“All those who have complained about the racist site Blog Cochon will be pleased to know that Blogger has decided to ban the site from public viewing on the basis that it is in contravention of its Contents Policy. Blogger is to be congratulated and supported in its exemplary actions.”
Chimes of Freedom reports on a successful campaign against an Islamophobic French-language website.
The president of the Union for Reform Judaism accused American media, politicians and religious groups on Friday of demonizing Islam. Addressing the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, Rabbi Eric Yoffie said Muslims have been turned into “satanic figures.”
“There exists in this country among all Americans, whether Jews, Christians, or non-believers, a huge and profound ignorance about Islam … there is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion, and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic roots,” he said.
Yoffie said his organization is discussing with Muslim leaders a dialogue and education program in the near future to increase understanding between the two faiths. He said Americans need to know “how far removed Islam is from the perverse distortions of the terrorists who too often dominate the media, subverting Islam’s image by professing to speak in its name.”
“Much as one hates to pre-empt the outcome of another of those famously sabre-toothed FA inquiries, the stench of inaction is already beginning to hover around the fact that a significant number of Newcastle supporters racially abused Mido during their side’s 2-2 draw with Middlesbrough on Sunday.
“Soho Square has begun an investigation, and is talking of banning orders if the police identify the culprits, but Middlesbrough will not be demanding an apology. Quite unforgivably, meanwhile, Newcastle have refused to comment. And already, we have been treated to the views of apologists for the fans who persistently chanted ‘Mido, he’s got a bomb you know; Mido’s got a bomb’ at the Egyptian striker, along with other Islamophobic abuse that somehow contrived to be even less artful.
“Speaking to this newspaper, one Ian Cusack of the Newcastle fanzine Players Inc described the chants as ‘unsavoury’. ‘But I don’t think they were racist’, he went on. ‘Newcastle have Muslim players. Emre is a Muslim … The chants should be placed in the context of local rivalry.’ It takes a special sort of idiotic blindness, really, to downgrade racism to something that can be excused on account of geography….
“Newcastle’s failure to issue a statement at the very least condemning Islamophobia in football speaks volumes. The FA making the chanting a police matter should not be used as an excuse to let the club’s distasteful mulishness slide. It doesn’t help that Mido was booked for holding his finger to his lips in front of the abusive fans, who will inevitably go largely unpunished….”
Marina Hyde in the Guardian, 30 August 2007
The question is posed by the Christian Science Monitor. There’s an informed article by Jocelyne Cesari, professor of Islamic studies at Harvard, who points out that “recent polls show that Muslims praise democracy as the best political system. At the same time, they acknowledge the importance that sharia, or Islamic law, plays in their lives. This is where misunderstanding often occurs. Sharia does not refer to actual laws but to a set of moral principles and norms that guide Muslims in their personal and social choices.” However, in the interests of “balance” we also treated to the thoughts of one Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, who tells us that “Islam has two sets of ethics. One set is for Muslims and the other set is for kafirs; this is dualistic ethics. A Muslim should not harm another Muslim, but the kafir can be robbed, killed, or cheated to advance Islam.”
NAIROBI – Kenyan Muslims marched on police headquarters in Nairobi on Thursday in protest against what they called the illegal detention and torture of fellow Muslims in an anti-terrorist drive urged on by the United States. The protest involving a few dozen people followed months of simmering tensions between the east African nation’s Muslim community and authorities they accuse of persecuting and arresting them on U.S. government orders.
Apologetically imperial: Liberals, political Islam, and a war of terror
By Ben White
Long before Nick Cohen ruminated on “What’s Left?” and Martin Amis imagined the sexual frustration of millions of Muslim men, even as the ink dried on opinion pages in the “liberal” New York Times, Guardian and Independent urging on the slaughter in Iraq, those on the left still committed to resisting imperialism were already ably despatching the accusations of “appeasing Islamofascism”. It is not my intention to repeat those thorough demolitions here.
However, an interview earlier this month in the Guardian with the New Statesman‘s political editor Martin Bright afforded excellent insight into how leading “liberal” writers have justified (to us and themselves) their support for the reactionary policies of the “war on terror”.1 Bright is a more recent addition to the imperial left club, having risen to prominence through his long-running investigation into what he called the British Foreign Office’s “love affair with radical Islam”, an interest that has fed a documentary, numerous articles, and a think tank policy paper.
The interviewer gives Bright space to vent, principally towards those on the “liberal left” who have the temerity to accuse him of Islamophobia: “There is a tendency on the British left to believe that the ‘wretched of the earth’ have some sort of moral superiority to us in the West. That same tendency also associates anyone who opposes American or British so-called imperialism with the wretched of the earth.”
Twice, Bright refers to “the wretched of the earth”, an expression made famous by seminal anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon in his book of the same name. Bright is not alone; Christopher Hitchens elaborated on this point in a book review in City Journal, claiming that “[many liberals] cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth.”2 Fanon is an unlikely ally, and to borrow from his theories deeply ironic (unintentionally). Fanon’s fiery prose, like other classic anti-colonial texts by Aimé Césaire, Sartre and Albert Memmi, still rings true today as a denunciation of the liberals’ approval of colonial violence and horrified moralising towards any resistance.3
More than forty years before the Time magazine specials on “Sunni jihadists” and a “Shia crescent”, Fanon sarcastically wrote that: “Colonialism will attempt to rally the African peoples by uncovering the existence of ‘spiritual’ rivalries … references are made to Arab imperialism, and the cultural imperialism of Islam is denounced.”4
It is not, as Bright supposes, that anti-imperial leftists attribute intrinsic moral superiority to “the wretched of the earth”, but rather that they defend the right of the colonised to resist colonialism; the occupied, occupation; the wretched, those who seek to maintain in perpetuity their wretchedness.
Daniel Pipes rejects calls by Geert Wilders, Roberto Calderoli et al for a ban on the Qur’an and/or Islam. Can’t see that going down too well with some of his admirers. But fear not, Daniel hasn’t succumbed to the disease of liberal appeasement. He writes: “More practical and focused would be to reduce the threats of jihad and Shari’a by banning Islamist interpretations of the Koran, as well as Islamism and Islamists.”
Jerusalem Post, 28 August 2007
Update: See “US Islamophobes fall out”, Islamophobia Watch, 29 August 2007
“Islamophobia” and the defamation of Islam are the most conspicuous forms of racism and intolerance today, and a global U.N. conference on racism planned for 2009 should come up with practical solutions to deal with them, an Islamic bloc representative told a preparatory meeting in Geneva Monday. The 2009 meeting is intended to review a U.N. conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, just days before 9/11, but the 56-nation Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) wants Islam to be high on the agenda.
“The world since 2001 has not remained static and witnessed new forms of racism and racial discrimination,” Pakistan’s representative to the U.N., Masood Khan, said at a meeting of the planning body, or “prepcom bureau,” according to prepared remarks. Speaking on behalf of the OIC, Khan told the meeting that “there has been a stark rise in hate crimes, discrimination, racial profiling and intolerance against Muslims in many countries.”
The Hudson Institute’s “Eye on the U.N.” project, which is observing the process in Geneva, described it Monday as the U.N.’s “latest anti-Jewish and anti-American extravaganza.”
Austrian right-wing firebrand Joerg Haider said on Monday he plans to change building laws to prevent mosques and minarets being erected in his home province of Carinthia.
Haider, Carinthia’s governor, said he would ask its parliament to amend the building code to would require towns and villages to consider “religious and cultural tradition” when dealing with construction requests.
“We don’t want a clash of cultures and we don’t want institutions which are alien to our culture being erected in Western Europe,” Haider said in a statement. “Muslims have of course the right to practise their religion, but I oppose erecting mosques and minarets as centres to advertise the power of Islam.”
His spokesman, Stefan Petzner, said that there were no plans to restrict Muslim prayer rooms, as this would violate Muslims’ human rights, and the planned change applied only to dedicated mosques and minarets.
Muslims in Europe are meeting increasing resistance to plans for mosques that befit Islam’s status as the continent’s second religion after Christianity, with petitions in London, protests in Cologne, a court case in Marseille and violence in Berlin.
However, while all those places have significant Muslim minorities, Haider’s Carinthia has the second lowest share of Muslim citizens of all Austrian provinces – 11,000 out of a population of around 400,000, a Muslim spokesman said.
“It’s a ridiculous statement to say he fears a clash of civilisations (in Carinthia),” said Omar al-Rawi, a centre-left lawmaker who is spokesman for the Austrian Muslims’ Initiative. “We don’t know of any mosque plans there. His move is meaningless, populist, racist and anti-Islamic,” he added.
“There is a new racist dogma that is taking hold in this country that if allowed to fester any further will result in the greater marginalization of minority groups and increase the prevalent atmosphere of fear and mistrust. The most glaring manifestation of this phenomenon is the unbalanced and intellectually impoverished discourse about Islam and American Muslims.
“America’s last accepted form of racism tolerates statements about Muslims that would be unacceptable if referring to other groups. In this paradigm multiculturalism is a threat to the foundations of democracy and those voices who espouse a contrary view are opposed to freedom of speech. The great American melting pot is conspicuously thrown to the wayside.”
M.T. Akbar at Media Monitors, 27 August 2007