Category Archives: USA

New York Post and Daily News defend NYPD’s spying on Muslims, denounce Associated Press

Posted on by Bob Pitt

New York Daily News Get Lost headlineBob McManus, editorial page editor of the New York Post, blasted the Associated Press on Tuesday, suggesting that the news organization cares more about winning a Pulitzer Prize than the threat of terrorism.

“It will win its prizes, or not,” McManus wrote. “But to the extent its activities undermine a great city’s will to protect itself from proven enemies, it may someday have much for which to answer.”

McManus’ attack was just the latest journalistic broadside against the news organization in response to its ongoing investigation of the NYPD’s widescale surveillance of Muslims in New York City, several neighboring states and on over a dozen college campuses across the northeast.

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Florida: Senate panel rams through bill Muslims and Jews call discriminatory

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Florida protest against anti-sharia billTALLAHASSEE — Ignoring about 50 people who wanted to testify – and with a total of three minutes of deliberation – a Senate panel Tuesday slammed through a measure that both Muslims and Jews say is discriminatory and would prohibit them from freely practicing their religion.

The 5-2 vote by the Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Subcommittee approved legislation, SB 1360, that would ban any court or legal authority from using any sort of religious or foreign law as part of a legal decision or contract.

Some supporters acknowledge the bill was targeting Sharia law, the Koran-based code used by Muslims that, in the words of the Florida Family Association that supports the bill, “authorizes polygamy, pedophilia and perpetuates violence toward women and death for dishonoring the faith.” Similar bills have been filed by conservative Republicans in other states and in Congress, where Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Orlando, is a prime sponsor.

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Gingrich says Islam is incompatible with freedom, claims US government is ‘lying to us and censoring us as we try to understand those who would kill us’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gingrich at First Redeemer ChurchCUMMING, Ga. — Newt Gingrich turned the church pulpit into a history class when he addressed the congregation at First Redeemer Church, comparing the struggle of American colonies under British rule to what he sees as the modern day assault of religious freedom in America.

Gingrich said that the religious foundation of America is being attacked on two fronts: “We have a secular elitist wing that deeply, deeply disbelieves in America, that wants to create a different country based on a different set of principles,” he said. “And we have a radical Islamist one which legitimately and authentically hates us and should.”

He drew a standing ovation for slamming a State Department meeting with the Organization of Islamic countries, which Gingrich said had “the purpose of talking about how to protect Islam from being described inappropriately. I have passionate opposition to the government of the United States lying to us and censoring us as we try to understand those who would kill us.”

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CAIR condemns racist cartoon in New York Post

Posted on by Bob Pitt

New York Post cartoon

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the New York Post to apologize for publishing a political cartoon that the Muslim civil rights group says “evokes anti-Semitic themes” through its depiction of hook-nosed terrorists objecting to the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) widespread campaign of spying on Muslims without warrants or evidence of wrongdoing.

CAIR is also asking American Muslims and other people of conscience to contact the newspaper and to politely ask that they apologize for the offensive cartoon. E-Mail: letters@nypost.com, Copy to: info@cair.com

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Political Islam and the Arab Spring: Human Rights Watch responds to secularist critics

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Last month in his introduction to the Human Rights Watch annual report, Kenneth Rothurged western governments to accept that the successes of Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt reflected the will of the people and to engage constructively with the elected governments.

This entirely reasonable proposal met with a fierce reaction from an alliance of secularists. The Centre for Secular Space published anopen letter to Roth denouncing his supposed capitulation to Islamist reaction. (UK readers will recognise some of the usual suspects here: One Law For All, Maryam Namazie, Gita Saghal.) Roth’s opponents have even organised an online petition calling on HRW to “support separation between religion and state”.

HRW has now sent a reply to its critics, which we reproduce here along with the original open letter.

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Bloomberg defends intelligence-gathering on Muslim communities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

New York’s mayor served notice Friday that his police department will do everything in its power to root out terrorists in the U.S., even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny. “We just cannot let our guard down again,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned.

The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show following a week of criticism of a secret police department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

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A global war on Christians in the Muslim world?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John Esposito thinks not. He writes:

In the 21st century, Muslims are strongly challenged to move beyond older notions of “tolerance” or “co-existence” to a higher level of religious pluralism based on mutual understanding and respect. Regrettably, a significant number of Muslims, like many ultra conservative and fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Hindus are not pluralistic but rather strongly exclusivist in their attitudes toward other faiths and even co-believers with whom they disagree.

Reform will not, however, result from exaggerated claims and alarmist and incendiary language such as that of Ayan Hirsi Ali in in a recent Newsweek cover story, reprinted in The Daily Beast.

Huffington Post, 23 February 2012

With cameras, informants, NYPD eyed mosques

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NYPDWhen a Danish newspaper published inflammatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in September 2005, Muslim communities around the world erupted in outrage. Violent mobs took to the streets in the Middle East. A Somali man even broke into the cartoonist’s house in Denmark with an ax.

In New York, thousands of miles away, it was a different story. At the Masjid Al-Falah in Queens, one leader condemned the cartoons but said Muslims should not resort to violence. Speaking at the Masjid Dawudi mosque in Brooklyn, another called on Muslims to speak out against the cartoons, but peacefully.

The sermons, all protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, were reported back to the NYPD by the department’s network of mosque informants. They were compiled in police intelligence reports and summarized for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Those documents offer the first glimpse of what the NYPD’s informants – known informally as “mosque crawlers” – gleaned from inside the houses of worship. And, along with hundreds of pages of other secret NYPD documents obtained by The Associated Press, they show police targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations.

They did so in ways that brushed against – and civil rights lawyers say at times violated – a federal court order restricting how police can gather intelligence.

The NYPD Intelligence Division snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived to pray. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. Plainclothes detectives mapped and photographed mosques and listed the ethnic makeup of those who prayed there.

“It seems horrible to me that the NYPD is treating an entire religious community as potential terrorists,” said civil rights lawyer Jethro Eisenstein, who reviewed some of the documents and is involved in a decades-old, class-action lawsuit against the police department for spying on protesters and political dissidents.

Associated Press, 23 February 2012

See “NYPD intelligence chief wanted sources in every mosque within 250 miles”, Guardian, 24 February 2012

Also “NYPD spying on N.J. Muslims leads to calls for state Attorney General investigation”, NJ.com, 23 February 2012

And “NYPD spied on Paterson mosque, report reveals”, NorthJersey.com, 23 February 2012

A group to counter anti-Islam sentiment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As anti-Muslim rhetoric rises locally and nationally – some of it fueled by the presidential campaign – a group of Chicago-area Muslims is battling back, using tactics including a television ad campaign and public forums against bigotry.

Gain Peace, an Islamic outreach organization based in Chicago, spent $40,000 in December to counter negative portrayals and produce two television ads intended to promote Islam as a just faith. The spots, which will run through March in the Chicago area on Fox, CNN and TNT, depict friendly Muslim students and professionals and display a phone number and a Web site for more information.

“This is an election year and in the Republican primaries and elsewhere, generally we have seen more discrimination, hate and misunderstanding about Muslims,” said Sabeel Ahmed, director of Gain Peace. “We wanted to take it up a notch.”

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Michigan Islamic Academy files lawsuit over discrimination

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CAIR Michigan press conferenceThe Michigan Islamic Academy has been in Ann Arbor, MI since 1986, but now a move has hit a road block and prompted a lawsuit over discrimination.

The lawsuit announcement came at a press conference inside the Council on American Islamic Relations office. “MIA once had a dream, but the Township has made it a nightmare for our students and their families,” said Tarek Nahlawi of the Michigan Islamic Academy.

According to the Michigan Islamic Academy, the lawsuit is the last resort in their effort to put a new school building on a 26.9 acre property, purchased in Sept. 2010. “This project was not a surprise to the township, as we approached them before purchasing the land our intentions to build a small school and community center,” said Nahlawi.

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