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Their paper, "The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy," cited the organizational prowess of pro-Israel groups in marrying the media, think tanks, and numerous politicians into a unified front that muzzles criticism of the Jewish State. However, in the vitriol exchanged by supporters and detractors of the paper, an illuminating section is overlooked. Mearsheimer and Walt, in comparing the existence of the Israeli lobby to the likelihood of the existence of a similar Muslim or Arab grouping, say "pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israeli lobby's task even easier." Although there is no national consensus data on the number of Muslims in the United States, estimates put the figure between six and seven million, equal to the number of Jews in the country. Each religious group accounts for two percent of the US population. While the global population of Jews is some 15 million, there are nearly 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.
If the logic of strength in numbers is applied, why then is there no Muslim lobby to balance the strong influence of other lobby groups? There are multiple answers to this question, often directly mirroring the status quo in Arab and Muslim countries, but chief among them is the lack of a unified socio-political platform. Diverse Muslim Groups Muslims in the United States are primarily derivative of an immigrant community and belong to a number of diverse ethnic groups. From a religious and sectarian point of view, American Muslims comprise Sunni, Shiite, Ismaili, and Ahmadi sects, to name a few. Most sects do not see eye to eye and often do not intermingle. The Ahmadi sect, for example, is considered an apostate group by mainstream Islamic theologians, while other sects have complained of repression in their home nations at the hands of other Muslim sects. As'ad AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus, says Arabs and Muslims in the United States are far from being united and are in a state of disagreement over many issues. "Just as the Turkish lobby acts on behalf of one Turkish government, the Arab or Muslim lobbies can't mirror a single agenda that represents the interests of all Arab or Muslim governments," AbuKhalil says. "Arab and Muslim governments often conspire against one another, and their rivalries, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, were mirrored in the competition and rivalries between Arab and Muslim organizations in the United States," he adds. The deep divisions in the Arab world (along sectarian and ethnic lines) only impair the effectiveness of those groups. "In the case of the Arab and Muslim lobbies, there is a plethora of often competing groups and organizations, which do not seem to adhere to the same agenda," AbuKhalil remarks. AIPAC's Shadow
Mearsheimer and Walt's paper points to the Jewish Americans' skillfulness in setting up an impressive array of influential organizations, of which the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most powerful and best known. AIPAC operates in near unison with several think tanks, such as the Washington Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and others who share a common denominator: pro-Israel policies. They produce monthly reports culled from "experts" in Israel as well as journalists on the ground. These are then used in a unified assault on the US Congress to influence policy to tilt in favor of Israel. Similar media exercises from Muslim groups are minimal to none. Fawaz A. Gerges, who holds the Christian Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence University in New York, and is a senior analyst for ABC Television News, says the Israeli lobby is well-organized, well-endowed, and well-recognized as a powerful influence by friend and foe. "It is taken seriously by the foreign policy establishment," he asserts. On the other hand, "[T]he Muslim community does not possess the political, institutional, and financial prerequisites to make a difference in the American political arena. It takes time, organization, and institutional building to do so." Coining the Term If no effective organization resembling an influential lobby represents Muslim or Arab interests in the United States, where did the term Muslim lobby originate? In researching the above question, the author of this article came across several references to the term specifically in news journals, publications, and blogs with a clear pro-Israel, anti-Muslim slant. In fact, the term Muslim lobby is an artificial construct, with the word lobby being rather misleading. "References to Arab or Muslim lobbies occur only in the Arab and Muslim press, or in the propaganda of pro-Israeli groups," says Abukhalil.
Worldnetdaily.com, a website that has featured commentary by writer Joseph Farah urging the killing of 100 non-combatant Palestinian adults for every slain Israeli, regularly uses the term Islamic or Muslim lobby to refer to advocacy groups trying to combat Islamophobia through education and awareness campaigns. One such advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has been sufficiently targeted by journalists and pro-Israel groups. When CAIR contacted FOX network to raise the issue of negative stereotyping of Muslims on the popular TV thriller "24," journalist Cliff Kincaid accused it of being a "lobby" attempting to intimidate the media. CAIR says its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. It does not lobby senators and congressmen to affect pro-Muslim tilt in US foreign policy. Compare that to AIPAC's mission statement as follows: Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress — at home and in Washington — AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid critical to Israel's security, to funding joint US-Israeli efforts to build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel. Consequently, labeling CAIR and other advocacy groups as "lobbies" is an exercise in journalistic inequity and willful disinformation. Yet, both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have been accused by Ami Isseroff, executive secretary of MidEastWeb for Coexistence, of being part of an Arab US lobby. "The Arab and Muslim lobby and the lobbies of Arab and Muslim countries, and the lobby of US oil interests in those countries are together certainly far more powerful than the 'Israel Lobby,'" she recently wrote. Fueling Islamophobia In his book Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington, journalist Paul Sperry uses the term Muslim lobby to refer to an "Islamic terrorist" conspiracy to infiltrate the US leadership and influence policy. Sperry links what he terms Muslim lobby groups, faith-based charities, and a wide network of mosques throughout the United States as a unified subversive front. He stipulates that this grand lobby of Muslim interests is connected to foreign groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood organization, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, and Al-Qaeda. "It's a syndicate, a Muslim mafia, and law enforcement is only starting to get their arms around it. The base of their operations is in Northern Virginia, where I live — right in the shadow of the nation's capital. I call it The Wahhabi Corridor," he said in an interview with Frontpage Magazine in April 2005. Given that the term Muslim lobby is so loosely used by pundits to elicit Islamophobia and wax paranoid of a misconceived and undue influence of Arab and Muslim interests in US policy-making, the term should be abolished from the Arab and Muslim lexicon. Not doing so would cater to a demonization of all Arab- and Muslim-American political participation, a right that is enshrined in the US Constitution. To Build a Lobby While no real unified Arab or Muslim lobbying platform can be considered to be functional in the United States, the need remains for such a group to be formed. In late October 2001, former US ambassador to Egypt and Israel Edward Walker urged Arab governments to set up measures to counter Israel's influence in America's policy-making. "But you, the Arabs, can no longer afford to just ignore Washington. Arab governments and institutions should start considering how to affect public opinion in the US," he told a political discussion forum hosted by the University of Jordan. However, 5 years later, Walker's advice may have fallen on deaf ears. What scant lobbying there is usually depends on the behest of individual Muslim governments. "One can say that there never was a serious attempt to create an Arab or Muslim lobby, and that whatever organizations that exist today under that umbrella of a name have only succeeded in effectively representing the interests of ruling Arab dynasties," AbuKhalil says of Saudi Arabian initiatives to influence US foreign policy regarding the Kingdom. "But those dynasties don't even rely on those loyal groups and organizations when they wish to advance a particular issue: Instead, they hire 'purely' American public relations and lobbying firms in order not to allow the Arab or Muslim stigma to hurt their lobbying efforts." With individual Middle Eastern nations opting to choose public relations firms to represent their interests in Washington, the prospect of a Muslim lobby ever consolidating its efforts in the future remains murky. Gerges says that while an Arab and Muslim lobby in the United States does not exist, Arab and Muslim voices are laboring hard to be heard and recognized. And those are steps in the right direction, say many Arab and Muslim Americans. "It has taken the Israeli lobby half a century to arrive at this historical juncture," Gerges said. "It will likely take the Muslim community as long, if and when the community decides to organize itself politically and institutionally." "The key word is institutional building, which is in its infancy." | |||||
Monday, April 30, 2007
Is There a Muslim Lobby in the US
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Video: James Yee, Islam, Guantanamo and his Ordeal
Chaplain James Yee on Guantanamo
Jump to segments on his becoming a Muslim
and on Guantanamo and his arrest and solitary confinement.
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Charles Jenks, Traprock Peace Center
"There are many female interrogators down at Guantanamo...there are very many who interrogate Muslim male prisoners after stripping all of their cloths off standing naked in front of these men."
Chaplain James Yee, former US Army Muslim Chaplain and Captain at Guantanamo, discusses how he became a Muslim and then goes into detail about psychological and physical at Guantanamo and his own arrest and solitary confinement while a US army chaplain.
He reveals Guantanamo's shocking interrogation technigues (such as sexual taunting from naked female interrogators), physical and psychological abuse, and desecration of the Koran by guards. He also discusses his own arrest, solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, and eventual total exoneration. All charges were dropped again him. He was returned to duty and given a commendation. He resigned his commission and received an honorable discharge.
Mr. Yee spoke on April 14, 2007 at the 3rd Annual Midwest Peace and Justice Summit held on the IUPUI campus in Indianapolis, IN.
Conference sponsors were: IUPUI Student Advocates for Global Equality; Indiana Peace & Justice Network; Plowshares Consortium of Peace Studies Programs; IUPUI Center for Service and Learning; Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center; and IUPUI Office of Campus and Community Life.
On Guantanamo and his arrest/solitary confinement
On his becoming a Muslim
Entire presentation at Google
Video recorded and edited by Charles Jenks; © 2007 Traprock Peace Center; all rights reserved.
Contact: charles@traprockpeace.org
The unsung hero of the Virginia Tech massacre
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Waleed Shaalan
Waleed Shaalan, a 32-year-old graduate student, came to the United States from northern Egypt last year to study engineering. He lived among other Egyptian students in Blacksburg, Va., and was planning on bringing his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old son to America in May to live with him.
He was gunned down on Monday while he was studying in Norris Hall, but witnesses say he died a hero.
According to Randy Dymond, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, Mr. Shaalan was in a classroom with another student when the gunman entered and opened fire.
Mr. Shaalan was badly wounded and lay beside the other student, who was not shot but played dead, as the gunman returned two times searching for signs of life. Just as the gunman noticed the student, Mr. Shaalan made a move to distract him, at which point he was shot a second time and died. The student believed that Mr. Shaalan purposefully distracted the shooter to save him, Mr. Dymond said.
"Waleed was bright, energetic and caring," Mr. Dymond said. "The reason we are in higher education is because there are students who are the bright light to the future. Waleed was one of them."
Equally social and studious, Mr. Shaalan was active in the Muslim Student Association at Virginia Tech, and he especially enjoyed participating in the group's community activities.
The Egyptian Consul has notified Mr.Shalaan's wife and parents, all of who live in Egypt. Mr. Shaalan's body will be flown back to his country in the near future, the vice consul, Mohamed Elghazawy, said.
"This is a very emotional time for his entire family, but especially his mother and father," Mr. Elghazawy said.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
PBS=NEOCON TV
Why we must tell truth about torture
Right Web | Profile | Frank Gaffney
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The producer Frank Gaffney's message is, "Some Muslims aren't bad." You remember the neocons? Those rat basteds that lied Amerika into war.
PBS programming that old Adolf would approve of.
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MEDIA-US:
Public Broadcaster Pulls TV Documentary on Islamism
Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON, Apr 18 (IPS) - The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has dropped a documentary film purporting to show the struggles of U.S. "moderate" Muslims against Islamic extremists from a television series airing this week on more than 300 U.S. public television stations.
No sooner had PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) excluded "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Centre" from the series "America at a Crossroads" than the film's producers accused the station of suppressing their views as part of "an ideological vendetta."
"This is a well-documented, textbook case of the abuse of taxpayer funding by elements in the public broadcasting system to advocate their agenda and ensure that people who have a different agenda don't get on the air," said Frank Gaffney, one of the film's producers, as quoted in the conservative Washington Times. "The public ought to be allowed to see a film which PBS doesn't want them to see."
"Islam vs. Islamists" was one of 21 documentaries commissioned by the CPB, a private, congressionally charted agency that administers federal money for public radio and television. The effort provided 20 million dollars in grants for independent filmmakers to develop films about the "challenges and opportunities America faces in the wake of the September 11 attacks," according to CPB website.
The film was not selected because of what PBS executives described as editorial deficiencies.
"In fairness to Mr. Gaffney, we recognise that he believes his film is completed," CPB spokeswoman Louise Filkins told IPS. "Public broadcasting officials have expressed concerns that the film may not comply with established PBS standards."
Executives at WETA, the Washington D.C. TV station overseeing the series for PBS, say the documentary was cut because its agenda was irresponsible and lacked the obligation of fairness.
"The writing is alarmist and overreaching without adequate context and specific information to justify the tone and degree of generalisation," wrote Crossroads series producer Leo Eaton to Gaffney in an evaluation of the documentary's final cut. "There are awkwardly phrased assertions, convoluted reasoning, and implications of connections between subjects without evidence."
A series of written exchanges between PBS and Gaffney, posted on the right-wing website familysecuritymatters.org, underscores the fundamental conflict between the station and the film's producers. According to Gaffney, the problem is not that his film has "a point of view."
"Rather, it is that mine is perceived to be other than a left-wing one," he wrote in a memo to Michael Pack, senior vice president of television programming at CPB.
Aminah Beverly McCloud, the director of the Islamic Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago, who advised WETA on the Crossroads Initiative, told IPS that "Islam vs. Islamists" touched on a topic little explored in the media, but that the film lacked coherence and ultimately did not fit with Crossroads main theme.
"It's not about America, and it's not about the war on terror. It's basically the experiences of individuals, with no real explanation of what the topic is," McCloud said.
"It's not about a left bias or a right bias, or else Richard Perle's film wouldn't have been there," she added, referring to "The Case for War: In Defence of Freedom," a film by Bush administration official Perle, that advocates neoconservative policies and was one of those selected by CPB.
The Crossroads initiative developed amidst Republican efforts to diversify the voices in public television by financing more conservative programming to balance a schedule that former CPB chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson saw as overly liberal. Tomlinson resigned in November 2005 after the agency's inspector general released a report critical of his leadership, including evidence that he had violated the organisation's ethical code by using "political tests" in the hiring of high-level candidates.
Gaffney, who is also the president of the hawkish Centre for Security Policy, and his co-producer Alex Alexiev, CSP's vice president, approached Canadian novelist and filmmaker Martyn Burke to make the film with 675,000 dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds.
The right-wing Washington-based think tank seeks to "undermine the ideological foundations of totalitarianism and Islamist extremism," according to its website. CSP's advisory council also includes current and former high-level aides in the George W. Bush administration, such as Eliot Abrams and Douglas Feith.
The think tank's initiatives include "The Islamist Project," which aims to research and raise awareness about "the threat of Islamofascism." CSP views "non-Islamist Muslims" as natural allies in the fight against "the repressive, totalitarian ideology of Islamists," according to its website.
In an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Burke argued that his film became the target of "almost hysterical critiques" from WETA.
"What PBS/WETA attacked us on was they wanted us, in our opinion, to become virtually apologists for the Islamists, those who are the fundamentalists in this world," he said. "They demanded I fire my two partners (Frank Gaffney an Alex Alexiev), who brought me into this film, because my partners were conservative."
Crossroads series producer Leo Eaton called Burke's claims that he was asked to fire Gaffney and Alexiev because of their political opinions "totally misleading." In a letter to the editor published in the Washington Times, Eaton wrote that both PBS and CPB expressed initial concerns that the editorial focus of the film "too closely echoed" the opinions of the producers, who hold official positions at the Centre for Security Policy.
"It is how Messrs. Gaffney and Burke choose to frame and structure their characters and stories that hasn't yet met PBS standards," Eaton wrote. "[They] have chosen to 'attack the messenger' rather than trying to correct the message."
In an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Times, Gaffney reiterated his complaint that "Islam vs. Islamists" was being suppressed and went on to equate PBS's refusal to air the film with the recent repression by government riot police of Russian protesters in Moscow's Pushkin Square. More than 200 protesters, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, were arrested during the clashes.
"I have watched with horror as techniques out of Mr. [Vladimir] Putin's playbook have been applied to prevent the telling of the story of freedom-loving Muslims who -- like the Kasparovs of Russia -- warn about the ominous rise of totalitarian ideologies in their communities, and what that portends for the rest of us," said Gaffney.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Petition against Israeli assault on Al Aqsa and all Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem
Sunday, 15 April 2007
A Muslim and Christian petition is out on behalf of Al Aqsa Mosque. As is much of the nonviolent resistance to Israeli destruction at the Muslim holy site, the petition is sponsored by head of the Islamic Movement inside the Green Line, Sheikh Ra'ed Salah.
Organizers have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures as part of efforts to stop Israeli excavations and their devastating impact at the Muslim holy site in East Jerusalem's Old City.
Aimed at Palestinians living within Israeli boundaries, the petition reads in part, “We, the undersigned, representing the entire spectrum of Palestinian society, men and women, young and old, from Jerusalem and the Naqab, the Galilee and the Triangle, and the coastal cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Lod and Ramle...pronounce our support for Jerusalem, the Al Aqsa Mosque, and other Islamic and Christian holy places.”
Signatories pledge to “work using all legitimate means to expose the crimes of the occupation and address its aims to Judaize the holy city, its gradual destruction and confiscation of Al Aqsa and other Islamic and Christian holy places.”
Within the petition are three-points, the first of which is addressed to the present Arab and Muslim leaders in science, politics and civil society. It demands that they assume responsibility for Jerusalem and its "sacred shrines."
The second letter is addressed to the Palestinian Presidency, government and all factions, to agree on a clear strategy. They must work with the complete understanding that Jerusalem remains the capital and that no one has the authority to negotiate away that legitimate right.
The third point addresses international humanitarian organizations to “curb the spread of Israeli hysteria” and implement international law in order to put an end to the “continuing crimes in the city of Jerusalem.”
President of the Council of Muftis, Sheikh Khalid Ghaneim, said that the petition and its signatories illustrate "the profound loyalty to Al Aqsa Mosque and the utter rejection of any attacks against it."
The Sheikh said that the petition will be presented to the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Born Again Nazis: Germany Persecutes Muslims
German media, politicians launch chauvinist campaign over a “Muslim takeover” of Germany
By Justus Leicht14 April 2007
Campaigns alleging that a nation is being “swamped” by foreigners have always been part of the repertoire of right-wing extremist politics. The influx of immigrants, their culture and language is regarded as a threat to one’s “own” people and—depending upon which version is being promulgated—Western or German culture. In recent times, the danger of being “swamped” has been replaced by that of a “Muslim-takeover,” with the difference, however, that such agitation is not limited to right-wing extremist circles. Magazines such as Der Spiegel, Christian Democratic and Social Democratic politicians, and former liberals or leftwing intellectuals have now joined in the chorus.
A milestone in this development was the dispute regarding the publishing of anti-Islamic cartoons last spring.
The right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that were consciously aimed at insulting and inciting Muslims. When this provoked the expected angry protests, with some displays of violence, a European-wide storm of indignation in official circles ensued, aided and abetted by various “left” organizations. Muslims, the sub-text read, are intolerant, violent and backward; the Western states, on the other hand, are too tolerant and peaceful. Different voices would have to prevail. The campaign formed a welcome accompaniment to the military interventions in the Middle East.
In the past weeks, a relatively minor decision by a German district court has served as cause for a similar campaign in Germany.
Der Spiegel appeared on March 26 with the headline, “Mecca Germany. The quiet Muslim takeover.” The front page showed the familiar sight of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, swathed in darkness with the Islamic crescent moon and star above.
Regular Spiegel columnist Franz Josef Wagner commented, “Our symbols of justice wear a headscarf or a burka. What sort of country do we live in that our laws are no longer valid?”
The deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) parliamentary faction Wolfgang Bosbach told the press he had long feared “the fact that we are gradually importing moral values from other cultures into Germany, even making them the basis of the legal system.”
The feminist Alice Schwarzer opined that the German legal system had “for a long time, been systematically infiltrated by Islamist forces” and Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian state premier and Christian Social Union (CSU) chairman, warned, the “rule of law in Germany” should not “kow-tow to the Koran” or let itself be “undermined.”
What has occasioned this extreme agitation?
It revolves around a divorce case being heard by the Family Court in Frankfurt am Main, in which a German woman of Moroccan origin wants to divorce her Moroccan husband. They married in Morocco in 2001 “in accordance with the Koran,” and later moved to Germany. The husband is said to have begun beating his wife soon after they were married. For this reason, she left him in May 2006. In June the same year, the Family Court ordered that she should take sole possession of the marital home and forbade the man from coming within 50 metres of his former wife.
After he allegedly harassed her repeatedly, including making death threats, the woman filed for immediate divorce. Usually, a marriage in Germany can only be dissolved one year after the husband and wife have separated. Only if this is deemed “unreasonable” can a divorce take place any sooner.
In January 2007, the Family Court upheld its June 2006 ruling and the man continued to be prohibited from approaching his wife. At the same time, the judge stated it was her opinion that the grounds of “unreasonableness” did not apply and so there could be no early divorce. She proposed staying the divorce proceedings until the couple had been separated for one year otherwise she would reject the application for a divorce.
The judge’s reasoning included the claim that in “Moroccan cultural circles” it was “not uncommon” for a man to beat his wife, pointing to verses in the Koran (4:34) in which this is allegedly justified by Islam. The petitioner must have known this when she entered the marriage, according to the judge. Whereupon, the woman’s attorney lodged a petition that the judge be disqualified, which was upheld after the case was widely reported in the media.
Although the judge was disqualified, and although the Hesse state Justice Minister Jürgen Banzer (CDU) announced he would consider taking disciplinary action against the judge, the case was seized by the media and political establishment as proof of the alleged infiltration of the German judicial system by Islamist forces.
Firstly, it should be noted that the legal opinion concerning “reasonableness” expressed by the judge is not only completely wrong, but it is also manifests anti-Islamic prejudices.
Whatever is alleged to be usual in “Moroccan cultural circles” is irrelevant under German family law. Moreover, there are all possible sorts of “cultural circles” in Morocco. As in other countries, the culture of a poor farmer or nomad, who has received hardly any education or exposure to modern life at all, differs substantially from the culture of a university graduate from a large city. Such generalised references to a “Moroccan”, “Islamic” or “German” culture leave a bad taste of chauvinism and racism.
For a long time, the legal system has recognised that serious abuse and threats make the continuation of a marriage unreasonable. Even if one were to refer to Islamic jurisprudence such grounds are also considered as cause for divorce, particularly in Morocco, which substantially modernized its family law three years ago. And it is also punishable in Morocco to beat and threaten a spouse with death.
The judge cannot be accused of “kow-towing” to Islam as she is now being accused by politicians and media. On the contrary, her point of view amounts to saying, “Those who take up with a Muslim have only themselves to blame, they must expect to be abused; it lies within the nature of Islam.” Such views are part of the anti-Islamic sentiments that have been stirred up over the last years.
An attack on democratic rights
Sections of the press as well as political figures are attacking the views of the judge from the right, however. They are exploiting this legal incident in order to attack basic democratic rights not only of Muslims and other immigrants, but German working people as well. In their eyes, Muslims should not enjoy any fundamental rights and constitutional protections before the German courts.
Under the headline, “Is our justice system kow-towing to Islam?” (Bild newspaper) and “Does Sharia law now rule?” (Der Spiegel news magazine), such journals rage indignantly among other things about the following court decisions:
* A company is banned from issuing a warning to a Muslim employee because he wanted to perform his prayers;
* The decision to sack an employee for making a pilgrimage to Mecca was reversed at another firm;
* The Constitutional Court has upheld the right to the ritual slaughter of animals according to Islamic rites, elevating the freedom of religion of Muslims, like that of Jews, over issues of animal welfare;
* The Administrative Courts permit the building of mosques and—like the ringing of church bells—also permit the muezzins’ call to prayer;
* In criminal cases, in examining the question of culpability the cultural background of the perpetrator is considered. In some judgements this leads to the punishment being reduced, however this is usually later reversed.
Conversely, the criticism of these judgements means that according to Spiegel and Bild, Muslims, if they practice their faith at all, should only do so secretly, otherwise the practice is forbidden and is grounds for dismissal if it is done at work. The cover story in Der Spiegel draws a direct line between the case upholding Muslim employees’ employment protection rights to the murder on the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh: “Creeping Islamisation with the energetic support of the rule of law and its servants”
In its print edition, the magazine provided the notorious provocateur Henryk M. Broder with more than a page in which to fulminate against Muslims, who according to Broder are all to be regarded as fanatics and violent criminals. In Broder’s recent book titled “Hurrah, we are capitulating,” he accuses the West of capitulating to Islam.
A certain degree of demagogy is to be expected from the tabloid press and politicians such as Stoiber and Beckstein. But now Der Spiegel has taken the lead in a new version of the campaign for a “leading German culture,” which is directed against immigrants and religious minorities, while mouthing platitudes about self-determination and the rights of religious minorities.
There is a particularly bad odour of hypocrisy in the indignation about judgements that permit Muslim parents to absent their daughters from class trips, sex education lessons or sports instruction. This has less to do with the embrace of Islam and much more to do with the systematic social exclusion of children from immigrant families. The European Commission has come to the conclusion that there is no other country in Europe where educational opportunities are dependent on ethnic and social origin as much as in Germany.
The UN Special Raporteur for Education has also noted, “Selection in the German education system above all affects the underprivileged layers, people with a migration background, the disabled or socially disadvantaged. Twenty percent of students do not graduate High School. Nearly half of all pupils with a migration background do not get an apprenticeship place. This further intensifies exclusion.”
In recent years, several states (Bavaria, Baden Württemberg, Hesse, Saarland, North Rhine Westphalia) have passed laws granting privileged status to “Christian” values and symbols while discriminating against all others. This happened even following a ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2003 expressly underlining the “strict equal treatment” of all religions.
Hesse has gone the furthest and has expanded discrimination to all civil servants.
In Hesse, the “law protecting state neutrality” states right at the beginning, “Civil servants have to conduct themselves neutrally politically, in their world-view and religiously. In particular, they may not wear particular articles of clothing or use symbols or other objects that are meant to undermine confidence in the neutrality of their office or which threaten political, religious or ideological peace. In deciding how to apply sentence 1 and 2, appropriate account should be taken of the Christian and humanistic traditions of the state of Hesse.”
In plain language, this means that in Hesse, only those who uphold Christian traditions can be neutral. And anyone who expresses the quietest doubt may face “disciplinary measures.” In addition, several CDU politicians have called openly for a struggle to defend the Christian world.
The Hesse Minister of Social Affairs Silke Lautenschläger (CDU) has criticized the attitude of the judge because she did not base her ruling on “Christian” values. “Integration requires a clear point of view. Here there should be no pardon,” stressed the politician. “Our social foundation is the Christian idea of man and the concept of human dignity embodied in the constitution.”
What Lautenschläger means was made clear two years earlier, when she demanded the Hartz IV welfare “reforms” be made even harsher—an unemployed person should first look to his or her children and parents for financial support.
Johannes Singhammer, the CDU/CSU family policy spokesman, expressed similar views when he claimed that the dignity and self-determination of women was a result of “Christian moral concepts!” Singhammer is in fact turning reality upside down. It was above all the socialist workers’ movement, which fought for equal rights for women in a bitter struggle against the church and other defenders of the “Christian world.”
Posted in Submitted by islamservices on Sat, 2007-04-14 13:19.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs
Spies at work
VISITS AN OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD: Bassam Hussein
by STEFAN CHRISTOFF
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their work places, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques, say national and Montreal-based Arab and Muslim community groups. The groups are reporting major increases in the numbers of calls from distressed community members concerning CSIS interventions. According to the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada (CAIR-Canada), CSIS intelligence gathering activities have increased over the past year.
“Community members who have been approached by CSIS across the country are calling our office on a weekly basis,” says Sameer Zuberi, CAIR-Canada’s communications coordinator. “This hike in CSIS visits is alarming to CAIR-Canada as it casts a blanket of fear and intimidation that is spread over our entire community.”
In response to increased CSIS activity, CAIR-Canada has shipped thousands of copies of a publication designed for Canadian Muslims dealing with CSIS and other Canadian authorities, entitled Know Your Rights Guide, to local mosques and community centres.
“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,” says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.”
“People are being targeted by CSIS for simply belonging to a certain ethnic group with certain religious beliefs without any obvious rationale for such targeting,” says Bassam Hussein of the Centre communautaire Musulman de Montréal. “I was recently visited by a mother of four in Montreal who was seeking help due to CSIS harassment against her and her husband,” says Hussein. “CSIS went to her husband’s employer to inquire about him, the employer was terrified when CSIS contacted him and two weeks later, the employer let the husband go.”
The 2007 Conservative federal budget “earmarks new funding for CSIS,” according to the Ministry of Finance Web site, to the tune of $80-million over two years in addition to the approximately $200-million already allocated to Canada’s national spy agency. Media representatives from CSIS did not return repeated requests for an interview from the Mirror before deadline.
CAIR-Canada recently reported that approximately 30 per cent of all CSIS visits in the Muslim community are occurring at the workplace, often putting individuals’ careers in jeopardy.
“Community members feel that their civil liberties are being seriously compromised under the pretext of fighting terrorism,” says Hussein. “Community members who I know are being contacted by CSIS are simple people working hard to live in peace and raise their families.”
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Feds May Move On Local Mosques
By Najeeb Hasan
After 23-year-old Lodi resident Hamid Hayat was convicted last year of training at a terrorist camp in Pakistan, government officials warned that terror investigations in Northern California were ongoing.
Now, members of the Bay Area's Muslim community believe that the FBI is close to making additional high-profile arrests of one or more terror suspects who frequent mosques in Silicon Valley and the East Bay. According to a source informed about the investigation, one of the organizations targeted in the Bay Area terror probe is the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative-leaning Muslim organization, founded in India during the 1920s, that boasts world-wide membership and whose primary focus is to persuade Muslims to recommit to their faith.
Last October, a South African Muslim scholar associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, Fazlur Rahman Azmi, was denied entry to the United States and detained at San Francisco International Airport by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Azmi, who had successfully entered the United States to preach in both 1999 and earlier in 2006, was planning on teaching at various American mosques during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Nawaz Khan, a resident of Newark, Calif., and one of Azmi's students, had arranged for Azmi to lecture at the Islamic Society of the East Bay in Fremont, one of the Bay Area's largest and most diverse mosques.
Muslims are concerned that the ongoing terror probe in the East Bay is related to Azmi's planned visit to the Fremont mosque.
A spokesperson said the FBI could neither confirm or deny the existence of such an investigation.
"There is of course not a lot I can say," says FBI public information officer Joseph Schadler. "I did want to make clear that we don't target mosques for investigation. We begin and end an investigation if they pose a threat based on credible information."
Muslims connected to the Fremont mosque are also concerned that the planned arrests may be supported by flimsy evidence. One critic with ties to law enforcement agrees that current terror investigations can be motivated not by strong evidence, but by pressure on America's counter-terrorism agencies to produce results.
"It's something, in my opinion, that is happening," says James Wedick, who retired from the FBI in 2004 after 35 years of service, when asked if the FBI could be pressured to move on weak terror cases. During the Lodi case, Wedick had been skeptical of the evidence marshaled against the terror suspects and worked with defense attorneys on the case; a judge did not permit him to testify in the trial as an expert witness.
"In the last couple of years throughout the Bureau, they know there is a pot of gold out there called terrorism dollars," he says. "[It's] resource allocation—who gets what money, including plain dollars and agent bodies. You are allocated these resources depending upon if you got something going. What I've seen is the Bureau and the department is quick to call something terrorism when it's not—because you got an obvious interest in getting those resources, and they are not going to get them, unless they could say to folks back in Washington that there is a legitimate case. So there is motivation, unfortunately. I've talked to people in the position to know; I've got guys coming to me all day long, telling me they [the FBI] are mischaracterizing things. I don't know if it's going on with respect to this specific case."
"I think that's a completely mistaken assumption," counters the FBI's Schadler. "We work our cases at our end with the Department of Justice, nobody is pressuring us to do anything."
Members of the Bay Area Muslim community, meanwhile, have become somewhat accustomed to FBI activity within their community since 2001.
"It's disheartening," says Mohamad Rajabally, a Fremont dentist who recently completed his term as the president of the Islamic Society of the East Bay. "But, unfortunately, this is the climate Muslims are facing. I always say that we have nothing to hide, and we welcome anybody to our mosques."
During the controversial Lodi case last year, Hayat was convicted based on a confession in which he contradicted himself several times. He was also secretly taped by a government informant posing as a friend; the informant, however, was not able capture a Hayat confession on tape, which weakened the case further. At the time, Muslim leaders in groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) believed that the Hayat case was pursued by the FBI to bolster the arguments for the renewal of the Patriotic Act.
"I mean, if you can imagine, nobody joins the Bureau to work some BS case," says Wedick. "Let's go back to the Hayat case. People stepped into the case, said this is going to be great, only to find out there is no case. There was nothing corroborated to terror except to say in recorded conversation, you had a series of statements ... [but] if you look at them, they made no sense. They [the FBI] made no effort to mitigate them or make sense of them, except to say he said in some fashion [that he attended a camp], and even if he contradicted himself, we'll make an indictment. The older guys are saying, 'What am I doing, this isn't a case—do we follow this guy, does he have something connected with explosives?' Did we follow them? That's what you have to do to prove the case. If you look at all the [nation-wide terror] cases, most of the cases involved the Bureau paying somebody huge amounts of money to go into a network, leaving it up to them, and saying we got a terrorism case."
Rajabally, however, would rather wait and see what unfolds than panic.
"They are arousing suspicion," he says of the rumors that have been swirling through the community. "For what? People will ask you what proof you have. You are raising doubts and panic in the community for no reason."
Monday, April 2, 2007
Rand Corporation's new recipe to handle the Muslim World
Al-Jazeerah, April 2, 2007
The semi-official U.S. think tank, Rand Corporation, suggests creation of networks of the so-called moderate Muslims to promote US policy objectives in the Muslim World.
In its latest report, titled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” the Rand Corp advocates that the building of moderate Muslim networks needs to become an explicit goal of the U.S. government policy, with an international database of partners and a well-designed plan.
Just as it fought the spread of Communism during the Cold War, the United States must do more to develop and support networks of moderate Muslims who are too often silenced by violent radical Islamists, according to the Rand Corporation report issued on March 26, 2007. Lead writer of the report Angel Rabasa says that the United States has a critical role to play in aiding moderate Muslims, and can learn much from the way it addressed the spread of Communism during the Cold War. “The efforts of the United States and its allies to build free and democratic networks and institutions provided an organizational and ideological counter force to Communist groups seeking to come to power through political groups, labor unions, youth and student organizations and other groups.”
The report defines a moderate as a Muslim who supports democracy, gender equality, freedom of worship and opposition to terrorism. This looks an amplification on its two previous reports - “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies” (March 2004) and “US strategy in the Muslim World after 9/11” (December 2004) - which also suggested supporting moderate Muslims and exploitation of inter-Muslim religious differences. Interestingly, a novelist turned research scholar, Cheryl Benard is the author of “Civil Democratic Islam” and co-author of Dec. 2004 and March 2007 reports.
In the December 2004 study Rabasa had suggested to exploit Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides to promote the US policy objectives in the Muslim world. Echoing this theme, the latest report recommends reaching out to Muslim activists, leaders and intellectuals in non-Arab countries such as Turkey as well as in Southeast Asia and Europe. The report recommends targeting five groups as potential building blocks for networks: liberal and secular Muslim academics and intellectuals; young moderate religious scholars; community activists; women’s groups engaged in gender equality campaigns; and moderate journalists and scholars.
The report warned that moderate groups can lose credibility – and therefore, effectiveness – if U.S. support is too obvious. Effective tactics that worked during the Cold War include having the groups led by credible individuals and having the United States maintain some distance from the organizations it supports. “This was done by not micro-managing the groups, but by giving them enough autonomy,” Rabasa said. “As long as certain guidelines were met, they were free to pursue their own activities.”
To help start this initiative, the report recommends working toward an international conference modeled in the Cold War-era Congress of Cultural Freedom, and then developing a standing organization to combat what it called radical Islamism.
The recent summit of "Secular Islam Conference" in St. Petersburg, Florida, almost coincided with the release of the latest Rand Report. A small group of self-proclaimed secular Muslims from North America and elsewhere gathered in St. Petersburg for what they billed as a new global movement to correct the assumed wrongs of Islam and call for an “Islamic Reformation.”
The St. Petersburg conference, held on the sideline of the Intelligence Summit, was carried live on (Islamophobe) Glenn Beck's CNN show. Some of the organizers and speakers at the convention were well known thanks to the media spotlight: Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble With Islam," and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian and author of "Infidel," were but a few there claiming to have suffered personally at the hands of "radical" Islam. One participant, Wafa Sultan, declared on Glenn Beck's show that she doesn't "see any difference between radical Islam and regular Islam." Other participants were the now public ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq and self-proclaimed ex-terrorist Tawfiq Hamid.
Surely, the “moderate” Muslim agenda is promoted because these ideas reflect a Western vision for the future of Islam. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everyone from high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to anti-Islam authors have prescribed a preferred remedy for Islam: Reform the faith.
The Rand Reports about Islam appear to be part of a grand strategy to “change the face of Islam” as revealed by the US News and World Report on April 15, 2005. The report entitled - Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions...To Change the Very Face of Islam - reads: “From military psychological-operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself.”
According to the well planned leaks to the US News and World Report, this strategy for the first time stated that the United States has a national security interest in influencing what happens within Islam. The report also confirmed that it is, in fact, the US which has been funding an American version of Islam, called “Moderate Islam.”
The Rand reports try to create a fictitious vision of Muslims and of Islam, where it is antihuman, uncreative, authoritarian, and intrinsically against Western societies. It is an ethnocentric view of Islam that dominates current representations of Islam that are reductive, predominantly negative, and encouraging a culture of Islamophobia.
The complexities of the so-called fundamentalism and extremism in the past 100 years or so, whether it be Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim, need to be understood in the context of modernization, the process of secularization, the changing nature of religious institutions, the post-colonial experience in developing countries, globalization, the divide between wealthy and poor, contesting political power, and the impact of totalitarian regimes on civil society.
What is not mentioned in the RAND reports is that the reason for the alienation of Muslims from the West, is the issue of "double standards" the West so brazenly practices when dealing with Muslim nations. America already has a very tarnished image in the Islamic world. It has already alienated a great majority of Muslims throughout the world through its misguided foreign policy. Who in the right mind will believe that this asinine assault on Islam and Muslims will win America friends in the Islamic world?
Now a word about the Washington-based semi-official think tank – the RAND Corporation. Among other government departments, the Rand Corp conducts studies for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the Navy and the U.S. intelligence community. Obviously, writers of the three under discussion reports on Islam may be considered as neo-Orientalists with clear intention to belittle Islam.
When the European nations began their long campaign to colonize and conquer the rest of the world for their own benefit, they brought their academic and missionary resources to help them with their task. Orientalists and missionaries, whose ranks often overlapped, were the servants of an imperialist government who was using their services as a way to subdue or weaken an enemy. The academic study of the Oriental East by the Occidental West was often motivated and often co-operated hand-in-hand with the imperialistic aims of the European colonial powers. The foundations of Orientalism were in the maxim "Know thy enemy". This equally applies to the modern day Orientalists of such semi-official think tanks as the Rand Corporation.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Call that humiliation?
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian
I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.
And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!
What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.
And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".
What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.
As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net
Brits in the Gulf and a Doctored British Map? - UPDATED
Easter Surprise: Attack on Iran, New 9/11… or Worse - UPDATED
Monday, March 26, 2007
Muslim Sacrifices at Bush's Temple Alter
"We kill ourselves by our own hands only to discover that after long years of unprecedented destruction and the loss of millions of innocent souls - the only definite and all-consuming victor is none other than the evil American administration."
By Dr. J. Al Rasheid
Translated By Jack Shuff
March 7, 2007
Kuwait - Al-Ray Al-Aam - Original Article (Arabic)
The sectarian conspiracy that the evil American Administration is planning to spread to the entire Arabic and Islamic region shows a disregard for the human spirit that is beyond contempt. If the war between the [Sunni and Shiite] communities spreads or rather - if it expands to completion - it will lead to one - and only one - inevitable result: It will claim lives amongst both parties.
The strangers will suffer nothing if war breaks between the communities in every Muslim country, because the dead will all be Muslim. The strangers will lose nothing because the victims will be ours - all from amongst our ranks.
We, the Muslims of all sects, of whom it was written would die in the millions when the United States of America "decided" to have its puppet Saddam Hussein launch a criminal attack on sister country the Islamic Republic of Iran, want this newest administration of criminals to abandon its repetition of this selfsame game, which is dirtier than previous incarnations but which it is stubbornly playing once again. It is this all-consuming game of sectarian war that the American Administration of evil wants us to suffer from and confront through years of disaster - and for millions to die so that no sect or faction can overcome, and so that no side can succeed over the other, so as to keep prostrate the entire whole.
We kill ourselves by our own hands only to discover that after long years of unprecedented destruction and the loss of millions of innocent souls - that the only definite and all-consuming victor is none other than the Evil Administration in the Black House [White House]. So will this game from the last century play out again, only this time in even more ugly and bitter fashion leading to a new security crisis in every country of the region? Why is it always "necessary" for us Muslims to be obedient instruments of villains seeking to use us to harm ourselves, and to destroy our own countries and our own homes? Are we destined to be sacrificial lambs at Bush's Temple alter forever?
See Also:
New Middle East' Borders to Be Drawn in Arab Blood,
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Terrorized by 'War on Terror' : Zbigniew Brzezinski
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, March 25, 2007; B01
The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."
To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.
The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.
That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.
Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.
That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.
Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.
Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans.
The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.
The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.
Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.
The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.
In the meantime, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television, it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil!
The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.
Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).
Monday, March 19, 2007
STOP THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
So where to start? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key symbol of the rift between Islam & the West. It's time to step up and take the initiative.
Add your voice below and when leaders meet in late March, our message will be delivered in a way they can’t ignore...
--MORE--
Friday, March 16, 2007
Unrepentant
Here is Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, writing in the Financial Times about the latest American Enterprise Institute shindig, where neocon bigwig Bernard Lewis received an award and made a speech defending the Crusades as the first phase of the necessary struggle against “Islamofascism”:
Were one to start counting ironies here, where would one stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticising the Pope for apologising to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge their war an error. And here was the clubhouse of the neo-conservatives, throwing itself a lavish party when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they have dug.
In attendance: Dick Cheney, applauding; Clarence Thomas, the first to rise for a standing ovation; Richard Perle, Robert Bork, and Reason editor Nick Gillespie. We hear the crab bisque was “better-than-average.”
in News by Justin Raimondo|
Taming Leviathan
Lexington
Mar 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition
These are both the best of times and the worst of times for the American-Jewish lobby
THIS week saw yet another reminder of the awesome power of “the lobby”. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brought more than 6,000 activists to Washington for its annual policy conference. And they proceeded to live up to their critics' darkest fears.
They heard from the four most powerful people on Capitol Hill—Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner from the House, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell from the Senate—as well as the vice-president (who called his talk “The United States and Israel: United We Stand”) and sundry other power-brokers. Several first-division presidential candidates held receptions.
The display of muscle was almost equalled by the display of unnerving efficiency. There were booths for “congressional check-in”, booths for “delegate banquet troubleshooting”, and booths full of helpful young people. The only discordant note was sounded by a group of a dozen protesters—Orthodox Jews in beards, side-curls and heavy black coats—holding up signs saying “Stop AIPAC”, “Torah forbids Jews dictating foreign policy”, and “Judaism rejects the state of Israel”.
The lobbyists had every reason to feel proud of their work. Congress has more Jewish members than ever before: 30 in the House and a remarkable 13 in the Senate. (There are now more Jews in Congress than Episcopalians.) Both parties are competing with each other to be the “soundest” on Israel. About two-thirds of Americans hold a favourable view of the place.
Yet they have reason to feel a bit nervous, too. The Iraq debacle has produced a fierce backlash against pro-war hawks, of which AIPAC was certainly one. It has also encouraged serious people to ask awkward questions about America's alliance with Israel. And a growing number of people want to push against AIPAC. One pressure group, the Council for the National Interest—run by two retired congressmen, Paul Findley, a Republican, and James Abourezk, a Democrat—even bills itself as the anti-AIPAC. The Leviathan may be mightier than ever, but there are more and more Captain Ahabs trying to get their harpoons in.
Some of the most determined are Arab-Americans, who have been growing in numbers and influence for years—there are probably about 3.5m of them—and who have been in the eye of a political storm since September 11th 2001. They are a growing political force in northern Ohio and Michigan, and their institutions, such as the Arab American Institute and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have plenty of access to Middle Eastern money.
But so far their performance has been unimpressive. James Zogby has been promising a breakthrough for his Arab American Institute for 20 years. CAIR remains marginal. Arab-Americans are badly split between Christians (63%) and Muslims (24%). They have also been late in taking to politics. Between 1990 and 2004 Arab-Americans donated $788,968 to candidates and parties, compared with $56.8m from pro-Israeli groups.
AIPAC's ace in the hole is the idea that it represents Jewish interests in a country that is generally philo-Semitic. But liberal Jewish groups retort that it represents only a sliver of Jewish opinion. A number of more liberal groups have started to use their political muscle—groups such as the Religious Action Centre of Reform Judaism, Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum. These groups scored a significant victory over AIPAC by persuading Congress to water down a particularly uncompromising bit of legislation, the Palestinian Anti-terrorism Act, which would have prevented any American contact with the Palestinian leadership. This accomplishment led to a flurry of speculation that George Soros might try to institutionalise this successful alliance by creating a liberal version of AIPAC.
It has yet to materialise. And it is doubtful whether Mr Soros, a left-wing Democrat who has little sympathy with Israel, would be the best patron for such an organisation. But the growing activism of liberal Jewish groups underlines a worrying fact for AIPAC: most Jews are fairly left-wing. Fully 77% of them think that the Iraq war was a mistake compared with 52% of all Americans. Eighty-seven per cent of Jews voted for the Democrats in 2006, and all but four of the Jews in Congress are Democrats.
Dissenting voices
An even bigger threat to AIPAC comes from the general climate of opinion. It is suddenly becoming possible for serious people—politicians and policymakers as well as academics—to ask hard questions about America's relationship with Israel. Is America pursuing its own interests in the Middle East, or Israel's? Should America tie itself so closely to the Israeli government's policies or should it forge other alliances?
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, worries that America is seen in the Middle East as “acting increasingly on behalf of Israel”. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has compared the situation in Palestine to segregation, and argued that there could “be no greater legacy for America than to help bring into being a Palestinian state”. Philip Zelikow, her former counsellor, argues, in diplomatic language, that the only way to create a viable coalition against terrorists that includes Europeans, moderate Arabs and Israelis, is a “sense that Arab-Israeli issues are being addressed”.
The biggest challenge facing AIPAC is how to deal with this changing climate. Its members have been admirably honest about their mission in life. They boast about passing more than a hundred bits of pro-Israel legislation a year. But they are too willing to close down the debate with explosive charges of anti-Israel bias when people ask whether this is a good thing. America needs an open debate about its role in the Middle East—and AIPAC needs to take a positive role in that debate if it is to remain such a mighty force in American politics.
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