Archive for September, 2010

Emerson’s Paranoiac Approach Toward the Muslim Brotherhood

By Omar Mazin | Ikhwanophobia

Steven Emerson, One of the prominent members of the Islamophobic dirty dozen, The founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), wrote a new phobic article to show the world how dangerous is the Muslim Brotherhood (!!).
Emerson, and as usual, alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood has produced Osama Bin Laden to the world, who is created originally by the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war.

The Brotherhood’s affiliates include the terrorist organization Hamas. Its alumni include 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist mentor. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaida’s second in command, is said to have been heavily influenced by the ideology of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian chapter.

In this quote, Steve Emerson alleges that “it’s said” that Ayman Al Zawahri” had been heavily influenced by the MB’s ideology.

In the coming quote, Emerson is imagining the relations between MB and Islamic Centers and Organizations working in the US:

Some of the most prominent Muslim organizations in the United States have close, longstanding relationships with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was linked in court papers to a Brotherhood-organized Hamas support effort.

Now, Emerson, with a very innocent article, he linked directly between the American Islamic organizations such as CAIR and ISNA, to the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist Group!

Now we should announce these critical facts !!

1- Muslim Brotherhood is not a violent organization, and MB doesn’t have any anti-western agenda!

3- Muslim Brotherhood has no organizational relations with any of the American Islamic organizations working in the United States, and the Moderate form of Islam is the only thing common between the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic organizations active in the US.

Emerson, by these allegations, doesn’t want Obama’s administration to take any aggressive actions against MB, But actually he is pushing the American Administration to suppress the Islamic activities in the United States, which is serving millions of Americans on the American soil.

This who so called ‘expert’ is trying his best to fight the Muslim minority in the US, and this won’t lead to the good of the United States in the near future.

It’s the duty of the moderate Americans to stop these waves of hatred and racism, to return America to its glorious principles, to Justice, to Equality and to Tolerance.

Rashad Hussain Under Fire from Right-wing Bails on OIC

Source

Rashad Hussain was appointed by President Barack Hussein Obama to be the United States’ second Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). After he was appointed he became the subject of much scrutiny and anti-Muslim rhetoric from right-wing Islamophobes. He was called every name in the book.

Now the American Islamic College (AIC) and the OIC is jointly organizing a conference from September 28-30 on the topic of “Islam and Muslims in America” to be held at the AIC. Rashad Hussein was one of the headline speakers for the conference and his presence was essentially a sure thing considering that his JOB is to be the special envoy to the OIC. The Islamophobe-sphere went buck wild when they heard that Hussain would be a speaker and responded with their usual hate smears calling it a “supremacist gathering,” a “Muslim Brotherhood event,” throwing in all the usual buzz words and the kitchen sink like “Hamas,” “Shariah,” “Khilafah,” yada yada.

In light of these attacks Rashad Hussain canceled his scheduled speech at the conference last minute citing a “scheduling conflict” according to the emcee (hat tip: Joel).

Are you serious? So at the last minute the Special Envoy to the OIC has a “scheduling conflict”? What possible “scheduling conflict” would keep the special envoy to the OIC from attending a major OIC conference right here in the United States, in fact in his hometown? Did he have another scheduled event at the OIP (Organization of Intimidated Pushovers)?

Where is this guy’s priorities? And why is he kow-towing to the Right-wing hate machine? Why is he submitting to the intimidation and smear tactics that have so successfully exposed the glaring weakness of the Obama administration? Are the higher ups telling him to sit this conference out because it will be bad for PR? Do they and he not realize that this essentially empowers the goons on the far-right that no one in the Muslim community gives the light of day or takes seriously?

This episode reveals a very troubling problem, Rashad Hussain seems to be nothing more than window dressing used by the noodle-kneed Obama administration to create the image that Obama is trying to reach out to the Muslim world.

This intimidation and acquiescence to hate and fear mongering has to stop and if the Obama administration is truly serious about reaching out to the Muslim world he has to go beyond symbolic action and translate that symbolism and usage of pretty words into tangible and concrete results. Pulling the plug at the last minute means you aren’t serious and only furthers the perception that all the talk is just for show.

Obama: Fox News Destructive for Country

Source | Posted by juliemillican

We’ve been saying it for years: Fox News is not a news organization, it is a political outlet. It seems that the President agrees. In the latest Rolling Stone, President Obama is quoted as saying Fox News is “part of the tradition” of media outlets who, like William Randolph Hearst, report with “a very clear, undeniable point of view.” He added, “It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

At this point, it is even hard for Fox to deny that it has an agenda. After all, this is the same news outlet that relentlessly propped up the tea party movement, allows its contributors to fundraise for conservative causes on air, serves as a launching pad for countless GOP candidates’ general election campaigns, spent hours fawning over the GOP’s widely panned Pledge to America, and routinely allows Republican politicians to fundraise on air. Not to mention the fact that its parent organization, News Corp, donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, while giving exactly zero to its Democratic counterpart.

Five potential Republican presidential candidates are employed by the network, in turn providing them with at least 269 appearances to promote themselves and their positions. Fox’s embrace of the Republican Party is so transparent, that even the candidates they tactically endorse don’t feel the need to keep secret just how much they benefit from their relationship with Fox. Recall that just days ago, Sharon Angle, Nevada’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, bragged about how much money she’s able to raise through her Fox News appearances.

So I have one message for Fox News. Do us a favor and spare us all your inevitable whining about how “fair and balanced” you are in response to Obama’s comments. That gig is up.

Burned Quran found outside Islamic community center in SF

By: Omar Ali | Source

Fueled by campaign against proposed Islamic community center in New York City

On Sept. 12, workers found a burned Quran, the holy book of Islam, in a trash bin outside the Islamic Society of San Francisco. Khaled Olaibah , the administrator of the ISSF, reported the bigoted act to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and CAIR reported it to local authorities.

The ISSF has functioned as a community center in San Francisco for almost 15 years, helping Muslim immigrants and providing a venue for weddings and other religious ceremonies for the Muslim community. The ISSF serves over 800 people.

The Quran burning in San Francisco is a direct result of recent anti-Muslim rhetoric targeting the proposed Park51 community center in New York City, falsely referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center, had issued a provocative appeal to mark 9/11 as an international day to burn the Quran. Jones used as a pretext for the threatened burning opposition to Sharia law and honoring the victims of 9/11.

The threat to burn 200 copies of the Quran did not happen as planned, due to pressure from sectors of the U.S. ruling class who feared their interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the other predominantly Muslim countries would be adversely affected.

Since 9/11, Muslims and Arabs have been racially profiled in the United States as well as Europe. The U.S. government used the 9/11 attacks as well as claims to be delivering freedom to women as justification to invade Afghanistan. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was carried out based on bogus claims that the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction and was harboring terrorists. In reality, the goal was to turn Iraq into a colonial-type state.

Anti-Muslim bigotry has also been used to portray the Palestinian struggle as a religious holy war, when in fact it is a struggle of the Palestinian people against imperialist-backed Zionist colonialism. The scapegoating of Muslims is necessary for the U.S. ruling class to create an artificial enemy and prevent working-class unity.

All progressives must stand against anti-Muslim bigotry and join in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters and against imperialist oppression.

Islamic Studies Institute and SSI Ally to Stop Registering The Book “Witness to the Muslim Brotherhood”

Source

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information resented today the refusal of The Islamic Studies Institute to approve the book “Witness to the Muslim Brotherhood” by the researcher, Ibrahim Saleh al-Khowlani.

The book monitors the historical phases of the Brotherhood movement in Egypt, their ideas and relations with presidents.

The book is free of any religious irregularities and yet it was refused claiming that SSI was against the idea of the book in principle alleging it would “confuse” citizens.

In May 2010, Ibrahim al-Khoulani , a researcher, went to register his book at the intellectual property registration office. He was informed that the book has to be first approved by The Islamic Studies Institute as it contains many Koran and Hadith verses.

Ibrahim submitted two copies of his book at the research department at the Islamic Studies Institute with a transaction number 639 as of 13/5/2010. He waited for 4 whole months before receiving a response that the book is free of errors and approved for publishing , but then SSI objected to the theme of the book alleging it would stir confusion among the public. Islamic Studies Institute refused to hand Ibrahim a written disapproval of the book.

The Arabic Network said, “It is unacceptable that the Islamic Studies Institute will not approve the book because SSI is against it alleging that it will cause public confusion. This is neither the role of the Institute , its role is restricted to check for religious errors , nor the role of SSI to decide on books”.

The Network added, ” We suffered long enough from the arbitrariness if the Islamic Studies Institute as it has refused and confiscated many books before. Instead of taking a more moderate stance , the Institute forwarded the book to SSI and allow them to be a decision maker that disapproved the book. The Islamic Studies Institute is only boosting SSI and giving them more control on the political and cultural life in Egypt , which is utterly resented and unaccepted”.

Truthout: Sikhs Challenge Discrimination in Courts

by: William Fisher | Inter Press Service | Report

New York – A North Carolina man is joining a growing group of Sikhs who are looking to U.S. courts to remedy the “ignorance and intolerance” faced by practitioners of the religion, especially since the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, which they say “unleashed a torrent of discrimination”.

Latest to file a legal complaint is Surjit Singh Saund, who charges that M.M. Fowler, Inc., which owns and operates the Family Fare Convenience Store chain, denied him employment because he is a Sikh and wears a turban and beard, as required by the Sikh religion. If proven, this would be a violation of federal and state civil rights laws.

The federal lawsuit was filed last week by the public service law firm Public Justice and several private law firms.

Saund, a U.S. citizen who has worked in other convenience stores for nearly eight years, applied for a store operator position with Fowler in early 2008.

He was qualified for the position, but the company refused to hire him because of its alleged grooming policy. The company told Saund it would hire him, but only if he first removed his turban, cut his hair, and shaved his beard.

The lawsuit alleges that Fowler violated civil rights laws when it refused to make accommodations to its alleged grooming policy to allow him to work for the company with a turban and beard.

“I came from India to find a better life for me and my family in America, and I was looking for a better job,” said Saund. “M. M. Fowler wanted me to choose between a job and my religion. What they did was not right, and is not allowed in America.”

Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world. A monotheistic faith with origins in South Asia, it teaches honesty, compassion, humility, universal equality, and respect for all religions. Sikhs maintain uncut hair throughout their lives, and the turban as a head covering is a mandated article of their religious faith.

Approximately 500,000 Sikhs live in the United States. About 1,000 Sikhs live in North Carolina.

Victoria Ni, a Public Justice senior attorney representing Saund, told IPS, “Nothing about Mr. Saund’s turban and beard would interfere with his ability to run the cash register and manage a convenience store.”

“M. M. Fowler had a duty to try to accommodate Mr. Saund’s religious beliefs. It didn’t even try,” she added.

Fowler has approximately 70 convenience stores, located throughout North Carolina, which offer gasoline at self- service fuel dispensers.

Kavneet Singh, a board member and managing director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation’s oldest Sikh American civil rights and advocacy group, said, “Every day, Sikh Americans face employment discrimination, hate crimes, school bullying, and harassment due to misconceptions about the Sikh identity.”

“Religious intolerance is un-American, and even at a time of economic crisis, we must make sure to not lose sight of the ideals that our country was founded on,” he said.

Although Sikhism is often confused with Islam, Sikhism and Islam are entirely unrelated religions.

In accordance with Sikhism, Saund, 59, has not cut his hair since birth, and has covered his hair since he was a young boy. Although he earned a college degree in chemistry in his native India, Saund could not find white-collar work after he relocated to the U.S. Since 2002, he has worked in convenience stores in New York and North Carolina.

Saund is permitted to wear an under-turban, called a patka, at his current job. A patka is a Sikh head covering which is worn by many Sikh children in preference to its bigger brother, the turban.

Saund now joins other Sikhs who are seeking relief through the U.S. justice system. For example, in December 2009, a federal lawsuit was brought by Inderjit Singh, an Indianapolis man who was denied a job as an airport shuttle bus driver because he wears a turban and beard.

In 2007, Singh, a U.S. citizen, applied for the job with Air Serv as at the Indianapolis International Airport. He passed a drug test and background check, but the company refused to hire him. At that time, the position paid $9.90 an hour.

“An investigation by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already determined that there is a reason to believe that Air Serv violated the law,” according to lawyer Ni, who added, “The company should make this right.”

Public Justice’s lawsuit is still pending.

Following the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Department of Justice, under the leadership of then attorney general John Ashcroft, conducted widespread sweeps of major U.S. cities, arresting people thought to be Muslims and others whose appearance led law enforcement authorities to conclude they were “Middle Eastern” types.

This racial profiling led to hundreds of people being arrested and detained in federal prison facilities, without access to family members or legal counsel for long periods of time. Many were physically abused by prison guards.

While some of the detainees were deported for immigration violations, a civil abuse, none was ever charged with a criminal act.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights reported a sevenfold increase in hate crimes against Sikhs, Muslims and Arabs in 2001.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Exclusive: New book: ENOUGH! Islamophobia

By IBRAHEEM

After years of Islamophobia, here is the devastating counter-attack.

Quoting directly from The Five Books of Moses and The Four Gospels, the two studies THIS IS JUDAISM and THIS IS CHRISTIANITY are a terrible indictment of those two faiths, and ought to force a complete rethink of what they are and stand for, as well as a serious public debate on whether such brutally intolerant systems of thought should be allowed to operate freely in a civilised world.

Here the author lets the quotes speak their own loud and clear language, then adds relevant comments based on common sense and logic, and the combination must surely be convincing enough for all but the absolute radical-fanatical-extremist-fundamentalist Jew or Christian or Zionist or Islamophobe to realise that Islam and Muslims have nothing to apologise for.

Read these two studies and prepare to be shocked. The Judeo-Christian “values” that Western civilisation is based upon will never be the same again.

This is the DEDICATION

For the Ummah
To all my Brothers and Sisters in Islam

After years of Islamophobia your sense of justice is probably just as enraged as mine .

Here at last you have some hard-hitting answers should you or your faith be accused of being radical-fanatical-extremist-fundamentalist or dangerous and barbaric .

By all means listen to the abuse, as politely as you can – BUT ANSWER! FIGHT BACK! Read some of these quotes to them, they are straight from the holy books of Judaism and Christianity .
Throw all this right in their faces until they cover their ears and go away .
We can do it, so GO TO IT! Tell all your friends! Spread the GOOD NEWS! It is my hope that this book will become a classic and a kind of reference work, not for academics in universities, but for Muslims in general, and indeed for anybody on our planet concerned about current developments worldwide .

This is the FOREWORD

Writing this book has been one of those rare occasions where you achieve much more than you planned or hoped for when you setout, and although the project spread, and kept spreading, way beyond what was initially anticipated and therefore took a lot longer to complete than expected, it means that all the time invested was very well spent .
Al-hamdu-lillah! (=the praise belongs to God) .

The DID YOU KNOW section demonstrates in a condensed format what these 2 studies answer-expose-prove-reveal but let us just take a brief look at some of the more startling findings:

that Muslims are right in claiming that the scriptures of both the Jews and the Christians are corrupted, and the importance is that we have proven it again and again, not based on personal wishful thinking or rumours and gossip but using method and logic, so we have established beyond any doubt that the well-known Islamic claims are actually and factually true .

that more than 90 percent of those classified as “Jews” today are in fact neither Semitic nor Hebrew, as not from the line of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob, and therefore not Jewish, meaning that the total current world population of real Jews is not the generally quoted 13 to 15 million, or 0 .
2 percent of humanity, but only somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million, or 0 .02 percent of us .
Will the world please take note and start acting accordingly NOW .

that all Arabs are not only Semitic, which we knew already, but also Hebrew, probably as difficult to comprehend and accept for the reader as for the writer, but the evidence is clear so the conclusion is inevitable and indisputable .

that Ishmael, first-born son of Abraham, and not Isaac, is the rightful heir to The Promised Land .
Some of us have suspected this all along but now it is out in the open for all to see and understand, assuming you want to, for although the argument is very long and built up from more than 10 chapters of Genesis, it is wonderfully simple .

that Judaism explicitly forbids humans re-establishing Israel .
We found no less than 84 verses in the Five Books of Moses which all tell the same story, and not one single verse contradicting it .

The consequences are clear: Zionist colonisers OUT of Palestine .

that the commonly heard phrase “an Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates” is not only directly contradicted by the Law of Moses but on more than one occasion indirectly made impossible, laughable and hallucinatory .

that the Law of Moses makes it clear that goyim (=non-Jews, foreigners) exist only to be exploited or enslaved or eradicated as Judaism sees fit .

that Judaism commands the Jews NOT to make peace with either the people of neighbouring countries or with the foreigners living in The Promised Land .

that Judaism commands that other religions are not only overthrown and repressed but completely eradicated .

that Judaism commands holy war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, all to be achieved through holocausts resulting in the total annihilation of the goyim, including obliterating anything which might remind the world that the vanquished people ever existed .

that Judaism commands human sacrifice, to the God of Israel Yahweh, who thereby indisputably is revealed to be the Jewish equivalent of the Canaanite’s Moloch, who is repeatedly and absolutely condemned in the Law of Moses not only as a horrible monster but also as a false god .
It takes one to know one .
You may have to read that again, and slowly, but it is a sad and dreadful undeniable fact of Judaism, until now generally regarded as a dignified and noble religion .
But truth will out
that Judaism as defined by the Law of Moses is entirely void of spirituality .
How, then, can it still be called a religion?

that according to the Law of Moses, wholeheartedly endorsed by Jesus on more than one occasion, the Jews were quite right to condemn Jesus to death (for blasphemy) .

that, by endorsing the entire Law of Moses, it follows that Jesus approves of: human sacrifice, genocide, ethnic cleansing, stoning homosexuals and many others to death, eradicating competing cultures and religions, the welfare of his own group to the exclusion of all others etc .
The Pope never told us any of this .

that Jesus forfeits his own right to eternal life, for he states that in order to have eternal life we must obey the Law of Moses, which he breaks himself repeatedly .
Most amusing .

that Holy Communion, the new ritual invented by Jesus, violates the Law of Moses by ordering his followers to drink his blood, which is repeatedly and absolutely outlawed in Judaism, so participating in this revolting cannibalistic and Satanic ritual would therefore be punishable by death .
Most hilarious .

that, although denied by Muslims, Jesus DOES claim to be the son of God for we found no less than 31 verses in the 4 Gospels that confirm it, and there are many more waiting to be listed .

that Jesus was a radical extremist, steadfastly going out of his way to ridicule and lecture the leading teachers and clerics of the time, in his own ultra-provocative know-all manner .

that Jesus was a sorcerer using black (=evil) magic, was a pyromaniac, a megalomaniac, merciless and arrogant, a serial blasphemer, he came to bring trouble and not peace, and wishes to watch his enemies being killed .

Why have Christians down the ages never told us about all this?

that Jesus wishes you a horrible death for no other reason than rejecting his message, namely that you may perish in a holocaust worse than the one inflicted upon Sodom and Gomorrah .

So much for the Prince of Peace .
Lies, all lies .

that there is no evidence to support the universally accepted claim and belief that Jesus was from the family of David .

Surprisingly, only 2 of the 4 Gospels address the issue at all and, while at first glance the family lines presented look both thorough and impressive, when closely examined and analysed they turn out to be not only wildly out of synchronisation but mutually exclusive, with catastrophic results .

that Jesus as presented in the 4 Gospels was a shameless impostor and a false prophet, comically one of the many that he himself warned us about .
It takes one to know one

that, contrary to common misconceptions, Jesus was sent ONLY to the Jews, as repeatedly stated both by Jesus himself and by arch-angel Gabriel (=Jibreel), a major and very pleasant surprise, indeed, we now consider this fact to be the Good News itself .

All Christians, please take note and stop proselytising to all non-Jews, meaning 99.98 percent of humanity, and IMMEDIATELY .

Clearly Christianity is counterfeit goods and has for 2000 years been knowingly marketed under a false declaration on content and ingredients .
Is there a world-wide money back guarantee?

Already after these few samples we are hopefully all agreed that it must be both reasonable and appropriate to ask Jews and Christians the following question:
have you honestly never noticed any of the clear discrepancies or obvious contradictions, or any of the horrible and barbaric aspects of your faith that we reveal here and bring to the world’s attention?
Whether you knew but said nothing, or you were too lazy or afraid to examine your own faith, so blissfully unaware – it does not really matter which group you fall into: if you still criticised and demonised Islam and Muslims, you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves, pray for forgiveness every day and seek rehabilitation .

Now that at last it has all been brought to your notice, and in plain language, you cannot plead ignorance any longer .

The logical and decent course of action would therefore be to repent and reform .

Maybe above everything else, we demonstrate what we claim right at the beginning, namely that, compared with the holy books and the prophets of Judaism and Christianity, clearly Islam and Muslims and the Quran and prophet Muhammad (pbuh) have
NOTHING to apologise for .

Will the world please take note and start acting accordingly NOW .

We remind all Islamophobes, whether they are ultra-orthodox Jews or arch-Zionists or Christian Evangelicals or neo-Crusaders, that if they do not like the contents of this book, and find us one who will, they should not howl and squeal in protest but look in the mirror, for their own devious and despicable behaviour is entirely to blame, in other words: this devastating review of Judaism and Christianity could have been avoided .

But Islamophobes asked for it, indeed they begged, insistently – so here it is

Peace to the world,
Copenhagen, July 2010

IBRAHEEM
www.IBRAHEEM.dk
info@IBRAHEEM .dk
Visit ENOUGH! Islamophobia for general information, incl front and rear covers, 50 pages of excerpts, plus link to buy
About the writer
IBRAHEEM is Danish, a convert to Islam, and a former freelance computer programmer who now concentrates on creative writing, mainly in the form of poems, you are invited to visit IBRAHEEM-POEMS with currently (Sept . 2010) 114 poems totalling 16,000 lines, to be offered in print soon, inshallah .

ENOUGH! is his first book .

What the Hell Was That Ground Zero ‘Mosque’ Uproar Really About, Anyway?

By Sara Robinson | Source

The Future of the Conservative Movement
ow that the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy is slipping off the front pages for the first time in weeks, it’s time to ask: Just what the hell was all that about, anyway? Why was it so important that we had to spend all that time discussing it? And why are the conservatives taking out after the Muslim community now — nine full years after 9/11?

By now, it’s pretty obvious that this was never really about sacred ground or respecting the memories of the dead. What it was really about was the future of the conservative movement.

Where Have All The Bad Guys Gone?

Conservatives can do without a God, but they can’t get through the day without a devil. Their entire model of reality revolves around the existence of an existential enemy who’s out to annihilate them. Take that focal point away, and their whole worldview collapses into incoherence. This need is so central to their thinking that if there are no actual enemies around, they’ll go to considerable lengths to make some (or just make some up).

Unfortunately, the past couple of decades have been rough for them on this front. Losing the Communists as the Bad Guys left a big gap in the conservative cosmology, which they’ve been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to fill ever since. This void has driven them crazy, forcing them to reveal their inner ugliness in all kinds of ways as they thrash around looking for some likely replacement. The longer this goes on, the more of that ugliness we’ve all seen — and the less coherent their politics have become.

They had some luck early on with gays. But that target had one serious flaw. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of conjuring yourself a major existential demon, you want one people can hate on with unfettered abandon for at least a couple of decades to come. The biggest threat to that goal is familiarity: it’s nearly impossible to sustain the necessary level of fear when members of the feared group are living on your own street (or can be seen regularly on your own TV), where you’re forced to deal with them as actual human beings. It’s a question of ROI: you don’t want to invest all that effort in a creating a target, only to have people figure out within just a few years that you were flat-out lying about how awful those people are. In the end, hating on gays turned out to be nothing but a big fat credibility hit, which they’re still paying for.

Hating on Latinos seemed promising for a while; but it’s fizzling out, too. Even the most rageaholic right-wingers now realize that the GOP has no future if conservatives don’t knock off that crap, preferably 15 years ago. You’ve got a rising Millennial generation that’s 44% minority — a plurality of it Latino — that will probably not be voting Republican in their lifetimes due to this new New Southern Strategy. So that’s not going to work, either.

For a couple of years around 2008-2009, they tried to ratchet up the liberal-hating. The proximity problem made liberals a bad target from the get. But on top of that, there was a scary rash of nutjobs who didn’t get the memo that this was all just political noisemaking, and the “liberals are a mortal threat to the nation” exhortation wasn’t meant to be taken as a literal call to arms. In less than a year, over a dozen people were murdered in cold blood as a direct result of this hatemongering; and Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bernard Goldberg, and Bill O’Reilly were all put in the uncomfortable position of telling people that they didn’t mean for their blustering eliminationist screeds to be taken seriously. Given the choice between dialing down the liberal-bashing or acknowledging the blood on their hands, they picked the obvious alternative.

All this leaves the conservatives right back where they were in 1990 — still flailing around trying to find their next scapegoat. And at this stage, there’s nobody really left to pick on but the Muslims. They’ve got all the perfect attributes for a solid long-term enemy: brown, Not Like Us, we’ve actually been in a war with some of them, and they’re mostly so far away that it’s unlikely that any red-blooded conservative will ever actually have to acknowledge one as a fellow human being. Apart from the messy downsides like war, debt, world approbation, continued terror, and so on, the right wing is starting to see the Muslim Threat as potentially the best thing that’s happened to them since the Communists.

“Teachable Moments” — Conservative Style

Having identified such a great potential target, the next logical step was to whip up public outrage and give people emotionally satisfying reasons to adopt this group as a worthy object of hate. Fortunately for the right wing, conservative PR folks have made an art form out of creating calculated, protracted media crises that drag on for weeks, during which they get to suck up all the news time and create “teachable moments” that put some new agenda item on dramatic public display.

Take two past examples: Terry Schiavo and the Minutemen. Both were ginned-up controversies carefully designed to create a public crisis around a new right-wing political initiative. The goal in both cases was to create a public outcry that someone in a back room somewhere hoped would galvanize the nation into mass political action.

Sometimes this works; sometimes, it doesn’t. Schiavo was a spectacular failure. Americans of all persuasions took one look at that situation and recoiled: it turned out nobody in the country wanted Congress and/or the Southern Baptists making their end-of-life decisions for them. But the Minutemen’s summer campouts on the border succeeded in bringing immigration and border security to the front burner, ultimately feeding into the militancy of the Tea Party and leading to the building of the border wall.

And that’s what the Ground Zero Mosque tantrum was — yet another conservative PR confection designed to put a new boogeyman on the public agenda. (And the media, as usual, went right after the fake throw — again. My dog is too smart for that trick, but our corporate media can be counted on to go for it every time.) The right wing has put us on notice that after nine years, they’ve abandoned Bush-era restraint where Islam is concerned, and are now declaring the entire Muslim world to be the new Devil who will fill that yawning void at the center of their cosmology.

As a target, Muslims were just too tempting to resist any longer. They can be killed with impunity. They can be used to justify endless war. As a demon, they’re likely to have tremendous staying power: after all, in the white, straight, Christian enclaves where most American conservatives live, Muslims are far rarer on the ground than even gays, Latinos, or liberals.

Fighting Back

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. American Muslims (including our homegrown Black Muslims, who are collateral damage in all this) are strong and well-organized, and they’re already fighting back. They’re taking steps to define their faith in the public mind, rather than let conservatives do it for them; and to make themselves and their cultures more familiar to the average American. (This was, in fact, the ultimate goal of building a Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan in the first place.) The hate campaign can only last as long as most Americans don’t know a few Muslims personally. The sooner that ignorance is fixed, the sooner this nonsense stops.

As progressives, we need to give them all the help we can, for two reasons. The first is that we have a clear moral obligation to step up and defend the civil rights of a group that’s now been declared a high-profile public target. We’ve always done this, and history is calling on us to do it again. The media has moved on; but now that war has been declared, the conservative haters have their orders, and we’d be smart to expect more attacks on our Muslim neighbors, no matter where in the country we live.

But beyond that, if we can deprive the conservatives of this made-to-order boogeyman, we may be able to keep that void at the center of the conservative cosmos wide open — thus forcing them to keep their essential meanness on full public display. Conservatism doesn’t thrive in cultures where diversity is recognized, embraced, and celebrated. As long as we keep debunking their devils, we make it very hard for them to regroup politically and present themselves as sane

Sara Robinson is a Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

My name is Dr. Terry Jones.. Help me to Fight Islam!

Terry Jones, The crazy pastor which decided once to burn holy Quran send a new message to his church’s mailing list to encourage them to fund his hate-war on Islam and Muslims.
The Racist pastor, said in his message:

We need your financial assistance in order to continue the fight that we have started against Islam.

Now, his war is against Islam! When this bigot first announced his mad plan to burn Qurans, he said to the world that he is not fighting against moderate Muslims! Now, he is talking about his war On Islam!

To bring to their awareness, that we must wake up, we must look at this radical element of Islam, and we must stop them.

Now, it’s obligatory for the American people to stop this bigot racist from continuing threatening the civil peace of the United States of America!

Here are the message he sent!

Source
My name is Dr. Terry Jones.

We need your financial assistance in order to continue the fight that we have started against Islam. As we know, Islam is a very dangerous and violent religion. We must take this message to Washington D.C. We must take this message around to the major cities in America. We have plans to contact Senators and Representatives and knock on doors to talk to them in Washington D.C. To bring to their awareness, that we must wake up, we must look at this radical element of Islam, and we must stop them. We must, around America call for rallies in order to wake up our churches, in order to wake up our local governments, that they might be able to see that it is time for us to stand up. It is time for the Church, it is time for people to speak out. In order to do this, we need your financial help. If you would like for us to come to your area, then please contact us by e-mail at, info@doveworld.org, or by phone at 352-371-2487 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 352-371-2487 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

Please send your donations to Dove World Outreach Center, 5805 NW 37 Street, here in Gainesville, Florida 32653. Or, go to our web site, www.doveworld.org, and donate using Paypal. Please be as generous as you can with a one time donation and with a monthly donation.

It is very important that we go through this door that God has given us and that we begin to spread this message. God has given us a divine opportunity. We cannot miss that! Please help us as generously as you can.

We have also written a book called, Islam is of the Devil. You can obtain that by going to our web site again, www.doveworld.org. Everything that you can do, through your prayers, your financial support, buying of the book, goes to the efforts of stopping Islam.

Thank you.

God bless,
Dr. Terry Jones

Islam and the Media in the age of Islamophobiapalooza

Source

Islam and Muslim related issues have taken central stage as leading news stories in America with a frequency of coverage that might make other faiths green with envy. Does all this (un)wanted attention serve to bolster the perception of Muslims (as the saying goes, “any publicity is good publicity”) or does it present a scenario of helplessness in which ones faith is gawked and bawked at willy nilly by political opportunists and an overwhelmingly complicit uncritical media? Or both?

The answer to the first question is that it is not always true that “any publicity is good publicity,” if you believe that then there is a New York City Cab driver with whom I would like you to speak. The attention that has been levied on Islam and Muslims has taken stories that were really “tempests-in-a-tea-pot” and made them into hurricanes that only highlight the helplessness American Muslims face when it comes to their relationship with the media and society.

Take the example of the NYC Mosque and Cultural Center. This story was whipped up into a frenzy by a pair of bigoted anti-Muslim bloggers, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, two individuals who should be summarily dismissed as loons that have zero influence in the mainstream media or amongst any of our politicians.

Yet, we are reaping the fruits of their persistent and belligerent disinformation campaign about a “mosque at Ground Zero,” smears against an Imam who has been sponsored by the State Department as a diplomat, and a Muslim community that is being indicted as collectively guilty for the crimes perpetuated by a fringe extremist organization. Muslims are told to be sensitive to the those who are insensitive, to quietly take the bigotry and move elsewhere. For some, the heavily accented Dutch neo-fascist politician Geert Wilders’ cry of “no mosque here” resonates and is far more familiar than appeals to the Constitution and the rights of their neighbors.

More egregiously however has been the silencing of Muslim voices in the face of the perpetuation of stereotypes resulting in the witting and unwitting explosion of prejudice directed at Muslims. Muslims are only brought on TV to respond to crises, sometimes these crises are wholly manufactured by an uncritical media. A case study on this is needed but let us take the example of the threat against the South Park creators by Revolution Muslim and the International Burn the Koran Day by Pastor Terry Jones and his Dove Outreach Church.

The controversy that swelled around South Park was initiated by Revolution Muslim, a fringe group even amongst extremists, composed of about 4 morons with below zero credibility in the Muslim community. In fact, they were kicked out of the mosque they attended and were relegated to being scraggly street side loons with a bull horn. Most people with common sense who passed them by on the street viewed these people for who they were, a bunch of nuts.

However, for whatever reason the media took it upon itself to give them a voice. These nobodies became the spokesmen for Muslims, and in an even worse move Comedy Central lent credence to the threat by canceling the South Park episodes that included the Prophet Muhammad. No one asked Muslims for their opinion, Comedy Central didn’t bother to consult Muslims, instead they chose the path of self-censorship (or what some cynically term a PR stunt) at the expense of Muslims. The result was a perception that Islam not only can’t take criticism, not only do they react violently to such criticism but they can’t even handle their Prophet being depicted by people who don’t hold the same opinion as they do about pictorial representations of holy figures.

This perception metastasized into a phenomenon that pitted false paradigms against one another, leading to the willful deafness of one group so consumed by its perceptions that it ultimately resulted in the wrongheaded and thoroughly Islamophobic “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”

What did the media do to correct the ignorance it helped to perpetuate? Nothing. The damage was done, the story that was headline news for a while faded into the abyss of old news but the residue of perception remained.

Fast forward to the past few weeks and the debate over whack job Pastor Terry Jones’ call for an International Burn the Koran Day on 9/11. He based his action on Acts 19:19 in which the early Christians burned the books of witches. He believed he was doing the Godly, righteous thing since Islam was “of the Devil” and leading people to the doom of Hellfire.

But notice the difference in the coverage of the Revolutionary Muslim crackpots and this Terry Jones character. Even though both are fringe groups/individuals with unbelievably small followings, only one group, Revolutionary Muslim, was allowed to define a whole religion.

The distinction was made consistently and repeatedly from the top echelon of our government all the way down to our media that Terry Jones and his followers were a minority who don’t speak for Christianity or America, but the same point was given scant time or attention when it came to the South Park Controversy.

This double standard has to end because it is intellectually and morally dishonest and only perpetuates a perception of Muslims as backward primitives defined and represented by their least common denominator, a myth that can, as we have seen in the past, have dire consequences.

Daniel Pipes Accuses Obama of Enforcing Sharia Law

Source

Over at the Washington Times Daniel Pipes opines that he found Pastor Terry Jones’ plan to ban the Qur’an “distasteful”. But actual the object of his attack is the Obama administration, who Pipes claims capitulated to the threat of “Muslim violence” when they persuaded Jones to call off his book-burning stunt. Pipes explains: “That violence stems from Islamic law, Shariah, which insists that Islam, and the Koran in particular, enjoy a privileged status. Islam ferociously punishes anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who trespasses against Islam’s sanctity.”
Pipes concludes with the following charge against the Obama administration: “Its pressure on Mr. Jones further eroded freedom of speech about Islam and implicitly established Islam’s privileged status in the United States, whereby Muslims may insult others but not be insulted. This moves the country toward dhimmitude, a condition whereby non-Muslims acknowledge the superiority of Islam. Finally, Mr. Obama, in effect, enforced Islamic law, a precedent that could lead to other forms of compulsory Shariah compliance.”
Pipes has found himself rather sidelined recently by more newsworthy Islamophobes like Pamela Geller or Newt Gingrich. Maybe this is Pipes’ attempt to show he is still a major player when it comes to whipping up hysteria against the US Muslim community.

1 woman’s story: Islamophobia reaches O.C.

By YVETTE CABRERA | Source

As a Muslim living in America, Anwar Hijaz has come to expect certain reactions – stares and “Aren’t you hot in that?” commentary – to her hijab, a scarflike head covering that she began wearing in 10th grade.

As she puts it: “Some things in Muslims’ daily lives are so embedded in our lifestyle that we don’t consider them incidents.”

But Hijaz, 22, says that while living in Irvine and studying for her master’s degree in international relations at UC Riverside, she has felt fortunate to have neighbors and friends who seem welcoming about her religion.

“I was always in denial that xenophobia was even around. I was always surrounded by friends who weren’t Muslim and never treated me differently,” says Hijaz, the American-born daughter of Palestinian immigrants.

That is, until recently, when she was a target of anti-Muslim harassment and bigotry – an experience so intense it left her shaken.

Earlier this month, as she exited from the I-405 en route to Huntington Beach, a man driving behind her started honking. As he passed her, he angrily displayed his middle finger.

Hijaz would not have given the incident a second thought, but after exiting the freeway the two cars came to a stop at an intersection, where the man verbally criticized Hijaz’s driving. When Hijaz defended herself, he called her a racial epithet and rolled up his window.

But even with the window up, the exchange continued as he hurled more derogatory names like “towel head” at Hijaz, who was driving a convertible with the top down and was with her cousin, who like herself was wearing a hijab.

Hijaz says she tried talking to the stranger.

“You’re obviously not a true American if you treat people like this,” Hijaz told him.

Afterward, she pulled to the side of the road because, she says, her hands were shaking and her heart was pounding.

“I thought ‘Oh my God, how can someone have so much hate for someone without knowing anything about them except for the way I’m dressed?’ ”

Hijaz says she saw a look of pure contempt in the stranger’s eyes.

“It was so much hate that it was unbelievable,” says Hijaz, who adds that her sister also recently was physically threatened for being Muslim while dining at a local restaurant.

Hijaz and her sister are not alone. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reports that nationally anti-Muslim incidents are on the rise. On Wednesday, the Orange County Human Relations is scheduled to release its annual hate crime report showing that the number of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Orange County also has increased.

Affad Shaikh, the civil rights coordinator for CAIR’s Southern California Chapter in Anaheim says he’s tracking eight cases so far this year involving neighbor-to-neighbor incidences in which Muslims, Arabs or South Asians say they have been harassed because of their religion, race or nationality.

Such cases often escalate from name calling (such as referring to the Muslim as a terrorist) to actions such as leaving American flags or notes on the victim’s car or property saying “This is America,” says Shaikh.

So, this is America?

A country where people are suspicious of the “other” just because of a hijab? A country founded on religious freedom, yet filled with people so angry about a proposed community center and mosque about two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York that they threaten to burn the Quran?

Did we not imagine that the hateful seeds sowed this summer by extremists like Gainesville Pastor Terry Jones would embolden others to hate, not just with their words, but with violence.

Sometimes, fear can lead us to act irrationally.

Why else would anyone oppose a community center in Manhattan like the Cordoba House, (which has been dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque” by Fox News even though it is not purely a mosque and wouldn’t be at Ground Zero)? What affront will be committed by building an Islamic mosque, theater, gym, swimming pool, child care center, food court and, yes, a Sept. 11 memorial? It was Islamic extremists – not Islam itself or the vast majority of Muslims – who brought down the Twin Towers.

What better way to foster understanding of Islam than through a community center that includes prayer spaces for people of other faiths, tolerance-focused education programs, and a multifaith memorial dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

When I ask Hijaz what can be done about this rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, she points out that an accurate portrayal of Muslims in the media would go a long way in dispelling the stereotypes. But when it comes to situations such as the driver who harassed her, she says relatives recommended that next time she remain quiet.

But the suggested course of action – silence – goes against the very freedoms she was raised, as an American, to appreciate. So, despite her relatives’ warnings, she says she will speak out anytime a stranger is willing to listen.

Facts not assumptions; conversations not threats; understanding not fear: It takes all of this to turn the tide against this treatment of Muslims in America. That, and a willingness to defend these freedoms for all, no matter what religion they practice.

“I don’t care who you are, if someone is being treated wrongly I’m going to be sure to stand up for them. I don’t care if I’m endangered, I make sure they are treated right,” Hijaz says.

This is what America is all about.

Spencer, Anti-America again!

Ikhwanophobia Comment

Robert Spencer, one of the most racist bigots in the United States. Spencer is arguing that Rep. Keith Ellison, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood Ideology.
Spencer is trying to deceive the truth and to link between Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist attacks in NY, London and through the world.
It’s also very weird that Spencer argued that the hate crimes against Muslims are very rare, I think that we can say that hate crimes against J. F. Kennedy were very rare, actually there was one ‘hate crime’ !! it seems that the human life is very cheap in Spencer’s eyes to say some thing like that!
Spencer by his continuing lying and bigotry against Islam, Muslims and even the American representatives will be main reason to ‘eliminate’ the civil peace in the US, which is threatened by a lot of other bigots around the world.

By Robert Spencer | Source

Rep. Keith Ellison (D.-Minn.), the first Muslim in the House of Representatives, has weighed in on the Ground Zero mosque controversy, and in the process defamed the 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque.

After the November elections, Ellison predicted, the controversy will “die down” but not “go away,” because “the people who are struck by fear and who are creating a climate of fear with the thought of this Islamic center are not going away.”

He compared this “climate of fear” to “people scapegoating Catholics” in the early 1960s, and added: “We have a long history of racial discrimination and scapegoating,” naming Jews, welfare queens, black men and Latinos as victims of this scapegoating.

This is the same dishonest narrative we have seen recently from Nicholas Kristof and many others: that Muslims in America today are facing a resurgence of the nativism that earlier targeted Catholics and others.

In the first place, there is no such scapegoating: Hate crimes against Muslims are actually quite rare. But also, the comparison is entirely fallacious because none of the groups Ellison names as previous “scapegoats” were carrying out terror attacks against Americans and others worldwide.

They weren’t justifying violence and hatred by reference to Catholic or Jewish teaching. The people who were worried about the pope running the country could point to no action by the pope to try to achieve such power. The Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast, is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” so that Islam “is victorious over other religions.”

The idea that non-Muslims are suspicious of Muslims out of bigotry, rather than out of a legitimate concern for both jihad terror and the utterly supine and often disingenuous response to it from peaceful and ostensibly moderate Muslims is nonsense of such an outstanding character that I wonder if Ellison himself even believes it, rather than simply seeing it as a useful line he can use to bamboozle the besotted leftists who elected him to Congress.

It is rich for Ellison to complain about scapegoating when so many mass murderers and would-be mass murderers point to Islamic teaching as the motivation and justification for their actions.

Think of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihadist; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas underwear jihadist; Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square jihadist; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden on 9/11; the London jihad bombers of July 7, 2005; and so many, many others. How long will non-Muslims continue to swallow the increasingly less convincing line that none of this violence has anything to do with Islam?

Of course, many will continue to do so, and they will continue to do so because of the attempts by Ellison and so many other Muslim spokesmen to claim victim status for Muslims and divert attention away from jihadist crimes. Ellison does mention a few of these jihad attacks, but says nothing about the belief-system that motivated them, or what can and should be done within the Muslim community in the U.S. to help ensure that there will be no such attacks in the future—that is, if preventing such attacks is on the Muslim community in America’s to-do list at all.

Ellison also praised President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler for contributing to the “marginalization of people who make their living on this stuff, like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer.”

He would certainly like to see us marginalized, since I have been the one calling attention to his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca was paid for with $13,350 from the Muslim American Society, which is the Brotherhood’s chief operating arm in the U.S. The Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Imagine if a conservative congressman had taken a trip that had been paid for by a Christian group that was, according to one of its own documents, dedicated to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” so that Christian law would replace the U.S. Constitution. I expect we would hear more of an outcry than we ever heard about Ellison’s Brotherhood-funded hajj.

But I’m going to keep talking about it. No wonder he wishes we were marginalized.

The rise of Europe’s far-right

Andrew Wander | Source

As the Sweden Democrats win seats in parliament, Europe searches for a response to the success of far-right parties.

As Sweden adjusts to the idea of a far-right party sitting in the country’s famously liberal parliament for the first time, several postal workers in the town of Sodertalje have found themselves in trouble.

During the campaign, they refused to distribute election material from the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (SD) to minority residential areas, arguing that the pamphlets constituted hate speech.

Their employers, Posten, have taken a dim view of their employees’ political stance. “We cannot, as the dominant mail service, act as a censor,” Posten told its rebellious workers.

The row over the delivery of campaign material may seem parochial, but it goes to the heart of a debate being played out across Europe; how best to respond to the recent resurgence of the far-right in national elections across the continent.

Anti-immigration parties have notched up impressive gains in Europe in recent months, often doing well in countries with a reputation for liberal politics and tolerant electorates.

In the Netherlands, the far-right Freedom Party came third in June elections, denying its rivals a governing majority and ensuring it a seat at the negotiating table in coalition talks. Meanwhile, in Hungary, the Jobbick Party, which advocates incarcerating the country’s Roma population in internment camps, also did well in this year’s parliamentary election.

Far-right parties form part of Italy’s coalition government, and have seats in the parliaments of Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia and Slovakia. In Britain, the British National Party (BNP) has won European and local elections and appeared on a mainstream political debate show.

On a continent that has historically suffered disproportionately as a result of right-wing excesses, something is persuading voters to back far-right parties in growing numbers. But what?

Islamophobia or the economy?

Anti-Islamic sentiment and concerns over immigration levels have appeared at the centre of many far-right political campaigns, leading some to believe that the threat of terrorism and a perceived “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West is driving the resurgence of the right.

But many experts say that issues closer to home are likely to be behind the parties’ increased popularity in recent years, citing fallout from the financial crisis as a major driver of their success.

“Because of the crisis and dearth of jobs, politicians are playing on emotions to win votes, looking for scapegoats,” says Shada Islam, a researcher at the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

Per Ake Westurlund, the chairman of Sweden’s Socialist Justice Party believes that economic uncertainty facing ordinary Swedes has been a major contributor to the success of the Sweden Democrats.

“I think that the most important thing is the insecurity about the future for more and more people,” he told Al Jazeera. “There is an increasing gap between rich and poor, increased inequality, and there has been no real anti-racist reply against this racist party.”

He says that Muslim immigrants have been blamed for economic pressures facing the country. “The racist parties find any suitable scapegoat,” he said. “In the 1920s or 1930s it was the Jewish population who they attacked. In the last decade, it has been political refugees or asylum seekers, and in recent years it has been Muslims.”

Matthew Goodwin, an expert on far-right politics at the University of Nottingham, agrees that the far-right has shifted the focus of its attacks over time. “The far-right has, over the past couple of decades, effectively adapted its campaigns to different minority groups, whether Roma, whether Muslims or other immigrants,” he says.

How best to respond to the racist and inflammatory rhetoric being peddled by such parties is dividing Europe. Attempts to freeze the far-right out of the debate have failed. The Sweden Democrats were not allowed to show a television campaign advert depicting a pensioner being chased by women in burqas, and despite not being included in televised debates, went on to electoral success.  

Going mainstream?

While far-right parties are still a fringe force in most European parliaments, fears are growing that mainstream politicians are beginning to exploit the electoral momentum that put them there at all.

“One obvious response strategy has been to co-opt the far-right’s issues,” Goodwin says. “So in France for example, you have Zarkozy talking tough on the Roma. But in other countries, we’ve actually seen mainstream parties adopt a very hostile response to the far right.”

But co-opting the politics of the far-right is not without risk. In France, President Zarkozy’s drive against Roma immigrants has set Paris on a collision course with the European Union, and the Swiss government’s controversial decision to hold a referendum last year on whether to allow the construction of minarets on mosques backfired when it was won by the ‘No’ camp, led by the anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party.

Goodwin says that far-right parties are successfully tapping into currents of fear swirling through Europe’s cash-strapped and war-weary populations. “When we ask voters in a range of different surveys about their views about immigrants and about Muslims we can see quite significant pockets of anxiety in populations across Europe,” he says. “These parties are the tip of a much deeper trend.”

It is impossible to tell just how deep this trend runs, but as the Sweden Democrats settle into their  parliamentary seats as a new political force, one thing is clear: It is not just the postmen of Sodertalje struggling to find an appropriate response to the growing momentum of the far-right in Europe.

Hate is still hate

By Sarah Jaffe | Source

Politics in the U.S. has reached a level of toxicity that those of us who worked the campaign trail during the 2008 elections couldn’t have imagined. Foolishly, perhaps, my friends and I on the Obama campaign thought that things would get better once he was in office.

Instead, the hatred has grown and swelled, enveloping people who didn’t succumb during the endless campaign season, and threats of violence seem to be everywhere.

Fed up with it last week, I lashed out on Twitter:

If half these a**holes inserted “Jews” where they rant about “Muslims,” do you think it would become clear how f***ed up this all is?

I mean really, we’ve never seen where scapegoating an entire religion or ethnicity can get us…

Someone replied “apples and oranges” to me and I almost had to laugh. Because it’s not, of course.

Later on in the week, I listened to Qasim ‘Q’ Basir discuss his new movie, Mooz-Lum, on GRITtv, and he said much the same thing as I had:

“Every time I see something that seems offensive or just totally wrong in general, I say what if they were saying this about black people, or Jewish people, or anyone else, would this be OK? Most of the time it’s like no! This is not OK! The idea that they’re questioning our president, asking if he’s Muslim, what if he were a Caucasian man who may have had African-American blood in his bloodline years, generations ago? Would it be OK for people to say ‘Is he part black?’ Would that be OK?”

Well, many commentators have noted that in fact, the constant Muslim-baiting of Obama is based in part on reminding white Americans with a much longer history of racial resentment directed toward black Americans than they have toward Islam that he’s black. So playing fill-in-the-blanks there isn’t as much of a stretch.

But in a country whose foreign policy is based around unconditional support for Israel, despite plenty of lingering antisemitism in all corners, it’s heresy to note the similarity between ginned-up anger at Muslims as the racial Other du jour and the ginned-up anger at Jews in times past.

Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, caused even Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times to make the comparison to antisemitism when he wrote:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

The public castigation from Kristof forced Peretz to backtrack, but the fact that a public figure like him–one long identified, for what it’s worth, with the Democratic party–felt comfortable writing this in public speaks volumes about how far our public discourse has fallen.

I’m Jewish. I had to explain to nice Jewish families on the campaign trail that no, Obama was not going to allow Iran to nuke Israel (and bit my tongue to keep from further explaining that while I’d like Obama to take a hard line on Israel and maybe stop selling them weapons, that was probably quite unlikely, actually). I could see the residual fear in the faces of people not unlike my grandparents, the mistrust of people who might hate them for simply being who they are.

In my time at Hebrew school and studying history, I learned about how anger and fear were created, in a time of economic crisis, in a country looking desperately for someone to blame. I learned what happened to those who took the blame.

I hate Nazi comparisons, and to suggest that this country is on the road to Fascism would be hyperbole. And yet, what if you take those lines of Marty Peretz’s–a man considered a liberal by many–and substitute the word Jew? What if you take Dinesh D’Souza‘s words–published in Forbes, not an anonymous email–about Obama and his father, and change two words, so it says “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a [Jew] of the 1950s”?

I know what it’s like to stumble across a slur directed at you. Just the words hit like a slap across the face that you have to stand there and take–you can’t fight back, it’s already out of range. And these words that are coming now from all angles, fast and furious, in anonymous emails or from the mouths and pens of well-paid writers and politicians, are increasingly hitting the headlines along with reports of vandalism and violence.

I believe in the first amendment as a bedrock principle of the U.S. government–free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble. I believe that the best cure for bad speech isn’t censorship, it’s more speech. I don’t have a platform the size of Peretz or D’Souza. Few of us do. But we’re going to have to speak up, and loud, to counter all the hate flying around right now.

The Bonfire of the Qurans

By Patrick J. Buchanan | Source
9-9-2010

Is there anyone who has not weighed in on the Saturday night, Sept. 11, bonfire of the Qurans at the Rev. Terry Jones’ Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.?

Gen. David Petraeus warns the Quran burnings could inflame the Muslim world and imperil U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton declares it “disgraceful.” Sarah Palin calls it a “provocation.” President Obama calls it “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaida. You could have serious violence in … Pakistan and Afghanistan,” and Muslims could be inspired “to blow themselves up.”

The State Department has put U.S. embassies on alert in the near 50 countries where Muslims are a majority. The Vatican calls the bonfire “an outrageous and grave gesture. … No one burns the Quran.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the defender of the ground zero mosque, is consistent. Burning Islam’s most sacred book is “distasteful,” he says, but the “First Amendment protects everybody.”

Everybody frets and wrings their hands. No one acts.

Yet if, as President Obama and his commanding general both say, the torching of hundreds of Qurans could so enrage the Islamic world as to incite terror-bombings against U.S. troops and imperial our war effort, why does not the commander in chief send U.S. marshals to arrest this provocateur and abort his provocation?

For Jones, who sells t-shirts saying “Islam is of the Devil,” may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland’s elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

And if Petraeus says letting Jones set this bonfire could imperil U.S. troops, Obama should act to stop it. And if he is so paralyzed by uncertainty as to whether he can do anything — and, as a result, soldiers die — what would that tell us about their commander in chief?

Would stopping Jones and confiscating the Qurans violate Jones’ First Amendment rights? Perhaps. And perhaps not. But if Eric Holder cannot find a charge against Davis, or an inherent power of a war president to prevent actions imminently damaging to the war effort, Obama should find some Justice Department attorneys who can.

Let the ACLU make the case that interfering with Davis’ bonfire violates his First Amendment rights. Let a U.S. court decide whether Obama has the power to take a decision previous wartime presidents would have taken without hesitation.

And if Obama does not have the power to stop actions like this, imperiling our troops, then we should get out of this war.

This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of the Quran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a “long war” in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?

Action creates consensus, Mr. President. People follow when a leader leads.

New Jersey Fired Tea Partier Who Burned Qu’ran

By Joshua Holland | Source

The NY Daily News:

The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.
Derek Fenton’s 11-year career at the agency came to an abrupt halt Monday after photographs of him ripping pages from the Muslim holy book and setting them ablaze appeared in newspapers.
Fenton, 39, of Bloomingdale, N.J., burned the book during a protest on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 outside Park51, the controversial mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.
Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida clergyman who threatened to burn the Koran that day but later changed his mind.
NJ Transit said Fenton was fired but wouldn’t give specifics.
“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.
“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”
Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.
“He said, ‘This is America,’ and he wanted to stand up for it, in a Tea Party kind of way,” a police source said.

This guy is a bigoted moron, and I’d have no problem with his termination had he been on the clock — employers do have the right to enforce standards of deportment.
But that’s not the case; Fenton was fired for political expression on his own time, and it doesn’t matter if one agrees with his views or not. This is America, and his political actions, on his own time, are supposed to be afforded the highest level of protection. It’s outrageous that NJ Transit even believes that it is within its rights to can him for his protest, no matter how ugly that protest is.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joshua_holland1.

TAM: Center for Security Policy Sharia Report a Threat to American Ideals

by Sheila Musaji | Source

This week, a 177 page report was released by the Center for Security Policy titled Sharia: The Threat To America.  The Center for Security Policy was founded by Frank Gaffney who is also its’ director. 

The group putting this together call themselves Team BII and are identified in the document as:  Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin—US Army (Ret.), former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.  Lieutenant General Harry Edward Soyster—US Army (Ret.), former Director, Defense Intelligence Agency.  Christine Brim—Chief Operating Officer, Center for Security Policy.  Ambassador Henry Cooper—former Chief Negotiator, Defense and Space Talks, former Director, Strategic Defense Initiative.  Stephen C. Coughlin, Esq. —Major (Res.) USA, former Senior Consultant, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Michael Del Rosso—Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute and Center for Security Policy.  Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.—former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy (Acting), President, Center for Security Policy.  John Guandolo—former Special Agent, Counter-Terrorism Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Brian Kennedy—President, Claremont Institute.  Clare M. Lopez—Senior Fellow, Center for Security Policy.  Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons—US Navy (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet.  Andrew C. McCarthy—former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney (Southern District of New York); Senior Fellow, National Review Institute; Contributing Editor, National Review.  Patrick Poole—Consultant to the military and law enforcement on antiterrorism issues.  Joseph E. Schmitz—former Inspector General, Department of Defense.  Tom Trento—Executive Director, Florida Security Council.  J. Michael Waller—Annenberg Professor of International Communication, Institute of World Politics, and Vice President for Information Operations, Center for Security Policy.  Diana West—author and columnist.  R. James Woolsey—former Director of Central Intelligence.  David Yerushalmi, Esq.—General Counsel to the Center for Security Policy.

A number of our elected officials have backed this report.  These folks are among those who have forgotten that they represent “we the people” and that includes American Muslims. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) both participated in the press conference announcing the reports release.  Who are these elected officials?

Rep. Michele Bachmann has said “not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal,” letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.  She also called the American Muslims who came to pray at the Muslim Day of Prayer on Capitol Hill “terrorist sympathizers” and “Islamo-Fascist bastards”. 

Rep. Pete Hoekstra is the the guy who breached the security of a Congressional delegation’s trip to Iraq by broadcasting its whereabouts and itinerary on Twitter.  Hoekstra called for a boycott of mainstream Islamic organizations, although the U.S. Attorney’s office in Detroit seeks the cooperation of such organizations for homeland security.  As Steve Benen noted “When it comes to national security issues, Hoekstra has one of the more transparently ridiculous track records of any member of Congress in recent memory. We are, after all, talking about a partisan clown who held a press conference in 2006 to announce, “We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

This report attempts to make up (by its length, and by working in every possible conspiracy theory that has ever been suggested about Muslims into one document) for the fact that it is utter nonsense.  Daniel Luban points out about this report: “Suggesting that sharia is “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time”, the report offers far-reaching – and to critics, draconian – proposals for how to combat it.    These include banning Muslims who “espouse or support” sharia “from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States”. The report similarly recommends prosecuting those who espouse sharia for sedition, and banning immigration to the U.S. by those who adhere to sharia.    Few scholars of Islam would agree with the report’s conception of “sharia”. The word (typically translated as “the way”) is a broad term referring to Islamic religious precepts, and thus there are as many interpretations of sharia as there are interpretations of Islam.    Even moderate practitioners of Islam, like all religious believers, strive to adhere to their conception of what sharia requires. This does not, however, mean that they necessarily aim to impose sharia, much less a fundamentalist version of sharia, on others.”

The report manages to work in the anti-Muslim memes of “stealth jihad” p.12, contributing to charity as something subversive p.16, Muslim “demographic jihad” p.127, Sharia as some sort of disease that Muslims spread by their very presence p.130, etc.  This report joins the What Everyone Knows School of Islam which repeats the same old claims over and over:

“everyone knows” that most or all terrorists are Muslims, and there are no Christian and no Jewish terrorists (or terrorists of any other religious stripe), and that Muslims are inherently violent.  Everyone also knows that Muslims are not equivalent to real Americans, that they are the enemy within, and a fifth column,  that good Muslims can’t be good Americans, that they are not a part of our American heritage, that they are all militant,  that Islam makes Muslims “backward”, that Muslims have made no contribution to the West,  that Islam is “of the devil”, a Crescent menace, and an “evil encroaching on the United States”, and not a religion.  Everyone knows that this is a Christian nation, which everyone knows the Muslims are trying to take over, starting with getting an Eid stamp which is the first step towards shariah law, and by purposefully having more children than others to increase their numbers.  Everyone knows that Muslims have no respect for the Constitution.  Everyone knows that Muslims are given a pass by the elite media.  It’s “us versus them”.  Their goal is world domination under a Caliphate.  They 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 the Qur’an is uniquely violent, that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t include God’s love, that Allah is a moon god.  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.

The report released right in the middle of the Cordoba House/Park51 controversy, and starring many of the same characters just adds to the anti-Muslim bigotry being stirred up.  The hate campaign that has been waged against Islam and Muslims by a certain extremist segment of the American population has seen no parallel since the anti-Semitic hate campaign against Jews in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  This hate campaign is evil, but it has been extremely successful.  American Muslims have become “the other”, not to be trusted, not good Americans.

This looks like a think tank product, but the only thought that went into it was bigotry and a determination to prove a pre-determined point of view.  They have styled themselved team BII, referencing a 1976 Reagan era analysis of the Soviet Union as a continuing threat to the U.S.  BII has simply replaced Islam with Communism to keep alive the dream of eternal war. 

As Frank Woodward points out “The fact that Washington’s foreign policy establishment won’t take the report seriously is beside the point since Islamophobia needs neither the consent nor the interest of the establishment or the mainstream media in order to continue its advance across America.”

I will leave it to Islamic scholars to tear apart the scholarship of this attack on Sharia.  I will stick to simply looking at the individuals and organizations involved with the production of this report.

WHO ARE THESE “experts” WHO UNDERSTAND SHARIA SO WELL?

Ret. Gen. William Boykin said in an interview: “What we are not seeing first and foremost is the fact that Islam is not a religion. It is a totalitarian way of life. There is a religious component. But we still treat it as a first amendment issue when in fact it is a totalitarian way of life.  And when you think Islam you need to think Sharia law. Sharia law is the law that subjugates women, that cuts off the hand of the thief, that beheads the adulteress, that’s sharia law, and that’s what Islam is. It is a legal system more than anything else, with a religious component. And people simply do not understand that. And consequently, Skip, we still treat it as a first amendment issue.  …  And we continue to categorize them as extremists or radicals or people who are not following the dictates of Islam, well the reality is they are following the dictates of Islam and all we’re doing is playing their game of propaganda when we refuse to acknowledge that they are terrorists, they are Jihadists, they’re Muslims, they’re Islamists, and they want to destroy our constitution and replace it with Sharia law.”  Boykin said Islam “is not a religion,” Boykin told Human Events. Extending First Amendment protection to Muslims, he added, was a “fundamental mistake.”

Stephen Coughlin  Fox News reported that “Stephen Coughlin was fired from his job at the Pentagon after a confrontation with one of the deputy defense secretary’s aides, which ended with Coughlin being called, “a Christian zealot with a pen.”  He was a speaker at the controversial CPAC event “Jihad: The Political Third Rail,”  sponsored by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. 

FRANK GAFFNEY, as the director of the Center for Security Policy who put together this group and issued this report requires special mention.  There really isn’t an Islamophobic controversy that Gaffney hasn’t been involved with:

– Gaffney is a “birther”.  He said in an article Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii. There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian. If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.  

– Gaffney smeared the names of two Muslim White House staffers and unfairly charged Grover Norquist with giving White House access to “radical Muslims.” 

– Gaffney commented in an article that Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is part of a secret ploy to institute Sharia law in the United States. The article was accompanied by a photo of Elena Kagan in a turban.     

– Gaffney contended in a Washington Times editorial that the efforts to use non-interest measures to do banking transactions was a Muslim conspiracy to impose Islamic law on the United States. 

– Gaffney in the Wash. Times said “[I]t increasingly appears” Obama “will be embracing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood”. 

– Gaffney wrote an article titled Understanding Islam’s Threat to the U.S. Vital.  Note, he didn’t qualify Islam in any way. 

– After Pres. Obama’s Cairo Speech Gaffney said “there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”  He said “Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America’s first Muslim president.” (This article seems to have been removed from the web?)  However, there are many articles still existing that refer to Gaffney’s article including this one in the Washington Times.

– Gaffney used a fake quote from Abraham Lincoln to make his point in another article that objection to the war in Iraq was “treason”.  (This article has also been removed)  Glenn Greenwald’s article discussing this fake quote and Gaffney’s article is still online.

– Gaffney accused MPAC of being “pro-Hamas” and having a “Wahabi” ideology. And, he accused ISNA of supporting terrorism.

– Gaffney is one of the regular speakers at David Horowitz’ annual Islamo Fascism Awareness Week on college campuses. 

– When asked by MSNBC host David Shuster and Mother Jones’s David Corn for proof of Obama’s supposed willingness to submit to Sharia, Gaffney pointed to a secret “code” Obama is using — which apparently only he, al Qaeda, the Saudis, and the Taliban understand: CORN: Where in that speech does he say we’re going to submit to anybody?  GAFFNEY: “I think what he is using is code — … When he uses the word “respect,” in the context of a waist-bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, for example, and talks about respectful language, which is code for those who adhere to Sharia that we will submit to Sharia. We will submit to the kind of program.” 

– Gaffney said regarding the the U.S. Missile Defense Logo:  A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot… Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah… the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo… Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.

–  Gaffney published an over the top Islamophobic rant calling the proposed Cordoba House/Park51 center “a durable, symbolic taunt by our enemies about their bloody victory”, which is “designed to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Shariah, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful and eroding resistence to their demands for separate and (for the moment, at least) equal treatment in America.”  He also uses all the tired cliches – taqiyya, stealth jihad, etc. 

– Gaffney regularly suggests that any opposition to his positions is taqiyya which we have dealt with previously.

– Gaffney said about the newly opened Zaytuna College “This is stealth jihad in the sense that it is about promoting in the United States incubators for sharia,” the religious law of Islam.”

– Gaffney made a web video in opposition to Park51 that says: “If we let them defile Ground Zero with a beachhead for sharia we will validate their sense of victory on 9/11 and encourage future attacks on America. No mosque at Ground Zero.” He also wrote that “the twin towers were destroyed on 9/11 by adherents to the barbaric, supremacist and totalitarian program authoritative Islam calls ‘Shariah.’”

– One of the anti-mosque rallies was sponsored by a group called The Coalition to Honor Ground Zero.  They sponsored one of the most hateful rallies against the Cordoba House/Park51 Center.  However, as Glenn Greenwald has reported “The group which sponsored this rally has a website—the repellently named StopThe911Mosque.com—which is registered to The Center for Security Policy, the group of Frank Gaffney.”

As Louay Safi points out “John Guandolo involved himself in the Rifqa Bary case and in an article published by CSP, uses misleading arguments to fault the FDLE and defend the fundamentalist Global Revolution Church. Guandolo accuses the FDLE investigators of negligence and willful blindness, and urge Florida Governor Charlie Crist to dismiss the current investigative team and appoint another one that will vindicate his version of the case.  …  How do I know that Guandolo got his facts wrong? Well, he used, or rather distorted, my own writings on the issue of apostasy to advanced his prejudicial views on Islam and American Muslims. Guandolo proclaims that “a due diligence review would reveal the existence of authoritative Islamic Law” and found that “Islamic Law – which is real law – has requirements and rules as to how to deal with those who leave Islam.”    One crucial piece of evidence of his “due diligence review” comes from a book “Peace and the Limits of War.”  Guandolo writes: “In it, Mr. Safi notes that individual apostates cannot be killed for a ‘quiet desertion of personal Islamic duties,’ but can be put to death as ‘just punishment’ when the apostate deserts Islam publicly (p. 31).”    Speaking of negligence and willful blindness, it helps to reproduce the passage that preceded that selective quotations cited by Guandolo in its entirety: “When a group of Muslim individuals fortify themselves in an area of the Muslim territory and refuse to permit the application of certain fundamental Islamic principles or laws, such as the establishment of public prayer (salah al jama’ah), the payment of zakah, and the like, it is a case of apostasy, for which, the group is to be fought until its members cease their rebellion with respect to the law. It should be clear that apostates are to be fought not because they refuse to profess or practice Islam, but because they disobey the Islamic law. Therefore, nobody should be questioned or prosecuted for not fulfilling his personal duties toward Allah – for he is answerable to Allah, not to the Muslim community, insofar as his personal duties are concerned-as long as he fulfills his public duty.”    A fair reading of the above passage should lead to a conclusion quite contrary to the one Guandolo conveniently arrived at through the partial and incomplete quotation he cherry picked from the passage to advance his ideologically held position. Indeed, the above argument was made in the context of limiting the ground for war and rejecting the use of force against people on the basis of their personal beliefs. My more definitive statement on religious freedom and the notion of apostasy in Islam is provided in another article, “Apostasy and Religious Freedom,” that was published in the wake of the case of apostasy in Afghanistan in 2006.”

Andrew McCarthy said that the proposed Cordoba House/Park51 center was “Islamist supremacism” and that “well-meaning people would know that this is an affront to common sense.”  In an NRO interview with Andrew C. MCarthy. The first question is: “What do health-care reform and ‘the Grand Jihad’ have in common?” To which McCarthy replies: “They both enjoy the support of Islam and the Left.”  John Guardiano notes “McCarthy has written that “Islam is innately political,” and that “Islam and Communism are aligned… Both are diametrically opposed to the core assumptions of American constitutional democracy: individual liberty and free-market capitalism.”    He has called Islam’s legal code “totalitarian.” He rejects the concept of moderate Islam as an “invention” that “does not currently exist.” He declares, in the subtitle of his book, that Islam — not radical Islam, but Islam — is a fifth column political movement intent on “sabotaging” America.” 

Think Progress notes that:  “At an event on Capitol Hill, retired Lt. Gen. Soyster introduced the report by admitting, “I’m here out of ignorance. Three years ago I realized how little I knew about Islam.” Soyster said he “went to some classes,” and “the more I learned, the worse it got.” 

Tom Trento of the Florida Security Council planned a “free speech summit” featuring Geert Wilders. 

David Yerushalmi of SANE (Society of Americans for National Existence) that released a policy paper that in part stated: “Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US. Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People . . .  It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”  Yerushalmi said “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 Moslem 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…”  He also said “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…The Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.”  And, “Instead of a promise of victory, Sura 24:52 must be made ashes in the mouths of Muslims. A seemingly unending air control campaign over enemy territory is the way to continually remind the Muslims of their subordinate status and the impotence of Allah without becoming mired in the quagmire of counterinsurgency.”   Yerushalmi was a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which was instrumental in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim smear campaign that brought down Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of Khalil Gibran International Academy, a dual-language Arabic school in Brooklyn. Yerushalmi is also an attorney with the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.  Yerushalmi also published a racist article that, as Alex Kane points out “Yerushalmi has deleted as much evidence of the “On Race” article as he could; he removed it from the Internet Archive and the Google cache, and put his entire website behind a registration wall. But here’s a PDF that contains the full article, and it’s as ugly and twisted a piece of racism as anything I’ve ever seen. Yerushalmi opens by calling Islam “an evil religion,” and “blacks … the most murderous of peoples.”

The Center for Security Policy sponsors “Family Security Matters.” On August 3, 2007, Family Security Matters published an opinion piece by Philip Atkinson, which advocated for making George W. Bush president for life, because “the inadequacy of Democracy, rule by the majority, is undeniable.” Furthermore, after giving Atkinson’s interpretation of Julius Caesar’s treatment of Gaul, the article called for emptying Iraq of its Arabs:  If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestige while terrifying American enemies.  The website removed all articles by Atkinson and references to the writer the next day after complaints were received, but several bloggers found similar passages in other articles by means of Google Cache

Think Progress notes thatdue to: “… some of the report’s broad and controversial claims about Islamic law, such as that all devout Muslims are duty-bound to wage jihad against unbelievers, ThinkProgress asked Gaffney how many actual Muslims or Islamic scholars he and his group had consulted with in writing the report. He could not name any, though he noted that he had consulted with various Muslims “over the years.”  So there you have it. A report on the threat posed by Islamic law to the United States, one of whose leaders admits to having started studying Islam only three years ago, whose authors admit consulting with no actual Muslims, produced by a think tank that has previously claimed that key members of the Obama administration are part of the Iran Lobby.”

SEE ALSO:

The advance of the anti-Muslim movement across America, Paul Woodward http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/the-advance-of-the-anti-muslim-movement-across-america.html

All Bigoted Islamophobic Roads Lead to Frank Gaffney, Richard Allen Smith http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4332

American Muslims must defend the Constitution of the United States , Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/american_muslims_must_defend_the_constitution_of_the_united_states/

America’s Ideals Are Being Challenged By Cordoba House Controversy, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/cordoba_house/

Anti-Mosque Coalition’s Website Owned By Neo-Conservative Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, Alex Seitz-Wald http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/24/gaffney-mosque-website/

Apostasy and Freedom of Faith in Islam, Sheila Musaji http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/apostasy_and_freedom_of_faith_in_islam/0016063

Michele Bachmann Endorses Call for Anti-Muslim Inquisition, Daniel Luban http://thefastertimes.com/diplomacy/2010/09/16/a-new-report-offers-prescriptions-for-an-anti-muslim-inquisition/

Bent on Confusing the Public about Islam:  The Far Right Exploits Rifqa Bary’s Case to Distort Islam, Louay Safi http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/bent_on_confusing_the_public_about_islam_the_far_right_exploits_rifqa_barys/

Center for Security Policy background http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Center_for_Security_Policy

Conservatives Chew Up Their Own in Battle Over Islamic Community Center, Bill Berkowitz http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributor/3601

Conservative Feud Grows Over Muslims White House Staffers, Shahed Amanullah http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/b/1726/

Henry Cooper background, Rightweb http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Cooper_Henry_F_Hank

Cordoba House:  Hope From the Ashes of Tragedy, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/muslim_cultural_center_and_mosque/

Cordoba House versus Team B:  Key to the Global 21st Century,  Dr. Robert D. Crane http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/cordoba_house_versus_team_b_key_to_the_global_21st_century/0018230

Stephen Coughlin: Islamofascist Nonsense, Larry Johnson http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/01/09/islamofascist_nonsense/

Does the first amendment apply to Muslims?, John Guardiano http://www.frumforum.com/does-the-first-amendment-apply-to-muslims

FBI Leaking To Neocon Conspiracy-Theorist Frank Gaffney?  http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/08/23/fbi-leaking-to-neocon-conspiracy-theorist-frank-gaffney/

For critics of Islam,“sharia” becomes shorthand for extremism, Michelle Boorstein http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/25/AR2010082504298.html?sid=ST2010082506505

Forget ‘Ground Zero Mosque’, It’s the Great Sharia Conspiracy, Daniel Luban http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52863

Fox & Friends crops Rauf’s CFR comments to fearmonger about Sharia law, Justin Berrier http://mediamatters.org/blog/201009140028

Fox Promotes NSS “Islamic Crescent Logo” Conspiracy Theory, Richard Bartholomew http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/fox-promotes-nss-islamic-crescent-logo-conspiracy-theory/

Free-speech hero or an anti-Islamic publicity hound? Geert Wilders is coming to America., Mark Hosenball http://www.newsweek.com/2009/02/16/the-flying-dutchman.html

Gaffney: The left and Islamists are both “advancing the takedown of America”, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201008230064

Gaffney: The President ‘May Actually Still Be’ A Muslim http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/09/gaffney-the-president-may-actually-be-a-muslim/

Frank Gaffney: At War with Islam http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2009/08/18/frank-gaffney-at-war-with-islam/

Frank Gaffney: Obama Duped America Like Hitler Duped Chamberlain http://www.alan.com/2009/06/08/frank-gaffney-obama-duped-america-like-hitler-duped-chamberlain/

Pete Hoekstra, Shameless Buffoon, Steve Benen http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_12/021638.php

Hoekstra’s “epic grandstanding”, Jason Linkins   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/11/rachel-maddow-takes-on-pe_n_353706.html

House Republicans pal around with anti-Muslim, anti-Black racist David Yerushalmi, Alex Kane http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/house-republicans-pal-around-with-anti-muslim-anti-black-racist-david-yerushalmi.html

How Many Muslims Contributed To New Right-Wing ‘Team B’ Report On Islamic Sharia Law? None, Matt Duss http://thinkprogress.org/2010/09/15/team-b-sharia-report/

Is Sharia law reconcilable with modernity?, Sh. Ali Gomaa http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/08/is_sharia_law_reconcilable_with_modernity.html 

Islam and democracy – article collection http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/democracy_political_order/

Islamic Law:  A Thematic Primer on Human Rights, Dr. Robert D. Crane http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamic_law_a_thematic_primer_on_human_rights/

Islamic Sharia and Jewish Halakha Arbitration Courts, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamic_sharia_and_jewish_halakha_arbitration_courts/

Islamophobia Machine Targets American Muslims, Nihad Awad http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamophobia_machine_targets_american_muslims/

Islamophobia no longer questioned – even by our elected representatives, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/islamophobia_no_longer_even_questioned/

Israelis, McCain Neocons Behind Anti-Islam “Obsession” DVD, Kurt Nimmo http://www.infowars.com/israelis-mccain-neocons-behind-anti-islam-obsession-dvd/

Media rife with anti-Muslim rhetoric in weeks leading up to 9-11 anniversary http://mediamatters.org/research/201009090008

The Misinformants: What ‘stealth jihad’ doesn’t mean, Lisa Miller http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/28/stealth-jihad-conveys-paranoia.html

Mosque debate is not a distraction, Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/23/park51

MPAC’s Response to Frank Gaffney’s Slander http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=249 

NeoCons Make Unapologetic Call for McCarthyism against Muslims http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/09/16/the-neocons-make-unapologetic-call-for-mccarthyism-against-muslims/

Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war, Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2007/02/14/neoconservatism

New Rainbow of Islamic Knowledge and Religious Diversity: Zaytuna College, Dr. Ibram Rogers http://diverseeducation.com/blogpost/303/new-rainbow-of-islamic-knowledge-and-religious-diversity-zaytuna-college.html 

The New Anti-Semitism: Recent attacks on Islam in the United States echo old slurs against Jews, Daniel Luban http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/43069/the-new-anti-semitism-2/2/

Nuclear Security Summit Logo Is Proof of What?, Sheila Musaji http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/symbols/

Obsession:  Deja Vu! Never Again?, Jeff Siddiqui http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/obsession_deja_vu_never_again/

The Pathetic Desperation of the Anti-Kagan Campaign http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/individuals/frank-gaffney

Progressive radio show in NY serves up neocon moonshine about Islam, Philip Weiss http://mondoweiss.net/2009/12/progressive-radio-show-in-ny-serves-up-neocon-moonshine-about-islam.html

Review: Documentary “America at a Crossroads”, Rafia Zakaria http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/r/2479/

Right-Wing Nuts: “Obama is a Mooslim, Convert Mooslims” http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/09/right-wing-nuts-obama-is-a-mooslim-convert-mooslims/

The Right’s Anti-Islam Extremists, John Guardiano http://www.frumforum.com/confronting-the-rights-anti-islam-extremists

On Team B-ing, Spencer Ackerman http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/09/16/on-team-b-ing/

Separation of church and state – article collection http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/separation_of_church_and_state/

Sharia – collection of articles http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/shariah_fiqh_islamic_law_ethical_moral_issues/

Specter Embraces Pipes Islamophobia, Richard Silverstein http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/05/15/specter-embraces-pipes-islamophobia/

The Terror Industry And Anti-Jihadism, Who Benefits?, Richard Silverstein http://www.eurasiareview.com/201009168239/the-terror-industry-and-anti-jihadism-who-benefits.html

What Shariah Law Is All About, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf http://www.huffingtonpost.com/imam-feisal-abdul-rauf/what-shariah-law-is-all-a_b_190825.html

Who’s Afraid of Shariah? , Sumbul ali-Karamali http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sumbul-alikaramali/whos-afraid-of-shariah_b_701331.html

Why the GOP embraced Islamophobia, Joe Conason http://www.salon.com/news/politics/republican_party/?story=/opinion/conason/2010/09/12/islamo

Woolsey’s World War IV Comments Reveal Truth About War on Iraq, Stan Moore http://dissidentvoice.org/Articles3/Moore_Woolsey.htm

Yerushalmi, Anti-Semitic White-Supremacist Orthodox Jew Tries To Ban Islam In US, Bruce Wilson http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/12/27/20819/823

Yerushalmi: Devout Jewish Fascist, Richard Silverstein http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/08/24/david-yerushalmi-devout-jewish-fascist/

The Connection Between Zionism & Organized Islamophobia – The Facts

Source

Aubrey Chernick, Major funder of Zionist Orgs & Islamophobic Orgs

Conspiracy Theory?

Much has been said about the disproportionate Zionist presence in the world of organized Islamophobia. Now we learn that there is more to that claim than unfounded conspiracy theories. It turns out the main funder of anti-Muslim blogger/anti-Park51 organizer Robert Spencer and his hate site JihadWatch are husband and wife duo Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, the same couple are ardent supporters of Zionist causes and major funders of pro-Israel groups across the country.

Aubrey Chernick according to Politico,

A onetime trustee of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network that made its name partly with hawkish pro-Israel commentary and of late has kept up a steady stream of anti-mosque postings, including one rebutting attacks by CAIR against Spencer — who Pajamas CEO Roger Simon called “one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror.”

Politico lists some of the Zionist propaganda organizations and pro-occupation front organizations that Aubrey and Joyce Chernick have funded over the years:

• The Zionist Organization of America
• MEMRI, a group that distributes translations of inflammatory Arabic language material
• The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a group that tracks what it depicts as the threat of radical Islam, run by notorious Islamophobe Steven Emerson
• CAMERA, a group that tracks what it says is anti-Israel bias in the media and that is associated with Daniel Pipes
• The Central Fund for Israel, a clearinghouse for moneys directed to pro-settler groups
• A number of conservative think tanks that are aligned with the Likud.

The Chernicks are also major funders of Jewish groups including: The American Jewish Congress, The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, and The Anti-Defamation League.

Lauren Rozen goes into more depth as far as the contributions and think tanks such as the Hudson Institute, Defense of Democracies, Central Fund of Israel, etc. (via. Richard Silverstein), including some well-known anti-Muslim and Islamophobic initiatives (in bold below).

Laura Rozen has discovered that Chernick’s charity-giving is done through the Fairbrook Foundation ($66-million in assets). According to its 2008 IRS 990 report, among the far-right pro-Israel groups he’s funding are:

• Ateret Cohanim ($30,000), involved in the Judaization of East Jerusalem through “appropriation” of Arab homes
• Muslim-basher Bridgette Gabriel’s American Congress for Truth ($50,000)
• Aish HaTorah, funders of the anti-Muslim films Obsessed and Third Jihad ($14,000)
• the anti-Palestinian media advocacy group MEMRI ($100,000)
• American Freedom Alliance, another Muslim-bashing group, founded by Avi Davis, which defends western civilization from the unwashed hordes ($120,000)
• Gary Bauer’s American Values ($80,000)
• Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture ($160,000)
• The anti-Arab media advocacy group CAMERA ($25,000)
• The Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an Arab-bashing group established by a Pakistani neocon ($160,000)
• Defend the West, yet another Muslim-turncoat group founded by Ibn Warraq ($130,000)
• Hudson Institute ($50,000); Heritage Foundation ($50,000)
• The Jewish neo-con security think tank JINSA ($15,000)
• The anti-Arab media advocacy group Second Draft ($40,000)
• Stand With Us ($20,000); and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum ($180,000).
• In 2005, Chernick gave $60,000 to the Central Fund of Israel, one of the largest pro-settler ‘philanthropic’ advocacy groups.

This information is quite disturbing on a number of levels, foremost amongst them being the scant media attention being given to it as opposed to hyped-up stories such as the most recent attempt to sabotage the Park51 project with ten degrees of seperation/guilt-by-association smears against one of the investors in Park51, Hisham El-Zanaty.

The non-news story smears Zanaty by claiming that his one time donation to the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) of $6,050 in 1999 indicts him as a terror supporter. HLF was accused of giving aid to Hamas in the guise of charitable work.

So Zanaty was supposed to have foreknowledge about the HLF that even the US government didn’t have? Is it reasonable then to assume that everyone who gave money to the HLF in 1999 knew that the HLF was giving money to Hamas?

This AP news story sums it up quite nicely,

Many other donors to the foundation gave thinking their donations would fund humanitarian programs.

Other people and companies who donated money, equipment or services to the foundation the year Elzanaty gave included NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon, the Microsoft Corp., and a medical equipment company owned by General Electric, according to tax records.
When the foundation’s leaders were indicted, Attorney General John Ashcroft said, the case was not “a reflection on the well-meaning people who may have donated funds to the foundation.”

Even the Attorney General under George Bush, the one who was instrumental in the implementation of the Patriot Act affirmed what is obvious common sense, the case was not “a reflection on the well-meaning people who may have donated funds to the foundation.”
However, for some reason this non-story about Zanaty eclipses the very real story about the implications surrounding the funding of leading Jewish and Zionist organizations, JihadWatch, and Conservative groups many of which are the chief proponents behind the anti-Mosque drive.
How comfortable do the leaders of the ADL, AJC and others feel about receiving money from a couple who at the same time are the chief funders of an organization and a group of anti-Muslim bigots who are leading the charge in fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment across the United States?
Will they be coureagous enough to return the money they have received from the Chernicks and say that they do not want to be tainted by people such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer who as we have documented are thoroughly anti-Islam and anti-Muslim? Will the media drop its willful ignorance and double standards and begin to look into the glaring data out there?

Shariah Law, Civil Society and Human Rights

Written by Asghar Ali Engineer | Source

Recently there was a conference in Abuja, Northern Nigeria on Islamic penal and family laws and human rights to which I was invited as a resource person. The conference was convened after a woman Amina Laval was sentenced to death by stoning in Northern Nigeria for the offence of adultery. This sentence had attracted world-wide protest from human rights groups.

In this conference convened by the International Human Rights Law Group, Nigeria, not only modern scholars but also a large number of traditional ‘Ulama also participated. It was a useful dialogue. What was a pleasant surprise to me was that the Nigerian ‘Ulama could speak English fluently and some of them were also fully conversant with the modern academic jargon.

Number of papers were presented from both sides and were followed by heated but not acrimonious debates which generated as much light than as heat. The issue at stake was whether there was need for change in Islamic penal and family laws. Most of the ‘Ulama, of Maliki persuasion (Maliki madhhab) resisted change (with few exceptions, of course) while modern scholars of Islam pleaded for it. I was also invited for a live T.V. discussion on Islamic penal laws with an ‘Alim from Abuja.

The modern society has thrown up new problems which need to be tackled within the framework of Qur’an and hadith. The great jurists of early Islam also experienced various problems and they tried to tackle them in the light of their own experiences and social background. The early jurists were as much a product of their own society as we are of our own. The early jurists tried to tackle problems they were confronted with reference to the Qur’an and Sunnah of the Prophet (PBUH). Thus an element of human interpretation of the divine word and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet was definitely involved.

The ‘Ulama hesitantly accepted this fact in all discussions. Thus it was established that the Shari’ah was based on human understanding of the divine sources in the light of their socio-cultural experiences. It is true that the society remained stagnant for long throughout medieval ages and no need was felt for change until nineteenth century when colonial rule in most of the Muslim countries created conditions for social change. Most of the modern movement thus started in this century. The great thinkers and reformers like Jamaluddin Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and others began to stress need for change.

In the post colonial period the nation states came into existence and these nation states undertook programme for modernisation and nation building which included programmes for spread of modern education. The spread of modern education both among men and women brought much greater awareness of social, political, cultural and religious rights. The women also acquired higher education and modern skills and began to demand their rights. All this created need and social pressure for change.

However, the ‘Ulama in general, with few exceptions, refuse to take notice of any change and maintain that no change is needed. They want to follow the Shari’ah laws as evolved by the great Imams, the founders of various madhahib (schools). It is said that in the early period of Islam there were more than 100 schools of which only four in Sunni Islam survived. All the imams maintained that it is their opinion and their disciples differed from them on many issues. Thus there always was space for interpretation and re-interpretation.

The principle of ijtihad is of course accepted by all without exception but the conservative ‘ulama do not permit anyone to do ijtihad saying no one is qualified to do ijtihad. Of course every one cannot be permitted to do it unless one has profound knowledge of Qur’an, sunnah, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), and history of evolution of Shari’ah. No one without such knowledge would ever claim right to do ijtihad. The Nigerian ‘ulama too raised such objections and maintained no one including themselves are qualified to attempt ijtihad.

In fact the question is not so much of qualification as of willingness. Unless one is ready to open ones mind to modern conditions and use divine sources to reinterpret issues in penal and family laws, it will not be possible to explore the richness and comprehensiveness of the Qur’anic teachings.

The ‘Ulama in Nigeria also expressed their apprehension that this re-interpretation may lead to what is called tafsir bi’ al-ra’i (i.e. basing the Qur’anic meaning on ones own opinion) and they quoted a hadith that one who attempts tafsir bi’ al-ra’i his place is in hell. This hadith is undoubtedly true but this was meant for those who tried to use the divine injunctions to suit their selfish desires and were swayed by their own interests. No one can be permitted to use the Qur’anic injunctions to suit ones personal interests.

But an honest and sincere attempt to interpret a divine source to meet the given conditions cannot be equated with tafsir bi’ al-ra’i. If it is so equated then everyone, including the founders of various schools of jurisprudence, will also be exposed to that charge i.e. doing tafsir bi’ al-ra’i. One must distinguish between an honest sincere attempt and being swayed by personal desires (what the Qur’an calls hawa’).

The Holy Prophet permitted ijtihad even if there is likelihood of committing error unconsciously. He said that for those who do ijtihad and commit error would be singly rewarded and those who do so correctly will be doubly rewarded by Allah. The Prophet was well aware that his ummah will continue to face new situations and ijtihad (utmost intellectual exertions to understand) will be very much needed. But with the decline of Muslim power with sack of Baghdad in 13th Century the ‘ulama became extremely apprehensive and closed the door of ijtihad ever since.

Now the political situation has radically changed and nation states generally tend to be democratic and a large number of Muslims live in Diaspora in many non-Muslim countries. Each nation-state has its own problems depending on level of its development, composition of population, spread of literacy and awareness of people. What is to be borne in mind that though the Qur’anic principles and values are universal, but their application is situation specific. The early jurists tried their best to apply these values and principles according to their situation and we have to apply them according to ours.

One clarification is highly necessary here. The Shari’ah has two distinct aspects: ‘ibadat and mu’amalat i.e. one aspect pertaining to matters of worship and beliefs about tawhid (unity of God), risalah (Mohammad being messenger of Allah and other previous prophets), qiyamah (Day of Resurrection). These are most fundamental beliefs (‘aqa’id) and cannot be subject to any debating much less any change. There is naturally no question of any ijtihad as far as these beliefs are concerned. This also includes prayers, fasting, haj and so on.

However, it is the other aspect i.e. mu’amalat which is under discussion for likelihood of change. This was made abundantly clear to the ‘ulama in Nigeria also. Mu’amalat pertain to interpersonal relations, family laws ahwal al-shakhsiyyah), crime and punishments, etc. Here too the Qur’an has laid down certain basic principles and values which are not subject to any change.

It was pointed out by me that most stressed values of Qur’an are justice (‘adl), ihsan (benevolence), rahmah (compassion), hikmah (wisdom) and human dignity. These values cannot be compromised in any law and if any law violates these values would be Islamically unacceptable. All the ‘Ulama accepted this unanimously and here was a meeting point. This was stressed in final declaration also.

It is also important to note that these values could not find their fullest _expression during medieval ages. The Qur’anic values were far ahead of their time and the concept of justice in democratic society is qualitatively different from that in a medieval society. What was considered just then cannot be considered just now in a democratic society. This will have to be kept in mind by the law -makers today. This becomes the main point of contention between those who resist any change and those who advocate change.

The modern concept of justice is rights-oriented and not merely duty-oriented. This is great difference. Also, modern discourse gives centrality to freedom and liberty whereas medieval society and traditional ‘ulama stress ‘aqa’id, constancy of epistemology. Mr. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a modern Nigerian Islamic scholar pointed out, “One point needs to be made before we proceed with a discussion of modernist epistemologies. Traditional Muslim thought rejects completely the principles of modernism including “western” conceptions of liberty were alien to Islam. In most instances the rejection is based on the source of these theories and their root in Judeo-Christian and/or secular paradigms.”

The democratic discourse considers liberty as quite central and no democracy can survive without its centrality. However, no one can seriously argue that liberty or libertarian critique can ever ignore values mentioned above. Freedom can never transcend limits set by these fundamental values. Modern human rights discourse is entirely based on certain values. Freedom should be contraposed to authoritarianism and not to values. What it means is that there is no single authoritarian interpretation of divine source but there can be multiple interpretations.

It is interesting to note that right from the early period of Islam multiple interpretations of the Qur’an have been in vogue. It is not later day development. Many eminent commentators wrote commentaries on the Qur’an having significant differences. Also, in Shari’ah formulations imams not only relied on different ahadith but also on different interpretations. A lot has been written on this. In nineteenth century too when colonial rule began in the Muslim countries, reformists, inspired by new vision, began to reinterpret earlier sources.

In the early Islamic period differences of interpretation were mainly a result of personal inclinations. Now the differences between the orthodox and conservatives arise more on account of modern situation and new developments. The reformists today see much better chances of unfolding of the Qur’anic values and seeing various issues in the light of unfolding of these values.

Today in a democratic social structure civil society plays an important role due to its enhanced awareness and greater empowerment. The ‘expert view’ is also subject to much greater scrutiny today. The doctrine of ijma’ (consensus) was limited to only ‘ulama in those days. Today the doctrine could be extended to ummah as a whole, which was the real intention behind ijma’. In those days civil society did not exist nor even a section of it could intervene in such matters. Thus ijma’ remained confined to the experts (i.e. ‘ulama) only.

Today the concept of human rights has quite significant role to play. One cannot dismiss human rights merely as ‘western concept’. They have come to be accepted universally and most of the Muslim countries are also signatories to the declaration issued by the UNO in 1948. The universality of human rights is such that many Muslim countries and their organisations are not only accepting them but also examining them in the light of teachings of Islam. Today we have Islamic declaration of human rights.

Thus we see that Organisation of Islamic Conference adopted a declaration of human rights in Islam in Cairo on 5th August 1990. There are twenty-five articles in all in this declaration. In fact numerous Qur’anic and Shari’ah pronouncements are quite compatible to human rights concept today. In fact these pronouncements preceded human rights declaration by centuries. Unfortunately the authoritarian Muslim regimes right from medieval ages until today never allowed these pronouncements the centrality they ought to have been accorded.

Many of the Shari’ah formulations based as they were on human endeavour to apply divine injunctions in their own times were also affected by medieval ethos and thus would certainly serve divine purpose better if they are rethought and reformulated afresh, especially those about which there are is no unanimity in ummah. We would also like to deal with issues of crime and punishments.

Take punishment for adultery, for example. The Shari’ah punishment for adultery in shari’ah is stoning to death. This punishment has not been mentioned in the Qur’an. In Qur’an the punishment for zina is hundred flogs. The Qur’an says, “The adulteress and adulterer, flog each of them (with) a hundred stripes, and let not pity; for them detain you from obedience to Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day, and let a party of believers witness their chastisement.” (24:2)

It is to be noted here that in Arabic the word zina is used for fornication, rape and adultery. There are no separate words for these acts in Arabic. Thus he word zinai in this verse includes adultery as well as fornication and rape. The punishment for both fornication as well as adultery thus will be flogging and not stoning to death. The shari- ‘ah does prescribe stoning to death for adultery. But there is no basis for this in Qur’an. Even its basis in sunnah is subject to controversy.

Stoning to death was, in fact, a Jewish punishment and we find reference to this in Bukhari (23:61). According to Bukhari the Prophet (PBUH) had given this punishment to a Jew and a Jewess according to their religious tradition. And to the Muslims it was given before revelation of this verse. That the Qur’an never intended to accord stoning to death for adultery becomes clear from the verse 4:25 wherein it is specifically mentioned that the punishment for married slave-girls is half that of free women. How the death punishment can be halved? Since it is specifically mentioned married slave-girl what is intended is a punishment for adultery and not for fornication.

Also the following verse i.e. 4:3 also make it quite clear that punishment for adultery could not be stoning to death. According to this verse an adulterer can marry only an adulteress or an unbeliever and vice versa. To marry an unbeliever has been mentioned as he/she did not really strongly disapprove of such relationship in the Arab society of that time. Thus a Muslim adulterer or adulteress was considered closer to an unbeliever than to Muslims. Where is then the question of stoning to death?

The Seceders (Khawarij) never accepted stoning to death as punishment for adultery arguing on the basis of the verse 4:25. Thus one has to seriously re-think the punishment for adultery in Islam. Amina Laval’s case has made it all the more urgent. Amina is a divorcee and was in fact deceived by a man who promised her to marry. She confessed to illegitimate relationship without knowing the implications. No one informed her of the implications of her confession. She is an illiterate woman from rural background.

It should also be borne in mind that a large number of Muslims live in non-Muslim countries and hence are not subject to Shari’ah punishments. In India where second largest number of Muslims in the world live, there is common secular criminal code. Shari’ah laws regarding crime and punishment do not apply to them. The British rulers enforced secular criminal code in early twentieth century and the Indian ‘Ulama accepted it unanimously. In fact Maulavi Nazir Ahmed, an eminent ‘alim of the time translated this secular criminal code into Urdu and was awarded the coveted title of Shamsul ‘Ulama (Sun of Islamic theologians) by the British.

It would be in keeping with the Qur’anic spirit to abolish stoning to death as a punishment for adultery. It is also important to note that the Qur’anic outlook for crime and punishment is reformatory and not merely punishment-oriented. Punishment is an ultimate measure failing all other efforts to reform an offender or a criminal. Tauba (sincere repentance) is a measure recommended by the Qur’an repeatedly and many verses on punishment like the one on theft are followed by the ones on repentance and reform. Thus the verse 5:38 prescribing punishment for theft is followed by 5:39, which says, “But whosoever repents after his wrongdoing and reforms, Allah will turn to him (mercifully). Surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

Thus it is quite clear that emphasis is as much on repentance and reform as on punishment. One cannot inflict ultimate punishment without giving chance to reform. In connection with these punishments it also has to be borne in mind that before appearance of Islam on the scene the moral conditions of the Arab society during the period of Jahiliyyah (ignorance) was far from healthy. Various crimes sometimes not considered crimes at all) like zina and inter-tribal raids etc. were widespread and had to be brought under check. And thus certain punishments had to be prescribed which appear harsh to check those crimes.

These punishments have to be seen in the then prevailing social conditions in Arabia. Only hardened criminals refusing to repent and reform could be awarded these punishments. In general emphasis is on repentance and reform. Punishments are means and not ends. Unfortunately those not aware of social conditions, social changes taking place and philosophical ends, rigidly insist on punishments and miss the baby for bath water.

Even the punishment for flogging for zina (fornication or adultery) appear quite harsh to us as we do not keep social conditions then prevailing into mind. Also, the way today this punishment is inflicted is not the way it was inflicted in the Prophet’s period or the period immediately following his period. The provision for a party of believers witnessing the act of flogging (24:2) suggests that it was not so much bodily punishment as disgracing that was intended.

In early period whip was not used for flogging but either stick or hand or even shoes. The intention was disgracing rather than injuring. The offender was not even asked to remove all clothes unless he wore very thick clothes. However, later on rigorous rules were laid down and intention changed from disgracing to physically torturing.

Today when, unlike medieval society, emphasis is on human dignity and right to life as sacred right (the Qur’an also emphasises right to life) one has to rethink the concept of punishment as less corporeal and more as reformatory unless all efforts to reform an offender fail. Also, one must exercise ones wisdom in assessing the circumstances, which compel one to commit a particular offence. Justice otherwise cannot be done.

At Harvard, Protest Over Honoree’s Remarks About Muslims

By KATIE ZEZIMA | Source

BOSTON — Some Harvard University faculty members and students are objecting to a plan to honor an alumnus and editor of The New Republic because of a blog post he published this month that said Muslim life is “cheap.”

The editor, Martin Peretz, is scheduled to be honored Sept. 25 during a 50th-anniversary celebration of the university’s social studies program. Friends, alumni and former students of Mr. Peretz, who taught at Harvard for more than 40 years, established an undergraduate research fund in his name this year. Harvard already has a professorship in Yiddish literature named for Mr. Peretz.

But some on the campus are calling on the university to rename the fund or rescind the honor in light of a blog post Mr. Peretz wrote on Sept. 4. In the post, written in response to a New York Times poll on a proposed Muslim community center near ground zero, Mr. Peretz said that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”

Mr. Peretz asserted that among Muslims led by the founder of the proposed center, “there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood,” and went on to say that he wondered “whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

After being criticized by Nicholas D. Kristof on Sunday in his Op-Ed column in The Times, Mr. Peretz apologized Monday for the “embarrassing sentence” about the First Amendment, but stood by his other comments.

Mr. Peretz did not respond to an e-mail message and telephone call for comment on Thursday.

Abdelnasser Rashid, president of the Harvard Islamic Society, said a letter urging the Social Studies Department to rescind the honor was signed by numerous student groups and delivered to the department this week.

“Social studies will alienate a large segment of the student body, including its own concentrators, if it does not reverse its decision,” Mr. Rashid said.

In a statement, Harvard said that Mr. Peretz’s assertions were “distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so,” but that it would not revoke the honor.

“It is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with them, to express their views,” the statement said.

Media: Jon Stewart Vs Bigot Pastor

The Daily Show