Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Sanity on Islam is sailing out of port

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tim Rutten examines the background to the Islamophobic campaign in the US media which prevented the UAE-owned company Dubai Ports World taking over the commercial contracts on five US ports.

Los Angeles Times, 11 March 2006

See also Ali H. Aslan’s article “Politicians and media provoke Islamophobia in US” in Zaman, 10 March 2006 and “Two new polls show negative image of Islam in US”, CAIR news report, 9 March 2006.

Update:  See Parvez Ahmed, “Dubai Ports fallout / Islamophobia on the rise”, SFGate, 13 March 2006

Mail on Sunday offers students cash to spy on Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Mail on Sunday has been accused of fuelling Islamophobia after offering students hundreds of pounds to spy on Muslim student societies in an attempt to uncover evidence of “extremism”. The newspaper promised student journalists £100 per meeting to pose as Muslims and secretly record meetings of student Islamic societies to see if any radical organisations were recruiting there.

The offer came in an email from junior reporter Sophie Borland, who graduated from UCL in 2004. It said: “What the editor wants is to pay student reporters to go undercover to one or two meetings of various societies. The reporters would be paid £100 per meeting but IF something came up that turned into a story obviously they would be paid a lot more.”

The email referred to a ‘tip off’ that radicals would be targeting London campuses. Borland referred to “rumours flying around a lot”. The Sunday Times reported on radicals allegedly operating undercover at UCL in the autumn, but Borland said: “If you take a look at their article it really wasn’t based on much. The Sunday Times went really big on it but it wasn’t anything really.”

The Mail on Sunday’s Education Correspondent Glen Owen specifically targeted Imperial College’s Muslim students and Queen Mary’s World Revival Society.

Continue reading →

Uncle Sam sends Muslims to timeout

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Next time you read an apocalyptical article about the impending doom of the world due to the ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Muslims and [insert non-Arab, non-Muslim nation here] take a moment and think for yourself: amidst the debates about free speech and freedom of the press that have been circulating around the globe over the past few months, a double standard has been applied to a large part of the global community. The portrayal of Islam in the media has long been questionable, but the situation in Denmark is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cartoons and the resulting chaos represent the escalation of a deeper problem.

“Why has Islam become the demon monolith of the world which threatens to destroy all that is good and peaceful? People identify Islam with something that threatens their very being and all that they stand for: democracy, equality and liberty. Yet, this fear is perpetuated by the stereotype of a fight between good and evil, the world against Islam, a stereotype which has come to distort world public opinion.”

Sarah Dajani and Emily Norris in the Daily Princetonian, 10 March 2006

Fighting terror or pushing bigotry?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dan Gillerman“It’s hard to conceive how the United States will win a ‘war of ideas’ in the Islamic world when American leaders flock to a Washington conference where Muslims are publicly insulted and the U.S. officials fail to voice objections to the bigotry.

“That’s what happened at this week’s annual meeting of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee whose invitees included Vice President Dick Cheney, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, Virginia’s ex-Democratic Gov. Mark Warner, and Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Susan Collins, R-Maine.

“In a luncheon speech on March 6, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman [pictured] entertained the AIPAC crowd with what the Washington Post described as ‘straight talk’, including a comment that came close to equating Islam with terrorism. ‘While it may be true – and probably is – that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim,’ Gillerman said to the crowd’s delight.”

Robert Parry at Consortiumnews.com, 8 March 2006

The insulting remark was in fact a quote from Abdelrahman al-Rashid of al-Arabiya TV – which tells you something about the role played by pro-western Arab intellectuals like that.

Daniel Pipes finds comfort in Muslims killing Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John Walsh on America’s leading Islamophobe, in Counterpunch 9 March 2006

Whether it is accurate to describe Pipes as a neocon in questionable, though, in the sense of advocating an aggressive US foreign policy aimed at removing hostile regimes under cover of imposing democracy. He has always been sceptical that “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene” are ready for democracy.

Bigotry toward Muslims and anti-Arab racism grow in US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Juan ColeJuan Cole writes: “The constant drumbeat of hatred toward Muslims and Arabs on the American Right, on television and radio and in the press, has gradually had its effect. This according to a Washington Post poll. Even in the year after September 11, a majority of Americans respected Islam and Muslims, but powerful forces in US society are determined to change that, and are gradually succeeding. As they win, Bin Laden also wins, since his whole enterprise was to ‘sharpen the contradictions’ and provoke a clash of civilizations. Some 25% of Americans now say they personally are prejudiced against Muslims. And 33% think that Islam as a religion helps incite violence against non-Muslims, up from 14% after September 11. The Bush administration policy is to continually insinuate that the Muslim world is the new Soviet Union and full of sinister forces that require the US to go to war against them.”

Informed Comment, 9 March 2006

See also “Negative perception of Islam increasing”, Washington Post, 9 March 2006

Islamophobia masquerading as free speech

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumayya Ghannoushi“The truth is that today racism, intolerance, xenophobia, and hatred of the other hide behind the sublime façade of free speech, the defence of ‘our’ values and protection of ‘our’ society from ‘foreign’ aggression. Let us not be deceived about this rhetoric of liberalism and free speech. The Danish cartoons have nothing to do with freedom of expression and everything to do with hatred of the other in a Europe grappling with its growing Muslim minorities, still unable to accept them.

“Muhammad, who had been depicted in medieval legends as a bloodthirsty warrior with a sword in one hand and a Quran in another, is now made to brandish bombs and guns. Little seems to have changed about Western consciousness of Islam. The collective medieval Christian memory has been recycled, purged of eschatology and incorporated into a modern secularised rhetoric that goes unquestioned today.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at Aljazeera, 9 March 2006

Standing up against hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Right-wingers tried to fan the flames of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate at the University of California-Irvine (UCI) on February 28, sponsoring a meeting titled “Unveiling the Cartoons”. Following the lead of a few college newspapers that reprinted cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, the UCI College Republicans sponsored the public meeting to display the offensive caricatures.

But Arabs, Muslims and their supporters didn’t take this provocation sitting down. As many 1,000 people turned out to counter the racists’ message, outnumbering the Republicans’ audience. “We are standing up against racism and hatred. We are not going to let it happen, not here,” said Quanita of the Muslim Student Union (MSU). Students at the protest wore armbands to express their solidarity and held banners saying “Stop Islamophobia!”

Socialist Worker (US), 10 March 2006

Muslim woman denied job for scarf sues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim woman who claims she was denied employment after she refused to remove a head scarf worn for religious reasons is accusing a Des Moines convenience store chain of violating her religious rights. In the lawsuit, Aaliyah Withers-Johnson claims officials at Git-N-Go Convenience Stores Inc. told her she could not work for the company if she insisted on wearing the head scarf, known as a hijab, worn as part of her Islamic faith. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Des Moines, accuses the company of racial and religious discrimination.

Withers-Johnson, who also is black, claims she wore the scarf to her initial job interview for a position as a store clerk on March 11, 2005, was offered a position and told to report six days later for training. But at the training session, Withers-Johnson claims she was immediately pulled aside by a company official and told she would not be able to start ‘”because of the thing you are wearing on your head,’” the lawsuit said.

Des Moines Register, 6 March 2006