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thabet
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thabet
The words of one Guramit Singh of Nottingham, speaking at a recent English Defence League (EDL) rally:
“God bless the Muslims… they’ll need it when they burn in fucking hell.”
Bolton Council has also asked the Home Secretary to ban the planned EDL rally in the city.
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plimfix
Germany: an anti-racist academic faces prosecution for questioning whether court negligence could have been a contributory factor in the case of Marwa al-Sherbini, who was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom in July 2009. Dr Sabine Schiffer, Director of the Institute for Media Responsibility in Erlangen, is accused of slandering a police officer; she has been summonsed to appear before Erlangen Municipal Court on 24 March and, if convicted, could face a 6,000 Euros fine or two months imprisonment. There is also a petition in support of Dr Sabine Schiffer and calling for a full investigation into Marwa al-Sherbini’s death.
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aziz
“communislam” – a gem of a website discovered by thabet in the comments thread of my own blog (a wasteland into which I rarely tread).
Looking this over, I see that the author’s primary sources are Fox News and Glenn Beck. With such inputs such as these, we can rightly expect the GIGO principle to apply, and we are not disappointed:
- Communism and Islam are the same thing.
- America is China’s slave
- Obama is rooting for terrorists to win.
- Global warming is also a communist plot** by the associative property, we can conclude that global warming is a muslim plot. Or perhaps Islam is a global warming industry plot? No wait, that would be commutative and associative.
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thabet
Moron:
This thinking gives Singh an affinity with even the most diehard BNP members. He’s been to several party meetings and says he never feels awkward in their company. “They treat me normally,” he insists. “I feel at home.” I ask if he thinks many BNP members can tell the difference between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. “They might think of me as a Paki,” he replies. “I’ve had people shout ‘Paki Go Home!’ when I walk down the street. But that speaks much about the ‘Paki’ reputation – it’s a negative reaction to Pakistan.”
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thabet
A German orthodontist refused to serve a teenager named ‘Jihad’:
The doctor in Donaueschingen told local daily Schwarzwälder Bote on Friday that she believed his name was a declaration of war against all non-Muslims and refused to treat him.
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plimfix
Muslim fundamentalists should ‘drink wine to learn tolerance’, says the intellectual visage of the British right, philosopher Roger Scrutton. And what does he recommend as a tipple for fundamentalist Christians? Perhaps his remarks were inspired by Conservative MP Philip Hollobone’s equally hilarious quip comparing life inside a Burka to “going round with a paper bag over your head”. No doubt, both Scrutton and Holobone would deny any link between their inflamatory language and hate crimes against Muslims, as a report recently claimed. Here’s a funnier joke: how do you stop a right wing philosopher from drowning?
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johnpi
Muslim advocates decry councilwoman Facebook post.
Muslim advocates are demanding a California city councilwoman apologize for posting anti-Muslim comments on her Facebook page.
Muslim organizations in California on Friday called on Lancaster Councilwoman Sherry Marquez to apologize for a posting last weekend about the 2008 beheading of 37-year-old Aasiya Hassan in New York. It included the comment, “This is what the Muslim religion is all about.”
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plimfix
Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer of the University of Exeter’s European Muslim research centre and former special branch detective and Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officer Dr Robert Lambert have published a study which “provides prima facie and empirical evidence to demonstrate that…” people in London who commit crimes against Muslims “…are invariably motivated by a negative view of Muslims they have acquired from either mainstream or extremist nationalist reports or commentaries in the media.” An extensive study into the largely negative representations of Muslims in the British media was previously carried out by Elizabeth Poole: Reporting Islam (2002, I B Tauris), which concluded that “…the media as an instrument of public ideology demonizes Islam, portraying it as a threat to Western interests, thus reproducing, producing and sustaining the ideology necessary to subjugate Muslims both internationally and domestically.” (p.17)
It will be interesting to see how much airtime the British media give to this study, and how it’s represented. My scepticism is coloured by the fact that, several years ago, I was talking to a media studies academic at a major British University who claimed to have taken a special interest in Islamophobia in the media, and was even blogging on it. Despite it being widely cited, he’d never even heard of Poole’s study, or research done by Richardson. However, he was aware of a paper, not based on any empirical research, which argued against the existence of Islamophobia in the media.
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johnpi
Bulls***, calculated to inflame: Hijabis are attacking free-spirited blond girls in Berlin schools, according to this article appearing in some European media outlets.
Speculation, mind reading and fantasy about the motives of the alleged attackers made it into print:
The victims are blond Polish girls since they’re Catholic and yet very liberal, and therefore embody everything that the headscarf-girls reject. Steffens says the reason for the conflict is often envy. The girls are banned from many things in their own strict religious upbringing at home, but in school they see other girls who are allowed more. They get jealous and want to beat up the children from more liberal families.
Or as George Bush said, “They hate us for our freedoms.”
I don’t doubt that there may be tension and occasional violent incidents arising from any number of reasons, and that needs to be condemned and put to a stop. But the rest of this sounds like somebody overlaid a script to get some political mileage out of it.
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johnpi
An important fact in the poll that was released today that showed high levels of prejudice against Muslims in the US: “The strongest predictor of prejudice against Muslims is whether a person holds similar feelings about Jews.”
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johnpi
Muslim police in the UK have attacked the government’s anti-terrorism strategy for triggering an upsurge in Islamophobia and deepening divisions in communities.
The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) warned that the Prevent programme, which aims to combat violent extremism, was “stigmatising” Muslims by focusing on “so-called Islamist extremism.”
The group said the real threat came from the growing far-right movement.
“The hatred towards Muslims has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values,” said the association in a written submission to a parliamentary commission examining the anti-terror initiative.
“The climate is such that Muslims are subject to daily abuse in a manner that would be ridiculed by Britain, were this to occur anywhere else.”
There may be a “connection in the rise of Islamophobia and our Prevent programme as it feeds on the stereotypes that the media and some rightwing parties promote,” the group said.
These stereotypes were that “all Muslims are evil and non-trustworthy”, added the officers.
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johnpi
Daniel Pipes steps out of the closet… as an Islamophobe.
Eli Clifton writes that Pipes threw over any shred of remaining credibility he may have had as a serious commentator on Mideast affairs with his latest column in National Review about Geert Wilders.
For years, Pipes has denied accusations that his columns have espoused Islamophobic rhetoric, but his recent column in the National Review goes out of its way not just to endorse Geert Wilders, but also to explicitly praise anti-Muslim statements made by Wilders.
In the column, Pipes admires Wilders for asserting that ‘Islam is the problem, not just a virulent version of it called Islamism.’
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johnpi
A meditation on the evolution of the word ‘Paki.’
It’s obvious to say that ‘Paki’ is an offensive, catch-all racist term that seeks to attack, offend, and alienate those of South Asian extraction in the UK. Yet in a post-9/11 – or post-7/7 world with regards to the UK – the term is beginning to connote a new prejudice in which Islamophobia takes centre-stage.
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abunoor
It would be hard to imagine a more counterproductive strategy than that suggested by this Fox News guest:
On Fox News Saturday, guest Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (retired) offered a radical solution for improving national security. “We have to use profiling,” he said, “And I mean be very serious and harsh about the profiling.” Then McInerney proposed the United States should strip search all 18-28 year old Muslim men at airports.
Okay, maybe invading and bombing a bunch of Muslim countries would be even more counterproductive.
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johnpi
Somebody else on the good news in the decading just ending for Muslims:
Today, the diversity of Muslim voices in the public domain make it much more difficult than it was 10 years ago for any one Muslim group to get away with speaking on behalf all Muslims. It is also more difficult for elements in the media to make gross generalisations, as so many more Muslims are now themselves part of the print and broadcast media. The same is increasingly true of the political and business worlds.
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thabet
Mosque in the West Midlands burnt to the ground:
A fire engulfed the Cradley Heath Mosque and Islamic Centre in Plant Street on Boxing Day destroying the building and the religious countless books inside.
It is the second time in five years that the building has been targeted by arsonists and police are hunting the culprits.
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johnpi
Challenging what is becoming an increasingly common Islamophobic smear: That Islam is somehow juxtaposed with Nazism. Usually a photo is bandied about of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting with Adolf Hitler. Sheila Musagi writes:
The actual Nazi party originated in Germany, a predominantly Christian country. The actual Facists came out of Italy, another predominantly Christian country. The Nazis and Fascists were predominantly Christians. Christianity had a role in the rise and fall of the Nazi’s. The Vatican signed a concordat with Hitler’s Reich. The Catholic responses to Hitler were ambiguous at least.
There are numerous photographs of Hitler with various Christian clergy including Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin, and with a Catholic Cardinal, Spanish and German Bishops giving Nazi and Fascist salutes, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber marching in a Nazi parade, the Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller, and many more that are still available. There are also numerous photographs of Christian symbols in Nazi artifacts.
The latest example of the Nazi libel is a full-page newspaper ad taken out by the Canadian branch of B’nai Brith. BB once had a reputation as a solid defender of core liberal values: anti-racist and against persecution of peoples for their physical or cultural attributes. But an advertisement like this largely undermines that reputation and makes a plain example of how B’nai Brith – along with some other Jewish civil rights organizations such as the ADL – have been emptied out of their core values and now engage in the same kind of low conduct they were created to resist.
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plimfix
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buzz
Challenger to Keith Ellison wants to unseat Michelle Bachman as the craziest bigot in Congress.
Lynne Torgerson, who wants to unseat U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th District, says she’s “big on freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as establishment by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Those freedoms evidently don’t apply to Muslims such as Ellison, however, judging by the language she uses on her campaign Web site.
Torgerson, a criminal defense lawyer, who graduated from the University of Minnesota and William Mitchell College writes on her campaign Web site, “What do I know of Islam? Well, I know of 911. Nineteen (19) men from Saudi Arabia, all Muslim, hi-jacked planes, and flew into the two (2) World Trade Towers murdering thousands of people, and tried to fly into our Pentagon, and some believe they also tried to fly an airplane into our White House. From this, what I perceive is Islam conducting an act of war against my country.”
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buzz
“Exposé” of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s secrets by the American Stinker and Campus Watch
“Shaykh Hamza” was long known as one of the most outspoken Muslim radicals in America. Two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Hanson, speaking in Southern California, declared that America stood “condemned” and “unfortunately has a great, great tribulation coming to it.” This diatribe, reported in The Washington Post on October 2, 2001, was delivered at a benefit dinner for the prominent black nationalist known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, and later as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who is now serving a life term without parole at the U.S. federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for murdering a police officer in Georgia (among other charges). The dinner was advertised on an Islamist website, NetMuslims.com.
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johnpi
What’s in a town motto?
In Alamogordo, New Mexico (pop.: 36,000) an Islamophobic trainwreck on the front page of the local paper, the second-most viewed and the most emailed article today:
Can a ‘good Muslim’ be a ‘good American?’
The Daily News recently carried two letters of extreme interest to the future of our country. One carried the title “Being Politically Correct Is Not Correct” and the other was titled “Lunatic Muslims Should be Rounded Up in Camps.”
We must disregard all this garbage as to whether it is politically correct, whether it is called religious or racial profiling, or our president and Washington politicians’ attempts not to refer to Muslims as terrorists.
I am sure this is not what some would call politically correct, but the real question is: “Is it the truth?” If it is, what are Americans going to do about it?
The penultimate paragraph of the editorial: “Therefore, after much study and deliberation, perhaps we should be very suspicious of all muslims in this country.”
According to Wikipedia, Alamogordo’s town motto is “The friendliest place on Earth.” Talk about false pride. Reminds me of the moral of a great Mark Twain story “The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg“:
…it is easy to corrupt those who have never had their resolve tested.
Or as Twain put it so much better:
Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.
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buzz
But with this increased awareness of the Muslim, there is a lack of appreciation of the nuances within our group. The reality is that many Muslims are secular. We do not pray five times a day, do not read the Koran and have not spent much time inside a mosque. We only turn to Islam when a child is born, someone gets married or someone dies.
We certainly have no interest in participating in civilizational battles. We are, in fact, loathed by the religious minority. And yet we have no clear voice, no representation and no one in the Western world appears to be aware of our existence. Every time a terrorist attack occurs, we suffer the most.
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buzz
Review of Alia Malek’s New Book:
In “A Country Called Amreeka,” Malek chronicles the lives of a dozen Arab Americans. Their stories are markers on a timeline that stretches back to the legendary Alabama-Auburn football game of 1948 and runs through the riotous Detroit of the ’60s, the fraught tensions over Palestine in the ’80s, up to the election of George W. Bush. Each chapter focuses on an individual (often, a family) whose personal lives dramatize the political concerns of the age or the timeless personal anxiety of living, as an outsider, in a foreign land. In between each chapter, Malek fills in the historical gaps, recapping for the reader the changes in Middle Eastern politics or in American immigration policy necessary to understand the next narrative.
The book looks at America through the eyes of a minority so often viewed as its enemy. As the book progresses through time, a bigger story begins to emerge. With delicate cues from Malek, the reader begins to see how the image of Muslims has hardened over time. They have always been outsiders; in the early 20th century, politicians went to great lengths to classify newly arrived Arabs as nonwhites, a form of social exclusion. But by the ’80s, the outsider has become the other, the “swarthy-looking,” turban-wearing villain in Hollywood’s good-versus-evil dramas. (Never mind that it’s Sikhs who wear turbans, and Sikhs aren’t Muslim.)
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buzz
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs goes rogue and follows deansworld in reassessing their ties with the conservative right, especially in light of the “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam…”
Pro-Israel blogger breaks with right wing
By Eric Fingerhut · December 2, 2009Longtime pro-Israel blogger Charles Johnson of the popular Little Green Footballs site has “parted ways with the Right” and writes that he can be called an independent. In a post on his blog earlier this week, Johnson, a critic of radical Islam, wrote that among his reasons was “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide.” Other problems with the right, he said, was “support for anti-science bad craziness” and “hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source).”
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johnpi
Below, an email published in all seriousness by a Portland (Maine) pastor named J. Grant Swank who also writes a weekly religion column for the Portland Press Herald. Perhaps one of our Muslim bloggers who are also members of professional religious journalism or religious writers associations will be sitting next to Mr. Swank at the next conference/gathering. I’d love to be a fly on the wall to listen in on that table conversation.
The headline he put on this, which he received from “a friend,” was “Muslims, welcome to America, now take over.”
I thought I would let everyone know that I took a deer into Archers Meats in Fishers, Indiana on Friday after Thanksgiving. It is the same place I have taken deer for 20 years.
They told me they couldn’t take my deer today because it was a Muslim holiday and the Muslims were in the BACK SACRIFICING GOATS TO ALLAH.
I repeated back to her slowly and in a shocked tone what she had just said to me.
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aziz
bottom line about the Swiss minaret ban: All muslims are Taliban, Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism, and Shari’a is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion.I advocate that the Swiss muslim community stay cool. And engage in some “confrontational architecture“.
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buzz
CAIR: Va. Gov-Elect Asked to Repudiate Anti-Islam Donor’s Remarks
One of McDonnell’s top contributors says Muslims should be treated like communists, fascists
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today called on Virginia’s Governor-elect Robert F. McDonnell to publicly repudiate anti-Islam remarks by Pat Robertson, the televangelist and gubernatorial campaign contributor who recently said Islam is “not a religion” and that American Muslims should be treated like members of a communist or fascist party.
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buzz
Muslims need not be apologetic
By Linda S. HeardMuslims make up roughly one quarter of the world’s population. Just because one out of almost 1.5 billion ran amok, leaving 13 dead and 23 wounded, does not mean the entire Muslim nation is responsible. When Sergeant John M. Russell opened fire on his comrades at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, last May, killing five, the media did not even mention his religion. Instead, papers reported that the young man, who “had been broken by the army” was suicidal and in debt.
When National Guard soldier Joshua Cartwright shot and killed two Florida deputies in April he was characterized as “severely disturbed”. No one investigated his spiritual beliefs. The media, likewise, took a soft approach, last year, when Dustin Thorson, an Air Force sergeant, shot his wife and son at Tinker Airbase and, in 1995, when Sergeant William Kreutzer killed one and injured 18 at Fort Bragg. But when an American-born major with the name Nidal Malek Hassan commits a similar crime he is judged in the court of public opinion based on his ethnicity and religion.
Bill O’Reilly of Fair and Balanced on Fox News has already decided that Hassan is either a “Muslim terrorist” or “crazy”. Fox’s Brian Kilmeade has made up his mind too. He asked a guest: “Do you think it is time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army Officers …?” or “anyone enlisted”?
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buzz
A Russian-born immigrant who stabbed to death a pregnant Muslim woman as she gave evidence against him in court was today given Germany’s highest possible sentence for murder – 15 years’ jail with no chance of early parole.
The case has enraged the Arab world and in particular Egypt, where 31-year-old pharmacist Marwa al-Sherbini grew up.
Street demonstrators and commentators have blamed Germany for encouraging Islamophobia. The victim has been hailed as a martyr for her faith, a so-called “veil martyr”, because she had stood up against the taunts of the 28-year-old assailant, Alexander Wiens.
A fatwa has been pronounced on Mr Wiens and as a result the trial in Dresden was held under extraordinary security conditions, with the whole courthouse cleared and 200 armed police encircling the room.
“We find you bear a particularly heavy burden of guilt,” said Judge Birgit Wiegand. The phrase is German legal language indicating that Mr Wiens will not be considered for early release. Fifteen years constitutes a life sentence.
“We are very satisfied with the verdict,” said Ramzy Ezzedin Ramzy, Egypt’s ambassador to Berlin, “the maximum sentence was demanded and the maximum sentence was awarded.”
