011
“No, no, they can’t. … I don’t think that many westernized Muslims know when they pray five times a day that they’re cursing Christians and Jews five times a day. … I believe in the idea of a moderate Muslim. I do not believe in the idea of a moderate Islam. I think a moderate Muslim is a secular Muslim.”
— Quoted in The New York Times, responding to a question as to whether devout practicing Muslims can be political moderates, Oct. 8, 2010
“In the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man. … If you don’t lay down and die for Islamic supremacism, then you’re a racist anti-Muslim Islamophobic bigot. That’s what we’re really talking about.”
— Quoted in The New York Times, Oct. 8, 2010
DAVID HOROWITZ
ORGANIZATION Front Page Magazine (online), published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
CREDENTIALS Organized “Islamofascism Awareness Week” which brought prominent anti-Muslim activists to college campuses in 2007. Author of several books including Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004), which claims that American leftists support Islamic terrorists.
SUMMARY Horowitz, who spent his young years as a Marxist, has in recent years become a furious far-right antagonist of liberals and leftists. He also provides some funding support for other anti-Muslim ventures, including, according to the blog SpencerWatch.com, paying Spencer $132,537 to run the JihadWatch website. Horowitz sees no philosophical gradations; if you’re not in total agreement with his view of Islam, you’re in favor of Muslim hegemony. He believes the Muslim Brotherhood and “Islamofascists” control most American Muslim organizations, especially Muslim student groups on college campuses.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “I spent 25 years in the American Left, whose agendas are definitely to destroy this country. The American left wanted us to lose the Cold War with the Soviets and it wants us to lose the war on terror. So I don’t make any apologies for that.”
— On the “Riz Khan” Show, Al Jazeera, Aug. 21, 2008
“Some polls estimate that 10 percent of Muslims support Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. An al-Jazeera poll put the number at 50 percent. In other words, somewhere between 150 million and 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who don’t happen to be true believers in the Quran according to
bin Laden.”
— In the Columbia Spectator, Oct. 15, 2007
“There are 150 Muslim Student Associations on American campuses. The Muslim Student Associations were created by Hamas and funded by Saudi Arabia. … [The associations] are Wahhabi Islamicists, and they basically support our enemies.”
— On Fox News’ “Neil Cavuto Show,” Aug. 15, 2006
JOHN JOSEPH JAY ORGANIZATION summer patriot, winter soldier (a website; Jay doesn’t use capital letters in his website’s name or in his writings). Board member, SIOA. Listed as one of the founders of American Freedom Defense Initiative, SIOA’s umbrella group (see also Pam Geller, above).
CREDENTIALS Jay worked for 25 years as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. Geller’s Atlas Shrugs blog describes him as a constitutional scholar. In addition to his anti-Muslim commentary, Jay blogs prolifically on the right to bear arms.
SUMMARY Jay is remarkable for his unreconstructed hatred of all Muslims. He believes attacks by Muslim terrorists justify any violence directed at any Muslim, adding that, as he sees it, the Koran itself justifies such blind retaliation.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “every person in islam, from man to woman to child may be our executioner. … there are no innocents in islam. … there is no innocence in islam. all of islam is at war with us, and … all of islam is/are combatant[s.] … islam has established without intellectual doubt that there are no innocent muslims, that the myth of the ‘moderate muslim’ is precisely that, and that muslims are no more entitled to exemption or protection from retaliation that [sic] any of the other ‘non-innocent’ combatants in the world. … there are no innocent muslims. islam is subject to killing on grounds of political expediency on the same basis as islam kills its victims, and islam cannot ethically and morally claim otherwise.”
— From his website, July 14, 2010
“in short, dear muslims, g_d in his infinite wisdom saw in advance this struggle between men and religions to win his favor, and the only thing that is foreordained, is that the strong and the resolute shall win his favor, and so far, it has been amply demonstrated that he has chosen the jews as his people, and favored christianity with science, technology, culture and military power. to islam, he has given the hind and dry tit, and the sewers and the deserts of the world in which to inhabit, and in which to fester.”
— From his website, June 27, 2010
TERRY JONES ORGANIZATION Dove World Outreach Center of Gainesville, Fla. Listed by the SPLC as a hate group.
CREDENTIALS Pastor of Dove World; instigator of “International Burn a Koran Day,” which was slated for Sept. 11, 2010, but canceled after worldwide protests and calls from senior officials of the Obama Administration. On March 20, however, Jones did burn a Koran, leading to several days of rampages in early April by religious rioters in Afghanistan, including the storming of a United Nations compound, that resulted in the deaths of at least 20 people. Jones showed no remorse over the deaths, which included at least seven foreigners. Author ofIslam is of the Devil (2010). Jones has admitted never having read the Koran. He has no academic or theological degree; his “doctorate” is honorary.
SUMMARY A true fanatical extremist who seems to be driven mostly by the need for self-promotion and publicity. Operates entirely outside of the core circle of anti-Muslim activists. Jones is also virulently anti-gay.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “Here’s your opportunity, all you so-called peaceful Moslems [Jones' pronunciation]. … We are accusing the Koran of murder, rape, deception, being responsible for terrorist activities all around the world. … Present to us your defense attorney who is going to defend the Koran. Let us really see. We challenge you: do it. Let us not talk. Let us have some action and proof. … The Koran, if found guilty, can be burned … Or the Koran will be drowned. Or the Koran will be shredded into little bitty pieces … or the Koran will face a firing squad.”
— From an undated video on the Dove World Outreach website announcing “International Judge the Koran Day”
“The world is facing a great danger, which, if it is not stopped, will sooner or later be a threat to freedom in all nations and specifically to the United States. This danger is the growing religion of Islam.”
— From the introduction to Islam is of the Devil, 2010
CREDENTIALS The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Schlussel is a Detroit-based attorney and MBA. Frequent guest on conservative talk shows.
SUMMARY Uncompromising, viciously anti-Muslim commentator who dismisses ostensible allies if they are willing to believe in the concept of moderate Islam. She has even berated Hollywood for its failure to depict Muslims as sufficiently villainous. She has referred to Muslims as “animals.” Her intense animosity toward Muslims appears rooted in strong pro-Israel sentiments.
IN HER OWN WORDS “So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows. Or so we’d hope. … How fitting that Lara Logan was ‘liberated’ by Muslims in Liberation Square while she was gushing over the other part of the ‘liberation.’ Hope you’re enjoying the revolution, Lara! Alhamdillullah (praise allah) [sic].”
— From her website, following the gang sexual assault on CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo, Feb. 15, 2011
“[T]he fact is that the majority of Muslims support terrorism. The vast majority. Not just a few hijackers and a few suicide bombers. But the MAJORITY. This isn’t me saying it. It’s Muslims saying it. And not just in poll after poll of Muslims around the world including in America. Go to the streets of ‘moderate Muslim’ Dearbornistan [Dearborn, Mich.] and see how many Muslims dare condemn Hezbollah and HAMAS. It’s like playing “Where’s Waldo?”
— From her website, Oct. 8, 2008
ROBERT SPENCER ORGANIZATION Runs the Jihad Watch website, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Co-founder with Pamela Geller (see above) of Stop Islamization of America and the American Freedom Defense Initiative.
CREDENTIALS Spencer has a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Co-produced with Geller the film “The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks” (2011). Author of numerous books including The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2007) andThe Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (2005).
SUMMARY Spencer is entirely self-taught in the study of modern Islam and the Koran. Critics have accused him of doggedly taking the Koran literally — Spencer considers it innately extremist and violent — while ignoring its nonviolent passages and the vast interpretive tradition that has modified Koranic teachings over the centuries. Spencer believes that moderate Muslims exist, but to prove it, they’d have to fully denounce the portions of the Koran he finds objectionable. Spencer has been known to fraternize with European racists and neo-fascists, though he says such contacts were merely incidental. Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan, accused Spencer of “falsely constructing a divide between Islam and West” in her 2008 book,Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Spencer, she wrote, presented a “skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps to sow the seed of civilizational conflict.”
IN HIS OWN WORDS “Osama [bin Laden]‘s use of these and other [Koranic] passages in his messages is consistent … with traditional understanding of the Quran. When modern-day Jews and Christians read their Bibles, they simply don’t interpret the passages cited as exhorting them to violent actions against unbelievers. This is due to the influence of centuries of interpretative traditions that have moved them away from literalism regarding these passages. But in Islam, there is no comparable interpretative tradition.”
— From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), 2005
“Where is moderate Islam? How can moderate Muslims refute the radical exegesis of the Qur’an and Sunnah? If an exposition of moderate Islam does not address or answer radical exegeses, is it really of any value to quash Islamic extremism? If the answer lies in a simple rejection of Qur’anic literalism, how can non-literalists make that rejection stick, and keep their children from being recruited by jihadists by means of literalism? Of course, as I have pointed out many times, traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”
— Jihad Watch, Jan. 14, 2006
DAVID YERUSHALMI ORGANIZATION President of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE); principal of Stop the Madrassa.
CREDENTIALS General counsel for the Center for Security Policy (see Frank J. Gaffney Jr., above); also, an attorney representing SIOA. Yerushalmi drafted a proposed law filed this year in the Tennessee legislature that would subject anyone who advocates or adheres to Shariah customs to up to 15 years in prison; he drafted a similar bill in Georgia in 2008.
SUMMARY Yerushalmi equates Shariah with Islamic radicalism so totally that he advocates criminalizing virtually any personal practice compliant with Shariah. In his view, only a Muslim who fully breaks with the customs of Shariah can be considered socially tolerable. He waxes bloodthirsty when describing his preferred response to the supposed global threat of Shariah law, speaking casually of killing and destroying. Ideally, he would outlaw Islam and deport Muslims and other “non-Western, non-Christian” people to protect the United States’ “national character.” An ultra-orthodox Jew, he is deeply hostile toward liberal Jews. He derides U.S.-style democracy because it allows more than just an elite, privileged few to vote.
IN HIS OWN WORDS “On the so-called Global War on Terrorism, GWOT, we have been quite clear along with a few other resolute souls. This should be a WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all Muslim faithful. … At a practical level, this means that Shari’a and Islamic law are immediately outlawed. Any Muslim in America who adopts historical and traditional Shari’a will be subject to deportation. Mosques which adhere to Islamic law will be shut down permanently. No self-described or practicing Muslim, irrespective of his or her declarations to the contrary, will be allowed to immigrate to this country.”
— A 2007 commentary entitled “War Manifesto — The War Against Islam,” as reported by The American Muslim
“The more carefully reviewed evidence, however, suggests that because jihadism is in fact traditional Islam modernized to war against the ideological threat posed by the West against Islam proper,there is no way to keep faithful Muslims out of the war. If this is true, any Muslim who sticks his neck out of the mosque to yell some obscenity at the West should be considered an enemy combatant and killed or captured and held for the duration of the war. If you kill enough of them consistently enough, those disinclined to fight in the first place will find a way to reform their religion.”
— Review of Mary Habeck’s book Knowing the Enemy on the American Thinker website, Sept. 9. 2006
A leader in the movement protesting plans to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan is defending the actions of a right-wing, anti-Muslim group that was involved in violent clashes with British riot police over the weekend.
Pamela Geller is a conservative blogger, activist, and a principal organizer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), which seeks to block construction of the proposed center. The group is sponsoring a protest rally at the site on the 2010 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a week from Saturday. In a posting on her Atlas Shrugs blog, Geller expresses sympathy for the goals and actions of the English Defense League (EDL), a far-right group implicated in violent clashes with police during an anti-Islamic demonstration last Saturday in the northern English city of Bradford. “The stated goal of the EDL is to oppose militant Islam and the sharia,” Geller writes. “What’s wrong with that? Everything to the PC, leftist slaves in the media and the government.”
In an e-mail to Declassified, Geller affirmed her support for the EDL and defended the group’s actions in Bradford, which, with its nearby sister city of Leeds, has a substantial Muslim population, many of Pakistani extraction.
Geller wrote: “The media has been defamatory and libelous towards any and all counter jihad activists, including the EDL, which far from being neo-Nazi and racist, is pro-Israel and has Sikh and other non-white members and spokesmen. The EDL’s own explanation of what happened in Bradford ishere. As you can see from that statement, a group of Islamic supremacists and Communists actually began the violence by throwing rocks at EDL members. White supremacists at the demonstration did not represent the EDL, and EDL members actually removed them from the demonstration.”
British media reports—including accounts from outlets known for their conservative political slants—and official police statements on the Bradford clashes do not offer much support for, and in some cases contradict, the account offered by the EDL. In an official chronology of last Saturday’s events posted on the Web site of the West Yorkshire Police, the first reference to violence is a 2:30 p.m. entry that says: “Missiles have been thrown in the area around the Bradford Urban Gardens, however, this has been contained and the police are utilising their resources to manage the current situation.”
Bradford Urban Gardens is the location at which U.K. authorities had allowed the EDL to stage its rally; a left-wing counterdemonstration was booked a half mile away. (The EDL had wanted to conduct a march through the city, but authorities denied permission.)
A report from The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper known for its conservative sympathies, says violence broke out “as chanting EDL supporters began throwing missiles towards Asian youngsters and anti-fascist activists who had been taunting them with shouts of ‘Nazi scum off our streets.’ ” The Telegraph said that as EDL protesters got off buses that had taken them to the site, they shouted slogans at locals, including “Allah-Pedophile,” “We want our country back,” and “We love the floods”—a reference, the paper said, to flooding that’s now devastating much of Pakistan.
The Daily Mail, a newspaper perhaps even more conservative thanThe Telegraph, also reported on the violence. The paper’s Web site carries photos of what it says are EDL protesters, with one caption reading, “Crossing the line: EDL supporters in hats, hoods and balaclavas hurl missiles at police in Bradford today.”
By her own account, Geller’s support of the EDL and other anti-Muslim groups in the U.K. has put her at odds with what are considered mainstream groups representing Britain’s Jewish community. In an interview with the conservative FrontPage Magazine Web site, Geller claims that rabbis and prominent Jewish groups in Britain had urged Jews to boycott a demonstration that a group called Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE) organized last December to protest plans to build a mosque in the North London neighborhood of Harrow.
According to Geller, the Community Security Trust, which keeps watch on extremist and anti-Semitic activities in the U.K., much like the Anti-Defamation League does in the U.S., urged Jews not to support the SIOE protest, as did unnamed rabbis who said the protest’s “only purpose” was “to spread hatred and fear.” Geller accused U.K. Jewish groups like the CST of “aiding and abetting Islamic jihad and Islamic anti-Semitism.” A person familiar with the views of British Jewish leaders, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said mainstream Jewish groups regarded the English Defense League as “politicized football hooligans.”
In an e-mail to Declassified, Geller acknowledged that some epithets that The Telegraph attributed to EDL protesters in Bradford were “in bad taste, although in saying that I am not accepting the accuracy of The Telegraph account, and also understand that words said in anger are not always words the speakers would endorse in moments of reflection.” In a move apparently designed to avoid such embarrassments at her group’s upcoming 9/11 event, she said, “We have already published several notices warning that inflammatory signs will be removed.”
Geller said the EDL itself acknowledged that there may have been neo-Nazi thugs among its ranks: “The left and real neo-Nazis frequently attempt to infiltrate EDL rallies in order to discredit the EDL. This is amply documented. Both have an interest in seeing the EDL fail: the left so that there will be no serious resistance to its agenda, and the neo-Nazis so that there exists no respectable alternative to them in opposing the British elite, and also because the neo-Nazis have generally aligned with the Islamic jihad that the EDL resists.”
She added that while she would not assert that the EDL “can do no wrong, I just refuse to accept accounts of EDL misdeeds from sources that have been proven in the past to have lied about EDL activities.”
St. Paul, Minn. — A St. Paul blogger faces misdemeanor charges after he allegedly harassed two Muslim women last week in downtown Minneapolis.
Minneapolis police say John Hugh Gilmore, 52, who writes a blog called Minnesota Conservatives, caused a scene Thursday night on Nicollet Mall. Sgt. Bill Palmer, a police spokesman, said Gilmore appeared to be drunk when he confronted the two women wearing the Muslim headscarf known as the hijab.
“Mr. Gilmore made some comments that he didn’t believe the women should be in the United States, and that he thought that they were ruining America,” Palmer said.
One of the women, University of Minnesota student Jamila Boudlali, said she’s lived in Minnesota her entire life and has never been hassled about her religion.
Police say several onlookers intervened, and Gilmore allegedly threatened to assault one of the men.
Gilmore was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process.
Boudlali said Minneapolis police, who took the man to jail, did the right thing.
“I have to admit I was very surprised that the guy got arrested because we’ve always kind of been afraid, I guess, of the police, and afraid to report things when things happen to us,” Boudlali said. “It made [me] really happy and made me have a lot more trust and confidence in the city of Minneapolis.”
The Muslim women had been attending the liberal NetRoots Nation convention, which was taking place at the same time as the conservative RightOnline conference.
The real scandal surrounding Anthony Weiner is that he is bigoted against Palestinians and has misused his position in Congress to support punitive policies against them. Americans appear to be bored by policy, titillated by private peccadilloes. But it is the policies that are important. Mahatma Gandhi was once kicked out of a brothel in South Africa. No one judges him by his lapses. Weiner, in contrast to Gandhi, has not worked for peace but has rather given knee-jerk support to the worst policies of the most far rightwing parties in Israel toward Palestinians. A social liberal in American terms, Weiner is so blinded by his allegiance to Israel and so studied in his ignorance of the Middle East that he has played a uniformly sinister role in that aspect of foreign policy. If he were replaced by, say, an up-and-coming Dominican-American politician from Queens who had some sympathy with Arabs, that would be all to the good.
Weiner:
1. Called for Columbia University professor Joseph Massad to be fired for being critical of Israel; Weiner thus spearheaded a new McCarthyism.
2. On the Israeli attack, in international waters, on the Mavi Marmara relief ship, Weiner sputtered: “”If you want to instigate a conflict with the Israeli navy it isn’t hard to do. They were offered alternatives. Instead they chose to sail into the teeth of an internationally recognized blockade.” The blockade of Gaza civilians is a breach of international law; it is not internationally recognized and has on the contrary been condemned by almost every nation and human rights organization.
3. Alleged that the New York Times is anti-Israel: “Amnesty International in particular, has always had bias against Israel, and frankly I would argue that in many cases, the New York Times has, as well.”
4. Alleged that the Palestine Liberation Organization is still listed by the US as a terrorist organization. It was dropped from the list over 2 decades ago.
5. Tried to bar the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations from New York.
6. Alleged that Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestine Authority, is not the head of the PLO. He is.
7. Refused to condemn the use by Israel of cluster bombs on the civilian farms of south Lebanon in 2006.
8. Alleged that the Israeli army does not occupy the West Bank and that there is no Israeli Army presence in the West Bank.
9. Called Israel’s war on Gaza a “humane” war. 400 children were killed.
10. Voted for Iraq War authorization in 2002, before later turning against the war.
Hanan Qahwaji, better known as Brigitte Gabriel in the Islamophobesphere has been exposed yet again. We wrote about Brigitte a while ago, and brought to fore the hate that her organization ACT! for America regularly engages in. (via. Brigitte Gabriel Review)
Hanan is the Islamophobic Lebanese woman, Hanan Qahwaji who as a child lived in the South Lebanon village of Maryoun overlooking the Lebanon-Palestine border during three years of the on again off again Lebanese Civil War before she became an Israeli collaborator and fled to Israel. Hanan, repackaged as “Rachael”, soon quickly landed a job with Israeli TV and specialized in telling stories about how Muslims terrorized her and her Christian neighbors.
Later, repackaged as “Nour Semaan”, a name she still sometimes uses, Hanan tells American audiences that she became a Middle East “anchor” in Israel. Forgetting to mention that her job was with Pat Robertson’s, Christian Broadcasting Network, working to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East which includes Robertson’s vision of rapture and how righteous Jews will all convert when Jesus comes again. The others will burn in Hell according to the Pentecosts. Hanan is sometimes known as, Nour Semaan, Rachael Cohen, “Dark Angel” and more recently, Bridgitte Gabriel, founder of the anti-Islam Zionist hate group “Act! For America”.
Peter, would be US Congressman Peter T. King, the Republican Islamaphobe from Long Island, NY, who as Hanan’s new partner in saving America from Islam, she sometimes flirtatiously refers to simply as “Petey” or “Petey Chops.”
It’s unknown to this observer whether the couple experienced “un vrai coup de foudre” when Mr. King was Hanan Qahwaji’s first guest earlier this year on a new cable television show that she co-hosts with Guy Rodgers, a Republican consultant who helped expand the Christian Coalition, which used to be a potent political organization on the Christian right and who is ACT’s Executive Director. However, “Petey” and “Bridge” as he calls her sometimes, certainly appear to see potential in one another for saving America from the Muslim hoards, which according to the duo are now in all American neighborhoods and who have infiltrated the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the White House!
The new team is said by one King staffer to share a vision of “defeating Radical Islam in America and defeating it before it’s too late.” And they intend to show their fellow Americans just how to do it.
This past week in Washington, King held the second of what it planned as a series of “Congressional Hearings” designed to warn Americans about various threats from Muslims in their midst.
Gabriel frequently tells interviewers that “[F]or my first ten years I led a charmed and privileged life. All that came to an end when a jihadist religious war, declared by the Muslims against the Christians, […] tore my country and my life apart. It was a war that the world did not understand.”
What is obvious to the many Lebanese who view Hanan with contempt for misrepresenting and besmirching their country (not to mention her open letter to Israel during the July 2006 war, which she read frequently on TV shows urging Israel to keep bombing Lebanon despite their already killing of more than 1,300 civilians is that it was a war that Gabriel did not understand.
The on again, off again intermittent civil war was not characterized by anything remotely resembling a Muslim “Jihad”. Some Muslims actually fought with Israel and with the Christian Militia. Moreover, the Palestinian organizations were secular nationalists and not remotely Jihadists; plus many were also Christians, while other fighters were communists, Nasserites, and non-religious westerners. Although many combatants were Muslim, perhaps 35% were not. And their fight was with Israel; it was not a religious crusade against Christians. Gabriel’s fundraising speeches among largely uniformed right wing Republican audiences in which she claims she was the target of a religious crusade against Christians is patent nonsense.
“Watching the World Trade Center buildings fall in 2001,” Hanan tells audiences, “I was struck by the same fear that I experienced during the war in Lebanon. As I watched, words instinctively came from my mouth as I spoke to the TV screen: ‘Now they are here.” Gabriel is well aware, as Michael Young of Beirut’s Daily Star has pointed out, that there was nothing remotely comparable between what happened in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and what she experienced in Marjayoun.
Bridgitte is said to believe that she can help King from deflecting rising criticism of his “hearings” given her own experience with hecklers as she tours the American heartland sounding the alarm.
She is said to resemble a Sarah Palin “mama grizzly” when she senses danger to those she cares about and no sooner than King’s hearing began last week than ACT! pounced with Tweets from the Congressional Hearing Room.
An ACT! staffer twittered live labeling it: “Round 2: House Homeland Security Committee Hearing on The Threat of Muslim-American Radicalization in U.S. Prisons:
“As I watched the discussion during the hearing, I Tweeted about so that our ACT! for America members could see right away what Members of the U.S. Congress are saying and doing about it. While there certainly were not as many “rabble rousers” as there had been for Chairman King’s first hearing on Muslim radicalization, there was some political drama, nonetheless.”
“For example, Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA) falsely alleged that the focus of Chairman King’s hearing “can be deemed as racist and as discriminatory.” The Chairman immediately fired back by saying that “the purpose of this Committee is to combat Islamic terrorism because that is the terrorist threat to this country. Bravo!”
“In response to Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) commenting that “the political correctness in this room is astounding,” Rep. Shiela Jackson-Lee (D-TX) held up a copy of the Constitution replying that the document is where she finds her “version of political correctness.” She went on further to state that there is a parallel between Christian militants and jihadists when it comes to bringing down the Constitution. More nonsense.”
“Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) ranted terribly on for several-minutes about the real problem being the overcrowding of prisons due to unfair sentencing guidelines and claimed that prisoners were turning to Islam to “protect themselves.”
Other witnesses who reportedly left Peter and Bridgette unhappy were:
Deputy Chief Michael Downing, Commanding Officer of the LA Police Department’s Counter Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, and Professor Bert Useem of Purdue University.
According to ACTS! Tweets:
“Chief Downing repeatedly tried to distinguish “Islam” from what he referred to as “Prislam,” and said that all jihadis had “hijacked” the Islamic faith. As I listened to him, I wondered if he has taken the time to read sharia law, the Qur’an and the hadiths? If he did, I think he would understand that what the “radicalized” Muslims are adhering to is an ideology that is clearly enunciated within Islam’s holy books and has been practiced for 14 centuries. His statements reminded me that a great deal of educating at local, state and federal levels still needs to be done.”
“Professor Useem made several amazingly naïve and plain stupid assertions, one of which was that “correctional leadership (at both the agency and prison-level) has consciously and successfully infused the mission of observing signs of inmate radicalization into organizational practices. Rather than being sitting ducks, waiting for their facilities to be penetrated by radicalizing groups, correctional leaders have fashioned, staffed, and energized the effort to defeat radicalization.”
A few examples of questions from new Members that may have pleased Bridge and Petey were:
Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) asked if Shariah law would supersede the U.S. Constitution for radicalized Muslims. A chorus of “Yes” was heard from most of the witnesses.
Rep. Scott Rigell (R-VA) remarked that he was disappointed to see some members of the committee question why a hearing of this nature needed to take place. That the threat of Islamic radicalization in our prisons is clear.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) commented how remarkable it is that a discussion about the threat of radical Islam appeared to be “off limits.” He also expressed concerns about literature found in U.S. prisons, such as writings by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, that ask: Which do you choose, the flag of Islam or the flag of America?
ACTS! Final Tweet from King’s Hearing last week:
“Action by our grassroots is the fuel that makes the ACT! For American engine run. As we wait for Chairman King’s third hearing on Islamic radicalization it’s really nice to see that the engine is roaring loud and strong.”
In perhaps a personal message of encouragement to the Chairman were the words: “Please keep it up for Round Three!”
One subject being considered for Round Three is: “How to spot an Islamic terrorist in your neighborhood”. An interesting subject since that’s one suggested title for Hanan’s (Bridgitte’s) next book featuring an introduction by none other than “Petey” King.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be contacted c/o fplamb@gmail.com
He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon.
MINNEAPOLIS — A group of around ten women in Muslim headscarves crashed the RightOnline conference for about ten minutes Saturday, protesting what they said was an incident targeting Muslim women Thursday night.
The event was the latest spark kicked up by the proximity of Netroots Nation and RightOnline. The two conferences are blocks apart — RightOnline is being held in a hotel many Netrootsers are staying in — and interaction between the progressives at Netroots and the conservatives at RightOnline has been inevitable.
A spokesperson for the group of women told TPM they weren’t sure of the identity of the man responsible for the Thursday incident — when two hijab-wearing women were followed by a man with a cell phone camera who reportedly asked them why they were dressed the way they were “in America” — but rumors that the incident involved an employee of conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart were rampant at Netroots.
It was partially a confrontation over those rumors that caused the Breitbart kerfuffle at Netroots Friday.
The women who arrived at RightOnline were Netroots attendees, and were accompanied by blogger Joe Aravosis and gay rights advocate/provocateur Dan Choi.
The spokesperson for the “flash mob,” Allison Nevitt, told TPM that there was a larger message to their protest beyond the Thursday incident, which Nevitt said had been reported to Minneapolis police.
“The point was mostly that Muslim women are an equal part of this nation, and that we have an equal right to exist here,” Nevitt said.
Following that, Nevitt and the rest of the flash mobbers were escorted out of RightOnline by hotel security.
Terry Jones, the Quran-burning pastor from Florida, is to lead a three-hour rally against Islam today at Dearborn City Hall followed by a 2-mile walk to the Arab International Festival, where he will further speak out. The three-day festival is the largest outdoor gathering of Arab Americans in the U.S. and is held in Dearborn, known for its sizable Muslim population.
Jones, who led a rally at City Hall in April, gained worldwide attention for his threats to burn the Quran last year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He didn’t go through with it, but he led a Quran-burning in Florida in March. He tried to protest outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn in April, but a jury ruled he would likely breach the peace, thwarting his plans. Jones has appealed that decision, which was criticized by the ACLU and some constitutional law experts as an infringement of his free-speech rights.
Jones said the decision was an example of sharia, or Islamic law, coming to America, which he said is a growing threat. Today, Jones plans to speak out against sharia again as part of a five-point plan he said will help fight Islam. One point calls for the “monitoring of all mosques to assure that they are places of worship and not of Islamic propaganda.”
Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly Jr. has said repeatedly that the city has never implemented sharia.
In a letter sent this week to residents, O’Reilly said Jones and his supporters “are coming here to promote the concept that Islam is a false faith and that Muslims by teaching and nature are violent. We know that there is no substance to their message — their goal is to promote fear and hatred in others.”
Referring to Jones supporters, O’Reilly said he is urging the public to “ignore them and their empty words. Their goal is to bait and anger us so that they can then misrepresent who we are in order to serve their personal agenda.
“Debating them and confronting them at this event or in our city can produce no positive result for us.”
In ominous tones, Islamophobes toss around terms like “taqiyya” and “Shariah.” Do they even know what they mean?
In a now infamous column, the writer Eliana Benador argued this week that Anthony Weiner (who is a Jew) may have converted to Islam but was hiding it from the world in accordance with the practice of “taqiyya.”
“It is also important, when looking at this situation, to remember that observant Muslims practice taqiyya, an element of sharia that states there is a legal right and duty to distort the truth to promote the cause of Islam,” Benador wrote.
In invoking the Arabic term “taqiyya,” Benador exemplified a practice we’ve noticed in the past few years. It’s become common for right-wing writers and even politicians to matter-of-factly toss around Arabic terminology when warning of the Muslim threat to America. These references, often made in ominous tones, are almost always without context.
So we thought it would be useful to hear explanations of terms like “taqiyya” from an expert. John Esposito, university professor at Georgetown and author of “What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam,” was kind enough to explain six of the more common Islamic terms we’ve been hearing. Esposito wrote the “What it actually means” items below, following my introductions.
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The term: dhimmi
How it’s used: As a pejorative for non-Muslims who fail to understand — and unwittingly aid, or even appease — the Islamic menace
Example: “These dhimmi effetes at the Times think their toe licking will save them. They will be the first ones with their heads on the chopping block.” — the blogger Pamela Geller
What it actually means: “Protected people.” The dhimmi were non-Muslims living under Muslim rule who paid a special tax and in return were permitted to practice their own religion, be led by their religious leaders and be guided by their own religious laws and customs. This treatment was very advanced at the time. No such tolerance existed in Christendom where Jews, Muslims and Christians who did not accept the authority of the pope were persecuted, forced to convert or expelled.
However progressive this policy may have been in the past, it would amount to second-class citizenship for non-Muslims today. Therefore, some insist that non-Muslims must be given full citizenship rights because of the Quran’s emphasis on the equality of all humanity. This need for reinterpretation can be seen in the increased incidents of discrimination and violence against non-Muslims in countries like Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
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The term: jihad
How it’s used: As casual shorthand for Muslims’ war against the West
Example: “Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.” — Newt Gingrich
What it actually means: Literally, “struggle” or “exertion” in the path of God, following God’s Will. It is a concept with multiple meanings, used and abused throughout Islamic history. The importance of jihad is rooted in the Quran’s command to struggle in the path of God and in the example of the Prophet Muhammad and his early Companions. The two broad meanings of jihad, nonviolent and violent, are contrasted in a well-known Prophetic tradition. “Greater” jihad is the struggle within oneself to live a righteous life and submit oneself to God’s will. “Lesser” jihad is the defense of Islam and the Muslim community.
Jihad as struggle pertains to the difficulty and complexity of living a good life: struggling against the evil in oneself — to be virtuous and moral, making a serious effort to do good works and help to reform society. Depending on the circumstances in which one lives, it also can mean fighting injustice and oppression, spreading and defending Islam, and creating a just society through preaching, teaching and, if necessary, armed struggle or holy war. A radicalized violent minority combines militancy with messianic visions to inspire and mobilize an army of God whose jihad they believe will liberate Muslims at home and abroad.
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The term: taqiyya
How it’s used: As an explanation for why Muslims cannot be trusted — because their religion allows them to ethically practice deception
Example: “Thus it is reasonable to conclude that Keith Ellison’s deceitful pronouncements at Thursday’s Homeland Security Hearings, this past Thursday, and one day later on ‘Real Time With Bill Maher,’ are consistent with the Koranic doctrine of taqiyya, Islamic religious dissimulation.” — writer on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace site
What it actually means: Precautionary dissimulation of religious belief and practice in the face of persecution. Muslims recognize the personal duty of affirming right and forbidding wrong, but when confronted by an overwhelming injustice that threatens the well-being of an individual, this obligation can be fulfilled secretly in the heart rather than overtly. Among Shia Muslims, who from the death of the Prophet onward considered themselves subject to persistent religious persecution by the Sunni majority and the holders of political power, taqiyya permits not only passive or silent resistance, but also an active dissimulation of true beliefs when required to protect life, property and religion itself.
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The term: Shariah
How it’s used: To refer to a rigid set of Muslim laws that prescribe stoning for adulterous women, execution for homosexuals, etc.
Example: “We all know what shariah law does to women — women must wear burqas, women are subject to humiliation and into controlled marriages under Sharia law. We want to prevent it from ever happening in Texas.” — Texas state Rep. Leo Berman
What it actually means: Historically, many Muslims and non-Muslims have come to confuse and use the terms “Shariah” and “Islamic law” interchangeably. Because the Quran is not a law book, early jurists used revelation as well as reason to create a body of laws to govern their societies. But, over time, these man-made laws came to be viewed as sacred and unchangeable. Muslims who want to see Shariah as a source of law in constitutions therefore have very different visions of how that would manifest. Though the definition of Shariah refers to the principles in the Quran and prophetic tradition, some expect full implementation of classical or medieval Islamic law; others want a more restricted approach, like prohibiting alcohol, requiring the head of state to be a Muslim, or creating Shariah courts to hear cases involving Muslim family law (marriage, divorce and inheritance). Still others simply want to ensure that no constitutional law violates the principles and values of Islam, as found in the Quran.
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The term: madrassa
How it’s used: To refer to a place where Muslim youth are indoctrinated into radicalism and, often, terror
Example: “I am very concerned that the school will be a madrassa, funded by taxpayer dollars. We will in effect be supporting the training of future terrorist cells.” — Opponent of a proposed Arabic-themed New York school
What it actually means: A place where teaching, studying and learning take place. In early centuries, “madrassa” came to refer to a school of higher studies (college or university) where Islamic sciences were taught. Today, the term is also often used more broadly. Like the term “school” in American English, it can refer, for example, to a university, seminary, college as well as primary or secondary school. In recent years, the term has taken on a negative connotation, and for some simplistically equated with militant madrassas or schools in Pakistan and elsewhere. While they certainly exist and are dangerous training grounds, they represent a relatively small number of the institutions/schools that are referred to as madrassas.
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The term: Allah
How it’s used: As a negatively charged byword for a special Islamic deity
Example: “The animals of Allah for whom any day is a great day for a massacre are drooling over the positive response that they are getting from New York City officials over a proposal to build a 13 story monument to the 9/11 Muslims who hijacked those 4 airliners.” –Tea Party activist Mark Williams
What it actually means: Arabic for “God” (the term is used by Muslims and Arab Christians for God but is also used in Arabic-influenced languages and thus by Turkish and Malaysian Christians and others). Muslims believe Allah is the same deity worshiped by Jews and Christians. The first verses of the Quran present the basic Muslim view of God: “Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Sovereign of the Day of Judgment. Truly, it is You we worship and You whose aid we seek.” He is creator, sustainer, judge and ruler of the universe; all-powerful and all-merciful. Allah is described as the Merciful and Compassionate; every verse of the Quran begins with “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.” Believed to have revealed himself to a long line of prophets (including the biblical prophets), to Moses, Jews (Torah) and Jesus (Gospels). As in Judaism and Christianity, God is also seen as the Just Judge who is to be obeyed and feared as well as loved.
Europe today is the scene of extremely xenophobic anti-Muslim and populist forces bent on confrontation with the continent’s Muslim citizens. The main reason for the continuing rise and growth of this hateful force is the position Europe finds itself in today, a crossroads in which it is grappling with its identity as well as how to deal with its growing minorities.
Javier Solana, formerly the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy wrote that in the next forty years Europe’s workforce will decrease by 70 million and migration is the solution to maintaining its economy,
A major challenge that Europe must still face is migration, which will only become a bigger problem over time. Between now and 2050, Europe’s workforce will decrease by 70 million. Maintaining our economy requires migration and open EU borders – and facing down the populist movements in Europe that would shun “outsiders”.
One can assume that a significant percentage of the migrants will be Muslims, this will be especially true if Turkey eventually accedes to the EU. This will have dramatic effects on politics in Europe, one can foresee the rise of many more Geert Wilders and Le Pen’s, as well as organizations such as the EDL, BPE, SIOE, etc.
One of things needed to insure that Europe successfully maintains its economy, strengthens its cohesion while maintaining the universal values it proclaims is for it to overcome the hateful forces pushing nativist tendencies and Islamophobic rhetoric.
As Tariq Ramadan has mentioned this requires a commitment from all citizens and the realization of a new “WE.” One way in which to “face down” the haters is to actively be informed, as well as to participate in combating Islamophobia, racism and bigotry much in the way that thousands of anti-fascist protesters did when they rallied against Robert Spencer and the BPE in Stuttgart, Germany.
In this regard there is a relatively new Facebook page, Europeans Against Islamophobia, which collects up to date and breaking news in regards to anti-Muslim hate, Islamophobia, racism, violence and activities to combat these forces. I suggest everyone like the page, suggest to friends (especially Europeans) and join the discussion there.
Europeans Against Islamophobia is also joined by other Facebook pages that are worth joining:
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner appeared on a Sarasota conservative talk show today, echoing previous comments on the dangers of Sharia in the Sunshine State by saying there is a “civilizational jihad” underway across the country and in Florida. Audio after the jump.
“It’s not just a threat on foreign soil,” he continued. “It’s also a threat from those who seek to destroy us from within. And we have a problem of domestic terrorism both in the violent form as well as in the civilizational jihad that we’re witnessing here in our own country and our own state.”
The return of Ask Dr. Politics! A forum for civil exchange in a civil society.
Dear Dr. Politics: Why are you such a jerk? You call Herman Cain “hateful” for wanting to protect Americans from Muslim militants who want to kill us. It’s you who is hateful!
Reply: Let’s look at the record. This is from PolitiFact.com, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan fact-checking organization that examines the statements of public figures. PolitiFact gives Cain its lowest rating, judging his statements on this issue “not accurate” and “ridiculous.”
Let’s start with Cain’s comments in a March 21 article in Christianity Today.
“And based upon the little knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them,” Cain said.
On May 26, a blogger for ThinkProgress.org asked Cain: “Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim either in your Cabinet or as a federal judge?”
“No, I will not,” Cain replied. “And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there’s this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government.”
A few days later, Cain went on “Your World With Neil Cavuto” on Fox News.
“A reporter asked me, would I appoint a Muslim to my administration. I did say, ‘No,’” Cain said. “And here’s why. … I would have to have people totally committed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And many of the Muslims, they’re not totally dedicated to this country.”
Then, in Monday’s CNN debate, moderator John King accurately asked Cain about his statement that he would not appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet.
Cain replied that he never said that — only that he would not be “comfortable” appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet. This contradicted Cain’s statement to Cavuto.
“And I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims, those that are trying to kill us,” Cain said during the debate. “And so, when I said I wouldn’t be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones that are trying to kill us, No. 1. Secondly, yes, I do not believe in Sharia law in American courts.”
In my column on the debate, I called this not only “incoherent nonsense” but also “hateful, incoherent nonsense.”
But you want to know what’s worse? As an excellent editorial in The New York Times pointed out Tuesday, “None of the other candidates took [Cain] to task for this. Mitt Romney, a Mormon who has himself been the subject of religious slurs, at least mentioned the nation’s founding principle of religious tolerance and respect but missed an opportunity to include Muslims. Newt Gingrich tumbled over the historical cliff with the idea, announcing some kind of loyalty oath to serve in his administration, similar to that used in dealing with Nazis and Communists.”
I don’t know if Monday’s debate will be quickly forgotten, replaced in our memories by a jumble of other debates, but I am going to remember it as the debate in which the entire Republican field to date refused to speak out for Muslim-Americans. They refused to speak out for the ones fighting for America in our armed forces, for the ones serving in Congress and for the ones living peaceful, productive and, yes, American lives.
The silence of these candidates was an act of cowardice.
Keep in mind these famous words when it comes to failing to speak out for people who are unpopular. They are by Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor, and they are famous enough that even Republican candidates for president should know them. Niemoller was speaking of the courage it took to remain a decent human being in Nazi Germany:
“First they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist.
“Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Niemoller was arrested in 1937 and sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for “not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement.” He was eventually liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on May 5, 1945. He died in 1984 in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Do I regret the remarks I made about Herman Cain? I do not. Anyone who won’t speak out for those unjustly despised is despicable.
You want to live in a country that has a litmus test for Muslims? You want to live in a country that demands loyalty oaths from Muslims?
Fine. Today, it will be the Muslims. Tomorrow, it will be you.
How badly do these candidates want to be president? Badly enough to shred the Constitution to get the job? No job is worth that, not even president.
They should be ashamed of themselves. I certainly am ashamed of them.
Dear Dr. Politics: I notice you are now on Twitter under the name @politicoroger. Don’t you find that Twitter is divorced from reality?
Reply: Twitter is reality. Everything else is an illusion.
Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.
Editor’s note: Rep. Michael Honda, D-California, is senior Democratic whip and a member of House Budget and Appropriations Committees.
(CNN) — Who would have thought that my early childhood experience in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II would offer such useful insight, 65 years later, in determining the direction America is headed? In reflecting on this week’s second round of Muslim radicalization hearings, planned by New York Rep. Peter King, I feel as if a mirror is being held up to my life, giving value to lessons learned as a child.
Make no mistake. Growing up in internment Camp Amache in Colorado was no joy ride — just look at the pictures. We were treated like cattle in those camps. Never mind that we were born in America. Never mind that we were patriotic Americans and law-abiding citizens. Never mind that we were constructively contributing to the American economy. Despite all this, hundreds of thousands of Americans suddenly became the enemy at the height of the war, with no cause, no crime, and no constitutional protection.
We look back, as a nation, and we know this was wrong. We look back and know that this was a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” We look back and know that an entire ethnicity was said to be, and ultimately considered, the enemy. We know that internment happened because few in Washington were brave enough to say “no.”
We know all this, and yet our country is now, within my lifetime, repeating the same mistakes from our past. The interned 4-year-old in me is crying out for a course correction so that we do not do to others what we did unjustly to countless Japanese-Americans.
Camp Amache, Colorado, where Rep. Honda and his family were sent.
This time, instead of creating an ethnic enemy, Rep. King is creating a religious enemy. Because of prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of Republican leadership, King is targeting the entire Muslim-American community. Similar to my experience, they are become increasingly marginalized and isolated by our policies.
Never mind that many were born in America and have no allegiance to their ancestors’ native homeland. Never mind that they are patriotic Americans and law-abiding citizens. Never mind that they are constructively contributing to the American economy. Regardless of all this, millions of Americans have become the new enemy, with no cause and no crime.
There is no question that a congressional hearing, which targets an entire religion, is morally and strategically wrong-headed. First, it is un-American. This is not the America that I know and have helped build as a lifelong public servant. The America that I know has always provided refuge for those fleeing persecution, from early settlers to recent refugees. The America that I know does not hate and discriminate based on race, religion or creed.
Rep. Michael Honda
Second, it is counterproductive. King is undermining his own objective. In hosting these hearings, King, as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has declared, erroneously, that the Muslim-American community does not partner actively enough to prevent acts of violence — or in the case of prisons, extremism. Despite the offensive and fallacious nature of King’s concern, given extensive evidence that contradicts his claim, the Homeland Security chairman’s strategy makes future partnerships unpalatable.
Michael Honda on the day his family was released.
In one fell swoop of his discriminatory brush, King, in his apparent attempt to root out radicalization, marginalizes an entire American minority group, making enemies of them all. To add insult to injury, King has quipped (again, speciously) that America has too many mosques and that extremists run 80 percent of them. We can only hope that Rep. King does not completely undermine all the goodwill established across this country between Muslim Americans and law enforcement officials. You can be certain that few will want to work with King going forward.
Don’t get me wrong. I support the Homeland Security Committee examining “radicalization” in this country, and in our prisons, provided it is a comprehensive review, not a discriminatory one that targets only one subgroup of America. I support the committee examining “violent extremism” in this country, including an examination of militias and the 30,000-plus gun-related deaths that happen each year. I support a committee chair that is keen to keep our homeland secure.
This is not the case with King. These hearings do little to keep our country secure and do plenty to increase prejudice, discrimination and hate. I thought we learned a lesson or two from my internment camp experience in Colorado. I hope I am not proven wrong.
The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Michael Honda.
(Huffington Post) Glenn Beck agreed with GOP candidate Herman Cain on his Tuesday show, saying that he would be uncomfortable having a Muslim in his administration. Cain has attracted attention for saying that he is worried about the spread of Sharia law in the U.S., and that he was worried that a Muslim might not be faithful to the Constitution. On Tuesday, Beck said he understood what Cain meant. “Do you feel comfortable in saying, ‘yeah, you know what? I’m not even going to check that guy on his stance on Sharia law,’” Beck said. He started to say that, although it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t ask the same of a Catholic or a Baptist, but then backtracked, saying that, in fact, he might be “uncomfortable” with people from any faith, explaining, “I don’t trust anybody anymore.” However, Beck had a distinction to make. “Would I be more uncomfortable with a Muslim?” he asked. “Yes.” The reason for this, he said, was because Muslim rights group had “wildly deceived” Americans–though he didn’t say about what exactly. “And a Muslim is more likely to want Sharia law in America than any other religion,” Beck’s co-host said. Beck was quick to say that not all Muslims wanted Sharia law. “I have friends who are Muslim who are not for Sharia law,” he said. Beck has made controversial statements about Muslims in the past. He has said that around ten percent of Muslims are terrorists and that some want to bring about the Antichrist. And, in 2006, he famously asked Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”
An injured Muslim worshipper holds a towel on his head after suffering a wound in clashes supporters of the Bulgarian ultra-nationalist party Ataka (L) during Friday prayer in front of the Banya Bashi Mosque in Sofia, 20 May. Photo by EPA
The warden of the main mosque in downtown Sofia has suffered a brutal assault at the hands of unidentified attackers just minutes before the start of the morning prayer on Sunday, the Chief Mufti‘s Office announced.
“Today we witnessed yet another attack against Sofiamosque. This morning, 20 minutes before the morning prayer, the warden of the mosque in Sofia was cruelly beaten. Unknown people have jumped over the fence of the mosque, beaten the keeper, destroyed the security room and burst into the mosque,” says the statement.
The man was found by worshippers who came to the mosque for the morning prayer, covered in blood and unconcious, it said. He has been taken to the emergency Pirogov hospital.
“Hate crimes, acts of xenophobia and Islamophobia have risen dramatically in recent months,” says the statement of the Chief Mufti‘s Office.
Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry has issued no official information about the incident so far.
The news comes just a month after a Muslim man and five policemen were hurt in clashes between supporters of Bulgaria’s ultra-nationalistAtaka party and worshippers outside the Banya Bashi mosque in Sofia on May 20.
The incident was condemned by authorities and human rights groups as an example of a worrying escalation of xenophobia and religious hatred.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.
“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.
Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.
“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”
Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.
Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.
Mr. German said the change would make it harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal purposes. But Ms. Caproni said it was too cumbersome to require agents to open formal inquiries before running quick checks. She also said agents could not put information uncovered from such searches into F.B.I. files unless they later opened an assessment.
The new rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and searching people’s trash. Under current rules, agents cannot use such techniques until they open a “preliminary investigation,” which — unlike an assessment — requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment, too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant.
Agents have asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others. But Ms. Caproni said information gathered that way could also be useful for other reasons, like determining whether the subject might pose a threat to agents.
The new manual will also remove a limitation on the use of surveillance squads, which are trained to surreptitiously follow targets. Under current rules, the squads can be used only once during an assessment, but the new rules will allow agents to use them repeatedly. Ms. Caproni said restrictions on the duration of physical surveillance would still apply, and argued that because of limited resources, supervisors would use the squads only rarely during such a low-level investigation.
The revisions also clarify what constitutes “undisclosed participation” in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant, which is subject to special rules — most of which have not been made public. The new manual says an agent or an informant may surreptitiously attend up to five meetings of a group before those rules would apply — unless the goal is to join the group, in which case the rules apply immediately.
At least one change would tighten, rather than relax, the rules. Currently, a special agent in charge of a field office can delegate the authority to approve sending an informant to a religious service. The new manual will require such officials to handle those decisions personally.
In addition, the manual clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter” — investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.
The new rules make clear, for example, that if the person with such a role is a victim or a witness rather than a target of an investigation, extra supervision is not necessary. Also excluded from extra supervision will be investigations of low- and midlevel officials for activities unrelated to their position — like drug cases as opposed to corruption, for example.
The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs. And it will limit academic protections only to scholars who work for institutions based in the United States.
Since the release of the 2008 manual, the assessment category has drawn scrutiny because it sets a low bar to examine a person or a group. The F.B.I. has opened thousands of such low-level investigations each month, and a vast majority has not generated information that justified opening more intensive investigations.
Ms. Caproni said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.
We thought everything that could be said about Anthony Weiner’s lewd photo scandal had been said. But Eliana Benador, a former influential neoconservative public relations operative, has proved us wrong.
Writing for the “Communities” section of the Washingtom Times’ website, Benador argues that the Twitter scandal shows that … the Jewish Weiner might have converted to Islam!
Benador, who is currently the U.S.-based “goodwill ambassador” for a group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, advances an argument that is fairly difficult to follow, but it seems to go like this: Because a New York imam was quoted in the press seeming to take Weiner’s side in the matter, and because Muslims (supposedly) practice deception as part of their faith, it’s possible that Weiner is secretly a Muslim convert who is still presenting himself to the world as a Jew.
She writes:
The Imam of New York has stated: “I would tell her [Huma] to be a little bit patient. In our book, if you think your wife, or husband, is doing something unacceptable, you start by counseling her.”
Counseling? For whom, Huma or Anthony? The Imam’s statement seems to state that Huma is in need.
Regardless, those are words of compromise offered by a leading Muslim Imam trying to make us forget that the Koran actually advocates stoning wives for adultery while turning a blind eye toward the sexual mis-deeds of the husband.
It is also important, when looking at this situation, to remember that observant Muslims practice Taqiyya , an element of sharia that states there is a legal right and duty to distort the truth to promote the cause of Islam. …
Given the defense articulated by the Imam, which would be offered only for a Muslim man, we must believe this opportunity to remove this Muslim woman from a union with an non-believer would be quickly taken. Therefore we must consider that Mr. Weiner *may* have converted to Islam, because if he did not, we have to consider the unlikely, that being that Ms. Abedin has abandoned her Muslim faith, even while she still practices.
(It’s worth noting here that “The Imam of New York” is not an actual title, and she is pretty clearly taking this imam’s quote out of context.)
Benador also wonders in the column if Huma has “been groomed to access leading political movers and shakers to advance the cause of Islam in America, including a politically positioned marriage to Congressman Anthony Weiner?”
Benador is no random blogger. She was the president of the now-defunct Benador Associates, a public relations firm that wasactive in the run-up to the Iraq war getting media exposure for such influential hawks as Michael Rubin, Richard Perle, Laurie Myrloie, and former CIA director Jim Woolsey. An article in the Guardian described pictures of her at a party with Joseph Lieberman. And one of her clients famously (and falsely) claimed in a 2006 newspaper column that Iran had instituted a Nazi-style dress code for Jews.
The bottom of the “Communities” section notes that “contributors are responsible for this content, which is not edited by The Washington Times.” But an editor did apparently delete one paragraph from Benador’s column, leaving this note: “(Correction: Paragraph removed for inaccuracies. Apologies are issued and we regret the error. The Communities).”
I’ve asked the Communities editor for comment on what that error was.
In any case, the fact that Weiner married a Muslim woman has long been the subject of rumblings in certain corners of the right-wing blogosphere.
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – So a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar. The bartender turns around and says, “What is this … a joke?”
Yes, it is a joke but some people would wonder what a Muslim is doing in a bar and how he could possibly be involved in a joke. Because as far as many Americans are concerned, the words “Muslim” and “humor” don’t belong in the same sentence.
Which is where Ahmed Ahmed’s “Just Like Us,” which opened Friday in limited release, comes in. Ahmed is a stand-up comic in the
U.S. and, yes, he is an Egyptian-born Muslim. On a recent swing through the Middle East with a clutch of fellow comics, some of whom are also Arabs, he took along a camera crew to document to fact that Muslims can tell damn good jokes about themselves and that other Muslims will laugh uproariously.
The movie is fast, funny and light on its feet, dipping less into politics or religion than into cultural quirks and characteristics. For instance: An Arab invented the original mechanical clock, which is odd since Arabs are never on time. Bu-dah-bum. You get the idea.
One might complain that Ahmed and his Comedy Arabic Tour hit the most liberal ports-of-call in the Middle East — Dubai, that international center of business and trade in the United Arabs Emirates; Beirut, Lebanon, the “Paris of the East”; and Egypt, the “Hollywood of the Arab world.”
Ah, but the comics also gave an underground concert in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where no public entertainment is allowed, religious police are everywhere and they can’t even enter the country as entertainers but as “consultants.” How in the world did they get away with it? That may have been another documentary in itself!
Ahmed, one of the stars of Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show and The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, isn’t interested in the larger picture. He settles for brief forays into each city and a hit-and-run encounter with his relatives in Egypt. Expect no broader context but simply an assertion that once you get everyone laughing, an Arab is “just like us.” As an examination of complex cultural ties and conflicts, that’s pretty glib but in this instance glib is also funny.
Ahmed takes along a group of comedians that include Omid Dajalili (star of The Infidel), “In Living Color” alum Tommy Davidson, “The Wedding Ref” host Tom Papa and Ahmed’s Wild West Comedy Show co-star Sebastian Maniscalco. And while he did direct, Ahmed is generous in showing his fellow comics during their times on stage.
Some of the laughs here come in watching — and hearing — the North American comics test jokes on an entirely different audience without being fully aware of the censorship laws. Ahmed admits he was banned for a year in Dubai for saying something that rubbed the authorities the wrong way. A woman comic uses the word “balls,” then abruptly wonders if now she’ll be banned. The audience seemed to laugh at this but that may be how Ahmed edited the film. Who knows what they’re laughing at?
For that matter, editing is so fast and the pace of the tour so swift that you wonder what did get left out. How did that underground concert in Riyadh happen? Why is there a brief altercation backstage at one event? How did authorities react to the gags? And doesn’t the fact that most of the routines are in English exclude most of the Arab populations in these countries?
Mostly, Ahmed wants to show men, women and children of the Middle East smiling and cracking
up in laughter to counter the image of the serious, sullen or even furious Arab who inhabits the American consciousness. He and his comics tell jokes well enough that he gets ample opportunities for this.
(To read more about our entertainment news, visit our blog “Fan Fare” online atblogs.reuters.com/fanfare/)
A British Muslim women’s group has launched a “jihad against violence”, in a bid to reclaim the term jihad from extremists.
The campaign, launched by Inspire at City Hall in central London on Sunday, aims to combat all forms of violence but with an emphasis on crimes, including terrorism, domestic abuse and female genital mutilation, that some perpetrators attempt to justify in the name of Islam.
Although jihad means a struggle in the way of God, it has been hijacked by extremists, who have attempted to use it to justify holy war, the group says.
“People think ‘jihad against violence’ is a contradictory statement but our jihad is for peace,” said Inspire’s director, Sara Khan. “Islam has become synonymous with all things violent and the repression of women. We thought we couldn’t sit back and stay silent while our religion is being used to carry out acts of violence.” Khan has previously advised the government on tackling radicalisation and was critical of the government’s Prevent programme for combating extremism for not including enough input from women.
Inspire intends to make information refuting the arguments of those who purport to use the Qur’an to justify terrorism and domestic violence against women and children more widely available – information it says is lacking in many Islamic bookshops. It also wants to put pressure on Muslim leaders to confront what Khan says are currently “taboo” subjects and is encouraging organisations and individuals to sign up to the declaration of jihad against violence on its website.
A 35-year-old weightlifter is battling to be able to compete in the sport she loves while wearing a hijab instead of the body-hugging uniform that’s required.
Kulsoom Abdullah, who was born in the United States to Pakistani parents, discovered weightlifting at her gym, Crossfit, in Atlanta in 2008. She entered her first open competition last year, and was thrilled to find out that she was actually pretty good in the competitive sport. She can lift 70 kilos (about 154 pounds) to her shoulders, and 60 kilos (or about 132 pounds) over her head, in a move called the “clean-and-jerk.” Last December, she qualified for the American Open Weightlifting Championships, which would have been her first national competition.
But when her coaches asked whether she would be able to wear her modified uniform–which covers everything but her face, hands, and feet–the organizers told told them no.
Abdullah talked to some lawyer friends, who told her that other athletes had won their bids to wear different clothing for religious reasons. So she tried again, this time personally writing to USA Weightlifting with her request, and asking the group if it could compromise on a uniform.
Officials with the group wrote back and said they had to follow the rules of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), which mandates collarless uniforms and doesn’t allow exceptions.
“I was really disappointed because I was really looking forward to it,” she told The Lookout. “I had never thought I would qualify at the national level.”
“It is like saying, if you are different, you can not compete,” she wrote on her web site. “I am not asking people to change, I am just asking to participate and be able to dress the way I do.”
Now, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group, is taking up Abdullah’s cause, and trying to lobby weightlifting organizations to revise their rules in time for her to compete in a July national competition. CAIR officials are arguing that USA Weightlifting is in violation of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, which forbids sports bodies from discriminating based on “race, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin.” Not allowing Abdullah to wear her hijab is discrimination, CAIR maintains.
USA Weightlifting told The Lookout in a statement that “uniforms must not cover either the knees or the elbows because the judges must be able to see that the lifter has locked out his or her knees and elbows in order for the lift to be deemed completed.” The IWF will discuss Abdullah’s request at a June 26 meeting in Penang, Malaysia. United States Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Jones says the group is committed to being “inclusive” but that it’s up to the IWF to decide if the modified uniform would provide a “competitive advantage.”
While the weightlifting powers-that-be have decided against her for now, Abdullah says she never feels out of place when training six days a week or when in open competitions with other lifters.
“They’re very encouraging,” she says of her fellow weightlifters, who are mostly men. “They’re really nice people and they’re very welcoming.”
As female competitor, “you’re always going to feel a little different,” she said of the traditionally male-dominated sport.
She says her family, who she lives with, is also supportive. “I mean, it is different, so they were [hesitant] … but they said as long as you don’t get hurt that’s fine. Sometimes it’s a little bit scary for my mom but I think she’s used to it now.”
Abdullah has a PhD in electrical computer engineering from Georgia Tech, and still does research at the university. She said what she likes about lifting is ”there’s a lot of technique involved. Someone could be very strong and not be able to lift as much.”
Excelling at lifting “gave me confidence,” she said, adding that she hopes more women will join up if they hear about their story.
Abdullah’s problem is not unique in the world of sports. The Iranian woman’s soccer team showed up to a Olympic qualifying match against Jordan wearing hijabs on Sunday, and officials with the global soccer governing body, FIFA, promptly disqualified them. FIFA banned the headscarves in 2007, citing choking hazards.
This is what a standard weighlifting uniform looks like, as modeled by Mabel Mosquera at the 2004 Olympics:
In March, formers Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain burst onto the presidential scene when he told ThinkProgress that he “will not” appoint Muslims in his administration.
Under intensepressure, Cain’s campaign walked back the candidate’s words, saying that he would appoint “any person for a position based on merit.” However, the next week, Cain hedged his retraction, telling the Orlando Sun Sentinel that he would only appoint a Muslim who disavowed Sharia law, but that “he’s unaware of any Muslim who’d be willing to make such a disavowal.”
On the Glenn Beck Show today, the host asked the Georgia Republican about his refusal to appoint Muslims. Cain told Beck that he would be willing to appoint a Muslim only “if they can prove to me that they’re putting the Constitution of the United States first.” Beck followed up by asking if he was calling for “some loyalty proof” for Muslims. Cain said, “Yes, to the Constitution of the United States of America.” When Beck then asked “Would you do that to a Catholic or would you do that to a Mormon?” Cain told the host, “Nope, I wouldn’t.”:
BECK: You said you would not appoint a Muslim to anybody in your administration.
CAIN: The exact language was when I was asked, “would you be comfortable with a Muslim in your cabinet?” And I said, “no, I would not be comfortable.” I didn’t say I wouldn’t appoint one because if they can prove to me that they’re putting the Constitution of the United States first then they would be a candidate just like everybody else. My entire career, I’ve hired good people, great people, regardless of their religious orientation.
BECK: So wait a minute. Are you saying that Muslims have to prove their, that there has to be some loyalty proof?
CAIN: Yes, to the Constitution of the United States of America.
BECK: Would you do that to a Catholic or would you do that to a Mormon?
CAIN: Nope, I wouldn’t. Because there is a greater dangerous part of the Muslim faith than there is in these other religions. I know that there are some Muslims who talk about, “but we are a peaceful religion.” And I’m sure that there are some peace-loving Muslims.
Watch it:
Cain’s call for a loyalty oath targeted at a specific segment of the population is a historical relic that ought to be confined to the past. Forcing a subset of Americans to prove their loyalty to the United States was as wrong during the era of McCarthyism as it is today.
Cain’s requirement that Muslim nominees take a loyalty oath while Catholics and Mormons would be exempted is not only bigoted, it’s also ironic considering that the same suspicion was once levied at Catholics. During the 1960 presidential election, anti-Catholic sentiment held that if then-Sen. John F. Kennedy were elected president, his Catholic faith would make him beholden to the Pope rather than the United States. Such views were abhorrent when directed at Catholics 50 years ago, and they are abhorrent when directed at Muslims today.
Three months ago, ThinkProgress wrote, “As the Republican presidential nomination process begins, one GOP candidate is making a name for himself as the Islamophobia candidate: Herman Cain.” Unfortunately, we are seeing just how true that prediction was.
Catholic anti-Muslim polemicist and hate blogger Robert Spencer was in Germany once again at the invitation of the Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE). We exposed the supremacist and fascist nature of the BPE in a previous article, Robert Spencer Teams up with Euro-Supremacists Once Again:
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.
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 tenets 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 theory 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.
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?
This time Spencer and his friends in the BPE were in Stuttgart, Germany where we are told by Spencer they held a “well advertised” event that was to have “Middle Eastern Christian musicians,” and other anti-Muslim “activists,” all gathering together to “fight the jihad.”
So what happened? Did thousands of newly “enlightened” and “awakened” Europeans show up to signal their solidarity with the BPE and Spencer and “fight” Islam and Muslims in the guise of a new front against the phantom threat of “jihad?”
No. In stark contrast to the much propagated idea pushed by xenophobic Islamophobes that “the West is waking up to the ‘threat’ of Islam,” it seems more people are waking up to the threat posed by anti-Freedom activists and Euro-supremacists such as the BPE and Spencer.
Thousands of anti-fascist protesters showed up at the event and stood down the hatred that was being promoted on Spencer’s side.
Spencer was clearly shaken up as his side only attracted a few dozen aging fans. He likened his experience to “looking into the pit of hell.”
For this, Germany has received Spencer’s diagnosis of being a country on the “brink.” The brink of what you may ask? Well, full blown radical-Islamization-jihad-creeping-sharia-evil-darkness-take-over of course.
Spencer spells this out in an interesting lecture he gives a few days after the failed BPE event in Stuttgart. The lecture is about “Islamization” and how he now doesn’t believe “Muhammed” actually existed (a regurgitation of age old Orientalist arguments such as those of Klimovich):
Robert Spencer: The process of Islamization is of course very advanced. And we are now entering into a different stage of it, and we saw this two days ago. In the Quran there are three stages of development, as many of you no doubt know, in the doctrine of Jihad. And the first is when Muhammad first became a prophet and preached in Mecca that he was the new prophet of the One true God. Most people paid no attention, he got a small band of followers together. The Quraish, they were the pagan Arabs of Mecca and the Quraish leaders did not like what he was saying at all because it challenged them, they had the Kaba, it was there at that time too before Islam and it was full of idols, 360 pagan idols, and the Arabs from all over Arabia would go there to venerate their gods. So the Quraish had a shrine, you know if you’ve ever been to Rome or Jerusalem or Fatima or Lords you know its a big tourist trap and so was Mecca and the Ka’ba, and so they didn’t like this…but in any case at that time he taught tolerance and peace and whenever you see the Imams on TV talking about tolerance and peace they are quoting from a time when Muhammad was weak and his enemies were strong and he had no military or political power. So he was not preaching tolerance and peace for non-Muslims, he was preaching tolerance and peace for them, he was asking to be tolerated.
Man from the crowd: same as what happens now…
Robert Spencer: Precisely, that’s the stage we are in now in Europe and America…So in other words when there is a small group of Muslims without military or political power then they preach tolerance and peace, just l
Eight years ago, he moved to Texas. After US President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Gelbman decided to get involved in politics.
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Sherrif Lee Baca has been a consistent defender of religious freedom and pluralism. He is someone who actually interacts with Muslims and has taken the effort to understand Islam. In his amazing testimony in front of Congress during the Peter King McCarthyesque hearings he displayed his intricate knowledge of not only Islam but the smears leveled at Muslim leaders and organizations. He provided curt, substantial, factual and logical replies to leading anti-Muslim questions that too often are not rebutted in the mainstream.
Ahmed Rehab is a consistent and seemingly tireless voice for rationality and harmony in our society today. He is one of a handful of Muslims who manages to receive airtime to annihilate any and all Islamophobes he encounters in debate; various Fox News interviews attest to that reality. His participation in the Arab Spring highlights the diversity of his activism. Recently, his article on the “Radical Right” threat to America garnered much attention and is a necessary corrective to the exaggerated focus on conspiracies of “Islamization” and “terrorism.” A point we have been making on this site for quite some time now.
Reza Aslan is one of our favorite scholars. When he is not demolishing Islamophobes in debate he is traveling the country speaking at various venues about Islam, the Muslim world and its interactions with the West. He is also a powerful voice for peace and his exclusive interview with Loonwatch was one of the highlights of the year for us:
Sarah Posner is one of the foremost writers on religion in America today. Her articles are carried widely across the country in many different venues. Her skill at in-depth analysis of religious trends makes her an important voice when she turns her attention to anti-Muslim and Islamophobic bigotry.
Haroon Mughal is a great writer, with tremendous insight and piercing analysis. He went into the lion’s den when he attended a radical Christian gathering in Detroit that was aimed at having Jesus “invade” the dreams of Muslims and turn them into Christians.
Aasif Mandvi is a special reporter for the Daily Show and one of the shining lights of Muslim comedy in the America today.
Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony at the Peter King hearings was heart wrenching. Ellison did a good job over the past year of humanizing Muslims and being a progressive voice for justice and equality in the nation.
All-American Muslim was targeted by a small Florida organisation
Florida Congressman Allen West has sparred with members of CAIR over the values of Islam
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LW: I found this quote in which you write:
will give them a better son (
acing the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. stands the Jefferson Building, the main building of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, with holdings of more than 140 million books and other printed items. The stately building, with its neoclassical exterior, copper-plated dome and marble halls, is named after Thomas Jefferson, one of the “founding fathers” of the United States, principal author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and, from 1801 to 1809, the third president of the young republic. But the name also recognizes Jefferson’s role as a founder of the Library itself. As president, he enshrined the institution in law and, in 1814, after a fire set by British troops during the Anglo-American War destroyed the Library’s 3000-volume collection, he offered all or part of his own wide-ranging book collection as a replacement for the losses, commenting that “there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
ut did reading the Qur’an influence Thomas Jefferson? That question is difficult to answer, because the few scattered references he made to it in his writings do not reveal his views. Though it may have sparked in him a desire to learn the Arabic language (during the 1770′s Jefferson purchased a number of Arabic grammars), it is far more significant that it may have reinforced his commitment to religious freedom. Two examples support this idea.
Charles Roffey / Flickr.com / 
BILL FRENCH
BRIGITTE GABRIEL 
ORGANIZATIONS Executive director and co-founder (with Robert Spencer; see below) of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA)
Others also took issue with Spencer:
So what ended up happening? It blew up in Spencer’s face. He would have done well to listen to his brethren, but such is the condition of the fuzzy guru of Islamophobes; he cannot countenance any criticism or even advice.
It turns out the attack had nothing to with “honor killing,” as loonwatch commenter RDS put it:
bboyblue also updates us that Nordine Armani was actually a gun freak, drug peddler and a felon:
Put this down as example number 1,000,342,784,678 in the annals of #EpicRobertSpencerFail.