“In the interest of preserving freedom in the U.S. while advancing it globally, it is time to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood and its splinter organizations for what they are and designate them as terrorist organizations.”
Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen offer a thoughtful contribution to the struggle for democracy.
“As legend has it, the Grim Reaper moves among us, unseen and unstoppable. His ugly, skeletal face is obscured by a black hood and no one knows he is near until his touch claims your life. Only in death is his face revealed.
“It is troubling that after America was attacked on her own soil not so long ago, that so many Americans still do not realize the danger of the insidious and relentless enemy that we face. Just as no living thing can escape death, Americans cannot escape the final showdown with Islam. It is unfortunate that so many will die because they are afraid to lift the black hood off and see the face of the enemy.
“Islam has declared war on America and our culture. Islam brought the battle right to our shores and still, many do not believe.”
Barbara J. Stock at ChronWatch, 26 December 2005
Vatican cardinals have warned Italian women against tying the knot with the rising numbers of Muslims in Italy, citing what they say cultural and religious diversities.
Church officials say that Italy has seen 20,000 marriages in 2005 between Catholic women and Muslims, whose population touches the one million mark, the BBC News Online reported Monday, December 26.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Vicar General of Rome, had said that cultural differences over issues such as the role of women and education of children make it difficult for Catholic women to marry Muslims. “The experience of recent years leads us as a general rule to advise against or in any case to discourage these marriages,” he wrote in a document released last month.
“Mixed Catholic and Muslim couples who intend to have a family have other difficulties above and beyond those experienced by other couples, when one considers cultural and religious diversity,” wrote cardinal Ruini, a conservative thinker close to late Pope John Paul II.
Robert Spencer takes issue with the Mayor of London’s attitude to Islam: “Red Ken’s friendship with Sheikh Qaradawi suggests that the peaceful subjugation and Islamization of the West, which Qaradawi has predicted, is perfectly fine with him. He just wishes these good people wouldn’t use bombs.”
Applying this logic to his own preferred religion, there is presumably no principled difference in Spencer’s eyes between a minister engaged in peaceful missionary work (in order to “subjugate” society to Christianity) and a “pro-life” militant who bombs an abortion clinic.
(Oh and by the way Robert, the “Lord Mayor” is not “Red Ken” but the head of the Corporation of London.)
The incendiary words came flying out of an exuberant, cheering crowd, words exalting the rise of Islamic power in Canadian politics. Now they’re being called an election smear that involves Islam and might have lasting repercussions for Muslims who have only recently become active in Canadian politics.
The fiery phrases, immediately attributed to Omar Alghabra – the rookie candidate who had just won the Liberal party nomination in Mississauga-Erindale – were soon making the rounds on the Internet, then became the subject of a news release from an outspoken group that seeks to expose radical Islam. “This is a victory for Islam … Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics,” Alghabra was reported to have said.
The problem is that Alghabra and others who were there – including outgoing Mississauga MP Carolyn Parrish – insist he didn’t say them. A Toronto Star reporter covering the event also heard no such thing.
Toronto Star, 23 December 2005
For earlier coverage, see for example here, here, here, and here.
“In these contentious times, debate about the Middle East and Islam is easily stifled. All it takes is for some disgruntled Arabs, preferably Palestinians, or a handful of western leftists to level a charge of ‘racism’. Then the alleged offender, whether he is a Jewish author, a Christian professor, or a Muslim dissident, is silenced and shunned.”
Phyllis Chesler at Front Page Magazine, 22 December 2005
This from a leading advocate of the “new anti-semitism” thesis, which basically involves labelling any critic of the Israeli government as a racist.
Over at Harry’s Place that well-known upholder of Enlightenment rationalism David T has posted a Reuters report that Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has joined Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in describing the Holocaust as a myth.
David T draws our attention to the fact that “The Muslim Brotherhood’s United Kingdom representatives are the Muslim Association of Britain, an organisation which is part of the RESPECT coalition led by the Socialist Workers’ Party, and is a founder member of the Stop the War coalition.” So we are invited to believe that MAB, Respect, the SWP and the StWC are all implicated in Holocaust denial.
Yet it seems like only yesterday that David T was quoting Jonathan Freedland’s statement that “Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is to be applauded for his implicit condemnation of Ahmadinejad at the Stop the War conference at the weekend, telling his audience that, whatever their views, they could not deny the fact of the Holocaust”. David T described Freedland’s comment as “spot on”.
Never let consistency get in the way of a polemic against MAB and the anti-war movement, eh David?
Update: See “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood says no Holocaust denial”, Islam Online, 23 December 2005
As regular readers of Islamophobia Watch will be aware, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association recently underwent a crisis and split as a result of a controversy provoked by the publication of a disgustingly Islamophobic issue of its now defunct journal Gay and Lesbian Humanist (see here, here, here, here, here and here).
The upshot was that G&LH editor Andy Armitage who had been accused by the GALHA committee of commissioning a racist article resigned, and our dear friend Brett Lock took over the editorship of a revamped journal, now bearing the title Gay Humanist Quarterly. (Available online in pdf format here.)
Clearly the split was a severe embarrassment to GALHA. Up to then they had staunchly denied that anyone in their ranks was tinged with racism. When Andy Armitage was criticised over an article in G&LH in 2002, which referred approvingly to the late Dutch racist Pim Fortuyn and his warnings against the supposed threat posed by Muslim immigrants, GALHA rallied to Armitage’s defence.
It would therefore be too much to expect an honest accounting by GALHA of the recent split, since any serious assessment would involve some pretty rigorous self-criticism. Instead, in the new issue of Gay Humanist Quarterly we are offered an article by David T from the “left-wing” (in fact, on many issues, very right-wing) blog Harry’s Place. Under the title “Racists in Secularist Clothing”, David T takes on the job of producing a critique of the Armitage wing of GALHA – without actually mentioning them by name or making the slightest reference to the recent split.
Anyone who reads his posts at Harry’s Place will know that David T has two faces. He tries to maintain the appearance of being a sensible, rational and liberal sort of chap (after all, the bloggers at Harry’s Place are the self-proclaimed defenders of Enlightenment values) but sometimes he seems to lose control, and this frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Muslim bigot bursts out – a sort of Islamophobic version of the Incredible Hulk.
Anyway, in David T’s Gay Humanist Quarterly article we are treated to his Mr Reasonable persona. He writes:
“In recent years, racists have found a new disguise. Islam-baiting has become a proxy for racism. At its most sophisticated, instead of focussing openly on cultural groups, the focus of racists has shifted to Islamism: a political movement which draws on aspects of Islamic theology. Familiar arguments about non-white immigrants have been recast as critiques of ‘Islamism’, complete with conspiracist fantasies – usually about something called ‘Eurabia’ – which bear more than a superficial resemblance to traditional antisemitism. In its purest form, Muslims are thought to be engaged, either consciously or unwittingly, in a demographic and cultural plot to destroy western society generally.”
Though I think it’s untrue that racists, sophisticated or otherwise, concentrate their attacks on political Islamism rather than Islam – as the last issue of G&LH magazine itself demonstrated – in other respects this almost sounds like something you might read at Islamophobia Watch. After that, however, though the tone of sweet reasonableness is maintained, things go downhill fast.
“Secularists in particular will unavoidably find themselves in conflict with Islamism”, we are told, “because they challenge all forms of religious politics.” Really? I can’t remember secularists (or at least any with remotely progressive views) opposing political engagement by radical Catholic priests influenced by liberation theology. And how many secularists today are calling for Bruce Kent’s expulsion from CND? In the case of Christianity, most people would make a distinction between progressive political interventions and those of, say, Pat Robertson or Ian Paisley. But Muslims involved in faith-based political activity are often all lumped together irrespective of their actual political aims. As Tariq Ramadan has pointed out: “In the case of Islam, engaging in the defence of the poor or carrying the most reactionary ideas does not make any difference. Judgement here falls like a chopper: ‘fundamentalists’.”
David T goes on to distinguish his and GALHA’s position from that of “racists masquerading as secularists” (presumably a coded reference to Andy Armitage et al). The latter, we are told, claim “that there is no distinction to be made between the private faith of Islam, and the public political programme of Islamism”. So that seems clear enough. Those secularists who refuse to make a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as a political movement are racists. Yet a few pages later in this same issue of GHQ we find an article by Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq who tells us:
“The brutal truth is that for the last two decades Islam – in the contemporary Middle East – has justified people killing, stoning, imprisoning, veiling and forcing women into burqas. Women are imprisoned in the name of political Islam – a crime against all of humanity.”
This obliteration of the distinction between Islam and political Islamism is no slip of the pen. Such formulations appear repeatedly in the writings of the Worker Communist Parties of Iraq and Iran and their fragments. Of course, given her own ethnic origins, Mahmoud can hardly be accused of racism – which is no doubt why Brett Lock commissioned the article from her in the first place. The role she and her co-thinkers in fact play is to give credibility to the real racists by echoing and endorsing their arguments.
This was the effect of the campaign against faith-based arbitration tribunals in Ontario organised by Mahmoud’s former comrades in the Worker Communist Party of Iran, who aligned themselves with the anti-Muslim Right in whipping up hysteria about the supposed importation of sharia law into Canada. David T may argue that “secularists need to be particularly alive to the danger that they will find themselves fellow travelling with racists”, but that is evidently of little concern to the “Worker Communists”.
David T may claim to distinguish between the personal and political expressions of Islam, but he refuses to recognise that there are deep differences between the various tendencies within the broad category of political Islamism. He goes on to refer to “the falangists of the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood strains of Islamism”. Thus a mass-based reformist organisation like the Brotherhood is bracketed with the terrorist groupuscules of Al-Qaida – and both are defined as variants of fascism. Given that the Muslim Association of Britain identifies with the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, one can only conclude that they are fascists too. In David T’s eyes, this is indeed the case.
When Osama Saeed, a leading figure in MAB in Scotland, wrote an article for the Guardian in November this year presenting a reasoned case for an updated caliphate as a sort of Islamic version of the European Union, David T denounced this as “another piece of Milne-commissioned advocacy for clerical fascism from his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood”. (The reference is to Seumas Milne, the Guardian’s comment editor.)
Mild objections by Harry’s Place readers that Saeed had not in fact advocated any form of fascism reduced David T to apoplexy. He denounced the Guardian article as the product of an “extreme right-wing fascist” ideology and insisted that allowing a member of MAB to present a moderate-sounding argument for the caliphate was no different from the Guardian publishing an article by BNP leader Nick Griffin which argued that Britain would be a much better place for all people if the BNP were in power.
Osama Saeed is in fact a member of the Scottish National Party and stood as an SNP candidate in East Renfrewshire in the 2005 general election. He runs a blog called Rolled Up Trousers which recently applauded Peter Tatchell’s stance on asylum rights. To compare Saeed to fascist leader Nick Griffin is not only a disgrace but an indication that David T’s hatred of MAB in particular and Islamism in general is so extreme as to deprive him of the capacity for intelligent thought.
But then, that’s the trouble with being a frothing-at-the-mouth Islamophobe who wears the mask of an enlightened, rational liberal. Once in a while the mask slips.
“… Muslims in the US and Great Britain are, today, far more dominated by Islamist extremism than their counterparts in various Muslim countries…. the Islamic communities of the US (dominated by the Saudis) and Britain (run by radical Pakistanis) suffer under a totalitarian regime of thought-control.”
Stephen Schwartz continues his campaign against “Wahhabists” – in which category he includes virtually any non-Sufi Muslim who fails to share his own neocon views.
As an example of the extremism and totalitarianism of US Muslim leaders, Schwartz offers the example of CAIR’s protest against the accompanying cartoon, which he says was merely “questioning why so many mosques are centers of extremist agitation. The cartoon included nothing offensive to moderate Muslims; it simply dramatized an obvious fact.”
“The Muslim world is a strange and formidable place to an average American, in some ways a perennial zone of magic, mystery and disorder,” said Dr Ghazi Falah, of the University of Akron, Ohio, on Monday at the American University of Beirut. It is regarded in “a framework of violence, disorder and unreason contrasted with the rationalism of the West.”
Falah was one of three presenters for “Media and Film Representations of Arabs and the Middle East,” one session held as part of a three-day “America in the Middle East-The Middle East in America” conference.
On November 27, 2002, the Los Angeles Times printed a cartoon depicting three fully veiled women walking across a stage under the banner “Radical Islam sponsors the Miss Muslim World contest.” The sashes the women wore read “Miss waiting to be stoned,” “Miss can’t vote” and “Miss illiteracy,” while two Afghani-looking men watched, one of which had a rifle.
“Perhaps some would argue this cartoon contains a kernel of truth, and targets only radical Islam and not all Muslims, but how could such an insulting and crude cartoon be considered newsworthy enough to be published in the Los Angeles Times?” Dr Falah asked. He noted the cartoon was placed on the same page with an editorial about the Bush administration’s preparations for war in Iraq, creating a juxtaposition of “the bad Islam” with the “good Bush administration” coming to the rescue.
Robert Spencer is not best pleased. He himself, he whinges, has been accused of “spreading hate” and “defaming Islam”. (Now, where could anyone have got that idea from?) He continues: “The press is, as any regular Jihad Watch reader knows, extraordinarily reluctant to say anything about the Islamic component of jihad violence.” You can only conclude that Jihad Watch readers must inhabit some alternate reality.