Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Miami Islamic school vandalized for third time in past year

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic leaders renewed their calls for a hate-crime investigation on Tuesday after someone threw a rock through the glass doors of the Islamic School of Miami.

The incident, which occurred Monday, was the third at the mosque and the fifth in South Florida in the past year, according to Altaf Ali, executive director of the Florida branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ali said worshipers arrived at the mosque located at 11699 SW 147th Ave., at about 5 a.m. Tuesday and found the gate leading into the center broken and the two glass doors shattered. The damage came a week after vandals shattered another window there on May 28.

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Manufacturing Muslim ‘terrorists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

tarikshahThe US has a vast and very expensive Homeland Security bureaucracy with nothing to do. There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in America since 2001. There have been a vast quantity of terror alerts, the purpose of which was to scare Americans into supporting an unnecessary and illegal aggressive attack on Iraq.

As very few, if any, real terrorists have turned up, the FBI has resorted to creating terrorists by soliciting Muslim-Americans and appealing to them with schemes to aid ‘jihadists’. Recently, two American citizens were caught in a FBI sting. One, an Ivy-League educated physician, is charged with agreeing to provide medical care to wounded holy warriors in Saudi Arabia. The other, a famous jazz musician, is charged with agreeing to train jihadists in martial arts.

According to the Washington Times of June 1, the FBI began its sting in 2003, so it took two years of work and cajoling to manufacture the case against these two Americans.

What the FBI has done to Dr. R.A. Sabir and Tarik Shah was once known as entrapment. Judges would throw out entrapment cases, because crime was believed to require intent. If the intent was given to the accused by the police through enticement or threats, it was not regarded as criminal intent on the accused person’s part.

Unfortunately, “law and order” conservatives used fear of crime to “give our police more effective measures to clear criminals off our streets” and managed to eliminate the entrapment defense.

Antiwar.com, 7 June 2005

Australian Muslims decry detention, questioning powers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Australian Muslims have decried anti-terror security measures as creating a climate of fear and apprehension among the Muslim minority in the country.

“We want to live in a country where I feel proud to be Australian, belong to this land, where I have rights like any other persons,” Ali Roude, the deputy chairman of the Islamic Council of New South Wales, told a parliamentary panel reviewing the measures on Monday, June 6.

“Not always targeted, not always seen as a possible threat to Australia’s security, which is the feeling at the moment,” he was quoted as saying by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Roude complained that Australian Muslims feel targeted by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), which has been given powers to detain people on terror-related suspicion for up to seven days and question them for up to 48 hours without charges.

Other sweeping powers also allow the security agencies to hold Australians even if they are not suspected of criminal behaviors.

Islam Online, 7 June 2005

CAIR-CAN seeks probe of McGill ‘harassment’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) today called for an investigation of reports that Muslim students at Montreal’s McGill University are being singled out for harassment by campus security guards. The reports of harassment follow the eviction of the Muslim students from their prayer space in the university’s Peterson Hall last week. Students said security guards entered the prayer room, asked everyone to vacate the area and changed the locks on the doors. Now, the Muslim students are reporting that security guards in Peterson Hall are continuing to harass them. In one report, the students say security personnel would not permit them inside the building until they displayed their student cards. The students said the guards then followed them throughout the building until they left.

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Shut down Guantánamo – New York Times backs Amnesty

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Guantanamo“What makes Amnesty’s gulag metaphor apt is that Guantánamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other, secret locations run by the intelligence agencies. Each has produced its own stories of abuse, torture and criminal homicide. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a tightly linked global detention system with no accountability in law. Prisoners have been transferred from camp to camp. So have commanding officers. And perhaps not coincidentally, so have specific methods of mistreatment.”

Editorial in the New York Times, 5 June 2005

Little Green Footballs is not impressed: “The New York Times defends Amnesty International’s comparison of Guantanamo Bay (where 600 unlawful combatants are held) with the Soviet Gulag (where more than 20 million innocent Russian citizens were imprisoned, and millions killed). As a solution to this towering injustice, the editors of the Times call for Gitmo to be shut down. Immediately. Turn them all loose. And make sure the evil Bushco doesn’t send those poor oppressed killers without consciences to places where they might be imprisoned again – like their home countries.”

LGF, 5 June 2005

See also “Senator urges Guantánamo closure after Pentagon admits Qur’an abuse”, Guardian, 6 June 2005

And “Quran splashed with urine at Guantanamo”, Informed Comment, 6 June 2005

Minister urges fine for burka

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Women wearing burkas in Italy should be reported to the police and fined, Silvio Berlusconi’s justice minister said at the weekend. Roberto Castelli said the garment was at odds with an Italian law that forbids masks.

The burka is rare, though not unknown, in Italy. But commentators yesterday noted that the minister’s ruling against masks could be applied to other garb more commonly worn by Muslim women, that leaves only the eyes visible.

Mr Castelli told a meeting in the northern town of Como: “No one may break the law.”

He was referring to a decision by the local prefect to overturn fines imposed last year on an Italian convert to Islam from nearby Drezzo, who wears a burka. Two other women have been fined for wearing the garment elsewhere.

Mr Castelli’s remarks were condemned by leftwing parties. Marco Rizzo of the Communist party said they were “at the threshold of incitement to racial and religious hatred”.

Guardian, 6 June 2005

See also “Italian minister grilled over fining niqab”, Islam Online. 6 June 2005

High-flying professor faces US terror trial

Posted on by Bob Pitt

samialarianUniversity of Florida professor Sami al-Arian goes on trial today in what is being billed as the most important terrorism case in the United States since September 11.

Prosecutors claim that Dr Arian, and three other Arab-Americans who will be in the dock with him, commanded an Islamic Jihad cell that flourished in Tampa and infiltrated the University of South Florida. The group is said to have helped finance a series of attacks in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel in which more than 100 people died, including at least one American.

However, supporters and lawyers for the Kuwait-born professor claim that it is not a straightforward case of terrorist funding. Instead, they say it raises serious issues about anti-Muslim bias in the US post-September 11, freedom of speech and what they see as a blatant attempt by Israel to silence a powerful Palestinian voice in America.

Guardian, 6 June 2005

One Muslim’s odyssey to Guantánamo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

muratkurnazRichard Bernstein examines the case of Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, a 19-year-old Muslim from Germany, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and handed over to US forces to face imprisonment and torture.

New York Times, 5 June 2005

No doubt this is the sort of person General Richard Myers had in mind when he claimed that Guantánamo detainees would “slit our children’s throats” if they were freed. See here.

Occupation main driver of suicide bombs

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A surge in suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere around the world is a response to territorial occupation and has no direct link with so-called Islamic fundamentalism, an American writer said in a new book.

“Islamic fundamentalism is not the primary driver of suicide terrorism”, Robert Pape, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told Reuters.

In his “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” the American academician demonstrates to policymakers that a presumed connection between suicide attacks and the so-called Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and could contribute to policies that worsen the situation.

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