Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Abu Ghraib only the ‘tip of the iceberg’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The crimes at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger pattern of abuses against Muslim detainees around the world, Human Rights Watch said on the eve of the April 28 anniversary of the first pictures of U.S. soldiers brutalizing prisoners at the Iraqi jail.

“Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg,” said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch. “It’s now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over – from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners. And probably quite a few other places we don’t even know about.”

Human Rights Watch called this week for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and ex-CIA Director George Tenet, as well as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in cases of crimes against detainees. It rejected last week’s report by the Army Inspector General which was said to absolve Gen. Sanchez of responsibility.

“General Sanchez gave the troops at Abu Ghraib the green light to use dogs to terrorize detainees, and they did, and we know what happened, said Brody. “And while mayhem went on under his nose for three months, Sanchez didn’t step in to halt it.”

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US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded. The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.

The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes’s case. In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo, Mr Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and clothing.

Independent on Sunday, 24 April 2005

US Muslims sue government over border detentions

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Five US Muslims sued the US Department of Homeland Security, accusing the US border agents of rights violation and racial profiling.

The suit, filed in US District Court on Wednesday, April 20, named Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff among four defendants in what the New York Civil Liberties Union called a case of profiling, according to Reuters on Thursday, April 21.

The three men and two women said the agents who detained them as they returned from an Islamic conference in Canada violated their rights, held them, along with dozens of other US Muslims. They added that they were interrogated, photographed and fingerprinted against their will in December 2004.

The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs, who were later released without charge, were singled out after telling customs officials they had attended a “Reviving the Islamic Spirit” conference in Toronto.

The suit does not seek monetary damages, but asks for a declaration that the government action was unlawful, an injunction against further enforcement of such policies and practices and erasing from all federal databases of information obtained from the plaintiffs, Reuters reported.

Islam Online, 21 April 2005

See also alt.muslim, 22 April 2005

CAIR calls for FBI probe of mosque vandalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the FBI to investigate recent vandalism at a Colorado mosque as a possible hate crime.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said a brick was thrown through a window of the Fort Collins Islamic Center on Sunday. Some community members say the attack is suspicious because it followed a forum Saturday to introduce a “Not In Our Town” chapter in that city. “Not In Our Town” is a group formed to fight hate groups. Police say surveillance cameras captured the crime. Local law enforcement authorities have not treated the vandalism as a hate crime because there was no message left at the scene by the perpetrators.

“It has been our experience that anti-Muslim bigots do not always leave a calling-card,” said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “We urge the FBI to devote its considerable resources to assist local authorities in this case.”

CAIR news report, 20 April 2005

 

Belgian king renews support for hijab-clad worker

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Belgian King Albert II and Queen Paola have made a rare visit to a factory where a hijab-clad woman was forced to quit her job over death threats, to express their support for the Muslim employee and her factory colleagues against extremist threats.

Naimi Amzil, of a Moroccan origin, was forced to quit her job in the Remmery seafood factory on March 3, after receiving death threats from an extremist group for no reasons other than being a veiled Muslim. Expressing outrage at the extremist threats, the Belgian monarch decided to visit the factory to back the Muslim employee and other factory workers against the extremist death threats.

During a reception party held on the sidelines of the King’s visit Tuesday, April 19, Rick Remmery, the factory owner, said the visit represents a powerful sign of support for the Muslim employee and the factory workers.

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This Pope is Catholic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Powerline: The real beef with Ratzinger, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Pope is Catholic.

Aardvark: The real beef with Qaradawi, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Islamist is Muslim.

The ever-excellent Marc Lynch exposes Western double-think when it comes to Catholicism and Islam.

Abu Aardvark, 19 April 2005

Muslim feminism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Toronto Star last week ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she ‘blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity’ in the Islamic world. This is closely related to a large-scale and continually growing problem: analysts attribute the actions of the global terrorist movement to a hijacking of Islam, without caring or daring to look squarely at what exactly it is about Islam that gives rise to fanaticism and violence.”

Yes, you probably guessed – another Islamophobic rant from Robert Spencer.

Front Page Magazine, 14 April 2005

“Spencer portrays himself as a scholar of Islam, and that he is not. He misquotes verses of the Qur’an, takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies.” Khaleel Mohammed replies to Spencer. (Errs on the side of mildness, if you ask me.)

Front Page Magazine, 18 April 2005

Nick Cohen: telling lies about Bethnal Green

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week, [Oona] King and a group of mainly Jewish pensioners gathered for a 60th anniversary memorial service for the 132 people who died in the last V2 rocket attack on London in 1945. Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: ‘You fucking Jews’.”

So Nick Cohen claims in the Observer, 17 April

Dead Men Left points out that “Jonathan Freedland was at the memorial service Cohen refers to. He witnessed the horrid egging incident, and recorded his account in the Observer‘s sister paper, the Guardian. He is quite clear that no slogans or chants were heard. Cohen, not present at the event, and providing no source, claims that racist abuse was hurled. This gives every appearance of being pure invention.”

Dead Men Left, 18 April 2005

Freedland later returned to the estate where the egging incident occurred, and his findings concerning the motives for the attack are far from clear-cut.

Guardian, 16 April 2005

EU capitulates to Islamo-fascism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

European Union foreign ministers were urged on Saturday to consider the previously taboo idea of dialogue with Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East to encourage a transition to democracy. They also discussed ways to strengthen emerging democracy movements in several Arab states and persuade authoritarian governments to relinquish some power and accept the principle of alternation, diplomats said.

On the second day of an informal brainstorming session at a chateau in Luxembourg, the ministers were presented with a paper that suggested, at least in the form of questions, that the EU should reach out beyond its traditional secular interlocutors.

“In the past the EU has preferred to deal with the secular intelligentsia of Arab civil society at the expense of the more representative Islam-inspired organizations,” the report said. “Has the time come for the EU to become more engaged with Islamic ‘faith-based’ civil society in these countries?” asked the paper co-authored by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the bloc’s Luxembourg presidency.

Reuters report, 16 April 2005

See also Islam Online, 18 April 2005

The news follows a report that the US State Department has drawn up a memo calling for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – much to Robert Spencer’s disgust

We look forward Nick Cohen, Outrage, Harry’s Place, the AWL, the Worker Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq et al joining with Spencer in denouncing the State Department and the EU for this abject capitulation to Islamo-fascism.