Muslims Standup

Voices - Norman Finkelstein: "Israel Has to Suffer a Defeat"

2008-02-22T05:15:00.001-08:00

Norman Finkelstein: "Israel Has to Suffer a Defeat"

N. Finkelstein (Interview)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ&eurl=http://sabbah.biz/mt/
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1676.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1676.htm

Following are excerpts from an interview with American Political Scientist Norman Finkelstein, which aired on Future TV on January 20, 2008. The questions were posed in Arabic, and Finkelstein’s responses are in English.

Norman Finkelstein: I was of course happy to meet the Hizbullah people, because it is a point of view that is rarely heard in the United States. I have no problem saying that I do want to express solidarity with them, and I am not going to be a coward of a hypocrite about it. I don’t care about Hizbullah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon. It’s a choice that the Lebanese have to make: Who they want to be their leaders, who they want to represent them. But there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question.

My parents went through World War II. Now, Stalin’s regime was not exactly a bed of roses. It was a ruthless and brutal regime, and many people perished. But who didn’t support the Soviet Union when they defeated the Nazis? Who didn’t support the Red Army? In all the countries of Europe which were occupied – who gets all the honors? The resistance. The Communist resistance – it was brutal, it was ruthless. The Communists were not... It wasn’t a bed of roses, but you respect them. You respect them because they resisted the foreign occupiers of their country. If I am going to honor the Communists during World War II, even through I probably would not have done very well under their regimes... If I’m going to honor them, I am going to honor the Hizbullah. They show courage, and they show discipline. I respect that.

Interviewer: That is an accurate description of the situation before 2000, but after 2000, the Israelis withdrew from South Lebanon. There was a rift within Lebanon between the Lebanese political players on the issue of the future of the weapons and the issue of the resistance. This rift, which has taken place... You are now taking sides. After all, you are saying that you are only visiting Lebanon, but you don’t see the ramification of the July war for the people.

Norman Finkelstein: Listen, if you want to close your eyes and believe it was all over in May 2000, you can do so. You can play that game. But the reality was – and everyone understood it – that the Israeli attitude was: We are going to knock out Hizbullah. They began planning for a new war right after they were forced to leave in 2000. They found their excuse, their pretext, in July 2006, but there is no question among rational people that Israel was never going to let the Hizbullah victory go by. They were determined to teach their...

Interviewer: The war could have been avoided.

Norman Finkelstein: It could not have been avoided. There is no way that the United States and Israel are going to tolerate any resistance in the Arab world. If you want to pretend it can be avoided, you can play that game. But serious people, clear-headed people, knew there was going to be a war sooner or later.

[...]

Do you think there is not going to be another war? Do you think Israel is going to allow that defeat in July 2006? Do you want to pretend it is Hizbullah that is causing the trouble? No, there will be another war, and the destruction will probably be ten times worse – maybe even more – than July 2006, because Israel is determined, with the United States, to put the Arabs in their place and to keep them in their place. Now, how can I not respect those who say no to that? You know, during the Spanish Civil War there was a famous woman – they called her “La Pasionaria” – Dolores Ibárruri, from the Spanish Republic. She famously said: “It’s better to die on your feet than to walk crawling on your knees.”

Interviewer: But that is up to the Lebanese people in its entirety.

Norman Finkelstein: I totally agree. I am not telling you what to do with your lives, and if you’d rather live crawling on your feet, I could respect that. I could respect that. People want to live. How can I deny you that right? But then, how can I not respect those who say they would rather die on their feet? How can I not respect that?

[...]

Israel and the United States are attacking, because they will not allow any military resistance to their control of the region. That’s the problem. If Hizbullah laid down its arms, and said: “We will do whatever the Americans say,” you wouldn’t have a war – that’s true, but you would also be the slaves of the Americans. I have to respect those who refuse to be slaves.

Interviewer: Is there no other way than military resistance?

Norman Finkelstein: I don’t believe there is another way. I wish there were another way. Who wants war? Who wants destruction? Even Hitler didn’t want war. He would much prefer to have accomplished his aims peacefully, if he could. So I am not saying that I want it, but I honestly don’t see another way, unless you choose to be their slaves – and many people here have chosen that. I can’t really say... I can understand it – you want to live. I can’t really say I respect it. You know, so many dead, so much destruction... Before the bodies are even buried, before the buildings are even rebuilt, the person who is responsible for it all – you can’t wait to welcome him. You can’t wait to roll out the red carpet. I can’t respect that.

In that respect, I like the Jews much more. I like their attitude. Do you know what the Jewish attitude is? Never to forgive, never to forget. I agree with that. Who roll out the red carpet less than two years after your whole country was destroyed by them? The Secretary of State said it was the birth pangs of a new Middle East. That’s the statement of a freak. A human freak would compare the birth of a child with the destruction of a country, and yet, there are people here who are so anxious to welcome her. They are trying to figure out what the Americans are thinking. They can’t wait for their banquets. How can anyone respect that? I respect the Jews a thousand times more - never to forgive, never to forget. All the death and all the destruction – and you can’t wait to welcome him.

Interviewer: Norman...

Norman Finkelstein: It’s disgusting!

[...]

Who the hell cares if Bush is coming?

Interviewer: But you say there will be another war.

Norman Finkelstein: You should have declared him persona non grata. He’s not welcome here. He destroyed your country. He was responsible for the war. You know full well that resolution could have been passed three weeks earlier. He destroys your country, and you can’t wait to greet him. You have no self-respect. How can you expect other people to respect Arabs, if you show no respect for yourselves?

[...]

If the Lebanese people overwhelmingly vote to let the Americans and Israelis have their way, I guess you have to accept that. I could see that. I couldn’t possibly say that they don’t have the right to make that choice. Listen, in Nazi-occupied Europe, you have to remember, most of the populations made the choice to live under the Nazis. All this talk about a French Resistance is just a joke – it never happened. The French Resistance... About 20% of the French population read the Resistance’s newspaper. There were maybe 10% of the French who resisted. The rest said: “Don’t resist,” because the Nazis were ruthless. You resist – four hundred are killed for each soldier who’s killed. That’s how the Nazis operated. So most of the French said, like you: “We want to live.” “Don’t resist.” But now I have to ask you, in retrospect: Who do we honor? Do we honor those who say: “Let us live,” or do we honor those who said: “Let’s resist”?

[...]

Leaders come last. There will be a leader who comes to power in Israel, who is willing to make the concessions, after the conditions have been created – namely, Israel has to suffer a defeat.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Dr. Norman Finkelstein - received his doctorate from Dept. of Political Science at Princeton University. He is the author of several books including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering( Verso, 2000 ), which was attacked by organizations in North America dedicated to defending Israeli state policies. Finkelstein, both of whose parents were Holocaust survivors, says "The Holocaust Industry is, as I conceive in the book, institutions, organisations and individuals who have put to use Jewish suffering for political and financial gain." Finklestein’s book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict ( Verso, 1995 )was praised for its "intellectual integrity" by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, now teaching at Oxford. His book (with Dr. Ruth Birn) A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth ( Henry Holt, 1998 ) was praised by Israel’s outstanding Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, as well as renowned historians of Nazism Arno Mayer, Ian Kershaw and Christopher Browning.

© 2008 N. Finkelstein

SOURCE: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/message/1068

URL: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/02/22/norman_finkelstein_israel_has_to_suffer

Voices - Norman Finkelstein: "Israel Has to Suffer a Defeat"

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Christian Right's Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

2008-02-16T23:20:00.001-08:00

Christian Right's Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 12, 2008.

Christian extremists are preaching a war against tolerance to target and persecute all Muslims, including the 6 million who live in the U.S.

Technorati Tags: Kill Muslims,Christian right

Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out -- a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy -- to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world's population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called Why We Want to Kill You, promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how "Muslim terrorists" invaded America 30 years ago and how "perseverance, recruitment and hate" have fueled attacks by Muslims.

These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that "the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism," as does Mike Huckabee, who says that "Islamofascism" is "the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced." George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the "war on terror" as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.

The three men tell lurid tales of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the "grand wazir" of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as part of an extremist "sleeper cell."

"These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as 'Star Trek's' Capt. James T. Kirk was a real Starship captain," said Mikey Weinstein, the head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit by the men to the Air Force Academy.

The speakers include in their talks the superior virtues of Christianity. Saleem, for example, says his world "turned upside down when he was seriously injured in an automobile accident."

"A Christian man tended to Kamal at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment he needed," his Web site says. "Kamal's orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible."

This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage.

The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our "Christian" culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs.

These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst.

This article has been corrected.

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Christian Right's Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Mardell

2008-01-22T05:37:00.001-08:00

This is my first visit to Albania and it is a fascinating, beautiful country: Tirana much more impressive than I had been led to believe; the run-down Durres tower blocks and shanties more in keeping with my preconceptions.

I am here to report on Albania’s reaction to the looming independence of Kosovo and my report will be on Radio Four and the World Service next week and I will link to it when it is ready.

But that is for another day.

Today, religion.

On the way up into the town of Kruja, perched on the side of a mountain, we stop at a small road side shrine, a Teke, a green-domed, white walled, small building.

Down a few stone steps is a neat little room, covered with small, Turkish-style rugs. But a little area of the floor is bare, and what looks like limestone.

There’s a hole, about eight inches deep and it doesn’t take much imagination to see it as a footprint.

The shrine’s guardian, 79 year-old Masmut Subashi, tells me this is the footprint of Sari Saltik .

Holy man

The holy man’s portrait hangs on one wall, robed, with long dark hair, his hands apparently resting on the hilt of a sword. Masmut tells me how he was taken to the shrine by his father as a small boy and now he tends to it. Then he tells me the story of the saint.

A nearby village was terrorised by a monster who demanded a human life every day. Sari Saltik cut off the monster’s seven heads and for 25 years lived in the large cave which the beast had inhabited.

When he left, he first stepped on this mountainside. His next foot print was a hundred miles away and his next in Crete .

He tells us that the legend is that Sari Saltik had a brother who was a Christian, St Anthony, who had his own cave not far from here.

Please don’t hold me to the highest standards of BBC accuracy on this one.

A Muslim saint, a Muslim portrait, acknowledging a Christian brother?

Well, yes, Albania is the headquarters of the Bektashi, a Sufi group.

Sunni Muslim

Muslims are said to make up 70% of the population in Albania, and most of them are not Bektashi, who are Shia, but Sunni.

It’s mildly curious to me that while some people argue Turkey shouldn’t join the European Union because most of its population is Muslim, I have never heard the same argument applied to Kosovo or Albania.

Perhaps it’s because they are so small. Perhaps it’s because, for many, the religion is only nominal. As I write this, in Albania’s capital Tirana , I can hear the call to prayer but the approach to religion seems much more European than the more profound attachments one may find in other parts of the world.

I hasten to add I am not just talking about Islam and the Middle East: America’s devoutness seems very shocking to many worldly Europeans.

Anyway while some websites warn that Albania could be a base for “extremism ” or “fundamentalists” there seems little sign of even moderate conservatism or devotion on the streets or indeed in the villages.

Not a headscarf in sight, let alone a hijab or burkha. Is there a European Islam that is as different from Wahhabism as the Church of England is from Baptists of the Bible Belt?

Is it to be found in these lands?

Rock-and-roll poet

Ervin Hatibi is a poet and intellectual, a Sunni Muslim, who became serious about his religion after living a rather rock-and-roll lifestyle.

While some, like the historian Bernard Lewis, argue that secularism is a specifically Christian phenomenon, Ervin says Islam has its own secularism and should not be seen as a monolithic whole.

“Everywhere Islam is different,” he says.

“As an everyday experience in the Balkans, for centuries it has created unique features. I consider Islam as part of the European landscape. It was for centuries. It kept changing, especially in Europe, the continent of continuous change.

“As a believer I may have fantasies about a society that moves towards certain values, and so will an Albanian Orthodox, or an atheist from a Muslim background or one of the new Protestant Christians, but we all have to live within an Albanian space.

“We have to live in harmony with the will of the majority and this is our culture, a more and more European and Western culture. It has something special that is not only Islam, but Ottoman and from the communist regime, so we have our special flavour that gives more beauty to the European experience and is not something dangerous.”

Is he right ? Could the much derided Ottoman Empire ,multi-ethnic and relatively religiously tolerant, have got something right in the Balkans?

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Mardell

American Chronicle | Does Islam teach a believer (a Muslim), to hate Christians?

2008-01-16T05:44:00.001-08:00

By Mark Harding

Islamic teaching requires one to believe in Allah and his prophet Muhammad. But doing this requires the believer to do good which means that it is the works of the believer by his own actions that allows or disallows him or her to heaven.
It is not my intension to preach in this article, nor do I try to convince one through scripture that one is wrong and the other is right. My intention is only to compare and allow the reader an opportunity to see the differences so that one can find the reason, if any, for why Islam might teach to hate Christians.
In Luke 23: 39 to 43 tells of two men who were criminals being crucified beside Jesus. One said to Jesus “LORD, remember me when you come into your kingdom”. And did Jesus say to him “NO you have not done enough works”?. Or did Jesus assure this man that he would be with Him in Paradise Today? Therefore Christians believe that it is not by works that one can enter paradise but by faith in Jesus Christ.
What is then the good works that are taught from the Islamic teachings that allow a Muslim to be good enough to get to heaven?
Of course we find Islamic teachings that on the surface, seem to be a legitimate course of action to this challenge. For example,
Sura 21: 94 Then whoso doeth some good works and is a believer, there will be no rejection of his effort. Lo! We record (it) for him.
Sura 22:50 Those who believe and do good works, for them is pardon and a rich provision
So then what are these good works that Allah wants Muslims to do?
Sura 2:216 Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing, which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing, which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.
Sura 4:76 Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject Faith Fight in the cause of Evil
So then who are those that believe in the Quran, Allah of Islam and its messenger Muhammad and who are those that reject?
According to the Quran the believers are those who:
Believers
Sura 2:136 Say (O Muslims): We believe in Allah and that which is revealed unto us and that which was revealed unto Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the prophets received from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and unto Him we have surrendered.
I have been exhorting Muslims for many years now here in Canada to help them see the difference from what the Holy Bible teaches compared to that of the Quran. The biggest challenge is the Muslims belief that their god, ‘Allah’ in the Quran, is the same one found in the Holy Bible, the God of Israel.
Sura 2:136 is often used to promote this idea. The fact is nothing can be further from the truth. For in almost every situation found in the Quran, whether it is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Noah or even Jesus, there are very little similarities if any at all.
One of the questions I would ask the many thousands of Muslims I have questioned over the 20 years when speaking to them about their faith, has been about the severe persecution of Christians in every Islamic society. The answer that I would receive was generally the same and that was that the media was lying, there is no persecution at all in any Islamic society. They would never acknowledge the persecution of Christians in their home countries or comment on all the media reports regarding the same in any other Islamic society. Here is the reason that they must deny this terrible slaughter-taking place in every Islamic society today, which incidentally is more severe, more brutal today than it ever has ever been.
Sura 2:62 Lo! Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans - whoever believeth in Allah and the Last Day and doeth right - surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve.
This verse, and Sura 2:136, are used by Muslims to prove what Allah has to say about Christians and the fact that their god is our God. According to what they have to say there is never any persecution of Christians in Islamic societies and, they say, Muslims and Christians live in peace in their homelands like Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Somalia Sudan Turkey ect…
Of course the problem with Sura 2:136 has already been discussed, but one of the greater difficulties is that no Christian can ever believe in “Allah or the last day” thus making Sura 2:62 of no use to any Christian or Jew living in an Islamic society. This is a huge problem for many Christians living in an Islamic society who openly deny Allah, Muhammad or the Quran. Yet this is what they must do according to their religious convictions, for if the Quran preaches a lie and deception, according to what the Holy Bible dictates, it must not only be acknowledged by Christians, ALL Christians, but Islam must as well be openly discredited publicly. For God, the true God of Israel is a jealous God and is not willing to share His kingdom with Allah the god of Islam, and out of love for all Muslims, Christians must start to feel the need to encourage them to accept this truth and not the lies of Muhammad.

Un-Believers
Sura 84:20, 21, 22. What then is the matter with them that they believe not?
And when the Qur'an is read to them, they fall not prostrate,
But on the contrary the Unbelievers reject (it).
Sura 058:055 Those who resist Allah and His Messenger will be humbled to dust, as were those before them: for We have already sent down Clear Signs. And the Unbelievers (will have) a humiliating Penalty,-
Of course many living in these democratic societies like Canada, have a difficult time understanding the logic of killing someone because of their religious convictions, however that is what Islam teaches. Islam teaches a believer that they must kill those who will not believe in Allah or his prophet Muhammad until they are subdued into submission and pay a protection tax called a Jizyah tax. In other words, they mustl fight all non Muslims until all is Islam. Even the People of the book, which is Christians and Jews, must be subjected to persecution until they all are willing to admit that the god “Allah” is greater than the God of Israel which is the one we worship. And with willing submission we must pay the Jizyah tax to prove we have been subdued. This law is part of the Shaira Law which although may not be practiced yet in many Islamic societies, will be implemented to its fullest when there is an Islamic state and all the world is Islamic.
Sura 9:29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
This goal of taking over the world and making it all Islamic is still in the works today.
In the course of the last 20 years, which I have been learning about Islam, I have found out what it is like for those living in an Islamic society who disagree with Islamic teachings, like the one, which says that the god of Islam is the God of Israel. For my opinion and my religious convictions have resulted in Muslims hating me so much that they would spit on me, curse me by swearing vulgarities at me on the streets of Toronto and threaten me with such graphic and horrific statements of torture, I dare not mention them. We have all seen the carnage around the world by Muslims, because of a simple cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, which most Un believers who have studied Islam’s history believe to be very true.
Many moderate Muslims have been desperately trying to separate themselves from those who use the teachings in the Quran to further their goals of an Islamic state. But the separation that these moderate Muslims seek can never take place, because the Islamic teachings do not allow for any type of peace through democracy. For in democracy there is freedom of religion, in Islam there is no such law. In democracy there is freedom of religious choice, in Islam there is freedom of religious choice only providing you except the punishment of paying a tax for your choice of being Non Muslim. Homosexuality is outlawed and punishment includes 100 lashes or death. Women have very few rights in Islam and according to the teachings of the Quran, women risk being beaten by their husbands if they will not obey them.
I do not hate Muslims, yet in Canada there was such an outcry by Muslims who are against me for being public with my convictions about Islamic teachings of hatred, they were successful at having me arrested. The courts in 1997 found me guilty of hating Muslims and I was convicted of this crime. But I have continued my work of exposing Islam, the results of which have been extraordinary, and I will bring these stories to you at a later date.
The answer than to my original question “Does Islam teach a believer (a Muslim), to hate Christians?” is YES .
Web sites to consider:
http://www.theirownwords.com/site/showvideo/52
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57521
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID={8C1D2863-9FE5-43E9-BA8E-B21C2FFE5158}

American Chronicle | Does Islam teach a believer (a Muslim), to hate Christians?

How to Combat Radical Islamists

2008-01-15T19:12:00.001-08:00

By Mehdi Mozaffari

Mr. Mozaffari is Professor of Political Science at University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Note: This article is intended to follow another by Mr. Mozaffari, which we published two weeks ago: "Is It Possible to Combat Radical Islamism Without Combating Islam?"

We need a cognitive approach to Islamism by conceiving it as a totalitarian ideology.
A clear and full internalization of the fact that Islamism is an ideology and not a religion will purify the whole question from a variety of difficulties. In many ways, Islamism is like an octopus. We have to aim directly at the head in stead of wasting our time and energy to deal with the complicated body. By evacuating religious contents from Islamism, we change our direction from theology to ideology, from religion to politics. In this way, we put forward the real face and real nature of Islamism. The Muslims, especially among the young people, who are potentially ready to give their lives for the sake of Islamist ideals, will find out that their struggle is not a part of a religious duty but purely an ideological and political one emanating from a dangerous utopia.

We also need an international tactical or ethical consensus. This is especially needed in the Western hemisphere. The reason for such a consensus is motivated by the fact that often some western political parties and leaders use anti-Islamic rhetoric for political purposes. This policy is not productive, and it can be dangerous.

Attacking Islam is precisely what Islamists are waiting for. They are insatiably trying to convince Muslims of two things: 1) Islamism is the true face of Islam, and 2) the West is an enemy of Islam. Therefore, politicians must choose their vocabulary more carefully by avoiding attacks on Islam as a religion and by avoiding hostile remarks about Muslims in general. Americans became aware of this necessity and consequently transformed their language in this field. They talk about "terrorists who hijacked a religion" and rarely comment on Islam or Muslims in a negative way. We have to remember that Islamists are still today using President Bush's famous "crusade" pronounced in September 2001 as an evidence for American hostility against Islam. It seems that to avoid attacking Islam and Muslims, indiscriminately, has become general U.S. policy. In this respect, the most recent evidence are the apologies which a top Pentagon intelligence official, Lt. General William Boykin, offers (October 17, 2003) to Muslims because of his negative comments on Islam. The Americans' prudence is re-affirmed in President Bush's speech in Indonesia (October 22, 2003). In an elaborated and well-balanced speech, the president repeated that "Americans hold a deep respect for the Islamic faith. We know that Islam is fully compatible with liberty and tolerance and progress because we see the proof in your country [Inodonesia]." Then, he states "Terrorists who claim Islam as their inspiration defile one of the great faiths. Murder has no place in any religious tradition". In this way, President Bush tried to reach two important goals: To make a clear distinction between "Islam" and "Islamism" and to demonstrate that Islamists have hijacked Islam itself.

During the past decades, repetitive experiences have showed that dialogue with Islamists leads nowhere. While in a democratic culture, dialogue is a MUST and a natural process, Islamists consider dialogue a clear sign of weakness; their own weakness if they accept a dialogue, and especially weakness in their opponents. Dialogue is an unknown word for Islamists. Nothing positive has come out of different dialogues of diplomacy with totalitarian regimes and groups in general, and nothing positive with Islamists either. The Chamberlain and Hitler agreement, the Roosevelt and Stalin dialogue, the European Union's "critical dialogue," the "constructive dialogue," the "Iran gate," the "dialogue" with Taliban and so on and so forth. None of these attempts at dialogue have been successful for the Western diplomacy.
If dialogue or compromise is impossible and ineffective, what to do then? The answer is short and brutal: pressure! Pressure can be gradual or accumulated; but it must be real and sufficiently strong and consistent for Islamists to feel it as such. If the pressure has no positive effect-- as it was the case with Taliban -- war should not be excluded as a last resort.
Therefore, we must constantly remember and learn from previous, related experiences to deal with other totalitarian regimes, groups and ideologies. They were defeated either by war or by heavy pressure. This goes for Nazism and Fascism. It also goes for the breakdown of the USSR. Based on criteria of success, it will be wise to forget any possible arrangement with Islamists and start using systematical force and pressure.

Finally, it is necessary and urgent to acknowledge what is predominately important is democratization of the world. If there is a clash, the clash is not between civilizations or between religions. The real clash occurs between democracy and despotism.
Democratization of the Muslim world stands as the key word to combat Islamism and with it to combat current global terrorism. It represents a huge and vast task. Let me emphasize only one aspect of this, which I think is the most important. The Islamic world is producing three main things: Oil, Terrorism and Emigration. Thus, we have an Islamic Bermuda Triangle which is threatening peace and security in the world. The best way to break down this Bermuda Triangle is of course to do it within the Muslim world and by Muslims themselves. Unfortunately, democratic forces inside the Muslim world have not been able to break this Triangle. Therefore, external support is essential. To support democratic forces inside the Muslim world is an inherent and necessary part of the anti-terrorism war. External support can take different forms: conditioning economic aids to improving human rights and democracy is the first step. Awarding the Nobel Peace Price to a Muslim and Iranian woman (Shirin Ebadi) is an elegant and hopefully efficient stimulus. In extreme case, military intervention cannot be avoided. The ongoing war in Iraq - despite its doubtful legal foundations - represents a method to break down the Islamic Bermuda Triangle. In this sense, the war in Iraq is a 'strategic war' against the roots of terrorism, while the war in Afghanistan stands mostly as an "operational war" or simply a "theâtre d'opérations."

When combating Islamism, one of the main problems and difficulties is how to deal with millions of Muslims who are living in Western countries. Starting from the facts, it is apparent that Muslims in western countries are far too dispersed to constitute a compact bloc. In terms of social, cultural, political and religious orientations, the division among them is deep and real. Roughly, Muslims are divided into two large categories: Muslim Believers and Cultural Muslims. Islamists are predominantly issued from the first category. Cultural Muslims represent an agglomerate of peoples embracing agnostics, liberals, socialists and so on. In general, Cultural Muslims do not represent any tangible threat. The attention therefore must be oriented to the Muslim Believers who roughly are divided into Moderates and Radicals. Both are potential sources for Islamism; the former lesser than the latter.

Now, how to identify a Radical Muslim today in the Western countries? In this regard, there are a number of helpful indices. First, a Radical Muslim is of course a believer, who practices the rituals of Islam. But, this alone is not enough. A Radical Muslim is a man (rarely a woman--perhaps because Prophet Muhammad expressed his skepticism over women's capacity to hold a secret!). A Radical Muslim is constantly in communication with others. He can be a lonely man in the city and locality where he lives, but is with permanent communication with the outside world. Communication goes through mail, e-mail, fax, telephone (mobile and public) and so on. He is also a man who reads much and is generally a quiet person carefully avoiding clashes with the police and other public authorities. He is also traveler, a globetrotter! He is a young man with an average age of 25-27 years. In Southern Europe, Radical Muslims are issued from North Africa (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). In the U.K. essentially from Pakistan. In Scandinavia, from Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Pakistan. Iranian Islamists are working under the auspices of Iranian authorities, generally as diplomatic personnel or as business persons.

Conclusion

Today, the world is facing a single global terrorism, which is Islamist. In my analysis, I did not approach the force of the global terrorism. I took it as a given fact. Islamist terrorism is perhaps not as powerful as some people would imagine. However, according to Institute for Strategic Studies (in London), Islamist terrorism has been reinforced following the war on Iraq (October Report 2003). We may say that global terrorism at least appears as a huge troublemaker. In this study, I tried to demonstrate that the real danger lies somewhere else. Islamist terrorism is the expression of a totalitarian ideology. Therefore, the world is facing a new totalitarianism, which has been neglected for decades. Consequently, combating Islamist terrorism cannot be reduced to a simple classic counter-terrorism. Classic Counter-terrorism's highly necessary efforts and investigations must be accompanied by coherent political, cultural and economic actions.

In short, my propositions to combating Islamist terrorism without combating Islam are resumed in the three following points:

¢ Continuous pressure on Islamists and, if necessary, conduct of war;
¢ Dialogue and cooperation with moderate Muslims, and
¢ Effective support to democratic forces inside the Muslim world.

© Mehdi Mozaffari

Related Links

What Is the Difference Between Islam and Islamism

How to Combat Radical Islamists

ArabComment » In the Name of Hijab?

2008-01-07T18:59:00.001-08:00

In the Name of Hijab

As an American Muslim woman who chooses the hijab, I was shocked, enraged, and saddened to hear of the murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez in Mississauga, Canada. Aqsa was a young Muslim girl struggling to balance the more traditional values of her family with Western culture.

This brave young girl was allegedly killed at the hands of the man that should have been protecting her: her own father. Canadian media has reported that the 16 year old argued with her father about wearing the hijab, or traditional Islamic headscarf. Friends said she would leave the house in traditional dress and change into western-style clothing when she arrived at school.

Her father, Muhammad Parvez, called 911 to report that he had killed his daughter on Monday, December 11th. She died from her injuries only hours later. Her 26 year old brother has been charged with obstruction of justice for failing to cooperate with police. To me, Aqsa is a martyr for the freedom of individual choice.

I am especially distraught that this alleged murder happened in Canada, home of “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a TV sitcom produced by a brilliant Canadian Muslim director, Zarqa Nawaz. In the episode, “The Barrier,” first aired earlier this year; the teenage girl, Layla and her very conservative father, Baber, disagreed about her attire. She was an active girl and didn’t want to be restricted by her garments. She hid the fact that she had had her period—a traditional moment when girls are encouraged to begin covering their hair–for fear that her father would want her to wear a headscarf. While the two fundamentally disagreed about the issue, as is the case in most civilized families (Muslim or not), violence was never an option.

To some zealots, there is no place in heaven for a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair. For some, it is an ancient patriarchal tradition that should be abolished. But American Muslim teens themselves are embracing the autonomy that Islam and America afford individuals. In recently released The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook, Yasmine Hafiz, her brother, Imran Hafiz, and their mother, Dilara Hafiz, of Phoenix, Arizona, advise teens (and parents): “According to the Quran, as long as Muslims are dressed modestly and behave respectably, no specific dress code is required… modest behavior is also encouraged, therefore ogling the cute boy in Chemistry class or leering at the cheerleaders is definitely out! …Each person must read the Quran for herself and form her own opinion.”

Teens and others are turning to interpretations of Islam that assert that there isn’t one way to look if you’re a Muslim girl or woman. According to the distinguished Islamic scholar, Reza Aslan, “The veil was neither compulsory, nor for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.”

Some so-called “traditional” Muslims argue that ‘Western’ women are oppressed because they must derive their self-worth from the gaze of men. However, it is also true that within some Islamic communities a woman who does not cover is not afforded the same respect as one who does. The expectations are different but the result is the same; a woman’s worth is still determined by others, including men.

While living in Yemen, my friend, Kelly Wentworth, who is also a convert to Islam, experienced pressure to cover herself that did not stem from a religious mandate but a cultural one. As the wife of a Yemeni man, if she chose not to cover, the society would consider it a dishonor to her husband’s family.

It is essential that men and women make their own choices about dress for internal reasons rather than succumbing to external pressures. This is only possible when individuals have the freedom to choose. Personally, by wearing hijab, I experience a sense of autonomy, confidence and femininity I did not before. Yet, for those who have been forced to wear it, I believe it is a very physical barrier to connection with the Divine. Perhaps it is because of her belief in this freedom of choice that Aqsa Parvez was so viciously murdered.

As a Muslim, a woman, a wife, a daughter and a citizen of the free world, I am outraged by the fact that Aqsa was taken from this earth. No human being has the right to destroy the life that God has made sacred. I am sickened that this man has shamed Islam through his very unislamic acts. There is no place in the world for this kind of intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted thinking, no matter in what faith tradition it appears.

An important distinction difficult for fundamentalists of all faith traditions is that dress codes are a matter of choice, not religious mandate or obligation. Without choice, no act bears meaning. According to Islamic scripture, an act is judged by the intent with which it was performed. If a woman chooses to wear a scarf because she believes in its benefit to her, she has a pure motive. However, if she covers to please another person, whether that person is her husband, brother, father or mother, while not believing in its benefits, the motive is lost and the act of wearing it loses all meaning.

I believe Aqsa has found her place in Paradise. I pray that in her passing we will not miss this opportunity to take a lesson from the tragedy of her death, inspiring us to practice tolerance, love, kindness and understanding with all, however they are dressed.

Tags: canada, family, hijab, islam, violence

ArabComment » In the Name of Hijab?

Abused Muslim Women in U.S. Gain Advocates - New York Times

2008-01-06T06:20:00.001-08:00

Abused Muslim Women in U.S. Gain Advocates

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

A resident of the Hamdard Center for Health and Human Services, a shelter near Chicago that caters mainly to Muslim women.

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Published: January 6, 2008

CHICAGO — After enduring seven years of beatings from her husband, a young Yemeni-American woman recently fled to a local shelter, only to find that the heavy black head scarf she wore as an observant Muslim provoked disapproval.

The shelter brought in a hairdresser, whose services she accepted without any misgivings. But once her hair was styled, administrators urged her to throw off her veil, saying it symbolized the male oppression native to Islam that she wanted to escape.

Instead the woman, who asked for anonymity because she feared further violence from her relatives, decamped to the Hamdard Center for Health and Human Services in suburban Chicago, a shelter that caters mainly to Muslim women by not serving pork and keeping prayer rugs handy. Such shelters are extremely rare nationwide, activists say, because Muslim Americans only recently began confronting the issue of spousal abuse.

Domestic violence among Muslims has long straddled a blurry line between culture and religion, but now scattered organizations founded by Muslim American women are creating a movement to define it as an unacceptable cultural practice. The problem occurs among American Muslims at the same rate as other groups, activists say, but is even more sensitive because raising the issue is considered an attack on the faith.

“The Muslim community is under a lot of scrutiny, so they are reluctant to look within to face their problems because it will substantiate the arguments demonizing them,” said Rafia Zakaria, a political science graduate student at Indiana University who is starting a legal defense fund for Muslim women. “It puts Muslim women in a difficult position because if they acknowledge their rights, they are seen as being in some kind of collusion with all those who are attacking Muslim men. So the question is how to speak out without adding to the stereotype that Muslim men are barbaric, oppressive, terrible people.”

The answer, she and other activists have concluded, is to show that Muslim Americans are tackling the problem.

“Domestic violence is an issue we can deal with as a community, and not by saying we don’t have this problem, which is obviously a lie,” Ms. Zakaria said.

Some activists describe being expelled from mosques and holiday fairs when they first tried to broach the topic five years ago, but they have achieved a wider audience by allying themselves with sympathetic clerics.

The Yemeni-American woman sought advice from several imams after her Yemeni husband of just a few months started to slap, punch and degrade her.

The clerics offered marriage counseling, but only if the husband came too, a condition she knew doomed the idea. Her sister suggested she lose weight and be more obedient. Her father encouraged obedience, too, while her husband hit her through three pregnancies. After she filed for divorce, she said, her father hauled her home and hit her too, for shaming him.

“Both my dad and my husband told me that women don’t talk back,” said the 29-year-old woman. “They told me the Koran said I had to be obedient, and I answered that it does not say beat up your wife.”

At Hamdard, calls for help come from Muslim women as far afield as Wisconsin, Kentucky and Louisiana, shelter workers said, far more than they can accommodate with just 11 beds. They turned away 647 women and children in 2007, said Maryam Gilani, the director of Hamdard’s domestic violence program, noting that about 55 percent of the women the center helped were Muslim. Some large, wealthy Muslim communities, like the one in the San Francisco area, have been unable to raise money for a shelter, which activists attribute to the wish to label the problem as foreign to Islam.

“There was resistance, and there still is,” said Ms. Gilani, adding that opponents dismissed shelters as some kind of brothel. “There are some who say what we do is not right, you have to stay with your husband and make it work. They try to turn it either into a religious thing, or they say that it is just a normal thing that happens in the family.”

The challenge for most organizations is getting accurate legal information to women who are often closeted at home and may not speak English. Hamdard developed several novel solutions. Briefing area grocery store owners and hairdressers that cater to Muslims produced numerous referrals. More often, it organizes mosque seminars about breast cancer, then slips in a few minutes about domestic violence.

Activists describe mosques as the most effective way to reach Muslims because immigrant societies remain heavily patriarchal and because American mosques serve as community centers. The latter also means that immigrant imams ill-equipped to deal with social problems are prone to give battered women advice like “Read the Koran more,” or will try couples counseling, which can bring disastrous consequences at home.

One outspoken cleric is Imam Muhammad Magid, who runs a collective of seven mosques in suburban Virginia and is vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, the country’s main Muslim umbrella organization. Anyone getting married at one of his mosques must undergo marriage counseling during which domestic abuse is discussed.

But activists expect real change will only come with the next generation of Muslim women here, raised in an American context that condemns such violence.

In most Muslim countries, the law is rooted in a combination of the Koran and tradition, so immigrants are more reticent.

“It is much more difficult there to say I want a divorce, I want custody or my husband is forcing me to have sex without my permission,” said Samira Ansari, a family lawyer in San Jose, Calif. “Because they don’t get that legal support back home, it takes them a while to understand what exists here.”

Mr. Magid said older immigrants in particular refused to hold men accountable and expected imams to advise the wife to return to her husband.

“So many people emphasize trying to keep the family together regardless of the pain or consequences,” he said. “We tell them that the foundation of the family is peace and tranquillity and if that doesn’t exist, then the family doesn’t exist as a unit.”

To counter opposition rooted in religious texts, Mr. Magid and others use the example of Prophet Muhammad. There is no record of him striking one of his wives; rather, he would withdraw when angered. The raging debate comes with Chapter 4, Verse 34 in the Koran, long interpreted as giving husbands the right to strike their wives as the final step in an escalating series of punishments for being rebellious.

Maha B. Alkhateeb, who helped edit a book on domestic violence called “Change From Within,” is among the leading activists pushing a new interpretation of the verse that understands it as calling for women to be obedient to God.

But given that the Koran is considered the unassailable word of God, it is particularly difficult for young, often secular women to promote a new interpretation.

Although few men cite the Koran as justification for hitting their spouses, Ms. Alkhateeb said that in every seminar she organized about ending domestic violence, at least one man invariably asked on what authority the verse could be reinterpreted.

Toward that end, Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the outreach director for Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., is trying to set up a nationwide movement of Muslim men who will lobby for the new interpretation.

“That is the linchpin, the fulcrum that justifies domestic violence in the Muslim context,” the imam said.

Abused Muslim Women in U.S. Gain Advocates - New York Times

Family Security Matters

2007-12-29T09:00:00.001-08:00

The Right to Offend: Putting the Muhammad Cartoons in Context

By Nicholas Guariglia

Pity Sofia Karlberg, the spokeswoman of the Swedish foreign ministry, who was tasked with the highly weasel-like chore of expressing regret for something she was not responsible for; for something that need not be regretted. It seems that Lars Vilks, a cartoonist for the Swedish paper Nerikes Allenhanda, drew unflattering depictions of the Islamic prophet and seventh-century general Muhammad. Karlberg eulogized to the BBC that the Swedish government “expressed regret that the publication of the cartoons had hurt the feelings of Muslims,” but continued that the government “can’t apologize for the cartoons because (the government) did not publish them.” .....

Nor should we forget the visceral reaction to previous doodlings. The publisher of the first Muhammad cartoons in 2005, Jyllands-Posten of Denmark, had also published satirical cartoons of Jesus and (what were Iran-sponsored) Holocaust-denying cartoons. Nobody killed anyone. But once the Danish newspaper violated the “sanctity” of Islamic aniconism, embassies went aflame, civilians were butchered across the world, diplomats cowered and then were attacked for their perceived passivity, countless death warrants ordered by old men in robes were issued, and suicide bombs were discovered all over Europe.

The charade was entirely manufactured and stoked by the Iranian theocracy and various loose-end clerical theocrats jockeying for power. Boycotts on the small pacifistic European democracy were intended to destroy its economy. The majority of Western papers whimpered away from reprinting the drawings in solidarity with free expression (and one that did, Free Inquiry out of New York, was banned from Borders bookstores).

Apologies, mea culpas, and soft-spoken confessions continued for months, underscoring the necessity for a bit more stoicism and a lot less sentimentality in our society. “Perhaps the cartoons were tasteless? Maybe they were a tad too insulting? Was their publication really prudent?” The sniveling, self-loathing masochism entirely missed the point.

Family Security Matters

"Reform Conference Reaches Out to Muslims, Evangelicals - Forward.com"

2007-12-25T08:42:00.001-08:00

Reform Conference Reaches Out to Muslims, Evangelicals

By Anthony Weiss
Thu. Dec 06, 2007

The head of the largest Muslim organization in the country is expected to address the national gathering of North America’s largest Jewish denomination at its annual conference next week. The speech is part of a broader push at the conference to elevate interfaith dialogue with Muslims and Christians.

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, will appear at the Union for Reform Judaism’s biennial, which is being held in San Diego. The event comes three months after the URJ’s president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, addressed ISNA at its annual convention. Building on Mattson’s appearance, Yoffie is planning to announce a national dialogue and education program that Jewish and Muslim scholars have been developing together.

“We feel that American Jews and American Muslims need to sit down together and get to know each other, so you need a congregational component to that,” Yoffie told the Forward. “It’s not just a matter of bringing together a few rabbis and a few imams.”

In the past, Muslim-Jewish interfaith efforts have taken place on a small scale or within individual communities. Last month, a meeting of imams and rabbis from across the country billed itself as the first national interfaith effort. The Reform movement’s push is an attempt to encourage interaction nationwide, not only between clergy but also between rank-and-file members.

The appearance of Mattson at the convention is a triumph for Yoffie, who had insisted, in the face of criticism from within the Reform movement and from outside it, that ISNA was not a viable, moderate partner. But by attempting to push the dialogue from the leadership level down to the grassroots, the URJ and ISNA are entering difficult territory, testing the notion that congregants are as eager to work together as their leaders.

ISNA has been criticized in the past for its positions on terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the national umbrella organization has recently been moving toward more moderate positions — a shift symbolized by the leadership of Mattson, who is both a woman and a convert to Islam.

Mattson could not be reached for comment.

Reform movement leaders said that the response in the Reform movement to Yoffie’s ISNA speech was generally positive. Pre-registration levels for a panel discussion on Islam are among the highest of any session at the conference. Other Reform leaders caution, however, that Jews might not find the same level of interest in dialogue from the less-established American Muslim community.

“The American Muslim community is just not there yet. They’re still busy dealing with things that feel like survival issues to them,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center, the Washington office of the Reform movement. “So much of that community is still first generation, second generation, and still feeling its way through the organizational structure.”

Jewish and Muslim scholars have put together academic materials for congregations interested in pursuing a dialogue, or for those who, lacking a dialogue partner, wanted to educate themselves. But Rabbi Laura Geller, of Temple Emmanuel in Los Angeles, stressed that dialogue, by itself, wasn’t a sufficient basis for a connection.

“It used to be there was a Jewish-Catholic dialogue, there was a Muslim-Jewish dialogue, and the point was dialogue,” she said. “It’s important, but isn’t sufficient. I think what is really the goal of all of these connections is working together.”

The Reform movement’s interest in reaching out to religious groups with which the Jewish community has sometimes had contentious relations will also extend to evangelical Christians. Pastor Rick Warren, founder of the evangelical Saddleback mega-church in Orange County, Calif., and author of the mega-bestseller “The Purpose-Driven Life,” will be speaking at a workshop about community building, drawing on the enormous success of his own church.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, author of his own bestseller, “God’s Politics,” will be appearing on a panel about progressive religion and social action. Wallis has risen to prominence by arguing that evangelical values such as concern for poverty dictate a break with the religious right. More recently, Warren, too, has begun to speak about the importance of combating AIDS and global poverty.

"Reform Conference Reaches Out to Muslims, Evangelicals - Forward.com"

Muslim community growing in Connecticut -- Newsday.com

2007-12-25T08:25:00.001-08:00

"This is a national effort to establish some understanding of Islam, to start an interfaith dialogue"

HARTFORD, Conn. - The Muslim community in Connecticut is growing, drawing more faithful to a mosque that provides room to expand and prompting efforts to reach out to others.
For example, a billboard on Interstate 84 west near Cheshire invites motorists to turn east, or toward Mecca.
The Connecticut chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America that paid for the billboard has sponsored similar highway messages nationwide to inform non-Muslims about Islam and counter negative images that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"This is a national effort to establish some understanding of Islam, to start an interfaith dialogue," said Naveed Khan, a member of the United Muslim Masjid, a Waterbury mosque under construction. "There is a great need to educate people about Islam after 9/11. As a community we need to address this issue."
Islamic Circle's national convention in July at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford was attended by about 15,000 people.
"What we see in the news media and television is a picture of Muslims that is far from reality," said Muhammad Ahmad, a member of the Islamic Circle of North America and a doctor who practices internal medicine in Chicago. "Unless we go out and tell our neighbors who we are, there is no one who will correct the image."
Ahmad, who answers phone lines that inform callers about Islam, said he's received calls from curious priests, students, Muslims, non-Muslims and news reporters. Some callers have even tried to convert him to their faith.
"We are giving out information. What people want to do with that information is their problem," he said.
Construction of the United Muslim Masjid in Waterbury is more evidence of the growing Muslim community in Connecticut. Khan said the group is building a 24,000-square-foot building because its current mosque can no longer fit the growing number of Muslims in the Waterbury area who pray there five times a day and gather for Islamic holidays.
Attendance at the mosque has grown in the last decade as a rising number of Muslims have arrived in the Waterbury area from Albania, Ghana and elsewhere.
The new mosque will have a community hall, library, gymnasium, learning center and a minaret tall enough to be seen from I-84. The new mosque also will allow its members to hold more outreach activities to educate the public about Islam and Muslims.
___
Information from: The Hartford Courant, http://www.courant.com

Muslim community growing in Connecticut -- Newsday.com

Be the moderate you're looking for | Indian Muslims

2007-12-21T06:06:00.001-08:00

"O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, though it may be against yourselves"

By Kareem Elbayar

"O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, though it may be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for God can best protect both. Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest ye swerve, and if ye distort justice or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that ye do." (Qur'an 4:135)

Washington, DC - In a 7 December op-ed in The New York Times, Ayaan Hirsi Ali asked where the moderate Muslims were, and concluded that the very notion of a moderate Muslim majority was "wishful thinking". Ali's claims are echoed by many prominent commentators on the American right, and judging by the comments left on The New York Times website, by many average Americans as well. But the popular idea that mainstream Muslims either do nothing to condemn (or worse, secretly applaud) the outrages perpetrated in the name of our religion is not only reductive and misinformed – it is dangerously wrong as well.

The vast majority of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are indeed moderate, peace-loving people who reject violent extremism and terror. Moderate Muslims are all around us, from the attorney and husband of the rape victim from Saudi Arabia, both of whom expressed revulsion and shame at the decision made by Saudi Arabian courts; to the delegation of British Muslims who travelled to Sudan and worked with Sudanese MP Ghazi Suleiman to secure the "teddy bear" teacher's release (and prove that the entire controversy was more about distracting international attention from Darfur than it was about Islam); to the literally hundreds of thousands of Muslim individuals and organisations in the United States and around the world that expressed shock and disgust at the events which Ali cites.

Ali conveniently omits these facts from her narrative – just as she plucks a single verse from the Qur'an, devoid of any context – in order to create a black-and-white fantasy world of Muslim radicals versus civilised Westerners. Yes Ms. Ali, verse 24:2 of the Qur'an sets out a harsh punishment for adultery – but verse 24:4 requires four eyewitnesses (an almost impossible standard to meet) and, more importantly, verse 24:5 states that the punishment should not be applied to those who sincerely repent. (So much for your argument that the Qur'an orders believers to show no compassion).

Ali may make headlines by writing polemics condemning Islam as a "backward religion" and "the new fascism", but in the meantime Muslim organisations like the one I am a member of, Muslims for Progressive Values, will continue to quietly but effectively do what we can to counteract the hateful nonsense that regretfully is being taught as Islam in far too many places. Moderate and even progressive Muslim organisations can be found all over the world, but we are too busy working within our communities to promote a message of reform and tolerance to do as Ali asks and "rise up in horror" every time some lunatic commits a crime in the name of our faith. Nor should we be expected to do so. It seems that Ali would like me and my co-religionists to go about our lives constantly marching around the streets apologizing for the acts of zealots – but I will not do so, for I bear no more responsibility for these acts than she does.

Moderate and progressive Muslims are everywhere, but we are ignored and marginalised by the media and by commentators like Ali. It seems that in our modern age of sound bites and one-liners, strident if uninformed criticism will always outperform calm and reasoned debate. If Ali is serious about supporting tolerance among Muslims, perhaps she should spend less time penning distracting and misleading screeds against Islam and more time reaching out to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Muslims for Progressive Values, Al-Fatiha, and Sisters in Islam. The only way to prevent the "clash of civilisations" from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy is to build bridges between our communities. Promoting a black-and-white caricature of reality serves no one – least of all the tolerant Muslims Ali can't seem to find anywhere she looks.

------------------
Kareem Elbayar is the vice-chair of Muslims for Progressive Values. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: Common Ground News Service, 18 December 2007, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication

Be the moderate you're looking for | Indian Muslims

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The battle over mosque reform

2007-12-20T22:50:00.001-08:00

British Muslim leaders are to tell mosques to reform - but do young Muslims even care?
This week began as just another for Britain's mosques. But by the end of it, things could be very different.

The four largest Islamic organisations in the UK have, against expectations, agreed professional standards for mosques. It may sound like management speak - but these standards on a mosque's obligations to society are part of a battle for hearts and minds in the face of violent extremism.

The unwieldily-named Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (Minab) is seeking signatures on the dotted line. The question is whether any of it will make a difference.

The great era of mosque building was in the 1970s and 1980s, led by the first generation immigrants. They copied what they knew and mosques were built as prayer halls largely run on ethnic, cultural or tribal lines.

PROPOSED MOSQUE STANDARDS

Democratic and accountable

Transparent finances

Open to women and youth

Counter-extremism programmes

Inter-faith schemes

Work against forced marriage

Mosques body targets extremism

Today there are at least 1,500 institutions which are broadly independent of one and other. But while they may be about to get a dose of 21st Century management consultancy, tens of thousands of young British Muslims have already drifted away.

Many British-born Muslims believe mosques offer them nothing - and so they are looking elsewhere for answers. Navid Akhtar is a commentator and a producer of muslimcafe.tv. It's a polished internet broadcast with guests debating big issues of the day in a media-savvy way.

When some Muslim leaders condemned a recent groundbreaking Channel 4 drama about a British Muslim joining MI5 while his sister became a terrorist, muslimcafe.tv was one of the places where British Muslims debated the issues.

Complex identities

"The communities have changed and the mosques have not kept in touch because they are still run by the first generation," says Akhtar.

"Today we have got very complex identities as Muslims living in the West - but the mosque as an institution has not tuned in to that."

"People go, they learn the Koran, they do their communal prayers and that's about it. It's the bits that are missing that concern us - people going through divorce, social problems, alienation - people born here but feeling marginalised or betrayed as Muslims.

Prayers: But many mosques have little space for women

"They look to the mosque for support - but they are desperately inadequate in delivering it."

Akhtar tells a story that can be heard time and again among British Muslims who say Mosques have unwittingly played a part in extremism.

"If I go to my local imam who is Pakistani, whose identity is Pakistani, to talk this stuff, he will just give a flick of my ear - he is not really concerned about me being British or not.

"This is what gave birth to radical organisations - kids came to the mosque and battled with the first generation over cultural issues, like arranged marriages or being forced to learn Urdu. They went elsewhere for answers and found people like the radical preacher Omar Bakri.

"Some of the birth of radical Islam in this country came out of these cultural issues that the first generation didn't want to address."

Sensitivities

It's this accusation that has caused the most tension between the generations in Muslim Britain - and what will make the attempts to modernise mosques so they appeal to the young so difficult. Government is pushing hard for the work to be done because it needs results on extremism. But the communities are scared of becoming being political stooges.

Leicester-based imam Ibrahim Mogra is involved in the reform agenda and a leading figure in the Muslim Council of Britain - but he warns against creating a body that does government's bidding.

"This won't be a body with any legislative powers where we can police mosques and tell them what to do or dictate what not to do," says Sheikh Mogra.

Janmohamed says change must come from within

"We're going to be promoting good practice and highlighting where the formulas are extremely successful and encouraging others to buy into that model. The creation of this body is not in response to our so-called 'war on terror' and is not part of the agenda of preventing extremism. It will be a useful tool - but it's not the primary purpose."

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the voice behind Spirit21, an influential blog with readers across the cultural and religious spectrum. Her commentary on Muslim Britain has a following among key government figures. She is typical of growing numbers of Muslim women debating critical issues because they very often find no welcome at the steps of the mosque.

"You've got to realise that there are some that are small and run by 'uncles' who, to be frank, would not let a woman within three feet of the mosque. There are others which have large spaces for women. Some mosques sometimes seem to be a bit of a working man's club. And the problem is that many young people leave the mosque behind because there is no social element or relevance for them."

Pro-reform Muslims

Janmohamed argues that the new mosques body needs to encourage rather than force change and avoid the taint of government interference. The trick, she say, is to get changes like representations for women to happen from within. Only then will mosques start to look like progressive institutions playing an active role in building community ties.

And it is community that pro-reform Muslims see as essential to success. If Minab is a success, they believe it will bring Muslims closer to the mainstream because it will help build a sense of what it is to both a British citizen and a Muslim.

Hardline islamists see the two as incompatible. In the shadows of the real world and the internet exist extremists ready to identify confused young and women who can be sold a simple story that ends with a bomb being strapped to the body.

The fact is that these recruiters will be there for a long time to come. Janmohamed says government needs to change its language so the debate around mosques and improving the lot of Muslims is not automatically and always linked to terrorism.

"The really serious individuals intent on violence don't go to the mosques - but if mosques step up to the plate then some may not go down that route. But it's only one part of the answer."

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The battle over mosque reform

Where is the Muslim outrage?

2007-12-17T05:46:00.001-08:00

By: - Mike Ghouse

As a Muslim I am outraged at this nonsense going on in Sudan and Saudi Arabia.
When Prophet Muhammad's cartoons were published, the few Muslims around the world were outraged to the point of becoming destructive. They burned the embassy in Syria. Their contention was that the Prophet cannot be contained in an image, they were right but they were dead wrong on destroying any property, it went against the very principles taught by the Prophet "to forgive the wrong doers". Not enough of us were outraged against those criminals to make a difference.
Ms. Gibbons affectionately calls the Teddy bear "Muhammad" and the fanatics cry foul. The good for nothing silent majority needs to step up and condemn the individuals and the government of Sudan for treating a lady for her benevolence in such an ugly manner. She probably would not have named, had she known about it.
Prophet Muhammad would be saddened with these guys behavior.
When the Buddha Statue, a world heritage monument was destroyed in Pakistan last month, Where was the Muslim outrage?
When the Buddhist Monks were locked up in Burma, where was the Muslim outrage?
What is good for the goose has got to be good for the gander. The third Caliph Omar punished his own son against a complaint from a Jewish businessman; such was the sense of Justice. Where is that sense of justice and fairness now?
Mirza A. Beg writes, "…a woman in Saudi Arabia was gang-raped. She was seen in a car with a person not of her family. She was also found guilty along with the rapists and recommended punishment under the Saudi Law."

Where is the Muslim outrage?

On Faith: Guest Voices: The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy

2007-12-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy
By Hamza Yusuf

In all the heat generated by the teddy bear controversy in Sudan, we are missing a deeper reality: As irrational and backward as the reaction in Khartoum might seem, it is yet another example of some Muslims attempting to assert themselves and exercise a little authority in the face of the immense onslaught of Western hegemony in the region.
The facts are that Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher at a private school in Khartoum, had her 7-year-old students name a teddy bear and they overwhelmingly chose "Muhammad." The students took turns taking the bear home and wrote a diary about what they did with it, which was compiled into a book with a picture of the bear and the title "My Name is Muhammad." Some parents were offended and the Sudanese government responded by arresting and charging Gibbons with insulting the Prophet of Islam.
The charge is without merit, of course. But it is worth noting that for Muslims, the idea of calling any object other than a human being "Muhammad" is sacrilegious. With Jews, Muslims share a prohibition of making physical images of any living things. An exception is made for children's toys. Calling the image of any animal Muhammad, a name that Muslims won't utter without a benediction is, for them, beyond the pale. Turks even prefer the contraction Mehmet to avoid using the name in common circumstances. Westerners have a hard time understanding such reverence in a markedly irreverent age.
In the West, teddy bears are objects of devotion for little children and for most adults fond memories of a cuddly teddy bear endure. A child calling a teddy bear Jesus, for instance, may seem inappropriate, but would likely elicit a response of "How cute!" Westerners are dumbfounded at what appears to be an absolutely insane response to an unfortunate lack of cultural sensitivity. But so, I would venture, are most Muslims.
I was appalled by the response of the Sudanese authorities and denounce their arrest of Ms. Gibbons. I am glad she has been released. The danger here is that despite most Sudanese being beautiful and proudly hospitable people, too many Westerners will nonetheless see them as barbarians unworthy of respect. Hence, it fuels the current attacks on them due to their government's failure to address Darfur's serious problems. Far from being xenophobic or genocidal, I know the Sudanese to be a serene and irenic desert people. Even Ms. Gibbons now says that she has been treated well by the Sudanese. "I have encountered nothing but kindness and generosity from the Sudanese people. I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone and I am sorry if I caused any distress," she said.
Unfortunately, millions of Muslims all over the globe are humiliated and betrayed by the ignorance and lack of basic humanity that a small minority of Muslims too often exhibits. Should I, however, bring this up with many of my Muslim brothers and sisters a common response is: "It's true, but look at what the West is doing to Muslims; 800,000 thousand dead in Iraq. And what about Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and the rest? Why don't Western people denounce these atrocities against us and only harp about how backward we are?" A famous Iraqi poet once wrote, "If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people's destruction is something to debate." Unfortunately, these Western horrors against the Muslims demand responses, but Muslims must also recognize and denounce these wrongs too often associated with our Prophet and our faith without always pointing fingers elsewhere.
Our current world can go one of two ways at this crossroad. We can go down the path of more violence, more hatred and more alienation, or we can attempt to understand each other, recognize our real differences, and display mutual respect. True religion -- as well as the highest secular values -- demands we take the latter road.
Indeed, the situation in Sudan is a medieval misunderstanding and overreaction. So are the myriad cases of torture, rape and pillaging that are now part of our daily patch of foreign, and increasingly, domestic news. Indeed, our dark medieval past seems to be having an ironic renaissance in the West and the Muslim world.
So when we see an irrational or misguided reaction of some Muslims, as we now see in Sudan, it behooves us to reflect on the deeper reality causing it.

On Faith: Guest Voices: The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy

Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile | Hans Kèng: Moral moorings

2007-12-15T08:49:00.001-08:00

For him, one opportunity for Muslims to indulge in reform came during the era of the French Revolution, when Muslims were obliged to face modern realities and to examine the fundamentals of their religion

Hans Kèng: Moral moorings

Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kèng was ordained a priest in 1954, and in 1962 he was appointed peritus, or special theological advisor, by Pope John XXIII. However, in December 1979, he was stripped of his licence to teach, largely because of his opposition to the doctrine of papal infallibility, expressed in his book Infallible? An Inquiry, published in 1971. Nevertheless, Kèng has not given up his quest to reform the Catholic Church, and he is both a respected Christian theologian and a widely recognised authority on world religions, especially on the "Abrahamic" religions -- Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Until his retirement in 1996, Kèng was professor of ecumenical theology and director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research at the University of Tèbingen in Germany, where he worked with his friend Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Today, he heads the Global Ethic Foundation. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan appointed Kèng a member of an international group of eminent persons brought together to promote dialogue among civilisations. Kèng was a natural choice for the position, since he was familiar with the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the discourses of the Buddha and Confucius, and the Quran. Kèng's works include Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (1980); Eternal Life? (1984); Christianity and Chinese Religions (1988 with Julia Ching); Paradigm Change in Theology (1989); The Catholic Church (2002); and My Struggle for Freedom (2003). He was recently named one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the British magazine Prospect.

Interview by Gamal Nkrumah

'The history of Islam is about a third shorter than Christianity, it is no less complex. The more Islam spread, the less monolithic it became'

It is mid-morning, and the calm of the corner of the Cairo hotel in which Hans Kèng explains his views on Islam and inter-religious dialogue is disturbed by the infuriating ring-tones of mobile phones.

Misreading the Muslim world has had grave ramifications, he says, and he infuses his understanding of the history of Islam with a wealth of detail and a kind of unanticipated solemnity. "There will be no peace among nations without peace among religions," he states, matter-of- factly, and his deepest desire is precisely to help bring about an atmosphere of greater understanding between Muslims and Christians.

Kèng is unhappy with the current state of affairs and particularly about growing tensions between Muslims and Christians in the West. What he advocates above all is a common ethical framework for humanity as a whole, which must "demolish the walls of prejudice stone by stone and build bridges of dialogue, rather than erect new barriers of hatred, hostility and vengeance." In particular, for this Swiss-born Christian theologian, Westerners must build bridges of dialogue with Muslims.

Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile | Hans Kèng: Moral moorings

The Canadian Press: Calgary imam says Islam, family violence don't mix; goes on hunger strike

2007-12-15T08:35:00.001-08:00

CALGARY - An imam from Alberta was planning to go on a weekend hunger strike to bring attention to domestic violence and how it is completely against the teachings of Islam.

Any violence involving families is "absolutely un-Islamic," Syed Soharwardy of the Calgary Islamic Centre said Friday.

"We should not be using religion as a scapegoat to justify what we need. We should resolve our disputes based on reasoning, logic (and) cool-mindedness."

The imam's comments came after the death earlier this month of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez of Mississauga, Ont., who reportedly had a long-standing dispute with her family over her apparent reluctance to wear the traditional Muslim headscarf, the hijab.

Her father, who has not yet entered a plea, has been charged with her murder.

Soharwardy, who is also national president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, said family violence plagues every group in society, but it seems that faith is only used as an excuse when it comes to Muslims.

He also said it is against his religion to force Islamic will upon others. "Islam wants people to have a righteous and a pious life, but Islam leaves that decision up to that person."

Other Canadian Islamic leaders have also publicly come out this week to emphasize that their religion condemns violence and teaches its followers not to force their beliefs upon others.

The Canadian Press: Calgary imam says Islam, family violence don't mix; goes on hunger strike

Islam’s Silent Moderates - New York Times

2007-12-14T04:57:00.001-08:00

Islam’s Silent Moderates
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Published: December 7, 2007
The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)
She very conveniently leaves out the rest of the verses;
[24:5] If they repent afterwards and reform, then GOD is Forgiver, Merciful.
[24:6] As for those who accuse their own spouses, without any other witnesses, then the testimony may be accepted if he swears by GOD four times that he is telling the truth.
[24:7] The fifth oath shall be to incur GOD's condemnation upon him, if he was lying.
[24:8] She shall be considered innocent if she swears by GOD four times that he is a liar.
[24:9] The fifth oath shall incur GOD's wrath upon her if he was telling the truth.
And finally
[4:15] Those who commit Adultery among your women, you must have four witnesses against them, from among you. If they do bear witness, then you shall keep such women in their homes until they die, or until GOD creates an exit for them.*
[4:16] The couple who commits Adultery shall be punished.* If they repent and reform, you shall leave them alone. GOD is Redeemer, Most Merciful.

Sungyoon Choi
Related
Readers' Comments
"The key to ending this tyranny of interpretation of the Koran is within the Koran itself, if the people have the courage to use it. "
IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.
A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.
Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor

Islam’s Silent Moderates - New York Times

Comment is free: Everything in moderation

2007-12-13T23:28:00.001-08:00

Everything in moderation by Ali Eteraz

Ayaan Hirsi Ali should note that when addressing injustice in Islam, there is a need for reconciliation between secular humanists and Muslims

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Islam's silent moderates, wondering where were the Muslims speaking out against the Saudi rape tragedy, the Sudanese teddy bear fiasco, and the persecution of feminist writer Taslima Nasreen in India. Her article makes me think two things.

First, she clearly doesn't read leftwing magazines. Four days before her piece, Mahir Ali wrote in at Znet discussing Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India, and called the Muslim demagogues in each place "dimwits". He is just one example of a "moderate" Muslim speaking out, but it makes one wonder how many other condemnations Hirsi Ali ignored.
Second, her article is about more than condemnation. Her argument is that when Islamic dictates collide with a person's sense of "compassion and conscience", a Muslim should opt for the compassionate solution. She wants a compassionate interpretation of Islam spread "more widely".
Putting aside Hirsi Ali's questionable political affiliation and history of appalling statements - Islam must be defeated - hers is a hopeful piece. It makes me wonder whether she has finally realised that not all people who adhere to Islam are prone to cruelty and violence. If the future Ms Ali is more like this, she might resonate in a community that matters most: Muslims. However, in order to do so, she will need to have a better grasp of how Muslims respond to injustice in the name of Islam.
When, in the name of Islam, something horrifying occurs - say a raped woman is punished, or a bombing occurs - there are, in fact, a vast number of average Muslims who find the situation unconscionable. Their usual reaction, as Ms Ali points out, is to say something like, "But Islam means peace!" or that "this is a hijacking by extremists!"
Now, Ms Ali thinks that such slogans are platitudes, and do not reflect actual opposition. Thus: her pessimism about the unlikelihood of a moderate Islam.
Yet, the fact that Muslims around the world insist "Islam means peace" is evidence that a vast number of Muslims do not think that Islam means violence. Given that Islamically sanctioned violence is the actual threat we are dealing with, this is a good thing. Further, when a Muslim does commit something nasty against fellow human beings, and other Muslims decry this person as an "extremist", this is evidence that a vast number of Muslims find brutish behaviour worth distancing themselves from. This too is a good thing. At the least, it shows that most Muslims share in the universal definitions of good and bad.

Comment is free: Everything in moderation

The Cincinnati Post - Young Muslims hearing a gentler voice on TV

2007-12-13T20:35:00.001-08:00

Young Muslims hearing a gentler voice on TV
Focus on religion
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post
In her home in northern Egypt, Muna el-Leboudy, a 22-year-old medical student, talks about Moez Masoud, who preaches a modern brand of Islam.
CAIRO, Egypt - Muna el-Leboudy, a 22-year-old medical student, had a terrible secret: She wanted to be a filmmaker. The way she understood her Muslim faith, it was haram - forbidden - to dabble in movies, music or any art that might pique sexual desires.
Then one day in September, she flipped on her satellite TV and saw Moez Masoud.
A Muslim televangelist not much older than herself, in a stylish goatee and Western clothes, Masoud, 29, was preaching about Islam in youthful Arabic slang.
He said imams who outlawed art and music were misinterpreting their faith.
He talked about love and relationships, the need to be compassionate toward homosexuals and tolerant of non-Muslims.
Leboudy had never heard a Muslim preacher speak that way.
"Moez helps us understand everything about our religion - not from 1,400 years ago, but the way we live now," said Leboudy, wearing a scarlet hijab over her hair. She said she still plans a career in medicine, but she's also starting classes in film directing.
"After I heard Moez," she said, "I decided to be the one who tries to change things."
Masoud is one of a growing number of young Muslim preachers who are using satellite television to promote an upbeat and tolerant brand of Islam.
Television preaching in the Middle East was once largely limited to elderly scholars in white robes reading holy texts from behind a desk, emphasizing the afterlife over this life, and sometimes inciting violence against nonbelievers.

The Cincinnati Post - Young Muslims hearing a gentler voice on TV

The deadly face of Muslim extremism

2007-12-12T05:35:00.001-08:00

The deadly face of Muslim extremism
Tarek Fatah and farzana Hassan, National Post Published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The tragic death of a Mississauga, Ont., teenage girl -- allegedly at the hands of her own traditionally minded Muslim father -- has sent shock waves across the world. Canadians are justified in raising concerns as to whether this is a sign of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in their own backyard.
Aqsa Parvez, a sprightly 16-year-old, beloved of her friends and peers at Applewood Heights Secondary School, was only trying to be herself, was only wishing for a normal adolescence amid Canada's rich cultural mosaic. Her father has now been charged with murder, and his son with obstruction, while a young life has been snuffed out -- likely in the name of honour and Islam.
Radical Muslim men consider themselves ultimately responsible for the conduct of the womenfolk. This outlook is rooted in a medieval ethos that treats women as nonpersons, unable to decide for themselves what they should wear, where they must go and what they must accomplish in life. If their conduct is seen as contravening this austere religious outlook, they are invariably subjected to abuse.
The hijab in particular has become a thorny issue among Muslim families. It has been elevated as a sort of "sixth pillar of Islam" among militant sects. Young teenage girls are often lectured over the virtues of the hijab by their family members. Once they hit puberty, compliance is deemed a non-negotiable religious requirement.
Yet none of this is actually mandated by the Koran. The Koran, while speaking generally of modesty in dress and demeanour, falls short of specifying the details of that modesty. Scripture also makes allowances for non-compliance of religious edicts if the environment is not conducive to their observance.
The Koran exhorts compassion upon parents, caretakers and guardians of young girls. Yet some families instead exhibit a strict conformity to doctrine and dogma, which in turn leads to violence, bigotry and intolerance of alternative understandings of faith.

The deadly face of Muslim extremism

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Peer criticises Muslim 'hotheads'

2007-12-12T05:32:00.003-08:00

Peer criticises Muslim 'hotheads'
Lady Warsi helped win the release of UK teacher Gillian Gibbons
Muslim peer Baroness Warsi has hit out at Muslim "hardliners and hotheads" who use Islam to argue against voting and equal rights for women.
The Conservative shadow minister for community cohesion said it was crucial to distinguish between social demands and genuine religious requirements.
She urged Muslims not to allow such confusion to cut them off from society.
Lady Warsi, speaking at a conference in London, also said Muslims had a special responsibility to defeat extremism.
'Wrong, wrong, wrong'

BBC NEWS UK UK Politics Peer criticises Muslim 'hotheads'

Anne Applebaum - Teddy Bear Tyranny - washingtonpost.com

2007-12-10T13:08:00.001-08:00

A protest against teacher Gillian Gibbons in Khartoum, Sudan, on Friday. (By Abd Raouf -- Associated Press)

Partly, this is because we still don't understand them. In fact, the Great Sudanese Teddy Bear Controversy, like its Dutch, Danish and papal precedents, was not actually a religious or cultural affair: It was purely political. Nobody -- not the other teachers, the parents or the children -- was offended by Mohammed the teddy bear (who received his name in September) until the matter was taken up by a totalitarian government, handed over to what appears to have been a carefully orchestrated mob, and briefly turned into yet another tool of domestic terror and international defiance. The Sudanese government, which pursues genocidal policies in Darfur when it is not persecuting British teachers, is under pressure to accept peacekeeping troops from the West. At least some of the Sudanese authorities thus have an interest in building anti-Western sentiments among the population and intimidating those who disagree.

Anne Applebaum - Teddy Bear Tyranny - washingtonpost.com

Controversy over Islam stirs useful conversation | ajc.com

2007-12-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Controversy over Islam stirs useful conversation
By KELLY WENTWORTH
Published on: 12/04/07
When the British teacher Gillian Gibbons was arrested for crimes against Islam in Sudan following a creative writing assignment in which her students named a teddy bear Muhammad, my mother called.
As she related the details to me, I was as stunned as she was. While I had spent some time teaching in Yemen, which is in close proximity in geography, and in many ways, in culture, to Sudan, I had never heard of such an issue. Being a Muslim myself, I finally understood my mother was calling to find out why naming a bear Muhammad was a crime against Islam. I had no answers for her and assured her the incident was not indicative of what Muslims believe.
(ENLARGE)
Kelly Wentworth of Smyrna is the co-director for the American Islamic Fellowship whose values include encouraging inter-faith dialogue and cooperation.
That same night, I playfully related the story to my husband. The idea that a teddy bear's name could be an insult to our religion was a completely ridiculous concept to me. As I spoke, my normally conversational husband suddenly said he did not understand how I could be so ignorant of the situation. I tried to understand what he meant, but he dismissed me. I was very shocked at this behavior. My husband and I often have very different ideas about our beliefs, but he had never interrupted me, no matter how much he disagreed. I pressed the issue, and he finally explained that it is insulting to name inanimate objects and animals after prophets and other respected people in Islam. Confused, I reminded him that I had named my cat after the prophet, King Solomon, in honor of the man. In my family, naming inanimate objects and animals after respected people is a tribute to them rather than an insult. We suddenly realized that we had stumbled upon a cultural issue and were able to continue the discussion without hurt feelings or interruption.
The teddy bear situation reminded me of my own experience as an English teacher in my husband's native country of Yemen. I had two things that should have been to my advantage when teaching: a husband very familiar with the nuances of the culture and a shared religious background with a majority of the citizens. Yet, I encountered a similar, though not as explosive, issue while teaching.
My students were learning the concept of "If ... then." As an assignment, I asked them to write an essay entitled, "If I were the president, then I would ..."
I believed it to be a very creative assignment and looked forward to the answers. My students did not share my beliefs. The students did not say anything at first out of respect, but did not turn in the assignment. I asked what the issue was and was told that the students were not allowed to lie. I did not understand. The students finally explained to me that they could not complete the assignment because it required them to "lie" and say they were president and then make pronouncements for him.
In Yemen, perspective writing, even on an "innocent" school assignment, if put in the wrong hands, could land a person in jail. As an American citizen who enjoys freedom of expression, the concept was very difficult for me to grasp. I had to change the assignment. Thinking back, I was lucky to be teaching in a secular classroom, because I could have easily substituted Muhammad or God for the president.
Gibbons has now been given a presidential pardon and was on her way to Britain. I am both very relieved and very worried for the educator. I hope she arrives home safely. The situation is unfortunate because the woman, from what I have read, truly respected the culture and religion of those she was teaching. I believe many similarly talented and adventurous teachers will now hesitate even more to venture into places such as Sudan where teacher shortages have been a constant problem, even for the most affluent schools. Perhaps Gibbons will be able to pen a memoir to share both her positive and negative experiences in the Sudan.
Cultural perceptions are a large bump on a long road as the world opens up and grows ever smaller in the information age. Respect is important when dealing with each others' cultures, but questioning and understanding is far more significant.
As Americans, we must use the power of our freedoms inside our country to open dialogue between cultural, religious and ethnic groups. Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, addressed this very issue in her speech at the Islamic Speakers' Bureau awards dinner here in Atlanta only a few weeks ago. She reminded us of the imperative of open discussion. She posed the theological question, "Why has God chosen for us to be here, now, in this time?" Painful questions inside our own beliefs will have to be addressed, but I believe we have an amazing gift in our freedoms to start our awareness here. Rumi, a world-renowned Islamic thinker, once said, "God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one."
I hope Americans continually strive for two wings.

Controversy over Islam stirs useful conversation ajc.com

Hirsi Ali, atheism and Islam

2007-12-03T05:29:00.000-08:00

Hirsi Ali, atheism and Islam
By Spengler

Few public figures have done more to earn our sympathy than the Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fugitive from her native Somalia, and now a virtual exile from her adopted country, the Netherlands. Under constant threat since the 2004 murder by an Islamist of her collaborator, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali warns the West that Islam presents a mortal threat to its freedoms.

America took her in last year when the Dutch government connived to remove her refugee status, but she remains

something of an embarrassment to the George W Bush administration. This autumn the Dutch government removed her security detail, and the Americans have taken no steps to protect her. That is a stain on the honor of both countries.

Although she has the credibility of a witness as well as the moral standing of a victim, Hirsi Ali remains a bystander civilian in the great war of our times, whose broadest front is in the global South. That is, she proclaims herself to be an atheist. Millions of Muslims reportedly convert to Christianity each year, mainly in Africa. Islam is stagnant in Asia while tens of millions become Christian. Yet all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists - not only Hirsi Ali, but also Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am not a Muslim and several compendia of Koranic criticism.

Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism? That is not true of other religions. Many Jewish converts achieved prominence in 20th-century Christianity - for example, the recently deceased Cardinal Danielou of Paris, the martyred Carmelite nun Edith Stein (now canonized), and the great Protestant theologian Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy. But the name of no prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (much less to Judaism) comes to mind.

It is easy to change what we think, but very hard to change how we think. Contrary to superficial impressions, Islam is much closer in character to atheism than to Christianity or Judaism. Although the "what" of Muslim and atheistic thinking of course are very different, I shall endeavor below to prove that the "how" is very similar.

Hirsi Ali states that the West is at war with Islam, not with "terrorism", "Islamism", "radical Islam", or "Islamo-fascism". Here is a snippet from her November exchange with Reason [1]:
Reason: The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the [Wojciech] Jaruzelski puppet regime [1990]. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world's 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, "defeat Islam"?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there's no middle ground in wars.
Nonetheless Hirsi Ali has no clear idea how a war with Islam might proceed. Again, from the Reason interview:
Hirsi Ali: Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they're the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, "This is a warning. We won't accept this anymore." There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don't do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.
The implication that the West will crush Islam by force borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then? Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries.

Can Democracy be imposed in Muslim Countries?

2007-12-02T22:09:00.000-08:00

By Alamgir Hussain

Those who argue that democracy and rule of law cannot be imposed by outside interventions are obviously wrong, as demonstrated by the interventions in Japan, Italy and Germany in post-WW II era. All indications from the more recent but unfinished interventions in the Balkan, in Liberia and Haiti also prove them wrong. However the critics are right when considering the intervention in Somalia in 1993 and more recent ones in Afghanistan and Iraq. In order to understand this intriguing disparity in success of outside interventions in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, one must grasp the fundamental precepts of Islam, which is the common ideological denominator that binds them together. Islamic scholars over the centuries have divided the world into two domains.

The first being the Dar-al-Islam (house of peace), which constitute the domains dominated and ruled by the Muslims according to the Islamic laws. The other is the Dar al-Harb (house of war), which is dominated and ruled by the non-Muslims and Muslims must wage a ceaseless war (so it called 'house of war') against it in order to bring it into the domain of Dar al-Islam, thereby fulfilling the wishes of the almighty creator.

Pope Stresses Muslim-Christian Dialogue

2007-11-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press: Pope Stresses Muslim-Christian Dialogue: "Pope Stresses Muslim-Christian Dialogue 16 hours ago VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI has replied to a letter from Muslim scholars, stressing the need for dialogue between Islam and Christianity and saying he would be willing to meet Muslim representatives, the Vatican said Thursday. The pope expressed 'deep appreciation for this gesture, for the positive spirit which inspired the text (of the letter) and for the call for a common commitment to promoting peace in the world.' The October letter by 138 Muslim scholars urges Christian and Muslims to develop their common ground of belief in one God. Among those signing were Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Europe and the United States. 'Without ignoring or downplaying our differences as Christians and Muslims, we can and therefore should look to what unites us, namely, belief in the one God,' the pope said in his reply, which was sent via the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. 'Such common ground allows us to base dialogue on effective respect for the dignity of every human person, on objective knowledge of the religion of the other, on the sharing of religious experience and, finally, on common commitment to promoting mutual respect and acceptance among the younger generation,' Benedict said. The message said the pope was confident that cooperation would then become possible in such areas as culture and the promotion of justice and peace."

Know your enemy

2007-11-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

Know your enemy
Arnaud de Borchgrave

Radical Islam — or Islamofascism, as conservatives are prone to call it — conveys the impression of a political movement. It is no such animal. Al Qaeda's suicide bombers and assorted gunslingers are not individual al Qaeda terrorists, inspired by Osama bin Laden, that have hijacked a religion. Like it or not, the West is fighting a religion "that arose in enraged reaction to the West," writes Fergus Kerr in "20th Century Catholic Theologians."
The only leader who has called it by its real name, according to Mr. Kerr, "is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace in World War I." Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, "challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg University address," which touched off noisy protests throughout the Muslim world. The pope repeated a question posed by Manuel II Paleologos, an obscure 14th-century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter quarters near Ankara. "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

2007-11-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

Debunking the Myth of Islamist Intransigence

By Mohammed Herzallah, Amr Hamzawy
The Daily Star, November 2, 2007

Nonetheless, the controversy obscures the fact that the Brotherhood's positions are not born out of animosity toward non-Muslims, women, or democracy, but stem from cultural and religious norms that are continuously debated and modified by the Brotherhood's leading members. To be sure, internal disputes over comprehensive equality, like many other disagreements over Shariah law, have yet to be settled, and the Brotherhood's leading members do not pretend otherwise in public. An example that bears special emphasis is the new platform's endorsement of the right of the people, irrespective of their race, gender, religious or ideological affiliations, to form political parties and associations. Given that the founders of the movement were firmly opposed to factionalism and the political party system, the move illustrates the growing capacity of progressives within the Islamists' ranks to shape the movement's intellectual trajectory.

Islamofascism Week

2007-10-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

"Islamofascism nutbasket?" Love it! David Horowitz, are you there? Here is a YouTube moment on Horowitz's "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week."

Ignoring 'Islamofascism' hype

Last week, Islamofascism Awareness Week came to town. Yet, contrary to the campaign's promise that "the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever," our lives went on much as before. The week was a bigoted joke, an insult to the intelligence of college students, and we're proud most of our peers didn't take the bait.The purpose of "Islamofascism Awareness Week" is not awareness, but provocation. It's a stalking horse set up by David Horowitz, whose target is not Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists, but American liberals. The Web site of the "Terrorism Awareness Project," which sponsored the week, is filled with the language of confrontation. "The left is up in arms," the site notes, while colleges nationwide are "bracing for campus showdowns" as Horowitz's paladins seek to confront and expose liberals' support of the terrorists.

Islamofascism Awareness Week is WWIV Propaganda

Unfortunately, our College Republicans (CRs) recently participated in Islamofascism Awareness Week (IFAW), and unknowingly became associated with far-right extremist neoconservatives who directly desire Iran war. In anti-partisan fairness, I agree with CRs calling Hillary Clinton a b**** because she recently approved movement toward Iran war. I also powerfully believe in unrestrained free speech. If they can’t say b****, I couldn’t say Bush’s policies are antithetical to Christ’s Love philosophy, and thus anti-Christ.

Dennis Prager Stuns Them at UCSB

I made the drive up the coast tonight to see Dennis Prager speak at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was invited by the College Republicans, and he did not disappoint. This week is an emotional one for the college left - the bubble they live in has been punctured by an army of eloquent conservatives fanning out throughout the country to unveil a sensitive topic - Islamofascism. The crowd that packed Girvetz Theatre was amazingly behaved, and much of the credit for that has to go to Prager - he charmed the crowd into submission, and a wry smile came to his face when the last questioner of the night complained that she “didn’t like being manipulated.”

When consciousness is counterproductive

I’m really disappointed. Last week was Islamofacism Awareness Week, and nobody sent me a greeting card marking the observance.Surely someone behind this concept could have printed up some cards with a still photo from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” on the outside, with desert headdresses Photoshopped onto all the Nazis’ heads.And then you open the card and it says, “They’re coming to get you. Happy Islamofacism Awareness Week.”Or, given the proximity of the observance to Halloween, just some pictures of jack-o’-lanterns with the Arabic head coverings would do.

The Problem With 'Islamofascism'

The Muslim World is not so homogeneous as to have its various fanatics and morally bankrupt governments lumped together with a single, clumsy word. This argument manages to both simultaneously split hairs in a shamelessly tendentious manner that would be immediately rebuked in any other context and miss the point entirely.
What is the common bond between Saudi Arabia and Iran? Why are the rights of the individual repressed in such similar ways? You cannot execute a female virgin in Iran. In order to be killed, she must be raped first by the Revolutionary Guard and then executed. Why does that not provoke outrage in Saudi Arabia? Why do both societies stone women to death for the crime of adultery? (Iran officially stopped this in 2002, but the practice continues unabated.)

Islamofascism speaker misses the point

There was an elephant in the room during Robert Spencer's provocative speech last Thursday night. Spencer, the director of the website Jihad Watch, spoke as part of "Islamofascism Awareness Week" and presented a simple but highly controversial argument: that Islam is a religion of violence and oppression. Citing passages in the Quran, Spencer suggested that the Islamic faith inherently condones misogyny, abuse of homosexuals, authoritarianism and the killing of non-believers. "I do not believe that Islam at its core is a peaceful religion," he said.But while there is little debate that segments of the Quran could be read as a justification for bigotry or abuse, what Spencer left unsaid - a glaring omission that many in the audience later commented on - is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims don't actually follow the passages that he cited. Throughout the Islamic world, there is little support for the notion that apostates should be killed, that non-Muslims should be taxed separately or that women should be mistreated. As with all religions, most adherents of Islam view the Quran as flexible and open to interpretation. While certain passages are embraced and followed carefully, others are tacitly rejected and ignored.In fact, there are numerous ways of reading and interpreting the Quran in its historical context. As'ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, suggested in a recent phone conversation that there is a "very broad interpretation of Islam across many different countries and cultures."

Spencer (And Other Critics) Respond

Robert Spencer, following the publication of my Brown Daily Herald article that criticized his comments during Islamofascism Week, has responded in a post over at his blog. Interestingly, a lot of the criticisms that I’ve gotten at Jihad Watch have to do with my alleged ‘misreading’ of the Quran. The Muslim holy book is much more violent than the Bible, many are suggesting, and therefore Islam is inherently based on violence and oppression.

If Not Islamofascism, What Name to Give?

The term, Islamofascism, is not acceptable. Fair enough! But how about a Stop Islamization of Europe rally, which one transnational European group, wanted to bring about in Brussels to commemorate 9/11 this year? The secular-liberal fabric of western societies ― from New Zealand to Australia to Canada to Europe ― are being aggressively Islamized by Muslim immigrants. To give a few examples: airports must have a mosque; canteens in jails must have separate quarters, cutlery and menu for Muslim inmates; school and university canteens must remove pork and even alcohol from their premises; and they must have separate public swimming pools or specific days of the week exclusively for them. A A poll in 2006 found some 40% British Muslims would prefer an Islamic Sharia law based governance to replace the secular-democracy, while another poll in 2004 found 61% Muslims want the Sharia court system in the U.K..

“Islamofascism”: The Failure of a Concept

The real (Americo-)fascists staged an early Halloween event last week, all dressed up as anti-fascists, made up as compassionate conservatives deeply disturbed by Muslim misogyny. They went door to door—or rather campus to campus—trick-or-treating, trying to scare. Their so-called “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” undertaken by well-funded, extreme-right ideologues, featuring such cartoon characters as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum and deploying student brown shirts to lead their way, was amusing in its childishness but like most Halloween events rather spooky. They want to scare. That’s the whole point.

The truth stirrer

The media storm broke a month ago, when Eagleton accused Amis of inheriting his father's racism, homophobia and hatred of women. It rumbled on for a further fortnight, when Amis admitted to occasionally feeling odd racist impulses, and then argued that some Muslim societies had not evolved as fully as countries in the West.
Nor should anyone expect Amis to disappear from the headlines anytime soon. His next book, The Second Plane, a collection of his writing about Islamofascism, will be published early next year. For his next novel, The Pregnant Widow, he promises "a couple of bombshells about what feminism has wrought". And no, he's not going to tell me what they are.

Viewpoint: Responding to Schazner

The best part of Schanzer's speech was his three-pronged list of solutions. His first piece of advice was starting dialogue about the nature of the issue, saying that a good starting point would be to identify the "enemy." This would have been great advice to hear before we invaded Iraq. Not only was Saddam Hussein not the enemy -- he was indubitably a harsh dictator, but ran a secular government that had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda -- but his removal and more importantly the reconstruction of Iraq, is draining our military resources and taxpayers' money. In a serious irony, a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate said that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a "cause célèbre" for "jihadists" around the world. By dismantling the Hussein regime, we have also eliminated Iran's biggest rival in the region and replaced it with a fragile government that is Shia-dominated and, by extension, ally with Iran, a theocracy -- what some say is the center of "Islamofascism" -- and a significant financial supporter of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Islamofascism and 9/11, Bush's Neo-McCarthy Brainwash Tools

Islamofascism is the object perpetually attacked, with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden mentioned over and over. What is never mentioned is how bin Laden was the CIA's man in Afghanistan under neocon idol Ronald Reagan back when we were fighting Russia's "evil empire". Last week Bush turned up the heat when he spoke about Iran and evoked the names of Hitler and Lenin at one point, stating that if the Democrats do not give him all he wants, in this case presto confirmation of attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey, that we may suffer the same tragedies as a nation that Germany and Russia did when those leaders were not stopped in time. All roads lead back to 9/11 and the specter of Islamofascism as represented by Osama bin Laden and 9/11.

A lazy, simplistic analogy

Recently, the former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz promoted something called "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on college campuses. The implication was that the academic left has so lost its bearings that it can no longer recognize its historic enemy, the old fascist wolf, under that beast's new disguise. Another apparent aim was to discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam

On "Islamofascism"
Jamie Kirchick, October 29, 2007

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

The Warped Mirror: The Islamofascism debate
Petra Marquardt-Bigman

For Israel, this is of course an important debate, because whenever Israel is criticized most severely, the threats posed to the country by Islamists are usually downplayed. Indeed, Israel is often blamed for giving the Muslim world much reason to turn to extremism, and the “blame-Israel”-brigade tends to subscribe to the simplistic notion that once Israel could be forced to address all Muslims grievances against the Jewish state, Islamist extremism would wither away. The fact that documents like the Hamas charter make it plain enough that one of the Islamists’ “grievances” is the very existence of Israel is often dismissed as inconsequential.

All this talk of Islamofascism, what is Zionism then?

This observer has pointed out time and again that the Zionists are out to ensure that the world remains polarized with two major sides of conflict of their very own choosing! With the Cold War out of the way and Israel losing its reliance on its “policeman role” of the West in the region, the best way to maintain the flow of American support for the renegade and mutant state is to ensure that there is a common enemy between the “civilized West” and the mutant synthesized Zionist state, with the enemy manifested by the “heathen” Islamic East. No one likes to suggest that the horrible acts, often labeled as “Islamic terrorism” and sometimes suggested as “Islamic radicalism” are justified by any means and least of all by Islamic doctrine or are even closely associated with genuine Moslems as these bigots are alluding. But to assume that all evil is rooted in Islam as is apparent by the literature being put to discussion in this Anti-Islam “awareness” effort is heinous and points to the hypocrisy of its sponsors.

O'Reillysaurus: A Dinosaur In Need Of A Tar-Pit

Krugman never says there's no threat of terrorism, he just doesn't buy into the White House's calculated use of the word Islamofascism which - just like the O'Reillysaurus cut and pasted in his attempt to create a Krugman-boogeyman out of hole-cloth - was created as a simplistic fraud to frighten people on to the Bush war-making wagon.
Perhaps, BillO, we should ask all the dead and injured you callously exploit how they feel about being manipulated for your own selfish fear-mongering, fabricated propaganda.

From "pointless" to intolerance: Islamofascism week
By Dana Al-Qadi, freshman in LAS, and Mohsin Alvi, sophomore in Engineering

Dan Streib ("Columbia and Islamofascism," Oct. 26) claimed that "Islamofascists" were "those who perverted the fine religion of Islam." At first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong with a word whose purpose is to set apart the bad guys. But when the underlying tones are recognized, the term sets a double standard exclusive to Islam, setting the stage for dangerous discrimination against Muslims. Throughout history, the political ideology of fascism has been religiously motivated. Hitler was raised Catholic and often said he was fulfilling God's work by carrying out mass extermination. But this prime example of fascism has not provoked the introduction of the term "Cathofascism" into our lexicon.

Spinning at The Globe
By FrontPage Magazine

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’s speakers could never get away with painting Islamists with as broad a brush as Hedges paints Southern Baptists. And what truly separates us from his ilk is that we do not want to. All IFAW speakers noted a minority of the world’s Muslim population accepts “Islamofascistm” and longed for them to accept a moderate, pluralistic Islam in its place. None felt there was anything “inevitable” about a clash between all Muslims and all others.
However, since Islamofascists are the perpetrators of the War on Terror and Western “infidels” are their targets, only Islamofascists can end this war – and they won’t. A clear assessment of these organization’s goals and theology are necessary to strengthen American resolve to protect her own freedoms and continue fighting the terrorists in their chosen battleground: Iraq.

A lazy, simplistic analogy

If language is a window on the world, a deliberate smudging of that window will make it harder to see the world clearly and comprehend it. So it is with the highly ideological term "Islamofascist," a label that is being wielded as a blunt weapon in a left-right debate and has been carelessly bandied about by some presidential candidates.
Recently, the former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz promoted something called "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on college campuses. The implication was that the academic left has so lost its bearings that it can no longer recognize its historic enemy, the old fascist wolf, under that beast's new disguise. Another apparent aim was to discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam

Islamo-Fetishism
By James O. Goldsborough

Deprived of traditional issues, Republicans have turned to the neo-conservatives, who gave us Iraq, for their new theme. They call it Islamofascism, and there is a competition among them to see who is its stoutest foe. Democrats, they claim, are soft on the thing they call Islamofascism.Being soft on something or other has been a stalwart GOP theme for years. Harry Truman was soft on Bejing, Jimmy Carter soft on Moscow and Bill Clinton soft on Belgrade and Baghdad. But let's not forget that until Bush brought them out of the closet, neocons accused Republicans themselves of softism: Ronald Reagan was soft on the Soviet Union. His successor, George H.W. Bush, was soft on China and the Arabs.

Islam and Islamofascism
Larry Houle - 11/8/2007

How could any person be ‘proud’ to follow a man who was a pedophile, endorser of clitoridectomy, slave trader, rapist, polygamist, punched his child bride and endorsed whipping/beating women and ploughing them like fields, stoned women to death, flogged his slave women for fornication while he had sex with slaves himself, propositioned women and passed them round to friends, denied women equal inheritance, or equality under the law etc forever and abused and denigrated them in every way--not to mention his general sadism to others, mass murder, beheading captives, massacres, terror, torture, owning slaves and raping them, looting and pillaging, amputations, flogging, thievery, lying, hate, megalomania--- unending horror.All Muslims believe the Koran is the Eternal divine word of God – the Eternal laws of God. All Muslims believe that God authored the Koran and a copy of the Koran is in heaven. The Koran remains for all Muslims, not just "fundamentalists," the uncreated word of God Himself. It is valid for all times and places forever; its ideas are absolutely true and beyond all criticism. To question it is to question the very word of God, and hence blasphemous. A Muslim's duty is to believe it and obey its divine commands without question.

Islamo-Fetishism
By James O. Goldsborough

Islamofascism is as meaningless a term as "axis of evil," or "war on terrorism" -- other neological inventions that substitute slogans and fear for fact and reason. Who or what exactly is an Islamofascist? Al Qaeda, Hamas, Taliban, Wahhabis, Salafists, Syrians, Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, Pakistanis, all of the above? What about Turkey's PKK? One sees the problem: These groups and governments see Islam in different ways and none unites the principal characteristics of fascism -- power, industry, organization and desire for world conquest.
By hiring Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neocons, Rudy Giuliani has injected this absurd notion of Islamofascism into the presidential race. The other Republicans, led by Romney, have joined the chorus. They have Iran principally in their sights, an "Islamofascist" country that Podhoretz, and presumably Giuliani and the others, would have bombed long ago.Iran's theocratic government is loathsome in Western eyes, but hardly bent on world conquest. Iran's desire for nuclear power, which dates to the time of the Shah, is understandable in a world of diminishing carbon fuels and rising oil prices, and it is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Last month Egypt indicated it, too, was going nuclear. Western nations would like to prevent Iran from converting its nuclear power program into bombs, and the burning question is how to do that -- whether to "war-war" or "jaw-jaw," in Churchill's formulation.

The Associated Press: Evangelicals' Issue: Radical Islam: "'The war against Islamofascism is in many respects a 'values issue,'' Bauer wrote. 'That may seem like an odd statement at first glance, but, as I have often said, losing Western Civilization to this vicious enemy would be immoral.' From one perspective, branding 'radical Islam' as a family values issue is yet another example of the broadening of the evangelical agenda. But next November, it also could energize one of the Republican Party's key voting blocs, much like anti-gay marriage measures did in 2004."

“Islamofascism”: The Failure of a Concept
by Gary Leupp / November 1st, 2007
The Louisiana politician Huey Long declared in the 1930s that “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism” and “in the name of national security.” I don’t think we’re there yet, but there are some fascist-like forces mobilizing, and they’re doing so in the name of protecting American Judeo-Christian civilization from a phantom they’ve conjured up called “Islamofascism.” (Variants include Islamo-Fascism, Islamo-fascism, Islamic fascism, etc.)

Evangelical leaders hope 'radical Islam' threat will awaken weary voting bloc

"It's the ultimate life issue," said Rick Scarborough, president of the Texas-based conservative Christian group Vision America. "If radical Islam succeeds in its ultimate goals, Christianity ceases to exist."
That might sound alarmist, but Scarborough's words illustrate how many conservative Christian leaders view matters of national security as a battle between good and evil - nothing short of a clash of civilizations.

More religion won't stop fundamentalists
November 20, 2007

Is Islam threatening Christianity? Well yes, as are fundamentalist Christians threatening liberal Christians, invading their camps with evangelical zeal and imposing stricter views but, importantly, without murdering them.
Fundamentalist Islam is a particularly virulent strain of deadly evangelism. Secular reasoning and law enforcement is the correct antibody.
More religion is not the answer; it is the problem because victorious religious zealots always impose laws favoring themselves.

Ohio State Does Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week Right
By Patrick PooleFrontPageMagazine.com Tuesday, November 20, 2007

You have to admire the sheer brilliance of the organizers. To my knowledge, no other university or college participating in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (certainly not in the Big Ten, at least) offered their community a chance to see an actual Islamofascist in action. Participants in the CAIR/MSA educational forum, ironically entitled “Interfaith Relations – the Muslim Perspective”, were invited to observe Badawi for an up-close and personal study of the North American species of Islamofascism.
Sadly, I was not able to attend the festivities, but a subsequent press release by CAIR quoted CAIR-Ohio president Asma Mobin-Uddin in her description of their Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week event: “The opportunity to listen to Islamic scholars like Dr. Badawi was a great opportunity for the community to become educated, and it gave people the change to ask questions about things they may have heard about Islamic teachings.”

Report: 'Islamofascism' blinds U.S.
Published: Nov. 28, 2007 at 4:52 PM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- The term "Islamofascism" dangerously obscures important distinctions and differences between groups of Islamic extremists, says a counter-terror think tank."Since Sept. 11 conservatives have continually lumped various groups and countries together … into one threat that they term 'Islamofascism,'" according to the National Security Network, a group of left-leaning former U.S. officials and experts in counter-terrorism and national security."The reality is much complicated," reads their report issued Wednesday. The groups and nations that make up the "Islamofascist" threat include al-Qaida, al-Qaida in Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian government institutions that they control, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran

Report: 'Islamofascism' blinds U.S.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- The term "Islamofascism" dangerously obscures important distinctions and differences between groups of Islamic extremists, says a counter-terror think tank."Since Sept. 11 conservatives have continually lumped various groups and countries together … into one threat that they term 'Islamofascism,'" according to the National Security Network, a group of left-leaning former U.S. officials and experts in counter-terrorism and national security."The reality is much complicated," reads their report issued Wednesday. The groups and nations that make up the "Islamofascist" threat include al-Qaida, al-Qaida in Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian government institutions that they control, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran.In reality, the report says, "These various groups and countries have different intentions and capabilities, often work at cross purposes and are in some cases ideologically opposed to each other."Escalating tensions across the region between Shiites and Sunnis only emphasize their divergent interests and intentions.

Attacking Muslims under the veil of free specch is wrong
Chris Shortsleeve
Issue date: 12/3/07 Section: Opinion

A few weeks ago, something called Islamofascism Awareness Week came to almost 100 college campuses across the United States. Organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, this speaker series was intended, in its own words, to "alert Americans to the threat from Islamo-Fascism and focus attention on the violent oppression of Muslim women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other Islamic states." A simple survey of modern Middle Eastern history will show that the number of Muslim women killed by American empire and its puppet regimes is more than the most egregious Muslim patriarchs could ever hope to accomplish with all the stones in Arabia. In Iraq alone - a country terrorized for decades by the American-backed dictator and former CIA agent Saddam Hussein - civilian casualties as a result of current U.S. occupation and U.S.-led sanctions that preceded it are now over one million.Yet, white racists like Horowitz, who have no interest in the liberation of the Middle East, repeatedly whine about the veil and the lack of freedom in Muslim societies. This Horowitz-led diatribe against "Islamofascism" is not a good faith attempt at solidarity with Muslim women suffering under patriarchy, but a shallow, opportunistic demonization of an entire religion and culture, all for the ultimate purpose of justifying American imperialism in the Middle East. These people do not feel anything for the women of Islam. They preach from a pulpit of bones.

O’Reilly and Beck get chummy over Islamofascism.
Yesterday evening, right-wing talk show hosts Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly teamed up on the O’Reilly Factor. Beck criticized the University of Florida for admonishing the campus College Republicans for airing the film Obsession, which students promoted with posters stating, “Radical Islam Wants You Dead.” O’Reilly and Beck agreed, “They missed 9/11 in Gainesville”:
BECK: And in the — when they played it, they put out a flier all around the campus that said militant Islam wants you dead. Well, the university came out with a statement and said how dare you say that? That’s hate speech. That’s completely inaccurate. I mean, Bill, would you agree…
O’REILLY: Well, they missed it. They missed 9/11 in Gainesville. You know they missed it. That was the only city in the country that didn’t get the broadcast around the world.
BECK: Right.
O’REILLY: I don’t know why, but they are looking into the technical problem.

Islamofascism: Why It Is Fascism and Why Hating It Isn't RacistNicholas M. Guariglia -

12/8/2007 This is getting a bit tedious, but for as long as there are those who decry antifascists as something they are not, there must be those who forcefully defend the spirit of antifascism. A few weeks ago, student groups across some 200 universities aligned with commentator David Horowitz, amongst others, to declare Islamofascism Awareness Week. Such “cause-awareness” charades –– global warming/cooling awareness, the danger of giant man-eating squirrels/how to save endangered giant man-eating squirrels, etc. –– where do-gooders sit around a table and discuss how they “feel,” usually leave me with a feeling of exasperation. But for this, I will concede: defending liberal Western munificence against foreign clericalism is no small gig.This task, however, seems to begin with two fallacies leveled against the democratic resistance. The first untruth being that Islamist fanaticism is an aberration, not commonplace abroad; a political equal to its religious counterparts, not authoritarian; its followers simply misguided distorters of actual Islamic instruction, not the enforcers and heeders of literal Islamic text. The second lie, perpetrated by relativists and multicultural therapists, would be that challenging this despotism, in all its forms, is somehow indicative of racism; that hating a belief is the equivalent to hating a people. These two falsities should be confronted at the very start, and at their very core.Let’s start with the latter, and, I propose, the indisputable: Islam is not a race. Even its harshest critics, if they limit their criticism to doctrine and to those only who follow it, are not to be labeled bigoted or racist. Religion is an idea, a belief system not immune from mockery or even detestation, and abhorrence for it is perfectly ethical (and legal, at least in this country). Succumbing to political correctness would have me now declaring impartiality for all the monotheisms, claiming an equality for each theology. I am all for equal-time ridicule, but not today.

Attacking Muslims under the veil of free specch is wrong

A few weeks ago, something called Islamofascism Awareness Week came to almost 100 college campuses across the United States. Organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, this speaker series was intended, in its own words, to "alert Americans to the threat from Islamo-Fascism and focus attention on the violent oppression of Muslim women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other Islamic states." A simple survey of modern Middle Eastern history will show that the number of Muslim women killed by American empire and its puppet regimes is more than the most egregious Muslim patriarchs could ever hope to accomplish with all the stones in Arabia. In Iraq alone - a country terrorized for decades by the American-backed dictator and former CIA agent Saddam Hussein - civilian casualties as a result of current U.S. occupation and U.S.-led sanctions that preceded it are now over one million.

Ron Paul and the War on Islamofacism

And Bin Laden knew this. This is what he was talking about when he talked about "bleeding America to death" http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060905-7.html (I can't believe the White House has this on their website and doesn't get it). In short, Terrorists can only defeat the United States by--FEAR which leads to overreaction, overspending, and in the process creates more terrorists who believe the incredibly extreme propaganda promoted by Bin Laden and crew because they have seen the "horrors" of the United States with their own eyes. Dr. Paul is the only person who supports a policy which could actually rid the world of these "Islamo-Fascists" in the long run (or at least return them to a size and threat level which no American could fear). We are the United States of America. If a kid came up and punched you, would you pull your leg back as far as possible and try to kick its head off? If you missed, you'd hurt yourself in the fall far worse than the kid's punch hurt you. If you hit, you would incite the rage of his parents, his community, and even the population as a whole that otherwise would be disconnected from this act until they found out what you did. Compared to us, terrorists are just little kids. The best way to deal with them is to let them know what they did was wrong (tell their parents, or kill the terrorists who actually did this in our case--not overreact and bring people into the battle that have nothing to do with it) and laugh about it and move on.

What is Islamofascism?
A simplistic term designed to mask the complexities of the Middle East

I can't remember the first time I heard the term "Islamofascism," but I can remember the first time I knew it was going to stick. It was Oct. 6, 2005, and President George W. Bush was delivering a speech. In it, he said, "Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamofascism."
From that moment, if not before, the media took Bush's ball and ran with it, where every new stumbling block in the Middle East could be reduced to one word — Islamofascism. Bill O'Reilly couldn't get enough of it. Rudy Giuliani was glad to finally have a verbal substitute for "9/11." And Rush Limbaugh hadn't been so happy to have a new word to repeat ad nauseam since "Clinton" in the 1990s. Yes, for the neoconservatives, most of whom didn't have much of a purpose in life since the end of the Cold War, the new menace on the horizon finally had a name, and they intended to use it.
The problem is Islamofascism doesn't really mean anything. Trying to reduce the complexities of Middle Eastern politics into a single, jingoistic phrase is not only impractical, but a disservice to the American public. Explains conservative columnist Joseph Sobran, "Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own."
Sobran is correct. Take for example the recent assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Every pro-Bush talking head was screaming "Islamofascists" before the woman's body was cold. Bhutto's supporters and family were blaming Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf was blaming the "extremists." But who are the extremists? Who are the Islamofascists?

2007-10-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

Fearing Fear Itself

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 29, 2007

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”
Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?
For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

2007-10-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

"real target behind the “Islamo-Fascism” rhetoric appears to be Islam itself"

By Charles C. Haynes

First Amendment Center

Halloween arrived early this year in the guise of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” held Oct. 22-26 on hundreds of college and university campuses across the nation. Scary speakers like Ann Coulter fanned out to warn students about the lies organizers say are being taught about the war on terrorism in institutions of higher learning.

The “protest week” is organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an organization dedicated to promoting the ideas of, well, David Horowitz (a 1960s leftist who now describes himself as a conservative).

If the purpose were only to wake Americans up to the threat of extremists who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam, then who could object? I suspect, however, that most of us are already fully awake to the terrorist threat – including the many Muslim Americans now serving in our armed services, as well as the many Muslim soldiers fighting with them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the real target behind the “Islamo-Fascism” rhetoric appears to be Islam itself. Horowitz is convinced that the “academic left” censors the truth about the Islamic roots of terrorism and thereby creates “sympathy for the enemy.”

That’s why many of the week’s campus events don’t focus on terrorism, but rather on topics like the “oppression of women in Islam.” And that’s also why the featured speakers are not experts on terrorist groups. They are, instead, people like author Robert Spencer, who argues that Islam is “the world’s most intolerant religion,” and Coulter, who refers to Muslims as “rag heads” and describes the Quran as “tied to a Stone Age culture.”

To the extent that political correctness on college campuses chills debate about the true nature of the terrorist threat, I’m all for replacing empty clichés such as “Islam is a religion of peace” with an open and honest discussion about the history and teachings of Islam. As a student of world religions, I’m well aware (as are most Muslims) of the extremist voices within Islam today and in history. (Similar voices are heard in the history of every world faith.)

But my own study of Islam convinces me that a fair, scholarly assessment of Islamic theology, history and civilization would refute the canard that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant. And it would expose al-Qaida and other terrorist groups as preaching a perversion of Islamic teaching.

Beyond demonizing Islam, it’s hard to understand what Horowitz, Coulter, Spencer and company hope to accomplish with their campus protests. If they are genuinely interested in defeating Islamist terrorists, why don’t they reach out to the vast majority of Muslims who share their rejection of extremism instead of pushing them away with blanket condemnations of their religion?

As journalist Peter Bergen points out in this week’s New Republic, “the American Muslim community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideological virus of radical Islam.” This explains, he argues, why we have been spared “the scourge of home-grown terrorism.”

Just when we least need to inflame religious differences and most need to work together as American citizens, along comes “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” with its not-so-subtle hostility toward the Islamic faith.

Far from waking people up to terrorism, these campus events are likely to cause a spike in hatred toward American Muslims, already a growing problem in many parts of the nation. To make matters worse, the anti-Islam rhetoric will be a propaganda boon to al-Qaida, already busy working to convince Muslim youth that the West is at war with Islam.

Explain it to me again, Mr. Horowitz: How, exactly, does attacking Islam advance the fight against terrorism? 10-25-07

Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22209. Web: firstamendmentcenter.org. E-mail: chaynes@freedomforum.org.

2007-10-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

Why they call it 'Islamofascism'
Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, October 26, 2007

At least since the days of Oswald Mosley and the Spanish Civil War, "fascist" has been the preferred slur of campus revolutionaries and other leftists of limited vocabulary. But something curious has happened in the last few years.

Among conservatives, "Islamofascist" has become the standard label for those who butcher in the name of Allah. Practically unknown prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the term was first embraced in the nether regions of the blogosphere before it seeped into the mainstream. President George W. Bush used it only once, in 2006, but Rudy Giuliani, the Republican with the best shot at succeeding Bush, has made it a crowd-pleasing fixture of his stump speech.

There is even an "Islamofascism Awareness Week." On now, this creation of neo-conservative David Horowitz will have Ann Coulter and other right-wing luminaries attend consciousness-raising sessions -- as the new left called them when the new left was new -- at universities across the United States........

Gates of Vienna: Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies

2007-09-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

Saturday, August 18, 2007
Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies
by Baron Bodissey
Our Swedish corrsespondent Carpenter sent us an email this morning with the latest on the Modoggie affair:
TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, the Swedish news agency) reported yesterday that the network of SEMUS (Sekulära Muslimer i Sverige = Secular Muslims in Sweden) is about to exhibit Vilks’ Mohammed-drawings in a gallery. A sign of moderation?
The dispatch was published in many newspapers, among them Helsingborgs Dagblad.

Here’s Carpenter’s translation of the article in question:
Muslims exhibit Vilks’ Mohammed drawings
Muslims now want to exhibit Lars Vilks’ drawings of the prophet Mohammed as a dog. A balanced debate on the artwork is needed, the initiators think
[...]
It’s the network Sekulära Muslimer i Sverige (Semus) and the magazine Minaret who together have initiated the exhibition of the much-discussed dog drawings
"This will happen on an established stage for music and culture in Stockholm. Negotiations are going on; I think it’ll be finished next week," says Hooman Anvari of Semus to TT.
More than that he doesn’t want to say as yet, but he considers the chance that the exhibition will take place to be good.
- - - - - - - - -
“In part because there’s a public interest for a balanced discussion on this matter, and in part because Lars Vilks has agreed to take part,” says Hooman Anvari.
This is the third try for the drawings during a short period. Exhibitiors in Värmland and Bohuslän earlier have said no to showing them.
Hooman Anvari himself thinks the drawings are disgusting, but he wants them exhibited anyway.
“The intention is to create a balanced debate on free spech, freedom of religion and democracy. These issues tend to get polarized if one doesn’t handle the debate in a good way.”

Gates of Vienna: Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies

Who are the "moderate Muslims", asks Muqtedar Khan, Ph.D.

2007-09-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

Who are the "moderate Muslims"?
The term moderate Muslims is not only becoming important in the post September 11 discussion of Islam and the West, it is also becoming highly contested. What do we really mean when we brand someone as a moderate Muslim? Indeed the more interesting question is what does the word mean to Westerns, looking-in to Islam, and to Muslims, looking out from within Islam?
By Muqtedar Khan, Ph.D.
As one who identifies himself strongly with the idea of a liberal Islam and also advocates moderation in the manifestation and __expression of Islamic politics, I believe it is important that we flush out this “political identity”. In an era when who we are determines what we do politically, it is imperative that we clarify the “we” in politics.
American media uses the term moderate Muslim to indicate a Muslim who is either pro-western in her politics or is being self-critical in her discourse. Therefore both President Karzai of Afghanistan and Professor Kahlid Abul Fadl of UCLA wear the cap with felicity, the former for his politics the latter for his ideas.
Muslims in general do not like using the term, understanding it to indicate an individual who has politically sold out to the “other” side. In some internal intellectual debates, the term moderate Muslim is used pejoratively to indicate a Muslim who is more secular and less Islamic than the norm, which varies across communities. In America, a moderate Muslim is one who peddles a softer form of Islam – the Islam of John Esposito and Karen Arm Strong – is willing to co-exist peacefully with peoples of other faiths and is comfortable with democracy and the separation of politics and religion.
Both, Western media and Muslims, do a disservice by branding some Muslims as moderate on the basis of their politics. These people should general be understood as opportunists and self-serving. Most of the moderate regimes in the Muslim World are neither democratic nor manifest the softer side of Islam. That leaves intellectual positions as the criteria for determining who is a moderate Muslim, and especially in comparison to whom, since moderate is a relative term.
Both Muslims and the media are generally on the mark when they identify moderate Muslims as reflective, self-critical, pro-democracy and human-rights and closet secularists. But who are they different from and how?
I believe that moderate Muslims are different from militant Muslims even though both of them advocate the establishment of societies whose organizing principle is Islam. The difference between moderate and militant Muslims is in their methodological orientation and in the primordial normative preferences which shape their interpretation of Islam.
For moderate Muslims Ijtihad is the preferred method of choice for social and political change and military Jihad the last option. For militant Muslims, military Jihad is the first option and Ijtihad is not an option at all.
Ijtihad narrowly understood is a juristic tool that allows independent reasoning to articulate Islamic law on issues where textual sources are silent. The unstated assumption being when texts have spoken reason must be silent. But increasingly moderate Muslim intellectuals see Ijtihad as the spirit of Islamic thought that is necessary for the vitality of Islamic ideas and Islamic civilization. Without Ijtihad, Islamic thought and Islamic civilization fall into decay.

Who are the "moderate Muslims", asks Muqtedar Khan, Ph.D.

Gates of Vienna: Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies

2007-08-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

Saturday, August 18, 2007
Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies
by Baron Bodissey
Our Swedish corrsespondent Carpenter sent us an email this morning with the latest on the Modoggie affair:
TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, the Swedish news agency) reported yesterday that the network of SEMUS (Sekulära Muslimer i Sverige = Secular Muslims in Sweden) is about to exhibit Vilks’ Mohammed-drawings in a gallery. A sign of moderation?
The dispatch was published in many newspapers, among them Helsingborgs Dagblad.

Here’s Carpenter’s translation of the article in question:
Muslims exhibit Vilks’ Mohammed drawings
Muslims now want to exhibit Lars Vilks’ drawings of the prophet Mohammed as a dog. A balanced debate on the artwork is needed, the initiators think
[...]
It’s the network Sekulära Muslimer i Sverige (Semus) and the magazine Minaret who together have initiated the exhibition of the much-discussed dog drawings
"This will happen on an established stage for music and culture in Stockholm. Negotiations are going on; I think it’ll be finished next week," says Hooman Anvari of Semus to TT.
More than that he doesn’t want to say as yet, but he considers the chance that the exhibition will take place to be good.
- - - - - - - - -
“In part because there’s a public interest for a balanced discussion on this matter, and in part because Lars Vilks has agreed to take part,” says Hooman Anvari.
This is the third try for the drawings during a short period. Exhibitiors in Värmland and Bohuslän earlier have said no to showing them.
Hooman Anvari himself thinks the drawings are disgusting, but he wants them exhibited anyway.
“The intention is to create a balanced debate on free spech, freedom of religion and democracy. These issues tend to get polarized if one doesn’t handle the debate in a good way.”

Gates of Vienna: Swedish Muslims Will Exhibit the Modoggies

On Faith: Muslims Speak Out Blog

2007-08-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl
Not too long ago, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. reported that Saudi Arabia had bribed the British government with a $70 million arms deal to cease a criminal investigation against members of the Saudi royal family, and stop affording asylum to two prominent Saudi dissidents, Sa’d al-Din al-Faqih and Muhammad al-Mis’iri. These two men called attention to Saudi Arabia human rights abuses, and were strong advocates for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Per the terms of the arms deal, they were turned over to Saudi Arabia where they would certainly be tortured and killed.
For three days, neither government confirmed nor denied the Yamama deal, as it came to be known. At the same time, the British government ordered the Guardian to stop reporting on this matter of national security. Shockingly, al-Faqih and al-Mis’iri, both British citizens, were arrested, denaturalized and deported. Relying solely on Saudi evidence, both men were charged with supporting terrorism. This is only one example in an extremely alarming trend of human rights abuses committed by Western democracies in the name of fighting terrorism. Add to this the recent revelations about secret U.S. detention centers, the horrifying use of torture by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and the abhorrent practice of “rendition” or “proxy” torture, where other governments do the dirty work at the behest of the U.S
These are all serious moral failures that have disastrous consequences for humanity at large, not to mention the effective “front line” for the world in fighting extremist Islam—moderate Muslims like al-Faqih and al-Mis’iri, who typically espouse the ideals of democracy, pluralism, and human rights. It would be a grave mistake to think of these practices as the unfortunate but necessary compromises in the fight against terrorism—they only perpetuate the very same problem that they are purportedly intended to solve.
These types of abuses are built on a logic of pragmatic opportunism, the exact logic upon which Osama Bin Laden and many extremist movements justify their acts of terror. Modern Islam is currently under siege by a virulently extremist movement rooted in the Saudi brand of Islam known as “Wahhabism”. Unfortunately, as in the Yamama deal, Saudi Arabia has been wildly successful in using its financial means to control the voice of Islam around the world, neutralize or terminate alternative voices, and force Muslims and non-Muslims into accepting Wahhabi Islam as the only valid form of Islam. In reality, Wahhabism was an outlier and marginal movement in Islamic history, and its theology was largely alien to Islam until Saudi money forced Wahhabism upon the Muslim mainstream. Although Wahhabism boasts a literalist approach to Islamic texts, it is starkly functionalist and pragmatic. Wahhabi extremists very often rely upon the logic of social and political necessity to overcome ethical and moral inhibitions, and to justify a wide range of abuses from terrorism to torture and the oppression of women.
But here at home, in the so called war against terrorism, we find that the same logic prevails. Western democracies have their own pietistic rhetoric about democracy and human rights, but in the name of national interest we often act in an unprincipled opportunistic fashion. As in the case of the Yamama deal, Western democracies can commit or condone grave human rights violations in the name of national security. And, several Western democracies, including the United States, continue to overlook the many human rights abuses committed by the Saudi government while unabashedly declaring this government to be a close ally and friend. Also in the name of pragmatism, we have become marred in the quagmire of detentions without due process, extrajudicial killings, the killing of civilians, and torture or proxy torture.
The most recent example of this logic is the insistence of the executive branch of our government on having the unfettered power to conduct surveillance against its own citizens without any judicial involvement. Other than degrading our country’s civil liberties, this position materially alters the balance of powers between the three branches of government at the expense of the judiciary, and distorts the very nature of American democracy.
This reminds me of two statements made by Bin Laden, in which he mocked the ideas of democracy and human rights as Western hypocrisy. Bin Laden predicted that his war with the West would push the West to abandon its avowed moral principles of upholding human rights and democracy, and show its true inhumane face. Second, he predicted the defeat of those Muslims, our “front line”, who embrace the West’s ideals and oppose Wahhabism.
Unfortunately, it appears his first prediction is becoming all too true. In this war on terror, every human or civil rights failure is a victory for terrorism. Terrorists do not assess their victories by counting the number of people killed; they assess the extent to which they have broken the spirit of their opponent, and the degree to which their opponent, while plagued by fear, abandons its own ideals, ultimately to its own demise.
The outcome of his second prediction has yet to be seen, although indications are not encouraging. It is common knowledge that moderate Muslims and Wahhabi inspired extremists are battling for the very soul of Islam. The West can make the vital difference for the moderate cause, now humanity’s cause. If Wahhabism is defeated as an active and viable theology in the Muslim world, then the very ideological foundations of the Bin Laden’s of the world will be thoroughly undermined.

On Faith: Muslims Speak Out Blog

Hudson Institute > Islam: Suspended in Centuries Past?

2007-05-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

Islam: Suspended in Centuries Past?
May 31, 2006
by Zeyno Baran , Emmet C. Tuohy
In the more than four years since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks—a period that has seen many more such horrendous acts conducted "in the name of Islam"—many Americans wonder whether Islam itself is at the root of the problem.
Similar concerns were expressed by the Danish cartoonists, whose drawings caused a worldwide uproar that led to fatal rioting. The recent case of Abdul Rahman, a convert to Christianity who narrowly escaped a death sentence on charges of apostasy, led many to conclude that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with modernity.
The relative silence of moderate Muslims in the resulting discussion has only made matters worse. Certainly, there have been some hopeful signs: From the spread of democracy in Lebanon to the reforms undertaken in Indonesia, Malaysia and India, some adherents of the Islamic faith are seeking to disprove the blanket assertion that Islam is a violent religion incompatible with modern democracy.
None of these attempts will succeed unless Islam's essence is understood—above all, by Muslims. In its essence, Islam is as compatible with modernity as is Christianity or Judaism. The problem is not with Islam itself; rather, the fault lies with certain Muslims who wish to hide the essential truths of the religion in the nonessential traditions of early Arab societies.
From its beginnings, Islam has been a "living religion," one not bound by the practices of a particular time and culture. The truths of the Muslim faith are in its primary source: the Quran. The hadiths (words) and sunnas (deeds) of the Prophet Mohammed are only secondary, used in cases where there is uncertainty.
There is no doubt that, as the first Muslim, the prophet lived an exemplary life. While justly emulating the prophet, however, modern Muslims must take care not to place undue emphasis on the cultural practices of his time.
To look at the political, social and economic conditions of the Muslim countries and then to conclude that Islam is not compatible with modernity is to confuse cause and effect. Unfortunately, there are those who preach and practice a form of Islam that is not compatible with modernity—but the problem began much later, with the spread of extremist ideology.
This ideology has been promoted most of all by Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family owes its existence to its two-century alliance with the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect. It has used that position to destroy historic mosques, shrines and other physical reminders of the pluralistic Islamic heritage. And, with its significant petrodollar reserves, the country has also used that position to export its intolerant brand of Islam. In similar nations, Islamic law often is used as a pretext to squelch dissent and eliminate popular opposition, while distracting the public from the failure of each regime to provide good governance.
Islam today is the only major world religion in which fundamentalism has become identified as mainstream. However, this fundamentalism is not representative of mainstream Islam—a tolerant, peaceful religion that thrives from Southeast Asia to South America.
We need to separate Islam as a religion—where the moral and ethical principles of the religion are compatible with democratic values and principles—from Islam as a culture or a political ideology.
For example, the Quran explicitly states, "there is no compulsion in religion" and "let him who please believe, and let him who please disbelieve." While these verses emphasize the private nature of religion, in Islamic literature, apostasy is said to be punishable by death.
However, this is not a premise based in the theology of Islam, as its starting point is political: When the prophet died, some tribes rebelled and wanted to leave the first Islamic state. Abu Bakr, his political successor, declared them "apostates" and waged war against them on ostensibly religious grounds.
This is one of many examples that underscore the importance of separating the unchangeable essence of Islam from what happened at a particular point in history—just as is done in Christianity and Judaism.
It is also critically important not to fall into the trap set by the Islamists, who want to continue to mix state and religion to control their societies. Thus, including Islam in the constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq was a mistake. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion can only be provided under secular systems.
In addressing the question of Islam's compatibility with the modern, democratic world, the West must avoid the simplistic solution of condemning Islam in its entirety.
While it is ultimately up to Muslims to demonstrate that the teachings of Islam are applicable to modern life, the West must help them reclaim their religion from the extremists who profane its name.
This article appeared in the Press-Examiner (Riverside, California) on May 27, 2006.
Zeyno Baran joined Hudson Institute as Senior Fellow and Director of Hudson’s Center for Eurasian Policy in April 2006.
Emmet Tuohy is the Assistant Director of the Center on Eurasian Policy at Hudson Institute

Hudson Institute > Islam: Suspended in Centuries Past?

Hudson Institute > A Muslim Manifesto

2007-03-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

A Muslim Manifesto
Rejecting the bad.
March 1, 2006
by Zeyno Baran
"Who are the moderate Muslims, and why do they not speak up?" After being asked this question over and over again since 9/11, particularly after the Danish cartoon crisis, we decided to propose the following Muslim Manifesto:
Recently, the disrespectful cartoons about Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) published in Jyllands-Posten resulted in an extreme reaction among many Muslims worldwide. While we understand the feelings of our co-religionists, we strongly urge them to refrain from rage and violence.
A zeal for Allah is rightful only when it is expressed in an enlightened manner, since Allah himself has ordained a restrained response. When the early Muslims were mocked by their pagan contemporaries, the Koran ordered not a violent backlash, but rather a civilized disapproval: "When you hear Allah's verses being rejected and mocked at by people, you must not sit with them till they start talking of other things." (Koran 4:140) The Koran also describes Muslims as "those who control their rage and pardon other people, [because] Allah loves the good-doers." (3:134) Therefore all demonstrations against the mockery of Islam should be peaceful. All critiques of Islam should be countered not by threats and violence, but by rational counter-argument.
We also believe that terrorist acts can never be justified or excused. None of the challenges Muslims face, such as oppression or military occupation, can justify attacks against non-combatants. In the Holy Koran, Allah orders Muslims to "never let hatred of anyone lead you into the sin of deviating from justice." (5:8) The true Islamic sense of justice is well-established in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh); even in time of war — let alone peace — Muslim soldiers should never "kill the old, the infant, the child, or the woman." Those who do so are not martyrs, but cold-blooded murderers.
Supported by the Koran's affirmation that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256), we cherish religious liberty. Every human has the right to believe or not to believe in Islam or in any other religion All Muslims furthermore have the right to reject and change their religion if desired. No state, community or individual has a right to impose Islam on others. People should accept and practice Islam not because they are forced to do so, but because they believe in its teachings.
We support and cherish democracy — not because we reject the sovereignty of the Almighty over people, but because we believe that this sovereignty is manifested in the general will of people in a democratic and pluralistic society. We do not accept theocratic rule-not because we do not wish to obey Allah, but because theocratic rule inevitably becomes rule by fallible (and sometimes corrupt and misguided) humans in the name of the infallible God.
We accept the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular law. Islamic law, or sharia, was developed at a time when Muslims were living in homogenous communities. In the modern world, virtually all societies are pluralistic, consisting of different faiths and of different perceptions of each faith, including Islam. In this pluralistic setting, a legal system based on a particular version of a single religion cannot be imposed on all citizens. Thus, a single secular law, open to all religions but based on none, is strongly needed.
We believe that women have the same inalienable rights as men. We strongly denounce laws and attitudes in some Islamic societies that exclude women from society by denying them the rights of education, political participation and the individual pursuit of happiness. Like men, women should have the right to decide how they will live, dress, travel, marry and divorce; if they do not enjoy these rights, they are clearly second-class citizens.
We believe that there is no contradiction between religious and national identities. Any Muslim should be able to embrace the citizenship of any modern secular state while maintaining feelings of spiritual solidarity with the umma, the global Muslim community.
We regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths in the common family of Abrahamic monotheism. We strongly denounce anti-Semitism, which has been alien to Islam for many centuries but which unfortunately has gained popularity among some Muslims in recent decades. We accept Israel's right to exist, as well as the justified aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state and hope that a just two-state solution in Israel/Palestine will bring peace to the Holy Land.
In short, we strongly disagree with and condemn those who promote or practice tyranny and violence in the name of Islam. We hope that their misguided deeds will not blacken our noble religion — which is indeed a path to God and a call for peace.
We encourage Muslim political, social, community and business leaders to contact us at http://www.hudson.org/infor@muslimmanifesto.org to sign onto the Manifesto so that the authentic peaceful and civilized message of Islam will be heard.
This article first appeared in NRO and was co-written by Mustafa Akyol
Zeyno Baran joined Hudson Institute as Senior Fellow and Director of Hudson’s Center for Eurasian Policy in April 2006.

Hudson Institute > A Muslim Manifesto