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Farha Khaled: Bat Ye’or and The Dhimmitude of Eurabia

By Farha Khaled

Meet Bat Ye’or, the Islamophobia industry’s favourite historian who popularised such terms as ‘Eurabia’, a Euro Arab Axis and “Dhimmitude” the servile state Christians and Jews are condemned to under Islamic rule.

Bat Ye’or historian  to Islamophobes

Born in Cairo as Gisèle Orebi to a Jewish family she and her parents were forced to flee leaving behind everything in 1956. Settling in England, she married David Littman in 1959 and moved to Switzerland.  Gisèle Littman writes under the name Bat Ye’or, Hebrew for ‘daughter of the Nile’. Now in her seventies she wrote her first book about Jews in Egypt under the name ‘Yahudiya Masriya’ which means “Egyptian Jewess” in Arabic.

Bat Ye’or wrote a series of books and articles about life under Islamic rule for Christians and Jews, drawing mainly from her own experiences. With no qualifications or academic background in history, she routinely denigrates the contributions to humanity made by successive Muslim civilisations, magnifies their intolerant periods, ignores the periods of tolerance and generally paints a selective agenda driven picture which grossly distorts the truth and ignores the wider historical context. Despite her pretensions, she was not taken seriously in academic circles and remained on the fringes until 9/11.  Her star rose after 9/11 when bashing Islam became a lucrative business most ardently embraced by conservative extremists. Some right wing Zionists have since made it a career. Prior to 9/11 the only Islamophobe of note was Daniel Pipes. By comparison he seems almost a moderate now, indeed he has bemoaned his growing irrelevance by whining that he does believe in a ‘moderate Islam’, a view that puts him at odds with the radical Zionist Islamophobes. These links have been elaborated in  ‘ The Islamophobia Industry: Zionism and The Middle East‘ and highlighted by Ali Abunimah in an article for Al Jazeera English ‘Islamophobia, Zionism and the Norway massacre‘ shortly after the Norwegian massacre.

Eurabia the myth Bat Ye’or invented

One of the first to cite Bat Ye’or’s work was the Israeli American historian on Islamic history Bernard Lewis, who predicts that ‘Europe would be Islamic by the end of the century’.  Self styled ‘counter jihad’ experts like Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Brigette Gabriel a Christian Zionist with her Act for America minions, and the shrieking Pamela Geller  enthusiastically promoted Ye’or as ‘an expert on Islamic history’. She propagates that European and Arab elites along with the Muslim Brotherhood, have a secret plan to usher in a world caliphate through the OIC. This revisionist history, packaged with images from round the clock 9/11 coverage was sold as the ‘true face of Islam’. Included in this propaganda was the mantra that 9/11 was the same threat Israel faced daily. It was in this manipulated climate of fear that the Iraq war was sold, though Saddam Hussein’s regime was secular.

Since the Anders Breivik massacre, Bat Ye’or has been under the spotlight for having been a prime influence upon the murderer. Her conspiracies however, had already been discredited prior to the Anders Breivik massacre. One of the first to deconstruct the Eurabia myth was Matt Carr of ‘The Institute of Race Relations.’ In 2006 he authored a 23 page report which is downloadable as a free PDF document ‘You are now entering Eurabia’. On page 8 Carr notes:

‘The EU’s perceived tilt towards the Palestinians is crucial to Ye’or’s indictment of Eurabia, where ‘the conception and practice of Palestinianism as a hate cult against Israel has had a profound impact on European society’ and where anti-Zionism is always synonymous with anti-Semitism.’

In his report, Matt Carr mused that the Eurabia myth had the potential of evolving from a fringe conspiracy to a ‘dangerous Islamophobic fantasy’. With hindsight his words proved to have been tragically prophetic with the Norwegian massacre. Loon Watch which has indepth and intelligent responses to Islamophobic smears published  ‘Bat Ye’or: Anti-Muslim Loon with a Crazy Conspiracy Theory Named “Eurabia’. 

David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag interviewed Bat Ye’or in 2006. The interview began with the pretentious introduction ‘the world’s foremost authority on ‘dhimmitude’. Ye’or was then asked to explain her new term, ‘Palestinianization’. She replies:

‘I think that it is, precisely, ’Palestinianism’ which is at the root of Europe’s decadence. It is an ideology based on a replacement theology whereby Palestine replaces Israel. As it has been conceived and instigated together by European and Arab intellectuals and politicians, it combines the worst of both cultures.’

She continues:

‘The European trend has added to it traditional Christian anti-Semitism which condemns the Jews to perpetual exile till they convert. The Palestinian war against Israel, strongly encouraged by many in Europe, came as a magnificent opportunity to continue and maintain the culture of hate and denigration against the Jews — now the State of Israel — and by lending a moral and political support to a second Holocaust. Europe has been the biggest supporter and subsidizer for the Palestinians, as well as their ideological teachers.’

Which is it? Is it the OIC imposing their caliphate on the ‘dhimmified’ Europeans for the past thirty-five years or is it the Europeans imposing their Christian anti-semitism on the Palestinians since Israel’s creation so that they can carry out a second Holocaust against Israelis? Either way, both the OIC and the Europeans with their combined resources have been miserable failures, after having had decades to complete this mission! < Putting things into perspective, one could view Bat Ye’or’s pathological hatred and attempt to explain it in psychological terms as being a reaction to her earlier life and expulsion from Egypt. Or one could compare it to the route Judea Pearl embraced after the murder of his son Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.  Judea Pearl set up the ‘Daniel Pearl Foundation‘ which he hopes will address the root causes of the tragedy. Since 2002 the organisation has held musical concerts around the world promoting the values of tolerance, integrity, and respect.

Feigning a concern for Europe’s supposed demise into ‘dhimmitude’, Ye’or’s real agenda becomes apparent. In her sanctimonious, holier than thou diatribes addressed to the ignorant, dhimmified, Jew hating Europeans, Bat Ye’or unwittingly shows herself to be the very antithesis of those same virtues she claims Europeans have abandoned.

Farha Khaled is a freelance writer. Her op eds are published in the Saudi based Arab News. You can follow her on Twitter http://twitter.com/farhakhaled

MTA Rejects Pamela Geller’s Subway Advertisement That Calls Muslims ‘Savages’ (PHOTO)

Source

Pamela Geller, New York City’s most vocal Islamophobe, is having a rough week.

Not only is Palestine asking for statehood up in Midtown, but that pesky “Ground Zero Mosque” Park 51 Community Center she fought so hard to prevent from opening, held its first exhibit Wednesday night.

And as if that wasn’t enough for the right-wing blogger, now the MTA won’t even put up her advertisement!

Last week, in response to a subway ad calling for the end of US military support to Israel, Geller submitted this to the MTA:

Geller made the papers when she said she’d sue if the MTA refused to put up the advertisement, calling it “a free speech issue.”

And now, well, the MTA’s refusing to put up her advertisement.

Geller was notified of the ad’s rejection Thursday and the rejection letter, which she’s posted on her Atlas Shrug blog in an entry titled, “IT’S OFFICIAL: PRO-JIHAD MTA BANS PRO-ISRAEL ADS, RUNS ANTI-ISRAEL ADS“, explains that Geller’s ad “contains language that, in our view, does not conform with the MTA’s advertising standards regarding ads that demean an individual or group of individuals…” A call to the MTA confirms that her ad didn’t pass muster.

And the MTA has a good point. As Gothamist sarcastically notes: “Yeah! Why is everyone shocked at the word “savage?” Or the phrase “war between the civilized man and the savage?” It’s not as if that phrase has ever been used in history to suppress minorities or advance theories of white supremacy. Nope.”

Geller, who’s done this kind of thing before, is keeping her promise and is preparing to sue the MTA. She writes:

The pro-jihad MTA is refusing my ad for the word “savage.” Just so you know, I will be suing, with the aid of my inestimable legal team, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise of the Thomas More Law Center. We are what? 4-0, now? Tarazi lawsuit roundly defeated, check. Detroit/SMART Transit on “Leaving Islam” bus ad lawsuit, check. MTA on the Ground Zero Bus ads lawsuit, check. Miami Transit for “Leaving Islam” bus ads lawsuit, check.

I will say this until someone in those clueless ivory towers of the sharia-compliant MTA understands this. “Savage” is accurate. The pro-jihad MTA cannot ban the the truth, particularly in the political arena…

In the spring of 2010, as part of her “Leave Islam” campaign, Geller paid $10,000 to put this advertisement on city buses:

And in the summer of 2010, during the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy she helped spearhead, she successfully scared the MTA into keeping up this advertisement:

The clever tactics of Islamophobes

By Haroon Siddiqui | Source

Many minorities in Canada and the U.S. suffered discrimination initially, especially during wartime. Still, the current wave of Islamophobia will have a dishonourable place in history.

What’s said and tolerated about Muslims and Islam is not about other people and their religions. Self-restraint is also missing when violating the privacy and dignity of Muslims, disproportionately. Their every move and word is parsed, to nail them for some real or imagined radicalism.

Our public discourse has been allowed to be hijacked by those whipping up fear of Muslims and Islam.

Islamophobia cannot be censored out. But it should be subject to the critical scrutiny of a democracy. Often it is not. So it feasts on wild accusations, double standards and being happily disconnected from reality, even logic. Here’s how.

• Collective guilt

Islamophobes hold that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of some. Told that this is absurd, they take another tack: Yes, not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists these days are Muslims, so all Muslims must answer for Muslim terrorists anywhere.

It is also said that Muslims do bad deeds because of their religion, while others do so for other reasons.

It follows that Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, are not representative of Christianity but Major Nadal Hasan, who killed 13 fellow Americans, is of Islam. Pastor Terry Jones of Florida, the Qur’an burner, is not representative of 311 million Americans, but every ignorant mullah is symptomatic of 1.3 billion Muslims.

• Double standards

In the book of Islamophobes, the Qur’an is “violent” but the Bible is not. And Islam is not a religion but rather an ideology, a “fascist” one, whose followers are “Islamo-fascists.”

Even if it can be proven that their ideas are similar to fascism – a very European construct – they would be Muslim fascists, not Islamic ones.

Other hypocrisies:

Anti-Muslim demagoguery is free speech but anti-Western nonsense is hate-mongering.

The minority of Muslims who believed that 9/11 was an American-Israeli inside job were conspiracy theorists, but the 70 per cent of Americans who believed that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 were patriots.

Critics of Islam, such as Geert Wilders from Holland, should be welcomed in Canada but those who dare question Western policies, such as British MP George Galloway, must be denied visas.

• Innuendo

All or most mosques are controlled by hateful imams brainwashing the faithful to be “fundamentalists” “radicals,” and “jihadists.” No proof is offered.

It is also said that many Muslim institutions are funded by Saudi money. The premise of the allegation is that while it is good for America to take billions of dollars from the Saudis for armaments, it is bad for Muslim institutions to get a fraction of that – if they are indeed getting it.

It is said that Muslims cannot integrate. But studies show otherwise, especially in the U.S. where they are among the most educated and are among the top earners. The ones not doing well are in countries where they face the most discrimination, such as France and Germany. Polls in Europe, U.S. and Canada also show that Muslim values are no different than those of other groups.

• Irrationality

Twenty-three American states have taken legislative steps to stop the sharia, Muslim personal law, that’s not coming.

Lest we snicker at Americans, Ontarians in 2006 stopped the sharia that wasn’t coming, either. In 2007, the Quebec village of Herouxville banned the stoning of women that had a zero chance of happening there.

In 2009, the Swiss banned minarets when there are only four in their country and many more are unlikely to be erected.

All such measures are not to be taken literally but rather symbolically, a reflection of mass hysteria.

• Clever tactics

Islamophobes claim victimhood — that their courageous truth-telling is hindered by political correctness, even as they command increasing media coverage.

They say they are not against Muslims or Islam, only against “Islamists” and “Islamism,” “Islamicism” and “political Islam” – terms that can mean anything their users want them to mean.

“Like anti-Semites and racists, who protest they are not against Jews or blacks, Islamophobes are the first to protest that they’re not Islamophobic,” says John Esposito, professor of religion at Georgetown University and co-editor of Islamophobia (Oxford Press, 2011).

Islamophobes also enlist Muslims who are highly critical of fellow Muslims and Islam. These few individuals are used to discredit the religious beliefs and practices of a majority of Muslims. This is akin to citing a handful of oddball Catholics or Jews to rationalize discrimination against all Catholics and Jews.

hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

Top Ten Right-Wing Responses To CAP’s Islamophobia Report: ‘Cowards,’ ‘Straight Out of Mein Kampf,’ ‘A Pile Of Dung’

Source | By Eli Clifton

The Center for American Progress’s new report, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” is receiving a positive welcome from neutral observers as journalists and pundits pore over the 139-page exposé on the U.S. Islamophobia network.

The report’s authors have appeared on CNN.com, Al Jazeera English, Current TV, Guardian.co.uk and numerous radio interviews. Print media outlet such as The Jewish Daily Forward, The Atlantic, Salon.com, The Washington Post and The Nation have all run articles discussing the report’s findings.

Unfortunately, that accuracy and thorougness has proven a challenge for many of the Islamophobes mentioned in the report. With no serious factual errors with which to attack the authors, they’ve fallen back on attacking straw men and offering vitriolic, if at times colorful, ad hominem attacks.

Here’s the top ten list of right-wing responses to “Fear, Inc.”

10.) Townhall.com columnist Karen Lugo concludes that the report’s authors are “the real cowards” and claims “it was the authors of this 138-page report that demonstrated a real phobia when they evaded the urgent question: Does America have a reason to fear Muslims?” (Actually, that was a major part of the report.)

9.) Writing on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag, Daniel Greenfield runs with the new meme that the report blames Jews for Islamophobia. He writes, “Any report on Islamophobia that scapegoats Jews is not a report on bigotry, it is an act of bigotry.”

8.) Ed Lasky, writing on The American Thinker, inaccurately claims that the report pins blame on Jews, arguing, “…this ‘report’ relies on the conspiracy and age-old anti-Semitic trope that Jews fan prejudice towards others and promotes divisions for their own nefarious purposes (to support Israel in this case). This mindset is straight out of Mein Kampf.”

7.) Adrian Morgan, editor of Family Security Matters, takes issue with report author Wajahat Ali, writing, “Ali is said to be a ‘humorist’ but there is pitiably little that appears in his blog ‘Goatmilk’ that displays this purported sense of humor.” Morgan also identifies a typo in the report and ponders “Was there no money left for a proof-reader, to here strike out the superfluous word, ‘he’?”

6.) Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes told The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein that, “I am not against the religion of Islam but am very much against the political ideology of Islamism, which I see as the third great totalitarian movement after fascism and communism. This lack of distinction points to the intellectually shoddy premise of the report.”

5.) Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer wrote on Human Events that the report’s authors are assisting jihadists because “Fear, Inc.”, “ignores jihad activity altogether, portraying Muslims as victims and demonizing all who stand in the way of the misogynistic and unjust agenda of the Islamic jihad, whether advanced by violent or nonviolent means. It thus reveals itself to be just another tool of those same jihadists.”

4.) Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney bizarrely, and we might add inaccurately, describes the report as CAP’s “…latest ‘copy and paste’ effort [duplicating] large sections of five nearly identical ‘investigations’ just this year, complaining that millions of concerned Americans are Islamophobes.” Gaffney, in what might be an editorial misstep, proceeds to interview himself, writing, “Frank J. Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, noted that ‘The ‘Shariah Defense Lobby’ is in a race against time to hide the grim reality of Shariah law as it is actually enforced…’”

3.) Daniel Pipes’ PipeLineNews.org observed that the report “neatly falls into lockstep with the efforts being exerted by Muslim Brotherhood front groups to incrementally Islamize the West.”

2.) Blogger Pamela Geller calls the report “a predictable misfired missile by Islamic supremacists and leftist useful idiots” and “a pile of dung masquerading as research” that “reads more like a Mein Kampf treatise.” She encourages her readers to “watch [the authors] choke on their own vomit” and concludes “they will never defeat me.”

1.) Fox Business Network’s Eric Bolling, inaccurately attributed an outlandishly anti-Semitic quote to the report, saying, “I’m reading directly from this report: ‘The Obama-allied Center for American Progress has released a report that blames Islamophobia in America on a small group of Jews and Israel supporters in America, whose views are being backed by millions of dollars.’

To be clear, neither that quote nor anything resembling it, appears in our report. Please email Brian Lewis, VP for Corporate Communications at Fox Business (brian.lewis@foxnews.com), and tell him that Bolling’s wildly inaccurate reporting on “Fear Inc.” requires an on-air correction.

Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America

By Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang , Scott Keyes, Faiz Shakir | Source

Download this report (pdf)

Read the report in your web browser (Scribd)

Download individual chapters of the report (pdf):

• Introduction and summary
• Chapter 1: Donors to the Islamophobia network
• Chapter 2: The Islamophobia misinformation experts
• Chapter 3: The grassroots organizations and the religious right
• Chapter 4: The right-wing media enablers of anti-Islam propaganda
• Chapter 5: The political players
• Conclusion

Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia

On July 22, a man planted a bomb in an Oslo government building that killed eight people. A few hours after the explosion, he shot and killed 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labor Party youth camp on Norway’s Utoya Island.

By midday, pundits were speculating as to who had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Norwegian history since World War II. Numerous mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, speculated about an Al Qaeda connection and a “jihadist” motivation behind the attacks. But by the next morning it was clear that the attacker was a 32-year-old, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Breivik. He was not a Muslim, but rather a self-described Christian conservative.

According to his attorney, Breivik claimed responsibility for his self-described “gruesome but necessary” actions. On July 26, Breivik told the court that violence was “necessary” to save Europe from Marxism and “Muslimization.” In his 1,500-page manifesto, which meticulously details his attack methods and aims to inspire others to extremist violence, Breivik vows “brutal and breathtaking operations which will result in casualties” to fight the alleged “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”

Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous footnotes and in-text citations to American bloggers and pundits, quoting them as experts on Islam’s “war against the West.” This small group of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals in our nation is obscure to most Americans but wields great influence in shaping the national and international political debate. Their names are heralded within communities that are actively organizing against Islam and targeting Muslims in the United States.

Breivik, for example, cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto. Spencer’s website, which “tracks the attempts of radical Islam to subvert Western culture,” boasts another member of this Islamophobia network in America, David Horowitz, on his Freedom Center website. Pamela Geller, Spencer’s frequent collaborator, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, was mentioned 12 times.

Geller and Spencer co-founded the organization Stop Islamization of America, a group whose actions and rhetoric the Anti-Defamation League concluded “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy “American values.” Based on Breivik’s sheer number of citations and references to the writings of these individuals, it is clear that he read and relied on the hateful, anti-Muslim ideology of a number of men and women detailed in this report&a select handful of scholars and activists who work together to create and promote misinformation about Muslims.

While these bloggers and pundits were not responsible for Breivik’s deadly attacks, their writings on Islam and multiculturalism appear to have helped create a world view, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended. According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,” the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.” Sageman adds that their rhetoric “is not cost-free.”

These pundits and bloggers, however, are not the only members of the Islamophobia infrastructure. Breivik’s manifesto also cites think tanks, such as the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism—three other organizations we profile in this report. Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.

This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.

And it all starts with the money flowing from a select group of foundations. A small group of foundations and wealthy donors are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, providing critical funding to a clutch of right-wing think tanks that peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam—in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that anti-Islam grassroots organizations and some right-wing religious groups use as propaganda for their constituency.

Some of these foundations and wealthy donors also provide direct funding to anti-Islam grassroots groups. According to our extensive analysis, here are the top seven contributors to promoting Islamophobia in our country:

• Donors Capital Fund
• Richard Mellon Scaife foundations
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust
• Russell Berrie Foundation
• Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund
• Fairbrook Foundation

Altogether, these seven charitable groups provided $42.6 million to Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009—funding that supports the scholars and experts that are the subject of our next chapter as well as some of the grassroots groups that are the subject of Chapter 3 of our report.

And what does this money fund? Well, here’s one of many cases in point: Last July, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the Islamic practice of Sharia was “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Gingrich went on to claim that “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.”

Sharia, or Muslim religious code, includes practices such as charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism. But Gingrich and other conservatives promote alarmist notions about a nearly 1,500-year-old religion for a variety of sinister political, financial, and ideological motives. In his remarks that day, Gingrich mimicked the language of conservative analyst Andrew McCarthy, who co-wrote a report calling Sharia “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.” Such similarities in language are no accident. Look no further than the organization that released McCarthy’s anti-Sharia report: the aforementioned Center for Security Policy, which is a central hub of the anti-Muslim network and an active promoter of anti- Sharia messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In fact, CSP is a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of reports mischaracterizing Islam and warnings about the dangers of Islam and American Muslims. Operating under the leadership of Frank Gaffney, the organization is funded by a small number of foundations and donors with a deep understanding of how to influence U.S. politics by promoting highly alarming threats to our national security. CSP is joined by other anti-Muslim organizations in this lucrative business, such as Stop Islamization of America and the Society of Americans for National Existence. Many of the leaders of these organizations are well-schooled in the art of getting attention in the press, particularly Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, The Washington Times, and a variety of right-wing websites and radio outlets.

Misinformation experts such as Gaffney consult and work with such right-wing grassroots organizations as ACT! for America and the Eagle Forum, as well as religious right groups such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and American Family Association, to spread their message. Speaking at their conferences, writing on their websites, and appearing on their radio shows, these experts rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims. Much of their propaganda gets churned into fundraising appeals by grassroots and religious right groups. The money they raise then enters the political process and helps fund ads supporting politicians who echo alarmist warnings and sponsor anti-Muslim attacks.

These efforts recall some of the darkest episodes in American history, in which religious, ethnic, and racial minorities were discriminated against and persecuted. From Catholics, Mormons, Japanese Americans, European immigrants, Jews, and African Americans, the story of America is one of struggle to achieve in practice our founding ideals. Unfortunately, American Muslims and Islam are the latest chapter in a long American struggle against scapegoating based on religion, race, or creed.

Due in part to the relentless efforts of this small group of individuals and organizations, Islam is now the most negatively viewed religion in America. Only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Islam: the lowest favorability rating since 2001, according to a 2010 ABC News/Washington Post poll. According to a 2010 Time magazine poll, 28 percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, and nearly one-third of the country thinks followers of Islam should be barred from running for president.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 alone did not drive Americans’ perceptions of Muslims and Islam. President George W. Bush reflected the general opinion of the American public at the time when he went to great lengths to make clear that Islam and Muslims are not the enemy. Speaking to a roundtable of Arab and Muslim American leaders at the Afghanistan embassy in 2002, for example, President Bush said, “All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith—face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.”

Unfortunately, President Bush’s words were soon eclipsed by an organized escalation of hateful statements about Muslims and Islam from the members of the Islamophobia network profiled in this report. This is as sad as it is dangerous. It is enormously important to understand that alienating the Muslim American community not only threatens our fundamental promise of religious freedom, it also hurts our efforts to combat terrorism. Since 9/11, the Muslim American community has helped security and law enforcement officials prevent more than 40 percent of Al Qaeda terrorist plots threatening America. The largest single source of initial information to authorities about the few Muslim American plots has come from the Muslim American community.

Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.

The White House recently released the national strategy for combating violent extremism, “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” One of the top focal points of the effort is to “counter al-Qa’ida’s propaganda that the United States is somehow at war with Islam.” Yet orchestrated efforts by the individuals and organizations detailed in this report make it easy for al-Qa’ida to assert that America hates Muslims and that Muslims around the world are persecuted for the simple crime of being Muslims and practicing their religion.

Sadly, the current isolation of American Muslims echoes past witch hunts in our history—from the divisive McCarthyite purges of the 1950s to the sometimes violent anti-immigrant campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has compared the fear-mongering of Muslims with anti-Catholic sentiment of the past. In response to the fabricated “Ground Zero mosque” controversy in New York last summer, Mayor Bloomberg said:

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center. … We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.

This report shines a light on the Islamophobia network of so-called experts, academics, institutions, grassroots organizations, media outlets, and donors who manufacture, produce, distribute, and mainstream an irrational fear of Islam and Muslims. Let us learn the proper lesson from the past, and rise above fear-mongering to public awareness, acceptance, and respect for our fellow Americans. In doing so, let us prevent hatred from infecting and endangering our country again.

In the pages that follow, we profile the small number of funders, organizations, and individuals who have contributed to the discourse on Islamophobia in this country. We begin with the money trail in Chapter 1—our analysis of the funding streams that support anti-Muslim activities. Chapter 2 identifies the intellectual nexus of the Islamophobia network. Chapter 3 highlights the key grassroots players and organizations that help spread the messages of hate. Chapter 4 aggregates the key media amplifiers of Islamophobia. And Chapter 5 brings attention to the elected officials who frequently support the causes of anti- Muslim organizing.

Before we begin, a word about the term “Islamophobia.” We don’t use this term lightly. We define it as an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.

It is our view that in order to safeguard our national security and uphold America’s core values, we must return to a fact-based civil discourse regarding the challenges we face as a nation and world. This discourse must be frank and honest, but also consistent with American values of religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and respect for pluralism. A first step toward the goal of honest, civil discourse is to expose—and marginalize—the influence of the individuals and groups who make up the Islamophobia network in America by actively working to divide Americans against one another through misinformation.

Wajahat Ali is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and a researcher for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Eli Clifton is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and a national security reporter for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and ThinkProgress.org. Matthew Duss is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress and Director of the Center’s Middle East Progress. Lee Fang is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and an investigative researcher/blogger for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and ThinkProgress.org. Scott Keyes is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and an investigative researcher for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Faiz Shakir is a Vice President at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor-in-Chief of ThinkProgress.org.

Download this report (pdf)

Read the report in your web browser (Scribd)

Download individual chapters of the report (pdf):

• Introduction and summary
• Chapter 1: Donors to the Islamophobia network
• Chapter 2: The Islamophobia misinformation experts
• Chapter 3: The grassroots organizations and the religious right
• Chapter 4: The right-wing media enablers of anti-Islam propaganda
• Chapter 5: The political players
• Conclusion

Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia

To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:

Print: Anna Soellner (economic policy)
202.478.5322 or asoellner@americanprogress.org

Print: Anne Shoup (education policy)
202.481.7146 or ashoup@americanprogress.org

Print: Christina DiPasquale (foreign policy and security, energy)
202.481.8181 or cdipasquale@americanprogress.org

Print: Raúl Arce-Contreras (ethnic media, immigration)
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TV: Andrea Purse
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[scribd id=63489887 key=key-15nxgg2azw3yqelkv5v8 mode=list]

REPORT: $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America

Source

Following a six-month long investigative research project, the Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. The authors — Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matt Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and myself — worked to expose the Islamophobia network in depth, name the major players, connect the dots, and trace the genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda.

The report, titled “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” lifts the veil behind the hate, follows the money, and identifies the names of foundations who have given money, how much they have given, and who they have given to:

The money has flowed into the hands of five key “experts” and “scholars” who comprise the central nervous system of anti-Muslim propaganda:

FRANK GAFFNEY, Center for Security Policy – “A mosque that is used to promote a seditious program, which is what Sharia is…that is not a protected religious practice, that is in fact sedition.” [Source]

DAVID YERUSHALMI, Society of Americans for National Existence: “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…the Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.” [Source]

DANIEL PIPES, Middle East Forum: “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” [Source]

ROBERT SPENCER, Jihad Watch: “Of course, as I have pointed out many times, traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” [Source]

STEVEN EMERSON, Investigative Project on Terrorism: “One of the world’s great religions — which has more than 1.4 billion adherents — somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.” [Source]

These five “scholars” are assisted in their outreach efforts by Brigitte Gabriel (founder, ACT! for America), Pamela Geller (co-founder, Stop Islamization of America), and David Horowitz (supporter of Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch). As the report details, information is then disseminated through conservative organizations like the Eagle Forum, the religious right, Fox News, and politicians such as Allen West and Newt Gingrich.

Over the past few years, the Islamophobia network (the funders, scholars, grassroots activists, media amplifiers, and political validators) have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that “radical Islam” has infiltrated all aspects of American society — including the conservative movement.

To explain how the Islamophobia network operates, we’ve produced this video to show just one example of how they have mainstreamed the baseless and unfounded fear that Sharia may soon replace American laws:

Click here to read the full report.

Anti-Muslim Blogger Pamela Geller Lashes Out At Islamophobia Report: ‘Pile Of Dung Masquerading As Research’

Source | By Eli Clifton

Responding to CAP’s Islamophobia report, anti-Muslim activists David Horowitz called it “fascistic” and Robert Spencer deemed it the “agenda of the Islamic jihad.” Determined to one-up her Islamophobia network colleagues, Pamela Geller took to her blog on Friday evening to unleash a fiery tirade against the new report “Fear, Inc.”

Geller piles baseless, if at times colorful, allegations on the report’s authors. Including:

Over at the wildly funded machine of hate and lies, the “Center of American Progess,” the Soros cranks have spent hundreds of thousands producing a pile of dung masquerading as research. […]

It reads more like a Mein Kampf treatise. The funding section of the report is outrageous. I have not seen one dime from any those donors, though they name me as a recipient. Lies. […]

[MediaMatters and the Center for American Progress] mean to destroy this country, and they will crush anyone who gets in their way. […]

This “report on Islamophobia” is Goebbels attacking the Jew. I wear it as a badge of honor. These quislings are the enemy. They fear my work, and that is good. They fear my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. […]

Watch them choke on their own vomit.

Geller’s only factual issue with the report is that “I have not received one cent from any of these funders they attempt to tie me to.” But the report never claims that Geller receives any money from the seven funders who contributed $42.6 million to the Islamophobia network. Indeed, Geller is probably one of the few individuals who requires little money from outside donors. Last year, The New York Times reported:

Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when [she and Michael H. Oshry] divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.

Geller, much like her colleagues Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, uses the report as an opportunity to solicit readers for contributions while never meaningfully challenging the factual accuracy of the 130-page report on Geller and her anti-Muslim allies. While unsurprising and certainly not out of the norm for Geller, her response to the report underlines the bigotry, hatred and intolerance exhibited by many member of the Islamophobia network.

Last night, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Faiz Shakir discussed the Islamophobia network with Keith Olbermann:

Meet the White Supremacist Leading the GOP’s Anti-Sharia Crusade

— By Tim Murphy

Last week, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make “material support” for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal marks a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, critics say even seemingly benign activities like re-painting the exterior of a mosque or bringing food to a potluck could be classified as a felony
The Tennessee bill, SB 1028, didn’t come out of nowhere. Though it’s the first of its kind, the bill is part of a wave of related measures that would ban state courts from enforcing Sharia law. (A court might refer to Sharia law in child custody or prisoner rights cases.) Since early 2010, such legislation has been considered in at least 15 states. And while fears of an impending caliphate are myriad on the far-right, the surge of legislation across the country is largely due to the work of one man: David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based white supremacist who has previously called for a “war against Islam” and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith. Yerushalmi, a lawyer, is the founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which has been called a “hate group” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His draft legislation served as the foundation for the Tennessee bill, and at least half a dozen other anti-Islam measures—including two bills that were signed into law last year in Louisiana and Tennessee.

With the exception of SB 1028, much of Yerushalmi’s legislation sounds pretty innocuous: State courts are prohibited from considering any foreign law that doesn’t fully honor the rights enshrined in the US and state constitutions. Because a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law is unheard of in the United States, the law’s impact is non-existent at best. But critics of some of the proposed bills have argued they could have far-reaching and unintended consequences, like undoing anti-kidnapping statutes, and hindering the ability of local companies to enter into contracts overseas.
But Tennessee’s SB 1028 goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state’s attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia. On Monday, CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill.
“Essentially the bill is trying to separate the ‘good Muslims’ from the ‘bad Muslims,'” said CAIR staff attorney Gadeir Abbas in an interview with Mother Jones. “Out of all the bills that have been introduced, this is by far the most extreme.”
Reports about the rise of the anti-Sharia movement have typically focused on Oklahoma’s voter-approved constitutional amendment, which explicitly prohibited state courts from considering Islamic law (a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the amendment in December). But the movement began much earlier, with a sample bill Yerushalmi drafted at the behest of the American Public Policy Alliance, a right-wing organization established with the goal of protecting American citizens from “the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

In a 40-minute PowerPoint that’s available on the organization’s site, Yerushalmi explained the ins and outs of the sample legislation. His bills  differ from the failed Oklahoma amendment in one key way: They don’t mention Sharia. Instead, they focus more broadly on “foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines.” As Yerushalmi explained in an interview with the nativist New English Review in December, the language is “facially neutral,” thereby achieving the same result while “avoiding the sticky problems of our First Amendment jurisprudence.”
Since crafting the sample legislation, Yerushalmi’s services have been been in high demand as an expert witness. In mid-February, he flew to South Dakota to testify in support of a bill modeled on his “American Law for American Courts” plan. (He also offered to provide pro-bono legal support for the state if the law produced any legal challenges.)
Ultimately, the bill died in committee, after the state’s attorney general testified that the bill could lead to lawsuits. “I am a little chagrined by the fact that none of the opponents of the bill have actually read it with any care,” Yerushalmi told the committee. “Something else is at work here.”
But it’s not just Muslims who draw Yerushalmi’s scorn. In a 2006 essay for SANE entitled On Race: A Tentative Discussion (pdf), Yerushalmi argued that whites are genetically superior to blacks. “Some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones,” he wrote.

Yerushalmi has suggested that Caucasians are inherently more receptive to republican forms of government than blacks—an argument that’s consistent with SANE’s mission statement, which emphasizes that “America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white.” And in an article published at the website Intellectual Conservative, Yerushalmi, who is Jewish, suggests that liberal Jews “destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite.” Unsurprisingly, then, Yerushalmi offered the lone Jewish defense of Mel Gibson, after the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade in 2006. Gibson, he wrote, was simply noting the “undeniable Jewish liberal influence on western affairs in the direction of a World State.”
Despite his racist views, Yerushalmi has been warmly received by mainstream conservatives; his work has appeared in the National Review and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace. He’s been lauded in the pages of the Washington Times. And in 2008, he published a paper on the perils of Sharia-compliant finance that compelled Sen. Minority Whip John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to write a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox.
More recently, Yerushalmi co-authored a report on the threats posed by Islamic law—among other things, he worries Sharia-compliant finance could spark another financial collapse—that earned plaudits from leading Republicans like Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra. The report was released by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, for which Yerushalmi is general counsel.

In 2007, he pushed legislation to make “adherence to Shari’a” a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. That same proposal called for the deportation of all Muslim non-citizens, and a ban on Muslim immigration. The United States, he urged, must declare “a WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all Muslim faithful.”
Neither Yerushalmi nor the American Public Policy Alliance responded to a request for comment for this article.
If his racially infused writings and rhetoric are any indication, it’s Yerushalmi, not his Muslim bogeymen, who seems most determined to remake the American political system. Per its mission statement, SANE is “dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule,” and Yerushalmi has likewise criticized the universal suffrage movement. As he once put it, “there’s a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

]Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy@motherjones.com.

Educating or fear-mongering? The controversy over ACT!

By Deirdre Conner | Source

When ACT! for America’s Jacksonville chapter began attacking a local Muslim scholar this year, it might have appeared to be the isolated action of a fringe group.

Far from it.

Over the past year, ACT has engaged in similar skirmishes across the country that have raised the group’s profile, its membership and its revenue.

It describes itself as educating concerned citizens and exposing the threat of radical Islamic terrorists they believe are multiplying on American soil. When the local chapter protested the appointment of University of North Florida professor Parvez Ahmed to the city’s Human Rights Commission, they claimed he had ties to terrorist organizations, despite his written record of condemning violence and terrorism.

But the episode is also one of many reasons ACT has come under increasing scrutiny from critics. They say that at best, the group is promoting misinformation among an American public still largely uninformed about Islam, and at worst, it is exploiting people’s worst fears to propagate bigotry and hate speech against Muslims.

Related: Anti-Muslim activist who led fight against Jacksonville commissioner owes state more than $500K

Its detractors include Muslim civil rights groups as well as scholars and even the Southern Poverty Law Center, all of which say the group denigrates all Muslims, not just extremists.

Despite controversy over ACT’s message, the group has found more and more willing ears from the public, and, in some cases, elected officials.

ACT! for America has a full-time lobbyist in Washington and says it ended 2010 with 155,000 members nationally. In Florida, the group’s membership has more than doubled since 2009, to 19,233 members, said Guy Rodgers, the group’s national executive director. Those members, he said, have been key in the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” strategy.

Busy agenda

It counts among its successes:

– The passage of a ballot initiative in Oklahoma banning courts from considering “international law or Sharia Law” in making decisions.

Related: What sharia is – and isn’t

– The investigation and suspension of the Muslim Student Union at University of California-Irvine for disrupting a speech by Israel’s ambassador to the U.S.

– Protesting the cancellation of a course called “What is Islam?” at an Oregon community college, which was to be taught by one of the group’s chapter leaders.

Together, the Pensacola-based ACT! for America and its affiliated research group, American Congress for Truth, raised more than $1.6 million in 2009, according to the latest tax returns available. Rodgers attributes growing interest in the group to the rise in domestic terrorism threats from Islamic militants over the past two years.

“More and more Americans are beginning to in their consciousness wonder, what is causing this?” Rodgers said.

‘Political correctness’

ACT also is concerned that the government is not thoroughly investigating places in America they feel could be breeding ground for Islamic militants, such as jihadist websites or camps they believe are paramilitary training grounds for terrorists.

So why does ACT believe the government isn’t as vigilant as it should be?

“Political correctness, I think that’s why,” Rodgers said. “We believe that is shackling many in the government … from tackling that issue head-on.”

It was political correctness, the group believes, that led to Ahmed being appointed to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, a volunteer board.

Ahmed is the former chairman of the national board for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. ACT claims CAIR is a front for Hamas, a militant Palestinian organization designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. And ACT points to CAIR being named in 2007 as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a terrorism-funding trial.

But CAIR was one of hundreds of unindicted co-conspirators. And it was never accused of wrongdoing by the government. For his part, Ahmed has personally condemned violence against both Palestinian and Israeli civilians.

In numerous blog posts and op-eds for The Times-Union and national media, Ahmed has rejected extremist views and violence and writes frequently about how religions can coexist peacefully.

Related: Parvez Ahmed speech transcript: ‘Is Islam compatible with American values?’

And although nearly a third of the City Council voted against his appointment, he found many more supporters among politicians, business leaders and citizens concerned that the episode could paint Jacksonville as a place of intolerance.

Difficult to dismiss

ACT! for America has, both locally and nationwide, found common ground with tea party members and extreme conservatives who helped Republicans retake the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections.

One of its key allies, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., announced plans this month for hearings on Muslim-Americans and terrorism when he assumes the chairmanship of the House Homeland Security Committee.

That’s why even its opponents say the group shouldn’t be dismissed.

“If they were just yahoos … then why did you have people running for Congress or government officials who are otherwise well educated playing that [Muslim] card?” said John L. Esposito, a Georgetown University professor who studies discrimination against Muslims.

“They played that card because a significant number of voters believe that.”

Esposito said ACT! for America is Islamophobic, and he compares it to anti-Semitic and racist groups.

He said that ACT – along with politicians and pundits who agree with it – is capitalizing on people’s fear, which is heightened because of the trauma of terrorism and a painful economy.

“People don’t look at the numbers,” Esposito said. Islamic terrorists “are an infinitely small but dangerous part of the population, and that’s a group that most people reject.”

He compared it to stereotyping all anti-abortion advocates as violent extremists just because there have been incidents of violence against abortion providers.

“It’s a dangerous thing,” he said, “but nobody blows the numbers out of proportion on this.”

Despite its crusade against political correctness, ACT officials deny they are anti-Muslim.

Yet its national leaders – including its founder, the Lebanese-born Christian Brigitte Gabriel – repeatedly say that Islam itself creates terrorists.

In her book “They Must Be Stopped,” Gabriel writes that “The freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedoms that Muslims enjoy in this country have not tempted them to renounce their dreams of destroying the United States.”

In 2008, she told the New York Times Magazine that she disapproves of Islam because it “calls for the killing of other people.” In a speech to U.S. Navy SEALS that same year, she said that the West is doomed to failure until it identifies Islam as the “real enemy.”

A slideshow presented as educational material on ACT! for America’s website refers to Muslims’ birth rates as a “demographic timebomb” and says that moderate Muslims are the true radicals.

But Rodgers, the group’s executive director, said the group is not prejudiced, and that it works with Muslims who want to reform Islam. Islam has “issues” that need to be addressed, he said.

“Embedded within Islamic doctrine is a supremacist political ideology,” Rodgers said. “Does every Muslim agree with that ideology? No. Does every Muslim practice it? No. But it’s that particular political ideology that is at the root of militancy, whether it’s violent militancy or what we call ‘cultural jihad.’ “

When it comes to the information about Islam and terrorism that ACT espouses, the group is less than transparent. In its tax return, American Congress for Truth notes that it conducted 700 hours of research on the issues, but Rodgers declined to name any of those researchers.

‘This filthy doctrine’

If the difference between being anti-Islam and anti-radical Islam is nuanced, some of ACT’s supporters don’t appear to get the message.

Facebook “fans” of the group repeatedly post anti-Islamic sentiments on the page. In the past week, one posted that “this filthy doctrine needs to be wiped off the face of the earth,” and another declared hatred of Muslims. The week before, one post praised ACT for “fighting the good fight” against Islam, and another called on “God-lovin” Americans to disrupt a Muslim prayer service in New York City.

But Rodgers said the group tries to keep tabs on members who cross the line. He pointed to a video posted this year by CAIR, in which an ACT member is shown saying that the Quran should be used as toilet paper.

Rodgers said ACT condemned those actions when it found out about them. The group can’t know about the beliefs of every one of its members, he said.

What isn’t in dispute is how little most Americans know about Islam and the roots of terrorism.

An August poll from the Pew Research Center shows that 55 percent of Americans say they do not know very much or know nothing at all about the Muslim religion and its practices.

Yet just 62 percent of respondents said Muslims should have the same rights as other groups to build houses of worship.

And 38 percent believe Islam encourages violence more than other religions, a figure that has increased substantially in the nine years since President George W. Bush visited a mosque and reminded Americans that Islam is a religion of peace.

Republicans and people with less education are far more likely to express an unfavorable view of Islam, Pew found, and people with more knowledge of the religion are more likely to view it favorably.

Concern over rising volume

Groups that exploit that lack of information to spread fear about Muslims seem to have become louder over the past few years, said Brannon Wheeler, professor of history and director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy. He does not speak on behalf of the academy.

More insidious, he said, is when groups “take a 10th century legal text [regarding sharia] … and find stuff in that text and say, this is what Muslims all around the world believe.”

Just as Christians around the world have diverging beliefs on certain issues, Muslims around the world are also quite diverse – if not more so, Wheeler said.

“It was my hope … that after the tragedy of Sept. 11, many people would learn more about Islam,” Wheeler said. “But I fear that what has happened in general is that most people’s stereotypes have become more entrenched and more widespread.”

On the whole, Muslims in America are far more integrated into society than in Europe, where there have been more violent conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Still, American Muslims – who make up less than 2 percent of the overall population – say they are more often experiencing discrimination. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has seen a surge in discrimination complaints by Muslims in the past two years, the New York Times reported in September.

Although there are many different and complex ways that people become radicalized, discrimination can be a factor, said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. Known as the START Center, it is a partner with the Department of Homeland Security, known as a Center of Excellence.

“The more you marginalize any minority in your population, the more grievances they have, and the more their grievances will be supported,” he said. “[It’s] a way of provoking people who had peacefully coexisted.”

That, LaFree said, is something that Osama bin Laden expressed hope would happen.

“If one of the main purposes of this type of terrorism is to drive a wedge between the Muslim and non-Muslim population,” he said, “it seems this is playing right into that.”

deirdre.conner@jacksonville.com

Terror Expert Emerson Feels His Own Heat Over Finances

By Larry Cohler-Esses and Nathan Guttman | Source

WASHINGTON — Steven Emerson has made his reputation by scrutinizing American Muslim organizations and individuals, trying to uncover their possible ties to terror groups. But lately he is being scrutinized himself, by a Nashville, Tenn., daily newspaper digging into the finances of his operation.

Now, under pressure to introduce more transparency to his tax-exempt charitable organization, Emerson is attempting to explain how and why the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation avoids revealing much of the information that charities are routinely required to disclose.
Emerson, it turns out, succeeds in veiling his foundation’s data by channeling the tax-deductible funds he raises into a for-profit company that he controls.
Emerson said security considerations have forced him to avoid disclosing a lot of information that is usually made public by tax-exempt charities. Such disclosures include the names of his group’s board members, the names and salaries of its highest-paid employees and detailed information on the group’s finances.
A key figure in the national discourse on issues relating to Islamic terrorism, Emerson first emerged as a commentator and researcher on the topic in 1994, when his documentary, “Jihad in America,” shown on the Public Broadcasting Service, exposed fundraising for terror activities by Muslims in America, following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He subsequently set up the Investigative Project, an earlier, for-profit predecessor of the IPTF that evolved into a robust operation devoted to tracking and documenting alleged connections of American Muslims to international terror groups. He is also a frequent commentator on Fox News.
The spotlight pointed at Emerson, and his foundation’s business activity comes as the IPTF has injected itself into the heated debate over the Park51 Islamic center in New York, publishing reports highly critical of the Muslim leaders behind the project. But it is his criticism of the leaders of another planned mosque, this one in Murfreesboro, Tenn., that drew the interest of The Tennessean, Nashville’s sole daily newspaper, and led to the paper’s October 24 investigative report on Emerson’s tax status.
“Emerson is a leading member of a multi-million-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances,” the report claimed.
In its wide-ranging article, The Tennessean reported that while the IPTF is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt charity, it in fact distributes almost all of its contributions to SAE Productions, a for-profit company that Emerson founded in 1994 and continues to control, as he does the IPTF.
Citing publicly available tax filings, the paper reported that Emerson’s foundation paid $3,390,000 to SAE in 2008 — the foundation’s only significant expenditure. It was the Emerson-controlled for-profit firm that then made all expenditures on the foundation’s behalf.
This is how Emerson’s foundation avoided the IRS’s detailed disclosure requirements for charities regarding their expenditures. Indeed, under this setup, even the IRS’s own tax-exempt division is in the dark on how Emerson uses his revenues.
Yet a careful look at Emerson’s correspondence with the IRS shows that the tax authority in fact approved Emerson’s IPTF for tax exemption only after Emerson assured the tax agency that “there are no, and will be no, financial/business transactions between officers, board members or relatives” of the IPTF and its subcontractor.

In an e-mail response to questions from the Forward, Emerson stated that at the time he made that commitment, “I was considering a number of options” and had not yet settled on contracting with SAE — a company he founded years earlier. Emerson noted that since gaining its tax-exempt status from the IRS, the IPTF has informed the tax agency, in annual tax reports, of his controlling role in both groups.
Emerson also said that salaries for SAE employees, who number 20 including himself, average between $65,000 and $70,000. “I can guarantee you that no one is becoming rich at IPTF,” he said. His own annual compensation amounts to $116,000, he reported.
“All of this was approved by our outside legal and accounting experts,” he wrote.
But William Josephson, a former head of the New York State Department of Law’s Charities Bureau, told the Forward, “Donors to IPTF get a tax deduction for in fact supporting a taxable entity. In effect, it’s just whitewashing the contributions.”
And Bruce Hopkins, a nationally recognized expert on charities law, said that Emerson’s later disclosure of the relationship between the ITPF and SAE in annual tax reports “does not mean that the IRS is okay with this practice.” Due to staff shortages, he explained, the IRS does not usually review these returns and does not compare them with the original request for tax exemption.
“Normally, the agency doesn’t like exempt organizations using taxable entities to carry out their programs,” Hopkins said. “As you can imagine, this is exacerbated where there is common control, as is the case here.”
Emerson’s communications with the IRS reveal a trail of contradictory and inaccurate statements.
In his original application for tax exemption, submitted May 6, 2006, long after SAE was created, Emerson replied “Yes” when asked if IPTF would have contracts or agreements with any other organization in which IPTF officers or directors also served as officers or directors. But asked to identify with whom IPTF would be contracting, he replied, “The subcontractor has yet to be decided upon.”
Emerson also answered “No” when asked specifically if anyone other than his employees or volunteers would “manage your activities or facilities.” Asked if any “officers, directors [or] highly compensated employees” would receive compensation “from any other organization related to you through common control,” Emerson again replied, “No.”
At the same time, Emerson assured the IRS that the arrangements between the IPTF and the unnamed subcontractor would be reviewed by an outside auditor to ensure that they were “at arm’s length” — a concern generally reserved for transactions in which there are common parties on both sides of an agreement. Such arm’s length arrangements are designed to guarantee that any goods or services exchanged between two related parties are transacted at market rates.
Unsatisfied, the IRS pressed Emerson in a letter dated December 8, 2006, on whether there would be “any financial/business transactions between officers, board members or relatives” of the still unnamed subcontractor and IPTF. It further requested a “signed/dated statement” attesting that the subcontractor would be “an unrelated third party” and, like the IPTF, a tax-exempt organization.
It was this question that prompted Emerson to respond that “there are no, and will be no, financial/business transactions between officers, board member or relatives” of SAE and the IPTF. But Emerson did not provide the IRS with the signed and dated statement it requested. He instead noted that the subcontractor would, in fact, not be a tax-exempt organization precisely to avoid the need for public disclosures, due to security concerns. The subcontractor would be, however, organized as a “not-for-profit organization,” Emerson wrote.
SAE is incorporated in the state of Delaware under its “general corporation” category, which is for for-profit firms.
On January 8, 2007, the IRS asked Emerson for additional explanations of this arrangement. Emerson replied that because of his work, he himself had been “the target of a death threat [that] can be confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials.” The proposed arrangement, Emerson argued, “furthers the legitimate business purpose of maximizing fundraising activities” for IPTF, while providing added security for “the staff conducting its work.”
It was the last follow-up the tax agency made. On January 26, 2007, the IRS approved Emerson’s application for tax exemption for the IPTF.
A Muslim group that has been a subject of Emerson’s investigations is now questioning that tax determination. The Council on American-Islamic Relations sent a letter to the IRS, claiming that the IPTF misused its tax-exempt status by paying millions to Emerson’s other company. According to Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s spokesman, the group has not yet received any response to its letter.
In his e-mail responses to the Forward, Emerson dismissed as “bogus” questions about SAE’s registration as a for-profit company after he told the IRS that it would be a not-for-profit. “The main issue for the IRS was whether the subcontractor would be tax exempt or not,” he wrote. He further stressed that despite being for-profit, “SAE spends all the money it receives from IPTF on IPTF’s stated mission and [on its] expenses in fulfilling that mission. No money is left over at SAE, so therefore SAE makes no profit.”
Asked to identify the third party that guaranteed the relationship between the ITPF and SAE was at “arm’s length,” as he had promised the IRS, and to provide that party’s certification of this, Emerson replied, “For security reasons, the firm [that] routinely monitors our transactions prefers not to be named publicly.” But he added, “They and my lawyers routinely reviewed all of our financial transactions and legal matters to ensure that everything was in order, including the relationship established between IPTF and SAE. They have continued to do so.”
Emerson added, “This is an unusual arrangement, but one that I had to implement because of the overriding needs of security. It was also fully disclosed to the IRS.
“I realize the opposite needs for disclosure. So I am trying to figure out another way in which we can disclose much more information without jeopardizing security. I have to take into account the fears of employees and our auditing firm and lawyers, who do fear that being publicly named, they will be targeted…. When they look at the threats I have endured, as well as the threats made against [the IPTF], I am morally bound to respect their fears.”
The controversy over Emerson’s financial practices does not seem to be an issue for at least one prominent IPTF donor. Kenneth Bialkin, who contributes annually to the group, said that Emerson could have been a target for smearing by the pro-Arab lobby.
“Of all those of us who labored in the vineyard in trying to help the Jewish people, there is no one who stands higher in the pantheon of honor than Steve Emerson,” said Bialkin, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “for all of us — those of us who are hard-liners — feel this guy is worth his weight in gold.”

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Additional reporting by Josh Nathan-Kazis

Ginni Thomas Stepping Down from Far-Right Think Tank

By Adele Stan | Sourced from AlterNet

Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is stepping down as president and CEO of Liberty Central, the Tea Party-affiliated think tank she founded, according to the Washington Post. Liberty Central spokesperson Caitlin Carroll (of CRC Public Relations) told the Post’s Amy Gardner that Thomas was relinquishing control of the organization to spare the organization the “distractions” caused by Thomas’s celebrity. From the Post:

“She’ll take a back seat so that Liberty Central can continue with its mission without any of the distractions,” Carroll said. “After discussing it with the board, Mrs. Thomas determined that it was best for the organization.”

Among those distractions is the one Mrs. Thomas created for herself when she dialed up Anita Hill, a professor at Brandeis University, last month to suggest that Hill apologize to Clarence Thomas for accusations Hill made during his Supreme Court nomination hearing that she had been sexually harassed by Thomas when she worked for him at a government agency. News of Ginni Thomas’s call to Hill brought forth another accuser — a former girlfriend of Clarence Thomas — who made claims similar to those articulated by Hill.

AlterNet reported links between Liberty Central and several far-right outfits: Gun Owners of America, headed by militia guru Larry Pratt (known for addressing a gathering of white supremacist groups in the 1990s, and declaring “war” on the federal government earlier this year); the Missouri Sovereignty Project, whose Web site features a video threatening armed insurrection against the government; and Tradition Family and Property, a religious cult that celebrates the Spanish Inquisition and trains teenage recruits in medieval warfare with spears and maces.

Now, reports the Post, Liberty Central will merge with the Patrick Henry Center, whose board is headed by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, who served under President Ronald Reagan and presided over the Iran-Contra scandal. The Patrick Henry Center was founded by Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent who found his way onto the best-seller list with a book that accused the Clintons of compromising national security. The Patrick Henry Center advisory board includes talk-show host Mark Levin — who has made sexist comments about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s anatomy, and tossed about incendiary rhetoric about President Barack Obama — as well as Oliver North, who was convicted of a felony in the Iran-Contra scandal — a verdict that was later tossed out on a technicality.

Also on the Patrick Henry advisory board are two anti-gay activists: Beverly LaHaye, founder of the Concerned Women for America, and Alan Sears, head of the Alliance Defense Fund. Rounding out the advisory board is Howard Phillips, founder of the Constitution Party, which seeks to replace secular law with biblical law. Phillips is one of the founders of the religious right, and a close associate of John Birch Society President John McManus.

Islamophobia Inc.

Source
Nicole Colson documents the big business of spreading anti-Muslim hate and lies.

“STEVEN EMERSON has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims.”

So begins a stunning investigative report from Tennessean newspaper journalist Bob Smietana on the business of Islamophobia–a multimillion-dollar industry that profits from promoting fear of Arabs and Muslims as part of the U.S. “war on terror.”

As Smietana reports, Steve Emerson is the owner of SAE Productions–a company that took in $3,390,000 in 2008 alone “for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.”

And Emerson isn’t alone.

In the years since September 11, an entire Islamophobia industry has sprung up, similar in many ways to the anti-Communist politicians, “experts” and foundations which warned America about the creeping “Red menace” during the Cold War.

The Islamophobes are sounding the alarm about the “Muslim menace” that they claim is threatening the Western, “civilized” world. According to them, every new mosque built in the U.S. is an invitation to jihad and the imposition of sharia law in the U.S.–because Islam is, at heart, a violent, terrorist-producing religion

And to get the message out, they’ve spawned a host of poorly researched and virulently racist–but apparently very profitable–books, Web sites and speaking tours.

Smietana cites people like Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-era deputy assistant defense secretary and now head of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Security Policy, which paid him a $288,300 salary in 2008.

One project of Gaffney’s “charity” to warn about the supposed dangers of Islam.

Gaffney recently testified in a lawsuit brought by residents of Rutherford County, Tenn., against a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro. As Smietana describes, “On the stand…[Gaffney] accused local mosque leaders of having ties to terrorism, using ties to Middle Eastern universities and politics as evidence. His main source of information was his own report on sharia law as a threat to America, one he wrote with other self-proclaimed experts. But, under oath, he admitted he is not an expert in sharia law.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

BUSINESS IS booming for the Islamophobia industry. Some examples, according to Smietana: “IRS filings from 2008 show that Robert Spencer, who runs the Jihadwatch.org blog, earned $132,537 from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative nonprofit. Brigitte Tudor, who runs the anti-Islam groups ACT! For America and the American Congress for Truth, earned $152,810, while her colleague Guy Rogers collected $154,900.”

Smietana also cites another opponent of the proposed Murfreesboro mosque, a man named Bill French, who runs the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

The benign title, however, obscures the fact that French is a former Tennessee State University physics professor with no actual credentials in the study of religions, political science or anything else remotely related to Islam. But like many others looking to profit off of their bigotry, his personal ignorance about the subject hasn’t stopped him from writing a book about Islam–which he penned under the name “”Bill Warner” and sells at speaking events.

The book, Sharia Law for Non-Muslims, is a screed full of racist distortions and half truths about Islam that warns ominously:

When you study Islam in Europe today, you are seeing America in 20 years. Why? The actions by Muslims in Europe are based on sharia law, the same sharia law that is beginning to be implemented in America today.

— Traffic cannot move in London streets as Muslims commandeer the streets to pray–a political result based on sharia law.

— Entire areas of Europe are no-go zones for non-Muslims, this includes the police. These are Islamic enclaves where only Muslims live. The Muslim-only policy is based on sharia.

— In England, an Anglican bishop calls for the rule of Islamic law for Muslims. The bishop is obeying sharia law.

— In the schools, only Islamic approved texts can be used. This is based on sharia law.

— Christians may not speak to Muslims about Christianity, nor may they hand out literature. This is a political result based on sharia law enforced by British courts.

— Rape by Muslims is so prevalent that Sweden has forbidden the police to collect any data in the investigation that would point to Islam. Rape is part of Islamic doctrine as applied to non-Muslim women.

— In London, mass demonstrations by Muslims call for the end of British law and sharia law to rule all people. This political action is based on sharia.

— In some English hospitals, during Ramadan fast (an Islamic religious event) non-Muslims cannot eat where a Muslim can see them. The submission of non-Muslims is based on sharia law.

Of course, each of these supposed facts is an unhinged lie. But taken together French/Warner’s rhetoric is disturbingly reminiscent of that used by Ku Klux Klan or Nazi groups to demonize other races and religions.

In contrast to the bigoted descriptions of people like French/Warner, “sharia” is not a uniform concept–it varies based on the type of Islam practiced, as well as the country and culture in which it is practiced. As Akbar Muhammad, an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Binghamton University in New York, explained to NewsHour,

The word “sharia” is the term given to define the collectivity of laws that Muslims govern themselves by. And there is a presumption that these laws recognize all of the specific laws mentioned in the Koran and in the practice of the prophet, and do not conflict with that…

Islam is a very flexible system, and it has been very flexible for centuries. What I mean by that is that differences of opinion have been accepted within Islam and given legitimacy by some of the highest authorities in Islam. Thus in certain areas of the sharia, one country may differ from another country. One community may differ from another community, even in the same country…

Islamic law is not one thing. It’s not monolithic, as American law is not monolithic, as Western law is not monolithic.

But French didn’t let such facts get in the way during a speech to opponents of the proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, where he told an assembled crowd of 80 that sharia law is a threat to their way of life, including their American flags (which, he claimed “offend Allah”).

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

FRENCH CERTAINLY isn’t the only self-described “experts” on Islam who spouts nothing but distortions and lies.

There’s Pamela Geller, a leading opponent of the Park51 Islamic community center project in lower Manhattan (misnamed the “Ground Zero mosque”) and founder of “Stop Islamization of America,” who has stated her approval for fascists like the English Defense League and dead South African white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche. Another is anti-Muslim blogger Debbie Schlussel, who in May accused the Miss USA contestant Rima Fakih–an American Muslim of Lebanese descent–of supporting terrorism because she shares her last name with some Hezbollah officials.

As Frankie Martin, a research fellow at American University’s School of International Service, recently wrote in the Washington Post, there is now an “infrastructure” of anti-Muslim hate in the U.S.:

Much of this bigotry and misinformation can be traced directly to what I am calling the infrastructure of hate, an industry which connects venomous anti-Islamic blogs, wealthy donors, powerful think tanks, and influential media commentators, journalists and politicians. The most visible component of the infrastructure is the hate blogs, which have recently grown exponentially in number, influence and stature…

To the hate bloggers, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims represent an insidious, inherently violent force seeking to enslave the United States by overthrowing the government and jettisoning the Constitution in favor of sharia law.

Frequently the bloggers include caveats, such as claiming that they are only talking about “Islamists,” “Islamofascists,” or those supporting “sharia,” but by tying terrorism explicitly to the Prophet Muhammad and to the Koran, they equate it with Islam. Under this simplistic, warped logic, every Muslim is a potential, if not-fully formed, terrorist and every one of America’s 7 million Muslims a potentially treasonous enemy. Such crass, demonizing generalizations constitute hate speech.

What is especially disturbing, however, is that these fringe voices have been given an increasingly wide hearing by politicians and the media, especially in connection with the Tea Party phenomenon, which has frequently embraced Islamophobia alongside its conservative “small government” mantra.

Some examples: Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans were some of the loudest voices speaking out against the Park51 project. And in September, for example, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington about the supposed growing threat of sharia law, saying, “We should have a federal law that says under no circumstances in any jurisdiction in the United States will Sharia [law] be used in any court to apply to any judgment made about American law.”

Not surprisingly, media commentators–particularly those from the Fox News stable–have let loose with anti-Islam racism on the air as well, often with zero consequences. Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade, for example, recently stated on air, “It wasn’t just one person [that attacked the U.S. on 9/11], it was one religion. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

That, of course, would be news to the families of the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by right-winger Timothy McVeigh, or family members of slain abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, assassinated at his church by anti-abortion maniac Scott Roeder); or the victims in bombings of abortion clinics, a gay bar and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, all carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph of the “Christian Identity” movement.

One of the most recent waves of anti-Islam bigotry came in defense of journalist Juan Williams, who was fired by National Public Radio after an appearance on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor, during which he said, “[W]hen I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.”

Unfortunately, many people who aren’t right-wingers also defended Williams, claiming that his comments were “misconstrued” or that that he was a victim of “political correctness run amok.”

But Williams made his statements in his role as a “liberal” counterpoint to right-wing blowhard Bill O’Reilly, who earlier in the week had claimed on national television that “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” In that context, Williams’ talking about his “fear” of people dressed in Islamic garb at airports played to a slightly more “acceptable” form of racism–but it was racism nonetheless.

Imagine if Williams’ target had been different–if he had said, for example, that being around Orthodox Jews made him “uncomfortable.” He would labeled an anti-Semite, even if he admitted to his racism with a slightly apologetic tone.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IF LEFT unchallenged, Islamophobia has real consequences.

Days after Williams’ remarks, for example, a Muslim family was removed from a plane at Memphis International Airport, in a case of what’s become known as “flying while Muslim.” “My understanding is they were dressed in attire that would indicate some Muslim-type religion,” airport vice president Scott Brockman explained to a reporter. The family was subjected to interrogation by the FBI before being placed on a later flight.

Such stories are brushed aside by those in the Islamophobia business, with conservatives claiming that “America has a right to protect itself” and that racial profiling of Muslims is warranted because “they attacked us” and “want to destroy our way of life.”

From the planned “Burn a Koran Day” by Christian conservatives in Florida earlier this year, to protests against the misnamed “Ground Zero mosque,” to the recent ballot measure to “ban” sharia law passed by Oklahoma voters, such actions pave the way for real violence against Arabs and Muslims. Recent months have seen the stabbing of a taxi driver in New York City after he was asked if he was Muslim; a drunk man walking into a New York City mosque and urinating on the prayer rugs; and the vandalizing of a mosque in California–first with signs expressing Islamophobic bigotry; and second time with a rock was thrown through a window.

Bob Smietana’s Tennessean report was sparked in part by the furor over the proposed mosque in Murfreesboro and a series of disturbing racist attacks against Muslim residents of the area.

The proposed Islamic center site in Murfreesboro has had at least one arson attack on construction equipment, and the Al-Farooq Islamic Center in nearby Nashville was vandalized with red spraypaint reading: “Muslims go home” and images of crosses. In Columbia, Tenn., an Islamic center was burned to the ground two years ago by men who also spray-painted swastikas on the site, along with the phrases “White Power” and “We run the world.”

As Smietana notes, the economic crisis has intensified anti-Islam sentiment in Tennessee. Unemployment in Rutherford County, which contains Murfreesboro, has doubled in the past four years. stands at 8.6 percent, more than twice what it was in 2006. As Smietana writes:

When revenue for state and local budgets shrinks, immigrants become a target–especially their perceived toll on education and health-care systems. And non-Christian immigrants often bear the brunt, said Katharine Donato, chairwoman of the sociology department at Vanderbilt.

Chinese immigrants were considered un-American because they were not Christians, while Catholics were ostracized for being the wrong kind of Christians. Today, Muslims are seen as part of the problem.

But most people who dislike Muslims don’t describe their reasons so eloquently, or maybe don’t even understand the reasons. Retired Murfreesboro resident Jerry Paschal does it in one sentence: “They don’t want to be us.”

Despite this, there are encouraging signs of people rallying to the defense of Muslims in the area. According to a poll conducted by Middle Tennessee State University found that 76 percent of Tennesseans said U.S. Muslims deserve the same rights as other Americans, and about the same proportion either support or would not oppose construction of an Islamic facility in Murfreesboro or near where they live.

In other words, the anti-Islam bigots represent a small but vocal and well-funded minority–a minority whose reactionary views that can be pushed back.

According to the Associated Press, “Other faiths have risen to the defense of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The newly formed Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which is composed of prominent Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Southern Baptists and other Protestants, has filed a brief in the [court] case.”

As Rev. Joel Hunter, an evangelical megachurch pastor and coalition member, explained, “Every minority–and Islam is very much a minority in this country right now–has had to struggle for equal rights. Islam is facing that now, and we will not rest until they have equal rights with other religions.”

Mother Jones: Muslimophobia: Election Roundup

Source | By Jen Phillips

— YouTube still from Josh Mandel campaign / fair use

First, the good news: Many anti-Muslim candidates did not get elected Tuesday. Now the bad news: Alas, several anti-Muslim candidates won—mostly in the South. Oh, and Oklahoma became the first state to ban sharia law, even though only 0.8% of the population is Muslim. Below, a (fairly) complete list of vocally anti-Islam politicos in 2010. I’ve tried to include only candidates who won primaries, but if you have additions, please post them in the comments.

Oklahoma

Question 755: Banning of Sharia and international law. This measure, aka “Save Our State,” amends the state’s constitution to forbid Oklahoma judges from “considering or using” international or sharia law when deciding cases. The bill’s sponsor, Oklahoma State Senator Rex Duncan, admits that no judge in the state has ever tried to use sharia law. As he told Fox News, “we want to make sure they never will.” He’s called the bill a “preemptive strike” against sharia.
PASSED 70% / 30%

Delaware

Christine O’Donnell for Senate: O’Donnell worked with an aide who, as we reported, pushed the idea that Obama was secretly Muslim and would always be one, despite attending Christian churches for decades. On another note, O’Donnell said it was “refreshing” to go on a Bible-themed tour of Jordan because she found the culture more modest. She’s a bit of a mixed bag (declined to endorse or condemn the mosque near Ground Zero) but with her wacky statements and fuzzy hold on separation of church and state, still probably a good thing she didn’t get elected.
FAILED 40% / 56.6%

New York

Carl Paladino for Governor: Paladino said the proposed Islamic center near ground zero “makes a mockery of those who died there” and promised to stop it if elected in this campaign ad. He called it “a monument to those who attacked our country,” simultaneously espousing that Muslims are not Americans and they’re all terrorists. Paladino went further to propose no mosque be built where the 9/11 “dust cloud” had been.
FAILED 34% / 61.5%

Minnesota

Keith Ellison for House: Rep. Ellison, a Muslim and a Democrat, has been attacked by conservatives like Glenn Beck and more recently, by tea party leaders like Judson Phillips. Back in 2006, Beck asked Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.” This year, Phillips wrote that “I’m bothered by a religion that says kill the infidel,” encouraged Minnesotans to vote for Ellison’s rival, and said that “I, personally have a real problem with Islam.” Voters disagreed with Phillips, and re-elected Ellison by a landslide.
WON 68% / 24%

North Carolina

Renee Ellmers for House: Republican Ellmers ran on an anti-mosque platform, running ads like this one that equates the Muslims of ancient Constantinople (failing to mention the equally rapacious Christians of that era) with the Muslim Park 51 organizers and calls the proposed Islamic center a “victory mosque.”
WON 49.6% / 48.5%
Ilario Pantano for House: Pantano is perhaps better known for shooting 45 rounds of ammunition into two unarmed Iraqi civilians, killing them, during his 2004 tour of duty. “I had made a decision that when I was firing I was going to send a message to these Iraqis,” Pantano said. He was charged with murder, but the charges were later dropped. Since then, Pantano’s been busy protesting the Park51 project and welcoming an endorsement from radical anti-Islamist Pam Geller. He even wrote in an op-ed that the Islamic prayer space was a “martyr marker” and “If this was truly about bridging cultures, we should be erecting a church.”

FAILED 46.2% / 53.8%

Ohio

Josh Mandel for State Treasurer: Mandel said in an ad that Boyce gave out jobs as favors, including one “he only made available at their mosque” and another “sensitive” job at the Treasury Department. The ad looks like it was trying to paint Boyce as a Muslim, even though he is Christian and had never been to the mosque in question. Boyce’s deputy, Amer Ahmad, is Muslim but both he and Mandel disputed the claims in the ad, including that the secretarial job at the Treasury was sensitive in nature. The ad stopped running after a week, but Mandel won anyway.
WON 54.9% / 40.2%

Florida

Allen West for House: Tea party candidate West is one of the most anti-Islamic this election season. West said that “Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD, and we need to have individuals that stand up and say that.” To continue the blatant fear-mongering, in speeches West equates today’s Muslims with those of medieval Europe, alleging that if Muslims in the US are not stopped, we too will have to change our name like Constantinople.
WON 54.4% / 45.7%

Indiana

Marvin Scott for House: Scott ran against Muslim Andre Carson for a House seat and used Carson’s faith as a campaign tool. Scott stated on his website that “Radical elements of Islam are funding and building mosques across America.” While professing a love for freedom of religion, he said that “I passionately defend his [Carson’s] right to become a Muslim… What they do not have the right to do is to replace American law with extremist Muslim Sharia law.” To Scott, apparently, there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim or one who doesn’t advocate Sharia law.

FAILED 37.8% / 58.9%

Nevada

Sharron Angle for Senate: Angle thinks the Park51 organizers should move their mosque, and told an audience that “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States … on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan.” She also voiced concern about sharia law, which she seemed to think was being used widely in American courts in Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas (it’s not, and Frankford was incorporated into Dallas long ago).

Jen Phillips is the editorial coordinator at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here or follow her on Twitter, @the_hip_hapa

The Hater Party: How Right-Wing Candidates Have Turned Hate Into Political Currency

Source

By Tiny (aka Lisa Gray-Garcia)

“Unemployed workers are lazy welfare queens,” said Sharron Angle, running for Senate in Nevada under the Tea Party banner, in one of her many speeches laced with vitriol and hate for families living in poverty in the U.S.

From New York to California, from Sharron Angle to Meg Whitman, the running theme of hundreds of political campaigns supported by the so-called Tea Party and its Republican counterparts is hate: hate for us poor mamas, poor people of color, poor families and immigrants.

“I will end the welfare system as we know it and I will crack down on sanctuary cities for immigrants,” said Meg Whitman, the billionaire Republican who is running for governor of California. She and others have built their campaigns on a perceived baseline of racist and classist hate that exists in the U.S. for poor folks and immigrants and people of color. Even if this perceived hate isn’t actually there, it is fueled by a constant stream of disinformation and lies that rolls, unchecked, through corporate-owned media and out of the mouths of corporate politicians.

“Instead of handing out welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check, we’ll teach them personal hygiene,” said New York’s Tea Party candidate for governor Carl Paladino, who is running on a platform riddled with myths and lies about poor families and the measly subsidies we get. Paladino has proposed to transform New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, to teach us “hygiene” so we can “work” for our checks. Again, either because of his own ignorance and arrogance and/or to fuel the baseline fascism of the U.S., he fails to mention that us poor parents who receive the tiny amount of cash aid from the state always have to work for that subsidy through the welfare-to-work program — work we have done for years. There is in fact no “free money” in the U.S. scarcity model of welfare.

From calling migrants “terrorists,” as Angle has done many times, to claiming that we need to incarcerate “illegals” for just being “illegal,” as Whitman has said many times, all of the Tea Party and Republican candidates have consistently used immigrants of color to fuel hate and a perceived racism that apparently lurks everywhere in the U.S. But does it? Is this overt racism and hate for the poor really here? Or is it crafted like a well-oiled Hitlerian machine meant to birth a national hate toward someone, anyone, as long as it’s not the corporations that keep stealing our resources, killing families and poisoning land across pachamama (mother earth).

“You are the reason Arnold Schwarzenegger is in office,” my welfare case worker spat through clenched teeth in one of my food stamp evaluation meetings. My already sad heart dropped to the floor as the words tumbled angrily from her lips. I’m not sure why she said this to me, maybe for no reason except to make me feel like less than the gum on the bottom of my shoe and/or to make her feel a moment of hegemony-fueled power. But as I watch the current batch of politicians top each other with hate speech for the poor, I continue to wonder how hate became political currency in the U.S.

“There but for the grace of god go I,” goes the old saying my mama used to say to me about folks sleeping on the street below our rundown East L.A. apartment window. Then, after my mama became disabled, unemployed and without resources, there we were, on the street, in our car, sleeping on top of all of our clothes, being viewed as trash, bums, lazy, and all the other ways people are stereotyped and silenced with words and names and casual hate.

One of the reasons Whitman, Rand Paul, Paladino, Angle, Christine O’Donnell, and all of the Tea Party/Republican members continue to use poor mothers and children and immigrants is because they can. Because we don’t own Clear Channel or YouTube, NBC, ABC, Fox or the New York Times. We don’t own the channels of information and access, and so we can be easily lied about, talked about, disrespected with hateful impunity.

“We want to make all of California a sanctuary state,” said Carlos Alvarez, the unheard gubernatorial candidate of the Peace and Freedom party, in response to my question in a recent interview on PoorNewsNetwork, on the party’s proposed policies on immigration.

Not only are the “other” candidates, i.e, candidates not running on hate or multimillion dollar campaigns, shut out and silenced, sometimes they are even arrested like Laura Wells of the Green Party, when she attempted to attend the billionaires club debate of Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. Which is why the inclusion of Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, in a recent debate in New York was so revolutionary.

“Landlords, we are coming to get you,” he said. Since his recent involvement in the debate, McMillan has raised money and gained massive popularity across the country, which leaves me thinking that the deep racism, classism and hate that fuels the Tea Party is based on the ongoing exclusion and silencing of truth, and true voices.

Which is why I, a poor mama who has been called a welfare queen, lazy, trash, and all kinds of other classist and racist slurs, who has have spent my life making sure that my voice and the voices of my fellow poor folks are not only heard but listened to, recognized and included, have a proposal: I think that we should rename the euphemistically titled Tea Party and all its Republicrat friends and supporters, the Hater Party. And if goddess forbid, they win a majority rule in the Senate and the House, the U.S. should be known for the next four years as Haternation.

Tiny (aka Lisa Gray-Garcia) is a poverty scholar, journalist, PO’ poet, spoken-word artist, welfareQUEEN, lecturer, mixed-race mama and the co-founder and executive director of POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork. Tiny is a teacher, multimedia producer, and author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America (City Lights).

ADL, ICNC, and more

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD

Obama: Fox News Destructive for Country

Source | Posted by juliemillican

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

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

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

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

Religion of peace? Yes, peaceful religion.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)

When Noble Prize laureate Sinclair Lewis stated these words little did he know that his words would ring? In all reality history has proven that his quote was some sort of prophecy!!

Now, after about 60 years after Lewis’s death, we are witnessing a new form of fascism trying to storm the American society, announcing itself as a patriotic warrior for security and homeland!!

The Fascism we are discussing does not use weapons however it depends largely on racism against Muslims and Islam which is practiced widely by many influential individuals affecting the American public opinion. A typically racial website called thereligionofpeace.com does not combat terrorism or extremists as alleged but in fact practices animosity to Muslims and Islam.

Although the website attempts to portray itself as rational rejecting all forms of prejudice it has in fact illustrated the complete opposite. Articles published depict Muslims as the enemies and Islam the religion of terrorism

The website controlled by smear casters, mistakenly uses the Islamic sacred texts of the Quran to promote the wrongful ideas they support, by using texts out of context, ultimately changing its meaning.

ROP website also publishes fabricated statistics on the number of terrorism attacks committed by “Muslims” against other religion followers.

The website laces its articles with sarcasm and insinuations playing on the readers emotions where in one instance it posted on its homepage, an article stating that in 2007 Islam and Judaism’s holy holidays overlapped for 10 days asserting that Muslims racked up 397 dead bodies in 94 terror attacks across 10 countries during this time as opposed to the Jews who worked on their 159th Nobel Prize.”

The website portrays to its readers that Muslims loathe Americans since the Americans combat terrorism which symbolizes Islam and now the Muslims will attack Americans. Hence the American citizen who reads that “all Muslims” considers him as an enemy should be killed, won’t wait for his Muslim neighbor to come and kill him. Clearly there is a missing link with true misunderstandings and misgivings

The disagreeable vibes circulating, truly oppose the most basic human rights of freedom of religion, and will ultimately end with crimes committed against Muslims, who are a minority in western countries such as the United States and Britain.

The website fails to assert that each individual has an international and constitutional right to freedom of religion; in fact the very religion they oppose stipulates that a good Muslim should not judge individuals by religion, and Islam is a religion which endorses and advocates peace.

ROP has not only proven that it is aggressive towards western Muslims, the website is also supportive of crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against Palestinians. The website tends to tilt its scales favoring the Israelis it uses double standards in events such as the Israeli military massacre where commandos descended military helicopters boarded the ship and attacked international peace activists, on the Miva Marmara which resulted in 20 deaths and dozens of injuries.

The ROP website shed light on the dead Israelis with no rebuking to the Israelis’ victims both on board and in the Palestinian lands.

In fact the website has demonstrated that it lacks integrity as it continues to distort the truth and aims at constantly tarnishing the image of Muslims and the religion of Islam by posting photos and stories of provoked Muslims without reporting both sides of the story.

This introductory essay is the first of a series that will handle many causes addressed on the ROP website, related to the Islamic centers in the west, in addition to Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood bloc, and many other issues.