Yesterday at City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg met with Ahmed Sharif, the cab driver who was stabbed by a drunken passenger because of his religion. Despite the harrowing experience, and the lingering trauma from the attack, Sharif affirmed his love for NYC: “I feel like I belong here. This is the city actually [for] all colors, races, religion, everyone. We live here side by side peacefully.”
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Netherlands: Christian Democrat leader rejects Lubbers’ criticisms, insists on pursuing deal with Wilders
Division within the Netherlands’s Christian Democratic Appell (CDA) party over dealing with the far-right PVV party of anti-Islamist politician Geert Wilders deepened Friday with a top leader insisting talks with the PVV should continue.
CDA parliamentary faction leader Maxime Verhagen ruled out suspending talks with the PVV – rejecting a call made the day before by former premier Ruud Lubbers – on getting the PVV’s backing for a minority government.
Verhagen said any suspension of the talks was out of the question. The work towards forming a Wilders-approved minority cabinet was in full swing, he said. “I expect that we will achieve a good result with which we can convince Mr. Lubbers,” Verhagen said.
Update: See “Increasing pressure from senior CDA members”, Radio Netherlands, 28 August 2010
RUSI slammed over terrorists in prisons report
A Muslim who served 20 years behind bars has slammed a report that claims prisons are factories for hundreds of home-grown terrorists. Former prisoner Danny Afzal, who works as a researcher for the Prison Reform Trust, hit out at the Royal United Services Institute journal after it published a report warning that prisons are radicalising Muslims.
It stated that Britain has more to fear than any other Western country from home-grown terrorists. According to its estimates, one in 10 Muslim prisoners in high security jails across England and Wales are “successfully targeted” by radical jihadists.
“Perhaps 800 potentially violent radicals, not previously guilty of terrorism charges, will be back in society over the coming five to 10 years,” the journal said. It warned against British “public complacency” and stoked fears that the possibility of terrorist attacks hangs over all major sporting events including the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Mr Afzal rubbished the report and warned that it would create major tensions inside and out of prisons.
He said: “I’m very disappointed by this scaremongering report. All the hard work to improve faith relations inside and out of prison are severely jeopardised by reports such as this. When so-called experts publish these misleading figures they never think of the consequences for Muslims and their families, who will be isolated as a result.
“The report is based on unreliable secondary evidence. I’ve visited prisons first hand and spoken to enough Muslims there to know that the report’s ‘facts’ are unfounded.”
Tea Party email reveals motive behind campaign against ‘Ground Zero mosque’
Writing at the Huffington Post, Ahmed Rehab of CAIR reproduces a email circulated by the Tea Party opposing the Park51 development. As he points out, it demonstrates that the campaign against the “Ground Zero mosque” is “motivated by an ideological belief that ‘Islam is evil and must be stopped; America is Judeo-Christian'”.
The Tea Party email asserts that the principle of freedom of religion does not apply to Islam, as it is “a religion [that] can and does demand world domination by any means, including violence if necessary”. The email demands:
“Should the first amendment protect the practice of a religion which has a hostile political agenda wrapped in cleric’s robes? Should the U.S. Constitution protect a religion whose focus is converting the United States from a Democratic Republic into a Theocracy lead by religious cleric’s who are antithetical to what made this nation great and what keeps it great? …
“Should ‘We The People’ give haven to religions whose main purpose it to install a system of Theo-political colonization? Shall the American people welcome with open arms a religion having untold millions of members demanding the beheading of western infidels? Shall the People of America grant safe haven to those who cheerfully work for the day Israel, the United States and all other non-Islamic states are finally eradicated off the face of the earth?
“These bothersome questions are not ones of religious rights, but rather of the will of the people. Will the people tolerate everything? Will ‘blanket tolerance’ be the downfall of the Judaic/Christian basis of the American society?”
Via LoonWatch
More scaremongering over ‘radicalised’ Muslim prisoners
Britain faces a potential “new wave” of home-grown terrorist attacks as a result of an escalating rate of radicalisation of Muslims inside the prison system, according to a report published today by a leading defence and security thinktank.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says that up to 800 “potentially violent radicals” who have not been convicted of terrorist offences could be released from prisons in England and Wales over the next five to 10 years and will pose a significant challenge to the security services to identify them.
The estimate rests upon “prison probation sources” saying that one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslim prisoners in high security jails in England and Wales could be successfully targeted.
However, the Ministry of Justice disputed the figures in the report. It said last night: “The prison and probation service does not recognise the figure of 800 ‘violent radicals’ referred to in the report, nor do we agree that jihadist radicalisation is taking place at a rapid rate.
“There are only 6,000 prisoners in the high security estate, most of whom are not Muslim. The figure of ‘one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslims’ in the high security estate is therefore unrecognisable.”
So the RUSI report’s figures, which are evidently based on nothing more substantial than the subjective opinion of unnamed individuals in the probation service, don’t add up. Or at any rate the report’s authors know so little about the subject that they are unable to distinguish between the general Muslim prison population and those in high security jails. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press doesn’t see the need to highlight this point.
The Mail performs its usual trick of running a shock-horror headline (“Muslim inmates ‘turning to terror’ as think tank says convicted terrorists are radicalising fellow inmates”) while burying the Ministry of Justice’s rejection of the RUSI’s claim at the bottom of the article. The Sun (“800 fanatical Muslim lags ‘waiting to hit UK'”) and the Star (“Muslim radicals bred behind bars says think-tank”) do the same. And, just to show that the liberal press isn’t immune to this sort of thing either, so does the Independent (“Muslims ‘being turned into terrorists in jail'”).
Neither the Telegraph (“Britain faces new terror wave”) nor the Express (“Jailed Muslims ‘converted to terrorist cause'”) bother to quote the Ministry of Justice at all.
Predictably, it is the Telegraph version of the story that is reproduced by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch.
Myths and ignorance about Sharia
Protesters of the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero waved signs there this past Sunday with a single word: Sharia.
Their reference to Islam’s guiding principles has become a rallying cry for those critical of Islam, who use it to conjure images of public stonings and other extreme forms of punishment in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan and argue that those tenets are somehow gaining a foothold in the United States.
Blogs are proliferating with names like Creeping Sharia and Stop Sharia Now. A pamphlet for a “tea party” rally last weekend in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. asked: “Why do Muslims want to take over the world and place us under Shariah law?” Former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich amplified that point in a much-publicized speech a few weeks ago exploring what he calls “the problem of creeping sharia.”
The fact that the word has become akin to a slur in some camps is an alarming development to many religious and political leaders.
Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post, 25 August 2010
France’s ban on the veil has nothing to do with women’s emancipation
If there were any doubt about the motivation for the ban on Islamic face coverings passed by the French national assembly in July, the Sarkozy government’s actions in August have laid them to rest.
The issue isn’t women’s emancipation, for all the pious rhetoric we’ve heard about equality being a “primordial value” of the French nation. It isn’t the danger that terrorists and robbers will hide behind burqas in order to blow up buildings or rob banks – the exemptions in the law for motorcycle helmets, fencing and ski masks, and carnival costumes quickly dispel that argument. And it isn’t about enforcing openness and transparency as an aspect of French culture.
Outlawing what the French call “le voile intégral” is part of a campaign to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements – although many of these “foreigners” are actually French citizens – from membership in the nation. It is part of a cynical bid by Sarkozy and his party to capture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim animus that has brought electoral gains to the rightwing National Front party and to disarm the Socialist opposition, which has so far offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign.
Joan Wallach Scott, author of that excellent book The Politics of the Veil, writes in the Guardian, 26 August 2010
Ruud Lubbers opposes coalition deal with Wilders
Three-time Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, who brokered talks on forming a government between his Christian Democrats, the Liberal Party, and the anti-Islam Freedom Party, said he now opposed the plan, citing concerns about freedom of religion.
“My stance has developed from a ‘yes, but’ to a ‘no, unless’,” Lubbers wrote in an Aug. 20 letter to the Christian Democrat leader in parliament, Maxime Verhagen, and party chairman Henk Bleker published by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant today.
Lubbers’s change of view may jeopardize the formal negotiations that started last month on establishing a Liberal-Christian Democrat government that would rely on the support of the Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, to get legislation through parliament. It would be the Netherlands’ first minority administration since World War II.
Other senior Christian Democrats have also expressed opposition against the talks with Wilders. His party seeks to ban new mosques, curb immigration, cut development aid and reduce European Union influence in the Netherlands.
“Freedom of religion – also of Islam – and no discrimination based on religion or world view have to remain essential features of our constitutional state,” Lubbers wrote. “On that, there can’t be a shadow of a doubt.”
Mark Steel on the ‘Ground Zero mosque’
“To give yourself a stressful and futile day, try telling people there are no plans to build a mosque at Ground Zero. You’ll get nowhere, although the truth is there are plans to build an Islamic centre, with a swimming pool open to everyone, two blocks away from Ground Zero. So if this is a continuation of the terrorist agenda as claimed, it’s been a peculiar plan, and Bin Laden must have started by telling his followers ‘First we will destroy their buildings – and then, oo it’s so deliciously evil, we will get people to swim near to where the buildings were… mwaHAHAHAHAHA’.”
Connecticut: members of all faiths gather to oppose Muslim-bashing
Stamford, Connecticut — Dozens of people from all religious backgrounds gathered outside the First Congregational Church of Stamford Tuesday night to express support for the local Muslim community.
“I don’t like, as a religious person, as a person of faith, seeing a religion condemned,” said the event’s organizer, Rev. Kate Heichler, president of the InterFaith Council of Southwestern Connecticut. “In the America I grew up in, when someone’s getting picked on you go stand with them.”
Heichler planned the vigil in reaction to recent instances of “Muslim bashing,” which she said are occurring on national and local levels. The controversy over “Park51,” an Islamic Community Center slated for construction two blocks from ground zero, and an Aug. 6 demonstration by members of the Christian group Operation Save America outside a Bridgeport mosque were two incidents that inspired Tuesday’s vigil, Heichler said.
Mongi Dhaouadi, a representative from the Council on American Islamic Relations, drove down from Hartford to attend the event. He said he had been inside the Bridgeport mosque when Operation Save America members yelled that Muslims should give up the Koran for a month. The remark, made on the first night of the holy month of Ramadan, was “very hurtful,” Dhaouadi said.
“We need to use this occasion to turn things around,” he said. “Let us walk away tonight with a commitment. We have so much in common. There are so many problems out there and we can face them all together.”
Religious leaders from the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths read prayers in English, Hebrew and Arabic in front of the crowd. Naveed Khan, a representative from the Stamford Islamic Center, said that acts of hatred and bigotry risk isolating Muslims from their own communities.
“Events such as this today help bridge the gap of our misunderstood religion,” Khan said. “We ask for your support in any times of darkness we may have. And we will, in turn, be in lockstep with our community.”
Several elected officials attended the vigil, including state Rep. William Tong, D-Stamford, and state Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, who drove down to Stamford from New Haven for the demonstration.