All Entries Tagged With: "Hamas"

When Your Father Is Accused of Terrorism

For a while, the phone stopped ringing. Not completely—reporters called, but many old friends did not.

How Obama Missed an Opportunity for Middle East Peace

Why did the president ignore the only part of the “peace process” that was working?

Hamas Wouldn’t Honor a Treaty, Top Leader Says

Abu Marzook Says He’s Open to a New Israel Relationship

Why Israel Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The Israeli nuclear facility in the Negev Desert outside Dimona. 

Five myths about the Muslim Brotherhood

Washington Post | By Lorenzo Vidino

Even before Hosni Mubarak gave in to the throngs in Tahrir Square and stepped down as Egypt’s president on Feb. 11, officials in Western capitals were debating what role the Muslim Brotherhood would play in a new Egypt and a changing Middle East. Yet much of what we know – or think we know – about the group’s ambitions, beliefs and history is clouded by misperceptions.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a global organization.

1Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood saw its ideas quickly spread throughout the Arab world and beyond. Today, groups in more than 80 countries trace their ideologies to the Brotherhood, but these entities do not form a cohesive unit. Globally, the Brotherhood is more a school of thought than an official organization of card-carrying members.

Attempts to create a more formal global structure have failed, and the movement instead has taken on various forms. Where it is tolerated, as in Jordan, it functions as a political party; where persecuted, as in Syria, it survives underground; and in the Palestinian territories, it took a peculiar turn and became Hamas.

Though they interact through a network of personal, financial and ideological ties, Brotherhood entities operate independently, and each pursues its goals as it deems appropriate. What binds them is a deep belief in Islam as a way of life that, in the long term, they hope to turn into a political system, using different methods in different places.

The Brotherhood will dominate the new Egypt.

2With most political forces in Egypt today discredited or disorganized, many assume that the Brotherhood’s well-oiled political machine will play a major role in the country’s future.

This is not far-fetched, yet there are reasons to believe that the group will hardly dominate post-Mubarak Egypt. When I interviewed members of the Brotherhood’s Shura Council in 2009, they estimated that about 60 percent of Egyptians supported the group – seeing it as the only viable opposition to Mubarak – but that only 20 percent or so would support it in a hypothetical free election. And even that might have been optimistic: A poll of Egyptians by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy after Mubarak’s fall found that only 15 percent of respondents approved of the Brotherhood, while the group’s leaders received barely 1 percent in a presidential straw vote.

Over the past decade, aging hard-liners and a second generation of 50-somethings have wrestled for leadership of the Brotherhood. Then there are the younger cadres, which took part in the protest movement against Mubarak and deplored their leaders’ late participation in it. How these divisions develop will determine the role of the Brotherhood in Egyptian politics.

The Brotherhood seeks to impose a draconian versionof sharia law.

3All Brotherhood factions will now push to increase the influence of sharia – Islamic law – in Egypt. However, the generational battle will determine what vision of sharia they will pursue.

The old guard’s motto is still “the Koran is our constitution.” The second generation speaks of human rights and compares itself to Europe’s Christian Democrats – embracing democracy but keeping a religious identity. The third generation, especially in urban areas, seems to endorse this approach, even if skeptics contend that younger militants are simply offering a moderate facade to the West.

So far, the old guard is prevailing. The Brotherhood’s first major political platform, released in 2007, paid lip service to democracy and stated that women and non-Muslims could not occupy top government posts, and gave a body of unelected sharia experts veto power over new laws. How long this old guard remains in control will shape the group’s positions on sharia’s most debated aspects, from women’s rights to religious freedoms.

The Muslim Brotherhoodhas close ties to al-Qaeda.

4Historically, yes. But recently, those ties have frayed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Brotherhood was brutally repressed by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Understanding that violence against Nasser was a losing proposition, most of the group opted for nonviolent opposition, seeking to Islamize society through grass-roots education and mainstream politics.

But a smaller wing, led by theologian Sayyid Qutb, opted for violence. This faction argued that Islamization from below was too slow and would be impeded by local and foreign powers. For generations, Qutb’s idea of religiously justified violence has inspired jihadists worldwide. Several al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were influenced by the Brotherhood early in life, only to grow disillusioned with the organization later on.

While the Brotherhood has not completely rejected violence – supporting its use in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan and other places where it believes Muslims are under attack – the two groups have recently clashed over tactics and theology. Al-Qaeda’s No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, even wrote a book attacking the group for replacing bullets with ballots.

Washington can’t workwith the Brotherhood.

5U.S. and Brotherhood officials have taken tough public stances against each other recently. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the Brotherhood a “nefarious element” in Egyptian politics, while Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badi said America is “heading toward its demise.”

But posturing aside, there may be room for engagement with the Brotherhood’s more moderate players. It has happened before: Since early in the Eisenhower administration, parts of the U.S. government have reached out to the group, seeing its religious message as a potential bulwark against communism. It wasn’t a true partnership, but during the Cold War, Washington and the Brothers occasionally put distrust aside to establish limited cooperation.

The White House took criticism last month when it said it would be open to a role for the Brotherhood in Egyptian politics, if it rejected violence and accepted democratic goals. But even after Sept. 11, 2001, some elements within the CIA and the State Department toyed with the idea of working with the Brotherhood against al-Qaeda, convinced that only radicals could defeat other radicals.

Even if Washington and the Brotherhood find ways to live with each other, big foreign-policy breakthroughs are unlikely. Wielding more power in Egypt could make the Brotherhood more pragmatic, but opposition to U.S. policy in the region is the cornerstone of its agenda – and that probably won’t change.

Lorenzo Vidino, a visiting fellow at the Rand Corporation, is the author of “The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West.”

Emerson’s Paranoiac Approach Toward the Muslim Brotherhood

By Omar Mazin | Ikhwanophobia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we should announce these critical facts !!

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

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

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

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

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

Should We Be Afraid Of Egyptian Democracy?

Source: The New Republican
Aroop Mukharji

Egypt’s Regime Will Change
Here’s how to cushion the blow.

Sometimes, it seems like the United States is more interested in giving aid to Egypt than Egypt is to receive it. This year, for example, Egypt objected to a $250 million civilian aid package if USAID funded unregistered NGOs. Many human rights groups in the country have trouble receiving official sanction from the Egyptian government and thus require outside support to be effective. So, instead of standing firm, the Obama administration agreed to cut their USAID support, departing from U.S. policy elsewhere in the world and breaking its own law as stipulated under the Brownback Amendment.

This perverse exchange is just one of many accumulating signs that U.S. policy toward Egypt desperately needs change, and soon. Currently, America gives Egypt over $1.3 billion every year in military aid alone, fortifying a cruel dictatorship in the hope that this friendship helps the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, contributes to stability in the Middle East, garners more Arab alliances, and fends off religious extremism. And with Egypt’s upcoming elections and indications that Mubarak may be unlikely to live out the next few years, the benefits of incremental reform are increasing, while the costs of sticking with the status quo remain very high.

There are a host of reasons for the United States to reconsider its policy. Morally, it’s clear that Egypt’s three-decade emergency law has engendered a police culture devoid of restraint, as evidenced by the sad case of Khaled Said, a young man who was recently publicly beaten to death by Egyptian police. Such treatment, in varying degrees, is commonplace—and the United States cannot, in good conscience, continue such aid when Egypt refuses to respect fundamental human rights. Washington should make it clear that its sympathies lie with the Egyptian people, especially in this delicate time of transition, when the political environment is being reshaped, and when the public is increasingly demanding a larger voice in policy making. Moreover, American support for Mubarak brands Washington as a fickle and hypocritical champion of democratic principles, and the United States would do well to seize this moment to restore its credibility.

Meanwhile, democratic reform would not be all that harmful to U.S. interests. President Mubarak has successfully sustained the perception that any democratic opening equates to devolution of power to Islamic extremists. But the truth is rather different: The current incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood is neither fanatical nor self-destructive. It has formally renounced violence, and it sees itself as part of a broader opposition effort in Egypt. The group has formally thrown its weight behind the renowned moderate Mohamed ElBaradei and its electoral platform this year is exclusively concerned with democratic reforms that are supported by a broad coalition of opposition parties, including El Ghad, Wafd, and AlWasat. While freer elections could increase the representation of Muslim Brothers in parliament, they almost certainly would not swamp Egypt’s brand of moderate secularism. This year, according to Essam al-Arian, a member of the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau, the Brotherhood plans to field candidates for only 40 percent of the contestable seats—and, highlighting the group’s moderation on social issues, 20 to 25 of those nominees will be women.

The belief that reform would bring radical Islamists to power misreads Egyptian society and underestimates the Egyptian people. Unlike the Gazans, who voted for rule by Hamas in 2005, the Egyptian populace has choices between many political parties, and the average Egyptian is not a religious extremist. On the contrary, 70 percent of Egyptians say they are concerned about the global rise of Islamic extremism, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

From a national security standpoint, too, it turns out that the costs of supporting democracy are fairly low. The Bush administration saw this firsthand in 2005, for example, when it pressured Egypt to hold free and fair elections. To a small extent, the policy worked. The election was far from free and fair, it represented an important step forward. As the first multi-candidate election in Egypt’s history, it increased political space for opposition parties from nothing to something, and it opened up the campaign atmosphere more than ever before, while the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was unaffected. As a former administration official explained, “Egypt will continue to make those policy choices based on national interest alone, and not on the United States.” Furthermore, the primary opposition parties and movements in Egypt, in their current statements, demands, and actions, have so far expressed themselves as moderates. Thus, deciding between healthy democratic reform in Egypt and a stable Middle East is a false choice.

Plus, the scope of policy changes required would not actually be that radical. Successful democratic reform is a gradual process. And the Obama administration has already performed some advocacy on behalf of Egypt’s democrats, quickly denouncing the government’s brutal response to the April 6 protests, its renewal of emergency law, its flawed upper house elections, and the murder of Said. In June, the State Department even released a YouTube video of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Tamara Wittes reaffirming U.S. support for democracy in Egypt—although Wittes’ video has only been viewed 250 times, five of which were by this author.

What is needed instead is an escalation in the profile and priority of our democracy-promotion efforts, and insistence upon modest but important deliverables. Working-level conversations with the Egyptians have been ineffective. The administration should do more and engage the government of Egypt at the highest diplomatic levels to encourage small but real steps toward democratic reform.

In addition, it’s clear that United States cannot discontinue aid, but it can leverageit, which would at least align rhetoric with action and improve our image. The White House should ramp up financial assistance to human rights and democracy groups. And, for the upcoming parliamentary elections, it should push for immediately executable changes. Inviting international observers to increase election transparency would be an easy step forward, as would encouraging security forces to keep a distance from polling places, lifting emergency law, and allowing all political parties free campaigning and access to media.

In the longer-run, the United States will have to concern itself with creating a freer environment for political succession. For the presidential election, which is a year away, the scope for reform can expand. In particular, Articles 76, 77, and 88 of the constitution establish high barriers for presidential nomination, remove term limits, ban political rallies, and reduce effective judicial supervision of the election. The United States should support the Egyptian people in their call to amend these.

Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 gave many Egyptians hope. Obama spoke of supporting human rights “everywhere,” and “power through consent, not coercion.” However, in the months following Obama’s landmark address, these priorities were absent from the agenda. Now is a perfect time to redouble efforts, build on the gains made in 2005, and follow up on Cairo. Otherwise, we risk alienating the world’s largest Arab population.

Aroop Mukharji is a former Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and currently a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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ei: Why Americans should oppose Zionism?

Steven Salaita, The Electronic Intifada
Source

Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 400 Palestinian children. In May 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled “IDF [Israeli army] — the best time of my life.”

While Abergil’s pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality — Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt — all three actions are intimately connected. First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil’s photos are nonviolent. As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence. There is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Ritz Carlton.

More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. What is noteworthy about Israel’s three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities. In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism — that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel.

I would like to address this piece to those who have undertaken such questioning or to those who are prepared to initiate it. I would urge you not to limit your critique of Israel only to its errors of judgment or its perceived excesses; it is more productive to challenge the ideology and practice of Zionism itself. There is no noble origin or beautiful ideal to which the wayward Jewish state must return; such yearnings are often duplicitous mythmaking or romanticized nostalgia. Zionists always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, a strategy they carried out and continue to pursue with horrifying efficiency.

Likewise, Zionism was always a colonialist movement, one that relied on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria and North America. Zionism, by virtue of its exclusionary outlook and ethnocentric model of citizenship, is on its own a purveyor of fundamental violence. The bad PR to which Israel sometimes is subject today is a reflection of changed media dynamics, not a worsening of Israel’s behavior.

The 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the attack on the Mavi Marmara and Abergil’s Facebook photos aren’t anomalous or extraordinary. They are the invariable result of a Zionist ideology that cannot help but view Palestinian Muslims and Christians as subhuman, no matter how ardently its liberal champions assert that Zionism is a liberation movement. Zionism has the unfortunate effect of proclaiming that one group of people should have access to certain rights from which another group of people is excluded. There is nothing defensible in this proposition.

Here, then, are four reasons why Americans (and all other humans regardless of race or religion) should oppose Zionism:

1. Zionism is unethical and immoral: Because Zionists claim access to land and legal rights that directly obviate the same access to an indigenous community, it operates from within an idea of belonging that is cruel and archaic. Israel bases its primary criterion for citizenship on religious identity. Imagine having your religion on your driver’s license. And imagine having limited access to freeways, farmland, family, education, employment and foreign travel because the religion by which the state has chosen to identify you is legally marginalized. Such is the daily reality of the Palestinian people.

2. Zionism is racist: This claim isn’t the same as saying that all Zionists are racist. I would make a distinction between the categories of “Zionist” and “Zionism.” However, inherent in the practice of Zionism is a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully participate in the benefits and practices of a national community. Many Zionists view themselves merely as supporting freedom and safety for Jewish people. I would suggest that people who identify themselves as Zionist look more closely at the ideology they support. Such freedom and safety, both of which are in fact mythologies, come at the direct expense of people confined to Bantustans and refugee camps.

3. Zionism contravenes the geopolitical interests of the United States: Many Americans have heard former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boast that he once pulled George W. Bush off the dais while Bush was giving a speech, or more recently current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that “America is something that can be easily moved.” Israel costs the United States billions of dollars in direct aid and in bribe money to Jordan and Egypt for their docility. Israel also is the main reason for disgruntlement about American foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. I raise this point with some hesitation because I believe all citizens of the United States should challenge and not celebrate American geopolitical interests. I would also point out that Zionism’s narrative of salvation and redemption resonates deeply among Americans because of the US’ origin and continued presence as a nation of settler colonists. In the end, America itself needs to be decolonized and the vast sums of money that support the imperial projects Israel so brazenly exemplifies need to be directed toward the well-being of those who pay the government its taxes.

4. Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy: Israel, as a result, is undemocratic and will be as long as it uses religious identity as the operating criterion of citizenship. We hear much in the US about Islam being incompatible with democracy, a belief that is historically untrue and that elides the massive military and monetary support the US provides to the assortment of dictators and plutocrats that rule much of the Arab World. Neoconservative and mainstream commentators both evoke Israel in opposition to Islam as a symbol of democratic achievement. In reality Israel performs one of the most barbaric forms of oppression today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while simultaneously discriminating against the Palestinian citizens of Israel who constitute approximately twenty percent of the citizenry.

The alternative media engendered by new technology have allowed more people to witness the unremitting violence that has been Israel’s stock in trade for decades. Many consumers of this information and these images believe that Israel is guilty of excess when a simpler explanation exists: Israel is acting out the requisites of an exclusionary and inherently violent ideology.

These days all it takes is a little braggadocio from an ex-soldier such as Eden Abergil to so perfectly symbolize the callousness of Zionist colonization. Ten years ago, the Israeli government’s lies about the killings aboard the Mavi Marmara would have been unchallenged by gruesome footage distributed through alternative news networks and social media. Nobody these days could have stopped the images of white phosphorous exploding and spreading over the Gaza Strip from being aired; Israelis themselves were foolish enough to capture Jewish children writing messages on soon-to-be-launched missiles.

Americans now have all the evidence they need for a reasonable and morally-sound conclusion, that Zionism produces a cruelty and truculence that they bankroll with their taxes and legitimize with either silence or consent. As a result, I am not arguing that Americans should reassess their level of support for Israel. I am arguing that Americans should oppose Zionism altogether. Perhaps in this way we might begin the long and difficult process of redeeming our own nation of its imperial sins.

Steven Salaita is author, most recently, of The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought. A version of this essay was originally published by Foreign Policy Journal and is republished with the author’s permission.

Commentary: The real debate is among Muslims

In this post, Peter Skerry is arguing that Muslims should have some sort of inner debate over the critical issues.
The fact is that Muslims throughout decades have made a lot of debates and inner discussions on the highest intellectual levels. Muslims defined their stances toward many issues, such as: Terrorism, Oppression against women, Minorities in the Muslim world, Engaging Muslims in the west and many other issues.
Now, The ball is not in the Muslim’s playground. We don’t count on bigots and racists, Muslim around the world are expecting the American people to show a larger amount of understanding. Muslims in the States suffered from terrorism, Even Muslims in the Middle East suffered from terrorist attacks throughout the last years like what happened in Egypt and Algeria.
It’s the role for reasonable public figures in the United States to clear their stance from Freedom of religions, They have to spread the word within the American People to change their minds, They should incept the message that “Mosques don’t threaten your safety”
On the Other hand, the writer talked about the ties between HLF and Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood confirmed many times that there are no such connections. It was clear that the goal from eliminating HLF is to destroy the Islamic humanitarian activism in the States.
And it’s not understandable, to link between two different issues in that way, HLF was a very narrow cause, related to zero percent of American Muslims. On the contrary to that, Cordoba Initiative is one of the most important issues for the American Muslims in general.

Source

THE MOSQUE near ground zero should be built, but not merely on account of the lofty principles about religous freedom articulated by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In fact, when it comes to Islam, Americans have good reason to be suspicious of high-minded pronouncements by their leaders. A more compelling argument for building the mosque is to get beyond the current controversy, because it empowers the most opportunistic elements in the Muslim community and fosters an us-versus-them mentality that stalls a much-needed debate among Muslims about their place in American society.
Time and again, our political leaders have demonstrated an unsettling eagerness to put a positive gloss on troubling scenarios involving violent jihadists. After the failed Times Square bombing by self-proclaimed “Muslim soldier’’ Faisal Shahzad in May, Bloomberg declared: “So far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.’’ Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano characterized the incident as “a one-off’’ event. Attorney General Eric Holder virtually refused to associate the plot with “radical Islam.’’

Reasonable people have good grounds to be distrustful of Muslim leaders and of the proposed prayer space. US mosques have often been battlegrounds between contending Muslim factions. A typical scenario is for one group to go to the trouble and expense of building a mosque, only to have it taken over by some other group. Although extremists have sometimes prevailed in this way, terrorists and would-be terrorists have typically operated outside mosques — either because they chose to or because they were forced out by fellow Muslims.

To be sure, such expulsions illustrate a reassuring process of self-policing by Muslim Americans, especially since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet this coexists with a striking degree of evasion and self-delusion, typified by the claim, frequently made by Muslims, that “religion had nothing to do with 9/11,’’ or the plaintive query “why didn’t anyone ask about the religion of the Unabomber?’’

More disturbing is the lack of candor on the part of many Muslim leaders about their past associations. As federal prosecutors established in the recent Holy Land Foundation trial, many leaders have had ties to Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood. To be fair, the implications of such ties may not be as dire as anti-Muslim zealots suggest. The Muslim Brotherhood is, after all, an encompassing movement in the Arab world, with divergent tendencies responsive to the different contexts in which adherents operate.

Nevertheless, such concerns need to be addressed. But far from compelling Muslim leaders to do so, controversies like this one allow them to change the subject. And the accompanying media storms also help such leaders to overcome daunting obstacles to mobilizing their co-religionists. An overlooked irony about the proposed mosque is that as many as 80 percent of Muslims in the United States lack a regular relationship with any mosque. Of these, some probably reject Islam and organized religion altogether. A larger number likely continue to identify with Islam but do not seriously observe its tenets. In addition to the usual reasons why immigrants do not get involved in civic or political affairs, such “unmosqued’’ Muslims are particularly difficult for leaders to communicate with and mobilize.

Adding to the difficulty is the diversity of Muslims in the United States. Not only are they divided among Sunni, Shia, and Sufi, they are separated by language and ethnic ties to their homelands. There is also a gulf between immigrant Muslims and their African-American brothers and sisters, who are themselves riven into many different sects. Finally, there are differences among traditionalists, fundamentalists, and Islamists.

In light of such fault lines and obstacles, controversies and attacks from non-Muslims afford leaders a singular opportunity to unify and mobilize their people, as Muslims. But the more the frame becomes Muslims versus non-Muslims, the more responsible leaders get pushed aside by the most opportunistic purveyors of victim politics.

This is the real tragedy of disputes like the present one. For the critical debate that must proceed is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but among Muslims themselves.

To facilitate this process, the rest of us should follow Bloomberg’s imperfect example, support the building of the mosque near ground zero, maintain our vigilance against our true enemies in the Muslim world, and encourage Muslims here to get on with the critical business of coming to terms not only with their rights but also with their responsibilities as citizens.

Peter Skerry teaches political science at Boston College and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Stewart: ‘Is Fox News a terrorist command center?’

Jon Stewart, Again, decides to stand against racism and fictions published by FOX News.
Jon Stewart tried in his last show (19/8/2010) to expose the sick techniques and analysis that led to link innocent and moderate American citizens to terrorist organizations outside the United States.

Source
By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer

In a recent Fox News segment, panelist Eric Bolling held up a card claiming to show links between Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the mosque near Ground Zero, and Hamas and Iran.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart responded by using the same guilt-by-association technique to link Fox News to Islamist terrorism.

Bolling, appearing on Fox & Friends Thursday, said the imam behind the controversial mosque could be “loosely linked” to organizations such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. He held up a card showing the names of the organizations highlighted in yellow to make his point.

Bolling’s claims are a “dangerous game of built by association you could play with almost anybody,” Stewart said on the Daily Show Thursday night. “All you need is a card and a highlighter. It’s nothing.”

And to prove his point, Stewart then brought out a card of his own, this one showing links between Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-owned parent company of Fox News. Prince Alwaleed owns the largest share of News Corp. outside the Murdoch family, worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

Stewart pointed out that Prince Alwaleed can be tied to the Saudi royal family, which finances the construction of Wahabbist mosques, and which has links to the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group has, in turn, been tied to Osama bin Laden. And Stewart also pointed out that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected a $10-million gift from Prince Alwaleed after the 9/11 attacks, because the Saudi prince had said that US foreign policy contributed to the terrorist attack.

“I think that, really, when you look at this card and you do highlight it in yellow, the only thing you can come up with is: Is Fox News a terrorist command center?” Stewart asked.

Stewart then rolled footage of actor-turned-gun-rights-activist Charlton Heston, defending the NRA after the Columbine shooting in 1999. While Heston’s speech was meant to defend Second Amendment rights, Stewart said it could just as easily apply as a defense of First Amendment freedom-of-religion rights.

Tragedy has been and will always be with us. Somewhere right now evil people are planning evil things. All of us will do everything meaningful, everything we can do, to prevent it. Each horrible act can’t become an act for opportunists to cleave the bill of rights that binds us.

America must stop its predicable pattern of reaction. When an isolated terrible event occurs, our phones ring demanding that the NRA explain the inexplicable. Why us? The story needs a villain. That is not our role in American society and we will not be forced to play it. If you disagree, that’s your right. I respect that but we will not relinquish it or be silenced about it or be told, do not come here, you are unwelcome in your own land.

“Well said, sir,” Stewart said of Heston’s remarks.
This video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, broadcast Aug. 19, 2010.

White Supremacists Totally Oppose Cordoba House

Source

People who have nothing serious to say about an issue often resort to fallacious arguments. One common — and cheap — fallacy is known as “guilt by association.”

The righties are all in a tizzy this morning because of this:

Murdoch’s Post reports that a leader of Hamas is pro-Cordoba House, and the wingnut bloggers rush in to shout it from the rooftops. It’s proof — those supporting the “mosque” are in league with the terrrrrsts!

Two can play that game, however. Here are the first few graphs from Occidental Dissent’s post on the mosque:

The Ground Zero Mosque is without a doubt the most outrageous surrender to political correctness and multiculturalism that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

It is a 13-story monument to Islamic terrorism that will be built as a tribute to 9/11 victims on a national graveyard. The groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled to take place on September 11th. The Ground Zero Mosque will open its doors on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The audacity of these people and their calculated symbolism is breathtaking. I’ve never seen a bigger slap across the face of White America.

Occidental Dissent is an openly white supremacist site. Ergo, by the same logic that compels wingnuts to report the non-news that some guy who belongs to Hamas thinks it’s a grand idea, those opposing the Cordoba House are in league with white supremacists.

This is much easier than actually making an argument of some kind.

Update: Paul Woodward points out that the story is, not surprisingly, wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

Wahabi Imam to burn the Bible in Cairo!

What if some Wahabi Imam in a mosque decided to burn the holy Bible after Friday prayer in Cairo .

Let’s imagine the headlines of the highly ranked newspapers, websites and dozens of bitter Islamophobes on their websites truly they would have a field day.

CNN
Extremist Muslims decide to burn the holy Bible in Egypt

FOX
Muslim Brotherhood set to burn the Bible in the Muslim World!

Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report
Exclusive: Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood call for anti-Christian actions in Egypt .

Family Security Matters
GMBDR: Exclusive: Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Call for anti-Christian actions in Egypt .

Jihad Watch
Hamas Leaders to burn Torah synchronously with Muslim Brotherhood Bible Burn Day

Daniel Pipes
Turkish Islamist teacher beats Christian student carrying Bible!

Pamela Geller
CAIR’s mother group to burn Bible!

Dallas News
Holy Land Foundation supported Bible Burn Day in Palestinian Territories

Steven Emerson
IPT monitored Al Qaeda preparation for Bible Burn Day

Sean Hannity
Ground Zero Imam will participate in Bible Burn Day!

Sarah Palin
Oh Peaceful Muslims! Please refudiate Bible Burn Day!

Religion of Peace
Photo: Islam Orders Muslims to burn Bibles and to Kill Christians

,,,,,,,,,,,

That was hypothetically speaking, now back to reality and what has in fact happened in the US to be precise a church in Florida was planning to burn the Quran, however the appalling truth is that all news bulletin corporations and smearcasters failed to report such incidents abstaining from writing or publishing a word on this subject.

In a tilting of scales, it seems to be normal and acceptable to have a Church burn Quran Day but in the event of a Muslim burning Bible Day imagine the uproar and scandal.

The question is why didn’t the western and most influential mediacomment on this racist and discriminatory incident? The diehard bigots and hypocrite racists who want to burn Quran and smear Islam are the real terrorists.

Although terrorism cannot and will not be justified the burning of the Muslims Holy Quran may lead to such undesirable actions in response to the provocative actions illustrating anti-Islamic tendencies.

The Independent websites, who discussed the Quran burning day, unfortunately are not high profiled or effective news sources. They focused mainly on the lack of exposing of the incident wondering why the more famous agencies abstained from discussion.

Throughout Islam’s long history, Muslims have never been involved in any actions of religious suppression against Jews and Christians. The Ottoman Empire received thousands of Spanish Jews refugees after the defeat of Muslims in Andalusia, And within this history, Muslims didn’t try even once to fight the ideas by sword! they always were trying to oppose ideas by ideas.

Current events in the US with the burning of the holy Quran reveal some Christians’ lack of tolerance to a different religion and culture exposing their true ignorance. Rather than discuss and engage in open dialogue with Muslims they chose to burn the Quran demonstrating pure hatred and animosity

Many questions will be asked, and the true, factual answers will not be in favour of news corporations such as CNN and FOX News. Do they support these bigots? Are the smearcasters supporting the Christian bigots? And the most important question remains … What if they were Muslims how would they react?

ei: What’s in a name? In a racist society, everything

Richard Irvine, The Electronic Intifada, 29 July 2010

Israel’s racist policies toward Palestinians have worrying historical precedents. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills)

Names have always been political. Throughout history different regimes have used naming as a means of racial or religious identification. In Nazi Germany a 1938 law obliged Jews to add Sara or Israel to their names so as to eliminate ethnic confusion. And in my own country, Northern Ireland, even without a law, a name could determine one’s success in life.

Until comparatively recently many Catholic families I know chose Protestant Anglicized names so as their children could have a chance of escaping the discrimination inherent in the sectarian state. It rarely worked however, as there were always other ways one could tell someone’s background. Indeed, even today most of us immediately conduct a sort of scan upon meeting a new acquaintance. If we can’t tell by name then we move on to other questions like, “Where do you live?” or the clincher — in a society where schools are largely segregated — “What school did you go to?” This approach is not always successful but most times we can quite quickly classify who we think our new acquaintance is and how much we can reveal of ourselves to them.

Sad though most of you must think this is, for people of my generation it is an automatic but unfortunate hangover from hundreds of years of mutual suspicion. Thankfully however, never did we have someone convicted for rape on the basis that the woman had mistaken her sexual partner as being of the same religious group as herself. This is what happened in an Israeli court last week.

For those unfamiliar with the case the story goes like this. A young Jewish Israeli woman and a young Palestinian Jerusalemite had consensual sex. Afterwards, the Jewish woman discovered that her partner was in fact not Jewish at all, but horror of horror, a Palestinian. But there was more, the Palestinian had called himself “Dudu,” his nickname, but one most often used by Israeli Jews, and from this the young woman concluded she had been deliberately deceived and in fact raped.

In our society of course, refusal to contemplate a relationship with a person from another ethnic or religious background is described and denounced as racism or bigotry. In Israel it is now protected by law. The court found that indeed the young Jewish woman had in fact been raped, not by force of course, but by name. Finding the Palestinian guilty, district court Judge Zvi Segal stated, “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price — the sanctity of their bodies and souls.”

Sadly, this all has very worrying historical echoes. It hints back to the Apartheid and Jim Crow Laws which presupposed dangerous Blacks waiting to pounce on virginal Whites. It also conjures up the notorious images from the Nazi publication Der Sturmer of supposedly lecherous Jews trying to seduce young Aryan Germans, no doubt also at the unbearable price of the sanctity of their bodies and souls. In part it also shares the Nazi obsession with racial mixing and the naming policy Germany introduced to eliminate any possible confusion in ethnicity. Except perhaps Nazi policy was more honest. In the Nuremberg Laws Germany explicitly outlawed sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews; Israel does no such thing, it merely makes it a crime if sex takes place without the actors being fully aware of each other’s background. Perhaps then Israel should take a leaf of out of Germany’s 1938 naming law: every Muslim to have the name Muhammad attached; every Christian, Jesus. But it won’t do that, after all, that is racist.

Richard Irvine teaches a course at Queen’s University Belfast entitled “The Battle for Palestine” which explores the entire history of the conflict. Irvine has also worked voluntarily in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and taken part in olive planting and harvesting in the West Bank.

Robert Spencer Supports Dictatorship in Egypt!

By Omar Mazin

In 2005, Condoleezza Rice, stated:

“For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of the people.”

It seems Spencer has forgotten this important statement when he decided to write his new article on Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt .
Spencer argued in his last article titled: “Muslim Brotherhood Jockeys for Power in Egypt” that in the case of Hosni Mubarak’s death because of his terminal stomach cancer the Muslim Brotherhood will take control in Egypt since he is not expected to survive beyond another year. He added

“Mubarak has appointed his son Gamal as his successor; however, the Brotherhood, from which sprang both Hamas and Al Qaeda, could attempt to seize power upon the elder Mubarak’s death, and is maneuvering now to ensure that once Hosni Mubarak is gone from the scene, the Muslim Brothers will be more powerful than ever”

It is well known that Al Qaeda was founded as a result of repression and oppression committed by the Egyptian government against the Islamist groups throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. And the most moderate Islamic organization in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood.

In all reality the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have always condemned violence and terrorism confirming more than once that they promote only peaceful and tolerant measures in their call for political reform.
Robert Spencer by Lying deliberately and blatantly demonstrates support of dictatorship in Egypt, and this may consequently lead to another formation of Al Qaeda and another Ayman Al Zawahry, which will in turn offer a real chance for Spencer to spread further allegations and accusations against the Muslim Brotherhood ignoring the real circumstances of oppression which may well be a possible foundation for a new terrorist group.

—————–

Muslim Brotherhood Jockeys for Power in Egypt
by Robert Spencer
07/27/2010

The Islamic supremacist group known as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated, according to a captured internal document, to eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, has its best chance in years to take power in Egypt, with implications for the Middle East and beyond.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has terminal stomach cancer, and is not expected to survive beyond another year. Mubarak has anointed his son Gamal as his successor; however, the Brotherhood, from which sprang both Hamas and al Qaeda, could attempt to seize power upon the elder Mubarak’s death, and is maneuvering now to ensure that once Hosni Mubarak is gone from the scene, the Muslim Brothers will be more powerful than ever.

The Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, but often runs candidates in Egyptian elections as independents. In this way it won one-fifth of the seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections. Since the days of President Gamel Abdel Nasser (1956-1970), the Egyptian government has looked the other way as the group terrorized Coptic Christians and enforced Islamic strictures upon the Egyptian populace, but cracked down when the Brotherhood showed signs of growing powerful enough actually to seize the reins of the Egyptian government.

Shortly before he was assassinated, Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat released all the Brotherhood political prisoners who had been languishing in Egyptian prisons, and even promised the Brotherhood that Islamic law would be fully implemented in Egypt.

The Islamization of Egypt has been proceeding steadily for decades. The Brotherhood’s societal and cultural influence has long outstripped its direct political reach, and shows no sign of abating. Nonetheless, nearly 30 years after Sadat’s promise, the Brotherhood is still pressing for that full implementation of sharia law.

Gamal Mubarak said in July 2008, in a clear reference to the Brotherhood, that “confessional political parties” were “multiplying anti-Western references” and thereby “building barriers between the different cultures” and “destroying the bridges between the Eastern and Western worlds that the past generations had so much trouble building.”

But will he be able to out-maneuver the Brotherhood? The Brotherhood recently came out for the presidential candidacy of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Brotherhood leaders may be banking on being able to exploit the popular discontent with the Mubarak regime that is unwilling to take up the cause of the Brotherhood itself, and to holding real power in a weak ElBaradei presidency. ElBaradei is widely regarded as ineffectual.

But the Brotherhood is not necessarily hoping for an ElBaradei presidency at all. Hossam Tamam, a political analyst and former editor at the Islamic supremacist website IslamOnline, has suggested that the Brotherhood is using its support for ElBaradei to win concessions from the Mubarak regime: “The Muslim Brotherhood wants to use ElBaradei as a card in its negotiations with the regime ahead of the upcoming elections. By supporting ElBaradei, the Muslim Brotherhood can put pressure on the regime and force it to reach a compromise with them, eventually granting them a certain quota of parliamentary seats.”

If the Brotherhood succeeds in imposing a sharia regime in Egypt via a figurehead or weak ElBaradei presidency, the Camp David Accords, already much transgressed and ignored by Egyptian authorities, could be swept aside altogether. Egypt could follow Turkey’s path of a new belligerence toward Israel as it jockeys for power with the Saudis and the Turks among the major players of the Sunni Muslim world. If, on the other hand, it wins enough concessions from Gamal Mubarak and his ailing father to push forward its agenda with new energy, confidence, and power, an Egyptian sharia state inveterately hostile to the United States and Israel is not necessarily forestalled, but merely postponed.

Hosni Mubarak is the third Egyptian strongman in a row to keep a lid on the Brotherhood’s power. Whether his son will be able to do so as well remains to be seen—but if he doesn’t, the consequences of an Egyptian political scene dominated by the Brotherhood will almost certainly extend far beyond the borders of Egypt itself.

What is the İHH?

This is a phobic article on IHH, The Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. This article clearly wants to hide the Israeli crime against Gaza Flotilla behind the lies of alleged connections between Hamas and IHH.
By republishing this article, we believe that we’re facing the Israeli racism and brutality against Gaza, Palestinians and against the whole world.
Ikhwanophobia

What is the İHH?

İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı, translated into English as the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, was created in 1992 when a group of individuals came together to provide humanitarian relief to those affected by the war in Bosnia. The group redirected its efforts toward the war in Chechnya after Bosnia and was officially founded and registered as an NGO in Istanbul in 1995.

The İHH board of trustees has 21 members, including İHH President Bulent Yıldırım, İHH Deputy President Hüseyin Oruçand, and charter member Mahmut Savaş. İHH also has a supervisory “Board of Inspection” with three members who are also on the Board of Trustees: Ali Yandır, M. Hanefi Kutluoğlu, and Yusuf Şahin. The organization is set up on typical NGO lines, with paid staff in charge of a wide range of activities and volunteers filling in the rest. It is estimated that İHH has an annual income of over $100 million a year, entirely from donations. This number is expected to increase in the aftermath of the flotilla incident.

Israel banned the group in July 2008, along with 35 other organizations, “since they are part of Hamas’s fundraising network.” Israel has long maintained that İHH is an extremist group with ties to Hamas, but only placed it on its terrorist list after the Gaza flotilla incident during which Israeli commandos entered a ship cyarrying aid material and İHH affiliated personnel. Germany banned the organization’s Frankfurt affiliate due to its relationship with Hamas on July 12, 2010. But it has received no such ban in either the United States or Turkey.

İHH represents itself as a humanitarian organization that acts “with the motive of brotherhood,” aiming to help and protect all regardless of “religion, language, race, and sect.” İHH also states that it wishes to remain “unaffiliated with politics” while voicing the “problems of the wronged.” Its rhetoric is centered on notions of justice, good, and brotherhood. It belongs to the Turkey Voluntary Agencies Foundation, an association of Turkish NGOs, and has a special consultative membership to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, which coordinates the work of 14 UN agencies dealing with economic and social work.

The organization has religious underpinnings and the higher leadership tends to be more verbal about their religious beliefs in public settings. Religion is not directly mentioned in its vision or mission statements, but İHH is an openly Muslim organization and affiliated with the Union of NGOs of the Islamic World, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Humanitarian Forum, which works with Muslim communities around the world. İHH’s projects also cover non-Muslim communities—Haiti disaster relief, for example—but the majority of its projects center on Muslim communities or Islam-related activities such as building mosques or sponsoring Ramadan celebrations.

İHH also runs a separate website covering its humanitarian aid in Israel and Gaza. The majority of the website focuses on the flotilla incident, asserting it was aggression on the part of Israel’s commandos. It released a 42-page report that furthers this position. The group calls itself “civilians who had come together for peaceful purposes” and argues that the “Israeli government carried out a terrorist attack.”

Gaza aid efforts and the flotilla incident

İHH took a humanitarian convoy by land from Turkey and Cyprus to Gaza in January 2010 with the intent to cross at the Egyptian border. The convoy’s attempt to reach Gaza resulted in clashes between Palestinians in Gaza and Egyptian border guards. The worst of these clashes resulted in one death and nearly 40 injuries. İHH issued a press release recounting some of the events, but did not appear to be directly involved. The group was eventually granted 24 hours to enter Gaza, unload the aid, and leave, following private phone discussions between Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egyptian officials.

İHH also organized a flotilla headed for Gaza in May of 2010 and owned two of the six ships involved, including the Mavi Marmara, which was the scene of the violent confrontation between Israeli commandos and flotilla members. According to a report filed by German newspaper Taz, a “40-person, Turkish-speaking group [İHH]… controlled the deck” of the Mavi Marmara.”

Links to the Turkish government

Murat Mercan, a prominent member of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was in Egypt with the İHH during the January flotilla incident and spoke with the press when the humanitarian aid was not allowed through. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also from the AKP, personally undertook negotiations with the Egyptian government at Mercan’s urging when the aid convoy was not allowed through. Mercan was also scheduled to be aboard the Mavi Marmara but cancelled at the last minute. The New York Times reported that the Turkish Foreign Ministry convinced him and several other parliamentarians not to go.

Ali Yandir, who is both on the board of trustees and the supervisory board, is a manager at the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation. This corporation controls Istanbul Fast Ferries, which sold the Mavi Marmara to the charity for about $1.8 million. Yandir was an AKP candidate for the mayor’s office in Istanbul’s Esenler District.

Three other members of the charity’s board—Zeyid Aslan, Ahmet Faruk Unsal, and Mehmet Emin Sen—are also affiliated with the AKP. Aslan is currently an AKP member of parliament, Unsal served in the parliament from 2002 to 2007, and Sen is the former AKP mayor of Mihalgazi in Anatolia.

There is general agreement in the United States and most other countries that the organization has nonhumanitarian political motivations, but there is disagreement as to why. Some media reports argue that the AKP’s connection to the group has encouraged it to become politically confrontational, with some pointing to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan. Others argue that the rise of middle- and upper-class religious families that front their Muslim identity in the academic, business, and political world has changed the atmosphere in which İHH operates, making overtly political actions more acceptable.

İHH-Israel relations

Israel arrested İHH’s founder İzzet Şahin on April 27, 2010 when he was passing through a checkpoint in Bethlehem. No reason was given for his arrest. He was later released on May 18, 2010.

İHH has repeatedly denounced Israel’s actions, but it has also admitted that the raid on the flotilla ships brought it international attention, for which they have expressed a sort of strange gratitude to Israeli officials.

Israel alleges that the group’s support to Gaza bolsters Hamas indirectly and that it has brought in supplies specifically intended to support Hamas and its activities. Israel has also charged İHH with connections to Al Qaeda. The Israeli government fears that the group is attempting to smuggle weapons into Gaza for Hamas and is a front for radical Islamist groups. Israel added İHH to its terrorist watch list on June 16, 2010.

Mehmet Kaya, head of the İHH office in Gaza, told the New York Times in response that, “We only work through Hamas, although we don’t limit our aid to its followers.” Hamas’s control of the Gaza strip necessitates that organizations in the region cooperate with it in order to continue their activities. The question is whether the İHH’s activities in the region are limited to nonpartisan humanitarian aid and cooperation with Hamas as necessary to achieve those goals, or if their actions also actively support Hamas as an organization. Kaya noted that his group sponsors 9,000 orphans, helps a local hospital, and runs job-skills training sessions, adding “We consider Israel and the United Nations to be the terrorists, not Hamas.”

Possible links to Hamas and Al Qaeda

State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley has stated that there is some cause for concern since the İHH has met with senior Hamas officials in Turkey, Syria, and Gaza over the past several years, but it has not been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States.

Germany banned İHH’s German wing on July 12, 2010, stating that the group has direct links to Hamas and provides it with support. The Interior Ministry pointed in its press release to the “social clubs” that İHH supports in Gaza. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid, İHH has long been providing considerable financial support to the so-called social clubs in the Gaza Strip, which are under the control of Hamas…donations to the social clubs of Hamas, which the İHH has made in the millions, in reality supports the terrorist organization of Hamas as a whole.”

Some media articles argue that the group has become a radical Islamist organization, rather than a Muslim humanitarian aid group that also has political inclinations. A few individuals have also been particularly outspoken about İHH. Jean-Louis Bruguière is a former French counterterrorism magistrate. He argues that İHH members planned to fight in conflicts involving Muslims around the world and that the organization was involved in weapons’ trafficking and supporting Al Qaeda activities. Bruguière has been mentioned in Newsweek and The Washington Post as the first person to publicly draw attention to the possibility of İHH being a terrorist organization or a front for illegal activities. Bruguière also claims to have been involved in a 1998 raid on İHH offices in Turkey that turned up weapons. İHH admits that there was a raid but denies that weapons were found, and the matter was never publicly discussed by the Turkish forces involved in the raid. Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism expert and author, cites Bruguière’s testimony in a study published by the Danish Institute for International Studies and has written additional articles arguing that the İHH is a terrorist organization. Both Bruguière and Kohlmann have come out since the flotilla incident to further argue that İHH has ties to terrorist organizations and should be treated as such.

Videos of remarks by İHH President Bulent Yıldırım

İHH President Bulent Yıldırım gave a speech on board Mavi Marmara, which is believed to be recorded on May 30 by one of the passengers and was later released by the Israeli government. Yıldırım speaks in Turkish while the two other men, believed to be a religious cleric and an Egyptian member of parliament, provide translation and make additional comments in Arabic.

Yıldırım’s speech uses religious imagery and language, and he says that if Israeli commandos come, those on board will “throw them into the sea.” Yıldırım appears to be supporting violent resistance to potential Israeli military action, but he could also be expressing political conviction rather than a call to violence. The phrase “throw them down” is utilized in Turkish political rhetoric to undermine or bring down an opposing political party, person, or point of view. Yıldırım may have taken creative liberty in this context and added “into the sea” given the group was on a ship.

Some of the listeners may have taken this speech as a call to violence. Others, particularly native Turkish-speakers, could have understood it as a purely political speech intended to motivate those on board. Yıldırım does express political views and anger about the blockade, implies that their actions are morally and religiously necessary, and tries to provoke an emotional reaction from the audience.

Another video has circulated of a man identified as Yıldırım giving a speech before a large, flag-waving Palestinian crowd. He uses strong religious language and is calling Israel a terrorist country: “Three, four years ago they called the Hamas a terrorist organization. Today, we are calling Israel terrorists. We are calling America terrorists. We are calling England terrorists. They have bombs. They have nuclear weapons. They have chemical weapons. But we have the will. We have the courage. We fear no one but God.”

He goes on to assure the Palestinian crowd that “all of Turkey is with you. The day has come to remove the embargo, Allah willing. From here I call upon all the leaders of the Islamic world, and upon all the people. Anyone who does not stand alongside Palestine, will be toppled from his throne.” He ends on an unusual note of international solidarity, disturbing to many Turkish policymakers: “I wish we could take you away from here to Istanbul and bring Istanbul here to be hit by the bombs instead of you. The entire Turkish people, all the Muslim world, and all of humanity say, raise your fists to the skies and repeat after me: What can the enemy do to me? I carry paradise in my heart. If they deport me, it would be a trip. If they imprison me, I will be able to spend time alone. If they kill me, that is martyrdom for the sake of Allah.”

Poor video quality makes it difficult to tell if portions of the speech have been edited or altered in any way. But if verified, it lends support to the argument that Yıldırım is religiously and politically motivated in his actions, as well as in contact with Hamas. It is unclear whether or not Yıldırım was representing İHH in an official capacity, but there has been no attempt by İHH to distance itself from, or discredit the video.

Analysts’ and scholars’ opinion of İHH

There appears to be a general belief among scholars and analysts, based on interviews conducted by Melis Tusiray, that İHH is a humanitarian aid organization with strong religious underpinnings and political motivations among its leadership. It is highly likely that there is contact between some İHH’s members and Hamas, as well as other militant organizations in the Middle East. But İHH is not itself believed to be a terrorist organization that practices violent extremism. All interviewees agreed that İHH had not been on anyone’s radar prior to the Gaza flotilla incident and that the organization has since used their international publicity in questionable ways to push their agenda.

A professor of the sociology of politics at a well-known Istanbul university stated that İHH “is a terrorist organization because its actions do not comply with the standards of a democracy.” But it should be held up to the standards of democratic society that value discussion, voting, and other forms of legal participation over aggression and illegal activities even if it does not commit actual acts of terror. He argued that İHH’s attempt to break the blockade and the allegations of violence toward the Israeli commandos are acts of aggression that are not acceptable within a democratic society.

Two political analysts from well-known policy-oriented think tanks in Turkey and Europe also point out that individuals within Turkish political parties are affiliated with İHH even though the Turkish government has not funded or supported the group in any way. Murat Mercan, chairman of the Turkish Parliament’s Commission on Foreign Affairs, was named as one such member of the AKP. According to media reports, five AK party members were a part of the İHH aid convoy to Egypt that was let through only after private discussions between the Turkish and Egyptian heads of state.

The Istanbul university professor brought up the suggestion that the AKP may have only shown support for İHH because of its popular appeal in Turkey. İHH showed that a large portion of the Turkish public applauds individuals who stand up to Israel, and the group is immensely popular among the demographics that vote for the AKP. So even if the AKP wanted to condemn the group, which they may not, the party could not take the risk of losing widespread political support. He noted, however, that anyone who is against the AKP because of its Islamist tendencies firmly believes that the İHH is an Islamist terrorist organization that is protected by the party.

Two interviewees highlighted the fact that İHH has the potential to be a terrorist organization or support terrorist organizations in terms of size, finances, and internal networks. Yet none of the interviewees had heard evidence supporting this position.

The director of a well-known German foundation in Turkey commented that many İHH actions are questionable even though there is no indication that they are a terrorist organization or are supporting a terrorist organization. For instance, the group’s close ties to members in the Saadat Party, a minority political party that is openly Islamist, is one indicator that the İHH is likely supportive of more extreme, religiously motivated actions.

And two interviewees pointed out that most of the journalists on the Mavi Marmara were affiliated with media outlets that tend to have more extreme Islamist views. The director found it “hard to take Bulent Yıldırım’s self-representation at face value.” Yıldırım has tried in the aftermath of the flotilla incident to position himself and the organization as a moderator for humanitarian action in Gaza, but he often made partisan political speeches prior to the incident. The director said that even if the group was a political organization, its “political expression is poorly planned and executed.”

Download this brief (pdf)

Melis Tusiray is an intern with National Security and International Policy and Michael Werz is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Clash of Civilizations

Rod Dreher: Macroculture
Islam vs. the West? More like Modern vs. Traditional

Source

Haneen Zoabi: The largest threat to Zionism is democracy

Haneen Zoabi speaking in Tel Aviv, July 2010. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

Haneen Zoabi: The largest threat to Zionism is democracy

Max Blumenthal, The Electronic Intifada,

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author working in Israel-Palestine. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al-Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute. His book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Israeli Journalist: “Bomb the next Gaza flotilla–with flyers”

In an almost shocking departure from his usually controlled tone, Ma’ariv columnist Ben-Dror Yemini recently penned a blog for the newspaper’s website entitled “The New Empire.” Yemini, normally associated with Israel’s center-left, warned, in a scathing and arguably alarmist tone, of a “new empire” threatening to destroy the Jewish State. Surprisingly enough, he claims that famous Israeli author Amos Oz is a part of it.

World of Judaica brings you an exclusive translation of parts of the article. To see it in its entirety and Hebrew original, click here. All bold is copied from the original.

The New Empire

The Soviet Union collapsed. The United States of Barack Obama has become a kingdom of appeasement. And the New Empire, more than just a small force, is growing before our very eyes. Last weekend (June 1^st) it decided to call for international monitoring of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Pay attention. The monster, excuse me, the Empire, didn’t even mention Iran, the very purpose of its gathering. The Empire mentioned Israel.

Now, as it is bursting forth before our eyes in full force, we can already try to define it. The New Empire is a union of international public opinion springing from college campuses and among cultural elites, and the automatic majority of non-democratic countries in every international forum. This is deadly combination. Because the free world’s elites are going through a process of disintegration. They no longer believe in themselves. They believe in the “other,” the victim of colonialism, which never ended according to them. These elites have established an anti-globalization movement, taken control of human rights organizations, as well as a part of, or perhaps even a majority of, environmental groups. They are broadcasting a new world order that dares speak in the language of rights…

Amos Oz as Part of the New Empire

Amos Oz is not anti Zionist. He’s not Noam Chomsky, and doesn’t belong to his ilk. But he, too, has been conquered by the Empire. This week (June 2) Oz wrote that “Hamas is not just a terror group. Hamas is an idea. A despairing zealous concept that sprouted from the frustration and despair of many Palestinians.”

Oz gives a bad name to intellectuals. Always with the same code words. Always disconnected from facts. Always with a predictable style. Hamas is the poor victim. Israel is the evil oppressor. Here, Oz is joining himself up with the New Empire. So it’s worthwhile to set things straight.

There is no bigger lie than the assertion that Hamas was established because of Israel. Because Hamas arose as part of a worldwide awakening of political Islam. Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Strong branches of that movement arose in Syria and Jordan. In Syria, the story ended, at least temporarily, with the sadistic massacre in the city of Hama in 1982. In Egypt the movement is constantly suppressed, but it is alive and kicking. In Jordan the movement is blossoming, with the oversight of the defense establishment. In Tunisia, similar movements have met with brutal suppression that Israel couldn’t even dream of doing.

The huge surge of radical Islam took place because of enormous budgets consisting of billions that were funneled by Saudi Arabia, to Hamas as well. Not because of Israel and not because of oppression and not because of occupation. But now Amos Oz the author, Israeli patriot and Zionist, is actually strengthening the claim of the New Empire. And if that’s what’s written in Israel by a well known intellectual, how can we complain about the world media?

“We must bomb the coming ships”

One more thing regarding the flotilla, and the next ship is about to come, followed by possibly more. They destroyed us with their propaganda. So we need to answer them in their own language.

Amos Oz

We need to bomb, literally bomb, every boat that comes. Bomb them with fliers. Since this time the story will focus on the meeting point between Israel and Hamas supporters pretending to be peace activists, we can come to this meeting prepared. With fliers. Instead of helicopters full of special naval forces, helicopters armed with fliers. It’ll be a show. On every single boat, fliers will fall like rain in ten languages. That’ll be enough for the embedded journalists. These fliers will clarify why there is a blockade in the first place, and who Hamas is. Only the truth. Only quotes from the Hamas charter and declarations from Hamas spokesmen in their own voices. On global Jihad, on the aim of world domination including Rome and America, on opposition to peace in any form, on racist anti Semitism, on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, on the genocide of Jews because they are Jews.

If we think that the world knows—we are mistaken. Even in fights with a mix of “peace activists” it became clear that they hadn’t a clue. So the time has come that they will have a clue, and the entire world will have a clue. Many will think that Israel has gone crazy. Flier bombing? Yes. Flier bombing. It costs nothing. No media outlet will allow itself to ignore the “insanity” that has gripped Israel.

What follows isn’t that important. They’ll arrest them, drag them off, block them. At least it will be clear why Israel did what she did even before the actual confrontation. And perhaps, who knows, we’ll score a few points in the battle against the lies mill. I suggested this in an article three weeks ago. With recommended wording. With quotes. With sources. I am suggesting it again. The next boats are coming. It’s still not too late.

Anti-Semitism!! Seriously??

On July 15, Ikhwanophobia republished the article titled: “Muslims need to tackle Jewish Islamophobia“, by Khaled Amayrah

Ikhwanophobia offers a simple explanation to the fabricated allegations, regarding the MB and its views of its position regarding Jews.

The famous report published by Steven Brooke and Robert S. Leiken titled “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” described the MB’s attitude towards Jews

The Muslim Brotherhood explicitly denies that their organization is anti-Semitic.
The former Egyptian MB Chairman Mr. Mohamed Mahdi Akef argues
that there is no conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Jews, however he asserted that there are conflicts between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Zionists who, Akef asserted “are not Jews.”

This is the endorsed attitude of the Muslim Brotherhood, which expresses the MB ideology. In all reality the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys affable relations with the Jewish intellectuals and academics.
To scope.eghost.zoneIn fact when the MB contacted prestigious Jewish intellectuals to support it in the struggle against racism and smear casting. We found them extremely co-operative and helpful. Professor Noam Chomsky simply described the site as an interesting project. Professor Norman Finkelstein, was also supportive of the fresh website; ascertaining that he would certainly want to cooperate with the site whenever it was mutually advantageous and convenient. This attitude from professor Finkelstein is a clear indication that the Muslim Brotherhood does not stand against Jews, on the contrary, the MB encourage affiliation and cooperation with the Jews so long as they do not support the racist Israeli-Zionist agenda

Second, One of the most important issues that should be clarified is the stance of Hamas towards Jews and the Jewish faith. The MB believe that Hamas targets the Zionist occupational project, Hamas and as a liberating movement it does not have any prejudices against Jews, their struggle is against the racist Israeli occupation and their massacres committed against Palestinian people throughout 60 years of occupation.
In all reality the Muslim Brotherhood has no relations with the Islamic Resistance movement (Hamas), and is the compiling of imaginative and manipulative individuals.

In fact in 2008, The Palestinian government led by Hamas, presented the Palestinian citizenship to Daniel Barenboim, world renowned Israeli pianist and conductor.

Rather than discussing the Muslim Brotherhood’s attitude against Judaism which is merely hearsay the MB calls for discussing racism by GMBDR and FSM against Muslims?
The latest article titled: “Islam Must be stopped in America” speaks for itself where it reeks of racism and hatred.!

Ikhwanophobia.com confirms that the MB does not promote any anti-western agendas and calls on all to view both sides of the coin in an effort to bridge the gap and eliminate any racist and hate sites which ultimately anger citizens on all levels.

Mideast Analyst Reilly: Radical Islamists Block Peace

By: John Rossomando

Peace in the Middle East is impossible as long as radicals in the Islamic world persist in the “intellectual suicide” of insisting that Jews have no right to exist there, a leading Mideast analyst says.
In an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview, Robert Reilly also contends that President Barack Obama’s effort to appease Israel’s enemies in the Muslim world makes peace even less likely.

The Muslim world views the president’s efforts to apologize for America’s past actions as a “sign of weakness” that has failed to sway popular opinion about his policies in the Arab world, says Reilly, author of “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created The Modern Islamist.”

“I don’t think that approach is working,” Reilly says. “His own decline in the opinion polls in the Middle East more or less indicate that.”

Story continues below.

Obama’s decision to distance the United States from Israel to curry favor with the Arab and Muslim world has been “interpreted as an opportunity for them to become more aggressive and more provocative in their attempts to delegitimize . . . Israel,” says Reilly, whose career includes being senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Information, director of Voice of America, and a special assistant to the president in the Reagan administration.

Reilly believes the president’s failure to stand with Israel when Turkey tried to break the blockade of Gaza was the most “egregious” example of this.

“We are creating opportunities for Israel’s enemies to become more aggressive, and that’s a big mistake,” Reilly tells Newsmax.TV.

Reilly contends that the fight among Muslims, Israel, and the West rises primarily from theological rather than political sources. So political and economic programs cannot resolve this clash of civilizations unless the theological causes are addressed.

He believes the discord dates to a ninth-century Islamic theological civil war that pitted a group known as the Mu’tazlis, who favored a reasoned approach to their religion, against a group known as the Ash’arites, who rejected human ability to understand God and the universe.

The latter group won the struggle and ended the Mu’tazlis’ efforts for a reasoned approach to Islam.

“As Benedict XVI said in his Regensburg address, ‘acting unreasonably is against God’; therefore, using violence to promote religion would be against God,” Reilly says.

But the Ash’arites created an Islam that views God as above reason, Reilly says.

“And at the end of that trail, we end up with that notorious statement by Abdullah Azzam, who was one of Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentors, . . . saying, ‘Terrorism is an obligation in Allah’s religion.’

“You get from a religion of pure will to terrorism being a religious obligation.”

Radical Islam’s repudiation of reason, he says, explains why Islamists such as bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood have been able to convince many Muslims to believe that their civilization lost its glories because it “left the path of God” and that war with the West and their own “apostate regimes” is the only way to regain it.

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Ikhwanophobia Comment:

Our comment is not really ours, we are referring to the FP article, titled: Red Team, Written BY MARK PERRY which quoted:

“Putting Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in the same sentence, as if they are all the same, is just stupid,”

Nonie Darwish Caught in a Pool of Lies

We are going to have an explosive breakdown of the clownish Nonie Darwish, another charlatan akin to Wafa Sultan who is milking the Islamophobic cash cow for all it’s worth. Jim Holstun, a professor at SUNY Buffalo wrote this great piece in 2008 that lays bear Nonie’s excessive Islamophobia, as well as her contradictions and lies.

Nonie Darwish and the al-Bureij Massacre

StandWithUs is a Zionist advocacy group in Los Angeles. It concentrates on US colleges and universities, offering fellowships, book donations, lectures, training and hands-on activism. I first heard about the group in 2005, after its Executive Director, Roz Rothstein, wrote my university’s president, provost and Arts and Sciences dean to warn them that I was teaching courses in Palestinian culture. She passed along some hysterical libels from anonymous community members (not my students), gave a detailed critique of my syllabuses, encouraged them to investigate me and two other colleagues, and helpfully suggested a few questions they might want to ask.

StandWithUs manages an impressive stable of Zionist speakers, including several who are Arabs, Muslims, or ex-Muslims: Brigitte Gabriel, Ishmael Khaldi, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Nonie Darwish. Darwish, born an Egyptian Muslim, now an American Evangelical Christian, is one of the most energetic. She manages the website Arabs for Israel and has appeared on FOX News, on the website Frontpage Magazine, and in the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. She is also the author of Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Penguin Books publishes it under its Sentinel imprint — a special line of conservative titles. Since her book’s publication in 2006, Darwish has toured extensively, speaking primarily at colleges and universities.

Now They Call Me Infidel has blurbs from all the usual crew: Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’Or, former Senator Rick Santorum, Representative Tom “Nuke Mecca” Tancredo, and General Paul Vallely, who advocates the final ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the book itself, Darwish interweaves stories of her Egyptian girlhood with potted accounts of female genital mutilation, arranged marriages, polygamy, veiling, domestic abuse, honor killings, sharia law, jihad, censorship, hate-oriented education, the rejection of modernity, the cult of martyrdom, Islamic imperialism, and the pathological, groundless hatred of Israel.

In her interviews and in her book, she insists that she is not anti-Arab or anti-Islamic, and even suggests from time to time that she is still a Muslim. Then she pivots nimbly and attacks “the Arab mind,” “the seething Arab street,” and “the Muslim world,” with its “culture of jihad,” “culture of death,” and “culture of envy.” There are “no real distinctions between moderate or radical Muslims,” and no significant differences within or among Arab or Muslim cultures: for Darwish, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism was essentially jihadist. Darwish is allergic to social history: “I realized that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a crisis over land, but a crisis of hate, lack of compassion, ingratitude, and insecurity.” Instead of history, scholarship, and footnotes, she gives us a watered-down version of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind: a dictionary of Islamophobic commonplaces underwritten by the authority of an ex-Muslim native informant: I was there — I know.

Darwish’s portraits of Israel and of the US, to which she emigrated in 1978, are diametrically opposite but equally fatuous: Israeli Jews are tolerant, pragmatic, and peace-loving. From 1967 to 1982, they made the Sinai bloom. Americans are honest, charitable, industrious, self-sufficient, intellectually curious, and benevolent toward the foreign nations to whom they bring liberty. They err only in their excess of credulous goodness: because of “the simplicity of American values such as truthfulness,” they risk falling prey to duplicitous jihadist immigrants and dangerous professors, who “indoctrinate American young people with the radical Muslim agenda.”

Her outsider’s view of America complements her insider’s view of the Arab and Muslim world, for imperial states want not only other people’s land and labor, but their love. Here, we may compare Now They Call Me Infidel not only to recent anti-Islamic conversion narratives like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (her conversion was to neoconservative atheism and the American Enterprise Institute), but to earlier works in the genre. In her 1964 Editions Gallimard autobiography, O mes soeurs musulmanes, pleurez! (O My Muslim Sisters, Weep!), Zoubeida Bittari recounts her escape from Algerian Muslim patriarchy to French Christian bliss as a domestic servant to a Pied-Noir family; Nonie Darwish finds friends, family, and faith in southern California, including a Republican women’s group, an American husband, and Christian fellowship in Pastor Dudley Rutherford’s Shepherd of the Hills Church. As Bittari helped French colons feel better about their ungratefully rebuffed civilizing mission in Algeria, so Darwish helps Americans feel better about the long and bumpy road to global democratization.

There are occasional flashes of something more individual and authentic in Darwish’s book. For instance, her reiterated heartfelt attack on Nasser’s rent control laws (her mother lived partly off of her Cairo rentals) helps us understand why she feels so much more at home in southern California, where she arrived with enough money to buy a house with a swimming pool. But as a whole, the book is tedious, predictable, and badly edited — born to be bought, scanned and displayed, not actually read. But this will not diminish the demand for Darwish as a lecturer, which derives not from her writing but from her parentage: her father was Colonel Mustafa Hafez, head of Egyptian army intelligence in the Gaza Strip in the early ’50s, who was killed by an Israeli letter bomb in July 1956. Every lecture notice, every interview, even the title page of her book announces her as “a Muslim Shahid’s Daughter.”

Throughout her book, Darwish struggles to maintain love and loyalty both to the father she lost at age eight and to the Israeli state that killed him. In a parting flourish, she says that “My father — and potentially my whole family — was sent to his death in Gaza by Nasser, who was consumed by his desire to destroy Israel,” and she fondly imagines him surviving and flying with assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel. But this argument sometimes requires a torturous chronology: “When, on January 16, 1956, Nasser vowed a renewed offensive to destroy Israel, the pressure on my father to step up operations increased. More fedayeen groups were organized, and their training expanded to other areas of the Gaza Strip. Often my father was gone for days at a time. In an attempt to end the terror, Israel sent its commandos one night to our heavily guarded home.”

The problem here is that this early, failed assassination attempt occurred in 1953, when Hafez was struggling to prevent destabilizing Palestinian infiltration from Gaza into Israel. Things changed dramatically in February 1955, when then military commander Ariel Sharon’s Gaza raid killed 37 Egyptian soldiers and wounded 31. This raid brought shocked international condemnation, the end of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s ongoing negotiations with Nasser, mass demonstrations of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, and Nasser’s decision to have Hafez organize and arm Palestinian fedayeen for cross-border forays. Israeli historians Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris see the raid as a turning point in Israeli-Arab relations. Darwish never mentions it.

Continuing with her discussion of the earlier undated raid on her family’s home (it actually occurred on 28-29 August 1953), she says, “My father was not at home that night, and the Israelis found only women and children — my mother, two maids, and five small children. The commandos left us unharmed. I personally did not even wake up or know of the incident until later in life, when I read a book written about my father. After I read it, I called my mother immediately, and she confirmed the story. The Israelis chose not [to] kill us even though the Egyptian-organized fedayeen did kill Israeli civilians, women and children.”

Young Nonie must have been a very sound sleeper, since one squad blew the gate off her house, injuring several civilians, and, by one account, proceeded to demolish the house. Grown-up Nonie seems not to know that the Israeli commandos were part of Ariel Sharon’s newly-organized Unit 101. While the one squad attacked her house, Sharon’s was cornered nearby in al-Bureij refugee camp. He decided they would bomb and shoot their way through the camp rather than retreat from it. General Vagn Bennike, the Danish UN Truce Chief, reported to the Security Council on the ensuing massacre: “Bombs were thrown through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons. The casualties were 20 killed, 27 seriously wounded, and 35 less seriously wounded.” Other sources estimate from 15 to 50 fatalities.

The Israeli army blamed the raid on rogue kibbutzniks, and Ariel Sharon tried to reassure his men, telling them that all the dead women were camp whores or murderous Palestinian infiltrators. But some of them remained shocked at what they had done. Participant Meir Barbut said they felt as if they were slaughtering the pathetic inhabitants of a Jewish transit camp: “The boys threw Molotov cocktails at [innocent] people, not at the saboteurs we had come to punish. It was shameful for the 101 and the IDF [Israel army].” Another asked, “Is this screaming, whimpering multitude … the enemy? … How did these fellahin sin against us?” In 2006, Palestinian journalist Laila El-Haddad interviewed a survivor for Al Jazeera English:

“Mohammad Nabahini, 55, was two at the time and lived in the camp. He survived the attack in the arms of his slain mother. ‘My father decided to stay behind when they attacked. He hid in a pile of firewood and pleaded with my mother to stay with him. She was too afraid, and fled with hundreds of others, only to return to take me and a few of her belongings with her,’ he said. ‘As she was escaping, her dress got caught in a fence around the camp, just over there,’ he gestured, near a field now covered with olive trees. ‘And then they threw a bomb at her, Sharon and his men. She tossed me on the ground behind her before she died.’”

Though Darwish never mentions it, the al-Bureij Massacre hasn’t exactly been a secret — both Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have described it clearly, with little disagreement save the number of fatalities, with the high-end estimate coming from an Israeli history. If it tends not to loom large in Palestinian historical memory, that’s because it was overshadowed just two months later by the Qibya Massacre, during which Sharon’s Unit 101 killed 67, women and children, demolishing buildings over their heads and shooting them down when they tried to flee — the tactic pioneered at al-Bureij. Given its propensity for civilian soft targets, this daredevil elite unit might be better described as a death squad.

We probably shouldn’t expect Nonie Darwish to alter her campus presentations anytime soon. The bookings by StandWithUs might dry up if she were to start supplementing her cautionary tales about sharia law, jihadi immigrants, and female genital mutilation with a serious discussion of Israeli massacres at Deir Yassin, Tantura, al-Bureij, Qibya, Kfar Qasim, Sabra and Shatila, and Beit Hanoun. In any case, Darwish prefers simple cultural generalities and intimate personal reflection to historical analysis. But since that’s the case, someone at her next lecture might ask if she remembers playing with any of the refugee children murdered at al-Bureij, and why the kindly Israeli commandos who spared her family decided to blow up Mohammad Nabahini’s mother.

Jim Holstun teaches world literature and Marxism at SUNY Buffalo and can be reached at jamesholstun A T hotmail D O T com.