Members of the Brookfield-Elm Grove Interfaith Network are coming to the defense of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee’s proposal to build a mosque in Brookfield, the Journal Sentinel reported as the religious leaders started a letter of support.
“This is about the rights of decent human beings to have a place to worship,” Rabbi Steven Adams of Congregation Emanu-El in Waukesha, who was drafting the letter on behalf of the group, told the Journal Sentinel.
“I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama. But the worst site by far is the right wing’s premier news channel, Fox News.”
Charles Johnson provides the details.
Little Green Footballs, 11 March 2012
Via LoonWatch
The Government is giving £200,000 to a charity that uses football stars to fight racism and intolerance, it has been revealed. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the money would help ensure the national game was not “perverted” by the “insidious influence of the far right”.
Show Racism the Red Card organises professional footballers to run workshops, tackling the views of extremists. The state funding, from the Communities and Local Government budget, will cover lessons for 9,000 young people, resources for teachers and research into racism.
Daniel Trilling has an interesting article in today’s Guardian. Responding to the findings in the new report From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, Trilling asks: “Is Britain’s far right preparing for armed conflict? And could a catastrophe of the kind that struck Norway last summer be on its way here?” He writes:
As electoral success has melted away since the BNP’s collapse at the 2010 general election, the hardcore is now left exposed. At the same time, a younger generation has been attracted to the adrenaline-pumping street politics of the English Defence League, which adapts its language to better suit the realities of multicultural modern Britain. It claims merely to oppose “militant Islam”, but its supporters have carried out numerous violent attacks on Asian Britons, on their shops, homes and places of worship. Shut out from mainstream politics, some far-right supporters may well turn to violence, seeing it as the only way to achieve their goals. Indeed, it has happened in this country before – most recently in 1999, when David Copeland, a neo-Nazi who had drifted through the BNP, set off a series of nail bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, killing three people and maiming 129.
However, Trilling argues that the main threat from the far right is not political violence and terrorism but rather the impact of its ideas on wider society:
The greater danger remains where it always has done: in the elements of far-right propaganda that overlap with mainstream political sentiment. Few people in Britain would agree that race war is on its way, but how many would agree that immigration has gone “too far”; that multiculturalism has failed or that the west is locked in a “clash of civilisations” with Islam?
By his murderous actions in Norway last summer, Anders Breivik has become the new face of far-right terror. Yet he did not tear Norway’s society apart in the way that, say, the rhetoric of Geert Wilders threatens to do in Holland. There, his nonviolent Freedom party has been able to extract reactionary anti-Muslim concessions from the Dutch coalition government in return for support on economic policies. In France, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen has made halal meat a major issue in the presidential election, and encouraged Nicolas Sarkozy to compete with her furiously in the immigrant-bashing stakes.
Assailed by Muslim groups and quashed by Senate President Mike Haridopolos, an “anti-Sharia” law bill died in the Florida Legislature on Friday.
Senate Bill 1360 would have restricted state courts from considering foreign laws in most cases. Authored by Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, the bill was identical to HB 1209, which easily passed the House 92-24. But Hays’ bill became ensnared in a late-breaking political controversy when proponents distributed fliers and a pamphlet decrying the alleged intrusion of Islamic law into America’s courts.
The New York Police Department collected information on businesses owned by second- and third-generation Americans specifically because they were Muslims, according to newly obtained secret documents.
They show in the clearest terms yet that police were monitoring people based on religion, despite claims from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the contrary.
The NYPD has faced intense criticism from Muslims, lawmakers – and even the FBI – for widespread spying operations that put entire neighborhoods under surveillance. Police put the names of innocent people in secret files and monitored the mosques, student groups and businesses that make up the Muslim landscape of the northeastern U.S.
A hardcore of far-right supporters in the UK appears to believe violent conflict between different ethnic, racial and religious groups is inevitable, and that it is legitimate to prepare even for armed conflict, according to a new report.
The study, From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, by Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham, and Jocelyn Evans, of Salford University, was launched at Chatham House on Thursday. The report questioned more than 2,000 supporters of “radical-right” and “far-right” groups and found that many endorsed violence, with a “hostile inner core” apparently willing to plan for and prepare for attacks.
“What we have got here is a group of people who self-identify as supporters of the far right and who are, to quite a large extent, backing ideas about preparing for violence and appear to view violence as a justifiable political strategy,” said Goodwin, who is a specialist in far-right politics.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published the Spring 2012 issue of its Intelligence Report, on “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2011”, which identifies a continued growth in the number of hate groups operating in the United States.
In “The ‘Patriot’ Movement Explodes” Mark Potok states: “The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years.” Potok writes:
The number of anti-Muslim groups tripled in 2011, jumping from 10 groups in 2010 to 30 last year. That rapid growth in Islamophobia, marked by the vilification of Muslims by opportunistic politicians and anti-Muslim activists, began in August 2010, when controversy over a planned Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan reached a fever pitch. Things got worse later in the year, when Oklahoma residents voted to amend the state constitution to forbid the use of Islamic Shariah law in state courts – a completely unnecessary change, given that the U.S. Constitution rules that out. The overheated atmosphere generated by these events also helped spur a 50% jump in the FBI’s count of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2010. Then, in March 2011, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims that seemed meant to demonize them. At the same time, there was a swelling of truly vicious propaganda like this remarkable Jan. 14, 2011, comment from columnist Debbie Schlussel: “They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won’t learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward.”
In connection with anti-gay groups Potok points out:
In another development, most of the religious right groups that started out opposing abortion but moved on to attacking LGBT people have recently begun to adopt anti-Muslim propaganda en masse. The gay-bashing Traditional Values Coalition, for instance, last year redesigned its website to emphasize a new section entitled “Islam vs. the Constitution,” published a report on Shariah law, and joined anti-Shariah conferences.
According to the British Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia “is a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.”
Islamophobia is a form of intolerance alongside xenophobia and anti-Semitism and these days it’s not difficult to find online. Hate mongers spout vitriol against Muslims on Facebook, YouTube and BlogSpot. Just returned from an internal OIC workshop held in Brussels to discuss Islamophobia, Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Chicago Office, asserted that Muslims must do more to fight this scourge.
“Islamophobia is rampant online. There is almost a monopoly by the Islamophobes on Islam and Muslims online,” remarked Rehab. “What we’re trying to do is to encourage others to be more active online. People need to start blogs and have websites that engage in commenting on Islam and which link to positive material that is informative about Islam and Muslims. It is necessary to push back against this onslaught of Islamophobic attacks.”
A new People For the American Way Right Wing Watch: In Focusreport identifies the techniques used by Religious Right leaders to portray themselves as victims of an assault on religious liberty.
The report, The Mythical Martyrdom of Jerry Boykin, examines the anti-Muslim extremism of Retired Lt. Gen. Boykin that derailed an offer to speak at West Point Military Academy, as well as the tactics he employs to legitimize his own religious and political agenda.
“Lt. Gen. Boykin’s claim that Muslims have no First Amendment rights and that the United States is at war with Islam are contrary to basic American values,” said Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “His attacks against Muslims are so extreme he was even publicly rebuked by President George W. Bush. It is ironic that a man who so fundamentally misunderstands our Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of worship to all Americans is playing the victim of religious oppression. In reality, Boykin is just a part of the far-right effort to use the banner of religious freedom as cover for spreading fear and intolerance.”