Category Archives: Right wing

Geller celebrates judge’s ruling on Detroit bus ads, claims she is inspired by feelings of love

Posted on by Bob Pitt

*May 25 - 00:05*

A national group that wants to advertise its anti-Muslim messages on Metro Detroit buses has won the right to display their ads on the sides of local buses.

The ads, which will soon be ready to go on the side of some local public buses, read “Fatwa on your head? Leaving Islam? Refuge from Islam.com. Got questions? Get answers!” The controversial ads from the New York City-based American Freedom Defense Initiative group are aimed at people who want to leave the Islamic faith.

Metro Detroit has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the nation.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Denise Hood granted a preliminary injunction against the Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority’s rejection of the ads, ruling SMART violated the group’s First and 14th Amendment rights. Both sides are due back in court April 11.

“This is a huge win, not just for us, but for the First Amendment,” Pamela Geller wrote on the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s website. “This is a direct refutation to all those who claim I am a hater or that my lawyers are ‘haters’ for representing me,” added Geller. “I love, not hate.”

Local Muslim activist Dawud Walid sees it differently. “The organization … is simply fomenting Islamophobia,” said Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Michigan). “(Geller) is simply engaging in fear mongering.”

Victor Begg, also a Muslim advocate, said the case is “is another example of a hate group taking advantage of our First Amendment.”

Detroit News, 2 April 2011

Debunking conservatives’ skewed interpretation of sharia law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

'Ground Zero mosque' opponents3

Over at the Center for American Progress Wajahat Ali and Matthew Duss have prepared a briefing on sharia law and how the issue has been misrepresented by the US Right – specifically in the September 2010 report Sharia: The Threat to America, published by the Center for Security Policy.

Download the briefing here.

See also Tim Murphy, “The great sharia freakout”, Mother Jones, 31 March 2011

And Greg Sargent, “Debunking the right’s crackpot sharia panic”, The Plum Line, 31 March 2011

Mail resurrects ‘smell of bacon offends Muslims’ story

Posted on by Bob Pitt

You may remember the “Cafe owner ordered to remove extractor fan in case smell of frying bacon offends passing Muslims” story in the Daily Mail last October (as you can see from the url, that was the original headline – it was later amended).

The story concerned Stockport Council’s rejection of a retrospective planning application for the retention of an extraction vent to the front of a cafe. This decision was the result of a successful objection by one individual, a Mr Graham Webb-Lee, who lived next door to the cafe and was not himself a Muslim. He stated: “The vent is 12 inches from my front door. Every morning the smell of bacon comes through and makes me physically sick.”

The “Muslim” connection consisted in the fact that Webb-Lee added: “I have a lot of Muslim friends. They refuse to visit me anymore because they can’t stand the smell of bacon.” He also stated that he had “a daughter with an eating disorder” whose health was affected by the odours from the extractor fan and that they made his clothes smell. But the only one among this range of objections that the Mail highlighted was Webb-Lee’s reference to his Muslim visitors.

Richard Bartholomew took the story up at the time, as did Tabloid Watch, and three readers wrote to the Press Complaints Commission objecting to the Mail‘s inaccurate and irresponsible reporting. Predictably, the PCC ruled in favour of the Mail – a decision criticised by Tabloid Watch, Roy Greenslade and Sunny Hundal.

Greenslade quoted the bigoted comments that the Mail‘s misleading report had provoked on its website. Some examples:

“Well how about, you go back to your own country and we can eat our food in peace” … “Absolutely ludicrous! If Muslims are affected let them ‘pass by on the other side of the street!’ I’m fed up of hearing about the possibility of offending Muslims in this God forsaken country!”… “If the Muslims don’t like our way of life they know where the airport is. Sick of listening to whinging religious fruitcakes.” And so on.

Greenslade also reproduced a comment on the Mail‘s report by Mr Webb-Lee himself:

“This vent is affecting my children’s health and that is why the council denied planning! Yes, I have some Muslim friends who it offended, but nothing was said about my English friends who avoid my house within opening hours of the shop! Shame on you Daily Mail. You have stirred up lots of racial tension in my area now, so for you its ‘mission accomplished’.”

Today the Mail has returned for a second bite at the cherry with a story headlined “‘A victory for common sense’: Cafe owner wins extractor fan appeal after neighbour claimed ‘smell of bacon offends Muslims'”. It begins, with characteristic disregard for accuracy: “A cafe owner was yesterday celebrating victory after a six-month legal battle to fry bacon triggered by Muslim complaints.” (The original version read: “A cafe owner who was ordered to tear down an extractor fan because the smell of bacon offended Muslims was celebrating a ‘victory for commons [sic] sense’ today.”)

And, again, the Mail‘s misrepresentation of the facts has fuelled the predictable outburst of anti-Muslim bigotry. Exposing racism and intolerance online has provided a screengrab of some of the Facebook comments by supporters of the English Defence League.

EDL Daily Mail bacon offends Muslims

See also the Sun, which reports: “A café boss ordered to tear down an extractor fan as the smell of her frying bacon offended passing Muslims has won her appeal against the decision.”

And for a critical view of the press coverage, see “There’s a nasty smell about this story”, www.MethodistPreacher.com, 31 March 2011

Bryan Fischer dedicates yet another program to attacking Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Last week, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer declared that the First Amendment does not apply to Islam and therefore, Muslims have no right to freely practice their religion in this country.

A few days later, Fischer was in Iowa to broadcast his radio program from the Rediscover God in America conference where he lined up an all-star list of guests, including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Haley Barbour.

As such, People For the American Way released open letters to Gingrich, Huckabee, and Barbour, asking them not to give Fischer credibility by appearing on his program or, at the least, to denounce Fischer’s bigoted views.

Not surprisingly, our request was roundly ignored.

Yesterday, Fischer dedicated nearly the entirety of his two-hour radio program to railing against Islam and demanding an end to immigration from Muslim nations and a ban on the construction of mosques in America.

This is where George Bush was simply plain wrong: he believed that there’s a hunger in every human heart for freedom. Not true. That hunger for freedom does not exist in the Islamic heart. It’s not in their DNA. Why? Because the spirit of God is absent in Islam. There is no spirit of God in Islam. It is the spirit of Satan. It is the spirit of darkness. It is the spirit of tyranny. It is the spirit of bondage.

The Quran is based on hallucinations. These hallucinations, I think Mohammad really experienced something, but what he experienced was what Paul refers to as the Angel of Light. This was a messenger of Satan masquerading as a messenger from God. You want to see what a religion looks like when it has been revealed by the Prince of Darkness, you look at Islam and the Quran.

From now on, no more immigrants from Islamic countries. Can’t have it. It’s going to corrode western culture. No more mosques because these are places of subversion, places where Sharia law, places where jihad is inculcated, where it is taught and where there are recruits made for jihad.

Right Wing Watch, 30 March 2011

Alaska: Republican party turns to Geller as Islam expert

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pamela Geller UndeadWhen an Alabama Republican legislator introduced a bill to ban Shariah law and subsequently couldn’t define Shariah law, I thought we had seen the single most ignorant and problematic of the anti-Shariah efforts.

But now the Alaska GOP is giving Alabama a run for its money. In becoming the latest state legislator to seek to ban Islamic law, Alaska Republican Rep. Carl Gatto called a fringe anti-Muslim blogger to testify as an expert witness in the House Judiciary Committee.

That would be Pamela Geller. The New York-based blogger delivered a statement by phone and then took questions from Alaska legislators during the hearing Wednesday.

Geller is the blogger who spread many of the original falsehoods about the so-called “ground zero mosque” (sample headline from her “Atlas Shrugs” website: “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction”). Her blog also regularly features conspiracy theories such as the classic, “Malcolm X is Obama’s father.”

That Geller was called as an expert in anything in a deliberative body is remarkable. The Anchorage Daily News reports on her testimony:

“Geller maintained ‘surveys in the Muslim world’ show most Muslims want a unified caliphate with a ‘strict al-Qaida-like Sharia’. She spoke of Muslim polygamy, jihad in support of Sharia, and said Muslims have demanded special accommodation in U.S. schools, workplaces and government.”

Salon, 31 March 2011

Durbin hearings on Muslim civil rights open

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dick DurbinIt was billed as the first-ever congressional hearing on the civil rights of American Muslims. But it played more like an Act II than a premiere.

In many ways, the hearing led by Senate Democrats on Tuesday was the dramatic antithesis of one House Republicans held earlier this month on homegrown Islamic radicalism.

Instead of gavel-banging, decorum prevailed. Sobering statistics stood in for emotional anecdotes, and laughter, not sobs, resounded in the committee room. While an audience packed the gallery, the dais was empty save for the six senators who came and went.

But the most striking change was the second hearing’s focus: Crimes committed against American Muslims, not by them. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he convened Tuesday’s hearing because of rising Islamophobia, manifested by Quran burnings, hate speech and restrictions on mosque construction.

And though he did not mention him by name, Durbin twice criticized House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., who convened the earlier hearing on the “radicalization” of American Muslims.

King told Fox News on Monday that Durbin’s hearing “is somehow trying to create the illusion that there’s a violation of civil rights of Muslims in this country. It’s absolutely untrue, and to me it makes no sense.”

Durbin, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, wasted little time in rebutting King. “Some have even questioned the premise of today’s hearing,” he said in his opening remarks, “that we should protect the civil rights of American Muslims.”

Durbin also criticized King’s controversial statement that “there are too many mosques in this country.”

“Such inflammatory speech from prominent public figures creates a fertile climate for discrimination,” Durbin said.

Durbin’s star witness was Thomas Perez, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a “steady stream of violence and discrimination” has targeted Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs and South Asians in the United States, he said.

“In each city and town where I have met with leaders of these communities, I have been struck by the sense of fear that pervades their lives – fear of violence, bigotry and hate,” Perez said. “The headwind of intolerance manifests itself in many ways.”

Perez noted that the Justice Department passed a grim milestone last month when it secured a guilty plea from a man who torched a playground at a Texas mosque: He was the 50th defendant charged in a federal criminal case of post-9/11 backlash.

Muslim complaints about workplace discrimination have increased 150% since 9/11, Perez said, but he and other witnesses seemed most upset by reports that many Muslim children are harassed at school –called “terrorists” and told to “go home.”

“We have a growing docket of cases involving Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian students,” he said. Muslim students form the largest category of religious discrimination cases handled by the Department of Justice’s education division, Perez added.

“Parents worry, ‘Will my child be next?'” said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, who also testified on Tuesday. “And they worry about the future: Will America be hospitable to other faiths? Will its better angels prevail?”

USA Today, 29 March 2011

See also “ADL: Anti-Muslim sentiment ‘significant'”, JTA, 29 March 2011