All Entries Tagged With: "Masjid"

Dudley Council mosque refusal is ‘Islamophobic’

BBC News

Plans for a new mosque and community centre in the West Midlands have been turned down for the second time.

Dudley Council refused permission on Monday for the buildings measuring 6,415 m sq.

Dr Kurshid Ahmed, chairman of the town’s Muslim association, said the decision was “Islamophobic”.

The council said its decision was based solely on planning reasons as the scale and design of the building would be out of keeping with buildings in the area.

The council originally refused outline planning permission for the Hall Street mosque in February 2007 on the basis the land had already been designated exclusively for employment use under the council’s unitary development plan.

‘Not surprised’

A planning inspectorate overturned the council’s reason for refusing outline planning approval in July 2008.

The council fought the decision in the High Court in July 2009 and lost.

Full plans for a mosque and community centre went before Dudley planning committee on Monday night but were rejected.

Dr Ahmed said: “Obviously I am disappointed but certainly not surprised because decisions in Dudley Planning committee are driven by the influence of bigotry, racism and Islamophobia.”

Dr Ahmed said he was aware that the proposed buildings had been described by some councillors as “an alien feature” and “a blot on the landscape”.

He added: “There’s not really any planning consideration as the two comments that you’ve just referred to suggest, so it is a decision based on people’s prejudices against Islam.

“They don’t want to see a mosque or they see it as a blot, they see it as completely out of character, which means that they are still living in some historical context and don’t see the globalisation of today and Dudley as part of that.”

‘Passed two mosques’

Dr Ahmed said it was evidence that council policy was being determined on the basis of anti-Muslim prejudices and described it as “institutional Islamophobia”.

Tim Wright, deputy leader of the Conservative-run council, denied the decision meant the council was Islamophobic.

He said five of the nine members of the planning committee had been on the committee previously when he was its chairman.

He said: “To my knowledge, over the time that I was there, we passed two mosques so how can that be Islamophobia?

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mosque, whether it’s a school, whether it’s office block, whether it’s a private house, in planning law it’s a building.

“And basically the refusal was because… its overall scale, mass and design was out of keeping with what is in Dudley.”

Dudley Muslim Associates, which submitted the plan, has three years to submit an alternative before the outline planning approval expires.

‘Undercover’ in hijab: unveiling one month later

Source
by Cassidy Herrington
E-mail cherrington@kykernel.com.

Hilton Als, an African American writer, says our worldview and sense of “otherness” is created in our mother’s lap.
Mother’s lap is protective and familiar. Leaving this worldview can be uncomfortable, but I can assure you, the rewards are much greater.

Hijab

Last month, I climbed out of my “lap” and wore a hijab, the Muslim headscarf. I thought this temporary modification of my appearance would bring me closer to an understanding of the Muslim community, but in retrospect, I learned more about my place in the world.
Simplified, one piece of fabric is all it takes to turn perspectives upside-down.
The hijab is a contested, sacred and sometimes controversial symbol, but it is just a symbol. It is a symbol of Islam, a misconstrued, misunderstood religion that represents the most diverse population of people in the world — a population of more than one billion people.
I realized the best way to identify with Muslims was to take a walk in their shoes. On Oct. 1, I covered my head with a gauze scarf and grappled with the perceptions of strangers, peers and even my own family.
Because of perceptions, I even struggled to write this column. My experience with the hijab was personal, but I hope sharing what I saw will open a critical conversation.
My hijab silenced, but simultaneously, my hijab brought unforgettable words.

Idea

In the first column I wrote this semester, I compared college to an alarm clock saying, “we see the face of a clock, but rarely do we see what operates behind it.” At the time, I did not realize how seriously I needed to act on my own words — as a journalist, a woman and a human.
A few weeks after I wrote that piece, a guest columnist addressed Islamophobic sentiments regarding the proposed “ground zero” mosque. The writer was Muslim, and she received a flurry of feedback.
The comments online accumulated like a swarm of mindless pests. The collective opinion equated Islam to violence and terrorism.
In response to her column, one comment said, “[The writer] asks us to trust Islam. Given our collective experience, and given Islam’s history I have to wonder what planet she thinks we are on.”
Although I did not know the voices behind these anonymous posts, I felt involuntarily linked to them — because I am not Muslim. I wanted to connect people, and almost instinctively, I decided that a hijab was necessary. A hijab could help me use my affiliation with “white,” non-Muslims to build rapport with the Islamic community and at the same time, show non-Muslims the truth from an unheard voice. Above all, I wanted to see and feel the standard lifestyle for so many women around the world — because I’m curious, and that’s why I’m a journalist.
Before I took this step, I decided to propose my idea to the women who wear headscarves every day. Little did I know, a room full of strangers would quickly become my greatest source of encouragement and would make this project more attainable.

The handshake

Initially, I worried about how the Muslim community would perceive a non-Muslim in a hijab, so I needed its approval before I would start trying on scarves. On Sept. 16, I went to a Muslim Student Association meeting to introduce myself.
When I opened the door to the meeting room, I was incredibly nervous. To erase any sign of uncertainty, I interjected to a girl seated across the room, “meeting starts at 7, right?” The girl, it turns out, was Heba Suleiman, the MSA president. After I explained my plan, her face lit up.
“That is an amazing idea,” she said.
I felt my tension and built-up anxiety melt away. In the minutes following, I introduced myself to the whole group with an “asalaam alaykum,” and although I was half-prepared for it, I was alarmed to hear dozens of “wa aylaykum asalam” in response.
Before I left, several girls approached me. I will not forget what one girl said, “this gives me hope.” Another girl said, “I’m Muslim, and I couldn’t even do that.” It did not hit me until then, that this project would be more than covering my hair. I would be representing a community and a faith, and consequentially, I needed to be fully conscious of my actions while in hijab.

First steps “undercover”

Two weeks later, I met Heba and her friend Leanna for coffee, and they showed me how to wrap a hijab. The girls were incredibly helpful, more than they probably realized. Although this project was my personal undertaking, I knew I wouldn’t be alone — this thought helped me later when I felt like ripping off the hijab and quitting.
Responses to my hijab were subtle or nonexistent. I noticed passing glances diverted to the ground, but overall, everything felt the same. Near the end of the month, a classmate pointed out that a boy had been staring at me, much to my oblivion. The hijab became a part of me, and until I turned my head and felt a gentle tug, I forgot it was there.
For the most part, I carried out life as usual while in hijab. I rode my bike and felt the sensation of wind whipping under my headscarf. I walked past storefront windows, caught a glimpse of a foreign reflection and had to frequently remind myself that the girl was me. Hijab became part of my morning routine, and on one morning I biked to class and turned around because I realized I left without it. At the end of the day, I laughed at my “hijab hair” pressed flat against my scalp.
The hijab sometimes made me uneasy. I went to the grocery store and felt people dodge me in the aisles — or was that just my imagination?
I recognize every exchange I had and every occurrence I report may be an assumption or over analysis because few of my encounters were transparent. The truth is, however, very few of my peers said anything about the hijab. My classmates
I’ve sat next to for more than a year, my professors and my friends from high school — no one addressed the obvious, and it hurt. I felt separated from the people who know me best — or so I thought.
A gap in the conversation exists, and it’s not just surrounding my situation.
Just over a week ago, I turned on the news to see Juan Williams, a former NPR news analyst fired for commentary about Islam. Williams said, “If I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
His statement revealed an internalized fear. And I saw this fear when my colleagues dodged the topic. When I went back to ask “why?,” several said it was too “touchy” or insensitive to bring up.
A hijab is a just symbol, like a cross, a star or an American flag. I am still the same Cassidy Herrington — I didn’t change my identity, but I was treated like a separate entity.

Talk is not cheap

When someone mentioned my hijab without my provocation, I immediately felt at ease. A barista at my usual coffee stop politely asked, “Are you veiling?” A friend in the newsroom asked, “Are your ears cold?”
My favorite account involves a back-story.
I love Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, and I garnered an appetite when I was young. My childhood home neighbored my “third grandmother,” the most loving second-generation Lebanese woman and exceptional cook (not an exaggeration, she could get me to eat leafy vegetables when I was a child zealot of noodles and cheese). I remember knocking on her back door when I was five, asking for Tupperware brimming with tabouleh.
When King Tut’s opened on Limestone, my school year swiftly improved to a fabulously garlicky degree. At least once a week, I stopped by to pick up the tabouleh, hummos or falafel to medicate my case of the newsroom munchies.
On Oct. 21, the owner, Ashraf Yousef, stopped me before I went inside.
“I heard about your project, and I like it,” he said. “And you look beautiful in your hijab.”
This encounter was by far the best. And it made my shawarma sandwich taste particularly delicious. I went back on my last day to thank him, and Yousef said, “I’m just giving my honest opinion, with the hijab, you look beautiful. It makes your face look better.”
Yousef asked if I would wear the hijab to his restaurant when the project was over. I nodded, smiled and took a crunchy mouthful of fattoush.

False patriotism

I did not receive intentional, flagrant anti-Muslim responses. I did, however, receive an e-mail allegedly “intended” for another reader. The e-mail was titled “My new ringtone.” When I opened the audio file, the Muslim prayer to Mecca was abruptly silenced by three gunshots and the U.S. national anthem.
I spoke to the sender of the e-mail, and he said, “It was just a joke.” Here lies a problem with phobias and intolerance — joking about it doesn’t make it less of an issue. When was it ever okay to joke about hatred and persecution? Was it acceptable when Jews were grotesquely drawn in Nazi cartoons? Or when Emmet Till was brutally murdered?
The e-mail is unfortunate evidence that many people inaccurately perceive Islam as violent or as “the other.” A Gallup poll taken last November found 43 percent of Americans feel at least a “little” prejudice against Muslims. And if you need further confirmation that Islamophobia exists, consult Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich.

Hijab-less

I’ve been asked, “Will you wear the hijab when it’s over?” and initially, I didn’t think I would — because I’m not Muslim, I don’t personally believe in hijab. Now that I see it hanging on my wall and I am able to reflect on the strength it gave me, I think, yes, when I need the headscarf, I might wear it.
Ashraf said, “A non-Muslim woman who wears a hijab is just wearing a headscarf.” (and apparently, my face “looks better.”) Appearances aside, when I wore the hijab, I felt confident and focused. I wore the hijab to a news conference for Rand Paul, and although an event coordinator stopped me (just me, except for one elusive blogger) to check my credentials, I felt I accurately represented myself as an intelligent, determined journalist — I was not concerned with how I looked, but rather, I was focused on gathering the story.
So now, I return to my first column of the year. I’ve asked the questions, and I’ve reached across the circles. Now, it’s your turn. You don’t have to wear a hijab for a month to change someone’s life or yours. The Masjid Bilial Islamic Center will host a “get to know your neighbors” on Nov. 7, and UK’s Muslim Student Association is having “The Hajj” on Nov. 8. These are opportunities for non-Muslims to be better informed and make meaningful connections.
I want to thank Heba for being a friend and a resource for help. Thank you to Ashraf Yousef and King Tut for the delicious food and the inspiration. Finally, I apologize to the individuals who feel I have “lied” to them about my identity or who do not agree with this project. I hope this page clears things up — you have the truth now, and I hope you find use for it.
Why are we so afraid to talk about this? We are not at war with Islam. In fact, Muslim soldiers are defending this country. Making jokes about terrorism is not going to make the situation less serious. Simply “tolerating” someone’s presence is not enough.
If you turn on the news, you will inevitably hear the prefix, “extremist,” when describing Islam. What you see and hear from the media is fallible — if you want the truth, talk to a Muslim.

Cassidy Herrington is a journalism and international studies junior. E-mail cherrington@kykernel.com.

Muslims should reach out to fellow citizens to counter rise of Islamophobia in Canada

By MOHAMMED AZHAR ALI KHAN | Source

Canada is a model country that operates under the rule of law and respect for human rights and diversity. But in these harsh times signs are mounting that it is not immune to the Islamophobia that is sweeping through Western countries.

Ottawa’s Carleton University has become the first university in North America to offer courses in defense against terrorism. Engineering students will study, among other subjects, national security, intelligence and terrorism.

The government has also decreed that passengers at Canadian airports must show their faces at boarding gates in addition to producing passports and other photo identification.

These actions follow the arrest of some Muslims on terrorism-related charges — and the conviction, in recent years, of some Canadian Muslims for planned terrorism in Canada or Europe.

A recent poll, commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, showed that 55 percent of Canadians did not think Muslims shared their values.

Suicide bombs that target innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, terrorism and niqab are among the factors fueling distrust of Muslims. Ayman Al-Yassini, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said the situation is getting worse and Canadian Muslims should counter it by reaching out to their fellow Canadians of other faiths. Polls show that Canadians who have Muslim friends view Islam more favorably than those Canadians who do not know Muslims.

Some Muslim organizations and Muslims have started to do that in recent years. But the Muslims of Canada are hugely diverse — ranging from highly educated professionals to traumatized refugees who found safety in Canada from persecution or death in their own countries but who have little understanding of the West. The absence of a national Muslim umbrella organization in Canada has also prevented joint action or strategic leadership.

The bickering in some Muslim organizations and their preoccupation with building mosques but neglecting vulnerable Muslims — such as refugees, disgruntled youth, women victims of domestic violence, new immigrants, those in jail, ill and mentally ill, etc — has produced an underclass of vulnerable Muslims.

A Christian friend of mine recently sent an e-mail to his friends saying he is sick of all Muslims being blamed for the actions of a few criminals. Most of his friends agreed. But one wrote back saying that Muslims hate non-Muslims and their goal is to rule the world.

Such views also stem from the Islamophobia being spread by sections of the Canadian media. Canada’s national magazine, some radio and TV stations and print journalists level baseless accusations against Muslims. For example, a columnist wrote in Ottawa’s major paper, “There is no question during Muslim rule non-Muslims were regarded under Shariah law as second-class citizens.” He added that “Islam’s holiest of holy, Kaaba, in the Saudi Arabian city of Makkah, was a pagan shrine for hundreds of years before Muhammad and his army slaughtered the residents in 630 A.D.” He later published a correction that the city had surrendered without a fight. He did not state that the Prophet (peace be upon him) forgave his tormentors. Nor did he say that the House of God was originally built by the Prophet Abraham to worship one God before it was converted to a temple of idols.

In fairness, some media give Muslims the chance to express their viewpoints. These include Muslims who lack credibility among Muslims but whose Muslim-bashing has turned them into media darlings. For example Canadian Muslim imams issued a declaration clearly condemning violence and terrorism. Their views got some coverage — along with the interviews of media darlings who chastised the imams for not banning jihad, or self-defense, outright.

Islam also gets tarnished by suicide bombings, sectarian killings, and persecution of non-Muslims, corruption and oppression in some Muslim countries.

In Canada, Muslims are mostly disorganized and the majority of Muslims, including the youth, keep away from mosques, except for Eid or Friday prayers.

Now Canadian Muslims must teach their own community about Islam’s emphasis on compassion, justice, brotherhood and human dignity. They must also reach out to fellow Canadians of other faiths, including the media, and participate in all aspects of life. They must also uplift disenfranchised Muslims and help them to become productive, respected citizens.

Canada remains a great country. But minorities in the past had to strive mightily to gain respect and equality and to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Now Canadian Muslims face that challenge.

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a journalist, retired Canadian civil servant and refugee judge. He has received the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal for his work as a journalist, his leadership of Muslims and efforts to promote better understanding between Canadians of different faiths

Some conservative Christians still don’t have a clue what America is all about

examiner.com | By Mitchell S. Gilbert

Two stories in today’s news stand out as reminders that to many conservative Christians, America is their country and everyone else should apparently think about leaving or just be grateful that they are allowed to live here.

In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville, a county judge ruled against a suit brought by a citizens group committed to putting the breaks on the building of an Islamic Community Center. A number of local churches and conservative Christian organizations co-sponsored the suit.

In the course of 8 days of testimony, opponents of the community center called a number of witnesses who argued among other things, Islam is not a religion but a political movement that is committed to world domination. Other expert witnesses suggested that given a chance, American Muslims will try to impose Sharia Law on the United States. In recent months, opponents of the Islamic Community Center even organized a march, complete with unfriendly signs down Murfreesboro’s main thoroughfare.

The legal thrust of the suit was based on the premise that the county planning commission had not taken enough community input in giving their approval for the project. In his ruling the presiding judge simply noted that nothing improper had taken place.

The other story comes from the State of Texas where it has now been learned, a number of conservative Christian groups and individuals have been sending out emails to members of the State’s legislature directly opposing Joe Straus (Republican, San Antonio) as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Why? Because Joe is one of them, his is a Jew. The fact that Straus happens to be a conservative Republican apparently doesn’t mitigate his religious heritage.

I light of such reoccurring expressions bigotry and ignorance by people who genuinely believe that they are “good Americans,” one can’t help but wonder if America’s most ominous enemies are not in foreign lands but right here, living among us.

One very thoughtful, eloquent American with a very different perspective on what America is all about, wrote a very warm letter to a congregation of non-Christians just to reassure them of their rightful place in this country. I thought it appropriate to conclude this column with an except from that letter:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

The letter was composed in 1790 and addressed to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. It was signed: “G. Washington.”

2012: Exploiting Islamophobia to Win Big

Source | by Kelley B. Vlahos

Why did Renee Ellmers, a Republican candidate for Congress from North Carolina, produce a campaign ad skewering her opponent for not vociferously opposing the Park 51 Islamic center planned for Manhattan near Ground Zero, over 500 miles away?

Because it was good campaign strategy, that’s why. She presumed that the Newt Gingrich-hyper-generated history of the Muslims conquering the city of Cordoba 13 centuries ago, complete with illustrations and the juxtaposition of Ground Zero, would pay off, particularly among the disgruntled southern conservatives in her district, which covers the central and eastern parts of the state. And she was right – this blatant exploitation of their fears certainly didn’t hurt and might very well have helped her beat seven-term incumbent Democrat Rep. Bob Etheridge in one of the many GOP upsets of the midterm elections.

In fact, anti-Muslim rage in today’s national discourse is populism’s low-hanging fruit, and many Republicans hungrily grabbed at it with both fists and were duly rewarded this campaign season. Sure, not every one of the Sarah Palin/Tea Party-endorsed candidates won on Nov. 2, but those who did, won in part because of their willingness to indulge in the Islamophobia coursing through the Republican base today, not despite it. The same Republican base that helped the party torpedo the Democrats last Tuesday, taking back the House, six senate seats, six governorships, and 680 slots in state legislatures (the most in the modern era, according to the National Journal).

“I think this election will weigh heavily on us for the next couple of years,” lamented James Zogby, director of the Arab American Institute, talking before an audience assembled at The Palestine Center in Washington, D.C on Thursday. Parsing out the election results in the frame of the current backlash, he said Islamophobia has “exploded” on the Arab-American community in the U.S., “to the extent I don’t think I have ever seen before.”

In Florida, for example, Republican ex-Army officer and two-time congressional candidate, Allen West, has been fond of giving speeches that highlight his perceived historical knowledge of Islam as a religion of murder and hate. Pontificating on the Quran at the Hudson Institute this year, West exclaimed, “this is not a perversion, (Terrorists) are doing exactly what this book says.”

In February, West took it up a notch, speaking before the Freedom Defense Initiative, a jihad-hunting fundraising machine headed by Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch):

“There is no such thing as ‘war on terror,’” he told his audience, “a nation does not go to war against a tactic. A nation goes to war against an ideology… we are against something that is a totalitarian, theocratic, political ideology and it is called Islam.”

Geller did her best to promote West’s candidacy – “Run West Run!” – and Ellmers was also on Geller’s list of “endorsed” candidates. In ordinary political times, respectable Republican candidates would have steered clear away from Geller and Spencer and other such toxic avengers.

Not West, not now. On Tuesday, the Tea Party-backed West beat Democratic incumbent Rep. Ron Klein with 55 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, just days before the election, right wing blogs started touting what they said was proof that Democratic Rep. Joseph Sestak, running in a tight race for Senate with Republican Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, had attended a 2006 campaign fundraiser hosted for him by the director of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), an “unindicted terrorist co-conspirator” that is supposedly a front for Hamas, but apparently not so effective to have been charged as such by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, the accusations have been dogging Sestak, a retired Vice Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and in July, blogs like Atlas Shrugs began pushing the issue and circulating this ad by the “Emergency Committee for Israel,” a right wing marriage of Washington neoconservatives and evangelical Christians with a lot of money to burn. It launched with the Sestak attack, and was key in making Park 51 a national issue a few weeks later.

Sestak lost last Tuesday to Toomey, 49 to 51 percent.

In Nevada, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid may have beat back a challenge by Tea Party favorite Sharon Angle, but most would agree she forced him to dance to her tune throughout the entire campaign. Example: when challenged in August by Angle to break his silence on the Park 51 project, Reid succumbed to the noxious Tea Party atmosphere and said Park 51 should be “built elsewhere.”

Later, in October, Angle indulged a delusional audience member by agreeing with him that Muslims were slowly taking over the American legal system.

“We’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it,” she told the audience.

Off the congressional grid, Republican Josh Mandel, whose campaign produced an attack ad that artfully invoked anti-mosque/Muslim feelings while pumping up Mandel’s “real American” status as a “decorated Marine,” “crushed” incumbent Ohio State Treasurer Kevin Boyce, a Democrat, by 15 points.

Notably, national jihad-watchers weighed in on this statewide race, targeting Mandel’s opponent’s deputy, accusing him of attending an “infamous mosque” and “hanging with Islamic extremists.” After the election, the Cleveland Plain Dealer referred to Mandel as “a rising star in his party.”

And of course, there was the successful state ballot initiative in super red Oklahoma, touted by Gingrich and others as the first shot across the bow at the coming Muslim invasion. The “Save our State” amendment will modify the state constitution to ban Sharia law. Comedian Stephen Colbert, while noting that there are only 15,000 Muslims in Oklahoma today, had the best take yet: “Just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ban it. That’s why I have long fought for ballot measures to ban cat pilots, baby curling, and man-futon marriage.” (video here).

Looking at the smoldering post-election landscape and the long presidential campaign trail ahead, it’s clear that Islamophobia as a political tool is here to stay –- wielded by Republicans who use it to excite and galvanize the right wing, embarrass their opponents and sow the seeds of fear and paranoia in everyone else. And it’s so damn effective!

Zogby says President Bush may have “kept a lid on” the worst of the backlash after 9/11, however selfishly, by promoting the meme that his military invasions were not a “war on Muslims.” But the election of Barack Obama and the accompanying economic crisis unleashed the vitriol simmering under the surface, stirred by what Zogby called the expanding “cottage industry of terrorism experts” like Geller, Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Clifford May and Frank Gaffney. They inhabit largely Republican think tanks like the Center for Security Policy, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which as a monolith of anti-Muslim rhetoric, all provide daily talking points to Republican politicians like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and up-and-comers like West and Ellmers.

They also inspire and conspire with evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham (son of the Rev. Billy Graham), who felt emboldened enough to call Islam “wicked” and “evil” during a televised town meeting-style forum last April. Why not, when he knows that nearly half the electorate, or those identifying as Republican or ‘leaning Republican,’ likely agree with him on some level.

According to poll results announced by the Arab American Institute on Nov. 1, 66 percent of Republican voters now hold an unfavorable view of Arabs; 85 percent hold an unfavorable view of Muslims. Compare that to 28 percent who hold a favorable view of Arabs, and 12 percent who hold a favorable view of Muslims.

From Zogby:

“The GOP has become captive of several groups that now dominate the party’s base and have transformed its thinking. The ‘religious right’ and its ‘end of days’ preachers like Pat Robertson, William Hagee and Gary Bauer, presently constitute almost 40% of Republican voters. This group’s emphasis on the divinely ordained battle between the forces of ‘good’ (i.e. the Christian West and Israel) and the forces of ‘evil’ (Islam and the Arabs) has logically given rise to anti-Muslim prejudice.

“Then there are the Christian right’s ideological cousins, the neo-conservatives, who share an identical Manichean and apocalyptic world view, though with a secular twist. And into the mix must be thrown Islamophobic right-wing radio and TV commentators like [Bill] O’Reilly, [Glenn] Beck, [Rush] Limbaugh, [Michael] Savage and company, who daily spew their poison across the airwaves.

“The combination produces a lethal brew that is dangerous not only for the intolerance it has created, but the sense of certitude and self-righteousness it projects.”

The incoming Republican chairs to the foreign policy/security/intelligence committees and shifts in the party leadership in the House are “really problematic,” said Zogby. He pointed out several members who are quite known for promoting interventionist, anti-Arab/Muslim policy prescriptions and are expected to rise in the ranks next year, including Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Foreign Affairs), Eric Cantor (Majority Leader), Dan Burton (Foreign Affairs-Middle East), Peter King (Homeland Security), Lamar Smith (Judiciary) and Steve King (Judiciary-immigration).

“You have people who have a decidedly anti-Arab, anti-Islam mindset … it’s born out of the same ideological fervor of the last (Bush) administration,” said Zogby. As for the broader problem of Islamophobia and the Republican wave of influence in Washington politics, he said, “I think it will have an impact on the President and it will make the climate very difficult.”

You bet. Especially with the presidential campaign right around the corner. In fact, I’ve argued that it is already here. Watch the Islamophobia that poisoned the well in the midterms metastasize like a vulgar cancer for what already promises to be a Republican/Tea Party crusade to throw Obama – a man who upwards of 46 percent of Republicans believe is a secret Muslim – out of the White House for good.

Though the so-called Tea Party movement was supposedly born out of a backlash to the President’s “socialist” economic policies in times of financial crisis, it has done nothing to dissuade its adherents from scapegoating immigrants and Muslims for the country’s problems. Zogby tells Antiwar.com that “if a popular (GOP) leader criticizes this bigotry it could have an impact.” I am not so optimistic. As Zogby said himself, “once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to get it back in.” And this is one hell of a vengeful Jinn.

Still Hating: Our Summer Of Islamophobia

Susan Campbell | Source

This summer, we rolled over and showed our ugly underbelly.

While hounds bayed over a not-mosque planned for not-Ground Zero, a nutty pastor in Florida threatened to mark 9/11’s ninth anniversary by burning the Qu’ran. People who in times of floods might volunteer to fill sandbags contributed to a different kind of deluge by staging loud opposition to the construction of mosques in their neighborhoods in Tennessee, in California.

We can still hate in America. We have this summer to prove it.

Imam Abdullah Antepli is a former Hartford Seminary student, former Muslim chaplain at Welseyan University, and now Duke University’s first Muslim chaplain. Right after college, Antepli left his native Turkey to avoid pressure to homogenize in a land once proud of its colorful tapestry of cultures.

We are not the same, we won’t ever be, and it suits us better to embrace our differences. As Antepli earned his education around the world, he discovered the golden truth about multi-faith efforts.

“Some of my most transcendental personal moments have not come in a mosque, not when I am dealing with a uniquely Muslim community, but when I am dealing in a cross-religious, cross-lingual society,” Antepli said. “That’s when I say, ‘Oh, my God. There you are.'”

The terrorist attack of 9/11 was a horrible way to be introduced to Islam because that act was not Islam. That was evil, and for nine long – and, up until the summer, fruitful – years, Muslims in this country made important inroads educating neighbors and co-workers about what Islam is not.

There should have been time to talk about what Islam is, but ignorance is an ugly beast and sometimes, the terrorists win. They may not kill our physical selves, but they kill the American tradition of standing together.

And then this cancer of a summer happened, and the beast arose again.

Antepli chose Duke over Princeton or Yale. He was drawn to the opportunity to serve the school’s 6,600 undergraduates, including its 500 Muslim Blue Devils. He became the face and voice of Islam for a land not overly familiar with his religion.

That has been challenging, to say the least. Duke Country is dotted with church signs that say things like “Hell is Full of Fags and Muslims.” Antepli has visited churches where, before he settles into a pew, someone asks him about the virgins he can expect in the afterlife.

In answer, he hands them his Qu’ran and asks them to find the verse that promises virgins. In fact, it’s not there. My response? People generally don’t read their own sacred text, much less the holy verses of someone else. They prefer someone to spoon-feed them their religious beliefs because learning for themselves takes blood, sweat and tears. Ignorance is and ever will be easier. But that’s me talking, not Antepli.

Dawn pierces even the darkest night. As a Duke chaplain, Antepli befriended U.S. Rep. David Price, who invited him to deliver the opening prayer for a House session in March. That, in turn, has led to more contacts in Washington.

“The civic culture we have in this society is one of the best, shariah-compliant, in my understanding of Islamic theology,” Antepli said. “We’ve made huge progress. We’ve inspired the global community with our successes. And we have worked together, but the work is not done.”

Of course there’s hope. Summer’s in the rearview. We just may come through these times as we’ve come through others: A little battered, a lot sadder, but a whole lot smarter.

Abdullah Antepli is the keynote speaker at the Hartford Prayer Breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Thursday at The Artists Collective, 1200 Albany Ave., Hartford. For more information, go to http://www.hartfordprayerbreakfast.org.

On Fox CT Monday: Reporter Laurie Perez takes a look at 10 p.m. at Islamophobia in Connecticut — how more than ever it’s influencing development, leading to debate, and creating controversy. There will be a panel discussion on the issue on the Fox CT morning show at 8 a.m.

GR White Paper: Islamophobia And The New York Mosque Controversy

By M. Cherif Bassiouni l Source

Cordoba House/Park 51
Referring to the proposed Muslim Community Center in lower Manhattan as the “Ground Zero Mosque” has inflammatory and misleading implications. Calling it the “Terror Mosque” and the “Jihad Mosque” adds a hate-inspiring dimension. Every time avowed or concealed Islamophobes describe the New York Community Center in these, and other terms, they distort the facts.

The project that its promoters call Cordoba House/Park 51 is named for an ancient Spanish city that epitomized the understanding between the three Abrahamic faiths in the twelfth century.  It is intended to be a center of enlightenment and inter-faith understanding with praying space for Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, and a memorial for the victims of 9/11. What could be more harmonious with the memory of that tragic event, or more symbolic of religious tolerance?

Cordoba House is not a mosque, but a community center, which is planned as a $100 million modern nineteen-story building that will replace the presently run-down structure, which is similar to others in that lower Manhattan economically depressed area. The new building will house a swimming pool, basketball court, culinary school, and a multitude of other non-religious uses, with only the two top floors dedicated to a Muslim prayer hall. Nothing would distinguish it from other buildings in the area, aside from whatever inscription will adorn its front entrance.  It will also include a memorial commemorating the 9/11 tragedy, irrespective of the religion or belief of any victim, and two praying areas for Jews and Christians.

The present run-down building has been used as a Muslim prayer center, or mosque, for the last two years without raising any questions.  But that is seldom mentioned.  And, contrary to what the project’s opponents say or imply, there is no view of the proposed Community Center from Ground Zero and vice versa. Besides, in Manhattan, two-and-a-half blocks full of buildings are quite a separation for anyone familiar with that part of New York City.  Lastly, the opponents fail to mention that there is also a mosque ten blocks away from Ground Zero, which has been in existence for a decade.

A review of the allegations made by the opponents of the project that received wide dissemination and credence is indicative of the misleading nature of this campaign.

The primary objection that has gained public credence concerns the location. Its proponents contend or imply that the Community Center is a mosque overlooking Ground Zero, which is not the case. Another objection is that, presumably, such a mosque, with all of the distinct Islamic architectural characteristics of a cupola and minaret, would be offensive to the victims’ families and friends because those who orchestrated 9/11 were Muslims. Others add that it would be insulting to all Americans.  This too is not the case.  These claims, however, ignore the fact that more than 60 Muslims were also killed at Ground Zero and that Muslims are also grieving for Americans.

As far as symbolism goes for the “hallowed grounds” of the heart wrenching hole left by the destruction of the twin towers, the area where the Cordoba House/Park 51 is to be located is run-down, and has several sleazy strip clubs.  Yet nothing is said about these establishments near the “hallowed grounds” by the opponents of the project. So it’s not really about location or symbolism.

Islamophobia

The wide dissemination of misrepresentations about Islam and Muslims has given the impression of public credence to many falsities about the project.  Religious and racial prejudices, political opportunism, and a deliberate campaign of Islamophobia have all contributed to a publicly accepted negative perception of Islam and Muslims.  It has reached a level that makes it acceptable to publicly express anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments that would be unacceptable if they were directed against other religious groups in America. Consequently, a double standard has come to exist.  A curious face about the sources of this campaign is that no irrefutable academic sources is involved.  Why would the media and public accept representations by individual sources that are either obviously or significantly prejudiced?  Why does the media not seek verification from authoritative sources, or do its own research?  These are among the puzzling, unanswered questions that need to be investigated.  Similarly, the funding of sources of this campaign needs to be uncovered.

The Islamophobic campaign, like all other forms of group discrimination, starts with an “us” versus “them” mentality.  The “them” are identified as a category whose objectification ranges from dehumanization to different levels of violence.  Hitler dehumanized Jews as a prelude to his program of extermination.  Slave owners and traders dehumanized black-skinned Africans as a way of justifying their enslavement.  However, there is no more Jewish, Christian, Hindu, male, black, Republican “they” than there is a Muslim “they.”  People adhering to great faiths cover the globe and are from all national origins, skin color, gender and cultures.  The 1.4 billion Muslims fall into all of these categories and there is as much commonality among them as there are differences.  The Chinese Uyghurs, Afghans, Persians, Iranians, Nigerians and the Bosnians and Saudi Arabians are different even though they are Muslims.

In August, Time Magazine and the New York Times each commissioned polls on public sentiments about Islam, Muslims, and the New York Community Center/Mosque.  These two polls lumped together the Community Center/Mosque project with public attitudes about Islam and Muslims.  The results are not surprising, considering the intensity and purposefulness of the post 9/11 Islamophobic campaign.  According to Time Magazine’s poll, 61% of Americans opposed the project.  According to the New York Times, over 50% of New Yorkers oppose the project, while 35% favor it, and 20% of all New Yorkers disclose animosity and suspicion toward Islam.  More particularly, 33% disclose that they believe that, compared to other Americans, Muslim Americans were more sympathetic to terrorists and, in general, 60% of those polled have negative feelings about Muslims.  Surely, these reactions come out of somewhere other than an objective factual basis.

General polling and reporting on a nationwide level reveal a similar negative attitude towards Muslims.  There are some indications as to differences in perceptions among Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and others.  It seems that, with the exception of the Evangelical Christian right, Protestants are equally divided and more tolerant of Islam and Muslims than Catholics and Jews, the latter confusing the religion of Islam with their feelings about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  But that is all tentative, and for reasons discussed below, not likely to persist.

Public attitudes, particularly at certain times in this country’s history, have frequently been superficial, knee-jerk reactions occasioned by misguided public perceptions, sometimes driven by the worst motivations concealed under a cloak of high purpose.  But when governmental leadership asserts itself on a given social issue and acts in an unequivocal manner, things change. The prejudicial public reaction deflates.  One example was a survey conducted in the military in 1947 about whether U.S. armed forces should be integrated.  Over 80% of the military personnel polled were against integrating African-Americans, then referred to as Negroes or blacks, with whites in the military.  Seventy percent were also against integrating Jews within the ranks even though they already were integrated.  That year, President Truman ordered the integration of U.S. armed forces; the question has not been raised since and race relations have significantly improved.

This example demonstrates that decisive, principled leadership rectifies the public record and shows the correct path that Americans are most likely to follow.  President George W. Bush did this after 9/11 by publicly declaring that the attack upon the U.S. was not a reflection of Islam or a reflection on Muslims, though subsequently his administration abetted Islamophobia. President Obama’s initial reaction to the Community Center/mosque controversy was to support the constitutional right embodied by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion.  The next day, he qualified his reaction by raising questions about the wisdom of the location of the center.  Then, on Friday, September 10^th, in a statement in Washington DC on the anniversary of 9/11, he reiterated his original, principled position and unequivocally condemned Islamophobia. Interestingly, however, he added for the record that he spoke out from his deeply held Christian beliefs as if to respond to those who have accused him of being a “secret Muslim”, as if one should be ashamed of being a Muslim.

Opportunistic Escalation of the Islamophobic Campaign

The nationwide controversy escalated in August when a self-proclaimed minister, who is a committed white-collar criminal, with a congregation of some 50 members in Gainesville, Florida announced that 9/11 should be “Qur’an Burning Day” in the U.S..  The media’s coverage made the announcement into a shot heard around the world.  And yet, the Attorney General has taken no action against this form of hate speech.  Would any U.S. administration have remained that passive if a group of Muslims announced that they would burn the Torah on May 15th, the day Israel was established in 1948?

Rhetoric and demagoguery has taken these and other false contentions to such levels that no credibility can attach to them, but they have a powerful impact on the American publics’ psyche. This is why some in the Republican Party and the Tea Party have used it, as well as others in the Evangelical Christian right, white supremacists, and Neo-Cons.  Many of these lessons have been part of the post-9/11 Islamophobic campaign.

One of these opportunistic politicians is, Newt Gingrich, who recently compared the location of the community center to planting a swastika near the Holocaust museum in DC, or putting a Japanese shrine near the area of Pearl Harbor bombarded by the Japanese in 1941. Leaving aside the differences in the location and the type of structure, the swastika was a symbol of Nazi Germany, which exterminated an estimated 6 million Jews for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews. This was the greatest crime in history.  Its symbol was the swastika. Thus, to plant such a symbol near the Holocaust museum, or for that matter to use the swastika anywhere, would be an outrage not only to Jews, but all humankind. As for the example of the Japanese shrine, it was the government of Imperial Japan that decided to attack the U.S. by stealth, causing enormous human harm and damage to the United States and initiating World War II in the Far East. The imperial state of Japan certainly does not represent Japanese Americans. It would indeed be offensive to have anything representing the Japanese imperial state overlooking the harbor, but Japanese-American installations such as a Shinto temple are American installations and are no more and no less offensive than installations by Americans hailing from any other ethnic background.

Guilt by Association

The Islamophobes artfully play on the notion of guilt by association or collective guilt.  Their assumption is that if 19 Muslims committed the 9/11 crimes, then all Muslims are tainted by it because they share the same faith as the criminals.  This faith is portrayed as violent, aimed at world domination and can only have peace when Muslims have subjected all others in the world.  That is why they seek to impose the Shari’a (Islamic law) in the U.S. and elsewhere.  Preposterous as it is, many believe this nonsense because it is shouted by well-known persons, and is frequently repeated by the media.  Repetition tends to make the message stick, no matter how strange or misleading it may be.

Most responsible media, such as Time Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, the Christian-Science Monitor, MSNBC, CNN and others have reported on these general distortions as being part of an Islamophobic campaign or trend.  But the pervasiveness and extensiveness of the media coverage created a perception that a legitimate controversy exists, even when there is no legitimacy to it.

What distinguishes the many outrageously inappropriate connections of 9/11 to Islam and to all Muslims is that the attacks were individual acts committed by 19 Muslims.  They were not supported by any Muslim government, but by an outlaw Osama bin Laden and his loosely connected network called al Qaeda. 9/11 did not have the support of the main religious institutions of Islam anywhere in the world, and it did not have the support of 1.5 billion Muslims living in over 140 countries of the world. Above all, it did not have the support of American Muslims. There is no basis in law or morality to expand the guilt of a few to an entire religion and its adherents, unless, of course, there is a political agenda linking this campaign with the Islamophobic campaign unleashed by some after 9/11.

9/11 was a criminal act committed by a few whose guilt cannot be collectivitized to include all Muslims, and it certainly cannot be ascribed to Islam as a religion. It cannot be ascribed to the estimated 6 million American Muslims, one third of whom are African-Americans whose slave ancestors brought Islam to this country some 300 years ago, nor can it be attributed to the other four million American Muslims who are not African-Americans, an estimated 500,000 of whom are born in the U.S., to immigrant parents or converts. The remaining 3.5 million are of Asian, African, and Arab origin. American-Muslims operate 1,900 mosques, community centers, and schools throughout the U.S..  None have been found to harbor terrorists or support terrorism.

It is surprising that the most vocal proponents of guilt by association, Evangelical white Christians, who take the Bible literally do not abide by such Biblical statements as “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen” or “Love your neighbor as yourself” (English Standard Version, Leviticus 19:18 and 19:9). Instead, they selectively use collective guilt and guilt by association against Muslims when neither are part of the American system, or part of the Abrahamic faiths’ religious values and traditions. Responsibility for wrongdoing is always individual.  There was a period when the Catholic Church blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, even though crucifixion was a Roman penalty and not a Jewish one. But that was changed by the Second Vatican Council (28 October 1965, paragraph 4, Decree Nostra Aetate, “on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” Rome), and rightly so. The Jews of the world had for years rejected this concept of guilt by association, which was a contributing factor in their persecution by Christians for the last 2,000 years. This historic lesson should not be lost on Americans when it comes to the Islamophobic campaign that has been launched against Islam and Muslims since 9/11, particularly in light of a new level of dangerousness it has reached since the so-called Mosque controversy.

The Record

In the last nine years there have been two actual terrorist incidents committed by American Muslims.  One was by Major Nidal Hasan, a mentally deranged man who killed twelve persons at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, and the other was by Faisal Shahzad, who parked an explosive-laden car in Times Square on May 1, 2009.  Statistically, two incidents in a six million-person community over a period of nine years is probably the lowest crime rate in America of any community.  Conversely, white supremacists, who call themselves Christians, mostly in the South, kill and injure a substantial number of African-Americans and homosexuals annually, with relatively little said about these crimes in the national media.  They have however been reported by other sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps an up-to-date newsfeed on hate crimes.  The worst of these white supremacist hate crimes is the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 680 on April 19, 1995.  The perpetrators were white Christians who opposed the present system of government.  All of these acts have been treated as individual crimes and no one has sought to collectivize the responsibility of white Evangelical Christians and white supremacists.

During the month of August, two Muslims were physically attacked and injured in New York and Florida, mosques in Florida have been firebombed and vandalized, and an open campaign against Mosques is raging in such varied states as Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, California, and Wisconsin. President Obama is accused of being a Muslim as if that were something to be ashamed of. So it is not surprising that the August 2010 Time Magazine poll also found 46% of Americans to think that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence.

Willful Ignorance

Racial, religious, ideological motivation and political opportunism coming mainly from the political right and Christian and Jewish extremists are behind the Islamophobic campaign in America.  In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration, spurred by some in the evangelical right and Neo-Cons, unleashed a campaign against Muslims in the U.S..  This was accompanied by a nationwide PR campaign raising fear about Muslim terrorism in the U.S..  Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzalez, issued numerous reports of investigations, arrests, and prosecutions of Muslim terrorists in America.  These cases were given catchy names like the “Lackawanna Seven” and “Operation Backfire.”  In all, some 500 federal cases were put together.  That they were fabricated is evidenced by the fact that various federal courts across the country outright dismissed 250 cases. This is the highest percentage of dismissed cases of any category of violent federal crimes, which averages 15% across the board. For 50% of the cases brought against Muslims in the U.S. to be dismissed means that these charges were either without a legal basis or unsupported by probable cause, meaning that there was insufficient evidence to convince an ordinary, reasonable person that there is a basis to remand the accused to trial.  This is far from the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard needed to convict.  Thus, for over half of the cases not to have risen to this low threshold, particularly in light of the national percentage in federal cases, is quite telling.

The other cases, with the exception of a dozen or so, were ended by guilty pleas for offenses, which had nothing to do with the original charge.  This means that less than 10% of the charges brought had any potential linkage to terrorism.  Considering that the nationwide rate of federal convictions for violent crimes exceeds 47%, this too is an indicator of the degree of invalidity of the some 500 criminal charges brought against Muslims in America.

These cases were brought more for political than valid legal purposes.  This explains why in none of the 250 cases dismissed for lack of probable cause did the Attorneys General in function issue a statement or press release as they did when indictments were returned.  The record was never corrected, but the political objectives were achieved when the public was falsely induced to believe that American Muslims were a public danger and Islam was a violent religion.

The Department of Justice’s campaign under the Bush administration extended also to attacking Muslim charities.  The IRS, FBI, and U.S. attorneys across the country conducted investigations into local charities and mosques on the proposition that these organizations were funding terrorism.  The real goal was to deter Muslims from contributing to local charities and thus to weaken the Muslim community as a whole in the United States.  Obviously, a weak and threatened community is less likely to have any political weight and therefore less likely to express views that may be inamicable to certain political interests in this country.

The following case stands out for how the law was abused in order to achieve the political results mentioned above.  The federal case was brought in Texas again the Muslim charitable fund the United Holy Fund, which contributed money to qualified religious and charitable institutions in Palestine, including hospitals.  The case was not based on the proposition that the money did not go to legitimate charitable organizations; instead, the government argued, probably for the first time in the history of the U.S., that when these funds went to these religious and charitable organizations, it freed Hamas from having to reallocate its resources to engage in terrorism against Israel.  Preposterous as the proposition may be, it also ignores that only a small portion of the Hamas organization engages in armed resistance against Israel, and that Hamas has never engaged in acts of violence against the United States.  The first trial ended in a mistrial on October 22, 2007, after the jury found the defendants not guilty of most of the 108 charges brought against them, but was hung on a dozen technical charges that were complex and thus not easy to understand.  On a Thursday, word leaked of this situation and surprisingly on that day, the judge announced that rather than having the jury return the verdict on Friday, that he was going to take that day off for a long weekend.  This left the jury in a vacuum for over three days while the Department of Justice prepared itself for the outcome of the mistrial.  This too showed that the trial was politicized.  The prosecutor’s goal was to develop a strategy of how to bring a new trial on all 108 charges and thus to have a second bite at the apple.  So much for the constitutional right against double jeopardy.  On November 24, 2008, the second trial returned convictions on all 108 charges, which included conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.  It must be noted that no facts directly support the charges or conviction.  The proposition on which the government prevailed was that by providing resources to legitimate religious and charitable organizations, the donor organizations indirectly supported Hamas, which was listed by the Department of State as a terrorist organization, and that was enough for all of these legal consequences to flow.

What was more outrageous in that case was that the Department of Justice listed 189 Muslims and Muslim organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators”. This guilt by association without any proof of guilt is an anomaly of the U.S. criminal justice system. It has been used in organized and white-collar crimes, but never before in a purported charitable conspiracy. The unindicted co-conspirators, without proof of any wrongdoing on their part, included some of the most mainstream and respected American-Muslim organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust, as well as many individually listed respected Muslim clerics. The reason for that historically unprecedented action was to raise the implication that these organizations and individuals supported terrorism. More importantly, it opened the way for pro-Israel individuals and groups in the U.S. who have standing to bring civil cases against these individuals and organizations to claim damages for terrorism by means of this very indirect alleged connection to terrorism. In other words, this is a technique to destroy the American-Muslim religious organizational structure, and thus to deprive American-Muslims of a voice in their country.

The post-9/11 Islamophobic campaign abetted by the Bush administration is the most blatant abuse of the law and manipulation of public opinion that took place in the history of the United States since the end of World War II.  It ranks with the campaign against Japanese American citizens, which led to the internment of close to 100,000 Japanese Americans starting in February 1942, the anti-Chinese sentiment and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the slavery and racial discrimination laws that lasted until the 1950s, and prior to that, the laws and practices that permitted the destruction of Native Americans and the seizure of their lands.  Just as there is no monolithic Muslim group because they come from so many diverse cultures, ethnicities and traditions, there is no monolithic American-Muslim.  They come from this same wide-ranging diversity. In addition, an estimated half of American-Muslims are African-Americans, whose affiliation to Islam goes back to the time when they came to this land as slaves, and Americans born in this land to immigrant parents.  This number does not include American converts who have been born in the U.S. and whose ancestry goes back several generations.  The insidious notion that there is a monolithic worldwide group called Muslims and that they are represented in the U.S. by a corresponding monolithic group persists and it is fundamental to the campaign of “they” who are a threat to “us.”

The Moral Courage Honor Roll

Against this backdrop of what some benignly call “craziness,” certain positive outcomes developed.  The shining example of moral courage is New York Mayor Bloomberg who supported the Community Center/mosque project. He was joined by many victims’ families of 9/11 who supported the right of the project’s proponents to complete it in its planned location, as did a number of civic and religious organizations in New York and elsewhere.  Of particular note is that many supporters are Jewish, including Mayor Bloomberg and Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.  They should be commended for the example that they and others have given America and the world.  Another such person who belongs to the roster of profiles in courage and human integrity is Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, who not only wrote against Islamophobia and the opponents of the Community Center/Mosque, but who returned to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League a journalistic award that he received.  The reason was that Abe Foxman, the League’s Executive Director, joined the Islamophobes in their opposition to the project.  Why the League’s board did not censure Foxman for this and other anti-Islam stances, which have nothing to do with the League’s laudable purposes, is puzzling.  Recently, Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican senator, had the courage and integrity to break away from his party’s Islamophobes by upholding the constitutional right of Muslims to build a mosque on private property in lower Manhattan.  More power to him.  The ranks of the righteous increases daily; it now includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington D.C., Rev. Richard Cizik and many Christian and Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, the New York Union of Reform Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly.  On September 10^th, The New York Times carried a whole page (A17) ad stating, “Burning the Qur’an does not illuminate the Bible.”  It listed thirty leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches.  Similar statements were made by interfaith groups throughout the country, such as the Cardinal Bernardin Center at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, representing a large number of Christian and Muslim organizations engaged in inter-faith dialogue.

Those described above and many others who are among the righteous represent America at its best.  God bless them for their courage and integrity.  They show the world what kind of society America really is.  The others are a blot on the dignity of this great nation, and they should be called to the carpet.  The rhetoric and demagoguery of the Mosque controversy is obviously Islamophobic, but it is also politically motivated.  It started after 9/11 with leaders of the religious right like Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Pat Robertson, and goes on today with the work of Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer, and the Jihadwatch.com and Campus Watch websites and related activities. It also includes other anti-Islam conspiracy theories and blatant, racist Islamophobia that receives funding from extremist, pro-Zionist organizations and individuals, as described by Kenneth P. Vogel and Giovanni Russonello of Politico in Latest mosque issue: The money trail, posted on LoonWatch.com on September 8^th. The article particularly points to Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, who are reported as “ardent supporters of Zionist causes and major funders of pro-Israel groups across the country.”  Other individuals and funders of hundreds of thousands of dollars are mentioned. This reminds us of the story about the funding of the Tea Party by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch in Jane Mayer’s August 30^th expose, ‘Covert Operations’ in the New Yorker.

Adding Fuel to the Fire

Nothing could give more comfort or support to Osama bin Laden’s followers, other violent Muslim fundamentalists, and the Taliban than the Islmaphobic campaign that has been going on since 9/11.  The Community Center/mosque controversy adds more credence to the belief in Muslim countries and in many other countries that America is at war with Islam.

Our troops are in Muslim countries fighting alongside Muslims against violent radical Muslims.  The Islamophobic campaign increases dangers for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for Americans abroad and undermines U.S. efforts in confronting terrorism worldwide.  What is taking place in the U.S. undermines these efforts and places our troops in greater harm’s way.  Moreover, Islamophobes support the message of Bin-Laden and other extremists who claim that there is a war waged by the U.S. against Islam and Muslims. Helping the enemies of the U.S. is surely not the way to be patriotic.  And no U.S. political gains can justify such a campaign.

Coming at this problem from what I would call a normal, sane, or reasonable approach makes it very difficult to understand why people would preach hate and fabricate false stories, create misleading innuendos and engage in all sorts of pernicious techniques to pit human beings against one another for the ultimate goal of seeing the destruction or subjugation of one group by another.  But there it is. Memories of similar situations are all too often forgotten.  But for those of a certain generation, the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels during the Nazi regime cannot be forgotten.  The anti-Jewish hate-mongering of that time, which had been nursed for a good decade before tangible action commenced, led to the Holocaust. It is something the world should never forget.

The Kernel of Truth Used by the Islamophobes

The misuse of jihad as a way of giving credence to the underlying proposition that Islam is a violent religion and that Muslims are violent and dangerous people, except for the ones that Islamophobes deem as “moderates.” A recently published book entitled Jihad and Its Challenges to International and Domestic Law, co-edited by myself and Amna Guellali, published by Hague Academic Press) also contains my article, “Evolving Approaches to Jihad: From Self-Defense to Revolutionary and Regime-Change Political Violence” address the history and evolution of jihad.  In it, I describe how radical Muslim fundamentalists who justify the use of force, including harming innocent civilians as an acceptable practice, have hijacked jihad. I categorically denounce their positions and reveal the falsity of such theological claims.

Jihad has become a revolutionary political doctrine that Muslim radical groups have used either against certain domestic regimes or against the West, the United States in particular.  The ideology and its rhetoric is no different from that which we heard from Maximilien Robespierre in 1794 during the French Revolution, in the 1920’s by Trotsky and his followers in the camps of Marxist revolutionists; it is echoed in the revolutionary teachings of Mao Zedong as of 1948, spread in Latin America by Che Guevara in the 1960’s and tragically practiced by the Khmer Rouge revolutionists between 1975-1985.  All of these revolutionaries have caused enormous harm to their societies and others.  The fact that they have relied on higher principles and causes does not in any way mitigate the horrible crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of these ideologies against so many, for so long.  Violent jihad is no different.  That is what Osama bin Laden and Ayman el-Zawarhy preach.

In all of these situations however, there is a common thread.  It is the existence of a basic injustice committed by some, against others that the victim group is unable to redress, and having reached despair, they resort to violence.  That does not justify what has been done throughout history in the name of revolutionary ideology, nor is it to say, in any way, that people should not resist certain injustices, sometimes by force.  Indeed, this country was born out of such a resistance, as have many colonized countries.  But there are, of course, ideological and physical distinctions, both as to the legitimacy of the cause, and the validity of the means.  No legitimate cause permits harm to innocent civilians.

Islam is the first religious/political system to have clearly enunciated the dual conditions for the use of force, namely the legitimacy of self-defense (with exceptions which are too complex to discuss herein, but which are addressed in my article mentioned above) and the limitations on the use of force.  The Prophet Muhammad made the first of these pronouncements before Muslim troops entered Mecca in 630 B.C.E.  The second was an edict from the Prophet’s first successor, Islam’s first khalifa, Abu-Bakr, who ordered, in 637 B.C.E., the Muslim forces going to fight the Romans in what is now Syria and Lebanon, not to kill innocent civilians, particularly the elderly, woman, children, clergymen, to respect the Jewish and Christian places of worship, not to destroy crops and trees and not to pillage or engage in wanton destruction.  The edict of Abu-Bakr was echoed in the contemporary international law of armed conflict (the Geneva Convention).  His successor, Umar ibn al-Khattab, issued his edict in 638 B.C.E. before entering Jerusalem, guaranteeing freedom of religion for all Christians and Jews.  That edict has been carried out to date.  Because of it, Jews were able to return to Jerusalem since their exclusion by the Romans in 70 A.D.  Salah el-Din, who defeated the crusaders in 1187, allowed the Christians to surrender and leave without harm, something the early crusaders did not do with Jews and Muslims who were slaughtered or taken as slaves.  Islam in its fourteenth century history never had a forced conversion of Jews or Christians as the Christians did with the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition of 1478-1884. None of that is ever mentioned.  But more importantly, does all this ancient history matter today?  Is not our globalized world much different than these ancient times?  No people should be judged by the past, and no person carries the sins of his or her father or mother.

The Dual Standard

A common characteristic of the conflicts involving the west and Muslims are the dual standard practices by those who are more powerful in respect of those who are less.  Thus, the killing by American forces of Afghan Taliban is considered legitimate while the latter, who are fighting against a foreign occupier of their country, are deemed terrorists.  Another classic example is that whenever Israel uses force against Palestine, it is deemed justifiable self-defense and when Palestine reacts with much lesser violence, it is always considered terrorism.  This duality of standard enhances the use of violence by the weaker side, particularly in these situations, which reflect an asymmetry of forces.

An example of the above is when Israel engaged in Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, killing over 1,300 civilians, of whom 300 were children under 12, and 100 were women and over 6,000 persons were injured.  Beyond human harm, over 20,000 structures were destroyed, including water filtration plants and other infrastructure, in what Israel billed as legitimate self-defense.  These infrastructures were crucial to the survival of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza, whom Israel had already kept under siege for five years.  Many of these acts are unquestionably war crimes as the United Nations Goldstone Commission report established.  Recently, Israel even admitted to some of these crimes. The trigger for the Operation was that the military wing of Hamas, with an estimated 5,000 fighters, had fired over a span of four years between 4,000-6,000 rockets and mortars into areas inhabited by Israeli settlers, resulting in the killing of 4 Israeli military persons and 9 civilians.  These attacks were roundly denounced by Israel, the U.S., and the world as being acts of terrorism, while the five-year siege of Gaza and the following Operation by Israel were deemed legitimate.  Anyone with any degree of objectivity would come to the conclusion that this is representing a dual standard.  Moreover, it is inevitable that the asymmetry of military power that exists between Israel and the few Hamas fighters is such that one can hardly expect Hamas to fight back in ways that would be acceptable under the international law of armed conflict.  But in the end, while Hamas unlawfully killed nine Israeli civilians and that is a crime, the Israelis unlawfully killed 1,300 or more and injured 6,000 or more innocent civilians, and that is an even greater crime.

President John Kennedy, meeting with North and South American heads of state in 1961, said, “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible, make violence revolution inevitable.” There are no more eloquent words to describe the unfortunate, tragic period of history that we live in, where so much injustice prevails and so little is done to redress it.  Suffice it to consider that since World War II, 313 conflicts have taken place in the world, resulting in 92 million casualties, with most of the perpetrators benefiting from impunity, as highlighted in my two volumes, The Pursuit of International Criminal Justice: A World Study on Conflicts, Victimization, and Post-Conflict Justice (Intersentia, Brussels Belgium, 2010).  Of these causalities, only an estimate of three million occurred in Muslim states. That represents less than 3% of the world’s causalities.  97% of these victims were killed in Europe, Africa and Asia by non-Muslims.  So much for the Muslims propensity towards violence.

Are we witnessing the making of a new Crusade?  Is the clash of civilization that was predicted by Samuel P. Huntington in the making?  Is the Christian Right ready to push forward the Biblical scenario of Armageddon in order to hasten the return of Jesus to Earth?  If so, the plan becomes obvious.  The Jews in Israel and elsewhere must first fight the Palestinians, remove them from the “Promised Land,” remove any Muslim traces on the Mount in Jerusalem, rebuild the Second Temple and then Jesus can come back, urge humankind to follow him and those who refused will be killed.  If anyone disbelieves this Biblical scenario, please rest assured that millions of Christians and Jews believe it, though with a different outcome for Jews.  It is estimated that at least one hundred million Christians in the U.S. believe in this outcome while almost all orthodox Jews have a belief in their repossession of the “Promised Land” and the rebuilding of the Second Temple before the arrival of the Messiah (who is, of course, not Jesus).  But until then, the extremists in these groups have a common enemy, mainly Muslims.

Conclusion

Ultimately the American people will redress this wrongful situation.   Sometimes it takes longer than expected, as evidenced by the time it took to abolish slavery and to confront racism, and how we have yet to come to grips with the extermination of the Native Americans. But the history of this nation reveals that frequently after certain abuses, excesses, and digressions from the correct constitutional, social, and human path, America finds its way back to the right path. This controversy’s silver lining may well be that it will bring us back to the right path in matters of religious freedom, equality, and respect for all as our constitution ordains it.  This is the America that we call God’s blessing upon.  But let there be no mistake about it, the Islamophobic campaign must be opposed, and its supporters and funders exposed.  America, all its people, must shout loud and clear “shame, shame, shame” on those who engage in such pernicious, hateful, and divisive propagandistic endeavors.

There is no more room in America for Islamophobes than there is for anti-Semites, racists, or those who harbor prejudices on the basis of gender, national origin, color of skin, sexual preference, or whatever else their nefarious minds may invent.  Such hatred and divisiveness is always dangerous, and always wrong.  This country’s foundation was based on the elimination of some of these prejudices, namely those based on religion and national origin.

What greater words can one recall than those in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Silent Jihadist Outside White House

Source: OnIslam.net
Dina Rabie, OnIslam Staff

WASHINGTON –- He smiles gently unbothered by curious, or even disapproving, looks of people struck by his scene; a gracefully looking aging man standing right in front of the White House with one big white banner in his hand.

Mohammad Ali Salih actually waits for them to approach him seeking answers to the two questions written in bold black on the banner: “What is Islam” and “What is Terrorism”.

“I just want the American people to think,” Salih told OnIslam.

“I want this man who sees my banner to think before he goes to bed what is Islam, and what this faith is really about?”

Every weekend, he stands with his banner with one goal: spurring Americans to think of the true essence of his much-stereotyped faith and the meaning of the controversial term terrorism.

“I do not think the American people know what Islam is,” believes Salih, who has been a Washington correspondent for several newspapers and magazines in the Middle East since 1980.

“The other thing I want Americans to think about is the term terrorism. There is no certain definition of terrorism. Until now the United Nations has not been able to set a definition of the term terrorism.”

As Salih speaks, many people read what is written on his banner as they walk.

Some of them stop to have a look at the man asking such compelling questions.

One of them comes closer and shakes Salih’s hand.

“My name is Eric. I am Jewish. I just want to thank you for what you are doing.”

A smiling Salih says he meets many people like Eric who appreciate his efforts.

“Just recently, I was approached by groups of churches in Virginia who wanted to meet me at my vigil. They just stood near me and prayed for me and left. Another interfaith group also from Virginia did the same.”

Silent Jihadist

Salih first launched his one-man campaign in late 2008, the last days of George W. Bush’s residency.

“Since 9/11 I started to get a little sad, dismayed and angry as this so-called war on terror started going on and on,” he recalls.

“I have come to believe later that this war on terrorism is a subtle war on Islam and Muslims.”

He continued with his vigil every weekend until Barack Obama came to the White House with his message of change and traveled to Cairo promising a new page in US-Muslim relations.

“There was a lot of hope and expectations to change,” says Salih.

“But I came to believe by the end of last year that Obama was just a politician.

“These days, the media and politicians are talking all over again about terrorism and that’s why I came back again to ask the American people what is Islam and what is terrorism?”

Salih says the arrest of five young Americans in Pakistan last December on terror charges was another reason that made him realize it was time to get back to the White House with his banners.

The five told a Pakistani court they were not terrorists but rather jihadists who wanted to fight alongside the Afghan people against Western forces.

Salih sees his one-man peaceful campaign as a demonstration of what jihad truly is.

“In Islam, the faithful should sacrifice their money, their time and their soul for the sake of Islam and ending injustices. I am not doing any of this. I am only standing here holding this banner,” he explains.

“Everybody has to do whatever he can. And this is the least that I can do. That is my jihad. I am a silent jihadist,” he adds humbly.

“I hope this would send the message that jihad is not about violence. Jihad can also be silent. Talking to people, asking them questions peacefully is also a jihad.”

America’s Anti-Islam Hysteria

By Reza Aslan | Source

We all knew Nevada’s Republican Senatorial candidate Sharron Angle was a bit loony. After all, this is the woman who said that rape and incest victims who become pregnant should be forced to have their babies so as to turn their “lemon situation into lemonade.”

But when Angle suggested last week that certain American cities like Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas, have been taken over by a “militant terrorist situation” wherein Muslims have instituted Sharia law upon its residents, many people were left scratching their heads at what she could possibly have meant.
It’s not just that Dearborn is—last anyone checked—still under the purview of the United States Constitution, or that there is no place in America called Frankford, Texas (I’m not kidding, look it up). It’s the rather bizarre notion that there may be a city in this country where the Constitution does not apply. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States,” Angle said about the real Dearborn and the imaginary Frankford.

Angle is right. There is something fundamentally wrong with this idea—it’s not true. There is no city or municipality in this country where Islamic law has taken hold. And yet, Angle is not the only one sounding the alarm over an imminent Muslim takeover of America. Indeed, now that the screeching over the building of the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan seems to have died down, a new battle cry is arising from the radical anti-Muslim fringe: American Muslims, they say, are trying to replace the Constitution with Sharia!

Now I admit that we Muslims are a pretty powerful bunch. But in all the secret Muslim gatherings I have attended to discuss our plans for destroying democracy and taking over the White House (we meet every Friday night directly atop Ground Zero), we have come to the conclusion that we will need to raise our numbers from the 1% of the US population we currently represent, to at least 2% before we can begin stoning people at random.

Angle is right. There is something fundamentally wrong with this idea—it’s not true.
Still, it’s good to know there are God-fearing Americans like Oklahoma State Senator Rex Duncan who are taking steps to prevent such an outcome. Citing a need to protect the American constitution from the “looming threat” of Muslims, Duncan has introduced an amendment outlawing Sharia from Oklahoma’s court system. Duncan admits that his measure, which Oklahomans will vote on this fall, may be a bit premature. After all, there are only about 30,000 Muslims in the entire state. But he’s not taking any chances. “I see [Sharia] in the future somewhere in America,” Duncan said. “It’s not an imminent threat in Oklahoma yet, but it’s a storm on the horizon in other states” (By other states I believe Duncan is referring to Frankford, Texas).

Mike Blake, Reuters / Landov

The loudest and most hysterical voice among the Muslims-are-taking-over-America chorus belongs to the pseudo-scholar and professional noise-maker Robert Spencer who, along with Pamela Geller—most famous for her theory that Obama is Malcom X’s bastard Muslim love-child—formed the organization behind the anti-mosque protests that have erupted all over the country. Spencer is convinced that Sharia has begun to take over the American legal system. His proof? The new Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan.

In an interview with the conservative website The Daily Caller, Spencer claimed that Kagan “would knowingly and wittingly abet the advance of Sharia,” in her tenure as Supreme Court justice because, as a liberal, she shares with Muslims “a hatred of the West and Western civilization.” Now, Spencer also believes that the decision by Campbell Soup to create a line of halal soups to accompany its kosher line is another sign of the Muslim takeover of America (“why is Campbell’s Soup rushing to do [Muslims’] bidding?” Spencer wrote in his blog. “M-M-Muslim Brotherhood Good?”), so he is obviously a nut who should not be taken seriously on any subject.

But then how to explain Newt Gingrich? Fresh off his most recent media blitz, during which he compared Islam to Nazism and associated American Muslims with al-Qaeda terrorists, Gingrich has enthusiastically taken up the anti-Muslim cause. He recently released a film titled “America at Risk,” which details the Muslim threat to America (“This is the end of times,” the film warns. “This is the final struggle”). Now he is calling for a federal law banning Sharia in the U.S..

“We should have a federal law that says Sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States,” Gingrich told an audience at the Values Voter Summit in D.C. last month. He wants the law to stipulate that, “no judge will remain in office [who] tried to use Sharia law.”

Considering that no judge in the United States has cited Sharia in any legal case, and that no Muslim organization has called for its imposition in America, this is a bit like passing a federal law banning Americans from riding unicorns. Yet it does bear mentioning that there are already a number of religious courts all over this country through which a particular religious community can adjudicate matters of family law for themselves. They are called Halacha (Jewish law) courts and they allow observant Jews to conduct business and personal transactions in accordance with the principles of the Torah as long as Halacha does not violate the civil law. Why shouldn’t Muslims in the US have the same opportunity as America’s Jews when it comes to issues of marriage, divorce, and inheritance.

As Marc Stern, associate counsel for the American Jewish Committee, put it in an interview with NPR: “Just as the Catholic Church… didn’t take over [Constitutional] law when large numbers of Catholics came to the United States, and Jewish law doesn’t govern Jewish citizens [of the U.S.], Shariah law is not going to govern, except voluntarily, the rights and responsibilities of Muslim citizens in the United States.”

But these are just facts and, as such, have no bearing on the nonsense pouring out of the mouths of the Sharron Angles and Robert Spencers of the world. So while they continue with this newest round of their fear Islam campaign, I, for one, am going to move to Frankford Texas where I can finally marry four wives.

Reza Aslan is author of the international bestseller No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism. His new book Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East comes out in Nov. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Florence mosque defaced with bacon

By Alisha Laventure | Source

FLORENCE, SC (WMBF) – A national Muslim civil rights and advocacy group is calling on the FBI to investigate a message written in bacon at mosque in Florence.

Three chair members of the Islamic Center in Florence discovered the words “pig” and “chump” written in strips of bacon on the walkway along the mosque Sunday afternoon.

Mushtaq Hussain was one of the members who discovered the message after concluding a prayer gathering. He initially thought the message was a practical joke.

“Then later on, we thought seriously and we thought, ‘You know, somebody doesn’t like us,'” he said.

Florence Police Chief Anson Shells says the incident is currently being investigated a form of harassment. Because nothing was done to an actual person, no crime has technically been committed. They are looking into a possible bias motive for the latest incident.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says the Florence mosque was defaced.

“We urge the FBI to add this incident to the growing list of possible bias-motivated attacks on American Muslims and their institutions,” CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said.

The police department does not have any leads on a suspect. In the interim, they will increase the number patrols near the mosque.

Hussain said this is the second time someone has vandalized the mosque. Earlier this year, vandals broke windows in the facility. Apart from these incidents, Hussain said the center has never had problems before.

“People are nice around here. I don’t see anything, you know, serious, but you know, whoever did this, they mean something,” Hussain said.

“Shame on them,” said Darryl Hughee, who lives across the street from the mosque. “Whoever did what they did, it has to be a mental thing, you know.”

He said the Islamic center has had a positive influence on the community.

Hussain says he is not offended by what was done.

“He will pay for it himself,” he said about the person behind the act. He sees this incident as a simple case of ignorance.

“God will take care of him.”

Copyright 2010 WMBF News. All rights reserved.

Keith Ellison: Should We Fear Islam?

Source: LoonWatch.com

Keith Ellison discusses the interesting if seriously flawed show that Christiane Amanpour held this past week. He rips into the format and discusses what would happen if we replaced Islam with Black or Jewish and proceeds to call for a heightened more intelligent discourse.

Should we fear Islam? (Washington Post)

by Congressman Keith Ellison

At a time when our nation is seeing a rise in intolerant behavior, crossing every cultural line, whether based on race, religion or sexual orientation, we seem simultaneously stuck with a national news media that is preoccupied with conflict and controversy when we desperately need one that weighs facts and reports fairly. A recent national news program reinforced these concerns. Let me explain what I mean.

Imagine a respected TV show or news magazine article with the title, “Should Americans Fear Black People?”

Imagine staccato hip-hop music for the teaser, with clips of black gang members toting guns, hanging around urban scenes, looking scary. Imagine the zoom-in close up of a shoulder tattoo, proclaiming “Thug for Life.”

As the host (some household name) opens the show, imagine that the white expert opining about the root causes of urban decay is a nationally recognized racist, like for instance, David Duke. With a straight face, and no sense of irony, the host solicits Duke’s views, who proceeds to declare, “when the American people saw the LA riots, they received a peek into their future.”

Imagine the television cameras going in search of voices of ‘real’ black people. Where do they go? The ‘hood of course! I mean, where else do black people live?

The intrepid host invites regular Americans to ask the experts to explain black pathology: “Why is their rap music so degrading to women?” Cynthia from Wyoming wonders. “Why are so many blacks at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder?” Chuck from New York State muses.

Is this starting to get a little uncomfortable? Of course, it is. Just ask Don Imus about the wisdom of indulging in racial stereotyping against blacks. Add Jews, Catholics, gays and others as well. Not a good idea.

Now replace black with Muslim, and that’s just about how ABC News treated Islam and Muslims this past weekend, on 20/20 and This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

There were the obligatory clips of terrorist training camps, the planes flying into the twin towers, the victims of so-called ‘honor killings.’ The Muslim experts – looking officially ‘Islamic’ in their long beards and hats – included one declaring that one day the flag of Islam would fly over the White House. The non-Muslim experts – Robert Spencer(leading anti-Muslim advocate in the Park51 Project controversy), Ayaan Hirsi Ali (prolific anti-Muslim writer), and Franklin Graham (said Islam “is a very evil and wicked religion”) – are well known, even famous, for spewing anti-Muslim hate. Of course, these characters emphatically agreed with the caricatures with long beards and white hats, repeating the propaganda that Islam requires its adherents to dominate people. Among the ‘normal’ Muslims interviewed were a woman in niqab (fewer than 1% of Muslim women in America wear the full face veil and accompanying robes), and Muslims in the Muslim ‘hood’, cities, like Dearborn, MI, and Patterson, NJ.

Do some Americans fear black people? For sure. But we don’t validate those fears by allowing them to be expressed with fake innocence on respected news shows. Why are fears of Muslims validated by television airings?

Are there criminals in America who are African-American? Yes, again. But they’re not presented as representative figures of the community by reputable news programs. Why do such shows go out of their way to find the scariest, most cartoonish Muslims possible and present them as spokespeople for Muslims?

No serious journalist would ask a random black guy with a briefcase on the street to explain the pathology of an African American criminal because of the coincidence of shared skin color. But serious journalists called on ordinary Muslim Americans to explain the behavior of homicidal maniacs and extremists, thereby making the link between the crazies and the mainstream community.

Are there people willing to offer all sorts of racist theories about black crime, from problems in black genes to deficiencies in black culture? Plenty. But the only time they show up on mainstream news shows are as examples of racism, not as experts on race.

We are having a national conversation about belonging. The threatened Qur’an burning in Florida and the controversy over the proposed Islamic Center in lower Manhattan are examples of this national conversation about whether America can stretch her arms wide enough to embrace Muslims too. Irresponsible and sensational depictions of Muslims in the popular media are not the cause of Islamophobia, but they certainly can make it worse. Recent news shows and media reports do nothing to shed light or understanding on this national conversation, which is too bad.

But the conversation must continue. And I hope it continues in our mosques, churches, synagogues and other holy places, with Americans of all faiths talking face to face about differences and about our shared humanity – free of the stereotypes that, lately, are so prominent in our TV shows and magazines.

Thousands of True Americans Respond to Call for Donations to Islamic Center

By Michael Moore |Source

I knew that many of you would respond to my call to help out the embattled Islamic community center being built in lower Manhattan. I asked each of you to send a dollar (or five or ten) to their nonprofit organization, Cordoba Initiative, as a symbolic act against the bigotry Muslim Americans are facing. To help kick it off, I promised to match dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000, hoping to raise somewhere near that number by the end of this week.

That’s not what happened.

Within hours of posting that blog on Saturday, so many thousands of you had responded, we were already far beyond the $10,000 goal. In fact, as of this morning, we’re estimating that the funds raised from you have exceeded an amazing $50,000!

The people at the Islamic center are very appreciative that so many thousands have chosen to come forward in support of America and our First Amendment. And I, too, want to express my gratitude. (Anyone can contribute by clicking here.) Times are tough economically, and supporting our Muslim brothers and sisters is not a popular thing to do right now. I am truly touched by your generosity — and people around the world will know that you, too, represent an America they rarely get to see.

I’d like to share some of the notes we’ve received from some of you this past weekend along with your donations:

Michael,

Here’s my donation. I’m a  Presbyterian from Kalamazoo who has a friend who was on the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh (on 9/11).

Carol Smith

Michael:
Please find enclosed my receipt for my $5.00 donation. I am in the process of losing my house, but I will not ever lose my Soul. That was a great letter, I made the donation with out thinking about it twice. Thanks for matching it. Bless your heart.

Regards
Ed B.

From Rabbi Yonassan Gershom:
I am Jewish, and it is now the Jewish High Holy Day season, when it is traditional to give extra charity. I am donating $18 on behalf of my wife Caryl and I, as a gesture of fellowship and solidarity. (The number 18 in Jewish numerology is the number for life — Hebrew letters chet (8) + yod (10) — and it is traditional to give in multiples of 18.) Please, Imam Rauf, do NOT sell out to those who want you to move the Center — that would be a victory for bigots, heaven forbid. Build it where it is planned, in peace, pride, and freedom! Peace-salaam-shalom!

I wish I could have donated more, but I’m unemployed and money is really tight.

Thanks for matching this, Mr. Moore.

Eric Bauman

What could be more appropriate than doing this on 9-11? Rock on, Michael.

Al B.

Dear Michael,
I’m not sure you will ever read this, but I want to thank you for your
message you wrote on the mosque.  It is exactly how I feel.  Thank you
for expressing so eloquently and perfectly what needed to be said.
Keep up the work you’re doing!

Much aloha,
Verna Bowman
Maui

Hello!

I want you to know that this is the first time i have donated money to a cause, other than donations to my religion (The Baha’i Faith, which you may not know has one of it’s intrinsic values to be freedom of all religions: taking them as one single faith.)

I am active, by which i mean emailing my senators, in other areas such as protecting women’s rights and gay rights, but i never donate to them. They are always asking for money, no matter what happens, and it feels like throwing money into a pit in the ground. So i draw the line at emails, I have too big a heart so i have to have good strong boundaries. ;) I never even donate to Obama, and i love Obama (but i don’t trust his staff).

I guess i want you to know that you have something really good going on: you have my trust.  And in donating to the occasional causes you deem worthy, i think what i am really doing is saying thank you. Thank you. =)

Thanks,
-Katie Young

What the blog says is what I BELIEVE with all my heart. Nothing better could
have been written on 9/11. Many, many thanks. I am honoured to know you.
I wish you all the best and I HOPE, with your initiative and hard work and
with people like me supporting your efforts, we will be able to make a
difference.

S.R.

For the Muslim center in NYC…
Michael, I’m not working and it’s really a rough time for my husband and me, financially, but I wanted to do something nice for someone on 9/11, so I’m contributing to this cause.  Love, love, love your emails, and you!
Fern Sweet

I wish I could have donated more but have been out of work for many, many months.  Still, I wanted to make a token donation because I was very moved by the email I received from Michael Moore.

My thanks to Mr. Moore for, as usual, cutting through the BS and opening my eyes a bit wider to the truth.

Susan Kaiser

Mr Moore,

First of all, I should state that I am not a fan of yours.  I find the “style” that you tend to use to be…well, offensive. I do recognize that is probably intentional on your part as a way of driving home your points, but it puts me off enough that I don’t bother.

I tend toward being a conservative…though that’s probably more “fiscal” than “social”.  As a retired military man of 23 years, I am still embarrassed by the use of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell by the military rather than allowing homosexuals to openly serve. I’m certain you feel the same on that subject, at least.

And finally, I am an agnostic atheist (I don’t believe in any God, but I recognize that I really don’t know if one exists or not).  So I’m not particularly moved to think in glowing terms when the subject of religion is broached, because I tend to see the negatives of religion rather than it’s positives.

All that being said, I just want to say that I loved the article you wrote regarding the mosque being built in NYC and “this not being America any more”.  As I mentioned in my opening, I don’t find myself in agreement with you very often.  But this article was spot-on.

I am much more than a bit of an idealist still, and in my view, it is precisely for things like this mosque that I served.  I don’t mind the uproar over it, because that is those folks’ right to free speech also, but I certainly think it should be built.

Thank you for the article.

 

–Trent Woodruff

Dear Michael,

I’ve worked in stamping plants (in Warren) and as a welder/machinist (in Detroit, near the Budd plant by City Airport) to put myself through college. I know what the working class went through to get a fair deal (my grandfather knew Walter Reuther). I have friends and relatives back in Michigan who are struggling – big time – to hang on. I don’t know what we can do to raise class consciousness when our country is dominated by corporate controlled media (and the ultra-rich who own it) . Thank you for reminding America (again) how a decent human being behaves and what our country actually stands for. You make me proud to be from Michigan.

Peace,
Curt Smith

I live on Social Security and rarely can donate – but your compelling
invitation urged me to do more than cheer.
Thanks Michael for all your work.
Lynne Hoft

Thank you for making it so easy for me to donate a little something to the Cordoba House project. It is the perfect way for me to show what I think of the situation.

This project, which was initiated as a way of reaching out to non-Muslim Americans with a message of Peace, Love and Understanding has been twisted and distorted by those who are trying to sow discord and destruction among us. More than them, we should blame all the politicians and media folks who have either remained silent or fueled the fires of hate each time they say the lying phrase “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Thomas

Here is my donation.  This is the one and only donation I have made for 2+ years due to my financial constraints caused by an illness.  Thank you for being you,

Evonne Phillips

Why the Mosque Melee Actually Signals a New Era of Religious Tolerance

By Jim Kenney | Source

“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.”
–Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Take a moment to imagine Thomas Jefferson contemplating the hysterical posturing of Rev. Terry Jones. What might the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom make of the would-be burner of a book cherished by one-fifth of the world’s people as the most sacred manifestation of God on earth? He might well have asked how the republic had come to such a pass.

And how did it happen? How did the comic-opera pastor of a tiny Southern congregation come to dominate the media for the better part of a week, eclipsing countless expressions of outrage from religious and secular groups around the country? How did our ninth annual day of solemn remembrance become an occasion for naked intolerance? How could fear, anger, and hatred so discolor a time set aside for the celebration of values worth dying for?

There’s no doubting the importance of cynically crafty posturing by major figures on the far right or the grandstanding of penny-ante demagogues. But none of that would have any traction at all if it weren’t for culture-wide ignorance of and insensitivity to the religious “other.”

We’ve heard a great deal from pollsters and pundits regarding Americans’ concerns about Islam and their overwhelming opposition to the Park51 project (unsurprising, given the torrent of misleading invective about the “Ground-Zero Mosque”). But we’ve heard much less about polling data suggesting that 63 percent of us have very little knowledge of Islam — or none at all.

Today’s ugly Islamophobia painfully recalls the bigotries of earlier times. Now, as then, “culture wars” are energized less by what is known about the other than by what is not known or not understood. And, for those who care about lifting up the values that have meant the most to America’s social, political, and ethical maturation, that’s the place to put the lever.

When a society is divided by race, gender, class, politics, or religion, the path to harmony always leads through encounter, dialogue, and engagement. Too often, our most deeply held prejudices are simply unexamined, because we’ve never met, really talked to, or worked with anyone from “that group.” Actually meeting the other almost always lightens the burden of misconception, and the next steps can begin to build productive relationships.

So where do we start?

For the past 20-some years I’ve been on a fool’s errand, or so I’ve often been told. I’ve been active in the global movement for interreligious understanding and cooperation for the common good. Those who disparage the effort usually come from one of two very different starting points:

Yet the interreligious movement flourishes despite the naysayers. Those who have struggled to empower it know that religions, deep down, have much more in common than divides them, and that most of these religions are more inclined to convergence than conflict. The bridge-builders also understand that together, the religions of the world have a great deal of energy and inspirational power to offer to a world facing a daunting array of critical global challenges.

Skeptical? Then consider that in 1960, virtually no city on Earth had a serious interreligious program. By 2000, most did. Something significant had changed. What’s more, by the early 21st century, most of those local efforts had created rich programs of outreach, community-building, and interreligious cooperation.

On a larger scale, organizations like the International Association for Religious Freedom, the World Conference of Religions for Peace, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, and the United Religions Initiative now bring their own unique perspectives and years of experience to overcoming our cultural blindness to one another. And groups like the Islamic Society of North America and the Council for American-Islamic Relations are hard at work countering pernicious stereotypes and encouraging American Muslims to reach out to people of other faiths and to non-believers as well, to build new models for dialogue and engagement.

Those who are concerned about the current storm of religious intemperance are probably heartened by the calls for tolerance that we’ve heard from the president and from religious and secular groups around the country. But for those closest to the ongoing interreligious movement, tolerance just won’t suffice. If I merely tolerate you, I may be willing to accept your presence in the social order, but I’m less likely to relate to you in genuinely constructive ways. Real intercultural harmony demands exposure, as well as respect, mutuality, and, ultimately, engagement — the shared commitment to building a better world. Tolerance is only the starting gate.

Today, at home and abroad, religious extremists (who are to be found in every major tradition) are playing the odds, hoping to emerge victorious from a zero-sum game of their own making. In the process they have learned to manipulate the less-informed among their own co-religionists and in the despised group. But in an age on which the radical fact of religious plurality has descended, when the great majority of the world’s urban centers are home to adherents of countless different faith traditions, interreligious existence is a starkly non-zero-sum proposition. We either all win together or we all lose.

It may seem daunting during times like these, but culture-wide interreligious engagement is not only possible, but highly probable. And like so many of life’s most surprisingly rewarding dimensions, it all begins with the willingness to learn. I’m reminded of my friend Steve in Telluride, who responded to Rev. Jones’ incendiary proposition with mountaintop clarity. Instead of “Burn-a-Quran Day,” he urged, in a letter to National Public Radio, that we make it “Buy-a-Quran Day.” How ironically transformative it would be if for every sacred book desecrated many more were opened and read for the first time, and for every holy site defaced countless more were visited by people of other faiths.

I believe that Jefferson, who owned a copy of the Quran, would have nodded and, perhaps, smiled.

M. Cherif Bassiouni: Islamophobia and the Mosque Controversy

Source: LoonWatch.com

by M. Cherif Bassiouni

Cordoba House/Park 51

Referring to the proposed Muslim Community Center in lower Manhattan as the “Ground Zero Mosque” has inflammatory and misleading implications. Calling it the “Terror Mosque” and the “Jihad Mosque” adds a hate-inspiring dimension. Every time avowed or concealed Islamophobes describe the New York Community Center in these, and other terms, they distort the facts.

The project that its promoters call Cordoba House/Park 51 is named for an ancient Spanish city that epitomized the understanding between the three Abrahamic faiths in the twelfth century. It is intended to be a center of enlightenment and inter-faith understanding with praying space for Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, and a memorial for the victims of 9/11. What could be more harmonious with the memory of that tragic event, or more symbolic of religious tolerance?
Cordoba House is not a mosque, but a community center, which is planned as a $100 million modern nineteen-story building that will replace the presently run-down structure, which is similar to others in that lower Manhattan economically depressed area. The new building will house a swimming pool, basketball court, culinary school, and a multitude of other non-religious uses, with only the two top floors dedicated to a Muslim prayer hall. Nothing would distinguish it from other buildings in the area, aside from whatever inscription will adorn its front entrance. It will also include a memorial commemorating the 9/11 tragedy, irrespective of the religion or belief of any victim, and two praying areas for Jews and Christians.

The present run-down building has been used as a Muslim prayer center, or mosque, for the last two years without raising any questions. But that is seldom mentioned. And, contrary to what the project’s opponents say or imply, there is no view of the proposed Community Center from Ground Zero and vice versa. Besides, in Manhattan, two-and-a-half blocks full of buildings are quite a separation for anyone familiar with that part of New York City. Lastly, the opponents fail to mention that there is also a mosque ten blocks away from Ground Zero, which has been in existence for a decade.
A review of the allegations made by the opponents of the project that received wide dissemination and credence is indicative of the misleading nature of this campaign.

The primary objection that has gained public credence concerns the location. Its proponents contend or imply that the Community Center is a mosque overlooking Ground Zero, which is not the case. Another objection is that, presumably, such a mosque, with all of the distinct Islamic architectural characteristics of a cupola and minaret, would be offensive to the victims’ families and friends because those who orchestrated 9/11 were Muslims. Others add that it would be insulting to all Americans. This too is not the case. These claims, however, ignore the fact that more than 60 Muslims were also killed at Ground Zero and that Muslims are also grieving for Americans.

As far as symbolism goes for the “hallowed grounds” of the heart wrenching hole left by the destruction of the twin towers, the area where the Cordoba House/Park 51 is to be located is run-down, and has several sleazy strip clubs. Yet nothing is said about these establishments near the “hallowed grounds” by the opponents of the project. So it’s not really about location or symbolism.

Islamophobia

The wide dissemination of misrepresentations about Islam and Muslims has given the impression of public credence to many falsities about the project. Religious and racial prejudices, political opportunism, and a deliberate campaign of Islamophobia have all contributed to a publicly accepted negative perception of Islam and Muslims. It has reached a level that makes it acceptable to publicly express anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments that would be unacceptable if they were directed against other religious groups in America. Consequently, a double standard has come to exist. A curious face about the sources of this campaign is that no irrefutable academic sources is involved. Why would the media and public accept representations by individual sources that are either obviously or significantly prejudiced? Why does the media not seek verification from authoritative sources, or do its own research? These are among the puzzling, unanswered questions that need to be investigated. Similarly, the funding of sources of this campaign needs to be uncovered.

The Islamophobic campaign, like all other forms of group discrimination, starts with an “us” versus “them” mentality. The “them” are identified as a category whose objectification ranges from dehumanization to different levels of violence. Hitler dehumanized Jews as a prelude to his program of extermination. Slave owners and traders dehumanized black-skinned Africans as a way of justifying their enslavement. However, there is no more Jewish, Christian, Hindu, male, black, Republican “they” than there is a Muslim “they.” People adhering to great faiths cover the globe and are from all national origins, skin color, gender and cultures. The 1.4 billion Muslims fall into all of these categories and there is as much commonality among them as there are differences. The Chinese Uyghurs, Afghans, Persians, Iranians, Nigerians and the Bosnians and Saudi Arabians are different even though they are Muslims.

In August, Time Magazine and the New York Times each commissioned polls on public sentiments about Islam, Muslims, and the New York Community Center/Mosque. These two polls lumped together the Community Center/Mosque project with public attitudes about Islam and Muslims. The results are not surprising, considering the intensity and purposefulness of the post 9/11 Islamophobic campaign. According to Time Magazine’s poll, 61% of Americans opposed the project.

According to the New York Times, over 50% of New Yorkers oppose the project, while 35% favor it, and 20% of all New Yorkers disclose animosity and suspicion toward Islam. More particularly, 33% disclose that they believe that, compared to other Americans, Muslim Americans were more sympathetic to terrorists and, in general, 60% of those polled have negative feelings about Muslims. Surely, these reactions come out of somewhere other than an objective factual basis.

General polling and reporting on a nationwide level reveal a similar negative attitude towards Muslims. There are some indications as to differences in perceptions among Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and others. It seems that, with the exception of the Evangelical Christian right, Protestants are equally divided and more tolerant of Islam and Muslims than Catholics and Jews, the latter confusing the religion of Islam with their feelings about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But that is all tentative, and for reasons discussed below, not likely to persist.

Public attitudes, particularly at certain times in this country’s history, have frequently been superficial, knee-jerk reactions occasioned by misguided public perceptions, sometimes driven by the worst motivations concealed under a cloak of high purpose. But when governmental leadership asserts itself on a given social issue and acts in an unequivocal manner, things change. The prejudicial public reaction deflates. One example was a survey conducted in the military in 1947 about whether U.S. armed forces should be integrated. Over 80% of the military personnel polled were against integrating African-Americans, then referred to as Negroes or blacks, with whites in the military. Seventy percent were also against integrating Jews within the ranks even though they already were integrated. That year, President Truman ordered the integration of U.S. armed forces; the question has not been raised since and race relations have significantly improved.
This example demonstrates that decisive, principled leadership rectifies the public record and shows the correct path that Americans are most likely to follow. President George W. Bush did this after 9/11 by publicly declaring that the attack upon the U.S. was not a reflection of Islam or a reflection on Muslims, though subsequently his administration abetted Islamophobia. President Obama’s initial reaction to the Community Center/mosque controversy was to support the constitutional right embodied by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion. The next day, he qualified his reaction by raising questions about the wisdom of the location of the center. Then, on Friday, September 10th, in a statement in Washington DC on the anniversary of 9/11, he reiterated his original, principled position and unequivocally condemned Islamophobia. Interestingly, however, he added for the record that he spoke out from his deeply held Christian beliefs as if to respond to those who have accused him of being a “secret Muslim”, as if one should be ashamed of being a Muslim.

Opportunistic Escalation of the Islamophobic Campaign

The nationwide controversy escalated in August when a self-proclaimed minister, who is a committed white-collar criminal, with a congregation of some 50 members in Gainesville, Florida announced that 9/11 should be “Qur’an Burning Day” in the U.S.. The media’s coverage made the announcement into a shot heard around the world. And yet, the Attorney General has taken no action against this form of hate speech. Would any U.S. administration have remained that passive if a group of Muslims announced that they would burn the Torah on May 15th, the day Israel was established in 1948?
Rhetoric and demagoguery has taken these and other false contentions to such levels that no credibility can attach to them, but they have a powerful impact on the American publics’ psyche. This is why some in the Republican Party and the Tea Party have used it, as well as others in the Evangelical Christian right, white supremacists, and Neo-Cons. Many of these lessons have been part of the post-9/11 Islamophobic campaign.

One of these opportunistic politicians is, Newt Gingrich, who recently compared the location of the community center to planting a swastika near the Holocaust museum in DC, or putting a Japanese shrine near the area of Pearl Harbor bombarded by the Japanese in 1941. Leaving aside the differences in the location and the type of structure, the swastika was a symbol of Nazi Germany, which exterminated an estimated 6 million Jews for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews. This was the greatest crime in history. Its symbol was the swastika. Thus, to plant such a symbol near the Holocaust museum, or for that matter to use the swastika anywhere, would be an outrage not only to Jews, but all humankind. As for the example of the Japanese shrine, it was the government of Imperial Japan that decided to attack the U.S. by stealth, causing enormous human harm and damage to the United States and initiating World War II in the Far East. The imperial state of Japan certainly does not represent Japanese Americans. It would indeed be offensive to have anything representing the Japanese imperial state overlooking the harbor, but Japanese-American installations such as a Shinto temple are American installations and are no more and no less offensive than installations by Americans hailing from any other ethnic background.

Guilt by Association

The Islamophobes artfully play on the notion of guilt by association or collective guilt. Their assumption is that if 19 Muslims committed the 9/11 crimes, then all Muslims are tainted by it because they share the same faith as the criminals. This faith is portrayed as violent, aimed at world domination and can only have peace when Muslims have subjected all others in the world. That is why they seek to impose the Shari’a (Islamic law) in the U.S. and elsewhere. Preposterous as it is, many believe this nonsense because it is shouted by well-known persons, and is frequently repeated by the media. Repetition tends to make the message stick, no matter how strange or misleading it may be.

Most responsible media, such as Time Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, the Christian-Science Monitor, MSNBC, CNN and others have reported on these general distortions as being part of an Islamophobic campaign or trend. But the pervasiveness and extensiveness of the media coverage created a perception that a legitimate controversy exists, even when there is no legitimacy to it.

What distinguishes the many outrageously inappropriate connections of 9/11 to Islam and to all Muslims is that the attacks were individual acts committed by 19 Muslims. They were not supported by any Muslim government, but by an outlaw Osama bin Laden and his loosely connected network called al Qaeda. 9/11 did not have the support of the main religious institutions of Islam anywhere in the world, and it did not have the support of 1.5 billion Muslims living in over 140 countries of the world. Above all, it did not have the support of American Muslims. There is no basis in law or morality to expand the guilt of a few to an entire religion and its adherents, unless, of course, there is a political agenda linking this campaign with the Islamophobic campaign unleashed by some after 9/11.

9/11 was a criminal act committed by a few whose guilt cannot be collectivitized to include all Muslims, and it certainly cannot be ascribed to Islam as a religion. It cannot be ascribed to the estimated 6 million American Muslims, one third of whom are African-Americans whose slave ancestors brought Islam to this country some 300 years ago, nor can it be attributed to the other four million American Muslims who are not African-Americans, an estimated 500,000 of whom are born in the U.S., to immigrant parents or converts. The remaining 3.5 million are of Asian, African, and Arab origin. American-Muslims operate 1,900 mosques, community centers, and schools throughout the U.S.. None have been found to harbor terrorists or support terrorism.

It is surprising that the most vocal proponents of guilt by association, Evangelical white Christians, who take the Bible literally do not abide by such Biblical statements as “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen” or “Love your neighbor as yourself” (English Standard Version, Leviticus 19:18 and 19:9). Instead, they selectively use collective guilt and guilt by association against Muslims when neither are part of the American system, or part of the Abrahamic faiths’ religious values and traditions. Responsibility for wrongdoing is always individual. There was a period when the Catholic Church blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, even though crucifixion was a Roman penalty and not a Jewish one. But that was changed by the Second Vatican Council (28 October 1965, paragraph 4, Decree Nostra Aetate, “on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” Rome), and rightly so. The Jews of the world had for years rejected this concept of guilt by association, which was a contributing factor in their persecution by Christians for the last 2,000 years. This historic lesson should not be lost on Americans when it comes to the Islamophobic campaign that has been launched against Islam and Muslims since 9/11, particularly in light of a new level of dangerousness it has reached since the so-called Mosque controversy.

The Record

In the last nine years there have been two actual terrorist incidents committed by American Muslims. One was by Major Nidal Hasan, a mentally deranged man who killed twelve persons at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, and the other was by Faisal Shahzad, who parked an explosive-laden car in Times Square on May 1, 2009. Statistically, two incidents in a six million-person community over a period of nine years is probably the lowest crime rate in America of any community. Conversely, white supremacists, who call themselves Christians, mostly in the South, kill and injure a substantial number of African-Americans and homosexuals annually, with relatively little said about these crimes in the national media. They have however been reported by other sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps an up-to-date newsfeed on hate crimes. The worst of these white supremacist hate crimes is the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 680 on April 19, 1995. The perpetrators were white Christians who opposed the present system of government. All of these acts have been treated as individual crimes and no one has sought to collectivize the responsibility of white Evangelical Christians and white supremacists.

During the month of August, two Muslims were physically attacked and injured in New York and Florida, mosques in Florida have been firebombed and vandalized, and an open campaign against Mosques is raging in such varied states as Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, California, and Wisconsin. President Obama is accused of being a Muslim as if that were something to be ashamed of. So it is not surprising that the August 2010 Time Magazine poll also found 46% of Americans to think that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence.

Willful Ignorance

Racial, religious, ideological motivation and political opportunism coming mainly from the political right and Christian and Jewish extremists are behind the Islamophobic campaign in America. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration, spurred by some in the evangelical right and Neo-Cons, unleashed a campaign against Muslims in the U.S.. This was accompanied by a nationwide PR campaign raising fear about Muslim terrorism in the U.S.. Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzalez, issued numerous reports of investigations, arrests, and prosecutions of Muslim terrorists in America. These cases were given catchy names like the “Lackawanna Seven” and “Operation Backfire.” In all, some 500 federal cases were put together. That they were fabricated is evidenced by the fact that various federal courts across the country outright dismissed 250 cases. This is the highest percentage of dismissed cases of any category of violent federal crimes, which averages 15% across the board. For 50% of the cases brought against Muslims in the U.S. to be dismissed means that these charges were either without a legal basis or unsupported by probable cause, meaning that there was insufficient evidence to convince an ordinary, reasonable person that there is a basis to remand the accused to trial. This is far from the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard needed to convict. Thus, for over half of the cases not to have risen to this low threshold, particularly in light of the national percentage in federal cases, is quite telling.

The other cases, with the exception of a dozen or so, were ended by guilty pleas for offenses, which had nothing to do with the original charge. This means that less than 10% of the charges brought had any potential linkage to terrorism. Considering that the nationwide rate of federal convictions for violent crimes exceeds 47%, this too is an indicator of the degree of invalidity of the some 500 criminal charges brought against Muslims in America.

These cases were brought more for political than valid legal purposes. This explains why in none of the 250 cases dismissed for lack of probable cause did the Attorneys General in function issue a statement or press release as they did when indictments were returned. The record was never corrected, but the political objectives were achieved when the public was falsely induced to believe that American Muslims were a public danger and Islam was a violent religion.

The Department of Justice’s campaign under the Bush administration extended also to attacking Muslim charities. The IRS, FBI, and U.S. attorneys across the country conducted investigations into local charities and mosques on the proposition that these organizations were funding terrorism. The real goal was to deter Muslims from contributing to local charities and thus to weaken the Muslim community as a whole in the United States. Obviously, a weak and threatened community is less likely to have any political weight and therefore less likely to express views that may be inamicable to certain political interests in this country.

The following case stands out for how the law was abused in order to achieve the political results mentioned above. The federal case was brought in Texas again the Muslim charitable fund the United Holy Fund, which contributed money to qualified religious and charitable institutions in Palestine, including hospitals. The case was not based on the proposition that the money did not go to legitimate charitable organizations; instead, the government argued, probably for the first time in the history of the U.S., that when these funds went to these religious and charitable organizations, it freed Hamas from having to reallocate its resources to engage in terrorism against Israel. Preposterous as the proposition may be, it also ignores that only a small portion of the Hamas organization engages in armed resistance against Israel, and that Hamas has never engaged in acts of violence against the United States. The first trial ended in a mistrial on October 22, 2007, after the jury found the defendants not guilty of most of the 108 charges brought against them, but was hung on a dozen technical charges that were complex and thus not easy to understand. On a Thursday, word leaked of this situation and surprisingly on that day, the judge announced that rather than having the jury return the verdict on Friday, that he was going to take that day off for a long weekend. This left the jury in a vacuum for over three days while the Department of Justice prepared itself for the outcome of the mistrial. This too showed that the trial was politicized. The prosecutor’s goal was to develop a strategy of how to bring a new trial on all 108 charges and thus to have a second bite at the apple. So much for the constitutional right against double jeopardy. On November 24, 2008, the second trial returned convictions on all 108 charges, which included conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. It must be noted that no facts directly support the charges or conviction. The proposition on which the government prevailed was that by providing resources to legitimate religious and charitable organizations, the donor organizations indirectly supported Hamas, which was listed by the Department of State as a terrorist organization, and that was enough for all of these legal consequences to flow.

What was more outrageous in that case was that the Department of Justice listed 189 Muslims and Muslim organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators”. This guilt by association without any proof of guilt is an anomaly of the U.S. criminal justice system. It has been used in organized and white-collar crimes, but never before in a purported charitable conspiracy. The unindicted co-conspirators, without proof of any wrongdoing on their part, included some of the most mainstream and respected American-Muslim organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust, as well as many individually listed respected Muslim clerics. The reason for that historically unprecedented action was to raise the implication that these organizations and individuals supported terrorism. More importantly, it opened the way for pro-Israel individuals and groups in the U.S. who have standing to bring civil cases against these individuals and organizations to claim damages for terrorism by means of this very indirect alleged connection to terrorism. In other words, this is a technique to destroy the American-Muslim religious organizational structure, and thus to deprive American-Muslims of a voice in their country.

The post-9/11 Islamophobic campaign abetted by the Bush administration is the most blatant abuse of the law and manipulation of public opinion that took place in the history of the United States since the end of World War II. It ranks with the campaign against Japanese American citizens, which led to the internment of close to 100,000 Japanese Americans starting in February 1942, the anti-Chinese sentiment and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the slavery and racial discrimination laws that lasted until the 1950s, and prior to that, the laws and practices that permitted the destruction of Native Americans and the seizure of their lands. Just as there is no monolithic Muslim group because they come from so many diverse cultures, ethnicities and traditions, there is no monolithic American-Muslim. They come from this same wide-ranging diversity. In addition, an estimated half of American-Muslims are African-Americans, whose affiliation to Islam goes back to the time when they came to this land as slaves, and Americans born in this land to immigrant parents. This number does not include American converts who have been born in the U.S. and whose ancestry goes back several generations. The insidious notion that there is a monolithic worldwide group called Muslims and that they are represented in the U.S. by a corresponding monolithic group persists and it is fundamental to the campaign of “they” who are a threat to “us.”

The Moral Courage Honor Roll

Against this backdrop of what some benignly call “craziness,” certain positive outcomes developed. The shining example of moral courage is New York Mayor Bloomberg who supported the Community Center/mosque project. He was joined by many victims’ families of 9/11 who supported the right of the project’s proponents to complete it in its planned location, as did a number of civic and religious organizations in New York and elsewhere. Of particular note is that many supporters are Jewish, including Mayor Bloomberg and Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. They should be commended for the example that they and others have given America and the world. Another such person who belongs to the roster of profiles in courage and human integrity is Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, who not only wrote against Islamophobia and the opponents of the Community Center/Mosque, but who returned to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League a journalistic award that he received. The reason was that Abe Foxman, the League’s Executive Director, joined the Islamophobes in their opposition to the project. Why the League’s board did not censure Foxman for this and other anti-Islam stances, which have nothing to do with the League’s laudable purposes, is puzzling. Recently, Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican senator, had the courage and integrity to break away from his party’s Islamophobes by upholding the constitutional right of Muslims to build a mosque on private property in lower Manhattan. More power to him. The ranks of the righteous increases daily; it now includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington D.C., Rev. Richard Cizik and many Christian and Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, the New York Union of Reform Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly. On September 10th, The New York Times carried a whole page (A17) ad stating, “Burning the Qur’an does not illuminate the Bible.” It listed thirty leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches. Similar statements were made by interfaith groups throughout the country, such as the Cardinal Bernardin Center at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, representing a large number of Christian and Muslim organizations engaged in inter-faith dialogue.

Those described above and many others who are among the righteous represent America at its best. God bless them for their courage and integrity. They show the world what kind of society America really is. The others are a blot on the dignity of this great nation, and they should be called to the carpet. The rhetoric and demagoguery of the Mosque controversy is obviously Islamophobic, but it is also politically motivated. It started after 9/11 with leaders of the religious right like Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Pat Robertson, and goes on today with the work of Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer, and the Jihadwatch.com and Campus Watch websites and related activities. It also includes other anti-Islam conspiracy theories and blatant, racist Islamophobia that receives funding from extremist, pro-Zionist organizations and individuals, as described by Kenneth P. Vogel and Giovanni Russonello of Politico in Latest mosque issue: The money trail, posted on LoonWatch.com on September 8th. The article particularly points to Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, who are reported as “ardent supporters of Zionist causes and major funders of pro-Israel groups across the country.” Other individuals and funders of hundreds of thousands of dollars are mentioned. This reminds us of the story about the funding of the Tea Party by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch in Jane Mayer’s August 30th expose, ‘Covert Operations’ in the New Yorker.

Adding Fuel to the Fire

Nothing could give more comfort or support to Osama bin Laden’s followers, other violent Muslim fundamentalists, and the Taliban than the Islmaphobic campaign that has been going on since 9/11. The Community Center/mosque controversy adds more credence to the belief in Muslim countries and in many other countries that America is at war with Islam.

Our troops are in Muslim countries fighting alongside Muslims against violent radical Muslims. The Islamophobic campaign increases dangers for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for Americans abroad and undermines U.S. efforts in confronting terrorism worldwide. What is taking place in the U.S. undermines these efforts and places our troops in greater harm’s way. Moreover, Islamophobes support the message of Bin-Laden and other extremists who claim that there is a war waged by the U.S. against Islam and Muslims. Helping the enemies of the U.S. is surely not the way to be patriotic. And no U.S. political gains can justify such a campaign.

Coming at this problem from what I would call a normal, sane, or reasonable approach makes it very difficult to understand why people would preach hate and fabricate false stories, create misleading innuendos and engage in all sorts of pernicious techniques to pit human beings against one another for the ultimate goal of seeing the destruction or subjugation of one group by another. But there it is. Memories of similar situations are all too often forgotten. But for those of a certain generation, the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels during the Nazi regime cannot be forgotten. The anti-Jewish hate-mongering of that time, which had been nursed for a good decade before tangible action commenced, led to the Holocaust. It is something the world should never forget.

The Kernel of Truth Used by the Islamophobes

The misuse of jihad as a way of giving credence to the underlying proposition that Islam is a violent religion and that Muslims are violent and dangerous people, except for the ones that Islamophobes deem as “moderates.” A recently published book entitled Jihad and Its Challenges to International and Domestic Law, co-edited by myself and Amna Guellali, published by Hague Academic Press) also contains my article, “Evolving Approaches to Jihad: From Self-Defense to Revolutionary and Regime-Change Political Violence” address the history and evolution of jihad. In it, I describe how radical Muslim fundamentalists who justify the use of force, including harming innocent civilians as an acceptable practice,
have hijacked jihad. I categorically denounce their positions and reveal the falsity of such theological claims.

Jihad has become a revolutionary political doctrine that Muslim radical groups have used either against certain domestic regimes or against the West, the United States in particular. The ideology and its rhetoric is no different from that which we heard from Maximilien Robespierre in 1794 during the French Revolution, in the 1920’s by Trotsky and his followers in the camps of Marxist revolutionists; it is echoed in the revolutionary teachings of Mao Zedong as of 1948, spread in Latin America by Che Guevara in the 1960’s and tragically practiced by the Khmer Rouge revolutionists between 1975-1985. All of these revolutionaries have caused enormous harm to their societies and others. The fact that they have relied on higher principles and causes does not in any way mitigate the horrible crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of these ideologies against so many, for so long. Violent jihad is no different. That is what Osama bin Laden and Ayman el-Zawarhy preach.

In all of these situations however, there is a common thread. It is the existence of a basic injustice committed by some, against others that the victim group is unable to redress, and having reached despair, they resort to violence. That does not justify what has been done throughout history in the name of revolutionary ideology, nor is it to say, in any way, that people should not resist certain injustices, sometimes by force. Indeed, this country was born out of such a resistance, as have many colonized countries. But there are, of course, ideological and physical distinctions, both as to the legitimacy of the cause, and the validity of the means. No legitimate cause permits harm to innocent civilians.

Islam is the first religious/political system to have clearly enunciated the dual conditions for the use of force, namely the legitimacy of self-defense (with exceptions which are too complex to discuss herein, but which are addressed in my article mentioned above) and the limitations on the use of force. The Prophet Muhammad made the first of these pronouncements before Muslim troops entered Mecca in 630 B.C.E. The second was an edict from the Prophet’s first successor, Islam’s first khalifa, Abu-Bakr, who ordered, in 637 B.C.E., the Muslim forces going to fight the Romans in what is now Syria and Lebanon, not to kill innocent civilians, particularly the elderly, woman, children, clergymen, to respect the Jewish and Christian places of worship, not to destroy crops and trees and not to pillage or engage in wanton destruction. The edict of Abu-Bakr was echoed in the contemporary international law of armed conflict (the Geneva Convention). His successor, Umar ibn al-Khattab, issued his edict in 638 B.C.E. before entering Jerusalem, guaranteeing freedom of religion for all Christians and Jews. That edict has been carried out to date. Because of it, Jews were able to return to Jerusalem since their exclusion by the Romans in 70 A.D. Salah el-Din, who defeated the crusaders in 1187, allowed the Christians to surrender and leave without harm, something the early crusaders did not do with Jews and Muslims who were slaughtered or taken as slaves. Islam in its fourteenth century history never had a forced conversion of Jews or Christians as the Christians did with the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition of 1478-1884. None of that is ever mentioned. But more importantly, does all this ancient history matter today? Is not our globalized world much different than these ancient times? No people should be judged by the past, and no person carries the sins of his or her father or mother.

The Dual Standard

A common characteristic of the conflicts involving the west and Muslims are the dual standard practices by those who are more powerful in respect of those who are less. Thus, the killing by American forces of Afghan Taliban is considered legitimate while the latter, who are fighting against a foreign occupier of their country, are deemed terrorists. Another classic example is that whenever Israel uses force against Palestine, it is deemed justifiable self-defense and when Palestine reacts with much lesser violence, it is always considered terrorism. This duality of standard enhances the use of violence by the weaker side, particularly in these situations, which reflect an asymmetry of forces.

An example of the above is when Israel engaged in Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, killing over 1,300 civilians, of whom 300 were children under 12, and 100 were women and over 6,000 persons were injured. Beyond human harm, over 20,000 structures were destroyed, including water filtration plants and other infrastructure, in what Israel billed as legitimate self-defense. These infrastructures were crucial to the survival of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza, whom Israel had already kept under siege for five years. Many of these acts are unquestionably war crimes as the United Nations Goldstone Commission report established. Recently, Israel even admitted to some of these crimes. The trigger for the Operation was that the military wing of Hamas, with an estimated 5,000 fighters, had fired over a span of four years between 4,000-6,000 rockets and mortars into areas inhabited by Israeli settlers, resulting in the killing of 4 Israeli military persons and 9 civilians. These attacks were roundly denounced by Israel, the U.S., and the world as being acts of terrorism, while the five-year siege of Gaza and the following Operation by Israel were deemed legitimate. Anyone with any degree of objectivity would come to the conclusion that this is representing a dual standard. Moreover, it is inevitable that the asymmetry of military power that exists between Israel and the few Hamas fighters is such that one can hardly expect Hamas to fight back in ways that would be acceptable under the international law of armed conflict. But in the end, while Hamas unlawfully killed nine Israeli civilians and that is a crime, the Israelis unlawfully killed 1,300 or more and injured 6,000 or more innocent civilians, and that is an even greater crime.

President John Kennedy, meeting with North and South American heads of state in 1961, said, “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible, make violence revolution inevitable.” There are no more eloquent words to describe the unfortunate, tragic period of history that we live in, where so much injustice prevails and so little is done to redress it. Suffice it to consider that since World War II, 313 conflicts have taken place in the world, resulting in 92 million casualties, with most of the perpetrators benefiting from impunity, as highlighted in my two volumes, The Pursuit of International Criminal Justice: A World Study on Conflicts, Victimization, and Post-Conflict Justice (Intersentia, Brussels Belgium, 2010). Of these causalities, only an estimate of three million occurred in Muslim states. That represents less than 3% of the world’s causalities. 97% of these victims were killed in Europe, Africa and Asia by non-Muslims. So much for the Muslims propensity towards violence.

Are we witnessing the making of a new Crusade? Is the clash of civilization that was predicted by Samuel P. Huntington in the making? Is the Christian Right ready to push forward the Biblical scenario of Armageddon in order to hasten the return of Jesus to Earth? If so, the plan becomes obvious. The Jews in Israel and elsewhere must first fight the Palestinians, remove them from the “Promised Land,” remove any Muslim traces on the Mount in Jerusalem, rebuild the Second Temple and then Jesus can come back, urge humankind to follow him and those who refused will be killed. If anyone disbelieves this Biblical scenario, please rest assured that millions of Christians and Jews believe it, though with a different outcome for Jews. It is estimated that at least one hundred million Christians in the U.S. believe in this outcome while almost all orthodox Jews have a belief in their repossession of the “Promised Land” and the rebuilding of the Second Temple before the arrival of the Messiah (who is, of course, not Jesus). But until then, the extremists in these groups have a common enemy, mainly Muslims.

Conclusion

Ultimately the American people will redress this wrongful situation. Sometimes it takes longer than expected, as evidenced by the time it took to abolish slavery and to confront racism, and how we have yet to come to grips with the extermination of the Native Americans. But the history of this nation reveals that frequently after certain abuses, excesses, and digressions from the correct constitutional, social, and human path, America finds its way back to the right path. This controversy’s silver lining may well be that it will bring us back to the right path in matters of religious freedom, equality, and respect for all as our constitution ordains it. This is the America that we call God’s blessing upon. But let there be no mistake about it, the Islamophobic campaign must be opposed, and its supporters and funders exposed. America, all its people, must shout loud and clear “shame, shame, shame” on those who engage in such pernicious, hateful, and divisive propagandistic endeavors.

There is no more room in America for Islamophobes than there is for anti-Semites, racists, or those who harbor prejudices on the basis of gender, national origin, color of skin, sexual preference, or whatever else their nefarious minds may invent. Such hatred and divisiveness is always dangerous, and always wrong. This country’s foundation was based on the elimination of some of these prejudices, namely those based on religion and national origin.
What greater words can one recall than those in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Islam and the Media in the age of Islamophobiapalooza

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spencer, Anti-America again!

Ikhwanophobia Comment

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

By Robert Spencer | Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Sheila Musaji | Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“everyone knows” that most or all terrorists are Muslims, and there are no Christian and no Jewish terrorists (or terrorists of any other religious stripe), and that Muslims are inherently violent.  Everyone also knows that Muslims are not equivalent to real Americans, that they are the enemy within, and a fifth column,  that good Muslims can’t be good Americans, that they are not a part of our American heritage, that they are all militant,  that Islam makes Muslims “backward”, that Muslims have made no contribution to the West,  that Islam is “of the devil”, a Crescent menace, and an “evil encroaching on the United States”, and not a religion.  Everyone knows that this is a Christian nation, which everyone knows the Muslims are trying to take over, starting with getting an Eid stamp which is the first step towards shariah law, and by purposefully having more children than others to increase their numbers.  Everyone knows that Muslims have no respect for the Constitution.  Everyone knows that Muslims are given a pass by the elite media.  It’s “us versus them”.  Their goal is world domination under a Caliphate.  They don’t speak out against extremism or terrorism, and even those Muslims who do speak up or seem moderate are simply lying or practicing taqiyyah.  Everyone knows the Qur’an is uniquely violent, that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t include God’s love, that Allah is a moon god.  The problem is that what “everyone knows” is wrong.  These self-righteous and incorrect statements are usually followed by a demand that the Muslim community do something about whatever is the false flag of the day or face the inevitable consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Yerushalmi of SANE (Society of Americans for National Existence) that released a policy paper that in part stated: “Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the US. Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People . . .  It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”  Yerushalmi said “On the so-called Global War on Terrorism, GWOT, we have been quite clear along with a few other resolute souls. This should be a WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all Muslim faithful…At a practical level, this means that Shari’a and Islamic law are immediately outlawed. Any Moslem in America who adopts historical and traditional Shari’a will be subject to deportation. Mosques which adhere to Islamic law will be shut down permanently. No self-described or practicing Muslim, irrespective of his or her declarations to the contrary, will be allowed to immigrate to this country…”  He also said “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…The Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.”  And, “Instead of a promise of victory, Sura 24:52 must be made ashes in the mouths of Muslims. A seemingly unending air control campaign over enemy territory is the way to continually remind the Muslims of their subordinate status and the impotence of Allah without becoming mired in the quagmire of counterinsurgency.”   Yerushalmi was a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which was instrumental in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim smear campaign that brought down Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of Khalil Gibran International Academy, a dual-language Arabic school in Brooklyn. Yerushalmi is also an attorney with the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.  Yerushalmi also published a racist article that, as Alex Kane points out “Yerushalmi has deleted as much evidence of the “On Race” article as he could; he removed it from the Internet Archive and the Google cache, and put his entire website behind a registration wall. But here’s a PDF that contains the full article, and it’s as ugly and twisted a piece of racism as anything I’ve ever seen. Yerushalmi opens by calling Islam “an evil religion,” and “blacks … the most murderous of peoples.”

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

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

SEE ALSO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shariah Law, Civil Society and Human Rights

Written by Asghar Ali Engineer | Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Moore: If the Islamic Community Center Isn’t Built, This Is No Longer America

Source | By Michael Moore

I am opposed to the building of the “mosque” two blocks from Ground Zero.

I want it built on Ground Zero.

Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.

There’s been so much that’s been said about this manufactured controversy, I really don’t want to waste any time on this day of remembrance talking about it. But I hate bigotry and I hate liars, and so in case you missed any of the truth that’s been lost in this, let me point out a few facts:

1. I love the Burlington Coat Factory. I’ve gotten some great winter coats there at a very reasonable price. Muslims have been holding their daily prayers there since 2009. No one ever complained about that. This is not going to be a “mosque,” it’s going to be a community center. It will have the same prayer room in it that’s already there. But to even have to assure people that “it’s not going to be mosque” is so offensive, I now wish they would just build a 111-story mosque there. That would be better than the lame and disgusting way the developer has left Ground Zero an empty hole until recently. The remains of over 1,100 people still haven’t been found.

That site is a sacred graveyard, and to be building another monument to commerce on it is a sacrilege. Why wasn’t the entire site turned into a memorial peace park? People died there, and many of their remains are still strewn about, all these years later.

2. Guess who has helped the Muslims organize their plans for this community center? The JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER of Manhattan! Their rabbi has been advising them since the beginning. It’s been a picture-perfect example of the kind of world we all want to live in. Peter Stuyvessant, New York’s “founder,” tried to expel the first Jews who arrived in Manhattan. Then the Dutch said, no, that’s a bit much. So then Stuyvessant said ok, you can stay, but you cannot build a synagogue anywhere in Manhattan. Do your stupid Friday night thing at home. The first Jewish temple was not allowed to be built until 1730. Then there was a revolution, and the founding fathers said this country has to be secular — no religious nuts or state religions. George Washington (inaugurated around the corner from Ground Zero) wanted to make a statement about this his very first year in office, and wrote this to American Jews:

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. …
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens …
“May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

3. The Imam in charge of this project is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. Read about his past here.

4. Around five dozen Muslims died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Hundreds of members of their families still grieve and suffer. The 19 killers did not care what religion anyone belonged to when they took those lives.

5. I’ve never read a sadder headline in the New York Times than the one on the front page this past Monday: “American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?” That should make all of us so ashamed that even a single one of our fellow citizens should ever have to worry about if they “belong” here.

6. There is a McDonald’s two blocks from Ground Zero. Trust me, McDonald’s has killed far more people than the terrorists.

7. During an economic depression or a time of war, fascists are extremely skilled at whipping up fear and hate and getting the working class to blame “the other” for their troubles. Lincoln’s enemies told poor Southern whites that he was “a Catholic.” FDR’s opponents said he was Jewish and called him “Jewsevelt.” One in five Americans now believe Obama is a Muslim and 41% of Republicans don’t believe he was born here.

8. Blaming a whole group for the actions of just one of that group is anti-American. Timothy McVeigh was Catholic. Should Oklahoma City prohibit the building of a Catholic Church near the site of the former federal building that McVeigh blew up?

9. Let’s face it, all religions have their whackos. Catholics have O’Reilly, Gingrich, Hannity and Clarence Thomas (in fact all five conservatives who dominate the Supreme Court are Catholic). Protestants have Pat Robertson and too many to list here. The Mormons have Glenn Beck. Jews have Crazy Eddie. But we don’t judge whole religions on just the actions of their whackos. Unless they’re Methodists.

10. If I should ever, God forbid, perish in a terrorist incident, and you or some nutty group uses my death as your justification to attack or discriminate against anyone in my name, I will come back and haunt you worse than Linda Blair marrying Freddy Krueger and moving into your bedroom to spawn Chucky. John Lennon was right when he asked us to imagine a world with “nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too.” I heard Deepak Chopra this week say that “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, ‘Let’s give it a name and call it religion.’ ” But John Adams said it best when he wrote a sort of letter to the future (which he called “Posterity”): “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.” I’m guessing ol’ John Adams is up there repenting nonstop right now.

Friends, we all have a responsibility NOW to make sure that Muslim community center gets built. Once again, 70% of the country (the same number that initially supported the Iraq War) is on the wrong side and want the “mosque” moved. Enormous pressure has been put on the Imam to stop his project. We have to turn this thing around. Are we going to let the bullies and thugs win another one? Aren’t you fed up by now? When would be a good time to take our country back from the haters?

I say right now. Let’s each of us make a statement by donating to the building of this community center! It’s a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization and you can donate a dollar or ten dollars (or more) right now through a secure pay pal account by clicking here. I will personally match the first $10,000 raised (forward your PayPal receipt to webguy@michaelmoore.com). If each one of you reading this blog/email donated just a couple of dollars, that would give the center over $6 million, more than what Donald Trump has offered to buy the Imam out. C’mon everyone, let’s pitch in and help those who are being debased for simply wanting to do something good. We could all make a huge statement of love on this solemn day.

I lost a co-worker on 9/11. I write this today in his memory.

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008

Burning Korans and Building Mosques: America’s Blasphemy Laws

Ikhwanophobia Comment:


The Freedom of speech is guaranteed, there is no doubt! But From a Democratic-Liberal perspective, No one can suppress minority in the name of freedom of expression. Burning Quran can’t be compared to building an Islamic centers or places for worshipers!
In August 2010: “Judge overturns California’s ban on same-sex marriage” despite of the ban was stated by the majority’s decision. The judge overturns the majority’s decision because it’s standing against the liberal values, whether it’s democratic or not!
But as a Democratic-Liberal constitutional country, The US should stop the oppression against the minority (just like burning Quran).

Liam Fox | Source

Blasphemy laws are instituted when members of a religious group decide that their belief system should be unassailable, immune from any real or perceived criticism, and protected from any disrespect or display of dissent. As with any other laws, they are enforced through thethreat of punishment or dire consequences.

During the past few weeks, America’s commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion, has been challenged by a Pastor’s announced plan to burn several copies of the Koran and a developer’s desire to build an Islamic Community center. Elements within the global Islamic community threatened violence against Americans, American troops, and American interests, if Pastor Terry Jones, an American citizen planning to carry out an action on American soil, proceeded with the exercising of his constitutionally protected rights. Elements within American society have campaigned, demonstrated, and issued ominous warnings of potential future actions, if the legal owners of property in Manhattan, also American citizens planning to exercise their constitutionally protected rights on American soil, proceed with their approved plans to build their Islamic center.

“If you upset us, we’ll hurt you. We will terrorize you and cause you harm.” This is the message that seemed to be coming from elements within Afghanistan, Indonesia, and various other groups within the Islamic world, as well as form Christian Nationalists within America. It’s a threat of violence as punishment for non-violence, and it’s working. Americans are scared, and they’re willing to trade their freedoms for security.

“He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.” – Benjamin Franklin

Much has been said about the dichotomy between having the right to do something, and whether or not it is right to do it. While the right to do something is clearly defined in the Constitution, the question of whether or not something is ‘right’ to do has been defined as how offensive it may be, or how many people consider it offensive. This is an error. The question of whether or not a group of people decide that a thing is offensive cannot be a consideration when establishing whether or not someone has the right to do that thing.

If freedom of speech, and freedom of expression, were not understood to be potentially offensive, we would not have required a constitutional guarantee to protect them. For every opinion expressed, there is someone who will disagree; and for every opinion expressed strongly, there is someone who will strongly disagree. The vehemence or popularity of the opposition should be of no concern. That disagreement does not give one, or many, the right to silence the other; not when they have the equal right to express their difference, or opposition, in the same non-violent manner.

“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.” – Mark Twain

From the beginning of the Dove World Outreach Center episode in Gainesville, Florida, everyone has been concentrating on how to stop the Koran burning from happening. While recognizing that Terry Jones has the right to burn the Korans, the argument has been repeatedly expressed that it’s not right for him to do it. Representatives from other Christian churches and organizations, leaders and clergy from other religions, United States Government officials, and the mainstream media, have been unanimous in their objection to the Pastor’s actions and their desire to see these proposed actions, and therefore the threatened consequences of this act of blasphemy, cancelled. Disrespect for a religious text and the resulting danger to Americans, and American troops, has been the consistently cited reasons.

Likewise, the threat of protest, inflamed tensions, and potential acts of terrorism against the proposed mosque at 51 Park street in Manhattan, has developed into a campaign to convince the developers to voluntarily relinquish their Constitutionally protected rights. Rather than stand united with the force of a government sworn to uphold and protect the Constitutional rights of it’s citizens, many have opted for a position of appeasement requiring the representatives of a minority to forgo their rights in order to cater to the bigotry and bias of members of the majority.

Many conservative politicians, and pundits, including Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, have suggested that both the Koran burning as well as the development of the Islamic Center should be cancelled simply due to opposition. The fact that both of them share in the Islamophobic sentiments that are sweeping the nation, openly support fundamentalist Christian Nationalism, and construct their platforms out of the fears, biases, and bigotry of their audience and political base, provides them with strong motivation to pursue this anti-Constitutional agenda. They draw a false equivalency between the two situations, equating an overt action that has as its sole purpose to send a message with the building of a facility that others have chosen to interpret as an offensive message. The only similarity is that, in either case, their offense is of no import.

A De facto blasphemy law has been applied to Americans, with clearly proscribed consequences and threats of punishment, and America seems to be considering capitulation. Whether it be in response to the burning of Korans or the building of a mosque; groups of individuals, whether they be proponents of or protesters against a certain religion, have stated that if an American offends their religion, or if a religion offends their sensibilities, they will retaliate by causing America, and/or Americans, harm. Recognizing that the act was not considered ‘nice’, or ‘sensitive,’ has allowed Americans to accept this dictated law on its citizens without having to acknowledge the truth of their own fear, and willingness to surrender their rights to that fear.

The act of burning books is universally recognized as reprehensible. Images of tyranny and fascist control, and memories of some of human-kinds darkest hours immediately come to mind. Other than simply being distasteful to many, it is an act that can have two very clear messages. If done on a large scale, it is an act of censorship. If done on a smaller scale, it is a message of distaste and disrespect. Pastor Jones, and his approximately fifty followers, were not threatening an act of censorship that would have violated the rights of others. Pastor Jones was planning an act of disrespect. He was planning to send a message. As distasteful as many may consider it, he was simply planning to exercise his freedom of expression.

Why was responsibility for the reaction to this planned event levied against Terry Jones rather than those reacting? None of his actions committed any violence or had any real effect on anyone in Afghanistan, Indonesia, or anywhere else. The books he was planning to burn did not belong to them, they belonged to Terry Jones and his congregation. Why should he and his congregation be held accountable for violating the rules of a religion to which they do not adhere? Why should anyone be required to adhere to the rules and dictates of a religion to which they do not belong?

To say that the surrendering of these rights is a responsibility that we all have in order to be part of civil society is incorrect. To consider such actions morally superior, defining them as taking the high road for the greater good, is equally erroneous. An honest admission would include these excuses as nothing more than self-flattering disguises of the fear of the threatened consequences. The threat of an uncivil reaction does not define the action itself as uncivil. An action cannot be defined by the reaction of others. Civil society cannot be defined by those who threaten others with uncivil action. Civil society is not achieved by pursuing policies of appeasement to the more base aspects of our human nature, or to the more violent and reactive elements within society.

We cannot let religious leaders dictate what is the acceptable way for society to regard their religious icons and artifacts. Interviews with religious leaders on television demonstrated a unanimous opinion that anything sacrilegious is wrong and therefore should be subject to government intervention. This is like asking oil company representatives to draft legislation regarding environmental regulations for drilling operations. That would be unimaginable stupid, right?

The claim that the burning of a Koran is like yelling fire in a crowded theatre is also a gross misrepresentation. It may be like cheering for the Washington Redskins at a Dallas Cowboys home game, but it certainly is not like yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Yelling fire in a crowded theatre causes people to face the choice of exit or perish. The danger is that yelling fire would create a stampede that would cause people simply trying to save their own lives to be harmed, or to cause harm to others without any intention of doing so. Religious people are not put in a situation even remotely similar when faced with a Bible or Koran burning, or any other comments or actions they find offensive. They are in no danger, nor have they been threatened of any danger.

When demonstrations started in Indonesia, the President of that country, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, called President Obama and requested that he intervene and stop the planned burning of the Korans in Gainesville, Florida. American and NATO embassies were threatened by angry mobs. Rather than hold the protesters in his own country accountable for their violent and destructive actions, the chosen strategy was to ask the President of the United States to require one of his citizens to adhere to Islamic law. No one asked what President Yudhoyono did, or said, to have his citizens take responsibility for their own reaction.

Fortunately, President Obama’s public statement gave no indication that any such action in violation of the constitution would ever be considered. The fact that federal agents paid a visit to Mr. Jones may betray another reality, but there was no outward indication of any such official government intervention. If there was, America is in even greater danger. The capitulation was an act of the American people. Fear of reprisal has been a constant theme throughout the national discussion.

General Petraeus, commander of American forces in Afghanistan, made an official request that Pastor Jones not go through with his planned action. The reaction of the Afghan people was defined as the Pastor’s responsibility. The choice of the Afghan people to respond violently, to a non-violent action, was not defined as their responsibility, but his. On Saturday, September 11, 2010, in Afghanistan, shops and police check points were set on fire. Eleven individuals were reported injured in the violent demonstrations. No Korans had been burned. The clear threat is that, had he actually gone through with burning the Korans, the violence would certainly escalated even further. A line was drawn in the sand and America backed down.

There was no mention of any communication with President Karzai of Afghanistan asking him to address his people; nor was there any news that he did so of his own accord. The responsibility for any potential violent reaction was put squarely on the shoulders of a man exercising the very right to freedom of expression, and freedom of speech, that General Petraeus is sworn to uphold, and yet chose to surrender.

After nine years in the country, are there no relations established with local leaders? Is there no means of communicating with the people of Afghanistan? Is the military not sophisticated enough to become part of the media and Internet presence that seems to be driving the reaction in Afghanistan?

This is not acceptable. The extension of this principle, that something cannot be expressed or communicated because of the upset and reaction that it may cause, is the very antithesis of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. General Petraeus’ duty is to protect these rights, not limit them, abdicate them, or surrender them to a mob of religious fundamentalists.

The principle that offence trumps the right of expression is the foundation of the censorship that allows blasphemy laws. The fact that the restriction is imposed by society on itself, because of a sense of fear, creates an even greater chance that such an injustice may take hold and become institutionalized.

Any such action against the developers of the Islamic Cultural Center in Manhattan would be an even more egregious violation. The offense attributed to these individuals has been the result of propaganda, misinformation, and conclusions arrived at through allegations of nefarious intentions, xenophobic stereotyping, and cultural illiteracy. These people are building a place of worship on private property. End of story. Everything else is the result of ignorance, bigotry, and opportunistic demagoguery.

If those planning on building the mosque at Park 51 are stopped, America has not only succumbed to an Islamic Blasphemy law, but to an American Christian Nationalist Blasphemy law as well.

“Freedomis never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” – Ronald Reagan

Should liberty be diluted in the name of security? Benjamin Franklin admonishes such cowardice.

Should liberty be fearful, or demure? The spirit of Mark Twain’s unfettered boldness suggests otherwise.

Should Americans remain complacent while religious fundamentalist of different creeds are permitted to erode their Constitutional rights and freedoms? Ronald Reagan provided an excellent response to that concern.

The freedoms of speech, of expression, and of and from religion, are too important to surrender in the face of intimidation and threats; whether foreign or domestic. America’s freedoms are being threatened by both internal and external forces exploiting the unwarranted legitimacy they receive through religious profession. The next time someone wants to burn a Koran, or a Bible, unless it belongs to you, debate them, berate them, or ignore them; but you can’t stop them. The next time developers wish to proceed with the construction of a legally approved center for study, worship, or fellowship, on private property, remember that their rights supersede your sense of offense, be it perceived, or manufactured.

If any one is going to secure their rights as an American citizen, we must all stand firmly for the rights of all American citizens.

Would a Muslim burn the Bible?

Source

If you’re trying to understand what burning a Quran would look like to a Muslim, consider this:

“For Christians, Jesus is the word of God. For Muslims, the Quran is the word of God. Imagine someone burning Jesus,” says Emad El-Din Shahin, a religion professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Talk about the Quran has dominated the news ever since a Florida pastor announced that he would burn copies of Islam’s holiest book on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The pastor has since announced that he has called off the event, then later said it is still being contemplated. But his plan has already evoked some of the vilest acts of religious persecution in Western history, religious scholars say.

To burn a Quran is not just offensive; it is the equivalent of “destroying a people’s soul,” one Muslim scholar says.

The Quran is so sacred that many Muslims will not touch it without washing their hands, face and feet, says Caner Dagli, a religious professor at the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

“Muslims always keep the Quran
in a high place. No book is ever placed on top of it. It is never placed on the ground,” Dagli says. “When a Muslim picks up the Quran, he or she
typically kiss it and then touch it to their forehead, and do the same
when they are about to put it down.”

The Quran teaches Muslims to respect the sacred books of Christians and Jews as well, says Chris van Gorder, a religion professor at Baylor University in Texas.

“To burn a holy Quran for a Muslim is to throw down a gauntlet,” he says. “Those who deface any holy book, including the Bible, in many Muslim countries today, will be executed.

“How many Bibles have been burned in the Muslim world in the last nine years? None.”

Muslims, along with Jews and Christians are known by some as “people of the book.” Each religion descends from the same branch. The prophet Abraham is their patriarch.

The Quran considers both Jesus and Moses great prophets. It also praises Mary, the mother of Jesus, says Shahin, the Notre Dame professor.

“Moses and Jesus are mentioned more than the Prophet Muhammad in the Quran,” Shahin says.
The Quran doesn’t just preach religious tolerance; the Prophet Muhammad demonstrated it in his life, Shahin says.

The prophet would meet Christian delegations in his mosque.

“He would allow them to perform Christian prayers in the mosque,” Shahin says.

Muslims believe the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in a series of revelations by the archangel Gabriel. They say the prophet journeyed to a mountain cave where, after falling into a trance, the angel came to him and ordered him to “Proclaim!”

The Florida pastor, however, says he is compelled by his own faith to something else –burn.
To do so, though, would replay some of the most wretched moments in religious history, says Ivan Strenski, a religious studies professor at the University of California, Riverside.

The Florida pastor who has threatened to burn the Quran has unwittingly evoked some of the worst moments in Western history, Strenski says.

When a group of people conquered another, they often sought to destroy their victims’ sacred books. The Spanish conquistadors and Christian missionaries, for example, destroyed the sacred books of the Mayans; American slaveholders tried to destroy the African religion of slaves.

Desecrating a people’s sacred book is like “destroying their soul; you destroy their sense of who they are,” Strenski says.

“It’s about controlling memory,” Strenski says. “You can oppress people. You can beat them down, but if they can retain some kind of memory of who they were before you beat them down, they can pass that on and when the time is right rise up again.

The notion of burning a Quran was so offensive to one religious scholar that he drew on his own personal history.

Van Gorder, the religion professor at Baylor University, says that Nazis not only murdered millions of Jews. They also burned Torahs.

“As a German-American,” he says, “I rue that the day of burning books has come to my own ‘civilization.’ ”

Commentary: Building Mosque Vs Burning Quran!!

Ikhwanophobia

“Pastor Terry Jones’ call for ‘International Quran Burning Day’ “, which hit headlines in breaking news has succeeded in grabbing worldwide attention. According to the Qatari Aljazeera satellite channel ‘Pastor Jones seems to be “happy” with the media coverage’ and this may explain why Pastor Jones’ is talking about making deals with Muslim Imams.

However the man behind the mosque building initiative Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf maintained that he has not spoken to the Florida Pastor whom he described as fanatical

In a statement Rauf expressed much surprise to the Pastor’s allegations who alleged that he had struck deals with the Muslims to build the mosque elsewhere stressing;

“I am surprised by their announcement; we are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.”

In all reality there is no logic in linking the Quran Burning which is a clear violation of the religious sanctities affecting 1.4 Billion Muslims around the world, and the building of a religious centre in lower Manhattan which in fact is a human right for any religious sect.

By burning the Quran Jones is advocating hatred and racism with his insinuations comparing Islam to Nazism as opposed to Imam Faisal’s call which is promoting Peace and international tolerance

The Quran Burning must be prevented without negotiations and mediation since there is no parallel where one instance illustrates the burning of a holy book while the other urges the building of bridges between different civilizations and peoples.

Pastor Jones must end his prejudice actions and begin to culture himself and read up on Islam. Muslims in turn, must not make any compromising deals, and any concessions with such racist bigots will surely indicate that Muslims are not worthy enough of what they defend.