All Entries Tagged With: "Robert Spencer"

Muslim superhero comics meet resistance in U.S.

By Dan Merica, CNN

Naif Al-Mutawa anticipated a struggle when he launched an Islam-inspired comic book series that he hoped would become a symbol of toleration.

He worried about the comics being banned in Saudi Arabia – which wound up happening, briefly – and he expected to be challenged by conservatives in Islam, since Al-Mutawa wanted to buck the trend of Islamic culture being directly tied to the Koran.

But it wasn’t an Islamic cleric that stalled the series, called “The 99,” after the 99 attributes of Allah, which the superheroes are supposed to embody.

It is the American market, and the voices of Islam’s Western critics, that have caused the most problems for “The 99,” says Al-Mutawa, who is the focus of a PBS documentary airing next week.

In 2010, President Barack Obama called the comic books, which debuted in 2006, “the most innovative response” to America’s expanding dialogue with the Muslim world, which Obama has encouraged. The series features 99 superheroes from across the globe who team up to combat villains and who embody what Al-Mutawa calls basic human values like trust and generosity.

But Al-Mutawa, a Kuwaiti-born clinical psychologist and graduate of Columbia Business School, says a vocal minority have raised surprising questions about American tolerance of Islam.

Meeting resistance

The idea for “The 99” started during a conversation in a London cab between Al-Mutawa and his sister. It took off, although slowly, after Al-Mutawa raised $7 million from 54 investors across four continents.

The first issue was released during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in 2006. The comic book was quickly banned in Saudi Arabia and Al-Mutawa received threats of fatwas against him and his project from clerics. But Saudi Arabia eventually lifted the ban and the television adaptation of “The 99” will be aired there this year.

Al-Mutawa and his team have now raised more than $40 million in venture capital for the project.

But when word leaked that The Hub, a Discovery Channel cable and satellite television venture, purchased the series and planned to air it in the United States, the response from conservative bloggers and authors was swift.

A burqa-wearing superhero?

Pamela Geller, founder of the Atlas Shrugs blog, called the series, part of the “ongoing onslaught of cultural jihad,” and created a counter-comic strip that made the 19 hijackers behind the September 11, 2001 attacks the superheroes.

New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, meanwhile, urged readers to “Hide your face and grab the kids. Coming soon to a TV in your child’s bedroom is a posse of righteous, Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes – including one who fights crime hidden head-to-toe by a burqa.”

According to Al-Mutawa, the criticism spooked The Hub. “All of a sudden we couldn’t get an airdate and I was asked to be patient and we have been,” Al-Mutawa said. “But it has been a year and the actual push-back died down.”

Mark Kern, Senior Vice President of Communication for The Hub, told CNN that “‘The 99’ is one of the many shows we have on the possible schedule, but at this time, no decisions have been made about scheduling.”

Al-Mutawa isn’t shy about responding to the criticism his comics have received in the U.S. “There is nothing different from them and the extremists in my country,” he says. “They are just as bad. They are just intellectual terrorists.”

Geller, author of the book “Stop the Islamization of America,” called Al-Mutawa’s statement “ridiculous victimhood rhetoric.”

“He is the one mainstreaming oppression and discrimination,” Geller says. “I work for equality of rights for all people. So which one of us is the intellectual terrorist?”

Geller also takes issue with Al-Mutawa’s assertion that “The 99” exemplifies “moderation” and “toleration,” pointing to a “burqa-wearing superhero.”

But Al-Mutawa says criticisms of burqas are evidence that, “for some people anything to do with Islam is bad.”

“How cliché is it that characters created to promote tolerance are getting shot down by extremists,” he says.

Chronicling the ordeal

Al-Mutawa’s frustrations are chronicled in the new documentary “Wham! Bam! Islam!,” which will air on PBS on October 13 as part of the Independent Lens series.

The film’s director, Isaac Solotaroff, began shooting before the comic was released.

He said that one of the most surprising aspects of the story is how “a very small group of people who scream very loud, have a disproportionate share of the public discourse when it comes to culture.”

Echoing Al-Mutawa, Solotaroff calls it a case of the tail wagging the dog. He says that initial concerns of censorship in the Middle East began to change as the project progressed.

“We were waiting for a fatwa from a cleric in Saudi Arabia, Solotaroff says,” when it ended up being the U.S. market that has been resistant to “The 99.”

“Realizing that The 99 will not survive if focused solely on the Middle East, Al-Mutawa must now target an international and predominantly non-Muslim market,” reads the website for “Wham! Bam! Islam!”

Citing The Hub holdup, Solotaroff says the project is now stuck in the most important market” for “The 99.”

Al-Mutawa is also trying to gain distribution for his TV series in France and other countries, but his main focus remains the United States.

“One way or the other,” he says, “‘The 99’ will get on air in the U.S.”

Does Jewish Law Justify Killing Civilians?

Editorial Note:

This article is not against Judaism as a Religion! As Muslims We believe in Moses as a prophet of God, and in Judaism as a divine religion. What we want to prove here, is the fact that the Islamophobes like Robert Spencer and Pam Geller by saying that Islam is “Violent” Religion, are just deceiving their readers!
Islam is like any other religion, can be interpreted in several ways, and Judaism as a religion can be interpreted in a very extreme and violent ways!
Israel -for example- is the real manifestation of interpreting Torah in a very violent and racist way, So, What we are trying to prove here, that if Islamophobes see some logic in criticizing Islam because of ‘being violent’, They need to revise their thoughts about their own scriptures and holy books!
The real obstacle is not in religions, it’s in the racist, extremist and violent followers!

Source

Islamophobes like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller claim that Islam is more violent than other religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity.  To prove this, they argue that the Islamic holy book, the Islamic prophet, and the Islamic God are all uniquely violent–certainly more so than their Judeo-Christian counterparts.

We proved these claims completely bunk by showing the Bible to be far more violent than the Quran, the Biblical prophets to be far more violent than the Prophet Muhammad, and Yahweh of the Bible to be far more violent than Allah of the Quran.  (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-i, 6-ii, 6-iii, 6-iv, 7, 8, 9-i, and 9-ii of LoonWatch’s Understanding Jihad Series.)

Instead of defending their initial claim (which they simply cannot), the Islamophobes quickly shift gears and rely on a fallback argument: they argue that “the Bible doesn’t actively exhort its believers to commit acts of violence, unlike the Quran.”  I refuted this argument in part 6 (see 6-i, 6-ii, 6-iii, 6-iv) in an article entitled The Bible’s Prescriptive, Open-Ended, and Universal Commandments to Wage Holy War and Enslave Infidels.

Once that argument goes to the wayside the Islamophobes then jump to their next fall back argument: “most Jews and Christians don’t take the Bible literally like Muslims do the Quran!”  I refuted this argument in part 7, showing that they do in fact understand the Bible very, very literally.

In a very predictable pattern, once this argument fails, the Islamophobes rely on yet another fall back argument, the famous cop-out “But That’s Just the Old Testament!”.  I’ve refuted this argument in part 8.

Once this fall back argument is refuted, Islamophobes once again do not defend it.  Instead, they move on to the next fall back argument:  they argue that “Jews and Christians simply don’t interpret their holy book in a violent manner, unlike Muslims.”  Writes Robert Spencer on p.31 of his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades):

When modern-day Jews and Christians read their Bibles, they simply don’t interpret the passages cited as exhorting them to violent action against unbelievers. This is due to the influence of centuries of interpretive traditions that have moved away from literalism regarding these passages. But in Islam, there is no comparable interpretive tradition. The jihad passages in the Qur’an are anything but a dead letter.

This is Spencer’s preemptive parry to any counterattack whenever anyone (like myself) responds to his cherry-picking of Quranic verses by reciprocating and finding similar (and even worse) passages in the Bible. We are told that modern-day Jews and Christians simply don’t take those passages seriously any more, that they are merely symbolic or that they are dead letters.

Spencer et al. will then take a break from copying-and-pasting Quranic passages, and instead focus on “classical opinions” in the Islamic tradition, which they claim continue to be to this day the “orthodox, mainstream opinions according to the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence [madhaib].” By contrast, argues Spencer, classical and modern-day orthodox, mainstream interpretations of Judaism and Christianity have moved away from literal understandings of the Bible and opted for non-violent, peaceful understandings.

However, I will prove that this is not the case at all. The violent verses in the Bible helped formulate the “classical opinions” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and continue to be held by “mainstream, orthodox” groups today.  In this article, we will examine the Jewish rabbinical tradition (both the “classical” and modern day situation); in a later article, we will grapple with the Christian side of things.

Rabbi Eliyahu Stern published an article in the New York Times entitled “Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America.”  Stern’s balanced article noted that the anti-Muslim demonization of Islam (and Islamic law) “is disturbingly reminiscent” of “19th-century Europe” Anti-Semitism.  Pamela Geller, an extremist Zionist Islamophobe, published an irate letter from David Yerushalmi (who she describes as the “leading legal mind on sharia in America and my lawfare attorney”), who huffed (emphasis added):

[T]he historical comparison between the response to sharia in this country and Europe’s objection to Jewish law centuries earlier is a result of poor scholarship and faulty logic.  Jewish law, certainly since the destruction of the Jewish Commonwealth almost two thousand years ago, has had nothing to do with political power or the desire to effect dominion over another people. 

To the contrary, the opposition to sharia is the fact that throughout the Muslim world, sharia is the call to an exclusive Islamic political power with hegemonic designs (see the two most prominent surveys cited here: http://mappingsharia.com/?page_id=425).  The war doctrine of jihad is part and parcel of sharia.  It is alive and well as such throughout the Muslim world.

This is the same argument raised by Robert Spencer: Jewish law is peaceful and certainly does not call to violence or war like Islamic law does.

I will absolutely nuke this argument into oblivion.  (In the words of one of our readers: “Danios doesn’t make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight–he brings a nuclear bomb.”)

*  *  *  *  *

One of the fundamental differences between the Islamic canon (Quran and hadiths) and the Bible is with regard to discrimination: the Islamic texts explicitly, categorically, and emphatically command soldiers to fight combatants on the battlefield only, and totally forbid targeting and killing innocent civilians (women, children, the elderly, the decrepit, etc.). On the other hand, the Bible is replete with verses in which God Himself commands the believers to target and kill innocent civilians. In fact, the God of the Bible becomes very upset with those of his followers who fail to complete acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is perhaps no big surprise then that one of the main ways in which the “classical” and so-called “orthodox, mainstream views” of the Islamic tradition differ from those in the Jewish tradition is with regard to discrimination: the Islamic tradition forbids its followers from targeting and killing civilians, whereas the Jewish counterpart permits it.

Rabbi Norman Lamm, convenor of the Orthodox Forum

Every year leading Orthodox Jewish luminaries from around the world–including “rashei yeshivah [deans of Talmudical academies], rabbis, educators and academicians from America and Israel”–flock to The Orthodox Forum to discuss “a single topic affecting the Jewish world.”  In 2004, the topic of choice was “War and Peace,” which was chosen due to “the United States’ involvement in Iraq” and “Israel’s ongoing war with terrorism” (quotes from p.xiii of War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition).

After these influential experts discussed the issues surrounding “war and peace,” they published their discussion in the fourteenth volume of “the Orthodox Forum Series” in a book entitled War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition.  As such, this book does not merely reflect the views of one or two Jewish authors.  Instead, it “brings together the thinking of a wide range of distinguished American and Israeli academicians and religious leaders from various disciplines, to shed light on the historical, philosophical, theological, legal and moral issues raised by military conflict and the search for peaceful resolution” (p.xi) with the goal of appreciating “the relevance of Jewish sources in approaching contemporary challenges” (p.xii).

[Note: Throughout this article series, readers should assume all emphasis is mine, unless otherwise indicated.  Also note that Rabbi is abbreviated to R., as is the accepted convention.]

Reading this very authoritative book, written by the brightest minds of Orthodox Judaism, I came to appreciate at least five major ways in which Halakha (Jewish law) permits shedding the blood of innocents–at least five major exceptions to the law of discrimination.

The reader should keep in mind that these five different exceptions have nothing to do with “collateral damage,” the incidental or unintended killing of civilians, which is generally accepted by international law (with some important caveats).  Instead, these five exceptions have to do with targeting and killing civilians.

I purposefully say “at least five different exceptions,” since there are most certainly more, which I shall discuss in future articles.  However, those other exceptions are debatable or held as minority opinions, such as the concept of targeted assassinations (debatable, I guess) and the idea that Palestinians should be exterminated because they are the modern-day Amalekites (a valid but minority “halakhic opinion”).  Instead, I will focus on views held by the majority of mainstream Orthodox Jewish rabbinical leadership.

*  *  *  *  *

In the United States, Judaism is split into three main sects: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  In Israel, however, Reform and Conservative Judaism do not exist in large numbers.  Instead, the battle lines are drawn between secular and Orthodox Jews.  According to The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 20% of Israeli Jews are secular, 25% are Orthodox (17% are Religious Zionists [Modern Orthodox Judaism] and 8% are Ultra-Orthodox [Haredi]), with the largest group of Israeli Jews (55%) falling under the rubric of “traditional.”

The views of “traditional Jews” towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem to fall in between the two major ideological groups: secular and Orthodox Jews.  For example, whereas “only” 36% of secular Israelis support “price tag” terrorism against Palestinians and a whopping majority of Orthodox Jews support such tactics (70% of Religious Zionists and 71% of Ultra-Orthodox Jews), just over half of traditional Jews (55%) condone terrorism against the Palestinians.

Orthodox Judaism is split between Modern Orthodox Judaism and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Haredi Judaism).  In Israel, Modern Orthodox Judaism is dominated by Religious Zionism (alternatively called “national-religious”).  This sect is widely considered to be the “mainstream” of Orthodox Judaism in Israel.  It is this sect, therefore, that I will focus on in my article series.

One should not, however, be led to believe that Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is much better in this regard.  Although Agudat Yisrael (the original major political party that represented Ultra-Orthodox Jews) initially opposed the Zionist enterprise, this changed after the creation of the state of Israel.  These Ultra-Orthodox Jews saw the Israeli state as a means for “state enforcement of religious laws” and wanted “increased state financial support for their schools and for religious institutions” (quotes taken from the Zionism & Israel Center‘s official website).

Today, “though still non-Zionist, [these Ultra-Orthodox Jews] tend to favor perpetuation of the occupation and vote with the right against peace moves or negotiations.”  Their right-wing attitudes towards Palestinians are reflected in the earlier statistic I cited, which showed that an overwhelming majority (71%) of Ultra-Orthodox Jews support price tag terrorism against Palestinians, which is almost exactly the same percentage of Religious Zionists (70%) who do.  Ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel has been heavily influenced by Zionism and Religious Zionism, especially in their hostile views towards the indigenous Palestinians.

However, because many Israelis feel that Ultra-Orthodox Jews are “extreme,” I will focus my discussion here on the more “mainstream” sect, Modern Orthodox Judaism.  (In a follow-up article, I will outline the Ultra-Orthodox view on such subjects in order to prove that there is an emerging “bipartisan” consensus on these issues within Orthodox Judaism in Israel.) For now, however, I will largely stick to the generally accepted views within Religious Zionism.

Therefore, in my article The Top Five Ways Jewish Law Justifies Killing Civilians–the title that will be used for the remaining article series–I will not focus on Yizhak Shapira’s book the King’s Torah.  Despite the fact that Modern Orthodox Judaism’s rabbis seemed to accept Shapira’s views “governing the killing of a non-Jew’ outlined in the book [as] a legitimate stance” and a valid “halachic opinion,” I will bypass all such discussion by focusing on majority views held by Religious Zionism and Modern Orthodox Judaism, not the more extreme Kahanist sect of Religious Zionism.

In so doing, I will show that these majority views are hardly less worrisome than Rabbi Shapira’s opinions expressed in the King’s Torah.  I will show that one need not look to settler rabbis, Kahanists, or Ultra-Orthodox Jews to find extremely warlike views.  The mainstream Modern Orthodox rabbinical leadership will suffice.  Worse yet, Israeli Jews–deeply religious Jews–are leading the fight against the concept of distinction, the fundamental aspect of the just war theory.  They are applying pressure to change international law and to abrogate the regulations of the Geneva Conventions, which they believe are “archaic” and inapplicable today.  Could it be said, using the emotive language of our opponents, that Judaism is waging war against the principle of distinction?

The purpose of this is to prove that if there are problems within the house of Islam (which there certainly are), let it be known that the house of Judaism is no different in this regard.  It would behoove us to remind ourselves of this before we point the accusatory finger at The Other.  Extremist Zionist Islamophobes like Pamela Geller–and their Christian comrades-in-arms like Robert Spencer–should take note.

Disclaimer:  Before we get into it, please read my disclaimer, Why Religious Zionism, Not Judaism, is the Problem. (This is in addition to my earlier disclaimer, which you should also read):

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

By Farha Khaled

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

Bat Ye’or historian  to Islamophobes

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

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

Eurabia the myth Bat Ye’or invented

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

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

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

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

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

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

She continues:

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Again: “Police Blotter Bob” Not Interested in Facts

Source

Once again, “Police Blotter Bob” shows that he could care less about facts when it comes to Islam and Muslims. In his “response” to the Center for American Progress report on Islamophobia, Bob claims that he is not attacking all of Islam, but just the “radicals” and the “jihadists.”

My work…has never been against Muslims in the aggregate or any people as such, but rather against an ideology that denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people.

Yet, statement after statement, and post after post on his website talks about “Muslims” and “Islam” as just that: an aggregate. Take this latest post:

The fact that Muslims do not like Jews and Israel, I know, because many of my correspondents, Islamic leaders, Emirs, the heads of armed groups and ordinary Mujahideen talked about this at every meeting and every interview with me.

The fact that Islam is a nation and that Muslims have no other nationality is what I also heard from religious leaders supporting the Jihad.

The fact that Muslims can adapt and play by the political process more than once I saw myself.

They know how to do represent themselves as the victims of inhumane aggression through the media. And the same information is transmitted to the Islamic world in a different manner — as a victory for Jihad and death for the sake of Allah.

No nuance, no teasing out the particular…no, rather ”Muslims do not like Jews and Israel.” That is a general statement. That is what Spencer and his minions do again, and again, and again.

Yet, the facts tell a completely different story:

A World Public Opinion (WPO) survey done in collaboration at that time with the University of Maryland reported that 51 percent of Americans believe “bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified,” while only 13 percent of American Muslims hold a similar view, with a full 81 percent saying violence against civilians is never justified.

A recent Gallup survey (2011) asks the same question separately — first for a “military attacks against civilians” and then “individuals and small groups attacking civilians.” Muslim Americans came out as the staunchest opponents of both overwhelmingly as compared to their neighbors.

In response to military attacks against civilians, 78 percent of Muslim Americans said such attacks are never justified as compared to 39 percent of Christians and 43 percent of Jews. Only 21 percent Muslim Americans approve of it “sometimes” as compared to 58 percent of Christians and 52 percent of Jews.

Eighty-nine percent of Muslim Americans surveyed by Gallup rejected violent individual attacks on civilians as compared to 71 percent of Christians and 75 percent of Jews. Muslims are the least likely to justify attacks on civilians. Only 11 percent of Muslims justified that sometimes such attacks are acceptable as compared to 27 percent of Christians and 22 percent of Jews.

The same is true when it comes to opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslim Americans are way ahead in their opposition to wars as compared to their neighbors.

However, when the Pew survey first came out in 2007, it did not provide any relief for Muslim Americans from Islamophobic media frenzy. Most reporters used it as an opportunity to fan hatred against Muslim Americans, focusing on the smaller number of Muslim Americans who justified attacks on civilians without comparing it to Christian Americans, who did the same even in a larger numbers.

Right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin proclaimed in the National Review that the poll “should be a wake-up call.” Mark Steyn said it demonstrated the existence in America of “a huge comfort zone for the jihad to operate in,” and on CNN, Anderson Cooper was horrified — just horrified — that “so many” American Muslims would support such violence.

Well, I was also horrified myself until I checked what our neighbors are saying about intentionally targeting civilians. As a peacemaker, I will only be satisfied fully when all Muslims and people of other faiths oppose killing civilians fully, whether that is by a military or a terrorist group. But these statistics do offer me comparative relief.

FBI Evidence

The same evidence of a peaceful Muslim community was provided by Michael E. Rolince, former FBI Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, D.C. Field Office. He said the FBI conducted about 500,000 interviews without finding a single lead which could have helped the agency prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

That number means that almost 40 percent of all Muslim households in the United States were probably touched by this investigation. Here is what this presidential award recipient with 30 years of counterterrorism and counterintelligence experience said on Dec. 17, 2005, one month after his retirement, at the Muslim Public Affairs Committee’s annual convention in a panel titled, “Muslim Americans & Law Enforcement Partnership” (Here is an mp3 of his speech. His statement appears in the Q & A section):

“We conducted about a half a million interviews post 9/11 relative to the attacks of 9/11, and this is important because your community gets painted as not doing enough and you could have helped. I’m not aware — and I know 9/11 about as well as anybody in the FBI knows 9/11 and that’s not bragging that’s just the reality — I’m not aware of any single person in your community who, had they stepped forward, could have provided a clue to help us get out in front of this. The reality of that attack is that 19 people came here with what they needed. They spoke the language well enough to order meals and rent cars and hotel rooms. They had money coming in from overseas. Four people knew how to fly planes and 15 others were willing to be the muscle. They didn’t need any witting help from anyone to do what they did. And thus far, and I’m not saying this is conclusive because 10 years from now someone might find something that changes it, we’ve not found a sitting single witting individual in your community, and that’s a fact that gets overlooked because you get painted and that’s why I’m so committed and remain committed to projects like this because what we are in the business of is facts and the truth.”Anxiety about Muslim Americans is at an all-time high thanks to a well-funded campaign of Islamophobia.

Rand Corporation Findings

A 2010 Rand Corporation report rightfully states that “The volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s than it is today. It is important to note that Rand is mostly a Defense Department-funded think-tank. This report has a whole section called “The 1970s Saw Greater Terrorist Violence.” The report asserts that, “Thus far, there has been no sustained jihadist terrorist campaign in the United States.” And one possible reason for this, according to this Rand report, is, “The local Muslim community rejected al Qaeda’s appeals and actively intervened to dissuade those with radical tendencies from violence.”

But, facts mean very little to “Police Blotter Bob”…

“Islamic” Honor Killings and Crocodile Tears

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The clever tactics of Islamophobes

By Haroon Siddiqui | Source

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

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

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

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

• Collective guilt

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

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

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

• Double standards

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

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

Other hypocrisies:

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

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

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

• Innuendo

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

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

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

• Irrationality

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

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

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

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

• Clever tactics

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

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

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

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

hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

September 11th And The Legacy Of Islamophobia In America

Source

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was 11 years old. After the first plane hit, teachers took kids in from the playground and quickly ushered them into the classrooms. Some of them turned on TVs; others did not. Mine did. At that age, I was not fully able to comprehend what I saw. Though what I did see — buildings stripped to skeletal foundations, men and women covered in ash wandering the streets like ghosts, and remnants of homes, identities, and belongings strewn about like shattered glass — left quite an indelible mark in my heart. Ten years later, I think that this was my first glimpse into how fragile a nation and its unity can truly be. Funny, then, that we have chosen to rebuild ourselves and attack others with some of the very things that caused the mass destruction to begin with.

Although the neologism that is Islamophobia dates back to the 1990’s, it was not until after September 11, 2001 that the intolerance was so rampantly widespread that Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, stated that “when the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development.” While its definition, and for that matter, existence as a term, is contentious, many agree that Islamophobia is the hatred and fear of Islam and by extension, all Muslims. Though as much as I would like to say that American Islamophobia only emerged after 2001, the unfortunate truth is that it and the driving themes behind it have been around for quite some time; it is only after that cataclysmic day that it reared its ugly head that much higher.

According to Hussein Ibish, Senior Research Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, what we recognize today as Islamophobia is merely a reincarnation of 20th century anti-Semitism, a time when it was popular to create fantastical scenarios wherein Judaism and its followers were “dedicated to plotting and carrying out the violent overthrow of American and Christian Capitalist society.” Sound familiar? That’s because it is.

Ibish also uncovered some other popular anti-Semitic literature of the era, and the parallels between now and then are alarmingly similar. Just substitute “Muslim” for “Jews” in statements like “Jewish immigration to the United States is a weapon of this war and a mortal peril” or “Jews are religiously authorized to lie to, cheat, steal from and murder non-Jews whenever possible,” and you’ve got a winner.

Coming a little closer to September 11, the entire Muslim-American population was quick to be called the culprit for another horrific terrorist attack, this time at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. KFOR, the local news station, received an anonymous phone call that day from a man who claimed his membership to the “Nation of Islam” as well as the responsibility for the bombing. Although unaware if the claim was accurate, the news station chose to air this claim several times that day, which resulted in over 200 hate crimes being committed to Arab and Muslim Americans in the next 72 hours, according to a report by the Arab American Institute. Suffice it to say, the perpetrator was not, in fact, a Muslim, but rather Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist who claimed to be a devout Christian.

Despite the fact that those responsible for the unnecessary deaths on September 11 were by no means identical to the majority of Muslims in America (much like many devout Christians are nothing like Timothy McVeigh), and the fact that over 300 people who died that day were Muslim, the unwarranted hatred continued, this time with a vengeance. From 2000 to 2001, the amount of hate crimes (pdf) committed against Arab-Americans quadrupled.

• In San Gabriel, California, for instance, a woman dressed in Muslim clothing was attacked by another woman who yelled, “America is only for white people.” The woman was subsequently sent to the Emergency Room.
• At a bagel shop in Beverly Hills, a customer saw another woman wearing a Quran charm, and attacked her, screaming “Look what you people have done to my people.” The woman lunged at the Muslim woman, but thankfully was restrained. Meanwhile, it was the victim who called the police as the shop owner apologized only to the attacker and offered her help.
• Even those who weren’t Arab were targeted. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, two men attacked, robbed, and cut the penis of an Indian man, calling him an Arab and saying that “to be an American, you must be circumcised.”

These sentiments were only perpetuated and made legitimate by the remarks of many, like Ann Coulter, who earn their living by being small-minded and hateful. In 2001, Coulter stated, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Don’t worry, Ann; some of your conservative comrades have been trying.

While by no means were any of these hate crimes condonable, their prevalence so soon after the attacks is unsurprising. But now? Still?

Recently, Terry Jones, the attention-starved Evangelical pastor who gives quite a few Muslim extremists a run for their money, created another publicity stunt with his desire to host an “International Burn a Quran Day,” only deciding against it once high-up officials like General David Petraeus took his inane ideas seriously, and thereby spread Jones’ hateful and bigoted beliefs to an entire population of people who may never have known this Floridian fool otherwise existed.

And then there was the visceral and vitriolic reaction to the proposed construction of an Islamic Community Center close to (and by close I mean two city blocks away from) the former Twin Towers. Newt Gingrich, popular today for his extra-marital affairs and paying for nearly all of his Twitter followers, compared the community center to a Hitler memorial being built next to Auschwitz. The comparison is completely unfair and unreasonable, but if the comparison must be made, a fairer one would be that it is like stationing US troops next to the many Ground Zeros we have created in the Middle East.

And today, political leaders are quivering so much in their proverbial boots about the Islamic “takeover” that it has actually generated a substantial amount of heat in the Republican primary campaign trail. Recently, Michele Bachmann, largely under the influence of Frank Gaffney, well-known conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe, signed a pledge that rejected Sharia law. This pledge also equated homosexuality with adultery, which is something that is illegal in Bachmann’s home state of Minnesota. Funny enough, homosexuality and adultery are also considered crimes in Sharia law. Maybe Bachmann and Muslim extremists can find some common ground, after all.

In addition to calling attention to radical Islam while trying to squash it, Bachmann, along with others, has caught onto the trend of calling President Barack Obama whatever it is that she is currently afraid of. When Obama suggested that NASA increase its outreach efforts into Muslim countries, Bachmann riposted, “This leaves a lot of Americans wondering, where do this President’s interests lie?” thereby implying that Obama has a bias toward Islam. Suspiciously enough, Obama also has that name that rhymes with You-Know-Who. Bachmann, along with all other Republican fear mongers, knows that all you have to do is plant the seed to watch the paranoia flourish. And she did.

My question is, as a self-proclaimed Constitutionalist and Christian, what would it matter if Obama were a Muslim, Sephardic Jew, or a Mennonite? Both the Bill of Rights and Establishment Clause state that you may practice whatever religion you wish and not be punished or discriminated against because of it. Or to be pithier, there’s even that biblical beaut that commands Christians to “love thy neighbor.” But if it’s the violence about which Michele is concerned, she needn’t worry; democracy and Christianity both have a long history of war, oppression, and intolerance to offer.

Given how angry, scared, and bitter some Americans are about the imminent threat of the “Islamization of America,” one would think that the American Muslim must resemble some sort of blood thirsty sasquatch who seeks to implement his or her violent dogma into every aspect of peaceful American life. Wrong. Or that, you know, these Muslim Americans are really angry with how they’re being treated by the general public. Wrong again.

The results to a survey given randomly to over 1,000 Muslim Americans by the Pew Research Center are more telling about our own fear, hopelessness, and anger than theirs. For example, while 24% of the general population believes that Muslim support for Islamic extremism in the US is increasing, only 4% of Muslims (those who would actually know if this is true) agree. A mere 2% have a “very favorable” view of Al-Qaeda, much like there are a few handfuls of idiots out there that actually think white supremacy still makes one iota of sense. Furthermore, only 49% of those surveyed identify themselves as Muslims first and foremost. If that number seems alarming to you, fret not; 70% of White Evangelical Christians in the United States identify themselves as Christian before they do American.

The survey also unfortunately highlights the effects of Islamophobia: the majority of those surveyed report that they have received suspicious looks, been called offensive names, or have been singled out in airports or by other law enforcement. Furthermore, an additional 25% state that their mosques and Islamic centers have been targets of controversy and downright hostility.

Despite targeting and racial profiling, Muslim-Americans still are pretty satisfied with life in the United States. In fact, a majority of them say that the quality of life in America is better than their home countries, and that they want to adopt American customs and ways of life. And amid recessions and unemployment woes, it seems that these “outsiders” believe more in the “American Dream” than many of us “insiders” do: a whopping 74% of all Muslim-Americans surveyed believe that people can get ahead if they work hard, compared to the general public’s less enthusiastic 62% consensus. And no, these aren’t people born here and therefore inherently less pathogenic; 63% of those surveyed are first generation immigrants, 45% of whom have only been here since 1990.

And so in coping with the devastating effects of hate, we decided to respond with more hate, thereby more closely resembling a Hammurabi-esque form of “justice” than the international vanguard of justice and equality that we claim to be. The truth is that we don’t strengthen our country or honor the deaths of our loved ones by prescribing the same hatred and intolerance at which we were thrust that terrible September morning. We regain our national strength and honor them by loving thy neighbor, or, as expressed in the Quran, “[doing] good to […] those in need, neighbors who are near, [or] who are strangers.” More importantly, we honor those we lost by heeding their example: engaging in meaningful international and intercultural exchanges of ideas, goods, and services, realizing that the benefits of working together far outweigh those than when we do not.

Savannah Cox is a Foreign Languages/International Studies and Political Science double major at Bellarmine University, and has recently returned from the University of Granada, where she studied Spanish and Political Science. She has interned for the World Affairs Council of Kentucky and Southern Indiana as well as Congressman John Yarmuth. In her free time, she enjoys reading, strumming a ukulele, and consuming large amounts of salty carbohydrates.

The rise of Islamophobic blogosphere

On the 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, an Islamophobic right wing Norwegian, set off a bomb outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo. He then entered a summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya where the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor party had been holidaying and shot dead 69 people.

Source | By Farha Khaled

Breivik is now in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Breivik had cobbled together a “manifesto” that laid bare his reasons for the attack and the motivations. Under interrogation, he told police he had no regrets about the massacre because he had to save Europe from being taken over by Muslims and from multiculturalism.

A closer look at the 1,500-page “manifesto”, A European Declaration of Independence, which Brievik emailed to his online community hours before the crime, was replete with material and quotations from a small but tightly knit transatlantic network of anti Muslim demagogues and bloggers, of how Europe was becoming “Eurabia”, a myth propagated by Bat Ye’or. With some exceptions, the names of his favorite inspirations read like a Who’s Who of the Islamophobia industry. This underworld of the Islamophobic blogosphere which includes writers, self styled experts on Islam, dubious “historians” and from which Anders Brievik took his inspiration, has come into the spotlight since the horrific massacre.

European Far Right

Brievik cited heavily from the now notorious anti Muslim blog “Gates of Vienna” (GoV), his fellow Norwegian white supremacist, Pedar Jensen, wrote for under the anonymous alias of Fjordman until he was interviewed by Norwegian police. Fjordman has since gone into hiding.

Gisele Littman, better known as Bat Ye’or is a Cairo born Jewess, who fled in the 1950’s leaving behind everything she landed in England. She now lives in Switzerland. She is the author of “Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis” and other books. She claims to be a historian on “dhimmitude”. Her works are alarmist in nature, she claims European elites made secret deals with Arab rulers to bring in immigrants to Europe in exchange for oil. She gives dire warnings of impending “Dhimmitude” where Christian and Jewish Europeans would be servile dhimmis to their Islamic Arab overlords. Her theories have generally been dismissed by historians, but since 9/11 some like Bernard Lewis cited her work on Assyrian Christians. Islamophobes propagate her work and Brievik bought into her conspiracies.

On July 25th the Associated Press reported that Bat Ye’or ” has expressed regret that her writing might have helped to inspire his rampage.” It is perhaps not surprising that Bat Ye’or’s revisionist history of Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule, found an eager audience amongst Islamophobes. What is surprising is that a respected historian like Sir Martin Gilbert, who has received some flak from his peer group, would give her work credence in his book “The House of Ishmael”. Sir Martin Gilbert is a Zionist Jew, as is the American historian Bernard Lewis who has also cited her.

The “Eurabia” conspiracy was eagerly lapped up by the European far right. For over a decade the far right in Europe has been critical of the immigration policies of their countries. The Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the PVV in Holland (Geert Wilders party) the Front National in France and the FPO in Austria, and The English Defense League which has a Jewish Division.

Geert Wilders, whom Brievik admires, has called for the Quran to be banned. He was the subject of a BBC documentary “Europe’s Most Dangerous Man” and claims to have been to Israel over 40 times. His legal fees during his prosecution in the Dutch courts for incitement were met by Daniel Pipes’ “Middle East Forum”.

The British journalist Melanie Philips, author of “Londonistan”, and columnist for the Daily Mail and The Jewish Chronicle was quoted in the “manifesto”. Philips is known for her right wing views, she was in favor of the Iraq war, in contrast to the majority of the British public. Brievik cited her from an article she wrote describing the former Labour government as being guilty of “unalloyed treachery” for allowing mass immigration to “destroy what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place”.

Seeking allies to further their aims and for funding the European right wing populists, and white supremacists have forged alliances with far right Zionist extremists. The traditional hatred reserved for Jews by these same far right extremists, has now been exchanged for a new threat, that of Muslims. To this end, there have been some bizarre alliances, amongst ultra nationalist Europeans and the far right Islamophobic Zionists in Israel and the USA.

The Islamophobia industry has a network of funders, activists, and bloggers sympathetic to the far right wing Zionist aim of expanding settlements and ridding the land of Palestinians. For this they need to keep up a steady stream of propaganda, of the type that brought about the Iraq war.

American Islamophobes

Islamophobia became an industry after 9/11 in the USA.

The pseudo-academic Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch was referenced 55 times in Breivik’s manifesto. Robert Spencer a Catholic writer who is the director of Jihad Watch which is owned by David Horowitz and his “Freedom Center”, publishes Front Page mag, whose columnists regularly churn out anti Muslim and anti Palestinian propaganda.

Daniel Pipes, a neo con Muslim basher who was active long before 9.11 was mentioned over 18 times. The extremist blogger Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs is cited too. She operates an Islamophobic organization in partnership with Spencer, Stop Islamization of America, which has a European sister organization named Stop Islamization of Europe. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have been on talk shows and on Fox TV, giving them a degree of exposure, visibility and an audience. Geller was the ringleader in the controversy over the Cordoba House’s “Ground Zero Mosque” in 2010. Conservative media favorites like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mark Steyn are quoted by Brievik as is the historian Bernard Lewis. Patrick Buchanan opined that “Breivik may be right” about the supposed clash of civilizations between Western Christianity and Eastern Islam.

The Funding

Aubrey Chernick is a publicity shy software tycoon with a personal fortune of $780 million. He and his wife Joyce Chernick are amongst the biggest donors to David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre which owns Jihad Watch. Another recipient of their funds is Aish HaTorah, an organization which claims to educate Jews about Judaism. With an office in New York this group has branches in and is active in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Aish HaTorah shares an office address with the mysterious Clarion Fund which produced “Obsession”, a DVD warning of the dangers of Jihad. The Clarion Fund was responsible for distributing over 25 million DVD’s in the US 2008 election race. “Obsession” had a roster of Islamophobic speakers warning of the dangers of Islam. Clearly it was a propaganda piece designed to scare voters into choosing a candidate that would continue the bloodshed and war in the Middle East that had been the trademark of the Bush presidency since 9/11.

America’s free speech laws zealously guarded in the first amendment rights and the nature of the internet provide a fertile breeding ground for extremist bloggers to propagate their hate free from any kind of scrutiny and with relative anonymity. The Arab spring proved how influential online social networking media can be in influencing opinion.

Zionism, Palestinians and the Middle East

What does all this have to do with the Middle East? American foreign policy, lobby groups, media propaganda and the demonization of Islam, ultimately influences the politics and economies of not only Palestine, but the wider Arab and Muslim world as tools to be manipulated for an agenda. A selection of some of the more prominent personalities engaged in the Islamophobia industry gives us an insight into how the dots are connected:

“Let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists,” Breivik wrote in his manifesto.

Commending Israel for robbing most of its Muslim citizens of civil rights, as opposed to the freedom Muslims enjoyed in Europe Brievik spoke highly of Netanyahu for including the Yisrael Beiteinu and the Shas parties in his ruling coalition. A number of Israeli professors were quoted in his “manifesto”, including Itamar Rabinovich and Eyal Zisser.

Ten years earlier, Netanyahu could barely conceal his glee when asked for his reaction to the 9/11 attacks. “It’s very good”, he gushed, then realizing how it would sound, quickly added, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy”. This was a heaven sent opportunity to the Zionist lobby to propagate the myth of Israel and the United States as having the same enemy. In the heightened climate of fear, this propaganda of Islam and Arabs being the enemy found a receptive audience particularly amongst the millions of Christian Zionists. Thus was born a whole new Islamophobia industry, complete with “ex Muslims” like Walid Shoebat, whose fake narrative has now been exposed as a sham.

David Yerushalmi, a Brooklyn lawyer who settled in Jerusalem, and is affiliated with Lubavitch Hasidic Judaism, has been the architect behind the anti-Sharia bills in the USA. He is Pamela Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s legal representative.

Aish HaTorah, the Jewish educational organization which receives funds from Aubrey Chernick is active in the settlements of the West Bank, in Palestine. Most of the funds for the expansion of settlements come from the USA, from Jewish and Christian Zionist charities.

All of the writers and bloggers mentioned above have expressed their revulsion and distanced themselves from the carnage in Norway. Since coming under the spotlight, their reactions have ranged from expressing regret (Bat Ye’or) being on the defensive (Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders).

Gates of Vienna meanwhile is inferring that Anders Brievik may be working for covert forces, and Frank Gaffney and Jihad Watch have put forth bizarre conspiracy theories of the Norway massacre having being a false flag operation to silence the “counter jihadists”. Debbie Schlussul, who like Pamela Geller is notorious for her pro Israel and anti Muslim rants, has condemned the attack but crowed that it was “karma” for Norway, as it is an anti Israel country.

Up until the Norway massacre, the underground world of Islamophobic bloggers did not merit the attention of the law enforcement agencies. After Utoya, Europol announced a new EUR50 million fund to monitor far right extremism. Previously right wing extremism had been deemed as less worthy of attention and not as serious a threat as that posed by Al Qaeda and Islamists.

— Farha Khaled is an American freelance writer. Her articles focusing on Islamophobia have been published in the Saudi based Arab News. You can follow her on http://twitter.com/farhakhaled.

John Bolton Embraces His Pamela Geller And Robert Spencer Problem

Source | By Ben Armbruster

The manifesto of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik, who attacked targets in Norway in July killing nearly 100 people, contained numerous citations to Islamophobic bloggers and other so-called experts on Islamic terrorism here in the United States. The references included “counterjihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who received a combined 174 citations from Breivik (Geller and Spencer also feature prominently in CAP’s latest report on the Islamophobia network in the U.S., “Fear, Inc.“).

ThinkProgress’ Eli Clifton subsequently noted that former Bush administration official and prominent war hawk John Bolton — who is currently considering a run for president — has a “Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer problem.” Indeed, Bolton has deep connections to Geller. He even wrote the foreward to Geller and Spencer’s 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. The book contains language eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto.

Bolton kept quiet about his links to Geller and Spencer after Breivik’s attack. But now, it appears he’s fully embracing them. Geller announced today that Bolton will be speaking at her “9/11 Freedom Rally: Stand Against Ground Zero Mosque”:

Honor our war dead on September 11th at West Broadway and Park Place at our 911 Freedom Rally. Stand for freedom. Join us, Robert Spencer and me at West Broadway and Park Place and protest this cultural obscenity at our 911 Freedom Rally. Remember last year?

Speakers include U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton…

ThinkProgress asked Bolton staffer Christine Samuelian if the former U.N. ambassador is concerned about continuing to associate with Geller and Spencer given their influence on Breivik. Samuelian confirmed that Bolton is not attending the upcoming anti-mosque event in person and will instead send a recorded video, but she has yet to respond as to whether Bolton has any concerns about Geller and Spencer. (HT: Justin Elliott)

CAP’s Islamophobia Report raises some new questions

Source | by Aydoğan Vatandaş*

A study on Islamophobia in the US, released by the Washington-based Center for American Progress (CAP) on Friday, highlights how a small group of donors fund misinformation experts who promote Islamophobic sentiments and how their misinformation spreads through the media and grassroots organizers like Eagle Forum.

The research was also reported that these misinformation experts are also manufacturing a smear campaign against the Gülen movement, inspired by the teachings of Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, in the US.

The extensive study, titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” was conducted through the collaborative efforts of prominent experts like Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes and Faiz Shakir.

According to the research, five experts generated the misinformation and materials used by political leaders, grassroots groups and the media. Those experts are:

Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy

David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence

Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America

Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism

The research revealed that these misinformation experts have been very influential on Islamophobia groups in 23 states, exemplified by Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! For America, Pam Geller’s Stop Islamization of America, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and existing groups, such as the American Family Association and the Eagle Forum.

According to the report, this small network of people is driving national and global debates that have real consequences on the public dialogue and American Muslims.

The research also shed light on the key foundations that endorse these misinformation experts by channeling $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 to their efforts to spread hate and misinformation.

In the research, these top seven key foundations are listed and ranked according to the amount of founding as follows:

Donors Capital Fund

Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Newton and Rochelle Becker Foundation

Russell Berrie Foundation

Anchorage Charitable Fund and William

Fairbrook Foundation.

The Donors Capital Fund, which is listed at the top in the report, contributed $21,318,600 to groups promoting Islamophobia from 2007 to 2009. The research revealed that this money went to the Middle East Forum, Clarion Fund, Investigative Project on Terrorism and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

One of the significant parts of the research claims that these misinformation experts have served as source for Anders Breivik who shot and killed 77 people in Norway on July 22.

In the research, it was reported that Breivik cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto. Another member of this “network of Islamophobia” in America is David Horowitz and his Freedom Center website. Spencer’s frequent collaborator Pamela Geller and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, were also mentioned 12 times by Breivik.

According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman as quoted in the report, the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts make up “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.”

Now, it is important to make a distinction and say that even though some of these misinformation experts are of Jewish decent, like David Yerushalmi for example, not all Jewish organizations are in the same alarmist line.

For example, the Anti-Defamation League reviewed Yerushalmi’s activities and concluded that he has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and black bigotry.

The research also pointed out that The Eagle Forum, which is classified within the Islamophobia network, has targeted the Gülen movement, labeling it as a threat of radical Islam, although it actually devotes itself to education, global peace and mutual understanding efforts.

Noting that the Eagle Forum partners with Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! for America and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy to push anti-Muslim issues, particularly anti-Shariah hysteria, the study explained: “At its 2011 Eagle Forum conference in St. Louis, Missouri, for example, Gabriel, Gaffney and others in the network revealed a new supposed threat: Muslim Gülen schools, which they claim would educate children through the lens of Islam and teach them to ‘hate Americans’.”

“Worse, the speakers alleged that President [Barack] Obama’s support for charter school reforms was a back-door strategy for using taxpayer money to fund the schools,” it added. “Of course, Gülen schools are nothing of the sort. They are the product of moderate Turkish Muslim educators who want ‘a blend of religious faith and largely Western curriculum’,” the study, nevertheless, maintained.

Now we should also remember a disappointing article appeared in The New York Times on June 7, by Stephanie Saul titled “Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas,” which attempted to defame Harmony Public Schools in Texas.

The research raises the question of whether the article was a part of these misinformation campaigns or not.

As we remember quite well, the article contained an explicitly anti-immigrant bias and suggested that Harmony, one of the most successful charter school programs in the US, is somehow suspect because its founders were Turkish immigrants. Unfortunately, the impressive success story of Harmony students was barely mentioned in the article.

This New York Times article triggered some other biased articles in The Times Picayune of New Orleans, leading the charter of Abramson Charter School to be revoked. The school was run by the Pelican Foundation, which was established in December 2005 and primarily focuses on math, science and technology. Now, they are trying to start a similar smear campaign against Kenilworth Science and Technology School, which also operates under the Pelican Foundation.

Now, I think it is necessary to clarify here that even though these schools are often called Gülen schools, in fact they are quite different. As a reporter, I interviewed some of the founders of these schools and they claim that they have no affiliation with the Gülen movement, which has devoted itself to global peace and education in all over the world. Is it bad to be affiliated with the Gülen Movement? Most definitely not, but even though some of the founders of these schools migrated from Turkey and were inspired by the teachings of Mr. Gülen, they are American citizens and it’s their constitutional right to choose to identify themselves however they want.

Mainstream American media, interestingly, remains silent about CAP’s research.

* Aydoğan Vatandaş is an investigative reporter based in New York and holds an MA in media studies.

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

Source | By Eli Clifton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Made in the USA Islamophobia

Source | By Ismail Salami

Dubbed as Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, the report sheds light on the collective efforts of the Zionist groups funded by the United States in pedaling a hatred for and a fear of Islam in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points. According to the report, these wealthy donors and foundations also provide direct funding to anti-Islam grassroots groups.

The project of Islamophobia which has cost more than $40 million over the past ten years has been funded by seven foundations in the United States: 1. Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation; 2. Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; 3. Newton and Rochelle Becker; 4. Foundation and Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust; 5. Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald; 6. Family Fund; 7. Fairbrook Foundation.

According to the report, there are five misinformation experts who have contributed to the spread of Islamophobia in spearheading this project through the effective vehicle of media partners and grassroots organizing. These notorious people include 1. Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy; 2. David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence; 3. Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum; 4. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America and 5. Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The league of the despicable hate-mongers

These experts travel far and wide and inculcate the idea that most of the mosques in the United States harbor terrorists and sympathizers.

One of the major figures active in disseminating anti-Islamic sentiments in the United States is Walid Shoebat. A purported Palestinian Liberation Organization member, he claims he once bombed an Israeli site and spent some time in Israeli prisons. A Christian convert, Shoebat was born of an American mother and a Palestinian father and seems to be nothing more than a blatant liar and traitor to the Muslim community. Financially supported by anti-Islamic groups, he believes that “terrorism and Islam are inseparable” and that “All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them.”

Daniel Pipes is another notorious Muslim hater who spares no effort in tarnishing the image of Islam in America. During his career, Pipes has displayed “a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims…he professes respect for Muslims but is frequently contemptuous of them” (The Washington Post).

Apart from his strong hatred for Islam, he also shows racial disrespect for Muslim immigrants who “wish to import the customs of the Middle East and South Asia” (Los Angeles Times). In 1990, he stated, “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most” (National Review).

A barefaced liar and traducer, he vehemently extends his hatred to the person of the Holy Prophet of Islam and refutes the notion of the Night Journey, and the Holy Qur’an, and casts doubt even on the existence of the Holy Prophet of Islam.

To the gang of the haters also belongs Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eleven monographs and well over three hundred articles on jihad and ‘Islamic terrorism’. While expressing intense animosity and hatred for Islam, he finds himself incapable of testifying to the many attractive qualities of Islam.

Asked once why so many people embrace Islam, he admitted against his will that “there are many attractive elements of the religion.” He even admitted that the amorality in the western world is one of the reasons why many embrace the glorious faith. It is interesting to note that he has been widely acclaimed by his cronies. Daniel Pipes calls him ‘A top American analyst of Islam’. Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy describes him as ‘a national treasure…The acclaimed scholar of Islam.’

David Yerushalmi, the founder of the think tank the Society of Americans for National Existence, is another influential Islamophobe. Without proper training in Islamic law, he claims to be an expert in the field. Yerushalmi introduces Islam as an inherent threat to the West because of its doctrinal goal of world rule via ‘a caliphate that will impose Sharia law on all its subjects’ (Forward.com). To this accusation, Mark Cohen, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University replied that historically, even in the areas where Muslims ruled, they did not seek to impose Sharia law on non-Muslims.

“Jews and Christians were granted communal autonomy, including the right to live according to their respective legal systems and to adjudicate in their own courts of law,” he said

One of David Yerushalmi’s famous quotes is, “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization…the Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.” To sum up, he is a hate-mongering figure who has been described as ‘anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black.’

Also behind Islamophobia in the US is Frank Gaffney, the director of the hardline neoconservative Center for Security Policy (CSP), who advocates for controversial weapons programs and an expansive “war on terror” targeting “Islamofascists” (a term Gaffney frequently uses in reference to the Muslims). His bizarre ideas about Islam and the Muslims have placed him among the leading Islamophobes in the United States.

As Richard Allen Smith says, “Whenever there is an issue of bigotry directed at Muslims in America, it’s a safe bet that you can find Frank Gaffney behind it.” Last year’s opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque was actually organized by Frank Gaffney. With a mind contaminated by western teachings against Islam, Gaffney has memorized some verses from the Holy Quran and recites and interprets them in the flickering light of his crooked perceptions of the Holy Book.

Last but not least is smearcaster and defamer Steven Emerson, one of the leading Islamophobes who serves as the Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism. His specialty lies in linking any terrorist attacks to the Muslims in the US. This expertise can well serve the interests of the western media who seek to lay any blame on the Muslims in case of a terrorist attack.

He erroneously blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Muslims. Speaking on CBS Evening News, he said, “This was done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait… it was a bomb that brought down TWA Flight 800.” This clearly indicates a mind set at analyzing events and putting the blame on the Muslim society.

It is evident that these bloggers and think tanks work closely together and make concerted endeavors to promote their anti-Islamic campaign. Their outlandish ideas have unfortunately influenced some in the United States and in Europe as well. Just some time ago, the tragedy that took Norway by surprise and made Western media jump to the conclusion that the terrorist act was the work of the Muslims is a product of this flow of misinformation in the West.

Anders Behring Breivik who was responsible for the killing of 62 people was a byproduct of this macabre mis-teaching penetrating the European community as well. Breivik’s 1,467-page document containing gruesome details of his terrorist act reveals that he was inspired by the network of Islamophobia in the United States as well as his links with the extremist neo-Nazi British EDL who share similar ideas concerning Islam.

Islamophobia practically started with 9/11. Although the main motive and the real identity of those responsible for the attacks have remained a secret since then, the US government has from the outset shifted the blame on the Muslim extremists. This provided a plentiful excuse for the US government to mount wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext of combating terrorism. The wars have incurred inconceivable human loss, and irretrievable destruction of infrastructures in the two countries. Besides, the US government has suffered billions of dollars in the military adventures it has pursued in the region. This crooked policy of the US government has augmented an anti-Islamic sentiment in the US and in the West. To crown it all, the US has been effectively conducive to the emergence of Islamophobia by funneling millions of dollars to Zionist groups and organizations in the US, thereby entangling it in the web it has woven. The US is now stuck in an economic and military quagmire which can eventually terminate in the collapse of the Empire.

The massive conspiracy project to defame Islam and all Muslims is but another source of shame for and another black stain on the history of US policies.

Ismail Salami is the author of dozens of books and articles. Many of his articles have been translated into more than ten languages.

IS/HGH

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to read the full report.

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

Source | By Eli Clifton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch them choke on their own vomit.

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

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

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

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

Robert Spencer Admits “Islam Makes” Most Muslims “Very Moral”

Source: Loonwatch.com

It wasn’t long ago that Robert Spencer, a leader in the anti-Muslim movement, was arguing that “the only good Muslim was a bad Muslim.” Now he has suddenly “reversed” his position on Islam during a recent interview with Fox News’ Alan Colmes. Colmes did a pretty good job challenging Spencer on the holes in his anti-Muslim ideology: his double standards vis-à-vis Islam and Christianity, his downplaying the peaceful teachings of the Quran, his support for Pam Geller’s extremist and “meaningless” rhetoric, etc. Spencer spent most of his time on defense, often interrupting Colmes just when he was making a solid point.

Colmes could have done a better job refuting the point Spencer tried to make with the case of would-be terrorist Faisal Shazad. Spencer claimed that Shazad wholly and independently justified his actions by Islam when, in fact, he justified his deeds citing American foreign policy. This is what he really said:

“I want to plead guilty 100 times because unless the United States pulls out of Afghanistan and Iraq, until they stop drone strikes in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen and stop attacking Muslim lands, we will attack the United States and be out to get them.”

Shahzad cited the numerous civilian deaths as primary justification for perpetrating retaliatory terrorism, along with vague platitudes about the Quran, justice, and the afterlife; very little to do with normative Islamic teachings and mostly to do with drone strikes and civilian “collateral damage,” as Danios pointed out. Tellingly, Shahzad plainly violated mainstream Islamic teachings about fulfilling pledges and being a good neighbor. The judge rightly told him, “I do hope you spend time in prison thinking about whether the Koran gives you the right to kill innocent people.”

If this is the example Spencer wants to cite, then that’s a debate that I am happy to have. As in this case, Spencer’s own examples often turn out to be proofs against him. The raw data is simply on the side of those people, Muslim and non-Muslim, who wish to live together in a peaceful democratic society. Perhaps Colmes can be forgiven for not pressing him on this point (after all, he does work for Fox News). But it was this exchange at the end of the interview that was truly magical:

Robert Spencer Finally Admits Islam Makes Muslims Good People:

Colmes: Robert, excuse me, is there anything positive about Islam you could say?

Spencer: Islam makes a lot of people be very moral and upright and live fine lives.

Colmes: That’s good right? And wouldn’t that be true of most Muslims?

Spencer: I would certainly say so, yeah, I never have denied it.

At some point, Spencer must have had a “change of heart” and decided all his years of attacking Muslims as a whole, the Prophet, and the Quran wasn’t really fair. More likely, however, is that when pressed in public on his anti-Muslim ideology, Spencer retreats to the “political correctness” he regularly derides in liberals, lest the viewers think he is nothing but a hard-nosed bigot. Because I remember specifically when Spencer denied the fact that most American Muslims are normal, ethical people:

“I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.”

And again, who can tell the difference between peaceful Muslims and terrorists? Spencer observes:

“I have maintained from the beginning of this site and before that that there is no reliable way to distinguish a “moderate” Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a “radical” Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn’t acting upon them at the moment. And the cluelessness and multiculturalism of Western officialdom, which make officials shy away from even asking pointed questions, only compound this problem.”

Spencer had written on numerous occasions and maintained from the beginning that there is no practical difference between the average American Muslim on the street and an indoctrinated, foreign, psychotic jihadist. Did he really forget he said all that? Because Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway shooter, didn’t forget when he justified killing liberal race traitors, echoing Spencer’s talking points about multiculturalism and Islam:

“Tell me one country where Muslims have lived peacefully with non-Muslims without the Jihad

…How many thousands of new Europeans must die, how many one hundred thousand European women should be raped, millions robbed and tractor discarded before you understand that multiculturalism + Islam does not work?”

And again the killer repeats Spencer’s belief in the alleged absence of moderate Muslims:

“And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called “moderate Muslims”. There is moderate Nazis, too, that does not support fumigation of rooms and Jews. But they’re still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservatives Nazis strike (if it ever happens). If we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the fumigation of rooms and Jews?…. For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and Marxists are conservative, most are moderate. But does it matter? A moderate Nazi might, after having experienced fraud, choose to be conservative. A moderate Muslim can, after being refused to enter a club, be conservative, etc.”

And where in the world could he have gotten the idea that Muslims and Nazis are the same?

Is Spencer willing to acknowledge the plethora of errors in his long track record of extremist hate speech, or are his comments to Colmes yet another implementation of Islamic taqiyya on his part? Taking a lesson out of the jihadist playbook, are you Robert? Judging by your latest round of hateful vitriolic spew, in which you railed against the “propaganda line” that “Islam is a religion of peace,” it seems like you are.

Robert Spencer’s Co-religionist had Sex with Boys to Cure their Homosexuality, What if He was Muslim?

Source

Most of us in America learned something about prejudice and stereotypes in school. We know it’s wrong to misrepresent whole groups of people by highlighting only the worst behavior amongst them. Anyone can easily “prove” their religion, ideology, or culture is the most supreme by cherry-picking the worst examples of their opponents and “comparing” it to their highest ideals. Stereotyping, quite frankly, is cheating in the discipline of comparative religion/ideology/culture. But for Robert Spencer, stereotyping isn’t a social evil to be resisted. It’s a career.

Well, let’s turn the tables on him. A former youth pastor in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says he had sex with teenage boys because it was his pastoral duty “to help (the teen) with homosexual urges by praying while he had sexual contact with him.”

Earlier this month, Brent Girouex, 31, was arrested on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist, reported The Daily Nonpareil…

Court documents indicated Girouex told investigators the most sexual contact he had was with one teen over a four-year period, starting when the boy was 14 years old. Calling the contact “mutual,” he said it had occurred between “25 and 50 times” during that period…

“When they would ejaculate, they would be getting rid of the evil thoughts in their mind,” Girouex allegedly told detectives.

Truly a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and horribly disturbing account of a Christian leader exploiting his position of authority and trust to sexually gratify himself at the expense of innocent minors. This is certainly not the first time a priest or minister has abused children. If we were running an anti-Christian hate site (similar to Spencer’s anti-Muslim hate site), this incident would make a fine addition to our police blotter propaganda. We could make a strong case for the weak-minded that Christianity is a sex-with-boys religion. After all, Mr. Girouex appealed to Christian theology and scriptures to justify his misdeeds. This sort of thing happens all the time! What more evidence do you need? Case closed.

Or is it? We’re not running an anti-Christian hate site. We know the vast majority of Christians reject this kind of behavior. Neither does Mr. Girouex’s action agree with the spirit of Christianity. It’s common sense. Rather, we promote the American values of tolerance and pluralism. We have stated this repeatedly. Yet, if you’re Robert Spencer, whatever a Muslim does wrong, no matter how aberrant or outside the mainstream, it must have happened because of Islam and no other reason, even if the perpetrator is mentally ill.

So here’s my question, Mr. Spencer. Is it fair to label Christianity a religion of sexual perversion? Is it fair to blame Christian theology and texts for these crimes? Should we hold senate hearings to protect little boys from their Churches? Shouldn’t we stop being “politically correct”? Aren’t all Christians collectively guilty for not speaking out enough? Aren’t we justified if we gather together to shout obscenities outside the local church of the raping-boys religion?

Of course, Spencer won’t accept that any of these suggestions are fair, but when it comes to Islam there is a different standard. And this, as we learned in grade school, is the essence of stereotyping. Not only does Spencer consistently violate the Golden Rule (“do unto others what you would have done unto yourself”), in which he claims to believe, but also, as Senator Durbin recently said, his hateful rhetoric violates “the spirit of our Bill of Rights.”

Your Islamophobic House of Cards is falling, Bob. Keep working on that résumé.

Anti-terrorism training draws scrutiny

By Shaun Waterman | The Washington Times

Anti-Islam stereotypes, political correctness are rival fears

Two senators have launched an inquiry into federally funded counterterrorism training for state and local police, saying they are concerned some of the instruction includes inflammatory and inaccurate anti-Muslim stereotyping. But the move has ignited fears that political correctness might undermine the training.

“We are concerned … that state and local law enforcement agencies are being trained by individuals who not only do not understand the ideology of violent Islamist extremism, but also cast aspersions on a wide swath of ordinary Americans merely because of their religious affiliation,” wrote Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Susan M. Collins, Maine Republican, in a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano.

The two senators, who work closely together as the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked for details of the two departments’ grant funding for counterterrorism training and for information about any standards or guidelines that training had to meet to qualify for federal money — including instructors’ qualifications.

The senators said staff inquiries had uncovered evidence that “improper training may not be limited to mere isolated occurrences.”

Since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, billions of federal dollars have been poured into grant programs for state and local police and other first responders, with much of that spent on counterterrorism training. But there are few standards for such courses, and the senators fret that some trainers may be unqualified and some training counterproductive.

The senators cited recent news reports of “self-appointed counterterrorism training experts as engaging in vitriolic diatribes and making assertions such as “Islam is a highly violent, radical religion.”

“But Islam demonstrably is a violent religion,” said Robert Spencer, an author and blogger whose writings on Islam have proved controversial. “Not every Muslim is violent, but the religion teaches and encourages violence against non-Muslims.”

Mr. Spencer says he has taken part in counterterrorism training for U.S. military and intelligence agencies and the FBI, but not state and local police. He told The Washington Times he was concerned the senators’ inquiry could lead to “politically correct guidelines to stop people teaching the truth about Islam, especially from the Obama administration.”

Mr. Spencer, who has a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has studied Islam for three decades and written 10 books on the faith.

Walid Phares, another counterterrorism consultant who has helped train state and local police forces, told The Times that organized Islamic extremists were “trying to confuse the public by mixing criticism of unprofessional training with criticism of the best strategic analysis available in the United States.”

He said he supported the senators’ work.

At the root of many of the disagreements about the content of the training courses are differences about the nature of Islam and its relationship to extremist terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

Many see political Islam — a vision of the religion as not just a personal faith, but a blueprint for society and its laws — as the real enemy in the war against terrorism and as a toxic influence on the American body politic.

But the Obama administration, like its predecessor, says Islam is a religion of peace and generally urges officials not to describe al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic, but simply as violent extremists.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement released Tuesday evening, said the agency understands the senators’ concerns.

All DHS grant recipients providing training to state and local law enforcement partners “are expected to reflect the same professionalism and courtesy that is expected of all DHS and DHS component personnel,” according to the statement.

Spencer’s Radicalized Mosque Claim Gets Debunked

LoonWatch

Robert Spencer is still trying to peddle the myth that 80% of American mosques are radicalized. In a heated post on JihadWatch on March 19, Spencer said the following in reply to Reza Aslan’s claim that all of the studies Spencer cited to support the claim that 80% of American mosques are radicalized have been debunked:

In any case, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani’s 1998 study was not based on his personal opinion, as Aslan claims. Kabbani actually visited 114 mosques in this country before giving testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999 that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.” Has Reza Aslan investigated 114 mosques in the U.S.? Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.

Let’s break this down one by one. Kabbani said in 1999 that extremists “took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US.” How did he come up with this number? He didn’t say in his testimony. After the testimony Kabbani began to feel heat from many who were curious as to how he arrived at this “figure” and that is when he finally decided to offer up some “evidence” for his claim.

An under-fire Kabbani explained in 1999 exactly what he meant when he told the State Department that 80 percent of American mosques had been taken over by extremists. His point, he said, was that a “few extremists” were taking over leadership posts, despite a “majority of moderate Muslims,” thus “influencing 80 percent of the mosques.”
Today, he sticks even closer to his guns and adds embellishing data: Kabbani visited 114 mosques in the United States. “Ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology,” he said.

Kabbani bases his exposure conclusion on speeches, board members and materials published. One telltale sign of an extremist mosque, said Kabbani, was an unhealthy focus on the Palestinian struggle.

Alright – let’s be real here. This is not a “study” as Spencer claims. It’s an insult to actual studies out there to call what Kabbani did a “study,” it doesn’t even reach the basic standard of research, documentation or analysis. He conducted a subjective investigation of American mosques, plain and simple. Mosques he went to and where he found or heard things he didn’t agree with were labeled “extremist.” Just because there was a “focus on the Palestinian struggle” at a mosque doesn’t mean it’s “extremist.” What type of absurd methodology is that? It’s remarkable that Spencer would try to pass this off as a “study.” I know, it’s hard to prove that Muslims in America are bloodthirsty jihadists, but even Spencer should be ashamed of himself for trying to pass off Kabbani’s flawed investigation as a “study” to bolster his claim that 80% of mosques are run by extremists.
The next study that Spencer claims proves that 80% of American mosques are radicalized is from the Center for Religious Freedom. What is the methodology and scope of this study?

In undertaking this study, we did not attempt a general survey of American mosques.  In order to document Saudi influence, the material for this report was gathered from a selection of more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in American cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, and New York. In most cases, these sources are the most prominent and well-established mosques in their areas. They have libraries and publication racks for mosque-goers. Some have full-or part-time schools and, as the 9/11 Commission Report observed, such “Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools.”

From their own words, the Center for Religious Freedom says that it “did not attempt a general survey of American mosques.” The study itself was designed “to document Saudi influence.” They went to fifteen mosques to complete this “study.” Fifteen mosques! According to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, there are at least 1,600 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States. This, too, is not much of a study,
Further eroding Spencer’s point, this study does not even claim that 80% or even a high percentage of American mosques are radicalized in any way. Let me repeat that – the study makes NO claim that 80% or some other percent of American mosques are radicalized. It simply does not say what Spencer claims it says. Spencer is making it up. He is lying. But LoonWatchers shouldn’t be surprised by that.
Spencer’s deception and lack of intellectual integrity in this instance is blatant, he not only cites the Center’s “study” as proof of the 80%-percent-of-mosques-are-extremists-conspiracy-theory, but he also fails to mention that the only semblance of what he claims in the study is a regurgitation of Kabbani’s (false and discredited) assertion,

Sheikh Kabbani, perhaps the U.S.’s leading moderate Muslim leader, says that a substantial percentage of American mosques have Wahhabi-funded Imams

Isn’t this interesting? What sort of credible “study” perfunctorily sites the non-evidentiary based assertions of a lone individual without questioning his methodology? The language in the above sentence is also cause for alarm, anytime a claim such as “the U.S.’s leading moderate Muslim leader” is made we should view it not only with caution but skepticism. This sort of heavily biased and subjective language is employed now by Right-Wingers and Republicans to describe “Zuhdi Jasser” the Islamophobes favorite Muslim.
Spencer’s last piece of evidence to back up his bogus claim comes from the Mapping Sharia Project led by the loony racist anti-Muslim lawyer David Yerushalmi, David Gaubatz and conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney. The only thing I could find on this “study” was a Jihad Watch link reporting the findings of the Mapping Sharia Project. The Jihad Watch article reports that “An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism…”

Spencer relying on “undercover survey’s” by radical Islamophobes with pseudo-racist beliefs? Just par for the course.
Firstly, there is no web page allowing us access to examine the methodology employed by this study. When I went to the link to the Mapping Sharia Project, I was taken to the web site for David Yerushalmi’s organization, SANE (Society for American National Existence). To gain access, I had to become a member. I did not want to join this loony web site’s membership list, as I am spammed enough as it is. So Spencer’s third study does not even exist, at least out in the public. Even the link he places for the Mapping Sharia Project just takes you to another JihadWatch web page reporting the findings of the study. Guess we’ll just have to take Yerushalmi, Gaubatz, Gaffney and Spencer’s word for it that 80%… err, three out of four American mosques are radicalized.
Actually, we won’t. Spencer tried his best it seems to pass off these “studies” as evidence to support Rep. Peter King’s claim that 80% of American mosques are radicalized. None of these “studies” does that.
Kabbani’s “study” is based simply on his own opinions of the mosques and their leadership, not any objective metric gauging radicalism. If he did not agree with the viewpoints of the mosque, then he deemed them radical. That’s not a study. Spencer, someone who went to graduate school, should know better than that.

The Center for Religious Freedom study says itself that it “did not attempt a general survey of American mosques.” So how does Spencer cite this study as evidence that 80% of American mosques are radicalized? Because he’s not interested in the truth – he just needs something to cite to so he can bamboozle those who won’t actually check his sources. Sorry, Robert, but we did. And this so-called “study” does not even say what you claim it does.
The final piece of evidence Spencer clings to is the Mapping Sharia Project’s “study,” which apparently does not exist in the public domain. But considering its authors – David Yerushalmi, David Gaubatz and Frank Gaffney – I would venture to say that this “study” will not only not be very academic but thoroughly bigoted and prejudiced. Just consider some of the proposals Yerushalmi and his friends at (in)SANE have come up with:

WHEREAS Islam requires all Muslims to actively and passively support the replacement of America’s constitutional republic with a political system based upon Shari’a.
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.
HEREFORE, IT IS RESOLVED THAT: It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Shari’a.
The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation.

If these “studies” and individuals are the evidence that Spencer claims back up the myth that 80% of American mosques are radicalized, then Spencer has no evidence. For a great source on the history of this myth, see Media Matters’ Zombie Lie: Right Still Clinging To Decade-Old Fabrication About Radicalized Mosques.

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.

Islamophobia Inc.

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

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

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

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

And Emerson isn’t alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IF LEFT unchallenged, Islamophobia has real consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mmm, mmm, Islamophobia?

Source

THE INCREASINGLY paranoid antics of racist right-wingers claiming Muslims are getting ready to take over America and institute sharia law are, sadly, not uncommon this election season.

But now they’ve hit a new low: attacking companies that make or sell Halal products, the term for food products that conform to Muslim dietary laws, including guidelines for slaughtering and prohibiting pork. (Halal dietary laws share many features with Kosher dietary laws.)

Right-wing Islamophobes are now up in arms over the fact that Campbell’s Canada–the soup company–has a line of Halal-certified vegetarian soups.

Pamela Geller–a leader in the fight against the Islamic community center slated for near Ground Zero, and an open admirer of Dutch fascist Geert Wilders and right-wing street thugs such as the English Defense League–is now calling for a boycott of the company.

According to Talking Points Memo’s Rachel Slajda, the bigots apparently think sharia law is coming to get us via the supermarket:

“M-m-good for the Islamists. Not so yummy for the rest of us,” reads the blog of Scaramouche, which broke the news Tuesday, some eight months after Campbell’s launched the line.

Robert Spencer, who writes Jihadwatch.org and has been saying for years that ISNA is tied to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,* quickly echoed the alarm.

“So why is Campbell’s Soup rushing to do its bidding?” Spencer wrote on Tuesday. “‘M-M-Muslim Brotherhood Good?'”…

The Tea Party Nation is on board, too, tweeting today,” Campbell’s now making Muslim approved soups. Mmmmm Mmmmm not good. No more campbells for me.”

A Facebook group created just Tuesday called “Boycott Campbell Soup” already has almost 2,000 members. Members who leave messages like [sic]: “This is yet another example of just how dangerous creeping shariah is to Western Civilization, Democracy and all freedom loving peoples. There are stages to the islamization of non-islamic countries…This is just another way that terrorism and it’s sponsors are insinuating themselves into our culture, Terrorists are NOT freedom fighters they are murderous thugs and I will not pay money for soup or any other product that supports, aids or abetts their tactics. Hope someone puts a list out of all of Campbell’s affiliates.”

The blog Creeping Sharia notes that Kellogg UK has Halal-certified cereals and asks, “Are their U.S. products secretly Halal?”