by Mooneye

Christians face discrimination in many places in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, however it certainly doesn’t help when Fox News, a bastion of Right-Wing fundamentalism (of both the political and religious variety) pushes misleading stories.

In an article published on March 26, 2013, Fox News ran a story on its main page with the inflammatory title, “Egyptian mosque turned into house of torture for Christians after Muslim Brotherhood protest.” The headline paragraph read,

Islamic hard-liners stormed a mosque in suburban Cairo, turning it into torture chamber for Christians who had been demonstrating against the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in the latest case of violent persecution that experts fear will only get worse.

As you can see there is a fair bit of editorializing. Fox contradicts their own narration that this was an “Islamic hard-liners vs. Christians” demonstration,

Demonstrators, some of whom were Muslim, say they were taken from the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in suburban Cairo to a nearby mosque on Friday and tortured for hours by hard-line militia members.

Is this “militia” to go unnamed?

In fact the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Muslim Brotherhood groups clearly transcends the sectarian divide. For months there have been tensions in Egypt between the ruling party and opponents, sometimes spilling into violence; Brotherhood offices have been torched and ransacked while opponents of Morsi have been killed in clashes, jailed and have had peaceful protests disrupted.

Of course, Fox News is trying to fire-up another Randolph Linn and hence any of the complexities and nuance of the situation will be glossed over and left out of the context; we know that Islamophobia is a central position at Fox, being an integral part of Roger Ailes‘ strategy.

A more sober report by Ahram Online on the incident gives us a realistic picture, leaving out the false reporting about the protest as a “Christians vs. Muslims” conflagration:

The board of directors of a community-funded religious centre in Cairo’s Moqattam district – located near the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters – issued a statement on Monday confirming that “members of the Islamist current” had taken control of the mosque during Friday’s bloody clashes between protesters and Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Anti-Brotherhood protesters had accused Brotherhood members and supporters of holding and torturing their opponents inside the mosque during street battles.

The Belal Ibn Rabbah Mosque lies in the Nafoura square where scuffles broke out between both groups on Friday.

Media reports in the past 72 hours had cited witnesses, some of whom said they are Moqattam residents, who claimed to have been brutally tortured at the hands of Brotherhood members inside the mosque on the day of the clashes.

The statement issued by the mosque’s board of directors is the first document to corroborate claims made by anti-Brotherhood protesters that supporters of the ruling Islamist group had occupied the mosque.

Muslim Brotherhood Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein had accused protesters of breaking into mosques following Friday’s clashes.

The centre stated that it had filed an official legal complaint about the incident.

Egypt’s prosecution-general, meanwhile, has subpoenaed on Monday several political activists accused of “inciting and committing violence against the Brotherhood’s headquarters and group members.”

Prosecutor-General Talaat Abdullah ordered the subpoenas based on a complaint filed by Brotherhood lawyer Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud on Monday morning against 169 individuals – including opposition figures and “thugs” – accused of of instigating attacks on the Islamist group’s headquarters.

If Fox News was trying to feed its base’s “Christian persecution complex” they succeeded as the comments were, as you would expect, extremely anti-Muslim, verging at times on the genocidal.

Mick Wagner talks about burning the mosque down and sonarguy thinks Islam should be erased from the earth:

Scott Willis links it back to the USA:

Wilhelm1:

brunsk42 brings Obama into it:

Buck Ofama:

Some want to nuke the Egyptians, like totalpeon doing his best impersonation of Eric Allen Bell:

This is only a representative sampling of the 160 or so comments on the Fox article which was predictably  and faithfully reproduced by the looniverse.

Such media malfeasance at Fox is nothing new or surprising and just highlights how easy it is in our present climate to get away with bashing Muslims and Islam.

Islamophobe Mark Tapson of FrontPageMagRag got really really upset that he couldn’t find any sort of radical, stealth “Jihadist” conspiracy even after “changing his name” (likely pretending to be a Muslim like David Gaubatz did beforehand). He still believes however that such innocuous Muslim conferences are part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to win “the hearts and minds of the young.”

Anti-Islam writer “infiltrates” Muslim conference, finds it “innocuous”

But he says that it’s all part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plot to win “the hearts and minds of the young”

BY JILLIAN RAYFIELD

Mark Tapson, a writer for the conservative and anti-Islam FrontPage Magazine, detailed how his secret infiltration of the Muslim Student Association’s yearly West Coast conference did not yield the expected results. “It was largely very innocuous. I mean, there was nothing beyond what I’ve already told you, really. There was very little that you’d consider radical. Highly politicized, yes, but nothing damning,” Tapson said.

Miranda Blue from Right Wing Watch reports that Tapson was speaking on Janet Mefferd’s radio show, and was disappointed that after going so far as to use a “variation” of his name to get into the conference, there was nothing too nefarious to report, even at the apparently tantalizingly named panel “Islamatics.”

But, he stipulated, this is all part of the plan. Mefferd noted ”that for the Muslim Brotherhood front groups that organized this thing, it serves as a very successful recruitment and radicalization tool. Is that really, at root, the reason for the conference, or at least a primary reason for the conference …?”

Tapson agreed:

Bachmann who barely squeezed out a victory in her home state hasn’t learned her lesson. She is still saying things like:

Bachmann Compares Letter From Muslim Advocacy Group To Hitler’s Manifesto

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Dec 11, 2012, ThinkProgress

On a conservative radio program over the weekend, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went on an anti-Muslim tirade, making accusations about Muslims that ranged from the offensive to the absurd. Within her long conversation with host Jan Markell and co-host Eric Barger, Bachmann suggested that Americans read Islamic study materials to learn about Muslims’ supposed plot to conquer Western civilization, comparing the tactic to reading Adolf Hitler’s infamous book, Mein Kampf.

During the interview, Bachmann said she had proof that there was creeping sharia law — or, Islamic law — infiltrating the United States. That proof? A letter signed by groups of Muslim-Americans asking the Department of Homeland Security to stop distributing anti-Muslim materials:

BACHMANN: That’s right. That’s why we need to know what their belief system is; we need to know what they truly believe. That’s why the most important thing a person could do in WWII was to read the book that the leader of Germany wrote.

BARGER: Mein Kampf.

BACHMANN: Because he laid out very clearly what his intention was, he wasn’t hiding it, the Islamist does the same thing. They do not hide it, they lay it out very clearly. But what we’ve never seen before is the United States aiding and abetting that goal.

Listen:

Bachmann’s Islamophobia has been an important part of her congressional repertoire. Most recently, Bachmann lost a lot of favor among her congressional colleagues when she led the witch hunt of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, with accusations that Abedin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

(HT: Right Wing Watch)

It’s going to be a close race for Bachmann.:

Bachmann stands by Muslim witch hunt

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD (Salon.com)

Locked in the toughest fight of her congressional career, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann defended her witch hunt against alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators in the federal government last night during the final debate against her Democratic challenger, Jim Graves. “I certainly do stand by those letters,” Bachmann said of the five letters she sent to the inspectors general of various security agencies warning that they may have been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood agents.

“The events in Benghazi have proved that the United States remains under attack, both in the Middle East, and here in the United States,” she continued last night. When the moderator noted that there’s no proof that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomats in the Libyan city, Bachmann replied that “we are only just beginning” to investigate and suggested that all radical Islamists groups are tied to the Brotherhood.

(h/t: CriticalDragon)

Spencer’s Boss, mouths off.

Horowitz: Obama ‘Would Never Be President if He Weren’t Black’

Far-right activist David Horowitz has been out promoting his new book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, and told conservative talk show host Steve Deace yesterday that President Obama, much like professor Cornel West, is taken seriously simply because he is black. During an incoherent rant, Horowitz asserted that Obama “would never be president if he weren’t black” as no one with the same “curious background and radicalism would ever have been nominated, let alone elected president if he weren’t black.” “Part of the racism of our society is if you’re black you can get away with murder,” Horowitz concludes.

Cornel West is just symbolic of the corruption of our culture and not unlike Obama who would never be president if he weren’t black, no white person with his resume and his thoughts and curious background and radicalism would ever have been nominated, let alone elected president if he weren’t black. So Cornel West is an empty suit who has twenty honorary degrees and he’s taught at all these prestigious universities but is basically an airhead, most people who’ve seen him on TV they’ve noticed. Part of the racism of our society is if you’re black you can get away with murder.

Later, Horowitz repeated his smear of Huma Abedin and said that she is a “Muslim Brotherhood operative” and the “chief adviser to the American government right now on Muslim affairs.” Not only is patently it absurd to claim that Abedin is a secret agent for the Brotherhood but she is also not a policymaker.

After attacking Obama as someone who “sympathizes with our enemy” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, Horowitz said that conservatives are much nicer and more open minded than liberals. But he couldn’t even make that audacious claim without attacking Obama: “we don’t set out to destroy the character of people. Obama is a Communist.” Not only is Obama a Communist, Horowitz explained, but so are his advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, whom he says all serve this “evil cause” with religious zeal.

Obama basically sympathizes with our enemy and Hillary Clinton’s chief adviser, the chief adviser to the American government right now on Muslim affairs is Huma Abedin, who is a Muslim Brotherhood operative. The Muslim Brotherhood, for people who don’t know, that’s the organization that created Osama bin Laden, it’s the parent organization of Hamas, and it’s agenda — well they’re already doing it in Egypt — is to turn it into an Islamic, fascist state, meaning that everybody is under Islamic laws, this seventh century law.

…

People have to stop thinking of them as liberals. Conservatives are liberal people, we believe in two sides to a question, we don’t shut people up, when we have channels on television there is more than one viewpoint, we don’t set out to destroy the character of people. Obama is a Communist. Stanley Kurtz has written a really good book called “Radical-in-Chief” and his entire life has been spent in the same left that I came out of, which is the radical, Marxist left. Only it’s even worse. [David] Axelrod, his family is all—they’re communists. Valerie Jarrett, I mean literally members of the Communist Party. And I know as somebody who came out of the left, you know if you’re involved with an evil cause and you leave it, you denounce it, you tell people, particularly if you’re a political person, you warn people. These people are really dangerous but they haven’t done that, they are still committed to this cause. I think that’s the main thing, people have to suddenly awaken and realize, and that’s one reason I wrote this book “Radicals” because it’s a portrait of this mentality, it’s a very religious mentality.

Contrary to widely held assumptions, Muslims revere Jesus and the Virgin  Mary, and both are mentioned extensively in the Qur’an. There is no reason for Muslims to celebrate the denigration of Jesus.

Nevertheless, ignorant loons have decided Obama’s refusal to condemn quarter century old abomination (or is that ObamaNation?), “Piss Christ,” is further evidence he is a “secret Mooslim.”

Heathen President Refuses to Condemn Piece of Art From 1987

by Louis Peitzma, Gawker

Why does Barack Obama hate Christians so much? The notorious anti-Jesus President is refusing to condemn the controversial work Piss Christ by Andres Serrano.

Sure, Piss Christ has been around for 25 years, but it’s returning to New York as part of a retrospective on Serrano’s work. So why hasn’t Obama addressed this outrage? Is it his secret Muslim background? A lack of respect for Jesus? A weird pee thing?

Whatever the cause, we should all be very, very angry. As usual the Fox Nation commenters get it right.

Actually would you expect a mooselim to be offended by disrespect of anything Christian? Hasen’t the Mooslim brotherhood inchief already declared war on Catholicism as well as all Christians & Jews?

… what do you expect from a mooooslim… barry bows to them… he doesn’t care about America, OUR Traditions, and OUR Way of life to include Christianity… which IS what this nation was founded upon along wtih the Founding Fathers basic principles of Liberty… you elect a communist usurper… this is what you get…

Obama is a Mooslime. He will never denounce anything Anti-Christian. I used to give O the benefit of the doubt about being Mooslime but not any more.

It’s truly shocking the way we’ve let our government be infiltrated. But what’s even more unnerving is how long the secret Muslim agenda has been playing out.

Get ready for this bombshell.

Piss Christ was sponsored in part by the National Endowment of the Arts, which means Serrano received money from the U.S. government. And the President when this sacrilege was created in 1987? You guessed it — secret Muslim Ronald Reagan. Who knew?

The conspiracy theory that the Right won’t let die becomes an advertisement. (h/t: CriticalDragon):

Muslim Brotherhood ads hit Obama

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD (Salon.com)

Tired of political ads about jobs and the economy and the deficit? The conservative group Let Freedom Ring will break that monotony with a new spot straight out of the Michele Bachmann school of Muslim scaremongering. The new online ad, part of a $7 million campaign targeting swing states, seeks to “expose” President Obama’s “cozy ties with the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to a press release.

The ad features ominous music behind scenes of scary brown people rallying with Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood party. Another image shows an Islamic crossed-swords seal superimposed on the White House. The female narrator, sounding genuinely hurt and confused, asks Obama, “You invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House? Legitimizing a group that wants to undermine America and destroy Israel?”

Indeed, a Muslim Brotherhood delegation was invited to the White House after the party won Egyptian’s elections in the country’s first democratic elections. The ad does not mention Obamadistancing himself from the Muslim Brotherhood-led country last week in a minor diplomatic flub that was closer to the hawkish views of the ad’s creators than the apologetic ones it claims Obama holds. “You sent them 1.5 billion of our taxpayer dollars? Why, Mr. President, why?” the narrator continues. The U.S does send billions of dollars in military aid to Egypt, but the practice started under former dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The ad neatly picks up on Mitt Romney’s aborted narrative of the attacks last week on U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Middle East. “After our embassies were stormed, President Obama’s administration offered apologies while the Muslim Brotherhood stood by as we were attacked,” Let Freedom Ring president Colin Hanna said in a statement. “Instead of confronting our enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama kowtows to them. We must shine a light on his record that ultimately weakens our image abroad and emboldens our most dangerous enemies.”

CONTINUE READING

The looniverse has been uncharacteristically quiet about this story, leaving rabid anti-Muslim blog Bare Naked Islam to pick up the torch:

Rabid Israel-hater and huge Hamas-supporter, Rep. Keith Ellison (D- MN), says GOP is the party of bigots because it opposes sharia law

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim Congressman, who was sworn in on a Quran, and took money from a group (MAS) dedicated to destroying Western civilization from within, has decided to identify anyone who has a problem with Sharia law being implemented in the United States as a bigot. Interesting, coming from a member of the most bigoted group on earth – MUSLIMS!…

Read the rest…

In case you’re wondering, MAS is the Muslim American Society, and you can read all about it on another, slightly more sophisticated hate site here.

Mother Jones also covered the story, minus the frothing-at-the-mouth editorializing.

Rep. Keith Ellison: GOP Is “Basically a Bigoted Party”

—By Tim Murphy,  Mother Jones

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the nation’s first-ever Muslim member of Congress, doesn’t mince words when asked about the Republican party’s formal proclamation that the United States is under assault from Islamic Shariah law.

“It’s an expression of bigotry,” he said on Wednesday, in an interview with Mother Jones at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. “There has never been any legislation offered to establish Shariah law—not at the federal level, not at the state level. There’s not been a municipal ordinance opposing this, there’s not been anything.”

For Ellison, the anti-Shariah plank was part of a broader narrative of exclusion.

“Why do they want to become the party of hate? They’re hating on immigrants who are from Latin America. They’re demonstrating hatred toward Muslims. They’re demonstrating hostility toward women. They act like they don’t like gay people. Who is their party supposed to be made up of in 20 years?”

“I’m sad that they have decided to go into this dark ugly place where they see the whole world as their enemy,” Ellison continued. “And this is the thing: I don’t mind debating taxes and spending; we probably should. But they’re the party that is basically a bigoted party and they have now officially declared themselves against a whole segment of the American population, because if we said we were going to put a plank opposing Jewish law, or Catholic canon, it would be an outrage. This is also an outrage. But you know, it’ll pass.”

Ellison’s remarks echoed comments he made in July after his Minnesota colleague, GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, accused Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. (Bachmann’s statement was condemned by some high-profile Republicans, like Arizona Sen. John McCain.) Ellison said he’s spoken with Bachmann once since the Abedin controversy—in response to a bill she was proposing to audit Medicaid recipients—but didn’t bring up the subject with her. “I don’t find that to be a productive use of my time or hers,” Ellison said. “She whipped up a million [fundraising] dollars by promulgating hate against a religious minority. I’m not gonna talk her out of that.” His plan to settle the argument is to campaign for her opponent this fall, Minneapolis hotelier Jim Graves.

“She’s always bragging about how great the private sector is. She should join it.”

Tarek Fatah’s record of appeasing anti-Muslim charlatans and fear-mongers is well known, as is his furthering of Islamophobic causes.

Recently he jumped on the bandwagon of promoting the myths about “Muslim Brotherhood” infiltration and plots to “destroy the West,” echoing the rhetoric of bigots such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller (via. Islamophobia-Watch).

Tariq Ramadan’s visit to Canada is part of Muslim Brotherhood plot to destroy West, says Tarek Fatah

Tariq Ramadan will be speaking at the Proud Muslims Convention in Edmonton this weekend.

Tarek Fatah – whose own organisation, the so-called Muslim Canadian Congress, backed the hysterical “Ground Zero mosque” protests and calls for a ban on the veil – accuses Professor Ramadan of “using our Labour Day weekend to propagate the Muslim Brotherhood credo of ‘destroying the West from within’.”

Toronto Sun, 28 August 2012

by Garibaldi

The deception and depths of depravity and lying to which Islamophobes will devolve into knows no bounds. We have covered this specific well-worn Islamophobic pattern of lies and mischaracterizations numerous times; the Gaza Mass Pedophilia Wedding lie, the Nigerian Muslims burn hundreds of Christians lie, the John Hopkins Muslim Doctor Supports FGM lie, the Muslim Brotherhood Crucify Opponents lie and we can go on and on. In fact, at some point I want to collect all these stories and index them for easier Loonwatcher use.

In another such lie, in June, Islamophobes started spreading a video titled: “Graphic video: Muslims slaughter Christian convert in moderate Tunisia”. I won’t post the video itself, as it is too gruesome, but the link is provided for whoever wishes to see it for themselves. This title when searched on Google produces 7,000 results. When one searches “beheading+Christian+Tunisia” or similar search terms one comes across more than 300,000 results.

The Anatomy of a Lie

The video of the beheading actually surfaced in May, not June, and was titled “‘Free Syrian Army’ Behead a Civilian.” For anyone who has knowledge of the region, the video is definitely not from Tunisia. As the original YouTube user who uploaded the video, TimeToFightBack1 wrote in an update to the video, “the dialect, the terrain and the clothing are all suggestive of Syria.” The murderers refer to their victim as “Rafidi” a demeaning term used exclusively to refer to Shias, and in the mouths of AlQaeda and their affiliate extremists is also usually accompanied by proclamations of  being “renegades” and “apostates,” all the more to cheapen the life of their victims and to justify the spilling of their blood. (h/t: MAbdullah)

The perpetrators of this beheading were likely one of the AlQaeda linked or influenced groups who have infiltrated the Free Syrian Army or claim to be part of the Free Syrian Army (a very underreported and undocumented phenomenon in Western media).

The video failed to go viral in its original manifestation, perhaps because it doesn’t jibe with the prevailing narrative of a united, just, and Free Syrian Army fighting for democracy, rule of law and to overthrow the despotic Bashar al-Assad.

In early June, Egyptian T.V. (Masr al-Youm, “Egypt Today”) personality Tawfiq Okasha played part of the beheading video on his TV show. Okasha is well known for his over-the-top animosity and virulent disdain for Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. He described the beheading as happening in Tunisia, nowhere did he identify how he came to this conclusion, but in light of his political agenda it is clear why he would forward such a narrative.

Understanding the political context in Egypt gives us some clues. Okasha was using the video, in the lead up to the second round of Egyptian presidential elections to forward a fear-mongering premise to his Egyptian viewers, essentially telling them: look at what is happening in Tunisia as a result of the Islamist party of Rachid Al-Ghannouchi, ‘Al-Nahda’ having won elections, radicals are killing civilians and minorities. If the Muslim Brotherhood wins the upcoming presidential election you can expect the same thing in Egypt.” A few weeks after this aired, on June 24 Mohammed Morsi was declared president. Okasha recently announced the formation of a new political party, Egyptian National People’s Party, presenting himself as Egypt’s “champion against a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Raymond Ibrahim (the same individual who forwarded the Muslim Brotherhood Crucify Opponents hoax), a Coptic-American and long time writer on JihadWatch got a hold of the video, and the rest is history. The video that originally was posted in May as “Free Syrian Army Beheads a Civilian” had completely transformed into a viral news story in the looniverse, “Graphic Video: Muslims Behead Christian Convert in ‘Moderate’ Tunisia.”

One can easily discern the motive for such deception on the part of Islamophobes. The manipulated story validates, in one fell swoop, their prejudices against Islam, Muslims and the “Arab Spring,” while at the same time affirming for their audience the narratives of persecution of minorities (specifically Christians), the supposed “unique” violent nature of Islam, and most importantly the idea that changes being brought about by the Arab uprisings will not herald freedom, democracy, dignity, and rights (the slogans of Arab revolutionaries), but “radical Islam” a la the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Conclusion

On its own the video is a potent reminder of violent fundamentalist extremism. The re-packaging and re-titling of the video is not only a detriment to factual news reporting and information gatherers, it is an insult to the memory of the poor Shia’ man who was murdered by these extremists.

The damage from this story has already been done, the looniverse has consumed it, reinforcing their own prejudices. It is hoped this article will go some way in dispelling the false re-packaging and re-titling of the video–and may the unnamed, murdered man rest in peace.