All Entries in the "Books" Category

What Stirred Hornet’s Nest?

Peter Beinart’s Book Makes Fairly Simple Argument

How the West Used Libya to Hijack the Arab Revolts

Vijay Prashad talks neoliberal economics, the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and why NATO’s intervention in Libya marked a new chapter in the story of the Arab revolts.

“Islamic” Honor Killings and Crocodile Tears

Source

This month Pamella Geller published a book entitled, “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance,” which she describes as a “how to” guide for fighting various Islamic menaces, including “creeping sharia” and “stealth jihad.”  She also describes how Muslims, who make up less than 2% of the American population, are “Islamic Supremacists” plotting to take over every aspect of American life.

Geller has also announced plans for a future book tentatively entitled, “Sex, Murder, and Islam: Honor Killing in America. ”  She says the book will be about the “ongoing proliferation” of honor killings among immigrants to the West from Muslim countries.   Honor killings have recently become the centerpiece of Geller’s campaign against Islam, and feature prominently on her website, Atlas Shrugs.

Honor killings are not Islamic, and they are not condoned in the Qur’an.  This is a matter of fact. Honor killing is a form of murder where the victim is denied a fair trial, which is contrary to Islamic law.  Islam opposes acts of murder and vigilantism, and likens the killing of one human being to the killing of the entire human race (Qur’an 5:32, 6:151, 17:33).  Honor killing is a cultural inheritance which predates Islam by centuries, and  Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations have all said that honor killings cut across cultural and religious lines.

Nevertheless, “Islamic” honor killings are a public relations bonanza for Islamophobes, especially when they take place in a Western country.  They are used to reinforce the notion that Islam is inherently violent and irrational, and to suggest that Muslim families view a young woman’s adoption of Western culture as a capital offense.  Isolated incidents are amplified through intense media coverage, stoking fears that Muslims are importing barbaric customs into Western countries through immigration.

Anti-Muslim hate sites including Jihadwatch, Atlas Shrugs, and Frontpage Magazine have been weeping crocodile tears for Aqsa Parvez since she was killed by her father and brother in December of 2007 in an apparent honor killing.  Both men received life sentences for their crime in June of 2010, but that hasn’t stopped Pamela Geller from continuing to exploit the incident to advance her agenda.  She recently managed to raise $5,000 in donations she used to fund a controversial memorial plaque for Aqsa Parvez in Israel.

Parvez is the ideal poster child for their campaign to vilify Islam because she was the teenage daughter of Muslim immigrants living in Ontario, Canada.  For similar reasons, Robert Spencer is exploiting the tragic death of two sisters, Sarah Yaser Said, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, who were shot and killed by their father, an immigrant from Egypt, in January of 2008 in Texas.

Geller and Spencer show little interest in similar crimes when they are committed by non-Muslims.  A few months before Aqsa Parvez was killed, a gruesome video surfaced of a 17-year old Du’a Khalil Aswad in Mosul, Iraq being stoned to death by a mob while she cried out for help.  The video garnered immediate attention when it was presumed to be an “Islamic” crime, but quickly dropped out of the spotlight when it turned out the victim was a Kurdish girl from the Yazidi religion who was killed for having an Arab Muslim boyfriend.

In 2008, a man in Chicago killed his pregnant daughter, her 3-year old child, and her husband by burning down their home because she had married a man from a lower caste.  This horrific crime was ignored by the usual hate brigade because the perpetrator was a non-Muslim immigrant from India.  Robert Spencer mentioned the case on Jihadwatch only briefly, and that was to complain that media attention should be going to the murder of the Said sisters instead.

Geller’s Atlas Shrugs features a memorial page entitled, “Honor Killing: Islam’s Gruesome Gallery.”  It is indeed gruesome and serves her agenda of inspiring outrage against Islam and Muslims. Unlike the Memini (“Remembrance”) memorial for victims of honor killings from all religious backgrounds, Geller’s Gruesome Gallery is devoted exclusively to highlighting honor killings associated with Muslims.

Geller and Spencer have also been relentless in trying to get police in Tampa, Florida to reopen the case of  Fatima Abdullah, insisting she was the victim of an honor killing and subsequent cover up.   The 48-year old woman died when she fell and hit her head on a coffee table at her brother’s home.  Her brother was not home at the time of the incident.

Pamela Geller says the death is suspicious because Abdullah could not have “suicided” herself by “banging her head on a table.” Robert Spencer wrote about the Abdullah case on Jihadwatch, saying:

This is the sharia in America. The idea that a woman would die after she ‘threw herself to the floor’ or hit her head repeatedly on the coffee table is institutionalized gender apartheid, the sharia. The idea defies logic, belies reality.

As a self-proclaimed scholar on Islam, Spencer should know that Islamic law (“the sharia”) does not sanction honor killing.  The coroner’s autopsy report concluded the “Manner of Death” was “Accident (Decedent fell and struck head on table).”  The detailed medical report does not mention any evidence of foul play.

Jihadwatch later published a page with the headline, “Tampa Police crime scene tech now admits ‘fear of Muslim reprisal’ in honor killing classified as accidental death,” which was reposted to numerous anti-Muslim hate sites.  This implies police lied when they ruled the case an accident, but a closer look at the details shows this headline is misleading.

A crime scene technician from the Tampa police department called the Florida Family Association (FFA) nearly a year after the initial investigation and asked that her name be removed from their website, which has been stirring up controversy over the case, in concert with Geller and Spencer.  The technician did not want her name posted on a controversial public website, though it is unclear from the reports whether she feared reprisal from angry Muslims, or from “activists” aligned with the FFA.

Although Tampa police have stood by results of their initial investigation, Geller and an assortment of other loony Islamophobes continue to exert pressure on authorities to reopen the case.  They have linked the case to their conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over the country, apparently starting with the Tampa Police Department.  Geller has dubbed the city “Tampastan,” and claims Florida police are engaged in a cover up because, “…murdering Muslim women in America is preferable to offending Muslims or insulting Islam.”

It is tempting to dismiss Geller and Spencer for their outlandish statements and crude publicity stunts, but they have enjoyed surprising success, especially in using the mainstream media as a conduit for spreading their hateful ideas.  If they were targeting any other minority group, they would probably be consigned to the lunatic fringe.

Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood and a new historic testimony

Hussam Tammam | Source

Fatemah Abdel-Hadi, one of the founders of the Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood Chapter and a prominent leader in the group, was one of the founding generation of Muslim women activists. Women’s activism was modest in the first few years after the creation of the group in Ismailiya before it moved to Cairo in April 1932, and its work became better known under the leadership of Labiba Ahmed. In April 1944, it launched into action with the creation of the first Executive Committee of the Muslim Sisterhood upon the orders of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Hassan Al-Banna, and under the supervision of Mahmoud Al-Gohari. The committee included 12 female members chaired by Fatemah Al-Ashmawi and her deputy, Abdel-Hadi.

Abdel-Hadi was the wife of a very important although not well-known figure, Mohamed Youssef Hawash, who was a prominent member of the famous 1965 Group who were disciples of the famous idealogue Sayed Qutb. Not only was Hawash Qutb’s companion in jail and then execution, he is considered Qutb’s eye through which he viewed the Muslim Brotherhood and the hand that led him as an outsider through the group’s inner machinations which were difficult to decipher in the 1950s and 1960s, during bloody confrontations with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s regime.

Abdel-Hadi was a firsthand witness of an era; she was one of the founders of the Muslim Sisterhood, a realm that three quarters of a century later remains unexplored in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the overall Islamic movement. Only few have surfaced out of this dynamic and at times explosive entity, such as Haja Zeinab Al-Ghazali who was viewed as a symbol of Muslim women’s activism and fascination after the publication of her famous autobiography Days of My Life, about the true and unwritten record of the Muslim women’s movement. Abdel-Hadi’s testimonial serves as an introduction to this history, especially from a social perspective.

Abdel-Hadi’s life and record was intertwined with the major milestones, events and historic transformations of the Muslim Sisterhood and overall Islamic movement. It is also linked to the most prominent central figures in the history of Islamic activism in Egypt and Arab world. She was very close to the households of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the group’s historic icons; she was in close relations with Al-Banna’s family, wife and daughters, and in fact was the only female not in his family to be present at his home when he was assassinated, when his body was prepared for burial, and as his funeral procession left his house.

She was also closely connected with the women in the households of the second Muslim Brotherhood guide, Hassan Al-Hodeibi, and Qutb, the second most prominent idealogue of the group after its founder Banna. She lived with them through the ordeals of the arrest of their men and the dilemmas of Brotherhood households without their patriarchs. Abdel-Hadi also lived through the ordeal of imprisonment herself with 50 other Sisterhood members, and was a witness to and influential activist in the Muslim women’s movement.

Since her husband was Qutb’s companion during years of incarceration, where they spent most of their time in the prison hospital, Abdel-Hadi’s testimonial of the Islamic movement’s philosopher in the middle of the last century is exceptionally significant. She knew him at close proximity because of her husband’s relationship with him, and was familiar with his personal life through her ties with his sisters, and during her visits with her husband and his companion in prison and hospital. In time, she became a confidante of Qutb and even a go-between for a proposed marriage that failed.

Abdel-Hadi’s testimonial on the 1965 Group, which has earned a prominent place in the history of relations between the Muslim Brotherhood and the state, is a unique and exceptional perspective not only because of her proximity and connection to many events and details in these events, but also because she is one of its prominent victims. She experienced prison first hand and her husband was the last of three executed.

Abdel-Hadi’s narrative in My Journey with the Muslim Sisterhood: From Imam Al-Banna to Nasser’s Jails is a little known testimonial in the history of the Islamic movement, in which she attempts to document the most significant and muted events as part of a historic record. Her testimonial covers an important time in the history of the Islamic movement spanning more than three decades, beginning at the end of WWII, through the July revolution and the fall of the monarchy in Egypt, as well as critical years during the Nasser regime and the beginning of Sadat’s rule.

What is unique about her tale is that she presents a very personal insight, even when she discusses events and incidents that formed the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt during a very complicated era. She reveals her relations with figures who changed the course of history, some of them executed by hanging while others became presidents of the republic. It is an eyewitness and sometimes firsthand account where she is a protagonist in the events.

Unlike others, Abdel-Hadi does not exaggerate, inflate or improvise even when she relates her personal agony and suffering with her small family. Her young daughter and son lived through the ordeal of their mother’s incarceration, and their father’s imprisonment for many years, and his eventual execution.

Unlike other storylines, such as Zeinab Al-Ghazali’s, Abdel-Hadi’s tale appears to be more authentic as a historic testimonial about the acute conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the 1952 Revolution. What she lived through did not need emotional sensationalisation, or perhaps imaginary embelishments, to convince readers that the Muslim Brotherhood lived through true adversity under Nasser.

The most important aspect of Abdel-Hadi’s testimonial is that it is not purely political, but recounts important milestones in the social history of the Muslim Brotherhood movement — the group’s political dimension continues to overshadow its other facets that are mostly absent in testimonials and memoirs that document the history of the Brotherhood. Reading about Abdel-Hadi’s journey with the Brotherhood is key to understanding the important transformations which occurred in social life in Egypt over half a century, some of whose chapters we continue to live.

Abdel-Hadi’s testimonial spotlights the most important key to many of the critical transformations in the history of Muslim women’s activism, or preaching to women in general. Most significantly, the transformation of the Muslim Sisterhood from a social proselytisation movement into an ideological-political one caused by an even bigger transformation of the Muslim Brotherhood overall.

We find out how the Muslim Sisterhood was primarily focused on society and proselytisation in the beginning with the aim of promoting authentic piety, commitment to good conduct and values through charity, assisting the poor and needy, as well as collecting and distributing alms. Soon, it quickly delved into politics, perhaps as a result of momentous events, including the confrontation with the July Revolution regime, and morphed into a wing of an ideological movement immersed in all forms of politics, its rituals and leading figures.

There is an extensive discussion of the hijab (head veil) and its symbolism in the modern Islamic movement, and also its significance in religiosity and society in Egypt in general. We will be surprised at how it was almost non-existent when the Muslim Sisterhood was a prosetylising social movement before it immersed itself into a political conflict and slipped into the trap of ideology, making the hijab an icon that summarises the definition of faith and piety.

The transformation of the Islamic movement, especially the women’s chapter, into a political ideology required it to have prominent symbols and the hijab, and today’s niqab (face veil), met all the necessary criteria.

Further reading into this transformation reveals why prominent leading female activists in the Islamic movement became less public in the 1970s, such as Abdel-Hadi or Al-Ashmawi, while figures such as Al-Ghazali rose to the fore. The latter was an epitome of the transformation of the Muslim Sisterhood from a social prosetylitision movement into blatant political activism, with its ideological conflicts, components and conspicuous symbols.

Hussam Tammam is a researcher specialised in Islamist movements and ideology.

COVERING-UP, UNCOVERED: The Veil’s Revival

by Erin O’Donnell | Source

ONE EVENING in the late 1990s, Thomas professor of divinity Leila Ahmed saw a group of people gathered on Cambridge Common. All of the women were wearing hijab, the headscarf worn by some Muslim women but rarely seen at that time in the United States. Just the sight of hijab provoked a negative, “visceral” response in Ahmed, who was born and raised in Cairo in the 1940s, when even devout Muslim women of the middle and upper classes did not wear veils because they considered them old-fashioned. She took the appearance of veils in Cambridge, she explained recently, to mean that “there could be some fundamentalism taking root in America.”

That incident launched her on a 10-year study of women and Islam and their choices about the veil, and led ultimately to her new book, A Quiet Revolution (Yale). It also led her “into studying the very lively, complicated politics and history that were critical to—and in fact were the driving forces behind—both the unveiling movement of the early twentieth century and, later, of the re-veiling movement in the closing decades of the century,” Ahmed says. In the process, she says, she reexamined her own prejudices and reached surprising new conclusions about hijab. (Among women who wear it today, Ahmed explains, “hijab” usually refers to a veil that covers only the hair and neck; the burqa and niqab cover the face.)

Women in Egypt initially began to unveil around the turn of the twentieth century, as British occupiers sought to rescue Muslim women from what they took to be the oppression of Islam. But local women who unveiled had different reasons for doing so. “Unveiling,” Ahmed writes, “would become ever more clearly the emblem of an era of new hopes and desires, and of aspirations for modernity: the possibility of education and the right to work for both women and men, and of equal opportunity and advancement based on effort and merit.”

In the 1970s, most women began covering their heads again. After Egypt’s defeat in the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, groups that aimed to “Islamize” society, such as the Muslim Brotherhood—quashed under President Gamal Abdel Nasser—reemerged and flourished. At the same time, Saudi Arabia wielded increasing influence as an economic superpower that sought to spread its strict Wahhabi Islam globally. Islamist leaders of the period worked to persuade women to wear Islamic dress, but scholars who interviewed women during this period found that those who adopted it typically reported doing so willingly.

“As is the case sometimes today in America, many of the women who took on hijab did so against parental wishes,” Ahmed says. “Islamic dress gave them new authority as strictly observant religious women, and in a society where men and women were expected to maintain a certain separateness, it gave them the freedom to attend school and go to work—in offices, for example, shared with men—in ways that were socially acceptable. It certainly had some positive outcomes.”

The recent movement in Europe to ban Islamic dress for women echoes the old colonial concern for Muslim women, but Ahmed says it’s layered with something new. Hijab is now identified—wrongly, she believes—with violent strains of fundamentalist Islam. These assumptions, which she shared at the start of her research, “were quite mistaken,” she says now. “Certainly there are violent elements at the extreme edges, but the broad mainstream of the Islamist movement—according to all the experts—is overwhelmingly opposed to violence and committed to nonviolence.” She also emphasizes that the Muslim Brotherhood in particular has a long-standing commitment to social justice, including provision of education and medical treatment to the poor, and she believes such social activism is part of the organization’s legacy in America.

American Islam, she reports, was dramatically altered by 9/11, with more Muslims speaking publicly about their faith, and young Muslims insisting on a new dialogue within Muslim-American organizations. Immediately after 9/11, some women shed their veils to avoid harassment, but others began covering themselves for the first time in their lives. They cited a range of reasons: a desire to affirm their Muslim identity, to educate others and counter stereotypes, and sometimes to express solidarity with the Palestinians. Ahmed was particularly surprised to meet an American Muslim woman in Boston who said she hoped her headscarf would prompt other women to think about gender bias in society, including how clothing choices and physical appearance may influence the treatment of women.

Ahmed’s book has been widely reviewed in the United States and Britain, and she has faced some criticism for suggesting that the veil might symbolize a new kind of Muslim feminism in America; critics say it cannot shake its history as an emblem of oppression. Clearly, Ahmed responds, hijab can’t stand for empowerment in a place like Iran. “In a country where you’re free to choose to wear a veil, its meanings are worlds away from what it means when you’re forced to wear it,” she says. “That’s a critical point. The veil today has no universal meaning. Its meanings are always local.”

Racism and Islamophobia in America

Source | by Eric Walberg

Three books recently published by the American radical publisher Clarity Press reflect different aspects of racism in the US, which even under a black president is unfortunately alive and well, promoted in US policy at home and abroad — if not officially.

Devon Mihesua, American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities
Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims
Francis Boyle, The Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law

Top on the list of course is the continued second-class status of African-Americans, who make up an outsized proportion of prisoners, the unemployed and those living in poverty. One’s colour is enough to keep the black-and-white status quo intact, despite the cosmetic boost that Barack Obama’s election gave to the nation’s blacks.

But the endemic racism that Native Americans have experienced despite more or less blending in with the increasingly Hispanic and Asian mix of today’s America (most Native Americans are of mixed race) is a sad legacy that is equally endemic.

The irony is that Native American culture is revered around the world and by many Americans, especially by the young, as it appeals to the sense of unity of man and nature, recognises and respects the mystery of life: the fact that humans are one small part of a vast and beautiful world which is full of magic. It is only as people “grow up” that they lose this sense of mystery and accommodate themselves to a heirarchical, anthropocentric reality with no use for the romantic animism that allowed the natives to live in harmony with nature for thousands of years.

Devon Mihesua, a Choctaw from Oklahoma, sets out the many distortions of the image of Native Americans perpetrated by the mainstream media and demolishes them one by one in American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities, already a classic, first published in 1996 and newly republished this year by Clarity.

One of the many images that stand out to someone who grew up in North America and which Mihesua corrects is “Cowboys and Indians”, which should be “US Army and Indians” since “cowboys and Indians rarely fought each other. Besides, the first cowboys were Mexican Indians.” The English language itself reinforces the worst stereotypes, such as “Indian givers” (read: “US government givers”) and Columbus “discovering” America. Indeed, 1492 marks not a step forward in mankind’s history, but rather the beginning of the first and most horrific genocide in mankind’s history, with the premeditating killing of at least 10 million in North America alone.

The history of Native Americans is full of ironies. War Department officials maintained that if the entire US population had enlisted in the same proportion as Native Americans in WWII, the response would have rendered Selective Service unnecessary. As soldiers, they were respected as disciplined and brave. Comanche soldiers were given the vital task of encoding secret messages in the Pacific based on their native language. The code they developed, although cryptologically very simple, was never cracked by the Japanese; but they never received any special recognition from the government after the war.

Mihesua’s book is intended for the general public but also as a school text, and though it deals with grim material, it is full of fascinating details of native life. Living in earth lodges (wigwams), longhouses, grass houses or thatched-roof homes much like Europeans, most Indians never saw a tipi, for example. Indians were “conquered” largely via biological warfare, as they lacked immunity to European diseases. The European claim that they were “heathen” was a mere tactic to condone their decimation. It was the Dutch who introduced “scalping” to North America (to save transport costs for bounty hunters paid per Indian scalp): a revered tradition dating back to ancient Greece.

More than 60 per cent of the food consumed around the world today comes from the Indians, including corn, tomatoes, potatoes, many varieties of beans, chili peppers, squash, pumpkins, avocados, cacao, raspberries and strawberries. The main staple of the plains Indians, the 60 million buffalo that grazed the open plains, were wiped out by Europeans eager to steal the Indians’ land.

The Indians were just as “civilised” as the Europeans, in terms of technology and culture, though no North Americans had a writing system before the European invasion. Their societies were egalitarian, with division of labour according to sex, where the sexes were considered equal and each had their decision-making traditions. In fact the Iroquois Confederacy was used as a prototype by the American revolutionaries in writing the American Constitution.

The book has many illustrations. It includes oral histories, discourses on religion, anthropology, politics and economics of Indian societies. The author used the term Indian in the first edition, and writes that she now uses Indigenous, since Native Americans or First Nation are equally European in derivation. There are a mere 2.1 million Indians today, and they refer to themselves by their tribal name (the Navajos are Dinees, for example) — over 700 tribes are still extant. Mihesua’s aim is to encourage teachers to demand history books that truly reflect the country’s heritage, not just “feel-good” books which “tell more about the persons writing them than about the Indians”.

In Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Stephen Sheehi, director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina and author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, deals with the most recent manifestation of this social plague, which reached a crisis point following 9/11. The victimisation of Muslim Americans can only be called racism, since the overwhelming majority of American Muslims are nonwhite, and the few white Muslims are automatically considered even more suspect as potential “terrorists”.

The Muslim experience brings the black and Native American experiences together, though few Native Americans are Muslim. The structure of Islam and native religions seems radically different on the surface — the former strictly monotheistic, the latter polytheistic; however, the transcendence of spirit and the underlying unity of man and nature are very much central tenets of Islam, as they are for Native Americans. Muslims, like the Native Americans, live their spirituality and find it inseparable from their daily lives and interactions with others and nature, something that threatens the very foundation of secular capitalism.

The mouthpieces of Islamophobia — fear and hatred of Islam — in the US today include both academics like Bernard Lewis, Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, David Horowitz, and many politicians, with John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the vanguard. Their theories and opinions operate on the assumption that Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, suffer from particular cultural lacuna that prevent their cultures from progress, democracy and human rights. It is no surprise that such ex-Muslims as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali feminist-turned-Islamophobe, and revisionist Muslims such as Indian-Canadian feminist Irshad Manji are feted by Western media, as their antics reinforce the Islamophobes’ arguments.

While Islamophobia is not new, Sheehi demonstrates that it was refurbished as a viable explanation for Muslim resistance to economic and cultural globalisation during the Clinton era. Moreover, the “theory” was made the basis for an interventionist foreign policy and propaganda campaign during the Bush regime and continues to underlie Barack Obama’s new internationalism.

Following 9/11, the ceiling of acceptable hate-speech against Muslims, particularly Arabs, was blown off. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” wrote Ann Coulter two days after 9/ 11. “We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.” Since 9/11, Muslims, Arabs, Iranians and Islam itself have been the objects of derision and hatred in public, on TV and radio, and in print.

Sheehi demonstrates how such bigotry was translated into a sustained domestic policy of racial profiling and Muslim- baiting by agencies such as Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. It condoned widespread surveillance by the government, profiling in the street, at airports, in mosques and universities. Muslims have their movements tracked, their associations, finances and charitable giving monitored. They are systematically spied on, coerced and persecuted.

And not only Muslims. Once it’s ok to do this to Muslims, it becomes ok to suspend basic civil liberties of all suspected “terrorists”. Peaceniks and ecological activists are given the same treatment more and more. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s reflection on the descent into fascism in Germany — “First they came for the communists … Then they came for the Jews … Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me” — is as true as it was in 1946.

Islamophobia has institutionalised US government violations of international law, such as freezing habeas corpus, torture, renditions, extrajudicial kidnappings and assassination, even total war against and occupation of sovereign countries. They are all justified using Islamophobic stereotypes, paradigms and analyses as well as foils such as Hirsi Ali and Manji.

Sheehi examines the collusion between non-governmental agencies and lobbies and local, state and federal agencies in suppressing political speech on US campuses critical of racial profiling, US foreign policy in the Middle East and Israel. While much of the direct violence against Muslims on American streets, shops and campuses has subsided, Islamophobia runs throughout the Obama administration, serving an ideological function in the age of economic, cultural and political globalisation.

Liberals such as Democratic leader Howard Dean argue that it would be “a real affront to people who lost their lives” on 9/11 to build an Islamic Center two blocks away from the World Trade Center. “I think it is great to have Mosques in American cities; there is a growing number of American Muslims.” But Dean says they should “become just like every other American, Americans who happen to be Muslims… I hope they will have an influence on Islam.” Translation: co-opt and assimilate Muslims into American culture, so as not to pose a threat to US hegemony, and work within Muslim communities globally to bring them into the American fold a la the Christian missionaries of old, willing handmaidens in the imperial project, what black Americans referred to derisively as “Uncle Toms”.

The rampant Islamophobia of the past decade and the liberal answer of assimilation makes clear that Islam is the remaining enemy after the defeat of Communism. It too must be conquered to ensure US world hegemony, with revisionist American Muslims in the front lines. “Fight fire with fire,” so to speak.

There are voices in the West that try to fight back. Tariq Ali counters in response to the “civilization-mongers” that there were a range of political possibilities in Muslim countries, that western civilization itself had prevented the exercise of Western-style democracy in the Muslim world, leading their citizens to find political expression through Islam: “After WWII, the US backed the most reactionary elements as a bulwark against communism or progressive/ secular nationalism. [In Iran] the secular opposition which first got rid of the shah was outfoxed by British Intelligence and the CIA. The vacuum was later occupied by the clerics who rule the country today. … The 70-year war between US imperialism and the Soviet Union affected every single ‘civilization’.” We are all victims of imperialism, all losers, our cultures distorted and perverted rather than merely anachronistic, including American culture and Islam itself.

Sheehi points to an important difference between the manifestation of Islamophobia in the US and Europe. Muslim communities in the US eagerly assimilate and have a high median income and education level compared to other American minorities, while many European Muslim communities tend to be more insular.

The European version is grounded in anxiety arising from the colonial past. The colonial centres have always been uncomfortable with interacting with brown people as equals, compounded by the transposition of feelings of resentment, and anger over the loss of imperial power while still having to bear the social, cultural and economic consequences of their colonial past.

European Islamophobia also finds its origins in anxiety about and hatred of its own European “other”, namely European Jewry. Pre-WWII Europe feared a Jewish conspiracy to subvert Christian society. In the post-Holocaust era, this is no longer politically correct, so Europe’s traditional fear of Jews has been displaced onto its newer Muslim immigrants, even by the traditionally anti-Jewish far right such as Le Pen’s National Front and the British National Party, which are now Zionist and racist at the same time.

This phenomenon has repeated itself in every European country in the past decade, with far-right parties gaining rapidly by exploiting fears of the “Islamification” of Europe, the degeneration of institutionalised secularism, the bankrupting of the welfare state, and the “demographic bomb”. Most notorious has been Holland’s Geert Wilders with his Freedom Party. He has compared the Quran to Mein Kampf and called for a “headscarf tax”.

Such bigots are working to form a Europe-wide International Freedom Alliance, even including the US and Canada; an “Atlanticist Islamophobistan”, according to analyst Pepe Escobar. Considering that US and Canadian Muslims make up less than two per cent of the population, this leads to “the surrealist American phenomenon of Islamophobia without Muslims”.

Tariq Ramadan is one of the few media personalities given a chance to counter this slide towards a Euro-Reich; he argues that forcing Muslim immigrants to abandon their traditions merely reinforces racism. “What we need is a new narrative, a new ‘we’, a mutlicoloured, multicultural European identity. Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view.”
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The racism against Native Americans and Muslim Americans comes together in US Middle East policy, with the victimisation of Palestinians. US domestic racism is projected internationally on the Middle East in the unqualified support of Israel as a Jewish state, as argued by University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle in The Palestinian Right of Return in International Law. Boyle is both a brilliant academic and a controversial political figure, as adviser to Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority since 1988.

If Boyle has any bias, it is in favour of victims, especially Native Americans and Muslims. He has served as special prosecutor in the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities in the United States of America, as adviser to the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria vs the Russian Federation, as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Slobodan Milosevic, and as adviser to American activists intent on impeaching both US president George W Bush and US President Barack Obama. In all cases, he charged the accused with committing genocide and crimes against humanity.

But he is no Don Quixote. He also drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was signed into law by President George H W Bush.

Boyle argues that the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine would not only create an unviable Palestinian Bantustan-type nation, but that the current state of Israel and its illegal settlements already amounts to a Jewish Bantustan- type nation, and that neither is viable. That one is Jewish and privileged and the other Arab and poor and oppressed; it merely reflects the inherent racism underlying this projection of US power in the Middle East.

The just resolution of the Palestinian right of return is at the very heart of the Middle East peace process. Nonetheless, the Obama administration intends to impose a comprehensive peace settlement upon the Palestinians that will force them to give up their well-recognised right of return, accept a Bantustan of disjointed and surrounded chunks of territory on the West Bank in Gaza, and recognise Israel as “the Jewish State”, as newly demanded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and seconded by all US officials and mainstream media.

Boyle compares the current situation in Israel-Palestine with the collapse of Yugoslavia which he observed and participated in. “The correct historical analogue here is not apartheid South Africa, but instead the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a state, lost its UN membership, and now no longer exists as a state for that very reason.” Boyle “played a role in propelling this historical and principled process forward and ushering in the final extinction of the genocidal Yugoslavia as a state by debunking its legal, moral, and political right to survive and exist in front of the entire world for all humanity to see”.

Israeli settlements are “clearly illegal and criminal”, and “all these so-called settlers are committing war crimes, except the children, who are obviously not old enough to formulate a criminal intent.” Even before Operation Cast Lead, Boyle proposed that the UN General Assembly set up the “International Criminal Tribunal for Israel” as a “subsidiary organ” under Article 22 of the UN Charter, a suggestion endorsed by Malaysia and Iran, and supported by several dozen Arab and Muslim countries.

Boyle cannot be faulted for his legal brilliance. He devastatingly exposes the underlying racism in US-Israeli Middle East policy, portraying Israel as genocidal, and showing a way for the world to bring it to its knees. Boyle is a maximalist, rejecting any compromise with Israel. For him the endgame is “Sign Nothing, Win It All!”

But Israel-Palestine is neither South Africa in the 1980s nor Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Neither of these countries was created by and became indivisible with the US empire. Israel is a much harder nut to crack. Which is not to say that it won’t crack. Frankly, I don’t know where to place my bets on how this last racist nation state will be dismantled. I can only hope Boyle’s optimism is warranted.

What can one conclude from these very different studies about how to overcome racism, which is alive and well not only in the US but around the world? The authors present different approaches — Mihesua concerned with education, Sheehi with deconstructing the myths, Boyle with fighting in the international arena the monsters responsible for inflicting their racist policies on the world.

Reviewed by Eric Walberg
http://ericwalberg.com/
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1057/cu22.htm

Eric Walberg is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Eric Walberg

Why Aren’t There More Muslim Terrorists?

Source | By Aaron Ross

Immediately after last month’s terror attacks in Norway, Islamic extremism shot to the top of almost every list of suspected culprits. Among the soothsayers of creeping Shariah, there was never any doubt who was responsible. Others’ more rational, if hasty, assessments of Norway’s threat matrix pointed to the same (wrong) conclusion. For all their differences, both lines of reasoning shared a common assumption: that the sheer volume of Muslim terrorists out there made their involvement likely. Or as Stephen Colbert skewered the media’s rush to judgment: “If you’re pulling a news report completely out of your ass, it is safer to go with Muslim. That’s not prejudice. That’s probability.”
Charles Kurzman begs to differ. In his new book, The Missing Martyrs, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill sociology professor rejects that Muslims are especially prone to violent extremism. “If there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom,” he asks, “why don’t we see terrorist attacks everywhere, every day?”

In theory, we should. After all, there’s any number of ways a terrorist committed to murdering civilians could attack (and our gun lobby certainly isn’t making weapons harder to get a hold of). But we don’t. No Islamist terrorist attack besides 9/11 has killed more than 400 people; only a dozen have killed more than 200.

As it turns out, there just aren’t that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
Even so, it sure seems there are a lot of Muslims committed to the West’s destruction. What else to make of the celebrations in Middle Eastern streets after 9/11? Or Pew Research Center opinion polls of multiple predominantly Muslim nations showing significant support for suicide bombings? But Kurzman warns against conflating anti-Americanism with actual willingness to engage in terrorism. In reality, he says, the young man sporting the bin Laden T-shirt in Islamabad is probably more like the American teenager in Berkeley with the Che poster on his dorm room wall than a future Al Qaeda jihadist.
Yet even if only 1 in 100,000 Muslims is a terrorist, that still leaves something like 15,000 terrorists from a global population of around 1.5 billion Muslims. Surely that’s enough to inflict serious damage? It could be—and Kurzman concedes that Islamist terrorism should be taken seriously—but in practice, several factors conspire against Al Qaeda and its allies’ aspirations of regularly striking Western targets with spectacular attacks.
For one thing, Islamist terrorists are bitterly divided between globalist groups like Al Qaeda and localists like the Taliban and Hamas. The Taliban, for instance, opposed (and still opposes) Al Qaeda’s international ambitions, so much so, Kurzman claims, that its foreign minister sent an envoy to warn American and UN officials in the summer of 2001 about a possible, albeit unspecified, attack. Meanwhile, rifts within the Muslim world about issues like democracy, liberalism, and the role of women have crippled support for global jihadists. Insistent that all streams of Islamic thought conform to their rigid doctrines (and willing to murder fellow Muslims to make the point), Al Qaeda and its affiliates have alienated millions of potential supporters, rendering themselves far easier targets for unsympathetic Middle Eastern regimes to go after. 
After pressing his case with almost prosecutorial precision for the first two-thirds of the book, Kurzman’s analysis veers off the rails as he detours into an alternately banal and pedantic discussion of everything from America’s need to balance liberty with security to the lexicological origins of sociology. In a case of epically bad timing, he devotes the better part of six pages to praising recently discredited philanthropist Greg Mortenson as “a role [model] for American foreign policy.” Kurzman is unfortunate more than anything else here, but after arguing that American foreign policy doesn’t really affect Muslims’ views of the US, his sudden fawning over Mortenson’s in-vogue “hearts and minds” counterterrrorism strategy is somewhat befuddling.    

Still, Kurzman’s hard-headed empirical approach to an issue so often locked in emotion-fueled back and forth makes The Missing Martyrs (or at least most of it) a must-read. Early on, he states his aim: “to reduce the panic by examining evidence about Islamist terrorism—the actual scale of it and the reasons it is not more widespread.” It’s an important goal—perhaps more so now than at any point in recent memory—and Kurzman has made a valuable contribution.
Aaron Ross is an editorial intern at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter and email tips and insights to aross [at] motherjones [dot] com.

Do not let Islamophobes defeat ‘The 99’ everyday heroes

Ali Khaled | Source

Name a positive Arab character from a Hollywood film. Not easy, is it?

But don’t worry, there is nothing wrong with your knowledge of popular culture. Those characters, for the most part, simply don’t exist.

From Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik in the 1920s, through Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia in the 1960s, to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, Arabs have been portrayed by a rogue’s gallery of cartoonish, blood-thirsty criminals and harem-dwelling belly dancers.

Those stereotypes quickly come to mind when an Osama bin Laden arrives on the scene. Post September 11, things have hardly improved, with Hollywood’s Arab caricatures reaffirmed in television’s 24 and the risible Sex and the City 2.

One person who has tried to stem this relentless tide of bad publicity is Dr Naif al Mutawa, the Kuwaiti creator of The 99, a comic book series whose 99 Islamic superheroes are named after the names of Allah.

While The 99, which was recently commissioned to release a crossover series with DC Comics, received critical acclaim from Arab and international media alike, predictably there has been a backlash from conservative voices in the US.

An animated television series of The 99 was scheduled for mid-October but has been postponed until January. This planned exposure on American television screens has riled the religious right in the US – which, admittedly, is not so difficult to rile.

“Hide your face and grab the kids. Coming soon to a TV in your child’s bedroom is a posse of righteous, Shariah-compliant Muslim superheroes,” Andrea Peyser in the New York Post wrote. “These Islamic butt-kickers are ready to bring truth, justice and indoctrination to impressionable western minds.”

There were others. The conservative blog Patriot Post debated, somewhat hysterically, whether The 99’s “old-fashioned values” would include honour killings and suicide bombings, while other forums accused DC comics of “Muslim pandering” and, laughably, “treachery”.

The irony that they are the ones spewing religious hate seems lost on these angry voices.

The 99 are not the only other modern Islamic comic book heroes. Iman, the brainchild of the Dubai author Rima Khoreibi, is a teenage, cape and headscarf wearing Muslim girl who helps children deal with their problems. Khoreibi, whose 2005 book The Advetures of Iman dealt with racism and feminism among other issues, also cited the Quran as her inspiration.

Acclaim came from mainstream sources. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, a strong critic of honour killings and the abuse of women, lauded Khoreibi’s creation and her role in showing a moderate face of Islam.

The truth is that every society requires its own heroes. In a memorable episode of The Simpsons, the hapless Homer is cast as the lead role in the film adaptation of the comic book hero Everyman. It satirically brought to light a craving for a new breed of caped crusader who the masses could identify with.

Hollywood has not been slow on the uptake. Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Kick-Ass and Defendor are just three movie adaptations of comic books starring, not so much superheroes, but wannabe heroes.

These do-it-yourself vigilantes are not faster than a speeding bullet, cannot swing from buildings and their uniforms are not made of iron. They are ordinary folk who have found themselves fighting the eternal battle of good versus evil (hero attire optional). They are you and me. They are, in essence, Everyman. Or, indeed, everyman.

They capture the zeitgeist perfectly. If America needs its new heroes with old fashioned virtues, why can’t the Arab world have its own?

Even the most powerful man in the world, Barack Obama, is not safe from the powers of everyman. Whatever you may think of the Tea Party, their recent success in the US midterm elections has shown that the message of ordinary people taking back their country has struck a resonant chord with, well, the ordinary people.

Which brings us back to The 99. It is hoped that with their increasing influence, the conservative voices can see beyond their prejudices when it comes to positive Islamic role models.

The 99 deserve their day in the sun, and indeed on the screens.

akhaled@thenational.ae

The Muslim Brotherhood in the West: Wolves or sheep?

The Muslim Brotherhood in the West
Wolves or sheep?

Two books with a very different approach

The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. By Lorenzo Vidino. Columbia University Press; 326 pages; $29.50 and £19.50. Buy from Amazon.com, buy from Amazon.co.uk

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition. By Alison Pargeter. Saqi; 248 pages; £20. To be published in America by Saqi in January; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, buy from Amazon.co.uk

WHICH Muslims should Western governments engage with, and which should they shun? Since the bombings in New York and Washington on September 11th 2001, and the later attacks in Madrid and London, few questions have been so urgent or have generated such fevered debate. Some experts and government officials—Lorenzo Vidino, in the first of these books, calls them the optimists—argue for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s which now has a worldwide network of followers and institutions. A countervailing school—the pessimists, to whom Mr Vidino is closer—suggests that the Brothers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, sharing much of the militants’ agenda but hiding behind a mask of doublespeak.

Mr Vidino, who recently joined the RAND Corporation, a research outfit in Washington, DC, has in the past prophesied, in sometimes strident tones, that the Brotherhood’s ultimate goal is to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and America. He has berated those who fail to see the danger as hopelessly naive. His book is more restrained. He allows the “optimists” their say and acknowledges that the West faces a genuine dilemma in forming a judgment about such a big, baggy movement which speaks with many voices.

Though he remains a sceptic, he provides a wealth of information to let the rest of us make up our minds. He explains how in the 1950s a small, tightly knit band of Brothers successfully transplanted the movement to Europe. Led by Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, these pioneers turned Geneva and Munich into the hubs of a network of mosques and institutions lubricated with Saudi funding.

A similar process was at work in the United States, and here Mr Vidino’s charge-sheet may give even optimists pause. He makes extensive use of court documents from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based Muslim charity convicted in 2008 of channelling money to the Palestinian group, Hamas. Mr Vidino believes the documents reveal the existence of a wide and hitherto secret Brotherhood network with links to two of America’s best-known Muslim organisations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America. Both groups deny having such links, and have long condemned terrorism in unequivocal terms.

As for his bolder claim—that the movement aims at nothing less than the spread of Islamic law through Europe and America—Alison Pargeter, a Cambridge scholar and author of the second of these books, considers this scaremongering. Her book is shorter and more measured than Mr Vidino’s, and she has a surer grasp of the political dynamics of the Middle East, the soil from which the Brotherhood sprang. As her subtitle suggests, she regards it as an essentially reactionary movement unable to break with its past. Its hallmarks are pragmatism, opportunism and an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of violence.

The difference in the two authors’ approach is exemplified by their treatment of a document found by the Swiss authorities in 2001 at the home of a senior Brotherhood financier. The Arabic document, dated December 1982 and widely known as “The Project”, sets out what Mr Vidino regards as the movement’s strategy for global dominion. Ms Pargeter sees it as a “fairly mundane wish list”. The portrait of the Brotherhood that emerges from her book is scarcely attractive but it is a weaker, more fractured thing than the sleekly dangerous creature depicted by Mr Vidino.

Should the West engage with the Brothers? On this, perhaps surprisingly, the two authors agree. The Islamists have become “part of the furniture”, as Ms Pargeter puts it; besides, there are few credible alternatives. It is better to talk to them, carefully and without illusions.

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”.

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 .

The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism

In Ikhwanophobia we don’t have any biases or prejudices to or against anyone!
This article is harshly criticizing Tariq Ramadan’s Book “The Quest for Meaning”, We think that it will open a new horizons for discussions and debates over Ramadan’s thoughts and ideology.
We’ll try to find a review from another take to enhance the debate and to develop the talks over Ramadan’s ideas, since he is one of the most important Muslims Scholars.

Reviewed by Kenan Malik

In an age in which public intellectuals are often highly divisive figures – think of the storms surrounding Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins or Bernard-Henri Levy – few generate more controversy than Tariq Ramadan. Political activist, Muslim scholar, and professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, he is to some the “Muslim Martin Luther”, a courageous reformer who helps bridge the chasm between Islamic orthodoxy and secular democracy.

To his critics, Ramadan is a “slippery”, “double-faced” religious bigot, a covert member of the Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to undermine Western liberalism. When, in 2004, Ramadan was appointed professor of religion by Notre Dame, America’s leading Catholic University, the US State Department revoked his visa for supposedly endorsing terrorist activity. The ban has since been lifted.

The debate about Ramadan was re-ignited earlier this year with the publication of The Flight of the Intellectuals, American writer Paul Berman’s savage attack on European thinkers like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for what he regards as their appeasement of Ramadan. The Quest for Meaning, Ramadan’s first book aimed at a wider Western audience, arrives therefore at a timely moment.

It is, he writes, “a journey and an initiation” into the world’s faiths to discover the universal truths they hold in common and to set out “the contours of a philosophy of pluralism”. Unfortunately it will do little to settle the argument about the nature of Ramadan’s beliefs.

There is a willfull shallowness about this work, a refusal to think deeply or to pose difficult questions, that is truly shocking. Insofar as it is provocative, The Quest for Meaning seeks to provoke not through the excess of its rhetoric but the banality of its reasoning.

What Ramadan has produced here is a faith-lite manual for those seeking multicultural pieties. It is a book that forces the reader to wade through sentences such as this: “We are heading for that realm of consciousness and mind where all wisdoms remind us that it is its shores that make the ocean one, and that it is the plurality of human journeys that shapes the common humanity of men.” And: “Truth (insofar as it has a value) and meaning (for itself) are, quite logically, regarded as truth and meaning of everything.” And: “We need to find, collectively, ways to celebrate the union between emotion and reasonable reason, because, ultimately, that is what it is all about.”

Ramadan’s basic argument is comprised of three elements. Faith is an essential aspect of human life. All faiths embody a similar set of ideals. And given that is faith is essential and all faiths are similar, so society should respect all religious and cultural traditions. We need, in Ramadan’s words, to “apprehend the diversity of our points of view and the essence of their similarity”.

His starting-point is the insistence that humans are limited beings and reason an inadequate way of comprehending our world. Reason tells us in a partial manner how the world is. Only faith can inform us why it is as it is. Faith creates a framework that allows us to give life meaning and to comfort us when faced with our inadequacies.

The relationship between faith and reason is one of the key issues of our times. Ramadan is so sloppy and superficial in his argument, however, and so oblivious to any viewpoint other than his own, that he does little to help us navigate through the tricky waters.

Ramadan takes it as given that it requires a spiritual quest to impute meaning to life. What about those who are not religious and yet live meaningful lives? Silence. All faiths, he suggests, embody the same fundamental truths and are simply “different paths up the same mountain”. So why would he not be happy if all Muslims converted to Hinduism? No answer.

“All spiritual or religious traditions,” Ramadan claims, “have some notion of the universal”, which is the “common space where several roads, several paths, several religions meet, and where reason, the heart and the senses meet”. This is a typical deep-but-meaningless formulation that litters the book. Like much else in The Quest for Meaning it is both philosophically facile – there is, after all, more to the concept of the “universal” than the idea of a “common space” – and historically illiterate, given that the vast majority of religious traditions have been local or tribal, with no universal pretentions, and remain so.

Ramadan’s real aim is not to explore the complexities of reason, faith and universality, but to defend the sanctity of revealed truth. Revealed truth, he tells us, is “clear and immutable” and its legitimacy cannot be challenged by reason.

The question of the relationship of reason and revelation has been central to the controversies surrounding Ramadan. Most infamously, he has argued for a “moratorium” on the Islamic practice of stoning women for adultery, but refused to call for an outright ban: a stance that led to a famous confrontation with Nicolas Sarkozy on French television. Why will Ramadan not simply say that stoning is a barbaric punishment and should be banned? Because, as he explained when I interviewed him for a Radio 4 documentary, the Qur’anic text that demands stoning “comes from God”. But isn’t that the problem, I asked him. Ramadan knows rationally that certain actions are morally wrong but is not willing to say so because of his attachment to the revealed word of God. Simply to believe in rationality, he responded, is to accept the “dictatorship of intelligence”. And that is “a dominant, arrogant posture. It’s dangerous.”

This exchange gets to the heart of the debate about faith and reason. For many of us it is the abandonment of reason in the name of revealed authority that is truly dangerous. What is striking, however, is that there is not a whisper about this controversy in the book. He devotes an entire chapter to the question of gender relations, in which he quotes such secular thinkers as Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir. But he has little to say about the difficulties of the relationship between faith and equality.

There is not a mention of the contemporary disputes over abortion, divorce, adultery, the veil, or female genital mutilation, that often pit religious norms against secular ones, and are central to current debates about pluralism, It is an extraordinary silence, but typical of Ramadan’s refusal to tackle the difficult questions.

The Quest for Meaning reveals Ramadan as neither a bridge-builder nor a dangerous bigot, but as a shallow thinker taken far too seriously by both supporters and critics. His real strength is his ability to trade in that mixture of pseudo-intellectualism and faux-mysticism that has today become so fashionable. At the end of the book, Ramadan informs us that the “architecture of the text” reflects his spiritual journey. There are 14 chapters which “represent two cycles of seven”, seven being a “universal symbol” in all faiths. “Twice seven”, Ramadan tells us, “to reflect linearity, evolution and the cyclical return of the same and the different though the universality of the symbol.” At least The Da Vinci Code did not claim to solve the problems of pluralism.

Kenan Malik’s book ‘From Fatwa to Jihad’ is published by Atlantic

Why the Deadly Attack on the Freedom Flotilla Was the Breakthrough That Made the World See Israel’s Cruelty in Gaza

The Freedom Flotilla was not able to deliver its 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip, but it accomplished something more important — it finally broke the blockade on the world’s understanding of the Gaza crisis. The Israeli attack on the flotilla must be seen alongside the Israeli attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009 as marking the period in which the world’s understanding of the Israeli occupation irrevocably shifted. In this opening, the brutality of the Israeli occupation came into full view and the issue of Palestinian persecution was placed on op-ed pages and even legal briefs. In the end, these events may mark when the age of Israeli impunity came to an end.

In a generational sense, Operation Cast Lead and the flotilla attack can be understood as the anti-1967 war. It was the 1967 war that helped solidify Israel’s image in the eyes of the world, and in particular of American Jewry, as the scrappy underdog beating the odds. That image has now changed forever, and the ongoing siege of Gaza has caused many to consider what Zionism has built in the Middle East. The Goldstone report stands as the defining indictment of this era.

The report, which found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, specifically includes the persecution of Gaza, highlighting cases where Israel intentionally attacked civilian infrastructure, including water wells, chicken farms, and the last operating flour mill in the Strip. Not surprisingly, the report and Goldstone himself became the targets of unrelenting criticism and vitriol because it pulled back the curtain on Israeli actions.

For those who harbored doubts about the Goldstone report’s findings, those doubts were dispelled by the flotilla attack. The killings on the Mavi Marmara vindicated Goldstone’s reading of Israeli methods. And note that the Israeli defense of its actions is exactly the same as its defense of its actions in Gaza: We had a right to cross international lines, we got severe provocation, supposed civilians were actually combatants, no country would permit this situation to endure, we defended ourselves, just look at the video. In Gaza the Israelis killed 1,200-1,400 with minimal loss of life on the Israeli side; and the numbers were imbalanced on the Mavi Marmara as well.

And now the efforts to smear the activists on the boats as jihadists, which the Washington Post and other American outlets have taken up with energy, recall the efforts to portray the Gazans as a crazed, extremist population.

The vindication for Goldstone is that anyone with eyes in her head knows that there was something terribly wrong with the flotilla action–as anyone with eyes knew that there was something wrong about the Gaza onslaught. But at that time the West was still in denial, and the Israeli-American dismissal of the Goldstone report can now be seen as a defensive effort to cover up atrocities. Who can question Goldstone’s conclusions now: that Israel targeted civilian infrastructure disproportionately, and without distinction between civilians and resisters? Israel has once again shown us the playbook.

This awareness was seen in a shift in the discourse surrounding the flotilla attack, especially online as Internet journalists, led by Ali Abunimah, repeatedly exposed Israeli hasbara. The awareness even penetrated the establishment media; at the New York Times website, Robert Mackey’s Lede blog cataloged the work of those discrediting Israeli spin. He highlighted Max Blumenthal’s reporting on doctored IDF audio of the attack and Noam Sheizaf ‘s work on Turkish photos of the Mavi Marmara attack that contradicted IDF claims. Other significant reporting includes Lia Tarachansky and Blumenthal’s work disproving the IDF’s claim that the flotilla was linked to Al Qaeda, Jared Malsin’s work confirming the doctored audio, and Abunimah’s reconstruction of the path of the Mavi Marmara to show that it was actually fleeing at the time of the Israeli attack.

Despite the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s best efforts, these Internet journalists were able to shape the story and fill crucial voids in the narrative of the attack that persisted in large part because Israel refused to share the entirety of the video and still footage it confiscated from flotilla passengers. In the past, Israel’s control of the story of the conflict, especially in the West, has been an enormous source of power. Now we see that power breaking down at an incredibly swift rate. The one “success” in their hasbara effort has been a racist “we are the world” knock-off video that really only confirmed how absolutely tone-deaf many Israelis were to feelings around the world.

In another age, novelist Leon Uris helped supply a narrative of the Israel/Palestine conflict that survived for generations, but today the story is being told firsthand over the Internet. Portions of the attack on the Mavi Marmara were broadcast nearly live over a live-stream video channel online. In addition, several filmmakers onboard were able to smuggle footage off the boat, most notably Iara Lee from the Cultures of Resistance project, whose footage helped contradict the official Israeli version of events. So far, Israel has not found an effective response to this democratization of the media. And who knows, before long, people may talk about how the Gazans ended up in Gaza in the first place, the Nakba of 1948. Who’s going to believe “a land without people, for a people without a land” when there are ten You- Tube videos to prove you wrong?

We say that the age of Israeli impunity may be coming to an end because of the surge in international grassroots eff ort to hold Israel accountable. The global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) was catalyzed by the Israeli assault on Gaza, and the fl otilla attack only added fuel to the fi re. In the week following the attack a fl urry of boycott activities spread the globe from dockworkers in Sweden refusing to unload Israeli ships, to Britain’s largest Union, UNITE, deciding to promote an Israeli boycott, to the popular band the Pixies refusing to play Tel Aviv. In addition, Ecuador, Turkey, and South Africa recalled their ambassadors from Israel, and over fifteen other countries summoned the resident Israeli ambassadors to express their outrage. This anger seems to have coalesced at the United Nations, where Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is pressing forward with plans for an international investigation into the flotilla attack despite an Israeli attempt to derail the effort with a domestic inquiry.

Some are already referring to this new U.N. investigation as “Goldstone II.” Palestinian commentator Ali Abunimah pointed out on the Al Jazeera English website that if the attack on Gaza moved the world’s people, it seemed the flotilla attack moved its governments. He pointed to the international composition of the flotilla and wrote, “It was the day the whole world became Gaza. And like the people of Gaza, the world is unlikely to take it lying down.” And so the Gaza flotilla raid may one day prove to be a hinge of modern history.

Reprinted with permission from O/R Books, All Rights Reserved — 2010.

To order: Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, edited by Moustafa Bayoumi (O/R Books, 2010).

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz are co-editors of the site Mondoweiss, a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.

Source

Islam Divided Between Salafi-jihad and the Ikhwan

by Marc Lynch

Institute for Middle East Studies, Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs; George Washington University; Washington, DC, USA

The Muslim Brotherhood poses a unique challenge to efforts to combat Al Qaeda and like-minded groups. It is one of the key sources of Islamist thought and political activism, and plays a significant role in shaping the political and cultural environment in an Islamist direction. At the same time, it opposes Al Qaeda for ideological, organizational, and political reasons and represents one of the major challenges to the salafi-jihadist movement globally. This dual nature of the Muslim Brotherhood has long posed a difficult challenge to efforts to combat violent extremism. Does its non-violent Islamism represent a solution, by capturing Islamists within a relatively moderate organization and stopping their further radicalization (a “firewall”), or is it part of the problem, a “conveyor belt” towards extremism? This article surveys the differences between the two approaches, including their views of an Islamic state, democracy, violence, and takfir, and the significant escalation of those tensions in recent years. It concludes that the MB should be allowed to wage its battles against extremist challengers, but should not be misunderstood as a liberal organization or supported in a short-term convergence of interests.

For More information about this publication: Click Here

Debating Non-Violent Islamism

By Marc Lynch

I have just published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs which uses Paul Berman’s polemic against Tariq Ramadan, Twilight of the Intellectuals, as a jumping off point for a broader discussion of the challenge of non-violent Islamism. I finished drafting it over a month ago, and since then several excellent review essays have appeared including one by Pankaj Mishra  in the New Yorker and another by Yale University’s Andrew March in the American Prospect.  I found much to criticize in the book, including Berman’s exceedingly thin engagement with the vast scholarly and historiographical literature, his still-puzzling obsession with Ramadan, and his tiresome infighting with a few liberal Western journalists such as Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma.  But looking past the polemics, there’s a serious debate to be had about how to think about non-violent Islamist activism in Europe and the United States, the Middle East, and throughout the Muslim communities of the world.  In the end, I argue, Berman  “flags important debates about Islam’s impact on Europe and the world, but he is an exceedingly poor guide to navigating them.”

I am not going to reproduce the parts of the Foreign Affairs essay here which deal with the historiography or with Ramadan himself.  I urge you to read the full essay for those parts.   Here, I want to focus on what I see as the more fundamental issues raised about understanding the challenge posed by Islamism, about which legitimate and genuinely significant differences exist:

Berman gets Ramadan’s struggle backward. Ramadan’s primary adversaries are not liberals in the West but rather literalistic Salafists whose ideas are ascendant in Muslim communities from Egypt and the Persian Gulf to western Europe. For Salafists, a movement such as the Muslim Brotherhood is too political, too accepting of civil institutions, and insufficiently attentive to the formalistic and public rituals of Islam. They urge Muslims to separate from Western societies in favor of their own allegedly pure Islamic enclaves. The Muslim Brotherhood has encouraged women to wear the veil, but only so that they can demonstrate virtue while in universities and the workplace. The Salafists, meanwhile, want women at home and strictly segregated from men. True liberals should prefer Ramadan because he offers a model for Muslims of integration as full citizens at a time when powerful forces are instead pushing for isolation and literalism.

Ramadan has not couched his challenge to the Salafists in abstract language or kept it from public view. For example, when Salafi opponents have confronted him with Koranic verses dictating that women receive only half the inheritance of men, Ramadan has argued that these passages should be reinterpreted given the modern changes in family structure and the fact that many women today raise children alone. Therefore, Ramadan argues, Muslims should “try to keep the justice instead of literally implementing verses, pretending faithfulness to the Koran but in fact creating injustices on the ground.” This is a sharp challenge to the Salafists, the significance of which Berman does not recognize. Similarly, Ramadan’s call in 2005 for a moratorium on the implementation of hudud penalties — including the stoning of adulterers — is mocked relentlessly by Berman as too little, but in fact it posed an intensely controversial challenge to the heart of Salafi political agendas and jurisprudence.

Ultimately, Ramadan disappoints his liberal interlocutors because they are not his most important point of reference. He has made a strategic calculation that embracing the political passions of the Muslim mainstream is the only way for his reformist agenda to gain any sort of credibility or traction with the Muslim audiences that really matter. And although his vision may not be a classically liberal one, it is a fully legitimate guide for how Muslims — or any persons of faith — can participate in a liberal and democratic system. As Andrew March, a political theorist and professor at Yale University, has argued, the cultures of political liberalism in the West should be able to accommodate peaceful, law-abiding citizens who are motivated by explicit religious faith. The United States, which boasts its own powerful religious communities and fundamentalist political forces, should of all places be able to understand how this works.

This does not mean that liberals should not have misgivings about Ramadan’s project. He defines sharia — the system of Muslim jurisprudence — not as the law of the land but as a personal moral code, sustained by the faith of the believer. Why should such a belief be alarming? After all, this is how many people of faith have reconciled themselves to civic states. But in practice, this evangelical project of societal transformation through personal transformation — changing the world “one soul at a time” — is more deeply radical than what violent extremists envision. Anyone can seize state power through violence and then impose his will by force. True power lies in the ability to mobilize consent so that people willingly embrace ideas without coercion — so that they want what you want, not simply do what you want. Nonviolent Islamists excel at this level of soft power and, in doing so, have succeeded in transforming public culture across the Muslim world. Walking the streets of Cairo today, for example, it is hard to believe that only a couple decades ago, few women covered their hair.

Later in the essay, I elaborate on the stakes of this struggle inside Islamist politics:

Those, such as Berman, who see Islamism as flat and uniform claim that Islamists of all varieties — despite differences over the use of violence or the value of democratic participation — ultimately share a commitment to achieving an Islamic state. But this is misleading. There is a vast and important gap between the Salafi vision of enforced social uniformity and the moderate Islamist vision of a democratic state, with civil institutions and the rule of law, populated by devout Muslims. The gap is so great as to render meaningless the notion that all Islamists share a common strategic objective. Ramadan stands on the correct side of this gap, and by extension, he stands on the right side of the most important battle within Islamism today: he is a defender of pragmatism and flexibility, of participation in society, and of Muslims’ becoming full citizens within liberal societies.

Ramadan’s defense of participation places him opposite the literalists and radicals with whom Berman attempts to link him. The hard core of the Salafi jihadists view all existing Muslim societies as fundamentally, hopelessly corrupt — part of a jahiliyya, which means “age of ignorance,” from which true Muslims must retreat and isolate themselves. Ramadan, by contrast, calls for change from within. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood offer clinics, charities, schools, and other services, while pursuing the dawa, or “spiritual outreach.” Their approach would be familiar to anyone who has engaged with American evangelicals — the polite conversation, the pamphlets and other literature, the self-presentation as honest and incorruptible. There is an obvious difference between a woman who is forced to wear a veil for fear of acid being thrown in her face and one who does so to show respect for God. But there are other forms of coercion — peer pressure, societal norms, and economic need — that can be difficult to detect from the outside. These are topics for serious study.

But Berman does not even try. He sees only a radical mob of fanatics, not individuals who find meaning in their lives given particular contexts and specific challenges. As Berman sees it, blank-faced cyphers impose a grim conformity on passive communities that are unable to resist (presumably because their will has been weakened by an Ian Buruma essay). It does not occur to him that Islamism might offer meaning to those who are confined to gloomy urban ghettos or that Islamist groups might be the only ones working on the ground to improve certain people’s lives. For many Muslims around the world, Islamism may offer a better life in the here and now — and not just in the hereafter — than do many of the alternatives.

This point should not be misunderstood. Although the Muslim Brotherhood is clearly distinct from al Qaeda, it is not the uniformly “moderate” organization that its supporters often say it is. The organization’s character and goals often vary from community to community, and its rhetoric sometimes betrays a number of worrisome “gray zones,” in the words of a 2006 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Its members generally avoid making clear statements on contentious issues, such as the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic state, the toleration of secular Muslims, or where the authority to interpret Islamic law should reside. And the Muslim Brotherhood’s rejection of violence at home does not extend to areas where Muslims live under occupation, such as the Palestinian territories or Iraq. Such positions may not please many Americans, but they do — like it or not — represent the mainstream of much of the Muslim world.

But, I conclude, the problems with Berman do not mean that there are no problems with non-violent Islamists:

Berman highlights a very real dilemma. Put bluntly, Islamists have shaped the world around them in ways that many liberals in the United States and Europe find distasteful. Even moderate Islamists prioritize religion over all other identities and promote its application in law, society, culture, and politics. Their prosyletizing, social work, party politics, and organization of parallel civil societies have all helped transform societies from below. This frightens and angers secularists, liberals, feminists, non-Muslims, and others who take no comfort in the argument that the political success of the Islamists simply reflects the changing views of the majority. The strongest argument against accepting nonviolent Islamists as part of the legitimate spectrum of debate is that they offer only a short-term solution while making the long-term problem worse. These Islamists may be democrats, but they are not liberals. Their success will increase the prevalence and impact of illiberal views and help shape a world that will be less amenable to U.S. policies and culture.

But this is precisely why Berman’s lumping together of different strands of Islamism is so harmful. Ramadan may not be a liberal, but he offers a realistic vision of full participation in public life that counters the rejectionist one posed by the ascendant corps of Salafi extremists. Pragmatists who hope to confront the disturbing trends within the Muslim world do not have the luxury of moral purity.

And finally:

Secular Muslims, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the Somali-born writer and former Dutch politician — are a sideshow to the real struggles taking place between reformers and traditionalists, Muslim Brothers and Salafists, rulers and oppositionists. The real challenge to the integration of Muslims in the West comes from Salafists who deny the legitimacy of democracy itself, who view the society around them as mired in jahiliyya, and who seek only to enforce a rigid, literalistic version of Islam inside whatever insulated enclaves they are able to carve out. The liberals to whom Berman is drawn represent a vanishingly small portion of Muslim-majority societies. They are generally drawn from well-off urban elites that have become ever more detached from their surrounding environments and would not fare well in the democratic elections that the United States claims to want. Meanwhile, granting such prominence to ex-Muslims who support Israel and denounce Islam discredits other reformists in the real terrain where figures such as Ramadan must operate. Supporting them may offer the warm glow of moral purity — and they may be more fun at parties — but this should not be confused with having an impact where it counts.

At the end, Berman offers an impassioned defense of Hirsi Ali, whom he portrays as a classic dissident who has been betrayed by the leading lights of the liberal West. He feigns bewilderment at why these liberal authors, to whom he devotes so many pages, might find her problematic. Berman appears unbothered by the frightening march toward a clash of civilizations promoted by al Qaeda and fueled by anti-Islamic culture warriors in the West. Nor is he concerned that expressing extreme anti-Islamic views and embracing only those Muslims who reject Islam might help al Qaeda by antagonizing those hewing to the Muslim mainstream and perhaps convincing them that bin Laden is right after all. Berman portrays himself, Hirsi Ali, and a select group of others as the defenders of moral courage in a world where too many have fallen short. But real moral courage does not come from penning angry polemics without regard for real-world consequences.

The most helpful strategic victory in the struggle against Islamist radicalism would be to undermine the narrative that the West is at war with Islam. There should be no tolerance for Islamist extremists who threaten writers, intimidate women, or support al Qaeda’s terrorism. But defending Hirsi Ali from death threats should not necessarily mean embracing her diagnosis of Islam. Berman’s culture war would marginalize the pragmatists and empower the extremists. Muslim communities are more likely to reject such extremists when they do not feel that their faith is being attacked as fascist or that they can only be accepted if they embrace Israel and the policy preferences of American conservatives.

The Muslims in the West are not going away. It is therefore imperative to find a way for these communities to become full partners in the security and prosperity offered by Western societies. If democracy has any meaning, it must be able to allow Muslims to peacefully pursue their interests and advance their ideas — even as the liberals who defend the right of Muslims to do so are also free to oppose them. Ramadan may not present the only path to such an end — but he does present one. And that is why his liberal proponents in the West, who so infuriate Berman for promoting Ramadan, emerge as more compelling guides to a productive future.

There is a lot more in the Foreign Affairs essay, which I hope you’ll read in its entirety.