Sarah Posner investigates the “shari’ah conspiracy theory industry”.
Category Archives: Right wing
Why just quitting the Daily Star wasn’t enough
Hugh Muir interviews Richard Peppiatt, the journalist who resigned from the Daily Star in protest at its anti-Muslim reporting.
See also “Ex-Daily Star reporter ‘gets hate messages'”, Guardian, 9 March 2011
Ken Livingstone defends Muslim hate cleric Qaradawi
Well, that’s the headline in the Pink Paper.
Meanwhile, over at his Torygraph blog Andrew Gilligan has resumed his lying about Qaradawi, once again accusing him of defending rape and the targeting of non-combatants by Palestinian suicide bombers. These two accusations have already been demolished here. Gilligan also cites Qaradawi’s 1960 book The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam as evidence that Qaradawi advocates wife-beating and has “called for gay people to be killed”. Those charges are refuted here.
One of Gilligan’s claims is, however, true. Qaradawi does regard homosexuality as a sin. As indeed do the Pope and the Chief Rabbi, among others. There is of course an ultra-secularist minority who adopt the consistent if misguided position that all faith leaders who hold the view that homosexuality is immoral should be boycotted. But somehow I doubt Gilligan is one of them.
Manufacturing the Muslim menace: how US counter-terrorism training ‘presents Islam as inherently violent’
The US government is being accused of pumping millions of dollars into unregulated training schemes for local police officers and other law enforcers that give a distorted, dangerous and inflammatory picture of the Muslim faith.
Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based progressive thinktank, spent nine months investigating the burgeoning industry of counter-terrorism training. It concluded that in seminars and conferences across America, police, transit and other law-enforcement officers were being given an ideologically skewed impression of Islam that impugned the entire religion, presenting it as inherently violent and sympathetic to terrorism.
One training conference, which PRA investigators attended, was held last October by the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, a body formed by New York police officers in the wake of 9/11. The conference was addressed by Walid Shoebat, a speaker used by several of the private training outfits.
Shoebat is a convert to Christianity, having formerly been a Muslim with links to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In his presentation, called The Jihad Mindset and How to Defeat It: Why We Want to Kill You, he accused Muslim men of raping women, children and young boys. “They are paedophiles!” he shouted.
According to the report, Shoebat went on: “The Muslim beheads with a smile. You can see it on YouTube, on TV; the Afghan child trained to execute Christians. You say that Islam is a peaceful religion? Why? It hates the west.” He also said: “Islam is a revolution and is intent to destroy all other systems. They want to expand, like Nazism.”
See also Tarso Ramos, “The anti-Muslim fearmongering we can’t see”, Comment is Free, 9 March 2011
Read the Political Research Associates report Manufacturing the Muslim Menace here
Update: See also Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, 11 March 2011
Drawing US crowds with anti-Islam message
The New York Times profiles Brigitte Gabriel of ACT! for America.
See also “Radical Islamophobe activist advising Rep. Peter King explains his ‘Muslim messenger’ strategy”, Think Progress, 8 March 2011
And “Rep. King asked to clarify support from anti-Islam hate group”, CAIR press release, 8 March 2011
New York rally condemns King hearings
Proclaiming “Today I am a Muslim too,” about 1,000 protesters gathered Sunday in Times Square to decry Rep. Pete King’s upcoming hearings into homegrown radical Islam.
“Today, they’re targeting Muslims. Tomorrow, it will be Jews. Tomorrow, they’ll close a synagogue,” said Abu Abdullah, 57, a perfumer from Bay Shore, L.I., who stood in the rain at the interfaith rally. “Peter King is trying to divide us – to make it like shark eat shark,” he said of the Long Island Republican, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
Christians, Jews and Muslims branded the hearings a witch hunt, waved signs and chanted, “Shame, shame Pete King!”
Celebrities from boxing legend Mike Tyson to reality show darling Kim Kardashian added their support online. “We are bigger than Charlie Sheen – we are the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter,” hip-hop icon Russell Simmons told the rain-drenched crowd.
Magdy Salama, 50, a limo company owner from Astoria, Queens, who held a small American flag on a stick, said he worried his three Muslim kids will grow up facing religious bigotry. “We’re a free country. There should be freedom of religion,” Salama said.
New York Daily News, 7 March 2011
See also Associated Press, 6 March 2011
And “Congressman King defends himself against criticism over hearings on radical Islam”, Washington Post, 7 March 2011
White House tells Muslims ‘we will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few’
As a Republican congressman prepares to open hearings on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser visited a mosque here on Sunday to reassure Muslims that “we will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few.”
The White House billed the speech by the adviser, Denis McDonough, as a chance for the administration to lay out its strategy for preventing violent extremism. But the timing was no accident; Mr. McDonough was in effect an emissary from the White House to pre-empt Representative Peter King of New York, the Homeland Security Committee chairman, who has promised a series of hearings beginning Thursday on the radicalization of American Muslims.
“In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association,” Mr. McDonough told an interfaith but mostly Muslim audience of about 200 here at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, known as the Adams Center. “And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all.”
Mr. McDonough made no explicit mention of the hearings or Mr. King. But his speech came on a day when the back-and-forth over Mr. King’s plans crescendoed, from the airwaves of Washington’s Sunday morning talk shows to the streets of Manhattan to this northern Virginia suburb, an area packed with Muslim professionals, many of whom are extremely wary of Mr. King and his plans.
Swedish politician charged over anti-Muslim poster is acquitted
A Swedish politician facing charges for producing a poster depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad naked together with his nine-year-old wife was found not guilty by a jury in Malmö on Wednesday.
Carl P Herslow, leader of the Skåne Party (Skånepartiet), a small right-wing populist regional party, is charged with agitation against an ethnic group (hets mot folkgrupp). The poster included the text: “He is 53 and she is nine. Is this the kind of wedding we want to see in Skåne?.”
Herslow admits producing the poster but contested the charges. He said the aim of the poster was to stimulate a debate about Islam, which he argued was incompatible with democracy and equality. “The intention was to provoke a strong reaction among both Muslims and non-Muslims,” he said.
The prosecution argued that Herslow should to be given a suspended prison sentence and for the posters to be confiscated. But after deliberating less than an hour the jury, which are only used in Sweden in freedom of speech cases, told the court that Herslow was not guilty of agitation against an ethnic group. As a result, the court cannot convict the politician when it delivers its formal verdict on March 16th.
France: veil ban comes into force in April
From Saudi tourists window-shopping on the Champs-Élysées to Muslim women in a departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport or the few young French converts on suburban estates, any woman who steps outside in France wearing a veil that covers her face will be breaking the law from next month.
France’s bitterly divisive debate on Muslim women’s clothing took a new turn when the legal details of the controversial “burqa ban” were published in a decree by the prime minister. From 11 April women will be banned from wearing the niqab – full-face Muslim veil – in any public place, including while walking down the street, taking a bus, at a bank, library or shop, or in a cinema or theatre. It will be illegal for a woman in niqab to visit the Louvre, or any other museum, take a train, visit a hospital or collect her child from school.
Face veils will be outlawed virtually anywhere outside women’s own homes, except when they are worshipping in a religious place or travelling as a passenger in a private car, although traffic police may stop them if they think they do not have a clear “field of vision” while driving. Women wearing niqab will be fined €150 (about £130) and be given a citizenship class to remind them of the republican values of secular France and gender equality. Any third party found to have coerced a woman into wearing the face covering, for example a husband or family member, risks a €30,000 fine and a year in prison.
News of the Screws applauds hijab ban
“Hundreds of thousands of Muslim girls are to be banned from wearing veils at school, the News of the World can reveal. Headteachers will be told they can outlaw the full-face cover-ups under new rules being drawn up by Education Secretary Alan Johnson. Schools can already ban teachers from wearing niqabs, which cover the entire face apart from a slit for the eyes. And now pupils across Britain will be told they can’t wear them either…. Mr Johnson’s move has been welcomed by moderate Muslims. Dr Taj Hargey, of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, said: ‘This is fantastic news. It is wrong for Muslims to be given special treatment’.”
News of the World, 4 March 2007