Category Archives: USA

The truth behind the anti-Sharia movement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over the past few years, anti-Sharia organizations and politicians have introduced versions of anti-Sharia legislation in 26 states – with some bills expressly singling out Sharia law for condemnation, and others sweeping Islamic law under broader categories of “foreign” or “international” law. The ACLU is currently working to overturn an example of this kind of legislation in Oklahoma.

The anti-Sharia movement would have you believe that Islamic law is encroaching on our legal system and is a threat to an American way of life.

This is simply not true, and in fact the court cases cited by anti-Muslim groups as symptoms of some kind of “Muslim threat” actually show the opposite. Courts treat lawsuits that are brought by Muslims or that address the Islamic faith in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths or that involve no religion at all. The cases show that protections already exist in our legal system to ensure that courts do not become wrongly entangled with religion or improperly consider, defer to, or apply religious law where it would violate basic principles of U.S. federal or state policy.

Prohibiting courts from considering Islamic law serves only one purpose: to bar Muslims from having the same rights and access to the courts as any other individuals. Attempts to prevent courts from considering international or foreign law suffer from constitutional flaws and undermine the ability of courts to interpret laws and treaties regarding global business, international human rights and family law issues such as international marriages and adoptions.

Daniel Mach, Director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said today in a statement:

“The anti-Sharia law movement clearly seeks to ride the recent wave of anti-Muslim bias in this country, pushing laws that are rooted in the baseless idea that U.S. Muslims wish to impose Islamic law on American courts. Proponents of these misguided measures rely on the ugly implication that anything Islamic is inherently un-American, pressing for a legislative solution to a non-existent problem.”

ACLU Blog of Rights, 1 August 2011

Geller says Breivik’s motives were legitimate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pamela Geller UndeadPamela Geller is emphatic that she doesn’t endorse violence. However, following on from her defence of a Norwegian Islamophobe who announced that he was “stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment” to deal with the Muslim threat, Geller explains that Anders Breivik’s motives in attacking the Labour Party youth camp on Utøya island were entirely legitimate:

“Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole… all done without the consent of the Norwegians.”

Update:  Think Progress notes that Geller has now removed the caption to a photo of participants at the Labour Party youth camp, taken shortly before Breivik slaughtered 69 of them, which read: “Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.”

Pamela Geller edits post to conceal violent rhetoric in ’email from Norway’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Little green footballs has the details.

Update:  Geller has posted a “clarification” on her blog. She explains:

Back in June 2007 I received an email from a disheartened reader in Norway who was bereft at the deterioration of the society and the lawlessness of life in Norway. It was a heartbreaking email, and I published it at the time: “Email from Norway.” After the massacre in Norway last week, I removed the following sentence from the email, as I found it insenstive and inappropriate: “We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.” The sentence I edited is not an incitement to anything. It refers to self-defense, but I removed it in the light of recent horrific events in Norway. I thought it insensitive. Nothing more.

Over at Antiwar.com Justin Raimondo points out that in the comments which follow the original post one of Geller’s readers warns that the author of the email could be prosecuted in Norway. Geller replies that this is “why I ran it anonymously”.

Raimondo observes:

So here is some nut stockpiling “weapons, ammunition, and equipment,” because “this is going to happen fast” – with Geller’s enthusiastic encouragement. Indeed, she’s so concerned her correspondent might be arrested that she’s protecting his identity.

Who is Geller’s mystery correspondent – is it the same Norwegian nut-case who ruthlessly cut down dozens of children, or a different one waiting in the wings to do the same? Come on, Pamela – clear up the mystery. Or would you rather continue to shield your fellow “counter-jihadist”?

Murfeesboro Muslim mom: Road rage incident ‘a hate crime’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

It was a scary night for a Murfreesboro mother and son after a road rage incident took an ugly turn. The mother told DNJ news partner WSMV-TV that not only did the driver threaten to kill them, he started yelling racial slurs because of the way she was dressed.

Converted Muslim Lisa Sallaj, 43 of Murfreesboro said she hasn’t slept a wink since road rage incident. “I’ve been sick to my stomach. I’ve been shaking, nervous, lying in bed tossing and turning,” Sallaj told WSMV reporter Larry Flowers.

It all started on Medical Center Parkway near Interstate 24 around 8:30 Tuesday night. “He had just received his driver’s license. I was in the car with him,” the mother said.

Sallaj’s 18-year-old son was in a left turn lane, but needed to go straight. He pulled out right out in front of a black Mustang. “The guy went ballistic,” said Sallaj. “He went nuts.”

It got much worse. “He started yelling and cussing saying you (expletive) need to learn how to drive,” Sallaj told Flowers. “Then I look over and he has a knife out shaking at me saying, ‘I’ll kill you.'”

Sallaj told her son to pull over so she could get the tag number, she said. She started driving, but ended up right next to the black Mustang at a traffic light where the driver revved up his engine.

She said he then started using anti-Islamic slurs, mocking an Islamic prayer chant and making “racial slurs.” The mother said she really got scared when the man began yelling at her son. “He said he would put a red bullet dot in the center of his eyes,” Sallaj said.

The mother said the man followed them onto Broad Street. It was only after she shouted she was heading to the police station that he decided to leave them alone.

“I’m already under a lot of stress from all the discrimination and everything that’s been going on in Murfreesboro lately with everybody giving me dirty looks,” Sallaj said.

Murfreesboro police are investigating. “It’s something we’re not going to tolerate especially with the current situation with the mosque,” said Murfreesboro Police spokesman Kyle Evans, referring to vandalism at the site of the proposed Veals Road Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. “We’re not going to let that situation get out of hand.”

Sallaj said there is no doubt in her mind she was targeted because of her Muslim head dress. “This was definitely, definitely a hate crime,” Sallaj told WSMV.

Daily News Journal, 28 July 2011

‘Counter-jihadism’ and terrorist violence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the wake of the attacks, Fjordman, Geller, and other prominent counter-jihadists have condemned Breivik’s actions and argued that they have never condoned violence. However, their dystopian fantasy world – in which the white Christian martyrs of Eurabia are constantly subjected to rape and murder at the hands of bloodthirsty Muslims – clearly provided what former CIA officer Marc Sageman has described in The New York Times as “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged”.

Øyvind Strømmen analyses Anders Breivik’s roots in the “counter-jihad” movement.

Foreign Affairs, 27 July 2011

After Oslo, right-wing group accuses thousands of American Muslims of being a part of a ‘fifth column’ that has ‘infiltrated’ the US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CNS MB network

Days after a Norwegian terrorist allegedly motivated by a fear of Muslim infiltration killed 76 people, a Florida group took to Capitol Hill to accuse thousands of American Muslims of being a “fifth column”. Its presentation, a link analysis compiled from “open source” material, is collected into a database and brought to Washington by an influential Congressman.

An obscure nonprofit called Citizens for National Security compiled a “database” of “almost 6000 individuals and almost 200 organizations” in the United States linked in some way to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential 80-year old Egyptian Islamic group.

These individuals and organizations “form a fifth column movement, a subversive movement intended to help undermine the United States as a secular government, as a Judeo-Christian society”, said Peter Leitner, one of the founders of Citizens for National Security. Leitner identified himself as a retired federal employee who used to perform “counterterrorism-type analysis”.

Citizens for National Security would not name any individual listed in the database, which it maintains is compiled exclusively from “open-source” material. Asked by Danger Room who would have access to it, Leitner said it would be available to “someone in the government [or] law enforcement”. U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security agencies have recently warned about the rising threat of “lone-wolf” homegrown terrorists, which al-Qaida is trying to inspire.

But U.S. citizens don’t need to have been charged with any crime to be mentioned in the database, he said, only “connected” to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is not a banned organization inside the United States.

To release the database to private citizens would be “irresponsible”, Leitner said, but he aggressively rejected any association between his research and the rampage allegedly committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on Friday. In a sprawling online manifesto, Breivik accused European elites of acquiescing to a campaign of Muslim infiltration that threatened European civilization.

Breivik believed that “there was a certain type of threat” and might have been “correct”, Leitner said, but Breivik was a mere “lunatic”. “Having situational awareness of your condition,” Leitner said, “is in no ways inimical to national survival.”

Citizens for National Security released its accusation in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, thanks to the patronage of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), who blessed the group’s work. West, an Army officer whose career ended after he fired a gun at the head of an Iraqi detainee, said the group’s research “is about the protection of each and every American citizen”.

Wired, 25 July 2011

See also Matt Gertz, “Fox doesn’t even know who they’re using to smear Muslims”, Media Matters for America, 25 July 2011

Killings in Norway spotlight anti-Muslim thought in U.S.

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them….

In the document he posted online, Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

Scott Shane, in the New York Times, 24 July 2011

The quotes from Spencer in Breivik’s manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence are taken from the transcript of a 2006 film, Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which so impressed Breivik that he reproduces it in its entirety.

Another prominent Islamophobe who featured in that film, and is therefore also cited numerous times in Breivik’s document, is Walid Shoebat. Recently exposed by CNN as a fraud, Shoebat has been making a good living advising police and security services in the US on counterterrorism.

The message that Shoebat has been delivering to his audiences has been the same message that so appealed to Breivik – that Islam is an inherently violent faith that provides justification for the actions of Al-Qaeda. (See here, here, here and here.)

Spencer himself has been invited to address the FBI. So we’re not talking here about some fringe subculture restricted to right-wing cranks in the blogosphere. The anti-Muslim propagandists who provided Breivik with the ideology that led him to carry out his atrocities receive official recognition in the US and are regarded as legitimate figures who can provide important insights into Islam.

Hopefully the terrible events in Norway have revealed Spencer, Shoebat and their co-thinkers as the malevolent violence-inspiring hatemongers that they really are, and in future they will be treated accordingly.

Update:  Spencer has posted a statement by SIOA and SIOE on Jihad Watch denouncing Breivik as a “disgusting neo-Nazi”. But this completely misrepresents the ideology that inspired Breivik’s terrorist acts. He quite clearly dissociates himself from neo-Nazism in his manifesto and declares himself to be a “cultural conservative” – a category in which he includes the Islamophobic bloggers and websites of the counter-jihad movement. Indeed, for Breivik, political violence is only one element in the cultural conservative strategy – he sees non-violent anti-Muslim propaganda as playing a no less vital role.

Nationalists pose bigger threat than al-Qaeda

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Al Jazeera has a piece by Bob Lambert analysing the terrorist attacks in Norway, placing them in the context of “a violent extremist nationalist milieu in Europe and the US, and its dramatic shift towards anti-Muslim and Islamophobic thought since 9/11”.

And see Ibrahim Hewitt’s article “Norway, Islam and the threat of the West”, also at Al Jazeera.