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Islamophobia: Paranoia infects North America
By Haroon Siddiqui | Source
One legacy of the decade since 9/11 has been the growing fear of Muslims and Islam.
Many Europeans dread “Eurabia,” the ostensibly imminent Arab/Muslim takeover of the continent, even though its Muslim population is less than 3 per cent. Among those convinced of the coming apocalypse was Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. Other believers express themselves peacefully but no less fervently.
Americans have come to share this European paranoia.
Many dread “New Yorkistan” and the takeover of America by Muslims, who constitute only 0.8 per cent of the population.
Nearly half of the 50 states have taken legislative steps to stop sharia, Muslim personal law.
Nearly a fifth of Americans believe that Barack Obama is Muslim or Arab or both. He fretted so much over this that during the 2008 election his organizers ejected two hijabi women from camera range. At a Republican rally, a woman called out to John McCain that Obama was an Arab; the Republican candidate responded: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen.”
Last year, Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg tamped down the hysteria over “Ground Zero mosque” but they could not persuade aFlorida pastor from commanding national attention for weeks before burning a copy of the Qur’an.
This year Peter King, chair of the security committee of the House of Representatives, held hearings into “the homegrown radicalization” of American Muslims. He believes that “80-85 per cent” of America’s 1,900 mosques are “controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. This is an enemy living amongst us.” In fact, a study this year by Duke University found that American Muslims have been the biggest source of tips to the FBI in disrupting terror plots. Attorney General Eric Holder lauded the Muslim community for it.
In Oklahoma, Republicans are accusing Democrats of plotting an Islamic state on the Plains. Elsewhere, school texts are being challenged as being pro-Islamic, meaning, they are neutral and do not condemn Islam.
Among the 23 anti-sharia states, the Tennessee Assembly said sharia promotes “the destruction of the national existence of the United States.”
Newt Gingrich believes, or at least says he does, that “sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Sarah Palin says sharia is going to be “the downfall of America.” Michele Bachman says sharia means Muslim “totalitarian control” over America.
This is “is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation in 19th-century Europe that Jewish religious law was seditious,” writes Eliyahu Stern, professor of Judaic studies at Yale.
It turns out that the sharia panic is not a grassroots movement but rather an orchestrated campaign by one man backed by anti-Islamic think tanks and private funders.
David Yerushalmi, a Brooklyn lawyer, works in collaboration with anti-Muslim groups to stoke the anti-sharia hysteria and distribute model legislation for states to adopt.
The Anti-Defamation League, a leading American Jewish agency, has lambasted Yerushalmi for his “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”
He’s among five individuals named recently by the Washington-based Center for American Progress in its report Fear Inc.: Exposing the Islamophobic Network in America.
It names him along with Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy; Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum; Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America; and Steve Emerson of Investigative Project on Terrorism. Their propaganda is parroted by Rep. King and other Republicans as part of their wedge politics. It is also repeated ad nauseum by such media outlets as Fox-TV.
The report also lists seven foundations that since 9/11 have dispersed $42.6 million to individuals and groups that work with the Tea Party’s state chapters: Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! for America; Pamela Geller’s (and Spencer’s) Stop Islamization of America; etc.
Some of them were behind the “Ground Zero mosque” protests, and are part of the agitation against the building of mosques and Islamic centres, 35 of which have been held up or delayed across the U.S.
The American Civil Liberties Union said:
“While mosque opponents frequently claim their objections are based on practical considerations such as traffic, parking and noise levels, those asserted concerns are often pretexts masking anti-Muslim sentiment. Government officials in some areas have yielded to this religious bigotry.”
As in most things , Canada is somewhere in between Europe and the U.S. in dealing with its 850,000 Muslims, both in the battle against terrorism and in the public discourse about Islam.
There was the bungled case of Maher Arar, tortured in Syria with Canadian complicity. There was the 2003 case of 23 Indian and Pakistani students accused of plotting terror acts, though not one was ever charged. There are the lingering cases of three Canadian Arabs who, too, got tortured in the Middle East with Canadian complicity. There’s the ongoing legal battle of five Arab-Canadians over security certificates that permit indefinite detention of non-Canadians.
On the other side of the ledger, there was the successful prosecution of 11 of the “Toronto 18” charged with terrorism, and that of an Ottawa man for his involvement in a British bomb plot.
Canada has not imported European aversion to Muslim immigration, yet. But our debate on multiculturalism has also become a smokescreen for attacking Muslims and Islam.
“Almost every reason for toleration’s apparent fall into disrepute concerns Islam,” notes Prof. Charles Taylor of McGill University, one of the inventors of our constitutional multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism was blamed during the noisy 2005-06 debate over sharia in Ontario, and also during Quebec’s 2008-09 debate on reasonable accommodation that preceded the anti-niqab legislation to deny all public services, including health services, to those wearing it.
Mind you, Quebec has long resisted the term multiculturalism and preferred inter-culturalism, with its implied primacy of not only the French language but also French culture. This year, the Parti Quebecois baldly asserted that “multiculturalism is not a Quebec value,” even though it is the law of the land (Section 27 of the Charter and the Multiculturalism Act).
Of the five high-profile Canadian cases of hijabis barred from soccer, judo and taekwondo tournaments, three were in Quebec. And in 2007, a Quebec corrections officer was fired for wearing a hijab. Opposition to the hijab is highest in Quebec, according to an Environics poll.
Across Canada, mosques in Hamilton, Montreal and the Vancouver area have been firebombed and vandalized since 2010.
European and American Islamophobes do have fans in Canada.
Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim MP from the Netherlands, was here last year on a three-city tour, to much fanfare in the right-wing media. Among those applauding him was the virulently anti-Muslim group Canadian Hindu Advocacy. It is in the forefront of the protest against Friday prayers at Valley Park Middle School.
Another pro-Wilders group is the Jewish Defence League of Canada, which has an alliance with Britain’s anti-Muslim and racist English Defence League.
Among the anti-Islamic writers quoted by Breivik in his 1,500-page anti-Muslim manifesto were two Canadians — Mark Steyn and Salim Mansur.
Steyn, author and columnist, was the subject of a 2006-07 controversy when Maclean’s magazine ran his 4,800-word rant that Muslims pose a demographic, cultural and security threat to the West. When a group of Canadian Muslims complained to the human rights commission, they were vilified by Steyn supporters as well as free speech advocates in a way not seen before against any anti-hate complainants.
Mansur, a professor at University of Western Ontario and a columnist for the Toronto Sun, is a frequent critic of fellow Muslims and Islam. He is a member of the academic council of Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, and much used by Islamophobes in the U.S. and Canada.
hsddiqui@thestar.ca
Using Shariah to create fear
By BARBARA FERGUSON | ARAB NEWS
Critics argue that such legislation is based on anti-Islamic paranoia, noting that the US Constitution forbids the imposition of Shariah law — or any religious law — on anyone in this country and that Muslims make up only one percent of the American population and would have no ability to impose Shariah even if they did have a desire to do so.
Shariah is a set of rules that govern personal conduct, family relationship and religious practices for Muslims.
But this has not stopped State Rep. Dave Agema, R-Michigan, who has just proposed such anti-Shariah legislation which Muslim leaders there say is an attack on Islam.
In June, Agema proposed legislation that would ban the implementation of foreign laws. While the language of the proposal does not say it directly, it would ban Shariah or Islamic law. Agema told the Detroit News that the law is intended to preserve American laws.
“No foreign law shall supersede federal laws or constitution or state laws or constitution,” Agema said. “Our law is our law. I don’t like foreign entities telling us what to do.”
Under Agema’s proposed legislation, Shariah law would not be recognized in Michigan courts.
Many in the Muslim community believe he is directly attacking their religious beliefs and lifestyle.
“Agema … is a reflection of a segment of the Republican Party that is openly xenophobic and Islamophobic,” Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter, told reporters.
State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, told journalists she plans to speak out about the bill and Victor Begg, a prominent Republican and co-founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan, called the bill “appalling.”
“Some in our party find it politically opportune to target my faith by sponsoring an innocuous sounding bill, knowing well that their intent is so-called ‘creeping Sharia,’” Begg told reporters.
Agema rejected the criticism: “If anybody has a problem with this that means they don’t agree with US laws,” he said. “If they don’t want it passed then they have an ulterior agenda. It shows the people accusing me of that (bigotry) are guilty of it themselves.”
A surprise critic of the anti-Shariah rhetoric has become one of the most eloquent:
“The threat of the infiltration of Shariah, or Islamic law, into the American court system is one of the more pernicious conspiracy theories to gain traction in our country in recent years. The notion that Islam is insidiously making inroads in the United States through the application of religious law is seeping into the mainstream, with even some presidential candidates voicing fears about the supposed threat of Shariah to our way of life…”
Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League, wrote last week in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Foxman, who understands the dangers when people exploit a religion for their own racist intent, noted that the bills were based “on model legislation issued by the American Public Policy Alliance, an unabashedly anti-Muslim advocacy group that defends the legislation as seeking to ‘protect American citizens’ constitutional rights against the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shariah Law.’”
“These measures are, at their core, predicated on prejudice and ignorance,” wrote Foxman, who has taken his own rounds of criticism for this editorial in the JTA. “They constitute a form of camouflaged bigotry that enables their proponents to advance an idea that finds fault with the Muslim faith and paints all Muslim Americans as foreigners and anti-American crusaders.
“Let us…reject those who seek to divide us for political gain, or those who wish to stereotype and scapegoat an entire people because of their religious faith,” Foxman said.
Yet many Americans remain confused about Islam and Shariah. Acknowledging this, the White House released a report last week outlining a new strategy to reach out to local communities, and to educate community leaders about the religion.
The document is entitled: “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.”
“It seems obvious that these are individuals who are blinded by hatred and who have a personal agenda, writes Sheila Musaji in The American Muslim.
But acknowledges that leaders must stop using ignorance of a religion as a basis to promote themselves through fear: “Unless the hateful statements made about Islam and Muslims by government officials and elected representatives are publically challenged by other officials and representatives, and unless Islamophobes stop being considered as the go to experts on Islam and Muslims, then this report will have little or no effect on improving relationships with the American Muslim community.”
Who’s Behind The Movement To Ban Shariah Law?
In the past year, more than two dozen states have considered legislation that would prevent the use of Shariah, the Islamic code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions, in courtrooms. Several prominent Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann have all recently warned about the threat of Shariah law. In Tennessee, lawmakers recently debated whether to classify suspected Islamic terrorist groups as “Shariah organizations.”
On today’s Fresh Air, New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott joins Terry Gross for a conversation about the state-level movement to ban Shariah law. Elliott recently profiled David Yerushalmi, the Brooklyn lawyer who started the anti-Shariah movement and who she says, “has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.”
“What was intriguing to me was how this man, who was really a fringe figure, came to cultivate allies and influence people at such high levels — former military and intelligence officials, leaders of national organizations, presidential candidates — how did he make that leap?” says Elliott. “And I think part of the answer is, in person he comes across not as the erratic character as some might suspect but as a sophisticated man who is convinced by his idea and has an endless appetite for defending those ideas.”
One of the people Yerushalmi first connected with was Frank Gaffney, the president of the conservative think tank Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C. In 2010, Gaffney — who once suggested that President Obama might be a secret Muslim — wrote an op-ed suggesting that then-Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan should be investigated because of her support for Shariah law.
“Gaffney really became [Yerushalmi’s] bridge to a whole network of think-tanks and government officials, including Jim Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A,” says Elliott. “I would say Gaffney catapulted Yerushalmi onto a new platform of influence and their aim seems to have been to get people in circles of influence to understand Shariah in this totally new frame, as a totalitarian threat akin to what the United States faced during the Cold War.”
Enacting Legislation At The State Level
In 2008, Gaffney and Yerushalmi set up meetings with high-level officials at the Treasury Department. The two men argued that the Islamic financial industry lacked transparency. But the briefings went nowhere, says Elliott, and they began looking for other avenues — just as the Tea Party movement was taking off.
“Yerushalmi saw an opening there, in that people were calling for smaller government and greater state autonomy,” says Elliott. “So he started to focus on state legislatures and began drafting the model legislation that would later sweep across the country.”
By the summer of 2010, anti-Shariah laws were being introduced in several state legislatures. Louisiana, Arizona and Tennessee have all passed versions of a bill restricting judges from consulting Shariah or broader categories of religious, foreign or international laws. Voters in Oklahoma passed an amendment to the Constitution banning courts from considering Shariah.
“It’s hard to say what the legal impact of these laws will be because the establishment clause of the Constitution prevents from the government from favoring or targeting one religion,” says Elliott. “The Oklahoma amendment which singles out Shariah has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge pending the outcome of a lawsuit that argues that it infringes on religious freedom. But the three other laws that have passed are worded neutrally enough that they could withstand Constitutional scrutiny.”
Interview Highlights
On what Shariah law is
“Shariah literally means the way to the watering hole and is more commonly referred to as ‘the way.’ It is, most simply put, the law that guides Islamic beliefs and actions. But when Westerners think of a legal code, they tend to think of a fixed set of laws and Shariah is a lot more fluid than that, in part because there’s no governing authoring in Islam. So while Islam’s four major schools of law agree on many basic areas of Shariah, there are many areas that lack consensus and there’s really a whole spectrum around the world in ways Muslims observe Shariah law. One of the key points is missing in this debate is that Muslims living in non-Muslim countries like the United States, there is broad agreement that Shariah requires them to abide by the laws of the land in exchange for the right to worship freely.”
On creating a debate about Shariah
“[Yerushalmi] really set out on what might seem like an impossible mission, which was to make this very arcane and complex subject of Shariah a focus of national scrutiny. This was a word that was not even part of our vernacular a few years ago. … A lot of people would argue that what has come of this is not really a substantive debate about Shariah as much as a shouting match. It’s a shouting match that involves really simple messages on both sides — ‘Shariah is bad’ or ‘Shariah is a non-issue.’ But the leaders of this campaign really talk about it in a most preemptive way than a prescriptive way. What they say they’re doing is trying to prevent Shariah from having the kind of influence seen in Europe, particularly in England, where the Muslim community is far less integrated and where there are Shariah tribunals.”
Islamophobia, Zionism and the Norway massacre
Aljazeera | By Ali Abunimah
In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League, likened the hateful ideology that inspired Anders Behring Breivik to massacre 77 innocent people in Norway to the “deadly” anti-Semitism that infected Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is a parallel that I, and many others who have been observing with alarm the rise of anti-Muslim incitement in the US and Europe, have made frequently.
Does this mean that Foxman – head of one of the most hardline and influential pro-Israel lobby groups – has found common ground with the Palestine solidarity movement?
That would be a good thing if it helped to fight the growing scourge of racist incitement. But by criticising the ideology that inspired Breivik, and pointing the finger at a few of its purveyors, Foxman appears to be trying to obscure the key role that he and some other pro-Israel advocates have played in mainstreaming the poisonous Islamophobic rhetoric that has now – Foxman himself argues – led to bloodshed in Norway.
Pointing the finger
Foxman describes, in his Washington Post article, “a relatively new, specifically anti-Islamic ideology” which Breivik used to justify his attack. “Growing numbers of people in Europe and the United States subscribe to this belief system”, Foxman writes, “In some instances it borders on hysteria. Adherents of this ideological Islamophobia view Islam as an existential threat to the world, especially to the ‘West.'”
“Moreover”, Foxman explains, “they believe that leaders and governments in the Western world are consciously or unconsciously collaborating to allow Islam to ‘infiltrate’ and eventually conquer democratic societies.”
Just such irrational beliefs underpin the hysteria about “Creeping Sharia” – the utterly baseless claim that Muslims are engaged in a secret conspiracy to impose Islamic law on the United States. So prevalent has this delusional belief become, that legislative efforts have been mounted in about two dozen American states, and have been passed by three, to outlaw Sharia law.
Foxman points the finger – as others have rightly done – at extreme Islamophobic agitators such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, co-founders of “Stop Islamisation of America” – whose hate-filled writings Breivik cited in his manifesto.
So far, Foxman has it right. But then he drops a clue about what really frightens him:
“One bizarre twist to Breivik’s warped worldview was his pro-Zionism – his strongly expressed support for the state of Israel. It is a reminder that we must always be wary of those whose love for the Jewish people is born out of hatred of Muslims or Arabs.”
Who does Foxman think he is kidding? There is nothing “bizarre” about this at all. Indeed Foxman himself has done much to bestow credibility on extremists who have helped popularise the Islamophobic views he now condemns. And he did it all to shore up support for Israel.
After Norway, Foxman may fear that the Islamophobic genie he helped unleash is out of control, and is a dangerous liability for him and for Israel.
Zionists embrace Islamophobia after 9/11
Many American Zionists embraced Islamophobic demagoguery after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Their logic was encapsulated in then-Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious assessment that the attacks – which killed almost 3,000 people – would be beneficial for Israel.
Asked what the 9/11 atrocities would mean for US-Israeli relations, Netanyahu told The New York Times, “It’s very good”, before quickly adding, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy” and would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror”.
In order for Israel and the United States to have the same enemy, the enemy could not just be the Palestinians, who never threatened the United States in any way. It had to be something bigger and even more menacing – and Islam fit the bill. The hyped-up narrative of an all-encompassing Islamic threat allowed Israel to be presented as the bastion of “western” and “Judeo-Christian” civilisation facing down encroaching Muslim barbarity. No audience was more receptive than politically influential, white, right-wing Christian evangelical pastors and their flocks.
Sermons of hate
“Since the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, on September the 11th, American politicians have tripped over themselves to state that the vast majority of Muslims living in the United States are just ordinary people who love America and are loyal to America. Is that true? Is that really true?”
That is the question Pastor John Hagee, leader of an evangelical megachurch and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), posed to his followers whom, he said, were becoming more concerned as “mosques appear across the nation”.
In a series of sermons soon after the 9/11 attacks which he titled “Allah and America,” Hagee began a relentless campaign of inciting his followers to fear and hate Muslims and Islam (videos of Hagee’s sermons can be found on YouTube.
Hagee has emerged over the past decade as one of the most prominent Christian Zionist supporters of Israel. His sermons are broadcast on dozens of TV channels and he influences millions of Americans.
As his “Allah and America” sermons progressed, Hagee’s answers became clear: “In the Qur’an, those who do not submit to Islam should be killed. That means death to Christians and death to Jews. Now I ask you, is that tolerant? Is that peaceful? Is that a sister faith to Christianity?”
After reading and distorting “selected verses from the Qur’an, which is the Islamic bible, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to increase our understanding of the basis of their faith,” Hagee claimed, “the Qur’an insists that no matter how mighty a nation is, it must be fought until it embraces Islam.”
And, apparently knowing that his congregation may hate and fear only taxes as much as Muslims, Hagee told them that the Qur’an’s message to Muslims is “when you get into the government, tax Christians and Jews into poverty until they submit willingly to Islam. Sounds like the IRS [Internal Revenue Service], but not faith.”
Then he offered this warning: “Politicians who are telling America that Islam and Christianity are sister faiths are lying to the people of this country. There is no relationship of any kind between Islam and Christianity. None whatever.”
At every step, Hagee exhorted the faithful that Islam and Muslims were not only a danger to the United States, but specifically to Israel – a country to which they should offer unconditional support.
This sounds a lot like the ideology of generalised fear and loathing of Muslims that Foxman condemned in the Washington Post.
Islamophobic fearmongering, demonisation and dehumanisation, from the likes of Hagee, and bellowed continuously on cable channels and radio stations across America, enabled the US government to legitimise invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and expand wars from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia. These took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, under the guise of a “war on terror” – all the while as presidents hosted White House iftars.
What makes Breivik’s attack so shocking and new is that he turned the Islamophobic rhetoric against the white citizens of the Euro-American “homeland”, those whom the officially-sanctioned military slaughter of Muslims abroad was ostensibly meant to protect.
Foxman welcomes Hagee in from the fringes
While Hagee offered his zealous support to Israel (he founded CUFI in 2006), not all of Israel’s supporters returned the love. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, warned in 2007 that the pro-Israel Jewish community’s embrace of far-right ideologues would drive away young, socially-liberal Jews from supporting Israel. He feared it could endanger the bipartisan support Israel always enjoyed in the United States by identifying it with what Yoffie saw as extremist elements.
Yoffie focused his criticism on Hagee, “who is contemptuous of Muslims, dismissive of gays, possesses a truimphalist theology and opposes a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He worried about the warm reception Hagee was receiving at conferences of Jewish Federations all over America.
One influential figure who didn’t share Yoffie’s fears about Hagee was Foxman, who told a reporter from the Religion News Service in March 2008, “I don’t have to agree with anybody 100 per cent in order to welcome their support, as long as their support is not conditioned on my agreeing with them on everything or accepting them 100 per cent.”
When it came to light during the 2008 US presidential campaign that Hagee had said in a 1999 sermon that Hitler had been sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain repudiated Hagee’s endorsement. But Foxman was quick to offer Hagee absolution, issuing a statement accepting the pastor’s “apology”.
Enabling Islamophobia
Foxman’s embrace of Hagee does not even mark the lowest point of his dalliance with Islamophobic extremists. Recall last summer – in the run up to the US midterm elections – the hate campaign targeting a proposal for an Islamic community centre planned for lower Manhattan in New York City.
Dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque” by its critics, it became a cause celebre for the Republican Party – and some gutless Democrats – who claimed that building the institution close to the former site of the World Trade Centre would be an insult to the memory of victims.
The hate campaign was notable for unprecedented anti-Muslim rhetoric that exceeded anything heard in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks. While New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg earned plaudits for defending the right of American Muslims to build the Islamic centre where they wanted, Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League caused consternation when they backed the bigots and came out against the project.
And who was it who helped take a little-noticed plan for a community centre and turn it into “a national political spectacle?” None other than Pam Geller and Robert Spencer – as the Washington Post reported at the time– the same Islamophobic extremists whom Foxman now blames for fueling the kind of hatred that inspired Breivik to kill.
Rescuing Zionism from Islamophobia
Foxman’s claim that Breivik’s support for Israel is “bizarre” is a brazen attempt to deflect attention from the alliance that Foxman and leading Israeli politicians have made with the most racist Islamophobes – ones Foxman accurately likens to anti-Semites.
To be clear, Israel and Zionism have always been racist toward Palestinians and other non-Jews, otherwise how else could they justify the expulsion and exclusion of millions of Palestinians solely on the grounds that they are not Jews? It is the virulent, specifically anti-Muslim trend that has been particularly pronounced since 2001.
But the rot has already gone too far. As a recent article in Der Spiegel underscores, Europe’s far-right anti-Muslim demagogues have found many allies and admirers in Israel, particularly within the upper echelons of the ruling Likud and Yisrael Beitenu parties.
And the feeling is mutual: European ultra-nationalists, such as Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders, have put support for Israel’s right-wing government at the centre of their politics.
Islamophobia welcome in Israel
While the world was united in horror at Breivik’s massacre, several commentators in Israel’s mainstream media were much more understanding of his motives, if not for his actions. An oped on Ynet, the website of Israel’s mass circulation Yediot Aharonot, stated that “the youth movement of the ruling Labour Party” – of which many of the youths murdered on Utoya island were members – “is an organisation of anti-Israeli hate mongers”.
An editorial in The Jerusalem Post offered sympathy for Breivik’s anti-Muslim ideology and called on Norway to act on the concerns expressed in his manifesto, while an op-ed published by the same papersaid that the youth camp Breivik attacked had been engaged in “a pro-terrorist program”.
Meanwhile, an article in the American Jewish newspaper The Forward noted that on many mainstream internet forums, Israelis expressed satisfaction with Breivik’s massacre and thought that Norway got what it deserved.
Clear warning signs
Foxman cannot claim he didn’t see any of this coming. Back in 2003, I interviewed him for an article about the inclusion of Yisrael Beitenu and other parties in Israel’s governing coalition, parties that openly advocated the expulsion of Palestinians. Foxman’s attitude was as indulgent toward those racists and would-be ethnic cleansers as he was to Hagee’s hate-mongering a few years later, and it is those same Israeli parties that have forged the closest ties with European and American anti-Muslim extremists.
The continued lurch towards extremism in Israel, and among many of its supporters, underscores the truth that anyone who wants to dissociate from ultranationalism, racism and Islamophobia, also has to repudiate Israel’s state ideology, Zionism. Universal rights and equality for all human beings are concepts that are anathema to both.
With his panicked and belated jump onto the anti-Islamophobia bandwagon, Foxman hopes we won’t notice, and that organisations like his can continue defending Israel’s racism free from the stain of the deadly anti-Muslim extremism they have done so much to promote.
Ali Abunimah is author of “One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse”, and is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
A Jewish Group’s Shameful Smear
Michelle Goldberg | Source
The Anti-Defamation League, the premier American organization devoted to monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, has long had a dark side. No one has done better work investigating and exposing neo-Nazi and white Supremacist groups in the United States. I’ve spoken at several ADL meetings about my own reporting on Christian nationalism. But the ADL has also shown itself willing to smear human-rights activists when it thinks Israel’s interests demand it. It is in this context that the organization’s misguided new report on the “top 10 anti-Israel groups in America,” which includes Jewish Voice for Peace and the Council on American Islamic Relations, has to be understood.
In the 1980s, at a time when Israel maintained close ties with South Africa, the ADL went on the attack against Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. As Sasha Polakow-Suransky reported in his recent book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, ADL National Director Nathan Perlmutter co-authored an article implying that the ANC was “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American.” The ADL sent spies into the American anti-apartheid movement, as well as other movements critical of right-wing American foreign policy. Eventually, the organization was surveilling much of the American left. In 1993, a California police raid on the offices of the ADL and one of its investigators yielded files on Greenpeace, the NAACP, Act Up, New Jewish Agenda, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and several Democratic politicians, among hundreds of others. The ADL eventually settled a class-action lawsuit brought by several of its targets.
The ADL’s absurd new report doesn’t rise to the level of such escapades; there is no skullduggery here, just stupidity. But the impulse to smear Israel’s legitimate critics is much the same. To be sure, there are groups on the list that deserve harsh criticism: the anti-war group ANSWER, for example, has an awful record of conflating Zionism and Nazism, and of supporting the most reactionary forces in the Islamic world, from Saddam Hussein to Hezbollah.
But Jewish Voice for Peace? This is a group with a rabbinical council chaired by respected Jewish clergy and an advisory board that includes luminaries like award-winning author Adam Hochschild, playwright Tony Kushner and Democratic messaging guru George Lakoff. Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s center on extremism, justifies the group’s inclusion partly on the grounds that it provides cover to other, anti-Zionist organizations. Jewish Voice for Peace, he says, has “propaganda value. Some of these other groups use the fact that they’re there to kind of shield themselves from criticism that they’re anti-Jewish.” This is clearly guilt by association.
The ADL’s list also includes The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a coalition that aims “to change those U.S. policies that sustain Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and deny equal rights for all.” Among its member organizations are the American Friends Service Committee-Iowa, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA.
The Council on American Islamic Relations made the list even though, according to spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper, it has no official position on the Middle East conflict “other than to say there should be a just and comprehensive resolution based on the interests of all parties.” Though the ADL says that CAIR has “a long record of anti-Israel rhetoric, which has, at times, crossed the line into anti-Semitism,” some of the examples it gives are laughable. For instance, the ADL informs us, “In response to the Israeli Navy’s raid of a flotilla of ships heading to Gaza in May 2010, the executive director of CAIR-Chicago accused Israel of a ‘failure to apply Jewish values.’” If this is one of the worst quotes the ADL can rustle up, it gives one faith in the strength of American interfaith relations.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the ADL’s list is the desperation it betrays. Israel is now a country whose own social-affairs minister warns of “a whiff of fascism” in national politics. The New York Times documents brazen acts of theft and vandalism by extremist West Bank settlers, while Israeli intransigence on settlements is doing much to derail the current, ill-starred peace process. Last week, the Israeli government jailed the Palestinian non-violent activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a man whose supporters include Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On Friday, a new poll in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth found that 36 percent of Israeli Jews want to deny Israeli Arabs the right to vote. Israel is currently headed in a very frightening direction.
My most recent trip to the West Bank was a few days ago; there, it’s harrowingly clear how settlement expansion is killing hope for a two-state solution, how Israel is systematically making liberal Zionism an oxymoron. Among younger American Jews, identification with Israel is collapsing, and for obvious reasons. One 2007 study found that among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, only 54 percent are “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state.” At campuses like U.C. Berkeley, young Jewish activists, outraged by Israel’s policies, are joining groups like Students for Justice in Palestine—another member of the ADL’s top 10.
The ADL recognizes that it is losing the propaganda war. One reason it put out the list right now, Segal says, is that students are returning to campuses where there’s been an uptick in anti-Israel activism. “Online activism, as well as what’s happening on college campuses, are seeping into the younger generation,” he says.
But the reason young people’s views are changing isn’t because of sinister organizations. It’s because, given current Israeli policy, an unequivocal defense of the country requires ever more heroic feats of denial and rationalization. It requires great barrages of defamation, against Jimmy Carter, against once-revered South African jurist Richard Goldstone, against Desmond Tutu, against J-Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace Washington group, and now, against groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. “This defense of Israel right or wrong makes them not have a moral compass,” Sydney Levy, campaign director of Jewish Voice for Peace, says of the ADL. “They cannot distinguish right from wrong. All they can do is defend Israel blindly.” George Orwell famously said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” To refuse to see it requires a constant struggle as well.
Michelle Goldberg is a journalist and author based in New York. Her first book, the New York Times bestseller “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” delved into some of the reddest precincts of the United States to expose the ascendant politico-religious fundamentalism dominating the Republican Party. It was a finalist for the 2007 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Goldberg’s second book, “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” explored the international battle over reproductive rights, and argued that the liberation of women is key to solving the planet’s most urgent problems. It won 2008’s J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg has reported from countries including Uganda, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, India and Argentina, and her work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic among many other publications. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.
ADL, ICNC, and more
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
The Connection Between Zionism & Organized Islamophobia – The Facts
Aubrey Chernick, Major funder of Zionist Orgs & Islamophobic Orgs
Conspiracy Theory?
Much has been said about the disproportionate Zionist presence in the world of organized Islamophobia. Now we learn that there is more to that claim than unfounded conspiracy theories. It turns out the main funder of anti-Muslim blogger/anti-Park51 organizer Robert Spencer and his hate site JihadWatch are husband and wife duo Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, the same couple are ardent supporters of Zionist causes and major funders of pro-Israel groups across the country.
Aubrey Chernick according to Politico,
A onetime trustee of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network that made its name partly with hawkish pro-Israel commentary and of late has kept up a steady stream of anti-mosque postings, including one rebutting attacks by CAIR against Spencer — who Pajamas CEO Roger Simon called “one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror.”
Politico lists some of the Zionist propaganda organizations and pro-occupation front organizations that Aubrey and Joyce Chernick have funded over the years:
- The Zionist Organization of America
- MEMRI, a group that distributes translations of inflammatory Arabic language material
- The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a group that tracks what it depicts as the threat of radical Islam, run by notorious Islamophobe Steven Emerson
- CAMERA, a group that tracks what it says is anti-Israel bias in the media and that is associated with Daniel Pipes
- The Central Fund for Israel, a clearinghouse for moneys directed to pro-settler groups
- A number of conservative think tanks that are aligned with the Likud.
The Chernicks are also major funders of Jewish groups including: The American Jewish Congress, The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, and The Anti-Defamation League.
Lauren Rozen goes into more depth as far as the contributions and think tanks such as the Hudson Institute, Defense of Democracies, Central Fund of Israel, etc. (via. Richard Silverstein), including some well-known anti-Muslim and Islamophobic initiatives (in bold below).
Laura Rozen has discovered that Chernick’s charity-giving is done through the Fairbrook Foundation ($66-million in assets). According to its 2008 IRS 990 report, among the far-right pro-Israel groups he’s funding are:
- Ateret Cohanim ($30,000), involved in the Judaization of East Jerusalem through “appropriation” of Arab homes
- Muslim-basher Bridgette Gabriel’s American Congress for Truth ($50,000)
- Aish HaTorah, funders of the anti-Muslim films Obsessed and Third Jihad ($14,000)
- the anti-Palestinian media advocacy group MEMRI ($100,000)
- American Freedom Alliance, another Muslim-bashing group, founded by Avi Davis, which defends western civilization from the unwashed hordes ($120,000)
- Gary Bauer’s American Values ($80,000)
- Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture ($160,000)
- The anti-Arab media advocacy group CAMERA ($25,000)
- The Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an Arab-bashing group established by a Pakistani neocon ($160,000)
- Defend the West, yet another Muslim-turncoat group founded by Ibn Warraq ($130,000)
- Hudson Institute ($50,000); Heritage Foundation ($50,000)
- The Jewish neo-con security think tank JINSA ($15,000)
- The anti-Arab media advocacy group Second Draft ($40,000)
- Stand With Us ($20,000); and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum ($180,000).
- In 2005, Chernick gave $60,000 to the Central Fund of Israel, one of the largest pro-settler ‘philanthropic’ advocacy groups.
This information is quite disturbing on a number of levels, foremost amongst them being the scant media attention being given to it as opposed to hyped-up stories such as the most recent attempt to sabotage the Park51 project with ten degrees of seperation/guilt-by-association smears against one of the investors in Park51, Hisham El-Zanaty.
The non-news story smears Zanaty by claiming that his one time donation to the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) of $6,050 in 1999 indicts him as a terror supporter. HLF was accused of giving aid to Hamas in the guise of charitable work.
So Zanaty was supposed to have foreknowledge about the HLF that even the US government didn’t have? Is it reasonable then to assume that everyone who gave money to the HLF in 1999 knew that the HLF was giving money to Hamas?
This AP news story sums it up quite nicely,
Many other donors to the foundation gave thinking their donations would fund humanitarian programs.
Other people and companies who donated money, equipment or services to the foundation the year Elzanaty gave included NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon, the Microsoft Corp., and a medical equipment company owned by General Electric, according to tax records.
When the foundation’s leaders were indicted, Attorney General John Ashcroft said, the case was not “a reflection on the well-meaning people who may have donated funds to the foundation.”
Even the Attorney General under George Bush, the one who was instrumental in the implementation of the Patriot Act affirmed what is obvious common sense, the case was not “a reflection on the well-meaning people who may have donated funds to the foundation.”
However, for some reason this non-story about Zanaty eclipses the very real story about the implications surrounding the funding of leading Jewish and Zionist organizations, JihadWatch, and Conservative groups many of which are the chief proponents behind the anti-Mosque drive.
How comfortable do the leaders of the ADL, AJC and others feel about receiving money from a couple who at the same time are the chief funders of an organization and a group of anti-Muslim bigots who are leading the charge in fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment across the United States?
Will they be coureagous enough to return the money they have received from the Chernicks and say that they do not want to be tainted by people such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer who as we have documented are thoroughly anti-Islam and anti-Muslim? Will the media drop its willful ignorance and double standards and begin to look into the glaring data out there?
Arnold Friedman | ADL’s mosque stand flawed
By Arnold Friedman
Special to The Courier-Journal
Back in 1947, between the time I graduated high school and started college, I worked in the offices of an organization in New York called the Institute for American Democracy.
Today, one might suspect such a name as being a front for some right-wing think tank, but the IAD was far from it. It was an offshoot of the Anti-Defamation League and its role was to foster brotherhood, tolerance, togetherness.
For instance, an Internet search turned up an IAD poster from 1945; it showed workers, perhaps in a steel mill, stoking a furnace, with the heading “Working Side by Side … in War and Peace! Catholics — Protestants — Jews.”
That was my first introduction to the ADL, an organization founded by the Jewish fraternal group B’nai B’rith in 1913 in the wake of the lynching in Atlanta of Leo Frank, a Jew unjustly accused of murdering a little girl.
Over the years, I have been a strong supporter of the ADL and all it stands for. My first boss, at the old Long Island Press in New York, was a member of the organization’s National Board, and we often talked about its good works.
Perhaps what impressed me most was that it didn’t get involved only in Jewish causes, but in human causes. If something was wrong; if there was blatant discrimination, whether it be religious, racial, or something else, the ADL was there to champion the offended.
I cannot think of an issue on which I didn’t agree with the ADL position — until now. The issue now is the proposed Islamic community center and mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.
After long internal debate, the ADL came down on the side of the mosque’s opponents. In a statement that seemed to want it both ways, the ADL’s director Abe Foxman said, “We categorically reject appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion, and condemn those whose opposition … is a manifestation of such bigotry.”
Saying that there are legitimate differences of opinion about the site, he said “the overriding concern should be the sensitivities of the families of the victims” and that another site should be found.
I cannot imagine that my boss would have agreed. Consider the 1977 decision of the American Civil Liberties Union to support neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois, home to thousands of Holocaust survivors — a decision that cost it many members, but a correct decision nonetheless.
No, Mr. Foxman, “sensitivities” are not at issue. Religious freedom is. Indeed, in your statement, you called freedom of religion “must include the right of all Americans — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths — to build community centers and houses of worship.”
Yes, the ADL’s record on matters of intolerance has been exemplary. It has stood up when others wouldn’t — when mosques were attacked, when a member of Congress used stereotypes to depict Muslims.
But you are not right in this case. And as a Jew, I’m embarrassed
Muslims, too, died at Ground Zero. A Muslim alerted the police to the Christmas Day attempted bombing in Times Square.
Too many of my friends forward e-mails to me with xenophobic and Islamophobic messages, but I’ve known and worked with many Muslims and I know that no group can be all bad.
I’m pleased that respected journalist Fareed Zakariah recently returned a First Amendment award the ADL gave him in 2005 to protest your decision. I’d be more pleased if the ADL were to reconsider its position and admit that it was wrong in this case.
Arnold Friedman is a retired newspaperman who lives in Louisville.
Ikhwanophobia‘s Comment
We believe that Muslims also suffered in Ground Zero, Muslims lost hundreds of souls in 9/11. This means that Muslims, Christians and Jews should stand in the same position against racism, terrorism and bigots who calls for religious discrimination!
Fareed Zakaria: why I’m returning an award to the ADL?
I believe we should promote Muslim moderates right here in America. And why I’m returning an award to the ADL.
Ever since 9/11, liberals and conservatives have agreed that the lasting solution to the problem of Islamic terror is to prevail in the battle of ideas and to discredit radical Islam, the ideology that motivates young men to kill and be killed. Victory in the war on terror will be won when a moderate, mainstream version of Islam—one that is compatible with modernity—fully triumphs over the world view of Osama bin Laden.
As the conservative Middle Eastern expert Daniel Pipes put it, “The U.S. role [in this struggle] is less to offer its own views than to help those Muslims with compatible views, especially on such issues as relations with non-Muslims, modernization, and the rights of women and minorities.” To that end, early in its tenure the Bush administration began a serious effort to seek out and support moderate Islam. Since then, Washington has funded mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers that are trying to modernize Islam around the world. Except, apparently, in New York City.
The debate over whether an Islamic center should be built a few blocks from the World Trade Center has ignored a fundamental point. If there is going to be a reformist movement in Islam, it is going to emerge from places like the proposed institute. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them. Were this mosque being built in a foreign city, chances are that the U.S. government would be funding it.
The man spearheading the center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a moderate Muslim clergyman. He has said one or two things about American foreign policy that strike me as overly critical —but it’s stuff you could read on The Huffington Post any day. On Islam, his main subject, Rauf’s views are clear: he routinely denounces all terrorism—as he did again last week, publicly. He speaks of the need for Muslims to live peacefully with all other religions. He emphasizes the commonalities among all faiths. He advocates equal rights for women, and argues against laws that in any way punish non-Muslims. His last book, What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America, argues that the United States is actually the ideal Islamic society because it encourages diversity and promotes freedom for individuals and for all religions. His vision of Islam is bin Laden’s nightmare.
Rauf often makes his arguments using interpretations of the Quran and other texts. Now, I am not a religious person, and this method strikes me as convoluted and Jesuitical. But for the vast majority of believing Muslims, only an argument that is compatible with their faith is going to sway them. The Somali-born “ex-Muslim” writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s advice to Muslims is to convert to Christianity. That may create buzz, but it is unlikely to have any effect on the 1.2 billion devout Muslims in the world.
The much larger issue that this center raises is, of course, of freedom of religion in America. Much has been written about this, and I would only urge people to read Michael Bloomberg’s speech on the subject last week. Bloomberg’s eloquent, brave, and carefully reasoned address should become required reading in every civics classroom in America. It probably will.
Bloomberg’s speech stands in stark contrast to the bizarre decision of the Anti-Defamation League to publicly side with those urging that the center be moved. The ADL’s mission statement says it seeks “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.” But Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, explained that we must all respect the feelings of the 9/11 families, even if they are prejudiced feelings. “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted,” he said. First, the 9/11 families have mixed views on this mosque. There were, after all, dozens of Muslims killed at the World Trade Center. Do their feelings count? But more important, does Foxman believe that bigotry is OK if people think they’re victims? Does the anguish of Palestinians, then, entitle them to be anti-Semitic?
Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was thrilled to get the award from an organization that I had long admired. But I cannot in good conscience keep it anymore. I have returned both the handsome plaque and the $10,000 honorarium that came with it. I urge the ADL to reverse its decision. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain a reputation.
Jewish organizations schould have nothing to do with Ground Zero Mosque
By Ben Sales
I’m not sure if other people know this, but the community center/mosque that New York City just approved for construction is not a Jewish project. Given the public statements on the center from the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and J Street–all leading Jewish American organizations–your Jew on the street could assume that this was some sort of interfaith project by the Jewish Community Relations Council, rahter than an Islamic effort. By the same token, this latest bout of public statements was akin to those I’d seen on the flotilla crisis or the recent conversion fiasco in the Knesset.
Despite those public statements, this is not a Jewish issue. I understand that Israel fights Islamic terror. I understand that sympathy with Israel makes America’s Jews more attuned to Islamic activity in the US. What I don’t understand is why that makes some Jewish organizations think they have anything to do with an Islamic cultural center’s construction in downtown Manhattan. Islam is not the “opposite” of Judaism and just because something is Islamic does not mean that it relates in any way to Jews or the Jewish community.
Furthermore, it wasn’t even in the interest of those organizations to join the debate. The ADL lost out big-time–both morally and politically–by opposing the center’s construction, and while the AJC and J Street ended up on the winning side of the debate, this accomplished nothing for their causes.
The ADL is an organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry, so why did they advocate against building a religious community center? The AJC is a representative body of the Jewish community in Washington, but how did this have anything to do with the Jewish community? J Street is a lobby pushing a pro-peace agenda regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but what did this initiative have to do with that conflict? Yes, the initiative’s leaders are Muslim, just like the Palestinians, but you don’t see J Street commenting on every American domestic Islamic issue, nor on every Jewish one.
I know Jews like to debate, and I appreciate that our community stays informed about key local and national issues. That doesn’t mean, however, that every major Jewish organization should be issuing public statements about every hot news issue–even if the key players in that news issue happen to share a religion with the people who live across the fence from Israel. Odds are the Muslim community in the US also has some organizations with official-sounding acronyms; let them do some talking on this one.
Shame on ADL for opposing Mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero
By Rabbi Michael Lerner*
The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) publicly opposes the construction two blocks from Ground Zero of the Cordoba House (also known as Park 51), which the planners imagine as hosting a range of activities similar to those offered at the 92nd Street Y, and including a Mosque at which Muslims could worship. The plan, supported by Mayor Bloomberg, is opposed by some who have consistently used the attack on the World Trade Center as justification for war and fear+hatred of Muslims.
ADL leader Abe Foxman presented the position of this organization that claims to oppose discrimination by reading a formal statement that seemed to be a perfect example of "shooting and crying" (first you attack brutally, then you cry about how sad it is to be put into this difficult position, often blaming the victims for having "forced" us to attack them). The key to that statement was this:
"Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right."
This kind of argument is deeply mistaken. It was not "Muslims" or Islam that attacked the World Trade Center, but some Muslims who held extreme versions of Islam and twisted what is a holy and peace-oriented tradition to justify their acts and their hatred. We see the same thing happening in the name of Christianity (many of those who justified the war in Iraq were Christians who felt they were acting from a Christian ethical perspective) or in the name of Judaism (the immoral behavior of some of the settlers who use Judaism as their cover for stealing land and destroying the olive trees of their Palestinian neighbors). Just as we would rebel against others dismissing Judaism or Christianity, or prohibiting Jews and Muslims from constructing our holy places of worship or community centers where we wish because some of those who had suffered from the immorality of some Jews or some Christians had decided that it was painful to them to see the presence of these institutions near the site of previous suffering, so we reject this claim.
Arthur Waskow asks us to imagine how we would feel if some group of Muslims in the US, identifying with the suffering of Palestinians, and including within them some who had lived in Israel and had to leave to protect themselves from the oppression of Occupation that they labeled as "Jewish oppression," had opposed the construction of a synagogue in their predominantly Muslim neighborhood because it would cause some of the victims of Israeli policy to experience more pain. Would we accept that? Certainly not.
Underlying the ADL position is its references to the Holocaust and the need to respect the feelings of its survivors. Sadly, the memory of Jewish suffering is appropriated by right-wing forces to justify special privilege for Jews in general and Israel in particular, now is to be extended to victims of 9/11 (but not, for example, to the survivors of US military assaults on civilians in Vietnam,Cambodia, Laos, El Salvador, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iraq, or Afghanistan). The aggression of others is always evil, ours always justifiable, to the political right. That's bad enough. But shame on ADL in particular for now using our suffering in the Holocaust to justify discrimination toward others, whether in Israel or in the U.S.
Actually, to those of us who take seriously the Torah command to "love the stranger" (the Other), it seems clear that the rebuilding of Ground Zero should include the construction of an interfaith center in which all of the world's religions could be represented, particularly that of Islam as a way of affirming and supporting those many Muslims who do not adopt an extreme anti-American or anti-Jewish perspective.
The American Jewish Committee tried to adopt a more nuanced position, but wanted to withhold endorsement till they can establish that the source of money for this building did not come from extremist elements in the Muslim world. Yet how would we feel if construction of a Jewish center was similarly conditional? Would money from those who support the settlers or others who believe that Jews have a right to all of the Biblical Land of Israel and have a right to use violence to achieve that end be sufficient reason to prevent the construciton of a Jewish center? Would a Church that received money from sources in the Christian community that believed it appropriate to engage in violence to create the world they wanted (e.g. to support a US military intervention in Iran) be sufficient reason to deny them the right to build their Christian center? I don't think so.
No wonder, then, that we at Tikkun–seeking to build a world in which animosities among religions can be dramatically reduced so that all of us can recognize our common humanity (or what we Jews call "being created in the image of God") and recognize the immediate global environmental emergency to overcome national and religious antagonisms so that we can work together to save the planet and its peoples from destruction–strongly endorse and support the construction of the Muslim community center/mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero.
Shame on ADL and the American Jewish Committee for not understanding the moral imperatives of this moment! They not only betray Jewish values ("do not do unto others what you would not wish them to do to you") and American values (government should not interfere with the operations of religious communities), they unintentionally but nevertheless certainly increase the tensions between Jews and Muslims at a moment when all sane people in both communities recognize the need to build bridges of understanding, friendship and mutual caring as a prelude to supporting peace in Israel. Given that both ADL and the AJCommittee have consistently supported the most outrageous actions of the Israeli government toward Palestinians, is it possible that unconsciously they are taking these kinds of stands because they do not see the supreme importance of creating caring and sensitivity to the needs of the other? Yet it is this sensitivity which is the necessary prerequisite for a lasting peace with justice and security for both sides in the Middle East conflict. And that peace would be a major step toward undermining the support that terrorists have been able to amass, in part because such a peace is absent.
* Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org, chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley, Ca. and author of eleven books, most recently the national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country From the Religious Right. If you wish to support this kind of thinking, please join our Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org.