Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.
The initiative, which coincides [...]]]>
Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.
The initiative, which coincides with the appearance in subway stations in New York City and Washington of pro-Israel ads equating the Jewish state with “civilised man” and “Jihad” with “savages”, is designed to rebut the notion that Muslims pose a threat to U.S. values and way of life.
“Nothing gives weight to bigotry more than ignorance,” said Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who is president of the Interfaith Alliance, a grassroots organisation of leaders representing 75 faith traditions. “The FAQ enables people to be spared of an agenda-driven fear and to be done with a negative movement born of misinformation…”
Gaddy was joined by Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Project of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center which co-sponsored the new 13-page pamphlet, entitled “What is the Truth About American Muslims?”
“In my view,” Haynes said in reference to the so-called “Stop Islamisation of America” (SIOA) movement that, among other things, has sponsored the subway ads, “this campaign to spread hate and fear is the most significant threat to religious freedom in America today.”
“Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the anti-Muslim narrative has migrated from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream political arena – and is now parroted by a growing number of political and religious leaders,” he said.
Indeed, public opinion polls have shown a gradual rise in Islamophobia here over the past 11 years, most recently in the wake of last month’s anti-U.S. demonstrations across the Islamic world that were triggered by a vulgar internet video mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The video, supposedly a trailer for a longer movie, was reportedly produced by a California-based, Egyptian-born Copt, although the source of its funding remains unclear.
While a majority (53 percent) of U.S. respondents say they believe that it is possible to find “common ground” between Muslims and the West, that majority has shrunk since 9/11, according to a poll released earlier this week by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Only one year ago, it stood at 59 percent, and in November 2001 – just two months after 9/11 – it was 68 percent.
Conversely, the minority that agreed with the notion that “Islamic religious and social traditions are intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture” rose from 26 percent in 2001, to 37 percent last year, and 42 percent when the latest PIPA poll was conducted two weeks ago.
In another poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year which asked respondents “how much support for extremism is there among Muslim Americans”, 40 percent said there was either a “great deal” or a “fair amount”, while only a narrow plurality (45 percent) disagreed.
In addition to the violent images of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Islamic world that have been beamed onto U.S. television screens and home computers since 9/11, popular beliefs that Muslims are inherently more hostile and dangerous have been propagated by a small network of funders, bloggers, pundits and groups documented in a 2011 report, entitled “Fear, Inc.,” by the Center for American Progress (CAP).
It identified seven foundations – most of them associated with the far-right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel – that provided more than 42 million dollars between 2001 and 2009 to key individuals and organisations who have spread an Islamophobic message through, among other means, videos, newspaper op-eds, radio and television talk shows, paid ads, and local demonstrations against mosques.
Among the most prominent recipients have been the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Society of Americans for National Existence, as well as SIOA, the group, which, along with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is sponsoring the current subway ad campaign.
“Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran,” according to the CAP report.
It noted that their message was also echoed by leaders of the Christian Right and some Republican politicians, including several who ran for president this year, such as former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.
Leaders of many mainstream Jewish and Christian denominations have denounced specific aspects of the network’s initiatives, such as its efforts to derail the construction of a Muslim community center near the so-called “Ground Zero” site where Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11; distribute Islamophobic videos, such as ‘Obsession’; and to lobby state legislatures to ban the application of “Sharia”, or Islamic law, in their jurisdictions.
The new pamphlet, however, marks the first effort by faith groups and religious freedom advocates to directly rebut common misconceptions and claims made against Muslims and their theology by, among other things, explaining the meaning of “jihad”, and the sources, practice, and aims of Sharia.
“In a time when misinformation about and misunderstandings of Islam and of the American Muslim community are widespread, our goal is to provide the public with accurate answers to understandable questions,” said Gaddy, who noted that the authors consulted closely with well-recognised Muslim scholars in drafting the document.
Twenty-one religious and secular organisations, including the Disciples of Christ, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and Rabbis for Human Rights-North America endorsed the pamphlet, as did several major Muslim and Sikh organisations.
Six people were killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last summer by an individual who had mistakenly believed he was attacking Muslims.
Haynes stressed that the response to the Islamophobia campaign was late. “We have left the field to the people who demonised Muslims, and they have won the day,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up on this nonsense.”
In bold black-and-white lettering, the subway ad that first appeared in New York last month and then in Washington this week states: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
A coalition of 157 local religious groups have formally objected to the transit authority over the ad, and demanded that it issue disclaimers alongside the ads as the San Francisco transit authority did when the same groups took out ads on buses this summer.
A number of religious groups, including Sojourners, an evangelical group, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the United Methodist Church are running counter-ads in New York and Washington.
]]>Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma [...]]]>
Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin may be tied to an allegedly large-scale Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government. (Abedin is otherwise known as the wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner.) Perhaps the funniest take comes from Juan Cole, who uses Bachmann’s own haphazard guilt-by-association methods to prove that she herself is a Brotherhood agent.
While the sheer nuttiness of Bachmann’s accusations has understandably prevented commentators from taking them seriously, we should at least recognize that they spring from a broader nexus of conspiratorial thinking about Muslims that has far wider currency on the right. As I’ve written elsewhere, there has been a mini-boomlet of these conspiracy theories since President Obama’s election, fueled by a set of common tropes: the omnipresence of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration among American Muslims, the “creeping” spread of sharia law through the American judicial system, and the aiding and abetting of these currents by the ambiguously-Muslim Obama himself.
Bachmann and her congressional allies were clearly working from this playbook. Allegations against Huma Abedin herself are not new; only last year, well-connected neoconservative political operative Eliana Benador suggested that Weiner may have secretly converted to Islam upon marrying her. (Benador justified this strange theory with reference to another trope of the literature — the alleged pervasive reliance of Muslims on taqiyya, i.e. religiously-sanctioned deception.)
Allegations of crypto-Muslim identity are also far from unique to Weiner; Center for Security Policy (CSP) chief Frank Gaffney, for instance, took to the Washington Times soon after Obama’s Cairo speech to suggest that “the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” Gaffney, not coincidently, was the main source for Bachmann’s original letter against Abedin — although, as Alex Seitz-Wald notes, he was dropped from Bachmann’s latest defense of her position. Yet Bachmann has a long history of relying on Gaffney’s half-baked theories; she and Rep. Trent Franks (another signatory of the Abedin letter) were two sponsors of the 2010 CSP report “Sharia: The Threat to America,” which advocated harsh McCarthyite prescriptions against Muslims to counter the alleged spread of sharia in America. (Still another signatory of the Abedin letter was Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, perhaps best known for 2008 comments in which he disparaged Barack and Michelle Obama as “uppity.”)
The mastermind of the broader anti-sharia movement is a Gaffney staffer, CSP counsel David Yerushalmi, who — prior to cloaking his intentions in rhetoric about sharia — advocated making “adherence to Islam,” in any form, “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.” Yerushalmi himself has recently published in support of anti-sharia legislation in National Review, the conservative flagship, at the invitation of Andy McCarthy, yet another Bachmann favorite, whose book The Grand Jihad is perhaps the leading text claiming an Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy against America. And so on.
All this is merely to say that if John McCain is sincerely concerned about Bachmann’s latest fulminations, he should recognize that they have much deeper roots than he might like to admit. This kind of zany Islamophobia has taken hold of a large portion of the right, and getting rid of it will require more than a few ad hoc interventions.
]]>embarrass the very name of “religious liberty” and endanger our national security. Anti-Muslim bigots and their public apologists must be vigorously opposed by Americans who recognize the value of a religious voice in the public square and the imperative that all Americans be treated equally under the law, whether they are religious or irreligious, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
What made Schmitz’s article rather awkward was the fact that many of these sharia alarmists — Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy, and Daniel Pipes, to name only three — are among the most prominent writers for National Review. Predictably, anti-Islam activist Andrew Bostom took to the NRO‘s blog to denounce Schmitz as “willfully uninformed,” although his intervention consisted of a set of standard-issue talking points giving no indication that Bostom had even read the original piece. (As Schmitz noted in his reply, Bostom didn’t seem to notice that some of his talking points had already been rebutted in the piece.) This led Bostom to issue a second, more ill-tempered response in which he accused Schmitz of trafficking in “shallow, non-sequitur argumentation” and being “well marinated in cultural relativism.”
In the meantime, other NRO writers had gotten in on the fracas, with David French — a hawkish Christian Zionist lawyer and leader of the group Evangelicals for Mitt — providing a rambling defense of Bostom, while Ramesh Ponnuru — among the smartest and most prominent conservative pundits — attacked French and defended Schmitz’s original piece.
Why is any of this important? Simply because the controversy provides a hopeful (albeit highly tentative) indication that some on the religious right — and particularly the Catholic right — may be starting to stand up to the Islamophobic hysteria that has taken over much of the conservative movement. Perhaps uncoincidentally, both Schmitz and Ponnuru are Catholic, as is Robert George, the right-wing academic and movement power broker who has similarly called on Christians to “defend religious liberty for Muslims”. Prior to Schmitz’s article, his magazine First Things — which has no formal religious affiliation but has always been primarily Catholic in orientation — recently published another attack on anti-sharia laws by Robert Vischer.
Of course, it is nothing new to see religious Catholics, or the Church itself, take positions far to the left of the American conservative movement on foreign policy or economic issues. But the First Things crowd is notable in that it has always skewed to the right of most American Catholics and cultivated close ties with the conservative movement. Richard John Neuhaus, the magazine’s late founder, went from a left-wing opponent of the Vietnam War and campaigner for civil rights early in his career to a right-wing supporter of the Iraq War and proponent of a “clash of civilizations” between Christendom and Islam by the end of his life. Similarly, Robert George has all but urged fellow Catholics to abandon their (often-left-leaning) views on war or social justice and focus exclusively on issues related to abortion and sexual mores. (Rick Santorum is perhaps the classic example of this combination of conservative Catholic social mores and ultra-hawkish neoconservative foreign policy.)
In recent months, this group has raised an enormous outcry over the alleged violation of religious liberty inherent in the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. I confess that I have always been skeptical about whether their primary concern was really for “religious liberty” in general as opposed to Christian values in particular, and whether they would support the same sweeping conscience exemptions for Muslims that they were espousing for Christians. The current pushback against sharia hysteria on the right doesn’t provide a full answer to these questions — but it is at the very least a hopeful sign that the Catholic right might be willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to defending believers of other faiths.
]]>But new evidence suggests that this was precisely the intention of at least some of the authors of the report. Alex Kane at Mondoweiss has more background on David Yerushalmi, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) general counsel who was one of the authors of the report and who was featured at Wednesday’s press conference in the Capitol marking its launch. (Richard Silverstein and Charles Johnson have previously looked into Yerushalmi’s unsavory record.)
What does Yerushalmi believe? Let’s take a closer look.
On Muslims:
– “It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”
–”The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.”
–”The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.”
–”No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.”
(From the website of Yerushalmi’s group, SANE. Yerushalmi has since made all its content password-protected, but these statements are available here.)
On African-Americans:
–”There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”
(Yerushalmi has since tried to scrub the article in which this statement appeared from the public record, but Charles Johnson provides a link to it.)
On Jews:
–”The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society. I will ignore the Leftist version of the Jewish problem… But the Jewish problem for conservatives is a different and quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate.”
–”Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all ‘progressives:’ a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a ‘historical’ march to the World State…”
–”…one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.”
(Once again Yerushalmi has attempted to remove all record of these statements from the Internet, but they have been preserved here.)
It strikes me that Pete Hoekstra et al may have some explaining to do as to why they’ve gotten in bed with this character.
]]>The central problem with the report is that the authors identify “sharia” with the most literalistic and brutal versions of sharia, and therefore fail to understand what the term might actually mean to the bulk of Muslims worldwide. (When Matt Duss asked Gaffney at Wednesday’s press conference to name any Muslims scholars or theologians who had been consulted in the writing of the report, Gaffney was unable to produce any names.) As a result their prescriptions would amount in practice to a criminalization of virtually any form of Islam.
Here are some of their policy recommendations (p. 143 of the report):
“…extend bands currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah.”
“Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.”
“Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.”
“Immigrations of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.”
I am not a scholar of Islam, but any competent one will tell you that sharia is a far broader term than the “Team B” authors seem to think it is – it basically refers to Islamic religious precepts in general, to the point of being virtually synonymous with Islamic religious practice. As a result any practicing Muslim, no matter how moderate or extreme, will consider himself or herself to be “sharia-compliant” according to their own understanding of what sharia requires. This does not, of course, mean that they will endorse the brutal hudud penalties that have become the most notorious symbols of sharia to non-Muslims, that they will seek to impose these precepts on others, or that they will seek to make them the law of the land. But to demand that a practicing Muslim to renounce sharia is tantamount to demanding that they renounce Islam itself.
This is precisely what the report’s recommendations demand, whether or not it’s what the authors intend. Any Muslim who “espouses” or “adheres to” sharia – that is, any practicing Muslim – will thereby be banned from government or military service, prohibited from immigrating to the country, and even opened to prosecution for sedition. The only Muslims immune from this witch-hunt are those “who are willing publicly to denounce shariah” – a surefire recipe for the creation of conversos and crypto-Muslims, but hardly one consistent with the First Amendment.
We might be charitable to the “Team B” authors and argue that they’re simply ignorant: not understanding what sharia actually means, they have identified it with its most extreme manifestations, and therefore wrongly believe that by asking Muslims to renounce sharia they are simply asking them to renounce radical Islam. A less charitable explanation would be that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are seeking to outlaw Islam itself.
]]>Now look, nobody in America would object to the construction of an Islamic center — however the question is: Why here? Why in this spot? This is a spot that was for hours bathed in the ashes of the Twin Towers and the thousands of innocents who died in it.
[...]]]>Now look, nobody in America would object to the construction of an Islamic center — however the question is: Why here? Why in this spot? This is a spot that was for hours bathed in the ashes of the Twin Towers and the thousands of innocents who died in it.
It’s not just any other spot. It’s sacred ground.
As it happens, I was staying with a friend right around the corner from the site of the “Ground Zero Mosque” this past weekend, and I can second Krauthammer on the “sacred” feel of the area. From the Starbucks where young office workers grabbed their morning decaf venti mocha frappucinos to the dive bar where aging frat boys downed Jagerbombs, the whole neighborhood reflected Dan Senor’s injunction that the area “should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims.”
But as I was walking around the neighborhood, resting easy that its residents had resolved Never To Forget That We Were Attacked On 9/11, I suddenly saw something that stopped me short. In their zeal to halt the inexorable march of Islamofascism in Lower Manhattan, I realized that Krauthammer, Senor, and their comrades may have missed the real and more insidious threat that has been lurking in front of our very eyes.
This is the view from Park Place and Church Street, a few steps away from the planned mosque:
Nothing here but 9/11 memorials, right? But not so fast — let’s take a closer look at the block:
I couldn’t help but notice the Indian restaurant on the block. At first, I saw nothing openly alarming, naively believing that the Bengalis were Friendly Brown People rather than Islamofascists. But let’s take a closer look at this supposedly peaceful commercial establishment:
Look carefully at the signs at the upper right of the restaurant’s awning. A vigilant observer will immediately notice that this supposedly innocuous commercial establishment proclaims, not once, but twice, that it serves “halal” food — that is, food in compliance with Islamic Sharia Law. As scholars of Islam such as Andy McCarthy have described, radical Muslims have joined forces with radical leftists such as Barack Obama to spawn “America-hating Islamic enclaves in our very midst, gradually foisting Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life.” It would be no exaggeration to regard this restaurant as a beachhead for the creeping Shariafication of America, mere steps from where We Were Attacked On 9/11 (which We Must Never Forget).
We should also note that the Google Maps photos above record only the stationary Sharia outposts in the neighborhood. They cannot tell us precisely how many Mobile Semi-Armored Jihad Wagons — of the kind pictured below — are operative in the area:
Yet the lack of media attention paid to these terror-promoting Islamist outposts raises troubling questions about the entire Ground Zero Mosque debate. Lovers of the American way have naturally focused their energies on stopping the mosque — but what if the mosque itself is merely a red herring? What if the wily Islamists’ real intention is to distract America’s defenders with the high-profile mosque, while in reality working to foist Sharia on America through subtler — and tastier — means?
]]>A Saudi woman journalist escaped punishment last week but her cameraman wasn’t so lucky.
Rozana Al-Yami, 22, was pardoned by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah after the court sentenced her to 60 lashes for her work at the talk show Red Line in LBC, a Lebanese satellite TV.
[...]]]>
Shall we talk about it?
A Saudi woman journalist escaped punishment last week but her cameraman wasn’t so lucky.
Rozana Al-Yami, 22, was pardoned by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah after the court sentenced her to 60 lashes for her work at the talk show Red Line in LBC, a Lebanese satellite TV.
She made international news. He didn’t. No one mentioned that he has to serve a two-month jail term. His name remains anonymous in press reports.
Some would call this positive discrimination in favour of women but to me iit s a general bias. Women have been striving all over the world for equality, not favoritism.
Of course , Al-Yami doesn’t deserve to be punished. Neither does the cameraman nor anyone involved in the TV show that grabbed the hearts of million of Arab viewers but disturbed the conservative image of Saudi Arabia.
Let’s talk about sex
Sex remains a big taboo but the Arab world is opening up its airwaves to the topic. The LBC’s Red Line wasn’t the only TV show that tackles sex but there are few others. Be surprised: sex topics such as pleasure sex and organism that used to be discussed secretly by women during friendly gatherings are now discussed on air through many regional TV Channels.
One of the most popular talk show is Love Tales, by Dr Fawziya Duree, showing every Saturday on a private Kuwaiti Channel. Dr Duree holds a PHD in sex, culture psychology and believes in the need to discuss sex as an ordinary and important matter in life.
Her program started with a new, fresh approach to discussing marital problems and love relationships.
Sex talk: opening the door to freedom.
After gaining huge popularity, she shifted to more daring topics, such as sex during menstruation (a taboo among Muslims), passionate kissing and the anatomically correct description of genital parts.
In each show Dr Duree boldly discusses bold sex-related topic and receives calls from viewers calling for help in their sex-related conflicts. Although those programmes are opposed by hardliners, they are gaining popularity day by day.
Love Tales can be seen in Saudi Arabia. Let’s spare a compassionate thought for the poor cameraman jailed for something he could do freely in other Arab countries.
Images from the movie Anklet Dancer, Bharain 2008. Courtesy of director Ali Al ALi.
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