Category Archives: USA

Hysterical Islamophobes protest outside ICNA charity fundraiser

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yorba Linda protestSeveral hundred people from as far away as Corona and the San Fernando Valley filled the lawn outside the Yorba Linda Community Center Sunday afternoon and lined Imperial Highway in response to a fundraising event by a Queens, N.Y.-based Muslim group Islamic Circle of North America Relief USA.

People started gathering about 3 p.m., two-and-a-half hours before the fundraiser began. Many in the crowd waved U.S. flags and carried signs saying, “God Bless America” and “No Sharia Law,” in reference to Islam’s sacred law. In the afternoon, the event had the atmosphere of a July 4 picnic. Many brought lawn chairs and blankets, sang patriotic songs and tied red, white and blue bandanas on their dogs.

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Muslim immigrants spread sharia law, claims Tancredo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Though CPAC ruffled some feathers by bringing pro-gay GOProud into the tent, such social inclusiveness didn’t extend very far. Taking center stage on immigration were the Republicans’ biggest flamethrowers, who issued dire warnings about the evils that immigrants could inflict upon the US. “I’m worried, because most of them are lawbreakers – in fact, most of them are criminals,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told conference-goers on Thursday. But former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo upped the ante even further. Speaking to Mother Jones on Friday after his CPAC speech, he warned that Muslim immigrants would never be able to assimilate and posed a perilous threat by bringing Sharia law to America:

Then you got the issue of Muslim immigration. In every other case I’ve described, you can assimilate. If you come here as an atheist or a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu – there’s no inherent … conflict between that person and what it means to be an American, because the Constitution is the kind of document that wraps up all up.

But what do you do with people coming for the purpose of advancing sharia law, which is not compatible in any way with the constitution of the United States? How do you deal with that? That’s another very scary thing because demographically the numbers are on their side.

Tancredo’s warnings echoed recent efforts by right-wingers to ban sharia law in states like Oklahoma, and he drove home the link between immigrants, deadly crime, and terrorism in his CPAC speech as well – going so far as to equate open borders with treason. “Plenty of people coming across that border want to do very bad things to us – we know it’s been an entry point for terrorists. Why would that not be a cause for impeachment? I think it’s treasonous to not secure your border,” he told the crowd, to wild applause. Tancredo also denounced multiculturalism and ethnic enclaves as “the dagger pointed at the heart of Western civilization.”

Mother Jones, 12 February 2011

You’d think that US Islamophobes would all be enthusiastically supporting CPAC, but you’d be wrong. Frank Gaffney has alreadymade the bizarre claim that CPAC has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and now he has been joined by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer.

North Carolina: parents upset over use of the Qur’an in classroom

Posted on by Bob Pitt

More than 100 people came out Thursday night in Albemarle to raise concern about an incident involving the holy book of Islam. Some parents say a teacher passed the Quran around a Stanly County middle school classroom.

James Hinds, of Albemarle, said he was furious a few months ago when his daughter told him the Islamic holy book ‘the Quran’ was shown by her teacher in class at North Stanly Middle School. “A picture can show them what they needed to know. They didn’t actually have to physically put the book in my child’s face,” Hinds said.

District officials said Thursday the Quran was used as an artifact not as an instructional tool and that the discussion of religious differences in the world was well within the proper social studies curriculum.

Hinds said he wasn’t satisfied after addressing the Quran issue with the teacher and principal. So in late January, the father of two officially filed a grievance with the Stanly County School Board. Hinds called an informational meeting Thursday night in Albemarle to raise awareness and potentially get more parents to file similar grievances but not everyone was on board.

Trevor Schmidt and a group also came to the meeting peacefully holding signs and arguing the Quran in the classroom debate is being overblown. “Generalization of just an entire religion, saying you don’t want it taught in your school, in a social studies class, is kind of, you know, not right with our American values of freedom that we try to uphold,” Schmidt said.

The Stanly County School Board is expected to respond to Hinds’ grievance about the Quran in school by the end of this month. Stanly County School District leaders said they are sensitive to religious issues and said if parents feel any instruction violates their religious values that students may opt out of some lessons if they choose.

News14, 12 February 2011

FBI rules graffiti at Missouri mosque wasn’t hate crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic Center of SpringfieldWhen members of the Islamic Center in Springfield arrived for prayers Jan. 8, they were confronted with hate-filled graffiti scrawled across the walls of the building.

“You bash us in Pakistan. We bash you here,” the red spray paint said. One message, “Allah F…bar” implied an understanding of an Arabic saying, Allahu akbar – God is great. Other messages were sexual, including a drawing of a penis near the women’s entrance and a reference to Allah being gay. Two days later, another act of vandalism broke off an exterior water spigot.

The police were called both times. A Springfield Police Department incident report dated Jan. 8 describes the “nature of the call” as “graffiti.” “I called the police first,” said Robert Pollpeter, a member of the mosque. The police told him the investigation would go no further.

Pollpeter also called the FBI, which determined that the incident was not a hate crime. “At this point we have not initiated a hate crimes investigation,” said Bridget Patton, spokeswoman for the FBI office in Kansas City. A hate crime, she said, falls under the Civil Rights Act and would require a threat or prohibit a person from being able to exercise his or her freedoms.

“We view these events as hate crimes and we believe that because of the damage done these are felony crimes,” said mosque member Abdul Wahid in a written statement. “It is expected that it will cost at least $3,000 to fully restore our property to its former condition.”

Rabbi Rita Sherwin with Temple Israel agrees that the incident, like the vandalism of a Jewish cemetery in 2002, “feels like it was a hate crime.”

News-Leader, 12 February 2011

Posted in USA

Anti-Sharia bill introduced in Georgia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Republican lawmakers in Georgia have Sharia on their minds.

The “American Laws for Georgia Courts Act” was recently introduced in both chambers of Georgia’s General Assembly. The bill would amend Georgia law so that “no court, arbitrator, administrative agency, or other tribunal shall enforce a foreign law if doing so would violate a right guaranteed by the Constitution of this state or of the United States.”

While Georgia’s bill is aimed at banning Sharia, it doesn’t explicitly mention it – a strategy employed in similar bills introduced other states.

State Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Atlanta), who is vice chairman of the Georgia House Judiciary Committee, introduced the bill in the state House, and told the Fulton County Daily Report the bill would ban Sharia, while admitting that he does not know of any cases in Georgia where Islamic law has been an issue.

TPM, 10 February 2011

See also “At least 13 states have introduced bills guarding against non-existent threat of Sharia law”, Think Progress, 8 February 2011

Most Tennesseans back Muslims’ right to build houses of worship

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Murfreesboro mosque supportersThe recent battle over plans to build a mosque in Murfreesboro put tensions about the meaning of Islam in high relief, generating noisy denunciations of Muslims’ faith. But the people making the most noise were outnumbered, a recent poll found.

The statewide poll by Vanderbilt University revealed that 62.6 percent of respondents believe Muslims should have the same rights as other groups to build houses of worship, while 37.4 percent believe local communities should be able to prohibit construction of mosques.

Eric Bell, a Murfreesboro resident and filmmaker who is working on a documentary about the mosque controversy, said he wasn’t surprised by the poll results. “I have found that a lot of your everyday, mainstream people in Murfreesboro are afraid to speak out against the more vocal, xenophobic people,” Bell said.

Bell said he was troubled that the percentage of people expressing tolerance for Muslims wasn’t higher. Conversely, Rebecca Bynum, publisher and managing editor of the Nashville-based publication New English Review, was “encouraged” to find more than one-third of respondents “are wary of having a mosque built in their neighborhood”. “They’re correct to be concerned about the teachings of Islam,” she said.

The Tennessean, 9 February 2011

Some good news about ‘Islamic terror’ (David Cameron please take note)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ever since 9/11, Islamophobia has been a recurrent problem in a number of Western societies, including the United States. It’s been fueled by opportunistic politicians, hate-mongering bloggers, and any number of the other usual suspects. The lingering fear of Islam undergirds the present concerns that the turmoil in Egypt might give groups like the Muslim Brotherhood greater political influence there.

Trying to inject reason and evidence into this sort of debate is usually futile, but I do wish to report some good news. Remember the avalanche of Muslim-based terrorism that was about to descend upon the West? Well, according to the EU’s 2010 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, the total number of terrorist incidents in Europe declined in 2009. Even more important, the overwhelming majority of these incidents had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.

The report is produced by Europol, which is the criminal intelligence agency of the European Union. In 2009, there were fewer than 300 terrorist incidents in Europe, a 33 percent decline from the previous year. The vast majority of these incidents (237 out of 294) were conducted by indigenous European separatist groups, with another forty or so attributed to leftists and/or anarchists. According to the report, a grand total of one (1) attack was conducted by Islamists. Put differently, Islamist groups were responsible for a whopping 0.34 percent of all terrorist incidents in Europe in 2009.

Stephen M. Walt at his Foreign Policy blog, 9 February 2011

Evidently the news has failed to reach David Cameron, who last weekend told the Munich Security Conference:

It is important to stress that terrorism is not linked exclusively to any one religion or ethnic group. My country, the United Kingdom, still faces threats from dissident republicans in Northern Ireland. Anarchist attacks have occurred recently in Greece and in Italy, and of course, yourselves in Germany were long scarred by terrorism from the Red Army Faction. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that this threat comes in Europe overwhelmingly from young men who follow a completely perverse, warped interpretation of Islam, and who are prepared to blow themselves up and kill their fellow citizens.

Debunking the ‘Eurabia’ myth

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Pew Center on Religion & Public Life recently released a comprehensive study of Muslim populations around the world that should allay fears among many of an impending global Muslim takeover and debunk widely held beliefs about Muslims. The findings of “The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030” should also challenge the public to reconsider its perception of Islam and Muslims.

Skeptics, particularly those in Europe and North America, have long sounded alarm bells regarding the growth of the Muslim population.

Such scaremongers claim that Islam is a demographic threat, warning of an impending “Eurabia” within a few decades. This picture, of a triumphant Islam over a Europe that has lost its Christian roots, has contributed to the growth of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political parties and to their notable successes in European elections last year. In America, this fear began in the late 1990s with articles that warned “The Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming!” and continued with the recent Park51 debate over a plan to build an Islamic center near ground zero.

This paranoia – based more on fear and misperception – fuels anti-Islam and anti-Muslim hysteria across Europe and North America and undermines our multicultural society.

While Pew finds that the world’s Muslim population is expected to increase from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.2 billion by 2030, what of an “Islamic wave” across Europe?

Muslims will remain a relatively small minority, but they will make up a growing share of the total population. According to the study, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to grow from 44.1 million in 2010 to 58.2 million in 2030. The greatest rise is expected to be seen in Western and Northern Europe, where Muslims are expected to approach double-digit percentages. For example, in France, the population is expected to rise from 7.5 percent currently to 10.3 percent.

The Muslim share of the U.S. population is projected to grow from 0.8 percent in 2010 to 1.7 percent in 2030, meaning that Muslims will share the same population figures as Jews and Episcopalians. Interestingly, the United States is projected to have a larger number of Muslims by 2030 than any European country, except Russia and France.

Pew’s findings demonstrate that fear of a European Muslim takeover is largely the product of hysteria – France is not destined to become an “Islamic republic” by 2048.

John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani in the San Francisco Chronicle, 7 February 2011

New German anti-Muslim party calls Islam ‘totalitarian’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stadtkewitz and Wilders posterThe leader of a newly created anti-Islamic party in Germany said he wants to stop the immigration of Muslims and described Islam as a “totalitarian system” bent on supplanting western liberal values.

In an interview with The National, Rene Stadtkewitz, 46, said Muslims were not integrating into German society as well as other immigrants and that authorities should become stricter, by banning headscarves in school, stopping public funding for teaching young children the Quran and curbing the influence of Islamic organisations.

“Islam is far more than a religion. It’s an entire model of society that is incredibly binding for many people,” he said. “It’s basically a political system with its own legal system that seeks to regulate all aspects of life. We criticise the socio-political component of Islam, which I see as an ideological one similar to other totalitarian systems, and which I think is dangerous.”

He called Islam “the opposite of a free society” and said the faith posed a threat because it sought to instil different values in Germany, and because it encouraged immigrants to segregate themselves.

Mr Stadtkewitz, a former member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), set up his party, Freedom, last October. He had been expelled from the CDU’s parliamentary group in the Berlin city assembly for inviting Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch Islam critic and head of the Party for Freedom, to Berlin for a conference.

Mr Stadtkewitz said his party now had 1,400 members and was setting up regional branches across Germany. It plans to contest its first election in September when Berlin votes for a new mayor and city parliament. Mr Stadtkewitz said the aim was to cross the 5 per cent threshold needed to obtain seats in the assembly. “If that goes well, we’ll prepare for the general election in 2013,” he said.

He wants a temporary halt to immigration and favours introducing Swiss-style referendums in Germany. He said he would not stand in the way of a public vote on banning the construction of minarets, as Switzerland did in 2009, although he saw such a move as just “scratching at the surface” of the problem.

Mr Stadtkewitz denied accusations that he was a far-right populist. He said his party was espousing mainstream views about Islam and was part of an “uprising” by people across Europe against growing Islamic influence. “Anyone who criticises Islam stands in the centre of society,” he said. “Islam is becoming more visible in western countries and people are starting to rise up against that.”

The National, 7 February 2011

Outside of Germany, it may be recalled, one of the Freedom Party’s most prominent supporters is Daniel Pipes.